|
Blaise Pascal
|
|
|
Blaise Pascal
French philosopher and scientist
born June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand, France
died August 19, 1662, Paris
Main
French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of
prose. He laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities,
formulated what came to be known as Pascal’s law of pressure, and
propagated a religious doctrine that taught the experience of God
through the heart rather than through reason. The establishment of his
principle of intuitionism had an impact on such later philosophers as
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henri Bergson and also on the Existentialists.
Pascal’s life to the Port-Royal years
Pascal’s father, Étienne Pascal, was presiding judge of the tax court at
Clermont-Ferrand. His mother died in 1626, and in 1631 the family moved
to Paris. Étienne, who was respected as a mathematician, devoted himself
henceforth to the education of his children. While his sister Jacqueline
(born in 1625) figured as an infant prodigy in literary circles, Blaise
proved himself no less precocious in mathematics. In 1640 he wrote an
essay on conic sections, Essai pour les coniques, based on his study of
the now classical work of Girard Desargues on synthetic projective
geometry. The young man’s work, which was highly successful in the world
of mathematics, aroused the envy of no less a personage than the great
French Rationalist and mathematician René Descartes. Between 1642 and
1644, Pascal conceived and constructed a calculating device to help his
father—who in 1639 had been appointed intendant (local administrator) at
Rouen—in his tax computations. The machine was regarded by Pascal’s
contemporaries as his main claim to fame, and with reason, for in a
sense it was the first digital calculator since it operated by counting
integers. The significance of this contribution explains the youthful
pride that appears in his dedication of the machine to the chancellor of
France, Pierre Seguier, in 1644.
Until 1646 the Pascal family held strictly Roman Catholic principles,
though they often substituted l’honnêteté (“polite respectability”) for
inward religion. An illness of his father, however, brought Blaise into
contact with a more profound expression of religion, for he met two
disciples of the abbé de Saint-Cyran, who, as director of the convent of
Port-Royal, had brought the austere moral and theological conceptions of
Jansenism into the life and thought of the convent. Jansenism was a
17th-century form of Augustinianism in the Roman Catholic Church. It
repudiated free will, accepted predestination, and taught that divine
grace, rather than good works, was the key to salvation. The convent at
Port-Royal had become the centre for the dissemination of the doctrine.
Pascal himself was the first to feel the necessity of entirely turning
away from the world to God, and he won his family over to the spiritual
life in 1646. His letters indicate that for several years he was his
family’s spiritual adviser, but the conflict within himself—between the
world and ascetic life—was not yet resolved. Absorbed again in his
scientific interests, he tested the theories of Galileo and Evangelista
Torricelli (an Italian physicist who discovered the principle of the
barometer). To do so, he reproduced and amplified experiments on
atmospheric pressure by constructing mercury barometers and measuring
air pressure, both in Paris and on the top of a mountain overlooking
Clermont-Ferrand. These tests paved the way for further studies in
hydrodynamics and hydrostatics. While experimenting, Pascal invented the
syringe and created the hydraulic press, an instrument based upon the
principle that became known as Pascal’s law: pressure applied to a
confined liquid is transmitted undiminished through the liquid in all
directions regardless of the area to which the pressure is applied. His
publications on the problem of the vacuum (1647–48) added to his
reputation. When he fell ill from overwork, his doctors advised him to
seek distractions; but what has been described as Pascal’s “worldly
period” (1651–54) was, in fact, primarily a period of intense scientific
work, during which he composed treatises on the equilibrium of liquid
solutions, on the weight and density of air, and on the arithmetic
triangle: Traité de l’équilibre des liqueurs et de la pesanteur de la
masse de l’air (Eng. trans., The Physical Treatises of Pascal, 1937) and
also his Traité du triangle arithmétique. In the last treatise, a
fragment of the De Alea Geometriae, he laid the foundations for the
calculus of probabilities. By the end of 1653, however, he had begun to
feel religious scruples; and the “night of fire,” an intense, perhaps
mystical “conversion” that he experienced on November 23, 1654, he
believed to be the beginning of a new life. He entered Port-Royal in
January 1655, and though he never became one of the solitaires, he
thereafter wrote only at their request and never again published in his
own name. The two works for which he is chiefly known, Les Provinciales
and the Pensées, date from the years of his life spent at Port-Royal.
“Les Provinciales”
Written in defense of Antoine Arnauld, an opponent of the Jesuits and a
defender of Jansenism who was on trial before the faculty of theology in
Paris for his controversial religious works, Pascal’s 18 Lettres écrites
par Louis de Montalte à un provincialdeal with divine grace and the
ethical code of the Jesuits. They are better known as Les Provinciales.
They included a blow against the relaxed morality that the Jesuits were
said to teach and that was the weak point in their controversy with
Port-Royal; Pascal quotes freely Jesuit dialogues and discrediting
quotations from their own works, sometimes in a spirit of derision,
sometimes with indignation. In the two last letters, dealing with the
question of grace, Pascal proposed a conciliatory position that was
later to make it possible for Port-Royal to subscribe to the “Peace of
the Church,” a temporary cessation of the conflict over Jansenism, in
1668.
The Provinciales were an immediate success, and their popularity has
remained undiminished. This they owe primarily to their form, in which
for the first time bombast and tedious rhetoric are replaced by variety,
brevity, tautness, and precision of style; as Nicolas Boileau, the
founder of French literary criticism, recognized, they marked the
beginning of modern French prose. Something of their popularity,
moreover, in fashionable, Protestant, or skeptical circles, must be
attributed to the violence of their attack on the Jesuits. In England
they have been most widely read when Roman Catholicism has seemed a
threat to the Church of England. Yet they have also helped Catholicism
to rid itself of laxity; and, in 1678, Pope Innocent XI himself
condemned half of the propositions that Pascal had denounced earlier.
Thus, the Provinciales played a decisive part in promoting a return to
inner religion and helped to secure the eventual triumph of the ideas
set forth in Antoine Arnauld’s treatise De la fréquente communion
(1643), in which he protested against the idea that the profligate could
atone for continued sin by frequent communion without repentance, a
thesis that thereafter remained almost unchallengeable until the French
church felt the repercussion of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes
(which had granted religious freedom to French Protestants) in 1685.
Whereas the Jesuits seemed to represent a Counter-Reformation
predominantly concerned with orthodoxy and obedience to ecclesiastical
authority, the Provinciales advocated a more spiritual approach,
emphasizing the soul’s union with the Mystical Body of Christ through
charity.
Further, by rejecting any double standard of morality and the
distinction between counsel and precept, Pascal aligned himself with
those who believe the ideal of evangelical perfection to be inseparable
from the Christian life. Although there was nothing original in these
opinions, Pascal nevertheless stamped them with the passionate
conviction of a man in love with the absolute, of a man who saw no
salvation apart from a heartfelt desire for the truth, together with a
love of God that works continually toward destroying all self-love. For
Pascal, morality cannot be separated from spirituality. Moreover, his
own spiritual development can be traced in the Provinciales. The
religious sense in them becomes progressively refined after the first
letters, in which the tone of ridicule is smart rather than charitable.
“Pensées”
Pascal finally decided to write his work of Christian apologetics,
Apologie de la religion chrétienne, as a consequence of his meditations
on miracles and other proofs of Christianity. The work remained
unfinished at his death. Between the summers of 1657 and 1658, he put
together most of the notes and fragments that editors have published
under the inappropriate title Pensées (“Thoughts”; Eng. trans., Pensées,
1962). In the Apologie, Pascal shows the man without grace to be an
incomprehensible mixture of greatness and abjectness, incapable of truth
or of reaching the supreme good to which his nature nevertheless
aspires. A religion that accounts for these contradictions, which he
believed philosophy and worldliness fail to do, is for that very reason
“to be venerated and loved.” The indifference of the skeptic, Pascal
wrote, is to be overcome by means of the “wager”: if God does not exist,
the skeptic loses nothing by believing in him; but if he does exist, the
skeptic gains eternal life by believing in him. Pascal insists that men
must be brought to God through Jesus Christ alone, because a creature
could never know the infinite if Jesus had not descended to assume the
proportions of man’s fallen state.
The second part of the work applies the Augustinian theory of
allegorical interpretation to the biblical types (figuratifs); reviews
the rabbinical texts, the persistence of true religion, the work of
Moses, and the proofs concerning Jesus Christ’s God-like role; and,
finally, gives a picture of the primitive church and the fulfillment of
the prophecies. The Apologie (Pensées) is a treatise on spirituality.
Pascal was not interested in making converts if they were not going to
be saints.
Pascal’s apologetics, though it has stood the test of time, is
primarily addressed to individuals of his own acquaintance. To convert
his libertine friends, he looked for arguments in their favourite
authors: in Michel de Montaigne, in the Skeptic Pierre Charron, in the
Epicurean Pierre Gassendi, and in Thomas Hobbes, an English political
philosopher. For Pascal, Skepticism was but a stage. Modernist
theologians in particular have tried to make use of his main contention,
that “man is infinitely more than man,” in isolation from his other
contention, that man’s wretchedness is explicable only as the effect of
a Fall, about which a man can learn what he needs to know from history.
In so doing, they sacrifice the second part of the Apologie to the
first, keeping the philosophy while losing the exegesis. For Pascal as
for St. Paul, Jesus Christ is the second Adam, inconceivable without the
first.
Finally, too, Pascal expressly admitted that his psychological
analyses were not by themselves sufficient to exclude a “philosophy of
the absurd”; to do so, it is necessary to have recourse to the
convergence of these analyses with the “lines of fact” concerning
revelation, this convergence being too extraordinary not to appear as
the work of providence to an anguished seeker after truth (qui cherche
en gémissant).
He was next again involved in scientific work. First, the “Messieurs
de Port-Royal” themselves asked for his help in composing the Élements
de géométrie; and second, it was suggested that he should publish what
he had discovered about cycloid curves, a subject on which the greatest
mathematicians of the time had been working. Once more fame aroused in
him feelings of self-esteem; but from February 1659, illness brought him
back to his former frame of mind, and he composed the “prayer for
conversion” that the English clergymen Charles and John Wesley, who
founded the Methodist Church, were later to regard so highly. Scarcely
capable of regular work, he henceforth gave himself over to helping the
poor and to the ascetic and devotional life. He took part
intermittently, however, in the disputes to which the “Formulary”—a
document condemning five propositions of Jansenism that, at the demand
of the church authorities, had to be signed before a person could
receive the sacraments—gave rise. Finally a difference of opinion with
the theologians of Port-Royal led him to withdraw from controversy,
though he did not sever his relations with them.
Pascal died in 1662 after suffering terrible pain, probably from
carcinomatous meningitis following a malignant ulcer of the stomach. He
was assisted by a non-Jansenist parish priest.
Assessment
At once a physicist, a mathematician, an eloquent publicist in the
Provinciales, and an inspired artist in the Apologie and in his private
notes, Pascal was embarrassed by the very abundance of his talents. It
has been suggested that it was his too concrete turn of mind that
prevented his discovering the infinitesimal calculus; and in some of the
Provinciales the mysterious relations of human beings with God are
treated as if they were a geometrical problem. But these considerations
are far outweighed by the profit that he drew from the multiplicity of
his gifts; his religious writings are rigorous because of his scientific
training; and his love of the concrete emerges no less from the stream
of quotations in the Provinciales than from his determination to reject
the vigorous method of attack that he had used so effectively in his
Apologie.
Jean Orcibal
Lucien Jerphagnon
Major Works
Mathematics, logic, and the foundations of science
Essai pour les coniques (1640); Lettre sur le sujet de la machine
inventée par le sieur B.P. pour faire toutes sortes d’opération
d’arithmétique (1645); De l’autorité en matière de philosophie, the
first editor’s title of Pascal’s preface to a projected Traité du vuide,
consisting of a general statement of the principle of scientific
research (written 1647, printed 1779); Traité du triangle arithmétique
avec quelques autres petits traités sur la même matière (written 1654,
printed 1665); De l’esprit géométrique—de l’art de persuader (written c.
1658, first printed in two parts 1728 and 1776); Histoire de la
roulette, appellée autrement trochoïde ou cycloïde (1658); Lettres de A.
Dettonville, contenant quelques-unes de ses inventions de géométrie
(1658–59).
Physics
Expériences nouvelles touchant le vuide (1647); Récit de la grande
expérience de l’équilibre des liqueurs (1648); Traites de l’équilibre
des liqueurs et de la pesanteur de la masse de l’air (written 1651,
printed 1663; The Physical Treatises of Pascal: The Equilibrium of
Liquids and the Weight of the Mass of the Air, 1937).
Religious philosophy and controversy
Abrégé de la vie de Jésus-Christ (written 1654 or 1655, printed 1846);
Lettre escritte à un Provincial par un de ses amis sur le sujet des
disputes présentes de la Sorbonne (January 1656, followed by 17 more
pamphlets on the same themes down to March 1657), all 18 being
subsequently republished together as Les Provinciales (1657; augmented
edition, with supplementary pamphlets, 1659); Projet de mandement contre
l’Apologie pour les casuistes (written 1658, printed 1779); Ecrits sur
la grâce (four treatises drafted between 1656 and 1658 and printed from
1779 onward); Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques
autres sujets (1670; the first Eng. trans. was Monsieur Pascal’s
Thoughts, Meditations, and Prayers, 1688; numerous new translations and
versions have appeared since then); Prière pur demander à Dieu le bon
usages des maladies (written 1659, printed 1666 and 1670).
Other works
Trois discours sur la condition des grands (comprised 1660, printed
1670). Collected editions of Pascal’s works include letters of
mathematical or spiritual interest.
|
|
|
|
PENSEES
|
Type of work: Philosophical reflections
Author: Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
First published: 1670
|
|
Blaise Pascal, scientist and mathematician, became an active member
of the society of Port Royal after his conversion as the result of a
mystical experience in 1654. He was actively involved in the bitter
debate between the Jansenists, with whom he allied himself, and the
Jesuits, and the series of polemical letters titled Provinciates
(1656-1657) is the result of that great quarrel. Wanting to write a
defense of Catholic Christianity which would appeal to men of reason and
sensibility, Pascal, about 1660, began to prepare his defense of the
Catholic faith.
Like many other great thinkers whose concern was more with the subject
of their compositions than with the external order and completeness of
the presentation, he failed to complete a continuous and unified
apology. When he died at thirty-nine he left little more than his notes
for the projected work, a series of philosophical fragments reflecting
his religious meditations. These form the Pen-sees as we know it.
Despite its fragmentary character, the book is a classic of French
literature, charming and effective in its style, powerful and sincere in
its philosophic and religious protestations.
Philosophers distinguish themselves either by the insight of their
claims or by the power of their justification. Paradoxically, Pascal
distinguishes himself in his defense by the power of his claims. This
quality is partly a matter of style and partly a matter of conviction.
It was Pascal, in the Pensees, who wrote, "The heart has its reasons,
which reason does not know," by which he meant not that emotion is
superior to reason, but that in being compelled by a moving experience
one submits to a superior kind of reasons. Pascal also wrote that "all
our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling," but he admitted
that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between feeling and fancy;
nevertheless, he believed that the way to truth is by the heart, the
feeling, and that the intuitive way of knowledge is the most important,
not only because it is of the most important matters but also because it
is essential to all reasoning, providing the first principles of
thought. Much of the value of the Pensees results from the clarity with
which Pascal presented his intuitive thoughts.
A considerable portion of the Pensees is taken up with a discussion of
philosophical method, particularly in relation to religious reflection.
The book begins with an analysis of the difference between mathematical
and intuitive thinking and continues the discussion, in later sections,
by considering the value of skepticism, of contradictions, of feeling,
memory, and imagination. A number of passages remind the reader of the
fact that a proposition which seems true from one perspective may seem
false from another, but Pascal insists that "essential" truth is
"altogether pure and altogether true." The power of skepticism and the
use of contradictions in reasoning both depend upon a conception of
human thinking which ignores the importance of perspective in
determining a man's belief. Thus, from the skeptic's point of view
nothing is known because we can be sure of nothing; but the skeptic
forgets that "it is good to be tired and wearied by the vain search
after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer."
Contradiction, according to Pascal, "is a bad sign of truth" since there
are some things certain which have been contradicted and some false
ideas which have not. Yet contradiction has its use: "All these
contradictions, which seem most to keep me from the knowledge of
religion, have led me most quickly to the true one."
Pascal had the gift of responding critically in a way that added value
to both his own discourse and that of his opponent. Criticizing
Montaigne's skepticism, he came to recognize the truth—a partial truth,
to be sure—of much that Montaigne wrote. His acknowledgment of this is
grudging; he writes that "it is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I
find all that I see in him," and also "What good there is in Montaigne
can only have been acquired with difficulty." Yet, as T. S. Eliot has
pointed out in an introduction to the Pensees, Pascal uses many of
Montaigne's ideas, phrases, and terms, paralleling several parts of
Montaigne's "Apology for Raimond Sebond."
Perhaps the most controversial part of the Pensees is Pascal's section
on miracles. He quotes Saint Augustine as saying that he would not have
been a Christian but for the miracles, and he argues that there are
three marks of religion: perpetuity, a good life, and miracles. He
writes, "If the cooling of love leaves the Church almost without
believers, miracles will rouse them," and, "Miracles are more important
than you think. They have served for the foundation, and will serve for
the continuation of the Church till Antichrist, till the end." Although
there are other passages which assert the importance of faith which is
in no way dependent upon miracles, as, for example, "That we must love
one God only is a thing so evident, that it does not require miracles to
prove it," Pascal does seem unambiguously to assert that miracles are a
way to faith. This idea is opposed by those who insist that belief in
miracles presupposes a belief in God and the Gospels. Pascal had been
profoundly affected by a miracle at Port Royal, but his defense of the
importance of miracles goes beyond that immediate reference with appeals
to reason and authority as well as to feeling.
Pascal's "Proof of Jesus Christ" is interesting not because it pretends
to offer demonstrations which would appeal to unbelievers, but because
it uses persuasive references which throw a new light on the question of
Jesus' status. He argues that because of unbelievers at the time of
Christ we now have witnesses to Him. If Jesus had made His nature so
evident that none could mistake it, the proof of His nature and
existence would not have been as convincing as it is when reported by
unbelievers. Pascal emphasizes the function of the Jews as unbelievers
when he writes: "The Jews, in slaying Him in order not to receive Him as
the Messiah, have given Him the final proof of being the Messiah. And in
continuing not to recognize Him, they made themselves irreproachable
witnesses."
Pascal's famous wager is presented in the Pensees. He makes an appeal to
"natural lights"—ordinary human intelligence and good sense. God either
exists or He does not. How shall you decide? This is a game with
infinitely serious consequences. You must wager, but how shall you
wager? Reason is of no use here. Suppose you decide to wager that God
is. "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." Pascal
concludes that there is everything to be said in favor of committing
oneself to a belief in God and strong reasons against denying God. To
the objection that a man cannot come to believe simply by recognizing
that he will be extremely fortunate if he is right and no worse off if
he is wrong, Pascal replies by saying that if an unbeliever will act as
if he believes, and if he wants to believe, belief will come to him.
This wager later inspired William James's The Will to Believe, in which
the American pragmatist argued that Pascal's method is essentially
pragmatic. James's objection to Pascal's wager is that the wager alone
presents no momentous issue; unless one can relate the particular issue
being considered to a man's concerns, the appeal of the wager is empty.
If such proof would work for Pascal's God, it would work for any god
whatsoever. However, James's use of the wager to justify passional
decisions is much like Pascal's.
In a section titled "The Fundamentals of the Christian Religion," Pascal
wrote that the Christian religion teaches two truths: that there is a
God whom men can know and that by virtue of their corruption men are
unworthy of Him. Pascal rejected cold conceptions of God which reduced
Him to the author of mathematical truths or of the order of the
elements. For Pascal the God of salvation had to be conceived as He is
known through Jesus Christ. The Christian God car. be known, according
to Pascal, but since men are corrupt they do not always know God. Nature
assists God to hide Himself from corrupt men, although it also contains
perfections to show that Nature is the image of God.
In considering "The Philosophers," Pascal emphasizes thought as
distinguishing men from brutes and making the greatness of man possible.
"Man is neither angel nor brute," he writes, "and the unfortunate thing
is that he who would act the angel acts the brute."
Thus in Pascal we find a man who is on the one hand eager to defend the
Christian faith, on the other determined to indicate the shortcomings of
men. He is remorselessly critical in his attacks on skeptics, atheists,
and other critics of the Church, not simply because they err, but
because they do so in disorder and without respect for the possibilities
of man or the values of religion. In regard to skepticism he wrote that
his thoughts were intentionally without order, because only thus could
he be true to the disorderly character of his subject.
But it is not Pascal the bitter critic who prevails in the Pensees; it
is, rather, the impassioned and inspired defender of the faith. Even
those who do not share his convictions admire his style and the
ingenuity of his thought, and much that is true of all mankind has never
been better said than in the Penrzes.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
