Live and creativity of Michel de Montaigne /final part/

in #book6 years ago (edited)

In the essay "For the Possession of Will," the French Renaissance philosopher believes that man has enough work to do with himself, so that he must not depart from it. One must adhere to contempt for pain and the love of enjoyment; and Plato advises to walk along the middle road between one and the other ... To the passions that deviate me from me and attach me to something else, I resist with all my strength, Monten admits. My opinion is that one should serve others, but give himself entirely to himself. If my will was easy to bet on and applied to the orders of others, I would not bear that ... I am busy with my basic works, personal and assigned to me by nature, so that I also need to take sideways. According to him, nature has given rather complicated and not at all easy to order "by the people, so they should not dedicate themselves to the service of others, because" the freedom of our soul must be preserved, and it is only in extreme cases. " In the eloquently titled essay "For philosophizing is to learn to die" Monten develops a Cicero maxim that says, to philosophize does not mean but to prepare for death. Every self-examination and meditation inevitably leads the soul outside and separates it from the body, which is some kind of acquaintance and resemblance to death; in short, every wisdom and all reasoning in the world is ultimately reduced to learning not to be afraid of death. According to the Renaissance essayist, all philosophical teachings cross and merge at one point - to teach us to despise death.

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The contempt for death is a means of giving peace to our lives and allowing us to taste our pure and sweet joys; without him every other pleasure goes out. By looking at the "natural course of things, one understands that he lives "in the special benevolence of fate. Let those festivals and joyful sounds sound like this chorus that reminds us of our destiny; not to such a degree of pleasure that it will not fade from time to time in our mind the way in which this joyfulness can end with death and how many unexpected blows threaten it! - advised the French philosopher. This is what the Egyptians did, who, in celebration with the best guests, brought the skeleton of a dead man, as a warning to the feast.

In Monten and Rabela, love for ancient authors was a way for the man of today to be free, to return to the springs of knowledge, of living knowledge, says the author of the French historian Pierre Michel. - Monten's attempts show this respect for the language, which is both thought and action because it frees the thought. Monten's philosophy is based on his love of life and nature. - The roots of life are in the very being, and nature is the mother of everything that exists. Life itself is an outbreak, an explosion of the forces of being. Not only through the knowledge, but also with the feeling, one can encompass the existing one and understand it. The ideal of Monten is to enrich my own self, ie. man to be able to fulfill all his functions in life, to experience the joy of living, to enrich his soul, to quench his spirit, to love, to fight. The difficulty comes from balancing the forces of life in order to rise to the harmonious combination of what is possible with the actual, to realize ourselves, to manifest what we carry within ourselves.

For most French nobles who lived in the first half of the seventeenth century, Montaine's "Essays" became a desktop book. According to the French theological thinker Blaise Pascal, however, their author is possessed by his own narcissism, turned away from religious problems and deceives believers into dangerous self-esteem. Indeed, Monten was not a godly devotee, so in 1676 his famous collection fell into the Book of Books forbidden by the Church. The merits of the Monten essay collection have been rediscovered by intelligent readers across Europe in the mid-twentieth century. Their author becomes a modern benefactor of his spiritual liberation from the prejudices accumulated in society, his disobedience to the ruling norms, the analyticism of his intellectual insights, and the sincerity of his confessions and self-judgments. Unfortunately, few of his explorers have managed to penetrate Monet's unique skepticism. It is difficult to perceive its dual attitude towards intellectual commitment, civic activity, religious diligence. The difficulty in reading the Essays stems from the forgetting that these thoughts have been accumulated, reshaped and worked over for about twenty years. It is also difficult for us to dominate in the second half of the 16th century too seriously and strictly hierarchical thinking attitudes to which Monten reacted through provocative contradictions and the relentlessness of their reflections on man, morals and morality.


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Thank you for this series on Montaigne. Coincidentally, I have been listening to contemporary French philosopher Michel Onfray talk about how influential Montaigne has been for him, and how pertinent to one's everyday life Montaigne's writings are. Now I guess I am going to iBooks and download some of his writings :)
Meanwhile, I found this article on the Montaigne Project.
http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/1/777777122610/
You might find it interesting.

Thanks I will read it.

I have never heard about this philosopher Michel Onfray. Thanks for mention him , I will see what he writes :)

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