[These are excerpts from the “Consolation for Inadequacy,” the fourth chapter of the author’s The Consolations of Philosophy (New York:Vintage Books, 2000).]

MICHAEL MONTAIGNE was sent to one of France’s best educational establishments, the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, founded in 1533 to replace the city’s old and inadequate Collège des Arts. By the time he started attending classes at the age of six, the school had developed a national reputation as a center of learning.

The staff included an enlightened principal, André de Gouvéa, a renowned Greek scholar, Nicolas de Grouchy, an Aristotelian scholar, Guilllaume Guerente, and the Scottish poet, George Buchanan.

If one tries to define the philosophy of education underpinning the Collège de Guyenne, or indeed that of most schools and universities before and after it, one might loosely suggest it to be based on the idea that the more a student learns about the world (history, science, literature), the better. But Montaigne, after following the curriculum at the Collège dutifully until graduation, added an important proviso:

If a man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.”

Only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding.
Two great thinkers of antiquity were likely to have figured prominently in the curriculum at the Collège de Guyenne and have been held as exemplars of intelligence.

Students would have been introduced to Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics in which the Greek philosopher pioneered logic, and stated that if A is predicated of every B, and B of every C, necessarily A is predicated of every C. Aristotle argued that if a proposition says or denies P of S, then S and P are its terms, with P being the predicate term and S the subject term, and added that all propositions are either universal or particular, affirming or denying the P of every S or part of S.

Then there was the Roman scholar, Marcus Terentius Varro, who assembled a library for Julius Caesar and wrote six hundred books, including an encyclopedia on the liberal arts and 25 books on etymology and linguistics.

Montaigne was not unmoved. It is a feat to write a shelf of books on the origins of words and to discover universal affirmatives. And yet if we were to find that those who did so were no happier or indeed a little more unhappy than those who had never heard of philosophical logic, we might wonder. Montaigne considered the lives of Aristotle and Varro, and raised a question: “What good did their great erudition do for Varro and Aristotle? Did it free them from human ills? Did it relieve them of misfortunes such as befall a common porter? Could logic console them for the gout?”

To understand why the two men could have been both so erudite and so unhappy, Montaigne distinguished between two categories of knowledge: learning and wisdom. In the category of learning, he placed among other subjects logic, etymology, grammar, Latin and Greek. And in the category of wisdom, he placed a far broader, more elusive and more valuable kind of knowledge, everything that could help a person to live well, by which Montaigne meant to help them live happily and morally.
The problem with the Collège de Guyenne, despite its professional staff and principal, was that it excelled at imparting learning but failed entirely in imparting wisdom, repeating at an institutional level the errors that have marred the personal lives of Varro and Aristotle:

“I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned. And it has succeeded. It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology…

“We readily inquire, ‘Does he know Greek or Latin?’ ‘Can he write poetry or prose?’ But what matters most is what we put last: ‘Has he become better and wiser?’ We ought to find out not who understands most but who understands best. We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty.”

He had never been good at sports: “At dancing, tennis and wrestling, I have not been able to acquire more than a slight, vulgar skill; and at swimming, fencing, vaulting and jumping, no skill at all.” Nevertheless, so strong was Montaigne’s objection to the lack of wisdom imparted by most schoolteachers that he did not shrink from suggesting a drastic alternative to the classroom for the youth of France:

“If our souls do not move with a better motion and if we do not have a healthier judgment, then I would just as soon (prefer) that a pupil spend his time playing tennis.”

He would of course have preferred students to go to school, but to schools that taught them wisdom rather than the etymology of the word and could correct the long-standing intellectual bias towards abstract questions.

Thales from Miletus in Asia Minor was an early example of the bias, celebrated throughout the ages for having in the sixth century BC tried to measure the heavens and for having determined the height of the Great Pyramid of Egypt according to the theorem of similar triangles – a complicated and dazzling achievement, no doubt, but not what Montaigne wished to see dominate his curriculum. He had greater sympathy with the implicit educational philosophy of one of Thales’s impudent young acquaintances:
“I have always felt grateful to this girl from Miletus who, seeing the local philoso-pher…with his eyes staring upwards, constantly occupied in contemplating the vault of heaven, tripped him up, to warn him that there was time enough to occupy his thoughts with things above the clouds when he had accounted for everything lying before his feet… You can make exactly the same reproach as the woman made against Thales against anyone concerned with philosophy: he fails to see what lies before his feet.”

Montaigne noted in other areas a similar tendency to privilege extraordinary activities over humbler but no less important ones – and just like the girl from Miletus, tried to bring us back to Earth:

“Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating, and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor being false to yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult. Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and as tense as those other lives.

So what would Montaigne wish pupils to learn at school? What kind of examinations could have tested the wise intelligence he had in mind, on so far removed from the mental skills of Aristotle and Varro? The examinations would have raised questions about the challenges of the quotidian life: love, sex, illness, death. Children, money and ambition.

Setting people examination papers measuring wisdom rather than learning would probably result in an immediate realignment in the hierarchy of intelligence – and supporting a new élite. Montaigne delighted in the prospect of the incongruous people who would now be recognized as cleverer than the lauded but often unworthy traditional candidates.

It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it. Profound ideas cannot, after all, be explained in the language of children. Yet, the association between difficulty and profundity might less generously be described as a manifestation in the literary sphere of a perversity similar to an emotional life, where people who are mysterious and elusive can inspire a respect in modest men that reliable and clear ones do not.

back to top                      post a comment

NOTES:

Subhead