The Life and Thought of Blaise Pascal

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All of history’s greatest scientists were playing hide and seek one day. Several of them were extremely good at this. Schrödinger was particularly good at this. He kept hiding in a sealed box with a cat who didn’t seem at all happy about the arrangement.[1]



Heisenberg just climbed on a giant triple beam balance every time…because as long as he was making a precise measurement of his mass it was impossible to detect his location.[2] Now you can understand how Sir Isaac Newton finally got tired of losing to these guys. So finally, while Einstein was counting, he just stood in the center of the room and used a piece of sidewalk chalk to carefully draw a box around himself. When Einstein finished counting he looked up and saw Isaac standing in the middle of the room. He said, “Dude, I found you.” Newton responded, “No you didn’t. You found Pascal. I’m a Newton per square meter.” [3]



So this is how I got interested in Pascal. I was in grad school for engineering, and I had written down the abbreviation for this guy’s name roughly 1000 times (giving me a kilopascal) and heard he had written an insightful and accessible work of theology, so I picked it up.


I had never read a book by a dead guy and was a little skeptical. I wondered if it could possibly have any contemporary merit. Interestingly, I found that Pascal had anticipated this concern:


You see, there are two temporal fallacies when it comes to our quest for insight and wisdom. The first is traditionalism. Traditionalists prefer ancient wisdom to modern insight. Ideas with more history get more weight. Until approximately the time of Pascal, most cultures held to this view. A new idea could only prevail with difficulty because ancient wisdom was generally trusted and novelty was received with skepticism. However, in Pascal’s time (around the fifteen century) things began to change. There was a flourishing of optimism in human ingenuity and science. And there this led to a relatively sudden cultural reversal. Ancient ideas were suddenly viewed with skepticism in favor of novelty. The fallacy of Traditionalism was supplanted by fallacy of Modernism. The Modernists fallacy was to allow modern insight to uncritically trump ancient wisdom. CS Lewis calls this, “chronological snobbery.”

Tonight, and over the course of the next two weeks, we are going to test Pascal’s hypothesis that wisdom is a middle path between these fallacies. We are going to test the hypothesis that while novel ideas and contemporary reflection have a lot to offer us, powerful minds that have been silent for centuries have something special to offer our age, because they can speak free from our paradigms and prejudices of our time.[4]

Tonight we are going to briefly tell Pascal’s story and then look at just two of the principle ideas of his philosophy.

Pascal lived through the middle of the seventeenth century. He was a contemporary with Descartes and just before Newton and Spinoza. This meant he occupied one of the most turbulent eras of intellectual discovery and ferment in western intellectual history. It was ‘the enlightenment’, ‘the scientific revolution’, ‘the age of reason.’ And he was lived in Paris, which was the heart of the action.

Pascal’s story starts with tragedy. His mother died when he was three, leaving Blaise and his two sisters in the care of their eccentric father who was, essentially a Paris tax collector. His father decided to home school and despite the fact that Blaise showed uncanny early potential he was forced to studied classics (Greek and Latin) because his father believed that “mathematics was too intoxicating for a young mind.”[5] Though something came across my facebook last night that made me wonder if he wasn’t on to something.



This kept up until (as Blaise’ older sister reported later) his dad walked in on him deriving Euclid’s principles alone in his room – you get the picture of a dad walking in on his son looking at porn. So his father relented, and he began to study math. When he was 17 he published his first major publication. By 19 he had invented the first calculator (in order to help his father with his job). This should not be underestimated:

I realize how this could be underwhelming to an Iphone/Droid/blackberry generation – I mean it is just a single function device. But listen to what Douglas Groothis said about this: [6]




In his early twenties he turned to physics and performed a series of experiments on hydrostatics (which is why we use his name as the SI unit for pressure). This was the beginning of his tendency to champion unpopular views, as he argued for the possibility of a vacuum, which most of his contemporaries believed could not exist. This debate put Pascal head to head with Descartes himself, but, Pascal was, of course, correct. The vast majority of our physical universe is in fact a vacuum.

Now despite these early achievements, he was sick most of his life, and began to really suffer from his illnesses in his 20s. His doctor told him that he needed to spend less time on stressful things like math and science and more time on social diversions. Now I want you to imagine this. You are a 24 year old dude in the world’s most fun city and the Doctor officially prescribes more partying.



Let’s just say he was extremely contentious in medical compliance. He was introduced to Parisian high society and was very well received. Even though as the son of bureaucrat he was not really in their social class, there were two reasons this was generally overlooked. First, Scientists and Philosophers were the celebrities of 17th century.



Descartes was Tom Cruise and Spinoza was Russell Crowe. A couple years ago it came out that people pay Paris Hilton to show up at parties to make those parties successful. Pascal turned out to be a seventeenth century version of this…except he was also clever, articulate and witty. You do not have to spend very long with his writings before you can imagine that he could be highly entertaining. The second reason he climbed socially was a simple matter of mathematics. Many of his friends were gamblers and some of his early work in probability stemmed from his attempts to solve gambling puzzles.

But he found that a life of diversion was fundamentally unsatisfying. His life was full of anesthetic. Diversions did not make the big questions of the universe or the human condition go away, it just made him forget they were there. Later he wrote:

“Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things…That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle; that is why prison is such a fearful punishment…”

“The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.”

Peter Kreeft who wrote a fine commentary on Pascal’s writings wrote “The word “boredom” does not exist in any ancient languages. It first appeared in the 17th century.” 187
Pascal came to believe that the reason boredom had become so intolerable, the reason
there were so many ways to occupy their minds with insubstantial things, was because bordom makes mental space for dread of a vacant universe. The realities of a vacant universe and our true condition are too dreadful to allow it to maintain our attention.

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us (from) seeing it.”

About the same time Pascal’s father broke his leg. He hired two amateur bone setters to help him heal and rehab and they lived with the family. They were simple men whose lives revolved around their Christian faith, and Pascal found himself drawn to them. This is one of my favorite details of the story, because these were very simple, unassuming men. They were not in the intellectual ballpark of the precocious young Blaise, but he would eventually adopt their worldview. And this is one of my criterions for evaluating a worldview. Does it have generality across the human condition? Is similarly compelling and useful to simple tradesmen and world class intellects?

For the next few years, these two influences, the Jesus of the bonesetters and the high life of the Parisan cultural set each pulled at him. We only know how that resolved in retrospect. He did not let anyone in on the final decision as far as we know. But when he died, his family found this document, dated Nov 11, 1954 (which would make him 31) sewn into the lining of his jacket (as though he had resolved to always have the reminder of this night close to his person).



“The year of grace 1654.
Monday, 23 November, feast of Saint Clement
From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past midnight.
FIRE.
The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
Not of the philosophers and intellectuals.
Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace.
The God of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Forgetfulness of the world and everything except God.
One finds oneself only by way of the directions taught in the gospel.
The grandeur of the human soul.
Oh just Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have separated myself from him.
They have abandoned me, the fountain of living water.
My God will you leave me?
May I not be separated from him eternally.
This is eternal life, that they may know you the one true God and J.C . whom you have sent.
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I have separated myself from him. I have run away from him, renounced him, crucified him.
May I never be separated from him.
One preserves oneself only by way of the lessons taught in the gospel.
Renunciation total and sweet.
And so forth.”

This changed the trajectory of the last decade of Pascal’s life. He began to study theology and take an interest in Paris’ poor. His last big project was to implement the first public transportation system in the Western world. He used his own money to set up a series of omnibuses with prescribed routes and public time tables with the intent of giving Paris’ poorest citizens a way to get around the city. He also started to write his major work of philosophy, collecting fragments in a shoe box. Pascal never finished the book. He died before he turned 40. The autopsy revealed at least 3 terminal disease so advanced they couldn’t tell which one killed him. But his sister fond the shoe box published the fragments as she found them, under the title Pensees (simply the French word for ‘thoughts’). Now for not being an actual book, Pensees is one of the great works of history. It is easily one of my five favorite books. IT is a shockingly raw and subversive dissenting opinion to the rest of the triumphalistic philosophy that came out of that age. In some way, a non-traditional work was appropriate legacy for Pascal. Kreeft says: “To ask such a man to write an ordinary book is like asking lightning to sit for a portrait.”
At his funeral there were eminent scientists, members of Parisian high society, renowned members of the religious community, but the account reports that the much of the church was full of the Paris’ poor that he had assisted following his conversion. And I think that sums up his life pretty well, and I think that scene alone, makes his writings compelling. What kind of world view generates a life like this?



Well with the time I have left I just want to briefly look at two of the organizing ideas of his world view. To understand Pascal’s world view and why it was so radically different than the others of his time, you have to understand how he answers two of the big questions: “Who are we?” and “How do we know stuff?” or his anthropology and his epistemology.

First: Who are we? (Pascal’s Anthropology)

Pascal was fundamentally an empiricist. In the debates about a vacuum, he put the emphasis on experimentation and data over theory and principle. And he felt like, if you are going to achieve a stable view of the meaning and purpose of life, you first have to take some data on what it means to be human. So he undertook a new study later in life. He called it his study of “The Human Subject.” And he concluded that there were two fundamental and paradoxical things that any world view has to reconcile about the human condition:

“The more enlightened we are the more greatness and vileness we discover in man…” (613 – p51)[7]

“What sort of freak then is man? How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!” (131 - 107)

He argues that if you are going to try to answer the question “Who are we?” your answer has to account for two very different stories. First, you have to account for the capacity gun down 5 perfect strangers (including a 9 year old) outside an Arizona grocery. But you are also going to have to account for an 18 year old that used her college money to start an orphanage in Nepal and by the age of 24 was the sole caretaker of over 40 children, sharing her bed with a fussy infant.[8] You are going to have to account Stalin and Teresa, for our tendency to destroy and our tendency to create, our darkness and our beauty.



Pascal felt like the Christian story made the most sense of this paradoxical data. He argued that we are all metaphysically valuable but morally flawed. We are fundamentally good but existentially broken.

“(Human) greatness and wretchedness are so evident that (a successful world view) must necessarily teach that there is in (us) some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness. It must also account for such amazing contradictions…It must acknowledge that we are full of darkness…(and) teach us the cure for our helplessness.” (149 – p65)

The great irony is that most contemporary world views invert this. They argue that there is nothing intrinsically valuable about us, we are just carbon and chemicals, the accidental animation of cosmic dust, yet, we are all basically good at heart. We are intrinsically valueless but morally good. [9] Pascal says:

“What amazes me most is to see that everyone is not amazed at (their) own weakness…” (33 – 106)

Someone once asked Ravi Zacharias, a notable South Asian Christian for the primary reason he followed Jesus. This is a particularly fair question for him, as he grew up in India, one of the few places on earth where all of the major religions are well represented. He responded, “I follow Jesus Christ because he diagnosed my condition most precisely.”


Second: How do we know stuff? (Epistemology)

What Pascal demonstrated in the vacuum debates was that he was interested in data than theory. And he felt like, if you are going to achieve a stable view of the meaning and purpose of life, you first have to take some data on what it means to be human. And he concluded that there were two fundamental and paradoxical things that any world view has to reconcile about the human condition:

“Two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason…Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realize that.”

And this is why we have to understand Pascal’s anthropology before we can understand his epistemology. His answer to “Who are we?” informs his answer to “How do we know stuff?…and so does yours. If we fit Pascal’s picture of beautiful brokenness, there is a reason to be skeptical about our ability to penetrate reality ourselves.

He found that despite the immense power of his own mental faculties, that reason and the senses are helpful but slippery guides. “I found myself so often making unsound judgments that I began to distrust myself and then others…I realized that our nature is nothing but continual change.” (520 – p93)

Even the greatest minds will have trouble differentiating between their reason and their passions.

“The internal war of reason against the passion has made those who wanted peace split into two sects. Some wanted to renounce passions and become gods, others wanted to renounce reason and become brute beats. But neither side has succeeded, and reason always remains to denounce the baseness and injustice of the passions and to disturb the peace of those who surrender to them. And the passions are always alive in those who want to renounce them.” (410 – p97)[10]

Pascal anticipates the existentialists and the post-moderns (even as modernism itself is just getting started) by arguing that there is no ‘view from nowhere.’ All knowledge is perspective and fundamentally self interested.

“The aversion for the truth exists…in everyone to some degree, because it is inseparable from self love.” (978 -150)

He found dogmatism unsatisfying but was skeptical about skepticism. He needed a world view that allowed him to use his mind but also recognized the limitations of our equipment.[11]
Pascal believed that because we are beautiful and broken, it distorts the way we perceive reality. Like looking into a shattered mirror. We see some aspects of reality exactly right, but the big picture eludes us. And this state is supposed to supposed to lead us to look outside ourselves for the interpretive key that pulls the story together.



“You cannot be a skeptic without stifling your nature. You cannot be a dogmatist without turning your back on reason. Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.” (131 – 109)

Disillusioned with the capacity of his powerful mind to penetrate reality, he looked for help. And he found a tutor who seemed to see it all clearly.[12] He found someone who had a fundamental understanding of how we work and how the world works that fit Pascal’s empirical . He found Jesus.

“Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.”(417 -313)


Concluding Thought:

Let me just wrap up with a couple words on how Pascal’s mentorship has enhanced my experience of the University and the reflective life.

Letting Jesus inform your interpretations of your sense data does not have to devolve to dogmatism. But in the end, I have found the same thing Pascal found, the Christian story makes the most sense of the cloud of paradoxical data I have encountered in my studies. However, I am far more curious about science and philosophy, about how the world works and how we work, than I was without Jesus.

“I believe with (our) curiosity changed into wonder (we) will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to investigate them with presumption.” (199-122)

Pascal’s Jesus provides a robust approach to the academic life. Study hard, enjoy the accumulation of facts and the evaluation of ideas, develop your powers of reasoning, observation and experimentation. But instead of leading to arrogance, let them lead you to wonder. Consider the possibility that the one who made all this wants to walk with you through your discovery of it. And consider the possibility that if Jesus describes the human condition with such precision, that you might want to look to him for the solution.

____________________________
[1] “Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar…and doesn’t” My friend Zach
[2] My friend Steve brainstormed a bunch of these:
Schrodinger could hide in two boxes at once and when a box is opened/observed he could "collapse" to the unopened box (maybe leaving a dead cat behind?).
Einstein could change himself into energy and travel at the speed of light (since he would be massless) and then change back to matter.
Plank could hide inside of a really, really, really, tiny distance.
Feynman could be particularly good at finding people by making a diagram of every possible path the other scientist might use to try and hide.
[3] You English majors will just have to take my word for it…these jokes are hilarious.
[4] They are, no doubt, restricted by the prejudices and assumptions of their own age, but these are easy for us to sniff out. What makes looking to past figures for insight particularly valuable is that they do not have to dance to the fiddler of our moment and can provide an ‘outside’ opinion. Rather than musty, their ideas are often fresh because they would never occur to us.
[5] Seriously, you’ve got to love the seventeenth century – where they say stuff like this. Sometimes I hear would-be-hippies bemoan that they were born in the wrong decade…that their natural temporal home would have been the sixties. Well sometimes I sympathize…sometimes I feel like I should have been born in the sixties too…the 1660, when people talked like this.
[6] Douglas Groothuis On Pascal, p 17.
[8] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504464_162-20027569-504464.html
[9] Kreeft: “Psychopaganism is infinitely inferior to existentialist nihilism because it does not even rise to the dignity of despair.”
[10] “One must know when it is right to doubt, to affirm, to submit. Anyone who does otherwise does not understand the force of reason. Some men run counter to these three principles, either affirming that everything can be proved, because they know nothing of proof, or doubting everything, because they do not know when to submit, or always submitting, because they do not know when judgment is called for.” (170 - 236) 3 kinds of fanaticism
[11] He actually believed that the cloudiness of our cognitive equipment and our inability to see things clearly was a gift from God to point us to our need for an external interpretive key.
[12] “Let man both hate and love himself, he has with him the capacity for knowing truth and being happy, but he possesses no truth which is either abiding or satisfactory.” (119 p61)