Blaise Pascal: a Metaphysical Bent

I hope you've noticed how spectacular Venus has been in the morning sky just before sunrise for the last few weeks. As levels of sunlight decline and darkness closes in, we cling to such ephemeral delights.

In the evening, we listen for the owls,  and make ourselves comfortable in front of the fire with an appropriately reflective book. Though it's the time of the year when the critics' Top Ten lists appear, I like to give a book a few years on the bookstore shelf to mature—and come down in price. I've been hunkering down with Blaise Pascal, who died in 1662.

When my grandfather died, my grandmother moved into a small, second-floor apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd never been in an apartment building before, the first time we visited her. It was hot.

She had a copy of Pascal's Pensées on her little bookshelf, along with Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings and a bunch of books I'd never heard of. I have her copy of Pascal today, and I got a second copy—a paperback edition—from a friend in Madison who was downsizing his library. 

Pascal is widely known to people like me, who aren’t that familiar with his work, for only a few choice phrases, the most famous of which, as near as I can recall, is this: “The heart has its reasons that reason will never know.” Alongside this plum stands a second saying, less catchy and therefore harder for me to remember, in which Pascal describes the abject terror that grips his soul when he contemplates the emptiness of the universe. Pascal is also renowned for inventing the first pocket calculator, devising a primitive barometer to study how elevation affects air pressure, and formalizing the branch of mathematics that deals with probability. 

He entered my field of view in a serious way in the sixth grade, when I built a “probability machine” for a science fair. It was designed to illustrate how random activity could result in recognizable patterns over time. The device was simplicity itself. I drew a large triangle made up of smaller triangles on a piece of plywood, then drove finishing nails at the points of each triangle. In theory, the marbles I dropped one after another onto the top triangle would cascade down past the matrix of nails, bouncing to the left and right with equal frequency at each point in their descent. The result would be stacks of marbles at the bottom of the matrix of varying height, which, viewed together, would resemble a bell curve. 

It didn’t work out that way.

For the “machine” to work, it would have been necessary to place each of the nails—and there were fifty or sixty of them—with precision, perfectly centered and absolutely upright. One bent nail near the top would send a disproportionate number of marbles to the right or left. A few levels down, a second skewed nail would further muck up the pattern.

I wasn’t “handy” enough to produce the desired effect; the pattern that took shape at the bottom of the  triangle of nails looked more like a snail than a bell.

There were other lessons I might have learned from the experiment: a) the game is always rigged; b) math and life never match up. By stretching the field of reference far beyond the limits of the experiment, I might have arrived at the conclusion that, to borrow a line from Immanuel Kant, “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” But such conclusions would have been out of place at a science fair; no one pointed them out to me at the time, and at age eleven, there is little chance I would have figured them out for myself.

Pascal explores similar themes at length in his Pensées. In one section he tries to explain the difference between the mathematical and the intuitive mind. In the mathematical field, he suggests, the principles are obvious but “remote from ordinary usage”; in the intuitive field—that is to say, the world we live in—the principles are so “intricate and numerous that it is almost impossible not to miss some.” And this can easily lead to error.

Now the omission of one principle can lead to error, and so one needs very clear sight to see all the principles as well as an accurate mind to avoid drawing false conclusions from known principles.

It would be hard to mistake the naiveté underlying the notion that we could fully grasp every principle underlying the world we live in. In fact, intuition, by definition, doesn’t reason from principles at all. It relies on feelings, hunches, gut reactions, and savoir faire. What Pascal is examining here isn’t so much a difference in thinking patterns as a difference in subject matter. Mathematics is a game invented by humans to help them describe and predict the behavior of the simplest things in life—the random descent of marbles, for example. Intuition is the mental faculty with which we apprehend life in all its richness and complexity.

Thumbing through the various sections around which Pascal organized his thoughts—boredom, vanity, prophesies, and Christian morality—it struck me that he and Spinoza have a lot in common. But Spinoza’s lines of reasoning are meticulously organized and seemingly water-tight, while Pascal’s are scattered, haphazard, mutually contradictory, and often half-baked. Therefore, they make for much more interesting reading. 

Though Pascal’s probability theory can still be found in textbooks of mathematics, his theory of “the wager” holds greater interest for most of us. In this section of the book, number 418, he reasons that although there is no way to prove God’s existence, it would be wise for us to act as if he exists, because if we end up winning that bet, we’ve gained a lot, whereas  if it turns out there is no god, and we lose the wager, we’ll be no worse off than if we hadn’t wagered at all.  

This strikes me as a facile and self-serving line of reasoning. In the first place, if nothing is being put in jeopardy, then nothing is really being wagered. In any case, a half-hearted devotion based on the likelihood of personal gain doesn’t seem like much of a foundation for religious faith. As often happens in such cases, the error lies not in the line of reasoning but in the axiomatic assertions upon which that reasoning is based. Here Pascal’s problems originate in an overly mathematical conception of God. After riffing on the concept if infinity for a paragraph or two, he states that God is infinite in extension. Therefore, we “bear no relation to him” and he lies “infinitely beyond our comprehension.”

If these things were true, there would be no point in talking about him, or imagining that our ultimate fate—saved or damned—might be determined by how avidly we embrace his existence. It would make more sense to drop the subject entirely than to speculate on how we might most cunningly orient our thoughts with respect to such an alien and incomprehensible entity. We would not even be justified in referring to the God Pascal describes as a being, considering that, like infinity, he is limitless in extension. That is to say, he encompasses everything.

Religion has never been, and cannot be, rooted in such stuff. It might be worthwhile for us to bend our feeble brains around such abstractions from time to time, in an effort to get beyond our day-to-day fears and expectations and refocus our attention on matters of “ultimate concern.” But to be fruitful, such efforts require some sort of affinity with the issue at hand. A loving god is worth pondering. A remote, abstract, and infinite god is not.

Pascal knows these things. In fact, the sections immediately preceding and following the famous discussion of the wager bring up two alternative approaches to the issue. Section 419 reports:

Custom is our nature. Anyone who grows accustomed to faith believes it, and can no longer help fearing hell, and believes nothing else.

        

And 417, immediately before the “wager” section, says:

Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; wc only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves.

Thus without Scripture, whose only object is Christ, we know nothing, and can see nothing but obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in nature itself.         

In these two passages, Pascal touches on elements of faith that are nowhere to be found in the wager section we’ve been analyzing. The remark about custom highlights, perhaps without intending to, the fact that religious faith is, to a large extent, a community enterprise. Entering into belief introduces the believer to a social world of shared duty, fellowship, ritual, and comfort. Pascal associates belief with fear, however, and focuses on how it might enhance an individual’s personal fate. Yet custom, which is always shared, undergirds a universe of camaraderie and support that many people value highly.

The second passage underscores the foolishness of contending that God is infinite, alien, and unknowable. Christianity is rooted in the notion that Christ is God. And Christ, through scripture, is knowable. Beyond that, the presence of the Holy Spirit, though tricky to discern, offers an even more powerful and immediate point of access to the divine.

Sandwiched between these two brief but pertinent remarks, the tortured ratiocinations of the famous wager fragment seem facile and unconvincing.

Augustine believed that it would be impossible for the individual to know or understand anything without divine illumination. And I’ve got to admit that it’s difficult to describe the cognitive path by which a being or a principle that once seemed incomprehensible gradually, or suddenly, starts to make sense. When “illumination” occurs, it exposes an order and a harmony that shares something of the divine. Have we suddenly seen a snatch of God’s garment as he leaves the room?

I suggested a few minutes ago that Pascal’s Pensées are more scattered, but also more accessible and fun to read than Spinoza’s Ethics. On the other hand, Spinoza’s more rigorous inquiry leads him to an important discovery that Pascal never made, namely, that God is the indwelling, rather than the transient creator of all things (proposition 18). Spinoza’s reasoning is that if God were merely a transient creator, then the things he created would be distinct from and “outside of” him, and his extension would not be infinite. Against Pascal’s remote and alien God, Spinoza gives us a being whose energy works through all things, like a blossoming flower. Also, it would follow, through us.

Extensive though his analysis is, I don’t think Spinoza fully explored all the ramifications of this theory. Briefly put, the very notion of creativity requires open space, accident, contingency. Creativity, which in its most quotidian form is simply living, always comes in response to an inchoate urge, a challenge, a crisis, or a sense of lack. To say that God creates everything, through us, may be true enough, sub specie aeternitatis, but that’s not how it looks or feels. If something needs doing, we’re the ones who will have to do it. Creative living involves putting ourselves out there, taking a risk, not knowing if our efforts will meet the need or measure up to the ideal that fueled them. 

Though I can’t claim to understand Spinoza’s “system” adequately, it strikes me that he reduces most emotions to cognitive errors, and suggests that loving God as he manifests himself in events, regardless of feelings or outcomes, is our best path. It’s a quietistic vision, only slightly engaged in the rough and tumble of life. 

Pascal offers a different description of our view from “in the field,” slightly better in some respects because it isn’t so gobsmacked. 

I see the terrifying spaces of the universe that enclose me, and I find myself attached to a corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am more in this place than in another, nor why this little time that is given me to live is assigned me at this point more than another out of all the eternity that has preceded me and out of all that will follow me.

The mathematician in him sees finitude, contingency, and chaos. He sees hatred in men’s hearts and vanity in their endeavors. In one section he argues that people would never travel to exotic places were it not for the pleasure they derive from telling other people about it later.

Both men are grappling to reconcile the finitude and contingency of life with the celestial grandeur of divinity, but having been seduced by mathematical concepts, they have difficulty seeing how such a reconciliation could take place without stripping life of its charm and flavor. Pascal lacks Spinoza’s emphasis on love. Spinoza lacks Pascal’s familiarity with life in all its distinctive, idiosyncratic, and deeply imperfect aspects.

I thought about the connection Pascal alleges between travel and vanity for a while and decided it wasn’t sound. To visit and get the measure of a place is enriching, regardless of whom you tell the story to later. It deepens your perspective and expands your appreciation for things in their near-cosmic variety. I can still remember the first open-air market that Hilary and I visited. It was in 1978, in Sarlat, a town in the Dordogne Valley of southwest France. Live chickens squawking in cages. Women in floral print dresses walking off with them, clutching them around the neck. The sight of the windows in Étienne de La Boétie’s house. The cave art at Font-de-Gaume, and the ten-year-old kids who were going in after us with their crayons to draw the beasts. Years later, another open-air market in the French Alps, with rounds of cheese lined up like very thick poker chips and chickens broiling on wood-fired spits. (Thoughts of John Berger. Is that him, sampling the weak white wine of the region in the next stall?) The royal palace at Knossos; the tinkle of goat-bells on the hillsides near Delphi; the sight of Africa looming across the strait from Tarifa. Old men sitting around a bonfire on the road to Stonehenge. Hallowed memories that haven’t come up in conversation for decades.