What do I know?

Montaigne’s Essays remain interesting, also more than 400 years after its first publication. I cannot stop taking them in my hands now and then and read one or another essay. I have underlined many passages and I have marked those essays that I find most interesting. One of them is essay 27 (or 26 in some editions like the Gutenberg translation; but this time I’ll quote from the translation by Charles Cotton). This essay is very relevant to the present situation in which the world is amid a pandemic and in which a war in Europe undermines the social and economic order. In this situation there is much confusion about what is true and what is false; what is fact and what is fake. Scientific facts are being opposed to alternative ideas about the origin of the pandemic. It is not always clear what is happening on the European battlefield or what the real reasons behind the war are. In this confusing situation, Montaigne gives us useful advices that help us finding our way.
Essay 27 (26) is titled “It is folly to refer truth and error to our own capacity”. Montaigne says here that we tend to believe what we already think to know and to reject what seems unlikely to us. However, he wonders whether this is right. At first sight it is, for we believe what we believe not without reason. However, when we take a closer look at the reasons for our beliefs, it is often so that our beliefs are only a matter of custom. When we try to find out why we believe something that someone else may consider weird “assuredly we shall find that it is rather custom than knowledge that takes away their strangeness”. We tend to think that people who hold different views are less reasonable than we are. But even if this would be true, “tis a foolish presumption to slight and condemn all things for false that do not appear to us probable; which is the ordinary vice of such as fancy themselves wiser than their neighbors.”
Of course, we must not automatically accept anything that is told to us, but on the other hand, we must not reject it in advance, just because it seems unlikely. According to Montaigne we must try to find a middle course between credulity and scepticism. It is arrogant to consider impossible everything that seems unlikely to us. “If we give the names of monster and miracle to everything our reason cannot comprehend, how many are continually presented before our eyes?” Much of what we consider unlikely seems unlikely to us because of our prejudices is what Montaigne apparently wants to tell us here.
Now it often happens that otherwise reliable people tell us unbelievable things. If we don’t want to believe them, even then let us not reject as impossible what they told us. Who knows what evidence we’ll get later for it? Better is, so Montaigne, to suspend the judgment. “[T]o condemn [something] as impossible, is by a temerarious presumption to pretend to know the utmost bounds of possibility.” For there is a “difference betwixt the impossible and the unusual, and betwixt that which is contrary to the order and course of nature and contrary to the common opinion of men”. On the one hand, one must not believe rashly and on the other hand not be too incredulous. What now seems unlikely, can later turn out to be true. “Tis a presumption of great danger and consequence, besides the absurd temerity it draws after it, to contemn what we do not comprehend.” We, too, continuously change our minds. What we once considered true, may later be proved to be false, and the other way round. Moreover, what we think is full of contradictions. “Why do we not consider what contradictions we find in our own judgments; how many things were yesterday articles of our faith, that to-day appear no other than fables? Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul; the last prompts us to thrust our noses into everything, the other forbids us to leave anything doubtful and undecided.”
So far Montaigne in essay 27 (26). Montaigne lived in a time when science began to develop. Eternal truths were overthrown. What once were facts was uncovered as fake. Or fake was shown to be fact. People of both sides denounced each other. That’s also what we see in the present world; a world full of confusion and contradiction. I think that I don’t need to explain this here. We hear many half-truths and half-lies; facts that later had to be changed into other facts; conspiracy theories; and who knows what more. But Montaigne tells us that we must be open to all views. He does not say that we must believe everything, but we must lend an ear to other views, and often we’ll see that it’s better to suspend a definitive judgment than just state that the truth is on our side. How often isn’t it so that a fact becomes fake (or vice versa)? Not without reason Montaigne’s motto was “Que sais je?”. What do I know?