The unruliness of minds, his own especially, concerned Montaigne a great deal in his early essays. He will soon refer to his mind as a “runaway horse.” Here, he notes how common it is for us to great false objects instead of dealing with the actual things that torment us.
These objects can be projections of love. Montaigne uses monkeys and dogs as examples, but just as easily could have chosen people who we use for short term comfort. Then he focuses on objects in our lives that we strike out against in anger when there is no way to gain revenge on the things actually causing us to suffer.
At the core of Montaigne’s argument is our lack of clarity in life, how we continually place false value on people and things based on our emotional needs. Because we lack insight into our feelings, we project them onto others. This leads to a simulacra of life, one where our actions define us mindlessly. It will take his entire project for Montaigne to come to a conclusion about this dilemma, that we need the experience of life to see through our illusions and to discover the ability to sit with our feelings, not judging them, but letting them exist as things onto themselves, not transformed into objects we adore or despise.
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