Of Cannibals Montaigne Analysis

Montaigne is the author of the argumentative piece, “Of Cannibals.” He was an influential philosopher, skeptical of the society his race had fabricated. Essentially, He was a Frenchman who lived in the sixteenth century and questioned its modernistic practices. He believed man buried their true instincts under what a manufactured society deemed important: organized religion, money, and art, but it was these “savages” Montaigne mentioned that, he believed, embraced their natural impulses. Although some argue that Montaigne’s admiration for the natives is practically non-existent and that he is just unimpressed with the development of his kind, textual evidence points to his sincere esteem of the savages. Montaigne was raised in a family that was well off. They had enough to afford him a quality education. In his youth, he had a tutor, and when he was nearly seven, his parents sent him to the College of Guyenne at Bordeux. He would claim that school as his home for the next seven years. Later, he immersed himself in the studies of logic and dialect. In his later life, he studied law and was a citizen of the court. Not only did he have a prominent education, but he also married a well off woman, Francois de la Chassainge, and they would …show more content…
He believed that the savages, or cannibals, lived closer to the environment, something that is a human instinct, while the white men had detached themselves from the surrounding world and created an artificial environment. It is fair to argue that Montaigne, while offering his praise to the “savages,” or natives, was not placing their existence above the white man; in fact, he believed they were intellectually numb compared to the western world. Nonetheless, he believed that his people had continued down an irreversible path towards distancing themselves from their humanistic desires of being one with nature and all of her