1
20
2
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/32f24210cc711cd2e888738b35ab3974.pdf
f951d31d01076ed1283967a166a0d0e6
PDF Text
Text
The Pursuit of Happiness: Four French Thinkers on Our Restless Quest for Contentment
Lecture to be delivered at St. John’s College, Annapolis
October 18, 2019
1. Thank you all for the great honor of coming to speak at St. John’s. I’ve admired St. John’s since
my childhood in nearby Columbia; I have friends who were students here and friends who teach
here, to say nothing of all that I have learned from the scholarship of the faculty. Moreover, for
people like me who do the work of great books education on campuses where that project is less
central, St. John’s is a beacon—a standard of what liberal education can be. I thus come to this
campus upon which I’ve barely set foot before with an odd sense of homecoming.
2. Almost one hundred and eighty years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville described Americans as “restless
in the midst of their well-being.” Although Americans, as he saw them, were “the most free and
enlightened men placed in the happiest condition in the world,” “a kind of cloud habitually covered
their features,” and they seemed “grave and almost sad, even in their pleasures.” “A man, in the
United States,” he writes, “carefully builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it
while the ridgepole is being set; he plants a garden and he rents it as he is about to taste its fruit;”
“he embraces a profession and he leaves it,” if he has a little leisure at the end of his year, “he takes
his restless curiosity here and there” across this vast country. The Americans he saw had an
incapacity for sitting still that revealed an abiding discontent.
3. Tocqueville’s observation on this point seems to become truer with every passing year. The
1830s America that looked to Tocqueville like a place of unprecedented human enlightenment and
prosperity looks to us almost premodern, with people working enormously hard just to feed
themselves, high maternal-fetal mortality, slavery, bad sanitation, and slow communication. Almost
two hundred years of advancements have made us immeasurably more prosperous. But they have
not made us measurably less restless. Depression, anxiety, and loneliness are all around us, starkly
1
�evident in the disturbing rise of so-called “deaths of despair.” Quieter forms of this unease are
known to everyone who spends time with the young, including the very successful young people
who graduate from colleges like this one.
4. There are surely many causes for this strange combination of prosperity and discontent. Some of
these causes are political and economic, and might have political and economic solutions. But
others are deeper—causes rooted in the constituent elements of our way of life. Today, I want to
consider the distinctive restlessness Tocqueville observed, and that we can still observe, in the light
of what I will argue is our distinctive way of pursuing happiness. That way of pursuing happiness
developed centuries before Tocqueville, precisely as a strategy for palliating the natural restlessness
of the human heart. I then want to argue that this modern way of understanding happiness, which I
will call immanent contentment, exacerbates the very restlessness it is intended to alleviate. I want
to suggest that the particular form of agitation that attends this particular way of pursuing happiness
explains much about the present state of both our personal lives and our politics.
6. I’m going to make this argument by briefly outlining a conversation among four French thinkers,
all of whom make an appearance in your seminars: the great essayist Michel de Montaigne, who
originated the way of pursuing happiness I aim to understand and assess; the astonishing polymath
Blaise Pascal, who offered the first and still most powerful critique of this way of pursuing
happiness: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who transformed and radicalized the Montaignean quest for
happiness understood as immanent contentment, and Tocqueville himself, who shows us what this
mode of pursuing happiness does to our politics when it becomes the default way of life for an
enormous modern nation. I will close by suggesting that we would be personally happier and
politically better off if we reconsidered some of the basic assumptions behind this modern way of
pursuing happiness.
2
�I: Michel de Montaigne and the Art of Immanent Contentment
7. This story of the modern pursuit of happiness begins in an era of profound unhappiness: the
wars of religion of sixteenth century France. Michel de Montaigne lived through eight such wars,
which convulsed France, turning neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, from 1562,
when Montaigne was thirty, until the Edict of Nantes in 1598—six years after his death.
8. Montaigne began writing his Essays in 1572, the year the wars of religion reached their low point,
with the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre on August 24. Montaigne describes that book, in which
he inaugurates the use of the term essay to describe a literary form, as a self-portrait. That portrait
offers a charming depiction of a self successfully engaged in the pursuit of immanent contentment,
against France’s backdrop of a blood and fanaticism; it is that contrast that gives the Essays their
pathos.
9. Montaigne writes the Essays in obedience to the Delphic injunction to “know thyself.” “I study
myself more than any other subject,” he writes, “that is my physics, that is my metaphysics.” Highly
personal though his book is, however, it is not without political import. It is by sounding the depths
of his own apparently peaceable soul that Montaigne discovers the deepest causes of the troubles of
his country.
10. “We are never at home,” he writes, “we are always beyond.” “Fear, desire, and hope launch us
toward the future, and rob us of the sentiment of what is, to amuse us with what will be, even when
we will be no longer.” Such is Montaigne’s depiction of human restlessness, which he knows
firsthand. As he tells the story, when he first retired from his political career to his chateau to
undertake a life of solitary contemplation, his own mind bolted like a runaway horse, giving birth to
all manner of chimeras and fantastic monsters. Montaigne is, himself, a restless soul.
11. To alleviate this restlessness, Montaigne seeks to teach us, and himself, the art of being at home.
The first lesson of that art is, as he puts it, “learning to die.” For Montaigne thinks that our
3
�restlessness is driven largely by our obsession with our own mortality. For his own part, Montaigne
wants to die without thinking about it, and tells us that death will find him “planting his cabbages,
nonchalant about death, and still more about his unfinished garden.”
12. Montaigne’s instruction in the art of dying well is a not particularly veiled critique of the
Christian concern with immortality. But it is much more than that. Montaigne sees much of human
ambition—the aspirations that drive philosophy, theology, politics, and even virtue itself—as a
misanthropic and cruel rebellion against the human condition, which fuels, among other things, the
political and religious traumas of his time.
13. Montaigne’s art of living is therefore an art of circumscription. “The course of our desires,” he
writes, “must be circumscribed and restrained to the nearest and most contiguous good things.
Moreover, their course should be directed not in a straight line that ends up elsewhere, but in a
circle, of which the two points grasp one another and meet in ourselves by a brief contour.”
Ambitious lives take the form of that straight line that ends up elsewhere; Montaigne seeks to bend
those energies back around so as to return to himself.
14. Elsewhere, he specifies what this art of circumscription looks like in concrete terms: “In
household management, in study, and in every other exercise, we must go up to the last limits of
pleasure, but guard ourselves from engaging still further, where it begins to be mingled with pain.”
Montaigne’s art of living is thus frankly hedonistic, but without the austerity thinkers like Epicurus
thought true hedonism implied.
15. The motto of the Montaingean art of immanent contentment is thus moderation through variation.
It is a life that seeks to achieve the ancient maxim of temperance, “nothing too much,” by adding a
gentle modern corollary, “nothing too little.”
16. Although Montaigne draws extensively on the classical and Christian traditions to expound this
vision of the good life, his departures from those traditions are substantial. Whether we consider
4
�the way of life of a philosopher such as Socrates, a citizen such as Cato, or a saint such as Augustine,
all of them are living lives guided by some “one thing needful,” some “pearl of great price,” some
virtue or activity without which life is “not worth living,” whether that one decisive thing is
understood as philosophy, citizenship, or holiness.
17. Where Socrates contrasted the good life with mere life, Montaigne argues that mere life is the
good life. We are “great fools,” he writes, to criticize a man for passing his life in idleness, or to
look down on ourselves for “having done nothing today.” “What?” he asks. “Have you not lived?
That is not only your fundamental occupation, but your most illustrious one.” This elevation of
mere life, which might look slavish to a Roman or hellish to a Christian, to the status of the good
life, is Montaigne’s great contribution to what we call modernity. In the wake of Calvin and
Machiavelli, Montaigne’s art of seeking our contentment immanently speaks to the desires, as Pierre
Manent has put it, of the millions of human beings who care neither for the salvation of their cities
nor for the salvation of their souls.
18. This new understanding of the good life brings a new understanding of the virtues in its wake.
First among these virtues is nonchalance, the cultivated carelessness that allows Montaigne not to take
anything too seriously. The Essays themselves, which read like an undulating stream of
consciousness without premeditated form, exemplify this rejection of the arts of orderliness. The
intellectual side of this virtue is skepticism, the doubt which Montaigne applies to everything,
thereby rebuffing the attempts of any and every good to take over his life. By so doing, Montaigne
is able to exemplify the virtue of frankness in his speech: a man without pretensions has nothing to
hide; he can dispense with caution and politesse and be straight with us.
19. Montaigne’s book was enormously successful—perhaps the most widely read book in Europe
during the 17th century. Many of the great thinkers of that and future centuries would warm
themselves at Montaigne’s cheering fire: Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, Diderot and Voltaire,
5
�Emerson and Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf and Stefan Zweig. In the generations immediately
following Montaigne’s death, the Essays found an enormous audience among the rising class of
bourgeois gentilhommes, a newly ascendant social group looking for a moral model to replace the
chivalric ideal of the old nobility they intended to supplant. Many of them found that model in
Montaigne, who became the standard bearer for the way of life of the so-called honnête homme.
20. But it was from that social class that arose, in the 17th century, the man who was at once perhaps
Montaigne’s greatest reader and Montaigne’s greatest critic: Blaise Pascal, who would argue that
Montaignean self-knowledge is self-alienation, and that Montaignean happiness is a human misery.
6
�II. Blaise Pascal and the Inhumanity of Immanence
21. A “frightening genius”—that is what Pascal was called by the father of French Romanticism,
François René de Chateaubriand. A brief glance at his life will tell us why. Pascal was raised by a
father, Étienne Pascal, who homeschooled him with a gentle attentiveness reminiscent of
Montaigne’s “On the Education of Children.” Himself a serious mathematician, Étienne Pascal
senses that his son will be captivated by mathematics, fears that this infatuation will cause him to
neglect his Latin and Greek, and therefore withholds mathematical instruction during Pascal’s
earliest years. But Pascal overhears the talk of his father and the mathematicians who frequent their
home and begins to work at it on his own, inventing a private geometric vocabulary of barres and
ronds. According to his sister, Étienne Pascal discovers his son’s clandestine mathematizing when he
enters the twelve-year old’s room one day to find the boy deriving Euclid’s 32nd proposition for
himself. Étienne has a change of heart, and begins to instruct Blaise formally. The young man will
soon make significant contributions to the history of mathematics, not only with his works on
conics and the cycloid, but also with his treatise on what he calls “the arithmetic triangle”—known
to history as “Pascal’s Triangle”—which forms the basis of probability theory. At the age of
nineteen, he invents and presides over the manufacture of the world’s first functioning calculator,
capable of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers of as many as six digits. A handful
of these so-called Pascaliennes survive to this day, in good working order. (Try that with your Texas
Instruments in the year 2396). At twenty-five, he designs experiments on the void and atmospheric
pressure that deflate the ancient scholastic commonplace that “nature abhors a vacuum.” At thirtythree, he writes his Provincial Letters: daring, uproarious satires of the most powerful churchmen in
France, the Jesuits, and one of the greatest bestsellers of the ancien régime. He then sets to work on
an enormously ambitious Apology for the Christian Religion. Even though illness and early death will
keep him from making so much as a first draft of the book, his undigested notes, collated and
7
�published by his friends as the Thoughts of M. Pascal on Religion and Several Other Subjects, which were
Found after his Death among his Papers, will become a classic of French moral philosophy and one of the
most important works of Christian apologetics ever written. Finally, at the end of his life, he
collaborates with his friend Arthus de Roannez to give Paris the world’s first system of public
transportation, the five-cent carriages, donating all profits to charity.
22. Pascal’s mathematical and scientific genius, his literary and philosophic brilliance, his
technological and philanthropic contributions to the great Baconian project for the improvement of
the human condition are the unimpeachable credentials of a first-order modern mind. But Pascal is
no standard-issue modern innovator, however brilliant. For he perceives the disturbing existential
consequences of the modern scientific revolution as few have before him, or since. To Pascal, the
universe revealed by modern physics is a world in which man finds himself at sea, prisoner of a
meaningless nature that is utterly silent in the face of the human demand for the wisdom we need in
order to live well. The Montaignean quest for immanent contentment, intended to vindicate “nature,
complete without grace,” as one critic as put it, takes place in the context of a universe that science
relentlessly demonstrates to be no home for man. Pascal’s rejoinder to Montaigne is that truly
thinking through the scientific modernism Montaigne helped invent intensifies rather than blunts
our need for transcendence.
25. Pascal’s reflections on this existential dislocation derived as much from his moral insights as
from his scientific ones. He grew up among people who fashioned their lives after the Montaignean
pattern of the honnête homme—gentle, moderate, intelligent, curious sorts who were interested in
much but carefully avoided taking anything too seriously. Pascal’s examination of the lives of these
adepts in the Montaignean art of pursuing our contentment immanently suggested to him that they
were fooling themselves, and were far more discontent than they knew.
8
�26. We see this in Pascal’s great analysis of hunting and gambling—the latter a diversion particularly
beloved by some of his friends among the honnêtes hommes. Give the gambler his winnings or the
hunter his prey, he points out, asking only that he forsake his beloved activity, and you will make
him unhappy. And yet, if you allow him the game without the stake, or the chase without the
quarry, the charm of the thing will be equally lost. When we’re in the game, we long for the goal at
the end of it; when we possess the goal, we want the game to begin again. In motion, we long for
rest, at rest, we long for motion.
27. What we truly love, on this analysis, is diversion—that which gets our minds off of ourselves. But
our love of diversion drives not only our amusements but our most serious activities. “What is it to
be superintendent, chancellor, prime minister, but to have a position in which a great number of
people come each morning and from every quarter, so as not to leave any of them an hour a day in
which they can think about themselves?” Beyond making us feel important, responsibility is an
extraordinarily effective distraction, and distraction, at bottom, is what we desire.
28. Why? Because, as Pascal writes, “we cannot sit still in our rooms.” Pascal thus rediscovers the
restlessness that drove Montaigne to create his art of immanent contentment. And he discovers that
restlessness at work in the hearts of the greatest adepts of that Montaignean art. The love of variety
so characteristic of Montaigne and his followers reveals their abiding discontent.
29. What is the root cause of this inability to endure stillness, solitude, and quiet? Pascal tells us that
it is “the natural unhappiness of our weak and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can
console us when we think about it closely.” “We want truth,” he continues, “and find only
incertitude in ourselves. We want happiness and find only misery and death. We are incapable of
not wanting truth and happiness, yet we are incapable of truth and happiness.”
31. Pascal thus makes the case that human beings are naturally unhappy. That is, our unhappiness
does not arise from our particular failures or vices or strokes of bad luck; our unhappiness arises
9
�from the disproportion between the limitless character of our desires and the finite character of
every good we can give ourselves. We cannot cure our unhappiness, which is the natural human
condition. This remark has particular salience for Americans and Englishmen, for whom
unhappiness is, as Peter Kreeft remarks, the “truth we most assiduously hide.”
32. This unhappiness results from the distinctive human combination of finitude and intelligence.
We are as weak as reeds, Pascal tells us, so fragile that we can be killed by a vapor or a drop of water.
While this is true of every living thing, it makes man uniquely miserable, because of our unique selfconsciousness about the deadly facts of life. That self-consciousness makes our mortality and
ignorance seem like a kind of exile or loss of place, like “the misery of a deposed king.” There is a
massive disproportion between the thoughts our minds seem to have been born to think and the
deaths our mortal frames fate us to die. As Pascal writes, “l’homme depasse l’homme,” “man transcends
man.”
33. Pascal seeks to bring us to self-knowledge by making us aware of this disproportion, which he
sees as the mark of both our misery and our greatness— the misery of the sole being we know of
that necessarily lives with consciousness of its own death and folly; the greatness of the sole being
we know of that can think the thoughts “universe” and “God.” As Pascal writes, “if [man] exalts
himself, I humble him; if he humbles himself, I exalt him, until he comprehends that he is an
incomprehensible monster.” I think he means the term monstrous precisely: what we are cannot be
understood in natural terms. Pascal endeavors to show us this truth about ourselves so as to set us
in motion, in search of some answer to the riddle of our own beings. He hopes to make us “seekers
in anguish.”
34. If Pascal is right, the Montaignean quest to make ourselves immanently happy could reach a
successful conclusion only at the price of the obliteration of the human heart. Our unhappiness is
deeper, but our greatness is also vaster, than Montaigne imagined. Our hearts are restless not
10
�accidentally, not because of moral failures such as over-eagerness or inattention, but because we are
wayfaring strangers, not made to be at home in this world.
35. Pascal seeks to set us in motion, to make us seek, because he believes there is an answer to our
questions, a hidden God, whose strange story is the weird answer to the weird question that is the
human heart. But his appeal has never been limited to those who come to share his faith. Nietzsche
was the first in a long line of postmodern thinkers who could exclaim “Pascal’s blood flows in my
veins!” For the existential unease he describes so poignantly is the quiet but insistent companion of
our modern search for happiness.
36. The self-knowledge Pascal offers is a sad wisdom. In the years after Pascal’s death, Louis XIV
and his age decided that it was not wisdom at all. Both the Church and the monarchy turned against
Pascal and his Jansenist friends; Pascal’s works wound up on the Index of Prohibited Books, and the
Jansenists’ home at the monastery of Port-Royal was demolished, its tombs desecrated. As the
Promethean rationalism of the Enlightenment took flight, the eighteenth century seemed to forget
that the seventeenth century ever existed, and simply picked up where the 16th left off, as the great
French literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve put it. The eighteenth century philosophes, with
Voltaire as their leader, tended to rally to Montaigne and dismiss Pascal as a misanthrope. That
tendency, however, admitted of one great exception: perhaps the most capacious mind of the age,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
11
�III. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the Tragedy of Nature’s Redeemer
37. Rousseau set Europe on fire with everything from a hit opera to a bestselling novel to
enormously influential books on education, politics, and universal history. He did so in part because
he agreed with Pascal that modern man, in spite of all the delights Voltaire so memorably
celebrated—the vivacious wine, the delicate food, the splendid song, painting, and sculpture, the
carriages fitted out with excellent shock absorbers—is shallow, anti-social, and secretly miserable.
Modern man seeks science merely so as to distinguish himself; his refined amusements merely hide
his unease. True love and friendship have no place in his glittering society, which is in reality “a
society of smiling enemies,” as Arthur Melzer has put it. For thinking so, Rousseau came to be seen
by Voltaire, Diderot, and others, as a traitor, who uses the kinds of arguments and evidence the
Enlightenment developed to critique the Enlightenment itself.
39. Though Rousseau agrees with Pascal that modern man is miserable, he does not, however,
accept Pascal’s contention that such misery is natural. For Pascal, nature is fallen, but can be
redeemed by God. For Rousseau, man is fallen, but can be redeemed by nature.
40. To prove this contention, Rousseau performs a vast experiment, both in his writings and on his
life. He describes the huge, astonishingly various corpus this experiment produces as a “sad and
great system” of thought. I take him to be in complete earnest in his use of each of these terms.
His thought is systematic: in spite of its apparent contradictions, it can be understood as a
consistent, even zealous attempt to redeem Montaignean immanence by combining it with Pascalian
depth. Great, in that any such combination is surely a feat for the ages. And sad, insofar as his
attempt to do so fails. That failure is, however, the heart of what Rousseau has to teach us.
41. Rousseau’s system begins with his famous state-of-nature story, which is a genealogy of human
dividedness. We begin as natural man: solitary, mute, and almost mindless, but self-sufficient and
content with life, a truly unpremeditated Montaignean. Our efforts to win a living from nature,
12
�however, lead us into ever more frequent contact with one another, the ever-accelerating
development of our faculties, and ever-deepening interdependency. As we come to need others, we
come to care what they think of us. Eventually, amour-propre, our concern to attract the good
opinion, the admiration, and the envy of others, becomes the governing passion of human existence.
Because the face we put on for others, tricked out with words like justice, love, and the common
good, never matches the truth we know of ourselves, which is all passion, fear, and ambition, our
concern with their opinions leaves us ever more divided.
42. Having told us this sad story in his Second Discourse, Rousseau attempts to resolve the problem of
dividedness he describes through a series of experiments that consist in giving oneself,
wholeheartedly, to one or another alternative on his human landscape. Modern man, the bourgeois, is,
as he says, “nothing:” too self-interested to be truly social, too obsessed with the opinions of others
to be truly solitary. To become something is, in the first place, to choose. There are many
alternatives to choose from in Rousseau’s system; for the sake of brevity, I will focus on just two: his
citizen and his solitary.
43. Rousseau’s first great philosophic statement, the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, begins on a
famous walk he takes from Paris to Vincennes where his friend Diderot is imprisoned. Indulging
the bookish man’s bad habit of reading while he walks, Rousseau encounters, in a newspaper, an
essay contest on the question of whether the revival of the arts and sciences has contributed to the
purification of morals. His answer is a tremendous no, spoken in the voice of the Roman consul
Fabricius, whom he imagines denouncing the luxury of imperial Rome from the perspective of the
rough huts of the ancient Republic. Himself born in the Republic of Geneva, Rousseau attacks the
vain and cunning self-love of modern man from the vantage point of a human being wholeheartedly dedicated to the political community—the vantage point of the citizen.
13
�44. The citizen sees himself, as Rousseau puts it, not as Gaius or Lucius, but as a Roman. Good
social institutions extend the amour-propre of the individual over the whole community, through
cradle-to-grave immersion in the unceasing spectacle of public life, which produces an
“intoxication” that “raise[s] men above themselves.” By so doing, those social institutions allow
civic virtue to become not a pretense but an integral way of life, thereby overcoming the human
dividedness at the heart of Rousseau’s diagnosis of the problem of the bourgeois.
45. This picture of wholehearted civic virtue has proven powerfully attractive. But its achievement
requires, as Rousseau makes clear, “denaturing man.” And there is perhaps no modern author who
has done more to make the prospect of such denaturalization revolting to us than Rousseau himself,
whose history of the human race is self-consciously calculated to make us long for natural simplicity.
No reader of Rousseau could be expected to accept the prospect of denaturalization without at least
wondering whether we might recover a form of integrity that deserves the name natural. Rousseau
offers us a more natural model of integrity at the other extreme of his system, in the figure of his
solitary.
46. Rousseau’s effort to recapture the wholeness modeled by natural man stands at the heart of his
autobiographical writings, particularly the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Therein, he shows us how a
highly-developed, modern human being might recover the self-contentment known to natural man.
47. The greatest episode of Rousseau’s effort to recapture that contentment is his sojurn on the
small island called St. Peter’s in the middle of a Swiss lake. For the two months that he lives there,
Rousseau immerses himself in solitary, intentionally unproductive activities: botanizing simply for
the wonder of admiring plants, floating around aimlessly in a little boat, sitting on the shore of the
even smaller island next door to St. Peter’s, just listening to the waves lap.
48. Rousseau treasures these experiences because they provide him with just enough sensory
stimulation to “sense [his] existence with pleasure, without taking the trouble to think.” He thereby
14
�experiences what he calls “the sentiment of existence,” a psychic state in which he thinks of neither
past nor future; in which he feels neither desire nor fear; in which he thinks of no one else and does
not care what others think of him; in which he delights in the goodness of simply being. Though
civilized human beings often forget this fact, being, simply being, is good.
49. Rousseau’s depiction of this experience is surely inspiring. But when we examine it closely, it
proves to have a quixotic character. In the first place, although his description of his experience on
St. Peter’s island is a paean to solitude, he is not in fact alone there: he is dependent on the tax
collector and his family who are his landlords on the island. He is also dependent on Thérèse, his
faithful, much-maligned companion, mother of the five children he abandoned at a foundlings
hospital, whom he rarely dignifies with the name of wife. She is a living reminder that Rousseau
never achieves practical self-sufficiency.
50. Nor is Rousseau’s mind truly free from the concern with the opinion of others, from the amourpropre that is the source of human dividedness. This becomes clearest in another episode of the
Reveries, in which a botanizing expedition in the mountains leads him into a secluded glade where he
supposes himself completely alone, and perhaps the first human being ever to have set foot there.
Solitary yet joyfully immersed in the sentiment of existence, he compares himself to another
Columbus, planting his flag in this undiscovered country of psychic possibility. But the amour-propre
of a man who imagines himself in such terms remains very much alive—a point that is brought
home to Rousseau when he hears a clanking sound, bursts through a thicket, and finds a stocking
mill churning away just twenty feet from his undiscovered country. Rousseau’s quest to recover the
solitary, god-like wholeness and contentment of natural man achieves no enduring consummation.
51. Were we to consider the other alternatives within the Rousseauan system, such as the couples
Emile and Sophie, and Jean-Jacques and Mme de Warens, or Rousseau’s other great solitary, the
Savoyard Vicar, we would find that all of them have the same character as the citizen and the solitary
15
�walker: powerfully attractive in their efforts to transcend bourgeois dividedness, yet ultimately
fraught with contradictions that fatally undermine those efforts. All these thought experiments are
ultimately failures, and Rousseau was being precise when he called his system “sad.”
52. But a failed experiment can still be an instructive one. Rousseau is like a chemist whose
experiment blows up in his face, but leaves a telling residue in the beakers. The attempt to redeem
Montaignean immanence from Pascal’s attack by investing ourselves wholeheartedly in one or
another possibility on the Rousseauan landscape does not work. Redoubled dedication and renewed
singleness of mind cannot save the quest for immanent contentment from its failure to meet the
deepest demands of our nature.
16
�IV. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy and the Naked Soul
53.
To recapitulate: we began this brief tour of the thought of France’s moralistes with Montaigne’s
insistence on the possibility of immanent contentment—his attempt to demonstrate that human
beings can limit their aspirations to within the confines of this mortal life, and learn to live
pleasantly, peacefully, and reasonably therein. Pascal found in Montaigne a brilliant breviary of
human psychology, but nonetheless held him to be wrong about who we are and how we should
live, arguing that we are both greater and more miserable than Montaigne imagined—beings built
for anguished God-seeking rather than pleasant self-seeking. Rousseau sought to re-imagine
immanent contentment in forms capable of meeting the challenge of Pascal’s critique, from his
citizen to his solitary walker. His sad and great system demonstrates, however, that such alternatives
are destined to fail.
54. This great argument deeply informed the thought of our final thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville.
During his famous visit to the United States, Tocqueville read the prose of American life with the
poetry of these French moralistes resounding in his ears. He studied Rousseau daily, and was even
more devoted to Pascal; his great friend Gustave de Beaumont wrote that the minds of Tocqueville
and Pascal were “made for one another.” Tocqueville’s encounter with Montaigne was less
intensive, and largely mediated by Pascal. But when Tocqueville diagnosed the restless unhappiness
of democratic man, he was echoing Pascal’s diagnosis of the restless unhappiness of Montaignean
man.
55. In Democracy in America, we behold the spectacle of the great drama of the soul that takes place in
the pages of the moralistes scaled down to the prosaic, domestic scene of millions of ordinary
households, and multiplied over the expanse of an enormous nation. In this country, Tocqueville
sees immanent contentment become the standard of aspiration for millions, and it is as a reader of
Pascal that he made the famous observation with which I began—that Americans are restless in the
17
�midst of their prosperity. He sees the existential conundrum of the thinking reed haunting
American life from the mansions of Boston to the backwoods kitchens of the frontier.
56. Tocqueville also sees that, in a democratic country, so much psychic unease could not be
without political consequences. In the minutes remaining, I want to consider our unease and its
political ramifications by focusing on one particular aspect of the search for immanent contentment:
our hostility to what Tocqueville calls “forms.” Suspicion of forms accompanies the search for
immanent contentment from its inception in the thought of Montaigne. The unsettling political
implications of this hostility to forms were on display in the Jacksonian America Tocqueville beheld
in 1831, and are visible to us now.
57. Democratic human beings, Tocqueville writes, “despise forms, which they consider as useless
and inconvenient veils placed between them and the truth.” He never defines the term “forms”
precisely, but the meaning of it emerges from the portrait of aristocratic society he paints to put
democracy into relief. In aristocratic society, the observation of formalities structured all of social
life. One addressed people by their proper titles: “my lady” and “your grace,” “sir” and “madam.”
One went through the prescribed motions, from bowing and curtseying in the ballroom to kneeling
and crossing oneself in church. One had to dress one’s part, and know one’s place in the ranks of
men, so as not to dishonor oneself by placing oneself too low or give offense to others by placing
oneself too high.
58. The pursuit of immanent contentment is hostile to forms from its outset. Montaigne writes that
we “must tear the masks off of things as well as people;” and reminds us that kings and great ladies
go through the messy, funny, sad business of bodily life just like everyone else, from toilet to
boudoir to deathbed. His frank, unpretentious irreverence is essential to his effort to scale every
human pursuit down to within the circuit of immanence—we can glide lightly over the surface of
life because nothing deserves to be taken with the seriousness our formalities imply.
18
�59. Rousseau, for his part, takes this hostility to forms to his wonted extremes. His rejection of
bourgeois, Parisian life includes the rejection of all its finery, and he theatrically says goodbye to the
formal accoutrements of Paris when he quits the city: the watch, the sword, the linen shirts, all of it.
He comes to distrust even as much formalism as is required for articulate speech, trusting more in
inarticulate cries and gestures as the truest revelations of the human heart. He once chooses to
make his thoughts known to the staid David Hume through the highly informal act of leaping into
his lap and bathing him with kisses.
60. In America, Tocqueville sees this hostility to forms democratized. To refuse to observe
formalities is to take liberties, and free peoples enjoy taking liberties. There is nothing more
discordant to our ears than being told to “know our place.” Formal speech, formal dress, social
ranks, acts of intellectual or spiritual deference—all of them conflict with the defining belief of a
democratic age, the belief in the equality of conditions. And so we strip them away, often engaging
in a kind of ritualistic self-exposure that allows us to perform our liberation from social expectations
and encumbrances. Wearing flip-flops to class, asking other people’s children to call us by our first
names, the replacement of the organ by the praise band in church—all of it is a contemporary
manifestation of the nonchalance Montaigne celebrated so long ago.
61. This hostility to forms is not merely a matter of casual taste and impatience with rigmarole. It
has a philosophic side—an implied metaphysical materialism. Americans, as Tocqueville writes, are
often disposed “to believe that everything is only matter.” We find formality unpleasant and
unnecessary in part because we suspect that form is not real. Appearance and shape seem to us
evanescent and deceptive; what is real is the tangible, the material, the stuff of things; what is real is
matter, which has mass and volume. This belief has special power among us because it aligns with
one of the most powerful passions of the democratic soul, what Tocqueville calls “the love of
19
�material well-being.” Our love of improving the material conditions of our lives, our concentration
on those material conditions, makes us prone to the belief that matter is all that matters.
62. This moral and metaphysical materialism decisively shapes our understanding of ourselves.
Human beings disposed to suspect forms and trust in matter soon come to doubt the reality of the
soul, which Aristotle describes as the “living form” of an organic being. It is form or soul that
endures across the constant material flux of time and metabolism; it is form that constitutes the
unity and continuity of a person. Those to whom material realities often seem like the only realities
therefore come to doubt the reality of their very selves. They wonder if what is called the soul is as
illusory and meaningless as one of those aristocratic titles people used to get so fussy over; they
wonder if the soul they experience is merely a “powerless transient being[s] in an organically
generated cyberspace,” as one advocate of this view has put it. As the later Peter Augustine Lawler
wrote, democratic man comes to fear that it is his fate to be a “miserable accident perceiving itself as
such.”
63. To suspect that we are merely miserable accidents of course leaves us deeply doubtful of our
own reality as rational agents whose capacities for thought and action about and on the world are
real and potent. Doubt of the reality of our thinking, acting selves is the existential heart of our
unease. Turned outward, this doubt of ourselves takes of the form of a deep-seated suspicion of the
motives of others. If we have no confidence in the substantial reality of our own freedom and
reason, after all, we will not have any confidence in the freedom and rationality of others. We will
be prone to the view that the hidden play of material forces and interests really drive everything,
behind the masks of politeness, the appearance of fairness, and the rules of procedure.
64. Our suspicion of the motives of others, ultimately rooted in our suspicion of the reality of
ourselves, inclines us toward a dark, flat, and ultimately corrosive view of politics. Politics in the
Aristotelian sense—reasoned if intense negotiation between conflicting, plausible, and earnestly held
20
�ideas about the good—ceases to make sense when we understand ourselves not as rational animals
seeking the good, however errantly, and understand ourselves instead as pinballs passively bounced
around by hidden drives and forces. Public argument, seen in such a light, comes to seem a series of
performative gestures that merely divert attention from the conflicts of material interest that really
motivate everyone.
65. When we cease to believe that people are motivated by the principles they invoke, we treat them
differently. Conservatives see liberals not as people earnestly if misguidedly working to alleviate
entrenched injustice, but as insular cultural elites signaling their virtue; liberals see conservatives not
as people sincerely if mistakenly working to preserve traditional morality, but as rich white men
perpetuating their privilege. Those who invoke principles that might limit political conflict sound
weak or duplicitous. For to abide by such limits, we fear, is to be duped into observing arbitrary
constraints on one’s latitude for action that will not trouble one’s adversaries. The human beings
with whom politics deals come to seem like crude masses to be moved and manipulated by whatever
means necessary. We see no particular need to handle them with delicacy or respect, or to allow
them the freedom to seek a truth that cannot be seared into their brains by social pressure.
66. In such circumstances, vulgarity will come to be the political vernacular favored by all sides, and
political violence will enjoy an increasing measure of legitimacy. For crude words and fisticuffs are
nothing if not honest and unvarnished. The vulgar and the violent demonstrate that they are not
fooled by deceptive appearances, and understand the need to fight fire with fire.
67. In such circumstances, the whole architecture of separations that is the hallmark invention of
liberal politics comes to seem suspect. For the most fundamental separation upon which that whole
system reposed, the separation between the church and the statehouse, between transcendent
concerns and immanent ones, comes to seem an outmoded screen for corruption when immanent
and even material concerns are understood to be the only genuine and powerful human motives.
21
�68. Politics in what Charles Taylor calls “the immanent frame” thus comes to reflect the existential
unease of the souls that inhabit that frame. That unease drives political imprudence, abets hostility
to restraint, encourages vulgarity, rawness, and violence, and explains our growing impatience with
other human beings whom we find it ever more difficult to regard as separate and serious realities
that we are bound to respect. The defense of immanence, an ingenious invention of prudence that
once helped mark off the space that freedom and individuality require, comes to breed a new form
of imprudence, bent upon collapsing all such spaces. The deepest source of that imprudence is our
increasingly over-simplified understanding of ourselves.
22
�Conclusion: Liberalism and the Good Life
69. If the foregoing argument is correct, a revival of the fortunes of our shaky republican
government depends upon a rethinking of what we are and what we are living for. For the
restlessness that unsettles us, personally and politically, ultimately stems from our continually
frustrated attempt to achieve immanent contentment, which is a kind happiness incapable of
satisfying a being whose nature surpasses itself, as Pascal put it.
70. Such a rethinking might begin with a reexamination of the early modern thinker with whom I
began, Montaigne, and of the skepticism to which his case for pursuing happiness under the guise of
immanent contentment is conjoined. For that skepticism has become reflexive, and has unstrung
our very capacity for thinking about the kind of happiness beings like us might need.
71. Montaigne’s case for moderation through variation, for a life that takes nothing as the “one thing
needful,” depends upon his critique of all accounts, religious and philosophic, of a good life with
such a center. He presents that critique in the longest chapter of the Essays, his “Apology for
Raimond Sebond.” In reading it, one notices that he does not make his case for skepticism by
refuting, in any detail, any argument for a definite conception of the good. Rather, he draws
attention to the proliferation of such conceptions, piling up the most absurd arguments next to the
most reasonable ones until our heads spin. “Now trust in your philosophy,” he challenges the
reader, and “boast that you have found the bean in the cake, when you consider the clatter of so
many philosophical brains!”
66. This rhetorical strategy, as T. S. Eliot notes, is like a gas—it is an atmosphere we breathe in, not
an argument we consider. Montaigne wants to humble us by making us feel that our intellectual
lives are cosmically unsupported. While his reasons for adopting this strategy amid the theologyinfused bloodbath of his time may certainly draw our sympathy, the examination we have undertaken
of life lived within the immanent frame in which Montaigne encloses us should, I think, suggest to
23
�us that dealing with the problems of our time might require us to reconsider what reason can show
us about how we should live our lives.
67. Re-opening the question of what we can know about how we should live would involve reexamining the indications we have of the kind of lives that are suitable to beings with our distinctive,
upright, and open human form. It would also involve renewed consideration just how well the
various goods to which we are attracted might hold up as the abiding object of aspiration for the life
we will live with the nature we have been given.
68. I can think of no educational institution in the country that does more to raise such questions
and take them seriously than St. John’s College. The work you do here is thus not only of personal
and philosophic importance, but of the highest political importance. I am again grateful to you for
allowing me to offer you my thoughts today in what I hope is in accord with the spirit of this place.
Thank you.
24
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
pdf
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
24 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Pursuit of Happiness: Four French Thinkers on Our Restless Quest for Contentment
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered by Benjamin Storey, Associate Professor, Department of Politics and International Affairs, and Co-Director of the Tocqueville Program at Furman University, on October 18, 2019 as part of the Formal Lecture Series. The introduction to Storey's lecture was not recorded.
Storey describes his lecture topic as follows: "In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed that Americans are 'restless in the midst of their well-being'—strangely uneasy even as they enjoy unprecedented prosperity. This talk will consider the long French tradition of thinking about restlessness that lies behind that observation. It will begin by showing how the great essayist Michel de Montaigne seeks to quiet our restlessness by teaching us a new way of pursuing happiness, a way of life distinguished by the central place it accords to the modern virtues of skepticism, authenticity, and nonchalance. Turning next to Pascal and Rousseau, the paper will consider their separate and distinctive critiques of the Montaignean pursuit of happiness, which, in their view, deepens the very restlessness it is intended to palliate. The paper will conclude with a consideration of Tocqueville’s analysis of American politics in the light of his insight into the psychological unease of the American citizen, and an argument for how we might pursue happiness better by reconsidering some of the assumptions of modern skepticism from which we began."
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Storey, Benjamin
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-10-18
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audio recording of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Subject
The topic of the resource
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859
Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778
Pascal, Blaise, 1623-1662
Happiness
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Storey_Benjamin_2019-10-18_Typescript
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/993ba75205ca43af9a3731594c500704.mp3
6a334e6495b5110ada7652a722905b5c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
wav
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:47:24
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Pursuit of Happiness: Four French Thinkers on Our Restless Quest for Contentment
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered by Benjamin Storey, Associate Professor, Department of Politics and International Affairs, and Co-Director of the Tocqueville Program at Furman University, on October 18, 2019 as part of the Formal Lecture Series. The introduction to Storey's lecture was not recorded.
Storey describes his lecture topic as follows: "In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed that Americans are 'restless in the midst of their well-being'—strangely uneasy even as they enjoy unprecedented prosperity. This talk will consider the long French tradition of thinking about restlessness that lies behind that observation. It will begin by showing how the great essayist Michel de Montaigne seeks to quiet our restlessness by teaching us a new way of pursuing happiness, a way of life distinguished by the central place it accords to the modern virtues of skepticism, authenticity, and nonchalance. Turning next to Pascal and Rousseau, the paper will consider their separate and distinctive critiques of the Montaignean pursuit of happiness, which, in their view, deepens the very restlessness it is intended to palliate. The paper will conclude with a consideration of Tocqueville’s analysis of American politics in the light of his insight into the psychological unease of the American citizen, and an argument for how we might pursue happiness better by reconsidering some of the assumptions of modern skepticism from which we began."
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Storey, Benjamin
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-10-18
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audio recording of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Subject
The topic of the resource
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859
Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778
Pascal, Blaise, 1623-1662
Happiness
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Storey, Benjamin 10-18-2019
Deprecated: Directive 'allow_url_include' is deprecated in Unknown on line 0