Montaigne 6/7/14

          A famous saying states that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Well, it’s not just the definition of beauty that is largely subjective and dependent upon the taste of the observer. Barbarism can be just as subjective, as Michel De Montaigne argued against the backdrop of the Renaissance. What fueled Montaigne’s writing was his firm belief that people could not be entirely objective, “unmoved by emotion or circumstance” (Puchner 1649). In fact, he believed that people could not even truly know themselves because they are, essentially, unstable.  

          Montaigne writes, in “Of Cannibals,” that “each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice” (Montaigne 1653), meaning that each person has his or her own idea of what is good and proper and judges anything else to be foreign or even wrong. To illustrate his point, he observes that the Greeks call the inhabitants of all foreign nations “barbarians” (1651). For that reason, he states, it is important for people to judge things by way of reason, not by merely accepting the popular opinions of others.  

          Americans need not look as far as Greece to find another (painful) example of the way of thinking that Montaigne warns against. When Europeans came to the “New World” and quickly began consuming resources and staking claim to lands that were not theirs to claim, they labeled the native inhabitants “savages,” another word for barbarians. Yet those so-called savages lived off the land and in harmony with nature for thousands of years before the newcomers started taking away their entire way of life and their very lives. In fact, an outside observer might just conclude that the newcomers were the savages, not the comparatively peaceful natives.

Works Cited

Montaigne, Michel Du. "Of Cannibals." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. 1651-1660. Print.

Puchner, Martin. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013. Print.