We all stand on the shoulders of others. In
my blog last week, we have seen how Wittgenstein has been influenced by
Spinoza, albeit only a little bit. However, with the exception of a short
remark in his personal diary Wittgenstein doesn’t mention Spinoza in his work, just
as he mentions hardly any other name in his writings. As for this he should have
patterned himself on Montaigne, one of the first modern philosophers.
Montaigne’s Essays are full of
quotes. He mentions always the authors who stimulated him to develop his ideas.
For a big part his Essays are a debate
of Montaigne with his predecessors and we see how Montaigne grows by it.
On the other hand, Montaigne had and still
has an impact on thinkers after him. Especially during the first years after
his death he had, but actually his influence extends till this day. Christophe
Bardyn – the most important shoulder for this blog – writes in his splendid
Montaigne biography that the Essays
were widely read in the seventeenth century, even to that extent that one could
promote the reading of one’s own work just by referring to Montaigne (a trick
that is still applied: Write how your book relates to other important works,
and the chance that it will be read increases). Two of his most important
readers in those days were Blaise Pascal and René Descartes. A few years ago I
have written already about the influence of Montaigne on Pascal (see my blog dated
23 December 2013), although Pascal called the Essays a “foolish project”, since it was not done to write about
yourself, he said. Anyway, the impact of Montaigne on Pascal is explicit. On
the other hand, as Bardyn notes, the indebtedness of Descartes to Montaigne is
inconspicuous and not properly expressed, although it is decisive. It’s mainly
indirect. For example, actually the whole Discourse
on the Method is an application of Montaigne’s idea of doubt on the
foundations of the knowledge of his time, but Descartes doesn’t mention
Montaigne’s name in this grounding work. By using passages and ideas from the Essays without crediting the source,
today Descartes would risk being accused of plagiarism. Even more, Descartes’s indebtedness
to Montaigne if not his plagiarism starts already in the first sentence of the Discourse, where he writes:
“Good sense is the best shared-out thing in
the world; for everyone thinks he has such a good supply of it that he doesn’t
want more, even if he is extremely hard to please about other things.” It seems
to be an original if not brilliant intro for what would become one of the most
influential philosophical works in history, but Montaigne had written already
before him:
“’Tis commonly said that the justest
portion Nature has given us of her favours is that of sense; for there is no
one who is not contented with his share: is it not reason? whoever should see
beyond that, would see beyond his sight.” (Essays,
book II, 17).
It is as if Descartes wanted to profit by
Montaigne’s popularity without mentioning his name. Or he wanted to appear more
original than he really was. But when Descartes would have mentioned his
sources, nobody would have detracted even a little bit from his achievements.
We all stand on the shoulders of others, or
as Isaac Newton said it: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the
shoulders of giants.” In other words, everything we do we couldn’t have been done
without what our predecessors had done before us. By speaking of “giants” and
not simply of “others” Newton implicitly acknowledged that his predecessors
were greater than himself. And isn’t it so that making a start is often more
difficult than to continue? Descartes was a giant because he made many
important (re)starts in philosophy and science. Paying tribute to his gigantic
predecessors would have made him even taller.
Shoulders
- Bardyn, Christophe, Montaigne. La splendeur de la liberté. Paris:
Flammarion, 2015; pp. 467-8 (my main shoulder for this blog)
- Descartes, René de, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one’s Reason and Seeking
Truth
in the Sciences. 2007. On https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf
- Montaigne. Michel de, Essays. Adelaide: University of
Adelaide, 2015. On https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/montaigne/michel/essays/complete.html#book2.17
- Phillips, John, “Montaigne and
Descartes”. On https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/mondes.htm
- Wikipedia
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