Random quote
It is generally surprising these days that war could arise in our time, in our Europe, between civilized states. … But waging war, that is, trying to give themselves justice through the arms, at some point does every person and every group, who feel no law, protective or threatening, above them.

Albert Verwey (1856-1937)

Montaigne as a psychologist

When psychology did not yet exist as a separate science, so before the mid-19th century, it was part of philosophy and especially philosophers wrote about psychological themes. So, if you didn’t want to follow the commonsense psychological advices of your family and friends or other persons you trusted, or if you didn’t trust your own commonsense views, you tried to find out what philosophers had written about your problem or how philosophers could provide an answer to your question. So you turned to Aristotle, or Spinoza or to another thinker. Also Montaigne wrote sometimes about philosophical themes, for example in essay 4 of Book I of his Essays: “How the soul expends its passions upon false objects, when the true are missed”. Here, Montaigne tells us that people who are frustrated often direct themselves to the wrong object in order to take it out; especially, when there is no other way or no decent way to do something about your frustration. For instance, Montaigne tells us that “a gentleman of [his] country] marvellously tormented with the gout … [said] in the extremity of his [pains] he must needs have something to quarrel with, and that railing at and cursing, one while the Bologna sausages, and another the dried tongues and the hams, was some mitigation to his pain.”
Some other examples mentioned by Montaigne: Pulling your hair out of sorrow. Or the Persian King Xerxes who whipped the Hellespont because a gale had destroyed the bridges he was building. Or “Caligula demolished a very beautiful palace for the pleasure his mother had once enjoyed there.” Some wanted to punish even God or their gods, because they hadn’t helped them or had obstructed their plans.
I think it is a kind of behaviour that most of us know or even have performed themselves. You give a kick against the door or other object, because you are frustrated, although these objects don’t have any relationship with your frustration (and if they would have, even then they couldn’t help, for objects have no will). Others become aggressive, for instance football supporters, because their club has lost a match. Examples abound, and you’ll certainly find more, either because you sometimes behaved so, or because you have seen others doing so or have heard of it.
At first glance, it seems that Montaigne mocks this kind of behaviour, and some Montaigne interpreters explain the essay this way. Doesn’t Montaigne mention such behaviour “folly”? However, a closer reading of the essay shows a deep psychological insight into the matter. For Montaigne doesn’t only ridicule the behaviour, but he explains also its causes: “So it seems that the soul, being transported and discomposed, turns its violence upon itself, if not supplied with something to oppose it, and therefore always requires an object at which to aim, and whereon to act.” And if we cannot find an object that fits the frustration, we look for something else, even if it has nothing to do with the frustration. “And we see that the soul, in its passions, inclines rather to deceive itself, by creating a false and fantastical subject, even contrary to its own belief, than not to have something to work upon.”
This is a deep insight, for once we know the causes of our frustrated and irrational behaviour, we can try to do something about it and to look for a reasonable alternative or to learn to behave ourselves. And that’s what modern psychologists do. On the internet, for instance, you can find many tips how to control your frustration and how to lead it in a positive direction. To give your soul an object, in Montaigne’s terms. Montaigne himself did not do so, but at the end of the essay, he gives us the good advice to restrain ourselves, for it has no sense to let yourself go. Or address your frustration to yourself: “We can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.” But isn’t this what we do, when we pull our hair out of sorrow?

Random quote
A lot of the ideas that appear silly only appear silly because you’ve looked at the surface of them

Anthony Gottlieb (1956-)

On sorrow

“The Grieving Parents” by Kathe Kollwitz, a memorial to her son Peter,

killed during the First World War (German war cemetery, Vladslo, Belgium)

Emotions are complex, and we all have them. It’s why Montaigne writes so often about them. For example, the second essay in Book I of his Essays is dedicated to the emotion “tristesse”, which can be translated as sorrow, sadness or grief. It’s an emotion many people have and maybe he has it more than the average people, Montaigne says. And – what he doesn’t say in this essay, though –wasn’t his whole essay-project built on this same emotion? Hadn’t Montaigne started to write his essays because of his grief for his late friend Étienne de la Boétie, a grief that again and again comes to the surface in his Essays? And the whole world is steeped in this emotion, whether we call it sorrow, sadness or grief, which are all aspects of the same, to that extent that the world “is pleased to grace it with a particular esteem, clothing therewith wisdom, virtue, and conscience.” Montaigne doesn’t like this. It is “foolish and sordid guise”.
Sorrow is a fickle, multi-faced emotion. It’s not “what you see is what you get”. The emotion you see on the face or in the behaviour of a human, doesn’t need to be the emotion that this person feels in the heart. It’s so for all emotions but maybe in particular it is so for the emotion of sorrow (to use one word for the sorrow-sadness-grief emotional complex). Montaigne illustrates this with several examples. First he tells us the story of Psammenitus, an Egyptian king who was defeated and taken prisoner. He saw his daughter passing, who had been made a slave, and he showed no emotion. Then Psammenitus saw his son led away to execution, and still he showed no emotion. Then he saw one of his domestic and familiar friends brought in among the captives, and only then did Psammenitus show extreme sadness. Why only then? Didn’t he care about his daughter and son? No. When asked, Psammenitus said: “It is … because only this last affliction was to be manifested by tears, the two first far exceeding all manner of expression.” Our sorrow can be so great and intense that we cannot express it.
A second case told by Montaigne is at first sight the same. It is about “a prince of our own nation, who is at Trent and has news there brought him of the death of his elder brother, a brother on whom depended the whole support and honour of his house, and soon after of that of a younger brother, the second hope of his family.” The prince received the news apparently emotionless and cold-hearted. However, when a few days later one of his servants died, the prince was overcome with sorrow to that extent that “that some thence were forward to conclude that he was only touched to the quick by this last stroke of fortune”. However, “in truth, it was, that being before brimful of grief, the least addition overflowed the bounds of all patience.” Sorrow can become more than we can bear.
We can become petrified with sorrow, as these and other examples by Montaigne show. And just this is the deepest, the strongest sorrow. Quoting Petrarca, Montaigne tells us that those who can tell us how much they suffer, actually don’t suffer very much. However, as Montaigne also shows in this essay, sorrow is not too different from joy. They are the opposite poles of the same emotions and in that respect they are the same. Actually, pure emotions don’t exist, so Montaigne tells us in his essay “That we taste nothing pure” (Book II, 20). Both our sorrows and our joys, both our negative experiences and our positive experiences are mixed and contain at least a bit of the opposite. “Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience”, as he says there, which he illustrates with a quotation from Lucretius: “From the very fountain of our pleasure, something rises that is bitter, which even in flowers destroys”. “Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it…”. Montaigne would certainly agree with the opposite, since it follows from what he writes in both essays discussed here. Death often means the end of suffering. A soldier who has fallen has contributed to saving his country. In his essay “That we taste nothing pure” Montaigne tells us that the “confusion” between joy and sadness can be seen well, when painters hold, “that the same motions and grimaces of the face that serve for weeping; serve for laughter too”. This is actually an exemplification of the fact that both pure delight and pure sorrow do not exist. Besides this, expressions of joy are often not too different from expressions of sorrow. We don’t know what to say when an extreme happiness overcomes us.
And Montaigne himself? Sadness of the death of his dear friend Étienne de La Boétie is in the background of his essays and sometimes it comes to the surface. It is also the background of his life. But as we see in Book III of the Essays, in the end gradually the sadness fades away, although it never becomes zero. The good memories remain, but sorrow is seldom eternal in the sense that it remains to dominate life. As such, Montaigne has never been very subject to violent emotions, he says. “I am naturally of a stubborn apprehension, which also, by reasoning, I every day harden and fortify.” After a difficult time, we often come back stronger.

Random quote
It’s quite remarkable how much of what gets into print, especially in journalism but also, I’ve found, in books, is wrong, just because people copy what they’ve seen elsewhere.

Anthony Gottlieb (1956-)

What is true

Theories are like bubbles: In the end they splash

anarchism                     anthropomorphism          atheism

atomism                       Bayesianism                    behaviourism

Buddhism                     capitalism                       Cartesianism

Christianism                  cohenterism                   communism

communitarism             compatibilism                  computationalism

conceptualism               Confucianism                  connectionism

consequentialism           constitutivism                 constructivism

contextualism                conventionalism              critical rationalism

cynism                          Daoism                          Darwinisme

decisionism                   deconstructivism             deism

determinism                  disjunctivism                  dualism

egalitarianism               eliminativism                   empiricism

enactivism                    Epicurism                       epiphenomalism

essentialism                  existentialism                 expressivism

externalism                   fallibilism                       falsificationism

fascism                         feminism                       Fichteanisme

fictionalism                   fideism                          finitism

formalism                     foundationalism              foundherentism

functionalism                Hegelianism                   Hinduism

historicism                    holism                           humanism

hylomorfism                  idealism                        illusionism

incompatibilism             indeterminism                inductivism

infallibilism                    infinitism                       innatism

internalism                    interpretivism                Jainism

Kantianism                    Leninism                        liberalism

libertarianism                Marxism                         materialism

mentalism                     mercantilism                  modernism

monism                        nationalism                    naturalism

Nazism                         Neo-Marxism                  Neo-Platonism

nihilism                        nominalism                     normativism

objectivism                   Orthodoxism                   panpsychism

particularism                 personalism                    perspectivism

physicalism                   Platonism                       populism

positivism                     postmodernism               pragmatism

probabilism                   proceduralism                 Protestantism

Pyrrhonism                   quietism                          rationalism

realism                         reductionism                    reformism

relativism                     reliabilism                        representationalism

republicanism                Roman-Catholicism          scientism

secularianism                situationism                     socialism

skepticism                     solipsism                        Spinozism

Stalinism                       Stoicism                         structuralism

subjectivism                  Sufism                           Taoism

theism                          Thomism                        totalitarianism

transactionalism             utopism                         veritism

verificationism                vitalism                         voluntarism

                                     wokeism 

Etc. 

The above list is an arbitrary list of -isms that I have found on the internet and in my own computer files. It is certainly not all there is! Moreover, many of the specific -isms in the list have a different meaning according to the theme you are interested in. For example there is realism in political science and in philosophy. The -isms in this list are mainly philosophical but not only. Besides this, many -isms can be subdivided. Take dualism. There is an ontological dualism and a methodological dualism. Ontological dualism can be divided into three types of dualism: substance dualism, property dualism and predicate dualisms. Seen that way, my list is not more than an introduction to the ism-theory. In addition, many -isms have a neo-, post-, and/or anti- version (some are in the list). So, besides positivism, there is a neo-positivism, an anti-positivism and a post-positivism. Or, to mention another limitation of my list: It refers mainly to Western philosophy. The list is also arbitrary and one-sided since it contains only -isms and no -ologies, -anities, etc. (it’s up to you to make such lists).
However, with so many -isms inside and outside philosophy, the main question in this blog is: Which -ism is true or which -isms are true? But is this important? There simply is a view for everybody. Suum cuique (To each their own)