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Irony, Wretchedness, and the Liberal Arts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2023

Dimitrios Halikias Open the ORCID record for Dimitrios Halikias [Opens in a new window]
Dimitrios Halikias*
Affiliation:
Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
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Extract

In diagnosing a distinctively modern discontent, the Storeys have written a biography of a distinctively modern idea of happiness (141). Their achievement is to show that these two stories are the same. Montaigne's promise of what they term “immanent contentment” is itself connected to the ubiquitous if amorphous restlessness that plagues our culture today. Montaigne sought to find happiness not in transcendence or salvation, but in the simplicity of ordinary pleasures. Life is a game of variety and excitement, not an anguished pilgrimage to an eternal home. This counsel—meant to bring peace and to inoculate us against dogmatism—paradoxically underwrites the pervasive unhappiness of our time.

Type
A Symposium on Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey's Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 85 , Issue 3 , Summer 2023 , pp. 382 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame

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References

1 Pascal, Pensées, 214, S680/L418. Cf. 43, S175/L142. Citations in footnotes are to page number and the Sellier and Lafuma fragment number in Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, trans. Ariew, Roger (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005)Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 55, S222/L190.

3 Ibid., 199, S655/L808.

4 Ibid., 31, S145/L113; 64, S231/L200.

5 Ibid., 36, S164/L131.

6 Ibid., 37, S164/L131.

7 “At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for.” Niccolò Machiavelli to Vettori, in The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 109.

8 Pascal, Pensées, 40, S168/L136.