We noted of Kant, in CoPhi, that he'd never ranged further than forty miles from his native Konigsberg. But Susan Neiman reminds us what an ordeal it would have been, to traverse such "stony excuses for roads" in the 18th century. Travel must have been even more of an "extreme sport" in Montaigne's day, never knowing when you might happen upon plague or pirates.
Nonetheless, Montaigne loved "the feeling of going with the flow" and "avoided all plans." Abroad in the land he saw "everything afresh and with full attention." When's the last time most of us really did that? I'm always astounded at fellow flyers who lower the window shades before the plane even ascends. How blase we've become about getting from A to B.
And the daily commute is more harrowing than adventuresome. On my way to school yesterday I passed the burnt shell of a truck on I24, hoping the driver got out in time. The return trip, which I always postpone 'til 6 to avoid the worst traffic, was still intolerably dense with dangerously reckless lane-switching Richard Petty wannabes.
I spoke with the metro bus driver outside my building the other day, hoping he'd tell me his trip had quickened since the last time I rode twenty years ago or so. It hasn't. But one of these days the stress of the drive is going to finally be too much, worth trading for a little extra transit time detouring to Smyrna and La Vergne while leaving the driving to a pro.
First-world twenty-first century problems, right? If Montaigne could remount his horse, I can hop back in the Corolla. Today, anyway.
Montaigne aspired to a cosmopolitan identity, and accordingly sought (and gained) Roman citizenship. Nowadays you don't have to align with imperial national power, to claim such a status. You just have to renounce narrow nationalism, One of the great puzzles of this historical moment, surely, is why in recent years we've seen such a retrograde march backwards to the last refuge of scoundrels. Real patriots are at home everywhere. With enough of them we'll eventually defeat Make [____] Great Again nationalistic bluster and nonsense.
Montaigne shared an odd attitude with Freud, when viewing antiquities and relics: first wowed, then underwhelmed. Reality always has a hard time competing with our dreams and fantasies. Analyze that, Herr Doktor Professor. Is our dreamscape too large? Or too small?
Lend ears to all and mind to none, was Montaigne's Pyrrhonian principle. Listen up, but keep an open mind. Seems a reasonable approach, but of course we want our leaders to sift the relevant evidence slowly and judiciously and then to issue a judgment and lead. Temperamental skeptics are possibly not generally well-suited for that form of pro-activity. A philosopher's better place is probably on the sidelines. Same for academics generlly. Trouble is, our "leaders" tend not to understand the value of academic detachment. Like Georgia's board of regents they're prepared to toss tenure and academic freedom.
Was Montaigne "an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher"? If you write about everything, you'll eventually philosophize. But the best philosophers, premeditated or not, understand that everything is their proper purview. The trick is figuring out which dots connect to which, and which are best left to stand alone. That's the essayists' mission. The English Montaignes, the William Hazlitts, aimed to. be "alert to everyday life as it really is." Shouldn't that be every philosopher's aim? Relevance is no accident.
In honor of the Hazlitts, here's their best line: "Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner -- and then to thinking!"
Or not.
The nectar is in the journey!
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