We live in a time of great anxiety, and great challenges. Covid19 has thrown much of our lives into turmoil. While many of us are facing huge stress, juggling childcare with lack of income, or serving our communities on the front line, there is another cohort, me included, for whom, ironically, there is an oblique benefit.
We may share the anxiety, and find the situation deeply oppressive and worrying, but we also have unexpectedly more time on our hands. If we use it positively we suddenly have an opportunity for more reading and learning.
Taking advantage of this, I came across the 16th century French writer Montaigne’s contribution to literature and thinking only in the last week or so. A shameful gap in my knowledge.
“Que sais-je?” “What do I know?” was his beloved motto, meaning: What do I really know? To find out, he wrote down his thinking in small, more or less digestible chunks of prose, which he called essays. Quite literally they were “essays” — after the French word essayer — to try. He was trying to sort out what he thought on various issues.
And so the literary form of the essay was born.
Looking deeper into his work, I discovered he was an agile thinker. Unlike many other French intellectuals and philosophers, he was looking for the essence of things. He looked for fresh insights. Not elaborately reworked old ones. He avoided the thinking of those who came before him, and indeed after him, who were attracted to form, rules, structure, and convention. They embraced rigidity — defence of past ways of thinking and approaching what was perceived as reality.
Because he was free in his thinking, he often doubted he was right. He continually searched for other answers that might be better.
Montaigne embraced uncertainty. In his vast book of essays, he often contradicted himself. He understood that the world, and the issues in it, were complex and divided. There were no simple, unchanging answers. He doubled in on himself in the search for truth.
“Que Sais-je”. What do I really think? It’s a great motto for agile thinking. It encapsulates the need to be alert, open, flexible — constantly adjusting to new, or evolving realities. Never getting stuck in conventional mindsets that are comfortable, but outdated.
It struck home with me because earlier this year (pre Covid) I managed to complete a book on agile thinking, and I would have loved to have included Montaigne as an early pioneer of the approach. I’ve just heard its publication is going ahead amongst all this on the 7th May and I hope it’s a decent read for those looking for something to ponder https://amzn.to/2W2lotc
It just goes to prove that there is nothing new under the sun. Or in Montaigne’s case, had he lived a century later, under the Sun King, Louis 1V.
