Episode #024 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

For a large portion of the life of Michel de Montaigne, he was plagued by this terrible, paralyzing fear of death. And it’s actually pretty funny. I think 99.9% of people have a terrible fear of death. The difference between people lies in how effectively they’ve learned to ignore it. And really, it’s not something to be ashamed of. We are creatures programmed for survival, and a fear of death is a great way for us to stay away from activities that might get us killed. But ever since we’ve gathered together and built these fortresses that we call cities and we’ve had an unprecedented level of security, that fear of death becomes much less useful than what it once was. The paradigm to strive for now is to be a person that can appease that fear of death to achieve that level of tranquility that civilization should be providing people.

This was the task of all the various schools of the Hellenistic age: stoicism, Epicureanism, skepticism, cynicism. People have been experiencing this fear for a long time. But when we’re talking about going against processes in the brain that are as deeply engrained as a fear of death, that task of quelling it becomes much easier said than done. Some would even say impossible. This fear of death is present at a different level in everyone. And for a guy like Michel de Montaigne, it was probably much worse than any of us experience this.

One of the things I love about Montaigne is that there’s a level of disclosure and honesty in his writing that you just don’t find with many other philosophers, and it gives him a very unique feel. One of the things he discloses, one of the things he’s most open about, is this fear of death that troubled him for a giant portion of his life. He said, “With such frequent and ordinary examples passing before our eyes, how can we possibly rid ourselves of the thought of death and of the idea that at every moment it is gripping us by the throat?”

But that all changed with a single traumatic experience. It’s funny how as humans we’re shaped by these traumatic experiences. Most of the time the things we’re the most passionate about as individuals and the things we care the most about are not really things that we’ve reflected on and arrived at introspectively; they’re passions that arose from moments in our life when life smacked you in the face. Well, this is almost literally what happened to Montaigne.

The story goes that he was riding his horse, in the slow lane by the way; he was being perfectly respectful. And some guy rides up behind him, and he wants to pass him on his horse. So, Montaigne says, go around me; go around me, please. And the guy tries to dart past him, but instead of going past him, he runs directly into the back of him. He flies off of his horse. He hits his head. He gets mangled up pretty badly. And his friends rush over to him to see if he’s alright, and it’s immediately evident that things are not alright and that he’s probably going to die. Medicine back in the 1500s is obviously nowhere near what medicine is today. And when his friends scooped him up off the ground and looked at him, he was freaking out. He was vomiting blood; he was scratching at himself. It seemed to his friends like he was trying to rip his own skin off. And to top it off, the whole time, he didn’t seem very conscious of anything that was happening to him.

Well, long story short, Montaigne made a full recovery. In fact, he actually came out on the other side of the experience a better person. When his friends told him that he was puking blood and flailing around like he was on the exorcist—just the quintessential picture of pure agony—Montaigne was shocked. I mean, he didn’t feel anything terrible like that. He didn’t remember feeling any pain. In fact, the whole experience wasn’t so bad. To him, it didn’t really feel like much at all. It felt kind of like the process of falling asleep.

Now, as somebody that feared death his entire life, knowing that nobody really knows what it’s going to be like when you die, this experience gave him some insight. He had experienced something very close to death. And based on his experience, what was there really to fear? This turning away from arguing about all-encompassing, catch-all rules about things and turning towards the use of personal experience to arrive at understanding—this is a hallmark of Montaigne’s philosophy in every area. And we’ll continue to refer back to it throughout the episode.

But right now, let’s not oversimplify Montaigne, alright? Saying, “What is the point of Montaigne’s writing?” is a little bit like saying, “What is the point of Led Zeppelin I?” What is the point of the album Rumours by Fleetwood Mac? It’s not like these artists set out with some grand message in mind beforehand, and then they wrote an entire album with the purpose of delivering that message. No, they wrote a bunch of songs that have meaning to them with individual messages. You listen to the songs. You get takeaways from each one of them. Two songs may play back to back on an album and not seem even remotely related to one another. But there definitely is a single intelligence that’s being portrayed through the songs. Rumours by Fleetwood Mac is not them writing a bunch of educational songs one after another, laying out an organized system of how to navigate the tribulations that you might face in your next relationship. The delivery method is not systematic, and it’s not intended to be.

Well, this is a pretty good parallel to Montaigne’s philosophy. We’ve seen other philosophers that lay out an organized system that you can live by. You know, they usually have maxims and useful techniques to practice and all sorts of tools that will lead you to the end goal that they’ve designated. For example, the philosophy of Siddhartha Gautama was very clearly laid out with his Four Noble Truths. There was a very clear practice regimen that, if you followed diligently enough, you would remove yourself from the chains of suffering and attachment. There’s other people like Epictetus that had their philosophy distilled down into books like the Enchiridion, which means the handbook.

But Montaigne didn’t have a handbook. Although he still offered what he thought was the most effective way to live life, he didn’t really organize it as well as these other guys. He’s actually the inventor of the essay. The word “essay” means attempt. And that’s exactly what we can think of his philosophy as, an attempt. For this reason, this episode may seem a little less systematic in its approach because it’s emblematic of Montaigne.

The essays of Michel de Montaigne may seem rambling and tangential, and he may start making a point about one thing and then go off on a ten-page anecdote about something only semi-related. But they are beautifully written. And to this day, if someone’s never read any philosophy before, it’s a collection that I recommend for them to start with, hands down. The reason why is because he doesn’t talk about what we would consider metaphysics much at all. He actually talks about issues that every human being can relate to. And he does so in a very unique and candid way—sometimes a little bit too candid, to be honest. He gives us a breaking news report on his private areas and private activities that he goes into.

But this isn’t him just being a creep. He does this stuff for very good reason. When you read his essays, you almost feel like you’re having an email exchange with somebody that’s a very close friend to you, somebody that’s sharing these intimate details about their life with you, but it makes you feel a little bit better about the fact that you have those problems too. Montaigne, if I had to categorize him, is a very interesting mixture between all four dominant schools of thought in the Hellenistic age. His way to approach life is the sum total of different pieces of stoicism, skepticism, Epicureanism, and cynicism, plus a lot more.

But if there was one school that affected his thinking the most of the four, hands down, it would be skepticism. Now, there are parts of his essays where there is a very stoic ambiance, very obviously stoic themed. There are passages in his essays that you could take out, and you could tell somebody that these are lost fragments of Diogenes the Cynic. And aside from the writing style, people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference just in the philosophy. But skepticism is the foundation on which all of his other thoughts are based. What I’m saying is, the reason why he’s able to make conclusions at all that sound very stoic based on personal experience is because his skepticism led him to value that personal experience as the most valuable data.

There’s a popular saying nowadays that Montaigne would have loved. The plural form of anecdote is data. Have you guys ever heard that before? Well, what people mean by it is, I guess, kind of like this. Have you ever been talking to somebody—and let’s say you tell them that you read in the paper that morning that some people down at the local fish and wildlife office did a study where this river in your area has the largest quantity of fish swimming through it in the country, and that through years and years of research they found that you’re more likely to catch a fish in this one river than in any other river in the country. And then the person you’re talking to says, “Well, no. One time my Aunt Beatrice went down there, and she didn’t catch a single fish. That article’s wrong.” Well, that would be a perfect example of ignoring the data and basing what you think about the reality of the world—in this case, a river—on your own anecdotal evidence.

But it’s funny, what is the data really but a collection of anecdotes? For years, some guys at every local fish and wildlife office around the country went down to the rivers in their respective areas and recorded how many fish were swimming by. Each one of those measurements could be considered an anecdote. Montaigne understood that the sorts of conclusions that people were trying to arrive at when collecting data were sweeping ones. And it makes sense: do experiments and collect many micros to try to arrive at a macro. By collecting data, by collecting lots of individual examples, maybe we can arrive at laws or rules that are always the case. If in theory we could arrive at these sorts of truths through experimentation, we might be able to use them to our advantage and understand the world we live in more effectively.

But Montaigne thought most of these sweeping generalizations that people tried to make in science, medicine, and law, etc.—they just weren’t that useful. The reason why, among other things, is that they almost always seem to be proven wrong eventually. I mean, think about it. Montaigne is living during a time where long-held principles—things that had been held as absolutely true for thousands of years—were crumbling all around him. All these truths ended up being disproven and replaced with another theory, and then disproven and replaced with another theory. And the whole process to Montaigne was just exhausting. Why waste our limited time on this planet agonizing over trying to come up with scientific or medical rules that apply to every circumstance without exception?

He trashes people that spend their time doing this stuff quite a bit in his essays. But this quote is one of my favorites. It’s when he’s talking about the medical sciences in particular. “Physicians have this advantage: the sun lights their success and the earth covers their failures.” There’s always an exception to the rule. Theories will continually be accepted as truth and then disproven by another theory. And that process is going to go on forever. Montaigne thought that maybe the solution is just to not overthink things and to base things on the way we experience them as individuals.

Now, don’t get him wrong. He understands the value of medicine and science, but he wants to keep our focus on things that are immediately useful to us, not ethereal things like what everything is made of or what the origins of the universe are. For this reason, Montaigne didn’t write much about metaphysics. He was just interested in other stuff more. Maybe he felt that, based on his own experience, he wasn’t qualified to talk about these things that exist at a level of reality that he can’t experience. Regardless, this disinterest in metaphysics because we lack the ability to truly know based on experience is a great example of the skepticism that underlies the rest of his more practical philosophy.

Now, if you think back to our episode on skepticism, you can remember how Pyrrho used a fundamental doubt about everything around us as a tool to arrive at ataraxia, or a freedom from disturbance. By reserving judgment about everything around us, we prevent ourselves from making negative judgments that might ail us in some way. Montaigne can be seen as kind of a less-extreme variant of this. He actually references Pyrrho several times in the essays, so it’s clear to us that he was heavily influenced by him. But instead of reserving judgment about everything and walking around in confusion, not really believing anything that goes on around us, Montaigne thought the most productive view of the world should be one where we pull from the vast bank vault full of experiences that we’ve garnered throughout our lives. I mean, after all, we are the catalyst for our experiences.

My personal experience of something offers a very unique insight into what I might expect to experience in the future, an insight that I can’t really be sure surveys can offer me, or even the anecdotes of other people. Really, how can I be sure that anybody experiences things the same way I do? This is another reason why even the pursuit of collecting all these all-encompassing rules without exceptions—Montaigne says, “For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.” The thing that Montaigne feels most comfortable trusting is his own experience. This is the reason why he feels comfortable making a conclusion about death after having his own near-death experience.

That said, one of Montaigne’s most interesting works is titled “To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die.” Now, he wasn’t the first to say that. It actually goes all the way back to the Greeks. But it definitely encapsulates the aim of many of Montaigne’s essays. Life—from the very moment they snip your umbilical cord, you are decaying. You’re getting closer to death. We’ve all heard people say things like, we’re all dying; we’re all not getting any younger. Because for every day you live, you get closer to the only inevitability that a human being has—death. And if you’re thinking about taxes right now, you’re wrong. Wesley Snipes proved a long time ago you don’t actually need to pay taxes.

So, that should really terrify us all. We’re all slowly decaying. We’re all dying. And that wasn’t any different back in the 1500s. Montaigne saw that people have a lot of creative ways that they deal with this inevitable death that’s coming. Some people exalt that death onto a pedestal to try to come to terms with it. And this was actually a very common way of thinking back then that philosophers came up with. The idea was to try to stifle this fear of death by constantly dwelling on it. By constantly thinking about death, you can come to terms with it.

For example, if you’re walking over a bridge, imagine the bridge collapsing underneath you. And then you get crushed between two beams and you just [splat], you know? When you’re driving on the freeway, imagine one of your wheels flying off of your car. And then you go through the moon roof and you just ragdoll-somersault down the freeway and get torn to pieces. The thinking was, by constantly thinking about death, you would eventually come to terms with it because you were exposed to it so much. And this is actually how a lot of people conquer fears in today’s world. If you’re scared of flying, you just fly a bunch around the country, and eventually you’ll realize there’s not much to fear.

But Montaigne thought this was dumb when it came to death. You’re just needlessly scaring yourself by thinking about death all the time. In fact, that might actually make your fear worse because now you’re in the habit of thinking about it all the time. You shouldn’t exalt death. On the other hand, some people exalt life. They try to distract themselves from death. They exalt certain worldly pleasures like glory and fame and wealth. But these things run into the same problems.

To philosophize is to learn how to die because through the introspection of philosophy, we realize how baseless it is to exalt these things. Instead of trying to endlessly rationalize things and instead of trying to have this intellectual approach to coming to peace with our death, we should accept that we just don’t know. Wise people accept their own intellectual limitations in the same way they would accept physical limitations. They wouldn’t come across a bear in the middle of the wilderness and think that they could fight it and win. They would recognize that there are certain physical limitations in their way preventing them from making that a good outcome.

When you remove all of this needless worry about death or life, you remove the need to fear death at all. He famously said, nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know. And the parallel to his lack of metaphysics is clear here. Don’t agonize over things that we cannot know. Accept your own limitations and come to the best conclusion you can with your current experience.

There’s a very stoic-flavored portion of the essays where he’s talking about, instead of overintellectualizing things, we should allow our own nature to prepare us for death. It’s interesting what he means by that. It’s one of the most intriguing parts of his philosophy to me, one that I keep reading over and over again. In fact, I wanted to get an old person’s perspective on death for the show this week just to see if there’s anything to Montaigne’s theory that our own nature prepares us for death and that we should trust it.

I ran into some problems, though. I didn’t really feel comfortable going down to some, like, Shady Acres retirement home, talking to somebody I don’t even know about something that they’re faced with every day, and they probably have an aversion to it. I just didn’t feel comfortable doing that. I decided that the best solution to this is to ask a family member, because at least they’re obligated to deal with me, right? It’s a perfect crime. And then I realized, I don’t even have any family. So, the best thing I could do is talk to my wife’s grandma. This is the value that you guys get week after week with Philosophize This!—an exclusive interview with my wife’s grandma. How about that?

But anyway, I was talking to her, and I asked her when she wanted to die. And she said, “I want to live until I want to die.” What a beautiful statement. We have a desire to live until our quality of life becomes so bad that we would rather die than live. Now, in her case, it comes in the form of deteriorating health, where one day she’s going to be in so much pain or on so much medication that she won’t be losing much, certainly not losing as much as if she died when she was 25. Couldn’t this be considered a way that our own nature prepares us for death?

Now, this seems like an end point. But when I first was reading Montaigne, this is where I started having the most questions for him. Sure, you remove this glorification of life and death, and you arrive at this peace of mind that other people can only dream of. But how do I do that, especially considering the fact that it presents itself in so many ways, some of which we might not even be able to identify? Well, Montaigne doesn’t disappoint in this area. He talks a lot about all of the individual ways this manifests itself in people’s lives. And as you’d probably expect, there are a ton of things that humans worried about back then that people still worry about today.

Now, why is it that it’s a stereotype for an old man to walk around naked, to dress in an absent-minded way, and to talk to people with no reservations? The reason why is because he just doesn’t care anymore. He’s lived long enough on this planet to realize that that embarrassment, that desire for respect, and all the various things that motivate people to follow social conventions are really pointless. What else does he have to prove to anybody? He’s been on this planet for years. He fought in two wars. He realizes that even if everybody on planet earth rejected him, he’s still going to be able to wake up and watch The Price Is Right the next day.

Well, this is a form of wisdom, to Montaigne. And this is another way that our own nature prepares us for death by removing these pointless anxieties that we have. During the parts of his essays where he talks about his dynamic in particular, he sounds like a staunch follower of cynicism. He actually goes on a multiple-page diatribe about animals and how they’re much wiser than humans in many ways. And really, I think everybody can relate to what he’s talking about in it. Who listening to this has never looked in the mirror and nit-picked something about their physical presence, wished that something was a little different than it was? I mean, do you guys even know how much I want cheek bones like Ashton Kutcher or Don Draper? And what do I get from looking at myself in the mirror wishing for it? And how many of us do this to ourselves all the time?

Well, Montaigne gives example after example of people in his time that held themselves to these same brutal standards. He says that we despise our own beings. And is there any condition that’s really worse than that? You’re imprisoned in this tomb of self-proclaimed ugliness. We should try to recognize that we are animals just like your dog is an animal. Your dog doesn’t have a laundry-list of corrections for his body. He isn’t embarrassed about anything. And we should recognize that the differences between our brain and an animal’s brain do bring us certain benefits, but they also bring us certain needless anxieties—like how pronounced your cheekbones are, for example. We should be able to identify social conventions. And while we may follow them because that’s the wisest choice, we should recognize them for what they truly are.

Now, if I had to distill Montaigne’s life approach down, I might begin with a very Buddhist concept. It’s the removal of attachments in our lives that are brought on by our relationships with others. We constantly strive for the approval of others. Now, the problem with this, Montaigne would say, is that as long as you care at all about what other people think of you, as long as you care at all about whether people like you or not, you will never be able to achieve complete peace of mind—what the stoics would call ataraxia, what the Buddhists would call enlightenment. When we care about the acceptance of others too much, we’re more likely to do things not because they’re the wisest thing to do but because the people whose acceptance we desire are doing it, and we want to follow suit.

This always reminds me of the common thing that a parent will tell their child. The child will say, “Well, everybody else was doing it.” And then the parent says, “Well, if everybody jumped off a bridge, would you?” This is a good way to think about what Montaigne is saying here. We shouldn’t completely reject the actions of everybody else around us. But we should aim for what he refers to as solitude. But when he says solitude, he doesn’t mean solitude in a literal sense. He means solitude in action. We should base the decisions we make on more than just what everybody else is doing. We shouldn’t be tempted to fall in line with the mob simply because it’s easy for us to do so.

For example, you look out onto the street whenever you’re driving. There are stoplights and street signs all over the road. We follow these rules of the road. They benefit us greatly. They keep us safe on the road. They help us know where we’re going. They help us know what speed is safe for a particular area. But it would be complete madness to be enslaved to those stoplights where, no matter what happened around you, you couldn’t disobey them. For lack of a better example, if a volcano erupts behind you and lava is flowing down the street, the wisest move would not be to wait until the light turns green to go forward. Well, Montaigne would say that it’s complete madness to be enslaved to the social conventions that seek the admiration of other people.

Now it’s time for the question of the week, but I kind of want it to be the reflection of the week. There’s a fantastic quote by Montaigne where he challenges the way that we would typically look at the world by allowing us to look at it through the lens of a goose. I’m serious. It’s funny. It actually reminds me of something I read in a Jerry Seinfeld book one time where he was talking about how, if an alien species came down and looked at our society, they would have to conclude that dogs were really the dominant species on the planet and that humans were their slaves. I mean, the dogs get to sit around all day and sleep while the humans get up early in the morning. They work 40-plus hours a week to be able to pay for their food, to be able to make time to pet them and take them on walks and go and throw a frisbee for them. The dogs just get to sit around enjoying it all.

Well, I want you to think about your life in the same way Montaigne asks us to think about how a goose might look at his life. He says, “Why may not a goose say thus: ‘…the earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me; the stars have their influence upon me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters; there is nothing that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favorably as me. I am the darling of nature! Is it not man that keeps and serves me?’”