Reading Montaigne discussion

I've just picked up this book and am slowly working my way through the introduction.

I thought it would be fun to share this adventure with others. If you're interested, read along and post your thoughts.

Right now, Mr. Screech is describing Montaigne in relation to the other thinkers of the Renaissance.

On page xxviii of the introduction,Screech writes, "Since men such as Socrates and Cato lacked God's grace, even their virtuous actions are without shape or ultimate value; in the context of salvation they 'remain vain and useless'. So too with the themes of Sebond. By themselves they are heavy and barren. When Faith illuminates them, they become finger-posts setting man on the road which leads to his becoming 'capable' of God's grace....The Renaissance thinker, like his forebears from the earliest Christian times, had to decide what to do about great pious men of Ancient days."

Why are their actions viewed in this light? Is it based on the teachings of the church? Is this what Montaigne eventually thought? (I know this is the introduction but I'm trying to understand what Screech is saying here)

Later on when discussing pride, he writes, "Pride is the sin of sins: intellectually it leads to Man's arrogantly taking mere opinion for knowledge."


And finally he writes this about Pyrrho scepticism, "by reducing all Man's knowledge to opinion (it) deprives heretics of any criterion of truth....(yet) the Pyrrhonian method leaves you with no purely human certainties either."

My question after reading the introduction is that if man can only have opinions and no real knowledge of anything outside his own bodily experience, how can he (and by extension we)know objective truth?

And how can he know God's word, if God's word is truth?

Any ideas or thoughts?

In the first 100 pages of Montaigne, he seems to move through one topic after another with cursory thought like one drinking an aphoristic latte and never really seeing the need to go deeper than a light caffeine buzz. However, in writing essay no. 14 “That the taste of good and evil things” and in essay no. 20 “To philosophize is to learn how to die,” Montaigne spends the most time going into some interesting detail.

Essay no. 14 –

There is an old greek saying that they are tormented not by things themselves but by what they think about them.

The beginning of this essay is a perfect example of how Montaigne introduces a topic through the use of aphorisms and truisms. He then goes on to show examples of how that saying is true in his life. What I take away from reading this essay is how alike his struggles are with my own -- whether it’s my fears or whether it’s finding my place in the world. I find upon reflection that we are so much more powerful than we can imagine, because, ultimately, we decide how we see the world. Yet, I can’t tap into that thought on a consistent basis. (Maybe because it’s an intellectual thought and not an emotional belief? I don’t know?) The following passages are just a brief look at where he was headed in this essay:

Pg. 52 If what we call evil or torment insofar as our mental apprehension endows them with those qualities then it lies within our power to change those qualities.

If the original essence of the thing which we fear could confidently lodge itself within us by its own authority it would be the same for all men.

Pg. 57 What use is knowledge if, for its sake, we lose the calm and repose which we would enjoy without if it makes our condition good: shall we use it to bring about our downfall by fighting against the design of Nature and the order of the Universe, which require each creature to use its faculties and resources for its advantage?

Pg. 60 Remember that the greatest pains are ended by death, the smaller ones allow us periods of repose; and we are masters of the moderate ones, so that if they are bearable we shall be able to bear them; if they are not when life fails to please us, we may make our exit as from the theatre…What causes us to be so impatient of suffering is that we are not used to finding our principal happiness in the soul nor concentrating enough on her who alone is the sovereign Lady of our actions and our mode of being…All things indifferently can be turned to profit by the soul: even errors and dreams can serve her as matter to be loyally used to protect us and to make us contented. It can easily be seen that what gives their edge to pain and pleasure is the hone of our mind.

Pg. 61 But let us to come to those examples in which we find that it is with pain as with precious stones which takes on brighter or duller hues depending on the foil in which they are set: pain only occupies as much space as we make for her, Saint Augustine says, ‘Tantum doluerunt quantum doloribus se inseruerunt.’ (The more they dwelt on suffering, the more they felt it.)

Pg. 65 ‘Ex quo intelligitur non in natura, sed in opinione esse degritudinem.’ (From which we may learn that grief lies not in nature but opinion.

Pg. 66 What gives value to a diamond is its cost; to virtue, its difficulty; to penance, its suffering; to medicines their bitter taste…Epicurus said that being rich does not alleviate our worries: it changes them. And truly it is not want that produces avarice but plenty.

Pg. 67 … people fail to realize that they base themselves on a certainty, which is hardly less uncertain and chancy than chance itself.

Pg. 68 The heavier my money the heavier my worries, wondering as I did whether the roads were safe and then about the trustworthiness of the men in charge of my baggage.

Pg. 71 The man who is happy is not he who is believed to be so but he who believes he is so… whatever comes to us from outside takes its savor and color from our internal attributes…things are not all that painful nor harsh in themselves: it is our weakness, our slackness, which makes them so.

Pg. 72 Above all we must gain mastery over ourselves.

When Montaigne ends the essay, he has basically shown that how we think about things directly impacts the quality of our lives and the way to change how we think about things is to change how we value them -- look to the soul not to material things. But in the end, he doesn’t explain how that is accomplished. In other words, how does one change what one values?

Essay no. 20 To philosophize is to learn to die

Perhaps a better title of this essay is “To philosophize is to learn how to live well” Montaigne goes into detail discussing how one should value life and live it with the specter of death always looming. At times, he is on a peripatetic journey that makes one wonder how, for example, the topic of procrastination fits with a discourse on death only to find later that procrastination snatches life from us as surely as death does. Perhaps unlikely bedfellows?

Pg. 90 Even in virtue our ultimate aim – no matter what they say – is pleasure.


Pg. 96 Let us never be carried away by pleasure so strongly that we fail to recall occasionally how many are the ways in which that joy of ours is subject to death or how many are the fashions in which death threatens to snatch it away.

Knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint.

Pg. 100 I have noticed that as an illness gets more and more hold on me I naturally slip into a kind of contempt for life…. I have also found that I was much more terrified of illness when I was well than when I felt ill. Being in a happy state, all pleasure and vigour, leads me to get the other state quite out of proportion, so that I mentally increase all its discomforts by half and imagine them heavier than they prove to be when I have to bear them.

Pg. 101 If any of us were to be plunged into old age all of a sudden I do not think that the change would be bearable. But, almost imperceptibly, Nature leads us by the hand down a gentle slope; little by little, step by step, she engulfs us in that pitiful state and breaks us in, so that we feel no jolt when youth dies in us, although in essence and in truth that is a harsher death than the total extinction of a languishing life as old age dies.

Pg. 102 How absurd to anguish over our passing into freedom from all anguish. Just as our birth was the birth of all things for us, so our death will be the death of them all. That is why it is equally mad to weep because we shall not be alive a hundred years from now and to weep because we were not alive a hundred years ago. Death is the origin of another life.

Pg. 103 You are in death while you are in life: when you are no more in life you are after death…If you have profited from life, you have had your fill; go away satisfied… But if you have never learned how to use life, if life is useless to you, what does matter if you have lost it? What do you still want it for?

Pg. 104 Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a lance, depending on how you make it for them….If you have lived one day, you have seen everything. One day equals all days. There is no other light, no other night.

Pg. 105 No one dies before his time; the time you leave behind you is no more yours than the time which passed before you were born…

Pg. 106 …the usefulness of living lies not in duration but in what you make of it. Some have lived long and lived little. See to it while you are still here. Whether you have lived enough depends not on a count of years but on your will.

So Montaigne finishes this discourse with again, as a central theme, how we think about things colors how we view ourselves and the world, including the idea of death. Change our view and we change how we feel and how we see.

I'm sure some of his writing is relevant, but other pieces I have doubts about. Not sure I'm going to find myself the commander of a city under siege wondering if I should go parley or not, for example. On the other hand, his criticism of the education system in the 16th century is pretty much the same criticism people have of the education system in the 21st century: too much memorizing facts, not enough critical thinking. So obviously we as a people are still struggling with some of the same issues.

I've been studying Montaigne pretty closely for the last couple of years and the more I read by him and about him, the stronger my addiction grows. A few quick comments:

1. Thinking of Montaigne as a philosopher can be a little misleading...I think somewhere he writes that he is NOT a philosopher...he has been called an accidental philosopher....but he definitely has a philosophy.
2. I highly recommend Sarah Bakewell's new book "How to Live" for anyone interested in Montaigne.
3. I much prefer Donald Frame's translation of Montaigne to that of Screech. To me, Frame makes Montaigne seem friendlier, more relaxed, funnier...Screech seems a little "donnish", his translation is too British for my taste (I'm a Yank) and he has a tendency to make Montaigne more religious than I think is justified. But I do have the Penguin edition of Screech's translation of the Complete Essays (which Christine is using). I like it for the footnotes and the commentary and the actual latin of the quotations Montaigne uses so often.