MONTAIGNE THE SOCRATES (11)
I have been re-reading Shakes-peare’s Henry IV, marveling at the bumptious beauty of his Fal-staff. This led me back to Bloom’s great Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, and to Bradley’s gloss on Falstaff as a symbol and spokesman of freedom, bursting the balloon of every serious intent: “He will make truth absurd, by solemn statements he expects no one to believe; and honor, by demonstrating that it cannot set a leg; and law, by evading all the attacks of its highest representative, almost forcing him to laugh at his own defeat; and patriotism, by filling his pockets with bribes offered by soldiers who want to escape service; and duty, by showing how he labors in his vocation—of thieving; and courage, by gravely claiming to have killed Hotspur; and war, by offering the Prince his bottle of sack when he was asked for a sword; and religion, by amusing himself with remorse when he has none; and fear of death, by remaining untouched even while he feels the fear of it, dissolving it in persiflage while sitting at ease in his inn.”
Bloom regards Falstaff as an “outrageous version” of Socrates, and notes the link between him and Montaigne’s Socrates, in their “shared contrast of outer deformity and inner genius,” the theme especially of “On Physiognomy,” Montaigne’s most focused reflection on Socrates, whose real double-sidedness is not his face and soul so much as his unique ability to combine a seemingly unlimited skepticism and power of questioning—which uproots, at least initially, all foundations—while affirming the sovereignty of virtue in his values—which reasserts them. Sir John is no less double-sided in his ability to uproot all gravitas, all seriousness of purpose and morality in his playful assertion of freedom, but at the same time—as we read into the true tragedy of Henry IV—reveals his unlimited love for Hal, unlimited wish to free him of that “scutcheon” Honor and its cold, cold heart: “peremptorily I speak it, there is virtue in that Falstaff; him keep with, the rest banish.” It is a Christian death he dies, all mocking, just as it was a comic Resurrection he re-lived on the fields of Shrewsbury.
What Bloom does not pursue is the comic nature of Montaigne’s own Socratic self-image, the manner in which he too “rises” above the unities of dogma and faction, cruelty and virtue, willfulness and reason he sees anchoring human potential all around him. Even the reality of self—his ownmost nature—becomes for Montaigne the ironist something to be transcended by his art, so that, like Socrates, he now lives for us in his Essays, unburied in the cold, cold earth. Montaigne the 'assayist', Montaigne the tolerant, Montaigne the magnanimous man unburdened by pride, Montaigne the catholic unburdened by sin, Montaigne the skeptical collector of fantastic tales. Montaigne is engaged in a life of reason but mocking it, too, for its pretensions, bringing us, with him, back down to earth, to the body, to laughter and sunlight and love. I will a man to be not unlike Michel, a free spirit in the life of the mind, a free voice in the contentious world of rights and wrongs, a public private man who values both speech and touch and does not scold.
And yet the courteous Jesuitical counselor Gracian is not to me mistaken when advises us to give office a try (104). For we who are more solitary and perhaps extreme by nature, we who would remain of our own will at home, never to venture out into persons unknown, ambitious of mind yet un-adventurous of experience, may gain more from office than we surrender, without denying the value of our time. There is a way of living that is too enclosed upon itself, too vulnerable to loss and defeat because too un-battle hardened, too unwary and reticent at once, too self-protective to enlarge our loves, too unwilling to give oneself up to the sheer performance itself, however we may be received. Three times of life Baltazar calls for: (i) a life of learning from the dead in books; (ii) a life of the living in the world of action, facing the men of the time and meeting the women of the time; (iii) a life in a mind that has become one’s own, unburdened of persona. Three stages in a journey, which with grace we share with others, the last even more than the former.
Montaigne accepts the boundary of self-love, enfolding friend and foe creatively within it, a "gay and sociable wisdom." His Socrates learned in old age to dance, sometimes even at home alone. He knows well how to stand, to retreat, to play the card of truth. He knows how to find a man’s thumbscrew, to checkmate his will for his freedom. For there is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge, and in this game like any other one must learn how to discard.
In Rome, the art of playing the man combined two humors, oft opposed. Without gravitas, there could be no government, of men or soul. Without humanitas, no release, from iron duty and harsh command. The task of true rhetoric was to find a path between decadence and force, a path of human persuasion, a path to our very selves. Montaigne is no Plato, no maker of imagined cities; nor is he old Jack Falstaff, for our chains of ambition are not like Hal's of steel, any more than are the fetters of our thought; perhaps we should see him, though, as a more gentle Machiavel, who would free us from our sin of willful reason, that the Prince in each of us might learn to make a better government in which to live, for ourselves and our kinsmen, out from under the thumb of others.
No comments:
Post a Comment