Phenomenology - Nietzsche - Heidegger: YouTubing and Beyond

 Phenomenology

Nietzsche & Psychology:

Supernatural Polemics: Reason, Wonder, and Science with Carlos Eire & Peter Harrison:

I think (pun intended) this gave me an insight into Heidegger: I am, therefore I think – how Heidegger radically reframed being.

sch 12/19 

Essaying Montaigne  (Englesberg Ideas)

And this I think gives us a new understanding of Montaigne’s title: Essays. Essays are, in Montaigne’s French, not yet ‘essays’; they are assays, trials, tests, experiments. Take away belief, whether in philosophy or religion, and what do you have left? What you have is your own enquiring mind. Montaigne is the first modern because he is the first (although there were some classical precedents) to find himself without belief, at which point man becomes the measure of all things, endlessly trying and testing but never finding an eternal foundation. Montaigne is, in Richard Rorty’s language, the first anti-foundationalist. It is precisely because he is not a believer that Montaigne is constantly in movement, always adding, revising, rewriting, unable to settle. Had Montaigne been a pious Catholic the Essays would never have been written; they are, as it were, the record of his failure to believe (except, of course, in friendship). They are also a guide for readers, readers whom Montaigne assumes will be pratiquant but not necessarily croyant. (He is impatient with those who practise Protestantism while believing in the truth of Catholicism, or vice versa; there is no similar condemnation of those who practise without having any belief.)

To chronicle himself, Montaigne, the most conservative of thinkers, invented a new literary form. Malcolm Smith writes wonderfully about him, but he thinks and writes like a Roman censor, albeit a highly civilised one; to do Montaigne justice one would have to write like Montaigne, one would have to assay the Essays. And perhaps that too, like Montaigne’s constant, quiet distinguishing between belief and practice, can only be done indirectly, as in Carlo Ginzburg’s wonderful essay ‘The Soul of Brutes’, where Montaigne’s famous line ‘When I am playing with my cat how do I know that it is not rather she who is playing with me?’ is of course present even though it is, like Montaigne’s Jewish ancestry in the Essays, never mentioned.

Rara temporum felicitate, ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet. (Tacitus) ‘Happy the day when you can think what you like and say what you think.’ It’s comparatively easy to write about authors who think what they like and say what they think. The Essays presents itself as such a book; it isn’t, which is why it is difficult to write about it. In my yard the pools of water have sunk into the Suffolk sand. And yet ‘There are figures from the past that time seems to bring closer and closer to us. Montaigne is one such figure.’ (Ginzburg) Writing about Montaigne is difficult, but surely not, in these times of conflict and uncertainty, impossible.

I need to get back to reading Montaigne, just as I need to get away from this computer!

sch 12/21