This wise Montaigne mini essay left me wanting more—and may have influenced 20th century psychologist and philosopher Jacques Lacan. I have not come across any Lacan quotes about this essay, but the obscurantist French psychologist freely quoted Montaigne in many of his lectures, and this idea in particular sounds similar to one of Lacan’s central thoughts:
No matter what falls within our knowledge, no matter what we enjoy, it fails to make us content and we go gaping after things outside our knowledge, future things, since present goods never leave us satisfied—not in my judgement because they are inadequate to satisfy us but because we clasp them in a sick and immoderate grip
Lacan believed we can never attain what we desire, because what we are hoping for in that desire is not attaining an object, it’s winning the recognition of the Other, who we suppose covets that object, and what we really want most is the recognition of the Other. So, for example, if you lust after a movie star, it’s not really that you want to possess that movie star. You want to be recognized by the moviegoing public who adores that star.
The Rolling Stones said it more succinctly: if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need. That’s almost what Lacan said—he took it farther by saying you never get what you want.
And Montaigne comes really close to saying almost exactly that:
Our appetite lacks decision and is uncertain: it can neither have anything nor enjoy anything in the proper way. Man, reckoning that the defect lies in those things themselves, feeds to the full on other things which he neither knows nor understands, and honours and reveres them.
He closes with that quote from Caesar mentioned in the title, drawing a very interesting intellectual line from Julius Caesar to Michel de Montaigne to Jacques Lacan to Mick Jaggar:
By a defect of nature common to all men, we place our trust, rather, in things unseen, hidden and unknown, and are terrified to distraction by them.
To close the circle on this essay, I should return to the philosophical schools Montaigne was weighing at the time. I’ll begin with the stoics.
Epictetus claimed that only a stoic like himself could ever claim the title of king because the aristocratic young men who attended his lectures were the actual slaves. They were enthrall to their powerful desires and emotions, as well as the opinions of the surrounding people.
But how might a Pyrrhonist view this issue? What I like about this school of thought is that it isn’t judgmental about our feelings or desires, it doesn’t view them as weaknesses or distractions to be conquered. Rather, the Pyrrhonists prefer to examine how fleeting those feelings are, and to marvel at the fact that we have no firm, incontrovertible view of how anything internal should be interpreted.
So, to a Pyrrhonist, there’s nothing to be conquered and nothing to attain. Our feelings, hopes and desires are curious pieces of data about our human experience, glimpses of how we react to the world in a moment of time. We find peace by accepting these ever changing moments for what they are and see them neither as firm realities that must be brought to life nor annoying distractions from our core reality that must be banished.
This is a far more radical thought that it may appear to be on the surface, one that has consequences for the way we view the law, religion, social institutions like marriage, the legitimacy of governments, and even how we can hold individuals responsible for their actions. Keep this in mind as Montaigne moves on to these topics in the essays to follow.
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