A View on Blaise Pascal 3

Not only is man ego-centred, proud, vain, bored and deceitful and not only is his life torn between his limited reasons and his unlimited passions and desires, he is confused in his values. Pascal says :" One says that the sovereign good consists in virtues, another in pleasure, another in the knowledge of nature, another in truth, another in total ignorance, another in indolence, others in disregarding appearances, another in wondering at nothing, and the true skeptics in their indifference, doubt and perpetual suspense and others, wiser, think to find a better definition. We are well satisfied. "

To Pascal, men are usually foolish and irrational. "He who would follow reason would be deemed foolish by the generality of men. We must judge by the opinion of the majority of mankind. Because it has pleased them, we must work all day for pleasures seen to be imaginary; and after sleep has refreshed our tired reason, we must forthwith start up and rush after phantoms, and suffer the impressions of this mistress of the world." We think that to be happy, we must be immortal. Pascal says that "to be happy, man would have to make himself immortal; but, not being able to do so, it has occurred to him to prevent himself from thinking of death."  But due to our ignroance, we fail to recognize when we are near death. He says,"We know ourselves so little, that many think they are about to die when they are well, and many think they are well when they are near death" and we "run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it. " To Pascal, men are so foolish that they fail to judge what is important and what is not. To him, "nothing is so important to man as his own state, nothing is so formidable to him as eternity; and thus it is not natural that there should be men indifferent to the loss of their existence, and to the perils of everlasting suffering. They are quite different with regard to other things. They are afraid of mere trifles; they foresee them, they feel them, And this same man who spends so many days and nights in rage and despair for the loss of office, or for some imaginary insult to his honor, is the very one who knows without anxiety and without emotion that he will lose all by death. 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 effect."

Many people doubt the existence of God. To Pascal, "it is a great evil thus to be in doubt, but it is at least an indispensable duty to seek when we are in such doubt; and thus the doubter who does not seek is altogether unhappy and completely wrong. And if besides this, he is easy and content, professes to be so, and indeed boasts of it; if it is this state which is the subject of his joy and vanity, I have no words to describe so silly a creature....if at the bottom of their heart, they are troubled at not having more light, let them not disguise the fact; this avowal will not be shameful. The only shame is to have none. Nothing reveals more an extreme weakness of mind than not to know the misery of a godless man. Nothing is more indicative of a bad disposition of heart than not to desire the truth of eternal promises. Nothing is more dastardy than to act with bravado before God. Let them then leave these impieties to those who are sufficiently ill-bred to be really capable of them. Let them at least be honest men, if they cannot be Christians. ".

To Pascal, the possibility of faith in God is always there because of God's grace:  "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...But for those who live without knowing Him, and without seeking Him...this religion obliges us always to regard them, so long as they are in this life,as capable of the grace which can enlighten them." To him "the sensibility of man to trifles and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion." He is terrified by the eternal silence and the immensity of space: "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened, and astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been alloted to me?...Why is my knowledge limited? Why my stature? Why my life to one hundred years rather than to a thousand? What reason has nature had for giving me such, and for choosing this number rather than another in the infinity of those from whcih there is no more reason to choose one than another, trying nothing else?"  To him it is foolish to depend upon others for our happiness.: "We are fools to depend upon the society of our fellow men. Wretched as we are, powerless as we are, they will not aid us; we shall die alone. We should therefore act as if we were alone, and in that case, should we build fine houses? We should seek the truth without hesitation; and if we refuse it, we show that we value the esteem of men more than the search for truth." To him, "Between us and heaven or hell, there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.". Faith is not something easy to Pascal: "This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matters of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred time wished that if God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivcally, and that, if the songs she gave are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity."

Pascal thinks that " we do not need to be very high-souled to realize that there is no true and solid satisfaction to be had in this world, that all our pleasures are vanity, that our misfortunes are infinite and that death which dogs us at every moment, must in the space of a few years inevitably bring us face to face with the dreadful necessity of being either eternally annihilated or eternally unhappy. " and that it is possible that God is both one and infinite. "Do you believe it to be impossible that God be infinite, without parts? --Yes, I wish therefore to show you an infinite and indivisible thing. It is a point moving everywhere with an infinite velocity; for it is one in all places, and is all totality every place. let this effect of nature, which previously seemed to you impossible, make you know that there may be others of which you are still ignorant. Do not draw this conclusion from your experiment, that there remains nothing for you to know; but rather that there remains an infinity for you to know. " To him, when we are united to God, we merge with him. "Unity joined to infinity adds nothing to it, no more than one foot to an infinite measure. The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite and becomes a pure being. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.".  

According to Dr. Lee, since for Pascal, the study of man takes precedence over the study of things, objects and matter, he could be considered a subjective thinker and a precursor of later existential thinkers.To the extent that Pascal deals with the condition and problems faced by man in his social and religious world: his self love, his vanity, his love of flattery, his unwillingness to face himself as he really is, his tendency to be torn between his reason and his passions and the insufficiency of reason to deal with the problems of existence by itself, Pascal could rightly be treated as a forerunner of existential philosophy. In his emphasis on the struggle between reason and passion, between the head and the heart, Pascal prefigures Freudian theory of the struggle between the ego and the id which later led to his theory that the Christian religion is a psychological illusion to help man deal with their authoritative father which in turn led to Marx's theory that religion is the opium of the masses to cover up the fact of their exploitation by the capitalists.