On Cannibals and Friendship, etc.: Montaigne

Montaigne (1533-1592) was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, writing experimental meditations he called "essais" (Old French for "attempts"), thus giving birth to a new literary genre. Montaigne believed that "each man bears the complete stamp of the human condition," and his essays served as portraits of humankind in all its diversity.

When Melville first read Montaigne in 1848, the Essays were among the books that helped transform Mardi from a travel book to a philosophical romance structured around a tormented quest for truth.

Montaigne continued to be referenced in Melville's work throughout his life. His impact can be strongly felt in Melville's digressive style, in his skepticism, and in the perspectival heroism and anti-fanaticism of Moby-Dick and Pierre. The "Apology for Raymond Sebond" is explicitly cited in the Moby-Dick's "Extracts." A famous section of that essay, in which Montaigne challenges the pretensions of human reason--"when I play with my cat who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?"--recalls typical Melvillian inversion and even became the basis for Melville's poem "Montaigne and His Kitten." And Montaigne's treatment of the laws bears on the situation which confronted Captain Vere in "Billy Budd."

For this meetup, we will read a selection of Montaigne's essays:

Book 1:
Essay 1, "That Men By Various Ways Arrive at the Same End" - 00:15:35
Essay 4, "That the Soul Expends Its Passions upon False Objects, Where the True Are Wanting" - 00:08:49
Essay 19, "That To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die" - 00:50:06
Essay 20, "Of the Force of Imagination" - 00:33:09
Essay 27, "Of Friendship" - 01:03:15
Essay 30, "Of Cannibals" - 00:36:56
Essay 35, "Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes" - 00:12:16

Please note that exact titles and numbers may differ by translation and anthology.

Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3600

Liberty Fund: https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/montaigne-essays-of-montaigne-in-10-vols

Librivox:
https://librivox.org/essays-book-1-by-michel-eyquem-de-montaigne/

Extracts:

"In me, many worthies recline, and converse. I list to St. Paul who argues the doubts of Montaigne; Julian the Apostate cross-questions Augustine; and Thomas-a-Kempis unrolls his old black letters for all to decipher. Zeno murmurs maxims beneath the hoarse shout of Democritus; and though Democritus laugh loud and long, and the sneer of Pyrrho be seen; yet, divine Plato, and Proclus, and, Verulam are of my counsel; and Zoroaster whispered me before I was born. I walk a world that is mine; and enter many nations..." (Mardi volume 2, 15)

"I saw it in his eye, that the man had been a reader of good books; I would have staked my life on it, that he seized the right meaning of Montaigne. I saw that he was an earnest thinker; I more than suspected that he had been bolted in the mill of adversity. For all these things, my heart yearned toward him; I determined to know him." (White-Jacket, 13)

"Herein lies an unsummed world of grief. For in this plaintive fable we find embodied the Hamletism of the antique world; the Hamletism of three thousand years ago: 'The flower of virtue cropped by a too rare mischance.' And the English Tragedy is but Egyptian Memnon, Montaignized and modernized; for being but a mortal man Shakspeare had his fathers too." (Pierre, Book 7.6)

"With nothing of that literary taste which less heeds the thing conveyed than the vehicle, [Vere's] bias was toward those books to which every serious mind of superior order occupying any active post of authority in the world naturally inclines: books treating of actual men and events no matter of what era—history, biography, and unconventional writers like Montaigne, who, free from cant and convention, honestly and in the spirit of common sense philosophize upon realities." ("Billy Budd")

This meetup is part of a series on Cannibals and Kings.