Pascal’s Pensées

This is a mini-collection of Pascal’s thoughts (Pensées), forming a microcosm of the larger macrocosm of his literary magnum opus. The selection is mine by personal preference.

 

“Justice and power ought to be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.” (This obviously reads as very much of wishful thinking, but it is certainly more than that. It raises several deeply philosophical questions, such as, for instance, can justice be tyrannical, when it is invested with too much power? Seeing that Pascal’s aphorism is a two-headed snake, we can accordingly ask this two-prong question: Does power corrupt justice? Can justice ennoble power? We can also say that there is a close organic connection between justice and power: justice cannot exist without the enforcement quality of power. By the same token, power coming into its own of necessity acquires the quality of justice, otherwise it can never rise about primitive brute force, which has little to do with the quintessence of power as we understand it in civilized society.)

“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” (Beautiful! This is to say that a man that is incapable of being at peace with himself and content with his own company is a grave danger to himself and to others.)

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.” (This is either terribly subtle, or emptily declarative, with a heavy load of circularity in it. Is it at all possible to love something without knowing what it is that we love? If not, how can we ever know what truth is? Now, if we know what truth is before we fall in love with it, Pascal’s necessary condition becomes superfluous at once, as it is not necessary, and sometimes even perverse, to love what we know just because we know it.)

“The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.” (Pascal has religion in mind, but I will interpret him to say that the necessity of irrationality as a complement to rationality, can be arrived at through reason alone.)

“All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.” (Irrationality within us has a stronger claim on our soul than rationality. Pascal’s “feeling” is not exactly Schopenhauer’s “will” but the two come pretty close when they find themselves together in the company of reason.)

“The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.” (In other words, the highest achievement of reason is its recognition of the irrational. With the admission of this sort, reason does not have to submit to its “nemesis,” but they can rather peacefully coexist in an amicable symbiotic union.)

“The present is never our goal: the past and present are our means: the future alone is our goal. Thus, we never live, but we hope to live; and always hoping to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so.” (Is there a future echo of Ivan Turgenev and Mikhail Bulgakov here? Or, rather, a Christian resignation to the inadequacy of life in “this world,” setting our sights on the hereafter, and consequently losing our love for life as such…)

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.” (This is of course a chilling truth, supporting Nietzsche’s assertion to a similar effect, namely that “convictions are the worst enemy of truth.”)

 “Little things console us because little things afflict us.” (This uncannily rings the bell of the Ecclesiastes’ “vanity, all is vanity.” “Little things” here are “vanity,” but it is obviously too hard to agree that the things that afflict us are “little things.”)

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” (In the USSR, this well-known dictum was frequently ascribed to the native wisdom of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, but those of us who knew the truth of it, still complimented Lenin on his genius of learning from the best masters of world culture.)

“To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.” (I cannot help but find another case of circularity here. It takes a philosopher to ridicule philosophy philosophically, but any “moska” dog can bark at a philosophical elephant without becoming an elephant on that account. Pascal’s mistake here is to forget about “moska.”)

“I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.” (The least a homo sapiens can hope for in the next life is an intelligent existence, whether in heaven or in hell. Otherwise, give me a merciful nothing!)

“Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m’effraie.” (The word “awe” sounds good here. The experience of eternity from the disadvantage point of our mortality is indeed profoundly intimidating, and, yes, terribly frightening!)

“Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.” (Here’s another curious comparison of eternity and our human temporality. Complete calm is the nature of eternity, whereas to us mortals it spells death.)

“And is it not obvious that, just as it is a crime to disturb the peace when truth reigns, it is also a crime to remain at peace when the truth is being destroyed?” (Here is the essential definition of a just war. There is no peace in a time of war, whereas the greatest crime of war is its disturbance and disruption of peace.)

“To understand is to forgive.” (On the contrary, I think that the hardest things to forgive are the ones that we can understand… Still, thank you, Pascal, for making me think, and compelling me to disagree! This means that I am a homo sapiens, and that I am alive.)