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Summary Of Montaigne's Essay

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Montaigne’s essays are very detailed and very intriguing, even though he is the “creator” of essays. Once you get into the essays its hard to put them down and that’s how most of modern day essays are intended on being. The titles like “On the cannibals”, “On the Custom of Wearing Clothes”, and “That it is Folly to Measure Truth and Error by our own Capacity”, are very hard to follow. Looking at these you may not be very interested, but if you took the chance to read them, you’d understand that in his era, people lived a fairly standard life. These people were called savages and did things people today would be ashamed of. Montaigne had a surprising outlook of the natives and their customs, having none of specific customs the europeans have. …show more content…

Montaigne talks about humanity as if we have separated ourselves from the rest of the world because of the artificial things we have made. While most of humanity things this is a good thing, it seems as if Montaigne is poking fun at the rest of humanity in a way that says maybe the artificial things we praise might not be the best way to live. While he is specifically talking about clothes in this essay, one could apply it to all of the artificial things humanity praises. Montaigne seems to be saying that maybe the natives of the New World might have the right idea in living a simple life. Montaigne’s third essay, “That it is Folly to Measure Truth and Error by our own Capacity”, was a very interesting essay, and had many interesting ideas. Although is had some good points, there was nothing in it to quote that would expand this argument of the comparison of man living in a state of civilization to man living in a state of nature. Montaigne’s first two articles were very helpful on that front, both talking about how the cannibals from Brazil lived and how their customs and clothes (or lack thereof) compared to Europeans of the time, which had happened to be the sixteenth

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