Montaigne’s essay “On Cannibals” is about truth, intelligence, and human behavior. Montaigne looks at things with an open mind. He thinks that what we know gets in the way of how we think. He uses many examples such as tribes that kill people and eat them and compares that to people who just kill people. He explains the reasons why sometimes being too educated is a bad thing and how people do not know everything they think that they know, so it is better to not judge others.
Montaigne quotes King Pyrrhus, “I do not know what barbarians these are’- for so the Greeks called all foreign nations-‘but the ordering of the army before me has nothing barbarous about it. (105)” Montaigne was discussing our human nature to make “vulgar opinions. Montaigne said, “We should judge them by the test of reason and not by common report. (105)” Meaning that it is wrong to judge someone or something if we do not know why it is that way. Just because it is not something that one might be used to, or something that one considers right or wrong, does not make it right or wrong. No one person can decide what is right or wrong. Because it depends on the reason and situation, as Montaigne explains in his essay.
Montaigne’s argument is that “we call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits” (108). Montaigne points out that where people live, they tend to think everything is right. Such as religion, politics, and the way things are done. However according to Montaigne, more civilized and intelligent people, who tend to think that they are always right and that tribal people for example, live wrongly and barbarously. Montaigne says that, “these nations, seem barbarous in the sense that they have received very little molding from the human intelligence and are still very close to their original simplicity” (109).
Montaigne also discusses truth; he explains that it is better to ask an unintelligent man or a very truthful man. We need either a very truthful man or one so ignorant that he has no material with which to construct false theories and make them credible: a man wedded to no idea. (108)” Even though intelligence is important, people who are intelligent tend to add their own thoughts to the truth because they think that they are intelligent enough to know more on certain things.
These things that Montaigne says are contrary to most people’s beliefs are in reason actually and much more right than what “civilized people” consider the right thing. For example, Most people would consider tribes very primitive and simple, and think that they should be more advanced and before they are not they must be savage. Then people look at how tribes eat their enemies; however civilized people have worst customs in some cases. These customs are usually in regards to “piety and religion”, according to Montaigne. Another example is that they fight wars for glory, not for land, money, or for power.
The point that Montaigne explained in his essay “On Cannibals” is that by nature no one knows what is really right or wrong. But the best way to live is to be unaffected by intelligence and others because then people are able to see what is right and wrong. The people that are seen as barbarians are actually, quite civil but because people have intelligence and have advanced from that they tend to think that simplicity is bad and that anything they don’t know is wrong.
*all quotes taken from Montaigne’s essay “On Cannibals”.
