2 posts tagged “montaigne”
Fortune sometimes seems precisely to lie in ambush for the last day of a man's life in order to display her power to topple in a moment what she had built up over the length of years, and to make us follow Laberius and exclaim: 'Nimirum hac die una plus vixi, mihi quam vivendum fuit.' [I have lived this day one day longer than I ought to have lived. -- Macrobius, Saturnalia]
The good counsel of Solon could be taken that way. But he was a
philosopher: for such, the favours and ill graces of Fortune do
not rank as happiness or unhappiness and for them great honours and
powers are non-essential properties, counted virtually as things
indifferent. So it seems likely to me that he was looking beyond
that, intending to tell us that happiness in life (depending as it does
on the tranquillity and contentment of a spirit well-born and on the
resolution and assurance of an ordered soul) may never be attributed to
any man until we have seen him act out the last scene in his play,
which is indubitably the hardest (Erasmus, Apophthegmata,
V). In all the rest he can wear an actor's mask: those fine
philosophical arguments may be only a pose, or whatever else befalls us
may not assay us to the quick, allowing us to keep our countenance
serene. But in that last scene played between death and ourself
there is no more feigning; we must speak straightforward French; we
must show whatever is good and clean in the bottom of the pot:
Nam verae voces tum demum pectore ab imo
Ejiciuntur, et eripitur persona, manet res
[Only then are true words uttered from deep in our breast.
The mask is ripped off: reality remains. -- Lucretius]
That is why all the other actions in our life must be tried on the touchstone of this final deed. It is the Master-day, the day which judges all the others; it is (says one of the Ancients [Seneca]) the day which must judge all my years now past. The assay of the fruits of my studies is postponed unto death. Then we shall see if my arguments come from my lips or my heart. -- Montaigne, Essays, 1:19
Must no one at all, then, be called happy while he lives; must we, as Solon says, see the end? Even if we are to lay down this doctrine, is it also the case that a man is happy when he is dead? Or is not this quite absurd, especially for us who say that happiness is an activity? But if we do not call the dead man happy, and if Solon does not mean this, but that one can then safely call a man blessed as being at last beyond evils and misfortunes, this also affords matter for discussion; for both evil and good are thought to exist for a dead man, as much as for one who is alive but not aware of them; e.g. honours and dishonours and the good or bad fortunes of children and in general of descendants....
Now many events happen by chance, and events differing in importance;
small pieces of good fortune or of its opposite clearly do not weigh down
the scales of life one way or the other, but a multitude of great events
if they turn out well will make life happier (for not only are they themselves
such as to add beauty to life, but the way a man deals with them may be
noble and good), while if they turn out ill they crush and maim happiness;
for they both bring pain with them and hinder many activities. Yet even
in these nobility shines through, when a man bears with resignation many
great misfortunes, not through insensibility to pain but through nobility
and greatness of soul.
-- Nichomachean Ethics, Book 1:10
It is not
merely academic to wonder how Michel de Montaigne’s spacious library
affected his views on toleration, or whether René Descartes could
have conceived the Meditations on First
Philosophy anywhere but from within his
study, for such questions embrace wider ethical and political concerns. We
are, all of us, shaped by as well as shapers of our built
environment—a landscape, as renowned architect Daniel
Libeskind likes to remind us, that exists more in time than in space. -- Adam Scharr, "A Philosopher's View"
In this respect, I concur with Joseph Fell when he writes that, “The entirety of Heidegger’s thinking turned out to be a protracted effort at remembering the place in which all human experience—practical or theoretical, willed or reasoned, poetic or technical—has always come to pass.” Indeed, I would argue that Heidegger’s work provides us with perhaps the most important and sustained inquiry into place to be found in the history of Western thought. -- Jeff Malpas, Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, and World (MIT Press, 2007), p. 3
With Being and Time . . . the “question of Being” . . . concerns the question of being qua being. It becomes thematic in Being and Time under the name of “the question of the meaning [Sinn] of being.” Later this formulation was given up in favor of that of “the question of the truth of being,” and finally in favor of that of “the question concerning the place or location of being” [Ortschaft des Seins], from which the name topology of being arose [Topologie des Seins]. Three terms which succeed one another and at the same time indicate three steps along the way of thinking: MEANING—TRUTH—PLACE (τοποσ). -- Martin Heidegger, Seminar at Le Thor, 1966
