A Peek Into Montaigne's World (Again!)

One of my favorite human beings, Montaigne was bought to life by Sarah Bakewell in her book, How To Live which is my all time favorite books. If you haven't read it, please do so. 

I re-read her seven part interview on Montaigne from 2010 (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7); it's phenomenal how this man loved animals and a developed a vision of humanity by his sheer power of observance. 

Thank you, Montaigne for changing my life and Sarah for bringing him to my life. 

What is it to be a human being, he wondered? Why do other people behave as they do? Why do I behave as I do? He watched his neighbours, his colleagues, even his cat and dog, and looked deeply into himself as well. He tried to record what it felt like to be angry, or exhilarated, or vain, or bad-tempered, or embarrassed, or lustful. Or to drift in and out of consciousness, in a half-dream. Or to feel bored with your responsibilities. Or to love someone. Or to have a brilliant idea while out riding, but forget it before you can get back to write it down – and then feel the lost memory recede further and further the more you hunt for it, only to pop into your head as soon as you give up and think about something else. He was, in short, a brilliant psychologist, but also a moral philosopher in the fullest sense of the word. He did not tell us what we should do, but explored what we actually do.

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For Montaigne, this old trick (he borrowed it from the ancient Epicureans) was more than just a therapeutic tool. It was the very foundation of philosophical wisdom. By expecting too much of ourselves, he thought, and trying to remain in control of every experience, we actually undermine that control. We lose contact with our nature, and thus we lose our ability to understand or judge situations correctly. This makes us foolish as well as miserable. Not understanding ourselves, we can understand nothing else either.

It is much better to look for what is natural in ourselves, and accept it. And so, as he summed it up on the final pages of the Essays, "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 … 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."

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So liberating is the epokhe that the first few Renaissance readers to rediscover Pyrrhonian texts apparently fell about laughing, and felt relieved of tiredness and depression. Montaigne was so delighted that he had a personal medallion struck, setting epokhe alongside a pair of scales to remind himself to weigh things equanimously, and the French question, "Que sais-je?" – "What do I know?" And he devoted the longest chapter in his Essays to accumulating anecdotes and case studies illustrating how little humans could know about anything.

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He took a special interest in the newly encountered "cannibals" of the New World, reading travellers' accounts and acquiring South American artifacts: hammocks, ropes, wooden swords, the arm-coverings warriors used in fighting, and "the big canes, open at one end, by whose sound they keep time in their dances". He even met a couple of Tupinambá people, who had travelled to Europe from Brazil in a French ship. Through a translator, he asked them what they thought of France. They replied, among other things, that they were amazed to see rich Frenchmen gorging themselves at feasts while their "other halves" – the beggars outside their houses – starved. Europeans felt shocked because the Tupinambá ate their enemies after a battle, but the Tupinambá were shocked because Europeans found it easy to ignore the suffering of the living. Montaigne did his best to feel equally amazed at both – and to think himself into both positions. "This great world", he wrote, "is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognise ourselves from the proper angle".

At home, he extended his perspective-leaping to other species. "When I play with my cat", he wrote, "who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?" He borrowed her point of view in relation to him just as readily as he occupied his own in relation to her. And, as he watched his dog twitching in sleep, he imagined the dog creating a disembodied hare to chase in its dreams – "a hare without fur or bones", just as real in the dog's mind as Montaigne's own images of Paris or Rome were when he dreamed about those cities. The dog had its inner world, as Montaigne did, furnished with things that interested him.

These were all extraordinary thoughts in Montaigne's own time, and they remain so today. They imply an acceptance that other animals are very much like us, combined with an ability to wonder how differently they might grasp what they perceive. Some animals see colours differently from humans, for example, so who is to say which are the "real" colours of things? Montaigne quoted a story he had picked up from Pliny, about a species of "sea-hare", a kind of sea-slug, which is deadly to humans but which (thought Pliny) itself dies on contact with human skin. "Which is really poisonous?" he asked. "Which are we to believe, the fish about man, or man about the fish?" Surely we must believe neither – or both.

Montaigne's dog, with its superior sense of smell and its mysterious sixth sense, might actually be better equipped to understand the world than Montaigne. "We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses; but perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or 10 senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence." The dog is missing some of these; we may be missing more.

This sounds alarming – we are cut off by our very nature from the full perception of reality. But it is exhilarating, too. It posits a multi-dimensional, endlessly varying world in which each object presents a thousand facets to a thousand different observers. The observers themselves are just as variable, for they shift mental moods and states at every moment. We can never grasp it all. But we can keep ourselves mindful of the world's diversity and of our own limitations, thus becoming, as Montaigne put it, "wise at our own expense". This is no simple relativism, flattening everything to the same level. It is "perspectivism": the recognition that angle of view always matters, and indeed that it makes the world vastly more interesting.

Thinking oneself into the experience of others also opens the way to a system of ethics based on communication and fellow-feeling, even between very different kinds of beings. Once you have seen the world from someone else's perspective, it becomes harder to torture, hunt, or kill them. 

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In his book, Montaigne presents all this as an accident of his own temperament. At the same time, he derives a powerful ethical code from it: an ethics founded in the body and in human nature. It is personal in origin, and he does not lay it out as a system. Yet it does, I believe, have the force of a moral law for him. He writes, for example:

"There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, and some mutual obligation."

Every living thing is linked by bonds of communication and some degree of shared nature. These bonds create a duty – a duty that is easy to follow, so long as we listen to our nature and tune out the voices of fanaticism and rationalisation (which all too often work together).

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"There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly", wrote Montaigne in the closing chapter of the Essays; "no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally. And the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being."

Animals That Take Advice From Bacteria

Pity the poor tubeworm, whose life is fraught with risk. Like many marine invertebrates, the worm spends its earliest days as a tiny larva drifting in the plankton — but sooner or later, it must choose a place to settle down. Once cemented to a hard surface, it begins the massive shape change called metamorphosis, from which it emerges in its splendorous adult form.

There are no second chances: A worm that picks a bad spot can’t try again. Faced with such a momentous decision — the most important of its life — the larva needs all the help it can get. Often, that help comes from another kingdom of life altogether.

Scientists have known for several decades that some animal larvae, including those of tubeworms, select sites for metamorphosis by monitoring chemical signals released by bacteria. But they’re just beginning to realize how widespread the relationship can be, and how sophisticated — sometimes involving specialized bacterial machinery to deliver signals to larvae. This implies that communication between animals and bacteria in the oceans could be much richer and more cooperative than previously suspected.

And there could be practical applications: Experts may someday find ways to manage this communication to encourage animals to settle in some places, such as oyster farms, and discourage them in others, such as the hulls of ships.

It’s hardly surprising that tubeworms and other planktonic larvae rely on bacterial cues to help select a suitable spot for metamorphosis. After all, a thin layer of mixed bacterial species — called a biofilm — coats every available ocean surface. What’s new is the emerging breadth of this phenomenon. “In every major branch of the animal tree of life, there are species that undergo metamorphosis in response to bacteria,” says Nicholas Shikuma, a microbiologist at San Diego State University who coauthored a look at how bacteria influence animal metamorphosis in the 2021 Annual Review of Microbiology.

- More Here

Archaic Torso of Apollo

 We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Animals In The Anthropocene

Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene, a new book... a collection of heart breaking images of animal sufferings caused by us, Sapiens. 

For the nth time, I am going to say this - My problems in life have become irrelevant. My life is so gifted when compared to these sufferings we cause on other animals. I have no desires anymore in my life. Yes, all of the me, me, me is no more for me. 

If these pictures cannot change your mind to quit killing animals for gastro intestinal pleasures then I am not sure what will... just quit it now. It would be THE best decision you would have made in your entire life. 

This cow, who was pleading for his life before being stabbed at a slaughterhouse.

This pig, who was viewed as nothing more than a product by the meat industry and discarded like trash outside a farm.

These ducks, who were herded into a pit to be buried alive after an outbreak of bird flu.

These cows, surrounded by concrete, tile, and steel, who suffer the repeated trauma of being separated from their babies.

This turtle, who writhed in agony as his shell was sliced off.

These chickens who, like most in the meat industry, were forced to live in cramped sheds and denied everything that was natural and important to them.

This duck, who languished for days after his beak was broken during force feeding in the foie gras industry.

These dogs, who cowered in fear before one of their cagemates was beaten to death by a butcher.

This pig, who gazed out from a transport truck before reaching her final destination at the slaughterhouse.

Source

On Fishing

But even with proper release techniques, slot limits, circle hooks, and descending devices, we will still need to change our behavior by limiting what the commercial fishing sector calls “fishing effort.” In fishing, like in life, there are good days and there are bad days. And because of the increasing number of bad days in the present era, fishermen tend to keep on fishing if they happen upon a run of good luck. Even those who practice catch-and-release angling are guilty of this habit. “If I’m not killing anything,” they reason, “why should I stop?” But as the marine conservationist Carl Safina wrote me recently, “Fish are not made to have hooks in their mouths. So if we hurt these animals, we need to have a better reason than ‘just because.’” To catch something from the wild and use it for our food is, to my mind, justifiable. To torture it for amusement is not.

So perhaps it’s time to rethink fishing. No one says that a fishing trip need only be about fishing; there are other things to learn while bobbing in a boat with your kids. We can teach our children to learn the lexicon of seabirds that still plunge into the ocean’s depths, or wonder at the whales and dolphins and seals that are much more common off American shores now than when I was a child—thanks to laws that prevent their destruction. Quiet observation is a good skill to learn. And, if all else fails to amuse them, a fishing trip could wrap up after the evening’s meal has been procured. In the end, it might be better to kill and go home rather than endlessly catch and release.

- What I Wish My Father Had Taught Me About Fishing

Peter Singer has an educational piece on the same; aptly titled If Fish Could Scream:

When I was a child, my father used to take me for walks, often along a river or by the sea. We would pass people fishing, perhaps reeling in their lines with struggling fish hooked at the end of them. Once I saw a man take a small fish out of a bucket and impale it, still wriggling, on an empty hook to use as bait.

Another time, when our path took us by a tranquil stream, I saw a man sitting and watching his line, seemingly at peace with the world, while next to him, fish he had already caught were flapping helplessly and gasping in the air. My father told me that he could not understand how anyone could enjoy an afternoon spent taking fish out of the water and letting them die slowly.

These childhood memories flooded back when I read Worse things happen at sea: the welfare of wild-caught fish, a breakthrough report released last month on fishcount.org.uk. In most of the world, it is accepted that if animals are to be killed for food, they should be killed without suffering. Regulations for slaughter generally require that animals be rendered instantly unconscious before they are killed, or death should be brought about instantaneously, or, in the case of ritual slaughter, as close to instantaneously as the religious doctrine allows.

Reading Fast, Well & Widely!

Brilliant piece by Tyler Cowen; I have learned so much from him in the past two decades!

Thank you for everything you do Tyler. 

Every area you don’t given a damn about you probably should read at least one book in. Because the very best book in that area is superb, and you’re not going to know what it is. So if tennis is something you don’t know anything about, well, read Andre Agassi’s memoir. That’s a wonderful book. You don’t have to know about or care about tennis. And just go through other areas – gardening, dogs, turtles, whatever. Find the best book about dogs and read it, and the less you like dogs, actually, the better that book is going to be, because you are not sick of the topic.

People don’t read enough, and I think as a society we’re under-investing in reading. People feel compelled to finish books they’ve started – that’s just a tax on your reading. Why would you do that to yourself? Imagine a world where any restaurant you tried you had to keep on going there for days or weeks, you’d hardly ever go out to eat.

Take reading seriously, develop a passion for it, and view it as part of your practice as a knowledge worker to get ahead, but along the way, having fun doing so.

End Of Suffering & Finding New Home - Moon Bear Homecoming

Heart breaking story; stupidity spread in China for centuries backed by one of the never-ending-spring of sapiens myths and stories which caused preposterous suffering for millions of bears. 

DNA results suggest that Asiatic black bears are the oldest of all modern bear species.3 They are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with their population numbers decreasing.4

Moon bears are often kept on farms in small cages in captivity to collect bile, a substance found in many animals, including humans. Bear bile is used in some forms of traditional medicine. 

“Bears continue to be caged and cruelly extracted of their bile in countries across Asia, including China, Vietnam and South Korea,” Animals Asia's Founder and CEO Jill Robinson tells Treehugger. “Thousands of them suffer at the hands of human exploitation and greed as their bile juice is used for a variety of traditional medicines, or is sold in incidental preparations such as teas, tonics, and wines.” 

- More Here

Blue Horses by Mary Oliver

I step into the painting of the four blue horses.

I am not even surprised that I can do this.

One of the horses walks toward me.

His blue nose noses me lightly. I put my arm

over his blue mane, not holding on, just

commingling.

He allows me my pleasure.

Franz Marc died a young man, shrapnel in his brain.

I would rather die than explain to the blue horses

what war is.

They would either faint in horror, or simply

find it impossible to believe.

I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc.

Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.

Maybe the desire to make something beautiful

is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

Now all four horses have come closer,

are bending their faces toward me

as if they have secrets to tell.

I don’t expect them to speak, and they don’t.

If being so beautiful isn’t enough, what

could they possibly say?

- Mary Oliver (via the brilliant Maria Popova)

If you haven't watched the movie War Horse then please do so. Sapiens and their ready made stupidness killed millions of horses in world war 2. 

Mexico Bans Animal Testing for Cosmetics

Mexico’s Senate has unanimously approved a federal bill banning animal testing for cosmetics. The decision makes Mexico the first country in North America and the 41st country in the world to ban cosmetics testing on animals.

Under the new law, cosmetic research may not include testing on animals that includes individual cosmetic ingredients or finished cosmetic products. The new law also prohibits the manufacture, marketing, and import of cosmetics whether their final formulation or some of their individual ingredients have been tested on animals elsewhere in the world.

Of the 103 senators who participated in the vote, all voted in favor of the bill. Humane Society International/Mexico advocated for the bill along with a non-governmental organizational called Te Protejo that promotes the use of cosmetics that haven’t been tested on animals.

The groups believe that interest in the legislation was influenced by Humane Society International’s stop-motion animated film “Save Ralph.” The story of a rabbit cosmetic tester had more than 150 million social media views and more than 730 million tags on TikTok. It spurred more than 1.3 million people to sign a petition for the legislation in Mexico.

- More Here

The Kisses, The Play & The Life We Lived - In Pictures