Que Sais-Je About Limits? Montaigne Responds to Constraint & Uncertainty

Que sais-je? What do I know? I have written of constraints twice now—once about gentlemanly warfare, once about Magna Carta’s productive vagueness—and I find myself returning to the same pattern from different angles, like a man circling a tower to understand its shape. Am I discovering something true, or merely rationalizing my own limitations? Perhaps the essay form demands I examine my examining.

I began with warriors who constrained themselves. Chinese aristocrats pausing sieges, Greeks refusing to liberate slaves though it would cripple their enemies, Romans sanctifying boundaries until Caesar’s blood profaned them. What struck me then was the paradox: these warriors chose limitation not from weakness but from calculation. Total war—annihilation, liberation, boundary violation—would destroy the system sustaining them. Better endless regulated conflict than decisive victory that upends everything. Constraint made violence sustainable.

Yet now I wonder: sustainable for whom? The aristocrats profited from perpetual low-intensity warfare. The oligarchs maintained their power by refusing destabilizing victories. When I write that constraints enabled sustainability, am I describing wisdom or merely explaining how elites engineer self-serving equilibria? The rules were negotiated by those who fought. Those who wrote the rules benefited from them. I noticed the elegance of the system before I noticed who the system served.

I am thinking of my essays now. I wrote that the essay form constrains me—demands I wander yet arrive somewhere—and that this constraint liberates rather than oppresses. Without the frame, infinite blank pages paralyze. True enough. But who decided the essay should take this form? The constraint enables my thought, yes, but it also shapes what thoughts are possible. I write within a tradition I did not choose, following rules I barely perceive. Does this make my thinking less genuine, or does all thinking require some structure to become visible?

On Ambiguity That Enables Rather Than Obscures

Here is where uncertainty enters. I wrote of Magna Carta—that document everyone venerates yet everyone misunderstands differently. Thirteenth-century barons claimed it protected noble rights. Seventeenth-century parliamentarians insisted it mandated parliamentary supremacy. During civil war, both sides invoked it as authority! Productive ambiguity, I called it. Had the document specified every particular with legal precision, it would have frozen in 1215, irrelevant within generations. Instead its vagueness allowed each age to reinterpret according to contemporary needs.

But is vagueness always strength? Or does it sometimes prevent accountability, allowing every faction to claim legitimacy while actual power goes unchecked? When I celebrate Magna Carta’s ambiguity enabling constitutional evolution, am I praising wisdom or merely noting that imprecision lets contradictions persist unresolved? English law accumulated through crisis and documented compromise, wandering toward adequacy without guarantee of finding any global optimum. This worked—but did it work because uncertainty was productive, or merely because England had sufficient stability to survive its constitutional confusion?

I notice I want patterns to be universal. Constraint enables. Uncertainty adapts. Clean principles, elegant symmetries. Yet the examples resist such tidiness. Gentlemanly warfare sustained violence benefiting elites. Magna Carta’s ambiguity allowed evolution but also endless contestation. The constraints were not neutral—they carried the fingerprints of those who established them.

Now φ enters with mathematics I barely comprehend but recognize nonetheless. The golden ratio finds itself in fungicide dosing: too little chemical permits pathogen victory, too much creates toxicity and resistance. Somewhere between lies the minimum effective dose. Here is constraint again—not the constraint of rules but of optimal balance discovered through opposing forces.

This feels different from warfare rules and legal ambiguity. The fungicide problem has an answer, presumably. Too little intervention permits pathology. Too much intervention creates different pathology. Or does it? Who decides what counts as sustainable—farmers maximizing yields, ecologists minimizing toxicity, chemical companies maintaining markets? Even mathematical optimization requires someone to define the objective function.

Yet I cannot dismiss the pattern. φ speaks of balance points where extremes fail. Regularization in neural networks faces identical dynamics: too little constraint permits overfitting, too much creates underfitting. The techniques seek middle paths between memorization and generalization. And here I recognize something that troubles my earlier skepticism about who benefits from constraints. Some constraints emerge from the structure of problems themselves, not merely from elite negotiations.

The Question of Which Constraints, Not Whether

Perhaps I have been circling the wrong question. Not whether constraints are good or bad, enabling or oppressive, but rather: which constraints reflect genuine necessities and which serve particular interests? Which arise from the nature of problems and which from the distribution of power?

Warfare rules made violence sustainable—true. But sustainable warfare served those profiting from it. Magna Carta’s ambiguity enabled adaptation—true. But adaptation occurred within frameworks that never questioned certain foundations. Fungicide dosing requires balance—true. But balance points depend on what we’re optimizing for, whose costs we’re minimizing.

I return to my essays, this self-examination that never quite examines itself enough. The constraint of form enables expression—I believe this genuinely. Without some boundary, thought dissipates into formlessness. The blank page stays forever blank. Yet the particular form I write within shapes my thinking in ways I cannot fully perceive because I cannot step outside them. The enabling constraint and the invisible limitation are the same thing viewed from different angles.

Regularization in neural networks: adding noise, disabling pathways, penalizing weights paradoxically improves learning. Infinite freedom produces overfitting—perfect memorization with no understanding. Artificial constraints force generalization. Systems require boundaries. Total freedom is not freedom but chaos.

Yet total freedom may not exist at all. We are always bounded by something—by language, by culture, by biology. The question is never freedom versus constraint but which constraints we acknowledge and which we mistake for nature itself. The aristocrats who invented gentlemanly warfare experienced their rules as civilized necessity, not as self-interested construction. I experience the essay form as enabling liberation, not as inherited limitation. Are we both correct? Both deceived?

Magna Carta evolved through misreading, not strict construction. Like neural networks initialized randomly, small differences in starting conditions produce wildly different endpoints. Parliamentary evolution proceeded through no grand design, groping toward adequacy. This worked—but perhaps many other paths would have worked differently, and we mistake our particular history for inevitability.

Embracing Limits as Method, Questioning Them as Practice

I notice I have written myself into a position I did not intend when I began. I wanted to celebrate how constraints enable. I found instead that constraints enable some things for some people while foreclosing other possibilities for others. The same boundary that gives form also restricts shape.

Does this make constraints bad? No—I cannot function without them. Does this make them good? No—they carry purposes I may not perceive. Perhaps constraints are simply how systems exist, neither good nor bad but necessary and partial. The task is not to eliminate limits but to understand which ones serve which purposes, to question even the boundaries that enable our questioning.

φ speaks of dynamic equilibrium—the point where intervention and restraint balance against each other’s pathologies. Perhaps this is what I seek: not the elimination of constraints but the recognition of their necessity and contingency both. To use form while questioning form. To work within limits while examining whose limits they are.

Gentlemanly warfare sustained violence. Should we celebrate the sustainability or condemn the violence? Magna Carta’s vagueness enabled evolution. Should we praise the adaptability or criticize the imprecision? These are not contradictions to resolve but tensions to maintain—the awareness that what enables also constrains, that what liberates also binds.

Que sais-je? I know that I write essays within a form I did not choose, discovering thoughts I could not think without that form, limited by boundaries I cannot fully see. I know that constraints enable and restrict simultaneously. I know that optimization requires defining objectives, which requires choosing values, revealing that even mathematical balance serves someone’s purposes.

What do I know about limits? That we cannot escape them. That they shape us. That the question is not whether to have constraints but which ones, decided by whom, serving what. That even this conclusion is constrained by the essay form compelling me to arrive somewhere. The boundary that makes thought visible also makes some thoughts invisible. This is the limit I cannot escape even as I acknowledge it. Que sais-je? Perhaps nothing more than this: that not knowing is itself a form of knowledge, that uncertainty about certainty is the most honest position I can hold, that constraints enable my examination of constraints. The tower I circle does not reveal its true shape; I simply see it from more angles, understanding better what I cannot fully comprehend.