The placement of this essay is interesting, coming directly after Montaigne’s deeply affecting description of his friendship with Etienne de La Boetie. After displaying his emotions most openly, he dives back into caution:
Things which in themselves are good and beautiful are corrupted by our handling of them. We can seize hold even of Virtue in such a way that our action makes her vicious if we clasp her in too harsh and too violent an embrace.
I understand Montaigne’s feelings on this matter. As I’ve mentioned in other places, I sometimes forget some of the lines I’ve placed into various essays and coming across them again can feel like a punch in the stomach. This essay in particular included some statements that not only did I forget writing, I don’t even know what I meant by them. Becoming too attached to any thought or theory can do that. I suppose that I will need to read careful through everything at this point to make sure there are no other stray pieces like this out there, both because I really do need to finish this project at some point and because it would pain me deeply if something ill considered that I wrote and didn’t clean up ended up hurting someone.
The reality is that moderation is not easy and can be fanatical in execution. Today felt like an endless, exhausting exercise in it—moderating my personal opinions about the weaknesses of someone I support so I can make progress in my work, moderating the opinions I express on the job because I’ve recently been vaguely warned against being too blunt in my feedback, moderating the matters I discuss to not create any internal conflicts that might jeopardize career opportunities, and moderating my happiness to see someone I always look forward to encountering. It can all feel like performing the role of someone else after awhile. I honestly cannot imagine what it would be like to go through life like this all the time, never speaking up, always pretending people in power know what they are doing, hiding true affections. If I did this routinely, I’d end up hating myself.
There is a touch of eastern philosophy to Montaigne’s counsel. He’s saying something very similar to the Buddhists, that anything we grasp too tightly can warp into a form of fanaticism:
That is a subtle observation on the part of philosophy: you can both love virtue too much and behave with excess in an action which itself is just. The Voice of God adapts itself fittingly to that bias: ‘Be not more wise than it behoveth, but be ye soberly wise.’
The fanaticism that concerns him had gripped France in his age and led to endless sectarian conflict. That part is understandable. But I have to wonder if Montaigne isn’t feeling some need to step back from the deeply devotional feelings he expressed towards La Boetie. If he thought it ok to be a fanatical friend, he certainly believed it important to be a temperate marital partner:
All those shameless caresses which our first ardour suggests to us in our sex-play are not only unbecoming to our wives but harmful to them when practised on them. At least let them learn shamelessness from some other hand! They are always wide enough awake when we need them. Where this is concerned what I have taught has been natural and uncomplicated.
In case you think Montaigne is being ironic in that statement, he goes on:
Marriage is a bond both religious and devout: that is why the pleasure we derive from it must be serious, restrained and intermingled with some gravity; its sensuousness should be somewhat wise and dutiful. Its chief end is procreation, so there are those who doubt whether it is right to seek intercourse when we have no hope of conception, as when the woman is pregnant or too old. For Plato that constitutes a kind of of homicide.
Plato was a psychopath. But remember, Montaigne is anti-ascetic — he doesn’t believe in denying “the good life” to anyone. So he’s not really making a case for the denial of human pleasure … he’s making a case for really boring sex with your partner, mostly for procreation, and perhaps open relationships of some sort to take care of the rest. But isn’t that just being French? Or maybe French before his time?
Montaigne believes that if you are singularly focused on a partner and desire her deeply, then something’s wrong:
In short there is no pleasure, however proper, which does not become a matter of reproach when excessive and intemperate.
Montaigne’s brand of moderation ends up being fanatical to readers today, in some respects. Our modern world thinks true moderation is seeking some kind of middle ground of aesthetic pleasure, enjoying our sensual, hedonic pleasures in reasonable doses at times. Montaigne isn’t buying that at all, he just doesn’t believe in mixing the sacred and profane.
I think Montaigne tries here to express eastern ideas through stoic concepts and, while he doesn’t quite pull it off; I agree that fanaticism is a social ill. We should discourage it however possible. And while I think his thoughts about marriage are odd, I broadly agree with him that perhaps we don’t put enough thought into how the various ways we make our private lives moderate may in fact be quite fanatical.
I would alter Montaigne this way: by all means moderate your emotions, especially when they can negatively affect others. But don’t moderate your values. There are ideals, standards and people I believe in and it will always bother me if I’m required to keep quiet about it.
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