I'm stacked and racked in meetings tomorrow, so won't be able to participate, but I did the reading and my conclusion was that Montaigne was a prig who could use a good drunk.
I'm probably going to sit out until Thursday, too. I'm trying to use the Montaigne readings as extra motivation to read a book on the Renaissance and, barring another day like today (full of procrastination), I should be done with it by Thursday.
I'm pleased that everyone is sitting out, because I actually didn't do the reading today, opting instead to spend all afternoon posting here rather than writing this blasted essay.
I think once we read more of his essays, it will make more sense. All of them are like this. You think you have some idea what his point is, then it makes a bizarre left turn, and then, whammo, you're lost. Is that, maybe, the point? To eschew the thesis-driven rhetoric of the Renaissance, which valued form, clarity, and performance over information or meditation, and create a form less constrained by writerly ease and cleverness?
Instead of seeing it as an argument for or against drunkenness, maybe we should look at it as a sort of review of all the possible attitudes one might take toward drunkenness.
From medieval writing up through the Renaissance, almost everyone who learned to write in French wrote an argument about how and why women are evil. This was known as the Querelle des Femmes and was, in a way, a whole genre of writing that had its own structures and rules. Each writer tried to contribute to the ongoing Querelle with new witticisms, new situational arguments, and so forth. It's easy to look at this huge body of work and see it as one long exercise in misogynistic training, but recently F/loyd G/ray* has pointed out that the Querelle had very little to do with people's actual thoughts about women. It was basically just an exercise in how to write arguments. These exercises perfected the art of creating a thesis and defending it with clever words, but contributed almost nothing to anyone's knowledge of women.
Montaigne's works are essays in the sense of "attempts" or forays into a topic, just to see what's there, with little bother about what the judgment will be in the end. Bacon's Essayes are similar (though more judgmental at their ends).
* I'm un-googlabling this as I'm writing this precis from memory while drinking a beer at 12:30 and am terrified Prof Gray will hunt me down if he finds this.
By all that, I meant to say that Montaigne broke from the Querelle tradition, but I've just pulled Gray off my bookshelf and I see he has something to say about Montaigne and the Querelle, which I've totally forgotten. Scuse me.
I think once we read more of his essays, it will make more sense. All of them are like this. You think you have some idea what his point is, then it makes a bizarre left turn, and then, whammo, you're lost. Is that, maybe, the point?
So I've only read a few of Montaigne's essays and the only one I remember, "On Cruelty", had the same sort of structure, but in the class for which I read it the professor offered a reading that made the whole thing actually make sense on a single topic, albeit pursued in a kind of unclear way. So maybe some unearthing can do similar things for the others? On the other hand, who cares if the subject veers all over the place? Not me.
Montaigne was one of the first authors, perhaps the first we still read, to "think out loud". He was well-read in various classical and Christian attempts to make serious official statements of the truth of things, but he wasn't trying to do that. He was (empirically, in a way) checking the various official statements against his experiences and intuitive reactions to things.
Compare the organization of what he wrote to what Aristotle or Aquinas or Locke or Descartes or Augustine or Marcus Aurelius would have written on the topic (if they ever would have written about soething that trivial -- Montaigne enjoyed writing about trivial stuff, not unlike some people here).
I also find it amusing that he essentially apologizes for not being a drunk, asking whether maybe he should be drinking more. (Rabelais vigorously advocated drunkenness, and seemingly many during the early modern age had beer or wine for breakfast and kept a buzz going all day -- there was even a special very weak beer for that purpose).
I have the Frame translation and he collates three successive editions -- Montaigne rewrote and enlarged as he went along. Often the later passages contradict or modify the earlier.
Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to say something about the layering, but I can tell you now it's complicated. The two pages are A B C A C A B A C, and there's only one uninterrupted passage as long as a page.
I didn't find it so incoherent, and some of the comments here reinforce the sense I got that he was just kind of exploring the topic and comparing what previous authorities had said about it. It seems like he personally doesn't drink much and has some prejudices against drinking, but then he sees that a lot of writers he likes argue in favor of drunkenness, and they make some sense, but on the other hand there are still problems with it, etc.
I didn't read it as so incoherent either, just suggesting his own preference for moderation, which is justified by the examples of the people who go wrong by drinking to excess. But then he's also wondering if he's being a bit priggish, or at least reminding himself of a conflicting view.
In general it seems there is a tension between Montaigne's idea of moderation or the mean and the Aristotlean one, which he may or may not be aware of. Although he is steeped in classical works, it seems like he recognizes on some level his own brand of virtue might be a bit timid by those standards.
I have to say it reminded me a lot of some of Ben Franklin's essays. Posing questions, half-answering them, sometimes seeming to take a position merely for the sake of argument, not taking it too seriously but nevertheless veering into thoughtfulness at times.
Could Franklin read French? I can't remember. Not Googling now - but would he have been influenced by Montaigne?
I like the point about writing on supposedly trivial topics, too. Amongst the silly anecdotes there are real thoughts ("The worst state of man is that wherein he loses the knowledge and government of himself") where it seems like Montaigne is testing a proposition, or floating an idea, and then letting himself react to it.
The conclusion (starting with "Our martyrs were heard crying out") remained about the same through all editions. It goes something like:
The great Stoics who were able to ignore physical pain and torture, or prophets, or the bravest soldiers must have been "taken out of themselves" somehow. We can not attain those accomplishments from our normal state of mind. He calls these states "sallies of runaway courage" and "poetic frenzy and madness". Montaigne is clearly undecided about these states; in general he's a strong advocate of self-possession, temperance and an even keel, but recognizes that everyone, even him to a degree, admires the accomplishments of some men who were clearly intemperate. Thus in our controlled, moderate state there are some things we are incapable of. The connection to drunkennes isn't explicit, but he's probably saying that drunkenness is one of the forms of loss of self-control which isn't entirely harmful.
Well I didn't read the essay. The only online translation I could find was made shortly after the essay was written--that is to say, archaic--and I didn't want to wade through a bunch of Shakespeare-talk.
But some people are more self-possessed than others when intoxicated, altering their personalities in idiosyncratic ways. Some people are prone to behavior they'd later regret, others don't experience much more than a buzz and loss of balance. Personally, I just get sleepy.
I think it's in code. The secret message is that sex and drinking are both pretty good, but sex is better.
The stoics said that either you're perfectly virtuous or perfectly vicious. Montaigne says that's crazy, and wants to engage in a comparison of vices. At first, it seems like he just wants to evaluate which vices are worse for the sake of calibrated judgment, but at the end of the essay, he rejects the stoic ideal as inhuman. For us, true excellence, requires surpassing our own judgment, as we find in dreams, madness, and celestial ravishment.
Montaigne's father wasn't a virgin at marriage. He solemnly swore that he was; however, he left a journal saying point for point what he did in Italy, publicly and privately. I think this is the point of the digression about his father. And Montaigne's generation was having more sex.
Can anyone make sense of this: La chaleur naturelle, disent les bons compaignons, se prent premierement aux pieds: celle là touche l'enfance. De là elle monte à la moyenne region, où elle se plante long temps et y produit, selon moy, les seuls vrais plaisirs de la vie corporelle: les autres voluptez dorment au pris. Sur la fin, à la mode d'une vapeur qui va montant et s'exhalant, ell' arrive au gosier, où elle faict sa derniere pose.
Cotton translates it as: "The natural heat, say the good-fellows, first seats itself in the feet: that concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middle region, where it makes a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; toward the end, like a vapor that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress," which doesn't make much sense.
I assume it's a bar joke, and 'gosier' doesn't mean throat here. But, to be honest, I can't tell if it's about sex or drinking, or both.
Could Franklin read French? I can't remember. Not Googling now - but would he have been influenced by Montaigne?
Montaigne was translated by Florio early enough for Shakespeare to've read him. I daresay Franklin couldn't have helped but pick him up.
Great comment by John Emerson above. Montaigne seems to have *invented* this wandering style. As every edition of the Essays tells you, "essai" is from "essayer," to attempt, to try, as distinguished from an accomplished work. He prides himself on his approach, in fact:
"No one is free from uttering stupidities. The harm lies in doing it meticulously." (Essays III.i.)
It would be surprising if Franklin couldn't read French, since he was the proto-US's first ambassador to France, and also sat on a French royal commission (into the scientific validity of Mesmerism) with Lavoisier in 1784. Whether he read M. in the original or translation would, I suppose, depend on which edition came to hand.
The secret message is that sex and drinking are both pretty good, but sex is better.
And I took the opposite meaning from it -- taking the story about M's father at face value, and M's father as an ideal. I got the sense that M is condemning his generation from having moved away from drunkenness, a vice praised by the ancients and indulged in by his idealized father's generation, and which is a route to a sort of transcendence of the self related, somehow, to the self-transcendence achieved in prophecy, or poetry, or great courage, to lechery, which he hasn't got much to say in praise of.
There was a bit I didn't quite follow, I think probably a translation problem, where I had the sense that he was also condemning himself as an effete connoisseur rather than a good oldfashioned drinker -- he talks about his condemnation of drinking coming from his taste for wine, and that one can't drink a great deal if one cares what one is drinking.
I think that LB might be right. I think that M. was moving away from the rather strict principles of his youth to a laxer position, but he never reached a strong "let it all hang out" position. (Rabelais seemed to, but part of that is his fondness of exaggeration.)
I love the asides, even though there is always something where you ask "what's that about?" The description of his father as the eternal attractive man, a theme we've touched on here, "being both by art and nature cut out and finished for the service of ladies." "Spoke well and little...very solicitous of neatness and propriety both in his person and clothes,....
On the other hand, "Lechery weakens the stomach..." Huh?
OK, I'm not all familiar with M., but I think some people may be trying to make this essay do more than it's intended to. Mike @20 seems to me to go to the core of it: The stoics said that either you're perfectly virtuous or perfectly vicious. Montaigne says that's crazy, and wants to engage in a comparison of vices.
But I don't think M. is proposing a detailed calibration of vice at this point, merely asserting, contra the Stoics, that it's absurd to suggest that drunkenness or sex is a vice at the same level as murder. The digression about his father - it is a digression, ending "let us return to our bottles" - merely makes the point that if people are drinking less, it isn't because they're getting morally stronger, but because a preferable vice, sex, is becoming more widely available in polite society.
M. seems to me to be appealing for humanity to be acepted as it comes, with all its imperfections, and to be saying that we can do this without getting relativist on the sins that really matter. This is a cliche in the 21st century, but might have appeared a bit risque in the 16th, when Classical systems were still the most fashionable discourse.
M.'s last paragraph, a fantastic rant against not just the excesses of formal Stoicism, but Epicureanism (for pretending to disengagement under impossible conditions) and Platonism (for expelling the poets from the Republic) is the best thing I've read for ages. No wonder the Enlightenment liked the guy.
I think John's right about the bar joke (and thanks for that), which means that Montaigne thinks that the only true corporeal pleasure is sex.
As for father, this is the crucial sentence:
Et de soy, juroit sainctement estre venu vierge à son mariage; et si avoit eu fort longue part aux guerres delà les monts, desquelles il nous a laissé, de sa main, un papier journal suyvant poinct par poinct ce qui s'y passa, et pour le publiq et pour son privé.
My French is terrible, but I think that means:
And regarding himself, he solemnly swore that he was a virgin before his marriage, but (si) he had had a long part in the wars over the mountains, during which we have left, from his hand, a journal reporting point for point what happened, both for the public and his own privacy.
That is, he swore he was a virgin, but we have his journal from Italy telling us everything that he did. Isn't the plain meaning of that sentence that his father wasn't a virgin? What's the point of the clause about the journal, otherwise?
That's certainly the way I read, but it leaves the question whether this way of talking about his father implies he was merely devious, or had put that out of his mind, like the gay friend AWB wrote about a few days ago?
the whole point is to show it to your fiancee on the eve of your wedding, to prove that you will have no secrets going forward. She'll be totally thrilled.
Most people don't know that M's dad was Tolstoy. Anyone whoever wrote a journal was influenced by Tolstoy, whether s/he knew it or not.
Similarly, anyone whoever wrote an unfogged comment was influenced by David Weman, whether s/he knew it or not. Thanks, David!
30-32: I speak no French (beyond a smattering of Franglais deployed for comic effect) so I can't speak to the original, but the linked translation seems unambiguous in presenting the journal as supporting, rather than debunking, the father's claim of virginity at marriage. Trying vaguely to work backward from the translation I have to what you're saying about the original, might the 'but' you're relying on somehow have the meaning of "despite this military career which would make the claim seem unlikely, the journal backs him up"?
Montaigne: "The natural heat, say the good-fellows, first seats itself in the feet: that concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middle region, where it makes a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; toward the end, like a vapor that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress."
BEP: "What you gonna do with all that junk, all that junk up in that trunk?---I'ma get get get get you drunk, get you love-drunk on my hump."
the middle region is perforce the hump, on whose vapors the speaker elicits us to get love-drunk. After the vapors arrive at the throat, it makes us scream makes us scre-eam.
35. I don't think so, but we're pretty much at the limit of my French. The relevant word is 'si,' which means if, except where it doesn't. http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/a/si.htm
41, etc.: This seems like a good occasion for a specialist of sixteenth-century France to delurk. My impression is that the natural reading of this passage is that the journal doesn't contradict M's father's assertion about his virginity, but does make it more extraordinary: the note to "si" in Pierre Villey's standard edition of the Essais is "et pourtant." It would also have been rather strange for Montaigne to note that the journal described the entire Italian expedition "et pour le publicq et pour son privé" if the "privé" contradicted his father's own account of his life. This also needs to be read in the context of the filial piety that runs all through bk. II, notably in the "Apologie de Raymond Sebond," but also e.g. in the last essay of the book, "De la ressemblence des enfans aux peres." As I recall, there's a very good chapter on this in Gérard Defaux's L'écriture comme présence. But I seem to be turning this into a grad seminar, so I'll shut up now.
No, don't shut up. Grad seminar is what we're going for, despite the entire lack of academic background in anything relevant most of us have. Stick around and say something else enlightening.
So his father, with every gift to be a womanizer, wasn't, perhaps because of the different spirit of the age. I feel like I could say the same about many in my parents' generation. I wonder if that's an evergreen impression, or if societies oscillate somewhat about sexual activity.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were generational changes. I'd be surprised if they were all that intense -- that is, I doubt there's been a society where someone like Montaigne's dad, a socially functional thirty-year old male virgin, were the norm, but I'd bet there are big historical swings in how unusual such a person would be.
Say a bit more about why I'm wrong, please. I thought I was the one saying that 'si' meant 'but'. My father swore he was a virgin; but he left a detailed diary And LB was saying that it meant 'despite' My father swore he was a virgin, despite the many years he spent in the army. Doesn't 'et pourtant' ('and however') support my reading? Can 'si' mean 'despite'? And what about 'juroit sainctement'? Does that suggest a vow in a religious ceremony rather than a particularly forceful telling of how I met your mother?
(I'm even more embarrassed by the stiltedness of my translation now. I guess this is moot, but here's an improvement: And as for himself, he swore a sanctified oath that he was a virgin before his marriage, but he had had a very long part in the wars over the mountains, during which he left us, from his hand, a journal reporting point for point what happened, both for the public and for his own private use.)
I'll cop to not having done the reading yet, but I would translate "juroit" more in the imperfect sense, as in "swore up and down" or "always swore" or "would always swear," and that problematic "si" as "despite" or "while" rather than "but. "Sainctement" I would render as the more modern and vague "piously"; I don't think it necessarily suggests a ritualized oath.
To expand a bit, then, "si" was rather protean in sixteenth-century French, but I'd be inclined to translate the passage in question something like this: "As for himself, he swore in a holy way ["sainctement" is a very strong word] that he came to his marriage a virgin; and yet, he had taken part for a long time in the Italian wars." Mike's reading is in fact a possible one, but it would be heavily ironic and not really compatible with Montaigne's attitude towards his father in the rest of his works -- or even the rest of this passage, where he describes his father as a prodigy of fidelity, "Monstreuse foy en ses parolles," with "monstreuse" again being a very striking and very strong word.
I thought the contradiction was more like "despite the fact that he spent much of his life before 30 doing something - being a soldier - that we (in Montaigne's time) would associate with promiscuity, he was a virgin until at 30 he became eligible for an affair with bitchphd."
Apologies if this has been said above; I've only skimmed today's comments.
Thanks. I'm sure that Montaigne's father is the hero of the story. I was just thinking that because the father is the hero of the piece, his pre-marital actions show something about his son's attitude towards sex.
It is, at least a little bit, an anti-stoic piece. But you (and I mean 'you all') don't think that it's so anti-stoic as to be pro-sex, right?
My take in 24 was that, to the extent it takes a position, it's anti-sex and pro-drunkenness (or at least skeptical if the shift from drunkenness as the vice of the prior generation to lechery as the current vice was a good thing.)
Would Dr. B. have sex with a 30 year old virgin? I think not. She wants guys >30+ y.o. who've been practicing extensively but unrewardingly on airheads
It's probably worth noting that the stories of Attalus and Pausanius and the drunk pregnant lady rather undermine the whole more drink=less illicit sex argument of the digression on M's father (they're both C additions, so it's not likely he forgot about one while writing the other). That sort of cross-talk is not untypical of M's essays, to say the least, but there's actually some weird shit going on here. The Pausanius story is one of the few places in the Essais where M brings up homosexuality, which was a very fraught issue for him; and while it seems like it's meant to illustate the initial contention that drunkeness produces a sub-human condition, you also have that final C addition bringing up Plato on prophecy, suggesting that the removal of reason can result in the super-human as well as the sub-human. I suspect there's a rather interesting queer reading lurking in here somewhere. Damn, I seem to have gotten sucked into this, don't I?
I noticed that, JWP, but thought it was resolved by being both instances where the drunk was insensible, and opportunistic men had their way with him/her. Sort of like a fact pattern familiar to us here.
They have that in common, and also a violation of social distinctions: Pausanius raped by "abject servitors" and the pregnant widow by her employee. On the other hand, the outcomes are very different: on the one hand, the restoration of social order through a ceremonial negotiation in church and the (literal) legitimation of the sexual act through an unequal but not, by sixteenth-century standards, completely out-of-line marriage. On the other hand, an aristocrat transformed by sodomy into a hedge-whore and subsequently into a regicide (like Caesar's assassins, who we just met a sentence ago). Regicide was another, closely related sensitive topic for M: he was unable to include his (very close) friend Etienne de la Boétie's "De la servitude volontaire" in the Essais because it had become associated with calls for the assassination of French kings.
"For all his virtues, the sage is still a man: what is there more vulnerable, more wretched, more null? Wisdom does not overcome our natural limitations." (A, oldest section).
I think that Montaigne was trying to renounce the perfectionism of Stoicism especially, and to accept the common condition.
Getting away from the studly dad a little:
Montaigne was raised as a sort of educational experiment by his father -- M's first language was Latin. (Mozart's father was another successful experimenter of that type). I think that in this essay he is renouncing some of the rigorous perfectionism that was easy to get from Latin philosophical and rhetorical writing.
As I recall, M always spoke well of his father, but you would certainly expect underlying tensions.
The story of the pregnant widow is anti-climactic in a way that I think Montaigne likes. No real moral to the story, no real victim, no real villain, just a messy little compromise that seemed to work.
If he rejects Stoic perfectionism, though, M doesn't reject the possibility of superhuman perfection: it just has to come through furor, whether divine (like that of a Christian or Jewish martyr persecuted by pagan tyrants) or human (like that of a soldier -- maybe including dear old dad, back in the day). We're maybe meant to ask where Bacchic frenzy might fit into this. On the other hand, we're probably also meant to remember that, in the context of the French Wars of Religion, a martyr's defiance of tyranny could help destroy the state and society, and indeed run directly into regicide -- by the time M did the C revisions, King Henri III had been assassinated by a rather illuminated monk.
I think that Montaigne was trying to renounce the perfectionism of Stoicism especially, and to accept the common condition.
I got the sense that if you took this from a standpoint of "how should I live my life" Montaigne was evaluating, back and forth, the extremes of heavy licentiousness and extreme abstemiousness, and that while he preferred that people not lose themselves in drunkeness he had to acknowledge that total abstinence would itself be a denial of our true natures.
There's also probably something to be said here about the emergence of civility/civilized manners - and with it a culture of self-control, restraint and refinement - at about this time period, but I don't have the background to say much about it.
"Thus the grossest nation that is in existence today is the only one which holds [drunkenness] in esteem." [A, earliest version.)
This must be the Germans, though the same was said of the Swiss by the diplomat Bellay (something like "I can't tell you too much about the Swiss, because they made me drink so much"). I believe that the Dutch also had a reputation for maintaing the continuous buzz (as I remember, the "Dutchmen" in Ben Franklin are normally drunk, though they may really be Germans).
I am in favor of German drunkenness. It;s when they get serious, like Hegel and Hoelderlin and Trakl and Schmitt and Heidegger, that trouble can be expected. And despite his mild nature, I blame Kant: the categorical imperative is a powerful wepaon either for good or for evil.
So, having tired of despotically watching as my subjects amuse themselves in the comment thread below, I'm rereading this essay in order to attempt to chime intelligently, and I haven't even read the comment thread yet, but I just have to say:
Okay, here's a preliminary actual question/comment.
but at the end of the essay, he rejects the stoic ideal as inhuman
M.'s last paragraph, a fantastic rant against not just the excesses of formal Stoicism, but Epicureanism (for pretending to disengagement under impossible conditions) and Platonism (for expelling the poets from the Republic) is the best thing I've read for ages. No wonder the Enlightenment liked the guy.
If he rejects Stoic perfectionism, though, M doesn't reject the possibility of superhuman perfection: it just has to come through furor
Here's the passage at the end:
When we come to these Stoical sallies: "I had rather be mad than voluptuous," a saying of Antisthenes; Maneien mallon e estheien. When Sextius tells us, "he had rather be fettered with affliction than pleasure;" when Epicurus takes upon him to play with his gout, and, refusing health and ease, defies all torments, and despising the lesser pains, as disdaining to contend with them, he covets and calls out for others sharper, more violent, and more worthy of him...latin stuff...who but must conclude that these are wild sallies pushed on by a courage that has broken loose from its place? Our soul cannot from her own seat reach so high; 'tis necessary she must leave it, raise herself up, and, taking the bridle in her teeth, transport her man so far that he shall afterward himself be astonished at what he has done
I'm really confused by this passage. Epicurus was opposed to the stoics, right? That's what Wikipedia says...but he's playing with his gout in order to feel pain? Isn't that a stoic thing to do?
I read that paragraph as admiring the ability to withstand pain, as enumerating it as an example of transcendent furor, and it sounds to me, at least in the grammar, like "these Stoical sallies" are instances of resistance to pain, and among the things he admires. Do I have this all wrong?
Also, ac, if you're around can you elaborate on the tension with the Aristotelian mean thing you were talking about? and Emerson, were you going to explain about the layering?
Preliminary report: A means the early editions, mostly the first 1580 edition; B means the last edition printed in M's lifetime, in 1588; and C means additions between 1588 and M's death.
About half the essay is A, about a third C, and the rest B. So in this essay at least, significant parts are late.
B consisted of 9 passages, 5 of which were merely added classical citations, and none ofwhich is lengthy or seemingly critical. C consisted of 13 passages, of which 5 are relatively trivial and 3 fairly lengthy. So in this essay the A / C comparison is the only important one.
By and large, the brief interjected passages expand on or nuance the preceding passage.
So the 3 lengthy passage in C are where to start these are: The story of Attalus plus the story of the pregnant widow; more than a page starting with "A man advanced in dignity and age counted drink amount the three comforts and ending with M's father's marriage; and half a page beginning with "My disposition is to not set store by drinking except after eating", and ending with the philosopher Arcesilaus.
Preliminary report: A means the early editions, mostly the first 1580 edition; B means the last edition printed in M's lifetime, in 1588; and C means additions between 1588 and M's death.
About half the essay is A, about a third C, and the rest B. So in this essay at least, significant parts are late.
B consisted of 9 passages, 5 of which were merely added classical citations, and none ofwhich is lengthy or seemingly critical. C consisted of 13 passages, of which 5 are relatively trivial and 3 fairly lengthy. So in this essay the A / C comparison is the only important one.
By and large, the brief interjected passages expand on or nuance the preceding passage.
So the 3 lengthy passage in C are where to start these are: The story of Attalus plus the story of the pregnant widow; more than a page starting with "A man advanced in dignity and age counted drink amount the three comforts and ending with M's father's marriage; and half a page beginning with "My disposition is to not set store by drinking except after eating", and ending with the philosopher Arcesilaus.
Good point. None of the figures offering offering 'stoical sallies' are really paradigmatic Stoics. Antisthenes was a Cynic, Sextius an eclectic Stoic, and Epicurus an Epicurean (it's like Lou Gehrig dying from Lou Gehrig's disease.) But in almost all ancient ethics, including Aristotle and Plato who are mentioned next, there's an idealization of moderation and self-control.
Epicurus thought that pleasure and the absence of pain was the good, but he thought that the badness of pain weighed more than the goodness of pleasure, so he thought people ought to cultivate undisturbedness. The result was that, practically speaking, Epicureans and Stoics recommended doing the same things, but for different reasons. (I think that's right. If you care, a quick look suggests that the Stanford Encyclopedia is better than Wikipedia here.)
I guess here's what's going on. The ancients held that moderation was one of the fundamental virtues. Montaigne wants to criticize them with ad hominem attacks. In the case of the first three quotes, he does that by showing that they took the doctrine of self-control and moderation to extremes, and in the last passages, he does it by finding uncharacteristic passages or uncharacteristic spins which make the philosophers look like hypocrites. The Latin quote from Epicurus is about living among tame animals in civilization and wishing for a lion. Plato drew a different lesson from the claim that you have to be mad to be a poet. (That's a simplification. I think that Montaigne is referring to the Ion, which is less hostile to poetry than the Republic.) And the passage from Aristotle seems to be from the spurious Problems and doesn't really fit with canonical doctrines in the Ethics.
"So the 3 lengthy passages in C are where to start. These are: 1. The story of Attalus, plus the story of the pregnant widow; 2. A long passage starting with "A man advanced in dignity and age counted drink among the three comforts" and ending with M's father's marriage; and 3. half a page beginning with "My disposition is to not set store by drinking except after eating", and ending with the philosopher Arcesilaus."
In the CT thread MK refers to @ 72, somebody quotes Seneca (Stoic) as saying that you should do everything in moderation, including going over the top. Which might chime in with Tia's reading.
By the way, as reading group despot I declare that we're not going to discuss the next essay on Tuesday. I'll pick a later day that will give us more time.
On the Stoic-Epicurean controversy, I don't think that these schools ever were mutually exclusive. They were just options or resources, and people mixed and matched. Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 AD) counts as a Stoic, but he's always dabbling in Epicurean or even Cynic views. (The recent Hard/Gill version is excellent).
I don't think Montaigne ever decide his questions, or intended to. He just laid them out for us in a pretty detailed way. I'd lay it out this way:
Montaigne by temperament is extremely moderate and temperate. He gets some validation on this from the pagan philosophers, but he notes that some of their qualities, such as the claim to be impervious to pain, seem pretty extreme.
Then he notes that, while he's always thought that alcohol made you brutish, men he respects (even Plato) say that wine can have beneficial effects, by helping free you from the ordinary (not exactly his way of saying it, or theirs). So maybe he should drink more.
On the other hand, he doesn't really know quite what to think about the more extreme aspects of classical philosophy. He never really renounces his moderation, and I think that he has his doubts about imperviousness to pain and the other superhuman claims of philosophers, who really have the same weaknesses and vulnerabilities as other men.
The reason he leaves us hanging is that he never came down completely on one side or the other.
82: I don't think that's it exactly. Rather, he's trying to use ad hominem arguments against moderation as an ideal. Once you decide that you are going to deviate from the mean--that is, in a sense, to participate in Aristotelian vice--then it become very important to pick your vices carefully. That's the point of the opening where M. argues that there are better and worse vices. And that gives a point and structure to the essay as a whole which is a weighing of the pros and cons of a particular vice.
85: I do think that Montaigne gives up on moderation as an ideal, but I'm in the awkward position where I don't have any texts where he says so explicitly, in his own voice. The last couple sentences are the best evidence, and they are, on their faces, just presentations of things that Plato and Aristotle said. But M's readings are so unlikely that I think that that they must express M's true view. M. wouldn't have known that the Problems wasn't really by Aristotle, but he would have known that the glorification of madness wasn't a characteristic view. And Plato doesn't really say anything good about drunkenness, except as a means of social control. That's the real point of the passage that M. alludes to at Laws Bk. II where Plato permits drunkenness to adults over 40. At that age, people are usually independent thinkers, and drunkenness allow the sober generals of the people to mold their souls. And when Plato says that poetry is like madness, the lesson he draws is: so much the worse for poetry, while the lesson M. draws is: so much the better for madness.
I'd say that he tempered his moderation (or his temperance), rather than renouncing it. Montaigne probably was sort of a goody-goody in his youth.
Even at the end, I think that he was saying that the wild and crazy life was not for him, while allowing that others differred and that there were, indeed, some good arguments for extremism.
86, 87 I think, on a philosophical level, both Mike and Emerson are right here. M is famous for his rejection of Stoicism (Pierre Villey more or less organized a chronology of the essays based on an initial acceptance and gradual rejection thereof), but I think his rejection of Aristotelian moderation is even more profound, because in order to practice it, you need an identifiable center around which extremes are distributed, and I think M eventually gave up on discerning one. "On Cannibals" is probably the locus classicus here, but it's actually pretty problematic -- "Of Custom" is really a better place to look. Anyway, his next step wasn't some kind of libertine debauchery but, in the spirit of classical scepticism, an embrace of a sort of "local" mean, whatever people in one's own society or social group were doing, but with substantial flexibility.
So guys, I really don't understand what you're saying. Or rather, I understand what you're saying, but I don't understand how it comes from the text. You're all getting the same thing, so I don't quarrel with it, I just want to see. I still literally do not understand how to read the last passage, or how all the sentences fit together. I don't understand how he can be making an ad hominem argument against the people he's discussing when he's saying positive things about them. Sextius, Epicurus, et al. all seem to my naive reading to be presented positively: they all have courage that has broken loose from its place; they're all finding the route to transcendence. Can you explain how you're actually interpreting the words of the essay to arrive at your conclusion? Because that's where my confusion lies.
By way of clarification, I meant ad hominem in the sense of appealing to premises that one's interlocutor believes in order to reach a conclusion that he disagrees with. So, in this case, the examples show that the ancients believe in immoderation, even though they usually espouse moderation.
As for whether the presentation of Sextius and Epicurus is positive to the extent of agreeing with their particular recommendations and policies, I guess I see all those examples (up to those of Plato and Aristotle, which have a different form) as being of a piece with Brutus' killing of his children. They show a kind of superhuman self-transcendence, but then a further question arises: should self-trancendence be done in just that way?
If you want a text to show that M. would rather feel pleasure than pain (against Sextius), and that he's against wishing for challenging pain (against Epicurus), I'd point to the line where M. says that the pleasure that we count on taking up for the duration of our lives ought to use more space.
My fault. Ad Hominem is more often the argument form: So-and-so believes P, so-and-so is a bad person, so, P isn't true. On comment threads, it usually just refers to insults. The way I used it is rare enough that hardly anyone could have guessed what I meant. Sorry
So under what circumstances did B and T kill their children, and what did Plutarch say about it? Was there an important reason to do so, and was the act, in the pre-Plutarch conception, honorable because they were able to surpress their filial feelings, and did Plutarch contest this, saying only another kind of extremity of feeling could have allowed it? This was all hard for me to understand since I didn't know any of the people he was talking about.
(BTW, thanks Mike, I feel like you're helping me to understand this essay much better than I would have on my own, although I'm kind of a parasite on the process.)
B and T were very strict political leaders whose children had been implicated in something that brought the family a bad name. Not necessarily anything very bad by our standards.
I can't remember the details -- the point is that B and T calls their heroic integrity into question.
My understanding of this piece is somewhat contaminated by other things I've read, and not based strictly on the text.
I tend more than the others to think that Montaigne never completely made up his mind, though I think that he did move away from Stoicism and heroic / murderous / masocistic virtue. Between moderation and madness / excess, I think that he wavered in principle; moderation was more congenial to him, though.
97: Thanks for the nice words. I should say that I haven't read anything else by or (pretty much) about Montaigne, so you should take what I say as lacking any weight of authority.
Still, in exchange for the compliment, I googled the references to Brutus and Torquatus. At the beginning of his Life of the famous Brutus, Plutarch refers to an ancestor Brutus who was "of a severe and inflexible nature, like steel of too hard a temper, and having never had his character softened by study and thought, he let himself be so far transported with his rage and hatred against tyrants that, for conspiring with them, he proceeded to the execution even of his own sons." As a passing remark in his Life of Fabius, Plutarch refers to "the son of Manlius Torquatus, who was beheaded by his father for a victory fought and triumphantly won against order."
I'm stacked and racked in meetings tomorrow, so won't be able to participate, but I did the reading and my conclusion was that Montaigne was a prig who could use a good drunk.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:01 PM
Eh, save up whatever you've got to say until Thursday -- it's not like the post is going anywhere.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:02 PM
I'm probably going to sit out until Thursday, too. I'm trying to use the Montaigne readings as extra motivation to read a book on the Renaissance and, barring another day like today (full of procrastination), I should be done with it by Thursday.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:10 PM
I'm pleased that everyone is sitting out, because I actually didn't do the reading today, opting instead to spend all afternoon posting here rather than writing this blasted essay.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:11 PM
Perhaps a shorter reading on a less intimidating topic would be a good idea. First Heidegger, then this.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:17 PM
Oh crap, I have to bail. When's the next one?
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:21 PM
I think once we read more of his essays, it will make more sense. All of them are like this. You think you have some idea what his point is, then it makes a bizarre left turn, and then, whammo, you're lost. Is that, maybe, the point? To eschew the thesis-driven rhetoric of the Renaissance, which valued form, clarity, and performance over information or meditation, and create a form less constrained by writerly ease and cleverness?
Instead of seeing it as an argument for or against drunkenness, maybe we should look at it as a sort of review of all the possible attitudes one might take toward drunkenness.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:24 PM
Or perhaps form is following function?
(See, this is how I've done my entire education--skip the reading, then pick up on something someone else says and make an educated guess.)
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:28 PM
Here's some background on a related topic:
From medieval writing up through the Renaissance, almost everyone who learned to write in French wrote an argument about how and why women are evil. This was known as the Querelle des Femmes and was, in a way, a whole genre of writing that had its own structures and rules. Each writer tried to contribute to the ongoing Querelle with new witticisms, new situational arguments, and so forth. It's easy to look at this huge body of work and see it as one long exercise in misogynistic training, but recently F/loyd G/ray* has pointed out that the Querelle had very little to do with people's actual thoughts about women. It was basically just an exercise in how to write arguments. These exercises perfected the art of creating a thesis and defending it with clever words, but contributed almost nothing to anyone's knowledge of women.
Montaigne's works are essays in the sense of "attempts" or forays into a topic, just to see what's there, with little bother about what the judgment will be in the end. Bacon's Essayes are similar (though more judgmental at their ends).
* I'm un-googlabling this as I'm writing this precis from memory while drinking a beer at 12:30 and am terrified Prof Gray will hunt me down if he finds this.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:33 PM
By all that, I meant to say that Montaigne broke from the Querelle tradition, but I've just pulled Gray off my bookshelf and I see he has something to say about Montaigne and the Querelle, which I've totally forgotten. Scuse me.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:36 PM
I think once we read more of his essays, it will make more sense. All of them are like this. You think you have some idea what his point is, then it makes a bizarre left turn, and then, whammo, you're lost. Is that, maybe, the point?
So I've only read a few of Montaigne's essays and the only one I remember, "On Cruelty", had the same sort of structure, but in the class for which I read it the professor offered a reading that made the whole thing actually make sense on a single topic, albeit pursued in a kind of unclear way. So maybe some unearthing can do similar things for the others? On the other hand, who cares if the subject veers all over the place? Not me.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:39 PM
Montaigne was one of the first authors, perhaps the first we still read, to "think out loud". He was well-read in various classical and Christian attempts to make serious official statements of the truth of things, but he wasn't trying to do that. He was (empirically, in a way) checking the various official statements against his experiences and intuitive reactions to things.
Compare the organization of what he wrote to what Aristotle or Aquinas or Locke or Descartes or Augustine or Marcus Aurelius would have written on the topic (if they ever would have written about soething that trivial -- Montaigne enjoyed writing about trivial stuff, not unlike some people here).
I also find it amusing that he essentially apologizes for not being a drunk, asking whether maybe he should be drinking more. (Rabelais vigorously advocated drunkenness, and seemingly many during the early modern age had beer or wine for breakfast and kept a buzz going all day -- there was even a special very weak beer for that purpose).
I have the Frame translation and he collates three successive editions -- Montaigne rewrote and enlarged as he went along. Often the later passages contradict or modify the earlier.
Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to say something about the layering, but I can tell you now it's complicated. The two pages are A B C A C A B A C, and there's only one uninterrupted passage as long as a page.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:42 PM
"The first two pages are A B C A C A B A C, and in the whole essay there's only one uninterrupted passage as long as a page."
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 10:49 PM
12 is very good. The 1st para is central.
My Swedish translation combines the three versions, but is mostly C, IIRC. I haven't read it in three or so years.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 05-30-06 11:22 PM
I didn't find it so incoherent, and some of the comments here reinforce the sense I got that he was just kind of exploring the topic and comparing what previous authorities had said about it. It seems like he personally doesn't drink much and has some prejudices against drinking, but then he sees that a lot of writers he likes argue in favor of drunkenness, and they make some sense, but on the other hand there are still problems with it, etc.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 12:35 AM
I didn't read it as so incoherent either, just suggesting his own preference for moderation, which is justified by the examples of the people who go wrong by drinking to excess. But then he's also wondering if he's being a bit priggish, or at least reminding himself of a conflicting view.
In general it seems there is a tension between Montaigne's idea of moderation or the mean and the Aristotlean one, which he may or may not be aware of. Although he is steeped in classical works, it seems like he recognizes on some level his own brand of virtue might be a bit timid by those standards.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 7:25 AM
I have to say it reminded me a lot of some of Ben Franklin's essays. Posing questions, half-answering them, sometimes seeming to take a position merely for the sake of argument, not taking it too seriously but nevertheless veering into thoughtfulness at times.
Could Franklin read French? I can't remember. Not Googling now - but would he have been influenced by Montaigne?
I like the point about writing on supposedly trivial topics, too. Amongst the silly anecdotes there are real thoughts ("The worst state of man is that wherein he loses the knowledge and government of himself") where it seems like Montaigne is testing a proposition, or floating an idea, and then letting himself react to it.
Posted by Witt | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 7:29 AM
The conclusion (starting with "Our martyrs were heard crying out") remained about the same through all editions. It goes something like:
The great Stoics who were able to ignore physical pain and torture, or prophets, or the bravest soldiers must have been "taken out of themselves" somehow. We can not attain those accomplishments from our normal state of mind. He calls these states "sallies of runaway courage" and "poetic frenzy and madness". Montaigne is clearly undecided about these states; in general he's a strong advocate of self-possession, temperance and an even keel, but recognizes that everyone, even him to a degree, admires the accomplishments of some men who were clearly intemperate. Thus in our controlled, moderate state there are some things we are incapable of. The connection to drunkennes isn't explicit, but he's probably saying that drunkenness is one of the forms of loss of self-control which isn't entirely harmful.
B.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 7:39 AM
Well I didn't read the essay. The only online translation I could find was made shortly after the essay was written--that is to say, archaic--and I didn't want to wade through a bunch of Shakespeare-talk.
But some people are more self-possessed than others when intoxicated, altering their personalities in idiosyncratic ways. Some people are prone to behavior they'd later regret, others don't experience much more than a buzz and loss of balance. Personally, I just get sleepy.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 7:49 AM
I think it's in code. The secret message is that sex and drinking are both pretty good, but sex is better.
The stoics said that either you're perfectly virtuous or perfectly vicious. Montaigne says that's crazy, and wants to engage in a comparison of vices. At first, it seems like he just wants to evaluate which vices are worse for the sake of calibrated judgment, but at the end of the essay, he rejects the stoic ideal as inhuman. For us, true excellence, requires surpassing our own judgment, as we find in dreams, madness, and celestial ravishment.
Montaigne's father wasn't a virgin at marriage. He solemnly swore that he was; however, he left a journal saying point for point what he did in Italy, publicly and privately. I think this is the point of the digression about his father. And Montaigne's generation was having more sex.
Can anyone make sense of this: La chaleur naturelle, disent les bons compaignons, se prent premierement aux pieds: celle là touche l'enfance. De là elle monte à la moyenne region, où elle se plante long temps et y produit, selon moy, les seuls vrais plaisirs de la vie corporelle: les autres voluptez dorment au pris. Sur la fin, à la mode d'une vapeur qui va montant et s'exhalant, ell' arrive au gosier, où elle faict sa derniere pose.
Cotton translates it as: "The natural heat, say the good-fellows, first seats itself in the feet: that concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middle region, where it makes a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; toward the end, like a vapor that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress," which doesn't make much sense.
I assume it's a bar joke, and 'gosier' doesn't mean throat here. But, to be honest, I can't tell if it's about sex or drinking, or both.
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 7:53 AM
Could Franklin read French? I can't remember. Not Googling now - but would he have been influenced by Montaigne?
Montaigne was translated by Florio early enough for Shakespeare to've read him. I daresay Franklin couldn't have helped but pick him up.
Great comment by John Emerson above. Montaigne seems to have *invented* this wandering style. As every edition of the Essays tells you, "essai" is from "essayer," to attempt, to try, as distinguished from an accomplished work. He prides himself on his approach, in fact:
"No one is free from uttering stupidities. The harm lies in doing it meticulously." (Essays III.i.)
Posted by Anderson | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 7:59 AM
"Children have fun running around, young adults screw, older guys drink".
When M. writes about sex elsewhere, he's a bit reserved. It might just be that both he and his father thought it wasn't something to talk about much.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 8:04 AM
It would be surprising if Franklin couldn't read French, since he was the proto-US's first ambassador to France, and also sat on a French royal commission (into the scientific validity of Mesmerism) with Lavoisier in 1784. Whether he read M. in the original or translation would, I suppose, depend on which edition came to hand.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 8:13 AM
The secret message is that sex and drinking are both pretty good, but sex is better.
And I took the opposite meaning from it -- taking the story about M's father at face value, and M's father as an ideal. I got the sense that M is condemning his generation from having moved away from drunkenness, a vice praised by the ancients and indulged in by his idealized father's generation, and which is a route to a sort of transcendence of the self related, somehow, to the self-transcendence achieved in prophecy, or poetry, or great courage, to lechery, which he hasn't got much to say in praise of.
There was a bit I didn't quite follow, I think probably a translation problem, where I had the sense that he was also condemning himself as an effete connoisseur rather than a good oldfashioned drinker -- he talks about his condemnation of drinking coming from his taste for wine, and that one can't drink a great deal if one cares what one is drinking.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 8:21 AM
I think that LB might be right. I think that M. was moving away from the rather strict principles of his youth to a laxer position, but he never reached a strong "let it all hang out" position. (Rabelais seemed to, but part of that is his fondness of exaggeration.)
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 8:27 AM
I love the asides, even though there is always something where you ask "what's that about?" The description of his father as the eternal attractive man, a theme we've touched on here, "being both by art and nature cut out and finished for the service of ladies." "Spoke well and little...very solicitous of neatness and propriety both in his person and clothes,....
On the other hand, "Lechery weakens the stomach..." Huh?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 8:46 AM
I think the point was to try to construct an essay while drunk. A noble effort, but M was no Lady Becks.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 8:52 AM
Anyone who ever wrote an essay was influenced by Montaigne whether s/he knew it or not.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 9:23 AM
OK, I'm not all familiar with M., but I think some people may be trying to make this essay do more than it's intended to. Mike @20 seems to me to go to the core of it:
The stoics said that either you're perfectly virtuous or perfectly vicious. Montaigne says that's crazy, and wants to engage in a comparison of vices.
But I don't think M. is proposing a detailed calibration of vice at this point, merely asserting, contra the Stoics, that it's absurd to suggest that drunkenness or sex is a vice at the same level as murder. The digression about his father - it is a digression, ending "let us return to our bottles" - merely makes the point that if people are drinking less, it isn't because they're getting morally stronger, but because a preferable vice, sex, is becoming more widely available in polite society.
M. seems to me to be appealing for humanity to be acepted as it comes, with all its imperfections, and to be saying that we can do this without getting relativist on the sins that really matter. This is a cliche in the 21st century, but might have appeared a bit risque in the 16th, when Classical systems were still the most fashionable discourse.
M.'s last paragraph, a fantastic rant against not just the excesses of formal Stoicism, but Epicureanism (for pretending to disengagement under impossible conditions) and Platonism (for expelling the poets from the Republic) is the best thing I've read for ages. No wonder the Enlightenment liked the guy.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 9:25 AM
I think John's right about the bar joke (and thanks for that), which means that Montaigne thinks that the only true corporeal pleasure is sex.
As for father, this is the crucial sentence:
Et de soy, juroit sainctement estre venu vierge à son mariage; et si avoit eu fort longue part aux guerres delà les monts, desquelles il nous a laissé, de sa main, un papier journal suyvant poinct par poinct ce qui s'y passa, et pour le publiq et pour son privé.
My French is terrible, but I think that means:
And regarding himself, he solemnly swore that he was a virgin before his marriage, but (si) he had had a long part in the wars over the mountains, during which we have left, from his hand, a journal reporting point for point what happened, both for the public and his own privacy.
That is, he swore he was a virgin, but we have his journal from Italy telling us everything that he did. Isn't the plain meaning of that sentence that his father wasn't a virgin? What's the point of the clause about the journal, otherwise?
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 9:31 AM
Btw, the teal idea is fine, but if anything, it doesn't stand out enough.
Posted by Anderson | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 9:52 AM
That's certainly the way I read, but it leaves the question whether this way of talking about his father implies he was merely devious, or had put that out of his mind, like the gay friend AWB wrote about a few days ago?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 9:53 AM
I think it must have been part of the wedding ceremony. The oath was sanctified, in some sense.
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 10:13 AM
the whole point is to show it to your fiancee on the eve of your wedding, to prove that you will have no secrets going forward. She'll be totally thrilled.
Most people don't know that M's dad was Tolstoy. Anyone whoever wrote a journal was influenced by Tolstoy, whether s/he knew it or not.
Similarly, anyone whoever wrote an unfogged comment was influenced by David Weman, whether s/he knew it or not. Thanks, David!
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 10:30 AM
30-32: I speak no French (beyond a smattering of Franglais deployed for comic effect) so I can't speak to the original, but the linked translation seems unambiguous in presenting the journal as supporting, rather than debunking, the father's claim of virginity at marriage. Trying vaguely to work backward from the translation I have to what you're saying about the original, might the 'but' you're relying on somehow have the meaning of "despite this military career which would make the claim seem unlikely, the journal backs him up"?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 10:46 AM
re 30: I think those mountains might be euphemistic. ATM.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 10:54 AM
The Black Eyed Peas were totally influenced by Montaigne.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 10:56 AM
Montaigne: "The natural heat, say the good-fellows, first seats itself in the feet: that concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middle region, where it makes a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; toward the end, like a vapor that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress."
BEP: "What you gonna do with all that junk, all that junk up in that trunk?---I'ma get get get get you drunk, get you love-drunk on my hump."
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 11:12 AM
the middle region is perforce the hump, on whose vapors the speaker elicits us to get love-drunk. After the vapors arrive at the throat, it makes us scream makes us scre-eam.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 11:15 AM
35. I don't think so, but we're pretty much at the limit of my French. The relevant word is 'si,' which means if, except where it doesn't. http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/a/si.htm
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 11:19 AM
Okay, from that link the 'while' meaning looks like what I want -- I think we're supposed to believe the father.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 11:24 AM
Test.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 1:41 PM
41, etc.: This seems like a good occasion for a specialist of sixteenth-century France to delurk. My impression is that the natural reading of this passage is that the journal doesn't contradict M's father's assertion about his virginity, but does make it more extraordinary: the note to "si" in Pierre Villey's standard edition of the Essais is "et pourtant." It would also have been rather strange for Montaigne to note that the journal described the entire Italian expedition "et pour le publicq et pour son privé" if the "privé" contradicted his father's own account of his life. This also needs to be read in the context of the filial piety that runs all through bk. II, notably in the "Apologie de Raymond Sebond," but also e.g. in the last essay of the book, "De la ressemblence des enfans aux peres." As I recall, there's a very good chapter on this in Gérard Defaux's L'écriture comme présence. But I seem to be turning this into a grad seminar, so I'll shut up now.
Posted by JWP | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 2:56 PM
No, don't shut up. Grad seminar is what we're going for, despite the entire lack of academic background in anything relevant most of us have. Stick around and say something else enlightening.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 2:59 PM
So his father, with every gift to be a womanizer, wasn't, perhaps because of the different spirit of the age. I feel like I could say the same about many in my parents' generation. I wonder if that's an evergreen impression, or if societies oscillate somewhat about sexual activity.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 3:08 PM
I suspect it's mainly evergreen.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 3:12 PM
I'm surprised nobody's really talked at length at the humiliated got-pregnant-while-drunk lady yet.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 3:15 PM
I wouldn't be surprised if there were generational changes. I'd be surprised if they were all that intense -- that is, I doubt there's been a society where someone like Montaigne's dad, a socially functional thirty-year old male virgin, were the norm, but I'd bet there are big historical swings in how unusual such a person would be.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 3:17 PM
I suspect much of the generational difference is in how openly people discuss such things.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 3:22 PM
Say a bit more about why I'm wrong, please. I thought I was the one saying that 'si' meant 'but'. My father swore he was a virgin; but he left a detailed diary And LB was saying that it meant 'despite' My father swore he was a virgin, despite the many years he spent in the army. Doesn't 'et pourtant' ('and however') support my reading? Can 'si' mean 'despite'? And what about 'juroit sainctement'? Does that suggest a vow in a religious ceremony rather than a particularly forceful telling of how I met your mother?
(I'm even more embarrassed by the stiltedness of my translation now. I guess this is moot, but here's an improvement: And as for himself, he swore a sanctified oath that he was a virgin before his marriage, but he had had a very long part in the wars over the mountains, during which he left us, from his hand, a journal reporting point for point what happened, both for the public and for his own private use.)
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 3:22 PM
I'll cop to not having done the reading yet, but I would translate "juroit" more in the imperfect sense, as in "swore up and down" or "always swore" or "would always swear," and that problematic "si" as "despite" or "while" rather than "but. "Sainctement" I would render as the more modern and vague "piously"; I don't think it necessarily suggests a ritualized oath.
JWP's interpretation seems very good.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 3:38 PM
To expand a bit, then, "si" was rather protean in sixteenth-century French, but I'd be inclined to translate the passage in question something like this: "As for himself, he swore in a holy way ["sainctement" is a very strong word] that he came to his marriage a virgin; and yet, he had taken part for a long time in the Italian wars." Mike's reading is in fact a possible one, but it would be heavily ironic and not really compatible with Montaigne's attitude towards his father in the rest of his works -- or even the rest of this passage, where he describes his father as a prodigy of fidelity, "Monstreuse foy en ses parolles," with "monstreuse" again being a very striking and very strong word.
Posted by JWP | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 3:49 PM
I thought the contradiction was more like "despite the fact that he spent much of his life before 30 doing something - being a soldier - that we (in Montaigne's time) would associate with promiscuity, he was a virgin until at 30 he became eligible for an affair with bitchphd."
Apologies if this has been said above; I've only skimmed today's comments.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 4:02 PM
Thanks. I'm sure that Montaigne's father is the hero of the story. I was just thinking that because the father is the hero of the piece, his pre-marital actions show something about his son's attitude towards sex.
It is, at least a little bit, an anti-stoic piece. But you (and I mean 'you all') don't think that it's so anti-stoic as to be pro-sex, right?
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 4:11 PM
My take in 24 was that, to the extent it takes a position, it's anti-sex and pro-drunkenness (or at least skeptical if the shift from drunkenness as the vice of the prior generation to lechery as the current vice was a good thing.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 4:14 PM
Would Dr. B. have sex with a 30 year old virgin? I think not. She wants guys >30+ y.o. who've been practicing extensively but unrewardingly on airheads
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 4:30 PM
airheads less than 30 y.o. "At last!" they will say, as they swoon in extasy.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 4:45 PM
good point. thanks for contributing.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 4:47 PM
It's probably worth noting that the stories of Attalus and Pausanius and the drunk pregnant lady rather undermine the whole more drink=less illicit sex argument of the digression on M's father (they're both C additions, so it's not likely he forgot about one while writing the other). That sort of cross-talk is not untypical of M's essays, to say the least, but there's actually some weird shit going on here. The Pausanius story is one of the few places in the Essais where M brings up homosexuality, which was a very fraught issue for him; and while it seems like it's meant to illustate the initial contention that drunkeness produces a sub-human condition, you also have that final C addition bringing up Plato on prophecy, suggesting that the removal of reason can result in the super-human as well as the sub-human. I suspect there's a rather interesting queer reading lurking in here somewhere. Damn, I seem to have gotten sucked into this, don't I?
Posted by JWP | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 4:48 PM
I noticed that, JWP, but thought it was resolved by being both instances where the drunk was insensible, and opportunistic men had their way with him/her. Sort of like a fact pattern familiar to us here.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 5:01 PM
They have that in common, and also a violation of social distinctions: Pausanius raped by "abject servitors" and the pregnant widow by her employee. On the other hand, the outcomes are very different: on the one hand, the restoration of social order through a ceremonial negotiation in church and the (literal) legitimation of the sexual act through an unequal but not, by sixteenth-century standards, completely out-of-line marriage. On the other hand, an aristocrat transformed by sodomy into a hedge-whore and subsequently into a regicide (like Caesar's assassins, who we just met a sentence ago). Regicide was another, closely related sensitive topic for M: he was unable to include his (very close) friend Etienne de la Boétie's "De la servitude volontaire" in the Essais because it had become associated with calls for the assassination of French kings.
Posted by JWP | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 5:57 PM
"For all his virtues, the sage is still a man: what is there more vulnerable, more wretched, more null? Wisdom does not overcome our natural limitations." (A, oldest section).
I think that Montaigne was trying to renounce the perfectionism of Stoicism especially, and to accept the common condition.
Getting away from the studly dad a little:
Montaigne was raised as a sort of educational experiment by his father -- M's first language was Latin. (Mozart's father was another successful experimenter of that type). I think that in this essay he is renouncing some of the rigorous perfectionism that was easy to get from Latin philosophical and rhetorical writing.
As I recall, M always spoke well of his father, but you would certainly expect underlying tensions.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 5:58 PM
I just wanted to chime in and say that the green was a great idea.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 5:59 PM
The story of the pregnant widow is anti-climactic in a way that I think Montaigne likes. No real moral to the story, no real victim, no real villain, just a messy little compromise that seemed to work.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 6:01 PM
"Getting away from the studly dad a little" should have begun the post. with the citation I was trying to start a new topic.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 6:05 PM
If he rejects Stoic perfectionism, though, M doesn't reject the possibility of superhuman perfection: it just has to come through furor, whether divine (like that of a Christian or Jewish martyr persecuted by pagan tyrants) or human (like that of a soldier -- maybe including dear old dad, back in the day). We're maybe meant to ask where Bacchic frenzy might fit into this. On the other hand, we're probably also meant to remember that, in the context of the French Wars of Religion, a martyr's defiance of tyranny could help destroy the state and society, and indeed run directly into regicide -- by the time M did the C revisions, King Henri III had been assassinated by a rather illuminated monk.
Posted by JWP | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 6:14 PM
I think that Montaigne was trying to renounce the perfectionism of Stoicism especially, and to accept the common condition.
I got the sense that if you took this from a standpoint of "how should I live my life" Montaigne was evaluating, back and forth, the extremes of heavy licentiousness and extreme abstemiousness, and that while he preferred that people not lose themselves in drunkeness he had to acknowledge that total abstinence would itself be a denial of our true natures.
Or to put it more succinctly.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 6:15 PM
M. seems very ambivalent about the "sallies of runaway courage", while granting that "madmen" can accomplish things that others cannot.
I get a little bit of a feeling that he suspected that the stories about Stoic indifference to pain might not be quite true, or at least overblown.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 6:28 PM
There's also probably something to be said here about the emergence of civility/civilized manners - and with it a culture of self-control, restraint and refinement - at about this time period, but I don't have the background to say much about it.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 7:06 PM
I'm surprised nobody's really talked at length at the humiliated got-pregnant-while-drunk lady yet.
Now that you say this I realize why I was thinking of Franklin: echoes of his "The Speech of Miss Polly Baker" (online here).
Franklin at his pun-making best (worst).
Posted by Witt | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 9:05 PM
34 - Please elaborate.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 11:06 PM
A post on CT touches on drunkenness.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 7:23 AM
"Thus the grossest nation that is in existence today is the only one which holds [drunkenness] in esteem." [A, earliest version.)
This must be the Germans, though the same was said of the Swiss by the diplomat Bellay (something like "I can't tell you too much about the Swiss, because they made me drink so much"). I believe that the Dutch also had a reputation for maintaing the continuous buzz (as I remember, the "Dutchmen" in Ben Franklin are normally drunk, though they may really be Germans).
I am in favor of German drunkenness. It;s when they get serious, like Hegel and Hoelderlin and Trakl and Schmitt and Heidegger, that trouble can be expected. And despite his mild nature, I blame Kant: the categorical imperative is a powerful wepaon either for good or for evil.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 7:57 AM
So, having tired of despotically watching as my subjects amuse themselves in the comment thread below, I'm rereading this essay in order to attempt to chime intelligently, and I haven't even read the comment thread yet, but I just have to say:
Marcus Aurelius was very frequent in his mouth
At the Mineshaft.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 11:51 AM
Okay, here's a preliminary actual question/comment.
but at the end of the essay, he rejects the stoic ideal as inhuman
M.'s last paragraph, a fantastic rant against not just the excesses of formal Stoicism, but Epicureanism (for pretending to disengagement under impossible conditions) and Platonism (for expelling the poets from the Republic) is the best thing I've read for ages. No wonder the Enlightenment liked the guy.
If he rejects Stoic perfectionism, though, M doesn't reject the possibility of superhuman perfection: it just has to come through furor
Here's the passage at the end:
I'm really confused by this passage. Epicurus was opposed to the stoics, right? That's what Wikipedia says...but he's playing with his gout in order to feel pain? Isn't that a stoic thing to do?
I read that paragraph as admiring the ability to withstand pain, as enumerating it as an example of transcendent furor, and it sounds to me, at least in the grammar, like "these Stoical sallies" are instances of resistance to pain, and among the things he admires. Do I have this all wrong?
Also, ac, if you're around can you elaborate on the tension with the Aristotelian mean thing you were talking about? and Emerson, were you going to explain about the layering?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 1:07 PM
In the fullness of time. It's really a mess.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 2:57 PM
Preliminary report: A means the early editions, mostly the first 1580 edition; B means the last edition printed in M's lifetime, in 1588; and C means additions between 1588 and M's death.
About half the essay is A, about a third C, and the rest B. So in this essay at least, significant parts are late.
B consisted of 9 passages, 5 of which were merely added classical citations, and none ofwhich is lengthy or seemingly critical. C consisted of 13 passages, of which 5 are relatively trivial and 3 fairly lengthy. So in this essay the A / C comparison is the only important one.
By and large, the brief interjected passages expand on or nuance the preceding passage.
So the 3 lengthy passage in C are where to start these are: The story of Attalus plus the story of the pregnant widow; more than a page starting with "A man advanced in dignity and age counted drink amount the three comforts and ending with M's father's marriage; and half a page beginning with "My disposition is to not set store by drinking except after eating", and ending with the philosopher Arcesilaus.
I don't see a pattern so far.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 4:51 PM
Preliminary report: A means the early editions, mostly the first 1580 edition; B means the last edition printed in M's lifetime, in 1588; and C means additions between 1588 and M's death.
About half the essay is A, about a third C, and the rest B. So in this essay at least, significant parts are late.
B consisted of 9 passages, 5 of which were merely added classical citations, and none ofwhich is lengthy or seemingly critical. C consisted of 13 passages, of which 5 are relatively trivial and 3 fairly lengthy. So in this essay the A / C comparison is the only important one.
By and large, the brief interjected passages expand on or nuance the preceding passage.
So the 3 lengthy passage in C are where to start these are: The story of Attalus plus the story of the pregnant widow; more than a page starting with "A man advanced in dignity and age counted drink amount the three comforts and ending with M's father's marriage; and half a page beginning with "My disposition is to not set store by drinking except after eating", and ending with the philosopher Arcesilaus.
I don't see a pattern so far.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 5:03 PM
Good point. None of the figures offering offering 'stoical sallies' are really paradigmatic Stoics. Antisthenes was a Cynic, Sextius an eclectic Stoic, and Epicurus an Epicurean (it's like Lou Gehrig dying from Lou Gehrig's disease.) But in almost all ancient ethics, including Aristotle and Plato who are mentioned next, there's an idealization of moderation and self-control.
Epicurus thought that pleasure and the absence of pain was the good, but he thought that the badness of pain weighed more than the goodness of pleasure, so he thought people ought to cultivate undisturbedness. The result was that, practically speaking, Epicureans and Stoics recommended doing the same things, but for different reasons. (I think that's right. If you care, a quick look suggests that the Stanford Encyclopedia is better than Wikipedia here.)
I guess here's what's going on. The ancients held that moderation was one of the fundamental virtues. Montaigne wants to criticize them with ad hominem attacks. In the case of the first three quotes, he does that by showing that they took the doctrine of self-control and moderation to extremes, and in the last passages, he does it by finding uncharacteristic passages or uncharacteristic spins which make the philosophers look like hypocrites. The Latin quote from Epicurus is about living among tame animals in civilization and wishing for a lion. Plato drew a different lesson from the claim that you have to be mad to be a poet. (That's a simplification. I think that Montaigne is referring to the Ion, which is less hostile to poetry than the Republic.) And the passage from Aristotle seems to be from the spurious Problems and doesn't really fit with canonical doctrines in the Ethics.
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 6:34 PM
Proofread version:
"So the 3 lengthy passages in C are where to start. These are: 1. The story of Attalus, plus the story of the pregnant widow; 2. A long passage starting with "A man advanced in dignity and age counted drink among the three comforts" and ending with M's father's marriage; and 3. half a page beginning with "My disposition is to not set store by drinking except after eating", and ending with the philosopher Arcesilaus."
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 7:06 PM
Well, that was a thread-killer. Forget I ever said anything.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 06- 2-06 8:47 AM
79: So Montaigne is saying that the Stoics/Epicurus were admirable when they were immoderate, despite their own advocacy of moderation?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 2-06 8:47 AM
In the CT thread MK refers to @ 72, somebody quotes Seneca (Stoic) as saying that you should do everything in moderation, including going over the top. Which might chime in with Tia's reading.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 06- 2-06 8:57 AM
By the way, as reading group despot I declare that we're not going to discuss the next essay on Tuesday. I'll pick a later day that will give us more time.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 2-06 9:00 AM
On the Stoic-Epicurean controversy, I don't think that these schools ever were mutually exclusive. They were just options or resources, and people mixed and matched. Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 AD) counts as a Stoic, but he's always dabbling in Epicurean or even Cynic views. (The recent Hard/Gill version is excellent).
I don't think Montaigne ever decide his questions, or intended to. He just laid them out for us in a pretty detailed way. I'd lay it out this way:
Montaigne by temperament is extremely moderate and temperate. He gets some validation on this from the pagan philosophers, but he notes that some of their qualities, such as the claim to be impervious to pain, seem pretty extreme.
Then he notes that, while he's always thought that alcohol made you brutish, men he respects (even Plato) say that wine can have beneficial effects, by helping free you from the ordinary (not exactly his way of saying it, or theirs). So maybe he should drink more.
On the other hand, he doesn't really know quite what to think about the more extreme aspects of classical philosophy. He never really renounces his moderation, and I think that he has his doubts about imperviousness to pain and the other superhuman claims of philosophers, who really have the same weaknesses and vulnerabilities as other men.
The reason he leaves us hanging is that he never came down completely on one side or the other.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 06- 2-06 9:50 AM
82: I don't think that's it exactly. Rather, he's trying to use ad hominem arguments against moderation as an ideal. Once you decide that you are going to deviate from the mean--that is, in a sense, to participate in Aristotelian vice--then it become very important to pick your vices carefully. That's the point of the opening where M. argues that there are better and worse vices. And that gives a point and structure to the essay as a whole which is a weighing of the pros and cons of a particular vice.
85: I do think that Montaigne gives up on moderation as an ideal, but I'm in the awkward position where I don't have any texts where he says so explicitly, in his own voice. The last couple sentences are the best evidence, and they are, on their faces, just presentations of things that Plato and Aristotle said. But M's readings are so unlikely that I think that that they must express M's true view. M. wouldn't have known that the Problems wasn't really by Aristotle, but he would have known that the glorification of madness wasn't a characteristic view. And Plato doesn't really say anything good about drunkenness, except as a means of social control. That's the real point of the passage that M. alludes to at Laws Bk. II where Plato permits drunkenness to adults over 40. At that age, people are usually independent thinkers, and drunkenness allow the sober generals of the people to mold their souls. And when Plato says that poetry is like madness, the lesson he draws is: so much the worse for poetry, while the lesson M. draws is: so much the better for madness.
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 06- 2-06 10:39 AM
I'd say that he tempered his moderation (or his temperance), rather than renouncing it. Montaigne probably was sort of a goody-goody in his youth.
Even at the end, I think that he was saying that the wild and crazy life was not for him, while allowing that others differred and that there were, indeed, some good arguments for extremism.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 06- 2-06 12:19 PM
It's all over the place! More drunkenness blogging over at Apartment 11-D
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 2-06 6:44 PM
86, 87
I think, on a philosophical level, both Mike and Emerson are right here. M is famous for his rejection of Stoicism (Pierre Villey more or less organized a chronology of the essays based on an initial acceptance and gradual rejection thereof), but I think his rejection of Aristotelian moderation is even more profound, because in order to practice it, you need an identifiable center around which extremes are distributed, and I think M eventually gave up on discerning one. "On Cannibals" is probably the locus classicus here, but it's actually pretty problematic -- "Of Custom" is really a better place to look. Anyway, his next step wasn't some kind of libertine debauchery but, in the spirit of classical scepticism, an embrace of a sort of "local" mean, whatever people in one's own society or social group were doing, but with substantial flexibility.
Posted by JWP | Link to this comment | 06- 2-06 7:29 PM
Perhaps we have exhausted drunkenness and should ask the thread Nazi to assign a new essay.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 06- 3-06 5:11 AM
I suggest "On Cannibals"
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 06- 3-06 7:53 AM
So guys, I really don't understand what you're saying. Or rather, I understand what you're saying, but I don't understand how it comes from the text. You're all getting the same thing, so I don't quarrel with it, I just want to see. I still literally do not understand how to read the last passage, or how all the sentences fit together. I don't understand how he can be making an ad hominem argument against the people he's discussing when he's saying positive things about them. Sextius, Epicurus, et al. all seem to my naive reading to be presented positively: they all have courage that has broken loose from its place; they're all finding the route to transcendence. Can you explain how you're actually interpreting the words of the essay to arrive at your conclusion? Because that's where my confusion lies.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 6-06 11:48 AM
By way of clarification, I meant ad hominem in the sense of appealing to premises that one's interlocutor believes in order to reach a conclusion that he disagrees with. So, in this case, the examples show that the ancients believe in immoderation, even though they usually espouse moderation.
As for whether the presentation of Sextius and Epicurus is positive to the extent of agreeing with their particular recommendations and policies, I guess I see all those examples (up to those of Plato and Aristotle, which have a different form) as being of a piece with Brutus' killing of his children. They show a kind of superhuman self-transcendence, but then a further question arises: should self-trancendence be done in just that way?
If you want a text to show that M. would rather feel pleasure than pain (against Sextius), and that he's against wishing for challenging pain (against Epicurus), I'd point to the line where M. says that the pleasure that we count on taking up for the duration of our lives ought to use more space.
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 06- 6-06 4:06 PM
OHHHHHHH. I didn't understand what "ad hominem" meant, obviously. Now I must look back at the text.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:04 AM
My fault. Ad Hominem is more often the argument form: So-and-so believes P, so-and-so is a bad person, so, P isn't true. On comment threads, it usually just refers to insults. The way I used it is rare enough that hardly anyone could have guessed what I meant. Sorry
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:43 AM
No, no, I'm glad to be exposed to the broader meaning.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:39 AM
So under what circumstances did B and T kill their children, and what did Plutarch say about it? Was there an important reason to do so, and was the act, in the pre-Plutarch conception, honorable because they were able to surpress their filial feelings, and did Plutarch contest this, saying only another kind of extremity of feeling could have allowed it? This was all hard for me to understand since I didn't know any of the people he was talking about.
(BTW, thanks Mike, I feel like you're helping me to understand this essay much better than I would have on my own, although I'm kind of a parasite on the process.)
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:52 AM
B and T were very strict political leaders whose children had been implicated in something that brought the family a bad name. Not necessarily anything very bad by our standards.
I can't remember the details -- the point is that B and T calls their heroic integrity into question.
My understanding of this piece is somewhat contaminated by other things I've read, and not based strictly on the text.
I tend more than the others to think that Montaigne never completely made up his mind, though I think that he did move away from Stoicism and heroic / murderous / masocistic virtue. Between moderation and madness / excess, I think that he wavered in principle; moderation was more congenial to him, though.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:59 AM
"M"
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 10:04 AM
(Wilt)
97: Thanks for the nice words. I should say that I haven't read anything else by or (pretty much) about Montaigne, so you should take what I say as lacking any weight of authority.
Still, in exchange for the compliment, I googled the references to Brutus and Torquatus. At the beginning of his Life of the famous Brutus, Plutarch refers to an ancestor Brutus who was "of a severe and inflexible nature, like steel of too hard a temper, and having never had his character softened by study and thought, he let himself be so far transported with his rage and hatred against tyrants that, for conspiring with them, he proceeded to the execution even of his own sons." As a passing remark in his Life of Fabius, Plutarch refers to "the son of Manlius Torquatus, who was beheaded by his father for a victory fought and triumphantly won against order."
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 1:06 PM