In 1580, Michel de Montaigne published the Essays and included, in the chapter "On Friendship," the most famous sentence in the Western tradition about the nature of a deep bond between two people: Parce que c'était lui, parce que c'était moi — Because it was him, because it was me. Montaigne was writing about Étienne de La Boétie, the jurist and political writer he had met in 1558 and lost to dysentery in 1563, at the age of thirty-two. They had been friends for approximately four years. The sentence appeared as Montaigne's answer to the question of why the friendship had been what it was.
The answer is deliberately inadequate. Montaigne knows that it fails as an explanation. That is the point. His project throughout the Essays is to describe the specific, the irreducible, the human experience that resists systematic account — and his friendship with La Boétie was, for him, exactly that. It could not be reduced to shared interests, complementary needs, or mutual advantage. It was not a relationship that a theory of friendship would have predicted or that any theory could fully account for. It simply was what it was because of who each of them was.
This is a significant philosophical move, even if it appears modest. Montaigne is rejecting the inherited frameworks — Aristotle's, Cicero's, the Stoic accounts — not because they are wrong but because they are general, and the friendship he is describing was particular. The Greek and Roman traditions tried to identify the conditions under which genuine friendship is possible and the qualities it requires. Montaigne is saying: I understand all that, and it is insufficient. The friendship I had with La Boétie was not an instance of a category; it was a singular event.
The loss of La Boétie shaped Montaigne's entire intellectual project. The Essays — the self-examination that became the defining form of personal essayistic writing in European literature — emerged, by Montaigne's own account, from the void that La Boétie's death created. With La Boétie gone, there was no one to talk to in the way Montaigne had talked with him: with complete honesty, no performance, no concern for how the conversation would be used or reported. The Essays are, among other things, Montaigne's attempt to recreate that conversation with an imagined reader — to supply, through writing, the interlocutor that death had taken.
At collective scale, Montaigne's essay transmits something that the philosophical tradition tends to systematize away: the irreducibly singular quality of the deepest human bonds. Two people who have experienced a friendship of the kind Montaigne describes with La Boétie — complete mutual recognition, ease, the sense that they were made to know each other — will recognize what Montaigne is pointing to. The recognition crosses centuries. The theoretical frameworks that purport to explain this experience, however useful, miss the thing itself.