The best philosophic book of the last several years, particularly among those aimed at an intermediate-level audience, is Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment, co-authored by Jenna Silber Storey and her husband Benjamin Storey. The Storeys teach at Furman University, and their book consists of four studies of thinkers from the French canon, Michel de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Alexis de Tocqueville.
While each of the studies is excellent and a necessary piece of the book, everything ultimately flows from the conflict sketched in the first two chapters between Montaigne and Pascal. And since the Storeys side more with the latter, their chapter on Pascal can be considered the heart of the book.
It is one of the best things I’ve ever read on Pascal.
Writing on Pascal is difficult, in part because his key work, the Pensées, was unfinished at the time of his early death, and thus is a collection of fragments and epigrams which may be arranged in different ways, but the main difficulty is that grappling with his thought is a challenge to the soul, one simultaneously philosophic and personal. I know—back in 1999 I wrote my St. John’s College master’s essay on the theme of “diversion” in the Pensées. That was rewarding, and a delight in many ways, but it involved some hard wrestling, too. The big difficulty was my being forced to realize that the account of happiness, or eudaimonia, at the heart of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was not the end-all of reflection on the subject, nor one as readily-adjusted to a Christian understanding as the man who had inspired me to come to St. John’s, the Thomistic “Great Books-guy” Mortimer Adler, had led me to assume. You might say I had to let go of the young man’s hope that happy-living-through-a-sound-ethical-philosophy was possible, or at least, was all that clear of a path. I made many wonderful discoveries at St. John’s—too many to tell, but the thinkers who had the biggest impacts on me were Plato, Hume, Euclid, Homer, Rousseau, Bloom/Strauss (not on the curriculum), and most of all, Pascal. I was so Adler-influenced at the time, that I had come to campus expecting to be the most-impressed by Aristotle; the deeper forays into his texts which the college fostered did not disappoint, so that he remained at or near the top of any list I would make, but a key counterweight to my love of Aristotle emerged in Pascal. Obviously, my receptivity to his thought had a good deal to do with my already being a Christian, but it was a deep impact, and it proved invaluable for my doctoral studies of Tocqueville. Even before I fell under the influence of Peter Augustine Lawler, and read his essential Tocqueville book, The Restless Mind, I had detected Pascal’s influence in several parts of Democracy in America, and especially in its famous chapter “Why the Americans Show Themselves So Restless in the Midst of Their Well-Being.”
I have not, however, done a lot of Pascal-study since those days at St. John’s, and when I was later writing my dissertation on Tocqueville. At present, I lead a book group which tackled selections from his Pensées last summer, but that was my first time back into extended study of it in a decade. More than with any other work which this Provo Great Books Club has read together, I felt we only scratched the surface in our discussions, and I was somewhat on edge preparing for those sessions, because more than any other work I know of, with only Nietzsche’s works and the Bible itself feeling comparable in this, reading the Pensées always seems an event, one that will potentially involve a struggle of the soul. There are times when Blaise inflames, others when he repels, others when he can bring--at least to his fellow Christian--deep peace. And when it is not an event, when I respond with a “yes, I already know what he says here,” I worry more than I usually would with a previously-studied work that I have not risen up to the occasion. With Nietzsche, part of the issue always feels a matter of not letting the sheer rhetorical force sweep you off your feet, and while there is a similar—if less obvious--danger of getting swept away with Pascal also, there seem to be additional forces and dangers yet. I would even assume that Tocqueville was exaggerating when he suggested that he read Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Pascal (“lived with them”) nearly “every day.” Daily Montesquieu, or even Rousseau, seems like something one could handle—but Pascal?
So, I am super-impressed by how deftly the Storeys have presented many key aspects of Pascal’s thought in this book’s one 50-page chapter on him. The point of departure they adopt, the posing of Pascal against Montaigne, seems to drive their success. Anyone who reads Pascal with care sees that Montaigne is an important interlocutor, at least on certain subjects, but given the difficulty of arriving at a summary understanding of what Montaigne himself is up to—is he primarily a skeptic, an essayist, or what?—and the greater difficulty of even coming to think such a encapsulating task is needed with him,1 it is far from obvious that he could serve as one of the best pathways into Pascal’s thought.
The Storeys begin by sketching Montaigne’s skeptical-secular and “ME”-focused pursuit of what they label immanent contentment—and they then turn to Pascal’s radical critique of it, which turns out to require a sketching of several of his main lines of thought. Rousseau’s thought then comes to light as an attempt to defend the basic Montaingean position, but with a deeper anthropology, one still secularist yet Pascal-like (also Plato-like) in its radical critique of the Enlightenment society so influenced—acc. to the Storeys--by Montaigne; finally, Tocqueville’s thought comes to light as an attempt to examine modern democratic society by means of ideas derived from both Rousseau and Pascal, but especially the from latter, and thus, as a resource well-suited for thinking about contemporary manifestations of restlessness.
The unifying message of Montaigne’s “semi-autobiographical” but all-over-the-map Essays, the Storeys argue, is a
…new and particular ideal of happiness—an ideal we call immanent contentment. The formula…is moderation through variation: an arrangement of our dispositions, our pursuits, and pleasures that is calculated to keep us interested, “at home,” and present in the moment but also dispassionate, at ease, and in balance.(3)
The Storeys later indicate how this ideal basically rejects classical ones of virtue-pursuit, particularly as seen in the life-models of the hero, statesman, and philosopher, but they initially stress the way it serves as an escape from Christian models of penitential, otherworld-focused, and doctrine-insistent living, all of which in Montaigne’s time (1533-1592) were in regular tension with the spirit of the Renaissance, and the last of which could not but be associated with the disastrous, and apparently potentially endless, Wars of Religion.
Now the new ideal here, while deliberately removing one from grand political or religious concerns, would nonetheless impact how one lives in society. It favors a politics of custom-backed settlement of those grand debates, but more fundamentally, it redirects social energies towards the particularities of our lives.
…this ideal also has a social dimension, which one pursues by presenting to others the variegated and balanced self one has fashioned in the hope of receiving their complete, personal, unmediated approbation: the affirmation that we are lovable, not merely for the pleasure, utility, or even nobility of our company but because we are who we are—irreducibly distinct human wholes…Such approbation…Montaigne depicts in his story of the bond he shared with his own great friend Etienne de la Boétie.(3)
The Storeys assert that this overall ideal—both its personal and social sides—became, and in the main remains, the “vision of human flourishing that animates modern life,” while hinting that it is also the source of the intense manifestations of restlessness they have noticed among many of their most diligent students. They pose Pascal against it. Arguing that Montaigne’s vision was the key inspiration for the 17th-century French ideal of the honnêtes hommes, which we usually—but somewhat problematically2--translate as “gentlemen,” the Storeys then bring in Pascal:
Some wonder, however, whether Montaigne and his growing number of followers have not drawn the confines of life too narrowly—whether they have not accepted fleeting pleasures as a poor substitute for solid happiness. Nonchalance might be much less than moral life demands of us, and might go along far too easily with the ruses of power. The desire for our friends’ unqualified approbation might be something darker than an innocent wish for human confirmation of our individuality. On this view, Montaignean diversion might distract us not only from fruitless obsessions with a death we cannot avoid and truths we cannot know but from the reality of what we are. If so, then gliding lightly over the surface of life comes to look less like a healthy constraint of our restless desires and more like a self-alienating truncation of our god-seeking souls. (51)
…No one has given more powerful voice to such suspicions of Montaignean moral modernism than Blaise Pascal. At modernity’s outset, Pascal examines its meaning in all of its dimensions, with a penetration few have been able to match. …he witnesses the living truth of the modern quest for immanent contentment in the lives of the honnêtes hommes around him and sees that, in spite of his contemporaries’ impressive efforts to arrange artful and pleasant lives…the restlessness of the human heart Augustine described in antiquity remains alive in them. …the quest for immanent contentment leaves the restless human heart more anxious than ever, for modernity’s very success…allows us to see, with terrifying clarity, that a human life is not the sort of problem a psychological stratagem can solve. In Pascal, the restlessness that is truly modern…finds its first and most powerful voice. (52)
Several sections of biographical information about Pascal the scientist-scenester-polemicist then follow, much of it having to do with his influence by the Jansenist Catholics, and with his writing of the Provincial Letters. For readers interested in more of this, one biography I like is the Pascal: The Emergence of Genius by Émile Cailliet, or there is the doesn’t-exactly-work film Blaise Pascal by the neo-realist and Catholic-friendly director Roberto Rossellini, who of course was also the only film director nervy enough to attempt a film depicting Socrates. (That is also not entirely successful, so for a totally-successful instance of Rossellini’s seeking to capture the impact of a great man, try The Flowers of St. Francis.)
The Storeys then return to the Pascal v. Montaigne framing by going into my favorite Pascalian subject, “diversion,” showing how Pascal arrived at his conception by expanding upon an essay of Montaigne’s.
Pascal aims to show human beings who think themselves happy…that they are secretly miserable. To do so, he steps out to meet Montaigne…on his own territory, the territory of diversion. Montaigne recommends a healthy dose of diversion and prides himself on his conversational art of leading sad or angry souls step by step away from throughs of grief or vengeance. Pascal sees the efficacy of the Montaignean solution; diversion, he writes, “is the only thing that consoles us from our miseries.” But that diversion alone consoles us is, for Pascal, merely, “the greatest of our miseries.”
Effective diversion must include both the hunt and the kill, for neither satisfies alone. Put the soul at rest, and it longs for activity; put the soul in motion, and it longs for rest.(64)
Diversion can distract us from grief, but if we grieve not only over what has happened to us but over what we are, to distract us from grief is to distract us from ourselves. Self-knowledge can begin only with the honest acknowledgement of our unhappiness. …Our desire to avoid such honesty with ourselves is all-pervasive. It animates social life, which Pascal sees as a mutually reinforcing architecture of illusions…(66, emphasis added)
Not easy to write prose that amplifies the roar of Pascal’s, but the Storeys have the chops! This last sentence is from a section they title “Social Life and Self-Deception,” which ends with this, riffing off of Pascal’s blunt dismissal—“The self is hateful. You, Mitton, cover it up, but you do not take it away”—of Damien Mitton’s elevation of manners:
Pascal could say as much to Montaigne, Mitton’s model…By painting his own colors so winningly, he makes a self-centered way of life attractive to many. …[but] to make the self the center of everything is the height of injustice, however we may dress injustice up in seemliness and wit. The truth of the self is tyranny, fear, hatred of truth and of those who bear witness to it, plus diversion and a conspiracy of mutual self-deception to close our eyes to it all.(70)
Did I say this is surely among the very best philosophic books in recent years? While I do not know about the Storeys’ religious commitments, assuming they have any, and will note that they have done the academic thing of not making it possible for the reader to know, it nonetheless seems that by so loyally conveying the most powerful arguments of the Pensées, albeit in their own words, they have also given us one among the very best Christian books of our times. At the least, they side with Pascal (& Tocqueville) against Montaigne in assuming humans are naturally “god-seeking.” (see above) And they title their Pascal chapter “The Inhumanity of Immanence.”
I also particularly like the title of their subsection which serves as their chapter’s conclusion:
“Pascal’s Legacy: Honest Sadness in an Age of Happiness-Signaling”
They of course mean our own age most of all, with its constant hum of social-media self-presentation, an age they say is “systematically dedicated to the masking of unhappiness” and one in which we “identify not only success but even normality with happiness.” (97, emphasis added) So the Storeys emerge as advocates of candor about the depth of our discontent, which we feel even (and especially!) when most of our plans are realized. They are partisans for “Searching in Anguish,” to quote another of their subsection’s titles.
In all of this, they line up with what many of our better rock-artists put forward in song, such as:
Tele Novella: …but grief is not your foe.
Game Theory: It might seem like we care, but we’ll all be selfish again.
& Kevin Morby: And cast your vision, on the dark road, for a while.
There’s certainly more from the Storeys on Pascal I could go into—they provide a very good summary of his case, not just for the Search, but for Christian belief, in number of the chapter’s subsections I haven’t delved into here, including an especially fine one on the Pascalian conception of the “Heart” and its capacity for a beyond-Montaignean kind of love.
But I’ll leave it to you.
I hope to later discuss the book more as a whole, and to compare it with another fine work of recent times, Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals, by the UVA English professor Mark Edmundson, a book similarly fed-up with contemporary attempts to set the soul, and the search for a noble way of life, into a rut of complacent variety-cultivation and desire-limitation. Meantime, if you want more info about the Storey’s book, here is an introductory video, and you might also look at what my friend and fellow Provo Great Books Club member John C. Hancock says about it here, here, and elsewhere on his stack. Unlike Anglican-with-an-evangelical background me, John will give you tie-ins to Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints teachings; but like me, he finds the Storeys’ prose just too delectable, and too simply right, to not quote at length.
My main attempts to read Montaigne were when I was younger and less adept in the arts of interpretation, but as the Storeys point out, Montaigne himself says at one point that “It is the lazy reader who loses my subject, not I,” and they add—quoting Pierre Hadot, I think--that he has a “unified intention and leads the reader through ‘an unprecedented genre of spiritual exercises’ so as to alter the reader’s self-understanding.” (17)
When we translate it this way, we add certain Anglo-American interpretations of and adjustments to the ideal of the gentleman that play up his readiness for political leadership and his pursuit of virtue in the classical sense, whereas for Montaigne, the acts of “self-revealing authenticity” at the heart of his ideal “largely dispense with the term ‘virtue’ as such,” even if certain “social virtues,” such as those of “humanity and justice to others” are played-up. (Storeys, 26 & 31) For the more-virtue-focused understanding of the gentleman pushed by certain British thinkers (including Smith and Austen) and held by nearly all the American Founders, see Gordon Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, 14-19.
Carl, you're quite right about the Storeys' achievement: Pascal in 50! No sane person would have thought it could be done. After they have, I guess I'll have to redefine "sane".
Do you have Manent's Montaigne book? If not, I'll send a copy. You also might want to look up my review of Tom Hibbs' book on Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal in the Review of Politics. It'll say more about Montaigne's "immanentism" (his Socrates ignores the Forms and doesn't have philosophical Eros!).
Benjamin Storey studied Montaigne with a famous French man of letters whose name escapes me, then a bit with Manent at BC (I think). He's written a review of Pierre's Montaigne book for PPS. (He doesn't get it quite right, but it's worth reading.)
Interesting learning about your early and formative encounter with Blaise.
I just wrote a little piece on a new translation of the Pensees that in my opinion has replaced the penguin classics edition as the definitive English edition.
Glad to see another SJC alum on Substack!
https://open.substack.com/pub/socraticpsychiatrist/p/diversion?r=44y4c&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post