Pascal

Blaise Pascal

On the nineteenth of September 1648, a man named Florin Périer climbed the Puy de Dôme in Auvergne carrying a glass tube of mercury, because his brother-in-law in Paris had written asking him to. At the base of the mountain the silver column stood at about twenty-six inches; at the summit it had dropped by more than three. Those three inches meant that the air has weight, that the mercury is held up by the pressing of the atmosphere and not by any horror of emptiness in nature, and that above the air there is void, the vacuum Aristotle had declared impossible for two thousand years. The brother-in-law who designed the experiment was Blaise Pascal, twenty-five years old, already the inventor of a calculating machine, soon to be a founder of the mathematics of probability. He is remembered now for something stranger. Within a decade, the man who had weighed the air turned the same exactness on the human being, and began taking the measure of the inner void. The fragments he left behind, the Pensées, are the first sustained account of what it is like to live inside the universe the new science had opened, and they read as if written this morning.

A geometer first. Pascal was born in 1623 at Clermont in Auvergne, son of Étienne Pascal, a royal tax judge and serious amateur mathematician who moved the family to Paris in 1631 and taught the children himself. His sister Gilberte tells the famous story: geometry withheld until Latin and Greek were secure, the boy at twelve found alone on the floor with charcoal, his own names invented for line and circle, as far as the thirty-second proposition of Euclid. Étienne surrendered and brought him to Father Mersenne's academy, the clearinghouse of European science. At sixteen Pascal produced an essay on conic sections containing the theorem that still bears his name; Descartes, shown the manuscript, declined to believe a boy had written it. At nineteen, for his father's tax work in Rouen, he designed the Pascaline, the first calculating machine offered for sale. In 1654, drawn in by a gambler's question about dividing the stakes of an interrupted game, he and Fermat worked out by correspondence the foundations of probability theory. The vacuum experiments, the treatises on the equilibrium of liquids, the arithmetical triangle: by his early thirties he had touched half the live problems of the age. This matters for reading him: when Pascal turned to the human condition he came not as a refugee from rigor but as the most exact mind of his generation, proposing to measure what everyone else declaimed about.

The two infinities. The measurement begins at fragment 72 of the Pensées, the great meditation on disproportion. Consider the whole visible world, Pascal says: "It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere." The formula was old; Cusanus had applied it to God two centuries before. Pascal's quiet revolution is to transfer it to nature, after the new astronomy burst the closed cosmos that gave humanity a fixed address. Then he turns the lens around. In the mite, the smallest creature then visible, each part divides into smaller parts without end, "an infinity of universes" opening downward. Man hangs "between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing": "a Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything." This is not an edifying figure of speech; it is an epistemology. A creature suspended between two infinities can see neither first beginnings nor final ends, and every science it builds floats on that double ignorance: "we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses." Beneath the epistemology runs a feeling no one had set down so nakedly, fragment 206, a single sentence: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." Pascal is the first to register, as lived experience, what the Copernican universe costs its inhabitants.

The thinking reed. Why does the fright not end in despair? Because the creature that measures its own insignificance has, in the act of measuring, escaped it. "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed." The universe need not arm itself to crush him, a vapour or a drop of water is enough; yet even crushed he would be nobler than what crushes him, because he knows it, and the universe knows nothing. "Thought constitutes the greatness of man" (346); "It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought" (348). Pascal's anthropology holds two truths at once and refuses to let either devour the other. Man is wretched; man is great; and each is evidence for the other, since "the greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable" (397). Who is unhappy at not being a king, he asks, except a deposed king? Our restlessness is the restlessness of a dispossessed greatness. Hence his double polemic, worked out in conversation at Port-Royal: Epictetus and the Stoics see the greatness and miss the wretchedness, and end in presumption; Montaigne, whose Essays Pascal knew nearly line by line, sees the wretchedness and misses the greatness, and ends in a soft despair. "Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute" (358).

Diversion. From that condition follows the most modern page in the book. Men cannot cure their wretchedness, so they arrange never to be alone with it: "all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber" (139). The hunter does not want the hare; offer it as a gift and he will refuse. He wants the chase, not the capture. Kings are the most diverted of men: the whole apparatus of a court exists to spare the king an hour of his own company. Gaming, war, office, conversation: what we purchase is not the prize but the tumult. Pascal's word is divertissement, a turning-aside, and he is exact about the mechanism: the quiet room is unbearable because in it we feel "the natural poverty of our feeble and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it closely." Diversion works, and that is the trouble; it is an anesthetic that never runs out. An age that carries its diversion in its pocket and consults it several hundred times a day has not refuted fragment 139. It has industrialized it.

The wager. Fragment 233 is the most famous and the worst-read page Pascal wrote. It is not addressed to believers, and it is not a proof; its premise is that proof has stalemated. "God is, or He is not," and "Reason can decide nothing here": a coin is spinning at the far edge of an infinite distance. The interlocutor is the honnête homme of the gaming tables, who proposes to sit out the question; Pascal closes that exit: "you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked." Suspension of judgment is itself a bet, placed against. Then the calculation, the Fermat correspondence turned on the one game no one declines to play: the stake is finite, the possible winnings infinite, so "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." Pascal wrote the decisive objection into the fragment himself. I am so made, says the interlocutor, that I cannot believe; belief is not an act of will. The reply is the deepest thing in the fragment: begin with practice. Live as the believers live, follow the customs, and what the will cannot do directly, habit will do from below; this road, he promises, "will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness." William James rebuilt the argument in "The Will to Believe," and decision theory still teaches fragment 233 as its founding document, the first argument from expected value rather than evidence. The wager was never the whole apology, only its door; behind it, in Pascal's plan, stood the long argument from wretchedness, greatness, and the hidden God.

Port-Royal, the Letters, and what this room reads. In January 1656 his friend Antoine Arnauld, the leading theologian of Port-Royal, stood before the Sorbonne facing censure in the dispute over grace and free will. Pascal, writing under the name Louis de Montalte, reported the quarrel in a letter to an imaginary friend in the provinces; then another; eighteen in all across fourteen months, printed clandestinely, condemned, and read by everyone. The Provincial Letters invented a weapon: doctrine examined by comedy. An obliging Jesuit casuist explains, with mounting enthusiasm, the doctrine of probable opinions, the direction of intention that licenses the duel, the art of equivocation and mental reservation, while the narrator needs only to quote him accurately to ruin him. Voltaire, no friend of Port-Royal, ranked them the first book of genius in French prose, and the sixteenth ends with the most quoted apology in writing: "The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter." This room reads both works in their classic public-domain translations: W. F. Trotter's 1904 Everyman version of the Pensées, which prints the fragments in Brunschvicg's numbering and carries T. S. Eliot's introductory essay, and Thomas M'Crie's 1846 translation of the Provincial Letters with his historical introduction. Cite the Pensées by fragment number (Pensées 233, Pensées 347) and the Letters by letter (Letter VII). The scientific treatises, the Fermat correspondence, the conversation with Sacy on Epictetus and Montaigne, the writings on grace, and the Mémorial, the parchment record of the night of 23 November 1654 that he kept sewn into his coat, are not in the corpus; the resident chat will say so when asked and answer those from the general scholarship.

The Pensées were to have been an Apology for the Christian Religion, and the book was never assembled; what the world has are the bundles of fragments he had sorted under headings, first printed by his Port-Royal friends in 1670. It took two centuries for editors to return to the raw fragments, and the unfinishedness turned out to be the power: an apology with the scaffolding still standing, where you watch a mind of the first rank thinking under pressure. The standard cartoon, a genius who abandoned science for religion, gets him exactly wrong. Pascal never stopped being a geometer; he is what the scientific revolution looks like when it refuses to exempt the scientist from the analysis, and his successors knew it. Kierkegaard reinvented his posture of inwardness; Nietzsche, who fought everything Pascal defended, called him the thinker who had taught him most, the one logical Christian; Unamuno built The Tragic Sense of Life on his agonic faith; Camus's silence of the world is fragment 206 heard again. Every actuarial table runs on mathematics he began at a gaming table, and the unit of pressure he measured on the Puy de Dôme is called the pascal. Open the Pensées anywhere; the book breaks off everywhere, and the place where it breaks off is the place where you are standing.