Episode 184: Pascal on Human Nature (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 184 is something like, what is the human condition? Or maybe is it rational to have religious faith? We read Blaise Pascal's Pensées, a collection of fragments of an incomplete work written up to the author's death in 1662. For more information and a link to the text, Please check out partially examin life.com. this is Mark Linsenmayer. Great, because I realize my wretchedness in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:30 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, wiping my beak in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:34 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey wallowing my concupiscence in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:38 Mark: Oh, my. I'll have you know that the translation that I initially listened to all the way through that I will link to the Trotter. Yes, the Trotter, 1910 uses lust, which I like better than concupiscence, just because concupiscence, such as a stupid long word.

0:55 Wes: Yeah, it's much easier to take notes if you're writing down lust every time than concupiscence.

1:00 Mark: Like, I can keep in mind that lust doesn't just mean animal sex lust. You know, lust for glory. There's lots of lust. It's not that much of a problem.

1:07 Wes: Hey, we should say something about the edition we're reading and how we're going to refer to the individual.

1:14 Mark: I will list in the blog post accompanying this the exact verses that we read, but the verses will actually just be from this particular Penguin edition.

1:23 Wes: So, yeah, it's the Penguin Classics edition, and they've gone through the trouble of arranging thematically. So chapter one, Order, chapter two, Vanity, Chapter three, Wretchedness, and so on, which actually, I think is really useful. It's saved us a lot of trouble. And the reason why we chose this edition is just it's the edition that Dylan and I read at St. John's and we've chosen the same passages that we read at St. John's but the numbering in the edition is not the same as the original numbering you'll see in any other edition. So I think we should just refer to these by their Penguin number and by their original number. So I might refer to 30, 320, for instance. Do you guys agree with that?

2:08 Dylan: Yeah, I think it's worth noting that in the Penguin edition, the first section were apparently actually classified by Pascal before he died in preparation for an edition that would have it. And then there's a bunch of others that were not classified at all that have titles that were based upon the translator, but the first hundred pages of them or so have some validity in being classified by Pascal.

2:33 Wes: Yeah, I shouldn't have said they went through the trouble. Pascal actually went through the trouble himself. But someone at St. John's also found. So in the unclassified Pensées, he found ones related to the classifications and added those on. So I think that's also very useful. If you look at the readings that Mark is going to put on the website, you'll see how that's done.

2:55 Dylan: Yeah. And some of the most famous ones, not the least of which is the Wager, which weren't in Pascal's original classification yet, though he died at 39 and he was very sick for much of his life.

3:06 Mark: One complication my history reading this is there's a LibriVox version of this. It's not posted as a podcast, but you can download it. So I actually listened to it at normal speed because I was listening to it through the Dropbox application on my phone. I listened through the entire book and the original ordering, which is reflected in that. And in the. I'm going to link to the Gutenberg Online free edition for readers as well. Those are supposedly the order in which he wrote them. I'm not really sure how they could figure that out exactly. And there is quite a lot of thematic unity.

There's a definite progression. Like it gets more and more religious. The whole last half of the book was just like one Christian apologetics topic after another that I was not interested in. Like, why Christianity is better than Judaism, why it's better than Islam, why his particular, particular brand of Christianity is better than the other ones. But the first half of the book, up until the Wager, and even through that, I found fascinating. He's an acute observer of human nature and he's a great writer. So it's very much like reading something by Nietzsche.

It's just that these are fragments, so they look like Nietzsche and aphorisms, but some of them actually stop mid sentence, or they're multiple drafts to try to get at one idea. So even in those early sections, it's very repetitious. There could be an edited version of this. So I think the fact that we chose particular selections made a lot of sense. And if you just started reading from the beginning, you wouldn't necessarily get to all the good stuff before you got sick of the book that we're going to go over here. However, I will say then, so after I had gone through the entire book, listening to it.

I took the Penguin one. I took this frickin half a page long of chapter and verse numbers to go through and take my notes on it. But I also had the Gutenberg by my side and I noticed that for some of the numbering, like when I looked up what number Penguin said I should have found in the Gutenberg, it was actually one off, so.

4:55 Wes: Oh, that's not helpful. All right, so our references may be one off. You'll have to figure it out. But I'm glad you listened to it at one times, Mark, because that's actually. I think Pascal actually did say the heart has its reasons, which you can only understand by listening to them at one time speed. We should also mention that I think he did this relatively late in life, which for him.

5:21 Dylan: Right, like his last five or six years. Yeah.

5:24 Wes: And we have to mention that like many of his contemporaries in the 1600s, he was also a great scientist and mathematician. I think at St. John's we also read his stuff on fluid dynamics and pressure and conic sections.

5:42 Dylan: There's a unit called the Pascal for measuring pressure. He did this famous experiment, or suggested this famous experiment first proving that air had real weight and that it affected barometric pressure, in which they took a tube of mercury that had a curve on it and stoppered one end and measured how far up the tube the mercury was on the stoppered end at the bottom of a mountain. And then this guy carried the thing up 5,000ft or whatever it was to the top of the mountain and noted that there was Bas, basically 3 inches of difference in the mercury. It was acclaimed apparently across Europe, that experiment.

6:21 Wes: And I have these vague recollections of stuff involving going underwater.

6:27 Dylan: The same kind of thing would be underwater fluid pressure.

6:29 Mark: So yes, he excelled in mathematics and science. We can link to some information if you want to learn more about that particular history. The things that he did. I think the important thing to point out with regard to that is it was not like Descartes where he was just a polymath. There was a definite shift though it wasn't like Augustine where he had a period of where he was completely, completely wanton. Apparently he was always pretty religious, but he had a relatively wanton period where he enjoyed reading Montaigne and skepticism involved in that and then had a particular like his coach almost went into a river.

He thought he had this mystical experience that he wrote about it and in fact got sewed into his jacket. It's the last thing, section 913 in our edition that we read and apparently after that point, he shunned. He thought that the scientific work that he'd done before was not important, was insubstantial, it didn't really matter. And that's when he turned his thoughts to writing first this Provincial Letters, which is a very famous piece of rhetoric blasting the Jesuits as opposed to his sect, the Jansenists. Right. So the big deal was between the Jansenists and the Jesuits, or the Jansenists and the Catholics writ large was the Jansenists were into predestination.

That is, it is not a matter of human choice, but only God's mercy. Who can even believe in God? Who can. God's power is so overwhelming that why would we need human choice to supplement that to allow us to have grace? So it really is entirely up to God who believes in him or not. So that's a thing to have in

8:05 Dylan: the background here and the inherent wretchedness of humanity.

8:08 Mark: Yes, most people are sort of familiar with this Pascal's Wager, but think of it as we don't have any reason whether or not we should believe in God, so we can kind of make a choice. And according to Jansenism, well, you really can't make a choice. So that's one thing to have in the background. And the other thing that people think of in the wager is, well, if you bet for God, you lose nothing. Even if you're wrong, if there is no God and you decide, I believe God exists, there's no real downside. And people point out like, well, you know, you waste time going to church. But like in his life, it really was a big deal for him that he could have done so much more, I think scientific work in those 10 years or whatever remained of his life that he didn't do that. He just shunned all that. So there really was even in his particular case, a cost.

8:55 Dylan: He had his conversion experience when he was 31 and he died at 39.

8:59 Mark: Should we just lay out the wager just to get it out there? Because it's the thing that people care about the most.

9:03 Wes: I'd rather start with the other stuff. A lot of what he's writing about sounds sort of like a self help book without the advice. No, there's a little advice. He just tells us what's wrong with us. So it sounds very negative. We hear a lot of talk of what he calls our wretchedness and our misery and our vanity and our pride and the sort of superficiality of our social relations. So a lot of that is just a setup that's in a way, why I didn't want to do the religious part first, because ultimately it will turn out that he thinks that this sort of wretchedness is in our nature and it can only be redeemed by religion properly conceived.

So I think that's a lot of the point of what we get along. The stuff you called fascinating, I think, Mark, is all this talk about human nature and the social relations and the sort of the qualities of those things that require redemption. And we also get sort of the alternative paths we might go down that end up not being solutions. So diversion is a big one of them. I think for Pascal, diversion is sort of the alternative to religion, and we'll see what that means. But it can mean things like staying busy, distracting oneself, all the sorts of things that are actually we talk a lot about still today in light of smartphones and the Internet.

That's sort of the stuff he's thinking about. Obviously, I think most of us are not as prone to thinking about all of this in terms of religion. Some of us still are, of course, but we are still prone to thinking about these sorts of problems related to the human condition and how we might solve them.

10:50 Dylan: The one thing that I would add to that in terms of a big theme is the relationship between reason and intuition or instinct.

10:59 Wes: In my translation, or we're using the same translation.

11:01 Dylan: Yeah. Something like geometrically derived, logical, mathematical style, argument and reasoning. And reasoning that's born out of the heart and born out of intuition. So he has a kind of criticism of reason as not being able to support itself in the end. And that comes to the conclusion that reason needs its own support. This links up with his religious position regarding intuition, but it does for him also link up with intellectual endeavors in general, where he loses his love of reason, so to speak.

11:42 Wes: Yeah. So it's interesting there because like Nietzsche, in a way, there's a celebration of instinct here. He'll also use that word in heart and intuition. But instead of militating against religion, it's going to serve as. Dylan, you pointed out his religious purpose, which is to say it'll serve him when it comes to explicating the concept of faith and why it is that only faith will help us in the end.

12:07 Dylan: Yeah, it's part of your direct conduit to God and to the truth.

12:12 Wes: Yeah.

12:12 Mark: For Nietzsche, instinct, the animal part of our nature, there's something that is pure and glorious about that. And yes, as human beings, we have to spiritualize that instinct to make it civilized and make us not stupid. But still kind of what we're doing is getting ourselves back in touch with some of those original instincts that we've ignored. Whereas for Pascal it's a little more complicated. Our animal nature is part of our corruption. It is part of what makes us garbage, that we are really the same as worms. And the thing that we have to get back to is actually more like a Platonic pre birth, pre fallen state that when we were born into our animal bodies, carrying around this corruption of physicality, really thought is the thing that links us potentially to God.

But like Nietzsche, Pascal is suspicious of reason as the way Nietzsche would say, as animals we have this certain centeredness, but reason like lets us go off in all these random, messed up directions and become self destructive. Well, for Pascal, even though the animal nature is itself a source of corruption, reason in the same way the way Wes was just describing his diversion is also a source of corruption. So it's really only through Christianity, only through grace. And so that's the picture of the human condition is that we are at once corrupt, but we have within us and there's certain clues like the fact that we came up with ideals like that shows that we remember something of God's grace, that we have this potential within us.

It's this division between both the fact that we have ideals that kind of makes us great and the fact that we're basically nasty in every way.

14:05 Wes: So the greatness. Yeah, the paradox is those two things, the greatness and the vileness, are in a way mutually implicating because our greatness consists only in knowing our wretchedness. And if that weren't the case, I think one of the reasons for that, if it weren't the case, we wouldn't be protected against pride. So if we could just be great by knowing God in some other way, knowing him more directly, I should say that knowledge of God and knowledge of wretchedness, our own wretchedness is related. For Pascal we'd be prone to self inflation and self aggrandizement and in a sense the turning away from, of our attention, away from God, towards ourselves.

So it's almost this picture in which it's the paradox of. We saw some of this in Kierkegaard as well, of contact with this infinitely great being. And how do you do that? How do you give a coherent picture of that contact and one that doesn't say, turn you into a madman. Right. It's often the case that people with psychoses think of themselves as God. They think of themselves as a Christ figure or having these Unlimited powers. How do you have contact with God without being potentially infected with that sense of grandiosity? I think for him, the flood wall against that is to have greatness consist of knowing one's own wretchedness.

So that's the way in which our dual nature is actually an inner sort of relation between the two.

15:45 Mark: Another theme that runs through this is how he sees theology. He sees his brand of theology as a step beyond philosophy.

15:54 Dylan: Because it's beyond reason.

15:56 Mark: Yeah, because it realizes the limits of reason. And he thinks reason tells you really what the limits of reason are. You had mentioned Dylan before, the difference between reason and intuition. And one of the ways he puts it is that reason only gets us right from premises to conclusions. He doesn't use those words, but it needs to have some first principles to start with. And those he thinks that we can't actually reason ourselves to.

16:23 Dylan: Which in a funny way presages Criticisms of the 20th century of philosophy. Right, yeah.

16:30 Mark: But the way that he does it is not very subtle, that it's not like he's. It's not like he's saying, well, there are some truths that are self evident and there are some that he uses. How do we know the sun will rise tomorrow? Well, I mean that's through induction. And he was certainly. I don't know if he. He doesn't use that term, but he thinks that's. We would have different analyses based on what we said in many past episodes or read Bertrand Russell or whoever on epistemology. They'll give lots of different. Yeah, of course there are some things that you can't argue to, but they're not all the same. And describing them as knowing them through the heart is not a very helpful way maybe to do that.

17:12 Dylan: Part of it is that. And maybe we'll get into some, a little bit of detail on this. But he gets tied up with infinity and finiteness partly, I think, because of his mathematical tendencies and that they're very tough topics. And also this is at a time, this is Descartes, just before calculus, that there's a lot of concern and a lot of sort of intellectual hashing out of the relationship between finite things and infinite things. Even mathematically, the calculus is just barely, hasn't really been born yet, but all that thinking is going on at this time. And then on the other hand, you have this long standing role of divinity and infinity and God and infinity and the supernumerary nature of it. And even in here, to me there's confused thinking about it, but that leads you to These incredible conclusions. That, for me, is part of the challenge and part of the problem.

18:15 Wes: Maybe we should get into the text here, because, as Mark, I think, as both of you pointed out, it is a complicated picture. On the one hand, seeming to celebrate something instinctual or intuitive. On the other hand, talking about concupiscence as leading us astray. And then in other places, it will turn out it sounds like there's sort of an emergent order that arises out of concupiscence that is itself redeeming. So in the first chapter, the Penguin edition that we read for this on Vanity, we get a story of the effects of what he calls imagination, which he's also associating with the senses and how it leads to falsity.

And the central pensée here is 44, 82. That's the longest one in the chapter and the one that gives a sort of sustained argument. And so he sounds here somewhat platonic and somewhat. I was reminded here of the sophist. So he's talking about the way in which imagination makes it hard to tell truth and falsity apart. And the way it does that is. And again, thinking of the sophist, falsity is, in a way, an image of the truth. And one looks like the other. So they're not just simply opposites, truth and falsity, but they have this interesting relationship.

Then he goes on to say how it makes it hard to tell truth and falsity apart. And he talks about the fact that imagination doesn't always lead to falsity. So because it sometimes leads to truth, there's this inconsistency that makes it even harder for us to tell truth and falsity apart. And then the fact that it's satisfying, that it makes us fear things when it's not warranted to. But then there's this whole other thing where he talks about what seem like superficial signifiers that ground reputation respect. Like the robes of a noble, for instance.

The sorts of things that people wear to give them an air of authority. Imagination grounds that initially those things are a matter of actually raw power and raw force. Right. If you're going to be the ruler, you actually have to physically overpower others eventually. That's grounded in what he calls imagination, which. It becomes a matter of custom, it becomes a matter of laws and these displays like robes and so on. Go ahead, Dylan. You had something to.

20:41 Dylan: Well, I just think that there's some great quotes that we should read from this section.

20:46 Mark: Sure. Well, bottom of page 10 here in the middle of this. Let's See, this is in the bottom of the second page of this. Our magistrates have shown themselves well aware of this mystery. Their red robes, the ermine in which they swaddle themselves like furry cats. The law courts where they sit in judgment, the fleur de lys. All this august panoply was necessary if the physicians did not have long gowns and mules, if learned doctors did not wear square caps and robes four times too large, they would never have deceived the world, which finds such an authoritative display irresistible.

So I picked that out just because, as Wes said, there is such a thing as raw power. And he actually does want us to respect that. And there is such a thing as custom. And for reasons we can talk about, he wants us to respect that. But he also wants us to recognize the fundamental bullshit that is involved here so that some of these people actually do. He says in the next paragraph after that, soldiers are the only ones who do not disguise themselves in this way because their role is really more essential. They establish themselves by force, the others by masquerade.

So in some cases, like in this thing, he's saying soldiers and kings. He's saying kings have not attempted to disguise themselves either because they have actual force. They don't need these symbols. The symbols are bullshit. In other places, he says, the symbols actually indicate the real power. So, yeah, we actually should respect noblemen, because if we don't, they're going to beat on us like they actually do have the power.

22:09 Wes: Later on, he will say that those signifiers are not simply superficial, that they're signs of real, actual power and that comes with consequences.

22:18 Dylan: Yeah, this is a whole nother theme which I think is much less well articulated in the Pensées. It's a kind of political philosophy that he's both deeply anti authoritarian, skeptical of lots of kinds of display of power, particularly traditional Catholic Church types of power and its relationship or non relationship to the truth. And then there's this sort of pragmatic part of recognizing strength and power in its manifestation so that you can negotiate your way through the world. While you're not accepting that it's truth, you're accepting that it's power and just recognizing it that way. It's not this clear, but there's a way in which I think he sees truth so much in God that when he looks at the earth, he says, well, justice is really the force of the stronger.

23:12 Wes: Right?

23:13 Dylan: So in all cases, whatever is decided as justice is just whoever has the biggest stick.

23:21 Mark: But it's not true justice.

23:23 Wes: Yeah, yeah, it's A render unto Caesar sort of argument where right comes under the sway of might, including, and this is in later chapter, but including in the form of majority rule. That's just one example in which right comes under the rule of might, because the majority rule is just the rule of the stronger, ultimately doesn't necessarily in itself protect minorities. Yeah, And I just wanted to add real quick. Let's see. So it's at 25, 308 that he talks about the way in which we start out with force, and then the signifiers of the rulers, their garb and all the rest of it get sort of instilled in us by habit, so that when we look at one of those things, we sense their authority.

I think what he objects to is a kind of essentialization of the habit, he says, and the world, which does not know that this is the effect of habit, believes it to derive from some natural force. Hence such things as the character of divinity is stamped on his features. It's this treatment of what is simply customary as natural that he's objecting to. It's not that we shouldn't understand that there are real effects so that we have to respect authority in some sense. It's that we don't essentialize authority. And there's another pensée here that speaks to that 30, 320, which basically says, don't confuse competence with breeding.

24:45 Dylan: That's exactly right. But he's a pithy way of saying it. We do not choose, as captain of a ship, the most highly born of those aboard.

24:53 Mark: There's a general dynamic here which, as I started to describe, that theology is a step beyond philosophy. It's the idea. A lot of people compare him to some sort of proto existentialist because he really does sound like Kierkegaard or Nietzsche in a lot of places. But this is one place where he's not, because those guys uniformly criticize the herd. Well, it seems like he's criticized the herd. He does say, like all their opinions are wrong. But the dynamic is that the first step in breaking away from the herd would be to engage in philosophy, to try to use your reason.

But that ends up. Again, it uses imagination, and you end up going very far astray. So maybe you'd say, hey, that's not right. I'm not going to just obey the government. I don't think that's justice. I think justice is. And then you spell out some sort of abstract principles, like John Locke or something, and he thinks that's a mistake because our reason is so fallible. Our reason is just, again, just can pull us in all sorts of different stupid directions. It basically is the faculty of imagination just rationalizing stuff. And so really, when we transcend that, we go back to being conformists, we go back to acting like the herd.

It's just not for the same reasons that the herd does, because the herd doesn't really have reasons at all. But Pascal, somebody at his stage, has reasoned out that, well, given that we actually don't have the capacity to divine justice, let's just go. There's. I think, for a few different reasons, we should just go ahead with custom.

26:24 Dylan: You know, it's a kind of journeying to submission.

26:27 Mark: Right.

26:28 Dylan: The right kind of submission to the truth is the best kind of transcendent choice you can make.

26:34 Mark: Right.

26:35 Dylan: It's not based on reason.

26:36 Wes: So it sounds like, in a way, hard and faith will end up being sort of middle ways, in a sense, because he does set up imagination and reason as sort of antitheses in 44 82, where ultimately he'll say, look, feelings conquer reason and justice. They completely rule over it. And then he does say, yes, we are right to make them allies in some sense. Yes, we can actually make them work together. But imagination always essentially has the upper hand.

27:09 Dylan: But you just said something, Wes. You linked imagination with feelings.

27:14 Wes: Yeah, because I think he does.

27:17 Mark: So you'd have to distinguish the whims from the heart, maybe. In other words, the heart would be kind of God conditioning you to be open to truth, whereas whimsical. It's all sorts of human emotions that he does not approve of.

27:30 Dylan: Yeah.

27:31 Wes: So feelings is my gloss of. He lists a few specific feelings here.

27:38 Mark: Love or hate alters the face of justice. Is that what you're thinking?

27:41 Wes: Yeah. So again, it's a complex picture because on the one hand, I think ultimately, Dylan, you paused there, because feeling might be a good word for that middle way that I was referring to his heart and faith. But on the other hand, in the sense love and hate here are associated with what he calls imagination, and they conquer reason and justice.

28:02 Mark: It's hard to talk about this because there really is just no human faculty that works for Pascal. He's very much like a stoic in a lot of ways, where, yeah, life is suffering. We shouldn't let all these worldly, you know, oh, no, am I going to get this promotion at work. We shouldn't let all that kind of stuff affect us. In fact, just like the criticisms that we have of Epictetus in our Epictetus episode of him potentially being down on family, like Pascal is actually down on family. He really, even though he apparently being sick all the time, relied very much on his sister and his family.

But, like, he didn't approve of, like his sister's kids showing his sister affection. He didn't approve of marriage. He really did believe that thing that you shouldn't get too close to people because they're just going to be taken away and life is suffering in that way. But at least the stoic, even the worst kind of stoic that believes that kind of stuff, still thinks that you can take the Platonic route of turning toward reason, turning toward transcendence, by focusing on a certain pure part of the human soul. And Pascal just doesn't want to characterize any particular part of the human soul as pure.

So we can't really say feeling or reason or something is the. Because it's really this external grace that is the good part of humanity.

29:18 Dylan: That sounds right, Mark. And I see what you're saying, Wes, about the role of feeling, and I agree. I guess I had an initial take on it or initial reading on it that put imagination, even if it's infused with feeling or related to it, as being much more directly tied to reason. And maybe the difference I'm thinking is just about passion and other kinds of sensory experience. To me, imagination was, even if it's infused with sensory experience, is closer to reason, because giving context in life to the reason's activity.

29:56 Wes: Well, I think it can be, and he says we're right to make them allies.

30:00 Dylan: Can I just give two examples? At the beginning of 10, he says, put the world's greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be. If there is a precipice below. Although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail. Many could not even stand the thought of it without going pale and breaking into a sweat. And then he says something funny. I do not intend to list all the effects of imagination. Everyone knows that the sight of cats or rats, the crunching of a coal,, etc. Is enough to unhinge reason. And then on page 11, he says imagination decides everything.

It creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the world's supreme good. So to me, that kind of language really lends itself to the co joinedness and in some ways the extension of reason by imagination, even though it is the conduit via which you lead into error. And it makes me think a lot of just the ways in which contemporaries of his were pointing out how reason would be wrong or in particular the usual way would be your senses are wrong because you are imagining. Coming up with an image of something that isn't true. You get fooled by the bending stick in the water and stuff like that.

31:14 Wes: Yeah, I think so. One of those examples, the philosopher on the plank, right? It makes reason and imagination sound like they are different things. Imagination leads us to fear, and reason can't help us. But I think you guys are both right. So imagination, which again is associated with the senses, when we use our senses, we're also using our imagination. It can serve science. So in this very section he says, again, we are right to turn them into allies. And I think what he means by that is, yeah, science is a good thing and we can use our imagination in good ways.

And maybe he would think the same thing of the arts as well. Yet the overall point still stands, which is that imagination will stand superior to reason. And reason isn't like a wormhole. Or it isn't this feature, as Mark pointed out, that simply allows us to transcend imagination altogether. Imagination and the error and falsity to which it leads are inevitably with us. I was also reminded of Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lie" in this whole section.

32:23 Dylan: One point being made is that reason will fail you and it's deeply constrained. Imagination will fool you, but it is through that conduit that you're going to get to the kind of truth that really is. Maybe transcendent isn't a word that Pascal would use, but that gets you past reason, even though it's also the place where you get fooled. So to me, it brings back Mark's point that you would sort of get past the error in imagination and ultimately you would follow some kind of pretty strict custom because you really submit yourself to the truth. But your conduit to that is through intuition and imagination. It's not through reason.

33:05 Wes: Just want to add a bookmark to that. Are you suggesting the conduit to God is imagination? Okay, so maybe that. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. Right now I'm inclined to distinguish imagination from whatever faith or whatever it is that's our conduit to God. But I think when we look at that section later, we should return to that idea.

33:24 Dylan: It might be that they're a triplet, right? And that there's a way they connect to one another. I agree with you that imagination is distinct in important ways from reason. But there's a way in which they clearly rub up against one another. And then it may be similar with the conduit to God that it's Adjacent to imagination in some important way, even if it is also distinct from imagination. It's further from reason.

33:48 Mark: That section 4482 that we've been discussing. I found that one of the most fascinating sections here. We could definitely even just read that whole thing straight through. But it's almost four pages. But I'm not sure that he's actually setting up a technical term. I think he's spitballing this notion of imagination because I'm in the Gutenberg version just searching on the word imagination. It comes up, well, 36 times. But that includes a lot in the footnotes, the index. Probably a third of the mentions of the word of imagination in the book are right here in this passage.

And one of the other mentions is the one that Wes mentioned about the imagination doing its work in fixing governments. Right. It starts with raw power and then imagination takes over the role of that. So that actually seems a constructive thing. Another one of these. This is Trotter's the Gutenberg number 275. Men often take their imagination for their heart. And they believe that they are converted as soon as they think of being converted. So imagination there is definitely not the way to.

34:49 Wes: Yeah, so that sounds like an argument for distinguishing whatever he's talking about with the heart and imagination.

34:55 Mark: But I just think he's probably not using it consistently as a technical term. He just doesn't care enough. He doesn't think the products of human reason are strong enough that he's going to say this is my theory of almost anything aside from things specifically related to salvation. I guess.

35:13 Wes: So we should. Before we leave this chat. Are we getting ready to leave this chapter?

35:18 Dylan: Yeah, we probably should.

35:19 Wes: So I just want to quickly summarize some of the other points here because it's a kind of. Even though. Yeah. As Mark, you've pointed out, I guess we're leaving the realm of the imagination now. It is a pretty comprehensive sort of thing for him in its effects. So he talks about pride, for instance, as something we put ahead of our own well being because of imagination. We gladly die, he says, if we knew that people were going to talk about it if it would win some sort of notoriety. 806, 147. Talks a lot about our desire to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others.

And again, putting that over and above our actual well being, our actual own good. Which is really referenced to the same sort of dichotomy we've talked about with other authors, including Nietzsche and Orwell and so on, which is this sort of Tension between power and the good and the way in which we can prefer power to our own good. There's also talk of there's no loving anyone for themselves. 688, 323 we only love people's borrowed qualities, which is the way of saying we only love their signifiers, like the robes of the nobles. And I thought in that section about Vertigo a little bit and our discussion of Judy's desire to be loved for herself and the sort of Lacanian idea that no one can be loved for themselves.

And so it's really interesting to see an echo of that in Pascal. One more thing. The very first passage about the twins, the two faces. 13, 133 at the very beginning of chapter two. That along with the parrot pensée, which we'll get to eventually. I remember being a running joke at St. John's so it goes. Two faces are alike, neither is funny by itself, but side by side their likeness makes us laugh, which I was always confused by. But now I think I have an idea what that means. Did you guys.

37:13 Mark: I took it literally, but go ahead.

37:15 Dylan: What's your.

37:16 Wes: Well, no, it's just because he talks a lot about images in this and the imagination, the way in which the image is easily confused with the real thing. And so he's talking about two faces here, one of which is an image of the other. And that's what makes them interesting. In other words, imagination is inherently interest conferring. The real thing is just the one. It's the Parmenidean unity. But the multiplicity, the two together, the false and the true, is just much more exciting and diverting and fun.

37:48 Dylan: I hadn't gone to having in the two, one of them being false and one of them being true. I took it as a pointing out about things that make us laugh. The things that almost are the same and seem to align but aren't quite the same are delightful as an observation.

38:08 Wes: Right.

38:08 Mark: That's what I thought when I first heard it. But then the fact that he put it in the vanity chapter though, has to mean something, that he classified it that way.

38:15 Wes: Yeah. All this to talk of imagination. Including. Again, when we're talking about imagination and falsity, we are talking about the false image of the truth. So yes, I'm making an interpretation here and there's some license to it, but I'm just. Yeah. Otherwise I'm not sure what it means in the context of the chapter you mentioned.

38:34 Unknown speaker: Love.

38:35 Mark: That's one of the ones toward the end of here. This is 413 162. I thought it was also interesting that this discussion of love was in the vanity chapter. Anyone who wants to know the full extent of man's vanity has only to consider the causes and effects of love. The causes of je ne sais quoi. And its effects are terrifying. This indefinable something so trifling that we cannot recognize, it upsets the whole earth. Princes, armies, the entire world. Cleopatra's nose, if it had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have been different.

39:03 Wes: Yeah, that's great.

39:04 Mark: So I can totally see that as him pointing at another thing that is corrupt about us. And this sounds like what's more the heart than love. But no, by the heart he can't mean what we would mean by the heart. He means God pulling the heart towards submission or something. Not what we take as. He's going to call romantic love as flippant in some way, as aberrant as even though it's universal, it is part of our corruption. You can see that in just how crazy it makes us act. Its effects are terrifying. It upsets the whole earth. That can't be good.

39:39 Wes: Yeah, it's terrifying because it's such enormous effects from such trivial causes. Right. The shape of Cleopatra's nose. You have to read this. And combination with 688, 323, where he says, we only love people for their borrowed qualities, right? So even if you say, oh, I love that person because they're so good looking, and then someone says, oh, that's superficial, you should love them for who they are, you should love them for their character. But what that means ultimately, according to Pascal, is you should love them for this sort of charm or that sort of charm of character, which is just as superficial as they're having a nice body.

And I think for Pascal it goes all the way down. You could say, oh, but they're such a good person and I love them for that. And he even gets to the point where he talks about, you might want to say, well, I love them for their soul, for their metaphysically substantial soul. Which is of course a ridiculous thing to say because at that point it's just completely non personal, right? There's no person there anymore. There's no particular character of a person who you're going to love. And it would make no sense to love this abstraction, which is exactly what he calls it.

40:49 Mark: It is not possible and it would be wrong.

40:51 Wes: Yes. So to love someone, love has got to be personal. But to the extent that it's personal, it's entirely superficial. Again, to relate it back to Vertigo and Lacan, only love the signifier. Ultimately, there's no real thing to love underneath that.

41:08 Mark: But what do we think of categorizing this whole phenomena as vanity? I mean, it's certainly not the vanity of Cleopatra. It's talking about the vanity of the Romeo who's being swept away. That somehow being in love, feeling this sort of intense thing that washes away all barriers, that is a form of self indulgence. That is a form of vanity of, I think you could say pride with equal measure. Like that seems a little weird to me. I mean, I see where he's coming from, but it's definitely reading something pernicious. The whole point of love is you're not thinking of yourself. Right.

41:40 Wes: But yet you are. If you're loving someone's charms, it's not the selfless act you think it is. Right. It's more like consuming something. There's nothing altruistic about saying, I love that person because they're intelligent and kind. It sounds like something in a way that's outwardly directed until you get some of Pascal's cynicism. And if they are only superficial qualities, and you're not loving them for themselves, you're loving them for how they titillate you, you're loving them for yourself. They're just another diversion.

42:12 Mark: Or at least it's focusing on your needs. Right. Even if you're saying my love is intense, even if the person had a brain injury and a facial deformity and these accidents, I would still love them to the end of time. Even if we lose our bodies. Well, you're still engaging in this reverie. You're really reflecting on your own, the vacuum that is in you.

42:34 Wes: Yeah, exactly. And we should say that by vanity doesn't just mean the way we would use the phrase being vain. It means all the things that we do that are in vain, all the trifling things that we fill our lives up with, they're meaningless. That's vanity. Yeah, we're trying to fill the void, but they don't do that. They're in vain for that purpose.

42:56 Dylan: And that way it links up with diversion. And in the section, he characterizes human beings as having nullity.

43:06 Wes: 36, 164.

43:09 Dylan: Yeah, but take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. They will feel their nullity without recognizing it. For nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of Diversion. And then at 24, 127, man's condition, inconstancy, boredom, anxiety. I did find this link with boredom a little confusing, but maybe it's just straight through to diversion that that's why he characterizes of having such boredom.

43:43 Wes: Well, elsewhere he says what we would feel if we stopped, ever came to a stop, and just thought about ourselves as depressed and despairing. And I guess he sort of said that in what you read. Dylan too. But that's different from boredom.

43:54 Dylan: Yeah, I confess it makes me think a little bit of different qualities of diversions or the ways in which people are very active. I mean, when he talks about us being terribly bored, that just seems to me not to be universally true. In a different way than maybe even something like anxiety might be. There are lots of people who are moving from one thing to another. And the last thing I would characterize them as his.

44:19 Mark: Bored.

44:21 Wes: Oh, yeah. I thought he was saying that you're bored if you don't do that.

44:24 Dylan: Oh, no.

44:25 Mark: Well, take away their diversion, you'll see them bored to extinction. But you're right, boredom is section four.

44:31 Dylan: I mean, man's condition, inconstancy, boredom, anxiety. So you're saying that the reason for our activities of diversion is trying to deal with our boredom?

44:43 Wes: Yeah, I mean, later on he's going to say we're trying not to feel sad, basically, and trying not to confront our own wretchedness and vileness. And it's interesting, boredom is in there as well, in the mix.

44:55 Dylan: Yeah. What I'd really like to ask him, and maybe he would, you know, at this time in his life when he's writing this, he wouldn't have taken well to the question, but was it diversion and reaction against boredom that made him suggest that experiment in barometric pressure, or was it something else that wasn't exactly diversion, but a different activity of the soul that inclined him to do that? I guess that's where I want to ask him about this, that he's categorizing basically every activity of the soul as being one of diversion against our own boredom because of how wretched we are.

45:33 Wes: Yeah, I thought of this too. In Freud, the Good News. The only version of religion that you get there for all the negative stuff is, well, there's sublimation, there's creativity, and it's the same thing in Nietzsche. You can harness these instincts and use them for something constructive. They can be destructive, but they can be used for good. For Pascal, it doesn't sound like he thinks that. It sounds like only One's relationship to God, which involves an intimate knowledge of one's wretchedness, is going to do the trick. But I don't know. Dylan, would you classify that as a diversion or is it a higher level diversion?

46:08 Dylan: Yeah, I don't know.

46:09 Mark: So I guess two things. One, boredom we have to take with restlessness. So he has several passages that say things like, our animal nature is such that if we're not moving, we die. And that's something somebody like Nietzsche would agree to as well, that you got to keep moving forward. You don't want to just lie back and become the last man. But Pascal interprets that as part of our wretchedness that we can't. Like Plato would like us to rest in. Oh, I'm comfortable in my reason and I'm now at peace. Like, no, but then the other thing. So you're making me, Dylan, look up the word curiosity, right?

That's the word that. That's the good thing. But I'm just going through the. There's only seven instances of it in the whole thing. One section. Gutenberg, section 18. For the chief malady of man is restless curiosity about things which he cannot understand. And it is not so bad for. For him to be in error as to be curious with no purpose. So science is bad number 152, pride. Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish to know but to talk. Otherwise we would not take a sea voyage in order never to talk of it and for the sole pleasure of seeing without the hope of ever communicating it.

In other words, we don't even actually have an honest scientific curiosity. Like we do that for status. Status and boredom.

47:24 Wes: Yeah. So that chapter four is the one that's devoted to boredom. So that's where he talks about the intolerability of rest without diversion or passion or activity. 622, 131. The result if we don't do that is loneliness, nullity, inadequacy. But he also uses this word dependence, which brings us back to the very first pensée we read in that chapter 78, 126, which is that basically the essential nature of man is to be this dependent being that desires independence. And of course, that is one of the things that can lead us astray, which is developing these sort of grandiose ideas, right?

Part of vanity and part of diversion are our projects to become great, to become rich and famous, or to win prestige, to win power. Those are attempts at fulfilling this desire for complete independence, for not being this dependent being who's going to die. Who, if they're not in the right environment, will be destroyed. And later on we'll find out that the way forward. So the way to have some sense of independence without pride, without the assumption of this false independence, is humility before God. That's what worship means for him. It means admitting one's dependence, but thereby linking oneself up to a being that is so powerful and so implicated in one's life that you get the proper sort of independence.

48:56 Mark: Yeah, this is making me think of all this stuff that has to say about the self as being fundamentally evil.

49:01 Dylan: Right.

49:01 Mark: Everybody is self interested. We all fundamentally hate each other and love only ourselves. But that the proper way, it's kind of like a foot wanting to be independent, that we need to realize that we are part of the body. And he just means the body of Christ. He doesn't mean your particular family or some other group like that. So I think we're about up to chapter three in the Penguin Classics edition on wretchedness, we just introduced the notion of self, the self and hating each other and the political stuff, spelling that out a little in a little more detail, if we didn't already. Reason versus faith and the wager, those are at least things. What are your thoughts?