Public and Private

When someone holds an office, it often happens that she or he doesn’t see the office only as a function they hold but as a part of their whole personal life. For them it is a function that penetrates everything they do, in public as an office holder and in private life as well. Or even, they see the function as a personal fief, like a mediaeval lord who manages his personal estate. (see also my blog “Three ways to perform an office”) In his essay “Of managing one’s will” (Essays, Book III, 10) Montaigne tells us that it was not his style. There is nothing against performing an office with full dedication. Sometimes it is necessary to do so with your whole personality, he says. However, generally it is better to keep office and private life separate, as Montaigne did himself when he was mayor of Bordeaux. It is not only better for yourself, but if you cannot distance yourself from your office, it can even be harmful to the performance of your duties: “[The] sharpness and violence of [private] desires more hinder than they advance the execution of what we undertake; they fill us with impatience against slow or contrary events, and with heat and suspicion against those with whom we have to do. We never carry on that thing well by which we are prepossessed and led: ‘Impulse manages all things ill’, [as Statius says].” Someone who approaches his office rationally is more at ease and more open to new chances and opportunities and can better take the reins than the one who lets himself be swayed by emotions and passions: “In him who is intoxicated with this violent and tyrannical intention, we discover, of necessity, much imprudence and injustice; the impetuosity of his desire carries him away; these are rash motions, and, if fortune do not very much assist, of very little fruit. … Avarice has no greater impediment than itself; the more bent and vigorous it is, the less it rakes together.” Instead, so Montaigne explains to us, it is better to take things as they are and to adopt a philosophical attitude, and not to expect miracles, but to wait till a new opportunity arises.
Moderate and controlled behaviour finally brings more. And isn’t it so that “most of our business is farce”? That the whole world is a play in which we just play our part? Indeed, so Montaigne, but “as a borrowed personage. We must not make real essence of a mask and outward appearance; nor of a strange person, our own; we don’t know how to tell the skin and the shirt apart.” So the office holder (the shirt) and you as a private person (the skin) are two different beings. But how many office holders don’t see the difference and “cannot … distinguish the salutations made to themselves from those made to their commission, their train, or their mule”, as Montaigne puts it. When you greet Montaigne, the mayor of Bordeaux, it doesn’t need to imply that you greet Montaigne, the writer of the Essays, at the same time. However, many office holders “swell and puff up their souls, and their natural way of speaking, according to the height of their [offices]”, to paraphrase Montaigne. And it is such office holders who see criticizing the holder of the office as criticizing the person who holds the office. They burst into anger when this happens. But, so Montaigne, they who “extend their anger and hatred beyond the dispute in question, as most men do, show that they spring from some other occasion and private cause. … The reason is that they are not concerned in the common cause, because it is wounding to the state and general interest; but [they] are only nettled by reason of their particular concern. This is why they are so especially animated, and to a degree so far beyond justice and public reason…” The public serves the private, and they are considered the same.
Look around what’s happening in this world. Again Montaigne holds up a mirror to us.

Note
Here and there I have adapted the translation of Montaigne’s text.