Contents
“Man is the most incomprehensible creation of nature for himself,” said the physicist and philosopher Blaise Pascal. – It is difficult for him to comprehend what the body is, even more difficult what the spirit is, and it is completely incomprehensible how the body can unite with the spirit. There is no task more insoluble for a man, and yet this is himself.
Andre Comte-Sponville – a modern French philosopher, author of many books and articles. At the age of 18, he lost faith in God and has since considered himself an atheist. His favorite themes are freedom, wisdom, the search for meaning.
Everyone knows the name of the brilliant scientist Pascal, at least as a unit of pressure measurement or the name of a programming language. He lived only 39 years, but managed to lay the foundations of several areas in mathematics, discovered atmospheric pressure, formulated the basic law of hydrostatics … However, it is not his scientific achievements that make Pascal a unique thinker, but the adjacent gift of a writer, mystic and connoisseur of the human soul. I do not know other people who, like Pascal, would equally deeply understand nature and man, would be so generously endowed with everything: reason, word and faith. He is often denied the right to be called a philosopher – after all, he did not invent his own system and wrote only two books: publicistically passionate “Letters to a Provincial”, calling for a living, sincere faith, and subtle, bewitchingly deep “Thoughts” – notes published by friends after his of death. But he did something else – he understood after Montaigne and long before Nietzsche the lies and hypocrisy of the world. This Christian believed in nothing—nothing but God. Everything else – secular life, politics, love – under his piercing gaze reveals our delusions, our smallness, our illusions.
Every person wants to be happy, says Pascal, but no one can achieve happiness on earth. “We never live, but only dispose to live; we always assume to be happy, but it is inevitable that we will never be happy.” To avoid misfortune is possible only through faith. If you don’t agree, you will have to deal with Pascal. And it’s not easy to beat him…
His dates
- July 19, 1623: born in Clermont-Ferrand to the nobleman Etienne Pascal.
- 1626: mother dies.
- 1631: Moves to Paris with his father and sisters.
- 1640: proves a theorem on the vertices of a hexagon lying on a conic section.
- 1642: Invents the calculating machine (a box filled with gears connected to each other). Receives a patent for it from the King of France.
- 1646-1647: Experiments with emptiness and atmospheric pressure.
- 1649-1653: lives the social life in Paris.
- 1651: father dies. Sister Jacqueline goes to a convent.
- 1654: completed a series of papers in mathematics.
- 1656-1657: writes Letters to a Provincial; because of them, the Jesuits vowed to find and throw Paxal’s body out of the coffin.
- 1658: deteriorating health; begins to write “Thoughts”.
- 19 August 1662: dies in Paris.
Keys to Understanding
Our greatness… and insignificance
Compared to infinity, he is nothing, and compared to nothingness, he is everything. However, man transcends the Universe that embraces him: he is higher than it, because he thinks. The main danger for a person is the desire to forget. Boredom is unbearable for us: being bored, we cannot forget that non-existence awaits us. Hence the many goals that are valuable not in themselves, but because they occupy us, give us a reason to act.
This is what Pascal calls entertainment: everything we do, we do with the aim of distraction and forgetting. Forget that we are unhappy and that we have to die. In the last years of his life, Pascal stopped doing science, apparently considering it to be entertainment. He made an exception only once: in order to escape from a toothache, he studied the properties of a cycloid – the trajectory of a point on the rim of a rolling wheel – and solved all the problems associated with it.
Hear the flesh, mind and heart
Pascal identifies three levels of human life: the flesh, where strength and lust operate, the mind, where evidence reigns, and the heart, where love rules. These levels are incompatible: force cannot do anything against truth, and truth cannot do anything against force; and neither one nor the other can replace love. Pascal’s conclusion is insightful and strict: in our world, force always wins, but it is neither an argument (for the mind) nor a value (for the heart). Man feels God not with his mind, but with his heart.
At the same time, scientific knowledge is autonomous and distinct from the truths of faith. Pascal was lucky: he experienced the highest insights both in mind and heart. On November 23, 1654, he had an experience of the Divine presence, which he wrote on a piece of parchment: “Joy. Joy. Joy. Tears of happiness…”
Bet on God
It is unlikely that anyone other than Pascal would define the rationality of religious belief in terms of game theory. Pascal argues as follows: God either exists or He does not exist. We cannot know if God exists. But we must make a choice, because it is a matter of life and death. How to proceed? Pascal replaces the traditional idea of proving the existence of God with the logic of betting. When does it make sense to bet? When the bet is small compared to the possible win. Here the rate is finite: our earthly life, but you can win an eternity of endless happiness. Once there is an “equal chance to win and lose” and a huge gap between betting and winning, there is no more room for doubt: you need to bet on God. This does not prove that he exists, but shows that it makes sense to believe in his existence: “If you win, you get everything; If you lose, you won’t lose anything.”
About it
- Blaise Pascal Thoughts. Small essays. Letters” AST, Pushkin Library, 2003.
- Boris Tarasov “Pascal” Young Guard, 2006.