Afternoon, philosopups. As we’re saying goodbye to Nietzsche, I thought it would be fitting to have him introduce our next philosopher – this is what he said about him: ‘…that such a man has written, joy on earth has surely increased…’
So, here’s what he looked like – welcome to the sixteenth century.
Interestingly, some commentators have challenged the notion that he was actually a philosopher because his writings, which he referred to as Essais (from the French ‘an attempt’…hence our word ‘essay’) wandered around a variety of subjects without ever presenting a systematic collection of theories. He himself said of philosophy: ‘…amazement is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry, its way of advancing; and ignorance is its end…’, and he spent a great deal of time exercising his sense of amazement, about the world, and very often about himself, writing from experience, observation and based on his study of the wide selection of mainly classical texts which he read. And he began always with himself. As he said: ‘I myself am the subject of my book.’
So, who was he, and how does he challenge our notion of what it is to be a philosopher?
His name was Michel de Montaigne and he was the son of a wealthy humanist – they lived in a castle in Perigord, Western France, and the young Montaigne was educated in a very unusual way for his day, or for any period if it comes to that…a musician playing a zither accompanied Montaigne and his tutor everywhere, striking up a tune anytime the boy was bored, defining his world with music. He was also a very successful statesman, though he eventually retired from public life to pursue his desire to record his ‘thoughts, by which I am striving to make known not matter but me.’
Montaigne referred to himself as a ‘chance philosopher, not a premeditated one’ and I think it’s this humility but also this self-understanding that is so attractive about him. He talked about the human body, his own – ‘kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies’ – in a way that is not common amongst commentators of his time, and definitely not philosophers. There is something very real and very modern about Montaigne. But although he encouraged the language of doubt, coming from a skeptical position about any cultures, or any individuals, having a hold on the truth – ‘The only thing certain is nothing is certain’ – he was as adamant as Nietzsche about the high standards we should apply when making judgments about any argument or proposition, and he warned us equally of the danger of relaxing into unexamined thought: ‘We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose.’
Montaigne only makes a small appearance in The Beginner’s Guide to Living, when Will spray paints one of Montaigne’s aphorisms on the side of his school gym – ‘A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave’ – but he features more in the novel that I’m currently writing, The Devotee. Sophie, the mother in the story, bases the way she educates her son partly on the life experience and writings of Montaigne (which, as we have seen, are inextricably linked). Here’s a sneak preview from my new novel (in progress): Sophie’s first visit to Montaigne’s tower as a child, presented as a flashback:
Sophie is climbing the circular staircase that leads to the château tower Montaigne referred to as the ‘citadelle’. Though she can’t see her father, his shadow appears from time to time in the stone stairwell behind her, its shape dependant on the position of the windows – on such occasions, he always lets his daughter go first. On the way, in the car, he’d recounted the details of the philosopher’s childhood, how his education followed a pedagogical plan sketched out by his wealthy, humanist father, Montaigne’s first three years spent with a peasant family in a cottage until he was brought back to live in the family castle, his instruction assigned to a tutor versed in Latin, his father only hiring servants who could speak the language.
Sophie is wearing a new dress the same shade of orange as the marigolds in their back garden in Paris, ones she planted; around her neck, the locket her father gave her last month for her tenth birthday. Her hand goes to the locket as she reaches the top step and turns round to make sure that her father is not far behind – hearing his footsteps, she enters Montaigne’s library. Once boasting a collection of over a thousand texts, the room is full of light but void of books, its stone walls bearing only faint traces of the shelves and furniture, the man that once inhabited them.
‘Look.’
Sophie’s father is standing behind her pointing to the ceiling.
She follows his finger to the rafters, to the words inscribed into the wood in Greek and Latin, the indecipherable lettering like secret languages.
‘What does it say?’ she asks her father.
He places a finger on the bow of his top lip and translates without faltering.
‘I do not understand. I pause. I examine.’
‘Did Montaigne write that?’
‘No,’ he says, sweeping his arm above his head as if delineating constellations. ‘They’re all quotes from writers he admired.’
And then her father begins to quote Montaigne himself, from memory, for which he has an infinite capacity – ‘Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies,’ he says as he leans back against the whitewashed walls of the library of one of the most famous thinkers in all of France, Sophie feeling the boom of history ricocheting around them, encapsulated in her father’s voice, and she laughs, aware that he could only say such things in the absence of her mother, complicity adding to the deliciousness of the afternoon, as he continues, ‘Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen’, and ‘Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition’, pausing by the window, his eyes seeking out hers before uttering the last, without detectable irony -‘Que sais-je?’
What do I know?
