Josep Pla und Montaigne. Eine Skizze

Abstract

Joseph Pla was a great admirer of French literature. As such, the writer Michel de Montaigne was of particular importance to him. Accordingly, Pla once remarked that he owed a plethora of fundamental philosophical knowledge to the author of Essais, as well as the ability to weigh and judge. In Pla’s opinion, the Frenchman was an ideal representative of a nonbombastic view of man and as a moralist. In the following passages, three further relations between the two authors will be reflected upon. To begin with, the depiction of the self and the emerging difficulty with the same phenomenon shall be treated; since the ego is not always present to itself, it vacillates between authenticity on the one hand, and convention and role on the other. Therefore the topic of the instability of human relation stands at the center of Montaigne’s observations as well as of Pla’s, which can evidently be traced in his tale “Contraban”; the theme of instability is counterbalanced by a certain consistency in these authors’ views. At last it demonstrates that both authors tend, with regard to their view of man, towards a policy of power decomposition. Thus they establish, with their understanding of nature and health, an inevitable counterimage (since Pla is defined by a profession towards antique cynicism and its use of the verb “badar”).
Keywords: Influence, affinity, depiction of the self, authenticity, instability, power decomposition, nature.