Reading the autobiography of an ancient writer such as de Montaigne (d. 1592, commonly known as Michel de Montaigne, one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance) hadn’t prepared me for his gentle (though punishingly critical) humour at his own expense.
As said to me once, that as plants are suffocated and drowned with too much nourishment, and lamps with too much oil, so with too much study and matter is the active part of the understanding which, being embarrassed, and confounded with a great diversity of things, loses the force and power to disengage itself, and by the pressure of this weight, is bowed, subjected, and doubled up.
We only labour to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void. Like birds who fly abroad to forage for grain, and bring it home in the beak, without tasting it themselves, to feed their young; so our pedants go picking knowledge here and there, out of books, and hold it at the tongue’s end, only to spit it out and distribute it abroad. And here I cannot but smile to think how I have paid myself in showing the foppery of this kind of learning, who myself am so manifest an example; for, do I not the same thing throughout almost this whole composition?
Excerpt From
Michel de Montaigne. “The Essays of Montaigne — Complete.”
The humour is a severe warning, a paradoxical one:
We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make it our own. We are in this very like him, who having need of fire, went to a neighbour’s house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any with him home…for though we could become learned by other men’s learning, a man can never be wise but by his own wisdom. But it is not enough that our education does not spoil us; it must, moreover, alter us for the better.
The conclusion to de Montaigne’s attack against pedantry are these heartening words:
When he arrived at fourteen he was transferred into the hands of four, the wisest, the most just, the most temperate, and most valiant of the nation; of whom the first was to instruct him in religion, the second to be always upright and sincere, the third to conquer his appetites and desires, and the fourth to despise all danger.
Nowhere in that prescription is there instruction to pervert the ambition and knowledge with lesser (though often more popular) desires the extent of which is open to one’s imagination. It is an unqualified recommendation. It is a universal safety net far surpassing for example the notoriety of fame, celebrity, wealth or position (civil or political). It is a mandate without the fulfillment of which one is at peril of being labeled a coxcomb. It is a warning against dangerously self-reflective ambition (literally looking at oneself in a mirror), the result of which only you will truly see.
“My Perigordin patois very pleasantly calls these pretenders to learning, ‘lettre-ferits‘, as a man should say, letter-marked—men on whom letters have been stamped by the blow of a mallet. And, in truth, for the most part, they appear to be deprived even of common sense; for you see the husbandman and the cobbler go simply and fairly about their business, speaking only of what they know and understand; whereas these fellows, to make parade and to get opinion, mustering this ridiculous knowledge of theirs, that floats on the superficies of the brain, are perpetually perplexing, and entangling themselves in their own nonsense. They speak fine words sometimes, ’tis true, but let somebody that is wiser apply them.”
The identity of these great truths is certainly nothing new. Yet for whatever curious reason the warnings are often dismissed as the inconsequential preoccupation of those seeking lesser achievement or those wishing to excuse their incapacity or failure. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is for example no greater emptiness than a man with a full room of stuff without but nothing of substance within. The violation of wisdom, justice, temperance or valiance renders incalculable poison and imbalance. It is our everlasting shame not to advance and promote among our youth and ourselves those theses before all others. The instruction cannot be spared for Sunday school or temple as though it were fictional dialogue or religious rhetoric. And lest we imagine we shall for a time escape the penalty, be assured that the disease is unfettered by time or the ephemeral pleasure of the injury howsoever it may be fashioned or acquited. Long before you die with a smile on your face you shall perish still living but dissatisfied if nurtured by false knowledge. Nor is this threat purely mystical by any estimate. The rot with which we adorn ourselves will soon outweigh our stamina and we shall fall into the mire. Anything else is a joking lottery. The mantle we wear is an inalienable burden whatever its weight, its colour or its cost. We, and we alone, choose.