Conclusion first: The more I read Montaigne, the more I love him. Born in 1533 in France, he’s completely out of step with our current moment. Rather than being self confident, he’s full of doubt. Rather than being set in his opinions, he changes his mind all the time. Rather than being causal and tribal, he’s a snob who’s open to learning from any source. He’s skeptical of politics but drawn to public life. He’s a lovable mess.
Why I Love Montaigne
He wanders
He’s full of weird ideas
He isn’t selling anything
He doesn’t dumb things down
He never makes bullet lists
He writes with style
He admires animals, especially dogs and cats
He’s not sure if he believes in God or not
If there is a God, he’s sure God is unknowable by human reason
He writes for no audience
He’s funny
He doesn’t pander
He has no tribe
He never comes to firm conclusions
He’s has some of the same thoughts I’ve had but better
I’ll show you why I love Montaigne by quoting from his great essay, An Apology for Raymond Sebond, which isn’t much of an apology and isn’t about Raymond Sebond. The section I’ll examine is about how humans are no better than the animals.
“Presumption is our natural and original malady. The most vulnerable and frail of all creatures is man, and at the same time the most arrogant.”
Montaigne isn’t selling anything. If a writer wants you to like his writing, he might start off with a compliment of you or an insult of a shared enemy. Not Montaigne. He skewers all of humanity by saying man — which in this context meant all of humanity — is the weakest and most arrogant of animals. I’ll buy that.
He writes with style. The twinning of words — “natural and original,” “vulnerable and frail” — is one of his stylistic fingerprints. It’s all over his writing, and I steal that device all the time now.
“Man feels and sees himself lodged here on earth, amid the mire and dung of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst, the deadest, and the most stagnant part of the universe, on the lowest story of the house and the farthest from the vault of heaven … and in his imagination he goes planting himself above the circle of the moon, and bringing the sky down beneath his feet. It is by the vanity of this same imagination that he equals himself to God, and attributes to himself divine characteristics.”
He doesn’t dumb things down. Read that passage slowly. It’s worth the effort. I hear a familiar (to me) echo of self hatred, depression, and contempt in that passage. It makes me feel right at home, like I’m vibing with a close friend. Human kind is covered in shit and thinks it’s king of the universe. That sounds like something I would have said back when I was drinking.
“Man picks himself out and separates himself from the horde of other creatures, carves out their shares to his fellows and companions the animals, and distributes among them such portions of faculties and powers as he sees fit. How does he know, by the force of his intelligence, the secret internal stirrings of animals?”
He wanders. In an essay about the incomprehensibility of God either through reason or through faith, Montaigne wanders into a comparison of animals and humans. I love that because it has the meandering quality of good conversation.
He’s full of weird ideas. According to Montaigne, humans place themselves above animals, steal their possessions and inheritance, and call them stupid. Montaigne isn’t engaging in romantic anthropomorphism. He’s attributing radical equality to animals.
“By what comparison between animals and us does man infer the stupidity that he attributes to the animals? When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me? …
He’s funny. The line about cats is a classic.
“The defect that hinders communication between the animals and us, why is it not just as much ours as theirs? It’s a matter of guesswork whose fault it is that we do not understand one another; for we do not understand them any more than they do us. By this same reasoning they may consider us beasts, as we consider them. It is no great wonder if we do not understand them; neither do we understand other people born in other countries.”
He doesn’t pander. Montaigne is doing one of my very favorite things: attacking a commonly held and stupid belief. We assume animals are stupid, but we don’t know. Animals don’t make guns. They don’t start real estate investment trusts. Are either of those things signs of intelligence?
We believe animals are dumb because we don’t understand them. It’s much easier to do whatever we want to animals and their habitats if we believe they’re dumb. We act the same way toward people and cultures we don’t understand — we tell ourselves the people we don’t understand are dumb, and then steal their habitat.
“We must notice the parity there is between man and animals. We have some mediocre understanding of animals’ meaning; so do they of ours, in about the same degree. Animals flatter us, threaten us, and implore us, and we them. Furthermore, we discover very evidently that there is full and complete communication between animals and that they understand each other, not only those of the same species, but also those of different species. … In a certain bark of the dog the horse knows there is anger; at a certain other sound of the dog the horse is not frightened. Even in the beasts that have no voice, from the mutual services we see between them we easily infer some other means of communication; their motions converse and discuss.”
He’s has some of the same thoughts I’ve had but better. I’ve thought animals communicate with each other, but I’ve never thought about it so eloquently, completely, or convincingly.
I’m in awe of how much Montaigne sees and tells me what he sees. He makes judgements from his observations like a scientist. We’ve ruined science by putting it in laboratories and covering it up with statistics. Science is so much more alive and accessible than that. Here’s Montaigne the naturalist philosopher saying animals communicate across species. Even if he’s wrong, it’s a beautiful idea.
“We recognize easily enough, in most of the works of the animals, how much superiority they have over us and how feeble is our skill to imitate them. We see, however, in our cruder works, the faculties that we use, and that our soul applies itself with all its power; why do we not think the same thing of them? Why do we attribute to some sort of natural and servile inclination these works which surpass all that we can do by nature and by art? Wherein, without realizing it, we grant them a very great advantage over us, by making Nature, with maternal tenderness, accompany them and guide them as by the hand in all the actions and comforts of their life; while us she abandons to chance and to fortune, and to seek by art the things necessary for our preservation, and denies us at the same time the power to attain, by any education and mental straining, the natural resourcefulness of the animals: so that their brutish stupidity surpasses in all conveniences all that our divine intelligence can do.”
He writes for no audience. This passage reads like Montaigne is talking to himself and we’re along for the ride.
There’re a lot things animals can do that we can’t do — find their way across continents, find their lost family, smell cancer and epilepsy. Why don't we give animals credit for intelligence? Instead of saying animals have reason, we say they have instinct, a “natural and servile inclination” as Montaigne says. Animals are so loved by nature that they don’t have to work for anything. Everything is given to the animals by instinct. We have to sweat and toil for everything, and no matter how hard we work we never equal the animals in grace or achievement. Animals have instinct, we have reason — it’s a massive self own on our part.
Living with an animal is like living with an alien. They are a foreign intelligence, an endlessly fascinating mystery. They’re also needy and messy, just like the rest of us. Animals can be our greatest friends and mentors and they can be freeloading, manipulative little bastards.
Animals don’t have the same intelligence we do. They don’t know 2 + 2 = 4. They do have the same emotional lives we do. They know love and friendship, fear and anxiety. At least they look like they do.
Words and reason are not the only ways to experience the world. Feelings and sensations do a good job, too. Read an article about music and then listen to the same music. The words aren’t half a candle as illuminating as the sounds. Eat some ice cream (if you like ice cream — potato chips are good, too) and then describe the ice cream. A spoonful of real ice cream beats a mouthful of words about it. Most of what we know we can’t accurately put into words.
Instead of capturing the essence of what inspires us, we make new things with words, or with sounds, or with tastes. We make art. It’s a pretty good skill, one animals don’t seem to have, but I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble.
“Why make art? My life is art.” — Margaret the Pug
All quotations of Montaigne are from the magnificent translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, Kindle Edition.