'We Are Not So Full of Evil As of Inanity'

Montaigne devotes a brief essay to a pair of pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, “Of Democritus and Heraclitus.” The former is reputed to have been a misanthrope, perhaps a melancholic. The latter was known as “the laughing philosopher.” 

The essayist begins by weighing the importance of judgment in life generally and in the composition of his essays: “If it is a subject I do not understand at all, even on that I essay my judgment, sounding the ford from a good distance; and then, finding it too deep for my height, I stick to the bank.” That’s an admirable custom, one too few of us practice. Typically, Montaigne proceeds by association, not rigorous, thesis-like adherence to logic. He describes his method for writing an essay, and sounds very much like a blogger:

 

“I take the first subject that chance offers. They are all equally good to me. And I never plan to develop them completely. For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us. Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view. I would venture to treat some matter thoroughly, if I knew myself less well.”

 

As usual, Montaigne sounds remarkably like one of our contemporaries. There’s nothing stuffy or cautious about the way he proceeds. He’s good at producing vivid metaphors drawn from real life (“sometimes only to lick it”). He handles serious subjects almost casually, sometime humorously. Two-thirds of the way through his essay he finally introduces the philosophers of his title. Democritus, he writes, “finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears.”

 

You may think you know where he’s going with this but Montaigne is no Renaissance version of a virtue signaler. He endorses Democritus’ manner, “not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.”

 

Robert Burton attributes his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy to his persona/pseudonym “Democritus Junior,” who writes of his Greek forebear:

 

“After a wandering life, he settled at Abdera, a town in Thrace, and was sent for thither to be their lawmaker, recorder, or town-clerk, as some will; or as others, he was there bred and born. Howsoever it was, there he lived at last in a garden in the suburbs, wholly betaking himself to his studies and a private life, ‘saving that sometimes he would walk down to the haven and laugh heartily at such variety of ridiculous objects, which there he saw.’ Such a one was Democritus.”

 

[The Montaigne passages are from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, 1957).]