/lit/ - Literature

>>19471487
It's interesting when Michel De Montagine talks about this aspect of ourselves and really puts into presepctive how absturd Human Beings are, even those we consider "great".

He writes: ‘to learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing, we must learn a more ample and important lesson: that we are but blockheads… On the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.’ And, lest we forget: ‘Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies'

He would also say things like imagine Plato writing the Republic, a timeless work of art, and think about how many times he farted while writing that. He holds up a mirror to ourselves as being inadequate by default. "Our life", Montaigne writes, "consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom"

spinoza

Where one must go after Montaigne?

Where do one go from here? Once you read The Essays, it seems like your life is solved.

>>9800549
Michelle De Mundane.

who are some of the most patrician people to have ever lived?

was he literally retarded

Now memory is the coffer and store-box of knowledge: mine is so defective that I cannot really complain if I know hardly anything. I do know the generic names of the sciences and what they mean, but nothing beyond that. I do not study books, I dip into them: as for anything I do retain from them, I am no longer aware that it belongs to somebody else: it is quite simply the material from which my judgement has profited and the arguments and ideas in which it has been steeped: I straightway forget the author, the source, the wording and the other particulars.

I am so outstanding a forgetter that, along with all the rest, I forget even my own works and writings. People are constantly quoting me to me without my realizing it. If anyone wanted to know the sources of the verse and exempla that I have accumulated here, I would be at a loss to tell him, and yet I have only gone begging them at the doors of well-known and famous authors, not being satisfied with splendid material if it did not come from splendid honoured hands. In them, authority and reason coincide. No wonder that my own book incurs the same fate as the others and that my memory lets go of what I write as of what I read; of what I give as of what I receive.

Cicero says that philosophizing is nothing other than getting ready to die. That is because study and contemplation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves, keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it; or perhaps it because all the wisdom and argument in the world eventually come down to one conclusion; which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying.

Anyone else read Montaigne?
He's a real bro.
Reading his essays over the last couple of years of my life have been a real comfort.

>>6415372

Because the one thing they don't know is how to have fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLAtXWaz76o

We generally think that philosophers should be proud of their big brains, and be fans of thinking, self-reflection and rational analysis. But there is one philosopher, born in France in 1533, who had a refreshingly different take.

Michel de Montaigne was an intellectual who spent his writing life knocking the arrogance of intellectuals.
In his great masterpiece "Essais", he comes across as relentlessly modern, wise and intelligent but also as constantly modest and keen to debunk the pretensions of learning. Not least, he's extremely funny, reminding his readers to learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing, we must learn a more ample and important lesson, that we are but blockheads, or as he put it, "...on the highest throne in the world, we are seated still upon our asses."
Montaigne was a child of the Renaissance, and the ancient philosophers that was popular in Montaigne's day believed that our powers of reason could afford us a happiness and greatness denied to other creatures. Reason was a sophisticated, almost divine tool offering us mastery over the world all to ourselves. That was the line taken by philosophers like Cicero.
But this characterization of human reason enraged Montaigne. After hanging out with academics and philosophers he wrote "In practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives than [Cicero]". His point wasn't that human beings cannot reason at all, but simply that they tend to be far more arrogant about the limits of their brains. As he wrote "our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom", "whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind".

Perhaps the most obvious example of our madness is the struggle of living within the human body. Our bodies smell, ache, sag, throb, pulse and age, whatever the desires of our minds. Montaigne was the world's first and possibly only philosopher to talk at length about impotence, which seemed to him a prime example of how crazy and fragile our minds are. Montaigne had a friend who had grown impotent with a woman he particularly liked. Montaigne didn't blame the penis, the problem was the mind, the oppressive notion that we had complete control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this theoretical normality. The solution, Montaigne said, was to redraw our sense of what's normal by accepting a loss of command over the penis as a harmless, common possibility in sex. One could preempt its occurrence, as the stricken man discovered. In bed with a woman, he learned to admit beforehand that he was subject to this infirmity, and spoke openly about it, so relieving the intentions within his soul. By bearing the malady as something to be expected, his sense of constriction grew less, and weighed less heavily upon him.

1/?