(Ill. 17.12)
Montaigne might have begun writing to alleviate a personal sense of loneliness, but his book may serve in a small way to alleviate our own. One man’s honest, unguarded portrait of himself – in which he mentions impotence and farting, in which he writes of his dead friend and explains that he needs quiet when sitting on the toilet – enables us to feel less singular about sides of ourselves that have gone unmentioned in normal company and normal portraits, but which, it seems, are no less a part of our reality.
4
On Intellectual Inadequacy
There are some leading assumptions about what it takes to be a clever person:
What clever people should know
One of them, reflected in what is taught in many schools and universities, is that clever people should know how to answer questions like:
1. Find the lengths or angles marked
x
in the following triangles.
2. What are the subject term, predicate term, copula and quantifiers (if any) in the following sentences: Dogs are man’s best friend; Lucilius is wicked; All bats are members of the class of rodents; Nothing green is in the room?
3. What is Thomas Aquinas’s First Cause argument?
4. Translate:
(Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics
, I i–iv)
5. Translate:
In capitis mei levitatem iocatus est et in oculorum valitudinem et in crurum gracilitatem et in staturam. Quae contumelia est quod apparet audire? Coram uno aliquid dictum ridemus, coram pluribus indignamur, et eorum aliis libertatem non relinquimus, quae ipsi in nos dicere adsuevimus; iocis temperatis delectamur, immodicis irascimur
.
(Seneca,
De Constantia
, XVI. 4)
Montaigne had faced many such questions and answered them well. He was sent to one of France’s best educational establishments, the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, founded in 1533 to replace the city’s old and inadequate Collège des Arts. By the time Michel started attending classes there at the age of six, the school had developed a national reputation as a centre of learning. The staff included an enlightened principal, André de Gouvéa, a renowned Greek scholar, Nicolas de Grouchy, an Aristotelian scholar, Guillaume Guerente, and the Scottish poet George Buchanan.
If one tries to define the philosophy of education underpinning the Collège de Guyenne, or indeed that of most schools and universities before and after it, one might loosely suggest it to be based on the idea that the more a student learns about the world (history, science, literature), the better. But Montaigne, after following the curriculum at the Collège dutifully until graduation, added an important proviso:
If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.
Only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding.
Two great thinkers of antiquity were likely to have featured prominently in the curriculum at the Collège de Guyenne and been held up as exemplars of intelligence. Students would have been introduced to Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics, in which the Greek philosopher pioneered logic, and stated that if A is predicated of every B, and B of every C, necessarily A is predicated of every C. Aristotle argued that if a proposition says or denies P of S, then S and P are its terms, with P being the predicate term and S the subject term, and added that all propositions are either universal or particular, affirming or denying P of every S or part of S. Then there was the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, who assembled a library for Julius Caesar and wrote six hundred books, including an encyclopedia on the liberal arts and twenty-five books on etymology and linguistics.
Montaigne was not unmoved. It is a feat to write a shelf of books on the origins of words and to discover universal affirmatives. And yet if we were to find that those who did so were no happier or were indeed a little more unhappy than those who had never heard of philosophical logic, we might wonder. Montaigne considered the lives of Aristotle and Varro, and raised a question:
What good did their great erudition do for Varro and Aristotle? Did it free them from human ills? Did it relieve them of misfortunes such as befall a common porter? Could logic console them for the gout …?
To understand why the two men could have been both so erudite and so unhappy, Montaigne distinguished between two categories of knowledge: learning and wisdom. In the category of learning he placed, among other subjects, logic, etymology, grammar, Latin and Greek. And in the category of wisdom, he placed a far broader, more elusive and more valuable kind of knowledge, everything that could help a person to live well, by which Montaigne meant, help them to live happily and morally.
The problem with the Collège de Guyenne, despite its professional staff and principal, was that it excelled at imparting learning but failed entirely at imparting wisdom – repeating at an institutional level the errors that had marred the personal lives of Varro and Aristotle:
I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned. And it has succeeded. It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology …
We readily inquire, ‘Does he know Greek or Latin?’ ‘Can he write poetry and prose?’ But what matters most is what we put last: ‘Has he become better and wiser?’ We ought to find out not who understands
most
but who understands
best
. We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty.
He had never been good at sport: ‘At dancing, tennis and wrestling I have not been able to acquire more than a slight, vulgar skill; and at swimming, fencing, vaulting and jumping, no skill at all.’ Nevertheless, so strong was Montaigne’s objection to the lack of wisdom imparted by most schoolteachers, that he did not shrink from suggesting a drastic alternative to the classroom for the youth of France.
If our souls do not move with a better motion and if we do not have a healthier judgement, then I would just as soon that a pupil spend his time playing tennis. (Ill. 18.1)
He would of course have preferred students to go to school, but schools that taught them wisdom rather than the etymology of the word and could correct the long-standing intellectual bias towards abstract questions. Thales from Miletus in Asia Minor was an early example of the bias, celebrated throughout the ages for having in the sixth century BC tried to measure the heavens and for having determined the height of the Great Pyramid of Egypt according to the theorem of similar triangles – a complicated and dazzling achievement, no doubt, but not what Montaigne wished to see dominate his curriculum. He had greater sympathy with the implicit educational philosophy of one of Thales’s impudent young acquaintances:
I have always felt grateful to that girl from Miletus who, seeing the local philosopher … with his eyes staring upwards, constantly occupied in contemplating the vault of heaven, tripped him up, to warn him that there was time enough to occupy his thoughts with things above the clouds when he had accounted for everything lying before his feet … You can make exactly the same reproach as that woman made against Thales against anyone concerned with philosophy: he fails to see what lies before his feet.
Montaigne noted in other areas a similar tendency to privilege extraordinary activities over humbler but no less important ones – and just like the girl from Miletus, tried to bring us back to earth:
Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor being false to yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult. Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and as tense as those of other lives.
So what would Montaigne have wish
ed pupils to learn at school? What kind of examinations could have tested for the wise intelligence he had in mind, one so far removed from the mental skills of the unhappy Aristotle and Varro?
The examinations would have raised questions about the challenges of quotidian life: love, sex, illness, death, children, money and ambition.
An examination in Montaignean wisdom
1. About seven or eight years ago, some two leagues from here, there was a villager, who is still alive; his brain had long been battered by his wife’s jealousy; one day he came home from work to be welcomed by her usual nagging; it made him so mad that, taking the sickle he still had in his hand he suddenly lopped off the members which put her into such a fever and chucked them in her face. (
Essays
, II.29)
a) How should one settle domestic disputes?
b) Was the wife nagging or expressing affection?
2. Consider these two quotations:
I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening. (
Essays
, I.20)
I can scarcely tell my cabbages from my lettuces. (
Essays
, II.17)
What is a wise approach to death?
3. It is perhaps a more chaste and fruitful practice to bring women to learn early what the living reality [of penis size] is rather than to allow them to make conjectures according to the licence of a heated imagination: instead of our organs as they are, their hopes and desires lead them to substitute extravagant ones three times as big … What great harm is done by those graffiti of enormous genitals which boys scatter over the corridors and staircases of our royal palaces! From them arises a cruel misunderstanding of our natural capacities. (
Essays
, III.5)
How should a man with a small ‘living reality’ bring up the subject?
4. I know of a squire who had entertained a goodly company in his hall and then, four or five days later, boasted as a joke (for there was no truth in it) that he had made them eat cat pie; one of the young ladies in the party was struck with such a horror at this that she collapsed with a serious stomach disorder and a fever: it was impossible to save her. (
Essays
, I.21)
Analyse the distribution of moral responsibility.
5. If only talking to oneself did not look mad, no day would go by without my being heard growling to myself, against myself, ‘You silly shit!’ (
Essays
, I.38)
The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being. (
Essays
, III.13)
How much love should one have for oneself?
Setting people examination papers measuring wisdom rather than learning would probably result in an immediate realignment of the hierarchy of intelligence – and a surprising new élite. Montaigne delighted in the prospect of the incongruous people who would now be recognized as cleverer than the lauded but often unworthy traditional candidates.
I have seen in my time hundreds of craftsmen and ploughmen wiser and happier than university rectors. (Ill. 18.2)
What clever people should sound and look like
It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it. Profound ideas cannot, after all, be explained in the language of children. Yet the association between difficulty and profundity might less generously be described as a manifestation in the literary sphere of a perversity familiar from emotional life, where people who are mysterious and elusive can inspire a respect in modest minds that reliable and clear ones do not.
Montaigne had no qualms bluntly admitting his problem with mysterious books. ‘I cannot have lengthy commerce with [them],’ he wrote, ‘I only like pleasurable, easy [ones] which tickle my interest.’
I am not prepared to bash my brains for anything, not even for learning’s sake, however precious it may be. From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime … If I come across difficult passages in my reading I never bite my nails over them: after making a charge or two I let them be … If one book wearies me I take up another.
Which was nonsense, or rather playful posturing on the part of a man with a thousand volumes on his shelf and an encyclopedic knowledge of Greek and Latin philosophy. If Montaigne enjoyed presenting himself as a dim gentleman prone to somnolence during philosophical expositions, it was disingenuousness with a purpose. The repeated declarations of laziness and slowness were tactical ways to undermine a corrupt understanding of intelligence and good writing.
There are, so Montaigne implied, no legitimate reasons why books in the humanities should be difficult or boring; wisdom does not require a specialized vocabulary or syntax, nor does an audience benefit from being wearied. Carefully used, boredom can be a valuable indicator of the merit of books. Though it can never be a sufficient judge (and in its more degenerate forms, slips into wilful indifference and impatience), taking our levels of boredom into account can temper an otherwise excessive tolerance for balderdash. Those who do not listen to their boredom when reading, like those who pay no attention to pain, may be increasing their suffering unnecessarily. Whatever the dangers of being wrongly bored, there are as many pitfalls in never allowing ourselves to lose patience with our reading matter.
Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is going on. Montaigne encouraged us to blame the author. An incomprehensible prose-style is likely to have resulted more from laziness than cleverness; what reads easily is rarely so written. Or else such prose masks an absence of content; being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say:
Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment.
There is no reason for philosophers to use words that would sound out of place in a street or market:
Just as in dress it is the sign of a petty mind to seek to draw attention by some personal or unusual fashion, so too in speech; the search for new expressions and little-known words derives from an adolescent schoolmasterish ambition. If only I could limit myself to words used in Les Halles in Paris.
But writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence. So strong is this bias, Montaigne wondered whether the majority of university scholars would have appreciated Socrates, a man they professed to revere above all others, if he had approached them in their own towns, devoid of the prestige of Plato’s dialogues, in his dirty cloak, speaking in plain language:
The portrait of the conversations of Socrates which his friends have bequeathed to us receives our approbation only because we are overawed by the general approval of them. It is not from our own knowledge; since they do not follow our practices: if something like them were to be produced nowadays there are few who would rate them highly. We can appreciate no graces which are not pointed, inflated and magnified by artifice. Such graces as flow on under the name of naivety and simplicity readily go unseen by so coarse an insight as ours … For us, is not naivety close kin to simplemindedness and a quality worthy of reproach? Socrates makes his soul move with the natural motion of the common people: thus speaks a peasant; thus speaks a woman … His inductions and comparisons are drawn from the most ordinary and best-known of men’s activities; anyone can understand him. Under so common a form we today would never have discerned the nobility and splendour of his astonishing concepts; we who judge any which are not swollen up by erudition to be base and commonplace and who are never aware of riches except when pompously paraded.
It is a plea to take books seriously, even when their language is unintimidating and their ideas clear – and, by extension,
to refrain from considering ourselves as fools if, because of a hole in our budget or our education, our cloaks are simple and our vocabulary no larger than that of a stallholder in Les Halles.
What clever people should know
They should know the facts, and if they do not and if they have in addition been so foolish as to get these wrong in a book, they should expect no mercy from scholars, who will be justified in slapping them down, and pointing out, with supercilious civility, that a date is wrong or a word misquoted, a passage is out of context or an important source forgotten.
Yet in Montaigne’s schema of intelligence, what matters in a book is usefulness and appropriateness to life; it is less valuable to convey with precision what Plato wrote or Epicurus meant than to judge whether what they have said is interesting and could in the early hours help us over anxiety or loneliness. The responsibility of authors in the humanities is not to quasi-scientific accuracy, but to happiness and health. Montaigne vented his irritation with those who refused the point:
The scholars whose concern it is to pass judgement on books recognize no worth but that of learning and allow no intellectual activity other than that of scholarship and erudition. Mistake one Scipio for the other, and you have nothing left worth saying, have you! According to them, fail to know your Aristotle and you fail to know yourself.
The Essays were themselves marked by frequent misquotations, misattributions, illogical swerves of argument and a failure to define terms. The author wasn’t bothered:
I do my writing at home, deep in the country, where nobody can help or correct me and where I normally never frequent anybody who knows even the Latin of the Lord’s prayer let alone proper French.
Naturally there were errors in the book (‘I am full of them,’ he boasted), but they weren’t enough to doom the Essays, just as accuracy could not ensure their worth. It was a greater sin to write something which did not attempt to be wise than to confuse Scipio Aemilianus (c. 185–129 BC) with Scipio Africanus (236–183 BC).
The Consolations of Philosophy Page 12
