False Objects

But we shall never heap enough insults on the unruliness of our mind.

I take it that here Montaigne concludes that "the soul discharges its passions on false objects when the true" object, the unruliness of the mind, is unregarded.

How odd the praise of a well-ordered mind sounds now. Indeed, we are suspicious of well-ordered minds. They are too much like machines. They lack creativity. They repress too much. They are fascistic in nature.

While I don't feel any need to heap any more insults on my own unruly mind—it's very good at chewing itself up, thank you very much—I concur with what I imagine is Montaigne's buried point. I long for a season of quiet deliberation, one in which I repair to my library to consider my life and mind, in which I reacquaint myself with wiser natures. George Eliot comes to mind. As does Montaigne's forebear, Lucretius.

I teach history, but I am only a historian in the very limited sense that I'm interested in where forms of thought have come from. Or in the present case, where they have gone to. One of the topic titles for this year's Theory of Knowledge essays in on the question of faith and religious knowledge. Although I enticed a professor from a local Jesuit university to visit our class and lead a stimulating discussion on Paul Tillich's ideas of faith as ultimate concern, my students still cling to the view that faith is a way of knowing that precludes deliberate thought or what we quaintly call "reason." What happened to that long tradition of Thomas Aquinas, that elaborate project to reconcile Aristotle's logic with biblical teachings?

Now that I've asked the question I feel a little silly for invoking such an anachronism. John Locke, quietly following in Aquinas' path, made the case, one more time, that revelation should be confirmed by reason, but the Enthusiasts have, apparently, outlasted him. My students cannot imagine how reasoned argument might strike even an uneasy relationship with religion. It's a matter of faith or reason, and the religious choose faith and everyone else chooses reason. No wonder they're struggling to get 1200 meaningful words out of this topic.

In the supposedly secular liberal politics of my state, the Enthusiasts are also winning, at least when it comes to public education policy. Our wealthy political elite have organized a small army of do-gooder "reformists" who want to privatize public education for the children. Counterarguments against such policies don't matter—it's for the children. Montaigne, speaking of the collective nature of foolish actions, said that they

are vices that always go together; but in truth such actions spring from presumption even more than from stupidity.

What a pleasing thought. The idea that minor vices lead to great ones sounds like a subject made for Montaigne.