1 Introduction
This is a notoriously wild essay. The topics it covers range from motion sickness to Spanish conquest. Two ways of reading it are, in short, that its structure makes sense and that it doesn’t.
The essay is about ‘coaches’, in the sense of horse-drawn carriages. Coaches seem to have two roles in the essay: Montaigne says riding in them makes him sick, and he describes their use in ‘the service of war’. For a sense, both of these two ideas, and of the generally impatient rhythm of the essay, see the passage at the top of p. 1020.
2 The coach as metaphor
Take ‘coaches’ as a metaphor for technology, and the essay gathers around a point that is at the heart of the early modern experience (and arguably ours also): Technology is not an unqualified good; it is, like manners, an expression of the moral character of a people.
A coach can be an instrument of military might, or cunning; it can also be sheer ostentation, an expression of insecurity. A sovereign can use coaches and other technology as a way of projecting greatness that they lack. There are kings who live in “extraordinary meanness” and yet “they were kings great in reputation, wealth, and fortune” (1021).
The coach isn’t just a metaphor for technology; it is also a metaphor for excess, which Montaigne seems to detest. (We might take his physiological reponse to riding in coaches as a bodily correlate to his moral objection.) See top of p. 1022.
Technology and its attendant wealth are public goods, so ostentation and forced scarcity are unjust, but in Montaigne’s view their distribution is not an unequivocal good either. “The subjects of a prince who is lavish in giving become lavish in their demands,” he writes (1023).
Montaigne spends a good deal of space describing scenes at the Roman colosseum, however, and it is evident he sees a great deal of virtue in them. See this passage on p. 1027.
Note here the rejection of progress and the emphasis on our limited understanding of the past and of other people. To try to keep the claims together, we might say: Technology (not only as a means-enhancer, but as military might; as wealth, a public good; as excess, ostentation, spectacle) reflects character, and character is diverse, and the extent of that diversity is far beyond the reach of our imagination. See p. 1028.
3 The Americas
One way to think about the ‘structure’ of the essay is to see everything to p. 1029 as a way of foregrounding a question about the meaning of the encounter with the Americas. What does it mean to encounter ‘new’ humans? How should our eyes be open to difference?
Montaigne is, in short, offering an alternative to the conquest or imperial model typical of the early-modern period in Europe. See p. 1029.
What brings home the significance of the precedent contextualization is imagining the same passage—with its emphasis on the lack of technology among indigenous Americans—without it. How does it read? It reads either like empty adulation of the Indians for their ‘simpler’ way of life, or like equally empty belittlement of the Indians for their ‘savageness’. Instead what we’ve been treated to is the thought that technology is, among other thoughts, morally neutral. Thus the presence or lack of technology among the Amerindians is not intrinsically meaningful.
Moreover, Montaigne then sets immediately into praising them for their virtue: their piety, goodness, liberality, bravery—all of the virtues that Montaigne expressed admiration for earlier. (See that second passage on p. 1029.) The sole advantage the Spanish conquistadors had was technology.
Montaigne provides as a contrast Alexander’s Asian expedition. Alexander is seen, in some respects notoriously, as having taken on certain of the customs of the lands he invaded rather than having imposed Greek ones. Partly the effect of this comparison is to note that there was nothing inevitable or necessary about the extreme nature of the conflict between European and American; it reflected a conflict in the contingent moral character of Europeans and Americans. See p. 1031.
Montaigne reconstructs an encounter between Spanish and indigenous American, the conquistador offering up the so-called requerimiento, and the American replying as follows: p. 1032. This passage may be seen as providing testament to the sagacity of the indigenous Americans, as well as outlining the moral case against the conquistadors.
4 Aesthetics and empire
“On Coaches” is something of a perfect exemplification of the issue that is the intended crux of this course, on early modern philosophy.
The coach is technology, but it is also spectacle, the spectacle of power. Consider the US president’s vehicles: “the beast” and the presidential motorcade, Air Force One. The vehicles are intended to project the authority and might of the office and the nation. Montaigne might see them also as surrogates for a lack of courage, as masks for cowardice. A recent news item involving the president being snuck off Air Force One on a catering truck, and the plane then taking off with dozens of reporters and staff, the threat evidently still a live one, captures tidily the way that technology alone and the spectacle of power that goes along with it (in this case, the mere spectacle, the illusion; New York Times reporters have been giddy about this story for weeks, as if they were revealing the secrets of a magician) are not interchangeable with upstanding character.
Questions of aesthetics are inseparable from questions of power, in particular where technology comes to govern the publicity and distribution of art and other presumptively ‘beautiful’ things; in particular when the reach of political power is mediated by this technology of distribution. In Back to the Future, after scoffing at the thought that Ronald Reagan (an actor) is president in the future (“Who’s vice president? Jerry Lewis?”), Doc Brown then learns about the accessibility of video cameras, and immediately gets it: “No wonder your president has to be an actor. He’s gotta look good on television!”
More intimately, aesthetics encodes a life. Consider an arbitrary example: the interest in gold. Europeans massacre whole villages seeking it; the indigenous Americans are by comparison indifferent to it. The discrepancy reveals artifice at the seat of experience, and simultaneously the scope and significance of sensory ‘value’.