Skip to main content

Foxy Montaigne

'Man cannot make a worm,' wrote Montaigne, 'yet he will make gods by the dozen.'

This is quoted by Morris Berman in an essay entitled 'The Hula Hoop Theory of History' that reflects on our human capacity for conversion to the next new idea, convinced that we now have not an answer to a particular contextualized question but 'The Answer' that supersedes all previous answers (until, of course, the next Answer comes along)!

Montaigne is suggesting, I think, that rather than be humble in the face of reality, contemplating it in its complexity, enterprising after ways of seeing it that never foreclose, we are more comfortable with total solutions - better to create a god in our own image (or ideology) than contemplate the mysteries and actualities of a worm: that which is gifted, present.

I was talking to a friend on Friday who is a highly gifted consultant on organizational development (a description that comprehensively fails to do her justice) and she was lamenting how people would keep referring to the absence of a 'silver bullet' to resolve complex situations. 'This is such a complex situation, 'they would say, 'for which we have no silver bullet' as if complex situations are amenable to 'simple technical solutions or finding the answer' rather than needing to be lived into, and with, making adjustments towards more favourable outcomes, and continually adjusting on the way.

I am reminded of Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy's philosophy of history: 'The Hedgehog and the Fox' where the hedgehog knows one thing, the fox many. Certain thinkers (artists etc) wish to comprehend the world within a comprehensive system (hedgehogs) and others believe this is an impossible task, you can essay after the truths but never find 'the truth' (the foxes). Berlin wanted to argue that Tolstoy longed to be the former but the texture of his vision was towards the particular, the anomaly, the individual. He kept lapsing into foxiness!

Montaigne was of the fox's party and I find so am I. It may not be a question of finding the truth that sets you free but being freed from the need for 'the truth' that binds you up.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more