The Complete Essays (56 page)

50. On Democritus and Heraclitus

[Contrasts between Heraclitus who wept over the tragic situation of Man and Democritus who laughed at Man’s comic predicament go back to Antiquity and were renewed in the early sixteenth century by Antonio Fregoso in
The Laughter of Democritus and the Tears of Heraclitus.
Montaigne like Rabelais sees laughter as the ‘property’ of Man, his specific characteristic; like Rabelais too (in the
Prologue
to the
Third Book of Pantagruel)
he sees Diogenes the Cynic as a guide to amused satirical comment and condemnation. This chapter is concerned to show Montaigne’s developing conception of what his
Essays
really are (cf. I, 8, ‘On idleness’ and II, 37, ‘On the resemblance of children to their fathers’). Some of the ideas found here are developed in ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’ (II, 12).]

[A] Our power of judgement is a tool to be used on all subjects; it can be applied anywhere. That is why I seize on any sort of occasion for employing it in the assays I am making of it here. If it concerns a subject which I do not understand at all, that is the very reason why I assay my judgement on it; I sound out the ford from a safe distance: if I find I would be out of my depth, then I stick to the bank: the realization that I cannot get further across is one effect of its action; indeed, it is the effect that judgement is especially proud of. Sometimes, when the subject is trivial and vain, I assay whether my judgement can find anything substantial in it, anything to shore it up and support it. Sometimes I employ it on some elevated, well-trodden subject where it can discover nothing new, since the path is so well beaten that our judgement can only follow in another’s tracks. In that case it plays its role by selecting what appears the best route: out of hundreds of paths it says this one or that one is the best to choose.
¹

[C] I take the first subject Fortune offers: all are equally good for me. I never plan to expound them in full for I do not see the whole of anything:
neither do those who promise to help us to do so! Everything has a hundred parts and a hundred faces: I take one of them and sometimes just touch it with the tip of my tongue or with my fingertips, and sometimes I pinch it to the bone. I jab into it, not as wide but as deep as I can; and I often prefer to catch it from some unusual angle. I might even have ventured to make a fundamental study if I did not know myself better. Scattering broadcast a word here, a word there, examples ripped from their contexts, unusual ones, with no plan and no promises, I am under no obligation to make a good job of it nor even to stick to the subject myself without varying it should it so please me; I can surrender to doubt and uncertainty and to my master-form, which is ignorance.

Anything we do reveals us. [A] The same soul of Caesar’s which displayed herself in ordering and arranging the battle of Pharsalia is also displayed when arranging his idle and amorous affrays. You judge a horse not only by seeing its paces on a race-track but by seeing it walk – indeed, by seeing it in its stable.

[C] The soul has her lower functions: anyone who does not know her in those does not know her thoroughly. And you may perhaps get to know her better when she is ambling along. It is in her loftier sites that the winds of passion batter her about. Besides she throws herself wholly into every matter, and never treats more than one at a time: moreover she treats it not its way but her way.

Things external to her may have their own weight and dimension: but within inside us she gives them such measures as she wills: death is terrifying to Cicero, desirable to Cato, indifferent to Socrates. Health, consciousness, authority, knowledge, beauty and their opposites doff their garments as they enter the soul and receive new vestments, coloured with qualities of her own choosing: brown or green; light or dark; bitter or sweet, deep or shallow, as it pleases each of the individual souls, who have not agreed together on the truth of their practices, rules or ideas. Each soul is Queen in her own state. So let us no longer seek excuses from the external qualities of anything: the responsibility lies within ourselves. Our good or our bad depends on us alone. So let us make our offertories and our vows to ourselves not to Fortune: she has no power over our behaviour; on the contrary our souls drag Fortune in their train and mould her to their own idea.

Why shall I not judge Alexander chatting and drinking his fill at his table? Or if he were playing chess, what mental chord is not touched and employed in that silly childish game, which I hate and avoid because there is not enough
play
in it, feeling ashamed to give it such attention as would
suffice to achieve something good: Alexander was not more preoccupied with planning his magnificent expedition into India, nor is this other man with explaining a knotty passage on which depends the salvation of the human race. Notice how our soul gives weight and depth to that silly pastime: how all her sinews are strained; how amply she provides each of us with the means of knowing himself or of judging himself aright. There is no other activity in which I can see and explore myself so thoroughly. What passion does not try us in that game: anger, vexation, hatred, impatience and an ambition to win such as carries the mind away – and that, in something where a more pardonable ambition would be to lose! For to show a rare and extraordinary excellence in frivolous pursuits is unworthy of a man of honour. And what I say in this example can also be said of all the others: every constituent of a man, each occupation, tells us about him and reveals him as well as any other.

[A] Democritus and Heraclitus were both philosophers; the former, finding our human circumstances so vain and ridiculous, never went out without a laughing and mocking look on his face: Heraclitus, feeling pity and compassion for these same circumstances of ours, wore an expression which was always sad, his eyes full of tears.

[B]
Alter
Ridebat, quoties a limine moverat unum
Protuleratque pedem; flebat contrarius alter
.

[One, whenever he put a foot over his doorstep, was laughing: the other, on the contrary, wept.]
²

[A] I prefer the former temperament, not because it is more agreeable to laugh than to weep but because it is more disdainful and condemns us men more than the other – and it seems to me that, according to our deserts, we can never be despised enough. Lamentation and compassion are mingled with some respect for the things we are lamenting: the things which we mock at are judged to be worthless. I do not think that there is so much wretchedness in us as vanity; we are not so much wicked as daft; we are not so much full of evil as of inanity; we are not so much pitiful as despicable. Thus Diogenes who frittered about all on his own trundling his barrel and cocking a snook at Alexander,
³
accounting us as no more than flies or bags of wind, was a sharper and harsher judge (and consequently,
for my temperament, a juster one) than Timon who was surnamed the misanthropist. For what we hate we take to heart. Timon wished us harm; passionately desired our downfall; fled our company as dangerous, as that of evil men whose nature was depraved. Diogenes thought us worth so little that contact with us could neither trouble him nor corrupt him: he avoided our company not from fear of associating with us but from contempt. He thought us incapable of doing good or evil.

Statilius’ reply was of a similar character when Brutus spoke to him about joining in their plot against Caesar: he thought the enterprise to be just but did not find that men were worth taking any trouble over; [C] which is in conformity with the teaching of Hegesias (who said the wise man should do nothing except for himself, since he alone is worth doing anything for) and the teaching of Theodoras, that it is unjust that the wise man should hazard his life for the good of his country, so risking his wisdom for fools.
⁴

Our own specific property is to be equally laughable and able to laugh.
⁵

51. On the vanity of words

[Montaigne, despite his own mastery of language, despised words and admired deeds or ‘matter’. He showed this before he embarked on the
Essays
in the dedicatory letter of his translation of Raymond Sebond’s
Natural Theology,
addressed to his father. What Montaigne admired in ancient Sparta – and what he found lacking in his own day – was a genuine respect for action over rhetoric.]

[A] In former times there was a rhetorician who said his job was to make trivial things seem big and to be accepted as such. [A1] He is a cobbler who can make big shoes fit little feet. [A] In Sparta they would have had him flogged for practising the art of lying and deception. [B] And I am sure that Archidamus their king did not hear without amazement the answer given by Thucydides when he asked him whether he was better at wrestling than Pericles: ‘That,’ Thucydides replied, ‘would be hard to prove: for after I have thrown him to the ground in the match he persuades the spectators that he did not have a fall and is declared the winner.’
¹
[A] Those who hide women behind a mask of make-up do less harm, since it is not much of a loss not to see them as they are by nature, whereas rhetoricians pride themselves on deceiving not our eyes but our judgement, bastardizing and corrupting things in their very essence. Countries such as Crete and Sparta which maintained themselves in a sound and regulated polity did not rate orators very highly.

[C] Ariston wisely defined rhetoric as the art of persuading the people; Socrates and Plato, as the art of deceiving and flattering; and those who reject this generic description show it to be true by what they teach. The Mahometans will not allow their children to be taught it because of its uselessness. And the Athenians, despite the fact that the practice of it was esteemed in their city, realizing how pernicious it was, ordained that the main part of it which is to work on the emotions should be abolished, together with formal introductions and perorations.
²

[A] It is a means invented for manipulating and stirring up the mob and a community fallen into lawlessness; it is a means which, like medicine, is used only when states are sick; in states such as Athens, Rhodes and Rome where the populace, or the ignorant, or all men, held all power and where everything was in perpetual turmoil, the orators flooded in. And in truth few great men in those countries managed to thrust themselves into positions of trust without the help of eloquent speech: Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, Lucullus, Lentulus and Metellus all made it their mainstay for scrambling up towards that grandiose authority which they finally achieved, helped more by rhetoric than by arms, [C] contrary to what was thought right in better times. For Lucius Volumnius, making a public address in favour of the candidates Quintus Fabius and Publius Decius during the consular elections, declared, ‘These are great men of action, born for war; they have Consular minds, uncouth in verbal conflict. Subtle, eloquent, learned minds are good but for Praetors, administering justice in the City.’
³

[A] Rhetoric flourished in Rome when their affairs were in their worst state and when they were shattered by the storms of civil war, just as a field left untamed bears the most flourishing weeds.

It would seem that polities which rely on a monarch have less use for it than the others: for that animal-stupidity and levity which are found in the masses, making them apt to be manipulated and swayed through the ears by those sweet harmonious sounds without succeeding in weighing the truth of anything by force of reason – such levity, I repeat, is not so readily found in one individual man; and it is easier to protect him by a good education education and counsel from being impressed by that poison. No famous orator has ever been seen to come from Macedonia or from Persia.

What I have just said was prompted by my having talked with an Italian who served as chief steward to the late Cardinal Caraffa until his death. I got him to tell me about his job. He harangued me on the art of feeding with a professional gravity and demeanour as though he were explaining some important point of Theology. He listed differences of appetite: the appetite you have when you are hungry, the one you have after the second and third courses; what means there are of simply satisfying it or of sometimes exciting it and stimulating it; how to govern the commonwealth of sauces, first in general then in particular, listing the qualities of every ingredient and its effects; the different green-stuffs in their season, the ones
which must be served hot, the ones which must be served cold as well as the ways of decorating them and embellishing them to make them look even more appetizing. After all that he embarked upon how the service should be ordered, full of fine and weighty considerations:

     [B]
nec minimo sane discrimine refert
Quo gestu lepores, et quo gallina secetur!

[For it is of no small importance to know how to carve a hare or a chicken!]
⁴

[A] And all this was inflated with rich and magnificent words, the very ones we use to discuss the government of an empire. I was reminded of that man in the poem:

Hoc salsum est, hoc adustum est, hoc lautum est parum
,
Illud recte; iterum sic memento; sedulo
Moneo quæ possum pro mea sapientia
.
Postremo, tanquam in speculum, in patinas, Demea
,
Inspicere jubeo, et moneo quid facto usus sit
.

[‘This is too salty; this has been burned; this needs to be properly washed; this is excellent – remember that next time.’ I advise them carefully as far as my wisdom allows; finally I tell them, Demea, to polish the dishes until they can see their faces in them as in a mirror. I tell them the lot.]
⁵

Even the Greeks after all highly praised the order and arrangement which were observed in the banquet which Paulus Aemilius threw for them on his return from Macedonia; but I am not talking here of deeds but of words.
⁶

I cannot tell if others feel as I do, but when I hear our architects inflating their importance with big words such as pilasters, architraves, cornices, Corinthian style or Doric style, I cannot stop my thoughts from suddenly dwelling on the magic palaces of Apollidon:
⁷
yet their deeds concern the wretched parts of my kitchen-door!

[B] When you hear grammatical terms such as metonymy, metaphor and allegory do they not seem to refer to some rare, exotic tongue? Yet they are categories which apply to the chatter of your chambermaid.

[A] It is a similar act of deception to use for our offices of state the same grandiloquent titles as the Romans did, even though they have no
similarity of function and even less authority and power.
⁸
Similar too – and a practice which will, in my judgement, bear witness one day to the singular ineptitude of our century – is our unworthily employing for anybody we like those glorious cognomens with which Antiquity honoured one or two great men every few hundred years. By universal acclaim Plato bore the name
divine
, and nobody thought to dispute it with him:
⁹
now the Italians, who rightly boast of having in general more lively minds and saner discourse than other peoples of their time, have made a gift of it to Aretino, in whom (apart from a style of writing stuffed and simmering over with pointed sayings, ingenious it is true but fantastical and far-fetched, and apart from his eloquence – such as it is) I can see nothing beyond the common run of authors of his century, so far is he from even approaching that ‘divinity’ of the Ancients.

And the title Great we now attach to kings who have nothing beyond routine greatness.