This is one of my favorite Montaigne essays, and it only grows more powerful upon a return and some reflection. Montaigne, returning to his essays after publishing volume one, makes the case here that readers should not be expecting similar thoughts in these new essays.
We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.
I love that thought so much, not only for the way it makes us think of ourselves through time, but also for the way it allows us to create a similar space for other people. It can be so easy to get caught up in other people’s inconsistencies—such as wondering why someone seems warmer towards you one day, then back to a cooler disposition tomorrow—without considering that we don’t even treat ourselves with the same affection and attention day to day. It’s the simple flow of life to be inconsistent, to be taken in by the tide of emotion one day and taken out the next by the egress of habit and routine.
It’s also a pretty good indicator of your feelings for someone else if you can calmly sit with their changes of disposition without it affecting your core opinion. Just as I believe it’s important to moderate feelings but not values, so too we need to accept inconsistency in the actions and affections of others while maintaining consistent belief in the innate value of those people.
Just bear in mind as you consider these concepts that Montaigne was also a strong believer in virtue, ethics, morality and character-defining customs. He did not use this form of relativism as a means to be an immoralist like Nietzsche. Accept people and their faults, Montaigne says, but celebrate those who rise above it.
Another point Montaigne is making is that we rarely assign the same role to people in our lives from day to day. While I may be baffled by someone or even angry when looking at one facet of a personality or some wish I have for that person, when the full relationship is taken in total, and considering the most important and consistent parts, conflicts often melt away:
That man you saw yesterday so ready to take risks: do not think it odd if you find him craven tomorrow. What had put heart into his belly was anger, or need, or his fellows, or wine, or the sound of a trumpet. His heart had not been fashioned by reasoned argument: it was those factors which stiffened it; no wonder then if he has been made quite different by other and contrary factors.
Montaigne, as we see across the essays, has an inconsistent stance on sentiment. He’s capable of writing some deeply affecting statements, but then shows disdain for it:
The changes and contradictions seen in us are so flexible that some have imagined that we have two souls, others two angels who bear us company and trouble us each in his own way, one turning us towards good the other towards evil, since such sudden changes cannot be accommodated to one single entity.
So, what purpose might a project like this have if our personal understanding shifts so frequently and dramatically. Montaigne clarifies that it’s a very perilous journey, and the writer needs to be ready for the turbulence:
anyone who turns his prime attention on to himself will hardly ever find himself in the same state twice. I give my soul this face or that, depending upon which side I lay it down on. I speak about myself in diverse ways: that is because I look at myself in diverse ways. Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist or attribute: timid, insolent; chaste, lecherous; talkative, taciturn; tough, sickly; clever, dull; brooding, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; generous, miserly and then prodigal—I can see something of all that in myself, depending on how I gyrate; and anyone who studies himself attentively finds in himself and in his very judgement this whirring about and this discordancy.
What I’ve also encountered is that this becomes even more difficult when other people enter the story. It’s hard enough to tell your own emotional story consistently, teling someone else’s is nearly impossible. And Montaigne felt trepidation about his journey on many levels. Montaigne argues you need to dig deeper to discover your core values and determine then if your actions are in alignment or discord with them.
By the way, here’s something I hadn’t considered before when analyzing this essay—it is often said that numerous passages from the Raymond Sebond essay influenced Shakespeare, and this essay traverses some of the same territory. A google search turned up this incredible site that lists dozens of Montaigne passages that found similar forms in Shakespeare’s plays. Lines from the Florio translation of this essay are very similar to some passages of Hamlet.
That website is a treasure trove of material I may have to mine when going back over numerous Montaigne essays.
Back to the essay, I noted during a couple first volume pieces a growing belief in Montaigne that he’d stumbled upon the way to live, and that self-reflection was a key component in that human journey. But with his deeper understanding about human inconsistency, Montaigne no longer sounds so sure:
It is not the act of a settled judgement to judge us simply by our outward deeds: we must probe right down inside and find out what principles make things move; but since this is a deep and chancy undertaking, I would (hope) that fewer people would concern themselves with it.
Montaigne doesn’t call his personal venture brave, but it is. To take on a Pyrrhonist point of view of life can bring about peace because you accept all of the odd little moments and reactions for what they are, tiny tiles in life’s mosaic. But to do like Montaigne and focus deeply on the tiles is to welcome in a certain amount of madness. I am certainly guilty of the same. Towards the end of his project, Montaigne made a final tweak to his philosophy, moving a little bit closer to an epicurean view of life and assigning Socrates as his prime role model.
Montaigne’s often stated love of debate fits well with his admiration for Socrates, but because Socrates never wrote any philosophy, it’s impossible to detect similarities in text. They seem like an odd pair to me. Montaigne was stubbornly inward looking, you never see him stray from his mission to try to figure out someone else’s motives or desires. Socrates was the exact opposite, always inquiring, always wanting to get people explaining themselves.
My grandfather had this oddly Socratic streak about him. He was a bus driver in Newark, New Jersey at time when the city was rapidly changing. But he never dropped the open, talkative personality that probably got him through the work day. He could get anyone talking about what they believed and cared about most. His mother died in childbirth, and he was sent away to live with relatives who never sent him to school until he was nine years old. So he turned into a furious autodidact and was probably the deepest reader of history I’ve ever known.
I’m sure that I developed my love for debate from the freewheeling discussions/arguments I’d have with my grandfather from an early age. He was definitely a man of his age and was prone to say ridiculous things, like his belief that the Irish immigrants had a rougher road in the U.S. than any other group. We did share a reflexive disdain for the Republican Party. He never voted for a Republican in his life, and neither have I. Despite that, we had more than ample ground to disagree and test each other’s views. But the thing that I loved about him most was that, even at a very young age, he was open to learning from the things I said. He took me seriously and that was a wonderful thing for a young boy who didn’t entirely feel at home with my nuclear family.
Where did this digression come from? I have no idea. But I am feeling grateful to my grandfather today for valuing my inquisitiveness, enjoying the discourse and sneaking me ice cream shortly before dinner, to the regular rage of my grandmother.
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