MONTAIGNE’S CANNIBALS ON NATURE, SELF, AND LIFE:

VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY AND RECOVERY

“I give my soul now one face, now another, according to which direction I turn it. If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways. All contradictions may be found in me by some twist and in some fashion”

(“Of the Inconsistency of our Actions” 293-4).

Essayer -- to try / experiment, to taste

“Of Freedom of Conscience”; “Of Drunkeness”; “How we laugh and cry at the same thing”; “Of Thumbs”

Essays written from 1571-1592

Key ideas: Experience “Know Thyself” -- Delphic Oracle

How should I live?

Nature and its meanings:

- Nature vs Civilization; Nature as Other

- Nature is “what is always and everywhere the same” -- Aristotle

- Nomos (custom) vs Physis (nature)

“Desires are either natural and necessary, like eating and drinking, or natural and not necessary, like intercourse with females; or neither natural nor necessary. Of this last type are nearly all those of men; they are all superfluous and artificial. For it is marvelous how little nature needs to be content, how little she has left us to desire” (Apology for Raymond Sebond, 420).

False consciousness: what you believe is your own, “true” belief or perception about the way things are is really externally imprinted on your mind (by your parents, ideology, advertising, etc.)

“Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature’s laws, I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked” (Preface)

Theodore Munster’s New World Map of the Americas (1540)

Costume/Custom/Coutume -- Second Nature and Habit

“For in truth habit is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. She establishes in us, little by little, stealthily, the foothold of her authority; but having by this mild and humble beginning settled and planted it with the help of time, she soon uncovers to us a furious and tyrannical face against which we no longer have the liberty of even raising our eyes” (Of Custom 93)

“We perceive no charms that are not sharpened, puffed out, and inflated by artifice. Those which glide along naturally and simply easily escape a sight so gross as ours. They have a delicate and hidden beauty; we need a clear and well-purged sight to discover their secret light. Is not naturalness, according to us, akin to stupidity and a matter for reproach?” (Of Physiognomy 965).

The Reformation

Protestants goal: to take authority away from the tradition and culture of the Roman Catholic Church and return it to the Bible, where it was thought the true teachings of Christianity were all laid out plainly for everyone to see.

- Chief Reformers: Martin Luther (Wittenberg, Germany); Jean Calvin (Geneva, Switzerland--though originally French)

Humanist goal: to return ad fontes (to the source) of literature, particularly pagan literatures.

Both movements were thus textual in orientation, seeking to purify life on the basis of reading and writing.

Huguenots and the Wars of Religion“Huguenot” from “Eidgenossen”, an alliance sworn to defend the freedom of the city of Geneva in Switzerland

“Monarchomachs”: king-fighters. Supported the right to resist monarchs and even kill tyrants. Notable monarchomachs include Phillipe Duplessis-Mornay (Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos), Theodore Beza, and John Ponet in England.

Étienne de La Boétie: Montaigne’s best friend, and author of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, which was appropriate by the Huguenots (against Boétie’s intention)

St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) Petrus Ramus

HENRI III HENRI IV

“The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold. Considering the importance of the actions of princes and their weightiness, we persuade ourselves that they are produced by some causes equally weighty and important. We are wrong: they are led to and fro by the same springs as we are in ours” (Apology for Raymond Sebond 425).

Now laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of their authority, they have no other. And that is a good thing for them. They are often made by fools, more often by people who, in their hatred of equality, are wanting in equity; but always by men, vain and irresolute authors” (Of Experience 1000).

“We may regret better times, but not escape the present; we may wish for different magistrates, but we must nevertheless obey those that are here” (“Of Vanity”, 924-5)

Montaigne on Protestant biblicism:

And those people must be jesting who think they can diminish and stop our disputes by recalling us to the express words of the Bible. For our mind finds the field no less spacious in interpreting the meaning of others than in presenting its own. As if there were less animosity and bitterness in commenting than in inventing (Of Experience 993)

Montaigne on freedom of thought:

“I set forth notions that are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in themselves, not as determined and decreed by heavenly ordinance and permitting neither doubt nor dispute; matter of opinion, not matter of faith; what I reason out according to me, not what I believe according to God” (Of Prayers, 284)

Stefan Zweig on Montaigne’s Freedom

Montaigne helps us answer this one question: ‘How to stay free? How to preserve our inborn clear-mindedness in front of all the threats and dangers of fanaticism, how to preserve the humanity of our hearts among the upsurge of bestiality?’

Cannibals of Brazil, from Hans Staden’s True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World (1557)

Montaigne and Utopianism“This is a nation . . . in which there is no sort of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or for political superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship, no clothes” (Of Cannibals 186)

“All those imaginary, artificial descriptions of a government prove ridiculous and unfit to put into practice. These great, lengthy altercations about the best form of society and the rules most suitable to bind us, are altercations fit only for the exercise of our minds . . . . Such a description of a government would be applicable in a new world, but we take men already bound and formed to certain customs: we do not create them, like Pyrrha or Cadmus. By whatever means we may have power to correct and reform them, we can hardly twist them out of their accustomed bent without breaking up everything” (Of Vanity 887).

Against Philosophy“What if knowledge, trying to arm us with new defenses against natural mishaps, has imprinted in our fancy their magnitude and weight, more than her reasons and subtleties to protect us from them?” (Of Physiognomy, 967)

“The philosophers with much reason refer us to the rules of Nature; but these have no concern with such sublime knowledge. The philosophers falsify them and show us the face of Nature painted in too high a color, and too sophisticated, whence spring so many varied portraits of so uniform a subject. As she has furnished us with feet to walk with, so she has given us wisdom to guide us in life: a wisdom not so ingenious, robust, and pompous as that of their invention, but corresponding easy and saltuary….The more simply we trust to Nature, the more wisely we trust to her.” (Of Experience, 1001)

“The most contemplative and wisest of men, / when I imagine him in the [bedroom], seems to me an impostor to put on wise and contemplative airs” (On some verses of Virgil, 812)

FIN