Four French thinkers and a perennial question

Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment

Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey 

Princeton University Press 

2021

264 pages

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Why We Are Restless is a scholarly book that brilliantly succeeds in compressing the central ideas of four leading French philosophers who each considered in depth the perennial problem of humanity’s struggle to achieve happiness in our world. Collectively, Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau and Tocqueville wrote extensively about this central questions of existence over four centuries. They were of course preceded and followed by other philosophers who also considered and discussed the same questions. What is interesting about this group however is that they together form a conversation between them as, following Montaigne, each one addresses directly the arguments of his compatriot philosophers.

Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, the authors, are a married couple whose academic careers have run in tandem, in the field of Politics and International Affairs, since they studied together as university students. They are currently directors of the Tocqueville Program at Furman University in the US. Their book concludes with a reflection on Tocqueville’s thoughts on the human condition in the most prosperous, advanced democracy of the nineteenth century. In America, Tocqueville found a society that was in terms of material development far removed from the societies in which Montaigne, Pascal and Rousseau developed their ideas. What emerges most strongly however is the persistence of the same fundamental questions and the application of the same inadequate solutions which, from century to century, hinge around a rejection of forms of “social, moral and intellectual patrimony”. The material and cultural conditions of life in America were very different from Montaigne’s France of the sixteenth century yet Tocqueville found the same inadequate solutions explored by Montaigne playing out on a much larger scale and with greater intensity in a rapidly advancing society with an apparent, unwavering belief in the gods of progress.

Two centuries later, Tocqueville would not have needed to travel beyond his own country to find the things that astonished him in America. In fact he would find the scale of the delusion of progress even more mind numbing. In one sense, the world continues to change beyond recognition as the centuries unroll, yet, in another, we are still dealing with, or consciously dismissing, the questions that teased the minds of thinkers from centuries past, all the way back to antiquity.

Montaigne was a touchstone for Tocqueville as he was for Pascal and Rousseau. Anyone reading him today would be as struck, as Tocqueville was in nineteenth century America, about the “modernity” of his ideas. His central idea was that humankind only needs the small everyday indulgences of life to attain “immanent contentment”, the highest form of happiness he believed was attainable for human beings. Like Epicurus before him, he saw over-indulgence as a hindrance to pleasure so like him he too extolled moderation. Understanding that we have to pursue self-gratification amongst others with the same selfish tendencies, he recommends we allow others their due. He proposed an attitude of what he called “nonchalance” to everything and everyone especially to what did not actively hinder one’s own personal pursuit of happiness. Public life, the ecclesio-political order of his day, was to be accepted as just another part of life’s architecture to which one paid one’s dues so one could maintain one’s freedom from them. He did not so much dismiss as set aside the big questions of life because he believed that humans were “immanent beings rather than beings oriented towards transcendence”. Transcendence might be one thing or another or nothing at all but it was not something the human mind could meaningfully engage with. He believed “immanent contentment” was within everyone’s reach if one followed his precept of “nonchalance”, the art of taking nothing except one’s pleasure seeking seriously. Yet, he acknowledged that temptations to “celestial flights” could take us by surprise but they must be resisted, especially in the affairs of the heart. For him, “to spiritualise love is to betray it”. No one should raise expectations in others or in oneself that could not be met. Human beings were both self-seeking and self-hating in their essence and so not to be trusted to act against the grain of self-gratification which was the highest aspiration of beings with no expectation of a life beyond our brief earthy sojourn. Being authentic to ourselves and our desires was what mattered. Montaigne described much of what we recognise in the identity politics of the Western World of today. He also anticipated today’s notion of “mindfulness”, being present fully to the moment of pleasure, in his aphorism, “when I dance, I dance”.

His rather poor view of ungraced, human nature was accepted by the great French philosopher of the century that succeeded him, Blaise Pascal. Unlike Montaigne, however, he did not accept that the big questions of existence can be put away on the high shelf of consciousness. Life and observation taught Pascal, that our desires which outstrip our human possibilities cannot be so easily silenced. “L’homme passe l’homme”, man transcends man. “The self is not self-contained.” So the psychic equilibrium Montaigne claimed was in the reach of every man was simply not possible. In the core of our being, we seek justice and we seek truth “not self-satisfaction, fenced with lies”. We are thinking beings and for Pascal “a thinking being is more than a material being”. Only Christianity offers what we seek, if we are honest enough to own our human authenticity in its fulness. What we seek is infinite life, happiness and knowledge. Pascal found his own term for what St Augustine called the “restlessness” of the human soul that refuses to be buried under the determined pursuit of Montaignean pleasures and distractions. Later Kierkegaard would describe the same restlessness as “anxiety”. For Blaise Pascal, the word that described his quest for the truth of human existence was “anguish”. Why We Are Restless takes us through the self-questioning Purgatorio that would bring Pascal to his most famous illumination which is that faith penetrates us through knowledge that is grasped by the heart before it is understood by the intellect. “La coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne comprends pas” does not set instinct and sentiment above reason but declares that the heart is reason’s starting point. As a mathematician Pascal knew well that concepts of time and space are first perceived intuitively and grasped with the firmness of reason. Reason later measures and proves what we already know to be true. This for Pascal is the language of Jesus who does not use intellectual arguments and formulations to convey the great truths of faith but speaks directly to the heart. Faith in his word is his gift, not our achievement. All that is asked of us is that we open ourselves humbly and enquiringly to receive it. 

Rousseau, the leading French philosopher of the century that followed agrees with both Montaigne and Pascal that civilisation is a society of self-seeking, “smiling enemies” in its unredeemed state but unlike Montaigne believes that redemption is possible and unlike Pascal believes that redemption is to be found in nature, not in God. He finds the Montaignean solution of a life of distraction and dissipation unconvincing. Instead, he advocates a single minded pursuit of public rather than personal good. Dedication to great projects of public improvement such as conscientious, active citizenry can de-nature man from his inherent self-centredness. Rousseau’s vision of the power of public service to elevate man from the narrow and ultimately unfulfilling world of self absorption has echoes in the contemporary embrace of a notional global citizenship committed to the pursuit of great public causes like environmentalism and inclusivity. For Rousseau, dedication to public rather than personal good did not in the final analysis bestow the fulfilment he had hoped to find. He drifted from public life and set himself to the task of modelling an education of the young that would restore family life to the natural state of simple goodness from which the materialism and greed of developing human civilisation had taken it. His books got him into trouble with ecclesio-political authorities and his final experiment in the pursuit of redemption was the solitary life in natural surroundings which gave him freedom to follow his fantasies on his long country rambles and find personal fulfilment in the virtual, inner world of the imagination. At the end of his theorising, he postulated the notion of a God whose only imprint in our world was the individual’s autonomous conscience.

In the nineteenth century that followed, Tocqueville, unlike his three predecessors, took his study of the human quest for happiness to another country and continent that offered its citizens more freedom, choice and prosperity than any people before in world history. It also offered mobility. Class was not a settled thing like it was in Europe. Anyone who worked hard could hope to advance socially as well as economically. Democracy and “the equality of conditions” that prevailed instilled fellow feeling and solidarity among the citizenry. Tocqueville found people more disposed to compassion for those around them who struggled. On the other hand, he also found a great deal more envy, engendered by the same “equality of conditions” for those who pulled ahead in the materialistic rat race. He found an innovative, optimistic, dynamic society who believed “… everything in the world was explicable and nothing goes beyond the limits of intelligence”. He was also intrigued that a society so secularist and skeptical, so dismissive of the ways and ideas of the past, would also be so church-going. He found a Montaignean society consumed with distraction and diversion of every kind, to a point of “habitual inattention”. He found a people that demanded the freedom to think for themselves even though they had no time for thinking. It was a society that took the pursuit of “immanent happiness” as a duty as well as a right which had already begun to draw politics into their quest for the same elusive and constitutionally guaranteed right to “the pursuit of happiness”. Two centuries after the publication of Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America and nothing he chronicled has changed. It just has scaled up and intensified still more. 

The great achievement of this book is to set the statement of its title Why We Are So Restless within the human condition itself and not attach it to any particular age or culture. Each of the four philosophers who explore the underlying questions of human existence are given their due by the authors. What stands out for the reader at the end, is what struck Tocqueville most forcibly, and that is the inability of humankind to learn either from such rumination and from personal experience that in seeking immanent happiness in diversion, busyness and projects, large or small, while rejecting the transcendent, whether tacitly or explicitly, they are denying the reality of the very selves they are seeking to satisfy. Human beings, as Pascal and St Augustine before him observed, transcend their human limits in desire. Only faith in Christ can offer us both the language to fully articulate those desires and the means to fulfil them. The book, like the philosophers whose thinking it examines, gives the world and its varied and many human pursuits their due. But it places them within their rightful hierarchy. First things are first. In the words of St  Matthew, “seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be given unto you” (Matt.6:33).

This book is a valuable and permanent addition to the library of every Christian. It gives a very clear and concise overview of the thinking and life contexts of each of its four seminal and influential subjects across a great span of time. It offers a very useful corrective to the spins that often go unchallenged in the media of our time. One that stands out is the determined mis-characterisation of Blaise Pascal’s famous wager (that each man stakes his life on whether God exists or not) by the late Christopher Hitchens who has found a new chorus of cheerleaders on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death. 

It was never so important for Christians to equip themselves with the knowledge that will help them challenge misrepresentation of their faith and also address the sincere questions of others on the universal quest for happiness, meaning and purpose in life.