Thinking through Pascal’s Pensees

Pascal’s form in the Pensees make an interesting 17th century precursor to Nietzsche’s aphoristic writings in the 19th century. Thoughts and fragments variously developed with no strong narrative thread although after reading the entire book certain themes weave their way throughout the fabric of the text. 

 

Pascal clearly owes much to Cartesian dualistic thought. Mind/body, reason/imagination are never far from the surface. He also has a clear discomfort with the notion of the contingent: universals can be the only truth (maybe a neo-Platonist thread too?) while the contingent and historically situated are to be reviled and cast away as false. From this need for the absolute and universal comes also a static notion of human being. 

 

On initial reading I felt almost nothing resonate with me. My disinterest in the religious has been turning into something more akin to distaste, so Pascal’s constant  use of ‘God’ to ‘explain’ things was off-putting to say the least. It seems to be a common strategy in many of the texts we’ve been reading to resort to ‘explaining’ things that we don’t (or possibly can’t) understand by referring to a ‘God’ of some sort. This does move us away from the infinite regress problem, but it does seem the ultimate unassailable explanatory cop out. If we can’t figure something out then it must be due to ‘God’s’ doing. Sure. Why can’t we live with the notion of certain things being too dynamic and mutable to ‘explain’ in a fixed, static manner, or with certain things being possible unknowable? 

 

After discussion, further reflection and re-reading the text I have come to feel some of what I believe Pascal was getting at. His constant critique of the limits of reason made sense to me. Pascal was really picking away at the limitations of reason and of those who considered reason sacrosanct. He recognized that there may be ‘forms of knowledge’ that may not be rooted in mathematical logic and consistency. Although he couldn’t abide by attributing this to any bodily basis of meaning-making due to its historical contingency and finite materiality (so he always fell back on notions of ‘God’ etc.) he seems to have touched on something compelling. The more I read Pascal’s aphorisms the more they struck me as being informed by an essentially ‘aesthetic’ impulse which he ascribed to the divine. I see the basic sense of these thoughts as aesthetic and discuss this in my paper The Lure of the Ineffable. 

 

Pascal treats imagination peculiarly: as enigma, both good and evil. For example in aphorism 44 regarding imagination, Pascal says: “It is the dominant faculty in man, master of error and falsehood,…” and further that “this arrogant force, which checks and dominates its enemy reason,…makes us believe, doubt, deny reason; it deadens the sense, it arouses them….” And then, contradictorily he says: “Imagination decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the world’s supreme good.”

 

Pascal goes on in aphorism 45 to say that nothing in man’s experience can possibly lead him to truth without ‘grace.’ Without God’s grace we can only wallow in error. He states explicitly that both reason and the sense do nothing but deceive us. Because it is possible to be deceived by our senses or reason incorrectly he jumps to the conclusion that we cannot do otherwise. Strange leap. 

 

His aesthetic sensibilities begin showing in aphorism 110 where he opens by stating that “we know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart.” he goes on to state, and I believe that this is crucial to seeing Pascal’s aesthetic impulse, that

We know that we are not dreaming, but, however unable we may be to prove it rationally, our inability proves nothing but the weakness of our reason, and not the uncertainty of all our knowledge…. For knowledge of first principles, like space, time, motion, number, is as solid as any derived through reason, and it is on such knowledge, coming from the heart and instinct, that reason has to depend and base all its argument…. Principles are felt, propositions proved, and both with certainty though by different means. It is just as pointless and absurd for reason to demand proof of first principles from the heart before agreeing to accept them as it would be absurd for the heart to demand an intuition of all the propositions demonstrated by reason before agreeing to accept them.

This is a remarkable statement really: something I would almost expect to hear emanating from the lips of a postmodern art theorist! Pascal defers to ‘God’ though, where the postmodern theorist would likely not. What Pascal is saying is in sync with my experience in the world (through art and otherwise). I see this as a primarily aesthetic stance accepting that what we ‘know’ is not simply rational: that the rational is a modality of our experience but not the only one. 

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