The title creates a word picture and expectation of what’s to follow. A reader might naturally expect this essay to be about something like the Hamlet story—about how indecisive people, unable to take necessary action, end up causing significantly more pain as a result of their dithering. But that’s not what Montaigne has in mind.
Rather, Montaigne had a theory that people with poor command of their emotions are far more likely to engage in cruel behavior, such as torture, because they do not act out of a sense of justice, but rather an emotional need for vengeance.
Montaigne begins with this historical example:
The Tyrant Alexander of Pheres could not bear to hear tragedies performed in the amphitheatre for fear that the citizens might see him, who had without pity put many to death every day, blubbering over the misfortunes of Hecuba and Andromache. Can it be a weakness in their soul which makes such men susceptible to every extreme?
He was appalled at what he was seeing in France in the religious wars, with brutal, inhumane behavior on both sides:
What is it that makes all our quarrels end in death nowadays? Whereas our fathers knew degrees of vengeance we now begin at the end and straightway talk of nothing but killing. What causes that, if not cowardice? Everyone knows that there is more bravery in beating an enemy than in finishing him off; more contempt in making him bow his head than in making him die; that, moreover, the thirst for vengeance is better slaked and satisfied by doing so, since the only intention is to make it felt.
From here, Montaigne makes a very interesting psychological connection between chains of lies and chains of cruelty. Just as a liar has to keep inventing new lies to cover up the original untruth, so too must the cruel punisher continue a series of cruel acts to prevent the abused from seeking revenge:
The first acts of cruelty are done for their sake; from them there is born fear of a just revenge; that produces a succession of fresh cruelties, each intended to smother each other.
This bloodlust then gets out of hand — the inflictor of pain no longer wishes to punish an act, but to remain in control:
What is it that makes tyrants so lust for blood? It is their worries about their own safety and the fact that when they fear a scratch their cowardly minds can furnish them with no other means of security save exterminating all those who simply have the means of hurting them, women included.
By staying on offense, the inflictor turns every counterattack into an act of defiance and retribution—he or she deserved the punishment for an evil act. I am only being retaliated against because he or she didn’t like the punishment. I have the power to punish, therefore I am in the right.
If someone suffers abuse long enough, he or she eventually becomes steeled to it and loses the ability to react to the punishment as something cruel and unusual. Montaigne finds punishment inflicted in this stage especially heinous:
Vengeance is at its most wretched when it is wreaked upon someone who has lost the means of feeling it; for, as the one who seeks revenge wishes to see it if he is to enjoy it, the one who receives it must see it too if he is to suffer the pain and be taught a lesson.
The worst thing that can happen to anyone who inflicts cruelty is for the punished to escape:
If we had thought that we had for ever overcome our enemy by valour and could dominate him as we pleased, we would be sorry indeed if he were to escape: he does that when he dies. We do want to beat him, but with more security than honour, and we seek not so much glory through our quarrel but the end of that quarrel.
The end goal of cruelty is to achieve pure submission. The inflictor of punishment wants the punished to be utterly broken. After the submission, enslavement ensues for both parties:
I find it derogatory to anyone who does fully trust in himself to go and confound his fortune with that of another. Each of us runs risks enough for himself without doing so for another: each has enough to do to defend his life on behalf of his own valour without entrusting so dear a possession into the hands of third parties. For unless it be not expressly agreed to the contrary, the four of them form one party under bond. If your second is downed you are faced, by the rules, with two to contend with; you may say that that is unfair. And indeed it is – like charging well-armed against a man who has only the stump of his sword, or when you are still sound against a man who is already grievously wounded.
To close, I want to point out how this essay must have inspired Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Just notice how well this passage from Nietzsche’s work fits with Montaigne’s thoughts in this essay:
One should remember that, even supposing that the affect of contempt, of looking down from a superior height, falsifies the image of that which it despises, it will at any rate still be a much less serious falsification that that perpetuated on its opponent—in effigie of course—by the submerged hatred, the vengefulness of the impotent. There is indeed too much carelessness, too much taking lightly, too much looking away and impatience involved in contempt, even too much joyfulness, for it to be able to transform its object into a real caricature and monster.
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