Inspired by his father, Blaise Pascal, born in 1623, took an early interest in mathematics and wrote an essay on conic sections at the age of just 16. He invented a calculating machine, which was completed in 1652 and sent by Pascal to Queen Christine of Sweden, among others. Shortly afterwards, he began to work on the subject of the vacuum, about which he also corresponded with Descartes. Mathematics, geometry and arithmetic accompanied him throughout his life and Pascal was one of the outstanding mathematicians of his time. He was constantly preoccupied with the theory of probability, which he discussed with prominent contemporary mathematicians such as Fermat, a topic that naturally interested the theorists of gambling in particular. For Pascal, considerations of probability theory would later become relevant in a completely different context, namely in the question of the existence of God.
In 1646, Pascal's family converted to Jansenism, and he himself subsequently devoted himself to intensive biblical and theological studies, as a Jansenist above all to the writings of St Augustine and their exegete, Cornelius Jansenius (Augustinus, 1640). After a serious illness in 1647, Pascal moved the centre of his life to Paris. In his middle years, he moved in fashionable Parisian salons and in the milieu of learned libertinism, epicureanism and scepticism - this is also of great importance for his later philosophy of religion.
Following a personal crisis linked to a religious vision - this is documented in a mémorial - Pascal gave up his life in Parisian society, withdrew more and more from the world and came into close contact with Port-Royal, the nunnery where his sister Jacqueline held a leading position from 1652. There he lived in the Granges, the estate of the convent, where a circle of educated aristocratic men, the so-called solitaires, gathered for meditation and to teach pupils, including Jean Racine. Here he also came into close contact with a group led by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, who were influenced by Augustinian-Jansenism, scientific ambition and Cartesian rationalism. Arnauld and Nicole wrote a grammar and, probably with Pascal's co-operation, the influential Logic of Port-Royal. In the milieu of the rationalist-coloured wing of Port-Royal around Arnauld, Pascal not only deepened his theological knowledge, but also honed his logical skills; Albert Camus, an attentive reader of Pascal, attested that he was "skilled in intellectual gymnastics" (Camus, Carnets II, 78).
As a Jansenist, Pascal polemicised sharply against the Jesuits under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte in his fictitious Lettres provinciales (1656/57), which he accused of probabilistic casuistry and moral laxism. The work was placed on the Index. It was later to become an often unacknowledged model for Enlightenment polemics in France and especially for the polemicist and church critic Voltaire - a remarkable circumstance considering Pascal's deep piety and, in particular, his pronounced belief in miracles.
From today's perspective, it may seem strange that Pascal, a mind well schooled in physics, mathematics and logic, productive as a mathematician for years and until the end of his life and in dialogue with Descartes, Huygens and Fermat, among others, probably one of the most intelligent minds of his time, a polemicist with all his wits about him, was prepared to place the experience of Christian miracles at the centre of his thinking. In 1656, a niece of Pascal's was cured of a serious eye condition when she touched a relic with a thorn from the crown of Christ in Port-Royal. In view of this so-called miracle of the holy thorn, Pascal drew up the plan for an Apologie de la religion chrétienne, from which the famous Pensées (written at the end of the 1650s) emerged, which form the centre of his non-scientific work. Pascal attributed an essential function to miracles in the revelation of God to mankind and demanded that Christians believe in miracles, or rather: he hoped that Christians would believe in miracles as divine grace. His resolute belief in miracles brought prominent philosophers onto the scene as critics in the 18th century, such as David Hume and - despite his admiration for Pascal - provoked the sarcasm of Voltaire.
Blaise Pascal was an extraordinarily versatile man of the highest intellectual rigour. But not only that. Among his most astonishing achievements were his technical, logistical and economic initiatives and innovations for the common good, such as the draining of marshes and the introduction of a public transport system in Paris, the so-called carrosses à cinq sols. In August 1662, Pascal, who had suffered from serious illnesses and severe mental crises throughout his life, died at the age of just 39. He bequeathed half of his fortune to charitable organisations.
Types of science
Pascal wrote mathematical works, including on conic sections, physical works, including on the vacuum, and important theological and philosophical writings, the most important of which are the Pensées. He also wrote smaller philosophical works of various kinds, such as methodological works like De l'esprit géométrique, but also texts on rhetoric and courtly behavioural treatises, which were common in his time. Given the diversity of his intellectual interests and activities, he could be described as a polymath. There were quite a few of them in the republic of scholars of the 17th century, Leibniz standing out among them. And yet Pascal was not a polyhistor like Leibniz. This is because Pascal was less recognised in the field of historical erudition and humanist scholarship than other prominent contemporaries, including Leibniz.
As early as 1650, Pascal set out his understanding of science and progress in a short essay published more than a hundred years later (Préface au Traité sur le vide). Here, a categorical distinction is made between the fields of knowledge that we have labelled the humanities and the natural sciences since the end of the 19th century. This essay, clearly influenced by Francis Bacon's view of science, is an early contribution to the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes that took place in France at the end of the 17th century. According to Pascal, in the natural sciences and mathematics, the rational sciences, knowledge grows continuously through rationally deduced or empirically-experimentally driven progress. In this type of science, the moderns and their contemporaries are fundamentally superior to the ancients (antiquity and post-antiquity). The sciences opposed to the natural sciences, which Pascal called the sciences of memory, include above all history, philology, jurisprudence and theology. According to Pascal, these sciences are based on authority, on testimonies and texts that should be located as close as possible to the authoritative sources. Accordingly, progress in this type of science consists of ever closer approximation to the sources recognised as such. In the field of this authority-based type of scholarship, there is no progressive-accumulative progress, but rather a source-based, constantly deepening knowledge.
Pascal distinguishes between two types of science and correspondingly different models of gaining knowledge and scientific progress. In the field of rational and empirical sciences, there is progress in specific areas - the corresponding differentiation and pluralisation of progress are, after all, prerequisites of the Enlightenment concept of unlimited progress. According to his conception of the historical and hermeneutical sciences, gaining knowledge can only consist in an ever closer approximation to the original sources, the Bible, the historical source, the legal text. Pascal's view can be summarised as follows: the mathematicians, scientists and physicians of the past should only be given historical significance, without considering their findings, which are in need of revision, to be valid today. Theologians and the Church Fathers, on the other hand, could be followed in the interpretation of Scripture, as they, as exegetes, followed the principle of authority; anyone seeking innovations in theology in the present, however, had not understood the principle of the sciences of memory and risked becoming a heretic.
In accordance with the scientific typology outlined above, Pascal worked differently as a mathematician and natural scientist than as a philosopher and theologian: namely more in exchange with other scientists, more open-ended and more competitive. As a philosopher, on the other hand, he was above all a theologian and as such, on the one hand contentious (cf. Lettres provinciales), but on the other hand and above all un grand solitaire, who sought to fathom the truth of man and the truth of God in fragmentary reflections (cf. Pensées).
A sceptical reason
The early modern philosopher who was probably the most widely read in France in the 17th century was Michel de Montaigne with his Essais, first published in 1580 and popularised by Pierre Charron in a kind of digest under the title De la sagesse (1601). Montaigne popularised ancient scepticism and its presentation by Sextus Empiricus in early modern Europe, both moderate academic scepticism and radical Pyrrhonian scepticism. He also advocated the so-called doctrine of double truth and, associated with this, gave fideism a clear profile in early modern Europe. In the longest of his Essais, the Apologie de Raimond Sebond, Montaigne questions the scope of human knowledge based on the translation and commentary of a 15th century theological text, the Theologia naturalis by Raimundus Sebundus. The truth of God proves to be inaccessible to human reason. According to Montaigne, there is a truth of reason and a truth of faith. The latter can only be grasped by taking a leap of faith, sola fide. The truth of God is transcendent and beyond human cognition. He developed the fideistic position, admittedly not as a theologian and rather unsystematically, in contrast to traditional natural or rational theology, which also assumed the competence of human reason in theological questions and religious matters. And it is precisely this fideistic line that leads to Pascal.
But human reason, Montaigne continues in the aforementioned essay, is not a very reliable instrument for recognising the truth, even beyond its incompetence in theological questions. It is thoroughly fallible and prone to error. This fallibility of human cognition affects not only human reason, but also the human sensory apparatus. Time and again, the senses deceive man, and Montaigne cites numerous examples of sensory deception in order to come to the conclusion that neither rational nor sensory-empirical human cognition is sustainable and leads to the realisation of objective truth. The academic scepticism of antiquity summarised this finding in the maxim that we know that we know nothing. Montaigne refers to this, but is more in line with the more radical Pyrrhonian sceptics, who hold the opinion that one cannot even know whether one knows or can know something and must therefore refrain from any opinion. Pascal, for his part, pointed out the characteristic interrogative form of Montaigne's sceptical motto Que sais-je?; for to ask What do I know? avoids the assertoric form of statement of: I do not know whether I know or can know something.
Like Descartes, Pascal now started from the sceptical starting point powerfully set out by Montaigne. The sceptical option was an obvious one in view of his contacts with fashionable Parisian milieus and libertinist circles. Like Arnauld, Nicole and other intellectual representatives of Port-Royal, on the other hand, he shared Cartesian rationalism and its method of mos geometricus in many areas. However, Pascal arrived at a position beyond scepticism and rationalism: "The last step of reason is to recognise that there are infinitely many things that go beyond it."
Reason is self-limiting, but divine grace works into its self-knowledge. For Pascal, reason is confronted with its limits in the face of divine transcendence and, thanks to divine grace, opens itself to the possibility of faith; indeed, it demands faith. Man does not come to the knowledge of God through esprit de géométrie, but through esprit de finesse and cœur. The heart that strives for the truth and conviction of faith receives revelation from the Holy Scriptures and from history on the basis of divine grace. In this context, Pascal arrived at the famous formulation: "Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point." "The heart has its reasons that reason does not know." (The French play on words is difficult to reproduce in German).
Pascal dealt with Montaigne's scepticism and Epictetus' stoicism in an Entretien avec M. de Sacy sur Epictète et Montaigne. Pascal accuses Epictetus' stoicism of overestimating and overtaxing man. Montaigne's scepticism, on the other hand, denies man's capacity for knowledge and thus denies him his dignity - an objection that, of course, can only apply to Montaigne's Apologie de Raimond Sebond, as Montaigne is by no means consistently critical of reason in his Essais. Pascal's assessment of reason is at least as ambivalent as Montaigne's, in which reason is predominantly characterised as a valuable and dynamic human faculty: Both Pascal and Montaigne emphasise and appreciate the power of human reason and discredit it no less emphatically.
Pascal develops an anthropology according to which man fell into misery after the fall into sin and is a "dethroned king". Only through grace - a guiding concept of Jansenism - could he attain greatness. Only the Christian approach can do full justice to the nature of man. This is the initial finding of the Pensées, which deal with questions of anthropology and religion, but also psychology, morality and politics. Pascal's anthropology moves between the pessimism of Augustinian anthropology and the optimism of Montaigne's anthropology. Montaigne is very present in the Pensées with his serene observations on human nature, but Pascal turns Montaigne's forbearance towards the weaknesses of man, his tendency to dissipate and his tendency to repress his mortality, into a diagnosis of the anxiety and fearfulness of fallen man, which can only be healed by divine grace.
Pensées: curing scepticism
Pascal left behind around 1,000 notes and notations of varying length and elaboration, which were intended to form an 'apology' of the Christian religion. Their intended overall arrangement is opaque and remains controversial to this day. Over the course of time, there have been many different editions of Pascal's main philosophical work, often philological masterpieces. The first edition of the Pensées was published as early as 1670 by his fellow Jansenists. One of the prominent later editions was organised by two of the most important French Enlightenment philosophers in the 1770s, namely the mathematician and philosopher Condorcet and Voltaire. Among the prominent Catholic translators and commentators of the Pensées in German-speaking countries were Romano Guardini and Hans Urs von Balthasar.
There are several important reasons for the discontinuous and always confusing history of Pascal's philosophical impact. These include, first and foremost, the arrangement of the Pensées, which has been disputed philologically for centuries, as a cardinal philosophical problem of the Pensées: that of the question of ordre reflected and thematised by Pascal, of order as such in the field of tension between mathematical-geometric order on the one hand and dialectical-rhetorical-discursive order on the otherand of discursive order also in its performative meaning (you only find the right beginning when you have already reached the end).
However, there is also an important linguistic and conceptual reason for the sometimes confusing philosophical impact of the Pensées: Pascal's philosophical language is philosophically pre-terminological, and from a later perspective, many of the terms he uses - such as le cœur - prove to be philosophically difficult to grasp. However, this pre-terminological terminology is not least a consequence of his conception of reason as a conceptual faculty and the heart as a faculty of intuitive insight.
The aim of the apology of the Christian religion in the Pensées is to lead unbelievers, sceptics and free spirits to faith. The anthropological prerequisite for man's need for redemption is his cognitive and emotional, moral and social misery as a result of the Fall. Pascal's approach, one could say somewhat superficially, is not only based on empiricism as a physicist and technician, but also as an anthropologist and philosopher. In this respect, he is rightly categorised as belonging to the great French tradition of moralism. The basis of knowledge is the experience that man has with himself as a thinking being, with his life as an individual and in society. Although fallen man is impoverished and corrupted, he still longs for true knowledge, for the good and the right life. Of course, he repeatedly fails to fulfil this inner destiny by obeying impulses, chasing after false goods and values and seeking distraction instead of remaining alone in his room: the pursuit of possessions, offices, high status, a restless thirst for fame, which was probably not entirely alien to Pascal himself, all this ties man to the earthly world and alienates him from his actual transcendent destiny. Only in God can he find himself. Only as a seeker of God can he also be a morally good person. Man without God hypostatises himself in a reprehensible way: "The ego is hateful", is another much-quoted formulation from Pascal's Pensées that requires explanation.
In the Pensées, Pascal characterises Christian morality as a combination of love of God and love of neighbour. His numerous and varied charitable activities testify to the fact that he personally subordinated his actions to this moral directive. Pascal justifies the Christian belief in God through the history of revelation. The self-revelation of a God, whom he understood in Jansenist terms as a deus absconditus, a hidden God, can therefore be deduced from signs: That Jesus Christ lived and worked on earth, that the prophecies of the Old Testament were fulfilled in him, can be recognised in this way by an understanding and believing person. Pascal reads the Holy Scriptures in a typological-figurative way. God has also revealed himself to man in miracles, which necessarily remain mysterious to human reason, but which, when God shows this grace to man, are revealed to his heart as signs of divine truth. Without the willingness of the heart, these signs cannot be deciphered. The person who experiences grace, whose heart is ready, i.e. permeated by love for God, needs no rational proof of divine truth. Such proofs cannot even exist; Descartes' ontological proof of God comes to nothing.
The bet
The wager on the existence of God can be considered the most eccentric piece of theory in the Pensées, and it is hardly comprehensible outside of its immediate context. The context of this passage and its concretely dialogical structure must be borne in mind in order to understand the wager.
Pascal's wager on the existence of God is based on probabilistic considerations and shows that it is more advantageous, more reasonable in a pragmatic sense, to believe in God than not to believe in him. At the centre of the text is a wager on the existence of God, which Pascal invites an agnostic free spirit who is indifferent to questions of faith to make. Betting comes naturally to a free spirit, as the wager reflects his scepticism about knowledge and his willingness to take risks. Typologically, the free spirit is a gambler and a daredevil who, however, seeks to arm himself against the risks of loss in gambling through probabilistic considerations. The Chevalier de Méré, a libertine who is possibly behind the libertinist interlocutor in Pascal's wager, had corresponded with Pascal about probability calculations in the context of gambling and inspired Pascal to carry out corresponding studies. The wager (le pari), this short, central section of the Pensées, must necessarily remain incomprehensible if one does not clearly recognise its dialogical structure (some editions and translations lack typographical references to this conversational structure, in particular inverted commas or inverted commas). Although it is irrelevant to the structure of the argument itself, it is important to bear in mind that Pascal himself was at times a free spirit and that the dialogical constellation of the text and the apologetic intention of the Pensées in general can therefore also be read as an inner dialogue between the former libertine and sceptic Pascal and the believing Pascal of Port-Royal.
This wager on the existence of God, for which Pascal wants to win over the free spirit, is not about a rational proof of God. "La raison n'y peut rien déterminer." "Reason can determine nothing." (déterminer: to decide). However, Pascal shows that belief in God is no more contrary to reason than an indifferentist, agnostic attitude. The text stages a fictitious conversation between an unbelieving libertarian and the believing Pascal, who asks the latter to decide in favour of image or scripture, i.e. for or against belief in God, as in a coin toss. The anthropological premise is important: Man must bet. The decision to bet on the existence of God is not left to man, but he must bet, he must position himself on the question of God and cannot indifferently pull himself out of the affair as an agnostic.
"Yes, but you have to bet. It's not voluntary. You are involved. [(...) il faut parier. Cela n'est pas volontaire, vous êtes embarqué(s).] So what do you decide in favour of? Let's check; since you have to choose, let's check what is least in your interest. [...] If you win, you win everything, and if you lose, you lose nothing: bet, then, without hesitation, that he [God] is."
Since the freethinker is forced to take a position on the question of God, Pascal can use a probabilistic calculation to make it clear to him that it is more advisable to decide in favour of God than against him. If God exists, he wins everything if he has bet on God's existence; if God does not exist, he loses nothing if he has wrongly bet on God's existence.
The actual paradox of Pascal's complicated game of thought, which is intended to pave the way to faith, lies in the following: Pascal, who consistently relies on the willpower of the human heart, bestowed by divine grace, in order to arrive at faith, to a certain extent surpasses the rationalism of the traditional proofs of God, which he criticises, with his wager and makes coldly calculating reason, rather than the sensitive heart, the standard for deciding for or against faith in God. He is well aware of this paradox, so that he writes at the end of the text fragment: "If this speech pleases you and seems powerful to you, know that it was written by a man who fell on his knees before and after to ask this infinite and indivisible being, to whom he submits his whole being, that he also submits your being for your own good and for his glory, and that power thus unites with this lowliness."
In view of the mathematically justified decision-theoretical option of betting on the existence of God, the libertine must admit defeat. He has allowed himself to be convinced, firstly, that he has to bet, and secondly, that he is acting pragmatically rationally when he bets on the existence of God. But even if he admits defeat and accepts God's existence, having been persuaded by the power of the better argument, this rational, pragmatic, mathematically induced willingness to accept God's existence is by no means linked to a genuine conviction of faith. Credere non potest homo nisi volens, the church fathers had already found. And even if someone wants to believe unconditionally, they may not be able to believe. Faith cannot be forced.
According to Pascal towards the end of the text, a genuine conviction of faith can and must, if necessary, be forced through various practices of self-discipline and religious habitualisation: Humility, sacrificium intellectus, self-mortification, mechanical familiarisation with ritual religious practices: "The external must be united with the internal in order to reach God; that is, one should fall on one's knees, pray with one's lips, etc., so that the proud man, who did not want to submit to God, may now be subject to the creature." Those who do not believe but want to believe must undergo a process of self-conditioning and habitualisation. He simulates, imitates and to a certain extent hypothetically practices the life of a believer: "Quite naturally, the same will lead you to faith and humble your mind." (German translation imprecise: "Naturellement même cela vous fera croire et vous abêtira."; abêtira: a multifaceted term; Nietzsche will take up this expression by Pascal). In a philosophical-theological controversy, Pascal's practices of forcing faith were discussed as a question of to deceive oneself into faith.
The libertine's path from scepticism to faith must therefore pass through three stages: from reason to habit to the heart: "There are three means of believing: reason, habit and inspiration. [...] one must open one's mind to the evidence and strengthen oneself in it through habit, but one must also make oneself receptive to the inspirations through humiliations, which alone can produce the true and salutary effect."
History of impact
As a scientist, Pascal impressed great thinkers such as Leibniz and, as a scientist and philosopher, won over Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Condorcet - on the other hand, it should also be clear after what has been said why, as a devout Christian who was prepared to sacrificium intellectus, he also irritated Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and repelled critics of Christianity such as Nietzsche. On the other hand, Nietzsche also repeatedly praised Pascal: "Pascal, whom I almost love, because he has taught me infinitely: the only logical Christian." (Nietzsche, letter to Georg Brandes, 20 November 1888) It is not only Pascal who divides opinion. Rather, great minds of the calibre of Voltaire and Nietzsche also reflected in Pascal the ambivalences of their own thinking.
Excursus: Pascal and Wittgenstein
In researching the history of the impact of Pascal's work, this is a stage of reception that should be given more attention by Pascal research, as it also provides an interesting new perspective on Pascal. One can assume a substantial influence of Pascal on Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, who as an intellectual personality and in his mathematical-logical and philosophical double talent was probably quite similar to Pascal, read Pascal's Lettres Provinciales and above all the Pensées. Traces of such an influence can be found in his philosophy of religion and his attitude to mysticism, in the literary-discursive form of his philosophy, in his conception of practices, in his anti-Cartesianism, in his conception of philosophy.
Even from a distance, consonances in the philosophy of religion between the two thinkers deeply indebted to St Augustine can be seen in Wittgenstein's Lectures on Religious Belief (1938), for example with regard to religion as the exercise of a practice. Substantial points of contact with Pascal have been found in Wittgenstein's analysis of the feeling of God. The extent to which fideistic positions can be attributed to Wittgenstein has been discussed several times. Moreover, both Pascal and Wittgenstein personally testified to the importance of active charity.
From a philosophical point of view: A parallel study of Wittgenstein's writing On Certainty and Pascal's Pensées will lead one to the conviction that Wittgenstein's reflections on scepticism, certainty and faith were developed in critical dialogue with Pascal's Pensées, and presumably not, or not exclusively, mediated through third parties, but in a direct dialogue. It is not only on the propositional level of insights into the status of certainty, the untenability of radical scepticism and the abysmal nature of faith as a mode of holding for-true that Wittgenstein's writing, itself an ensemble of fragments, unmistakably shows the influence of the fragment collection of the Pensées. Rather, this influence, or more correctly: this inspiration by Pascal, is also evident in the heuristic function and performative dimension of an epistemically founded fluid discursive order of the text arrangement ("La dernière chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage, est de savoir celle qu'il faut mettre la première."; Engl. correctly: "The last thing one finds when writing a work is the insight into what one must put at the beginning."). One might even read On Certainty, over and above the debate with George Edward Moore, as a dialogue in disguise with Pascal, just as Pascal himself had staged a dialogue in disguise with a libertinist, above all, but not only in the wager. Disguised means: not even typographically marked as a dialogue - the reader must first of all recognise that it is a dialogue.
Further striking similarities beyond On Certainty can be found in the importance of practice and practices in the thinking of both authors, similarities between Wittgenstein's concepts of training, therapy and Pascal's instructions on habitualisation. And finally: Wittgenstein's eccentric remarks about philosophising may be perceived as an echo of Pascal's view that in order to be a true philosopher, one must make fun of philosophy: "Se moquer de la philosophie, c'est vraiment philosopher." Incidentally, this is a topos handed down by Montaigne, and Montaigne was also one of Wittgenstein's readers. The paths of tradition are tortuous and hold many a surprise in store for those who seek out the more remote sources.
