Essays

5 ideas

1. The Tupinamba Visitors at Rouen, 1562

   Three Tupinamba men brought from Brazil to Rouen were shown the French court and asked what struck them most. They said it was strange that grown, armed men obeyed a boy king (Charles IX), and that half the people starved at the doors of the other half without seizing them by the throat. Montaigne adds that eating an enemy already dead is less barbarous than the Europeans' practice of torturing living men in the name of religion, and concludes that each person calls barbarism whatever is not their own custom.

2. Conscience Is Made by Custom, Not Nature

   The moral rules we feel as natural and self-evident are installed by habit and upbringing. Their felt obviousness is evidence of how thoroughly they have been absorbed, not of their truth. Because custom sets the very standard we would use to judge it, judgement cannot fully step outside its own formation, and we should hold our certainties about right and wrong more loosely.

3. Reason Is a Pot With Two Handles

   Any argument can be picked up and used from either side, so skilled reasoning can support opposite conclusions equally well. Fluent reasoning therefore does not certify a conclusion; it mostly shows the reasoner's skill and inclination. Montaigne answers this with suspended judgement, captured in his motto 'Que sais-je?' (What do I know?).

4. Near-Death Fall That Revised His View

   Early in the Essays Montaigne held that to philosophize is to learn to die, and he urged rehearsing death constantly so that it would lose its terror. He later concluded that nature teaches dying on the spot, so anxious rehearsal is unnecessary, and he left the earlier view standing beside the new one.

5. Writing by Accretion to Portray Passing

   Because his memory was weak and he himself kept changing, Montaigne did not rewrite old passages to match new opinions. He layered additions onto his earlier text across editions, so contradictions and second thoughts remain visible side by side. The essay becomes a record of a judgement being tried out, portraying 'not being but passing,' rather than a finished statement of settled views.

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