Montaigne Michel De. That To Philosophize Is To Learn To Die In The Complete Essays

Tags: Promotional Strategies ThesisPersonal Essays About EngineeringEssay Examination TimeThesis Binding Sydney UniversityHamlet Theme EssayTeacher Aide EssayFantastic Voyage EssayEssay Hamlet'S Madness

Without pretending to untangle all of the knots of this “book with a wild and desultory plan”, let me tug here on a couple of Montaigne’s threads to invite and assist new readers to find their own way.

Some scholars argued that Montaigne began writing his essays as a want-to-be Stoic, hardening himself against the horrors of the French civil and religious wars, and his grief at the loss of his best friend Étienne de La Boétie through dysentery.

Even today’s initiatives in teaching philosophy in schools can look back to Montaigne (and his “On the Education of Children”) as a patron saint or . Anyone who tries to read the Essays systematically soon finds themselves overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of examples, anecdotes, digressions and curios Montaigne assembles for our delectation, often without more than the hint of a reason why.

So what are these Essays, which Montaigne protested were indistinguishable from their author? To open the book is to venture into a world in which fortune consistently defies expectations; our senses are as uncertain as our understanding is prone to error; opposites turn out very often to be conjoined (“the most universal quality is diversity”); even vice can lead to virtue.

His Essays’ preface almost warns us off: Reader, you have here an honest book; …

in writing it, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end. No one before Montaigne in the Western canon had thought to devote pages to subjects as diverse and seemingly insignificant as “Of Smells”, “Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes”, “Of Posting” (letters, that is), “Of Thumbs” or “Of Sleep” — let alone reflections on the unruliness of the male appendage, a subject which repeatedly concerned him.I have had no consideration at all either to your service or to my glory … French philosopher Jacques Rancière has recently argued that modernism began with the opening up of the mundane, private and ordinary to artistic treatment.Thus, reader, I myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason that you should employ your leisure upon so frivolous and vain a subject. Modern art no longer restricts its subject matters to classical myths, biblical tales, the battles and dealings of Princes and prelates.Philosophy, in this classical view, involves a retraining of our ways of thinking, seeing and being in the world.Montaigne’s earlier essay “To philosophise is to learn how to die” is perhaps the clearest exemplar of his indebtedness to this ancient idea of philosophy.Many titles seem to have no direct relation to their contents.Nearly everything our author says in one place is qualified, if not overturned, elsewhere.But the message of this latter essay is, quite simply, that Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have lived it; I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future; and if I am not much deceived, I am the same within that I am without …I have seen the grass, the blossom, and the fruit, and now see the withering; happily, however, because naturally.When Michel de Montaigne retired to his family estate in 1572, aged 38, he tells us that he wanted to write his famous Essays as a distraction for his idle mind.He neither wanted nor expected people beyond his circle of friends to be too interested.