Tag Archives: On the Cannibals

Montaigne and the Ages of Life

Montaigne and the Ages of Life – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, reflections on Michel de Montaigne’s perception of his changing character throughout his life.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, reflections on Michel de Montaigne’s perception of his changing character throughout his life.

I’m currently reading Philippe Desan’s biography of Michel de Montaigne, the French philosopher and statesman and the father of the essay. Montaigne is an influence for me in how the Wednesday Blog has developed over the last four years that I’ve been writing this weekly. He is also one of the figures on the orbit of my dissertation, and one of the most important sources for critical analysis of the events which I describe in that doctoral work. Philippe Desan in turn is one of, if not the most prolific Montaigne scholar of our time. So, it’s been a delight to read his biography of this man who I’ve gotten to know however faintly through the frame of his Essays in my research.

Most of my work deals with his famous essay “On the Cannibals” found in Volume 1 of that three volume collection. “Des cannibales,” as it’s known in its original French, was published in the first collection of Montaigne’s essays in 1580, and it’s this collection with which I’ve been the most invested in my work. The cannibals of Montaigne’s focus speak to questions of humanity and human dignity which I pose in my dissertation, which is titled “Understanding the Sauvage in André Thevet’s Brazil: 1555-1590.” 

Yet it is in the third volume of Essays where Desan established a crucial connection between Montaigne the man and Montaigne the humanist of the late Renaissance preserved in the amber of his words. In the essay titled “On Vanity” Montaigne poses a fascinating self-reflection looking back at his life as he remembered it and who he was at the time he wrote that particular essay near the end of his days. Quoting here from Donald Frame’s 1965 translation, Montaigne wrote that in the years since he published his first edition of essays in 1580 “I have grown older by a long stretch of time; but certainly I have not grown an inch wiser.” Here whether out of humility or in refutation of Aristotle’s maxim that age and experience begats wisdom, Montaigne sees himself as the same light as before. Despite this, Montaigne continued to observe that “myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two; but when better, I simply cannot say.”[1] This struck me that the essayist could see such a simple yet profound difference between himself as he was when first he wrote and published his magnum opus and the man he later was publishing his third and final volume of essays nearly a decade later.

From my earliest days of extensive writing in my high school years I found myself looking ahead to a time late in my life when I would return to the places of my teenage youth and reflect on what once was and who I’d become. I suppose there’s some vanity of my own in having this profound sense of legacy even from what was then quite an early point in my life. Still, in recent weeks I’ve been reintroduced to younger versions of myself as my family carries out a Spring cleaning and we’ve found decades old boxes of photographs and postcards that I still remember taking and sending yet which haven’t seen the light of day since their capture. I was humbled and heartened to see in particular how loved was the boy I once was, and how inventive and imaginative he could be. Looking at these photos, especially from around my family’s great move from Chicago to Kansas City in 1999, I remember each and every one of them being taken. I remember the sights and sounds, the smells, the prairie winds and the things I was thinking in those first days of my life in Kansas City. These memories have always been there in my mind, yet the subsequent quarter-century has piled many more atop them so that they are now rendered foundations for the memories that comprise me today.

I suspect these days spent pouring over decades-old photos removed some sort of mental block I’d put up out of stress that’s kept my imagination in check in recent months. I longed to have the same expansive dreams and wandering thoughts that’ve populated so much of my consciousness, and now again I find it easy to tap into that deep reservoir which too is built into my memories yet also grows out from them into things which are wonderous and extend beyond the limits of reality toward the possible. Am I then wiser than I was when first I began writing essays in my adolescent and early teenage years? I’d like to think so, at least in some respects. I have a sense of calm today which was lacking in earlier years, and while the stresses of my life are great, as they are for all of us, I know how to accept them and tamper down some of their effects.

Yet in so many ways I do feel that I too am a different person from the kid who moved west all those years ago. Likewise, I see a clear distinction between the student starting high school in the years after the turn of the millennium and imagining his future in the last decades of this century. I’ve learned to live more in the moment in which I find myself, to influence that moment to fit what I aspire it to be. A complex turn of this answer is to consider all the potential lives I might have led, a thought experiment which I’ve considered developing into a short story with some sort of science fiction shenanigans. In one version of this, a broken-down elevator occurring simultaneously across parallel realities as a sort of mirror image resulted in contemporary alternative versions of myself ending up stuck in the same elevator all at once. I could see it either being a bit of a laugh-fest as one version of myself attempted to out-wit the others, or a simmering cauldron of irritation. 

What all this speaks to is the complexity of our personalities. We are all multifaceted with so many different competing thoughts and desires and inclinations and perceptions. I’ve thought more recently that perhaps my academic career would be further along if I limited myself to only focusing on my research, yet then again, I’ve always had multiple hats in the ring so why would I stop doing all these different things now? The Wednesday Blog for one remains a sort of release-valve for me to write about things which I’m curious about yet don’t directly relate to my research. I look to my colleagues, and I see people with similar interests and in some cases similar paths they’ve taken to get to where they are today. Several days ago, when I was dwelling in a particular bout of melancholy thinking about the long winter that has grayed the skies over my own doctoral candidacy when compared to my peers, I felt a sense of pride at noticing just how I’ve persisted in my efforts and my work in spite of all the challenges which the last six years have brought. Perhaps it is this combination of trial and hope which forms a person; it’s what formed me into the historian I am today.

When I started writing the Wednesday Blog in March 2021 I did so because I felt such a profound sense of nostalgic hope at one particular memory that surfaced after a sleepless night amid my comprehensive exam studying that I felt compelled to share it with the world. I know for a fact that I am a different person today than I was four years ago when I wrote that blog post about an Air France commercial I remembered seeing on ITV and Channel 4 five years before when I lived in London. The difference lies in the added layers of experience laid by all the trials which I’ve endured and the hopes which’ve kept me going. When I had such tremendous trouble unlocking my imagination and letting myself daydream in the latter months of 2024, I recognized that I am happier when I allow my mind to wander and craft stories that no one else will ever know. These are often stories of the future I hope I might live and the wonders I might come to know and explore. That imagination, that connection with my own consciousness, is the thread that runs all throughout my life and connects these different versions of myself that I’ve grown into and out of with the passing of time.

When Montaigne picked up a copy of the 1588 edition of his Essais, containing all three volumes of musings, he took a pen to it and steadily began correcting things he found beneath the standards he’d developed at that late moment in his life. I don’t often read my own writing after I’ve finished editing a document. I’ll occasionally return to an old blog post when I’m referencing it in a newer one, and even more occasionally if I’ve cited a source before in a previous paper, I’ll open that paper to aid me in citing the same source again in the research project of the moment. Yet, I rarely sit down just to read my own writing. The last time I did I ended up switching from a PDF file back to the Word document version so I could edit as I read. In fact, when I was moving into my apartment in Binghamton in August 2019, I found an essay I wrote in my sophomore year of high school when I was 15 years old. It was a near 20 page essay that attempted to summarize the history of religion in Britain and Ireland from the Stone Age to St. Patrick. Reading it then at the start of my doctorate and thinking about it as an essay that I might grade, I would’ve given it a low B- or maybe a C+.

I need to remember that my old writing fits into a particular time and place in my life and ought to remain in that setting for as long as I can muster the strength to not try to refine it further. These ages in my life mirror those in everyone else’s, and I hope that as I dream about the ages to come, I will be able to share them and live them to their fullest potential. Montaigne died in September 1592, almost 400 years before my own birth. At that point, he’d made his name in politics and in philosophy. The Wednesday Blog is essentially my collection of essays of varying length and quality. I hope that when I wander off in my own time that my life in all its ages will have been as fulfilled and prolific as the great essayist.

[1] Montaigne, Essais (EB) 3.9.433r, Frame, 736.

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On the Cannibals

On the Cannibals – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week on the Wednesday Blog, looking back to a Renaissance philosopher to try and make sense of the present. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week on the Wednesday Blog, looking back to a Renaissance philosopher to try and make sense of the present.

I was in my 8th grade year when Hamas took control of Gaza, and throughout my childhood as much as my own country was at war in Afghanistan and Iraq in what our government called the “War on Terror,” I knew of Israel and Palestine as a set of nations that had been in some state of war since the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. To hear then last week that Hamas had attacked Israel, starting a new war at the end of the Jewish high holy days filled me with a grief I thought had been lost in the jaded and bruised reactions of my conscience after decades of hearing of atrocities here at home and abroad. At one point in my life, I thought of war as a sort of grand adventure, of the glory that men like Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill looked to in combat. I never chose to serve, nor would I have likely been allowed to because of my health, though as I grew up, I found the very idea of war, let alone the idea of taking another person’s life to be anathema and horrific to behold.

The Catholic Church has a theory of just war, which argues that in the case of most need, when no other option is available that war is the only solution available to a good and morally upright people. I for one have trouble with this theory, though I do see how it could make sense. I’d rather negotiate for as long as possible, try to find common ground with a potential enemy in the same way that I try to speak to those I interact with on a daily basis in their own language. Yet sometimes it does come down to this question of whether after all the negotiating and the impasses that have resulted if fighting is justified?

In 1580, the French humanistic philosopher Michel de Montaigne, the first great essayist, published in his first volume of Essays one such document titled “Des cannibales,” or in English “On the Cannibals.” In it, Montaigne spoke about a Tupinambá man from Brazil who he met in Rouen, the great port in Normandy where most of France’s trade with Brazil was based. Montaigne described how the Tupinambá became famous in his time for their cannibalism, rituals which were an intrinsic part of their culture that made them seem alien to his own, and dreadful in their otherworldliness.

Yet Montaigne saw also in the Tupinambá something of a reflection of his own world. 1580 saw France embroiled in the Wars of Religion, which lasted nearly 40 years and cost the French people a great many lives across several generations. Montaigne retired from public life in the civil service in part out of disgust for how the course of French history had gone, disgust that Frenchmen were not just killing fellow Frenchmen but torturing them and bringing ruin onto their families and communities all in the name of religion.

Religion is a tricky thing in human cultures. Most religions today are intended to give their believers a guide to living a good and true life; the greatest commandment which Jesus offers in the Gospels is to “love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27, NAB) I’m a practicing Roman Catholic, as a priest once said to me “I’m practicing, I’m still learning how to do it right,” and at the end of the day the best any of us can do is try to be good people, to make something positive and impactful of our lives, even if it is only a small impact on our immediate friends and families. I am religious for many reasons which perhaps someday I will write about here. 

Yet I am also a skeptic, much like Montaigne whose essays reflect this uncertainty about life, humanity, and established norms. Montaigne’s skepticism reflected the empiricism that was born in the following decades of the Scientific Revolution and flowered 150 years later during the earliest stirrings of the Enlightenment as much as it came from the humanism of his own time during the Renaissance. Montaigne challenged his readers, his fellow Frenchmen amid their own bloodletting, to save their cries of barbarity for the Tupinambá lest they also “call that barbarism which is not common to them” at the same time. Montaigne thought it more barbarous to “eat men alive than feed upon them when dead.” The way in which this war is being prosecuted by Hamas, while they hold clear grievances, loses any sense of moral justice when, as Montaigne charged his countrymen, they “mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense, wresting him in pieces.” The horrors of this war then, in all their wanton cruelty, show this twisted version of the human character in its fullest expression.

When I thought more about the war after it began last week, and as I thought of what I could write about it, about the renewal of this long simmering conflict in lands thought to be holy by three of our species’s largest religions, I was drawn to Montaigne’s words again, especially after reading reports from a journalist friend about the killings of infants and children by Hamas still defenseless in the earliest verses of their song.

What worries me is this idea of religious war, fighting “under pretense of piety and religion” in Montaigne’s words, remains in my own Catholicism. I know there are some who adopt the image and iconography of the Crusaders of old to battle against what they see as the wickedness and snares of evil, desecrations against what they hold most dear. Theirs is a faith limited to only a few, a scarce number that will surely only grow within their own families. When one says, to quote Handel’s Messiah “if God be for us, who can be against us?” it is very hard to argue, let alone change the mind of those who see God on their side. That is a faith limited to only the most elect, denying the promises of salvation to “our neighbors and fellow citizens” who instead receive scorn at the least, torture, death, and dismemberment at the worst.

I worry about how large this war will become. It is not like the other sudden conflicts that Israel has found itself in throughout its young history as a modern nation-state. This is a war fought against a terrorist organization with clear backing from another power in the region. Will that power leave the shadows or be attacked directly by Israel to stop the flow of weapons and funds that at time of writing is likely going to Hamas? And if so, how far will the Israeli Defence Force go to defeat Hamas before they lose their own moral standing? This is why I do not care for the idea of just war; taken too far with too much emotion driving one’s judgement a just war can quickly become unjust and the warriors fighting in the defense of their own kind could resort to brutality like their foes “that exceeds them in all kinds of barbarism.” So, in the last week when I’ve been at Mass, when I’ve led my classes at my Catholic school in prayer, my thoughts have been on the victims of this war, the fighters who see their actions as their best and only recourse, and on the faint glimmer of hope that peace will someday return to the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. In an age when terror is as potent a weapon as any other, I hope those able to see an end to this war will find a way to start talking with each other again. Until then, just as Montaigne wrote 443 years ago, so too today we find ourselves “not sorry we note the barbarous horror of such an action, but grieved, that prying so narrowly into their faults, we are so blinded in our own.”

The translation of Montaigne’s Essays used here is based off of John Florio’s 1603 first English edition of the Essayes, or Morall, Politike, and Militaire Discourses of Lord Michell de Montaigne published in London.

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