His unstable fortunes introduce him to the full range of human possibilities, “from the lowest up to the highest, except the throne,” in the capital of the Enlightenment at its peak.4 Then he turns his back on it all. One day, in the grips of a vision he invites us to compare to the illumination of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, Rousseau

“the inhabitant of the United States attaches himself to the goods of this world as if he was assured of not dying, and he throws himself into seizing those that pass within his reach with so much precipitation that one would say that at every instant he is afraid of ceasing to live before enjoying them.”

Law school or a PhD? The young fixate on such questions. Trying to be prudent, they investigate them by deploying the modes of analysis they have been taught to use: looking up countless opportunities, tabulating pluses and minuses, making spreadsheets to keep track of it all. But the question of how to live cannot be answered by aggregating

This nonchalance must be learned, because taking oneself too seriously comes quite naturally to human beings. Montaigne describes a man of his acquaintance who thought it a cosmic injustice to find himself on his deathbed before he could compose his history of this or that king. Montaigne thinks we are all a little like that and must teach

Pascal seeks to understand just what the soul enjoys in diversion—in being “turned aside,” as the etymology of the word suggests.

The political cunning of the Jesuits makes plain that they are no innocents. Worse, they openly pray for the damnation of their enemies, such as the author of the Provincials. One wonders if those who pray that others might go to hell ever had any interest in the salvation of souls in the first place. For Pascal, the word that most properly

Pascal himself explains his rhetorical approach to man: If he exalts himself, I humble him. if he humbles himself, I exalt him. and continue to contradict him until he comprehends that he is an incomprehensible monster. Neither exaltation nor misery is proper to us on its own, for we are both “great and miserable.” If Pascal can bring his reader to

Achieving happiness, here and now, appears to us not only as a desire but as a duty; immanent contentment becomes a command. This transformation heightens the restlessness endemic to the quest for immanent contentment, for it deepens our unhappiness by transforming it into a form of moral failure.

That contrast makes the basic case for the self: modern peoples think of ourselves as selves and pursue immanent contentment in part because other ways of thinking about ourselves and our purposes seem to us prone to slip into religious violence.