Tag: montaigne

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Defense of Seneca and Plutarch

No rambling exegeses this week. Instead, you get a couple of passages from Montaigne. The first comes from his Defense of Seneca and Plutarch:

We must not judge what is possible and what is not, according to what is credible and incredible to our sense. . . . It seems to each man that the ruling pattern of nature is in him; to this he refers all other forms as to a touchstone. The ways that do not square with his are counterfeit and artificial. What brutish stupidity!

For my part, I consider some men very far above me, especially among the ancients; and although I clearly recognize my inability to follow them with my steps, I do not fail to follow them with my eyes and judge the powers that raise them so high . . . I well see the method which the great souls use to raise themselves, and I wonder at their greatness. And the flights that I find very beautiful, I embrace; and if my powers do not reach them, at least my judgment applies itself to them very gladly.

The next is from The Story of Spurina, which explores our physical and mental lusts and then relates the tale of a beautiful young man who decided to disfigure himself to avoid inflicting desire upon others. M. condemns this action as unwise, because desire is only one sin: “What is his ugliness later served to cast others into the sin of scorn and hatred or of envy for the glory of so rare a merit, or of calumny, interpreting this impulse as a frantic ambition?”

He goes on to tell us how, to quote Annie Lennox, “Dying is easy / It’s living that scares me to death”:

Those who evade the common duties and that infinite number of thorny and many-faceted rules that bind a man of precise probity in civil life, achieve, in my opinion, a fine saving, whatever point of especial rigor they may impose on themselves. It is in a sense dying to escape the trouble of living well. They may have some other prize; but the prize of difficulty it has never seem to me they had, nor do I think there is anything more arduous than keeping oneself straight amid the waves and rush of the world, loyally repsonding to and satisfying every part of one’s charge.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of virtue

I’m perplexed, dear reader. Of virtue (pp. 646-653) starts with a promising thought — that it is not in a crisis that we learn who a man is, but through his day-to-day actions — and somehow evolves into a celebration of assassins. In between, we learn that the ritual suicides of Indian wives and Gymnosophists is a “miracle” because of their “constant premeditation through a whole life.”

Montaigne appears to contrast this will-to-death with Christian peoples’ professed belief in fate. That is, while M.’s contemporaries paid lip service to the idea that your number was called long in advance, they still panicked like chickens with their heads cut off during battles.

I suppose M.’s point is that it’s one thing to say you believe something, but another to integrate it into your life:

Except for order, moderation and constancy, I believe that all things are achieveable by a man who in general is very imperfect and defective.

Ha-ha. And I didn’t even go into his celebration of men cutting off their own junk out of spite or abnegation.

* * *

Bonus! To paraphrase Of a monstrous child (pp. 653-4): “A couple of days ago, I saw a particularly messed-up Siamese twin. I also know a farmer who was born without ‘nads. Must be God’s plan. And quit being so provincial; if it happened, it must be part of nature!”

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of evil means employed to a good end

I’m going to skip some of the short ones in this segment, such as Of riding post (pp. 626-7) and Of thumbs (pp. 634-5), on the grounds that I couldn’t come up with anything funny to write about them. If anything, they bolster the Montaigne-as-blogger argument, because we all have observations that don’t really go anywhere: “But they made sense at the time!”

This week’s main reading was Of evil means employed to a good end (pp. 627-630). Like Socrates does in the Republic, Montaigne draws out the correspondence between man and state:

The diseases and conditions of our bodies are seen also in states and government: kingdoms and republics are born, flourish, and wither with age, as we do. We are subject to a useless and harmful surfeir of humors. . . . States are often seen to be sick of a similar repletion, and it has been customary to use various sorts of purgation.

And so, just as the medicine of his day called for leeching or bloodletting for personal health, the health of the state also relied on such practices. In this case, though, establishing colonies and fighting wars serves to drain humors:

Sometimes also [the Romans] deliberately fostered wars with certain of their enemies, not only to keep their men in condition, for fear that idleness, mother of corruption, might bring them some worse mischief . . . but also to serve as a bloodletting for their republic and to cool off a bit the too vehement heat of their young men, to prune and clear the branches of that too lustily proliferating stock.

The choice, as M. puts it after citing several examples through history, is between foreign war and civil war, and the former is the “milder evil.”

He goes on to declare that gladiator fights were more humane than, um, the ancients’ practice of human vivisection of condemned criminals (?), because at least the latter was meant for the health of the soul while the latter only aided treatment of the body (?). M. does get around to condemning gladiatorial combat for getting out of hand —

The early Romans used criminals for such examples; but later they used innocent slaves, and even freeman who sold themselves for this purpose; finally Roman senators and knights, and even women.

— but he points out that this practice isn’t so bizarre, given the fact that, as he was writing, foreign mercenaries were fighting France’s internal quarrels merely for money.

* * *

Of the greatness of Rome (pp. 630-2): The Romans could make slaves out of kings, and kings out of ordinary citizens.

* * *

Not to counterfeit being sick (pp. 632-634): Don’t make a face or it’ll freeze like that.

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Montaigne update

Hmm. Maybe I should have pushed my Montaigne-as-blogger idea, floated a few weeks ago when I wrote up Of presumption in my Monday Morning Montaigne series. Here’s a piece from Andrew Sullivan’s article “Why I Blog” in the new ish of The Atlantic:

But perhaps the quintessential blogger avant la lettre was Montaigne. His essays were published in three major editions, each one longer and more complex than the previous. A passionate skeptic, Montaigne amended, added to, and amplified the essays for each edition, making them three-dimensional through time. In the best modern translations, each essay is annotated, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, by small letters (A, B, and C) for each major edition, helping the reader see how each rewrite added to or subverted, emphasized or ironized, the version before. Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older — and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. Montaigne, for good measure, also peppered his essays with myriads of what bloggers would call external links. His own thoughts are strewn with and complicated by the aphorisms and anecdotes of others. Scholars of the sources note that many of these “money quotes” were deliberately taken out of context, adding layers of irony to writing that was already saturated in empirical doubt.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of four-in-one specials

I’m going to cover four shorter essays this week, because it’s my party.

* * *

Our first essay, Of giving the lie (pp. 611-615), actually continues the conversation from Of presumption, to my gratification (see last week’s post to get an idea of how overwhelming that essay is). Montaigne begins it by discussing the nature of his Essays and the purpose in writing a book of himself, despite his lack of “achievement”. After all, it’s natural for people to want to read the words of great men, but why would the public be interested in the essays of a minor noble who retired from public life at the age of 38? He offers a few defenses for his book, essays for his essays, as it were. First, it’s not for everybody:

This is for a nook in a library, and to amuse a neighbor, a relative, a friend, who may take pleasure in associating and conversing with me again in this image. Others have taken courage to speak of themselves because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, because I have found mine so barren and so meager that no suspicion of ostentation can fall upon my plan.

Maybe it’s for posterity (but probably not):

What a satisfaction it would be to me to hear someone tell me . . . of the habits, the face, the expression, the favorite remarks, and the fortunes of my ancestors. . . .

However, if my descendants have other tastes, I shall have ample means for revenge: for they could not possibly have less concern about me than I shall have about them by that time.

Okay, maybe I’m writing these essays for myself:

And if no one reads me, have I wasted my time, entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts? In modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me.

Hmm: “It’s meant as a quiet(ish) conversation; it’d be nice if people could refer to it in future to get some idea of who I am/was; the act of writing it has helped me define myself.” Those sure sound like the top three reasons I write Virtual Memories. If only he added, “I’m looking for a three-book deal and a movie option.”

Anyway, M. lets these defenses of his self-writing lead into the topic of lying. “But whom shall we believe when he talks about himself, in so corrupt an age [. . .]? Since mutual understanding is brought about solely by way of words, he who breaks his word betrays human society.”

Lying (and lying about lying) inverts our values, M. contends, by demonstrating contempt for God and fear of men. We — the French of his time, who treated lying like a virtue — take more offense about being accused of lying than of any other sin. He touches on the subject only briefly, but promises to return to the topic sometime to cover “the varied etiquette of giving the lie, and our laws of honor in that matter, and the changes they have undergone.”

So the alleged topic of this essay is undertreated, in favor of M.’s discussion of his own aims and purposes. I didn’t mind that particularly, but the discussion on lying did contain a brief aside that left me hoping for more. In a comment about “certain nations of the new Indies,” M. mentions the “monstrous and unheard-of case” of their conquest, the desolation of which “has extended even to the entire abolition of the names and former knowledge of the places.” Even though he’s discussing their use of blood sacrifice, he’s clearly coming down heavily on the the practice of genocide in the New World. I sure hope he gets back to this topic, even if it’s only in brief allusions like this one.

* * *

The next essay, Of freedom of conscience (pp. 615-619), discusses the damaging effects of hyperorthodoxy. M. contends that, among those who were on the “right” side in France’s civil war, there were many “whom passion drives outside the bounds of reason.” Further, he argues, early Christians who destroyed pagan library “did more harm to letters than all the bonfires of the barbarians.”

The center of the essay is the life of Emperor Julian, the Apostate. M. characterizes Julian as a great man who “[i]n the matter of religion . . . was bad throughout,” and doubts the story that Julian returned to the faith in his dying breath. M. describes him as a harsh enemy of Christianity, “but not a cruel one.”

M.’s question is this: Why do some regimes allow freedom of conscience? Julian permitted this to create general dissension “in the hope that this complete freedom would augment the schisms and factions that divided them and would kepe the people from uniting.” However, the kings of M.’s time used it to reduce dissension; by permitting freedom of religion, they give the people one less thing to fight over.

I prefer to think, for the reputation of our kings’ piety, that having been unable to do what they would, they have pretended to will what they could.

* * *

In We taste nothing pure (pp 619-623), M. explores the way all our sensations alloy to their opposite. He brings up le petit mort in a way that makes me doubt that he enjoyed sex:

Our utmost sensual pleasure has an air of groaning and lament about it. Wouldn’t you say that it is dying of anguish? Indeed, when we forge a picture of it at its highest point, we deck it with sickly and painful epithets and qualities: languor, softness, weakness, faintness, morbidezza: a great testimony to their consanguinity and consubstantiality.

Despite that, M. takes his essay in an interesting direction when he gets away from the alloys of abstractions and explores one of my favorite topics: how we can be too smart for our own good:

[One’s] penetrating clarity has too much subtlety and curiosity in it. These must be weighted and blunted to make them more obedient to example and practice, and thickened and obscured to relate them to this shadowy and earthy life. Therefore common and less high-strung minds are found to be more fit and more successful for conducting affairs. And the lofty and exquisite ideas of philosophy are found to be inept in practice. . . You get lost considering so many contrasting aspects and diverse shapes. . . .

He who seeks and embraces all the circumstances and consequences impedes his choice. An average intelligence conducts equally well, and suffices to carry out, things of great or little weight.

Which puts me in mind of That Damned Hegel Quote, and the smart guy’s tendency to overthink and miss out on life.

* * *

Against do-nothingness (pp. 622-626) turned out to be a lot less interesting than its title led me to hope. It basically says that, if you’re a king, you should accompany your soldiers in war. Kind of a letdown, even if its key example was the death of “Moulay Moloch, king of Fez.”

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of presumption

Of presumption runs 30 pages (pp. 581-610 in my edition) in my Complete Works of Montaigne and, like other great essays in the book, its title gives no indication of what’s ahead. The essay begins with a description of a “kind of vainglory”: esteeming oneself too much and not esteeming others enough. It ends with a justification of the entire project of the Essays. I think.

Much of the essay consists of M.’s litany of his own faults and shortcomings; while some of them are quite funny (he knows less than zero about his own estate and “if you give me all the equipment of a kitchen, I shall starve”), his attacks on his own writing lead him into a trap he set in the second paragraph of this essay: trying so hard to avoid vainglory that one demonstrates low self-esteem: “If he is Caesar, let him boldly judge himself the greatest captain in the world.”

But setting aside his self-deprecation, I think this essay may provide some illumination into what the Essays are actually about. That is, they cover a wide range of topics, and M. has been pretty explicit that their true subject matter is really M. himself. In this one, he writes:

The world always looks straight ahead; as for me, I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself. Others always go elsewhere, if they stop to think about it; they always go forward; “No man tried to descend into himself;” [Persius] as for me, I roll about in myself.

But the question of why he wrote and who he’s trying to reach is what interests me.

I tend to look for importance in seemingly tangential remarks, which is probably why I tend to speak in full paragraphs and try to keep silent rather than blurting out a response when I’m under pressure. Of presumption appears to be littered with signals amidst the “noise” of describing presumption. Enmeshed in M.’s condemnations of his flightiness, shortness, hairiness, poor Latin and “corrupted” French, poor memory, dull storytelling, lack of physicality, “harsh and disdainful” language, ignorance of the quotidian, lack of deliberation, etc., are brief passages that tell us, “I know I roll about in myself, but it’s all worth it.”

The first clue comes quite early in the essay (p. 582). M. mentions that great figures — placed in that position by Fortune and not some innate greatness, of course — demonstrate their character through public actions. But what about everyone else?

But those whom [Fortune] has employed only in a mass, and of whom no one will speak unless they do themselves, may be excused if they have the temerity to speak of themselves to those who have an interest in knowing them, after the example of Lucilius: “He would confide, as unto trusted friends, / His secrets to his notebooks; turn there still, / Not elsewhere, whether faring well or ill. / So that the old man’s whole life lay revealed / As on a votive tablet.” [Horace] That man committed to his paper his actions and thoughts, and portrayed himself there as he felt he was.

Twenty pages later, he notes:

One day at Bar-le-Duc I saw King Francis II presented, in remembrance of Rene, king of Sicily, with a portrait that this king had made of himself. Why is it not permissible in the same way for each man to portray himself with the pen, as he portrayed himself with a pencil?

I don’t want to paint M. as the ur-blogger, but don’t remarks like those seem to presage the “mainstream media vs. citizen bloggers” split? Okay, that’s probably a stretch, but at least he’s right on with his complaints about critics!

And then, for whom do you write? The learned men to whom it falls to pass judgment on books know no other value than that of learning, and admit no other procedure for our minds than that of erudition and art. If you have mistaken one of the Scipios for the other, what is there left for you to say that can be worth while? Anyone who does not know Aristotle, according to them, by the same token does not know himself. Common, ordinary minds do not see the grace and the weight of a lofty and subtle speech. Now, these two types fill the world. The third class into whose hands you come, that of minds regulated and strong in themselves, is so rare that for this very reason it has neither name nor rank among us; it is time half wasted to aspire and strive to please this group.

I think it’s that third class that give us our clue into M.’s project. Near the end of this essay, he rails against education, right after complaining about the mediocrity of contemporary men, their only glory coming through valor on the battlefield. (Shakespeare was only 16 when this essay was completed.)

I gladly return to the subject of the ineptitude of our education. Its goal has been to make us not good or wise, but learned; it has attained this goal. It has not taught us to follow and embrace virtue and wisdom, but has imprinted in us their derivation and etymology. We know how to decline virtue, if we cannot love it. If we do not know what wisdom is by practice and experience, we know it by jargon and by rote. . . [Education] has chosen for instruction not those books that have the soundest and truest opinions, but those that speak the best Greek and Latin; and amid its beautiful words, it has poured into our minds the most inane humors of antiquity.

So is that the goal of the Essays? To demonstrate virtue and wisdom? To reach that elusive third class of people? M.’s self-fascination and self-deprecation would seem to undermine that goal, but as I mentioned last week, the point remains that M. went through the process of writing, and revising his essays, of making them public.

It pus me in mind of the close of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan:

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Of presumption has a billion more strands I need to take up, but this is all you get for the moment. You’ve been warned: this is an essay I can see myself coming back to repeatedly.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of glory

At my college graduation, a girl with whom I’d had a fling gave me a hug and then whispered to me, “You’re the most nauseating prick I’ve ever met.” I told her, “Hey! It’s a superlative! I’ll take it!”

Which brings us to Of glory (pp. 568-81). The opening of this one has a tone much different than that of the other essays:

There is the name and the thing. The name is a sound which designates and signifies the thing; the name is not part of the thing or of the substance, it is an extraneous piece attached to the thing, and outside of it.

God, who is himself all fullness and the acme of all perfection, cannot grow and increase within; but his name may grow and increase by the blessing and praise we give to his external works.

On the strength of that, I feared we were heading back into Sebond territory, filled with condemnations of man. While M. does lambaste man’s desire for glory, he doesn’t directly, repeatedly and explicitly contrast this with the nature of God, beyond that opening passage. “Theology treats this subject amply and more pertinently, but I am hardly versed in it,” he tells us.

So what does he make of glory? Well, it’s a mug’s game, but everyone falls for it. M. points out that even Epicurus, whose maxim was, “Conceal your life,” betrayed himself in his final letter by reveling in his learning and requesting all manner of posthumous celebrations.

In his arguments, M. intertwines glory and virtue, with the goal of undercutting glory. To do this, he needs to show how virtue is greater than glory, because it’s not public. Glory is, by its definition, public opinion, so it creates the perverse incentive of not performing a worthy act if it’s not going to be witnessed/talked about by the public. Virtue, on the other hand is “the testimony of our conscience,” and connects us to God, rather than to the people.

Further, glory depends on chance and opportunity. Just as RBI leaders need runners on base ahead of them, storied figures from history need the right circumstances to achieve their renown. That doesn’t stop sportswriters from overrating RBI leaders and voting them up as MVPs.

And sometimes, M. points out, even if the right circumstances arise, there’s no one to record the honor:

The fortunes of more than half the world, for lack of a record, do not stir from their place, and vanish without duration. If I had in my possession all the unknown events, I should think I could very easily supplant those that are known, in every kind of examples.

Why, even of the Romans and the Greeks, amid so many writers and witnesses of so many rare and noble exploits, how few have come down as far as our time!

Like I said, it’s a mug’s game. At the conclusion of the essay, he admits that there’s a certain utility to public glory: inspiring the people to virtue: “Since men, because of their inadequacy, cannot be sufficiently paid with good money, let false be employed, too.”

So what to make of the fact that M. is exploring the accidents and hollowness of glory, but I’m reading his words more than 400 years later? Surely that’s a form of glory, not merely his private virtue. Near the conclusion he writes:

It might perhaps be excusable for a painter or another artisan, or even for a rhetorician or a grammarian, to toil to acquire a name by his works; but the actions of virtue are too noble in themselves to seek any other reward than from their own worth, and especially to seek it in the vanity of human judgments.

I have no answer, but it put me in mind of another of this weekend’s readings: an interview with Carol Alt about glamour, fashion and celebrity.

I found this week’s essay fascinating, in part because M. admits that he’s treading over old terrain, but his view has deepened. In Of names, he writes about the temporariness of reputation and the ways in which we invest too much in the honor of our titles. Check out my writeup of that one, and you’ll see how the essays actually do show some progression of M.’s thought. Where the earlier essay barely discusses God or heaven, this one uses them at its very foundation.

But even with this evolution toward religion, M. manages to embed a paragraph in the middle of Of glory that could have come from his earlier, more freewheeling phase:

All the glory that I aspire to in my life is to have lived it tranquilly — tranquilly not according to Metrodorus or Arcesilaus or Aristippus, but according to me. Since philosophy has not been able to find a way to tranquility that is suitable to all, let everyone seek it individually.

And on that sentiment, I may as well call it a week.

* * *

Bonus writeups!

How our mind hinders itself (pp. 562-3): No two things are equal, even if we think they are. There’s always some difference, and that’s why we choose one thing (the bottle) instead of another (ham).

That our desire is increased by difficulty (pp. 563-8): Nothing groundbreaking; we want what we can’t have. Also, M. didn’t lock up his door for decades, but no one ever tried to break in, even during a civil war. One of my neighbors has a video-camera and an electric eye set up at the top of his driveway, so I wonder what he has to hide.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of judging the death of others

Our first post-Apology essay from Montaigne is Of judging the death of others (pp. 556-62): not exactly a pleasant change of pace after the sermonizing of the Apology, but at least it was brief, and I was in need of a break.

M. starts this one out by referring to dying as “without doubt the most noteworthy action of human life,” but almost immediately manages to undercut the notion that most people die with dignity. In fact, he points out, most people refuse to believe they must die, figuring that the heavens will part to save them and only them: “And this comes about because we set too much importance on ourselves. It seems that the universe somehow suffers by our annihilation and that it has compassion for our state.”

Correcting our belief that our death only occurs after “solemn consultation of the stars,” M. he quotes Pliny: “There is no such association between us and the heavens that at our death the splendor of the stars should also die.”

So don’t get carried away with yourself. And if you have all sorts of wisdom and learning to share, write a book. Or have kids and raise them right.

M. moves from everyman’s denial of death to examples of suicides in history. How better to explore the judgment of death than to examine people who chose it over living? He contends that it takes a strong heart to resolve on suicide.

For color, he gives us the example of Heliogabalus, a Roman emperor whom I first read about in a mini-comic by Neil Gaiman. Sez M.:

[T]he most effeminate man in the world, Heliogabalus, amid his laxest sensualities, indeed made plans to kill himself delicately when the occasion should fore him to. And so that his death should not belie the rest of his life, he expressly had a sumptuous tower built, the base and front of which were floored with planks enriched with gold and precious stones, to throw himself from; and he also had cords of gold and crimson silk made for strangling himself, and a gold sword forged for running himself through; and he kept venom in emerald and topaz vessels for poisoning himself, according as the whim should seize him to choose from all these ways of dying: “By a forced valor resolute and brave.” (Lucan) Yet as for him, the luxuriousness of his preparations makes it more likely that he would have had a nosebleed from fear if he had been put to the test.

Gaiman writes that H. ended up assassinated by his troops and dumped in a latrine.

M.’s first set of suicides are martial captors, those who chose to off themselves rather than get tortured by their enemies. Of those, he seems to have more respect for those who failed at first attempt and chose, despite their pain, to redouble their efforts and finish the job.

After these wartime suicides, he writes about the gravely ill who either choose to forego treatment or who recover but decide, having tasted death, to embrace it. M. privileges those who take the time to think about their choice of death.

His epitome of a stout death seems to be Cato’s. Unwilling to live under Caesar, he tried to stab himself, but his wounded hand made the attempt fail. His aides bandaged him up, but he went on to rip off the bandages and then disembowel himself by hand. M. writes, “If it had been up to me to portray him in his proudest posture, this would have been all bloody, tearing out his own bowels, rather than sword in hand, as did the statuaries of his time. For this second murder was much more savage than the first.”

Frankly, I’m not sure how the Christian Montaigne of the previous 180 pages jibes with this Roman celebration of self-destruction, but it does make for more entertaining reading than the Apology, that’s for sure.

At the center of the essay, M. quotes a line from Epicharmus that I think sums up the whole piece: “It is not death, but dying, that I fear.” For these non-Christian historical figures, the best they can do is choose their time and manner of death, and face it bravely.

But that quote sent me back to one of the saddest days of my life, when my next-door neighbor / “second father” passed away in 2001. He had a heart attack, wouldn’t let his wife call an ambulance or their children, and died. That morning, standing in the yard where we spent our childhoods at play, his oldest son said those same words to me about his father. He said that his dad, after watching the lingering deaths of his own father and a brother, didn’t want to go through the hospitalizations, the sufferings and, most critically, the imposition upon the lives of those around him.

He let go. The stars didn’t weep, but his goodness propagates in his children and us.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Take 4

As promised, it’s the final part of my writeup on the Apology for Raymond Sebond (have fun with parts 1, 2, and 3 and you’ll see why I gave up on this project for a full year)! After this, it’s back to shorter, less preachy (I hope) essays! But this week you get — as per translator Donald Frame’s section titles — Man can have no knowledge (510-539), The senses are inadequate (539-553), Changing man cannot know changing things (553), Changing man cannot know unchanging God (553-556), and Conclusion: Man is nothing without God (556).

In last week’s apology for not having a writeup on the Apology, I mentioned that Montaigne loosened up in the last portion of this 180-page work. By that, I mean that he got back — at times — to the personal aspect of the “personal essay” for which he’s famous. Rather than preach in universal tones, he explored points through his own experiences. This technique, even when describing only abstractions, manages to bring M. down to earth and give some sense of his own journey. Which, of course, I correlate to mine:

I who spy on myself more closely, who have my eyes unceasingly intent on myself, as one who has not much business elsewhere . . . I would hardly dare tell of the vanity and weakness that I find in myself. My footing is so unsteady and so insecure, that on an empty stomach I feel myself another man than after a meal. . . . Now I am ready to do anything, now to do nothing; what is a pleasure to me at this moment will some time be a trouble. A thousand unconsidered and accidental impulses arise in me.

I prefer to quote Bitter Sweet Symphony by the Verve, but we all work with the tools we have at hand.

When I pick up books, I will have perceived in such-and-such a passage surpassing charms which will have struck my soul; let me come upon it another time, in vain I turn it over and over, in vain I twist it and manipulate it, to me it is a shapeless and unrecognizable mass.

I hearya. Somewhere in The Long Goodbye, I once read a passage that captured Chandler’s lyric vision of Los Angeles for me. Re-reading it a year or two later, I was flummoxed. I’ve just now gone back to the book, 16 years later; I’ll let you know if I find it this time.

Even in my own writings I do not always find again the sense of my first thought; I do not know what I meant to say, and often I get burned by correcting and putting in a new meaning, because I have lost the first one, which was better.

No comment.

As I mentioned last week, this segment also sees the return of fart jokes and jerkoff humor. But before getting to the good stuff, I feel like I should boil down the substance of this culmination of the Apology:

  1. Man is the measure of nothing, because neither his senses nor his reason can be trusted.
  2. Man cannot know anything, in himself.
  3. We need to find the world in God and hope that God bestows a “divine and miraculous metamorphosis” upon us.

And now, the Mel Brooks Segment!

Throughout the Apology, M. attacks various schools of philosophy, focusing on the Stoics. His commentary on the relativism of customs from place to place — how one place’s law is another’s crime — leads into an assault on how these philosophers employ reason to justify virtually any action. From there, he explains how the Stoics blurred lines between virtue and vice and tossed propriety out the window:

Metrocles rather indiscreetly let a fart while debating in the presence of his school, and was staying in his house, hiding for shame, until Crates went to visit him and, adding to his consolations and reasons the example of his own freedom, started a farting contest with him, by which he rid him of this scruple, and furthermore drew him over to his own freer Stoical school from the more polite Peripatetic school of which he had hitherto been a follower.

I’m not sure if I’d gravitate to a school like that, but I still laugh over the great campfire scene from Blazing Saddles, so who am I to talk?

A page after Metrocles’ story, M. turns to the Cynics’ lack of shame about sex. He contends that Augustine was too naive when the saint remarked that the Cynics were all talk when it came to sex in public, and that surely they were

merely representing lascivious movements, in order to maintain the shamelessness that hteir school professed; and that in order to eject what shame had restrained and withheld, they still needed later on to seek cover. He had no seen far enough into their debauchery. For Diogenes, practicing masturbation in public, expressed the wish in the presence of the bystanders that he could satisfy his stomach that way by rubbing it. To those who asked him why he did not seek a more comfortable place to eat than right out in the street, he answered: “Because I am hungry right out in the street.”

Never let it be said that the classics are boring. (And ignore the fact that M. does just that four paragraphs from the conclusion of the Apology, when he describes it all as a “long and boring discourse.”)

Thanks for sticking with this one. I hope the essays take a turn back to the fun, even though the next one is called, Of judging the death of others. . .

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Monday Morning Montaigne: An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Take 3

I made it through the longest portion of the Apology, dear readers! And while it was as depressing and sermonistically strident as the preceding 60 pages, some light popped up at the end of the tunnel!

This segment of the Apology — go back to previous installments of this series (1 and 2) for the background on this part of Montaigne’s essays — is titled by our translator as Man has no knowledge (pages 449-508 in this edition) and examines the failures and inconsistencies of philosophy to explain, um, anything. M. focuses on the Greeks, which makes given the state of philosophy at the time he was writing. He breaks out three schools of “wise men,” since his project is to show that the learning of man is worthless. Or, as he puts it:

To really learned men has happened what happens to ears of wheat: they rise high and lofty, heads erect and proud, as long as they are empty; but when they are full and swollen with grain in their ripeness, they begin to grow humble and lower their horns. Similarly, men who have tried everything and sounded everything, having found in that pile of knowledge and store of so many various things nothing solid and firm, and nothing but vanity, have renounced their presumption and recognized their natural condition.

Back to the three schools. We have:

  1. “Peripatetics, Epicureans and Stoics . . . [who] established the sciences we have, and treated them as certain knowledge,
  2. “the Academics . . . [who] despaired of their quest and judged that truth could not be conceived by our powers,
  3. “[Pyrrhonians and] Skeptics . . . [who] say that they are still in search of the truth . . . [and] judge that those who think they have found it are infinitely mistaken.”

M. starts out by denying skeptics their skepticism, concluding that their radical doubt is too aware of itself to truly be doubt. He also contends that their doubt is purely for argument: “They use their reason to inquire and debate, but not to conclude and choose.” To M., the doubts of the skeptics are about the branches, and not the root.

Throughout the section, the core of his argument remains that the nature of the infinite is so far beyond our senses that our reason can’t hope to grasp it. It’s only our faith that brings us close, while reason’s presumption separates us from that higher self: “All that we undertake without his assistance, all that we see without the lamp of his grace, is only vanity and folly.”

M. contends that, if forced to bestow a material body on the divine, he would have worshiped the sun, since “[besides] its grandeur and beauty, it is the part of this machine that we find farthest from us, and therefore so little known that [its ancient worshipers] were to be pardoned for regarding it with wonder and reverence.” He later remarks that it’s such folly to personify the diving that he’d prefer to worship a god patterned after a serpent, dog, or ox.

This point follows an entertaining segment where M. lists no fewer than 25 philosophers and each one’s view on God and the divine (some of which have multiple views on such). The point, of course, is that these were the greatest minds of their time, and they couldn’t settle on an idea of the divine.

From there, he lambastes them for coming no closer to an understanding of man. If anything, he opines, shouldn’t we have knowledge of ourselves?

It’s a long and exhausting chapter, especially when M. turns his attention to Aristotle. I was inclined to think he wrote that section in a particularly boring style to mimic Aristotle’s notes, but that may’ve just been my own wandering attention. By the time I reached its conclusion, I wondered why he needed to go on at such length, to dismiss so many targets, unless his commission was paying by the word.

* * *

I found myself greatly relieved at the conclusion, not only because It’s Finally Over, but also because it leads into a two-page passage that the translator titles Warning to the Princess (the Apology being written for Princess Margaret of Valois). In this brief segment, it’s as if the mask falls from M. He admits that the Apology is “so long a work contrary to my custom” and proceeds to distill his message:

People are right to give the tightest possible barriers to the human mind. In study, as in everything else, its steps must be counted and regulated for it; the limits of the chase must be artificially determined for it. They bridle and bind it with religions, laws, customs, science, precepts, mortal and immortal punishments and rewards; and still we see that by its whirling and its incohesiveness it escapes all these bonds. It is an empty body, with nothing by which it can be seized and directed; a varying and formless body, which can be neither tied nor grasped.

Indeed there are few souls so orderly, so strong and wellborn, that they can be trusted with their own guidance, and that can sail with moderation and without temerity, in the freedom of their judgments, beyond the common opinions. It is more expedient to place them in tutelage.

The mind is a dangerous blade, even to its possessor, for anyone who does not know how to wield it with order and discretion.

It’s not a sentiment I necessarily agree with, but I’m happy that M. is able to cut it down to a few paragraphs this way. Still, there are another 46 pages ahead comprising five more sections, so I’m afraid it’ll be another week before I can build up some enthusiasm for this project.