@cogito.rebellion: part 414 | you are not the same person twice. so who exactly are you arguing with yourself about? 🤍 "we are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. and there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others" — michel de montaigne, essays, "of presumption," book ii the deep dive… montaigne does not stop at the one sentence. the full passage opens with a confession: we are all patchwork. shapeless and diverse in composition. each bit, each moment, playing its own game. this is one of the most honest things ever written about what a person actually is. not a unified, consistent self with a fixed identity that persists unchanged through time. a collection of shifting pieces, moods, contradictions, and impulses that barely hold together into something we agree to call one person. the version of you that woke up this morning is not exactly the version that will go to sleep tonight. the version that is calm under pressure is not the same as the one that says things it regrets. the punchline, the line about the difference between us and ourselves, lands hardest once you have accepted the patchwork. if we are so internally various, then the gap between who i am at my best and who i am at my worst is at least as wide as the gap between me and another person entirely. which means self-knowledge is not easier than knowing others. it is harder, because the subject keeps changing. montaigne's response to this was not despair. it was curiosity. he kept writing about himself, not because he thought he would eventually arrive at a fixed portrait, but because the inconsistency itself was the most interesting thing he could study. the essays are the record of that study. who was montaigne? michel de montaigne was born in 1533 in the périgord region of southwest france. "of presumption" appears in book ii of the essays, written in the 1570s and 1580s. it is one of his longer and more self-scrutinising pieces, cataloguing his own physical and intellectual qualities with a directness that remains startling. montaigne died in 1592, still revising. part 414 #montaigne #philosophy #darkacademiaaesthetic #existentialism #dailyquotes

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Monday 06 July 2026 21:55:04 GMT