michael-dean-k/

How would the western canon be different if Montaigne were at the center, instead of Shakespeare?

First, it's worth noting Shakespeare was influenced by Essais, but the extent is debatable. Montaigne was translated into English in 1603, and it's undeniable that The Tempest borrowed a line almost verbatim from "Of the Cannibals." From this, there are different camps. Maximalists think that he shaped the entirety of Shakespeare's outlook and psychology. Moderates think Tempest and Hamlet were influenced, but otherwise it's just a shared self-derived psychology of passing (ie: characters audit and change their beliefs in real-time); much of Shakespeare pre-1603 already had this Montaignean quality. Skeptics say that both emerged in a late-Renaissance climate that drew from the classics and Stoics, and thus, were independently rederived.

It is fascinating to consider that Montaigne might be the real-life person that all Shakespearean psychology is based on—not that they were all like the French nobleman, but that the full array of characters, each with their own unique flaws, each embodied his particular characteristic of a mind coming to know and contradict itself—but I lean more towards the moderate/skeptic camp.

But, I still find it worth pondering the what-if. Of course, Shakespeare had a bigger influence, but if Montaigne were properly canonized and cast down, might he be even larger than today's Shakespeare? I consider this because essays are more participatory than plays. Drama has it's own arc of ebbs and flows, from the mid 16th century into the age of screens, and even movies do not eviscerate plays, they just upshift them into a new medium, but that whole genre is in the realm of production and consumption. It takes resources, a cast, a location—and in the end, it's something to watch. One does not casually organize a play, while all essays are written casually, for free, by oneself, independent of place. Where Shakespeare is a canon to consume, Montaigne is a verb to embody. Montaigne is the very verb inside of Shakespeare (I assume...)! And so if Montaigne were the man and meme at the center of it all, it would bring a contact high that turned all reads into essaysists of their own.

Since this did not happen, the essay as conceived by Montaigne was not at all integrated into mass education, and it became a mechanical beast that churns out obedient workers and only postures at intellectualism and aesthetics by forcing underprepared children to read Shakespeare. At 17 I was nowhere near ready to appreciate Hamlet or Othello, not because I wasn't smart enough, but because I wasn't mature enough, and probably because even though I was being forced to write 5-paragraph essays, I had not truly written, from a place of curiosity and autonomy, an essay. Only by becoming Montaigne can I see Hamlet in myself.

How would Bloom react to this? He'd probably argue that it's wrong to want to organize a canon by imitability. The canon is an ancient closet of aesthetic strangeness, not something you try to recreate. Like all closets, there is limited space. There is a cross-generational ritual to experience the same set of great works for the sake of experiencing them, and to argue what goes within it. If the central canonical figure were a solitary introspective writer, then might there be a culture of creation instead of criticism (for better or worse)? Would this lead to a monastic civilization instead of a theatrical one?

It makes sense that Shakespeare should be the center of literature's canon, but perhaps Montaigne needs to be resurrected as the patron saint of Education. Kinds are not ready to appreciate a museum of complicated objects, objects that they are unable to compile, before they themselves have self-initiated themselves into a tradition of practice. And so if there were to be a canon of essayists, the point isn't to see them as timeless works of literature, embodying strangeness or other aesthetic values, but to see them as methods of assaying into your own mind.

Yet, if Montaigne is himself in the canon according to Bloom, then maybe Shakespeare is still the king, but he the front door.

This all assumes that only the wicked, evil, and sinful can feel guilt. If "to expect punishment is to suffer it," then what about the innocent boy who commits a minor transgression but then is needless anxious over punishment? I say this because I was a self-punishing child. If I did something slightly devious from norms and expectations, I'd get very down over it, and pronounce my own punishments to my parents. I'd have to be unpunished.

And what about a sociopath who can steal cars, break traffic laws, get arrested and feel no remorse? Those are just silly rules. It's only jail for a few days, and jail's not so bad anyway (based on a true character). If he accepts institutional detainment without sting, then will his future self be tormented? He may feel less torment than me, who yesterday hesitated to kill a pair of ants, and in my uncertainty decided to let one of them live.

I'm coming to a weird conclusion here: hell is for the self-conscious. Future suffering is less about the rating of a virtue along some objective good vs. evil spectrum, and more about the nature of a rumination. In the act of being honest, in reviewing your life and assaying your slightest deeds, you're bound to find ways you could have acted better. Even if you're level-headed and non-regretful about it, you'll feel more weight than the menace with no capacity to reflect. And so, unfortunately, a virtuous person can suffer more by being more virtuous.

This isn't fair, but it feels true. Maybe you believe that the self-conscious repents in this life while the sinner repents in the eternities of hell, but that really depends on your conception of how the afterlife works.

Last night I had three consecutive dreams, each brooding with a supernatural evil that brought me the chills when I woke up. Throughout the morning, I wondered what the trigger might have been. Yesterday was a happy day: the weather was nice, I went to a Memorial Day BBQ, went swimming for the first time all season, introduced my daughter to extended family, and, oh yeah, I read a chapter by Montaigne on the nature of evil and punishment. Even reading and contemplating about it in the abstract is enough to load them into your subconscious and bloom into your dreams.

I found this chapter, "On Prayer," to disorient my model of Montaigne. It reads like a Hobbesian plea but towards the church, where he submits to the holy teachings, accepts censorship, and grants them limitless power. Historical context matters though. Essais was published in 1580, and the excerpt above was inserted in 1588, after it was read at the Vatican and their censors flagged certain topics for revision ("On Fortune," "On Prayer," and "On Suicide"). So one interpretation is that submission was the required price of writing about religion at all in the 16th century.

But another angle is that Montaigne's Catholicism is under-represented in his portrait. The modern reading of him is that he's the first liberated mind to focus on himself and to beam the laser of reason on all dogma to come to his own ever-shifting conclusions. He was a Pyrrhonist after all, a suspender of judgment. But apparently Pyrrhonism does accept laws and customs for social order, in the name of stability, even if they doubt them. So Montaigne in most works goes beyond traditional Pyrrhonism, and questions torture, marriage, and imperialism in a way his predecessors wouldn't; but he doesn't cross that line with the church.

One interpretation is that Montaigne questioned everything within reason, but since he found God to be beyond that, beyond himself to know definitively, the great unknown, he defaulted the tradition he was born into. This is known as "fideism," and his comfort in it is what bothered Pascal.

In reflecting on this, there is no way to opt-out of all submission without living feral in the woods, which is always an option. I'm landing on the idea that I'd rather submit to the state than the church. In submitting some liberty to a state-backed order, we then have the freedom and time to pursue creative, social, intellectual, and spiritual matters.

I basically disagree with the conclusion that if something is beyond reason we should revert to the default. This doesn't mean to betray all tradition, but character grows when you both accept and reject and put yourself in motion, if even you re-derive the whole religion and end up in the same place. Even if the virtues and metaphysics of Christianity ring true after two thousand years, it's the (closed) epistemology—how we come to conclusions—that's caused so much trouble all this time. Of course, earlier centuries didn't have the luxury to safely question epistemology, but it feels like the Scientific Era rejected religion outright without exploring the option of an open epistemology.

To focus on the sensual transience of a moment is to surrender to human hardware; it has many expressions, from peaceful acceptance to orgiastic nihilism. The alternative, to accept your end state now, as the ghost of tales told about, is the less embodying but more accurate view of life. It's the species-wide, view-from-the-moon view. If you shift from human time to cosmic time, you are more code than body. For a short-time you live in your own skull, but for much, much longer, you can live in many skulls as a lesser or greater legend.

Now that I have a child, I feel my self de-centered, and ready to shift from eros to logos. This stems from a weird thought: that my daughter is not only an independent being, but in many significant ways, she is me. She is the clone of my wife and I. Growing up, you see yourself as wholly different and unique from your parents and grandparents, but now I can't help but see us all as instances of the same code, changing through an evolving circumstance, but reinforcing through inter-generational dynamics. A familial lineage is the same genetic source, looping and mutating in place.

For me, becoming a parent is a slow-process of re-identifying from a singular self to the entire chain, forward and back. What comes with that is a new desire to live into the tales you want to be told, because that is your inevitable end. And if you can design your self and life into a tale that then helps the blooming of your children, letting them experience life's pleasures to the fullest, well then you've achieved the original goal, because they are you.

This feels like a line I should reflect on, pin on my wall, and take seriously. Feels particularly urgent, as the shift from Substack to my own website feels one towards solitude, but not fully committing to it. The fact that I call this "semi" public means it sits between two worlds. If I wanted true solitude, I would "scuff out the tracks" so the beasts can't get into the lair. I do have a vision for a labyrinthine website, where most visitors can't access most works.

But I find myself unable to commit to this, as if "writing in public" is unquestionably engrained in me. My uncle, who used to share a blog with his writing and photography, told me, after not publishing much for 10 years, that he made the philosophical decision to keep his work private, and to more so focus on the art of relationships. Instead of downloading thoughts onto paper for strangers to read, he focuses on the live interchange between two people.

It also feels irresponsible to retire now, to retreat into a cave of intellect, character, and creativity. As noble as that is, it's coming from Montaigne who (at age 37) had the financial luxury of secluding in his tower (another example of a philosophy as a rationalization of your circumstance). I am far from decades of financial security to support my wife and daughter, and so I very much need to operate in public.

I need to better articulate why I write in public the first place. To build off Didion's reasons for a private notebook—writing freezes what the wind of conversation would blow away, letting me see myself and my past selves, our assumptions and aspirations, fears and blindspots—a public notebook invites others into my process of evolution. By reading and talking to friends on the ideas of my rumination, they bring other unlocking perspectives.

Philosophy is a social endeavor. It's in the name: "friendship of wisdom." So then why does this Montaigne quote (where he paraphrases Seneca, Epicurius, and Cicero) resonate so hard? The risk is that by exposing yourself to the public, you position yourself to build status from the crowd. It's inevitable. Social networks are in the game of brokering status and making it explicit, giving you quantified follower counts and metrics per post. And so if you get fixated on scale and reputation and validation, your lack or wane or love of it, you risk missing the point: the work itself, the cultivation of character, the opinions of your imaginary heroes.

And so split infrastructure helps me resolve this tension. On my website I write for an audience of (n)one: if it's not for myself, it's for a single person, perhaps one relevant to the topic at hand, whether it's a close friend, a historical figure, or my great great grandchild who will one day scan a QR code on my tombstone to stumble upon the musings of an ancestor. On Substack though, I do write for the crowd. But so long as my personal writing practice is strong, then I will bring myself to the crowd, and not bend towards favor or fortune or trends or whatever. I think Emerson got the synthesis right: to retain the sweetness of solitude amidst the conformity of the crowd.

This is Montaigne citing Manilius citing Vives citing St. Augustine's City of God. The original in Latin is "Non alium videre patres: aliumve nepotes Aspicient", which is "Your fathers saw none other: none other shall your progeny discern." So this is four layers removed from the source, yet far more elegant, lodging itself in my mind in a way that the original never would have done.

This reinforces the idea that, while there is much of creativity that comes from your own mind, without conscious influence, there are whole wells of wisdom that are waiting to be transfigured into their maximum potency. Speaks to this whole project of reading widely, highlighting obsessively, and then reacting to, writing on, and deepening them.

I'd go as far as saying that Montaigne as a whole is due for a remixing. The Screech translations (1991) are already so much more accessible than Hazlitt's (1877) which was just a reworking of the 1685 translation by Charles Cotton. Just like Locke called for a revolution once a century to readapt government to the emerged situation, we likely need a re-rendering of great thinkers once per century to make them maximally salient to the current generation.

And so what Montaigne needs, in my opinion, as you might predict, is a re-structure.

Yes he did edited his essays when he republished them, but mostly, as far as I can tell, in the form of slight deletions and additions, keeping the overall essay arc the same, and the overall flow of the volume chronological. Why present the essays chronological? This matters for a historian, but not for a teenager who can be inspired into become Montaignian themselves. If I were to have a go, it would be a radical re-ordering, restructuring, and compression, while trying to preserve his cryptic essence, shape-shifting identity, and turns of phrase. It's a type of translation, not just of words, but of essence.

Fascinating that a personification of a person as a gas or liquid is described as "insidious" (def: "harmful, dangerous, or treacherous [...] subtle and unnoticed until it causes significant damage"), something so disturbing that we must destroy it with explosives.

Why do we fear non-solid personas? It is comfortable to know another as a known quantity. We are box putters. When everyone in our life is stable and unchanging, it gives us fixed conditions for us to ease into, for don't we define ourselves as our relationship to others? If our friends and family were to rapidly warp their politics and morals and tastes, would that not create clashes that force us to re-consider our own? The fear of shape-shifting others is fear of the inner gas. The "you've changed" middle-school jab is an act of defense. Ego is solid, frozen, calcified.

To molt is to let light, liquid, and air burst out the confines of the chitinous shell of a Roach self—to truly hold cognitive liberty, at least for a moment, an hour or day, before reassembling into a new shell, like the homeless hermit seeking refuge from the dangerous beach, is to glimpse the freedom that only you withhold from yourself. Montaigne is a model for man in perpetual molt, always passing, always becoming. We can only know our soul if we perennially refactor the code of our self.

What's surprising me about reading Orthodox theology (at least through Kallistos Ware), is how transcendental some of the language is. Maybe this is because Orthodoxy, at least my experience of it, is focused on ritual and dogmatic adherence, but if you get into the practice of the monks and mystics, it very much insists on direct experience. I did not expect St. Nicolas Cabasilas (a Byzantine monk from 1319) to write about the "infinite thirst for the infinite." Of course though, the answers to many of these open questions are given theological answers, but religious questioning is what's missing in a secular society.

Reminds me of today's shamings of inaction by protestors and armchair activists. To retreat from the "vortex of pandemonium" isn't cowardice, but to build courage to tap into your own inner reservoir, to live your own life, and to do the impossible act of summoning truths within yourself that is only possible with years of indistraction. After a decade, Montaigne did come back. He published his first volume of Essais and then was unanimously elected mayor without even running. Not that Montaigne had any role from Bordeaux in solving the larger crises of his time, but there is maybe no better example of how a self-direct life can lead one to a position of leverage to act on political and moral affairs.

This comes from a spread within "To philosophize is to learn how to die," on a page where almost every line is highlighted, meaning my past self, a self from just two weeks ago who I no longer have access to, must have really wanted to internalize all this. Neither the ecstatic nor the cynic has a reason to cling to life.

To not cling for life is to go against what Hobbes calls our primary drive, self-preservation. I could imagine one of today's transhumanists, with hope and conviction that immortality drugs are coming next decades, would loathe Montaigne's sentiment. Life is all we have!

My first impression is that Montaigne is wise in the acceptance of death, but if philosophy is often the rationalization of the stances we are forced to take, then might Montaigne just be coping? If he were to time travel ahead to a time where we had life extension drugs, and mortality were not inevitable, might he not write a beautifully persuasive essay on how we should live forever? The man is known to change his mind.

On where I stand, I don't know. I generally think life extension beyond a few standard deviations (ie: 10 years sure, but 50 or 500 years?) is a Faustian bargain where we can't quite imagine the horrors of changing our one primary constraint: death. In moments of peace, I feel happy to have lived, ready to die, and abstractly and rationally and theologically, I know the importance of dying and death; but in the moment, if I were dying and knew an extension were possible, I couldn't imagine not taking it. And even if I extended just one more year, over and over, might I take that deal for 300 years? When would I not want to extend my own life for just a bit longer? If life extension is possible, but you choose to die, even naturally, is that not a form of suicide?

A mythical figure with supernatural powers and a small group of devoted followers—can't help but see the parallels to Christ. I wonder how common mythologizing and symbolic flourishing is to figures of antiquity, and how much time distortion plays in it. In the case of Pythagoras, there was 700 years between his time and his detailed biographies (from which we know most about him). In the case of Christ, it's traditionally thought to be 25 years, but if we trace Christianity back to the Essene cult, we could be misdating by 100 years (and with that time comes mutations).

A few Pythagoras myths: (1) he had a golden thigh; (2) he remembers—and apparently proved details of—his past lives; (3) he communicated with animals (bear, ox, eagle); (4) he controlled the weather (rivers, earthquakes, storms, plagues); (5) he was recognize by Abaris (a Hyperborean shaman-priest) as Apollo incarnate, and given a golden arrow; (6) he controlled minds through music; (7) he could hear the planets.

I had no idea that Pythagoras went to Egypt at 21-22 years old, stayed for 22 years, then did a decade in Babylon, only returning back to Greece at 56 years old (dates are contested, and given the rumors, some doubt he went to Egypt at all). This is sort of like how Nolan Rylan was inducted to the baseball Hall of Fame as a Ranger, but he started as a Met... There's a book Black Athena that possibly overstates the Egyptian influence on Greece, but it's very possible that the what we know of as Greek is actually logos on top of Egyptian mysticism.