Inquiétudes (French Edition)

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Excessive worry, which is the central feature of Generalized Anxiety Disorder GAD , is recognized as an important clinical phenomenon with many negative consequences on people's health. For example, studies report that excessive worry is associated with higher frequencies of work absenteeism and medical consultations, increased risk of other anxiety disorders, depression, heart disease, diabetes and cancer. It is thus imperative to develop effective measures to assess worry among adult. Until now, no measures were available in French for the practitioners and researchers to evaluate the tendency to engage in excessive and uncontrollable worry.

This self-report measure has been widely studied and has shown excellent psychometric properties among the non-clinical and clinical populations. The first study includes the translation procedures used to create the French version of the questionnaire, the factorial structure, the internal consistency, the quality of the items, and the convergent validity among non-clinical participants. The second study examines the temporal stability, and the convergent and divergent validity of the questionnaire. Finally, the third study investigates the internal consistency, the quality of the items, and the convergent and divergent validity of the questionnaire among GAD patients.

This study describes the translation procedures used to create the QIPS, the factorial structure, the internal consistency, the quality of the items, and the convergent validity among non-clinical participants. The French version was translated by a group of clinical psychologists with the assistance of a professional translator and a linguist. A back translation procedure was also conducted. Finally, a pilot study confirmed the intelligibility of the questionnaire.

The statistical analyses reveal that the QIPS shows an appropriate factorial structure, an excellent internal consistency and a very good convergent validity. This French Questionnaire thus seems to be suitable to assess the tendency to worry among the nonclinical population. This second study examines the temporal stability, and the convergent and divergent validity of the QIPS.

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On the contrary, we would argue that it is a well-developed term which has every reason to be integrated into his Apologia. How could we think otherwise? Pascal himself makes it one of the elements in what we would like to call his anthropological triptych: Further still, the way in which the author rails against men who live without inquietude S, for example shows that the term possesses a positive axiological connotation: Inquietude, then, is for Pascal not merely a feeling — which one might feel more or less — but also a necessary state of the human condition and even a dynamic that one should seek out in conversion.

All the same, the notion of inquietude is not exempt from ambiguities, or even contradictions. Which raises many questions for us: How can we grant that, as Pascal claims, man is already irremediably and necessarily subject to inquietude, and yet that we should seek to introduce him to inquietude within the context of apology?

Why seek to provoke something that is already there? This also equates to posing the problem of the relation between inquietude and diversion: How can we think human inquietude as a universal anthropological property, when at the same time we live in the midst of a madness and blindness that are precisely what justify the apologetic exercise? These three dimensions of inquietude may thus correspond to three operations or functions: Of course, this typology is artificial, for the letter of the text generally conflates these uses, but it will permit us to identify the different levels at which inquietude can function.

In short, in our view, Pascal proposes a thinking of human inquietude, an apologetic usage of it, but above all a veritable spirituality of inquietude. This anthropology may be conceived as a necessary propadeutic to the deployment of the apologetic argument or, if one prefers, as the first stage of the latter. The undertaking is perfectly summed up as follows: If he humbles himself, I exalt him.

The economy of the argument seems now to make way for the notion of inquietude at least in order to attest to the inconstancy of the human condition, which it can alongside other concepts represent. As mentioned above, from the start Pascal characterises inquietude as a fundamental anthropological property: But precisely what relation holds between these three concepts? Inconstancy thus refers to the conception of an evanescent human temporality, which gives rise to or initiates inquietude.

Thus we are condemned to agitation, since it is impossible for us to ever find true rest: Thus inquietude proceeds negatively from the primordial status of boredom.

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Let us remark that if Pascal writes the term in the singular, this is so as to distinguish the fundamental inquietude of every human being from the numerous troubles in which we busy ourselves so as to be distracted from ourselves. Called forth by inconstancy and made necessary by the threat of boredom, the meaning of inquietude thus stems from the finitude and vacuity of man. First of all, the fundamental inquietude of every human being is revealed by the presence in each of us of violent and ungovernable passions: For the apologist this situation is not at all insurmountable.

This is why, in the same gesture, he repudiates both morals and the mastering of the passions whose paradigm would be Epictetus and a form of vulgar hedonism that would renounce all reason. If, for Pascal, these artifices necessarily fail, it is because passions are true forces which escape the control of the self; for they depend on the disposition of bodies, on the deleterious force of the imagination that strengthens them S78 , and on the force of habit.

If one cannot do away with inquietude through an act of will alone, it is because it functions as a passion — that is to say, as a feeling that affects body and soul. Pascal thus pays very particular attention to the rooting of inquietude in the corporeal, as is testified by this decisive but often disregarded fragment: In moving from the modality of having to that of being , we see the apologist attributing an indisputable anthropological function to inquietude, which bespeaks a refusal to reduce it to a mere state of consciousness.

The mysterious communication between body and mind dictates that inquietude is manifested from a purely external point of view as fever, restlessness, movement. The fragments dedicated to diversion depict this sad state, and for Pascal agitation is in fact a universal constant: This spectacle of universal inquietude shows how the latter always emerges in a gap , the gap between a profound desire and an irremediable frustration in man. For the contradiction between our aspirations and reality produces a fragility that affects our being and our acting, as evidenced for example in the following fragment:.

We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. We are incapable of not wanting truth and happiness and are incapable of certainty or happiness. We have been left with this desire as much to punish us as to make us perceive from whence we have fallen. Noone can escape this fundamental desire, or renounce it: This ever-thwarted will anchors human nature in a radical impotence or incapacity S61 , condemning it to an eternal tension between movement and the yearning for rest. Finally, the last characteristic feature of human inquietude for Pascal is the experience that anyone can have of his own radical ignorance in regard to all things: It is thus no surprise that he often makes use of this notion to indicate the cosmic bewilderment of man:.

Man does not know in what rank he should occupy. He has obviously gone astray and fallen from his true place, lacking the power to find it again. He looks for it with inquietude, and unsuccessfully, in impenetrable darkness. This place , this position within the order of creation, is also a rank , a hierarchical position from which we have fallen.

Because of the Fall the creature finds himself thrown into uncertainty: To this inquietude in relation to locality there corresponds an inquietude of identity: I see only darkness everywhere. Shall I believe that I am nothing? Shall I believe I am God?

Inquietude in Pascal’s Pensées | Cairn International

Inquietude, in this sense, comes from ignorance, and is manifested just as clearly in reflexivity. Given this, it seems to us that one can speak of epistemic inquietude in a double sense: Subsequently, apart from its being an experience that provokes inquietude, ignorance even gives rise to a particular form of inquietude: For the principal illness of man is restless curiosity about things he cannot know.

And it is not as bad for him to be in error as to be curious to no purpose. It should be remarked that here Pascal still refuses any philosophical way out of this problem. As we know, apologetics has an obvious interest in scepticism, which serves to destroy the plans and the hubris of dogmatists and rationalists, and to reveal the impotence of reason: An irremediable contradiction of desire, a passional and corporeal agitation, a painful uncertainty — here are the anthropological marks that make inquietude representative of the human condition.

For the latter seems by definition to counterbalance inquietude, or even to annul it.

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Pascal makes use of an extreme example to illustrate this idea:. We need not wonder; for a ball has been served him, and he must return it to his companion. Thus to a certain extent diversion explains the scandal constituted, for the apologist, by the apparent, and only apparent lack of inquietude in most men. But in reality, it is because we always suffer from inquietude that we seek to lose ourselves in the tumult of the world: Diversion, in other words, is never immediate, but already proceeds from an unease, and represents a paradoxical cure for inquietude.

Paradoxical because in reality it adds further to the inquietude of the human condition by condemning us to movement: An activity that is autotelic yet meaningless, diversion is far from being a path toward peace: Pascal is not content to bring to light the general truth of human inquietude.

As commentators have often remarked, he also seeks to instigate it, with the aim of orienting his interlocutor down the long and delicate path of conversion. A fine reason to rejoice and proudly boast, the head raised, like this…: If the apologist seeks paradoxically to generate that which is already there, it is because inquietude is not always present to human consciousness in immediate, self-evident form.

Diversion, the hardening of the heart, and the forgetting of the self in the follies of the world, explain the monstrosity that is the apparent quietude of libertines and honest men: This supernatural lethargy justifies the apologetic exercise, and at the same time legitimates the use of inquietude for rhetorical and argumentative ends: But above all, it functions precisely as a counterweight to diversion: In order to have its effect, the apologetic use of inquietude rests necessarily upon the bringing to light of the frailty of reason, a condition that explains the omnipresence of scepticism in the text.

But this is also achieved by other means: On this basis alone Pascal establishes the theoretical primacy of a rhetoric of sensibility. In other words, by exhibiting the failure of the art of demonstration, the apologist establishes the full validity of the art of persuasion. This is why his apologetics paradoxically establishes its success through the failure of that which classically defines apologetics as an exercise: The interlocutor refuses to leave things there, and manifests, somewhat in spite of himself, the ineffectiveness of the whole preceding demonstration in these few words: I have not been released and I am made in such a way that I cannot believe.

Rather than taking offense at such a reversal of his presentation, the apologist takes account of this unmotivated refusal, and makes it the starting point of the road to God: But at least realize that your inability to believe comes from your passions.

This element is important, because it legitimates the apologetic usage of inquietude in the context of a rhetoric of affectivity. This troubledness that Pascal seeks to produce cannot then be understood solely in terms of ideas or thematics: To mention only a few elements, one might say that it can function through the recurrent employment of certain stylistic figures oxymorons, hyperbole, anaphoric twists and through the use of certain enunciative strategies vocatives, fictional dialogues, interrogative and exclamatory modalities, irony, pretended confessions.

The bringing of the passions into discourse is driven by three essential motors, according to Laurent Susini:.

This will to touch the reader in any case explains the fact that the text multiplies arguments and points of view, and in our view possible interlocutors, so as to give inquietude its full range. In this sense it provides a guarantee of the universality of his address. This element is decisive for our analysis, for, given this plurality of interlocutors, one may suppose that for Pascal, not all men suffer inquietude in exactly the same manner or that it is not appropriate to induce inquietude in them in the same way. The fundamental and paradigmatic figure of inquietude in the text is no doubt that of the king S For, as anthropological reflection has shown, all men share at least the same tendency toward inquietude.

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Thus the apologetic use of inquietude, both thematic and rhetorical, allows us to bring into the light of day the pain that often does not recognise itself in the heart of each man; but also, in doing so, it allows us to increase its effects and its representations, to make it more prevalent, to make it an object of deliberation. It is here that the therapeutic movement of apologetics resides: Indeed it is here above all that it proves most paradoxical: He is also the God who murmurs: But then does God deliver one from inquietude, or does he merely maintain it?

What role is to be attributed to inquietude in Pascalian spirituality? We have just said that the idea of the hidden God, which Pascal borrows from among others the book of Isaiah, is in itself a source of inquietude. For it comes down to claiming that the divine does not reveal itself directly to men, and only shows itself in figures and mysteries, without ever allowing any absolutely clear proof of its existence. Certainly it is not in the very essence of God to be irremediably hidden.

If he is no longer directly present to man, it is primarily because of original sin, a mutilation of the natural relation to God, for which the weakness of the postlapsarian condition is to blame: However God is not unknowable, otherwise the very idea of conversion would be in vain. If there were no obscurity, man would not feel his corruption; if there were no illumination, man would not hope for a remedy.

Thus it is not simply right, but useful for us, that God should be partly hidden and partly revealed, since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness and to know his own wretchedness without knowing God. So it seems that faith is always a struggle against uncertainty, and a hope which, no doubt, does not entirely neutralize inquietude. Following the radical Augustinianism of Jansen, the apologist ceaselessly reminded us that the elect will be few and that God dispenses his grace freely, which is not to say arbitrarily.

All that we can do, therefore, is to place ourselves at the mercy of the latter, by turning away from the folly of the world, and by praying that God may not abandon us. It is precisely this which obliges the apologist not to despair at universal blindness, and which in fine legitimates the project of an Apology for the Christian Religion:. But because this religion requires us always to regard them, as long as they are in this life, as being capable of the grace that can enlighten them, and to believe that they may, in a short time, be filled with more faith than we are, and that we, on the other hand, may fall into the blindness in which they are, we must do for them what we would want to be done for us if we were in their place, and call upon them to have pity on themselves […].

But then, can one never escape from the inquietude of salvation and damnation? As we have said, it may seem quite contradictory to appeal on one hand to confidence and hope S, S and, on the other hand, to prescribe unquiet sleep S This difficulty may be resolved by considering that one passes from a deleterious, more or less consciousinquietude, generated by the unhealthy agitation of diversion, the inconstancy of time, and the fear of death, to another, fruitful and supportive form of inquietude, which is born of the acknowledgement of the folly of the world and the dread of salvation, and which accompanies the perpetual conversion of the heart.

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