From Essays After Montaigne
Men (saith an ancient Greeke sentence) are tormented by the opinions they have of things, and not by things themselves. It were a great conquest for the ease of our miserable humane condition; if any man could establish every where this true proposition. For if evils have no entrance into us but by our judgement, it seemeth that it lieth in our power either to contemne or turne them to our good: If things yeeld themselves unto our mercie, why should we not have the fruition of them or apply them to our advantage? If that which we call evil and torment, be neither torment nor evill, but that our fancie only gives it that qualitie, it is in us to change it: and having the choice of it, if none compell us, we are very fooles to bandy for that partie which is irkesome unto us: and to give infirmities, indigence, and contempt, a sharpe and ill taste, if we may give them a good: And if fortune simply affoord us the matter, it lieth in us to give it the forme.
Pirro the Philosopher, finding himselfe upon a very tempestuous day in a boat, shewed them whom he perceived to be most affrighted through feare, and encouraged them by the example of an hog that was amongst them, and seemed to take no care at all for the storme: Shall wee then dare to say that the advantage of reason, whereat we seeme so much to rejoyce, and for whose respect we account our selves Lords and Emperours of all other creatures, hath beene infused into us for our torment? What availeth the knowledge of things, if through them we become more demisse? If thereby wee lose the rest and tranquillitie wherein we should be without them? and if it makes us of worse condition than was Pirrhos hog? Shall we employ the intelligence Heaven hath bestowed upon us for our greatest good, to our ruine? repugning natures desseign and the universal order and vicissitude of things, which implieth that every man should use his instruments and meanes for his owne commoditie?
It may easily be seen, that the point of our spirit is that which sharpeneth both paine and pleasure in us. Beasts wanting the same leave their free and naturall senses unto their bodies: and by consequence, single well-nigh in every kind, as they shew by the semblable application of their movings. If in our members we did not trouble the jurisdiction which in that belongs unto them, it may be thought we should be the better for it, and that nature hath given them a just and moderate temperature toward pleasure and toward paine; And it cannot chuse but be good and just, being small and common. But since we have freed and alienated our selves from her rules, to abandon ourselves unto the vagabond libertie of our fantasies, let us at least help to bend them to the most agreeing side. Plato feareth our sharp engaging unto paine and voluptuousnesse, forsomuch as he over-strictly tieth and bindeth the soule unto the body: I am rather opposit unto him, because it is sundred and loosed from it.
The more I read of his essays, the more I'm convinced that Montaigne never felt or even encountered depression, at least not knowingly, and that leaves a lacuna in his commonsensical materialism. Depression, as I understand it, is one of a host of emotional disorders (also including anxiety, bi-polarity, anorexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and many others) that are most simply described as being unable to control how one feels. Depression is not just being sad. It's feeling a sharp or dull pain, a numbness, an excitation, everything or nothing at all, but feeling it beyond our ability to control it. Put another way, it's our fancy giving to our life the quality of unhappiness, without it being in us to change it. We do not have the choice of it. And because of that disparity between intention and experience, depression and related disorders are a vantage point from which the irrational machinations of our minds are apparent. It's no accident that Freud followed hysteria into the backstage of our psyches.
Whatever his failings, Freud was a dogmatically consistent materialist. He had no interest in explanations that didn't follow from empirically determinable and describable causes. He didn't always manage to locate those causes (and may not have been above inventing or exaggerating them), but that was always his goal. In his work, he sought to explain away nearly all of what we would consider our humanity as the result of fairly simple processes and their interactions. I don't know if he ultimately managed to convince himself or not, but I'm not entirely convinced. He pulled back the curtain that had been obscuring many of the darkest mysteries of our psychology, rendering the backstage machinations apparent, but understanding the intrigues motivating the performance that the audience sees doesn't explain the audience. Freud never managed an adequate materialist description of consciousness or self-awareness, beyond attempting to dismiss it as "a sensory organ for perceiving psychical qualities." (Who or what is to be the recipient of those perceptions?) Yet his work has been the catalyst to an effort that continues to convincingly shrink the ineffable portion of our minds, approaching the point where only consciousness itself will remain to be explained.
Suffering from an emotional disorder quickly teaches us how little control we as an audience actually have over what we feel, how much of what is generally considered emotional and even spiritual experience can be shaped by medication and other material actors, and the degree to which what we think of as our pure, independent selves is no more than a mute, impotent witness. Evocations of strength of character, poetic and stirring as they may be, are little more than empty phrases that comfort the fortunate and chastise the unfortunate. Our true strength is measured not by our ability to shape the world outside of us, but by our ability to abide within the world of which we are a part. Montaigne seems to have recognized this when he wrote that "we cannot be bound beyond our power and means--that we have no power to effect and accomplish, that there is nothing really in our power but will--all man's rules of duty are necessarily founded and established in our will." But it's there that his materialism ended. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him to attribute the workings of our psyches to the same material causes as the workings of the rest of the world.
Though it is certainly true that the taste of our experiences is shaped in our minds, it seems not to be true that we can control that shaping. We're often no more or less able to affect a process occurring within us (whether it's the development of cancer or of madness) than we're able to affect a process occurring in the external world (whether it's an earthquake or the spread of cancer). Fear, unhappiness, and all other emotions seem to be chemical expressions of the interaction of current experience with genetics, past experiences, and past emotions, some of which are witnessed by that audience in us (the last remaining territory of spiritual and ineffable--the only portion of ourselves that might not be of this world). Montaigne's humanist, even spiritual, belief that it lies in our power to decide whether to suffer or benefit from the evils that beset us contradicts the materialism that he so eloquently described elsewhere--a materialism readily apparent to anyone who has ever found herself in the midst of a depressive episode, despite being surrounded by all of the inducements to happiness, helplessly asking, like the audience at a bad performance of a critically acclaimed play, "What happened? Why isn't this as good as it's supposed to be? Why aren't I enjoying myself?"
8:31:32 AM 
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