1. Why should the art of conversation be encouraged in children at an early age?
2. What did Montaigne think we owe other beings?
3. What did Diderot's Tahitian tell Europeans about how to be happy?
4. Pilgrimages increased to where in the 19th century?
5. What happens to people who try to rise above the human, according to Montaigne?
6. Montaigne thought what was the essence of wisdom?
Discussion Questions:
- Do you ever take part in fashionable entertainments which you privately dislike? Why or why not? 172
- Are you "all in the open and in full view"? 173 Are most of us too much so, in this age of social media?
- What do you think of Rousseau's vision of pre-civilized humanity? 191
- Have you ever made a pilgrimage to someplace? Why? 196
- Do you share Montaigne's attitude towards mediocrity? 201
- Do you ever try to "look down on [your] troubles from above" as if upon an ant colony? Was that an early version of the cosmic perspective? 215
- Is it possible to "dream of paradise and religious transcendence" without turning away from "the real historical world"?
Is it possible to "dream of paradise and religious transcendence" without turning away from "the real historical world"?
ReplyDeleteI think for me, this was always the biggest hurdle for me to overcome when it came to dedicating myself and finding truth faith in religion. I couldn’t let go of what you’re referring to as “the real historical world” and all of its facts and “proof”. I think that if you are capable of letting go and allowing the possibility of powers outside of your own comprehensible understanding, then yes, it is possible to dream of paradise and religious transcendence without turning away from the real historical world.
That's a nice trick if you can pull it off. Bakewell says Montaigne thought most people who attempt it end up trying and failing to "rise above the human" and end up at the opposite "subhuman" extreme. They do not live appropriately-ordinary human lives. Witness the guy out on the lawn in front of the Student Union this afternoon, haranguing students and telling them their loving god will send them to eternal torment for tolerating gays and atheists and democrats...and that they'll deserve it.
DeleteAs an atheist I gave up a dream for paradise. I find dreams of a life after this one to not be worth the energy.
Delete1. Why should the art of conversation be encouraged in children at an early age?
ReplyDeleteMontaigne loved to “kibbitz” (a Yiddish word meaning to socialize without an agenda, ongoing dialogue going from story to story, thought to thought). He and I would agree that one can gain more in learned conversation with another person or in a group than can be gained in solitary reading. Sharing travel experiences, unusual words, funny stories, information about recent local goings on, etc., in a “kind-spirited and friendly” (Bakewell, p. 170) manner, is crucial for building community and staying well informed and mentally alert (like Boy Scouts pledge to do). Montaigne considered this to be a social grace that was essential to engender in children from the time they are communicative in order to “bring them out of their private worlds”. (Bakewell, p. 170) I agree that this kind of conversation is a great source of knowledge and wisdom. I have experienced this kind of learning in long term Bible study groups and as a member of the geek community of computer hardware enthusiasts.
It would have been fun to kibbitz with Montaigne at the Boulevard on a Thursday afternoon, wouldn't it?
DeleteI like to Kibbitz with my sons by text or email. I was talking with one son the other day who along with one of my grandson's is a huge computer geek about an arcade machine he is renovating (both son and grandson are big online gamers). We are having a great time kibbitzing about the computer parts he wants to put into the arcade machine. I wrote to him about the fun of doing such a projects in this way: "Such projects have always brought me a great deal of pleasure, enjoyment, and happiness. These are the things in life that have motivated me and caused me to wake up early to begin enjoying the wonders each day has to offer. Life can be delicious!"
Delete2. What did Montaigne think we owe other beings?
ReplyDeleteWhen conversing with some Brazilian Indians, Montaigne was fascinated by their idea that people are “halves of one another”. From this point of view, it was hard to understand how persons of means could stand by and be unfeeling and unwilling to intervene when others were starving to death. Montaigne felts that all people and living things shared some element of their being or a similar nature with other living things. In his view we “owe them a duty of fellow-feeling, simply because they are alive.” (Bakewell, p. 179) This meant to him that we owed them a certain amount of respect, justice for other people, and mercy and kindness to other living things. We are related to them and have a mutual obligation to show kindness and empathy toward them.
Kindness and empathy, exactly what Kurt Vonnegut said in Mr. Rosewater (see reply to Karlie above). Montaigne was a humanist.
Delete3. What did Diderot's Tahitian tell Europeans about how to be happy?
ReplyDeleteOne of the Tahitian characters in Diderot’s publication “Supplement au voyage de Bougainville” in 1796 advised “Europeans that they need only follow nature to be happy”. (Bakewell, p. 190)
4. Pilgrimages increased to where in the 19th century?
For many years the Montaigne estate remained occupied by his descendants. At one point the first floor of his tower was used as a potato store while the second-floor bedroom was used as a dog kennel and a chicken coop at times. In the era of the Romantics after 1811 the tower was restored to its original state to accommodate those who began making pilgrimages to the estate in order to experience his tower library and estate. Bakewell shares that “once there they (these pilgrims) lost their heads; they stood in rapt meditation, feeling Montaigne’s spirit all around them like a living presence.” (Bakewell, p. 196)
3. In his essay "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" Wm James says something similar:
Delete"Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."
Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys.
The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ali! my brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people. . . . when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,—the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present."(11)
The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception.. https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jcertain.html
4. I'm looking forward to that pilgrimage myself, and to conjuring Montaigne's "spirit"... guess I'm a bit of a Romantic myself. I had that experience in Chocorua NH in 2010, standing in the room where Wm James expired a hundred years before.
5. What happens to people who try to rise above the human, according to Montaigne?
ReplyDeleteMontaigne was what we would call a humble man who wore his mediocrity as a badge of honor believing that this was the path to “true greatness of the soul” (Bakewell, p. 206) Arrogant people aspiring to divine status did not impress him. He felt that their blind ambition only served to bring them low as humans. “For him, people who try to rise above the human manage only to sink to the subhuman.” (Backewell, p. 200) Montaigne strove to be an ordinate man, “ordered, regulated, orderly, regular, moderate.” (Bakewell, p. 201) He considered this way of living to be the greatest achievement a person could hope for. He valued the nature that he had in common with all other people and for that matter with all living things.
6. Montaigne thought what was the essence of wisdom?
Living the ordinate life, managing day to day, being just, kind, and merciful, keeping one’s “nose clean”, and staying out of trouble was what Montaigne “thought was the essence of wisdom.” (Bakewell, p. 210)
The aspiration to rise above the human is what Richard Rorty called the authoritarian impulse (we're going to talk about that next semester in "Atheism and Philosophy"):
Delete"Anti-authoritarianism, on this view, means acknowledging that our cultural inheritance is always open to revision because no authority exists to ascertain the truth, once and for all. If we cannot rely on the unshakable certainties of God or nature, then all we have left to go on—and argue with—are the opinions and ideas of our fellow humans. The test of these ideas, Rorty suggests, is relatively simple: Do they work? Do they produce the peace, freedom, and happiness we desire? To achieve this enlightened pragmatism is not easy, though. Pragmatism demands trust. Pragmatism demands that we think and care about what others think and care about, which further requires that we account for others’ doubts of and objections to our own beliefs. After all, our own beliefs are as contestable as anyone else’s."
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674248915
That is very interesting, aspirations to be something more than what you are on such a fundamental level has a very interesting place in America today. I think Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen has a very good way of explaining it.
DeleteI think it's entirely possible to dream of paradise and transcendence and not turn our back on the material world. Especially if one see's their mission on earth is to bring some amount of that paradise to earth by living a flourishing moral life there doesn't seem to me to necessarily have a dichotomy there.
ReplyDeleteIt's just a matter of whether one thinks of "paradise and transcendence" as representing a supra-human authority that overrides the human. That's the authoritarian temper that creates zealots and ideologues. And authoritarians, of course.
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ReplyDeleteMy presentation for tomorrow is on how Montaignes skepticism might be applied to the law and how that might be affecting to our happiness. Essentially my presentation contends that by acknowledging the limits of what we can come to know for certain, we may live with a greater connection to reality. Its that acknowledgement of our limitations that can make miscarriages of justice less likely and make the law in general more agreeable with the lived experience of the vast majority of people. This is meant to connect with chapter 9 in Blakewell Conviviality because it seems to me that when we stop esteeming our own opinions above others and acknowledge how much there is that we can never know for certain it allows for a greater amount of freedom in which each individual can seek out their own needs and fulfill them without interfering with others trying to do the same.
ReplyDeleteHere's my Bibliography for my Presentation
DeleteCookson, Linda, and Bryan Loughrey. Hamlet, William Shakespeare. Longman, 1988.
Creel, Richard E. Thinking Philosophically: An Introduction to Critical Reflection and Rational Dialogue. Blackwell, 2001.
Hume, David. David Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Gateway, 1956.
Montaigne, Michel de. Essays and Selected Writings. Translated by Donald M. Frame, St Martin's Press, 1963.
Regosin, Richard L. “Rusing with the Law: Montaigne and the Ethics of Uncertainty.” L'Esprit Créateur, vol. 46, no. 1, 2006, pp. 51–63., https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2006.0011.
Are you "all in the open and in full view"? 173 Are most of us too much so, in this age of social media?
ReplyDeleteI would like to say I’m not “ALL in the open and in full view,” but I have alway described myself as an “open book.” I try my best to refrain from lying or deceit, partly because it’s wrong and partly because I’m absolutely horrible at it. I’d also rather not juggle multiple constructed realities. I think this one is enough.
However, most of the knowledge of myself will be provided upon request, not freely and readily available for anyone’s viewing pleasure. Additionally and unapologetically, I believe people need to draw back from posting their entire lives on social media. Everything you do doesn’t need to be placed on the chopping block of the world’s judgment.
Do you ever take part in fashionable entertainments which you privately dislike? Why or why not? 172
ReplyDeleteNo I do not take part in fashinable entertainment that I don't enjoy. I suppose it is because I am far too opinionated, I can't help but blurt out what I dislike about something. My Fiancé definatly wishes I were different, she really enjoys plays and musicals but I really don't. I have always been more into movies and I suppose I have just been pampered with the perfection of it all. I have never been a fan of live entertainment anyway.