Montaigne e a idéia da ‘Diversion’:: persuasão e sagesse nos Essais

The ‘diversion’ is one of the most outstanding theme of the third book of the Essais de Montaigne, taken by a important trend of interpretation as an expression of a new and original moral philosophy in accordance with the individual nature of the ‘moi’, once emancipated of the moral models and procedures of Latin rhetoric that regulated the literate production of his time. Here we return to the examination of this issue, by reading the chapter that is devoted to it in the Essais, in order to reinsert it, however, in the very ambience of Renaissance Culture, founded on the recovery of the great tradition of ethics and classical rhetoric. To this end, we carried out a critical review of the trend of interpretation that tends to approach the thought of Montaigne of the modern paradigm of subjectivity and on the other hand, we emphasize the contrast between the sense of ‘diversion’ in Montaigne and the other one which appear in its recovery by Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century