Montaigne suggests that the study of books is a languishing and feeble motion that heats not. He prefers challenging conversation. (We bet he reads too, though.)

   posted 11.11.05

Conversation versus quarreling

by Michel de Montaigne

The most fruitful and natural exercise of the mind, in my opinion, is conversation. I find the use of it more sweet than of any other action of life. And for that reason it is that, if I were now compelled to choose, I should sooner, I think, consent to lose my sight, than my hearing and speech. The Athenians, and also the Romans, kept this exercise in great honor in their academies. The Italians retain some traces of it to this day, to their great advantage, as is manifest by the comparison of our understandings with theirs.

The study of books is a languishing and feeble motion that heats not, whereas conversation teaches and exercises at once. If I converse with a strong mind and a rough disputant, he presses upon my flanks, and pricks me right and left; his imaginations stir up mine; jealousy, glory, and contention, stimulate and raise me up to something above myself; and acquiescence is a quality altogether tedious in discourse.

Discourse honorable and dishonorable
As our mind fortifies itself by the communication of vigorous and regular understandings, so it is impossible to say how much it loses and degenerates by the continual commerce and familiarity we have with mean and weak spirits. There is no contagion that spreads like that; I know sufficiently by experience how much it is worth per yard. I love to discourse and dispute, but it is with but few men, and for myself; for to do it as a spectacle and entertainment to great persons, and to make of a man's wit and words competitive parade is, in my opinion, very unbecoming a man of honor.

Folly is a bad quality; but not to be able to endure it, to fret and vex at it, as I do, is another sort of disease little less troublesome than folly itself; and is the thing that I will now accuse in myself.

I enter into conference and dispute with great liberty and facility, forasmuch as opinion meets in me with a soil very unfit for penetration, and wherein to take any deep root. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, though never so contrary to my own; there is no so frivolous and extravagant fancy that does not seem to me suitable to the production of human wit. We, who deprive our judgment of the right of determining, look indifferently upon the diverse opinions, and if we incline not our judgment to them, yet we easily give them the hearing: Where one scale is totally empty, I let the other waver under an old wife's dreams. And I think myself excusable, if I prefer the odd number; Thursday rather than Friday; if I had rather be the twelfth or fourteenth than the thirteenth at table; if I had rather, on a journey, see a hare run by me than cross my way, and rather give my man my left foot than my right, when he comes to put on my stockings. All such reveries as are in credit around us, deserve at least a hearing: for my part, they only with me import inanity, but they import that. Moreover, vulgar and casual opinions are something more than nothing in nature; and he who will not suffer himself to proceed so far, falls, peradventure, into the vice of obstinacy, to avoid that of superstition.

The contradictions of judgments, then, neither offend nor alter, they only rouse and exercise me. We evade correction, whereas we ought to offer and present ourselves to it, especially when it appears in the form of conference, and not of authority. At every opposition, we do not consider whether or no it be dust, but, right or wrong, how to disengage ourselves: instead of extending the arms, we thrust out our claws. I could suffer myself to be rudely handled by my friend, so much as to tell me that I am a fool, and talk I know not of what. I love stout expressions amongst gentle men, and to have them speak as they think. We must fortify and harden our hearing against this tenderness of the ceremonious sound of words. I love a strong and manly familiarity and conversation: a friendship that pleases itself in the sharpness and vigor of its communication, like love in biting and scratching. It is not vigorous and generous enough, if it be not quarrelsome, if it be civilized and artificial, if it treads nicely and fears the shock: "Neque enim disputari sine reprehensione potest." ["Neither can a man dispute, but he must contradict." —Cicero, De Finib., i. 8.]

I'd rather be ruffled
When someone contradicts me, he raises my attention, not my anger: I advance towards him who controverts, who instructs me; the cause of truth ought to be the common cause of both. What will the angry man answer? Passion has already confounded his judgment; agitation has usurped the place of reason. It would be useful if we decided our disputes by a wager, if there were a material mark of our losses, so that we might the better remember them; and my valet could say to me: "Your ignorance and obstinacy cost you last year, at several times, a hundred crowns." I hail and caress truth in whatsoever quarter I find it, and cheerfully surrender myself, and open my conquered arms as far off as I can discover it; and, provided it be not too imperiously, take a pleasure in being reproved, and accommodate myself to my accusers, very often more by reason of civility than amendment, loving to gratify and nourish the liberty of admonition by my facility of submitting to it, and this even at my own expense.

However, it is hard to bring the men of my time to do this. They have not the courage to correct, because they have not the courage to suffer themselves to be corrected; and speak always with dissimulation in the presence of one another. I take so great a pleasure in being judged and known, that it is almost indifferent to me in which of the two forms I am so. My imagination so often contradicts and condemns itself, that 'tis all one to me if another do it, especially considering that I give his reprehension no greater authority than I choose. But I break with him, who carries himself so high, as I know of one who repents his advice, if not believed, and takes it for an affront if it be not immediately followed.

That Socrates always received smilingly the contradictions offered to his arguments, a man may say arose from his strength of reason; and that, the advantage being certain to fall on his side, he accepted them as a matter of new victory. But we see, on the contrary, that nothing in argument renders our sentiment so delicate, as the opinion of pre-eminence, and disdain of the adversary; and that, in reason, it is rather for the weaker to take in good part the oppositions that correct him and set him right. In earnest, I rather choose the company of those who ruffle me than of those who fear me. It is a dull and hurtful pleasure to have to do with people who admire us and approve of all we say. Antisthenes commanded his children never to take it kindly or for a favor, when any man commended them. I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary's force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness. In fine, I receive and admit of all manner of attacks that are direct, however weak; but I am too impatient of those that are made out of form.

I care not what the subject is, the opinions are to me all one, and I am almost indifferent whether I get the better or the worse. I can peaceably argue a whole day together, if the argument be carried on with method. I do not so much require force and subtlety as order. I mean the order which we every day observe in the wranglings of shepherds and shop-boys, but never amongst us: if they start from their subject, it is out of incivility, and so it with us. But their tumult and impatience never put them out of their theme. Their argument still continues its course; if they interrupt, and do not stay for one another, they at least understand one another. Anyone answers too well for me, if he answers what I say. When the dispute is irregular and disordered, I leave the thing itself, and insist upon the form with anger and indiscretion; falling into willful, malicious, and imperious way of disputation, of which I am afterwards ashamed.

Truth a casualty?
It is impossible to deal fairly with a fool. My judgment is not only corrupted under the hand of so impetuous a master, but my conscience also.

Our disputes ought to be interdicted and punished like other verbal crimes. What vice do they not raise and heap up, being always governed and commanded by passion? We first quarrel with their reasons, and then with the men. We only learn to dispute that we may contradict. And so, every one contradicting and being contradicted, it falls out that the fruit of disputation is to lose and annihilate truth.

Excerpted from "Of the art of discussion," in the Essays of Montaigne, as translated by Charles Cotton (1685-86) and edited by William Carew Hazilitt (1877), with some emendation as suggested by the 1957 translation of the Essays by Donald M. Frame. Montaigne lived 1533-1592.

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Read The Complete Essays of Montaigne translated by Donald M. Frame

Read On Friendship by Michel de Montaigne, translated by M. A. Screech

Read The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne edited by Ullrich Langer

Read Montaigne: A Biography by Donald M. Frame

Read Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher by Ann Hartle

Read How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler

Read The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang

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