As Terence Cave points out in "Fragments d'un moi futur de Pascal à Montaigne" (Fragments of a future self from Pascal to Montaigne) and Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self, the Essays mark the emergence of a modern conception of the intimate as that which defines the subject in its own right . Montaigne makes extensive use of the pronoun moi, which enters into a series of interplays and echoes with the subject pronoun je ; for the first time, he uses "moi" as a disjunctive subject pronoun: "moi qui me vois et qui me recherche jusqu'aux entrailles". Indeed, moi appears as a metonymy for the book: "Tout le monde me reconnoist en mon livre et mon livre en moi" (III, 5). Although it never appears in its substantival form in the Essais , its recurrent use in formulas referring to the substance that defines the self shows that Montaigne is on the borderline of modern usage.
The quest for the self in the Essays - to which Pascal owes his own reflection in the fragment of the Pensées entitled "Qu'est-ce que le moi? - The "De l'exercitation" chapter, as we have seen, proposes an attempt to define the self by what it is not. The question of the will's control over physical powers thus has its part to play in this definition, as shown by the passages devoted to sexuality in "Sur des vers de Virgile", as well as the chapter "De la force de l'imagination", which bears witness to Montaigne's interest in fleeting moments of impotence. In this way, subjectivity is no longer described as a small theater of struggling instances, as in the chapter "De l'expérience", where the ego is torn between the mind and the imagination, presented as autonomous actors of the personality, but as a trial of the will before the superior instance represented by the ego, which it deceives and betrays.
Reflection on the name, as that which escapes the definition of identity, constitutes the other side of the question of the self as envisaged by Montaigne: "the name is not a part of the thing nor of the substance, it is a piece estangere joined to the thing, and outside of it" (II, 16). Despite the discontinuity of identity, expressed in the phrase "Moy asteure et moy tantost sommes bien deux" (III, 5), the permanence of a core of continuity that runs through youth and old age, of an inertia that always brings the individual back to himself, helps define the essence of the self despite the constant change in its appearance. It is this "universal being" that Montaigne resolves to designate by proper name, at the opening of the chapter "Du repentir" (III, 12): "Authors communicate themselves to the people by some particular and estangere mark; moy, le premier, par mon estre universel, comme Michel de Montaigne" (Authors communicate themselves to the people by some particular and estangere mark; moy, le premier, par mon estre universel, comme Michel de Montaigne).
Montaigne's move towards the substantivation of the self, while not fully concretizing it, is based on the ancient topos of the alter ego , which he transforms by introducing a dimension of introspection and interiority. The first appearance of moi as a noun dates back to the period between the first and second editions of the Essais : it is found in the poet Desportes' phrase "cet autre moi pour qui j'aimais à vivre", a periphrasis that designates the friend as "another me", an alter ego. Montaigne inflects this theme with the evocation of La Boétie, in the chapter "De l'amitié" (I, 28), where true friendship is defined as a confusion of souls, as opposed to the maintenance that characterizes ordinary friendship, and according to the humanist, Neoplatonic theme of a unification of wills in friendship: "C'est je ne sçay quelle quinte essence de tout ce meslange, qui, ayant saisi toute ma volonté, l'amener se plonger et se perdre dans la sienne; qui, ayant saisi toute sa volonté, l'amener se plonger et se perdre en la mienne, d'une faim, d'une concurrence pareille".
