Fluent Essays

“I am not sorry that we note the barbarous horror of such acts, but I am very sorry that while judging their faults rightly we are so blind to our own. I think that there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead, in lacerating by rack and torture a body still full of feeling, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and pigs (as we have not only read about but have seen in recent memory, not among enemies in antiquity but among neighbors and fellow citizens and, what is worse, on the pretext of piety and of religion) than in roasting him and eating him after his death.” (“Of Cannibals”, p. 93)The exegesis papers are your attempt to explain and interpret a difficult or striking passage from a text we are studying. Please follow the guidelines below for your papers.Papers are to be submitted as a physical copy no more than one week after we have discussed the text in class.The passage you are writing about should be at the beginning of your response. Quote the passage as a single-spaced block quotation without quotation marks. The author, text, and page or section number of the passage should be cited in parentheses at the end of the passage. See the example below:The causality of reason in the intelligible character does not arise or start working at a certain time in producing an effect. For then it would itself be subject to the natural law of appearance, to the extent that this law determines causal series in time, and its causality would then be nature and not freedom. Thus we could say that if reason can have causality in regard to appearances, then it is a faculty through which the sensible condition of an empirical series of effects first begins. For the condition that lies in reason is not sensible and does not itself begin. Accordingly, there takes place here what we did not find in any empirical series: that the condition of a successive series could itself be empirically unconditioned. (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A551/B579–A552/B580)3. Your own response should be double-spaced. It should be no longer than two printed pages total, including the passage quoted at the beginning.4. Your task is to explain the passage in detail by drawing out clearly the central concepts or claims (explicit or implied), and situating the passage in the broader argument of the text in which it appears. The fundamental aim of this assignment is to interpret the text, not to evaluate it. montaigne._of_cannibals._bennett_ed..pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Essays, Book I Michel de Montaigne 1580 Copyright © Jonathan Bennett 2017. All rights reserved [Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported between brackets in normal-sized type. —Montaigne kept adding to this work. Following most modern editions, the present version uses tags in the following way: [A]: material in the first edition (1580) or added soon thereafter, [B]: material added in the greatly enlarged second edition (1588), [C]: material added in the first posthumous edition (1595) following Montaigne’s notes in his own copy. The tags are omitted where they seem unimportant. The ones that are retained are kept very small to make them neglectable by readers who aren’t interested in those details. Sometimes, as on pages 34 and 54, they are crucial. —The footnotes are all editorial. —Contemporary spellings of French words are used in the glossary and in references in the text to the glossary. —In the original, all the quotations from Latin writers are given in Latin. First launched: 2017 Contents 1. We reach the same end by different means 2 2. Sadness 4 3. Our feelings reach out beyond us 5 Essays, Book I Michel de Montaigne 4. How the soul discharges its emotions against false objects when lacking real ones 6 7. Our deeds are judged by the intention 6 8. Idleness 7 9. Liars 8 10. Prompt or slow speech 10 11. Prognostications 11 12. Constancy 12 13. Ceremonial at the meeting of kings 14 14. That the taste of goods and evils depends largely on our opinion of them 15 16. Punishing cowardice 24 17. A thing that certain ambassadors do 24 18. Fear 26 19. That we should not be deemed happy until after our death 27 20. Philosophising is learning to die 29 21. The power of the imagination 37 22. One man’s profit is another man’s loss 42 23. Custom, and not easily changing a traditional law 42 24. Same design, differing outcomes 51 25. Being a schoolmaster, being learned, being wise 56 Essays, Book I Michel de Montaigne 26. Educating children 63 27. It is folly to judge the true and the false from our own capacities 79 28. Friendship 81 30. Moderation 88 31. Cannibals 90 35. A lack in our administrations 96 36. The custom of wearing clothes 97 37. Cato the Younger 97 38. How we cry and laugh at the same thing 100 39. Solitude 101 40. Thinking about Cicero 108 42. The inequality that is between us 109 43. Sumptuary laws 113 44. Sleep 114 46. Names 114 47. The uncertainty of our judgement 116 49. Ancient customs 120 50. Democritus and Heraclitus 122 51. The vanity of words 124 Essays, Book I Michel de Montaigne 54. Vain subtleties 126 55. Smells 127 56. Prayers 129 57. Age 134 Glossary pédant: Montaigne uses this to mean ‘schoolmaster’ much more than to mean what ‘pedant’ does to us, ‘person who parades excessively academic learning [or] insists on strict adherence to formal rules’ (OED). His title for Essay 25 is Du pédantisme = ‘On pedantry’, which is seriously misleading because the essay extends beyond •schoolmasters and •pedants to •learned men generally. coutume: Where the coutume is social, it is translated as ‘custom’; where it is individual, as ‘habit’, especially in Essay 23. essai: An essai (French) may be a test, or an attempt, or an exercise, or a certain kind of literary production. The last meaning came solely from Montaigne’s way of labelling these ‘attempts’ or ‘exercises’ of his, and occasionally in the text there is some play on the word. prince: Like the English ‘prince’, this in early modern times could refer to any rank up to that of king (or monarch; Queen Elizabeth I referred to herself as a ‘prince’), though the phrase un Prince ou un Roi on page 57 seems to belie that. Anyway, prince is translated by ‘prince’ throughout. magistrate: In this work, ‘a magistrate’ is any official who applies the law; ‘the magistrate’ of a given nation is its system of such officials. moeurs: The moeurs of a people include their morality, their basic customs, their attitudes and expectations about how people will behave, their ideas about what is decent. . . and so on. This word—rhyming approximately with ‘worse’—is left untranslated because there’s no good English equivalent to it. The Oxford English dictionary includes it for the same reason it has for including Schadenfreude. rêverie: This can be a day-dream, or a fancy, or a straggling thought (page 63) or (perhaps on page 38) a mental set. science: Translated as ‘branch of learning’ or simply ‘learning’, except in a few cases where those seem stylistically impossible. Then ‘science’ is used, but it never means anything much like ‘science’ in our sense. 1 Essays, Book I Michel de Montaigne 31. Cannibals That man of mine was a simple, rough fellow—a character fit to bear true witness. For the clever folk observe more things and take in more detail, but they interpret them; and to give weight and conviction to their interpretations they cannot help altering history a little. They never show you things purely as they are; they bend and disguise them to fit with their way of seeing them; and to make their judgement more credible and to win you over, they emphasize their own side, amplify it and extend it. What is needed is a man who is either very honest or else so simple that he has nothing in him on which to build false inventions and make them plausible; and who has not committed himself to anything [here = ‘to any doctrine’]. Such was my man; moreover he at various times introduced me to seamen and merchants whom he had met on that voyage. So I settle for his information, without asking what the cosmographers say about it. There is a need for topographers who would give us detailed accounts of places where they have been. But ·actual voyagers·, because they have over us the advantage of having seen Palestine, want to enjoy the privilege of bringing us news about all the rest of the world! I wish everyone would write about what he knows—and as much as he knows—not only on this topic but on all others. For a man can have specialised knowledge or experience of the nature of a river or of a fountain, without knowing more than anyone else about anything else. Yet to parade his little scrap of knowledge he will undertake to write a book on the whole of physics! From this vice spring many great abuses. When King Pyrrhus crossed into Italy, after surveying the formation of the army the Romans were sending against him, he said ‘I do not know what barbarians these are’ (for that is what the Greeks called all foreigners) ‘but there is nothing barbarous about the ordering of this army that I see!’ The Greeks said as much about the army that Flaminius brought into their country, [C] as did Philip when he saw from a knoll in his kingdom the order and layout of the Roman camp under Publius Sulpicius Galba. [A] That is the way to guard against clinging to common opinions, and to judge things by the way of reason, not by popular vote. I had with me for a long time a man who had lived for ten or twelve years in that other world that has been discovered in our century, in the place where Villegaignon landed and which he named Antarctic France [we call it Brazil]. This discovery of a boundless territory seems to be worth thinking about. I don’t know if I can guarantee that no other such discovery will be made in the future, since so many persons greater than ourselves were wrong about this one. I fear that we have eyes bigger than our bellies, and more curiosity than capacity ·to take things in·. We embrace everything but clasp only wind. [Montaigne now presents two pages concerning changes over the centuries in coastlines and the courses of rivers; different theories about what put sea between Sicily and Italy; the improbability that the transatlantic new world is the fabled island of Atlantis; and recent events in Médoc, where the sea had pushed up sand dunes burying good land, some belonging to Montaigne’s brother.] [A] 1 31. Cannibals ·I N PRAISE OF NATURALNESS · Now, to return to my topic, I find (from what I have been told) that there is nothing barbarous and wild1 in that nation ·of Antarctic France [= Brazil]·, In this paragraph, ‘wild’ translates sauvage, which often = ‘savage’, but not, of course, in application to fruit. 90 Essays, Book I Michel de Montaigne except that each man labels as ‘barbarism’ anything he is not accustomed to. Indeed we have no other test for truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in. There is always the perfect religion, the perfect government, the perfect and accomplished way of doing everything! They are wild, just as we call ‘wild’ •fruits that nature has produced in its ordinary course; whereas really it is •the ones we have artificially perverted and turned away from the common order that we ought to call ‘wild’. •The former retain the powers and properties that are alive and vigorous, genuine, most useful and natural, which we have debased in •the latter by adapting them to gratify our corrupt taste. [C] And given that some uncultivated fruits of those countries have a savour and delicacy that our taste finds excellent in comparison with our own, [A] it is not reasonable that artifice should win the place of honour over our great and powerful mother nature. We have so overloaded the richness and beauty of its products by our inventions that we have quite smothered it. Yet wherever its purity shines forth, it wonderfully puts to shame our vain and frivolous enterprises: [B] ‘Ivy grows best when left untended; the strawberry tree flourishes more beautifully in lonely grottoes, and birds sing the sweeter for their artlessness’ [Propertius]. [A] All our efforts cannot even manage to reproduce the nest of the tiniest little bird, its texture, it beauty, its fitness for its purpose; or the web of the puny spider. [C] All things, Plato says, are produced by nature, by fortune, or by art; the greatest and loveliest by one or other of the first two, the least and most imperfect by the last. [A] These nations, then, seem to me to be ‘barbarous’ in having been very little shaped by the human mind and still being very close to their original naturalness. They are still 31. Cannibals ruled by nature’s laws, very little corrupted by ours. But their purity is such that I am sometimes annoyed that they were not known earlier, at a time when there were men who could have judged them better than we. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato did not know of them; for it seems to me that what we see in those nations surpasses not only •all the pictures with which poetry has decorated the ‘golden age’, and •all its inventions in imagining a happy state of man, but also •the conception and the desire of philosophy itself. They could not imagine a naturalness as pure and simple as the one we actually see; nor could they believe that our society could be maintained with so little artifice and human solder. This is a nation, I would say to Plato, in which there is •no buying and selling, •no knowledge of writing, •no science of numbers, •no terms for ‘magistrate’ or ‘political superiority’, •no system of servants, or of riches or poverty, •no contracts, •no inheritances, •no divisions of property, •no occupations but leisure ones, •no concern for kinship, except what is common to them all, •no clothing, •no agriculture, •no metal, •no use of wine or of wheat. As for lying, treachery, cheating, avarice, envy, slander, forgiveness—they don’t even have words for them. How remote from such perfection would Plato find the Republic 91 Essays, Book I Michel de Montaigne that he thought up!—[C] ‘men fresh from the gods’ [Seneca]— [B] ‘These are the ways that nature first ordained’ [Virgil]. ·T HE 31. Cannibals pleasant drink. In place of bread they use a certain white stuff resembling preserved coriander. I have tried some; it tastes sweet and somewhat insipid. The whole day is spent in dancing. The younger men go hunting animals with bows, while some of the women are occupied in warming their drink, which is their main task. In the morning, before their meal, one of their elders walks the length of the building (their buildings are a good hundred paces long) preaching to the whole barnful of them by repeating the same thing over and over again, recommending two things only: bravery against enemies and love for their wives. And they never fail to stress this second duty, with the refrain that it is their wives who keep their drink warm and seasoned. In many places, including my own house, you can see specimens of their beds, of their ropes, of their wooden swords and the wooden bracelets with which they cover their wrists in battle, and of the big canes, open at one end, by the sound of which they keep time in their dances. They shave off all their hair, cutting it much more cleanly than we do, with a wood or stone razor. They believe that souls are immortal; and that those who have deserved well of the gods are lodged in the part of the sky where the sun rises; the damned in the west. They have some sort of priests and prophets, who live in the mountains and rarely show themselves to the people. On their arrival there is held a great festival and solemn assembly of several villages (each barn, as I have described it, constitutes a village; they are about one French league apart). The prophet then addresses them in public, exhorting them to be virtuous and dutiful, but their entire ethical doctrine contains only these two articles—resoluteness in battle and affection for their wives. He foretells what is to happen and the upshots they should expect from their undertakings; WAY OF LIFE OF THE ‘ BARBARIANS ’ · For the rest, they live in a land with a delightful countryside and a temperate climate; so that according to my sources it is rare to see a sick man there; they have assured me that they never saw anyone trembling, blear-eyed, toothless or bent with age. They are settled along the sea-shore, shut in on the land side by great high mountains about a hundred leagues away. They have in abundance fish and meat that have no resemblance to ours; and they eat them with no preparation except cooking. The first man who rode a horse there, though he had had dealings with them on several previous voyages, so horrified them in that seat that they killed him with their arrows before they could recognise him. Their dwellings are immensely long, capable of holding two or three hundred souls; they are covered with a roof of tall trees, fixed into the earth at one end and leaning against each other in support at the top; like some of our barns whose roof reaches to the ground and serves as a side. They have wood so hard that they cut with it and make from it their swords and grills on which to cook their meat. Their beds are woven from cotton and slung from the roof, like those on our ships, one per person; for the wives sleep apart from their husbands. They rise with the sun and immediately have their meal for the day; for they have no other meal but that one. They drink nothing with it. . . . They drink several times a day, and copiously. Their drink is made from some root and has the colour of our claret. They always drink it lukewarm; it keeps for only two or three days; it tastes a bit sharp, is not in the least heady, is good for the stomach, and is laxative for those who are not used to it; for those who are, it is a very [A] 92 Essays, Book I Michel de Montaigne he puts them on the path to war or deflects them from it; but if he fails to prophesy correctly and things turn out other than he foretold, they condemn him as a false prophet and hack him to pieces if they catch him. For this reason one who gets it wrong once is not seen again. [C] Prophecy is a gift of God. That is why abusing it should be a punishable deceit. Among the Scythians, whenever their soothsayers failed to hit the mark they were shackled hand and foot and laid in ox-carts full of bracken where they were burned. Those who treat subjects under the guidance of human limitations can be excused if they have done their best; but those others who come and cheat us with assurances of powers beyond the natural order, should they not be punished for not making good their promise and for the foolhardiness of their deceit? ·T HEIR 31. Cannibals a meal of him, sending chunks of his flesh to absent friends. This is not, as people think, done for food—as it was with the ancient Scythians—but to symbolize ultimate revenge. As evidence for this: when they saw that the Portuguese who were allied to their enemies inflicted a different kind of death on those they took prisoner—namely to bury them up to the waist, to shoot showers of arrows at their exposed parts, and then hang them—they. . . .began to abandon their former method and follow that one. I am not sorry that we note the barbarous horror of such acts, but I am very sorry that while judging their faults rightly we are so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in •eating a man alive than in •eating him dead, •in •lacerating by rack and torture a body still full of feeling, in having him roasted bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and pigs (as we have not only read about but have seen in recent memory, not among enemies in antiquity but among neighbours and fellow-citizens and, what is worse, on the pretext of piety and of religion) than in •roasting him and eating him after his death. Chrysippus and Zeno, heads of the Stoic sect, thought that there was nothing wrong with using our carcasses for whatever purpose we needed, even for food—as our own forebears did when, beleaguered by Caesar in the town of Alesia, they resolved to relieve the hunger of the besieged with the flesh of old men, women and others who were no use in battle: [B] ‘The Gascons notoriously prolonged their lives by eating such food’ [Juvenal]. [A] And physicians do not flinch from using human flesh in all sorts of ways, both internally and externally, for our health. Yet there was never an opinion so wrong as to excuse treachery, disloyalty, tyranny, cruelty, which are our ordinary vices. REASONS FOR CANNIBALISM · [A] They have their wars against the nations beyond their mountains, further inland; they go to war quite naked, with no other arms but their bows and their wooden swords sharpened to a point like that of our hunting pikes. They are astonishingly steadfast in ·one-on-one· combats, which always end in killing and bloodshed: as for routs and terror, they know nothing of either. Each man brings back as a trophy the head of the enemy he has killed, and sets it up at the entrance of his dwelling. After treating their captives well for a long period, providing them with all the comforts they can think of, the master of each captive summons a great assembly of his acquaintances. He ties a rope to one of his prisoner’s arms and—[C] holding him by it a few steps away for fear of being hurt by him—[A] allows his dearest friend to hold him the same way by the other arm; then these two before the whole assembly kill him with their swords. This done, they roast him and make 93 Essays, Book ... Purchase answer to see full attachment