Montaigne and Brant

So, when I started working upon this post, I was determined to identify all the similarities between Montaigne’s essay “Des Cannibales” and Joseph Brant’s response to the question about indian vs. white civilization. I have never been happier to announce that I utterly failed. Well, to be quite truthful it was not an utter failure, I was just wrong in my approach. You see, there are some arguments that are indeed very similar in both texts, however, there is one consideration I failed to make. Whereas Montaigne had only heard about the New World and its people, Brant had actually lived in both worlds, and so he can sometimes give a more accurate perspective on the same topic. 

So I would like to do here, instead of just accusing Brant of stealing a white man’s essay, is to point some of the similarities and differences that I found between these texts. The first one is about the application of the “laws of nature”, which are deemed more perfect, than those of white civilization:  

“The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours.”  - Montaigne.

“(…) and will only observe, that among us, we have no law but that written on the heart of every rational creature by the immediate finger of the great Spirit of the universe himself” - Brant. 

As we can see, Brant is writing about these “natural laws” that Montaigne mentions. However, while Montaigne is taking a merely natural (biological?) viewpoint, the indian perspective is not only related to the natural but also to the supernatural. It is the “great Spirit of the universe” who wrote those laws on rational creatures, and that has a clear spiritual connotation. Here Nature and Spirit are linked in a way that Western civilization could never completely understand. 

Then, let us consider this second set of quotes. (The first one is Montaigne’s, the second comes from Brant). 

“I should tell Plato, that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of.”

“We have no prisons - we have no pompous parade of courts; and yet judges are highly esteemed among us, as they are among you, and their decisions as highly revered; property, to say the least, is as well guarded, and crimes are impartially punished. We have among us no splendid villains, above the control of that law, which influences our decisions; in a word, we have no robbery under the color of law” 

I will agree there is only a vaguely similarity (if there is one at all) between this two fragments. But I wanted to compare them precisely for that reason. Montaigne’s view is idealized and what he’s describing is pretty much an utopia. Some parts of it are true, others seem quite exaggerated. Brant, on the other hand, has a more centered position. Though still idealizing Indian society, he talks about judges, property and crimes. Its is not a perfect society, and its not as “primitive” as Montaigne would like to think, it’s just a better one. Of course, it would be only fair to mention here (though it may appear somewhat obvious) that Montaigne and Brant are not talking about the same people (for Mohawks, as far as I know, were not cannibals), nor are they speaking from the same century. Still, their point seems to be more or less the same. 

Both texts have also the claim about cruelty, which I will not quote, for it is fat too lengthy. But while Montaigne boldly says that its is far less barbarian to eat a dead roasted man that eating one that’s alive (making a reference to the cruel methods of punishment in Western society), Brant affirms that Indian torture is never as painful as the horrors of white men’s prisons.  The french man is talking from an intellectual and moral perspective, the indian is talking from experience, but they both seem to agree that at the end, cruelty is a matter of perspective.  

Finally, we find the sentence about which culture has earned the most being called “savage”. Not surprisingly, the verdict is the same: 

“We may then call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules of reason: but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them.” - Montaigne

“Cease to call other nations savage, when you are tenfold more the children of cruelty, than they.” - Brant. 

In my opinion, even if Brant’s speech is conventional, even if some of the arguments are very much like Montaigne’s, his text also provides some new insights on the topic. The audience Joseph Brant is addressing is clearly white, and he needs to abide to the formal and thematic conventions of his time. So, the way I see it now, it is not that we are not hearing an “authentic indian voice” (whatever that may mean) as much as that we are encountering an Indian man striving to meet us half way, so that we may understand all this a little better.