A View on Blaise Pascal. 2

The talk on Pascal on Sunday was on his views on the Christian faith. It was given by Dr. Richard Lee, an assistant professor at Baptist University who obtained a Ph. D at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

According to Dr. Lee, Pascal was against rationalism or the belief that reason is the exclusive criterion for judging truth especially where the relevant truths concern the problems of human life and to that extent, he can be considered a precursor of existentialist philosophy.To Pascal, we must know when to doubt, when to feel certain and when to submit to faith. To him, reason may not be entirely reliable as a criterion for a number of reasons. First, we normally base our opinion upon our senses but we may be deceived by our senses eg. optical illusion in magic and Cartesian  doubts.Thus for a long time, people thought the earth was flat, that it is the centre of the universe, that there is no vacuum, that light is just a wave.That is why Plato relies on purely speculative thought and not on our senses to situate the kind of truth not subject to change.Then, the accuracy of our conclusion based upon the use of our reason may depend upon the how reliable our memory of the relevant data is and it is possible that our memory may be fallible or be affected by our physical illness. Thirdly, we may think that our rationality comes from our brain which itself evolved from cells which are not themselves rational. He argues that if the source is irrational, then it is likely that the effect may itself be irrational. Fifthly, whilst we always try to explain and justify everything by means of reason, we cannot rely on reason itself to prove that reason itself is a reliable guide. We cannot guarantee the truth of what we find. This is confirmed by Godel's Theorem, which proves that the truths of mathematics cannot be justified by its own principles. In other words, the validity of reasoning must ultimately be based upon un-reason or irrationality. Finally, Pascal thinks that reason is insufficient to comprehend all kinds of reality He says, "Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it." and that "Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere". For Pascal, man is beaten by the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Man occupies so tiny a place in the universe, so short a period in history that it is unlikely that he would be able to find the first principles of all things. Scientists have now found that at the beginning of the universe, all our physical laws would break down and could no longer apply. As the accuracy of our measuring instruments improve, we are now finding what we formerly thought was the smallest unit are not longer the smallest units and what we thought was the size of the universe or universes are no longer what we previously thought they were and the it is likely that what we think of as the smallest or biggest units are infinitely divisible or infinitely expandable. Pascal says: "The eternal silence of these infinities terrifies us."

In his Pensées, Pascal doubts the position of the doubters and skeptics. We cannot doubt everything. Our doubts must stop somewhere. Pascal says, "Ït is not certain that everything is uncertain." He claims that "All the principles of skeptics, stoics, atheists, etc. are true. But their conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are also true.".To him, often we simply have to trust our intuition and have a kind of animal faith that what we think exists actually exists. Even Hume agrees that we can have philosophic doubts over everything whilst we are confined in our own study. Once we are outside in the real world, we simply got to trust that what is before our eyes exists e.g. a fast moving car on a road or we can cease to doubt forever. Dr. Lee says "If everyone is a doubter, there would be no doubter; if everyone is a critic, there is nothing to be criticized" "Doubt cannot be cancelled by another item of evidence because one item of knowledge presupposes another" and " Doubt is a willed state. It can go on forever..One who is set to deny miracles can never believe in miracles...Jesus cannot perform miracles because of unbelief!" To Pascal, " There is an incapacity to prove things which is impervious to all forms of dogmatism. We have an idea of truth which is impervious to skepticism." To him, "Two things instruct man about his whole nature: instincts and experience.".  

Pascal thinks that things incomprehensible to our minds may nevertheless be true and what is incomprehensible to reason can be comprehensible as brute facts or through intuition. Our conception of what is true is constantly changing e.g. with the advance of science, our view of the universe has changed from an earth-centred universe to a sun-centred universe; we now accept the existence of vacuum when previously we did not'; we thought the laws of physics to be absolute but now we think that in the quantum world at least, the laws of physics are governed by the laws of probability only; what we previously thought of as an electron or light particles is now considered a wave-particle depending on the measuring contexts; what is observed is affected by the observer; what we previously thought of as mass is now interchangeable into energy under suitable conditions; we now know that quantum waves or particles appear to show effects which seem to travel at a speed faster than the speed of light; we now know that as the mass of object approach the speed of light, its mass would increase and measured time itself may slow down. We now know that all knowledge is perspectival and piecemeal and never comprehensive or final. As Pascal says, "reason is only reasonable in knowing that it has not reached any firm truth and can only hope to find one in its ardent pursuit.." and that "that would probably suffice if reason were reasonable. It is reasonable enough to admit that it has not yet discovered anything definite; but it has not given up hope of succeeding."  Thus various kinds of truth may escape us foreever e.g. questions like "Does God exist?" "Is man immortal?" "Does man have a soul?" "What is good and evil?" "Do we have true freedom". As Kant says, it is as difficult to prove that God does not exist as it is to prove that he exists. It is difficult to prove with absolute certainty that God does not exist. It is thus difficult to be an absolute atheist and it is difficult even to be an absolute agnostic because all our data are confined to those of the past and the present. How do we know now with absolute certainty that we cannot find that God exists in the future? Have we looked everywhere? Have we looked for him in all the right places?

Dr. Lee says that life presents us with different kinds of problems at different stages of our lives. When we are children, we have an implicit faith in those who take care of us. In teenage and adolescence, we are infatuated with all kinds of ideologies, doctrines, ideals and heroes. But when we start working, we busy ourselves with our career, setting up a family, having children, looking after our parents and when we retire, we have to deal with problems of loss of friends, loss of our parents, loss of our mates and loss of our health and mental capacities and finally we all have to die. Faced with these kinds of problems, we find that works of literature speak to us about our problems and our realities much better than works of critical philosophy because they they study man as he is in the concreteness of his social world and they speak to our hearts, not just to our minds.  

Pascal analyzes man's problem from three starting points: the body, the mind, and the heart. At the most basic level of the body, man has sensory faculties and has desires for material goods. This is the order with which the businessman is concerned. Then there is our mind, which is sphere in which we exercise our reasoning faculties to understand what there is to understand. This is the order with which the scholar is concerned. Finally there is the sphere of the heart which he sometimes refer to the as the order of charity or spirit. This is the area in which we have to exercise true wisdom, desire what is truly good, relate ourselves to God through the exercise of our spontaneous intuitive feelings and judgement. This is the centre of our lives and our personality. Through love, we eventually come to God. We arrive there not through reasoning or logical analysis but through our heart. He says,"It is impossible that our rational part should be other than spiritual and if any one maintains that we are simply corporeal, this would are more exclude us from the knowledge of things, there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself. It is impossible to know how it should know itself.". "So if we are simply material, we can know nothing at all; and if we are composed of mind and matter, we cannot know perfectly things which are simple, whether spiritual or corporeal. Hence it comes that almost all philosophers have confused ideas of things and speak of material things in spiritual terms, and of spiritual things in material terms. For they say boldly that bodies have a tendency to fall, that they seek after their centre, that they fly from destruction, that they fear the void, that they have inclinations, sympathies, antipathies, all of which attributes pertain to the mind. And in speaking of minds, they consider them as in a place, and atrribute to them movment from one place to another; and these are qualities which belong only to bodies." He says that "Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.". Not only is he confused by matters of the mind and matters of the body, he is constantly confused between by matters of the body and matters of the reason. He says, " Man is only a subject full of error, natural and ineffaceable, without grace. Nothing shows him the truth. Everything deceives him. These two sources of the truth, reason and the senses, besides being both wanting in sincerity, deceave each other in turn. The senses mislead the reason with false appearances, and receive from reason in their turn the same trickery which they apply to her; reason has her revenge. The passions of the soul trouble the senses, and make false impressions upon them. They rival each other in falsehood and deception. "  Not only is man full of faults, he is unwilling to change. "Truly it is evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil...to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the futher fault of a voluntary illusion. We do not like others to deceive us; we do not think it is fair that they should be held in higher esteem by us than they deserve; it is not then fair that we should deceive them, and should wish them to esteem us more highly than we deserve. "

We know the truth not only through reason but also through our heart."The heart has its reasons of which reason knows not; we are aware of it in a thousand ways." He says, "We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reasons, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them. The skpetics, who have only this for their object, labor to no purpose. We know that we do not dream, and however impossible it is for us to prove it by reason, this inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, but not, as they affirm, the uncertainty of all our knowledge. For the knowledge of first principles, as space, time, motion, number, is as sure as any of those which we get from reasoning. And reason msut trust these intuitions of the heart, and must base them on every argument...Principles are intuited, propositions are inferrred, all with certainty, though in different ways. And it is as useless and absurd for reason to demand from the heart proofs of her first principles, before admitting them as it would be for the heart to demand from reason an intuition of all demonstrated propositions before accepting them. This inability ought, then, to serve only to humble reason, which would judge all, but not to impugn our certainty, as if only reason were capable of instructing us...Therefore, those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate, and justly convinced. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give them spiritual insight, without which faith is only human, and useless for salvation.". Our so-called reasoning may be little more than rationalizations. He says, "All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiments." perhaps because "people almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive." What determines his belief is not reason but will. He says "the will is one of the chief factors in belief, not that it creates belief, but because things are true or false according to the aspect in which we look at them. The will, which prefers one aspect to another, turns away the mind from considering the qualities of all that it does not like to see; and thus the mind, moving in accord with the will, stops to consider the aspect which it likes, and so judges by what it sees." He thinks that "it is natural for the mind to believe and the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false ones." 

To Pascal, man is a sick and miserable animal. "Man is unhappy in himself...Trifles comfort us because trifles upset us." Man are seldom content with what they have. We all need external stimulation to amuse ourselves so that we don't have to face ourselves as we are, when we are alone. He says: "If our state were happy, we should not need to take our minds off it in order to make ourselves happy." " Ennui. Nothing is more intolerable to man than a state of complete repose, without desires, without work, without amusement, without occupation. In such a state, he becomes aware of his nothingness, his abandonment, his inadequacy, his dependence, his emptiness, his futility. There at once wells up from the depths of his soul weariness, gloom, misery, exasperation, frustration, despair.....What is it to be superintendent, chancellor, first president, but to be in a condition wherein from early morning a large number of people come from all quarters to see them, so as not to leave them an hour in the day in which they can think of themselves? And when they are in disgrace and sent back to their country houses, where they lack neither wealth nor servants to help them on occasion, they do not fail to be wretched and desolate, because no one prevents them from thinking of themselves." Another source man's unhappiness is that he seldom lives in the here and now. We do not live in the present. We often relish the past. We dream of a glorious future. Pascal says, " We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idel are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us. We conceal it from our sight, because it troubles us; and if it be delightful to us, we regret to see it pass away. We try to sustain it by the future and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching...We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take flight from it arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to lvie; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so." and "Thus passes all man's life. Men seek rest in struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable. For we think either of the misfortunes we have or of those which threaten us. And even if we should see ourselves sufficiently sheltered on all sides, weariness of its own accord would not fail to arise from the depths of the heart wherein it has its natural roots, and to fill the mind with its poisons."

A more fundamental cause of man's unhappiness is his ceaseless concern for his "self." and his infinite capacity for deception and self-deception. He says: "The nature of self-love and of this human Ego is to love self only and to consider self only. But what will man do? He cannot prevent this object that he loves from being full of faults and wants. He wants to be great, and he sees himself small. He wants to be happy and he sees himself miserable". He wants to be perfect, and he sees himself full of imperfections. He wants to be object of love and esteem among men, and he sees that his faults merit only their hatred and contempt. This embarrassment in which he finds himself produces in him the most uprighteous and criminal passion that can be imagined; for he conceives a mortal enmity against that truth which reproves him, and which convinces him of his faults. He would annihilate it, but, unable to destroy it in its essence, he destroys it as far as possible in his own knowledge and in that of others; that is to say, he devotes all his attention to hiding his faults both from others and from himself and he cannot endure either that others should point them out to him or that they should see them,"

Because of our erroneous self-love, we don't like the truth. "There are different degrees in this aversion to truth; but all may perhaps be said to have it in some degree, because it is inseparable from self-love. It is this false delicacy which makes those who are under the necessity of reproving others choose so many windings and middle courses to avoid offense. They must lessen our faults, appear to excuse them, intersperse praises and evidence of love and esteem. Despite all this, the medicine does not cease to be bitter to self-love. It takes as little as it can, always with disgust, and often with a secret spite against those who administer it. Hence it happens that if any have some interest in being loved by us, they are averse to render us a service which they know to be disagreeable. They treat us as we wish to be treated. We hate the truth, and they hide it from us. We desire flattery, and they flatter us. We like to be deceived, and they decieve us." More over, "we do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labor unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence, and neglect the real...we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave...For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honor.".

Man is thus a creature of conceit, of vanity and of deceit. He says, "Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion. Man is then only disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart.". He says that he would "blame equally those who choose to praise man, those who choose to blame him, and those who choose to amuse themselves; and I can only approve of those who seek with lamentation.".

We are driven by our passions. Pascal says: "By knowing each man's ruling passion, we are sure of pleasing him; and yet each has his fancies, opposed to his true good, in the very idea which he has of good". And when "our passion leads us to do something, we forget our duty; for example, we like a book and read it, when we ought to be doing something else." To cure us, he suggest that "to remind ourselves of our duty, we must set ourselves a task we dislike; we then plead that we have something else to do, and by this means remember our duty." To Pascal, man is always fighting against himself. He says, "There is an internal war in man between reason and the passions. If he had only reason without passions. If he had only passions without reason. But having both, he cannot be without strife, being unable to be at peace with the one without being at war with the other. Thus he is always divided agaisnt, and opposed to himself....This internal war of reason against the passions has made a division of those who would have peace into two sects. The first would renounce their passions and become gods; the other would renounce reason and become brute beasts. But neither can do so, and reason still remains, to condemn the vileness and injustice of the passions, and to trouble the repose of those who abandon themselves to them; and the passions keep always alive in those who would renounce them." Because of our ceaseless internal conflicts, we are all to a certain extent "mad". Pascal says, "Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.".

To Pascal, man is neither an angel nor a beast. He says: "His misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast" and we sustain ourselves "not in virtue of our own strength, but by balancing two opposed vices, just as we remain upright amidst two contrary gales. Remove one of the vices and we fall into the other." But the greatness of man is that he knows his condition. "The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is then miserable to know oneself to be miserable; but it is also being great to know that one is miserable." But we are saved by our instincts. He says, "Notwithstanding the sight of our miseries, which press upon us and take us by the throat, we have an instinct which we cannot repress, and which lifts us up." To him, our miseries have one purpose. "It is good to be tired and wearied by the vain search after the true good, that we may stretch our arms to the Redeemer.". To him, religion must be the centre of our life. He says, " religion must so be the object and center to which all things tend, and whoever knows the principles of religion can give an explanation both of the whole of man in particular and of the whole course of the world in general.". But we must never take the word of God literally. He says, "When the word of God, which is really true, is false literally, it is true spiritually." As he says, he intends in the Pensées "to show the vanity of all conditions of men, to show the vanity of ordinary lives, and then the vanity of philosophic lives, sceptics, stoics; ...I know a little of what it is, and how few people understand it. No human science can keep it. St. Thomas did not keep it. Mathematics keep it, but they are useless account of their depth." To him, "When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasps, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite.  But our whole groundwork cracks, and the Earth opens to abysses." He is concerned with the moral life of man. He says,"Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science"" and that "whoever shall have understood the ultimte principles of being might also attain to the knowledge of the Infinite. The one depends on the other, and one leads to the other. These extremes ( ie. the biggest and the smallest) meet and reunite by force of distance, and find each other in God and in God alone."