Being in Touch with Life
Montaigne and the question of how to live
‘Read Montaigne … He will calm you … You will love him, you will see’ - Flaubert
We are each of us richer than we think … Montaigne has an eye for this richness. I like his flyaway mind that was always likely to be taken by something he saw around him, something he heard. He has a very proximate awareness that saw all the little details of life - and which could inspire him to write an essay.
Don’t worry about death, pay attention, read a lot, stop reading when it bores you, appreciate words and ideas that are useful for purposes of living well, give up control, embrace imperfection.
'Our life is part folly, part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it.'
Montaigne wrote on all of it, including his own follies and imperfections. He is endlessly entertaining company.
The idea of writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Périgord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592.
‘How do you avoid pointless arguments? How do you get over the death of someone you love? How do you balance the need to feel safe against the need to feel free? How do you deal with fanatics? How do you make the most of every moment?
Such questions arise in most people’s lives. They are all versions of a bigger conundrum: How do you live?’
‘Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did. He wanted to know how to live a good life — meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one. This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present. He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did. And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself.’ (Sarah Bakewell).
“Sometime towards the end of the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne reached up to the ceiling of his library and scratched off an inscription he had placed there some years before… The inscription Montaigne erased was a line from the Roman poet Lucretius: Nec nova vivendo procuditer ulla voluptas – There is no new pleasure to be gained from living longer. It was a sentiment he had previously held dear to.. His first born daughter had died at the age of only two months (the first of five to die in infancy). His younger brother had been killed, absurdly, tragically, by a blow from a tennis ball. His best friend, Etienne la Boetie, had died of the plague in his early thirties. And his father, whom he adored, had recently suffered a prolonged and agonizing death from a kidney stone. Moreover, violent religious warfare was spreading across the country, setting fire to Montaigne’s region, pitting Catholic against Protestant, father against son, massacre against murder.
And so in a Latin inscription he had made on the wall of his library after resigning from his job as a magistrate and retiring to his house, Montaigne had declared his intention to hide himself away, and crawl unburthened towards death…
But Montaigne’s erasing of the words of Lucretius from the ceiling of his library also marks an amazing reversal in Montaigne’s outlook over the course of his writing – a shift from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life.
‘To Philosophize is to Learn to Die’, as he declares in the title of one of his first essays. But over the course of his writing, Montaigne turns his back on this pessimism and embraces a new philosophy, in which it is ‘living happily, not … dying happily, that is the source of human happiness.’ Montaigne begins to reject to despair and feel the texture of the simple fabric of existence. And, with this, his essays grow from simple distractions into a way of replaying, rewinding, and reliving his life as he lives it. ‘The shorter my possession of life, the more deeply and fully I must make use of it’.
And Montaigne’s writing overflows with life. In over a hundred essays and around half a million words he records every thought, every taste and sensation that crosses his mind. He writes essays on sleep and sadness, on smells and friendship, on children and sex and death. And, as a final testament, he writes an essay on experience, in which he contemplates the wonder of human existence itself.
The reflections which Montaigne put together in three books of essays were quite unusual for the time in that they rarely touched upon man's relationship to God. It’s not simply that Montaigne was more interested in secular issues, but that overriding concern was with life as it is lived. Montaigne never lets the weight of metaphysical and epistemological considerations and speculations drag his quick and lively intellect down or deflect his attention from what real people actually do and think. He was utterly unimpressed by theory and by abstraction when it came to examining the world.
Descartes made the cogito - ‘I think therefore I am’ – his foundation of certain knowledge in the world. Montaigne was all about the ‘I’, but in a very different sense. His writings were all about him and how he related to others and to the world. He offers very much a maximal self, as opposed to a minimal self. And, bringing a deep erudition and an endlessly enquiring mind to bear on an incredibly wide range of themes and subjects, Montaigne managed to strike a universal human chord. His ‘I’ was not some self-absorbed, enclosed ego, but an expansive self that others could relate to.
And in the text of the Essays and his Travel Journal (recounting his trip to Italy), Montaigne explores the pains, paradoxes and pleasures of being. He asks whether you should jump or duck at the bang of an arquebus, or whether to stand still or run at the sight of the enemy. He tells how Plato says you shouldn’t drink before you are eighteen, should drink moderately until forty, but after then get drunk as often as possible… He loses his wallet; he pokes himself in the eye. He goes sledging down Mont Cenis. He goes to Pisa and meets the learned Doctor Burro, who presents him with a book on the ebb and flow of the sea.
Yet amidst these infinite interests there remains a heart to Montaigne’s enquiry: his own experience of himself. For Montaigne stands at the watershed of the two great intellectual movements of the past millennium: the darkened vaulting of medieval Christendom and the monstrous progeny of seventeenth century science. In both of these, everyday life is, in a sense, relegated: in science, into mechanism and matter; in religion, into transitoriness and sin. Montaigne is like a man standing on a platform, waiting between these two trains. Yet during this silence, in the space of perhaps a few decades around the end of the sixteenth century, life begins to unfurl. For what Montaigne discovers is the power of the ordinary and the unremarkable, the value of the here-and-now…
The Christian Stoicism of the sixteenth century saw the body and the senses as something to overcome, something which we should become indifferent to, and life as something that could be easily relinquished, provided the moral and theological price was right. But Montaigne rejects this indifference and over the course of his essays finds the reason for living in the very experience of living itself..
Montaigne was writing in the context of new learning and new discoveries, but his thinking can be characterised as modern in a much more sophisticated sense than asserting knowledge over belief, science over religion. The scientific revolution following Copernicus had not only undermined the old certainties of religion, it had put the very idea of certain knowledge into question. It was easy enough to see that the old beliefs were no longer true, but at the same time there was no way of being sure that the new truths possessed any more secure a foundation. Montaigne understood immediately that these developments were about much more than a crude antithesis between the old religious truths and the new scientific knowledge. He understood that certainty as such, whether divine or secular, was impossible to attain.
Knowledge, it seemed, had eclipsed belief. But Montaigne saw something else. Reason could not guarantee certainty at all and could not be a universal standard. For this reason, a general scepticism was the only appropriate attitude to take. In his essay Apology for Raymond Sebond Montaigne used the motto for which he became famous – ‘que sais-je?’, ‘what do I know?’ Lacking the hope that comes from certainty, such scepticism risks casting us adrift in negativism and relativism. With Montaigne, it becomes a liberating doubt, an invitation out of a mental prison of false certainties. And this referred to much more than an assertion of science against religion, the story of the victory of the forces of knowledge over the forces of ignorance and superstition that was told up to the Enlightenment and after. The world of knowledge itself is implicated in the presentation of false certainty. It may seem surprising, but Montaigne remained a practising Catholic. There is no contradiction here. For Montaigne it was the belief in secular certainty, and not scepticism, that made it difficult to accept religious truths, truths which could only be justified through faith. But if that certainty through reason was unwarranted, and if, therefore, scepticism was the more appropriate position, then it was perfectly possible to hold religious beliefs. Montaigne’s scepticism, then, was applied to truths and beliefs both old and new, religious and scientific. Scientific knowledge should be considered as part of a continuing process of discovery, and not become new mental shackles stifling enquiry. Philosophy, for Montaigne, was less about abstract questions concerning what we know and how we know it than a way of life. The important thing was to keep talking, experiencing, reflecting, thinking, living.
For Montaigne, life is to be lived actively, and not passively, a vitality that led even Nietzsche – not one to hand out compliments, least of all to philosophers – to proclaim:
‘That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth … If I were set the task, I could endeavour to make myself at home in the world with him’.
The towering edifice that Descartes and other seventeenth century build around the ego or the cogito [‘I think therefore I am’] – the huge glass and steel cathedral of Reason – is one that has come to eclipse Montaigne’s more modest tower.. But Montaigne can be seen to offer an alternative philosophy to that of Descartes, a more human-centred conception that lays no claim to absolute certainty, but that is also free from what some have seen as the implications of such claims: the totalitarian political movements of the twentieth century, and the individualist anomie of modern Western life.
For at the heart of Descartes’ philosophy is the intellectual principle of division, an attempt to offer clarity in a world made uncertain by religious and political unrest. He thus states as part of his ‘method’ that intellectual problems should be ‘divided’ into ‘as many parts as possible’ and that we should accept as true only that which we can perceive ‘very clearly and distinctly’ – i.e. separate from other things…
Montaigne, by contrast, operates with an older, less cutting-edge, yet perhaps more venerable intellectual instinct: that of proximity. Rather than defining and dividing things, Montaigne wants to bring them together, get near to them, close to them, not least to himself. And rather than searching for certainties that divide him from the commonality, Montaigne sees the principle of trust as of far greater importance; as he says at the start of his essays: ‘You have here a book of good faith.’ For Montaigne, human relations are the primal scene of knowledge: if trust is restored, agreement, tolerance and hence truth will follow; the search for constancy and certainty strikes him merely as obstinacy in another guise…
In the midst of the Wars of Religion, Montaigne began to see conflict as fuelled by the search for political and religious certainty. And where some saw the unfeeling Stoicism of the ancients as an ideal, a moral philosophy that Descartes endorsed, Montaigne begins to see it as exacerbating the divisiveness of his time, cutting off men’s awareness of themselves and their understanding of others, resulting in an acceptance and, indeed, an appetite for murder and gratuitous cruelty.
Montaigne therefore decides to look more locally for his morality, beginning by examining or essaying himself. And what he discovers is the imperceived experience of existence – imperceived .. because its ever-presentness has rendered it invisible. Whereas Descartes’ division of mind and body separates him from other bodies and other people, Montaigne sees his own relationship to his own body as opening a gateway to ‘the universal pattern of the human’, and as a consequence society at large. Self-knowledge thus leads us into ourselves, but then out of ourselves into others: we need to get to know ourselves before we can understand our fellow man – a logical paradox from a modern perspective, but not for Montaigne.
Montaigne’s essays thus bring with them an acceptance of variation and difference, but a difference built around our similarities in the first place. He sees travel as a way ‘to rub and polish our brains through contact with others’, and writes in Italian when in Italy and in French when he returns to France. He collects Brazilian love songs from the New World, making him perhaps the first fan of world music. He admires the Turks’ provision of hospitals for animals and wonders whether elephants have a religion. In short, Montaigne’s scepticism arrives at sympathy rather than certainty, seeing our most obstinate beliefs as simply grounded in habit…
But most of all, Montaigne develops a philosophy based on the things that lie around him: nourished by our natural capacities, uncontaminated by the artificial additives of Stoicism, dogmatism and doubt. Rather than seeking sanctuary of Reason, Montaigne combs the shoreline where death claws at life, and builds a shelter from what he finds there. It is formed of sand and seashells, of friendship and sex, of dancing, sleeping, watermelons and wine. It takes as its subjects a fall from his horse, the bang of an arquebus, his dog, his cat, his kidney stones and the sights and sounds that surround him…
Rather than reaching above ourselves in a search for certainty, Montaigne shows us where we already stand. And instead of seeking for truths beyond the human, he poses a simpler but far more important philosophical problem: ‘Have I wasted my time?’
‘We are never at home, we are always beyond ourselves.’ Montaigne’s writing is an attempt to return home, to come close to himself, to shadow himself as he climbs the stairs to his library and sits in his chair. But from there he reaches out to the reader in a gesture that is quintessentially social, introducing himself to ourselves, though not simply in terms of his thoughts but in terms of his house and his vineyards, his books and his writings, his handshake, his smile, and his chestnut-brown hair. We are, he says, ‘marvellously corporeal’, and our sense of life increases as we see this mirrored in the proximity of others – a truth he discovers within himself, but then expands to take in friends and family, servants and neighbours, Germans, Italians – even other creatures – and finally invokes in the intimacy between ourselves as readers and himself.
All the time reminding us that if you value a friend, you should meet with them; if you are fond of your children, eat with them; if there is someone you love, stand close to them, be near to them. And if you want to get back in touch with life – as Flaubert wrote to a depressed correspondent = ‘read Montaigne … He will calm you … You will love him, you will see.’”
(Saul Frampton, When I am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know She is Not Playing with Me?: Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life, 2011 Preface)
The Wars of Religion in Montaigne’s day are pretty much like wars in any other time and place, people so convinced that they are self-evidently right in their views that their opponents must be irredeemably evil, with no compromise possible between competing viewpoints. The quest for meaning is one thing, but this itch for certainty fuels conflict in religion and politics. It is a great paradox of history that that search for objective foundations which, in their discovery, would serve to unite the human race around the one truth, should provoke should disunity, such dogmatism, such hate-filled bigotry. What God? What Nature? What is the objective transcendental authority you search? And how do you conceive it? We need principles for our actions to be about something. What has inherent worth? What do you worship? Roger Scruton writes of the soul of the world, that which is left over when science and philosophy have done their work – that which is core. I like Scruton. Owen Flanagan I also like. In The Problem of the Soul he argues for a thoroughly embodied conception that gives us meaning and purpose but has no need of the soul. Which soul? Descartes’ immaterial soul is not Aristotle’s soul. Soul as DNA? Soul as psyche? I like Stuart Kauffman too, and his Reinventing the Sacred gives us an endlessly creative universe that does all the things we once called upon God to do, but within an entirely naturalistic framework. Deep, complicated questions. Who is right, who is wrong? Where does the truth of things lie? How can we be certain? I tend to the side of Kauffman’s endlessly creative universe as a co-creation in which we, with purpose, meaning, value and consciousness are actively involved as creative agents. We see here the world as a creative unfolding, a world in which we can never have complete knowledge or certainty. We live forwards into mystery.
And my point? I am with Montaigne, who said that he would as like light a candle to both St. Michael and his dragon: “…I could easily for a neede bring a candle to Saint Michaell, and another to his Dragon…” That’s my view. Evasive? No. The candle is being lighted, there is a recognition of worth. There is recognition of the need for light and dark. Civilisation as a triumph over our dragon nature has brought enlightenment in a most ill-balanced sense. A people confronted by a dragon face a calamity which can only be avoided in two drastic ways, human sacrifice or the slaying of the dragon. Either way, such civilisation is bought at a terrible price. For all we gain, something precious and essential is lost.
The dragon represented the fear of an unknown world, an external world ‘out there’, but deep down that uncertainty related to the ‘in here’. The unknown was unmastered, uncontrolled, uncontrollable, and was something to fear. The unknown threatened calamity. In a world in which the community lived under constant threat of famine, plague or natural disaster, the unknown was accompanied by an existential fear. So slaying the dragon made some kind of sense. But it has not bought certainty at all. In conquering natural necessity we have made ourselves prisoners of a new social necessity, in thrall to the very powers which brought victory. And just what victory is this in any case. In putting an end to nature, we put an end to ourselves.
The triumph of light over dark has been the triumph of culture over nature. But in identifying nature as an enemy to be vanquished, we have pitted our external and internal natures against each other. And while we may have slain the dragon, the human sacrifice continues, not to appease the gods and goddesses of nature but to serve our own gods – the new idols of money, capital, commodities, the state, bureaucracy, the nation.
‘The ultimate measure of the awesome power, and the fundamental violence, of unfettered abstraction is to be found in the millions upon millions of nameless corpses which this most vicious of centuries has left as its memorial, human sacrifices to one or another of Weber's renascent modern gods. War itself is not new, modernity's contribution is to have waged it, with characteristic efficiency, under the sign of various totalizing abstractions which name and claim the lives of all.’ (Sayer, Derek Capitalism and Modernity Routledge 1987: 154/5).
This is why a balance between light and dark matters, why enlightenment, exposing and rejecting the death dealing, destructive illusions of the politics of the cave must be balanced lest we substitute even more murderous, destructive illusions in their place, this time magnified by technological and institutional power.
The implications are spelt out by Karen Armstrong, discussing Picasso in A Short History of Myth:
‘In Guernica, humans and animals, both victims of indiscriminate, heedless slaughter, lie together in a mangled heap, the screaming horse inextricably entwined with the decapitated human figure. Even the sacrificial bull is doomed.
So too — Picasso may be suggesting — is modern humanity, which ... was only just beginning to explore the full potential of its self-destructive and rationally-calculated violence.’ (Armstrong 2005: 144/5).
Even the sacrificial bull is doomed … and so, too, is an enlightened, rationalised, instrumentalised humanity. Everything that is admirable about civilization — the art, the architecture, the technology, the efficient execution of difficult tasks, the human aspiration and achievement — is hard to disentangle from the very things which promise to bring an end to civilisation – epistemologies of rule and domination, social hierarchy, top-down power over people, the extremes of rich and poor, war, and human-made death as the central moral and material fact of our age. Here in modernity we find the institutional embodiment of the psychic truth that the best and worst qualities of human beings are often the same.
Can we disentangle it all? Yes. The conquest of nature without is also a conquest of nature within.
Now I read that ‘Dragons set to rise from their 'Great Sleep' thanks to climate change and economic downturn.’
(http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/dragons-set-rise-their-great-sleep-thanks-climate-change-economic-downturn-1494515).
‘The researchers say it is "only a matter of time" before they rise again and that scientists and governments must look at means of protection before it is too late. "Climatic conditions are rapidly reaching an optimum for breeding dragons, and it is only a matter of time before the neurotransfer spell loses its efficacy completely. Further research into fireproof protective clothing is highly recommended — as is an avoidance of honorific titles."’
Oh, dragons are again the unknown and the unmastered forces to be slain. So we are to become modern day St Michael’s or St George’s, don our technological armour and slay the dragon again. Which dragon? Climate change is a self-made calamity, not a natural calamity. We are looking at the self-made undoing of the self-made man. And that’s the problem. We slew the dragon and in the process vanquished ourselves – our civilisations have been removed further and further from our biological matrix, losing touch with the sources of life.
We need a sane and balanced perspective that eschews fear and embraces the future, however uncertain and unknown. And we need fear neither the light nor the dark but can embrace both. So I shall, with Montaigne, continue to light a candle for both St Michael and his dragon. And if that is a paradox, it is one we can live with and live by, not one we kill and die by.
The 20 attempts at an answer to “How to Live” that Sarah Bakewell describes in her book include: “Be born,” “Do a good job, but not too good a job,” and “Question everything.” But the one that resonates most strongly with her is “Read a lot, forget most of what you read and be slow-witted.”
Montaigne always complained of his “monstrously deficient” memory, so he didn’t bother accumulating facts, Sarah Bakewell explains. Much more important was the exposure to someone else’s experience and perspective. Reading and forgetting “let him follow his own thoughts wherever they led,” she writes, “which was all he really wanted to do.”
That may sound a little, shall we say, non- committal and self-centred. But I see it this way, if we are, as I believe we are, natural beings, then there is such a thing as the ecological self that is a part of, not apart from, nature. And if we follow the promptings of that ecological self, we will be playing our parts within nature by becoming and being ourselves. Montaigne’s concern with himself is not as self-absorbed as it seems – he has a knack of combining particulars and universals without imposing abstract truths. Life as a lived experience. To read Montaigne is ‘to touch base with oneself’ and to learn how to act within our capacities, to accept and even to savour them. It is to touch base with the Earth around us.
Nicholas Shakespeare applauds two books on Montaigne, the most modern of philosophers.
“He does not tell us what to think; rather he encourages us to think.”
A rather sane man, Montaigne. I like him.
‘Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.’
'If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will fully instruct you upon the spot; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care.'
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1572-1586)
'Montaigne’s project has shifted from the philosophy of death to the philosophy of life; from being not afraid to die to being not afraid to live. “Living happily,” Montaigne now believes, “not dying happily, that is the source of human contentment.”
'Montaigne’s empathy leads him to reflect that the true gap between us is not nearly so immense as the differences fomented by, say, religious opinions – or, come to that, medical opinions.
'Montaigne’s style is the man: compassionate, unshockable, tolerant, decent, intellectually independent. The pleasurable balance and flow of his sentences reflect the openness and even-handedness of his mind.' For Montaigne, there are always too many people busy trying to change the world who could not change a fuse.
“Man is quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot, but he creates gods by the dozen.”
To read Montaigne is “to touch base with oneself” (Saul Frampton). And in getting back in touch with our true being we come to learn how to live well with others requires that we act well by accepting and even savoring our capacities, and acting within them rather than overreaching them in pursuit of a future world to come. In doing so, we come to be at home with our world and with ourselves.
But - and you know me well enough to know that a 'but' would be coming - whilst agnosticism in politics, religion and ethics may refrain us from doing harm, it can be powerless in preventing harm being done. Wise and tolerant skeptics who think that nothing can be known are weak and ineffectual in face of fanatics, bigots and zealots who think they know everything. Civilisation needs citizens made of firmer stuff. Agnosticism can immunize us against tyranny, but a little more moral and political fortification is required when we are faced by various fanaticisms and extremisms, the people who will organise and mobilse to take our world, our liberties, our conditions of life away from us. This kid of agnosticism is to be thought, and can be lived in a personal sense; but it cannot be lived as a political praxis in the public arena, where it becomes self-doubting and pusillanimous and ineffectual.
We may wish that our fellow members of society would desist from imposing their versions of of the truth upon each other in the name of some "objective" truth, but individuals so tolerant, skeptical and agnostic as to shy away from actions and consequences with respect to public life, social justice and common interest can hardly be considered citizens at all, and are likely to lack the will and disposition to defend freedom in any form, including the individual freedom they value most. We need a liberating skepticism to immunise us against the tyrannies of putatively immutable, abstract, objective "Truth," but a spirited defense of provisional social truths is not only compatible with freedom, it is its condition. Once principle is removed and the possibility of shared goals, mutual understanding, knowledge and public good is denied, there is nothing left but bigoted and fanatical certainties on the one hand and institutionalised force to keep the civil peace on the other.
As social beings, we can do better than this in the public realm.
I am tempted towards environmental pragmatism which is able to break the impasse we have reached with respect to arguments over valuing and the value of nature. But without some idea of what nature is and without some notion of ecological principle, just what is the end of pragmatic activity? I am committed to human and planetary flourishing and interpret the virtues in light of the qualities for sustainable living on the planet. I believe we can identify the conditions for such flourishing and I believe we can define these qualities for successful living within planetary boundaries. In other words, any pragmatism on my part still needs to be buttressed by a set of ontological and epistemological principles. We just need to be sure we are not setting up some abstract matter as a metaphysical ideal, setting up political conflict in terms of competing versions of unwarranted certainty and misplaced concreteness.
What grounds do we have for certainty? Here, I return to that quote which heads this piece: "Let Nature have her way ..."
Does that contradict my emphasis on the virtues and their acquisition? Not at all. I believe there are natural virtues. In the 4th century BC, Xenophon wrote that ‘Earth is a goddess and teaches justice to those who can learn.’ ‘The better she is served,’ Xenophon continued, ‘the more good things she gives in return.’ Indeed, yes. In addition to justice there are the other natural virtues: prudence, which is a knowledge of natural limits; fortitude, which is the appreciation of natural realities; and temperance, the awareness of natural restraints. I wonder if, in slaying the Dragon, we put an end to the natural virtues of the ancient Goddess. As I say, keep lighting two candles. Because the grounds we are searching for are in both the light and the dark, in culture and in nature, in their entwining.
So, my work in the virtue tradition is very much about working with the natural virtues, the predispositions we are born with, whilst developing the right dispositions to act well with respect to ourselves and our environing relations. My work on ecological virtue accents prudence and practical reasoning in seeing our public life as creative. In other words, there is no abstract truth that is given prior to politics. We live in a participatory universe and, as such, democracy is active and creative in making and remaking the world. According to the natural virtues, as indicated above, but also the virtues we acquire, develop and exercise in creating a society that houses the wholeness of our being. Such a view comes close to John Dewey's pragmatism and his reference to 'natural piety'. It also follows William James and his conception of pragmatism as "the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts." (William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth, ed. A. J. Ayer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 32). For James, the pragmatist "turns toward concreteness and adequacy, toward facts, toward action, and toward power. . . . [Pragmatism thus] means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretense of finality in truth."
I develop a notion of Ecopolis, a public life which is fitted to the contours of the ecological conditions of life, a biospheric politics. Such a politics is pragmatic and democratic; it is politics practised in the participatory mode. It is a politics which puts culture and nature together in a fruitful partnership. As James wrote: "See already how democratic [pragmatism] is. Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature." (James 1978: 44)
We can, in this sense, let nature have her way, for in such an eco-public we see ourselves as active parts of nature, the realisation of our natural selves also playing a part in nature's own creative unfolding. This life-affirming, outer-oriented disposition enables us to live into the future, embrace the unknown as part unknowable and part uncreated. It is such action. not principles of a priori rationality, that is our principal concern in the public realm.
The struggle for freedom, justice, democracy, planetary health requires a principled conviction and commitment that only an active, informed citizenship can possess. So I would qualify my admiration of Montaigne this way, a spirit of equivocation born of metaphysical doubt in the context of wars between rival certainties may be wise. But it can also become weary and enervating and such qualities aids the practical struggle for a better world but little.
But remember, before entering the public arena and engaging in practical struggle, you don't have and can never have complete knowledge, your rivals may actually have a point, so don't go shoving your certainties down someone else's throat.
Montaigne reminds us that real politics is a messy, untidy and imperfect business. Like real life, then. 'The virtue assigned to the affairs of the world is a virtue with many bends, angles, and elbows, so as to join and adapt itself to human weakness; mixed and artificial, not straight, clean, constant, or purely innocent. . . . he who walks in a crowd must step aside, keep his elbows in, step back or advance, even leave the straight way, according to what he encounters. (On Vanity, in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958.)
Montaigne captures well the essence of human beings as social beings. In this, he can be located in a tradition that connects modern thinkers who see human nature as socially determined in history to Aristotle. As Marx put it: "The human being is in the most liberal sense a zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious [geselliges] animal, but an animal that can individuate itself only in the midst of society." (Grundrisse). This social expression of human nature is an ongoing interaction by which both human beings and their world shape each other. Aquinas’s resulting definition of man as ‘a political and social animal’ makes clear the ‘social’ component that is implicit in Aristotle’s original conception of zoon politikon. This gives us a conception of politics that posits the social nature of human beings, beings who are always involved in a dialectical interdependence involving both government and the world. In this conception, human beings possess a creatively unfolding telos whose ultimate end is shaped in interaction with others and with the world. In this understanding there can be no fixed natures nor absolute, 'objective', abstractly grounded notions of what is real, rational and right. Instead, human beings live the social-political life, a public life in which they individuate themselves. This view holds that human nature is "flexible, pragmatic, slow-moving, and highly political" and therefore that politics will be a process of "untidy accommodation." (Alexander Bickel, The Morality of Consent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). Human beings as social and political animals interact creatively with others and the world, producing patterns, behaviours, actions and consequences that can never be entirely captured by abstract morals and metaphysics cannot account for. As Montaigne comments, the virtue of human beings is of another order, with many bends and angles.
Montaigne has been criticised as a moral relativist, and it is true that his approach is different to that of Aristotle, Aquinas and Marx. I address the claim further below. I think Montaigne was more concerned with cultural variation and the way it undermines fixed notions of the human essence, that is, with the variable and creative ways that the human essence is expressed in history. His tone is critical and skeptical at all times, and avoids the twin reefs of absolutism and relativism. He does have a moral position. It's just that .... human beings are complicated and creative and human affairs are messy, an endless search for a good fit in the world as the human bent changes.
There are no straight lines and rules here, no a priori certainties which we simply translate into action, no 'objective' truths for philosopher-kings to relay downwards. It's a world of social interaction, of social learning, habits, practices. of meanings and significations, of the said, the unsaid and the unsayable, stories, symbols, myths, disagreements, passions, and a million of loud or silent manifestations by which we express our common humanity. Politics, as I understand it, is about creating the institutional and relational fabric that give these things a home - a housing of the psyche.
And here Montaigne has real merit. Normal is what most people do. And Montaigne reminds us just how varied human nature is. What most people do varies in time and place. And it isn't at all clear who is right or who is wrong. What is clear is that anyone who approaches politics with some abstract notion of what human nature is is going to fail miserably or do an awful lot of damage to an awful lot of people. So the line 'let nature have her way' is a good rule of thumb to begin with. We can take things from there, whilst staying in touch with the natural virtues.
From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://www.iep.utm.edu/montaign/
‘One of the primary targets of Montaigne’s skeptical attack against presumption is ethnocentrism, or the belief that one’s culture is superior to others and therefore is the standard against which all other cultures, and their moral beliefs and practices, should be measured. This belief in the moral and cultural superiority of one’s own people, Montaigne finds, is widespread. It seems to be the default belief of all human beings. The first step toward undermining this prejudice is to display the sheer multiplicity of human beliefs and practices. Thus, in essays such as “Of some ancient customs,” “Of Custom, and not easily changing an accepted law,” and “Apology for Raymond Sebond” Montaigne catalogues the variety of behaviors to be found in the world in order to draw attention to the contingency of his own cultural norms. By reporting many customs that are direct inversions of contemporary European customs, he creates something like an inverted world for his readers, stunning their judgment by forcing them to question which way is up: here men urinate standing up and women do so sitting down; elsewhere it is the opposite. Here incest is frowned upon; in other cultures it is the norm. Here we bury our dead; there they eat them. Here we believe in the immortality of the soul; in other societies such a belief is nonsense.'
'Montaigne is not terribly optimistic about reforming the prejudices of his contemporaries, for simply reminding them of the apparent contingency of their own practices in most cases will not be enough. The power of custom over our habits and beliefs, he argues, is stronger than we tend to recognize. Indeed, Montaigne devotes almost as much time in the Essays to discussing the power of custom to shape the way we see the world as he does to revealing the various customs that he has come across in his reading and his travels. Custom, whether personal or social, puts to sleep the eye of our judgment, thereby tightening its grip over us, since its effects can only be diminished through deliberate and self-conscious questioning. It begins to seem as if it is impossible to escape custom’s power over our judgment: “Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in” (F 152).'
Here, I am reminded of Aristotle: "Look for precision in each class of things only in as far as the nature of the subject permits." Human nature, customs, habits, practices and culture can never be a matter of precision.
Was Montaigne a relativist? 'Montaigne’s concern with custom and cultural diversity, combined with his rejection of ethnocentrism, has led many scholars to argue that Montaigne is a moral relativist, that is, that he holds that that there is no objective moral truth and that therefore moral values are simply expressions of conventions that enjoy widespread acceptance at a given time and place.'
Denying certainties, old and new, religious and secular, Montaigne’s scepticism would seem clearly relativistic. This immunised Montaigne against the dominant myths of the civilisation to which he belonged. There were no good reasons, he argued, for holding human beings to be superior to other species. The various species were different, but no universal standard was possible by which one species could be judged superior to another. Any judgement depended upon what trait is being measured, and which species does the measuring.
"If a rabbit defined intelligence the way man does, then the most intelligent animal would be a rabbit, followed by the animal most willing to obey the commands of a rabbit". ~ Robert Brault
Montaigne adopted the same approach to cultures. In On Custom, he argued that ‘the laws of conscience, which we say are born of nature, are born of custom. Each man, holding in inward veneration the opinions and behaviour approved and accepted around him...’ Different cultures have different customs. By what standard do we judge one culture to be superior to another? In On Cannibalism, he rejected the idea that European culture was any closer to God, truth or goodness than non-European, and supposedly less developed, cultures. The ‘savages’ of South America only ate their dead, Montaigne argued provocatively, but they did so directly; Europeans did the same, only indirectly. European pharmacies of Montaigne’s day used human blood and body parts - and routinely applied torture to living bodies. Montaigne opposed the conquest of the New World and deplored the suffering it brought to the indigenous people.
'Montaigne only carried his cultural relativism so far. All customs were not equally acceptable, and individuals were not equally in thrall to the culture they inhabited. Here again, judgement, was everything. Individuals could reflect on and evaluate the customs they lived by, and if necessary challenge them. Montaigne claimed that no universal standard was necessary, that individuals could look at different ways of doing things and then use their judgement as to which works best for those involved. However, he accepted that the idea of universal standards like 'reason' and 'nature' -standards which only God could truly define -might help humans in the exercise of their judgement. Montaigne's writings were not always consistent, which he would probably have regarded as a virtue. He was engaged in a sort of dialogue with himself, which he commended to other individuals and cultures.'
Yet Montaigne never explicitly expresses his commitment to moral relativism, and there are aspects of the Essays that seem to contradict such an interpretation, as other scholars have noted.
These other scholars are inclined to interpret Montaigne as committed to moral objectivism, or the theory that there is in fact objective moral truth, and they point to a number of aspects of the Essays that would support such an interpretation. First, Montaigne does not hesitate to criticize the practices of other cultures. For instance, in “Of cannibals,” after praising the virtues of the cannibals, he criticizes them for certain behaviors that he identifies as morally vicious. For a relativist, such criticism would be unintelligible: if there is no objective moral truth, it makes little sense to criticize others for having failed to abide by it. Rather, since there is no external standard by which to judge other cultures, the only logical course of action is to pass over them in silence. Then there are moments when Montaigne seems to refer to categorical duties, or moral obligations that are not contingent upon either our own preferences or cultural norms (see, for example, the conclusion of “Of cruelty”). Finally, Montaigne sometimes seems to allude to the existence of objective moral truth, for instance in “Of some verses of Virgil” and “Of the useful and the honorable,” where he distinguishes between relative and absolute values.’
Thus Montaigne’s position regarding moral relativism remains the subject of scholarly dispute.
‘Descartes parted ways with Montaigne quite decisively when he developed his dogmatic accounts of knowledge, the nature of the soul, and the existence of God. Pascal, on the other hand, also profoundly influenced by the Essays, concluded that reason cannot answer the theoretical question of the existence of God, and that therefore it was necessary to inquire into the practical rationality of religious belief.’
I'm with Pascal and against Descartes on this. Descartes proved the more influential, and we have been living in the Empire of Reason ever since. For some it is a liberation from nature and its dragons. For Max Weber, it is a psychic prison, a steel-hard cage that embraces our subjectivities. So total is our confinement in this prison that we cannot see the bars on the cage - they are within us.
‘A century later, Montaigne would become a favorite of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche. In Emerson’s essay “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic,” he extols the virtues of Montaigne’s brand of skepticism and remarks Montaigne’s capacity to present himself in the fullness of his being on the written page: “The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches into his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.” Nietzsche, for his part, admired Montaigne’s clear-sighted honesty and his ability to both appreciate and communicate the joy of existence. In Schopenhauer as Educator, he writes of Montaigne: “the fact that such a man has written truly adds to the joy of living on this earth.”’
"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." I can think of worse ways of going into the second decade of the 21st century than with such thoughts in mind. And I think Montaigne brings us back in touch with life and with being. We have it, we just need to appreciate it; neither we nor the world stand in need of improvement; progress is a delusion; we are going nowhere; we are here, we have arrived; and here is where we live.
Montaigne finds that ‘the most universal of human errors’ to be ‘always gaping after future things.’ He thus writes:
We are never at home, we are always beyond ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, still push us on toward the future, and deprive us of the feeling and consideration of that which is, to distract us with the thought of what will be, even when we shall be no more.
There is, however, no such possibility of going beyond ourselves. We are embedded in the tangible and contiguous nature of life and its living. The affairs of human existence are undertaken in proximity with respect to places and persons. All our knowledge derives from being in touch with people, places and things, starting with our own bodies but reaching out to embrace other beings and bodies. He has a very material faith in and tactile approach to the world around him and all that populate it. It is significant that Montaigne finds inspiration and support not merely in the theology of the Spanish monk Raymond Sebond but in his zoology. The circus of God’s creation was a squawking, squealing symphony that Montaigne found very appealing. Montaigne was evidently an animal lover. Philosophers since Aristotle have been concerned to demarcate the boundaries between human and non-human animals in terms of the capacity to reason and use language. In that sense, the specifically human character of human beings was marked at a distance from animal nature, our own and that of non-human animals. Montaigne, however, queried this setting of humanity and animality in inverse, even antagonistic, relation to each other. Montaigne had an acute awareness of the attributes that human beings and animals shared, and he drew attention to these in numerous essays, closing the gap that the modern world was seemingly opening up between the human on the one hand and the natural and the animal on the other hand. Montaigne populates his essays with the sights and sounds and activities of animals. He asks some interesting questions:
‘Is it not likely that there are sensitive faculties in nature that are fit to judge of and to discern those things which we call the occult properties in several things, as for the loadstone to attract iron; and that the want of such faculties is the cause that we are ignorant of the true essence of such things? ‘Tis perhaps some particular sense that gives cocks to understand what hour it is at midnight, and when it grows to be towards day, and that makes them crow accordingly; that teaches chickens, before they have any experience of the matter, to fear a sparrow-hawk, and not a goose or a peacock, though birds of a much larger size …’
And on he goes with his speculations, through wasps, ants, rats, stags, elephants, snakes. All life is in the pages of Montaigne. ‘There is no sense that has not a mighty dominion, and that does not by its power introduce an infinite number of knowledges. If we were defective in the intelligence of sounds, of harmony, and of the voice, it would cause an unimaginable confusion in all the rest of our science …’
Montaigne thus describes a world united in a proximate sensibility. Not long after, Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, argued that the bodies of both humans and animals are mere machines that breathe, digest, perceive and move by means of the arrangement of parts. But human beings are distinguished from animals in being able to direct bodily movements by reason; only humans give evidence of this reason by using true speech and language. Lacking such reason, animals are unthinking, unfeeling machines that move like clockwork. Animals are thus mere ‘beast machines.’ The view is now strongly challenged and rejected by biologists. (Armand Leroi, The Lagoon: How Aristotle invented Science p 360). But, in the age of mechanistic materialism, humans shed their ties to their fellow creatures and, removed further and further from the biological matrix, became unmoored and ungrounded. We are living with the consequences of this denaturing.
Montaigne challenged the view before Descartes had even inflicted it upon the world. And he did it in his own inimitably quirky style. It’s not that animals lack true speech and language, Montaigne contends, but that humans don’t understand them, and don’t make the effort to understand them. Because, given shared attributes, communication between humans and animals is possible:
‘By a certain bark, the horse knows that a dog is angry, at another sound he is not afraid. Even in animals that have no voice, by the reciprocal kindnesses that we see between them, we can easily argue for another form of communication: their movements converse and discourse.’
In his comments, Montaigne notes how animals demonstrate an intimate knowledge of the world in their behaviour and act in a way that is sympathetic to their surroundings rather than antagonistic and destructive. That’s a level of natural knowledge that is more sophisticated than the arrogant human relation to the natural world. Further, whilst it may be true that human beings fail to understand animals, animals show no difficulty in understanding humans, responding to the ways we speak to them. In the process, humans alter the language they use to animals, demonstrating an unconscious form of communication.
‘In what a variety different ways do we speak to our dogs, and they reply to us? With another language, and with other words, we summon birds, hogs, oxen, horses, and change the idiom according to is the species.’
In effect, Montaigne is taking the humanism of the Renaissance and expanding its concerns to the non-human world with which we share space. Man is not, after all, the measure of all things. The world we live in is a more-than-human world. Montaigne thus looks to expand linguistic boundaries beyond the Renaissance concerns with Latin and Greek, to Dog and Horse in pursuit of communication with all creatures. Montaigne thus describes himself as ‘rattling’ ‘the last fences and barriers of knowledge.’
And in doing so, Montaigne exposes the belief that animals lack reason and language to be a case of species arrogance and ignorance on the part of humans. He thus undercuts the basis for human moral supremacy over animals and nature:
‘The defect that prevents communication between them and us, why can’t it be ours as much as theirs? It is still unknown whose fault it is that we don’t understand each other – for we understand them no more than they do us. For by the same reason they may think us as brutish as we think them.’
Montaigne proceeds to point out the many things that human beings have learned from observing animals. It is only through ‘vanity’ that humans come to see themselves as superior to animals. Man, Montaigne writes: ‘attributes divine qualities to himself, withdraws and separates himself from the mass of other creatures, distributes the shares of the animals, his fellows and companions, and allocates to them such portions and faculties as he himself thinks fit. How does he know, by the efforts of his intelligence, the secret and internal motions of animals? From what comparison between them and us does he conclude the stupidity he attributes to them?’
With nature ‘accompanying and leading them by the hand’, and with the animals happy to be so guided, animals seem much more at home in the world than humans. He comments on Pyrrho’s story of a small boat at sea hit by a storm. The human travellers are terrified, but a pig on board bears it all with calmness. ‘What good is the knowledge of things if it puts us in a worse condition that Pyrrho’s pig?’
Animals thus check human species arrogance and invite us into appreciating our connections with nature, our own nature within and nature without. Montaigne identifies ‘a certain commerce between them and us, and a certain mutual obligation.’
‘We live, both them and us, under the same roof and inhale the same air: there is, save for more or less, a perpetual resemblance between us.’
We need to recognise our animals natures and get comfortable within our animal skin. And see our affinities with the non-human animals with whom we share this earth as a common home. Montaigne expands this commonality beyond animals to organic nature. Human beings, he says, have a ‘duty’ to ‘trees and plants.’ Montaigne notes, however, the extent to which the immoderate human appetite has come to outstrip ‘all the inventions by which we attempt to satisfy it.’
Through an appreciation of these animal ties, human beings could come to see their true place in the world and thereby come home. Montaigne’s concern is to foster an understanding of the ‘natural tie’ so as to bring human beings back to their natural home in order to join in the great mass of creation.
‘All this I have said to establish the resemblance there is in all living things, and to bring us back and join us to the great mass. All that is under heaven, says the sage, is subject to the same law and the same fortune.'
And that is to affirm the fellowship of all beings and bodies and enter into the commonwealth of life. A very good home, I'd say, and a good place to be in. I think we should stay awhile, and get on with the neighbours.
There is plenty to read here, but Montaigne is well worth becoming acquainted with.
How to Live Learning not to be afraid Believer and Doubter Borrowing the Cat's point of view Humanity, Cruelty and Fellow Feeling The Moment is Everything What can we learn from Montaigne?