…the house I live in…

“There is no description equal in difficulty, or certainly in usefulness, to the description of oneself.” II.6

Yes friends, it has taken me a tad longer than I anticipated to get back to work here. Please forgive me. Now, lets carry on.

We live in a time of high reveal. There are an estimated 92 million selfies taken and shared daily, accounting for 4 percent of the approximately 2.3 billion photos taken every day. With a camera embedded in the device we carry around with us, we can turn it on ourselves at any time, in any situation, and share the results for all to see. I once took and posted a photo of my foot prints on a sandy beach, commenting, humorously, I should emphasize, that it was evidence that I exist. It was not a selfie in the strictest sense but nonetheless an example of my self-absorption. Here are my footprints, therefore I exist in a weird Cartesian twist. We participate, many of us, in the contemporary selfie phenomenon emblematic of the times in which we live. Is it an unhealthy narcissism or a celebration of what we call the self? Socrates practiced philosophy not as theory but as an authentic way of life germinating from self-examination. Kierkegaard noted that Socrates’ “whole life was [a] personal preoccupation with himself…” Would Socrates, I wonder, take a selfie in the Agora?

I was raised in a modest mid-west household where talking about yourself was not encouraged. Likewise, self-examination might have been labeled navel-gazing, obviously not a thing to be encouraged in the young. While taking a selfie does not qualify as self-examination in any meaningful fashion it does point to an interest in one’s being, in a sort of raw-bits-of-existence way. Regardless, it would have likely triggered an eye-roll in my stalwart parents.

So it was that in returning to Montaigne recently I began to question some simple assumptions.

Let’s revisit the introduction to The Essays, the second paragraph specifically:

“If I had written to seek the world’s favor, I should have bedecked myself better, and should present myself in a studied posture. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed. Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature’s first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.”

If one uploads a photo to Instagram there is a palette of filters by which to change and edit the image, depending on your aesthetic direction. Montaigne is as much as saying, “hashtag no filter.” He wishes to portray himself, and be seen, “without straining or artifice.” There is no aesthetic direction, only lack of such, though when I think about it, that too is a decision in an aesthetic direction.

Montaigne is most often labeled a skeptic. That is a simple reduction, and like most reductions, it misses the point without being generally incorrect. As the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in his essay collection, Signs,

“Skepticism has two sides. It means that nothing is true, but also that nothing is false. It rejects all opinions and all behavior as absurd, but it thereby deprives us of the means of rejecting any one as false. Destroying dogmatic, partial, or abstract truth, it insinuates the idea of a total truth with all the necessary facets and mediations. If it multiplies contrasts and contradicts, it is because truth demands it.”

And, in a direct reference to Montaigne, Merleau-Ponty states,

“Montaigne begins by teaching that all truth contradicts itself; perhaps he ends up recognizing that contradiction is truth.”

This seems at the very heart of the matter. “I expose myself entire,” Montaigne writes, contradictions and all. He continues,

“…my portrait is a cadaver on which the veins, the muscles, and the tendons appear at a glance, each part in its place….It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence.” (II.6)

Montaigne’s skepticism overturns assumed truths only to reveal other assumed truths, often in contradiction. His probing consciousness never grows weary of discovering these paradoxes within himself. “It is a thorny undertaking,” he writes,

“and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.”

I’ll pick it up from here with my next post. It was good to see you again. Thanks for reading!