Great Authors - Literature of the Renaissance - Pascal, Pensses

[Music] so [Music] glazed pascal was one of the greatest figures in 17th century french intellectual life and this is a remarkable achievement first because of the fact that he died young he didn't live to reach his 40th birthday and moreover 17th century france was an extraordinarily dynamic uh intellectual milieu is the age of moliere and racine great philosophers and great literary figures and pascal somehow figures in between the scientists and the literary artists and the religious thinkers in some respects he's a man who can accomplish more than one kind of intellectual uh goal or seek more than one kind of intellectual achievement another interesting element of pascal or quality that pascal has is that he has a sort of religious mania he uh is not just a devout believer in god but he is an exceedingly doubt he's an exceedingly devout believer and he took upon himself the idea of converting as many of the intellectual figures of his time and place to his conception of christian religiosity to the perhaps the detriment of his later intellectual reputation he had gifts as a scientist and as a mathematician and he gave up science and mathematics after he had a religious experience which fundamentally changed the course of his life now he was a mathematical prodigy as a boy he had been educated by his father his father had considerable competence in mathematics and the kid was remarkable everyone said he's going to be our next great mathematical figure perhaps one of the great in the west when he was in his teens people used to compare him with pythagoras which is great praise without a doubt uh at the age of 17 he designed uh he wrote a book on conic sections which is a remarkable achievement for a teenager at 19 he designed a workable computer and at 21 he built it and when you consider the fact that we're talking about the mid 16th century or the mid 17th century that's a remarkable intellectual achievement the kid was really good at math and he used his mathematical gifts to kind of elbow his way into the scientific life of france and he made original contributions to things like the theory of the vacuum and the idea of air pressure he did a number of important experiments on the nature of the barometer and the nature of air's pressure things like that and he was well on his way to becoming one of the main intellectual figures of the enlightenment particularly because his scientific and mathematical impulses were so strong that he fit right into the general trend of the age of reason this tendency this trajectory that he had early on in life continued until he began to become more and more concerned with religious issues he became what we might call the scientist of salvation someone who is able not just to dabble in science but to make important and original contributions to scientific and to science and mathematics but in addition he's also able to write some of the most profound and moving religious casualty of his century now in 1646 pascal became a jansonist and for those of you unfamiliar with the details of 17th century french religious life jansenism is a sort of heresy of catholicism which attempts to do many of the things that the protestant reformation did to move away from the worldliness and corruption that had seeped into the church and to try and force people back to an original and kind of primary devotion to god and submission to god's will it emphasized good works which is something that for the most part the protestant particularly the lutheran tradition did not on the other hand it also emphasizes penitent penitence and the recognition of man's sinful nature it's one of the few religions with or it's one of the few religious movements within catholicism at the time that tried to make catholicism more rigorous those who want to make it more rigorous often withdrew from the church entirely the jansenists were kind of in between they had certain allegiances to the church which prevented them from wanting to break with it on the other hand they wanted to reform it in some respects from within they wanted for example to institute three lengths every year three 40-day periods of penitence and fasting and all that as a way of atoning for one's sins so if catholicism is a kind of rigorous religion with regard to atonement and things like that jansenism wants to take that and take it even further so a combination of good works piety and penitence for sin is what jan cinematism is all about and descartes bought into it when he was exposed to certain jazziness thinkers and this comes early in his life he's only in his 20s when he buys into this and he begins to be associated with port royal and the main jansenist thinkers that are living there and working there and he becomes one of the great figures in defending jansenism against the attacks of the jesuits there had been a considerable amount of infighting within the church between those like the jazziness that want to reform it and drive catholicism into a more uh more otherworldly and more rigorous approach to sin and atonement and those who wanted to defend the status quo so one of the first important religious texts that pascal wrote was called the provincial letters the provincial letters he attacks the lies and the hypocrisy that are entailed in the jesuit defense of things within the church that are obviously evil that are obviously corrupt and it wins wide applause and wide praise which made the anonymous author of the provincial letters a persona non-grata within church circles now although pascal was a great scientific mind and a profound mathematical mind his fame nowadays rests on a book that he never managed to complete and he intended to title the book an apology for the christian religion but we have it today in the form of a series of notes towards a book which was called the paul says now what pascal tries to do in the paul says is to defend his particular conception of christian orthodoxy and christian religiosity and the reason that he feels impelled to abandon his scientific inquiries and abandon his mathematical researches is because he has had a religious experience which transcends all the other experiences of his life and which make his life turn a corner which he can never go back upon he called this night the night of fire he's actually good enough to tell us exactly the date that it happened it was november 23rd 1654 and around midnight late in the evening one night he had a two-hour reverie in which he claims and it's not very clear what he claims except that something very important and very mystical and very theological happened to him but what appears to be the case is that he had direct and immediate apprehension of the divinity at least that's what pascal thought was going on perhaps nowadays we might describe it differently and in a more pejorative way but then he thought that finally god had revealed himself in that evening and he the the notes that he wrote at the time were kind of incoherent perhaps what you would expect after directly encountering god but he talks about god of abraham god of isaac god of moses he's obviously in an ecstatic situation and it's a very odd kind of discourse for a mathematician to enter into since mathematics is the clearest and most precise of the sciences or the kind of mental activities that were undertaken in the enlightenment and in some respects talking about religion particularly direct illumination of the nature of god himself is in some respects the opposite pole in other words mathematics is clear depends in some respects on the cartesian idea of clear and distinct ideas the idea of a point and a line and things like that in the case of geometry well one of the intrinsic qualities of talking about one's internal religious experiences is that it's the most murky and vague and nebulous kind of discourse and that he should commit himself wholeheartedly on the basis of one experience to this sort of discourse suggests something very peculiar something very intriguing has happened to him and whether we accept its validity or not it's certainly worth our inquiry and consideration and you'll certainly find that he's the kind of thinker that will be worth your while in encountering uh the pulsaes is a beautiful book it is in some respects a very disturbing book it is a frightening book but it is also a very profound and intriguing book it's obviously the product of a man who feels a certain tension between the intellectual part of his soul or his mind or his psyche and the spiritual part and this tension between the intellect and the spirit is extremely fruitful in intriguing ideas and rather pithy descriptions of the human condition now after having the night of fire after directly apprehending the deity he abandons all worldly concerns he gives himself up to good works study of the bible the writing of christian apologetics and morbid introspection one comes away with the sense that however brilliant pascal was he was a profoundly disturbed individual kind of a gifted kook i mean there's a certain connection i mean you'll often find the people that are gifted at that level i mean i mean truly outstanding within a you know a hundred thousand or a million people often have a certain degree of imbalance in their psyche and when i read passages from the paul says you will certainly come up with the conclusion that this guy is half crazy also one of the great thinkers of his age we have to kind of take the good with the bad or the incoherent with the lucid now we have to also think about the intellectual milieu in which pascal is working 17th century france is a happening place all kinds of interesting intellectual stuff is going on there science is moving forward a pace mathematics is doing nicely engineering is advancing literature we get moliere and racine classical french drama there's a great many advances that are being made we're at we're riding the crest of the enlightenment here but there are two groups of people that pascal is interested in talking to in other words he didn't write this book for peasants for the average illiterate or quasi-literate person he thought that religious truth was accessible to people regardless of their level of education but he has a particular audience in mind with these kind of striking and rather rather pithy and kind of somewhat unpleasant descriptions of the human condition in the first place he wants to argue against cartesianism and the entire tradition of promethean rationalism that comes from descartes if you think if you know the philosophy of descartes what descartes was trying to do is found a philosophy using skepticism as a medium which would be irrefutable and unquestionable in other words what descartes wanted was to create certainty out of skepticism and if you're familiar with for example the discourse on method right where he tries to bootstrap himself into absolute certainty it's clear enough that what he wants to do is allow for unfriend the unfettered development of human reason this represents the tradition in western culture that is derived from athens and it if it doesn't denigrate religion it treats religion as somehow superfluous or more or less irrelevant to its program of developing free and unfettered human reason the problem in pascal's view with cartesianism and his father was involved in intellectual circles that discussed cartesianism thoroughly that elaborated the ideas of descartes well the problem from pascal's view with cartesianism is that it is essentially hubristic in other words it tries to usurp god's place by replacing knowledge of scripture and knowledge of divinity through revelation with unaided human reason and the problem is that you can't find out a god about god and about things divine by reasoning reasoning by itself is not sufficient whereas if you talk to descartes or any of the latter cartesians all would say well look if we're not going to get it from reason where shall we get it i guess pascal's answer would be well when you have the night of fire and god comes in and talks to you then you'll get it but until then you are in fact a pernicious influence on culture because you give people the impression that reason by itself is sufficient you could say that it's the old conflict between the children of athens and the children of jerusalem or perhaps those who like the myth of job and those who like the myth of prometheus descartes was a very promethean figure by reasoning alone i will be able to figure out the ultimate certainty and then found the other disciplines the other branches of knowledge pascal wants to move against that he thinks it's arrogant he thinks it endangers the spiritual welfare of the people that buy into it and he thinks it enervates the culture and makes people hard-hearted and cruel he thinks it also has a bad moral effect so pascal is looking at a general critique of cartesianism and by implication he is offering a general critique of the the rise of modern science that is so characteristic of the thought of the enlightenment so descartes after i mean rather pascal is after big game in his attack on the cartesians and what he wants to show is that religious illumination god's uh word through in the form of scripture are necessary to our understanding of things reason alone is not enough he has a second group of people a second intellectual tendency that he wants to criticize and this is montagna and montene's skepticism those of you that know the essays of montagna they're wonderful pieces i'm very fond of them will know that montagna was a kind of urbane witty skeptical fellow who decided to withdraw from active public and political life and engage in a contemplative around with his books write his essays in his tower and have a minimum amount of bother with the world around him in pascal's view montene's skepticism while it's less arrogant than the promethean rationalism of descartes in fact leads to complacency and complacency leads to self-indulgence one of the problems with the over-educated perhaps two sophisticated types that drifted into us into montana skepticism is that skepticism very quickly becomes passivity and complacency and this passivity and complacency rather quickly turns into boredom and that turns into self-indulgence and various kinds of sin so if you think about salon society in 17th century france we had rigorous hubristic cartesians and we had kind of dilettante over refined followers of montagna and between them between their arrogance and their complacency we have real moral danger what pascal wants to do is to show the insufficiency of cartesianism the insufficiency of montenus skepticism and blaze a new path that satisfies the intellectual demands of both camps and shows the intellectual defects of both approaches last night when i had a i had a dinner with professor brom bear and he gave me a great idea about this i'm just going to steal it shamelessly he called pascal an intellectual terrorist is that a great idea i mean whether it's true or not it's just a great idea it's a beautiful locution no it's a smart man and it's very true what pascal wishes to do to us in the paul says is to rouse us to a kind of frenzied despair we are supposed to see the ugliness the depravity the misery the wretchedness of the human condition and by driving us to despair he hopes to maintain he hopes to force the passive and complacent followers of montagna to start a religious search that otherwise they won't do unless you rouse these self-indulgent people these withdrawn isolated skeptical people to a sort of religious despair to a frenzy of misery they're not going to do anything they're going to sit on their butts and stay in their tower and write essays indulge themselves one way or another he says no or pascal's idea is no you have to make them fear for the good of their soul make them fear the possibility that they're not going to get what religion might offer to them in other words you have to show them how wretched they are pascal wants to inspire in the reader a kind of terror a kind of morbid hatred of the kind of nuts and bolts tables and chairs facts of the human condition he wants to make you feel that if this is all there is i might as well just go put a bullet in my brain uh what is it i believe in the one in earlier lecture we saw that the only real philosophical question is whether to commit suicide or not well pascal's answer would be that if god doesn't exist you might as well matter of fact this is such a wretched condition that we're in that unless there's some sort of salvation unless there's some end towards which we might aspire the emptiness the wretchedness the meaninglessness of the human condition should drive us directly to despair and from despair to suicide i know that it's often it seems a very contemporary sounding idea the idea that life is meaningless actually it's a really old idea it just gets recycled every generation or two when people have a sort of reaction to some sort of dogmatism so although it sounds like the idea that would be generated specifically in the 20th century after the horrors of say the second world war in fact it's a perennial human temptation the idea that life is wretched and meaningless we see it in 17th century france you can see it much earlier than that you can go all the way back to the origins of the western tradition it is not a one-time fact that we happen to drift into into the 20th century in fact it is an ever-present possibility for the human condition nihilism awaits and it calls us with its dark and sparkling hands and pascal wants to point out to us that if there's no way to avoid the conclusion that this is all there is that there's simply tables and chairs and day and night and one day after another despair and misery and ultimately suicide would be a sensible response pascal also wants to drive cartesians to despair and he wishes to drive them to a different sort of despair because cartesians are not likely to be complacent and withdrawn they are likely to be active men who manipulate nature in other words you could think of descartes and the cartesian tradition as being the source of what in this century is called technological man you know cartesians are good scientists mathematicians whose formulae and whose figuring and whose calculation allow them to push nature around all kinds of interesting and entertaining ways and cartesians and the latter latter-day kind of engineering tradition that comes out of that they entertain themselves not by withdrawing and not becoming skeptical but rather by becoming dogmatic about what they know and then pushing nature around until they die what they call what pascal wants to say about the cartesians is that we force them into despair by showing them a that scientific and mathematical knowledge are not the only kinds of knowledge and b if they were the only kinds of knowledge such a life would not be worth living that it amounts essentially to the unexamined life that socrates warned us about so pascal is trying to kind of ignite a sort of intellectual terror and intellectual misery in people who are blissfully unaware of how wretched they are a very dubious or if not quite dubious a very unpleasant program right but he's not again in some respects like swift he's not here to to get our approval he's here to make us better and if making it better is no fun well that's the way it is now in distinguishing or in trying to avoid the hubris and complacency that montagna and descartes offer us pascal makes a distinction between two kinds of knowledge he says there's a kind of knowledge in which antiquity or tradition is absolute and there's a kind of knowledge in which reason is absolute in other words for those branches of knowledge in which antiquity or tradition is our standard there's no sense of bringing in reason on the other hand for those kinds of knowledge in which our foundation is reasoning then there's no sense of bringing in tradition let me give an example think of the development of physical science that we get with the enlightenment well there pretty clearly we have undermined aristotelian physics and while the medievals would probably have said well look we don't take your modern science seriously because we have the tradition the authority of aristotle pascal would say no you're making a mistake here a category mistake scientific knowledge is dependent upon reason not authority any argument made from authority is contrary to the nature of mathematical or scientific or phys natural scientific thinking that's the proper domain of reason where the cartesians make their mistake is to think that that's all the knowledge there is and that's the only way to approach knowledge as with reason as a kind of foundation so in mathematics and physical science we no longer make appeals tradition to tradition we do experiments we perform calculations we don't say aristotle said the following that's no longer acceptable the other side of the coin is that pascal believes there are certain kinds of knowledge and here i give examples of law theology and history in which the authority of tradition is canonical there's no point in other words in applying reason to the authority of scripture it is outside the domain of reason we have scriptures which are handed down from generation to generation the attempt to rationally criticize these only ends up undermining them and that's not a fault of scripture that's a fault of the cartesian insistence that all knowledge is knowledge based on rationa on reasoning rather than knowledge based upon authority the proper domain of authority is those things that are inaccessible to reason theology and the criticism of scripture is such an example he thinks history is an example he also thinks that law is an example i doubt very much that any contemporary theologian or historian would be willing to accept this distinction now but it's fundamental to the way pascal thinks about knowledge and the way he thinks about the intellectual milieu in 17th century france so we have these two kinds of knowledge and in the pulses among remember these were written down incidentally it's not a finished organized book we have our 700 or 900 scraps of paper in which his ideas are written down it has a kind of an overall coherence some scholars have worked very diligently on the problem of how to organize these things and we have a rough and ready understanding of how we would move from one to the other although of course the interstices between ideas we don't have any connection you can kind of connect the dots mentally and he says uh there's a rough outline of what he intended to do in the book this apology for the christian religion that he would have turned out if he had lived a little longer he says part one will be a discussion of the wretchedness of man without god now all of his thinking depends on that if human life without the deity and without salvation and without heaven and hell without moral order that's divinely sanctioned if that's happy and if that's good then all of pascal is irrelevant and this is a really stupid argument pascal takes as a dogma as a kind of a fundamental psychological fact the idea that man without god is in a wretched state uh t.s eliot once uh talked about the i think it was the hollow men we described them as being distracted from distraction by distraction what a lovely line it's a beautiful thought uh it's very much along the pascalian line to live in a world without god that has no moral order in which case we move from one whim to another is just a way of distracting you from the fact that the human condition is wretched maybe a good part of christian piety is dependent upon this well he he tries to show us first of all and this was where the intellectual terrorism comes in that it is a fact that man is wretched without god and there's a lovely little passage is it 36 consider this as one of his thoughts kind of the morbid introspection involved he says anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself so who does not see it apart from young people whose lives are all noise diversions and thoughts of the future but take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction they feel their nullity without recognizing it recognizing it for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion there is an unpleasant possibility that that's the case uh those of you who are familiar with the work of kierkegaard will notice a certain spiritual resonance here if you have read either or where he talks about boredom yes the boredom the nothingness that pervades the world is commonly a goad to the kind of deep and profound piety that we see in the kind of the most extreme of the christian apologists so this is the kind of intellectual terror he wants to instill he wants to say when you pull away all the new flavors and all the new tastes and all the new experiences all the places you you might go to and all the things you might do when you take all these diversions and distractions away what are you and what do you amount to are you really happy if you're really happy then why don't you just stay in your room why is it you want to constantly deceive yourself by giving yourself new flavors tastes and experiences because your life is full of nothing and you do your best not to let yourself know that now that's intellectual terrorism i mean this is a really unpleasant account of the human condition now he wants to to attack the idea that people can be happy without god and he says look how wretched your condition really is and part two of his book was going to be about the happiness with god and he doesn't he doesn't cover that nearly as eloquently as he does the negative qualities of being without god but if we can concede the point to him that if we're wretched without god without god when we finally do admit god into our lives if there is such a thing that we would be happy i imagine being all powerful and omniscient and all such things that he would have the capacity of making us happy as well let's concede in that point the next part of the book this is what's interesting he says that nature is corrupt and this is proved by nature in other words think about what we were talking when i made the decision between the knowledges that are dependent and contingent upon reason and those that are contingent upon authority well what he's going to do or what he claims to intend to do is to investigate nature to show that nature in this physical sense is corrupt and that just the rational and reasonable inquiry into nature will show us that will show us the moral vacuum of the physical world maybe so i mean here i think he's on kind of thin ice i think it sounds to me like more or less an arbitrary distinction on his part but let's play along with these with his neuroses because it's very fruitful to see what comes of it the final part after he shows us that nature is corrupt he's going to say there is a redeemer and this is proved by scripture you see we've moved now from the kinds of knowledge knowledge of the natural world which is dependent upon reason to a different kind of knowledge which is dependent upon authority and tradition so the proof that there is a redeemer doesn't come from any rational process it's not that kind of knowledge the proof that there is a redeemer comes from your acceptance of scripture so far so good not an entirely plausible argument but we'll come to the little scorpion sting at the end of this when i move to the wager that he wants to make you see pascal has a fascinating part in the the paul says about a wager between an atheist and a religious believer or between an atheist and a religious believer and they both make the wager away with god or the universe and this is connected with his earlier mathematical researches when he was a young man he had a brief wild period and of course he felt morbidly guilty about that all for the rest of his life that was one of the sins he was atoning for among the things he did he worked out the theory of probability he made original and important contributions to mathematics of probability which hadn't been worked out then and of course the best application or at least the most immediate application of the theory of probability is gambling so the fact that he furthered the gambling and vice of the world was one more sin that he had to throw upon the heap of sins he had developed he is tremendously neurotic and the fact that he had helped people gamble helps people engage in a life of vice made him feel all the more that he had an obligation to undo the harm that he had done so he said well i assume that he thought something along the line that if i have mathematical ability and i can work out the theory of probability and make important contributions to it perhaps i can use these mathematical gifts to formulate a sort of religious teaching or kind of introduction to religion to religious thought that will improve the world rather than harm it that will increase virtue rather than vice what he does in the process of extending the realm of virtue rather than vice is develop what's called pascal's wager wonderful part and here's how it works you could think of pascal's wager as being essentially theology for accountants right in other words it's for those calculating kind of how can i put it up those could sort of calculating uh self-interested heteronomous minds that want to worship or that are willing to worship god are willing to accept the existence of god not because of some tremendous spiritual illumination not because they they've been inspired by some change in their experience but rather because it looks like a good bet what pascal ultimately shows us is that the smart money is on god and we will talk about whether we like that idea or not but let me explain to you what the id what the wager amounts to start with a nice mathematical proposition either god exists or he doesn't either a or not a that's all there is to it we'll go with the law of the excluded middle either exists or he doesn't kind of a mathematical distinction now you have to bet in other words you can't not bet you have to decide whether you believe in god or not so let's see what the what the smart bet is and how what sort of stance you should take in a condition of uncertainty well if you're an atheist suppose you bet that god doesn't exist okay well if you're right well then your life is meaningless and wretched then you got nothing to lose because your life is meaningless and wretched and if the world is wretched and it's a moral void and we live in a kind of of a horrifying aimless meandering towards extinction hell why not do it now what do you got to lose on the other hand if you're an atheist and god has really existed it really does exist down to the pit down to the bottom you're going to get the damnation you so richly deserve so if you're an atheist at best you end up with a meaningless aimless arbitrary life which holds no attraction for anyone because it's entirely without value if you're an atheist and you're wrong and god really exists well you get damned for all time and that's just what you deserve now let's think about the possibility of being a religious believer if you're a religious believer and it turns out there's no such thing as god well then you have one mistaken belief in your life but since life is arbitrary and meaningless and pointless anyway what difference does it make we hold all kinds of preposterous beliefs and if it turns out that this particular belief of yours is false well really you have nothing to lose life didn't amount to anything anyway so if you believe something ridiculous and kooky you're dead anyway what's it to you on the other hand if you are a religious believer and god really does exist off we go right away we go the smart money is on god i mean you have nothing to lose because the human condition human life is wretched and miserable and pointless and if if you accept that proposition this makes a certain amount of sense now there are a couple of things to note here number one is he does not believe that this is a rational proof of god's existence i believe that pascal would hold the view that such a demonstration is blasphemous it is not conclusive because it doesn't prove that there is such thing as god maybe life really is wretched and miserable and pointless and maybe it'll turn out that there is no such thing as god he doesn't believe that but he can't say that this demonstrates that god does exist what it demonstrates is that you have nothing to lose the smart money is on god this is theology for accountants now you might want to think about the the wager as being propa-dutic in other words it's a stimulus towards knowledge it pushes you in the direction of religious inquiry in other words it is supposed to drive you to despair you're supposed to be convinced of the fact that human life is wretched and you got nothing to lose even though this doesn't prove god exists because in fact it may be that life is just wretched and miserable and pointless uh what is it that a leader's fool says is it that a life is a tale told by an idiot full of sounded fury signifying nothing all right that's what we got well it might be that that's the case this doesn't prove that but since that's psychologically intolerable for just about anybody well then in that case perhaps we would want to accept the fact that religious inquiry is incumbent upon us the only way to make life bearable to prevent us from justifiably committing suicide is the search for religious illumination that pascal got in the night of fire he doesn't say that you can drive the night of fire by some mathematical process that's the kind of proud hubristic mathematical thinking you'd associate with the cartesians he says no god is inscrutable he gives his grace to whom he will but the least you can do is go look for it that's the intention of the wager it's a proper duty towards religious inquiry now what do we think about this what are we supposed to think about the idea that the smart money is on god god's a good bet you've got nothing to lose you're not amping up anything so why not go for it all well a couple of problems one it certainly seems that this will drive us to try and make contact with the divinity on account of the fact that we're self-interested and calculating and that we're inclined to to do ourselves a favor by believing in god rather than giving to god the glory and praise that he deserves in other words we're not doing this because god deserves to be worshipped and god is you know the creator and origin of all things we're doing it because we think we get something at the end in other words it's entirely self-interested there's no more selfish activity than searching for god on account of the fact you think it's a good bet perhaps god has a special place in hell i mean if you know dante's inferno there's a special place in hell for kind of religious accountants who do it because they think that it's a smart move right it's like outfoxing the tax man right and it has just the spiritual grandeur of you know of out foxing the tax man it has nothing to do with a religious or very little to do with religious desire it has to do with saving your own skin it is an extremely selfish kind of christianity and somehow that doesn't seem entirely compatible with christianity i mean one would assume that if we believe in the god of the bible that we do so because he's the god of the bible not because we that we get something out of it god doesn't owe us anything a second problem comes in suppose god likes the intellectual integrity of people who are caught up with a naturalistic conception of the world suppose he likes people that don't lie to themselves and tell themselves pretty stories like oh yeah god exists and don't worry about it as soon as you have the night of fire which other people might describe as a psychotic episode um maybe he likes the idea of people being intellectually honest maybe he says look people who make the best rationally of the world around them are the kind of people that god is willing to favor and willing to overlook the smallest of their sins conceivable pascal doesn't offer us much room for that he says look worm the world is a vacuum the world is miserable if you don't search for god you might as well cut your throat now these are not the thoughts of a happy man this is the thoughts of a morbidly introspective man that one suspects is on the brink of suicide and kind of brings himself back by whatever it is this amounts to uh and he has what i would call a sort of pessimistic augustinian conception of the human condition people are intrinsically depraved you started out sinful and then as you lived your life you got more sinful and then your sins compounded upon each other and by the time you became you came to the point where you realized what you are and you realized what the world around you was you had such a length of sins in behind you that you almost couldn't possibly atone for them without god's grace it would certainly be impossible we were all carrying around marley's chains of sin and those of us who don't think there is such thing have the longest possible chains the irony of this is the kind of thing pascal would relish now there are some things that should be considered here in the first case the enlightenment thinkers who followed the sort of cartesian plan of emancipated reason generally tried to find some secular salvation some secular this worldly improvement in the human condition in the realm of politics and i think it's not just true in the enlightenment that's true today those of us who have given up the idea of biblical religion are also the ones who try and create a sort of pseudo-secular or partially secular this worldly salvation by improving the world through political action right politics is in some respects the new substitute for theology that's where we want to get of this worldly salvation it's another people stop believing in salvation just they brought it down here well pascal has some things to say about that and naturally i mean you can guess the tone of them but these are the kind of things that you should just ruminate over what number am i looking for 533 yeah try this i think you'll like this this comment on politics we always picture plato and aristotle wearing long academic gowns but they were ordinary decent people like anyone else who enjoyed a laugh with their friends and when they amused themselves by composing their laws and politics they did it for fun it was the least philosophical and least serious part of their lives the most philosophical was living simply and without fuss if they wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules from mad house and if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believe themselves to be kings and emperors they humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible he does not like the idea of secularizing salvation either we get salvation in heaven or you might as well not waste your time down here there is no way to fundamentally improve the human condition death will take us all he is in fact an intellectual terrorist uh here's a nice part as well this is in some respects pascal reminds me of nietzsche not neces well first of all completely opposite in tone and opposite in their relationship to religion and theology but the fact that they both write beautiful epigrammatic writings and that they kind of hopscotch from one idea to the next without any necessary coherence between them and there's a beautiful section 166 yes in which he not only reminds me of nietzsche but also of kierkegaard another kind of deep dark morbid thinker and his discussion here will kind of sting us all he says uh we run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it we move on towards inevitable extinction trying to persuade ourselves that mortality isn't real was it ernest becker that wrote a book called the nut denial of death well perhaps it is that we have a psychological need not to think about the fact that people do die even us and that we give ourselves distractions we give ourselves things to do we undertake various arbitrary projects so that we can convince ourselves that death isn't real as soon as you do that you fall into the paschalian abyss you begin to look around wretchedness and despair even if they weren't there to begin with in the human condition are certainly there once you adopt this stance towards human life now uh one the last treatment of the human condition because there's so many good things here i mean this is the kind of book that i read because it's sort of perverse and fun the things that i like about pascal and nietzsche are the things that i like about this it's not necessarily the truth or falsehood of it but it's so witty and learned and does kind of goad you into thinking about things and thinking in a way that you wouldn't otherwise because into this prospect here's what what our lives are like imagine a number of men in chains all under sentence of death some of whom each day are butchered inside of the others those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows and look at each other with grief and despair await their turn this is an image of the human condition well i think it kind of speaks for itself we are either faced with immediate death or postponed death take your choice ultimately your number comes up if that doesn't drive you towards despair i'm not quite sure what will this morbid introspection this obsession about death strikes me either as true religious illumination or psych or neurosis verging towards psychosis it's really kind of hard to tell how this would be interpreted depends on what century you live in more than anything else the tenor of our times doesn't allow for this i mean if you say stuff like this just psychiatrist he puts you in bellevue it's true if you say this back in the time of of the of the writing of the bible back at the time of the old testament you're a prophet right just depends on what cultural context you're saying something like this in if you say oh yes god talked to me last night and i had the night of fire and i the god of abraham and isaac he just showed up well what do we do with this i think there are two approaches and these different ways of looking at this correspond to the two figures that i've been or two of the figures that i've been comparing pascal to and i would call it we can interpret pascal in the spirit of nietzsche or we can interpret pascal in the spirit of kierkegaard if we take the spirit of kierkegaard i think that pascal is so morbid and so bizarre and so far out there so extreme in his religiosity that grudgingly kierkegaard might have actually liked him now kierkegaard who described himself as that individual who thought that he was blazing a religious path would have to acknowledge that yeah he's roughly as morbid as i am and yeah he's roughly as wild intellectually as i am and okay this man is truly religious yeah what is it that they say in the gospel go sell all you have and follow me well there everything or nothing yeah what tsla says it requires not less than everything well okay pascal and kierkegaard are willing to say fine it requires everything i'm willing to go the whole way that's religion i mean even if it's wrong you've got to kind of admire it just for the single-minded obsession of it there's another approach to this though and i i find this attractive as well i like both kierkegaard and nature which is i guess my problem but nietzsche said and this is a beautiful line as well i will never forgive christianity for what it did to pascal no matter what else it does it may build hospitals it may make people nice to each other but look what it did to pascal he was a great and original scientific thinker he was a great and original mathematical thinker he was a uniquely gifted individual and this made him a nut this forced him over the edge where he gave up on this world where he devalued physical human life where he decided to abandon science and mathematics so that he could pursue these lunatic neurotic pipe dreams look how that has impoverished our culture look at how that tortured a man who would otherwise be a noble intellect i will never forgive christianity for what it did to pascal a pregnant and kind of frightening kind of terroristic evaluation now how am i going to how are we going to decide between these two well look i just work here right i don't know how to decide between them flip the coin adopt whatever stance you want come out of athens come out of jerusalem follow job follow prometheus however you want to do it either i think is a worthwhile way of looking at this problem it leads us to the problem of what we're supposed to do with in the interpretation of religious experience we come up with what nietzsche described as the boundaries of what wittgenstein described as the boundaries of language and the boundaries of thought and experience we can't go beyond those boundaries but the journey to the edge is well worth the trip

Channel: Michael Sugrue

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Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Authors, Renaissance, Pascal, Pensses

Id: rbl1DprliPE

Length: 45min 48sec (2748 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020