Étienne de La Boétie

Statue of Étienne de La Boétie in Sarlat, France

In 1571 Montaigne quitted his job at the Parliament of Bordeaux and retired to his castle. He had enough of his work, as we saw last week. But there was also another reason that he resigned: He still missed his late friend Étienne de La Boétie, who had died eight years before. They had a close friendship and they had had deep conversations. One has the impression that one reason that Montaigne wrote his Essays is that they were a kind of continuation of his discussions with his friend. The influence of La Boétie can be seen in many places in the Essays; only in the Third Book, which Montaigne wrote much later, this influence is fading away. La Boétie’s impact on Montaigne was not only intellectual and spiritual, but it had also a material component, for Montaigne inherited La Boétie’s library, which the latter gave to his friend when he was dying. So it is not surprising that Montaigne dedicated both his Essays and his library to his late friend. But who was this man, who – outside France – is hardly known?

Étienne de La Boétie was born on 1 November 1530 in Sarlat, a town in the Périgord in southern France. He belonged to a patrician family that had worked its way up over the course of several generations. Not much is known about his childhood. We do know that Étienne's father died when he was young, and that he was raised then by his uncle Étienne, who has given him an excellent education. We can only guess which school La Boétie has visited. It may have been the famous Collège de Coqueret in Paris. Anyway, we do not come across his name again until 23 September 1553, when, according to the register of the University of Orléans, La Boétie had been granted a licentiate in law. His first teacher at this university was Anne du Bourg, who was then already leaning towards Protestantism, but was not yet that active fighter for the new religion, which he would later become in his time as a counsellor at the Parliament of Paris. Maybe La Boétie was also attracted to Protestantism at the time, but this is uncertain. What is certain is that he eventually remained Catholic, but was always moderate in his views. Before his university studies, La Boétie had already written his famous Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, possibly already at the age of sixteen, but the latest when he was 18 years old.
Apparently La Boétie had acquired a good reputation during his studies, for he was appointed counsellor of the Parliament of Bordeaux at the age of 23, although the minimum age for this was actually 25 years. He immediately lived up to this reputation, showed great commitment and soon received special assignments, followed by his first major commission in 1560. Soon other special commissions followed. In the meantime, he was married to Marguerite de Carle, a widow from a distinguished family with two children. At a large festive gathering in Bordeaux, probably in 1557, La Boétie met Michel de Montaigne. It was Montaigne who took the initiative, curious to get to know the person who had written the Discourse. It immediately clicked between them. Their friendship would last until La Boétie's death. However, they will not have seen each other often, because La Boétie regularly had to make long trips for the Parliament. An order from his colleagues to talk to the king about a better payment of salaries led him to Paris in 1560. Another time, in 1561, he had to go to the region of Agen, this time as an assistant to the king’s envoy, who had to settle the religious disputes there. This envoy had chosen La Boétie as his assistant precisely because of his moderate views. Partly thanks to La Boétie, the disputing parties reached an agreement. According to his biographer Bonnefon, La Boétie was one of the few thinkers then who took conscientious objection seriously. Even among those who advocated tolerance towards Protestantism, this tolerance was usually only a political means of preventing worse.
The peace in Agen, but also in Bordeaux and elsewhere, turned out to be no more than temporary. Because the Bordeaux Parliament feared an attack by Protestant troops, it was decided to recruit 1200 soldiers and to place every 100 of them under the command of a counsellor. One of these counsellors was La Boétie. It showed that the Parliament had a great confidence in his sense of justice and his ability to enforce authority. It would be Étienne de La Boétie’s last public act. Not long thereafter, he suddenly became ill. We do not know exactly what illness he had, but within ten days he died on 18 August 1563, aged 32, in the presence of his family and Montaigne.
Readers of Montaigne’s Essays will know Étienne de La Boétie mainly as a friend of Montaigne, but his importance is much wider. Outside of France and outside the circle of Montaigne readers he is best known for his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, particularly among peace activists and those who study the idea and practice of nonviolence. In his time already this work was famous and it circulated both among intellectuals and in Huguenot circles. It helped the latter in their fight for religious freedom and their opposition to the French king. It is questionable whether La Boétie intended it that way. Also after his death the work has not been forgotten. It has been reprinted many times to date, especially since the middle of the 19th century. Since then, it has influenced those seeking nonviolent means to resist violent oppression, such as Tolstoy and Gandhi and Dutch peace activist Bart de Ligt. But the Discourse is not the only work that La Boétie has written. Especially within France he is also known by his poems and his translations into French of several works by the classical writers Plutarch and Xenophon and by the Italian Ariosto. In France, La Boétie is seen as one of those who brought antiquity to the attention of his contemporaries. Both through his Discourse and by his contribution to the Renaissance, the influence of La Boétie has become permanent and in France many streets and schools bear his name. 

Sources
- Cocula, Anne-Marie, Étienne de La Boétie, Sud Ouest, Bordeaux, 1995.
- Delacomptée, Jean-Michel, Et qu’un seul soit l’ami. La Boétie, Gallimard, Parijs, 1995.

Random quote
A book – also in case it has been written in an honest way – has no value at least from one point of view: Actually nobody needs to write a book, for there is much else to do in this world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1989-1951)

Idleness

The side room of Montaigne’s library in the tower of his castle,
where he wrote his Essays. Left on the wall he wrote that he
resigned from his job on his birthday.

In 1571, Montaigne decided to resign from his job as a counsellor at the Parliament (court of justice) of Bordeaux and to retire to his castle. This was possible because he had become a rich man. After the death of his father in 1568, he had inherited the Castle of Montaigne and the entire estate that belonged to it. Now he could do what he liked and he didn’t need the income of a job any longer; a job that he didn’t like, because of all the scheming and intriguing by the other counsellors. Now he was a free man. Now he had time to read the books that he had inherited from his late friend Étienne de La Boétie. And he had time to manage his estate. But since he didn’t like the latter he left this to others as much as possible. And reading all day, every day, day in day out? To read is a pleasure, but doing nothing else is something different. It’s not what you can do all the time; at least, most of us cannot. Anyway, Montaigne could not. He had thought that “I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full leisure to entertain and divert itself, which I now hoped it might henceforth do, as being by time become more settled and mature…”. However, soon he became bored. He discovered that being too isolated from the world is not good for you. Moreover, he discovered that his mind begun to develop all kinds of strange ideas and fantasies, ideas without coherence and context. Or as Montaigne writes himself: His mind had become “like a horse that has broke from his rider, who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman would put him to…” and it had become full of “chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design”.
Montaigne solved the problem that he lived too isolated by returning to the world, as we know from his life history. Montaigne began to travel again, inside and outside France. And he started to network again, for Montaigne had also political aspirations. Although these political aspirations didn’t materialize in the way he had in his mind (it seems that he wanted to become France’s ambassador in Rome), it made that he became a mediator between Henry, the King of Navarre, (who would later become King Henry IV of France) and the French King Henry III; and it made that he became appointed mayor of Bordeaux (which he accepted reluctantly).
Montaigne solved the problem that his mind began to run away with him in a very different way: He began to reflect on what happened in his mind. Or as Montaigne writes himself: He began to “contemplate [the] strangeness and absurdity [of the ideas that whirled through his mind]”, and to write them down, together with his reflections on these ideas, “hoping in time to make it [=the mind] ashamed of itself.” This resulted in his Essays, which would become one of the most famous and most read books in the history of philosophy, a book that is still widely read, more than 400 years later.
Montaigne tells us what made him write his Essays, in “Of Idleness”, which is the eighth essay in Book I. Actually, it should have been the first essay, for it is a kind of statement why Montaigne began to write his work (beside his “To the reader”, the preface of the Essays). That’s why this essay is so important. But there is more. This essay tells us also something else: Humans cannot live by doing nothing. Humans cannot live isolated from the world. If you didn’t know it yet, you’ll have learned it now, in a time that a pandemic rules the world and one lockdown after the other is proclaimed. Man is a social being and when she or he is isolated from the world or isolates himself from the world, soon the mind begins to behave like a runaway horse and to develop all kinds of strange ideas. Then, as Montaigne made us clear by what he did and what he wrote, there are two things we must do: Go back to the world and bring order again in your mind, for idleness leads to nothing. 

P.S. I had promised myself to avoid writing again on the present pandemic. But what happens? I started writing this blog with a very different idea in my mind, although I did want to write about Montaigne’s essay “Of Idleness”, indeed. But as it often goes, once I had started to write, the writing process pushed me in a direction that I hadn’t planned and hadn’t foreseen, and in the end it moved me towards the covid pandemic again. No help. One cannot live isolated from the world. 

Source

All quotations are from Michel de Montaigne, “Of Idleness”, Essays, Book I, chapter VIII; Gutenberg translation: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#link2HCH0008

Random Note

You are a dictator. You are popular but your popularity is beginning to fade. What to do about it?

– Create an enemy

– Create a problem

– Create a provocation

In short: Create war. 

The Münchhausen Trilemma

You say that you are the King of Babylonia and I ask you “Why do you think so?” Generally then there are three ways to justify that you are, namely:
A) You say that your father was also King of Babylonia, and his father was, and so on, back into the past as far as man can remember.
B) Or you say: “I am the King of Babylonia according to the constitution. I have written the constitution in order to determine who will be the King of Babylonia. The constitution is the legal foundation of the Kingdom of Babylonia. So I am the legal King of Babylonia.”
C) Or you say that you are the King of Babylonia by the grace of God.
Although each of these three justifications that you are the King of Babylonia seems sound, there is a problem with each of them. Answer A has often been applied in history, and it is still valid for several monarchs in the present world, like the Emperor of Japan or (more or less) the King of the Netherlands or the Queen of England. However, maybe, your father was the legal king of Babylonia, and his father was, etc., but at a certain point we must stop going back in history because we don’t know the facts. And maybe there was once a king in the line who didn’t get his power in a legal way. Actually, what we have here is an infinite regression that we must break off at an arbitrary point because of the mystery of history.
On the face of it, Answer B seems sound. For if there is a constitution that appoints you as the King of Babylonia, it must be legal that you are the king. However, it is a circular reasoning, for you, the King of Babylonia, made the constitution and the constitution made you King of Babylonia. The King depends on the constitution and the constitution depends on the King.
Maybe then answer C is a correct justification that you are the King of Babylonia? Perhaps it is, but it’s merely a supposition that it is true, and if I am not religious, I don’t need to accept it. Answer C is a justification based on an axiom.
The trilemma that I have tried to explain here with the help of a fictitious King of Babylonia has first been formulated by a certain Agrippa, a sceptic philosopher who probably lived towards the end of the 1st century. However, nowadays it has especially become known by the work of the German philosopher Hans Albert (1921-) who called it the Münchhausen Trilemma, after the famous story about Baron von Münchhausen who pulled himself out of a mire by his own hair. (see here). According to Albert, in the end no knowledge, no truth or no statement can be established with certainty. For whatever argument or proof we bring forward in order to support a statement, it is always possible to ask further questions that cast doubt on each new argument or proof. In the end, we come into the situation that we have to choose between:
1) An infinite regression, which appears because of the necessity to go ever further back, but is not practically feasible and does not, therefore, provide a certain foundation.
2) A logical circle in the deduction, which is caused by the fact that one, in the need to found, falls back on statements which had already appeared before as requiring a foundation, and which circle does not lead to any certain foundation either.
3) A break of searching at a certain point, which indeed appears principally feasible, but would mean a random suspension of the principle of sufficient reason. (see Source; translation taken from the Wikipedia) We can call this point also dogmatism.
If the trilemma is true, and I think it is, the consequence is that no statement, no piece of knowledge, no assumed truth can be definitively substantiated. In this sense, there is no truth. In the end, we know nothing for certain. The only thing we can do then, so Albert, is to be critical and to make each statement, piece of knowledge, or supposed truth open to criticism, anyhow, for everything can be different from what is seems. Although I fully endorse this idea, there is a problem. For if the Münchhausen trilemma is right, no choice can be justified. Each choice is as good or as bad as any other choice. Then we are in the situation of Buridan’s ass, who now must choose not between two haystacks but between three haystacks. (see here). In such a situation living would be impossible. Then there is only one solution: just do what you think that is reasonable. Act! For action is the foundation of life. 

Source
- Hans Albert, Traktat über kritische Vernunft. Tübingen: J.B.Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1968 (a description of the Münchhausen Trilemma is on p. 13.

Random quote
Looters in normal times are pioneers from a historical perspective.

Peter Sloterdijk (1947-)

The rabbit-duck illusion

“Which animals are most like each other?” The original rabbit-duck illusion,
by an unknown author (see text).

In my blog last week, I used the rabbit-duck illusion, as it is usually called, to explain that there are two ways of looking at. Actually, the figure is not an illusion but an ambiguous image: It doesn’t evoke a false way of seeing but the image can be seen in two different ways that as such are correct. The figure has been made famous by Wittgenstein, who used it for explaining the difference between “seeing” and “seeing as”. When someone shows you the figure, you can say, for example: “I see a rabbit”. However, once you know that the figure is ambiguous and you can switch between the rabbit and the duck, you’ll say: “I see it as a rabbit”. Once we can see an image in different ways, we can notice aspects of the image, so Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, ix). This noticing of aspects is a theme that again and again returns in his later work.
Wittgenstein took the figure from an article by the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow, but the image was first published in 1892 in the German humour magazine Fliegende Blätter, which described it as “Rabbit and Duck” (see picture above). Also Jastrow talked about a rabbit and a duck, but in the original German version of the Philosophical Investigations (PI) Wittgenstein says that the image can be seen either as the head of a hare (Hase) or as the head of a duck (Ente). However, in the English version of PI this is translated as a rabbit-duck distinction. Why this difference? In view of the long ears, I would call the animal in the image a hare rather than a rabbit, and when I am running through the woods and fields around my town I am sure whether I see a hare or a rabbit.
Be it as it may, let me further call the animal in the figure a rabbit in agreement with the present usage. The image is not only philosophically and linguistically but also psychologically interesting. As psychologists know, seeing and watching are not spontaneous and not objective. One has to learn it. So one question is: How do children see the image? Alison Gopnik and her colleagues (source) tried to answer this question, and they found that 3-5 years old children don’t make the reversal between two aspects of an ambiguous image on its own. Others must tell them that it has two aspects. Only later some learn to switch spontaneously. Also the speed of switching between the rabbit and duck aspects is interesting: R. Wiseman and his colleagues found that more creative people find it easier to switch between the rabbit-duck aspects of the image than less creative people do. (source) I wonder whether this result depends on the ambiguous image you take for a study. Personally I find it easy to flip between the rabbit and the duck but difficult to do so in case of the old woman – young woman illusion (see here).
Also when you look at the rabbit-duck image has an impact on what you see. Peter Brugger and Susanne Brugger showed the image to different people, first on an Easter Sunday and later that same year on an October Sunday, and simply asked them to name the animal. This is what they found: “Whereas on Easter the drawing was significantly more often recognized as a bunny, in October it was considered a bird by most subjects…” (some mentioned another animal than a duck, such as a stork, a flamingo, or just “some kind of bird”) (source)
Seeing and watching are not objective, as said. The discussion about the meaning of the rabbit-duck illusion shows that we can see what we see in different ways. Even more, we don’t see only with our eyes but a big part of the process of seeing takes place in the brain. Impressions of light arrive in the brain and with the help of the information already present there, the brain constructs a picture and gives it a meaning at the same time. Actually the interpretation (meaning giving) and the construction of the picture are one process. However, the brain can also make construct pictures without an external input through the eyes, and actually it often happens. Therefore seeing – in the limited sense of receiving input through the eyes – is important, for although the construction of the picture takes place in the brain, what you see does have an impact, and if you cut off your brain from the world, it’s quite well possible that you keep a rabbit for a duck, or the other way round.

Random quote
Movement is … first and foremost the natural mode of being a body.

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1930-)

Two perspectives on “looking at”

At first, I thought it was a rabbit, but because it was

 swimming in the water, I realized that it was a duck.

Look at the figure above. I think that most readers will know that it can be seen either as a rabbit or as a duck but never as a rabbit and a duck at the same time. We can look at the figure either from a subjective point of view, also called the first-person perspective, or from an objective point of view, also called the third-person perspective. In the former case we focus our attention on my looking at the figure, in the latter case we focus our attention on my looking at the figure as such. I want to explain the difference with this figure:

                  

The left oval represents the first-person perspective; the right one represents the third-person perspective. That the words “the figure” are not enclosed by the left oval does not mean that the figure is ignored in the first-person perspective. One cannot “look at” just like that but one can only look at something. The theme of the first-person perspective in this example is, nonetheless, my looking. Likewise, the I as a subject is not covered by the third-person theme, but being the one who looks, I am involved in the analysis from the third-person point of view.
When I am looking at something (to be distinguished from just seeing), implicitly or explicitly I ask questions about what I watch. Such questions can be:
Q. What is the figure like for me?
And a possible answer is:
A. I see a sketch of a rabbit.
And then:
Q: Why does the figure represent a rabbit?
A: The two protrusions at the left are two ears and the little dent at the right is a mouth.
These questions and answers are questions from the first-person perspective, for they concern my subjective view. From the third-person perspective, one would ask questions like:
Q: What kind of figure is that?
A: It is an ambiguous figure representing both a rabbit and a duck, drawn for experimental purposes.
Q: Why do some see the figure as a rabbit and others as a duck?
A: That’s what your brain makes you think, on the basis of the light impulses that it receives from the piece of paper in front of you and your antecedent cognitive state, educational background and frame of mind.
In questions and answers from the third-person perspective my seeing and interpreting the figure as a subject is no longer present, but they concern the objective brain structures and processes and the input of these processes that take place “independent of me” by way of speaking. The first-person perspective is about what the figure means for me and which reasons I have for this interpretation, while the third-person perspective is about the objective causes that determine my perception of the figure as a certain thing and which I normally don’t know about.
It is not so that it is not possible that I, the first person that I am, take a third-person perspective towards myself. Nor is it so that another, a third person, has no access to my first-person perspective, no matter how. For taking a perspective is approaching a general theme in a certain manner by highlighting either the subject or the object, guided by questions of a certain type. And there is no reason why I (the first person) cannot ask the same questions about myself that another (a third person) asks about me or that I ask about another from the third-person perspective. On the other hand, there is also no reason why another cannot ask the same questions about me that I ask about myself. However, unlike me, the other has no direct access to the answers on these questions and therefore his or her knowledge of my first-person perspective can only be found via more or less complicated ways of understanding. Here I can’t elaborate such ways of understanding (see bij de Weg 1996), but what this analysis in terms of questions of the two perspectives makes clear is that these two ways to look at what is around us and to understand and explain what is around us are not contradictory in the sense that only one perspective is correct at the cost of the other, but that the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective are alternative ways of looking at something. The perspectives represent different standpoints characterised by different types of questions. As Karl-Otto Apel worded it in his “complementarity thesis” (1979, pp. 12-13):

1.    The perspectives supplement each other: what is known, experienced or observed from one perspective cannot be known, experienced and observed from the other perspective.
2.    The perspectives exclude each other: they have different intentions, expressed in different types of questions. The first-person perspective is subject directed; the third-person perspective is object directed.
3.    For both reasons, the perspectives cannot be reduced to each other.
It’s already more than forty years ago that Apel developed these ideas and presented his analysis, and both perspectives are still either confused or it is so that one perspective is idolized at the cost of the other (and usually it is, in science at least, that the third-person perspective is seen as the only right method). But is it so difficult to see that different types of questions lead to different types of answers and isn’t it quite authoritarian to forbid some types of questions being asked? 

References
Apel, K-O 1979b, “Types of Social Science in the Light of Human Cognitive Interests”, in: S.C. Brown ed., Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences, Brighton, Sussex etc.: Harvester Press etc., pp. 3-50.
Weg, Henk bij de 1996, De betekenis van zin voor het begrijpen van handelingen, Kampen: Kok Agora.