Montaigne on Conversation: Why Disagreement Can Be a Pleasure

A good conversation, according to Michel de Montaigne, is one you might leave a little changed. It is not a match with a scoreboard. You turn up curious, you say what you think, and you let the other person's pushback do its work on you. The pleasure is in the exchange itself, and a disagreement that stays friendly can be one of the best parts of it.

Montaigne was a French writer who lived from 1533 to 1592. He wrote at home, in a tower of his house, and he called his short pieces essais, which roughly means "attempts" or "trials". I find that comforting. A man who titled his life's work "Attempts" was not planning to be right about everything. One of those attempts is called "Of the Art of Conversation", and it is the one I want to walk through today. I'm still learning from it, so please read this as one person's notes, not a lecture.

What did Montaigne actually say about conversation?

I'll paraphrase, since his sentences wander off in lovely directions and I'd rather not mangle them. Here is what I take from the essay.

First, he thought conversation was the most fruitful exercise of the mind, and also the most enjoyable. He preferred it to reading, which is a striking thing for a man who loved his books.

Second, he said that when someone contradicted him, it woke up his attention instead of his anger. He moved towards the person who disagreed, because that person might teach him something.

Third, he said he would sooner be corrected than win, because being corrected frees you from an error you were carrying around without knowing it.

Fourth, and this surprised me, he had little patience for heated, stubborn argument, the kind where people raise their voices and dig in. He seemed to see that as a sign that the talk had stopped being about finding anything out.

Put together, it is a gentle idea. Talk is a way of finding things out together, and the finding out is the prize.

Why "winning" a chat is a strange goal

Here is a small thought experiment that made Montaigne's point click for me.

Suppose you and a friend are chatting at the kitchen table about whether it is better to store tomatoes in the fridge or on the bench. You both have firm views. Let's look at the possible endings.

• You win, and you were right. You leave knowing exactly what you knew when you sat down. You may feel pleased, but you have learned nothing.
• You win, and you were wrong. This is the worst one. You have talked someone out of a better answer, and you now hold your mistake more confidently than before.
• You lose, and they were right. You have one more true thing in your head. It cost you a little pride, which grows back.
• Nobody wins, but you find out why you disagree. Perhaps one of you was thinking of ripe tomatoes eaten this week, and the other of unripe ones kept for ages. You now understand the question better than either of you did.

Only the last two endings leave you with anything new. Winning, which feels like the point, is at best neutral for what you know and at worst harmful. Losing, which feels like the thing to avoid, is the only outcome where knowledge reliably arrives.

I'll admit this is a tidy picture, and real conversations are messier. Sometimes the right answer is plain, and sometimes the other person is simply mistaken. But the logic holds as a way of noticing what we are chasing when we feel that small flare of I need to get this across.

Isn't this just telling us to be agreeable?

No, and this is the misunderstanding I most want to clear up, because I made it myself for years.

When I first read about welcoming disagreement, I took it to mean "nod along and keep the peace". As I read Montaigne, he means nearly the opposite. He valued a partner with some backbone, someone who would push back firmly and make him work. Constant agreement gives you nothing to learn from. It is like practising the cello with a metronome that politely slows down whenever you struggle.

Learning anything works the same way. In Italian, I learn the most from the people who correct me, even when I wince. The friend who says "Sì, ho capito" and lets my mistakes pass is lovely company, but I am no better the next week. The friend who says "Almost, try it again" is the one who helps. Disagreement is just correction in a different coat.

So the skill is to hold your own view warmly and loosely at once. You say what you think, and you stay interested in what could be wrong with it. That is harder than either stubbornness or agreeableness, and I'm still practising.

What makes a disagreement pleasant instead of tense?

Montaigne's own answer, as I read it, is that the heat is the problem, not the difference of opinion. The trouble starts when a question about the thing turns into a question about me. If you say the tomatoes belong on the bench, and I hear "you have been doing it wrong your whole life", of course I bristle.

A rough way to think about it is that every disagreement has two layers:

1. The claim. "Tomatoes lose flavour in the cold."
2. The person. "Am I clever? Am I respected? Did I just get told off?"

A good conversation keeps the attention on the first layer. A tense one is mostly the second layer wearing a disguise. Knowing this does not make the second layer vanish, but it helps me spot it. When my face goes warm in the middle of a chat about, say, how long to boil an egg, that is usually my pride waving a small flag, not my reasoning.

There is a nice link here with how people check each other's work in many fields. A second pair of eyes catches errors that the first pair cannot see, because we are all poor at spotting our own blind spots. Having someone disagree with you is a bit like having a spare pair of glasses handed over. It would be silly to resent the glasses.

Four small habits for kitchen-table talk

None of these are rules. They are things that helped me, and your results may vary.

1. Ask one more question before you answer. This is my favourite. When someone says something you disagree with, pause and ask one genuine question about it. "What makes you say that?" or "Where did you come across it?" Very often the answer changes what I was about to say. Sometimes it reveals that we agree more than I thought. Sometimes it shows me a fact I did not have. At the very least, my reply is better aimed.

A confession: when I first tried this at a family lunch, I asked so many questions in a row that it began to feel like an interview. Someone said, kindly, "Tobias, are you all right?" So one more question is plenty. Two is a bit much, and three starts to look like a quiz.

2. Say back what you heard, in your own words. "So you're saying the fridge makes them mealy?" It takes five seconds. If you got it wrong, the other person fixes it, and you avoid arguing with a version of their view that only existed in your head. I find that about half my disagreements disappear at this step, which is humbling.

3. Notice the warm face. When you feel that flush of defensiveness, treat it as information and not as an instruction. You don't have to hide it. Just name it quietly to yourself: that's pride, not evidence. Then take a slow sip of tea. It is hard to be dramatic while sipping.

4. Be willing to say "I hadn't thought of that." This sentence is a small gift to the other person, because it tells them their words landed. It costs nothing, and it turns out to be one of the more pleasant things to say. I've started keeping a casual mental list of things I've changed my mind about. It is a short, slightly embarrassing list, and I'm fond of it.

What I learned from the back row of a choir

I should thank the community choir that lets me sit at the back and listen. I'm not a good enough singer to be at the front, and I have made peace with that. But from the back, I have noticed something that connects to all of this.

A choir sounds good not because every voice is the same, but because each voice is listening to the others while it sings. The altos are not trying to beat the basses. When one section drifts slightly flat, the others quietly adjust, and the whole thing finds its footing again. Nobody wins a chord.

A good talk feels like this to me. You are not trying to be the loudest part. You are trying to hear the whole sound, including the line you didn't write.

A caution, and a question to carry around

I should be honest about the limits of all this. Montaigne was writing about conversation between people who wish each other well and who are curious. Not every chat is like that, and some people do not want to be asked questions. Being gently curious does not oblige you to carry on with someone who is only trying to win. It is fine to change the subject, or to go and put the kettle on. I also don't know how well his ideas travel to every kind of talk, such as a tense one at work, where much more is at stake than tomatoes. I've only tested them at the kitchen table.

What I keep wondering about is this. If the best part of a conversation is the chance of leaving with something new, then how much of what I currently believe was once handed to me by someone who disagreed with me, kindly, over a cup of tea, and whom I have since forgotten to thank?

Thank you for reading. If you try the "one more question" habit this week, I'd love to hear how it goes, including if it goes sideways. That is usually where the best lesson turns up.