If truths and values are relative, in a
variety of views, each with an individual claim to validity, without a basis
for claiming one view to be better than another, is there still anything to commit
oneself to, to fight for? Or does one shrug and comply with the powers that be?
Montaigne was a sceptic and a relativist, to
some extent.[1] He
was committed to humanist sympathy with others and abhorred the excesses of
violence in his time (the religious wars in 16th century France). Yet he feared
what he saw as the even worse excesses of sedition and revolt. He preferred
continuity and peace to mutations, revolutionary change. He feared that
revolution would yield unforeseen disasters, the next tragedy of good
intentions gone sour.
He was a moderate conservative, arguing that
there are good reasons for the existing political and cultural order. It had
not arisen for nothing. He did not believe in any absolute underlying value or
validity, and his compliance with the established political order was ironic,
dispassionate and purely formal. He went along not out of conviction but to
preserve the peace.
I sympathise, in part, with the conservative
argument. Given the complexity of social systems, which emerge rather than
being rationally designed, there is a fundamental uncertainty of outcomes, and
any intervention will indeed have unforeseeable, unintended and unwanted
effects. Intelligent design is largely an illusion.
Also, from an evolutionary perspective, the
existing order has survived the struggle of survival with alternatives, and can
therefore claim some fitness.
However, the evolutionary argument is valid
only if the existing order indeed has been and still is subject to the
selective forces of competition with alternative ideologies. There lies the
value of democracy. Autoritarianism is less adaptive. There must be freedom of
rival views for the evolutionary argument to stick.
While Montaigne was occupied, obsessed, one
could perhaps say, with his self, he was not indifferent or passive regarding
society. He took on social responsibilities, e.g. as mayor of Bordeaux, but
dispassionately, not sacrificing the integrity of his self, and trying to
preserve his peace of mind.
How relativist is my plea for accepting,
indeed rejoicing in imperfection on the move? Earlier in this blog I
argued that while I admit that the moral and epistemic validity, and the
meaning, of ideas depend on context and are subject to change, this does not
entail relativism in the form of a claim that any judgement is as good as any
other. Rival views may be incommensurable, yielding no points of contact
for reasonable debate, but that should not be assumed too quickly. There are a
number of common conditions for life and survival, and people are likely to
have some common ideas as a foothold for some form of debate.
Hence in this blog I argued for a modest
notion of truth as warranted assertibility (in item 104), and
of morality as debatable ethics (in
item 118).
This stance is nihilist in rejecting immutable
absolutes of the true and the good, but it goes beyond nihilism, as I argued in
items 19 and 148 of this blog, in the commitment to achieve improvement, even
when acknowledging that that also will be imperfect. And, with a bow to
Nietzsche, that is not so much a duty as a fount of flourishing life.
There is something odd in Montaigne’s view
that the existing order is imperfect but yet to be accepted, and rejecting
change because it would fall into similar imperfections. Recognizing that all
effort yields imperfection, one could still be on the move, trying to make
improvements.
[1] Here, as before, I use Jean Starobinsky, 1993, Montaigne en
movement, Editions
Gallimard
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