Pascal’s PensÉes

Pensées (or Thoughts in English) was written by the 17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. The work is a collection of fragments he wrote in defence of the Christian religion. It’s unfinished as Pascal died before he could complete it. The Pensées is a powerful work, full of insights about the meaning of life and religious faith.  

So let’s talk about one of Pascal's most famous quotes. You know, this one: “the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” So what does he mean by this? Well ok, so I think it’s easy to misunderstand him here, as many of his opponents have. I mean when you talk about the heart there are certain connotations, actually connotations that often come to us from the Romantic writers of the 19th century. That’s to say, talk of heart suggests things like sentimentality, and emotionalism, and even irrationalism. But I don’t think Pascal has anything like this in mind, he’s not so singular like this. 

So maybe the best way to see is like this: on the one hand, there’s discursive and speculative and mathematical reasoning, and Pascal doesn’t deny this sort of reasoning can be extremely powerful and revealing. In fact, I think he would say that even God can come to be known this way. But, and here’s the important point, it’s just not the kind of knowing that has true religious significance or impact. So what does that mean? Well, simple discursive and philosophical reasoning is too limited in the sense that it can never by itself fully apprehend God, fully apprehend God existentially that is. In other words, the arguments of reason can never on their own fully do justice to the profundity of religious experience. No, in order to fully know God, in this more encompassing, existential way, we must use our mind in a more intuitive and holistic way, one that harnesses our affections and our will, so that our entire personality is involved in the process, not just our discursive intellect. That’s what he means by heart, heart is an effortful mode of knowing that’s not just purely intellectual but one that’s characterized by interiority, by the experiential and by the movement of one’s entire being in the direction of the divine. 

Actually, you know what, now that I think about it, Pascal here reminds me a bit of the Danish Christian existentialist Kierkegaard. Now I would say that Kierkegaard was more anti-rationalist than Pascal but nevertheless in spirit they do seem to have much in common. One Kierkegaard quote always stood out to me, it goes like this, it goes: to stand on one’s leg and prove God’s existence is a very different thing from going down on one’s knees and thanking Him. In other words, you might be able to use all sorts of fancy logic to prove that God exists but that doesn’t mean you’ve truly come to know God, and that’s because for that to happen, you actually need to open up and commit your whole being to Him. You see, for Kierkegaard it’s possible to be the most learned theologian in the world and yet be spiritually empty inside and it’s possible to be the most ignorant farmer in the world and yet truly know God! 

Anyway my point was just that Pascal and Kierkegaard are two Christian thinkers whose thoughts show many interesting affinities. And basically it’s that both feel deeply that human existence and matters of faith cannot be exhausted by objective or discursive knowledge. In other words, what they both counsel, in their own way, is not just objective truth, but the riches of experienced truth, or truth for individuals, as existing persons. In this sense, they might both agree with the New Testament Matthew, who tells us that your heart will always be where your riches are!

Ok now I want to mention one more thing here. So I think there’s another way of getting at what Pascal is suggesting when he talks about the heart like this. And, you know, maybe one way of explaining this is by taking a look at the French philosopher Rene Descartes, because actually Pascal not only knew Descartes personally but disagreed with him in some ways. Ok so we all know the famous Descartes quote, you know, “I think, therefore I am.” So what’s the implication of this quote? Well, among other things, it’s that we’re constituted by our thought alone! It’s that thought is the dignifying element in human nature. Now Pascal doesn’t entirely agree with this. No, for Pascal we’re not just essentially thinking beings, and transparent to ourselves. Rather, we’re more than we know and we have an all too human nature. So again, I think that when he talks about the importance of the heart, what he’s doing in a way is cautioning us against isolating human reason or intellect from the rest of our humanity and then relying on it exclusively to give us the so-called complete truth. 

Ok, let me just quickly say one last thing that came to mind just now. It just came to me that there might be another more modern interpretation of Pascal’s quote, and a pretty obvious one when you think about it. It’s just this: it’s that the explanations people give for what they do is often at odds with the motives by which they’re actually controlled. In other words, the reasons we give for our behaviour are usually not the reasons which produce it! Now, we’ve heard this before right, you know, from some guy called Sigmund Freud, the guy who talked about the conscious versus the unconscious and who warned us all, even if we didn’t want to hear it, that we are not the masters in our own house!  

So Pascal had a lot to say about the topic of distraction and diversion. And he wasn’t a big fan of it, to say the least! Now you might think, so we’re obsessed with entertainment and stimulation, so what? If there’s anything wrong with that at all, it’s just that it’s frivolous and silly, but that’s about it. Well, no, for Pascal, distraction is much more than just empty and frivolous. Our need for distraction, our constant agitation, is actually revelatory of an underlying existential and spiritual malady! In other words, we distract ourselves in order to try to overcome our anxieties and the harsh realities of life. You see, without distractions we’d be forced to confront ourselves, which means, among other things, coming face to face with not just our failures but ultimately with our incorrigible mortality. 

Now of course this isn’t something most of us want to do, so what do we do, well, we fall back into the numbing background noise and find consolation in distraction. You know, we pathologically and restlessly check our phones for the latest sports scores, or we serial binge on Netflix and so on.  So Pascal would say that there’s not only something shallow about living the distracted life, as it prevents us from thinking deeply and pursuing any higher, more meaningful activities, but there’s also something dishonest and cowardly about it too. There’s something dishonest or self-deceptive about it in the sense that we make believe like we’re going to live forever and so have nothing to think seriously or deeply about. As Pascal himself says, in the end “we run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it.” In other words, distraction, though it’s consoling in the short-term, it ultimately becomes the worst of our miseries because it prevents us from reflecting on and understanding our true condition and just leads us imperceptibly to our death. Or to put it another way, living in that continuous stupefaction that is distraction, we stay oblivious to our death and so choke off the possibility of living a truly conscious and genuine life. We run like a herd of buffalo, caught up in the hysteria of action and group frenzy, only to realize too late that we’ve stepped over the cliff! 

Ok, so actually in all this I left out a hugely important and famous quote of Pascal’s, and it’s pretty suggestive it’s this, he says : “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” What a great quote right? So what does he mean exactly? Well, obviously he links unhappiness to restlessness and movement and lack of real focus or attention. He seems to be saying that if we could just learn to take the time to linger more, and to stay focussed, we’d be much better off. And actually you know what, there is some modern empirical evidence that Pascal is right about this. That’s to say, there are studies which show that when people are engaged in some activity, they’re much happier when they’re actually focused on it than they are if they’re doing that activity but thinking about something else. In other words, a wandering restless mind decreases happiness and one that’s patient, and present and focused increases it, This is something the Buddhists have long known of course and, actually, the Ancient Stoics too, who never tired of counselling us to be mindful of the present moment and stop living in a past that’s now gone and a future that’s not here yet!  

Anyway, think about how much in our postmodern world we’ve lost that capacity to stay quietly in our own room without looking for stimulation and diversion! We don’t linger on things much, do we, we rush from one piece of information to the next, from one sensation to the next, and from one experience to the next. 

Actually, to deviate slightly, this idea of moving from one experience to the next, it speaks to what we today seem to think a good or fulfilling life amounts to, doesn’t it? You know, there’s a bucket list or there are activities we have to check off. Life is a list of things we need to do. We need to maximize all of life’s possibilities. But what are we really doing here? Well, what we seem to be doing is linking fulfillment with plenitude. That’s to say, a fulfilled or happy life is about quantity, it’s about how much we do or how many experiences we have!

But there’s something misguided about this. There’s something misguided about the idea that the point of life is to live as long as possible so as to try to exhaust all of life’s experiences. What misguided is this: that kind of life is without narration! Where is the story in that life? What is the story in a shopping list? How can a list of experiences provide direction and a meaningful totality? If we’re just rushing through everything, moving quickly to the next thing, never resting with what we have, then how is it we’re bringing anything to a conclusion or making sense of the whole? That just seems to be a life of incessant movement and atomized time, a life of activity without much reflection and without a real synthesis. 

I don’t know, maybe this is why we’re so afraid of death. Maybe we’re so afraid of death because we see the goodness of our lives as predicated on quantity and not on thoughtful narrative, something which makes us unable to see our lives as stories and so as having a meaningful and welcomed conclusion!