Pascal’s Pensées: Philosophy, Theology, and Doubt

Life-long invalid, prodigious mathematician, religious fanatic: Blaise Pascal cuts a figure at once typical of early modern Europe and utterly unique. He was a classic Renaissance-style polymath who invented the calculator; corresponded with a queen; and did urban planning for Paris. Yet he’s singular in Western philosophic history as the author of a series of fragments, collected posthumously as his “Thoughts”—or Pensées—that, in its attempt to provide a proof of the truth of Christianity, gave literary and philosophical expression to existential angst: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.” Though parts of the Pensées exhibit a mathematical stamp, including their famous “Wager” on the rationality of theistic belief, Pascal, like Kierkegaard 200 years later, saw faith as transcending reason. Turning inward, Pascal interrogated the self, writing, “The greatness of human beings consists in their ability to know their wretchedness.” But how can we understand Pascal’s unfinished Pensées—as a work of philosophy, a statement of faith, a method of inquiry? How can we fit it within the stream of early modern philosophy and the questions then racking the Western intellectual world? And in what ways, with its proto-existentialist tremors, do the Pensées speak to us still?

In this course, we will engage deeply with Pascal’s fragmentary text, seeking to understand its motivations, its methods, and the ideas that it offers about God, the self, belief, doubt, truth, and the human condition. Moreover, we will examine correspondence that was mathematical (to Pierre Fermat), political (to Queen Christina of Sweden), and theological (against the Jesuits in a selection of the Lettres Provinçiales). In reading “The Memorial,” his notes on an ecstatic religious experience, we will ask about the nature of knowledge. And in reading “The Art of Persuasion,” we will probe the relationship between form and content (keeping in mind the Wager). While Pascal will be our focus, other figures will be tacitly present, including Augustine, Descartes, and Simone Weil.