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| Getting a little above oneself ... |
PASSAGE 1: Montaigne, On Experience
There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge. We try all the ways that can lead us to it. When reason fails us, we use experience -
Experience, by example led,
By varied trials art has bred [MANILIUS]
- which is a weaker and less dignified means. But truth is so great a thing that we must not disdain any medium that will lead us to it. Reason has so many shapes that we know not which we lay hold of; experience has no fewer. The inference that we try to draw from the resemblance of events is uncertain, because they are always dissimilar: there is no quality so universal in this aspect of things as diversity and variety.
Both the Greeks and the Latins, and we ourselves, use eggs for the most express example of similarity. However, there have been men, and notably one at Delphi, who recognized marks of diffference between eggs, so that he never took one for another; and although there were many hens, he could tell which one the egg came from.
Dissimilarity necessarily intrudes into our works; no art can attain similarity. Neither Perrozet nor any other can smoothe and whiten the backs of his cards so carefullly that some gamesters will not distinguish them simply by seeing them slip through another man's hands. Resemblance does ot so much make things alike as difference makes them unlike. Nature has committed herself to make nothing sepaarte that was not different.
Therefore I do do not much like the opinion of the man who thought by a multiplicity of laws to bridle the authority of judges, cutting up their meat for them. He did not realise that there is as much freedom and latitude i the interpretation of laws as in their creation. And those people must be jesting who think they can diminish and stop our disputes by recalling us to the express words of the Bible. For our mind finds the field no less spacious in registering the meaning of others than in presenting its own. As if there were less animosity and bitterness in commeting than in inventing!
We see how mistaken he was. For we have in France more laws than in all of the rest of the world together, and more than would be needed to rule all the worlds of Epicurus. As formerly we suffered from crimes, so now we suffer from laws. [Tacitus]. And yet we have left so much room for opinion and decision to our judges, that there never was such a powerful and licentious freedom. What have our legislators gained by selecting a hundred thousand particular cases and actions, and applying a hundred thousand laws to them? This number bears no proportion to the infinite diversity of human actions. Multiplication of our imaginary cases will never equal the variety of the real examples. Add to them a hundred times as many more: and still no future event will be found to correspond so exactly to any one of all the many, many thousands of selected and recorded events that there will not remain some circumstance, some difference, that will require separate consideration in forming a judgement. There is little relation between our actions, which are in perpetual mutation, and fixed and immutable laws. the most desirable laws are those that are rarest, simplest, and most general; and I even think that it would be better to have none at all than to have them in such numbers as we have.
Questions:
(i) What can we infer here about Montaigne's atttiude to scientific procedures and laws?
(ii) Montaigne probably had little acquaintance with contemporary scientific activities. What would have been his likely response to the doctrine of primary and seconday qualities put forward by people like Gallileo, Descartes and Locke? Here are some specific quotations to contrast with Montaigne's assertions:
(a) "By convention there are sweet and bitter, hot and cold, by convention there is color; but in truth there are atoms and the void" [Democritus].
(b) "I think that tastes, odours, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. [Galileo Galilei, The Assayer (published 1623]
(c) "For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color." [Isaac Newton, Optics (3rd ed. 1721, original in 1704).
(b) "I think that tastes, odours, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. [Galileo Galilei, The Assayer (published 1623]
(c) "For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color." [Isaac Newton, Optics (3rd ed. 1721, original in 1704).
(iii) Montaigne moves from scientific regularities to man-made laws. What is his assertion concerning these?
(iv) What implications might we draw from these assertions? What human faculty is on this view supreme?
PASSAGE 2, Montaigne, Of Experience
Of the opinions of philosophy I most gladly embrace those that are most solid, that is to say, most human and most our own; my opinions, in conformity with my conduct, are low and humble. Philosophy is very childish, to my mind, when she gets up on her hind legs and preaches to us that it is a barbarous alliance to marry the divine and the earthly, the reasonable with the unreasonable, the severe with the indulgent, the honourable with the dishonorable; that sensual pleasure is a brutish thing unworthy of being enjoyed a by a wise man; that the only pleasure he derives from the enjoyment of a beautiful young wife is the pleasure of his consciousness of doing the right thing, like putting on his boots for a useful ride. May her followers have no more right and sinews and sap in deflowering their wives than her lessons have!
That is not what Socrates says, her tutor and ours. He prizes bodily pleasure as he should, but he prefers that of the mind, as having more power, constancy, ease, variety, and dignity. The latter by no means goes alone, according to him - he is not so fanciful - but only comes first. For him temperance is the moderator, not the adversary of pleasures.
Nature is a gentle guide, but no more gentle than wise and just. We must penetrate into the nature of things and clearly see exactly what it demands [Cicero]. I seek her footprints everywhere. We have confused them with artiifical tracks, and for that reason the sovereign good of the Academics and the Peripatetics, which is "to live according to nature", becomes hard to limit and express; also that of the Stoics, aneighbour to the other, which is "to consent to nature".
There is no part unworthy of our care in this gift that God has given us; we are accountable for it even to a single hair. And it is not a perfunctory charge to man to guide man according to his nature; it is express, simple, and of prime imortance, and the creator has given it to us expressly and sternly. Authority alone has power over ordinary intelligences, and has more weight in a foreign language. Let us renew the charge here. Who would not say that it is the essence of folly to do lazily and rebelliously what has to be done, to impel the body one way and the soul another, to be split between the most conflciting motions? [Seneca].
Come on now, just to see, some day get some man to tell you the absorbing thoughts and fancies that he takes into his head, and for the sake of which he turns his mind from a good meal and laments the time he spends on feeding himself. You will find there is nothing so insipid in all the dishes on your table as this fine entertainment of his mind (most of the time we should do better to go to sleep completely than to stay awake for what we do stay awake for); and you will find that his ideas and aspirations are not worth your stew. Even if they were the transports of Archimedes himself, what of it? I am not here touching on, or mixing up with that brattish rabble of men that we are, or with the vanity of the desires and musings that distract us, those venerable souls, exalted by ardent piety and religion to constant and consientious meditaion on divine things, who, anticipating by dint of keen and vehement hope, the enjoyment of eternal food, final goal and ultimate limit of Christian desires, sole constant and incorruptible pleasure, scorn to give their attention to our beggarly, watery, and ambiguous comforts, and readily resign to the body the concern and enjoyment of sensual and temporal fodder. That is apriviledged study. Between ourselves, these are two things that I have always observed to be in signular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.
Aesop, that great man, saw his master pissing as he walked. "What next?" he said. "Shall we have to shit as we run?" Let us manage our time; we shall still have a lot left idle and ill-spent. Our mind likes to think that it has not enough leisure hours to do its own business unless it dissociates itself from the body for the little time that the body really needs it.
They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts; instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves. These transcendental humous frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible places; and nothing is so hard for me to stomach in the life of Socrates as his ectasies and possessions by his daemon, nothing is so divine in Plato as the qualities for which they say he is called divine. And of our sciences, these seem to me most terrestrial and low which have risen the highest. And I find nothing so humble and so mortal in the life of Alexander as his fancies about his immortalisation....
It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do ot know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.
The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle or eccentricity. Now old age needs to be treated a little more tenderly. Let us commend it to that god who is the protector of health and wisdom, but gay and sociable wisdom:
Grant me but health, Latona's son,
And to enjoy the wealth I've won,
And honoured age, with mind entire
And not unsolaced by the lyre. [HORACE]
Questions & Commentary:
(i) What evidence is there here for Montaigne's emphasis on a balanced view of the world?
(ii) What evidence is there for his emphasis on the primary importance of free and independent judgement in life?
(iii) What is required, in Montaigne's view, before we can hope to have a good sense of judgement?
(iv) What, if anything, would you find to criticize about Montaigne?
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