Montaigne builds on his recent discussion of miracles with an examination of luck. Vatican censors were not pleased with this subject, and he’ll have more to write about that in subsequent essays. While Montaigne and many Montaigne scholars agree that Rome had nothing to worry about, I’m not so sure. When taken in conjunctions with Montaigne’s recent essay about finding a divine plan in human outcomes, it’s easy to read between the lines and conclude that Montaigne sees no difference between a miracle and an act of dumb luck.
Before diving into the substance, I need to say a few words about form. Unusual for Montaigne, this essay follows a formal structure. In each section, six starts with a short declarative statement, followed by an illustrating anecdote. It’s not a quotable essay, unless you consider the section markers themselves as worthy of renown:
Sometimes it seems that Fortune is literally playing with us.
Was not the following fate apparently playing the artist?
Sometimes it pleases Fortune to rival our Christian miracles.
Sometimes Fortune dabbles in medicine.
Did Fortune not surpass Protogenes the painter in mastery of his art?
Does she not sometimes direct our counsels and correct them?
Contemporary examples can illustrate all of Montaigne’s angles. When writing “Hey Jude,” Paul McCartney included the line “the movement you need is on your shoulder,” which he fully intended to replace later, only to be dissuaded by John Lennon, who called it the best line in the song. Fortune dabbled in medicine, famously, by leading to the accidental discovery of penicillin.
Which brings me back to Nietzsche; he believed that no idea is our own. Ideas introduce themselves to us and we recognize them only in retrospect:
A thought comes when “it” wishes, and not when “I” wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.”
This is a feature of many of the films of Krystov Kieslowski, whose stories often included parallel characters with no connection to each other having the same thought at the same time. One interesting aspect of this Nietzsche assertion is the direct attack it’s making on philosophic discourse. Philosophy professors encourage students to frame their writing in “I contend” or “I believe” statements. Later, Nietzsche notes that the success of these ideas is often a function of circumstances, not the intrinsic validity of the ideas:
What happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy commonwealth; namely, the governing class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth.
And I believe that thought sums up Montaigne’s essay perfectly. Whether an act becomes an “according to Hoyle miracle,” as referenced in the “Pulp Fiction” section two essays back, depends on whether it suits and comforts the governing class. If it doesn’t, it’s chalked up to dumb, random luck.
Nietzsche has other thoughts on this subject that take a slightly different angle. Instead of believing that we are slaves to fortune, Nietzsche felt we had the power to take the random, even horrible events of our past and reshape them into a purpose, therefore creating a destiny to the chaos after the fact. He called this self-overcoming, and I’ll have more to say on that subject sometime soon.
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