Montaigne
In January I took a short seminar at St. John’s College, my alma mater, on Montaigne. We read a few of his many essays—Montaigne is famous for only writing essays (mostly short, though some go on for 20 or 40 or even 100 pages) and for eschewing any type of order or system.
I confess that Montaigne was a favorite author of many of my peers, in college and afterwards, but not of mine. I liked more systematic, grandiose thinkers. My tastes have changed, but I still came to seminar thinking of Montaigne as something of a light-weight. His writings range widely across topics both profound and mundane; the titles include “That to Philosophize is to Learn How to Die” but also “Of Thumbs” and “Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes.” He is perfectly willing to describe the details of his diet and how many times a day he defecates. Montaigne, writing in the late 1500s, joins gleefully with his fellow humanists in debunking Aristotle and anyone who tries to create a system of thought.
The one essay of Montaigne’s that I remembered clearly was a famous one called “Of Cannibals,” in which he skewers European colonialism and assumptions of superiority to supposedly primitive peoples. He describes—it’s not clear how much is based on real events—the observations of Brazilian natives who are brought to Paris, and their shock at seeing people living on the streets in poverty, the abject deference of grown men to a child-King, and other questionable European customs.
I assumed that in our seminar these sorts of socio-political observations would be a major topic, and they were, but I was surprised to find—with the help of some gentle prodding from our seminar leader—that our most important theme turned out to be the Self. What is it, and does it even exist? Montaigne’s refusal to systematize, to start with first principles and build a logical edifice, is based in part on a conviction that human beings, himself included, are far too fragile and changeable to sustain such an enterprise. The essays are meant to illustrate the inherent disorderliness and contradictions of the human mind. We jump willy-nilly from one thing to another, from thoughts of God to scratching an itch. The essays have frequent observations such as this, from his concluding essay “Of Experience”:
o “Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like our silkworms, and is suffocated in it. A mouse in a pitch barrel [Erasmus]. It thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered.” (Donald Frame translation).
Now it is not as though previous philosophers had not noticed that our minds are restless and unfocused. But serious thinkers had tried to come up with remedies: better education, dialectical inquiry, more mathematics, self-discipline, submission to God. Montaigne’s fellow-countryman Rene Descartes would, a generation later, doubt our mental capacities even more fiercely but only as a means to establish a rock-solid Method for reaching the truth. (Descartes and his descendants, in fact, are dedicated to building better Selves by ruthlessly discarding what they consider useless and weak parts. No concessions to bodily frailties for Descartes). Montaigne doesn’t go there. His conclusion is a hard skepticism: “To learn that we have said or done a foolish thing, that is nothing; we must learn that we are nothing but fools, a far broader and more important lesson.”
What is hard to tell is what Montaigne makes of this intuition. At times he writes as though more self-knowledge—he reveres the Socrates who teaches “Know Thyself”—will enable him to control his wayward thoughts and passions. When he says “The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor’s or an ordinary man’s, it is still a life subject to all human accidents. Let us only listen: we tell ourselves all we most need,” he sounds like a champion of individual autonomy and self-knowledge. At a minimum he thinks recognizing his own weakness makes him more modest, less judgmental, a better friend and counselor. This Montaigne is a kind of discoverer and champion of the Self; he delights in charting its vagaries, its idiosyncrasies and its weaknesses as much, or more, than its strengths and virtues. See all of it, love all of it, seems to be his message, including our appetites, our passions, our bodies in all their messiness and frailty. This holistic embrace might lead to a new type of self-knowledge and self-control.
At other times though Montaigne seems to stress that the Self is unknowable, so full of changes and contradictions that, like Oakland, there is no there there. There is no point trying to regulate it, tame it, much less know it. All we can do is watch.
These pictures of an unstable, perhaps non-existent Self seems to be something new in Western thinking, and also to stand at the beginning of what has been a lengthy and fierce debate within modern thought. The contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor, in his encyclopedic Sources of the Self, says Montaigne represents a “turning point” who rejects “the virtually unanimous direction of ancient thought” that beneath the flux of the soul stands unchanging reason, our true inner core. But Montaigne also stands for a particular way of being in the world. “The Cartesian calls for a radical disengagement from ordinary experience; Montaigne requires a deeper engagement in particularity. These two facets of modern individuality have been at odds up to this day.”
On the one hand, the primacy of the individual self and its right to development and actualization is a core, usually unchallenged assumption of Western liberalism. It is at the foundation of the American political and social project, and of our attachment to free markets, free speech, freedom of religion. We admire especially the “self-made man” who through gumption and guile imposes form and direction on the Self.
On the other hand, modern (Cartesian) science has been steadily chipping away at ideas of free will, of genuine choice, of some island of autonomy in the soul that is untouched by genes, hormones, upbringing, media, or what song we happened to hear just now on Spotify. We are bundles of impulses and drives that operate for the most part unconsciously. Much of the story we invent to give shape and meaning to our lives is after-the-fact, a fabrication designed to disguise the truth from ourselves and others and make it appear that ‘I’ decides.
Finding and realizing our ‘genuine self’ still seems to have the upper hand in the popular imagination, judging by the New York Times bestseller list. But among the educated, in the universities and think tanks and other elite circles, I think assumptions have shifted decisively. Modernist art from Virginia Woolf and Joyce and Eliot and Picasso arguably softened up the culture to the idea of a fluid, contradictory identity. Now, it is harder-edged work by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and their multitude of followers that rules, pointing out the many, many ways our judgement is flawed and distorted. Every month sees the publication of a new book by Malcolm Gladwell or Dan Ariely popularizing findings from psychology, economics, or neuroscience that call into question our ability to know ourselves or make objective decisions. Oliver Sacks, the late talented writer-psychologist, wrote multiple bestsellers with case studies that showed how damage to the brain could change us in astonishing ways, and also how tenaciously ‘we’ fought to remake our internal stories to make sense of these changes.
I can affirm from my own experience that these findings have worked their way into professional education and training at every level. Usually it takes the form of identifying some way the brain tries to trick us, and exhorting the student not to fall for it. A variety of methods and algorithms can help. But there is a ‘finger in the dyke’ fatalism that I think comes through: our brains are in charge, and there is only so so much we can do to keep from fooling ourselves.
Sometimes explicitly, sometimes not, the message is: your Self is a delusion. At best it is a useful simplifying fiction that helps us navigate a bewildering world; at worst a lie that can make us deeply unhappy and destructive.
Harari
As it happens, while discussing Montaigne in seminar I started reading a new book by the Israeli historian/polymath Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, that was given to me for Christmas. Harari has written provocative bestsellers that I have not read, but based on this book he is a frighteningly learned, earnest, and clear-headed thinker. That this was a book of essays of course made it irresistible to compare with Montaigne.
Harari is concerned with a wide range of contemporary problems and has smart things to say about many of them. I was surprised, however, to find that, like Montaigne, Harari’s underlying theme is the Self. In many places Harari critiques the ways we delude ourselves as individuals and collectively. In his final essay, “Meditation: Just Observe,” he confesses his starting point, which is grounded in Buddhism and meditation (Harari doesn’t call himself a Buddhist and is caustic about organized Buddhism, but his conclusions rest on Buddhist insights). The meditation experience, according to Harari, reveals that the Self is an illusion, that the stories we make up about the Self to give our lives meaning are false, and we need to get over it. When these stories are scaled up to justify our allegiance to a country, a race, a faith they do tremendous damage.
Harari thinks popular culture has now internalized this message. As evidence he cites the recent Disney/Pixar animated hit Inside-Out: “In countless Disney movies, the heroes face difficulties and dangers, but they eventually triumph by finding their authentic self and following their free choices. Inside-Out brutally dismantles this myth. It adopts the latest neurobiological view of humans and takes viewers on a journey into Riley’s brain only to discover that she has no authentic self and makes no free choices.” Dale Carnegie is out, Tversky/Kahnemann is in.
Harari accepts the liberal claim that all Selves and all types of self-actualization (that don’t directly harm others) are equal and there is no way to say one is preferable to another. But his argument is the negative of the liberal vision: that all Selves have immeasurable value and need to be nurtured and developed. For Harari, the beginning of wisdom is to understand that every Self is equally without value—in fact non-existent—and every story is equally false.
Harari wants us to believe that this is a good thing. He is up to speed on the latest scientific and psychological findings. He hopes that more people taking up meditation and abandoning faith in the Self will help inoculate us against outside manipulation by advertisers, political hucksters, authoritarian states, religious fanatics, and so forth. He exhorts us to move fast. According to Harari, the manipulators are reading the same books about our weaknesses and inventing new techniques, riding the social media wave into our brains. Soon ultra-sophisticated algorithms that rest on mountains of personal data will leave us defenseless, even as we delude ourselves into thinking we are making up our own minds.
I share many of Harari’s fears, but count me skeptical about his solution. Convincing people they have no free will and live in a meaningless world (dominated by suffering, according to Harari and Buddhism) does not sound like a recipe for progress, peace, and freedom. In any case, this is a teaching that history shows is only available, in its fullness, to a few; Harari himself points out the many cases of leaders in Buddhist societies waging war and persecuting un-believers, in direct contradiction to Buddhist teachings, including contemporary examples like Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
My fear is that while it is easy to persuade people that OTHER human beings are weak puppets controlled by outside forces, very few will believe this about themselves. They are not taking from this the lessons that Harari—and I think Montaigne—hope for: humility, compromise, a retreat from fanaticism. Instead it is opening the gates for seeing the opinions and desires of other people as illusions. I think we see this already on a mass scale, in the ease with which so many dismiss unwelcome information and science as “Fake News.”
In the end, Harari seems to face us with a version of the same dilemma as Plato’s Republic: genuine knowledge, enlightenment, is the cure for injustice. But very few people are going to attain genuine knowledge. They need some stories, some noble lies, that ideally are compatible with genuine knowledge. More people meditating, or taking psychedelics, or anything that makes them take themselves less seriously, won’t hurt: we Americans especially are in the grip of an extreme version of the Self-actualization story, one that puts the individual and her interests and desires at the center and dismisses any other claims. But don’t imagine that this will be a silver bullet that ushers in a new age of tolerance and mutual respect.
Coda on Hume
Harari combines up to the minute findings in biology and behavioral science with an ancient tradition; he is not the first to point out that Buddhism has many compatibilities with Western science. That two distinct and separate traditions come to similar conclusions helps validate both and convince us this is where the truth lies.
However, this may not quite be the case. In Western thought, the turning point in our view of the Self in a Buddhist direction is usually associated with the British philosopher David Hume (though, as we have seen, Montaigne may have a prior claim). Hume closely analyzed human mental states and concluded in A Treatise on Human Nature, published in 1739, that there was no necessary connection, no causality, between successive states over time. Causality is an illusion (albeit one we cannot escape). There are only perceptions and experience, which are always in flux. The notion that we remain the same, that there is a constant interior substance that constitutes Adam or Sarah throughout our lives, is false.
Like Montaigne and Harari, Hume thought this skeptical teaching would induce more tolerance and moderation, especially about religion. This is apparently a key reason why in a recent poll of (mostly analytic, Anglo-American) philosophers, Hume was ranked as the #1 favorite of all traditional thinkers. 1Hume’s influence on subsequent Western thought has been massive.
It turns out, though, that Hume’s central insight may in fact have been borrowed from Buddhism. An American philosopher, Alison Gopnik, through an admirable bit of research, established a decade ago that the young Hume spent time in France—at the same time he was writing the Treatise—with Jesuit missionaries who had spent years in Tibet and Thailand and were intimately familiar with Buddhist thought. Though Hume never seems to have acknowledged these contacts, it seems too much of a coincidence not to have had an impact. Certainly Hume was entertaining thoughts along these lines, but it seems probable that acquaintance with Buddhism shaped his thinking and gave him the impetus to come to his radical conclusions. 2
I confess I am not sure what to make of this. Hume after all in the Treatise makes his claims based on the scientific method. He intends to apply the same approach to man that has been used successfully by Newton on the planets. He doesn’t advise his readers to go meditate. He persuades through his arguments and good old-fashioned Western philosophizing.
Still, the foundation comes from asking you, the reader, to look inside yourself and pay close attention to your experience—not that different from Harari’s description of meditation as being still and watching how your own mind works. Meditation advocates often describe it as entirely ‘empirical’, not based on any metaphysical assumptions, just repeated and disciplined close observation. This sounds Humean, if not Montaignean. It is easy to see this approach resonating with a young Hume, who then recast it in terms that would reach his audience.
Maybe the image of separate traditions and cultures is a myth (at least among literate civilizations in Eurasia). Goods, ideas, art, and people have been circulating in often uncharted ways for a very long time. It didn’t start with European expansion in the 15th century. A messy, complicated, interacting world that resists our attempts to sort it into neat boxes—Montaigne would like that.