Montaigne and Multiple Perspectives
Does Montaigne contradict himself? Or, does he just switch perspectives?
This is Part 7 of an extended commentary on Montaigne’s “Of Experience,” an essay that helped to establish the genre of the personal essay. Montaigne and the personal essay show us how to study the self and find ways to lead a full and meaningful life, even how to live authentically in dangerous times. Each post can be read separately. If, however, you want to read the series in sequence, consult the Table of Contents below, under the portrait of Punk Rock Montaigne:
Montaigne's "Of Experience": Table of Contents
For writers working in nonfiction, the personal essay, and memoir, I am in the process of doing an extended commentary on Montaigne’s “Of Experience.” The chapters in this project might slowly appear over a year, maybe two. While the chapters can be read independently, many readers will want to go through them sequentially.
Montaigne:
Who has seen children, laboring to divide a mass of quicksilver? The more they press and work it, and strive to force it to their will, the more they provoke the movement of the metal, which scorns their efforts, and scatters itself beyond all imagination. This is like lawyers, who in subdividing their subtleties in pieces, teach men to multiply doubts. By extending and diversifying difficulties, they lengthen and amplify them, they scatter and disperse them. In asking questions, they make the world to multiply in uncertainty, in quarrels, in legal disputes and controversies. As the ground is crumbled, broken, and plowed, the more fertile it becomes.
Difficultatem facit doctrina.
[Learning breeds difficulties.]
We found many doubts in Ulpian, we find more in Bartolus and Baldus [legal scholars]. The trace of this innumerable diversity of opinions should never have been allowed to continue and be praised. Rather, it should have been utterly destroyed.
[For comparison, see Frame’s translation, pp. 994-95; Atkinson and Sices’ translation, p. 230.]
Commentary:
When we struggle to make sense of Montaigne, it is often because we expect him to write a school essay. By that, I mean an essay with an introduction, a clearly stated thesis, body paragraphs with support for the thesis, and a conclusion, with exactly five paragraphs. We expect coherence and consistency. We want to follow a linear line of thought.
If we enter Montaigne’s world with the expectation that we will be reading a school essay, we will soon be confused and bewildered.
Because I am commenting on a paragraph or two of Montaigne’s “Of Experience” at a time, you might not sense the way that he meanders through a series of thoughts by following vague associations. If you read a Montaigne essay from beginning to end, you will likely be frustrated. Where is his thesis? It’s not there, not ever. What is his topic? Well, he has a starting point, but not really a topic. Isn’t he contradicting himself? Sometimes, but he is also presenting different perspectives, each with its own kind of truth, and he feels no need to merge these perspectives into a single unified conclusion, like we learned to do in high school English.
Montaigne does not write school essays.
When I taught Montaigne, I advised students to trust his process. Follow the flow of his thoughts. See where he leads you. Enjoy the ride. Don’t try to put all the pieces together. You will exit the essay changed, thinking less habitually, and maybe even questioning a bit of cherished dogma.
A Montaigne essay is like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, or Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz. The first time we listen to this kind of music, we find it jarring. If we stick with it, we begin to hear all music in a new way. Here’s our musical interlude:
Earlier Montaigne criticized the perspective of similarity (see “Montaigne and How to Think Better”). Here, he criticizes the perspective of difference—of dividing. Is this a contradiction? I don’t think so.
Most of you might be too young to understand the reference to quicksilver (mercury), a liquid metal. When I was a kid, we would break open a thermometer and play with the mercury. That was before parents worried about exposing their children to heavy metals. We also rode our bikes behind the Mosquito Man, who rode around the neighborhood in a WWII-era Jeep spewing a fog of DDT behind him. It’s amazing that I am still alive and relatively healthy.
Anyway, you can try to split mercury into little beads, but it won’t stay that way. It keeps reforming into a single mass. Please, don’t try this at home.
If focusing on similarity erases difference, focusing on divisions and difference leads to doubts and petty disputes. Montaigne wants us to look beyond this binary to experience (the event), which is singular and unified. Said differently, Montaigne is not going to settle on any single perspective.
Kenneth Burke, an American pragmatist, believed that all forms of thought are limited. As he wrote in Permanence and Change (1935), “A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B” (49). This notion, in and of itself, might not be a concern, until we realize that individuals and groups tend to become habituated to a particular perspective. As Burke wrote: “An orientation is largely a self-perpetuating system, in which each part tends to corroborate the other parts. Even when one attempts to criticize the structure, one must leave some parts of it intact in order to have a point of reference for his criticism. However, for all the self-perpetuating qualities of an orientation, it contains the germs of its own dissolution. . . . The ultimate result is the need of a reorientation, a direct attempt to force the critical structure by shifts of perspective” (169). A “shift in perspective” can be “forced” in a number of ways—by understanding the complexity of motives, by shifting from one “terministic screen” to another (switching from Freudian terms to Marxist terms), and by consciously and systematically looking for what has been neglected.
Montaigne switches perspectives. He usually does this by trying to see an issue from the perspective of others, whose perspective is situated in a different time and place.
The Quintilian quote (“Learning breeds difficulties”) is from The Orator’s Education (10.3.16). In the source, the quote is preceded by “It would be a shame that . . .” With the quote, Montaigne is extending his critique of legal language to education in general. The concern about education should not be read as anti-intellectual. Montaigne’s concern is directed toward institutions of learning, especially those that focused on memorization and recitation, a common practice in Montaigne’s age. It is important to note that Quintilian’s approach to education is typically viewed as humane and nurturing.
What kind of education does Montaigne support? We will see what unfolds as this commentary proceeds. For now, we can say that he wants teachers who help students to move beyond the comfort of dogma. He wants students to learn to play with thoughts.