Michel de Montaigne and self-awareness

Self-awareness remains as rare a phenomenon nowadays as it has been in prior generations. It requires the ability to apply philosophical ideas in daily life, weighing them against social pressures, personal convenience, and short-term practicality. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was the first essayist in history to practise self-awareness systematically. He displayed enormous efforts to compare abstractions with facts, emotions with prejudices, ethics with rationalisations, and principles with fashions. We can draw from Montaigne’s essays crucial advice about how to increase our alertness and self-awareness. If we follow those practices, chances are that we will make better decisions and attain our goals faster with less effort. Let us pass review to those recommendations. Self-awareness is easier to acquire in solitude. This does not mean that solitude should be embraced as a lifestyle. It is a question of degree. Montaigne himself shows us the way in his own life, when he chose to quit his profession and retire to live in the countryside as of 1571. He was thirty-eight years old at that time. Montaigne devoted his essay “On Solitude” to underlining the importance of occasional periods of quietness to figure out what exactly we want from life. Note that solitude does not mean seclusion or isolation. It only means that we are separating ourselves from the noise of the world. To a great extent, Montaigne also practised solitude when he travelled in 1580 to take the waters in Italy, Switzerland and Germany, trying to find a remedy for his kidney stones. Those periods of solitude enabled Montaigne to recharge spiritually, only to work even more productively upon his return to France. I think that nowadays most people can afford mini-periods of solitude to recharge their energies. I regard this practice as highly beneficial for generating fresh ideas and plans for the future. Here is the link to the original article: https://johnvespasian.com/michel-de-montaigne-and-self-awareness/