Most of us recall Montaigne's words: 'When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?'
Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (2016), is also an expert on Montaigne. Her book, How to Live, or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer, (2010) of course mentions Montaigne's cat, and we can see in such a kind of detail exactly what Minto means by "private life" and "personal essay". In fact Bakewell pulls out the significance of the cat for also the third element quoted-the discourse of toleration.
Here are Bakewell's words:
'One of Montaigne's favourite hobbies was imagining the world from different perspectives. To remind himself how strange human behaviour looked if one's vision was not dulled by familiarity, he collected stories from his reading: tales of countries where men urinated squatting and women standing, where people blackened their teeth or elongated their ears with rings, where hair was worn long in front and short behind, or where boys were expected to kill their fathers at a certain age....
'He took a special interest in the newly encountered "cannibals" of the New World, reading travellers' accounts and acquiring South American artifacts: hammocks, ropes, wooden swords, the arm-coverings warriors used in fighting, and "the big canes, open at one end, by whose sound they keep time in their dances". He even met a couple of Tupinambá people, who had travelled to Europe from Brazil in a French ship. Through a translator, he asked them what they thought of France. They replied, among other things, that they were amazed to see rich Frenchmen gorging themselves at feasts while their "other halves" – the beggars outside their houses – starved. Europeans felt shocked because the Tupinambá ate their enemies after a battle, but the Tupinambá were shocked because Europeans found it easy to ignore the suffering of the living. Montaigne did his best to feel equally amazed at both – and to think himself into both positions. "This great world", he wrote, "is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognise ourselves from the proper angle".
'At home, he extended his perspective-leaping to other species. [Besides the cat, as Montaigne]... watched his dog twitching in sleep, he imagined the dog creating a disembodied hare to chase in its dreams – "a hare without fur or bones", just as real in the dog's mind as Montaigne's own images of Paris or Rome were when he dreamed about those cities. The dog had its inner world, as Montaigne did, furnished with things that interested him.
'These were all extraordinary thoughts in Montaigne's own time, and they remain so today. They imply an acceptance that other animals are very much like us, combined with an ability to wonder how differently they might grasp what they perceive. ... Montaigne quoted a story he had picked up from Pliny, about a species of... sea-slug, which is deadly to humans but which (thought Pliny) itself dies on contact with human skin. "Which is really poisonous?" he asked. "Which are we to believe, the fish about man, or man about the fish?" Surely we must believe neither – or both.
'Montaigne's dog, with its superior sense of smell and its mysterious sixth sense, might actually be better equipped to understand the world than Montaigne. "We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses; but perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or 10 senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence." The dog is missing some of these; we may be missing more....
'It was not just that these...[perspectives] were marvels in themselves. Montaigne loved such stories because they lent him an altered point of view from which to look back on his own culture and see it afresh. Most human beings judged what was merely habitual to be what was natural. Montaigne tried to wake himself from this dream....'
Bakewell points up this significance:
'Thinking oneself into the experience of others also opens the way to a system of ethics based on communication and fellow-feeling, even between very different kinds of beings. Once you have seen the world from someone else's perspective, it becomes harder to torture, hunt, or kill them....'
'He took a special interest in the newly encountered "cannibals" of the New World, reading travellers' accounts and acquiring South American artifacts: hammocks, ropes, wooden swords, the arm-coverings warriors used in fighting, and "the big canes, open at one end, by whose sound they keep time in their dances". He even met a couple of Tupinambá people, who had travelled to Europe from Brazil in a French ship. Through a translator, he asked them what they thought of France. They replied, among other things, that they were amazed to see rich Frenchmen gorging themselves at feasts while their "other halves" – the beggars outside their houses – starved. Europeans felt shocked because the Tupinambá ate their enemies after a battle, but the Tupinambá were shocked because Europeans found it easy to ignore the suffering of the living. Montaigne did his best to feel equally amazed at both – and to think himself into both positions. "This great world", he wrote, "is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognise ourselves from the proper angle".
'At home, he extended his perspective-leaping to other species. [Besides the cat, as Montaigne]... watched his dog twitching in sleep, he imagined the dog creating a disembodied hare to chase in its dreams – "a hare without fur or bones", just as real in the dog's mind as Montaigne's own images of Paris or Rome were when he dreamed about those cities. The dog had its inner world, as Montaigne did, furnished with things that interested him.
'These were all extraordinary thoughts in Montaigne's own time, and they remain so today. They imply an acceptance that other animals are very much like us, combined with an ability to wonder how differently they might grasp what they perceive. ... Montaigne quoted a story he had picked up from Pliny, about a species of... sea-slug, which is deadly to humans but which (thought Pliny) itself dies on contact with human skin. "Which is really poisonous?" he asked. "Which are we to believe, the fish about man, or man about the fish?" Surely we must believe neither – or both.
'Montaigne's dog, with its superior sense of smell and its mysterious sixth sense, might actually be better equipped to understand the world than Montaigne. "We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses; but perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or 10 senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence." The dog is missing some of these; we may be missing more....
'It was not just that these...[perspectives] were marvels in themselves. Montaigne loved such stories because they lent him an altered point of view from which to look back on his own culture and see it afresh. Most human beings judged what was merely habitual to be what was natural. Montaigne tried to wake himself from this dream....'
Bakewell points up this significance:
'Thinking oneself into the experience of others also opens the way to a system of ethics based on communication and fellow-feeling, even between very different kinds of beings. Once you have seen the world from someone else's perspective, it becomes harder to torture, hunt, or kill them....'
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