LOCKE AS THE FATHER OF EUROPEAN LIBERALISM

 

We have previously identified some of John Locke’s strengths and weaknesses, balancing them in a manner that would satisfy a critical historian, especially throwing some very substantial criticism at him at the end. But since when have we been motivated by giving pleasure to the critic? I am sure that having put so much objection to Locke’s ethical theory in the previous entry, we cannot be content to leave it at that. After all, Locke can be rightly seen as the father of European political liberalism, and this tremendous accomplishment of his ought to be written on his tomb, figuratively speaking, as his crowning achievement, and, in practical terms here, we are obliged to give him the last praise in the closing entry of his subsection.

A lot of philosophers before Locke can be justly described as liberal thinkers, and Machiavelli is certainly a most distinguished precursor of Locke as a political liberal. What is of critical importance here, though, has to be the fact that Locke’s intellectual influence on the British power elite was such that his liberalism took root in the British soil, and from there sprung and proliferated all across Europe. It is very commendable to be a liberal thinker, of course, but it is absolutely rare to be as fortunate as Locke was in finding political support for his liberal thinking.

In order to support my thesis with outside authority, I am taking recourse to Bertrand Russell again, but this time I shall be quoting from his less known opera. The opus in question is Russell’s 1940 article under the title Freedom and the Colleges. All quotations are taken from Section II of that article.

“The principle of liberal democracy, which inspired the founders of the American Constitution, was that the controversial questions should be decided by argument, rather than by force. Liberals have always held that opinions should be formed by untrammeled debate, not by allowing only one side to be heard. Tyrannical governments, both ancient and modern, have taken the opposite view…

The liberal outlook is the one which arose in England and Holland during the late seventeenth century, as a reaction against the wars of religion. These wars had raged for 130 years without producing the victory of either party. Each party felt an absolute certainty that it was in the right, and that its own victory was of the utmost importance to mankind. At the end, sensible men grew weary of the indecisive struggle and decided that both sides were mistaken in their dogmatic certainty. John Locke, who expressed the new point of view both in philosophy and in politics, wrote at the beginning of an era of growing toleration. He emphasized the fallibility of human judgments and ushered in an era of progress, which lasted until 1914. It is owing to the influence of Locke and his school that Catholics enjoy toleration in Protestant countries and Protestants in Catholic countries…

…All those [today] who oppose free discussion, and who seek to impose a censorship upon the opinions to which the young are to be exposed, are doing their share in increasing this bigotry and in plunging the world further into the abyss of strife and intolerance, from which Locke and his coadjutors gradually rescued it…”

…With this glowing tribute to John Locke as the father of European liberalism I find it most fitting to close the Locke subsection among my Magnificent Shadows. Here is undeniably Locke’s most significant legacy to our Western Civilization, and by this alone the extent of his positive value versus negative value ought to be judged and appreciated by posterity.

 

LOCKE'S ETHICS

Touching upon Locke’s ethical doctrines now, we might, perhaps, find out why so many philosophers have found him reprehensible. (It is hard to imagine that the best of Locke’s political philosophy and the theory of knowledge should be found so detestable by others, as these others, like Lessing, have led us to believe.) I do not intend to make a long story of this, but the bottom line is, as Bertrand Russell puts it, that Locke is very much like Jeremy Bentham in his ethics, and Bentham, as we shall later see, is rather reprehensible in his utilitarian approach to morality. So, let us quote Russell here yet again:

Locke’s ethical doctrines are interesting partly on their own account, partly as an anticipation of Bentham. When I speak of his ethical doctrines, I do not mean his moral disposition as a practical man, but only his general theories as to how men act, and how they should act. Like Bentham, Locke was a man filled with a kindly feeling, who yet held that everybody (including himself) must always be moved, in action, solely by desire for his own happiness or pleasure. A few quotations will make this clear:

Things are good or evil only in relation to pleasure or pain. That we call “good” which is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain, in us. (Here is an example of philistine morality. What is good and evil in the context of war?, I may ask. Without relating morality to conflict--- where the notions of pleasure and pain do not apply, or apply very differently than in Locke--- we are glaringly unqualified to talk about morality as such, reducing it to a sterilized idealistic bubble of nonexistent pseudo-reality.

What is it that moves desire? I answer, happiness, and that alone.

Happiness in its full extent is the utmost pleasure we are capable of.

The necessity of pursuing true happiness is the foundation of all liberty…

It is patently clear from these Lockean quotations how his thinking influenced American democracy. It is also clear how utopian Locke sounds in his ethics, mistaking the happiness of an average man (not even a monster, of which species there are a great many in any society) for the happiness of a saint. There is no doubt that in such profuse exhortations of happiness, a much greater distinction must be made between the good kind of happiness and all the bad kinds of happiness that exist, or else, the word happiness might just turn on us and bite our throat out. It is true, of course, that, as a sensible man, he realizes the deficiencies in the human understanding of happiness, and that, in their pursuit of happiness, men do not always act as he would want them to act. Legal liberty therefore is only completely possible where both prudence and piety are universal (namely, nowhere!); elsewhere, the restraints imposed by the criminal law are indispensable.

This is, in fact, my personal objection to utilitarianism and the pursuit of happiness doctrine, which are in this respect far worse than the communistic theories, because they assume facts not at all in evidence, and with no recourse whatsoever, either to the authority of the Bible, or to the imperative of the State. Having this in mind, let us quote Russell’s conclusion on the subject of Locke’s ethics:

Locke’s ethical doctrines are, of course, indefensible. Apart from the fact that there is something revolting in a system regarding prudence as the only virtue, there are other less emotional objections to his theories. In the first place, to say that men only desire pleasure is to put the cart before the horse. Whatever I happen to desire, I shall feel pleasure in obtaining it; but, as a rule, the pleasure is due to the desire, not the desire to the pleasure. It is possible, as happens with masochists, to desire pain; in that case, there is still pleasure in the gratification of the desire, but it is mixed with the opposite. Even in his own doctrine, it is not pleasure as such that is desired, since a proximate pleasure is more desirable than a remote one. If morality is to be deduced from the psychology of desire, there can be no reason for deprecating the discounting of a distant pleasure or for urging prudence as a moral duty. His argument, in a nutshell, is: We only desire pleasure. But, in fact, many men desire not pleasure as such, but proximate pleasure. This contradicts our doctrine that they desire pleasure as such, and is therefore wicked. Almost all philosophers in their ethical systems first lay down a false doctrine, and then argue that wickedness consists in acting in a manner that proves it false, which would be impossible, if the doctrine were true. Of this pattern, Locke affords an example.

But now, instead of saying Amen to this (although this, of course, sounds and is true) let us remember that, if all philosophers were to be judged by the truth or falseness of their pet theories, their only surviving kind would be found in comedies. But the serious and true value of any philosopher is to be judged by--- just the way Nietzsche put it--- by three anecdotes, or, as I put it, by three sentences powerful enough to inspire our own philosophical disposition, in the process bringing to life ideas of our own. And by this standard at least, Locke more than amply qualifies to be counted among the undoubtedly great ones, and, well, so be it!

IS BEING SENSIBLE A SIGN OF SUPERFICIALITY?

 

(To put the title of this entry into proper perspective, rationality without its own admission of irrationality as an essential complement to itself, suffers from shallowness and superficiality, and, in fact, it is not worth much, philosophically speaking. This isn’t something new that I have said just now, but it is one of my recurring leitmotifs, playing through several of my philosophical sections. Incidentally, the last appearance of this leitmotif occurred most recently as a comment in the entry Pascal’s Pensées, earlier in this section.)

***

Continuing with Bertrand Russell’s general appraisal of John Locke, here is an important paragraph from one of the three Lockean chapters (Locke’s Theory of Knowledge), in his History of Western Philosophy. It is well worth noting that only Plato and Aristotle have received more chapters in his book, whereas no other philosopher has got more than a single chapter.

Locke’s philosophy, as it appears in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, has throughout certain merits and certain demerits. Both alike were useful: the demerits are such only from the theoretical point. He is always sensible, and always willing to sacrifice logic, rather than become paradoxical. He enunciates general principles, which, as the reader can hardly fail to perceive, are capable of leading to some strange consequences; but whenever the strange circumstances seem about to appear, Locke blandly refrains from drawing them. To a logician this is irritating; to a practical man, it is a proof of sound judgment. Since the world is what it is, it is clear that valid reasoning from sound principles can’t lead to error; but a principle may be so nearly true as to deserve theoretical respect, and yet may lead to practical consequences which we feel to be absurd. There’s therefore a justification for common sense in philosophy, but only as showing that our theoretical principles cannot be quite correct, so long as their consequences are condemned by an appeal to common sense. which we feel to be irresistible. The theorist may retort that common sense is no more infallible than logic. But this retort, although made by Berkeley and Hume, would have been wholly foreign to Locke’s intellectual temper. A characteristic of Locke, which descended from him to the whole Liberal movement, is a lack of dogmatism. Some few certainties he takes over from his predecessors: our own existence, the existence of God, and the truth of mathematics. (Let me remind the reader that my own thinking would include the truth of mathematics only in the generalized form, as the truth of all creation.) But wherever his doctrines differ from those of his forerunners, they are to the effect that truth is hard to ascertain, and that a rational man will hold his opinions with some measure of doubt. This temper of mind is obviously connected with religious toleration, with the success of parliamentary democracy, with laissez faire, and the whole system of liberal maxims. Although he is a deeply religious man, a devout believer in Christianity, who accepts revelation as a source of knowledge (but not to the extreme extent of subscribing to the double-truth doctrine), he nevertheless hedges round professed revelations with rational safeguards. On one occasion he says, The bare testimony of revelation is the highest certainty, but on another he says: Revelation must be judged by reason. (But isn’t this one of the two alternative tenets of Scholasticism, the other, of course, being the absolute supremacy of revelation!) Thus in the end reason remains supreme.

Bertrand Russell’s bottom line in the above is that Locke is a sensible man. This characterization can well be compared with Nietzsche’s repeated charge that Locke is superficial. Like here, for instance (the pertinent content of Jenseits 20 is quoted elsewhere):

So much by way of rejecting Locke’s superficiality regarding the origin of ideas. (Jenseits 20.)

The following comment of mine, as well as Nietzsche’s own remark proper, ought to be considered in the context of the whole Section (20) of Jenseits. Nietzsche does not actually attack Locke here on account of his ideas: he is too busy promoting his own. But the crucial negative assessment of what he calls “Locke’s superficiality” and the use of the negatively-charged word “rejection” sum up his general attitude to Locke pretty well.

So this is the interesting question here whether it is Locke’s staunch sensibility (leaving aside his enviable political fortune), which, in Nietzsche’s eyes, amounts to superficiality? The answer is, perhaps, or maybe even probably. But then, immediately, the next question arises whether these two ought to be equated also in our eyes? And, again, the right answer seems to be: yes, probably. After all, following the judgments of common sense, we are not obligated to dig too deep below the surface, which does make us superficial!

But, on the other hand, being sensible has its merit, even if sensibility be judged as superficiality. Locke’s doctrine of truth, in this sense, is admirable. And to prove it, here is Russell again:

His (Locke’s) chapter Of Enthusiasm (in the monumental work Essay Concerning Human Understanding) is instructive in this connection. “Enthusiasm” had not then the same meaning as it has now. It meant the belief in a personal revelation to a religious leader or to his followers. It was characteristic of the sects that had been defeated at the Restoration. When there is a multiplicity of such personal revelations, inconsistent with each other, truth, or what passes as such, becomes purely personal, and loses its social character. Love of truth, which Locke considers essential, is a very different thing from love of some particular doctrine proclaimed as the truth. One unerring mark of truth, he says, is not to entertain any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. Forwardness to dictate, he says, shows failure of the love of truth. “Enthusiasm, laying by reason, would set up revelation without it; whereby, in effect, it takes away both reason and revelation, and substitutes in the room of it the underground fancies of a man’s own brain.” Men who suffer from melancholy or conceit are likely to have “persuasions of immediate intercourse with the Deity.” Hence odd actions and opinions acquire Divine sanction, flattering “men’s laziness, ignorance and vanity.” He concludes the chapter with the maxim already quoted that “revelation must be judged by reason.”

In this aspect of his sensibility, Locke sounds even more modern than in his famous political doctrines, and in forming an opinion of his legacy we must be motivated not by some preconceived notions, but by exactly such characteristics, which, objectively (regardless of what anybody says), make him a philosopher worthy of our admiration. I confess that this admiration may not pertain so much to Locke the philosopher as to Locke the progenitor of the genuine American experience, sorely missed in today’s America, which is all the more the reason to feel nostalgic about that fading out experience, and about the” superficial” Englishman, by association.

 

GRANDFATHER OF THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION

 

 (Technically speaking, Locke was the great-grandfather, but somehow grandfather sounds more elegant in this phrase, so let the title stand as is, with this little caveat.)

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This is the opening entry on John Locke (1632-1704) in this section. There are, of course, other entries and references in other places, which the reader can take time to look up. However, for the sake of convenience and also because of its importance to the overall picture of Locke, I have included here an excerpt from my entry Checks, Balances And Natural Rights, which I expect to contribute rather significantly to the flow of the present Lockean series. It is thus best to start with this excerpt, and then to move on from it.

Locke was a wishful thinker backwards. Rather than idealizing the future, he idealized “the past,” namely, the much-discussed state of nature. Those who recall Hobbes’s description of the state of nature as a “war of every man against every man” may be shocked by the contrariness of Locke’s prehistoric utopia, where the state of nature is a happy state: “Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature.”

Locke further expounds this point by a direct jab at Hobbes, (whom he, however, never mentions by name, even in such conspicuous cases, where elementary decency demands one to give the man one borrows from some sort of attribution!): “And here we have the plain difference between the state of nature and the state of war, which however some men have confounded, are as far distant as a state of peace, goodwill, mutual assistance, and preservation, and a state of enmity, malice, violence, and mutual destruction are from one another.”

Needless to say, this glaring contrariness is probably the result of a semantic confusion of sorts, in Locke’s mind between what we call (mistakenly, I must say, distorting Kipling, who coined this phrase) the law of the jungle and what he apparently conceives to be the law of reason, in which case a better distinction ought to have been made. In fact, the law of nature is ostensibly the Law of God to Locke just as much, and along exactly the same lines of understanding, as in Plato, and in Saint Thomas Aquinas, and clearly, there is no originality here whatsoever, on Locke’s part.

What is peculiar to Locke, however, is his theory of natural rights of man, derived from his understanding of the law of nature. Thomas Jefferson would later call them inalienable Rights (corrected to ‘unalienable Rights’ in the Declaration of Independence, where he adds that we hold these truths to be self-evident). It is most instructive, though, that Jefferson’s “unalienable Rights” include “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of… Happiness,” as if he were reluctant to include the strictly capitalistic Right of Private Property, which was the first and foremost natural right to Locke, placed even above life and physical personal safety!

According to Locke, “political power [is] the right of making laws with penalty of death and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws and in the defense of the commonwealth from foreign injury and all this only for the public good.”

While Locke’s theory of social contract is rather unoriginal, except to insist that, according to this contract, the responsibility of the government is to protect those natural rights, his idea of separation of powers is of a particular interest. (Although he is limited in his understanding of this question by the conflict that he was witnessing in England between the Crown and the Parliament.) Locke sees it as the two powers in need of separation: the legislative and the executive, and, not surprisingly, never raises the question of the third key power, the judiciary, which was of course left up to Montesquieu to include in the eventual classic triad.

I personally see the greatest flaw of Locke’s natural rights philosophy in his promotion of private property to their rank. This is inconsistent with the Christian attitude toward private property, and once you wish to promote something to the absolute status of Divine Law, you better take into consideration what Jesus and his Apostles had to say about it. His failure to reconcile his defense of property with Christianity (it would have been an impossible task anyway!) immediately deflates his theory of natural rights, and leaves it only with a symbolic general reservoir of value, from which Jefferson drew his unalienable rights, preferring to leave property alone.

Why was Locke so intensely disliked, at least by some? Perhaps, because he was virtually deified by others at the other end? His authority stood so high already in his own lifetime that his intellectual opponents clearly resented this and went out of their way to bring him down from his pedestal. His political philosophy was probably not of the highest magnitude, but its historical luck was of the top order.

Here is a concise and very valuable summary, to that effect, of Locke’s legacy, given by Bertrand Russell:

“Locke is the most fortunate of all philosophers. He completed his work in theoretical philosophy just at the moment when the government of his country fell into the hands of men who shared his political opinions. Both in practice and theory, the views which he advocated were held, for many years to come, by the most vigorous and influential politicians and philosophers. His political doctrines, with the developments due to Montesquieu, are embedded in the American Constitution, and are to be seen at work whenever there is a dispute between President and Congress. The British Constitution was based upon his doctrines till about fifty years ago (written around 1942), and so was that which the French adopted in 1871.”

In other words, if I may introduce my own summary, it has been because of the American experience, and its association with Locke’s name that a great deal of reverence bordering on deification has been attached to his name, and history, as they say, is always written by the winners. In the few remaining entries of this series we shall attempt to draw some general conclusions from the Lockean experience, which wouldn’t be dependent so much on his lucky stars and political windfalls.

 

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.)

 

REASONS OF THE HEART

"Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point." (Pensées: #277.)

This is perhaps the most adorable, elegant, and sophisticated of all of Pascal’s numerous aphoristic phrases, which at first sight looks like a pun on the word raison, but on a deeper level can be boldly interpreted as a thoughtful clarification of this complicated word. It can be said that, just as the heart has its ‘little reasons,’ so does the ‘big Reason,’ which also has its own little reasons, that the heart’s reasons are not accessible to our big Reason, and also that there must be a certain connection between reasons and reason, which allows us to use the same word in these two seemingly different (but, perhaps, not) senses. As we can see, this line of thinking introduces us into an entirely novel philosophical virgin land, where we can explore things not explored yet in the three thousand years of philosophical thinking, including in our time.

Now, it does not matter whether Pascal himself realized the full potential of his little beautiful gem, or not. In this phrase’s larger context, he does not pursue the track which I find the most worthy of being pursued:

277. The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and also itself, naturally, according as it gives itself to them; and it hardens itself against one or the other at its will. You have rejected the one and kept the other… Is it by reason that you love yourself?

278. It is the heart that experiences God, not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart and not by reason.

279. Faith is a gift of God; do not believe that we said it was a gift of reasoning. Other religions do not say this of their faith. They only give reasoning in order to arrive at it, and yet it does not bring them to it.

But such is the magic of a philosophical genius that he will open myriads of doors for us, without entering them himself. (Not that this is in any way some kind of failure on his part, for, there are too many opened doors: the more, the greater the philosopher is.) And by this measure alone genius can be measured.

Needless to say, I will be returning to this subject at length at a later time. In the meantime, my Pascal series is now about to come to an end, with this next very important entry...

(To be immediately followed by the entry Pascal’s Pensées.)

 

PASCAL'S WAGER

Several mathematical theorems and physical laws have received the name of Pascal, such as Pascal’s law, Pascal’s arithmetical triangle; Pascal’s mystic hexagram, etc. But it is his peculiar philosophical theorem, known as Pascal’s wager, which is the subject of this entry. It is developed by him in #233 of his Pensées, which is too lengthy, perhaps, to quote it here in its entirety. But a very short summary of it will make an introduction. God is infinitely incomprehensible, and therefore utterly unknowable. But it is more rational to believe that He exists than the opposite, because the former is either supremely beneficial or totally harmless to us, but the latter is either totally irrelevant or supremely harmful to us, threatening us with eternal damnation.

“God is or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Reason decides nothing here. There is an infinite chaos separating us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance, where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing, nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions. Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. No, but I blame them for having made not this choice, but a choice; for again, both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.

Yes, and yet you must wager. This is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you the least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing the one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled… But your happiness?.. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate the two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much. Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play, since you are under the necessity of playing, and it would be imprudent when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain… But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.

The end of the discourse. Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly, you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory, and luxury; but will you not have others? I shall tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great a certainty of gain, and so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.

I have always been against any effort to prove the existence of God. (If knowledge were available, I argue, who would need the faith?) Moreover, should this wager be seen as an attempt to outsmart people of lesser intelligence into believing in God just because this costs you nothing, such an attempt would appear tacky and frivolous, a clever self-promotion of a brainwashing artist to a sympathetic audience. This is not, however, how it ought to be viewed, but primarily as a sophisticated philosophico-logical exercise directed toward philosophically-minded peers: as a deceptively simple challenge to them, rather than as a lure to the crowd, keeping in mind that the Pensées are, indeed, hardly intended for general audiences.

Bearing this in mind, and generally, the great Pascal’s honoris causa, this certain tackiness of his “wager” ought to be unequivocally excused. Yet, on the other hand, the “wager” must not be emulated and repeated by the lesser minds, directing it toward mediocrities just like them. Quod licet Jovi, non licet Bovi!