## 1. Life and Works




Pascal was born in Clermont (now Clermont-Ferrand), France, on 19 June 1623, and died
thirty-nine years later in Paris (19 August 1662). Following his
mother's death when he was three years old, Blaise was reared by his
father, Etienne, in the company of his two sisters, Gilberte
(b. 1620) and Jacqueline (b. 1625). Later, in Paris, the family hired
a maid named Louise Delfault, who became effectively a member of the
close-knit family. Pascal's father was an accomplished mathematician,
and he provided the only formal education that his son enjoyed. As
Carraud (1992: Chapter 2) shows, this arrangement was unique in the
seventeenth century for a young man of Pascal's social status. He was
never trained in theology or the philosophy of the schools, and his
exclusively domestic education focused initially on classical
languages and mathematics. The decision to educate Pascal at home was
motivated by the fact that he suffered from very poor health for most
of his life, beginning at the age of two. Although his sister,
Gilberte, may have exaggerated in her hagiographical biography, *La
vie de M. Pascal*, she reported Pascal as claiming that
"from the age of eighteen, he never passed a day without
pain" (I, 67: all references to Pascal's works are to Pascal,
1998/2000, with volume and page number). He continued to be so ill
that, at the age of twenty-four, he could tolerate no food other than
in liquid form, which his sisters or his nurse warmed and fed to him
drop by drop (*Vie*: I, 69). Gilberte's biography also
confirms that, as his sisters matured, they assumed many of the
nursing responsibilities for their infirm brother that would otherwise
have been provided by his mother had she not died prematurely.




The Pascal family moved residence frequently, for political and
financial reasons. They transferred initially to Paris in November
1631, although Etienne was forced to return seven years later to
his original home in what had meantime become Clermont-Ferrand, because he
expressed public dissent about the crown's fiscal policies.
France had declared war on Spain in 1635, and this
intermittent campaign lasted for most of Blaise Pascal's life.
The international and local political context in which Pascal lived, together
with very public disputes between competing religious and theological
traditions in which he participated, helped determine the issues to
which he contributed philosophical comments in the 1640s and 1650s.
For example, following the revolt of the Nu-Pieds in Normandy in July 1639,
Pascal's father was awarded a new post as a tax collector in
Rouen, to which he moved in 1639; his son, Blaise, followed in 1640. While still
in Paris, he had written the short *Essai pour les coniques*
(1640) and, despite his youth, had been introduced to the Mersenne circle by
his father as a promising young mathematician. Later at Rouen he developed
the first prototype of his calculating machine (1645), and began to
experiment with mercury barometers. Pascal's introduction to
barometric experiments occurred by chance when the royal engineer,
Pierre Petit (1598-1667), passed through Rouen in September 1646
and informed both Pascals, father and son, about Evangelista Torricelli's
experiments in Italy. Pascal performed experiments with mercury
barometers initially in Rouen and Paris, and published
*Experiences nouvelles touchant la vide* in 1647. Since
he was too ill to do so himself, he arranged for his brother-in-law,
Florin Perier, to conduct on his behalf one of the most famous
experiments of the scientific revolution on the puy-de-Dome, in
the Auvergne.




Perier arranged for two similar barometric tubes to be
filled with mercury, on 19 September 1648. He left one at the bottom of
the mountain, and charged a local friar to keep watch during the day
and note any changes in the height of the mercury. Together with other
witnesses, Perier climbed the mountain and took readings of the
height of the mercury on the mountain top, and subsequently at two
intermediate places on their return journey down the mountainside. As
expected, the height of the mercury column varied inversely with the height
(above sea-level) at which the measurements were taken. When the
experimenters rejoined the friar at the bottom of the mountain and
compared the measurements on both tubes, they concurred exactly. The
friar reported that, throughout the day, there had been no variation in
the height of the mercury column that he observed, "despite the
fact that the weather was very changeable, sometimes calm, sometimes
rainy, sometimes very foggy and sometimes windy" (I, 433).
The results of this experiment were published as *Recit de la
grande experience de l'equilibre des liqueurs*
(1648). Pascal concluded, mistakenly, that the experiment guaranteed his
interpretation of its results [see below, Section 4].




Pascal's initial encounter with Jansenism had occurred when he was
twenty-two years old. His father slipped on ice and dislocated or
broke his thigh in January 1646. Following the accident, the Deschamps
brothers, who had bone-setting and nursing skills, came to live in the
Pascal household at Rouen for three months. They introduced the family
to the strict observance of Christianity inspired by the Dutch
theologian, Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), and the French
theologian, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, who is more commonly known as
the Abbe de Saint-Cyran (1581-1643). The evangelical work
of the Deschamps brothers relied partly on Jansen's short treatise,
the *Discours sur la reformation le l'homme
interieur*, which was based on the text of I John 2:16:
"For all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh
and the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life, which is not
of the Father but is of this world." Jansen taught that a desire
for knowledge was one form of concupiscence, and he argued that from
this "illness ... arises the investigation of nature's
secrets (which are irrelevant to us), knowledge of which is useless,
and which men do not wish to know except for the sake of knowing
them" (Jansen 2004: 24). Jansen recommended that Christians
should turn aside from the pride and concupiscence of human knowledge
and scientific investigations, and that they should concentrate
exclusively on knowledge of God. While this encounter with Jansenist
theology is sometimes described as Pascal's first conversion, it is
unlikely that he had already made the definitive choice about the
insignificance of mathematical and scientific work that characterised
his change of heart in the 1650s. He returned to Paris with his
sister, Jacqueline, in 1647. Descartes met him there, in September
1647, during an extended trip to Paris from his
usual residence in the north of Holland, and discussed with Pascal the
results they might expect if they conducted the kind of experiment
that was subsequently performed on the puy-de-Dome.




The Pascal family (Etienne, Blaise, and Jacqueline) left Paris
again during the civil war known as the Fronde (1648), and they
returned later that year to a new address in the French capital. The
settlement agreed by Mazarin and the regent with
the *parlement* to end the Fronde meant that Etienne had
become redundant as a tax-collector in Rouen. The return to Paris was
followed within a few years by a radical change in the emotional and
nursing support that Blaise Pascal had enjoyed since his earliest
years. His older sister Gilberte had married Florin Perier in
June 1641 and had moved to Clermont-Ferrand. However, his younger
sister, Jacqueline, who had continued to act as his personal
assistant, expressed a desire, in May 1648, to become a nun. She
wanted to enter the Port-Royal convent in Paris, which was under the
spiritual supervision of Jansenists and in which one of Arnauld's
sisters was a prominent Abbess. Etienne's opposition caused
Jacqueline to defer implementing her decision as long as he was still
alive. However, four months after her father's death in 1651, and
despite her brother's opposition, Jacqueline Pascal joined
Port-Royal. Then, for the first time in his life, Blaise Pascal was
alone and still in poor health. He soon began to accept spiritual
guidance from his sister Jacqueline and subsequently from a prominent
Jansenist, Antoine Singlin (1607-64).




In the summer of 1654, Pascal returned briefly to mathematics in
correspondence with Pierre Fermat (1601-65) about calculating
probabilities associated with gambling. He summarized his findings in
the
*Traite du triangle arithmetique* which, like
much of his other work, remained unpublished until after his death. In
fact, as Edwards explains (Hammond, 2003: Chapter 3), Pascal's
contribution to probability theory was not recognised until it was
used by Bernoulli in the early eighteenth century.




During the night of 23 November 1654, Pascal had a dreamlike or
ecstatic experience which he interpreted as a religious conversion. He
wrote a summary of the experience in a brief document entitled
the *Memorial*, which he sewed into his coat and carried with
him until his death eight years later. The intensity of this
experience resulted in a definitive change in Pascal's lifestyle, in
his intellectual interests, and in his personal ambitions. After 1654,
he terminated the mathematical discussions about which he had
correspondended with Fermat, and he cancelled plans to publish a
booklet on the vacuum that was ready to go into print. This booklet
appeared posthumously as *Traites de l'equilibre des
liqueurs et de la pesanteur de la masse de l'air* (1663), with an
introduction by Florin Perier. Perier may have
exaggerated the other-worldly attitude of his late brother-in-law,
when he wrote that, for more than ten years before his death, Pascal
was aware of "the vanity and nothingness of all these types of
knowledge, and that he had acquired such disgust for them that he
could hardly tolerate intelligent people devoting their time to them
and speaking seriously about them" (I, 459). Pascal had entered
the final period of his life, which was dominated by religious
controversy, continual illness, and loneliness. This was also the
period in which he assumed the challenge of defending Arnauld and,
more generally, Jansenist theology in the *Provincial
Letters*.




Antoine Arnauld (1612-94) was a prominent theologian in the
Sorbonne, who was most famous for his defence of Jansenism in *De la
frequente communion* (1643). Following the condemnation by
Pope Innocent X (May 1653) of five propositions about grace that were
allegedly found in Jansen's posthumously published book,
*Augustinus* (1640), Arnauld was threatened with censure by the
Theology Faculty at the Sorbonne. This provoked Pascal to write a
series of open letters, between January 1656 and March 1657, which were
published one by one under a pseudonym and became known as the
*Provincial Letters*. They purported to inform someone living
outside Paris (in the provinces) about the events that were newsworthy
in theological debates at the Sorbonne and, more widely, in the
Catholic Church in France. The *Letters* rely on satire and
ridicule as much as on logic or argument to persuade readers of the
justice of Arnauld's cause and of the unsustainability of his critics'
objections. However, despite Pascal's efforts, Arnauld was expelled
from the Sorbonne (February 1656). Those who lived at Port-Royal des
Champs -- another convent associated with Port-Royal, which was
outside the city boundaries -- agreed to leave voluntarily (March
1656) under threat of forcible expulsion, and the convent was
eventually razed to the ground. The *Provincial Letters* are
Pascal's deeply personal, angry response to the use of political power
and church censure to decide what he considered to be a matter of
fact, and to what he perceived as the undue influence of a lax,
secular Jesuit morality on those who held political and ecclesiastical
power in France. The Jesuits were not members of the Sorbonne and were
not officially involved in Arnauld's censure; it is not immediately
clear, therefore, why Pascal, in the course of writing the letters,
devoted so much energy to criticizing the Jesuits. He may have blamed
their influence in Rome and their political connections with the
monarchy in France for Arnauld's censure.




The final years of Pascal's life were devoted to religious
controversy, to the extent that his increasingly poor health
permitted. During this period, he began to collect ideas and to draft
notes for a book in defence of the Catholic faith. While his health
and premature death partly explain his failure to realise that
ambition, one might also suspect that an inherent contradiction in the
project's design would have made its implementation
impossible. Apologetic treatises in support of Christianity
traditionally used reasons to support
religious faith (e.g. a proof of God's existence, or historical
arguments to show the credibility of witnesses whose evidence is
reported in the New Testament); however, according to Pascal's radical
theological position, it was impossible in principle to acquire or
support genuine religious faith by reason, because genuine religious
faith was a pure gift from God. Pascal had collected his notes into
bundles or *liasses* before he died, and had provided tentative
titles for each bundle; however, these notes gave no indication of the
order in which they should be read, either within a given bundle or
even between various bundles, and subsequent editors failed to agree
on any numbering system for the posthumously published notes. The most
frequently quoted modern editions of
the *Pensees*--those of Lafuma, Sellier, or Le
Guern--provide concordances to the numbering systems adopted by
alternative editions. Given the status of the *Pensees*
as a posthumously published notebook, it also remains unclear whether
Pascal endorsed the opinions that are recorded there, or whether he
planned to use some of them merely for comment or critique. They are
reliably attributed to Pascal only when he expressed similar views
elsewhere. One of the most famous and most extensive notes in
the *Pensees* (Fragment 397: II, 676-81) is the
so-called 'wager' in favour of belief in God.




Cole (1995, Chapter 15) argues that Pascal exhibited signs of manic
depression and an almost infantile dependence on his family in his
mature years. In addition, many of the reported details of his
personal life suggest a fundamentalist interpretation of religious
belief that is difficult to reconcile with the critical reflection
that defines philosophy as a discipline. For example, his
sister's *Life* recorded that Pascal had an almost obsessive
repugnance to any expression of emotional attachment, which Gilberte
attributed to his high regard for the virtue of modesty. She reports
that "he could not even tolerate the caresses that I received
from my own children" (I, 83). Pascal believed uncritically
that God performs miracles, among which he included the occasion when
his niece was cured of a serious eye condition and the cure was
attributed to what was believed to be a thorn from the passion of
Christ. In general, Pascal's commitment to Jansenism was unqualified,
although he denied in the *Provincial Letters* that he was a
member of Port-Royal (I, 781). Everything we know about Pascal during
his maturity points to a single-minded, unwavering belief in the
exclusive truth of a radical theological position that left no
room for alternative religious perspectives, either
within Christianity or outside it. This is not to suggest that it is
impossible to be a religious believer and a philosopher; there are too
many obvious counterexamples to such a suggestion. However, the
intensity of Pascal's religious faith, following his conversion, seems
to have made philosophical inquiries irrelevant to him, with the
result that he approached all questions during the final ten years of
his life almost exclusively from the perspective of his religious
faith. It was this perspective that predominated in
the *Pensees*.




There is a complementary reason for urging caution about reading
Pascal as a philosopher. He wrote much but published little, none of
which was philosophy in the sense in which that term is used
today [see section 6]. Apart from his brief essays on the vacuum and
the *Provincial Letters*, all his writings were edited and
amended posthumously by collaborators who were still involved in the
theological controversies that had dominated Pascal's later life. For
example, he seems to have contributed to an early version of the
Port-Royal Logic (Arnauld and Nicole, 1993) that was subsequently
published in 1662; and the
*Entretien avec M. de Sacy* was composed many years after his
death, based on the recollections of an editor. Thus philosophical
opinions that were attributed to him in various writings that he left
only in draft versions should be read with caution, because they were
published posthumously by partisan proponents of Jansenism rather than
their original author. His apparent disenchantment with philosophical
studies is reflected in Fragment 77 of the *Pensees*:
"we do not believe the whole of philosophy to be worth one
hour's effort" (II, 566). This may also testify to the extreme
ill-health and loneliness he experienced in his final years, when he
reported that he could find consolation for his misery only in
religion.




Pascal was never employed in any capacity, and he lived modestly with
the financial support provided by his family. He died in the care of
his sister, Gilberte, and was buried in the church of Saint
Etienne du Mont, in Paris. His younger sister, Jacqueline, had
predeceased him at the Port-Royal convent in October 1661.


## 2. Nature and Grace




Pascal's philosophical reflections are dominated by a theological
interpretation of the human condition that he claimed to have borrowed
from Saint Augustine. On this view, Adam's fall from grace resulted in
a human nature that is essentially corrupt, and there is no
possibility of recovery by natural means or human effort. This
theological perspective determined Pascal's views about human freedom,
and about ethics and politics; it also set extra-philosophical limits
to his theory of knowledge, and prompted the negative assessment that
he adopted, during the final years of his life, of the value of
scientific or mathematical research.




Following Augustine, Pascal emphasized the extent to which any
recovery from the fallen state of human nature was a gift from God,
which could not be earned or deserved in any way by human agents. This
divine gift included, as one of its elements, religious faith itself,
that is, the capacity of humans to believe the theological
interpretation on which the implied worldview depended. Other
philosophical commentators on Christian belief in the seventeenth
century, such as John Locke or John Toland, argued that what a
Christian is invited to believe must be intelligible; according to
them, there were no mysteries in Christianity if that term includes
propositions that we cannot understand. Thus religious faith merely
compensated for a lack of evidence in support of a particular
proposition, and made it possible for a Christian to accept it as true
(Clarke, 2011). For Pascal, however, faith provides appropriately
disposed Christians with a means to transcend the limits of what is
intelligible and to accept as true even matters that they cannot
understand. To claim otherwise would be to set limits to the reality
of God and to reduce religious faith to the compass of human
understanding. The *Pensees* suggest: "if one
submits everything to reason, our religion will contain nothing that
is mysterious or supernatural" (Fragment 162: II, 602). Thus
those who are given the gift of genuine religious faith are expected
not only to accept things that are uncertain but, especially, to
accede to realities that are incomprehensible. Pascal offered no
explanation of how this was possible.




This degree of incomprehensibility in the content of religious belief
is consistent with a corresponding relativism about the competing
claims of different religious traditions. For example, each religion
or each Christian sect might be understood as an alternative and
equally uncertain perspective on the transcendent. However, Pascal was
as committed to the exclusive truth of Catholicism, and even to his
preferred interpretation of that tradition, as he was unwavering in
his belief in mysteries. "I see several inconsistent religions,
all of which except one are false. Each one wishes to be believed on
the basis of its own authority and threatens unbelievers. I therefore
do not believe them for that reason" (Fragment 184: II,
608). For Pascal, the Roman Catholic Church was the only true church,
"outside of which I am fully convinced there is no
salvation" (*Provincial Letters*: I, 781).




In contrast therefore with many of his contemporaries in France, such
as Descartes or Malebranche, Pascal also rejected the suggestion that
one could prove the existence of God by rational arguments. "The
metaphysical proofs ... have little value" (Fragment 179:
II, 605). A fortiori, he rejected the view adopted by Malebranche,
that we have no basis for believing the alleged content of revelation
unless we have a prior proof that there exists a God who is capable of
communicating with us. For Pascal, reason was completely inadequate to
the task of relating to a transcendent divinity, and the only way to
God was by 'faith'.




Thus the discussion of wagering in favour of religious belief in the
*Pensees* (Fragment 397: II, 676-81), which Pascal
drafted and revised a number of times, was written from the
perspective of someone who already believed in God, and who assumed
that their belief was itself a gift from God. Pascal had independently
studied the mathematics of gambling, and while considering how to
compose an apology or defence of Christianity, he reviewed ways in
which a committed Christian might adapt the logic of wagering to show
that their belief is not unreasonable. However, according to Pascal's
deepest theological convictions, nothing that he wrote in this context
could persuade an unbeliever to become a believer in any sense that
could lead to salvation. No one can communicate religious faith in
Pascal's sense to others by reasoning or wagering, nor can such faith
be self-induced by the same methods. For Pascal, a decision to believe
God's revelation (in the relevant sense of 'believe') is
not based on rational calculation nor, as indicated above, does it
presuppose a philosophical argument in favour of God's existence. A
calculation of the probability of one's wager is logically posterior
to belief, and it purports to show only that those who have accepted
divine grace and believed in God have made a wager that is not
unreasonable. Why? Because the significance or value of the belief as
a means to eternal salvation would, if it were true, compensate for
its relative implausibility.




The various kinds of divine assistance (or, in the language of
theology, grace) by which human beings may overcome their Fallen
condition were the subject of intense theological controversy in the
seventeenth century. The Church had condemned as heretical the
Pelagian theory that human beings could achieve eternal salvation by
the use of their unaided, natural powers. Various opinions to the
effect that they could make some independent contribution to this
process were equally condemned as semi-Pelagian. These suggestions
were thought to deny or mitigate the exclusive efficacy of the
Incarnation. Jansenism represented a starkly exclusive interpretation
of how God's assistance enabled Fallen human beings to recover from
the effect of Original Sin by the influence of 'efficacious
grace'. However, such a unilateral interpretation of God's
intervention seemed to make human effort redundant. Pascal mocked the
suggestion that God assisted weak human beings by means of a
'sufficient grace' which was not sufficient, and that this
insufficient grace required an independent contribution from human
agents. "By sufficient grace you mean a grace that is not
sufficient" (*Provincial Letters*: I, 601). In response
to what he understood as various degrees of Pelagianism, Pascal
defended the theory that no human effort could
contribute to salvation, even as a partial cause, and that God's agency is
completely efficacious if He chooses freely to assist undeserving
sinners.




This controversy about the relative efficacy of God's grace
was most evident in the discussion of free will, and in Pascal's
account of how we come to know the truth about radically different
kinds of reality, the natural and the supernatural.


## 3. Free Will




How to reconcile the complementary agency of God and of natural causes
was a central metaphysical problem for those, in the seventeenth
century, who accepted divine intervention in the natural world. One of
the solutions offered (for example, by Malebranche and La Forge) was
occasionalism, which resulted in part from a recognition of God's
omnipotence. Unless God's causality were understood as inadequately
efficacious, occasionalists thought it was redundant to require a
supplementary causal activity on the part of natural phenomena or
human agents in order to cause the effects that are attributed both to
them and to God's agency. Pascal's account of free will reflected this
dilemma at the heart of human choice. His discussion owes much to that
of Augustine (2010), *On Free Choice*.




Pascal was little concerned about the freedom of human choices that
result, for example, in deciding to read one book rather than another,
or in analyses of what it means to claim that an agent could have
chosen or done otherwise. The comprehensive concupiscence under which
human nature struggled, according to Pascal's account of the Fall,
implied that what are usually called human 'choices' are
determined by the dominant desires of each individual. That provided a
naturalistic theory of mundane human choices. The less mundane cases,
which were the focus of Pascal's interest, include those where someone
'chooses' to act morally or otherwise. According to the
Jansenist theory of grace, God intervenes in the lives of individuals
and makes it possible for them to choose something that otherwise they
could not have chosen, namely, to act in a manner that is conducive to
salvation. If God's assistance is sufficient to guarantee the efficacy
of a human choice, it would seem that the choice of a human agent is
determined by God's greater power. On the other hand, if God's grace
were inefficacious, it would seem as if He provides inadequate
assistance because He relies on natural human powers to exercise free
will and thereby to supply what is missing from divine grace. This
latter position was rejected by Pascal as heretical and
semi-Pelagian.




Pascal's solution was to endorse an interpretation of Augustine's
theory of grace, and to re-describe as 'free' the choice
of a human will that is 'infallibly' motivated by God's
efficacious grace.



> Human beings, by their own nature, always have the power
> to sin and to resist grace, and since the time of their corruption
> they always have an unfortunate depth of concupiscence which
> infinitely increases this power of resistance. Nevertheless, when it
> pleases God to touch them with his mercy, He makes them do what he
> wants them to do and in the manner in which he wishes them to act,
> without this infallibility of God's operation destroying in any way
> the natural freedom of human beings ... That is how God disposes
> the free will of human beings without imposing any necessity on them,
> and how free will, which can always resist grace but does not always
> wish to do so, directs itself both freely and infallibly towards
> God. (*Provincial Letters*: I, 800, 801)


The *Ecrits sur la grace*, which was drafted at
about the same time as the
*Provincial Letters*, summarizes the Augustinian position as
follows: God predestines some human beings for salvation and saves
them by "means that are certain and infallible" (II,
262). There are also others to whom God gave graces "that would
have led them to salvation had they used them properly" (I,
262), but He chose not to provide them with the 'unique grace of
perseverance' without which it is impossible to be saved. By
defending the necessity of God's grace and its infallible efficacy,
and by assuming that some people resist this divine assistance, Pascal
was forced by the logic of his position to endorse a theory of divine
predestination. If God were to provide efficacious grace to each
person, they could not fail to be saved. Therefore, if some are
damned, that must be because God has decided not to rescue them from
the Fallen condition into which they have been born as a result of
Adam's sin.




It would be easy, philosophically, to accept the limitations of
human powers on which this account is based as a theologically inspired
account of weakness of the will. However, it is difficult to see in
what sense human choice is free when it is determined infallibly by a
divinely originated desire that the will of each individual, to whom it
is granted, finds irresistible. For Pascal, one's choice of
salvation is free in the sense that it expresses one's strongest
desire; but the desire itself is communicated only to those who are
predestined by God, and is such that the recipient is guaranteed to
follow it.


## 4. Theory of Knowledge




Pascal did not publish an explicit theory of knowledge or philosophy
of science in any single text. One can infer from disparate
works--such as his essays on the vacuum (written during the late
1640s), *De l'esprit geometrique* (1655), and
the *Entretien avec M. de Sacy* (published
posthumously)--that he had conflicting intuitions about natural
knowledge, although they all recognise the special role of religious
belief. The *Provincial Letters* provide a statement of his
general overview: "How do we learn the truth about facts? That
will be from our eyes ... which are the appropriate judges of
fact, as reason is of natural and intelligible things, and the faith
is of things that are supernatural and revealed" (I,
810). 'The faith' is not simply any religious faith; it is
the specific kind of belief to which Roman Catholics had access as a
gift from God. Apart from faith, which is directed to revealed truths
and the supernatural world, Pascal identified 'experience and
reason' (I, 454) as the only ways of acquiring knowledge of the
natural world.




The scientific and theological controversies in which Pascal became
involved engaged him in epistemological disputes that were both
commonplace and unresolved in the seventeenth century. These included
questions about observations or experiments as sources of evidence,
the certainty or otherwise of various types of knowledge claim, and
the epistemic status of hypotheses that are constructed to explain
natural phenomena.




Pascal was sympathetic to the mild, comprehensive pyrrhonism that is
found in Montaigne: "Montaigne is incomparable ... for
disabusing those who cling to their opinions and who believe that they
have found unshakeable truths in the sciences"
(*Entretien*: II, 97). Despite this tendency towards
scepticism, Pascal frequently expressed confidence in the certainty
with which we can know 'matters of fact.' For example, he
argued in the *Provincial Letters* that "matters of fact
are proved only by the senses" and that they are "easily
decided" (I, 812, 723). This was consistent with one of the main
lines of argument in the *Letters*. Pascal's
defence of Arnauld hinged on the claim that the five propositions
condemned by the Pope as heretical did not occur in the text of
*Augustinus*, and that this fact could be established easily by
inspection, i.e. by reading the book. On questions of fact, therefore,
even the Pope (who, Pascal accepted, was an authoritative teacher of
revealed truths) could be mistaken, and it is inappropriate to appeal
to any authority apart from one's senses to decide a factual question:
'authority is useless in that context' (Preface to
the *Traite du vide*: I, 452). The same kind of
certainty about experimental facts, he thought, should have resolved
the dispute about heliocentrisim that led to Galileo's house
arrest. "It was in vain" therefore that the Jesuits
"obtained from Rome a decree against Galileo ... That is
not what will prove that the earth does not move; and if one had
unchanging observations that proved that the earth revolves, all the
men in the world could not stop it moving" (*Provincial
Letters*: I, 813).




Even if facts could be known with certainty by observation, Pascal
conceded that it would require the use of reason to understand or
explain natural phenomena, and that "the secrets of nature are
hidden" (Preface to the *Traite du vide*: I, 455).
To penetrate those secrets, one has to have recourse to hypotheses.
Pascal's account of how hypotheses are confirmed, and the degree of
certainty that one could claim for them, were ambivalent. When
reflecting on the results of the puy-de-Dome experiment, he
argued against critics that not only had he established that the
mercury rises in a barometer because of the weight of the air, but
that the empty space at the top of a barometric tube is a
vacuum. Others (including Descartes) accepted the experimental
results, but disputed this interpretation of them. They agreed that
mercury is supported in a barometer by the weight of the atmosphere;
they also argued, however, that the apparently empty space in a
barometric tube contains a subtle matter of some kind, that it has
physical properties (for example, a specific size, or the capacity to
be penetrated by light, etc.), and that their interpretation of the
apparent vacuum was as consistent as Pascal's with the experimental
results.




Pascal's analysis of arguments that originate from hypotheses seems to
have been borrowed from mathematics. He argued that there are three
types of hypothesis. The negation of some hypotheses implies an absurd
consequence, and they must therefore be true. The affirmation of
others implies an absurdity, and these must be false. In a third
category, if no absurd conclusion results from either the affirmation
or negation of an hypothesis, one cannot draw any valid conclusion
about its truth. Logically, different assumptions may "lead to
the same conclusion, for everyone knows that truth is often concluded
from falsehood" (*Entretien*: II, 90). When applied to
experimental situations, it meant that one could get apparently
confirming results from a poorly executed experiment or one that is
based on a mistaken hypothesis. Accordingly, even the phenomenal
success of the puy-de-Dome experiment did not show conclusively
that Pascal was correct about the vacuum. On the other hand, Pascal
implicitly assumed that a negative experimental result would have
disconfirmed the hypothesis that his experiment was designed to test
because, by analogy with the claim that 'absurd'
consequences disconfirm mathematical hypotheses, he failed to realize
that scientific experiments test clusters of interconnected hypotheses
rather than individual hypotheses. The Duhem-Quine thesis, as it is
known today, shows that negative experimental results may be
attributed to any of the many hypotheses that are assumed in
observations or experiments, and that the certainty to which Pascal
aspired cannot be realized even when experimental results are
inconsistent with expectations.




This analysis left unresolved the status of scientific hypotheses.
Do hypotheses provide genuine knowledge, despite their uncertainty? Or
did Pascal anticipate the solution later adopted by Locke and restrict
genuine knowledge to two categories: (a) what is perceived, and (b)
what is 'demonstrated'? *De l'esprit
geometrique* adopts a foundationalist perspective on
knowledge, in which 'principles' are first established and
the certainty of other knowledge-claims derives from that of the
principles. Such logically interconnected principles and conclusions
were called 'demonstrations'. Thus every demonstration
requires that one first identify "the evident principles that it
requires. For, if one does not guarantee the foundations, one cannot
guarantee the building" (II, 175). One establishes the
certainty of propositions if they are "deducible by infallible
and necessary logical steps from such axioms or principles, on the
certitude of which depends all the certitude of the consequences that
are properly deduced from them" (letter to Father Noel: I,
378). This invites the question: does physical science provide
demonstrations in this sense? Pascal limited
'demonstration' to mathematics and 'whatever imitates
it' (II, 180). At the same time, he seems to have believed that
his own physical investigations were sufficiently similar to
mathematics that they amounted to demonstrated knowledge, and that
experiments or observations provided their foundational principles.




Accordingly, Pascal's preface to the *Traite du vide*
(1651) claims: "the experiments that provide us with an
understanding of nature continually proliferate; and, since they are
the only principles of physics, their consequences proliferate
accordingly" (I, 455). The certainty of experimental results
based on observation, their role as principles of a scientific
demonstration, and the facility with which natural philosophers could
perform appropriate experiments or make relevant observations, led
Pascal to an optimistic interpretation of scientific progress. He
claimed that, when researchers work together, they "make
continual progress in science in proportion as the world gets
older" (I, 456). This apparently bright future for physical
sciences contrasted with the scientific failure of earlier natural
philosophers, "those timid people who did not dare to discover
anything in physics" (Preface to the *Traite du
vide*: I, 454) and is reflected in the comment in the
*Pensees*, Fragment 654: "To what extent have
telescopes revealed realities to us that did not exist for earlier
philosophers?" (II, 807).




In summary, Pascal adopted an interpretation of natural science that
exaggerated both the ease with which the consequences of observations
and experiments could be determined, and the simplicity of the logical
links between theories or hypotheses and their apparently confirming
or disconfirming evidence.




In contrast with all knowledge that is derived from experience and
reason, Pascal identified 'authority' as the exclusive
foundation of religious belief. Authority depends on memory and is
purely historical, because the objective is simply to find out what
someone said or wrote. This applies 'especially in
theology' (Preface to the *Traite du vide*: I,
452), a discipline which Pascal presents as if there could be no
dispute about what is revealed in the scriptures or, more
fundamentally, about whether a particular writing belongs among the
canonical texts. He could not have avoided noticing that there were
many religious traditions that claimed to report divine revelations,
and that each in turn rested its claims on its own authority as a
reliable witness to earlier historical events and their
interpretation. This was apparent even with Christianity and, within
Catholicism, Pascal was familiar with decisions of church Councils
that determined which interpretations of its doctrinal history were
acceptable and which were anathemized as heretical. Thus the history
of churches was rife with disputes about how to identify the
appropriate religious authorities. Since Pascal rejected the validity
of rational arguments as a criterion for distinguishing between what
was authentic or otherwise in Christian belief, he had to rely
ultimately on a personal choice of what to believe about the
supernatural, and then to interpret that personal choice as if it were
inspired by a special grace from God.




It seems evident that the circularity of Pascal's
self-justification could be repeated, with appropriate changes, by
equally committed members of other religious traditions.


## 5. Ethics and Politics




In the discussion of what he described in the *Provincial
Letters* as the 'perniciously lax' morality of the
Jesuits, Pascal classifies many human actions -- such as
homicide, in cases where is it not justifiable as self-defence
-- as obviously immoral, and as widely recognised as such. He
characterizes these immoral actions variously as contrary to the
'natural light', to 'common sense' or the
'natural law.' As Ferreyrolles (1984) shows, there are
numerous references in Pascal to a 'law of
nature'. However, Pascal does not argue that this natural law
can be discovered by reason, or that it acquires its obligatory force
from human convention or contracts. The Jansenist interpretation of
the human condition implied that human nature is corrupt, and
therefore that reason is now an unreliable moral guide. "There
are undoubtedly natural laws, but our fine corrupted reason has
corrupted everything" (Fragment 56: II, 560). According to this
view, God had provided reliable moral guidance to human beings in the
prelapsarian state of nature, and some remnants of God's law continue
to be reflected in Fallen nature. Natural law, therefore, is what
remains of God's law in the state of concupiscence of human nature
after the Fall. There is thus no independent, philosophical account of
morality available in Pascal, apart from the law of God which is more
or less dimly revealed.




According to God's law, or those elements of it which survive
in the widely held opinions of human beings all over the world, there
are certain actions which are intrinsically evil or good. Our moral
duties include not only the more familiar examples, such as the
obligation to refrain from voluntary homicide; Pascal also quotes with
approval from Cajetan that "we are obliged by justice to give
alms from our surplus, to alleviate even the common necessities of the
poor ... those who are rich are merely stewards of their surplus,
in order to give it to whoever they select from among those who are in
need" (*Letters*: I, 714).




Having assumed that there are objective moral obligations, Pascal
directs his critique, both in the *Provincial Letters* and in
his contributions to the *Ecrits des Cures de
Paris*, to the claim, attributed to Jesuit casuists, that one can
change the moral character of actions by changing one's
intention at the time of their performance. On this account, if an
agent acts immorally while formally intending to act immorally,
nothing can excuse the action in question. In all other cases,
however, Pascal described Jesuit casuisty as teaching that it is
possible to modify the moral character of an action by applying the
method of "directing the intention, which consists in selecting
something that is permitted as the objective of one's actions"
(*Letters*: I, 649). This escape from moral responsibility
relies on the principle that "it is the intention which
determines the [moral] quality of an action" (*Letters*:
I, 679).




The claim that one could direct one's intention away from what is
otherwise a morally reprehensible action was consistent with the
casuists' defence of the doctrine of 'probabilism'. This
doctrine, to which Pascal also objected, meant that one may decide
moral issues according to any opinion which is said to be
'probable', even if it is much less probable than
alternative opinions. 'Probable' in this context had
little to do with calculations of probability, but was defined as
"everything that is approved by well-known authors"
(*Letters*: I, 732). The limits of what was morally acceptable
were thus provided by examining the writings of approved authors and
finding the least demanding moral opinions available in the
literature. Pascal's satirical critique of Jesuit casuistry assumes,
in contrast, that human actions have a moral character that is
independent of the private thoughts or intentions of the agent who
performs them, and that one cannot ameliorate them by
'intending' results that differ from the actual effects or
consequences that follow naturally from a given action. In that sense,
Pascal's critique is an early version of a modern objection to the
so-called 'Principle of Double Effect.'




Pascal's political theory was likewise dictated by his account
of human concupiscence. According to Fragment 90 of the
*Pensees*, "concupiscence and force are the
sources of all our actions. Concupiscence causes voluntary actions,
and force causes those that are involuntary" (II, 570). Although
the state of nature before the Fall of Adam was capable of guiding
human behaviour, human relations are now completely compromised by
concupiscence and by the exercise of power by one person over
another. One inevitable effect of this unwelcome subservience is that
we are coerced into obeying those who exercise political power over
us, and this can be interpreted as punishment for our sinful
condition. This pessimistic interpretation of political power and its
a possible abuse coincided with that of Luther and
Calvin. The *Trois Discours sur la condition des grands*
distinguishes between natural gifts or abilities, which vary from one
individual to another and may provide a basis for our esteem, and
variations in social status or political power, which result from
human contingency and require only that we obey and salute those who
happen to be our superiors (II, 194-9). The natural equality of
human beings that is implicit in this analysis, however, provides no
basis for any theory of justice which would justify opposition to an
established civil society or government, no matter how tyrannical it
may be (Bove *et al.*, 2007: pp. 295 ff). In fact, there is no
independent perspective available to corrupt human beings from which
one may query whether the laws of a country are just; they are just,
by definition, simply because they are the laws. "Justice is
what is established; thus all our established laws will necessarily be
accepted as just without being examined, because they are
established" (Fragment 545: II, 776). A more extreme expression
of the same view, in the *Pensees*, is that
"justice, like finery, is dictated by fashion" (Fragment
57; II, 562).




This political conservatism, which was partly motivated by Pascal's
experience of wars and partly by his theory of corrupt human nature,
is reflected in his claim that "the worst evil of all is civil
war" (Fragment 87: II, 569). In the
*Provincial Letters*, he directs readers to the moral teaching
of the Gospels to guide them in political action. "The Church
... has always taught her children not to render evil for evil
... to obey magistrates and superiors, even those who are unjust,
because we must always respect in them the power of God who has set
them over us" (I, 744). This compulsory tolerance of the status
quo, for the sake of the common good, did not preclude comparative
assessments of the merits or otherwise of different political systems.
However, even in such assessments, the criterion applied by Pascal
remained narrowly and theologically focused on the extent to which
political arrangements facilitated citizens in the performance of
their primary duties to God.




The appropriate attitude of subjects or citizens to established
political authorities that govern them was exemplified, acutely, in
the demand by the civil powers in Paris that even conscientiously
objecting Jansenists had to sign and obey the formulary which
condemned the five propositions allegedly found in Jansen's
work. Dissenters like Pascal were not required to assent, in
conscience, to what they did not believe; but they were required to
assent in their behaviour, and to obey their political and
ecclesiastical superiors. Likewise, the subjects of Pascal's polity
were not required to esteem their political masters, nor to hold
beliefs about them as human beings which they did not believe were
true. It was enough that they obey them, that they observe the laws in
their behaviour, and that they offer them the public deference that
was appropriate to their status as God's representatives, worthy or
otherwise, on earth.


## 6. Pascal and Human Existence




While it would be anachronistic to describe Pascal as an
existentialist, one of the most prominent features of his work is the
philosophical reflection on the radical contingency of human affairs
that emerges especially in the final years of his life. He used these
reflections to puncture the pride, arrogance, and self-love of those
who thought of themselves as superior to the vicissitudes of human
life. Oliver Cromwell provided a contemporary illustration by his fall
from power as a result of a relatively trivial
illness. "Cromwell would have ravaged the whole of Christendom;
the royal family was lost, and his own family was about to become
all-powerful, except for a little grain of sand that lodged in his
bladder. Even Rome was about to tremble beneath him. Once this little
piece of stone became lodged there, he died, his family was disgraced,
peace was established all round, and the king was restored"
(Fragment 632: II, 799). Many of Pascal's intuitions about the
contingency of human existence were a commonplace in the period,
especially among Calvinist theologians (Rivet, 1651). They were
inspired in part by a growing acceptance within cosmology of the
infinite extent of the universe and, in contrast, the relative brevity
of human lives. They owed even more to a theological perspective that
claimed to represent human affairs from God's perspective, including
the absolute will by which He predestines individuals for salvation or
eternal perdition. Pascal's distinctive contribution was to capture
some of these insights in the elegant, pithy phrases that
characterized the poetic style of the *Pensees*.
Fragment 104, for example, compares a human life to a 'thinking
reed.' "It is not in space that I should search for my
dignity, but in the control of my thoughts ... The universe
comprehends me by space and engulfs me like a point; by means of
thought, I comprehend it" (II, 574).




One could question the validity of considering the value of finite
beings from the naturalistic perspective of an infinite universe, or
even the conceivability of a divine perspective that, even according
to Pascal, is not naturally accessible to finite minds. Given his
extremely poor health and the expressions of abandonment that emerge
from his later writings, one cannot avoid considering whether Pascal's
choice of 'wretchedness' (*la misere*) as a
sub-title for one group of 'thoughts' reflected his
personal experiences. "The greatness of human beings consists in
their ability to know their wretchedness" (Fragment 105: II,
574). Pascal's rejection of any naturalistic explanation of the human
mind or soul, his emphasis on dread of an unknown future (because,
according to his theology, we do not know whether we are saved or
damned), the apparent insignificance of human existence, and the
experience of being dominated by political and natural forces that far
exceed our limited powers, strike a chord of recognition with some of
the existentialist writings that emerged in Europe following the
Second World War. This was philosophy in a different register. For
that reason, some commentators reject the suggestion that Pascal was
not a philosopher (Brun, 1992; Hunter, 2013). Rather than speculate
about matters that transcend the limited capacity of the human
intellect, Pascal invites his readers to recognize the description of
his personal experiences as resonating with their own. While
emphasizing the natural insignificance of individual human lives, he
did not conclude that human existence was absurd. He pointed instead,
as Christian existentialists have done since, to a source of meaning
that would transcend the limitations of our thought. Access, however,
was strictly limited to those to whom God freely gave the gift of
religious faith, without any merit on the part of the recipient.