Start here: one short reading, one question
Montaigne’s essays invite us to test our judgements against unfamiliar lives and customs.
Question: Does admitting that we might be wrong weaken our convictions or improve our judgement?
Short reading: Read the opening two paragraphs of the companion essay on custom, cultural comparison and cruelty. Choose one assumption worth reconsidering.
A few sentences are enough to begin. Offer one reason or example, or ask a question about the reading. Add your response below; the longer readings and recordings are optional.
Our new Beyond the Text series, Montaigne: Self, Doubt and Difference, asks how examining ourselves might change the way we judge other people. Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson begin with Montaigne’s self-portrait, move to mortality and education, and finish with custom, cruelty and cultural difference.
Start the conversation
Does admitting that we might be wrong make our convictions weaker, or make our judgement better?
Follow the three conversations
Episode 1: Why did Montaigne make himself his subject? is available now.
Episode 2: How should we learn to live and die? is available now.
Episode 3: Who gets to call whom barbarous? is available now.
Read the companion essays at The Intellectual Historian: Montaigne’s self-portrait and changing judgement, and philosophy, mortality and ordinary experience, and custom, cultural comparison and cruelty.
Three ways into the discussion
1. The self: Can a deliberately crafted self-portrait still be honest? What can we learn from someone who records changes of mind?
2. Living and dying: Does thinking about death help us enjoy life, or keep us trapped by fear? What would an education in judgement look like?
3. Difference: How can we question inherited customs without becoming indifferent to cruelty? Can a society hold strong convictions without turning opponents into barbarians?
Read alongside us
Start with Montaigne’s To the Reader and Of Idleness. For mortality and education, try That to Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die, Of the Education of Children and Of Experience. For cultural comparison, read Of Cannibals, Of Cruelty and Of Coaches.
The complete Essays are available free from Project Gutenberg in the Cotton-Hazlitt translation. Essay titles are the safest guide because chapter numbering differs between editions.
Leave a comment below with one passage, example or objection. You do not need to have read the whole book to join in. Please challenge arguments respectfully and give other readers room to revise their views.
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