- Length
- 352 pagesKrailsheimer, Pensées, Penguin, rev. ed. 1995
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Pensées
Notes for a book that was never written, by a mathematician who had already invented the mechanical calculator and the foundations of probability before he was thirty. What survives is a psychology of distraction and self-deception so acute that readers who reject every theological conclusion still find it hard to put down.
- Date
- 1670
- Author
- Blaise Pascal
- Region
- Paris and Port-Royal
- Language
- French
- 1688 English, Joseph Walker First English version Consensus
- 1904 English, W. F. Trotter Public domain; uses the Brunschvicg order Attested
- 1995 English, A. J. Krailsheimer Follows Lafuma; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Aphorisms
- Method
- Aphorism — Short separate statements, repeated rather than built
- Transmission
- Posthumous — Published after the author died
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 90 years
A book that never existed, assembled from fragments by editors who disagreed about the order, and read continuously for three and a half centuries.
What the book says
The wreckage of an unfinished book, and one of the most powerful things anyone has written about being human. Pascal was assembling a defence of Christianity aimed at people who found it uninteresting, and the surviving fragments show the strategy: before offering an answer, make the reader feel the problem. So much of the material is not theological at all. It is about diversion - that we cannot sit quietly in a room alone, and that everything from hunting to war exists so that we do not have to. It is about the imagination, which governs us more than reason does; about the way a judge's robes and a doctor's manner do work no argument could; about how a man's whole opinion of himself changes if a fly buzzes near him. Human beings are described as suspended between two infinities, too large to be nothing and too small to be anything, knowing enough to see their position and not enough to escape it. And then the wager: if reason cannot decide whether God exists, you are still betting, because you must live one way or the other, and the stakes are not symmetrical.
What it argues
That the human condition is genuinely unbearable when looked at directly, and that almost everything people do is arranged so that they do not have to look. Diversion is the central concept: a man who has everything is miserable if left without occupation, and what he wants from the hunt is not the hare. Reason is weaker than we think and is routinely overruled by imagination, custom and the body. From this Pascal draws two conclusions that do not obviously go together - that the philosophers who claim to have understood our position are wrong, and that a religion which describes human beings as fallen and divided fits the evidence better than one which describes them as fine. The wager then addresses the reader who agrees that reason cannot settle it: since you cannot abstain from living, you cannot abstain from betting.
What it answered
Montaigne above all, and the comfortable scepticism his Essays had made fashionable. He also answers Descartes, whom he thought useless - a philosophy that reaches God by proof reaches a God nobody would pray to, and Pascal's famous note distinguishing the God of Abraham from the God of the philosophers is written against exactly that. And in the background is the Jesuit moral casuistry he had already attacked in the Provincial Letters, which he regarded as a machine for making sin manageable.
How it argues
In fragments, and the fragmentation is not only an accident of his death. Pascal held that a demonstration cannot produce conviction about anything that matters, because the heart has reasons the intellect does not supply, and his method is to unsettle rather than to prove - to place the reader in front of their own restlessness and let it do the work. Some fragments are a line; some run for pages. The prose is the best French of its century and the compression is deliberate, which is why the notes read as finished even though the book is not.
The moment
Paris in the 1650s, with Pascal attached to Port-Royal, the centre of Jansenism - a rigorous Augustinian movement inside French Catholicism which the crown and the Jesuits were in the process of suppressing. He had a religious experience in November 1654 which he recorded on a scrap of paper and sewed into his clothing, where it was found after his death. He was ill for most of his adult life and died at thirty-nine.
How it travelled
In whatever shape its editors gave it. The 1670 edition smoothed and reordered the fragments for a devotional readership. Voltaire attacked it in the Philosophical Letters and thereby kept it current. Nineteenth-century editors restored what the first had suppressed, and the twentieth reconstructed the bundles from copies made before the papers were disturbed. Its influence runs oddly wide: Nietzsche called Pascal the only Christian he respected, and existentialist writers took the account of anxiety and diversion without the conclusion it was pointing to.
The strongest objection
That the wager proves too little. Grant that you must bet and that the stakes are asymmetric: the argument still gives no reason to choose this God rather than any other with a comparable offer, and any number of incompatible faiths can make the same pitch. The many-gods problem was raised early and has never been dissolved. There is also the objection Pascal half anticipates - that belief is not the kind of thing one can adopt on prudential grounds, to which his answer is that you should act as though you believed and belief will follow, which is either shrewd psychology or an admission that the argument produces conformity rather than conviction.
Why read it
Anywhere, in short sittings - the form makes it the most openable book in this section. The fragments on diversion, on imagination, on the two infinities and on the misery of a man alone in a room are the ones that stay with people who have no interest in the apologetics. Use an edition that follows Lafuma or Sellier and says so.
- First printed
- 1670
- First in English
- 1688
- Digitised
- Yes
There is no correct order. The 1670 Port-Royal edition rearranged and softened the fragments; Brunschvicg's nineteenth-century arrangement was standard for decades; Lafuma and Sellier later followed the two surviving copies made before the papers were disordered. Editions are cited by which numbering they use because the numbering is an interpretation.
Trotter's 1904 English is public domain. Krailsheimer, Ariew and Levi are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live on both sides. The wager is a standard item in philosophy of religion and in decision theory, where it is treated as an early and problematic use of expected value under uncertainty. The psychology of diversion is read as psychology, and the fragments are studied as literature.
On quoting this book
The French is public domain and Trotter's English is too, but the phrases everyone knows circulate in modern in-copyright renderings, and fragment numbering differs between editions. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The order is the permanent problem, and every edition is an argument about what the book would have been. How far the Port-Royal editors altered what they printed was only established in the nineteenth century. Whether the wager is a serious argument or a device aimed at a particular kind of worldly reader is disputed. And the relation between the mathematician who founded probability theory and the writer who says the heart has its own reasons is read either as a contradiction or as the single most interesting thing about him.