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Montaigne and Liberty, Part 1
I will be taking a look at Etienne de La Boetie’s essay “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” in three parts, both because this is a very long piece and because he broke it into those parts himself, so it makes sense to follow his lead. Let me begin with where I left off in my last…
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28. On Affection Relationships: The Unique Friendship
Very early in his touching essay about Etienne de La Boetie–the most emotionally powerful of his works–Montaigne quotes Aristotle on the subject of friendship. I’m going to start my essay with a long section from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book 8, because I believe this background is essential to understanding what Montaigne is trying to accomplish:…
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The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Etienne de la Boétie
There is controversy among Montaigne scholars about this essay by Etienne de La Boétie. Montaigne claimed he wrote it when he was a very young man–18 or 19, perhaps. Others say it is likely that he wrote it as part of his secondary education, so therefore was more likely to have penned it at the…
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107. “On Experience” and Meaning
Last week I took another look at Montaigne’s final essay “On Experience” from a practical viewpoint — what personal need was Montaigne fulfilling through his project, especially as expressed in that work. Today, I’m going to take a few steps further back and look at that project and the essay from the vantage of meaning….
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107. On Experience, An Act of Memory
There is nobody less suited that I am to talk about memory. I can hardly find a trace of it in myself; I doubt if there is any other memory in the world as grotesquely faulty as mine is! From “On Liars” I concern myself in this piece with Montaigne’s final essay, On Experience, but…
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107. On Experience (2011)
12 May 2011 About a year ago, I came across some lines from American philosopher Richard Rorty in his book “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,” that had a big impact on me. I was being treated for depression and had been on Cymbalta for about nine months. I couldn’t stand the drug and wanted to get…