While
I have yet to read the entirety of his essays, Michel de Montaigne is
a thinker after my own heart. He did not write out a complete
philosophical system or moral theory. Instead, he revolutionized a
way of writing: a series of essays on anything and everything he
found interesting enough to observe and think deeply about which was,
well, just about everything. Yet his Essays are a rich source of
wonderful philosophical and moral insights. The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy describes Montaigne's approach this way: “... under
the guise of innocuous anecdotes, Montaigne achieved the humanist
revolution in philosophy. He moved from a conception of philosophy
conceived of as theoretical science, to a philosophy conceived of as
the practice of free judgment'. Judgment, in this sense, involves
applying both our cultivated moral sense and our reason, enriched
with knowledge, to navigate the complexity and variety of situations
we face throughout our lives; it also refers to the expansive,
tolerant attitude we should display towards each other and towards
the whole of reality.
For
one thing, while Montaigne highly valued learning, he recognized that
it is often overemphasized, to the detriment of learning from our own
experiences of human beings, when it comes to understanding how to
live well. The way that educated people often learned in his day was
by rote, memorizing a vast quantity of facts. This can stifle our
ability to exercise practical judgment as well as blunt our social
skills, preventing us from learning from and about each other, which
is essential to cultivating moral understanding. We should learn as
much about each other as possible, Montaigne thought, both through
education and
through personal interaction. Montaigne says that sometimes, our big,
smart brains can even hinder our quest for wisdom. For example, we
becomes ashamed, insecure, even hateful of our own bodies, when we
contrast the refinements of education and the arts to the material
reality of the caring for and satisfying our bodily needs. This
distaste is ungenerous and ungrateful, Montaigne says, seeing that we
rely on our bodies for so much; in fact, our bodies
are
us.
Our big brains can make also make us too proud, unable to recognize
wisdom in humble or unexpected places. People of little or no
education sometimes display more wisdom than the most rigorous
scholar. Even animals are sometimes wiser than we are; for example,
in their natural, unembarrassed attitudes towards their own bodies,
and their unapologetic enjoyment of pleasure; we should learn from
them and imitate them in these respects. The wisest beings, then, can
come from all walks of life, and the wisest person will be receptive
to the lessons that can be learned from all of them.
We
should not limit our exposure merely to our own society, but should
learn about as many other cultures and beliefs as possible.
Montaigne, like Confucius, is of the opinion that before you can be a
social scientist or a moral theorist, you must first be an
anthropologist (my wording). This wide-ranging self- education has
two huge advantages. For one thing, the information you have to work
with will be much more vast, your scope much wider, than if you
merely stuck to the received 'wisdom' of your own culture. For
another, you will cultivate in yourself the very virtues that
characterizes the wise and moral person: tolerance, benevolence,
respect, kindness, generosity, and so forth. Conversely, xenophobia
leads to hatred, violence, and so on, as the horrific stories coming
back from the conquest of the New World made him all too aware. He
says, also, we should not base our attitudes towards right and wrong
on habit, which is morally lazy and which a narrow education can
easily lead us to do; rather, we should temper our moral attitudes
with reason, and our reason should be informed by an expansive and
ever-expanding body of knowledge.
This
can make Montaigne seem like a moral relativist, but I don't think
this is the case. He does recognize that some things that society
traditionally recognize as wrong is in fact both bad and good,
sometimes one or the other, sometimes both at the same time. For
example: drunkenness. It's bad when it gets you fired our causes you
to beat your family members. It's good when it promotes sociability.
Montaigne recognizes that if there are universally true moral maxims,
they are likely to be few. Rather, his approach to philosophy is a
skeptical one: he sees an attitude of uncertainty and doubt as a
fruitful one for gaining wisdom. When you don't accept the first easy
answers that come along, when you wait for more information to come
in, when you generally accept that there's a possibility you are
wrong, you are practicing a wise skepticism; otherwise, you cheat
yourself out of the opportunity to learn. Most importantly,
philosophy is a joyful enterprise.
Ethically,
he espouses some behaviors as universally preferable: tolerance,
joyfulness, sociability, generosity, benevolence, a good-humored
attitude towards other people and their various ways of living, and
so on; he specifically denounces cruelty and narrowness in thinking
and feeling. He describes his ethical theory not by outlining a
rigorous system, however, but by enacting a moral attitude that
inspires moral behavior in others. In sum, he may or may not be a
relativist when it comes to a specific theory or set of maxims, but
he is definitely not relativistic in the overarching value of he
places on the art of being a good, complete human being, and
promoting the same in others. Montaigne's writings provide compelling
evidence that the most well-reasoned advanced moral theory may never
be as convincing or effective when spelled out, as that which is
lived. Montaigne's shows us how we can all be philosophers, how we
can live ethically, and how we can discover it all for ourselves.
Philosophers, if they're doing it right, will be the happiest of all
people, and we should all be philosophers.
Sources:
Alain de
Botton: Video – Montaigne on Self-Esteem
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6436583611449448580
Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/montaign/
Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montaigne/#FreJud
