Or goats. I found her in the yard of a farm a few kilometres from Montaigne’s château, in the hamlet of Les Gauchers.
(Ill. 15.7)
She had never read the Tusculan Disputations nor Cicero’s On the Laws. And yet she seemed content, nibbling at stray pieces of lettuce, occasionally shaking her head like an elderly woman expressing quiet disagreement. It was not an unenviable existence.
Montaigne was himself struck by, and elaborated upon the advantages of living as an animal rather than as a reasoning human with a large library. Animals knew instinctively how to help themselves when they were sick: goats could pick out dittany from a thousand other plants if they were wounded, tortoises automatically looked for origanum when they were bitten by vipers, and storks could give themselves salt-water enemas. By contrast, humans were forced to rely on expensive, misguided doctors (medicine chests were filled with absurd prescriptions: ‘the urine of a lizard, the droppings of an elephant, the liver of a mole, blood drawn from under the right wing of a white pigeon, and for those of us with colic paroxysms, triturated rat shit’).
Animals also instinctively understood complex ideas without suffering long periods of study. Tunny-fish were spontaneous experts in astrology. ‘Wherever they may be when they are surprised by the winter solstice, there they remain until the following equinox,’ reported Montaigne. They understood geometry and arithmetic, too, for they swam together in groups in the shape of a perfect cube: ‘If you count one line of them you have the count of the whole school, since the same figure applies to their depth, breadth and length.’ Dogs had an innate grasp of dialectical logic. Montaigne mentioned one who, looking for his master, came upon a three-pronged fork in the road. He first looked down one road, then another, and then ran down the third after concluding that his master must have chosen it:
Here was pure dialectic: the dog made use of disjunctive and copulative propositions and adequately enumerated the parts. Does it matter whether he learned all this from himself or from the
Dialectica
of George of Trebizond?
Animals frequently had the upper hand in love as well. Montaigne read enviously of an elephant who had fallen in love with a flower-seller in Alexandria. When being led through the market, he knew how to slip his wrinkled trunk through her neckband and would massage her breasts with a dexterity no human could match.
And without trying, the humblest farm animal could exceed the philosophical detachment of the wisest sages of antiquity. The Greek philosopher Pyrrho once travelled on a ship which ran into a fierce storm. All around him passengers began to panic, afraid that the mutinous waves would shatter their fragile craft. But one passenger did not lose his composure and sat quietly in a corner, wearing a tranquil expression. He was a pig:
Dare we conclude that the benefit of reason (which we praise so highly and on account of which we esteem ourselves to be lords and masters of all creation) was placed in us for our torment? What use is knowledge if, for its sake, we lose the calm and repose which we should enjoy without it and if it makes our condition worse than that of Pyrrho’s pig?
It was questionable whether the mind gave us anything to be grateful for:
We have been allotted inconstancy, hesitation, doubt, pain, superstition, worries about what will happen (even after we are dead), ambition, greed, jealousy, envy, unruly, insane and untameable appetites, war, lies, disloyalty, backbiting and curiosity. We take pride in our fair, discursive reason and our capacity to judge and to know, but we have bought them at a price which is strangely excessive.
If offered a choice, Montaigne would in the end perhaps not have opted to live as a goat – but only just. Cicero had presented the benevolent picture of reason. Sixteen centuries later, it was for Montaigne to introduce the adverse:
To learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing, we must learn a more ample and important lesson:
that we are but blockheads
.
– the biggest blockheads of all being philosophers like Cicero who had never suspected they might even be such things. Misplaced confidence in reason was the well-spring of idiocy – and, indirectly, also of inadequacy.
Beneath his painted beams, Montaigne had outlined a new kind of philosophy, one which acknowledged how far we were from the rational, serene creatures whom most of the ancient thinkers had taken us to be. We were for the most part hysterical and demented, gross and agitated souls beside whom animals were in many respects paragons of health and virtue – an unfortunate reality which philosophy was obliged to reflect, but rarely did:
Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom: whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind.
And yet if we accepted our frailties, and ceased claiming a mastery we did not have, we stood to find – in Montaigne’s generous, redemptive philosophy – that we were ultimately still adequate in our own distinctive half-wise, half-blockheadish way.
2
On Sexual Inadequacy
How problematic to have both a body and a mind, for the former stands in almost monstrous contrast to the latter’s dignity and intelligence. Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age. They force us to fart and burp, and to abandon sensible plans in order to lie in bed with people, sweating and letting out intense sounds reminiscent of hyenas calling out to one another across the barren wastes of the American deserts. Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms. Our whole perspective on life can be altered by the digestion of a heavy lunch. ‘I feel quite a different person before and after a meal,’ concurred Montaigne:
When good health and a fine sunny day smile at me, I am quite debonair; give me an ingrowing toe-nail, and I am touchy, bad-tempered and unapproachable.
Even the greatest philosophers have not been spared bodily humiliation. ‘Imagine Plato struck down by epilepsy or apoplexy,’ proposed Montaigne, ‘then challenge him to get any help from all those noble and splendid faculties of his soul.’ Or imagine that in the middle of a symposium, Plato had been struck by a need to fart:
That sphincter which serves to discharge our stomachs has dilations and contractions proper to itself, independent of our wishes or even opposed to them.
Montaigne heard of a man who knew how to fart at will, and on occasion arranged a sequence of farts in a metrical accompaniment to poetry, but such mastery did not contravene his general observation that our bodies have the upper hand over our minds, and that the sphincter is ‘most indiscreet and disorderly’. Montaigne even heard a tragic case of one behind ‘so stormy and churlish that it has obliged its master to fart forth wind constantly and unremittingly for forty years and is thus bringing him to his death.’
No wonder we may be tempted to deny our uncomfortable, insulting coexistence with these vessels. Montaigne met a woman who, acutely aware of how repulsive her digestive organs were, tried to live as though she didn’t have any:
[This] lady (amongst the greatest) … shares the opinion that chewing distorts the face, derogating greatly from women’s grace and beauty; so when hungry, she avoids appearing in public. And I know a man who cannot tolerate watching people eat nor others watching him do so: he shuns all company even more when he fills his belly than when he empties it.
Montaigne knew men so overwhelmed by their sexual longings that they ended their torment through castration. Others tried to suppress their lust by applying snow-and-vinegar compresses to their overactive testicles. The Emperor Maximilian, conscious of a conflict between being regal and having a body, ordered that no one should see him naked, particularly below the waist. He expressly requested in his will that he be buried in a set of linen underpants. ‘He should have added a codicil,’ noted Montaigne, ‘saying that the man who pulled them on ought to be blindfolded.’