PASCAL: EXCERPTS from PENSEES
23 June 2004

"Thus, all our dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality." — Blaise Pascal

I came across these passages today. They seem to fit in well with the idea that judgment operates under severe limitations, that the mind has a mind of its own, and that human freedom — whether lovingly courted or grudgingly endured — is at once more momentous and foundational than "God," a term always placed in quotation marks because it can never be used except in reference to a system smaller than the freedom from which it springs. That Pascal ultimately settled for "God" should in no way disqualify him as a guide for those who won't.

And now, some passages from Pascal's "Pensees."

"It is deplorable to see everybody debating about the means, never the end. Everyone thinks about how he will get on in his career, but when it comes to choosing a career or a country, it is fate that decides for us.

"It is painful to see so many Turks, heretics, unbelievers follow in their fathers' footsteps, solely because they have all been brought up to believe that this is the best course. This is what makes each of us pick his particular career as locksmith, soldier, etc. That is why savages do not care about Provence.

"Why have limits been set upon my knowledge, my height, my life, making it a hundred rather than a thousand years? For what reason did nature make it so, and choose this rather than that mean from the whole of infinity, when there is no more reason to choose one rather than another, as none is more attractive than another?

"As we cannot be universal by knowing everything there is to be known about everything, we must know a little about everything, because it is much better to know something about everything than everything about something."

"Some fancy makes me dislike people who croak or who puff while eating. Fancy carries a lot of weight. What good will that do us? That we indulge in it because it is natural? No, rather that we resist it."

"When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. I see other people around me, made like myself. I ask them if that are any better informed than I, and they say they are not. Then these lost and wretched creatures look around and find some attractive objects to which they have become addicted and attached. For my part, I have never been able to form attachments, and considering how very likely it is that there exists something besides what I can see, I have tried to find out whether God has left any traces of himself."

"Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and lofty majesty. ... But if our eyes stop there, let our imagination proceed further; it will grow weary of conceiving things before nature tires of producing them. The whole visible world is only an imperceptible dot in nature's ample bosom. No idea comes near it; there is no good in inflating our conceptions ... we only bring forth atoms compared to the reality of things."

"For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding of the extremes; the end of things and their principles are unattainable hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy. Equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed. ... All things have come out of nothingness and are carried onwards to infinity. Who can follow these astonishing processes?"

"Let us then realize our limitations. We are something and we are not everything. Such being as we have conceals from us the knowledge of first principles, which arise from nothingness, and the smallness of our being hides infinity from our sight.

"Our intelligence occupies the same rank in order of intellect as our body in the whole range of nature.

"Limited in every respect, we find this intermediate state between two extremes reflected in all our faculties. Our sense can perceive nothing in extreme; too much noise deafens us, too much light dazzles; when we are too far or too close we cannot see properly; an argument is obscured by being too long or too short; too much truth bewilders us. I know people who cannot understand that 4 from 0 leaves 0. First principles are too obvious for us; too much pleasure causes discomfort; too much harmony in music is displeasing; too much kindness annoys us; we want to be able to pay back the debt with something over. ..."

"In a word, extremes are as if they did not exist for us nor we for them; they escape us or we escape them.

"Such is our true state. That is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge or absolute ignorance. We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind; if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips away, and flees eternally before us. Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations. We burn with desire to find a firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity, but our whole foundation cracks and the earth opens up into the depth of the abyss.

"Let us then seek neither assurance or stability; our reason is always deceived by the inconsistency of appearances; nothing can fix the finite between the two infinities which enclose and evade it."

"If man studied himself, he would see how incapable his is of going further. How could a part possibly know the whole?"

"What makes our inability to know things absolute is that they are simple in themselves, while we are composed of two opposing natures of different kinds, soul and body."

"Instead of receiving ideas of things in their purity, we color them with our qualities and stamp our own composite being on all the simple things we contemplate.

"Who would not think, to see us compounding everything of mind and matter, that such a mixture is perfectly intelligible to us? Yet this is the thing we understand least; man is to himself the greatest prodigy in nature, for he cannot conceive what body is, and still less what mind is, and least of all how a body can be joined to a mind. This is his supreme difficulty, and yet it is his very being. The way in which minds are attached to bodies is beyond man's understanding, and yet this is what man is."

"Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows he is dying and the advantages the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.

"Thus, all our dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality."

BIGGER THAN GOD • BIGGER THAN GOD II • MARCUS BORG • THE FOG OF WAR • THE FAILURE OF JUDGMENT • LINCOLN • PASCAL • POPPER