CERTITUDE, SENTIMENT, JOIE, PAIX

This entry’s title is taken from Pascal’s inscription on a piece of paper, stitched into the lining of his coat, and found after his death. This is the opening entry of the Pascal (1623-1662) series in this section, but the reader is as always advised to look for other Pascal references throughout the other sections of this book.

***

Pascal was one of the greatest creative geniuses who ever lived, a brilliant mathematician, physicist, and a prodigious inventor. He was also a great philosopher and a writer, whose impeccable literary style, elegant expression, wit, and depth, have enormously influenced the French language and European literature for all time. He had accomplished several lifetimes of work of genius, by the time he died at the age of thirty-nine, catching a deadly cold in the middle of Stockholm’s royal winter.

He is often called a religious philosopher, and there is some truth to that, for religion was indeed his biggest preoccupation, especially in his later years. But it would be wrong to see his specialized area of philosophy in theology-related matters only, as he was much more philosophically versatile. One of his lesser known, but exceptionally significant contributions was to the philosophy of mathematics. In his essay De l’Esprit Géométrique, published only over a century after his death, he looks at the issue of discovering truths, that is of particular interest to me, considering my basic premise that truth exists only within a specific creation, and that all creation starts with an unprovable hypothesis.

“Pascal argues that ideally such a method would lead to founding all propositions on already established truths. This is, however, impossible, because these truths require other truths to back them up; first principles therefore cannot be reached.” (Curiously, this is a variation on the cosmological argument for the existence of God. No wonder that, in Pascal’s view, the human mind is powerless in attaining any kind of absolute by human effort alone, hence his conclusion about the necessity of submission to God. The question remains of course whether such a submission makes the human knowledge of the absolute possible, and, to be sure, it hardly does, but, equally sure, it does open new horizons for human endeavor by reinforcing reason with intuition, underscoring the fact that a healthy dose of mysticism is a sine qua non of human progress.)

“Based on this, he argues that the procedure used in geometry is as perfect as possible,--- with certain principles assumed, and other propositions developed from them. But there is no way to know the assumed principles to be true.

He also uses this opportunity to develop a theory of definition. He distinguished between definitions which are conventional labels defined by the writer, and definitions that are within the language, and understood by everyone because they naturally designate their referent. The second type would be characteristic of the philosophy of essentialism. He claims that only definitions of the first type are important to science and to mathematics, arguing that these fields should adopt the philosophy of formalism, formulated by Dèscartes. In De l'Art de Persuader, he looks deeper into geometry’s axiomatic method, specifically into the question of how people come to be convinced of the axioms upon which later conclusions are based. He agrees with Montaigne that it is impossible to achieve certainty in these axioms and conclusions with human methods.” (Indeed, very few people outside the professional mathematical community ever realize that geometry, and all mathematics, for that matter, is based on a set of unprovable assertions. Far from being an “exact” science, mathematics is swimming in high-grade mysticism.)

“Pascal asserts that these principles can only be grasped through intuition (!), and that this fact underscores the necessity for submission to God in searching out truths.” (Or, to put it in other words, one has to become a profound mystic.)

***

But there is much more general philosophy in his Pensées, the great book, which I had a chance to read at a very early age. It is true that the amount of “theologicality” in it occasionally seems overwhelming, but this is not through any fault of his. Published posthumously as a collection of most of his unpublished thoughts and sketches, it includes two distinctly disparate sets. One is his drafted preparation of a theological book, under the already established title Apologie de la Religion Chrétienne; and the other is everything else. It is for this reason that when the Pensées was published in 1670, its full title read Pensées de M. Pascal sur la Religion, et sur Quelques Autres Sujets.

This book, therefore, can be seen, in part, as a magnificent collection of philosophical aphorisms of a great subtlety and profundity. I have several favorites among them, such as this for instance:

Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre. (#139.) (It is true that many people are afraid of solitude, and hate to be by themselves even for a few hours. Such an attitude is certainly destructive, and one does not have to be a sociopath to realize that. There needs to be time for social activity, time for one-on-one communication with others, and, yes, time for being alone with yourself.)

Or this creepy mystical shudder: Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie. (#206.) (Indeed, travelling into the outer reaches of human perception [like all great scientists do, and some of them never return], where eternal silence reigns, is a frightening and humbling experience. In fact, all silence is such. Remember Hamlet: “The rest is silence.”)

Curiously, there are several very familiar quotations here, which are often attributed to their later users, an ignominy, which needs to be rectified, as it is now in this entry: On mourra seul (#211), attributed to Schopenhauer, or this one: Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue, que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte (Lettres Provinciales, xvi), traditionally attributed to Lenin, but occasionally to a number of others as well.

As a fitting conclusion to this general entry, we shall look at Nietzsche’s peculiar attitude to Pascal, whose intense Catholic faith he rather harshly likens, in Jenseits 46, to a “continual suicide of reason,” and then, in Morgenröte, pronounces him a self-hater and, by the same token, a hater of mankind. In Der Antichrist, he laments about “the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!” (#5) And then, in Wille zur Macht, this comparison with Schopenhauer:

Without the Christian faith, Pascal thought, you, no less than nature and history, will become for yourselves un monstre et un chaos. This prophecy we have fulfilled, after the feeble optimistic eighteenth century had prettified and rationalized man. Schopenhauer and Pascal. In an important sense Schopenhauer is the first to take up again the movement of Pascal: un monstre et un chaos, consequently, something to be negated.--- History, nature, man himself. Our inability to know the truth is the consequence of our corruption, of our moral decay; thus Pascal. And thus, at bottom, Schopenhauer.--- The deeper the corruption of reason, the more necessary the doctrine of salvation--- or, in Schopenhauer’s terms, negation. (#83).

…There are many more references to Pascal in Nietzsche, all centering on Pascal’s lamentable intellectual martyrdom. Yet, Pascal is still one of the select eight in the already much-quoted Nietzschean passage that must be quoted yet again, to put Nietzsche’s opinion of Pascal in proper perspective: I too have been in the underworld to speak with a few of the dead. Four pairs did not deny themselves to my sacrifice: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. On these eight I fix my eyes, and see their eyes fixed on me. May the living forgive me that occasionally they appear to me as shades, while those men seem so alive to me. (Vermischte Meiningen und Sprüche: #408.)

This is not just Nietzsche’s personal opinion. This passage may well be regarded as an objective judgment of humanity on the great Frenchman’s historical legacy.