Apology For Raimond Sebond: 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's impact can be strongly felt in Melville's digressive style, in his skepticism, in the perspectival heroism and anti-fanaticism of Moby-Dick and Pierre, and in the treatment of the laws which confronted Captain Vere in "Billy Budd."

The "Apology for Raymond Sebond" is explicitly cited in Moby-Dick ("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?"--even became the basis for Melville's poem "Montaigne and His Kitten." And Melville's reference to "Darmonodes' elephant" (M-D, 86) is apparently based on an anecdote from the "Apology": the elephant, alleged to have fallen in love with a flower-girl, would "keep her always in his sight, and would sometimes put his trunk under her handkerchief into her bosom, to feel her breasts."

For this meetup, we will read "An Apology For Raymond Sebond" by Montaigne.

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-2-by-michel-eyquem-de-montaigne/

Deeper dive:

"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")

"Had this tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes' elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones." (M-D, 86)

This meetup is part of a series on Flora and Fauna.