PHILOSOPHER OF THE WEEK.

Michel de Montaigne.

 

Do we not generally think that philosophers should be proud of their big brains, and be lovers of thinking, self-reflection, rational analysis and critical decoding of logical statements?

Background.

Montaigne was born in the Aquitaine region of France, on the family estate Château de Montaigne , in a town now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne , close to Bordeaux . The family was very wealthy; his great-grandfather, Ramon Felipe Eyquem, had made a fortune as a herring merchant and had bought the estate in 1477, thus becoming the Lord of Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur of Montaigne, was a French Catholic soldier in Italy for a time and he also had been the mayor of Bordeaux.

Life. 

Montaigne was a child of the Renaissance and the ancient philosophers popular in Montaigne’s day had believed that our powers of reason could afford us a happiness and greatness denied to other creatures. During his lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that, "I am myself the matter of my book", was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent.

His big ideas.

It is important to note that according to Michael, he claimed reason allowed us to control our passions and temper the wild demands of our bodies, wrote philosophers like Cicero. Reason was a sophisticated, almost divine, tool offering us mastery over the world and ourselves. But this characterization of human reason enraged Montaigne. After hanging out with academics and philosophers, he wrote, “In practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives than [Cicero].” His point wasn’t that human beings can’t reason at all, simply that they tend to be far too arrogant about their brains. “Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom,” he wrote. “Whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind.”

Throughout his work, Montaigne took farts, penises, and shitting as serious topics for contemplation. He told his readers, for example, that he liked quiet when sitting on the toilet: “Of all the natural operations, that is the one during which I least willingly tolerate being disrupted.”

Montaigne mocked books that were difficult to read. He admitted to his readers that he found Plato more than a little boring – and that he just wanted to have fun with books.

Montaigne remains the great, readable intellectual with whom we can laugh at intellectuals and pretensions of many kinds. He was a breath of fresh air in the cloistered, unworldly, snobbish corridors of the academia of the 16th century.