The Uncomfortable Mirror: Montaigne and Selfishness as a Natural Law of Existence

“Let each person search within themselves, and they will find that our most intimate desires are born and grow, for the most part, to the detriment of others.”
— Michel de Montaigne

Introduction: A Quote That Isn't a Quote (but Seems Like One)

The phrase that opens this essay, attributed to Michel de Montaigne, is one of those maxims that circulate on social media, in self-help books, and in philosophical reflections as if they were absolute truths. However, as often happens with great ideas, its exact formulation does not appear verbatim in the French philosopher’s Essays. What does exist—and with even more compelling force—is the spirit of that statement, scattered across Book I, Chapter XXII (or XXI, depending on the edition), titled "Le profit de l'un est dommage de l'autre" ("The Profit of One Is the Loss of Another").

This brief chapter, spanning barely three paragraphs, is a gem of Renaissance thought. The author is one of the most prominent figures of Renaissance humanist skepticism. Unlike other thinkers who judge humanity from a religious moral standard, Montaigne prefers to use direct observation, psychology, and brutal honesty to analyze the human condition. With his direct style and no concessions to moral hypocrisy, he lays bare an uncomfortable truth: human society operates as a zero-sum game. What one person gains, another loses. And worse still: by probing into our deepest desires, we discover that many of them feed, consciously or unconsciously, on the detriment of others.

The Original Text: An Observation Without Moral Judgments

The key passage from Montaigne reads as follows:

"And what is worse, let every man search within himself, and he shall find that his inward desires are for the most part born and nourished at the expense of another."

But here lies the crucial nuance: Montaigne is not issuing a moral judgment. He is not saying that human beings are evil by nature, but rather observing a mechanism. For him, this dynamic is not a condemnation, but a natural law—as inevitable as the cycle of life and death. The merchant prospers through the extravagance of others; the physician, through illness; the soldier, through war; the lawyer, through human conflict and disputes. Even ministers of religion derive their purpose from human vices and mortality.

There is no call to repentance here, but rather an invitation to lucidity. Montaigne, as a true skeptic, does not seek to change human nature, but to understand it in order to coexist with it without self-deception.

The complete text of Montaigne in that chapter is extremely brief—barely three paragraphs—and reads as follows in its literal translation:

"Demades the Athenian condemned a man of his city whose trade was selling necessities for burials, under the pretext that he demanded too much profit, and that this profit could only come to him by the death of many people. This judgment seems to me ill-conceived, because no profit is made except to the detriment of another, and by that standard, all kinds of gain would have to be condemned.

The merchant only succeeds in business through the extravagant spending of youth; the farmer through the scarcity of corn; the architect through the ruin of houses; officers of justice through the lawsuits and disputes of men; the very honor and practice of the ministers of religion are derived from our death and vices. No physician takes pleasure in the health even of his own friends, said the ancient Greek comedian, nor any soldier in the peace of his city; and so of the rest.

And what is worse, let every man search within himself, and he shall find that his inward desires are for the most part born and nourished at the expense of another. Considering which, it comes to my mind how nature does not belie herself in this regarding her general condition; for physicists hold that the birth, increase, and growth of each thing is the alteration and corruption of another."

In this short essay, Montaigne argues that human society functions in such a way that the success, gain, or satisfaction of an individual inevitably depends on the misfortune or loss of someone else.

The Modern Misunderstanding: From Observation to Moral Sentence

The popular version of the quote—“Let each person search within themselves, and they will find that our most intimate desires are born and grow, for the most part, to the detriment of others”—is an interpretive paraphrase that heightens the pessimistic tone. While Montaigne limits himself to describing a phenomenon (desire as part of an exchange system where something must yield for another to grow), the modern version sounds like an ethical condemnation.

Why does this difference matter? Because Montaigne is not a moralist. He is not saying that we should feel guilty, but that this is how we are, and that denying it is living in ignorance. His approach is naturalistic: the corruption of one thing is the generation of another, as in an eternal cycle of transformation.

Montaigne in Dialogue: Hobbes, Schopenhauer, and Human Nature

The idea that human desire is linked to the harm of others resonates with other thinkers, though with different nuances:

•    Thomas Hobbes and his "man is a wolf to man" view selfishness as the justification for a strong State to contain violence. For Hobbes, the solution is external control. Montaigne starts from a much more intimate and everyday scale. He does not seek to theorize about the social contract or impose a political system; his method is self-observation. By looking inward, he invites us to recognize that societal dynamics are often a zero-sum game: a merchant's success often depends on another's scarcity, an heir's gain requires the death of a relative, and triumph in any realm requires a rival's defeat. While Hobbes uses human selfishness to justify an authoritarian State and social control, Montaigne uses it to invite us to introspection, reminding us that knowing ourselves is the only true path toward tolerance and peace.

•    Arthur Schopenhauer, on the other hand, takes pessimism to a metaphysical level: for the German philosopher, desire is the irrational engine of the "Will" that drives individuals to assert themselves at the expense of others. Montaigne anticipates this intuition by noting that desire is neither a neutral nor an innocent impulse; at its deepest root, it often harbors the need to deprive or displace the other to satisfy one's own craving.

Montaigne, however, proposes neither political nor metaphysical solutions. It is not about eliminating selfishness (which is impossible), but about recognizing it so as not to be its slave.

What is remarkable about Montaigne is that, despite holding such an uncomfortable mirror up to human nature, his conclusion is neither destructive cynicism nor radical misanthropy, but intellectual honesty and lucidity. Admitting that our desires are born in part from the detriment of others is the first step toward not deceiving ourselves with false sanctity and attempting, through reason and temperance, to cushion the impact of our natural selfishness.

Montaigne’s Solution: Acceptance, Self-Knowledge, and the Inner "Backroom"

Faced with this bleak diagnosis, how does Montaigne live? Not with bitterness, but with serene lucidity. His recipe has three ingredients:

1.    Acceptance of imperfection: There is no need to be outraged by the inevitable. Society is competitive; it is part of its essence. Montaigne is not scandalized; he simply assumes his place in the mechanism.

2.    The "backroom" (arrière-boutique): A key concept in his philosophy. Even if we participate in the social game (with its ambitions and rivalries), we must reserve an inner space that remains free and unshakable, where our peace does not depend on external fluctuations. It is a refuge of authenticity amidst chaos.

3.    Moderation: Self-knowledge allows us to see how our desires can harm others. Reason then invites us to curb excesses, seeking a simple and balanced life.

The Legacy: From Montaigne to Girard, via Nietzsche and Cioran

Montaigne’s intuition was taken up and deepened by other thinkers:

•    François de La Rochefoucauld (17th century) dismantles human virtues in his Maxims: what we call "love of neighbor" is often disguised selfishness.

"In the adversity of our best friends, we always find something that does not displease us."

•    Friedrich Nietzsche goes further in On the Genealogy of Morality: many "noble" desires (justice, equality) are born out of resentment—the secret desire to weaken, lower, or punish the powerful or the different.

•    Emil Cioran (20th century) takes up the spirit of the French moralists with an aphoristic and disillusioned style. For Cioran, action and desire are forms of aggression: desiring something in the world is already a way of asserting oneself over others and displacing their presence. He radicalizes this disillusionment.

•    René Girard (Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Violence and the Sacred) posits that human beings do not desire autonomously. He takes the theory to the extreme with mimetic desire: we do not desire objects, but rather what the other desires, because we take the other as a model, which turns us into natural rivals. Desire, for Girard, is intrinsically conflictual and generates violence; our most intimate desires are born from the attempt to deprive the other of their being or their object.

While these authors explore the psychological roots of conflict, Montaigne remains within phenomenological observation: the benefit of one is the detriment of another. There are no judgments, only raw reality.

Conclusion: The Mirror We Cannot Avoid Looking Into

Montaigne holds up a mirror to us: to look within ourselves is to discover that, at heart, many of our desires are built upon the detriment of others. However, unlike moralists or cynics, he does not leave us in despair. His message is twofold:

1.    Intellectual honesty: Recognizing our selfish nature is the first step toward not living a lie.

2.    Inner freedom: Even if the world operates as a zero-sum game, we do not have to be prisoners of that game. The "backroom"—that space of authenticity—is our sanctuary.

In a world where success is measured in likes, wealth accumulation, or victory over others, Montaigne’s reflection remains as relevant as ever. It is not about renouncing desires, but about knowing what we desire and at what price. Because in the end, as he himself would say, true wisdom lies not in changing the world, but in understanding it so as not to let it change us.
 

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book I, Chapter XXXIX

This essay was prepared with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools (Gemini and Mistral AI).

The Physiology of Taste, Under the Microscope: Between Gastronomic Mysticism and Empirical Suspicion

 
There are books that found a genre, and books that, in addition, found a secular religion. The Physiology of Taste (1825) belongs to this second lineage: Brillat-Savarin did not write a cookbook; he wrote a treatise on philosophical anthropology disguised as an after-dinner manual. His preface—that collection of aphorisms today quoted in isolation, stripped of context, as if they were almanac proverbs—is in reality the manifesto of a far more ambitious thesis: that eating is, above all, an act of civilization.
It is worth, then, first walking through that architecture of ideas just as Savarin himself constructed it, in order to then—and this is what truly interests me—subject it to the kind of scrutiny he never applied to himself.

The Construction of the Myth: Four Foundational Connections

The first thing Savarin does is remove food from the domain of the purely biological and place it, with complete naturalness, into the domain of identity. "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are" is no mere boutade: it is the cornerstone of the idea that diet functions as a mirror of character, that the plate reveals more than the mouth confesses. In the same vein, the distinction between "animals feed; man eats; only the man of intellect knows how to eat" establishes a hierarchy of three levels of existence and places the sophisticated diner at the apex of the evolutionary scale of taste.
From there, Savarin takes a leap that sounds almost prophetic to us today: he connects the table with politics. "The fate of nations depends on how they feed themselves" is nothing less than a anticipation of what centuries later we would call food geopolitics—the idea that a country's sovereignty begins, quite literally, with what its people have to eat.
But the most elegant gesture of the preface is another: the democratization of pleasure. When he states that the pleasure of the table "belongs to all ages, all conditions, all countries, and all days," Savarin constructs an egalitarian, accessible hedonism that accompanies human beings from the cradle to the grave. And that hedonism is completed by an ethic: hospitality. "To invite someone is to take charge of their happiness for as long as they are under our roof" transforms the table into an almost sacred space, where the host assumes a moral and affective responsibility for the guest.

What Savarin Flatly Rejects

This edifice rests, moreover, on two explicit rejections. The first is to functionalist asceticism: the idea of food as mere caloric fuel strikes Savarin as a renunciation of human understanding—almost a form of modern barbarism. The second rejection, more subtle, is to unreasoned excess: "those who get indigestion or get drunk know neither how to eat nor how to drink" sets a clear boundary within hedonism itself. It is not brute gluttony that Savarin celebrates, but an Epicureanism with rules: temperance, lucidity, intelligence. Pleasure, for him, always comes with fine print.

Now, the Suspicion

Up to this point, the complacent reading. But if one puts on the hat of the empirical skeptic—distrustful by trade of any sharp universalization, attentive to the gap between what is observed and what is declared—the edifice begins to show cracks far more interesting than the facade.

The fallacy of cultural determinism. "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are" assumes that diet is a reliable predictor of character, intelligence, or moral rigor. But food is conditioned, above all, by geography, social class, and economic circumstances: reducing a person's psyche to what is in their refrigerator is a reductionism with the pretensions of an aphorism. And there is something worse hidden there: the phrase presupposes that one freely chooses what to eat, when for the vast majority of human history nutrition was a biological necessity subordinate to scarcity, not an act of aesthetic self-determination. Class bias is not a detail; it is the silent heart of the maxim.

Elitism disguised as distinction. The animal–man–man of intellect triad is a moral hierarchy wearing the guise of a neutral observation. Where is the evidence that savoring food according to a certain protocol confers greater intellectual worth? There is none: it is a moralization of taste, a shift of value judgment from the realm of culinary skill to the realm of being. And the historical moment is no coincidence: this construction of new codes of prestige through the refinement of the palate is precisely what a post-revolutionary French bourgeoisie—no longer able to appeal to titles of nobility—needed in order to invent new forms of distinction.

Cause-and-effect magnification. That malnutrition or famine impacts the stability of a state is undeniable. But to assert that the fate of a nation depends on its diet is to confuse correlation with mechanical determinism. Geopolitical, institutional, economic, and technological variables operate with a complexity that diet alone can never fully explain. It is a borrowed causality, inflated so that the aphorism sounds more profound than its evidence allows.

The normativist trap of "knowing how to eat." Here lies, perhaps, the most elegant and tricky gesture of the entire preface: disguising a prescription as a description. Saying that whoever suffers indigestion or gets drunk "does not know" how to eat or drink presents as natural law what is in reality a particular aesthetic preference—that of Enlightenment balance, of 19th-century bourgeois measure. But the concepts of excess, temperance, and enjoyment vary radically across eras and cultures, and possess no ontological foundation to render them universal.

The Final Diagnosis

What this skeptical reading ultimately reveals is that Savarin's gastronomic aphorism never functioned as an empirical law or a neutral observation of human nature. It functioned—and continues to function whenever someone quotes it at an after-dinner table with an air of absolute authority—as an aesthetic and moral dogma with a very precise birth date: early 19th-century France, with its freshly rearranged class anxieties. Savarin's genius was not in discovering a universal truth about food, but in dressing up as universal truth what was, at bottom, the very particular taste of a very particular man of his time.

Written with coffee and a bit of AI.

The veil and the wound: notes on humor as a form of intelligence

 “Good humor always places a veil over pain.” 

Wenceslao Fernández Flórez.

There is a phrase worth reading twice. The first time, quickly, like an after-dinner aphorism. The second time, slowly, because it hides a complete architecture. It was spoken by Wenceslao Fernández Flórez on May 12, 1945, in his induction speech to the Royal Spanish Academy, titled Humor in Spanish Literature:

"The humorist is, ultimately, a sad person. They always place a veil over pain: you look at their eyes and they are wet, but, meanwhile, their lips smile. Deep down, there is nothing more serious than humor."

The image is precise to the point of discomfort: a veil. Not a cure, not a solution, not a denial. A veil. Something that stands in the way without erasing what it covers. That is where the problem begins—and also the interesting part of the matter.

Three layers of the same word

Before discussing whether that veil is wisdom or cowardice, it is worth dismantling the term. "Good humor" is not just one thing; it is at least three:
As a state of mind, it is affective: serenity, temperance, a disposition not to be swept away by everyday noise. As a vital attitude, it is almost an Aristotelian virtue: the ability to take a critical distance from oneself, to cushion the gravity of suffering through jovial detachment. And as a trait of intelligence, it is purely cognitive: the skill to detect the absurd, the paradoxical, the implausible that runs through daily life.
Irony, in its good versions, operates in these three registers at once. It neither heals the wound nor resolves its cause. It places a filter—Fernández Flórez's veil—that allows one to look reality in the face without it blinding or burning. Sometimes that filter is a momentary refuge to catch one's breath. At other times, a modest elegance to soften the blow before walking on. In no case is it free: it costs something, and that cost is precisely what makes it interesting as an object of analysis and not just as a pleasant gesture.

The objection, first in its moderate version

Every thesis on the veil deserves its counterargument, and this one has a reasonable version before becoming extreme. The skeptical question is simple: isn't cushioning the pain, deep down, a way of evading it? From that perspective, the veil does not protect: it blinds, it numbs, it masks. It prevents an honest confrontation with existence.
The argument has its logic. Laughter can operate as a social or psychological anesthetic. By softening tragedy with irony, one runs the risk of resigning oneself to it instead of processing it to the end, or trying to transform it. It is the usual critique against any relief mechanism: that it relieves too well, and that this relief substitutes for the real work.

The extreme version: Cioran tolerates no sugarcoating

If the moderate objection distrusts the veil, Cioran outright declares it the enemy. For the philosopher of radical pessimism, good humor is a cowardly defense mechanism against the abyss. Pain and despair are, for him, the only access routes to an unadorned truth. Interposing a veil—however elegant or ingenious it may be—is refusing to look nothingness in the face. His quote summarizes it leaving no room for ambiguity: "Hope is the normal form of a lack of lucidity."
Under that lens, the humorist who smiles with wet eyes is not being brave. They are being incapable of holding a steady gaze into the void without seeking the refuge of a grimace.

Schopenhauer: humor as a truce, not an escape

It is fitting now to bring in someone who, sharing the underlying pessimism with Cioran, reaches an almost opposite conclusion about humor: Arthur Schopenhauer.
In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer constructs a theory of incongruity: laughter arises when there is a sudden dissonance between an abstract concept—what reason thinks—and the real object, as it is perceived. It is the momentary victory of concrete perception over the rigidity of the concept. And he distinguishes humor from irony on a key point: irony is objective, saying something serious disguised as a joke for others; humor is subjective, it is the subject's gaze upon themselves. The humorist perceives human misery, the impossibility of satisfying the Will, and instead of despairing, smiles at the incongruity of human endeavors.
For Schopenhauer, then, humor is not an escape: it is a metaphysical escape valve, a brief and ingenious intellectual rest, a truce where intelligence laughs at its own conceptual traps.
There lies the real disagreement between two first-rate pessimists, and it is no minor one: both agree that the world is fundamentally tragic, but they disagree on what intelligence is for in the face of that diagnosis. For Schopenhauer, the world is driven by a blind and insatiable Will that condemns us to oscillate between the pain of not obtaining what is desired and the boredom of obtaining it. But there are windows of liberation: just as art and aesthetic contemplation disconnect us for an instant from the yoke of desire, humor functions as an intellectual shortcut. Laughter reveals a system failure—reason stumbles upon detecting the incongruity—and that stumble suspends, even if only for seconds, the tragic gravity of the Will. The humorist does not ignore tragedy: they understand it so well that they position themselves above it through the intellect. It is contemplative consolation, not denial.
Cioran, an heir to that pessimism, but without the Schopenhauerian faith in aesthetic consolation, rejects any mechanism that mitigates the void. If Schopenhauer sees humor as a rest, Cioran sees it as cowardice or a trap of hope: to smile in the face of pain is to label it, digest it, make it tolerable. And that, for him, is betraying the purity of suffering.

Bergson: laughter does not look inward, it looks toward society

There is still a third way, and it is the most foreign to the previous two because it changes the grounds for discussion: not metaphysical, but social. Henri Bergson, in Laughter (1900), seeks neither consolation nor existential lucidity. He seeks function.
His central thesis is "the mechanical superimposed on the living": life is fluidity, elasticity, constant adaptation. We laugh when someone loses that vital agility and behaves like a machine or an inert object—the stumble from distraction, clumsiness, rigidity of character. For that laughter to occur, Bergson argues, a "momentary insensitivity of the heart" is necessary: empathy must be paused, because humor appeals to pure and detached intelligence. Laughter, then, is not an intimate veil against one's own pain. It is a social corrective, a way society has of gently punishing rigidity or a lack of adaptability, forcing the individual to rejoin the flexible flow of the collective.

Returning to Fernández Flórez, now better equipped

Placed side by side, the three positions draw a fairly clear map. Bergson freezes the heart to correct the behavior of others. Cioran declares that any grimace of relief is cowardice that numbs lucidity. And in the middle of that intersection—neither cold social corrective, nor cowardly denial of lucidity—appears Fernández Flórez's intuition, which is, of the three, the most human and the most everyday: that of the indispensable refuge.
The humorist, in this reading, does not ignore the gravity of the world nor pretends to resolve it with abstract formulas. Nor do they fall into the trap of naive optimism, which would be the easy caricature of all this. They know, like Schopenhauer, that existence creaks under the weight of its own incongruity. But instead of letting themselves be crushed by that certainty, they choose the elegance of detachment.
Humor does not destroy tragedy. It envelops it. It allows one to hold their gaze without being blinded by the glare of their own wound. And there, after navigating Bergsonian anesthesia, Schopenhauer's metaphysical diagnosis, and Cioran's relentless despair, the original paradox returns to its starting point with all its strength intact:

"The humorist is, ultimately, a sad person. They always place a veil over pain: you look at their eyes and they are wet, but, meanwhile, their lips smile. Deep down, there is nothing more serious than humor."

#Co-created with AI.

The Refrigerator That Dispenses Justice

Edmund Burke wrote that "nothing turns out to be so much the world's respect as the cold neutrality of an impartial judge." It is one of those sentences one reads, nods along to, and files away without much scrutiny, because it sounds like common sense elevated to a maxim. But if one takes the trouble to cross it with objects that have absolutely nothing to do with the law, the phrase begins to show interesting cracks.

The Thermostat as a Model of Judicial Virtue
Let’s think about a refrigerator's thermostat. It is probably the least glamorous device in existence: it has no opinion on what it stores. It doesn't care whether its contents are a prime fillet steak or cold cuts of questionable origin, whether it is expensive food or junk food. Its sole function is to maintain a temperature, indifferent to the moral, economic, or nutritional value of what lies inside.
Here, the first connection appears: the judicial coldness that Burke calls for is not gratuitous moral indifference; it is a mechanism of preservation. Just as the thermostat prevents ambient heat from spoiling the contents of the fridge, the judge's neutrality prevents the heat of the moment—public outrage, political pressure, the social mood of the day—from corrupting the norm. It is not that the judge "doesn't care" about the case; it is that their role requires them to act as if they don't, because it is that structural indifference that preserves the integrity of what is inside: the law.
In other words, coldness is not the absence of commitment; it is the form that commitment takes toward something that transcends the individual case.

What If the Thermostat Were an Algorithm?
Now let’s push the connection one step further, toward less domestic territory: artificial intelligence. If Burke demands an almost mechanical coldness, wouldn't a well-trained algorithm be the perfect fulfillment of his ideal? No code wakes up in a bad mood, no algorithm sympathizes more with a charismatic litigant than with an articulate-challenged one, no software instance has a bad day. Total automation would seem to be the logical culmination of the neutrality Burke demanded.
And yet, that is where the unexpected connection begins to feel uncomfortable rather than reassuring. Because when one imagines an algorithm handing down a sentence, what arises is not relief, but suspicion. We intuitively feel that something is missing, even if it is hard to name precisely. Perhaps what Burke was defending was not the total absence of humanity in the decision, but the presence of a human capable of mastering their own humanity—of actively exercising coldness as a discipline, rather than a factory default.
A thermostat doesn't choose to be cold: it cannot be anything else. A judge, on the other hand, chooses to be cold every single time, against the current of their own inclinations. There lies the difference that no refrigerator and no algorithm can replicate: virtue is not in the coldness itself, but in the effort to maintain it when it would be easier not to.

The Remaining Paradox
Crossing Burke with a thermostat and an algorithm does not resolve the question of judicial neutrality: it deepens it. It leaves us with an uncomfortable paradox: the more perfect and automatic impartiality becomes, the less it resembles the kind that Burke, in the 18th century, had in mind. The coldness he admired was not that of a machine without internal friction, but that of a human being who experiences the friction—and chooses, despite everything, not to let themselves be moved by it.

* With the help of my AI assistant.