Gospel & Universe ❤️ Three Little Words

Montaigne’s Balance

On the next pages page I look at several thinkers who offer ways to think critically. I start with the Greek skeptic Pyrrho, who’s notion of equilibrium influences Montaigne and many others. I then look at the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who suggests that pivoting between different viewpoints can bring you closer to Nature and its spiritual mysteries. Finally, I look at Hegel, who argues that the process of fusing different perspectives is also an evolutionary one.

These thinkers provide various techniques or paradigms which allow people to see that ideas, like experiences, are contingent and always subject to change. These techniques help the mind to distance itself from fixed ideas, to escape dichotomous or polar thinking, and to shift toward new ways of thinking and feeling. The mind is thus free to explore, juxtapose, fuse, or otherwise transmute new ideas.

These thinkers also help to get at the nature and development of agnosticism. Zhuangzi’s geographical and cultural distance from Europe means that he had no impact on thinkers like Pyrrho, Aurelius, or Montaigne, and yet his ideas are strangely similar. All of them are similar to agnostics in that they employ critical distance to rethink their worlds and to balance opposing views, yet they are also different from agnostics in that they believe in a fundamentally good or positive essence in Nature. Likewise, Hegel, with his notion that critical distance progresses dialectically toward higher fusions of thought, is more optimistic than agnostics, who might use a similar dialectic yet without the certainty that it will lead to a higher evolution.

One of the strongest forerunners of agnosticism is skepticism, which was first explained in detail by Pyrrho and which plays a large role in the thinking of Montaigne — as I indicate in the chart below by the arrows from Classical to Modern thinkers, and from Pyrrho to Montaigne:

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In his long essay, Apologie de Raymond Sebon (c.1576), Michel de Montaigne refers to the Greek skeptics, who don’t claim to have found the truth but rather to be searching for truth. Montaigne refers to Pyrrho and other skeptics or “épéchistes,” who take their name from the Greek verb for suspending judgment, which is a fundamental aspect of critical thinking. Montaigne says that these skeptics believe that “those who think they’ve found the truth delude themselves infinitely.” He then quotes Lucretius: “As to he who thinks that one can know nothing, he equally doesn’t know if one knows enough to say that one knows nothing.”

Montaigne’s next paragraph is particularly helpful in getting at the origins of agnosticism:

Ignorance that knows itself, which judges itself and condemns itself, is not a complete ignorance. To be that, it would need to not know itself. In this sense the professed attitude of the Pyrrhonians is to balance, to doubt and to search, and to not take anything for sure or certain.

L’ignorance qui se sçait, qui se juge, et qui se condamne, ce n’est pas une entiere ignorance: Pour l’estre, il faut qu’elle s’ignore soy-mesme. De façon que la profession des Pyrrhoniens est, de bransler, doubter, et enquerir, ne s’asseurer de rien, de rien ne se respondre. (trans. by RYC, based on the original 16th French text and on André Lanly’s modernized French text).

About 30 pages later, Montaigne returns to the idea of balance, and explains why the phrase Je doute (I doubt) isn’t as useful as Que sais-je? (What know I?):

I see the Pyrrhonian philosophers as unable to express their general conception in any manner of speech. It would require a new language, our own formed too much from the affirmative propositions that are their enemy. When they say I doubt one wants to grab them by the throat and make them admit that they know at the very least that they doubt. [… Their idea of doubt] is conveyed more clearly by the question What do I know? as it carries with it the emblem of balance.

Je voy les philosophes Pyrrhoniens qui ne peuvent exprimer leur generale conception en aucune maniere de parler: car il leur faudroit un nouveau langage. Le nostre est tout formé de propositions affirmatives, qui leur sont du tout ennemies. De façon que quand ils disent, Je doubte, on les tient incontinent à la gorge, pour leur faire avouër, qu’aumoins assurent et sçavent ils cela, qu’ils doubtent. […] Cette fantasie est plus seurement conceuë par interrogation: Que sçay-je? comme je la porte à la devise d’une balance.

In a note to this “emblem of balance,” André Lanly writes that in 1576 Montaigne engraved a medal with the Pyrrhonian motto Que sais-je?, along with the image of a balance symbolizing “the impotence of his judgment to lean one way rather than the other.”

It’s worth thinking about Montaigne’s image of a balance in relation to the image of the coin which Pascal presents a century later. In proposing his famous wager, Pascal writes that one must decide whether or not God exists, just as one must choose heads or tails. “God exists or He doesn’t. But to which side will we lean?” (« Dieu est, ou il n'est pas. » Mais de quel côté pencherons-nous?). For Montaigne, this wasn’t a relevant question, since he already believed implicitly in God. Yet Montaigne’s paradigm of not leaning one way or the other, and instead suspending judgment, suggests a critical distance that he consciously imports from the pagan Classical world to the humanist Christian world. Over the centuries the type of humanist skepticism that we find in Montaigne combined with empiricism and science to remove the implicit part of belief, making philosophers as likely to lean toward disbelief as toward belief. In this sense, the balance of the Ancients is more completely restored. Pascal may insist that we choose heads or tails, but subsequent thinkers argue that it’s more reasonable to leave the coin spinning in the air. Others, like Hume in the 18th century, question everything so radically that every instance of our lives is put into question, from belief in God to the action of flipping a coin, to the nature of the metal that composes the coin.

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Next: ❤️ Pyrrho’s Equilibrium & Zhuangzi’s Pivot

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