We talked about Montaigne...

We talked the other day about Montaigne, the man Nietzsche thought an ornament to human life, someone who has increased the pleasure of existing in this world. What did Nietzsche mean, or at least, what might he have meant? I imagine that he had in mind the sense we have of Montaigne as a man who has gracefully resolved the problems of living a life that was heir, as all our lives are, to all of life's intrinsic troubles. He hopes to be able to accept himself with such features and faults as he has and not to put himself on the rack of perfection.

Henri IV, the French king who was stabbed to death by a Catholic fundamentalist 400 years ago. Montaigne acted as a diplomat for Henri de Navarre, who later became Henri IV. Henry IV is credited with ending the wars between Catholics and Protestants. Following the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants, he was forced to convert to Catholicism, allegedly declaring, "Paris is worth a Mass". Despite his popularity, Henri IV was assassinated on May 14, 1610, by a Catholic fanatic Francois Ravaillac. His embalmed body was buried in the basilica of Saint-Denis, north of Paris. In 1793, however, revolutionaries dug up the body and chopped off his embalmed head..

This is a portrait of an Indian Chief in the territory that became Virginia. It was painted by John White in about 1575. It is therefore nearly contemporary with Montaigne and Shakespeare. Montaigne's  On Cannibals shows us a picture of the Indian societies in what is today called Brazil, but which was then New France. Montaigne went to great trouble to meet and to get to know some of the Indians who had been brought to France.The picture he gives us of naturally virtuous people was no doubt sincere but it was probably also motivated by a desire to contrast their virtuous simplicity with the treachery of French political life and society at that time.


We might feel discontented with ourselves but repentance is probably not going to change our basic characteristics. Often we don't really mean or think in terms of genuine repentance. We think instead about the regrets we have for things we've said or done, gauche or unfeeling remarks or acts of pettiness in any of their many varieties, but regrets don't really change our lives; at best, they may put us on notice to be a little more circumspect before opening our mouths or slower in acting. We know that the inner engine that produces these erratic acts is unlikely to be changes by these attempts at regrets. We might, prompted by some more serious situation, we might feel moved to attempt some personal reforms; we tell ourselves that we will try to be braver in admitting our errors, faults and shortcomings or less lazy and evasive, less lecherous or plain greedy; in all of these projects no doubt the first true step is recognizing that this is what we are like and that this is what we have in fact done on this and that occasion, but even these programmes tend to have only marginally successful results. Instead of genuine reform, we often settle for the enjoyable luxury of admitting the truth, at least to ourselves, but then find it easy to forget as one day dies and another arrives. The inner man has no more success in changing himself than the outer woman has with her diets - and vice versa! We remain basically the same person, though perhaps a little wiser about ourselves through many years of self-reminding. 

How does Montaigne solve these enduring problems of our life? I think the answer is - bluntly and crudely speaking - by recognizing these truths about himself, acknowledging his greed at table and other failings, and increasing a little in self-knowledge at least to the extent of acknowledging just how much we are creatures of our impulses and unchosen environment. The German who believes so strongly in the singular effectiveness of German stoves is matched by the Frenchman’s preference for open fires and high beds with curtains. Our first task is to get a handle on our sheer contingency. That's just how we are, products of habits and unpoliced impulses and unacknowledged cultural inheritances. We should no more try to take arms against these facts of our natures than we should refuse to give to our bodily exigencies the time and attention that they demand. (You will recall Montaigne's mention of the Aesop's story about the busy master who was in such a hurry that he just pissed himself as he walked!) Life is in at least some measure learning to make accommodation with our factual selves. The more gracefully we can accept these things the less likely we would be to get fancy opinions about our capacity for high-flown theoretical judgements or to indulge in notions about being wise or having an elevated status. We wouldn't then be so ready to judge the world as though we enjoyed the superior vantage point of a man on stilts nor would we be so quick to forget that every king makes contact with his throne with his behind. His essay On experience reminds us indirectly that we are vulnerable embodied creatures. We might aspire to wisdom but for the most part that is as far as we get.

Montaigne's resolution is seen clearly towards the end of On repentance:

"In my opinion it is living happily, not, as Antisthenes said, dying happily, that constitutes human felicity. I have made no effort to attach, monstrously, the tail of a philosopher to the head and body of a dissipated man; or that this sickly reminder of my life should disavow and belie its fairest, longest and most complete part. I want to present and show myself uniformly throughout. If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived. I have neither tears for the past nor fears for the future. And unless I am fooling myself, it has gone about the same way within me as without. It is one of the chief obligations that I have to my fortune that my bodily state has run its course with each thing in due season. I have seen the grass, the flower and the fruit; now I see the dryness - happily, since it is naturally. I bear the ills I have much more easily because they are properly timed, and also because they make me remember more pleasantly the long fidelity of my past life."

He goes on to say that he has no time for these 'casual and painful reformations'. We should learn to live with what we are.

But what about 'real' reform? What about repentance in its religious sense where it means something like a complete turn-around in and of our lives? Montaigne does acknowledge this possibility. For this kind of root-and-branch change, Montaigne makes the following statement:

''God must touch our hearts. Our conscience must reform by itself through the strengthening of our reason, not through the weakening of our appetites. Sensual pleasure is neither pale nor colourless in itself just because we see it through dim and bleary eyes. We should love temperance for itself and out of reverence toward God, who has commanded it... We cannot boast of despising and fighting sensual pleasure, if we do not see or know it, and its charms, its powers, and its most alluring beauty."

'They spend their days dancing'

Montaigne's message is by and large strikingly secular in its accents. He seems to be dealing with himself and others in an entirely material world, but this statement seems to go beyond this in an interesting way. For all our ordinary hesitations and hang-ups, our regrets and our attempts at reform, he seems to advocate a sort of wise acceptance of oneself and the limitations of our nature, but we see here that he does accept - even if only glancingly - the more radical possibility of a genuine repentance, something much closer to Christian repentance or metanoia, which reflects the underlying Hebrew concept of teshuvah, which means 'return'. It is an entirely orthodox view that he expresses here. We cannot reform ourselves as though we were engineers of our own natures. For that we need the sort of quality or power that comes from outside ourselves. In traditional theological terms this is the grace or divine gift or favour that comes from God. The opposite view in the theological tradition is what used to be called pelagianism, after the British ascetic Pelagius, whose views were eventually branded as heretical by Augustine at the Council of Carthage. Pelagius thought that you could shape and improve yourself - 'pull your own strings' as they say in California.  Augustine took the view that we needed help from outside or above ourselves if we were to have any chance of success in this endeavour.

Two very different views of ethics can be seen here. There is the sergeant-major-cum-schoolmaster view that you can drill and beat people towards perfection and the view that we are not free to become what we ought or want to become and that the power must come from outside ourselves. I think that most of us would want to say that we need something of both these attitudes. We have a certain responsibility for ourselves and can hardly in human terms at least expect to be helped before we have made some attempt to get up on our own feet and that would surely demand a certain amount of habituation, of being brought up in the right way. On the other hand the idea that we can achieve everything by ourselves, as though as each of us were his own Michelangelo, carving beautiful marble versions of ourselves, seems to belie the limitations that we know are ours. Some things are just given, like the gracefulness of a gazelle, and, for Augustine, the gratia or grace of God.

One of the features of modern ethical theory has been a belief that everything can be achieved through human volition and by having the right intellectual view of the world, but as we know that kind of view soon leads to the blind alleys of the police state. The Catholic Church has certainly no better record than the worst of the Jacobins and their modern successors. We need only to think of the Churches behaviour in Spain during the Civil War, but then maybe that was because they too thought that they had all that was necessary for a complete answer to the world's problems, that they had the answer in their hands, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. And Montaigne? Where does he stand in all this? Well, he seems to be almost exclusively concerned with our limitations and contingency and how to come to come to terms with them, and underlying this view, perhaps, is the orthodox Christian view that real reform can only come from outside. As he says at some length in Of experience, you don’t get justice by just making more and more laws.  The ingenuity of human reason alone won't get us there, but he isn’t either, as far as I can see, advocating a doctrine of sola fide – the idea that we can be justified in a religious sense by faith alone - much less the enthusiasm of antinomianism. Montaigne isn’t rejecting reason, but he is keenly aware of its imperfect and often self-serving nature. Instead he gently urges an acceptance of our limitations, that’s to say, an acceptance of our contingent nature.

Let me make one last - well, penultimate - observation which perhaps points to a very opposite conclusion. In his essay On cannibals, Montaigne describes the nations of the new world of what was then called New France and which today we know as Brazil:

"These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity. The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours: but 'tis in such purity, that I am sometimes troubled we were not sooner acquainted with these people, and that they were not discovered in those better times, when there were men much more able to judge of them than we are. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledge of them: for to my apprehension, what we now see in those nations, does not only surpass all the pictures with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the wish and desire of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato, that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of. How much would he find his imaginary republic short of his perfection? Viri a diis recentes, (i.e., men close to the gods)."

This famous passage appears - or at any rate the last section of it does - as a speech by Gonzalo in Shakespeare's Tempest, where that garrulous old counsellor naively wonders at the perfection of this state of nature. Shakespeare saw through it at once, but many others did not, especially as we move steadily into the secular modern world when this idea of a recoverable primitive perfection started to cast long shadows across the European thought and society. But it is strange to find this passage in Montaigne who usually as we have seen takes such a downbeat view of human possibilities. What was his purpose here? It was partly what it seems to be, praise for the simplicity of a society that seemed to be free of so many of the vices of their French and Portuguese invaders. As with China and later Persia which became at this time images of more rational worlds, so in a reverse but similar way here the newly discovered Indian societies of the Americas become mirrors that reflect back to us images of our distance from a simpler more ‘natural’ world. Montaigne clearly has a very special interest in these people and their world. In this essay On cannibals, Montaigne is also bringing home to us the extent of our hasty and fallible judgement. Their ‘nature’ is superior to our ‘art’, that is to say, to our rational ingenuity. Look at them without prejudice and we will see, he claims, that they have made a much better job of solving the basic problems of society – ways of living together admirably and viably – than Plato managed with his extended account of how to achieve justice or, as he called it, dikaiosune. Montaigne plays with a rhetorical contrast between ‘art’ and ‘nature’ but his purpose is clear – he wants to cast a cold light on our own false opinions and to bring home to us our radical contingency and actual disorder. These images of perfection are mirrors for our own imperfection. His essays as a whole show us that we have to live with our imperfection and not seek to break out of our condition by trying to establish a future perfect world. Many later philosophers were less cautious and took more seriously the idea that we might regain that perfect state of nature glimpsed in distant imaginations, and in trying to construct that more rational society, they authorized ort seemed to authorize terrible excesses. Rousseau is of course the name that comes most readily to mind in this connection. Even today Rousseau has Jacobin successors in figures like the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, who asserts that in order to save the world from the ravages of capitalism we should be prepared to accept a total dictatorship. It is a philosophy that has a certain appeal in the environmental movement.

Slavoj Zizek

Pelagius, the British way..

One last point: - Is Montaigne philosophy? I think it is, though it is certainly not an academic treatise like those that university academics started to grind out first in late-eighteenth century Germany and then in every other European country. If today we think that philosophy must always be in the shape of abstruse articles or intractable academic treatises maybe we ought to lay the blame at the feet of Immanuel Kant and the university system of the Prussian state. Philosophy wasn't always like that. Plato's essays are highly wrought works of literary art and reflect the changing currents of his thought. The journey was the thinking and the thinking was in good measure (though of course not entirely) about the nature, and how we might attain, good judgment - sophrosune - or as the word ‘philosophy’ itself indicates, the pursuit or love of wisdom, but, as we know, one can chase and chase wisdom but somehow she always seems to get away! Montaigne shows us something about how all this works out in the messy business of living the lives that are given to us. 

But maybe you think that we shouldn't give time and space to literary works like Montaigne's Essays? Whatever your view, it is fair to point out that that view of yours, whatever it is, presupposes an assumption about what philosophy is about. Is it intellectual analysis like some of the best things in Aristotle? Or is it about understanding that leads more directly to understanding ourselves and changing our lives? Both views have been present since people started engaging in what they called philosophy, but the second has in the West tended to lose out in recent centuries, although now there is increasing impatience with exclusively academic approaches. So, the implicit question is clear: Why are you doing philosophy? Answers on a postcard, please. One point is perhaps that the more academic variety seeks to influence the politicians and power brokers whereas the other appeals more directly to individuals struggling to make sense of things on their own.

And one last, last note. ‘Pelagius’ is the Greco-Latin name for an ancient Celtic Briton. It means 'man of the sea' and if you translate that back into the Proto-Welsh they spoke here in the fourth century, it comes out as ---- ‘Morgan’! So we have to imagine Augustine having his big set-piece disputation in Rome with Morgan, the Welsh monk!

Montaigne, On Experience

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).

(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".

Is it not an error to consider some actions less worthy because they are necessary? No, they will not knock it out of my head that the marriage of pleasure with necessity, with whom, says an ancient, the gods always conspire, is a very suitable one. To what purpose do we dismember by divorce a structure made up of such close and brotherly correspondence? On the contary, let us bind it together again by mutual services. Let the mind arouse and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body check and make fast the lightness of the mind. He who praises the nature of the soul as the sovereign good and condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, truly both carnally desires the soul and carnally shuns the flesh; for his feeling is inspired by human vanity, not by divine truth [St Augustine].

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?

Montaigne, On Repentance

Montaigne admired independent judgement above knowledge

'Precisely because such a man has written, the pleasure of existing on this earth has been increased'. This was Nietzsche's early comment on his reading of Montaigne's Essays.There is something very agreeable about Montaigne, but there is also much that on first acquaintance is confusing, though this does decrease as one gets to know the man. His essay On Repentence is, I think, a good place to start, partly because it it reviews so many aspects of Montaigne's approach and outlook. Before we turn to that essay, however, we might look first at the following extract from his Apology for Raymond Sebond.  This expresses with great clarity all that Montaigne owes to the tradition of classical - especially - Pyrrhonian scepticism.

Ω

Passage 1: Apology for Raymond Sebond (Book II, 12)

(This extract is taken from Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, translated by Donald Frame, pages 550 to 553).

To judge the action of the senses, then, we should first of all be in agreement with the animals, and second, among ourselves. Which we are not in the least; and we get into disputes at every turn because one man hears, sees, or tastes something differently from someone else; and we dispute about the diversity of the images that the senses bring us as much as about anything else. By the ordinary rule of nature, a child hears sees and tastes otherwise than a man of thirty, and he otherwise than a sexagenarian. 


The senses are in some people more obscure and dim, in others more open and acute. We receive things in one way and another, according to what we are and what they seem to us.  Now since our seeming is so uncertain and controversial, it is no longer a miracle if we are told that we can admit that snow appears white to us, but that we cannot be responsible for proving that it is so of its essence and in truth; and, with this starting point shaken, all the knowledge in the world necessarily goes by the board.


What of the fact that our senses interfere with each other? A painting seems to the eye to be in relief, to the touch it seems flat. Shall we say that musk is agreeable or not, which rejoices our sense of smell and offends our taste? There are herbs and unguents suitable for one part of the body which injure another. Honey is pleasant to the taste, unpleasant to the sight. As for those rings which are cut in the form of feathers without ends, there is no eye that can discern their width and that can defend itself against this illusion, that on one side they grown wider, and narrower and tapering on the other, even when you roll them round your finger; however, to the touch they seem equal in width and everywhere alike.

Those persons who to enhance their voluptuousness, in ancient times used mirrors made to enlarge and magnify the object they reflect, so that the members which they were to put to work should please them the more by this ocular growth: to which of the two senses did they give the victory, to the sight which showed them these members stout and long as they liked, or to the touch which showed them small and contemptible?

It is the senses that lend the object these differing qualities, and do the objects themselves have only one? As we see in the bread we eat: it is only bread, but our use makes of it bones, blood, flesh, hair, and nails ...

The moisture that the root of the tree sucks up becomes trunk, leaf, and fruit, and the air, being but one, by being applied to a trumpet, is diversified into a thousand kinds of sounds.  Is it our senses, I say, which likewise fashion these objects out of various qualities, or do they really have them so? And in the face of this doubt, what can we decide about their real essence? 

Moreover, since the accidents of illnesses, madness, or sleep make things appear to us otherwise than they appear to healthy people, is it not likely that our normal state and our natural disposition can also assign to things an essence corresponding to our condition, and accommodate them to us, as our disordered states do? And that our health is as capable of giving them its own appearance as sickness? Why should the temperate man not have some vision of things related to himself, like the intemperate man, and likewise imprint his own character on them?

The jaded man assigns the insipidity to the wine; the healthy man, the savour; the thirsty man, the relish. 

Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know what things are in truth; for nothing comes to us except falsified and altered by our senses. When the compass, the square and the ruler are off, all the proportions drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are also necessarily imperfect and defective. The uncertainty of our senses makes everything they produce uncertain...

Furthermore, who shall be fit to judge these differences? As we say in disputes about religion that we need a judge not attached to either party, free from prejudice and passion, which as we know is impossible among Christians, so it is in this. For if he is old, he cannot judge the sense of perception of old age, being himself a party in this dispute; if he is young, likewise; likewise, sick, asleep, or wake. We would need someone exempt from all these qualities, so that with an unprejudiced judgement he might judge of these propositions as of things indifferent to him; and by that score we would need a judge that never was. 

To judge the appearances that we receive of objects, we would need a judicatory instrument; to verify this instrument, we need a demonstration; to verify the demonstration, an instrument: there we are in a circle.

Since the senses cannot decide the dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, it must be reason that does so. No reason can be established without another reason: there we go retreating back to infinity. 

Our conception is not itself applied to foreign objects, but is conceived through the mediation of the senses; and the senses do not comprehend the foreign object, but only their own impressions. And thus the conception and semblance we form is not of the object, but only of the impression and effect made on the sense; which impression and object are different things. Wherefore whoever judges by appearances judges by something other than the object.

And as for saying that the impressions of the senses convey to the soul the quality of the foreign objects by resemblance, how can the soul and understanding make sure of this resemblance, having of itself no communication with foreign objects? Just as a man who does not know Socrates, seeing his portrait, cannot say that it resembles him.

Now if anyone should want to judge by appearances anyway, to judge by all appearances is impossible, for they clash with one another by their contradictions and discrepancies, as we see by experience. Shall some selected appearances rule the others? We shall have to verify this selection, the second by a third; and thus it will never be finished.

[CHANGING MAN CANNOT KNOW CHANGING THINGS]

Finally there is no existence that is constant, either of our beings or of that of objects. And we, and our judgement, and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion. 

[CHANGING MAN CANNOT KNOW UNCHANGING GOD] 

We have no communication with being, because every human nature is always midway between birth and death, offering only a dim semblance and shadow of itself, and an uncertain and feeble opinion. And if by chance you fix your thought on trying to grasp its essence, it will be neither more nor less than if someone tried to grasp water: for the more he squeezes and presses what by its nature flows all over, the more he will lose what he was trying to hold and grasp. Thus all things being subject to pass from one change to another, reason, seeking a real stability in them, is baffled, being unable to apprehend anything stable and permanent; because everything is either coming into being and not yet fully existent, or beginning to die before it is born. 


Commentary: Some of the key assertions have been put into red italics. Montaigne's argument is an old one, but it is not all that easy to understand. Try formulating this argument in your own words. Also, you might like to assess how good or appropriate are Montaigne's points like the one he makes when he talks about the impossibility of objective assessment. Look, for example, at the three italicised paragraphs.

Ω 

PASSAGE 2: On Repentence (Book III, 2) 

Others shape the man; I portray him; and offer to the view one in particular, who is ill-shaped enough, and whom, could I refashion him, I should certainly make very different from what he is. But there is no chance of that.

Now the lines of my portrait are never at fault, although they change and vary. The world is a perpetual see-saw.  Everything goes incessantly up and down - the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt - both with the universal motion and with their own. Constancy itself is nothing but a more sluggish movement. I cannot fix my subject. He is always restless, and reels with a natural intoxication. I catch him here, as he is at the moment when I turn my attention to him. I do not portray his being; I portray his passage; not a passage from one age to another or, as the common people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute. I must suit my story to the hour, for soon I may change, not only by chance but also by intention. It is a record of various and variable occurences, an account of thoughts that are unsettled and, as chance will have it, at times contradictory, either because I am then another self, or because I approach my subject under different circumstances and with other considerations. Hence it is that I may well contradict myself, but the truth, as Demades said, I do ot contradict. Could my mind find a firm footing, I should not be making essays, but coming to conclusions; it is, however, always in its appenticeship and on trial.

I present a humble life, without distinction; but that is no matter. Moral philosophy, as a whole, can be just as well applied to a common and private existenceas to one of richer stuff. Every man carries in himself the complete pattern of human nature.


Commentary: Those of you who know some (old!) French might like to note the following phrases which are translated above: (i) Les autres forment l'homme, je le recite.(ii) Le monde n'est qu'une branloire perenne. (iii) je ne peinds pas l'estre, je peinds le passage. (iv) Si mon ame pouvait prendre pied, je ne m'essaierois pas, je me resoudrois: elle est toujours en apprentissage, et en espreuve. (v) Chaque homme porte la forme entiere, de l'humaine condition.   

Note: The word repentir has two meanings: it means not only 'repent' in the customary religious sense, but also 'repaint' or 'touch up' as a painter might correct and perfect his work just as here Montaigne constantly re-edits and revises his own 'essais' or 'trials', that is to say, his attempts to get to grips with ungraspable, ever-flowing experience.

Here are some questions to consider: 

(i) Montaigne stresses the changeableness of the world around us and of the world within as he experiences his own changing moods and attitudes. What consequences does this view have for our notion of personal identity? 

(ii) Is it true that 'I do not portray his being', i.e., that 'there is no 'essence', no essential human nature for him to portray? Does this mean that all we can hope to do is to portray our movement or passage through time, as Montaigne seems to claim? 

(iii) What does he mean when he says, 'Could my mind find a firm footing, I should not be making essays, but coming to conclusions'? 

(iv) If it is possible to do things intentionally, isn't it possible to refashion ourselves in ways that Montaigne tseems to think are impossible? What would Montaigne say to this?

(v) Is it true that 'Every man carries in himself the complete pattern of human nature'? Is Montaigne justified in making this big assumption? Is it an assumption or something better? (vi) What implications does this view of human nature have for Montaigne's own attempts to fix that portrait in writing?
(vii) And, finally, what kind of person would one have to be to have such an attitude to life and experience?

Ω

Passage 3: Of Repentance 

Some sins are impulsive, hasty, and sudden:  let us leave them aside. But as regards those other sins which are so often repeated, mediated, and considered, whether they are temperamental sins, or arise from our profession and vocation, I cannot imagine their being implanted so long in one and the same heart, unless the reason and conscience of the man who harbours them constantly wills them and intends them to be there.  And I find it somewhat hard to call up a picture of that repentance which, according to this thief’s boast, comes on him at a certain prescribed moment.

I do not agree with the Pythagorean sect, that men take on a new soul when they approach the images of the gods, to receive their oracles. Unless what he meant to say was that it must be a strange, new soul, borrowed for the occasion, since their own show so little sign of the purification and cleansing needed for this ceremony. 

They do just the opposite of the Stoic precepts, which indeed order us to correct the imperfections and vices that we recognize in us, but they forbid us to be repentant and glum about them. These men make us believe that they feel great regret and remorse within; but of amendment and correction, or interruption, they show us no sign. Yet it is no cure if the disease is not thrown off. If repentance were weighing in the scale of the balance, it would outweigh the sin. I know of no quality so easy to counterfeit as piety, if conduct and life are not made to conform with it. Its essence is abstruse and occult; its semblance, easy and showy. [Montaigne is talking in this paragraph about people who ‘sin’ and who then claim to ‘repent’ of their sins].

As for me, I may desire in a general way to be different; I may condemn and dislike my nature as a whole, and implore God to reform me completely and to pardon my natural weakness. But this I ought not to call repentance, it seems to me, any more than my displeasure at being neither an angel nor Cato. My actions are in order and conformity with what I am and with my condition. I can do no better. And repentance does not properly apply to the things that are not in our power; rather does regret. I imagine numberless natures loftier and better regulated than mine, but for all that, I do ot amend my faculties; just as nether my arm nor my mind becomes more vigorous by imagining another that is. If imagining and desiring a nobler conduct than ours produced repentance of our own, we should have to repent of our most innocent actions, inasmuch as we rightly judge that in amore excellent nature they would have been performed with greater perfection and dignity, and we should wish to likewise.

When I consider the behaviour of my youth in comparison with that of my old age, I find that I have generally conducted myself in an orderly fashion, according to my lights; that is all my resistance can accomplish. I do not flatter myself; in similar circumstances I should always be the same. It is not a spot, it is rather a tincture with which I am stained all over. I know no superficial, halfway, and perfunctory repentance. It must affect me in every part before I call it so, and must grip me by the vitals and afflict them as deeply and as completely as God sees into me. 


Commentary: 

(i) 'Montaigne thinks that it is not possible to remove single faults in our characters through a process of repentance?' Is this true? If so, what reasons might he have for thinking this? (ii) What does 'repentance' mean for Montaigne? 
(iii) Is it possible in Montaigne's view to repent of 'impetuous, prompt and sudden' sins? How do these differ from those sins where repentance is not possible on his view? 
(iv) Has Montaigne got it right by and large? What implications might his view have for life in time?
(v) If it is true that we are tied to ourselves and have no possibility of large or permanent reform, what implications does this have for our lives as married people and as parents and for our attitudes to those who break the law?

Quotations: Montaigne's cat

'When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?' Montaigne's cat is famous but she is not quite the whimsical creature people have so often taken her for. For Descartes, animals are just machines, lacking that interior consciousness that is for him the exclusive mark of human beings. Montaigne's view is very different. Elsewhere he said, 'We entertain each other with reciprocal monkey tricks. If I have my time to begin or refuse, so she has hers.' It is an acknowledgement of life together in a common world where each each creature has its own way of perceiving that world, including of course some modes of sense perception wildly different from our own. 

There is something about Montaigne that suggests he sees the cat as wiser than the man. Their instinct seems better than our our human claims to knowledge that so often turn out to be presumptuous, mistaken and which all too often have disastrous consequences.But this disparagement of human aspirations attracted condemnation by people like Pascal and Bossuet in the seventeenth century. Montaigne's implicit appeal to toleration prompted a renewed intolerance.

Our relationships with animals today have been soaked through with commercial sentimentalism. Animals are 'cute', they do amusing tricks for us, the stuff of cartoons, films aimed at children show them, like Lassie, as heroically loyal companions faithful until death, or like Elsa, the lioness in Born Free we use them to serve our image of a paradise where there is no separation or conflict; and we give our pandas and other zoo animals absurd and degrading names; so much so, that we feel uncomfortable in their presence because it's so much like an Infants' School. Yet behind all this faintly unpleasant emotional overlay, we feel something like a sense of awe and wonder at the sheer difference, and, simultaneously, their extreme closeness. They are our closest companions in this once-in-a-lifetime show we call life. They remind us of companionship in a colder, less sentimental manner. They cast other eyes on the world. This is something that Montaigne expressed clearly centuries ago. You may find this all too obvious, but I don't think it is: people forget and need reminding of these basic conditions and aspects of life. Calling them to mind is not like taking an item from the shelves in a warehouse; it is more like seeing the world afresh and that if it is to carry any conviction calls upon a person's deepest experience of life.

Otto Dix was noted for his ruthless depictions of the brutality of war

'There are many strange things, but the strangest of all is man' (Sophocles)

Note: If members of our circle have quotations from any of our authors that you would like to publish and comment on, please send them to me. You can include an illustration if you can find something appropriate; otherwise, I shall look for one.