Blaise Pascal : Pensées (posthumously 1670)

About the Text

The disjointed appearance of the Pensées has two causes. First, its composition: The manuscript is a set of notes preparing for an apology for the Christian religion. The notes were published after the author’s death and ordered differently in the editions that followed. It is even unclear if the Pensées had an intended disposition or not. Is one of the lists found a disposition or just another note? Pascal took the matter to the grave.
   Second, its breadth of scope: Pensées covers a broad range of topics. The connections remain elusive. Even within a single note, wide ranging claims can be made. For instance, the first line of the first note establishes “the difference between the mathematical mind and the intuitive mind”. The mathematical mind sees order by mathematical principles. It shifts perspective, and when properly shifted the principles impose themselves. An example can be found in his Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle, where the mathematical mind of Pascal sees how the stakes in a gambling situation should be divided.
   It is tempting to assume that the intuitive mind is akin to common sense or practical reason, but this would be a mistake. Unlike the intuitive mind, practical reason is not about discernment but about action. Common sense, on the other hand, is indeed about discernment, and like the intuitive mind it proceeds “tacitly, naturally, without technical rules”. Yet, common sense resorts to simplification and reduces what is complex to what matters most, while the intuitive mind distinguishes itself by discerning principles that “are so subtle and so numerous that it is almost impossible but that some escape notice.” The intuitive mind is hard to grasp. I would hope this is due to my mathematical mind, but I may simply be dull because, as Pascal notes in passing, “dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical” and there is very little in between.

   Despite its conditions of creation, Pensées is a rich text. I will focus on its most well-known topic, Pascal's wager in note 233. We will however get there via note 194, which displays a superb blend of rational thinking and writing.

Pascal's Wager : Setting the Scene

Pascal’s wager is often considered a simple mind game. In addition, it is usually misconstrued as a wager on whether I gain most by believing in God or not. Leading up to Pascal’s wager, the real stakes are laid out in note 194 with a rigor that deserves lengthy quoting, and without a trace of dullness:

How can it happen that the following argument occurs to a reasonable man? 

   “I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everything. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, not even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, and knows itself no more than the rest. I see those frightful spaces of the universe which surround me, and I find myself tied to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am put in this place rather than in another, nor why the short tie which is given me to live is assigned to me at this point rather than at another of the whole eternity which was before me or which shall come after me. I see nothing but infinities on all sides, which surround me as an atom and as a show which endures only for an instant and returns no more. All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least is this very death which I cannot escape.

   As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go. I know only that, in leaving this world, I fall for ever either into annihilation or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing to which of these two states I shall be for ever assigned. Such is my state, full of weakness and uncertainty. And from all this I conclude that I ought to spend all the days of my life without caring to inquire into what must happen to me. Perhaps I might find some solution to my doubts, but I will not take the trouble, nor take a step to seek it; and after treating with scorn those who are concerned with this care, I will go without foresight and without fear to try the great event, and let myself be led carelessly to death, uncertain of the eternity of my future state”

   Who would desire to have for a friend a man who talks in this fashion? [...]
   It is a monstrous thing to see in the same heart and at the same time this sensibility to trifles and this strange insensibility to the greatest objects. It is an incomprehensible enchantment, and a supernatural slumber, which indicates as its cause an all-powerful source. There must be a strange confusion in the nature of man, that he should boast of being in that state in which it seems incredible that a single individual should be. [...]
   Finally, let them recognize that there are two kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because they know Him, and those who seek Him with all their heart because they do not know him.

 

Pascal's Wager : Playing It Out

In Pascal’s wager (233) the mathematical mind has the upper hand. I will follow Ian Hacking’s account in chapter 6 of The Emergence of Probability. 

   Hacking argues, contrary to others, that Pascal’s reasoning is correct. The reason the argument fails lies in the premises. Some of the confusion stems from the fact that it is actually three arguments, all of which are valid: The conclusions follow from the premises. Hacking underlines that 

 

each has the form of a decision-theoretic argument of a kind properly named only in this century. [...] Pascal’s procedure [...] is to offer an argument of dominance. But if it is rejected, another premise is added and we obtain an argument from expectation. Then, if the second lot of premises be rejected, he offers an argument from dominating expectation.

 

 The ideas behind these terms are not complicated:

• Dominance is a technical term for when “an action is better no matter what the world is like.”
• Expectation means to include the likelihood of different states of the world; summing up all the possible actions and likelihoods, then perform the action with the highest expectation.
• Dominating expectation is the case where we can’t define the probabilities, so we have to resort to probability assignments. Combining the reasoning of dominance and expectation, we perform the act of dominating expectation.

There are two states and two actions: The states, “God is, or He is not”, combine with the actions, either “act with complete indifference to God” or “act in such a way that you will, in due course, believe in his edicts and his existence”.

• Dominance: If God is not, both actions will do. If God is, act to in due course believe; it can bring salvation, which is better than sure damnation. By dominance, act according to “God is”.
• Expectation: One problem is that if God is not, a libertine loses something by following dominance; “He likes sin.” (Hacking) That changes the scene. Pascal assumes “an equal risk of gain and of loss”, which Hacking calls “a monstrous premise of equal chance”. Maximizing the gain here clearly is to “act so you will come to believe in God”: the incomparable benefit of salvation by far outdoes the pleasures of any worldly life.
• Dominating expectation: We do know that there is a chance of God’s existence; it is not zero. And however small, “the expectation of the pious strategy with infinite reward exceeds that of the worldly one".

At least two of the premises are thought-provoking:

1. Is faith really a choice? The premise is that “belief is catching”. If I devote myself to the forms, content (belief) will come. This idea may seem farfetched, but isn't it confirmed in everyday experience? Doesn't it apply to the actions and distractions of daily work life? Doing a job, won't I even start thinking like a professional? (Pascal himself seemingly questions this idea when in note 292 he states that from “conformity of application we derive a strong conviction of conformity of ideas”. Here that conviction may be false: When we use concepts, we may arrive at the same conclusion from different premises. The premise for the wager is different: acting in such a way that one will "in due course, believe in his edicts and his existence", what is presumed is not change but consistency in action.)
   
2. Does one really have to place the bet? Pascal’s imagined interlocutor challenges this premise, but Pascal dismisses him: “You are embarked.” Next the discussion tips into the three-step procedure of dominance, expectation, and dominant expectation, that is mathematical thinking. It is unacceptable for the Christian Pascal to leave a fellow man of the dull mind ignorant: The lengthy citation from note 194 above indicates that not playing is a refusal to rational consideration, and Pascal finds this refusal to be rational and still claim to be a Man abominable. In note 195 he even considers it a duty to his fellow man to relieve him of his beast-like condition: “The resting in ignorance is a monstrous thing, and they who pass their life in it must be made to feel its extravagance and stupidity, by having it shown to them, so that they may be confounded by the sight of their folly.” Before we dismiss this caring intention as a 17th century religious assault on the freedom to be dull, we can remind ourselves that in relation to education Alfred Norton Whitehead less than a century ago said that: "Where attainable knowledge could have changed the result, ignorance has the force of vice."
   

Pascal's Wager: The Bottom Line

There is another, unnamed premise tucked away in another note (273), one that could be considered the real basis of the wager: The relation between reason and religion is one of close affinity, or equality, or even identity, depending on how rigorously one takes the following statement. I will take it to be identity, because one can swap reason and religion, and still retain a clear meaning:

If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.

This powerful statement – by a great scientist, great mathematician, great inventor, great entrepreneur, and great religious thinker, also arguably the foremost master of style in the French language, someone who died after a life of physical suffering at the age of 39 – rhymes with a sententious phrase jotted down on another scrap of paper: “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” (277) Yet another world of thought opens up: Reason depends on the heart; it is nothing without it.

Lucretius : On the Nature of Things (~60 BC)

The bottom line

When one understands the world, namely when one has digested Lucretius’s poem, the beauty of the natural world is accessible and fear of death is obliterated.

What does Lucretius say?

Book I: At the outset Epicurus is hailed as the slayer of religion, the cause of much suffering. In its place, in order to end suffering, Lucretius provides explanations based on the atomic model. Everything comes together as atoms, and everything dissolves into atoms. He had no Latin word for atom, and resorted to “rerum primordia”, “primordial things”, and similes, like “seeds”.
   Right at the beginning Lucretius counters the first natural objection in the reader: How can I believe in atoms I don’t see? He starts with what is sensory: How can the invisible wind have effects? And odors, what are they, if not atoms? And the ring on the finger, how does it wear if not by shedding atoms? “Nothing can touch or be touched, except matter.” He is ingenious in proving the characteristics of the atoms: They are interminable and indivisible units.
   Are there only atoms? No: There is one more thing, and it is just as important – “By void I mean vacant and empty space”. It has to be there, because voices penetrate the walls, some things are lighter, and without void nothing would be able to move. Furthermore, movement is what creates time, because no one would sense time separate from the movement of things. Lucretius, as Aristotle but unlike Newton, is economic in his theoretical view, not positing time, but subordinating it to events. The massive atoms are eternal. They combine, and recombine: “So changed that it forsakes former nature / Becomes death of what it was before.” Without the movement of atoms, there is no time. The atom-void pair is the key to everything that follows.
   Closely related is our ability to know: “What can there be more certain than our senses / To mark true things and false?” He uses his senses to refute the idea that fire or any other one substance is the basis for everything. The Pre-Socratics are in for a whipping, foremost Heraclitus for his monism based on fire, then Empedocles for positing several principles and base matters, and Anaxagoras for believing things can be interminably divisible. Lucretius instead argues for the multiplicity of the atoms building up everything. Combining similar things one gets differences, like when using the alphabet:

Look – in my lines here you can see the letters / Common to many of the words, but you know / perfectly well that resonance and meaning, / Sense, sound, are changed by changing the arrangement. / How much more true of atoms than of letters!

Lucretius’s reasoning is consequential. It provides explanations for the phenomena and displays the errors in alternative explanations. The universe, for instance, can’t be limited in any direction: How could we see there but not beyond? And if we’d encounter the limit and threw a spear, where would it go? Indeed, there can’t be anything beyond the universe, so there is no limit to it. Wherever you stand, it must be unlimited in all directions; hence quite logically, there can neither be a middle point.

In Book II the modern reader however finds him- or herself drawn into some explanations that challenge our school education.
   It starts with the sweetness of beholding someone else in trouble at sea, a flamboyant way to introduce our two naturally given propensities: We avoid pain, and, when our souls are free from fear, we immerse ourselves in the beauty provided by the senses. The latter brings us back to the movement of the atoms in a striking image: Beholding tiny particles jumping around in the sunlight rays enables us to sense the atomic dance. (This is a premonition of the discovery of Brownian motion, random fluctuations in pollen seen in a microscope, later investigated by Einstein on the molecular level. The wikipedia article actually refers to Lucretius’s “remarkable description of Brownian motion of dust particles in verses 113–140 of Book II”.) No less remarkably, Lucretius shortly arrives at the counterintuitive conclusion that atoms must move at the same speed, regardless of weight, sixteen centuries before Galileo proved Aristotle wrong on the same topic. Yet, breaking the scientific home run, stating that atoms move faster than light, Einstein tags out Lucretius coming in for the third base.
   Neither will the statement that atoms mostly move downwards convince us. Yet, another striking idea is introduced against this backdrop: Free will through atomic swerve. It is based on reasoning: The weight of the atoms paired with the directional changes of them bumping into each other is not enough to explain the phenomena, foremost the fact that our will has been torn from destiny.
   The book is clear about the atoms: The number of shapes must be limited, otherwise there would be some atoms of unlimited size; therefore the number of atoms that have the same shape is unlimited, because the number of shapes is limited. And, most importantly, atoms only have primary qualities – size, shape, weight – and no secondary – color, taste, smell, heat or cold.

The departure of Book III points in two directions: On the one hand, “What a man really is, the time to learn / Comes when he stands in danger or in doubt”; on the other hand the fear of death inflames Man’s avarice, losing honor, friendship and loyalty. (This triad is named in the Swedish translation, but hard to catch in the English.) Fear of death is the root of all evil in Man, and the only way out is “insight into nature, and a scheme / Of systematic contemplation.” With insight, death comes to mean nothing to us.
   Lucretius moves to a discussion of the soul, the body, and their relation. A few concepts are clarified by the notes in my translation: What in English is “intelligence and spirit”, “mind and soul” (in Swedish “sinnet och själen”), in latin is animus, the seat of reason, passions, and the will, and anima, which has its atoms all throughout the body and thus is closer connected to the senses. This is compounded by the use of anima also for both; Lucretius is wrestling with a series of Greek concepts, especially from Epicurus: psyché (≈soul) split into to logikón (reason), and to álogon (the unreasonable part), and in older Greek philosophy nous (≈reason). He boxes in the question of the soul by many sophisticated arguments, arguments for its mortality, for the soul being made up of atoms, for the logical pairing of sorrow and pain in the mind and body, and for the co-experience of body and mind. The key point is that the soul is held together by the body. The soul has a birthday and it dies too; what is dissolved is destroyed. There is consolation in this: Death is nothing to us precisely because our soul is deadly too; what comes before, it does not know, nor what comes after; death is the limit. One can as well dust off Epicurus own version of the same consideration: 

Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.

Furthermore, the illustrious Epicurus died, as did Homer and Democritus, so “Who are you, forsooth, / To hesitate, resent, protest your death?” After this attack on the small minded reader he adds an almost zen-like contemplation for consolation:

But life, prolonged, / Subtracts not even one second from the term / Of death’s continuance. [...] Suppose / You could contrive to live for centuries, / As many as you will. Death, even so, / Will still be waiting for you;

Book IV first deals with sensation and thought. Foremost focusing vision he safeguards the truthfulness of sensation, and displaces the problem to the mind. What he observes about sleep and dreams is truly amazing in several regards, foreshadowing Freud: The picture of a kentaur is combined from the closeness of the picture of horse and man. In sleep, our reason is inactive, our limbs lose their power to move, our mind does not find strange things strange, things that we have spent a lot of time pondering or recently encountered; these images join and move at the greatest speed; desires insist, from becoming a king to being at a river when one is thirsty. Even the pollution of the young soiling the bed sheet is named.
   Dreams introduce the theme of erotic desire and more generally, the problem of love. Venus is akin to madness and 

an appetite for pain [...] / There’s hope, always, that the fire may die / Extinguished by the body which aroused / Its ardor in the first place. What could be / more contrary to nature? Nothing else / Inflames us, with desire / Of more and more and more. [...] Venus plays tricks on lovers with her game / Of images which never satisfy.

Not only death should be handled by insightful reason, but also love, by clear injunctions: Blinded by love, Man gives the beloved qualities he or she does not have! She does the same things as the worst of her sex, and you know it! There are also others! You have lived without her so far without problem!
   Lucretius, unsurprisingly because the theme is really the harmony and the peace of mind, strikes a blow for the plain woman: 

The little woman does not have to be / A raving beauty; she can win your love, / Without the darts of Cupids or Venuses, / Simply by being decent, neat and clean, / A pleasant person to be living with. / That’s about all it takes, and love depends, / On habit quite as much as the wild ways / Of passion. / Gently does it, as the rain / In time wears through the very hardest stone.

Is On the Nature of Things compelling?

Yes. Lucretius observing the phenomena of the world resorts to two simple concepts given by tradition for explanation: atoms and void. Neither can be seen; both need justification. It is astonishing how much headway he makes with these two concepts into the phenomena by consistent reasoning. It is a Roman Enlightenment intentionally yielding a disenchanted world.

No. Fear of death still lurks behind; the mind is not satisfied with good reasons not to fear, because its very own reasoning will stop, as will its pleasures through the senses. As for pleasure, the plain woman is a more reasonable match, but passion will either have its way or a price will be paid if held at bay, neither of which will be conducive of a peaceful mind.

What of it?

What is remarkable is the movement from Nature, the natural order, the material basis, into the human order, into a moral world where the best way of life is built on the natural order. Lucretius succeeds where modern science fails.

For Starters

 A Reliable Source

"Where attainable knowledge could have changed the result, ignorance has the force of vice", says Alfred North Whitehead. There is little excuse for ignorance. Alfred Adler raised the bar, stating that not only law students are too narrowly educated, but all students, and indeed all members of faculties too. He offered  a remedy. In a world fighting culture wars over what ought to be read, the Great Books of the Western World (GBWW) has two qualities: Everything in the series is worth reading and re-reading; nothing prevents reading beyond it. Literary works standing the test of time and founding works in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, philosophy, theology, and mathematics, are lined up in a ten year reading program. Each year goes from ancient to modern, the oldest being Homer, the most recent being Freud, in the first edition. Having come full circle twice, eight laps to go, I'd like to risk writing about some thoughts a few of the works have evoked; si fallor, sum.

On Greats, Lesser Greats, and Giraffes

Augustine's si fallor, sum, "if I err, then I exist", is probed in podcast 115 of Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy Without any Gaps (HoPWaG), chapter 51 in the second volume of the parallel book series. If GBWW is a best off collection, HoPWaG also brings attention to thinkers and thoughts traveling in the margin. The trajectory here is not spiraling but straight, starting with the Pre-Socratics and presently, as I write, is mid-flight with Bernardo Telesio born 1509 AD and the dawn of science. It is episode 365, a full year of painless fixes vaccinating against ignorance.

Arche

Typesetting the journal Arche, I receive interesting texts and translations, which often lead to books I was unaware of. Sometimes the reading is deepened when I write an article, but usually it is broadened as the journal is comprehensive, from in-depth scientific writing via interviews to poetry, from the humanities via psychoanalysis to architecture, and much more.

Readers

I follow the themes covered in The Joys of Reading blog, especially what takes place in the book club themes Contemporary, Classic, Swedish, and Spiritual.

My Library's Gaze

Finally, I have no hope of finishing my library, which is liberating. I can simply pick great books for the rest of my days, living only which the question: Which immortal ones should be saved for the coffin?