Montaigne after Theory, Theory after Montaigne

2. Theory and Practice in "Du pedantisme"

Theory and Practice in “Du pedantisme” Eric MacPhail In the essay “Du pedantisme,” Montaigne asks the somewhat disingenuous question of why humanist pedagogues or “pedantes” have such a low reputation, a reputation that he seeks to confirm by every argument and example at his disposal. To disparage the modern pedants, who are incapable of public service, he contrasts them with the ancient philosophers, who were equally gifted at action and contemplation. Humanist education is impractical, he feels, because it does not teach us to appropriate our lessons , only to repeat them. By a series of antitheses, Montaigne seeks to expose the deficiencies of humanist pedagogy: humanists prefer memory to understanding, speech to action, knowledge to sense, and finally, theory to practice: “They know the theory of all things; you find someone who will put it in practice” (I, 25, 102).1 Montaigne’s apparent impatience with theory and with theorists masks a complex engagement in the quarrel over theory and practice. Montaigne may profess a distrust of theory, but his own writing betrays a strange fascination with the notion of theoria developed by classical 39 2 philosophers.2 It is in relation to this concept and its various counterconcepts that I want to situate Montaigne’s essay “Du pedantisme,” in part to see if there is anything in his essay that is not theory, or if in fact both terms of the opposition, theory and practice, don’t collapse into the same term. To support my argument, I will invoke the ideas of a modern philosopher , Hans Blumenberg, who has written on the origins of theory in The Laughter of the Thracian Girl, which, interestingly enough, reviews many of the same anecdotes and doctrines from the classical tradition that reappear in Montaigne’s essay on pedants.3 I want to start my genealogical reading of Montaigne’s essay with the genre of the protrepticus, or the exhortation to philosophy, which traditionally exalted theoria as the goal or telos of human existence. The genre remains somewhat enigmatic, since it is represented primarily by lost works, but we do have several fragments of Aristotle’s Protrepticus, which are conserved in the Protrepticus of the neo-Platonic philosopher Iamblichus.4 There are also some passages in the dialogues of Plato that have been identi fied, or which identify themselves as protreptic, including a section of the Theaetetus, the same dialogue which forms an obsessive subtext to essay I, 25.5 The tenth and final book of the Nicomachean Ethics fulfills a protreptic function by advocating the bios theoretikos or the contemplative life, as the means to achieve perfect happiness. I would also suggest that Seneca conceived of the preface to his Naturales quaestiones as a protreptic text, one to which Montaigne reacted quite vividly in the conclusion to the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond.” One common motif of these texts is the self-representation of theory as a type of apotheosis. In the Theaetetus, Socrates insists that the ultimate objective of philosophy is the assimilation to god, homoiosis theoi (176B), which the philosopher achieves through the cultivation of justice. Aristotle maintains that the theoretical life makes man like a god and that rather than be content with human knowledge, we should strive to be divine (NE 1177b26–34).6 Seneca echoes this pretension in the notorious phrase which Montaigne introduces at the end of the “Apologie” as good and useful but absurd: “O what a vile and abject thing is man, he says, if he does not raise himself above humanity” (II, 12, 457).7 In keeping with the protreptic tradition, Seneca attributes this elevation to theoretical philosophy. His preface concludes with the hortatory claim that to theorize is to rise above mortality: “haec inspicere, haec discere, his incubare nonne transilire est mortalitatem suam et in meliorem transcribi sortem?” (NQ I pref. 17; to contemplate these things, to learn them, to 40 / eric macphail dwell on them is that not to transcend one’s mortality and to be assigned a better fate?). Here we can detect a clear echo of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where “transilire mortalitatem” renders athanatizein (1177b33), rather than any Stoic posturing. In relation to these texts, “Du pedantisme” presents itself as an apotrepticus or dissuasion from philosophy and from the values of theoretical inquiry and speculation. At the outset of his essay, which insists at every turn on the antithesis of ancient and modern, Montaigne...