'Inconsistency' according to Michel de Montaigne and Jacques Barzun

From the book "From Dawn to Decadence : 500 years of western cultural life, 1500 to the present".  Copyright © 2000 by Jacques Barzun.  Published by HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

p. 134

Montaigne, then, is not "a skeptic" in the sense of a shoulder-shrugging philosopher who looks at the world with tolerant amusement; he is 'skeptical' in the sense of the reader who does not believe without evidence and the scholar who does not take any particular truth as final. This outlook in no way prevents having rooted convictions. To name only one, Montaigne is sure that people ought not to be burnt alive for their beliefs.

Montaigne lived in an age full of people who knew that they, and they alone, had the truth, direct from God---and these truth-bearers all disagreed. Reflecting on a far wider set of facts and with greater self-knowledge, Montaigne was at pains to make the point that Cromwell later phrased so superbly: "By the bowels of Christ, bethink ye that ye may be mistaken." . . . . . . . . .

The theme of 'Self-Consciousness' can never be more manifest than here, and its embodiment in Montaigne's 'Essays' (Translated by Charles Cotton, Edited by William Carew Hazlitt, 1877) has a cultural import that has hardly been recognized: Montaigne discovered Character. I mean by this that when he calls Man 'ondoyant et divers', a phrase so precise that it is difficult to translate---"wavelike and varying" will have to do---he replaced one conception of the individual by another, deeper and richer.

Before him, the accepted idea of personality was that it was ruled by one of the body's "humors."  A man, woman, or child was choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, or melancholic. All acts, attitudes, and moods depended on the given disposition. The system, as will appear in Robert Burton's masterpiece "Anatomy of Melancholy", was well worked out to allow for temporary deviations and it fitted pretty well the impression that one gets from our own neighbors: they always tend in one direction while responding to the way we tend toward them. And in the family, habit creates this same sense of uniformity---"there he (she) goes again."  This same is broken only by occasional vagaries that are explained away as "not being oneself."

This psychology of the humors, also called the ruling passion, kept its ancient authority for a long time. In the 17th Century Ben Jonson based on it two of his plays 'Every Man in His Humor' and 'Every Man Out of His Humor', and Alexander Pope versified it as late as the early 18th Century.  To this day, the suppliers of popular novels are incapable of anything better, which is good enough for ordinary consumption.

Meanwhile, in the essay "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions," Montaigne points out the elements that make the difference between a type and a character. The type may exhibit all kinds of tricks and tastes and gestures that make him different, recognizable, but his "stance" is unchanging, "typical."  Not so in the Character. He is, as we say, many-sided ("mountainous"), which is why we also speak of seeing someone "in the round."  For practical purposes, the character exists only in literature, because nobody has the time or the opportunity to look as roundly at anybody else as Montaigne looked at himself.

This contrast between type and character as we meet them in life and in fiction explains why so many biographers declare the subject of their book "a bundle of contradictions."  This misleading cliche occurs to them when, on surveying the life of the man or woman, they find the variations that belong to character: he or she was generous to strangers and public charities and stingy with the family.  Contradiction!  Not at all, 'inconsistency'; a contradiction kills its opposite; inconsistencies exist side by side, in response to different situations. How could an unbending self survive in a variable world? In winter, hot soup; in summer, cool drinks. And when the need is less apparent, as in the shift from open-handed to stingy, it is real enough to the doer: he has come to dislike his family, or they fail to give him the praise he gets from strangers, or some other point of contact with reality alters the posture of the "wavelike and varying self."

This disparity between logic and action enables Montaigne to understand history, of which he is so eager a student. Character (in his sense) and history are two facets of one reality: becoming. As he declares: "I do not portray being but passing."  The mass of observations in the 'Essays' is backed up by telling facts from history and biography. The quotations from the ancient Greek and Roman writers that pepper his text increased in number with each edition he published; they are evidence piling up about what he calls the "human condition."  Our modern use of the phrase to mean man's sad lot is quite wrong; it means only the power of circumstance---for evil 'or' for good. Acting together with character, circumstance accounts for the chaos of history and its unpredictable twists and turns, which cannot always be referred to motives. When asked the reason for his close friendship with La Boetie, the answer was no list of traits in the abstract; it was: "because he was he, because I was I."  The complexity of things, the plurality of minds and wills, and the uncertainty of outcomes form the grounds for keeping one's opinions ever subject to revision.