Welcome to The PATH (Monday Meditation): A weekly reflection with insights into daily life. This week’s reflection continues our series exploring the writing and philosophy of Michel de Montaigne (I’m calling Mondays with Montaigne).
Read last week’s: The Wisdom of Montaigne: 12 Short Rules for Life.
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Mondays with Montaigne
The philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533—1592) described his philosophy this way, “My art and profession is to live.” Montaigne believed there is no knowledge so hard to acquire as knowing how to live this life well and naturally. Today, he is best known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. He described his goal in The Essays as to describe himself with utter frankness and honesty.
Montaigne on Judgment, Curiosity, and Questioning Everything
Do you believe everything you hear? Although Montaigne lived by the maxim, “What do I know?” He didn’t stress an absolute skepticism or disbelief of everything. In one of his Essays titled, That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities, Montaigne called for “nothing to excess, not to believe too rashly and not to disbelieve too easily.”
Montaigne wrote,
How many improbable things there are which have been testified to by people worthy of our trust: if we cannot be convinced, we should at least remain in suspense. To condemn them as impossible is to be rashly presumptuous, boasting that we know the limits of the possible.
For Montaigne, it is with good reason that one adopts a readiness to believe anything and to ignore the willingness to be convinced. “On the other hand, there is a silly arrogance in continuing to disdain something and to condemn it as false just because it seems unlikely to us,” observed Montaigne. He called it a common vice among those who think their capacities are above the ordinary.
According to Montaigne, our ability to believe is often shaped by our past experiences. For example, a person who “has never seen a river the first time he did so took it for the ocean since we think that the biggest things we know represent the limits of what Nature can produce.”
“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.”
— Montaigne
Montaigne continues,
Apart from the absurd rashness that it entails, there is a dangerous boldness of great consequence in despising whatever we cannot understand. For as soon as you have established the frontiers of truth and error with that fine brain of yours and then discover that you must, of necessity, believe some things even stranger than the ones which you reject, you are already forced to abandon these frontiers.
Why is it so challenging to remember all the contradictions we feel within our judgment? How many things which were articles of belief for us yesterday are fables for us today? Montaigne stressed that “vainglory and curiosity are the twin scourges of our souls. The former makes us stick our noses into everything: the latter forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided.”
Final Thoughts
Montaigne is calling for a path between the extremes of belief and disbelief. In Buddhist teachings, this is referred to as the middle way. According to the Buddha, “There is a middle way between the extremes of indulgence and self-denial, free from sorrow and suffering. This is the way to peace and liberation in this very life.”
In his book Wise Heart, the longtime meditation teacher Jack Kornfield explains,
The middle way describes the middle ground between attachment and aversion, between being and non-being, form and emptiness, free will, and determinism. The more we delve into the middle way, the more deeply we come to rest between the play of opposites.
Our minds naturally view things as left or right, up or down, belief or disbelief. Montaigne (and the Buddha) called for something different, a middle way that enables us to see reality — to embrace life's tension, paradox, and uncertainty.
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,