The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [A] Tres mihi convivae prope dissentire videntur,

  Poscentes vario multum diversa palato:

  Quid dem? quid non dem? Renuis tu quod jubet alter;

  Quod petis, id sane est invisum acidumque duobus.

  [For me it resembles three men disagreeing at a feast, each liking very different dishes and asking for them. What am I to give them? What am I not to give them? You reject what delights another: what you like is tart and unpleasant to the other two.]383

  That is the way Nature ought to answer their disputes and their quarrels.

  There are those who say that our good is to be found in virtue; some who say in pleasure; some, in conforming to Nature; one says in knowledge [C] or freedom from pain;384 [A] another, in not letting oneself be deceived by appearances, a notion rather like that other one [B] taught by Pythagoras of old:

  [A] Nil admirari prope res est una, Numaci,

  Solaque quae possit facere et servare beatum;

  [Be astonished by nothing; it is almost the one and only way, Numacius, which leads to lasting happiness;]385

  that is the aim of the Pyrrhonists. [C] (To be astonished by nothing is, for Aristotle, the attribute of greatness of soul.)386 [A] Archesilaus said that suspending the judgement and keeping it upright and inflexible are good actions, whereas acts of consent and commitment are vicious and bad. It is true that he left his Pyrrhonism behind when he erected that axiom into a certainty!387 Pyrrhonists say that the sovereign good is Ataraxia, which consists in a total immobility of judgement; they consider that not to be a positive affirmation but simply an inner persuasion such as makes them avoid precipices and protect themselves from the chill of the evening; it presents them with this notion and makes them reject any other.

  [B] How I wish that, during my lifetime, someone like Justus Lipsius (the most learned man left, a polished and judicious mind, a veritable brother to my dear Turnebus), had the health, the will and sufficient leisure to compile an honest and careful account which listed by class and by category everything we can find out about the opinions of Ancient philosophy on the subject of our being and our morals; it would include their controversies and their reputations, it would tell us who belonged to which school, and how far the founders and their followers actually applied their precepts on memorable occasions which could serve as examples. What a beautiful and useful book that would be!388

  [A] Moreover, if we draw our moral rules from ourselves, what confusion we cast ourselves into! For the most convincing advice we get from reason is that each and every man should obey the laws of his own country;389 [C] that is Socrates’ precept, inspired (he said) by divine counsel.390 [A] But what does that mean, except that our rules of conduct are based on chance? Truth must present the same face everywhere. If Man could know solid Rectitude and Justice in their true Essences, he would never restrict them to the customary circumstances of this place or of that; Virtue would not be fashioned from whatever notions happen to be current in Persia or in India.

  Nothing keeps changing so continuously as the Law. Since I was born I have seen our neighbours, the English, chopping and changing theirs three or four times, not only on political matters (where we may wish to do without constancy) but on the most important subject there ever can be: religion.391 It makes me feel sad and ashamed, since the English are a people with whom we used to be so familiarly acquainted in my part of the world that traces of their former kinship can still be seen in my own house.

  [C] And closer to home, I have seen capital offences made lawful; such are the uncertainties and the fortunes of war that any one of us may eventually be found guilty of lèse-majesté against God and the King, simply for holding fast to different ideas of legitimacy, once our Justice were to fall to the mercy of Injustice (which, after a few years of possession, would change its essence).392 Could that ancient god have more clearly emphasized the place of ignorance within our human knowledge of the divine Being, or taught us that religion is really no more than a human invention, useful for binding societies together, than by telling those who came before his Tripod to beg for instruction that the true way of worship is the one hallowed by custom in each locality?393

  Oh God, how bound we are to the loving-kindness of our sovereign Creator for making our belief grow up out of the stupidities of such arbitrary and wandering devotions, establishing it on the changeless foundation of his holy Word!394

  [A] But what has Philosophy to teach us in this plight? Why, that we should follow the laws of our country! – laws which are but an uncertain sea of opinions deriving from peoples or princes, who will paint it in as many different colours and present it, reformed, under as many different faces as they have changes of heart. I cannot make my judgement as flexible as that. What kind of Good can it be, which was honoured yesterday but not today [C] and which becomes a crime when you cross a river! What kind of truth can be limited by a range of mountains, becoming a lie for the world on the other side!395

  [A] Philosophers can hardly be serious when they try to introduce certainty into Law by asserting that there are so-called Natural Laws, perpetual and immutable, whose essential characteristic consists in their being imprinted upon the human race. There are said to be three such laws; or four; some say less, some say more: a sign that the mark they bear is as dubious as all the rest. How unlucky they are – (for what else should I call it but bad luck, seeing that out of laws so infinite in number, they cannot find even one which luck [C] or accidental chance [A] has allowed to be universally accepted by the agreement of all peoples). They are so pitiful that there is not one of these three – or four – selected laws, which has not been denied and disowned by several nations, not just one. Yet universal approval is the only convincing indication they can cite in favour of there being any Natural Laws at all. For whatever Nature truly ordained, we would, without any doubt, all perform, by common consent: not only all nations but all human beings individually would be deeply aware of force or compulsion when anyone tried to make them violate it. Let them show me just one law with such characteristics: a would like to see it.396

  Protagoras and Ariston said that the essential justice of any law consists in the will of the lawgiver: without it, good and honourable lose their qualities, simply lingering on as empty words for things indifferent.

  In Plato, Thrasymachus thinks that there is no right other than the advantage of the superior.397

  Nothing in all the world has greater variety than law and custom. What is abominable in one place is laudable somewhere else – as clever theft was in Sparta. Marriages between close relations are capital offences with us: elsewhere they are much honoured:

  gentes esse feruntur

  In quibus et nato genitrix, et nata parenti

  Fungitur, et pietas geminato crescit amore.

  [They say there are peoples where the son lies with his mother, the daughter with her father, where family piety is enhanced by a double affection.]398

  Murdering children, murdering fathers, holding wives in common, making a business out of robbery, giving free rein to lusts of all sorts – in short there is nothing so extreme that it has not been admitted by the custom of some nation or other.

  [B] It is quite believable that natural laws exist: we can see that in other creatures. But we have lost them; that fine human reason of ours is always interfering, seeking dominance and mastery, distorting and confounding the face of everything according to its own vanity and inconsistency. [C] ‘Nihil itaque amplius nostrum est: quod nostrum dico, artis est’ [Nothing of ours is left: what I call ours is really artificial].399

  [A] Any object can be seen in various lights and from various points of view: it is chiefly that which gives birth to variety of opinion: one nation sees one facet, and stops there; another sees another.

  Nothing can be imagined more horrible than eating one’s father: yet the peoples who followed this custom in the Ancient world looked on it as a mark of piety and love, seeking to provide their ancestors with the mos
t worthy and honourable of obsequies, finding a home for their father’s remains in their own person, in the very marrow of their bones; they were giving them a kind of new life; they were born again, as it were, by being transmuted into their living flesh as their children ate and digested them. It is easy to think what abominable cruelty it would be for men deeply imbued in such a superstition to leave their parents’ remains to rot in the earth, food for beasts and worms.400

  The aspects of theft which struck Lycurgus were the quickness, the industry, the boldness and the skill necessary to steal something from a neighbour, as well as of the public good which came from each man carefully guarding his own property. He believed that this gave a grounding in the twin subjects of assault and defence, both of which are useful for training soldiers (the principal virtue and science which he wished to instil into that nation). That outweighed the disorder and injustice of carrying off other people’s property.

  The tyrant Dionysius offered Plato a long, perfumed, damask robe, fashionable in Persia. Plato refused it saying that, since he was born a man, he would not willingly wear women’s clothing. Aristippus, however, accepted it, replying that no apparel could corrupt a chaste heart;401 and [C] when his friends taunted him with cowardice for taking so little offence when Dionysius spat in his face, he replied: ‘Merely to catch a gudgeon fishermen suffer the waves to bespatter them from head to foot.’ Diogenes was washing some cabbage leaves when he saw Aristippus go by: ‘If you knew how to live on cabbage,’ Diogenes said, ‘you would not be courting a tyrant.’ Aristippus retorted: ‘You would not be here washing cabbages, if you knew how to live among men.’402

  [A] That is how Reason can make different actions seem right. [B] Reason is a two-handled pot: you can grab it from the right or the left.

  bellum, O terra hospita, portas;

  Bello armantur equi, bellum haec armenta minantur.

  Sed tamen iidem olim curru succedere sueti

  Quadrupedes, et frena jugo concordia ferre;

  Spes est pacis.

  [You are threatening war; what a hospitable land! Horses are armed for war: war is what these beasts portend! – Yet those same animals are often yoked to carts, plodding tranquilly in harness; there is hope for peace.]403

  [C] When they lectured Solon for shedding vain and useless tears at the death of his son, he replied, ‘It is precisely because they are vain and useless that I am right to shed them.’ Socrates’ wife exclaimed, increasing her grief: ‘Those wretched judges have condemned him to death unjustly!’ But Socrates replied, ‘Would you really prefer that I were justly condemned?’404

  [A] We pierce our ears: the Greeks held that to be a mark of slavery. When we lie with our wives we hide away: the Indians lie with them in public. The Scythians used their temples to execute foreigners: elsewhere temples serve as sanctuaries:405

  [B] Inde furor vulgi, quod numina vicinorum

  Odit quisque locus, cum solos credat habendos

  Esse Deos quos ipse colit.

  [The fury of the mob is aroused since everyone hates his neighbours’ gods, convinced that the gods he adores are the only true ones.]406

  [A] I have heard tell of a judge who, whenever he came across in his lawbooks a thorny disagreement between Bartolus and Baldus or a subject marked by conflicting interpretations, wrote in the margin, Question for friend, meaning by that that the truth was so entangled in controversy that in a similar case he could favour whichever party he wanted to. It was only lack of wit and intellect which stopped him from writing Question for friend all over the place! Counsel and judges today find enough bias in their lawsuits to bowl them any way they please. A field of study so limitless, dependent on the authority of so many opinions and subject to such arbitrariness, is bound to give rise to an extreme confusion of judgements. There is no case so clear that it does not provoke controversy. One court judges this way: another reverses the verdict and then, on a later occasion, reverses its own judgement. Familiar examples of this can be seen in an astonishing abuse which stains the splendour and ceremonial authority of our judicial system: the verdict of the parties is not to settle for the verdict of the Court: they dash from one judge to another for a decision on the same case.

  As for the licence of philosophical opinion about vice and virtue, there is no need to go lengthily into that; it is better to pass over some of the notions in silence than to trumpet them abroad [C] before weaker intellects. [B] Arcesilaus said that in lechery proclivities [C] and occasions [B] were irrelevant.’407‘Et obscoenas voluptates… si natura requirit, non genere, aut loco, aut ordine, sed forma, aetate, figura metiendas Epicurus putat’ [Epicurus thinks that when Nature demands to be satisfied by lascivious pleasures, we need not consider family origin, position or rank but only beauty, youth and figure]. ‘Ne amores quidem sanctos a sapiente alienos esse arbitrantur” [They even think that forbidden affaires are not incompatible with being a Sage]. ‘Quaeramus ad quam usque aetatem juvenes amandi sint’ [Let us investigate up to what age it is proper to love young men]. The last two quotations are Stoic; together with the reproach which Dicaearchus made to Plato himself on this subject, they show how far even the sanest philosophy will go in tolerating quite excessive licence, far from common practice.408

  [A] Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength. But just look at those Ancient concerns which gave the original impulse to that mighty stream, famed, full of dignity, awesome and venerable: you then see them to be so light and so delicate that it is not surprising that these people here – philosophers who weigh everything and reduce everything to reason, never accepting anything on authority and trust – reach verdicts far removed from those of the generality. These people, who model themselves on their concept of Nature as she originally was, not surprisingly stray from the common path in most of their opinions. Few of them for example would have approved of the constraints we impose on marriage; [C] most of them wanted a community of wives without binding obligations. [A] Courteous conventions like ours they rejected.409 Chrysippus said that, for a dozen olives, a philosopher will turn a dozen somersaults in public, even with his breeches off.410 [C] He could hardly have advised Clisthenes against giving his fair daughter Agarista to Hippoclides, just because he saw him stand on his head on a table with his legs wide apart in the air.411

  In the midst of a discussion, and in the presence of his followers, Metrocles rather injudiciously let off a fart. To hide his embarrassment he stayed at home until, eventually, Crates came to pay him a visit; to his consolations and arguments Crates added the example of his own licence: he began a farting match with him, thereby removing his scruples and, into the bargain, converting him to the freer Stoic school from the more socially oriented Peripatetics whom he had formerly followed.412 What we call ‘honourable’ behaviour – not to dare to perform openly actions which are ‘honourable’ when done in private – they termed silliness. As for ingeniously concealing or disowning those of our actions which Nature, custom and our very desires publish and proclaim abroad, they reckoned that to be a vice. They thought it a desacralizing of Venus’ mysteries to take them out from the discreet sanctuary of her temple and exhibit them to the public gaze: draw back the curtains, and her sports are debased. (Shame has a kind of weight: concealment, dissimulation and constraint form part of our esteem.) They thought that it was most ingenious that Lust, out of regret for the dignity and convenience of her traditional bedchambers, should don the mask of Virtue, seeking to avoid being prostituted at the crossroads and trampled underfoot before the eyes of the mob. That is why [A] some say that abolishing the public brothels would not merely take the fornication at present restricted to such places and spread it everywhere, but would also stimulate that vice in men by making it more dif
ficult:

  Moechus es Aufidiae, qui vir, Corvine, fuisti;

  Rivalis fuerat qui tuus, ille vir est.

  Cur aliena placet tibi, quae tua non placet uxor?

  Nunquid securus non potes arrigere?

  [Corvinus! You used to be the husband of Aufidia; she has married your rival and you are her lover. Now she has become the wife of another, she pleases you (she never did when she was your own). Why? Are you unable to get it up without risking a beating?]413

  You can find a thousand variations on that experience.

  Nullus in urbe fuit tota qui tangere vellet

  Uxorem gratis, Caeciliane, tuam,

  Dum licuit; sed nunc, positis custodibus, ingens

  Turba fututorum est. Ingeniosus homo es.

  [Caecilianus: when you left your wife free, nobody in the whole of Rome wanted to touch her: now you have put guards round her, she is besieged by a huge crowd of fucking admirers. Clever chap!]414

  Once a philosopher was surprised in the very act; asked what he was doing, he coldly replied: ‘I am planting a man’; he no more blushed than if he had been caught planting garlic.415

  [C] It is, I think, too tender and respectful an opinion when one of our great religious authors holds that Necessity actually compels this act to be carried out in modest seclusion: he could not convince himself that the Cynics actually consummated it in their licentious embraces, but were content with imitating lascivious motions in order to display that absence of shame which formed part of their teachings. He thought that they had to find a secluded place later on, so as to be able to ejaculate what shame had constrained them to hold back. But he had insufficiently plumbed the depths of the Cynics’ debauchery: for when Diogenes was masturbating in the presence of crowds of bystanders, he specifically said he wanted to give his belly complete satisfaction by rubbing it up like this. To those who asked why his ‘hunger’ had to be satisfied in the street, not in some more suitable place, he replied, ‘I was in the street when I felt hungry.’ Women philosophers who joined this school joined in with their bodies –everywhere and indiscriminately: Hipparchia was only admitted into the group of disciples around Crates on condition that she followed the customary practices and rules in every particular.416