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."
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