Michel de Montaigne, in his essay ‘That Men by Various Ways Arrive at the Same End’, paints a conflicted portrait of human nature:
“Man (in good earnest) is a marvelous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.”
Michel de Montaigne
Very hard indeed – agreed on that, Michel. And yet, we keep on trying. Although today the thought that our lives are works in progress may sound like a worn and tiresome cliche, the familiarity may be deceptive.
Contemporary thinkers do a lot of instructive and even inspiring work in critically illuminating the vital role of the familiar in our lives. It is a formidable and noiseless force that directs our choices and shapes our beliefs without us recognising its work. I fully agree with Sara Ahmed’s invitation to consider what we miss when we move on familiar ground. The familiar takes form precisely by being unnoticed.
“In the face of what appears, we must ask what disappears.”
Sara Ahmed in her book ‘Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others’ (2006)
However, perhaps an improbable source to contemplate the familiar, Montaigne, the French humanist philosopher, observed in his almost 450-year-old essay on the inconsistency of human ways that it might have been the sheer familiarity of courage in battle that left Alexander the Great unmoved by the valour of some of his adversaries, leading to less-than-charitable treatment of them.
“Was it that the height of courage was so natural and familiar to this conqueror, that because he could not admire, he respected it the less? Or was it that he conceived valour to be a virtue so peculiar to himself, that his pride could not, wihout envy, endure it in another? Or was it that the natural impetuosity of his fury was incapable of opposition?”
Michel deMontaigne, “That Men by Various Ways Arrive at the Same End”
I would venture to answer that even Alexander himself could not, in all honesty, point out a single and absolute reason for his actions, even though he might have felt convinced in the moment. Montaigne does not offer a definite answer beyond his judgement that humans are ‘fickle subjects’, which, I believe, is precisely his point.
Reading Montaigne’s essays is akin to the unfolding of a relationship with a person. Both are continuous projects, allowing for multiple interpretations and defying a definitive, universal judgement.
So it is. You meet a person, start talking, form a first impression informed by preconceptions so familiar to you that their persuasion goes unnoticed, then they say or do something, and you adjust your thoughts, you form a second, a third, a tenth opinion, which already at least in part contradicts the first and potentially the third, while the fifth and the eight might still give you a feeling you know this person, you are familiar with their personality until they surprise you (and themselves!) after years of friendship, leaving you bewildered and wondering – I thought I knew this person, but this… this is soout of character for them! What happened? What did I miss?
Who knows, but just maybe the ocean of the familiar concealed the human as “a marvelous vain, fickle, and unstable subject”, Montaigne and Ahmed might remind us.
keep exploring!
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