Blaise Pascal · Mathematics
The <em>Pensées</em> on the human condition: the being suspended between the infinitely large and the infinitely small; the ‘thinking reed,’ feeble yet aware; the heart that knows what reason cannot prove; and the point where mathematics ends and the existential begins.
In the fragments gathered as the Pensées, Pascal draws one of the most vertiginous pictures of the human place in the universe ever written. Look outward, he says, and the cosmos opens into the infinitely large: the earth a point, the sun a speck, the visible heavens an imperceptible dot in the immensity of space, which itself has no bound. Now look inward, into a mite, a drop of water, an atom, and you fall into the infinitely small: within the tiniest thing lies another whole universe, endlessly divisible, worlds within worlds without end. The human being is stranded between these two abysses, the infinitely large and the infinitely small, equally unable to reach either extreme. We are, Pascal writes, a nothing compared with the infinite, an everything compared with nothingness, a middle point between all and nothing, forever suspended in the vast middle where neither extreme can be grasped.
And yet Pascal refuses to let this end in mere humiliation, because he sees in the human being a strange and redeeming greatness. Man is the feeblest thing in nature, he says - a reed, which the least accident can destroy; a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But he is a thinking reed. The whole universe does not need to arm itself to crush him, yet even if the universe did crush him, the man would be nobler than his killer, because he knows that he is dying and knows the advantage the universe has over him - and the universe knows nothing at all. Here is the pivot of Pascal’s anthropology: our dignity lies not in size, strength, or duration, in none of which can we compete with the cosmos, but in thought. A single consciousness that knows its own condition outweighs the whole mindless immensity that overwhelms it. All our worth, then, consists in thought, and the task of life is to think well.
Pascal’s word for this deeper faculty is the heart (in French, le coeur), and it is easy to misread. He does not mean mere sentiment or feeling, opposed to thought. He means an intuitive power of direct knowing that lies beneath and beyond discursive reason - the faculty by which we immediately apprehend first principles, and by which, he believed, God is ultimately known. Reason works by chains of inference, moving step by step from premises to conclusions; but the premises themselves, and the deepest realities, are grasped all at once by the heart, not argued to. Far from being reason’s enemy, the heart is its ground: without the heart’s immediate certainties, reason would have nothing to build on. Pascal’s most quoted line is often sentimentalized, but its real meaning is epistemological and profound: there is a whole order of truth that argument cannot deliver, and it is known by a knowing that is not reasoning.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Pascal placed the human being between two infinites (the infinitely large and infinitely small), called us a ‘thinking reed’ whose dignity is thought, and held that reason has strict limits - that first principles and the greatest matters are known by the ‘heart,’ not by demonstration. Explain these i…
Leads to Michel de Montaigne.
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