Pascal's Thinking Reed

PalmIn the context of the French Baroque, Blaise Pascal wrote some thoughts with an eminently religious and Christian content, and an apologetic purpose in defense of the Christian religion and the Jansenist version based on the Bible and the belief in miracles, prophecies, and mysteries, in opposition to other monotheistic religions, to the Protestant. The thoughts are notes and fragments published posthumously in 1670, without following the author's recommendations regarding their ordering. According to the order provided by Pascal, the fragments were to be grouped thematically into thoughts on vanity, misery, boredom, amusement, immortality, Christian morality, and 20 other topics, and end with a conclusion. These instructions have been followed in the reference Catalan edition entitled Thoughts and pamphlets (Adesiara, 2021).

In The thoughts, criticizes the importance that the Stoics give to reason, does not share Cicero's philosophy, because it prioritizes self-esteem over love of God. And at the same time, he distances himself from Saint Thomas and the Thomistic doctrine of the Jesuits, because they encourage the adoption of very lax rules of Christian life that weaken the precepts of the Gospels and Christian morality and make salvation too accessible, with the intention of gaining the favor of the faithful. Furthermore, he says that the Jesuits are motivated by worldly interests and not by a sincere and selfless faith; he believes that their greatest aspiration is to influence papal and political power. And he denounces the Machiavellian behavior of the Society of Jesus, the lack of scruples in achieving their ends, which leads them to resort to slander and corruption.

Death and voluntary homicide

In his thoughts, he attacks Montaigne's anti-Christian view of death and voluntary homicide, reproaching him for doubting the immortality of the soul, although he recognizes his merit in adopting an aphoristic, direct, and popular style of writing that contributes to the memorization of ideas. He adopts Montaigne's skepticism as an effective weapon to combat the dogmatic philosophy of Descartes and the skeptics themselves. He also refers to Descartes in a rather critical tone, since he does not share the theistic vision of rationalism, which presents a God who withdraws and ceases to intervene in the world after creation, and allows physical laws to govern the world. Instead, he follows the doctrine of the Church's capparas and the Augustinian interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures, and laments the limited influence that Saint Augustine had on the Church of his time.

Pascal's philosophy reflects the conflict between faith and reason that he experiences firsthand, although he chooses to give priority to faith, understood as an immediate, intimate, and experiential intuition, linked to the capacity to know, as can be read in one of his best-known thoughts, identified with the number 423, where he says "cone." This is an idea anticipated in thought 110, where he values the importance of faith in knowledge with these exact words: "We know the truth not only with reason, but also with the heart," and he adds that it is the heart, not reason, and therefore feelings, that provide us with knowledge of the first principles. In fragment 424, he applies this same idea to the knowledge of God: "God is perceptible by the heart, not by reason." In an earlier passage, at 418, he introduced his innovative demonstrative argument for the existence of God, known as 'The Wager,' which is based on the idea that although there is an equal chance of God existing and not existing, one must bet on his existence because the gains infinitely outweigh the losses. Roughly speaking, those who choose to believe in God can win an infinite and eternally happy life, whereas those who do not believe can end up in hell, subjected to eternal torture. Given this probability, he considers the safest bet to take the risk and believe, and live as if God existed, despite rational uncertainty. Pascal's God is biblical and unlike that of the Cartesian rationalist philosophers because his existence is neither ahistorical nor can it be rationally proven. Furthermore, he represents the limit of human knowledge, as evidenced in aphorism 148: "That man without faith can know neither true goodness nor justice."

One of the most fortunate definitions of the human being is the one expressed by Pascal in aphorism 200, according to which "man is a thinking reed." The philosopher is telling us that the human being is fragile and weak, vulnerable, but that he knows how to connect and resist, like reeds, and that thinking makes him worthy, but it is insufficient, because he aspires to elevate himself morally through the effort of thinking well. Earlier, in aphorism 199, he provides this other definition: "The human being is an average between everything and nothing." Pascal's perception of the human condition is ambivalent. According to Pascal, humans are mired in great contradictions because they have distanced themselves from God and their first nature determined by creation, and have adopted a second nature that mixes with the first and results in a paradoxical being defined by a miserable condition and baseness that arises from their greatness, because to be aware of their misery is already to be "greatly miserable" (fragment 114). This state in which humans find themselves makes it possible to have feelings of appreciation and contempt, of love and hatred towards themselves, and leads to moving between knowledge and ignorance, and to wanting "to have enough and more", understanding that "neither contradiction is a sign of falsehood nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth" (fragment 17).

Pascal describes the hopeless human condition through the image of a group of chained men being slaughtered in front of one another, so that those who have not yet died know in advance that they will soon die and await their turn in pain and without any shred of hope (fragment 434). Human smallness is clearly manifested in fragment 28, where he says that "we are as incapable of arriving at goodness as we are at truth." Pascal presents a Christian vision of corrupt man, marked by original sin and his inability to redeem himself through his own will, which places him within the abyss of great insignificance. He is aware that the only hope of salvation is not in his hands, since it necessarily involves Jesus Christ and divine grace (frago).

In his thoughts on misery, he had already anticipated that man without God is ignorant and unhappy, because being unhappy in ignorance is inevitable (fragment 75). He attributes human unhappiness to the inability to ignore one's mortal condition and to the inability to leave one's mind and body at rest, completely unemployed. He hopes that man can redeem himself, emerge from this state of existential anguish, and achieve knowledge and happiness through faith. One only needs to believe in God, as he makes clear in fragment 407: "Happiness is in God." These existential reflections and concerns extend to the unclassified papers.

Pascal summarizes the Christian commitment to humanity by declaring the intention to love all men as brothers, to be just, sincere, and faithful, to love poverty, to care for the afflicted, to harm no one, to acknowledge the mistakes made because of one's weakness and concupiscence, and to submit to one's conduct.