Michel de Montaigne

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne

by perihelions • 3 years ago

110 38 3 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

dang• 3 years ago

Hmm - I found only one small previous thread about Montaigne:

Montaigne Fled the Plague, and Found Himself - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25261727 - Dec 2020 (4 comments)

maybe there were others?

karaterobot• 3 years ago

Montaigne is one of my favorites. Essays old enough that Shakespeare read them, but still totally approachable today (or, at least the translation I read was).

adasdasdas• 3 years ago

One of the OG skeptics, love Montaigne

ksenzee5• 3 years ago

Interestingly, there still is no complete scholarly edition of the Essays, because he published three different versions during his lifetime (to stay ahead of copyright expiration), and he made so many additions and changes between editions that it's practically impossible to represent them all on paper. What we need is an online digital edition, and nobody's done that yet AFAIK.

wazoox• 3 years ago

There is a "last edition", the so-called Bordeaux exemplary, with annotations from Montaigne's hand; then there is a later, posthumous edition which is the basis for most modern ones, but has been modified by his family on some important points (in particular politically or religiously sensitive ones).

Arguably this "last edition" is the best one: https://www.puf.com/content/Les_Essais_Livres_I-III

You can also go with "La Pléïade" version, however it's based upon the posthumous version, and in typical Pléïade's fashion, punctuation is altered/modernised from the ancient versions.

I've read both and my advice is to go with the first, cheaper one :)

briga• 3 years ago

My complete Penguin edition notes all the different changes between versions. It’s rather ungainly to read though. The changes between versions are rarely that extensive, usually just some different phrasing here and there

ksenzee5• 3 years ago

I guarantee it does not include all the changes between versions. It would be impossible to read. I chose an essay pretty much at random for a prototype digital edition in 2002, and it was eyebrow-raising how many differences there are among the three primary versions.

kwhitefoot2• 3 years ago

to stay ahead of copyright expiration

Could you elaborate on that? I thought copyright was a much more recent idea.

ksenzee5• 3 years ago

It dates to not long after the printing press was invented, but it was a much shorter period. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/mon...

efficax• 3 years ago

it's true that the Essays was published in three versions by Montaigne over his life but they did not have copyright regulations until much later (in the 18th century) and there are a number of critical and scholarly editions the Essays...

xhevahir• 3 years ago

The Donald Frame translation I read a long time ago had numbers or letters marking the different editions within the text. I didn't study the essays carefully enough to say how useful these were but they were there.

Aidevah• 3 years ago

I think the French Pléiade edition is a scholarly/critical edition? Montaigne himself said that the main changes between editions are additions. From On Vanity (Penguin translation):

I make additions but not corrections: firstly, that is because when a man has mortgaged his book to the world I find it reasonable that he should no longer have any rights over it. Let him put it better elsewhere if he can, not corrupt the work he has already sold. From such folk you should buy nothing until they are dead. Let them do their thinking properly before they publish. Who is making them hurry? My book is ever one: except that, to avoid the purchaser’s going away quite empty-handed when a new edition is brought out, I allow myself, since it is merely a piece of badly joined marquetry, to tack on some additional ornaments. That is no more than a little extra thrown in, which does not damn the original version but does lend some particular value to each subsequent one through some ambitious bit of precision. From this there can easily arise however some transposition of the chronological order, my tales finding their place not always by age but by opportuneness.

Although I agree that a digital edition that allows you to toggle between the different editions would be a wonderful idea. Charles Rosen talked at length about the inadequacies of the Pléiade edition in this regard in his review[1].

[1] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/02/14/the-genius-of-mo...

ksenzee5• 3 years ago

Right. I did a prototype digital edition of one of the Essays for my master's thesis 20 years ago, and it was surprising how much interesting stuff was just plain missing from the standard editions. I would have expected some Montaigne scholar to have published at least a partial digital edition by now. If it's not been done by the time I retire, I'll be tempted to do it myself.

rramadass• 3 years ago

You should checkout Michel De Montaigne The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters published under Everyman's Library Classics (hardcover edition).

billfruit• 3 years ago

Is that the case? The M.A Screetch translation published by Penguin seems to be just that, with copious annotations, notes, scholarly apparatus and indications of the multiple versions of the text in parentheses.

ksenzee5• 3 years ago

The Screech translation is excellent but it's a translation, not an edition, and it's not based on a complete critical edition because there was none in 1991 when the translation was published.

sherilm• 3 years ago

“Kings and philosophers shit—and so do ladies.”

"On the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses."

0823498723498724• 3 years ago

cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34365663

phronesis• 3 years ago

David Runciman did a great podcast about Montaigne last week: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/history-of-ideas-monta...

dredmorbius• 3 years ago

Ooh! Subscribed, and just finished the Montaigne segment a few seconds ago.

Runciman's "History of Ideas" series on political thought was excellent, and pairs well with a number of other philosophy podcasts I follow (Peter Adamson, Stephen West, Cecil Adams, Nigel Warburton, amongst others).

Thanks for mentioning that.

0823498723498724• 3 years ago

I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own. - MdM

Montaigne knew how to play The Glass Bead Game.

(and anticipated the Memex' associative trails with a low-tech implementation)

cjohnson318• 3 years ago

Can you expand on this?

0823498723498724• 3 years ago

http://worrydream.com/refs/Bush%20-%20As%20We%20May%20Think%... p.123

The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.

Montaigne incorporates classical material (by reference) into the personal trails of his essays. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millefiori beads, Glass Bead Game (Hesse) players incorporate old material into new contexts of their own devising...

bondarchuk• 3 years ago

apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game#Descriptio...

WastingMyTime892• 3 years ago

It’s illegal to do that in The Glass Bead Game however, isn’t it? If I remember correctly - it’s been a decade since I read the book - that’s one of the thing the magister ponders for a long time while a student at the monastery, how his own memory and experience colours his perception and how that’s lost to the game. That’s a part which stayed with me.

0823498723498724• 3 years ago

Huh... I'll have to re-read. (it's been 3+ decades for me)

I had been recalling that the raw materiel (the "beads", see millefiori in neighbouring thread) was shared, part of the "extant literature" if you will, but that plays were supposed to be novel as well as good. (a bit like an LZ decompressor, where each additional bit of input both recalls something in the dictionary and adds a new entry)

I have been assuming it was the players' personal styles that provided the novelty, but upon reflection that could easily be my US background more than the source text speaking!

Edit: come to think of it, maybe that's a valid criticism of the game as played in Castalia — that the castalians had become too conventional, losing the playfulness of their play?

(in possible relation, I was watching a national championship final over a decade ago with the mother of one of the contestants: she was very critical of her daughter, and correctly predicted the other would become champion. Why, I asked during the match? Her response: her daughter always came up with the classical textbook plays, whereas the the eventual champion knew how to exploit gambits: plays that were, on paper, weaker, but in practice, strong due to the element of surprise)

melvinmelih• 3 years ago

His essay on "To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die" is probably one of my most favorite pieces of philosophical work, I think about it every other day: https://hyperessays.net/essays/to-philosophize-is-to-learn-t...

A friend of mine the other day turning over my tablets, found therein a memorandum of something I would have done after my decease, whereupon I told him, as it was really true, that though I was no more than a league’s distance only from my own house, and merry and well, yet when that thing came into my head, I made haste to write it down there, because I was not certain to live till I came home. As a man that am eternally brooding over my own thoughts, and confine them to my own particular concerns, I am at all hours as well prepared as I am ever like to be, and death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with him I did not expect long before. We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care, at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self.

ealhad2• 3 years ago

Being French, I studied Montaigne in middle school (or high school, can't remember) – I did not expect to bump into him here. Quelle bonne surprise !

bzhang255• 3 years ago

I think his direct influence on English speakers has definitely dropped off a lot. I first learned about him from an essay Virginia Woolf wrote on him.

ealhad2• 3 years ago

Well I had never heard of Woolf before the age of 25, so there's that.

francoismassot2• 3 years ago

I'm very happy to see Montaigne on HN, there must be some affinities with the community here and I like that :)

This is my favorite philosopher by far (I'm not saying that because I'm french!). Partly because his essays are not too "abstract" and this allows me to truly understand it, partly also because I found his essays still valid today.

One little and unimportant anecdote I liked: his parents forced themselves and his tutor to speak only in latin when he was a child. Later, Montaigne thanked his parents a lot when he saw how others were struggling with this language.

vmsp• 3 years ago

I wrote a blog post about that! :)

https://0x1.pt/2023/01/20/how-montaigne-learned-latin/

francoismassot2• 3 years ago

excellent!

nescioquid• 3 years ago

I like to think of him as the last known native speaker of latin!

I made the pilgrimage to visit his study when I last visited your country. I had read about the quotations set into the rafters and was surprised to find so much greek!

pinewurst• 3 years ago

As an intro to Montaigne and his world, try the excellent "How to Live" by Sarah Bakewell

Quarrel• 3 years ago

I came to recommend this, so glad to see your comment.

I thought it was great, although I knew little more than that Montaigne was a philosopher before reading it. A really fascinating man.

Michel de Montaigne

Related Stories