The Consolations of Philosophy

by Alain De Botton

  They lived in long barn-like structures which slept 200 people. Their beds were woven from cotton and slung between pillars like hammocks (when they went hunting, the Tupis took their beds with them, and had afternoon naps suspended between trees). Every six months, a village would move to a new location, because the inhabitants felt a change of scene would do them good (‘Ils n’ont d’autre réponse, sinon de dire que changeant l’air, ils se portent mieux’ – de Léry). The Tupis’ existence was so well ordered, they frequently lived to be a hundred and never had white or grey hair in old age. They were also extremely hospitable. When a newcomer arrived in a village, the women would cover their faces, start crying, and exclaim, ‘How are you? You’ve taken such trouble to come and visit us!’ Visitors would immediately be offered the favourite Tupi drink, made from the root of a plant and coloured like claret, which tasted sharp but was good for the stomach.

  Tupi men were allowed to take more than one wife, and were said to be devoted to them all. ‘Their entire system of ethics contains only the same two articles: resoluteness in battle and love of their wives,’ reported Montaigne. And the wives were apparently happy with the arrangement, showing no jealousy (sexual relations were relaxed, the only prohibition being that one should never sleep with close relatives). Montaigne, with his wife downstairs in the castle, relished the detail:

  One beautiful characteristic of their marriages is worth noting: just as our wives are zealous in thwarting our love and tenderness for other women, theirs are equally zealous in obtaining them for them. Being more concerned for their husband’s reputation than for anything else, they take care and trouble to have as many fellow-wives as possible, since that is a testimony to their husband’s valour.

  It was all undeniably peculiar. Montaigne did not find any of it abnormal.

  He was in a minority. Soon after Columbus’s discovery, Spanish and Portuguese colonists arrived from Europe to exploit the new lands and decided that the natives were little better than animals. The Catholic knight Villegagnon spoke of them as ‘beasts with a human face’ (‘ce sont des bêtes portant figure humaine’); the Calvinist minister Richer argued they had no moral sense (‘l’hébétude crasse de leur esprit ne distingue pas le bien du mal’); and the doctor Laurent Joubert, after examining five Brazilian women, asserted that they had no periods and therefore categorically did not belong to the human race.

  Having stripped them of their humanity, the Spanish began to slaughter them like animals. By 1534, forty-two years after Columbus’s arrival, the Aztec and Inca empires had been destroyed, and their peoples enslaved or murdered. Montaigne read of the barbarism in Bartolomeo Las Casas’s Brevissima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias (printed in Seville in 1552, translated into French in 1580 by Jacques de Miggrode as Tyrannies et cruautés des Espagnols perpétrées es Indes occidentales qu’on dit le Nouveau Monde). The Indians were undermined by their own hospitality and by the weakness of their arms. They opened their villages and cities to the Spanish, to find their guests turning on them when they were least prepared. Their primitive weapons were no match for Spanish cannons and swords, and the conquistadores showed no mercy towards their victims. They killed children, slit open the bellies of pregnant women, gouged out eyes, roasted whole families alive and set fire to villages in the night.

  (Ill. 17.4)

  They trained dogs to go into the jungles where the Indians had fled and to tear them to pieces.

  Men were sent to work in gold- and silver-mines, chained together by iron collars. When a man died, his body was cut from the chain, while his companions on either side continued working. Most Indians did not last more than three weeks in the mines. Women were raped and disfigured in front of their husbands.

  (Ill. 17.5)

  The favoured form of mutilation was to slice chins and noses. Las Casas told how one woman, seeing the Spanish armies advancing with their dogs, hanged herself with her child. A soldier arrived, cut the child in two with his sword, gave one half to his dogs, then asked a friar to administer last rites so that the infant would be assured a place in Christ’s heaven.

  With men and women separated from each other, desolate and anxious, the Indians committed suicide in large numbers. Between Montaigne’s birth in 1533 and the publication of the third book of his Essays in 1588, the native population of the New World is estimated to have dropped from 80 to 10 million inhabitants.

  The Spanish had butchered the Indians with a clean conscience because they were confident that they knew what a normal human being was. Their reason told them it was someone who wore breeches, had one wife, didn’t eat spiders and slept in a bed:

  We could understand nothing of their language; their manners and even their features and clothing were far different from ours. Which of us did not take them for brutes and savages? Which of us did not attribute their silence to dullness and brutish ignorance?

  After all, they … were unaware of our hand-kissings and our low and complex bows.

  They might have seemed like human beings: ‘Ah! But they wear no breeches …’

  Behind the butchery lay messy reasoning. Separating the normal from the abnormal typically proceeds through a form of inductive logic, whereby we infer a general law from particular instances (as logicians would put it, from observing that A1 is ø, A2 is ø and A3 is ø, we come to the view that ‘All As are ø’). Seeking to judge whether someone is intelligent, we look for features common to everyone intelligent we have met hitherto. If we met an intelligent person who looked like 1, another who looked like 2, and a third like 3, we are likely to decide that intelligent people read a lot, dress in black and look rather solemn. There is a danger we will dismiss as stupid, and perhaps later kill, someone who looks like 4.

  (Ill. 17.6)

  (Ill. 17.7)

  (Ill. 17.8)

  (Ill. 17.9)

  French travellers who reacted in horror to German stoves in their bedrooms would have known a number of good fireplaces in their country before arriving in Germany. One would perhaps have looked like 1, another like 2, a third like 3, and from this they would have concluded that the essence of a good heating system was an open hearth.

  1.

  (Ill. 17.10)

  2.

  3.

  (Ill. 17.11)

  Montaigne bemoaned the intellectual arrogance at play. There were savages in South America; they were not the ones eating spiders:

  Every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!

  He was not attempting to do away with the distinction between barbarous and civilized; there were differences in value between the customs of countries (cultural relativism being as crude as nationalism). He was correcting the way we made the distinction. Our country might have many virtues, but these did not depend on it being our country. A foreign land might have many faults, but these could not be identified through the mere fact that its customs were unusual. Nationality and familiarity were absurd criteria by which to decide on the good.

  French custom had decreed that if one had an impediment in the nasal passage, one should blow it into a handkerchief. But Montaigne had a friend who, having reflected on the matter, had come to the view that it might be better to blow one’s nose straight into one’s fingers:

  Defending his action … he asked me why that filthy mucus should be so privileged that we should prepare fine linen to receive it and then should wrap it up and carry it carefully about on our persons … I considered that what he said was not totally unreasonable, but habit had prevented me from noticing just that strangeness which we find so hideous in similar customs in another country.

  Careful reasoning rather than prejudice was to be the means of evaluating behaviour, Montaigne’s frustration caused by those who blithely equated the un
familiar with the inadequate and so ignored the most basic lesson in intellectual humility offered by the greatest of the ancient philosophers:

  The wisest man that ever was, when asked what he knew, replied that the one thing he did know was that he knew nothing.

  What, then, should we do if we find ourselves facing a veiled suggestion of abnormality manifested in a quizzical, slightly alarmed ‘Really? How weird!’, accompanied by a raised eyebrow, amounting in its own small way to a denial of legitimacy and humanity – a reaction which Montaigne’s friend had encountered in Gascony when he blew his nose into his fingers, and which had, in its most extreme form, led to the devastation of the South American tribes?

  Perhaps we should remember the degree to which accusations of abnormality are regionally and historically founded. To loosen their hold on us, we need only expose ourselves to the diversity of customs across time and space. What is considered abnormal in one group at one moment may not, and will not always be deemed so. We may cross borders in our minds.

  WHAT IS CONSIDERED ABNORMAL WHERE

  Montaigne had filled his library with books that helped him cross the borders of prejudice. There were history books, travel journals, the reports of missionaries and sea captains, the literatures of other lands and illustrated volumes with pictures of strangely clad tribes eating fish of unknown names. Through these books, Montaigne could gain legitimacy for parts of himself of which there was no evidence in the vicinity – the Roman parts, the Greek parts, the sides of himself that were more Mexican and Tupi than Gascon, the parts that would have liked to have six wives or have a shaved back or wash twelve times a day; he could feel less alone with these by turning to copies of Tacitus’s Annals, Gonçalez de Mendoza’s history of China, Goulart’s history of Portugal, Lebelski’s history of Persia, Leo Africanus’s travels around Africa, Lusignano’s history of Cyprus, Postel’s collection of Turkish and oriental histories and Muenster’s universal cosmography (which promised pictures of ‘animaulx estranges’).

  If he felt oppressed by the claims made by others to universal truth, he could in a similar way line up the theories of the universe held by all the great ancient philosophers and then witness, despite the confidence of each thinker that he was in possession of the whole truth, the ludicrous divergence that resulted. After such comparative study, Montaigne sarcastically confessed to having no clue whether to accept:

  the ‘Ideas’ of Plato, the atoms of Epicurus, the plenum and vacuum of Leucippus and Democritus, the water of Thales, the infinity of Nature of Anaximander, or the aether of Diogenes, the numbers and symmetry of Pythagoras, the infinity of Parmenides, the Unity of Musaeus, the fire and water of Apollodorus, the homogeneous particles of Anaxagoras, the discord and concord of Empedocles, the fire of Heraclitus, or any other opinion drawn from the boundless confusion of judgement and doctrines produced by our fine human reason, with all its certainty and perspicuity.

  The discoveries of new worlds and ancient texts powerfully undermined what Montaigne described as ‘that distressing and combative arrogance which has complete faith and trust in itself’:

  Anyone who made an intelligent collection of the asinine stupidities of human wisdom would have a wondrous tale to tell … We can judge what we should think of Man, of his sense and of his reason, when we find such obvious and gross errors even in these important characters who have raised human intelligence to great heights.

  It also helped to have spent seventeen months journeying around Europe on horseback. Testimony of other countries and ways of life alleviated the oppressive atmosphere of Montaigne’s own region. What one society judged to be strange, another might more sensibly welcome as normal.

  Other lands may return to us a sense of possibility stamped out by provincial arrogance; they encourage us to grow more acceptable to ourselves. The conception of the normal proposed by any particular province – Athens, Augsburg, Cuzco, Mexico, Rome, Seville, Gascony – has room for only a few aspects of our nature, and unfairly consigns the rest to the barbaric and bizarre. Every man may bear the whole form of the human condition, but it seems that no single country can tolerate the complexity of this condition.

  Among the fifty-seven inscriptions that Montaigne had painted on the beams of his library ceiling, was a line from Terence:

  Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto

  .

  I am a man, nothing human is foreign to me.

  By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to exchange local prejudices and the self-division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

  Another consolation for accusations of abnormality is friendship, a friend being, among other things, someone kind enough to consider more of us normal than most people do. We may share judgements with friends that would in ordinary company be censured for being too caustic, sexual, despairing, daft, clever or vulnerable – friendship a minor conspiracy against what other people think of as reasonable.

  Like Epicurus, Montaigne believed friendship to be an essential component of happiness:

  In my judgement the sweetness of well-matched and compatible fellowship can never cost too dear. O! a friend! How true is that ancient judgement, that the frequenting of one is more sweet than the element water, more necessary than the element fire.

  For a time, he was fortunate enough to know such fellowship. At the age of twenty-five, he was introduced to a twenty-eight-year-old writer and member of the Bordeaux Parlement, Étienne de La Boétie. It was friendship at first sight:

  We were seeking each other before we set eyes on each other because of the reports we had heard … we embraced each other by our names. And at our first meeting, which chanced to be at a great crowded town-festival, we found ourselves so taken with each other, so well acquainted, so bound together, that from that time on nothing was so close to us as each other.

  The friendship was of a kind, Montaigne believed, that only occurred once every 300 years; it had nothing in common with the tepid alliances frequently denoted by the term:

  What we normally call friends and friendships are no more than acquaintances and familiar relationships bound by some chance or some suitability, by means of which our souls support each other. In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found.

  The friendship would not have been so valuable if most people had not been so disappointing – if Montaigne had not had to hide so much of himself from them. The depth of his attachment to La Boétie signalled the extent to which, in his interactions with others, he had been forced to present only an edited image of himself to avoid suspicion and raised eyebrows. Many years later, Montaigne analysed the source of his affections for La Boétie:

  Luy seul jouyssoit de ma vraye image

  .

  He alone had the privilege of my true portrait.

  That is, La Boétie – uniquely among Montaigne’s acquaintances – understood him properly. He allowed him to be himself; through his psychological acuity, he enabled him to be so. He offered scope for valuable and yet until then neglected dimensions of Montaigne’s character – which suggests that we pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.

  The idyll was painfully brief. Four years after the first meeting, in August 1563, La Boétie fell ill with stomach cramps and died a few days later. The loss was to haunt Montaigne for ever:

  In truth if I compare the rest of my life … to those four years which I was granted to enjoy the sweet companionship and fellowship of a man like that, it is but smoke and ashes, a night dark and dreary. Since that day when I lost him … I merely drag wearily on.

  Throughout the Essays, there were expressions of longing for a soul mate comparable to the dead companion. Eighteen years after La Boétie’s dea
th, Montaigne was still visited by periods of grief. In May 1581, in La Villa near Lucca, where he had gone to take the waters, he wrote in his travel journal that he had spent an entire day beset by ‘painful thoughts about Monsieur de La Boétie. I was in this mood so long, without recovering, that it did me much harm.’

  He was never to be blessed again in his friendships, but he discovered the finest form of compensation. In the Essays, he recreated in another medium the true portrait of himself that La Boétie had recognized. He became himself on the page as he had been himself in the company of his friend.

  Authorship was prompted by disappointment with those in the vicinity, and yet it was infused with the hope that someone elsewhere would understand; his book an address to everyone and no one in particular. He was aware of the paradox of expressing his deepest self to strangers in bookshops:

  Many things that I would not care to tell any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts, I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller’s stall.

  And yet we should be grateful for the paradox. Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.