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We generally think that philosophers should be proud of their big brains, and be fans of thinking
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self-reflection and rational analysis. But there's one philosopher, born in France in 1533, who had a refreshingly different take.
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Michel de Montaigne was an intellectual who spent his writing life
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knocking the arrogance of intellectuals. In his great masterpiece, the 'Essays', he comes across as relentlessly wise and intelligent
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— but also as constantly modest and keen to debunk the pretensions of learning. Not least, he's extremely funny,
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reminding his readers: 'to learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing, we must learn a more
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ample and important lesson: that we are but blockheads... (or, as he put it) On the highest throne in the world,
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we are seated, still, upon our arses.'
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Montaigne was a child of the Renaissance and the ancient philosophers popular in Montaigne's day
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believed that our powers of reason could afford us a happiness and greatness denied to other creatures.
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Reason was a sophisticated, almost divine, tool offering us mastery over the world and ourselves.
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That was the line taken by philosophers like Cicero.
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But this characterization of human reason enraged Montaigne. After hanging out with academics and philosophers, he wrote,
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"In practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives than [Cicero].
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His point wasn't that human beings can't reason at all,
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simply that they tend to be far too arrogant about the limits of their brains. As he wrote,
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"Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom. Whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind."
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Perhaps the most obvious example of our madness is the struggle of living within a human body.
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Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age (whatever the desires of our minds).
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Montaigne was the world's first and possibly only philosopher
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to talk at length about impotence, which seemed to him a prime example of how crazy and fragile our minds are.
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Montaigne had a friend
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who'd grown impotent with a woman he particularly liked.
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Montaigne didn't blame the penis. The problem was the mind, the oppressive notion that we had complete control over our bodies, and the horror of
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departing from this theoretical normality. The solution, Montaigne said, was to redraw our sense of what's normal.
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By accepting a loss of command over the penis as a harmless common possibility in lovemaking
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one could preempt its occurrence — as the stricken man eventually discovered. In bed with a woman, he learnt to,
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"Admit beforehand that he was subject to this infirmity and spoke openly about it,
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so relieving the tensions within his soul. By bearing the malady as something to be expected,
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his sense of constriction grew less and weighed less heavily upon him."
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Montaigne's frankness allows the tensions in the reader's own soul to be relieved.
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A man who failed with his girlfriend could regain his forces
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and soothe the anxieties of his beloved by accepting that his impotence belonged to a broad realm of sexual mishaps, neither very rare nor very peculiar.
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Montaigne was equally frank about limitations of his intellect (and of its usefulness).
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Academia was deeply prestigious in Montaigne's day, as in our own.
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Yet, although Montaigne was an excellent scholar, he hated pedantry in academia.
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He only wanted to learn things that were useful and relentlessly attacked academics for being out of touch.
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"If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life," he said.
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Only that which makes us feel better maybe worth understanding.
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In this vein, Montaigne mocked books that were difficult to read.
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He admitted to his readers that he found Plato more than a little boring — and that he just wanted to have fun with books:
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"I'm not prepared to bash my brains out for anything, not even for learning's sake however precious it may be.
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From books all I seek is to get myself some pleasure by an honorable pastime...
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If I come across some difficult passages in my reading
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I don't bite my nails over them: after making a charge or two I let them be... If one book tires me
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I just take up another." He could be pretty caustic about incomprehensible philosophers.
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"Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies
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and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment."
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Montaigne observed how an intimidating scholarly culture
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has made all of us study other people's books way before we study our own minds. And yet, as he put it:
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"We are richer than we think, each one of us."
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Montaigne is refreshing because he describes a life
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which is recognizably like our own and yet inspiring still — he is a very human ideal.
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We may all arrived at wise ideas if we cease to think of ourselves
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as unsuited to the task just because we aren't two thousand years old, or aren't interested in the topics of Plato's dialogues or have a so-called ordinary life.
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Montaigne reassures us: "You can attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life
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just as well as to one with richer stuff."
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In Montaigne's redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it's possible to speak no Greek
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change one's mind after a meal, get bored with a book, be impotent and know pretty much none of the Ancient philosophers.
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A virtuous ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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Montaigne remains the great, readable intellectual with whom we can laugh at intellectuals
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and pretensions of many kinds. He was a breath of fresh air in the cloistered, unworldly,
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snobbish corridors of the academia of the 16th century — and because academia has, sadly,
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not changed very much, he continues to be an inspiration and a solace to all of us who feel routinely
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oppressed and patronized by the pedantry and arrogance of so-called clever people.
