It’s often nostalgic, but sometimes difficult, for me to return to this story, because it was the first one that seemed to find its own audience. Back in 2020, this story had a large, regular readership. Or perhaps it just had one very vocal fan eager to ping it very often. Whether the audience was several or one, I’m fortunate to have highly astute readers who know how to guide me towards the most interesting potential areas of Montaigne’s work without even saying a word. I can simply see which stories they read and I can see the connections being made. This story remains an endless source of revision and rethinking.
Oxford professor Terrence Cave, in his wonderful short book “How to Read Montaigne,” posited that one of the best uses of the essays is to take them as a guide on how to think, not so you can come up with easy, simple solutions to anything, but rather to hold life at a curious distance, observe and turn it, consider and reconsider the ways thoughts, emotions and circumstance come together.
Virginia Woolf described Montaigne’s point of view on this well:
How could he explain other people’s souls when he could say nothing “entirely simply and solidly, without confusion or mixture, in one word”, about his own, when indeed it became daily more and more in the dark to him? One quality or principle there is perhaps—that one must not lay down rules.
The reasoning here is clear: if you cannot fathom your own mind and heart, how can you possibly assume universals for humanity? Like Montaigne, I can only examine myself with any credibility. In my efforts to assay this subject over the years, I’ve determined that I am prone to internal conflicts between my conscious and unconscious minds, and no level of insight about this conflict has helped settle it.
Of all the essays I’ve written, this one has at times become the most prone to personal digressions and flights of feeling. Part of that is due to the wonderful title and relatively mediocre essay that followed.
My basic problem with it is that I think Montaigne sets up a great question, but then examines it all wrong. Perhaps there are times when two rational decisions seem to be equal and we need to make a choice. But, in my experience, those quandaries are short lived. I ultimately pick one or the other and deal with the result. The situations where my mind truly becomes tangled up is due to emotions, not reasons. The intuitive, emotional unconscious part of my brain ends up in conflict with the pragmatic, calculating rational brain.
My unconscious keeps wanting to drag my conscious, calculating side into emotional analysis of various feelings. My rational mind wants nothing to do with this conversation and wishes my unconscious would just give it up.
Montaigne doesn’t apply Pyrrhonism to these types of situations, but that doesn’t preclude me from doing so. The Pyrrhonists would consider a heart/head quandary something wonderful. My unconscious is allowed full expression of feelings.
I could treat myself more kindly and try to extract insights from my feelings. If I treat my unconscious with kindness, perhaps I too can reach a level of ataraxis and begin to sit peacefully with my feelings.
I hope this is possible, but standing in the way is the pesky matter of expectations. The reality is that good feelings about someone, especially when positive brain chemicals like oxytocin are released, raise certain expectations about a continuation or expansion of those feelings. This is what makes it difficult to accept any human relationship simply for what it is rather than what we hope it to be. There is actually some solid neuroscience backing up why this happens. When faced with an uncertain situation, our brain tends to make assumptions based on prior knowledge, as this story in MIT News details:
The process of combining prior knowledge with uncertain evidence is known as Bayesian integration and is believed to widely impact our perceptions, thoughts, and actions. Now, MIT neuroscientists have discovered distinctive brain signals that encode these prior beliefs. They have also found how the brain uses these signals to make judicious decisions in the face of uncertainty.
“How these beliefs come to influence brain activity and bias our perceptions was the question we wanted to answer,” says Mehrdad Jazayeri, the Robert A. Swanson Career Development Professor of Life Sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.
In other words, if every time in the past, having certain feelings set off by interactions with another led to the formation of a romantic bond, your brain has already encoded the pathways to light up this answer when those feelings (and brain chemicals) are activated again. So it’s fine to use myself as an example of Pyrrhonism, but I need to be kind to myself in the process as well and not self attack for simply believing what my brain wiring is telling me, because it’s all backed by solid neuroscience. This does not mean my brain wiring has the right answer, we can never really know what’s going on inside another mind, but it does mean that my brain is acting in a perfectly sensible manner based on a lifetime of activity and experiences.
I’ve examined Montaigne’s take on this topic a number of times, in several different ways, and I’ve often found comfort on this subject by falling back on neuroscience research. For example, there’s been significant research around the possibility that the unconscious mind (in my case, that deeply romantic fool) makes most of our choices in life, even in moments when we think we made a rational choice. (One questions this raises for me: how much is my unconscious in charge of this project? Perhaps my greatest gift is that both my conscious and unconscious minds are good writers, although wildly different in their approaches. My unconscious mind creates, my conscious edits.) A 2008 study by the Max Planck Institute found that brain scanners could predict decisions seven seconds before they were executed. Study co-author John-Dylan Hayes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist, said “by the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done.”
But I have to admit, before carrying on this point, that I succumbed to a lot of magical thinking while making some of my worst choices in life. I felt like there was a certain destiny to the flow of my life, that I didn’t have a real say in how things could or should turn out. I see now that what I was really doing was surrendering my autonomy, letting my life drift away because I refused to stand up for what I felt was right for me.
These neuroscience studies do not obliterate the concept of free will. If your unconscious self makes a decision, it’s still you making the decision, even if the conscious mind has to guess why that decision was made. Instead of reason facing off with determinism in the battle of free will, something more akin to emotional habit may be the factor that maintains human freedom, or in my case, gives up human freedom.
As I mentioned before, Montaigne assayed this question from another point of view – imagine a situation where, in purely rational terms, the choices in front of you had exactly equal merit:
It is a pleasant thought to imagine a mind exactly poised between two parallel desires, for it would indubitably never reach a decision, since making a choice implies that there is an inequality of value; if anyone were to place us between a bottle and a ham when we had an equal appetite for drink and for food there would certainly be no remedy but to die of thirst and of hunger!
Montaigne’s solution to this conundrum is to posit that there’s no such thing as an absolute tie. Human beings always find some reason to prefer once choice over another:
This motion in our souls is extraordinary and not subject to rules, coming into us from some outside impulse, incidental and fortuitous …. It seems to me that we could say that nothing ever presents itself to us in which there is not some difference, however slight: either to sight or to touch there is always an additional something which attracts us even though we may not perceive it.
So Montaigne basically anticipated where neuroscience has come down today – long before psychology identified the unconscious as a powerful driver of human behavior. I find the translator’s phrase “an additional something” a particularly poetic expression of the unknowable elements of ourselves.
Montaigne’s closing thought comes from Pliny:
There is nothing certain except that nothing is certain, and nothing more wretched than Man nor more arrogant.
But what does all of this add up to? We cannot completely dismiss human rationality, the will, the all powerful ego-controlling rational mind. Clearly there are certain acts in life that would not be possible without significant planning and change to our day to day routine.
The existentialist’s credo—embraced by both Sartre and Camus—is that we are the sum total of our choices. But I believe, and I think Montaigne would agree, that we aren’t so much the sum of our choices as we are the sum of the habits we create and nurture. Because we can’t know which side (or bits) of us will be in charge on any given day. But we can establish an order to our thoughts and our actions. We still need our unconscious to take over and make the small choice, dream for us, and give us a sense of what really matters, even if that unconscious is more stubborn than you could image.
Perhaps Confucius said it best:
Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.
Or better, from Edward Thomas’ poem Liberty:
There’s nothing less free than who
Does nothing and has nothing else to do,
Being free only for what is not to his mind,
And nothing is to his mind.
Leave a Reply