Episode 184: Pascal on Human Nature (Part Two)

0:00 Wes: Chapters one through eight, I see, is like the, you know, and I'm just agreeing with you mark because you saw the first 13 as the thing. I don't think that it would take a lot of time to touch on what's in them, but I thought we should touch on chapter three, wretchedness at the very least, because, yeah, it sets up so much. So ultimately, if I had to just refer to one pensée in that chapter, it would be 75, 389 at the end where he basically says that to be happy we'd have to be powerful. Without some sense of being powerful, we're just doomed to unhappiness.

And the only way to really get that sense of power is through God. So this again is where we see this kind of a Nietzschean thing and then a divergent right turn into Christianity. So this is 75. Ecclesiastes shows that man without God is totally ignorant and inescapably unhappy. For anyone is unhappy who wills but cannot do. Now he wants to be happy and assured of some truth in it, yet he's equally incapable of knowing and of not desiring to know. He cannot even doubt. So by nature we're driven to want truth and we're driven to want happiness.

We can have those things, so we will, but we cannot do which is what I'm taking as powerlessness. So, yeah, I thought that was interesting as a solution to the problem of dependence, because ultimately that's what dependence means, is the situation of powerlessness. And ultimately what we'll see is the use of God to solve that problem. The other part of it, not to skip past what wretchedness means in its other facets, is just. He starts out talking about, basically, we just can't always get what we want. The things that we like are both good and bad.

They're complicated. Our enjoyments can always go wrong. Justice itself varies over time and place. This is 60 294. We're so suffused with convention. We're such conventional animals, creatures of custom and habit, that nothing belongs to us naturally. So even the situation of being in society, part of society, sort of disinherits us of any real satisfying nature where we be fully capable of something, maybe in the way an animal might be. Those, I think, are the key parts of what he's calling wretchedness.

2:18 Dylan: Well, I think you're right that the wretchedness for him is completely linked to our lack of satisfaction, especially satisfaction regarding our true natures. And I like what you just said about the way in which animals would not be wretched because they are able to fulfill the highest form of their being. And the wretchedness of human beings has to do with their capability of being close to God. I want to go Nietzschean, right? I want to go to being godlike. But that we're not. And again, as a point of distinction, that difference between our finitude and the infinite in God is everything.

And therefore it's not like we're only a shadow of godlikeness. We're actually wretched. And it's the lack of that satisfaction. But I do find it kind of weird that turn to having desires that go unsatisfied as being the engine for how we are in the world and how we the source of our activity of not being in one place all the time, as opposed to it being the source of our.

3:35 Wes: Well, that's because you love diversion, Dylan.

3:38 Dylan: Yeah, but maybe it makes sense that our desires are also, and especially unfulfilled desires, of course, are the source of our unhappiness as well. But there's just a pervasiveness of unhappiness and wretchedness and despair for Pascal, I

3:54 Wes: think if we were to think about this in existentialist terms, we think about de Beauvoir's lack, right?

3:59 Dylan: Yes, exactly.

4:00 Wes: It's not just wanting that Particular thing, the desire to be a doctor or to have a piece of pizza or whatever it is that is the object of our desire. It's the treatment of that as something that might fill us up in some spiritual sense. And the contrast is, for an existentialist like de Beauvoir, your solution to that is to embrace the lack, is to fill yourself up with the idea of oneself as a subjectivity, a subject that's the only thing to be filled by, is to know one's lack. Paradoxically. Actually Pascal will say similar things about us being a thinking reed and there being dignity in that which I take as being dignity and our mere subjectivity. But ultimately he'll need God as well. So we don't just embrace the lack with Pascal, we do something about it.

4:51 Dylan: What do you mean you would do something about it more than acknowledging our wretchedness?

4:55 Wes: Yes, because that acknowledgment of wretchedness is the obvious parallel to the embracing the lack. But the knowledge of wretchedness just is a relationship to God as well, a submission before God. So we still get this relation to something higher. We're not just left marooned on the island of our own subjectivity.

5:17 Mark: Yeah, I was trying to think what is different here than is just in plain old Stoicism or maybe Buddhism in terms of life is suffering. We have all these expectations and desires that are unfulfilled as soon as something is fulfilled and satisfaction doesn't last. And there's another desire that comes up that that's part of the, you know, we can't be happy at rest. We need to keep moving all the time. We're just engines of desire. And I think the only thing that's really different here is just the word wretched, which itself is supposed to imply, you know, he could have used fallen in the same way that it implies a non fallen, a non wretched state. Whereas suffering doesn't necessarily imply lack of suffering, that there's some pre birth lack of suffering state. But wretchedness is supposed to. Yeah, the Christian solution there pointing up,

6:08 Dylan: yeah, the fallenness in particular, that we're corrupted.

6:12 Wes: So Mark, when you were thinking about everyone hating each other, is that chapter five?

6:16 Mark: I think it's a really quite later chapter. It is from page 68, chapter 16. The falseness of other religions. For some reason, that's 210, 451. All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we can to make it serve the common good. But this is mere sham and a false image of charity for essentially is just hate.

6:38 Wes: Yeah. So what do you think of that?

6:40 Mark: Well, that fits very well with the political bit, which is right here in the wretchedness chapter. Right. So we use concupiscence, we use lust as far as possible in the service. This is the Gutenberg translated as the service of the public weal. But this is only a pretense and a false image of love. At bottom it is only hate. Elsewhere he talks about evidence of our divine nature that we do have ideals, right. So we do have ideals of justice. And we, you could say maybe it's like the social contract. Like it's kind of in our self interest to cooperate and make a society and have this idea of the common good, you know.

And this works actually pretty well with Hobbes. If you think for Hobbes, everybody's naturally pretty hostile to each other. And we use this hostility, this self interest to then build through a sort of a mutual non aggression treaty to build a society. And I don't see this in Hobbes. Pascal would have to add to that. But underlyingly, even if we have something like the social contract, there's still hostility just baked into it. At its very essence, it's going to. Government will inherently be corrupt because everybody's out for themselves.

7:49 Wes: Part of this too is just when he's talking about might holding sway over. Right. It's really an observation on the way societies are born, right. They're always born of violence and domination even after you've established a system of laws and even after conventions and customs have become solidified in some sense. And so now to pass property on, or the way property exchanges hands is through purchases and a set of laws and so on and before is just you take it well, the entire territory you live on. At some point it was just taken. And all the stuff that goes on inside it, all the legalistic stuff and the stuff that falls within the domain of justice, all of that is built on top of an act of pure violence, aggression, pure might. And that's the sense in which one thing inevitably holds sway over the other.

8:46 Dylan: His observation about political order is not based upon the way things ought to be. It's more observational than that about the way things just work. The closest thing to something that's underlying it is this one that we just referred to. All men naturally hate one another. That begins, as Mark said, sound like Hobbes. But a lot of the other stuff just seems to be like, this is how the world works. And pointedly it's not like Plato talking About, well, we want to be guided by justice. And so we want. What we should be doing is looking for the way in which justice ought to be manifest in the world, that kind of thing. He just doesn't seem to be that interested in it.

9:26 Wes: Well, it's not just. I think it also, it's because to assume that we can establish justice. Right. We might get this idea, this presumptive idea in our heads that, well, we don't need God. We can just, you know, we have truth and we have justice. We could take that whole, which is something that we're more used to and far more inclined to, probably, or people of our political stripe are inclined to these days. We don't see a need for God in the whole justice and truth project. He wants to show that no, in fact, these are indelible parts of our nature and society, therefore setting us up for the conclusion that the only way out of that is God.

There's not going to be a kingdom of heaven on earth, a secular, enlightened order on earth. And to that effect, in that chapter that Mark was referring to, he ultimately says that hating ourself is really important. We don't want to get around that. We don't want to develop this idea that we can be better than we wretchedly are. And the reason why he brings up hate is to say, ultimately the only way to really love is to have knowledge of our inability to love. And again, this all comes down to this knowledge of wretchedness being a relationship to God and that being the way out.

10:41 Mark: Yeah, it would be nice if he would say a little more in those sections about the foot wanting to obey itself rather than obeying the body. If he got a little more concrete about what the unit the body of Christ actually involves on earth. Like, is there any political upshot? Is he talking about obeying the Pope and things like that? Maybe in his previous work, Provincial Letters, he gets into a little more stuff having to do with the political religious climate of his time. In here we just get, well, so actually a lot of this political stuff is in chapter four, Causes and Effects.

But I see right in here in chapter two, 60, 294. It's on page 16. In fact, laws are so vain that he would break free of them. So it is useful to deceive him. So he sounds like Plato and that we should have the noble lie. But you know, for Plato, that's a matter of like, that would be justice. But for here it's just. It's useful. Yes, There is no divine Right of kings. But people are going to get all ornery and prideful and they hate each other. And so we really want to avoid violence. That would be very bad. So it's okay if the masses of people think that there is divine right of kings and all this sort of stuff that'll keep them in line and that their government does embody true justice.

12:01 Wes: Yeah, because revolution just makes it worse.

12:04 Mark: And there's biographical stuff that, you know, he was familiar with civil wars and, you know, he really thought that that was the absolute thing to avoid. So if you. You might think that he doesn't have much of an ethics or a public ethics, but like. Well, that's. I think it's obvious stuff like that. So if you're arguing for an abstraction like freedom and rights and like freedom of speech, he's not going to care about any of that stuff. But actually keeping people from killing each other, that would be good. He asked why do we have the maxima we should each follow the customs of our own country?

Well, because we recognize it's not actually reason that obliges us to obey law. Our laws really aren't more rational than many other arrangements. He says there no doubt exist natural laws, but once this fine reason of ours was corrupted, it corrupted everything. So good luck trying to make your government actually truly, just in chapter six,

12:57 Wes: we get this idea that concupiscence can actually, and this is 105 to 106 in the penguin, the concupiscence can produce its own practical order, that there's an emergent order that comes out of it. And this is what he calls the greatness of man. So just sort of pivoting to the positive account. So he says in 106. Greatness, causes and effects show the greatness of man in producing such excellent order from his own concupiscence. And the next one is 107. The parrot wipes its beak, although it is clean again. Another St. John's favorite. This reading, in the context of all of it and everything else I've read, it actually makes a little more sense now, a lot more sense than when I was 18 years old.

13:43 Mark: What does it mean?

13:44 Wes: Yes, before that. He's talking about if an animal did rationally what it does by instinct, and if it spoke rationally what it speaks by instinct when hunting and so on, it might say, bite through this cord. It is hurting me and I cannot reach it. So basically, instinct would give us all these practical syllogisms. There's something proto reasonable about instinct. And it actually produces its own order. There's a teleology to it. So even without rationality, we can get some sort of practical order. And if you look at the wiping of the beak, even though it is not clean, that's the point where it's no longer concupiscence.

It's no longer about what you need or what's necessary, right? You know, you got food on your beak and you got to get it off. At that point, it becomes custom. At that point, it becomes ritual. It becomes the order that emerges out of concupiscence. And to support that, later on at 1:08, he'll say, well, pleasure can't be sensual anyway. So pleasure isn't simply sensual. It reaches towards something higher. And I think the whole point of that is to get at that. The thing that we were discussing earlier was whether well is hard is that imagination, is that the passions.

How do we reconcile the idea that concupiscence leads us astray and the fact that he wants to talk about heart? Well, at 110, that's where he talks about us getting first principles, not from reason, but from the heart. So that this emergent order has something to do with the first principles that reason requires. And it's not actually entirely. I think Dylan was right. Divorced from instinct and concupiscence and imagination and all that stuff, it actually is somehow related to that.

15:32 Dylan: Well, he says in one 10 principles are felt propositions proved, both with certainty, though by different means earlier. For knowledge of first principles like space, time, motion, number is as solid as any derived through reason. And it is on such knowledge coming from the heart and instinct, that reason has to depend and base all its argument. So here, I mean, he's being. I mean, as strong as he is anywhere else, that reason rides on top of instinct. And the truths of reason ride on top of the first principles that are only accessed through feeling, through intuition, maybe through heart. Heart is the word that he uses.

16:11 Mark: Yeah, I'm trying to line up this talk of instinct with. Elsewhere, he contrasts reason and inspiration. And, well, the Penguin translated as a habit. Trotter translates it as custom. So custom and habit are used interchangeably. So, for instance, this is in chapter 23 in here Christian morality, page 244, 808, 245. There are three ways to reason. Custom, inspiration. The Christian religion, which alone has reason, does not acknowledge as her true children those who believe without inspiration. It is not that she excludes reason and custom. On the contrary, the mind must be open to proofs, must be confirmed.

By custom and offer itself in humbleness to inspirations, which alone can produce a true and saving effect. So inspiration here is what's being used for heart in other places. But the relation between instinct and custom here I think is interesting because just like you say we build stuff, there's an order built out of concupiscence, out of lust. Society is kind of an order, a customary order that is also built out of our collective wretchedness. And there's a certain logic to it. Again, it's an unplanned order. It just happens based on human nature.

You might say it's the wisdom of experience that bad ideas, if you try them out as social norms, they don't last long. Like that society goes extinct or that custom goes out of fashion. So custom, prima facie, has something going for it. It's worked so far and it's probably going to be better than your puny reason can come up with. In the context of the particular thing I was reading about Christianity, it's that, well, if you're in a well functioning society, then it will have passed down Christian customs from generation to generation. And so that's.

As an unthinking person, that's a fine thing to slide into as sort of your undeveloped first stage of spiritual awakening. But then you have to get beyond that. You have to look at reason and why you might think there is a God based on reason and then even get beyond that to harden inspiration. So I'm not sure where exactly instinct fits in there, other than maybe something underlying custom.

18:22 Wes: Yeah, if we think of the concupiscence part as the instinctual and then custom and even reason itself as an emergent order that rides on top of that, I think that makes some sense.

18:33 Dylan: Yeah, but the emergent order from reason is. Well, I mean, I guess he's focused on how it's distinct and really does ride on top of it, that it's super added because you know about the truth, whether it be through the customs that you accept based upon the order of the world. And those sometimes feel more like observations of the way things are and maybe less associated with truth. But in 110, the reasons of the heart are true, or the way we know things about the world, even in mathematics, but they're not known the way reason is known, the way we reason things, you can't prove them, but you can know them just as. Certainly.

19:15 Wes: Yeah. In the end, he says towards the end of 110, he'll basically say it's better to know everything via the heart. And not have to demonstrate it so as if reason were the only way we could learn, would to God on the contrary, that we never needed it and knew everything by instinct and feeling. But nature has refused us this blessing and instead given us only very little knowledge of this kind. All other knowledge can be acquired by reasoning.

19:43 Dylan: You got to read the last sentence there too. That is why those to whom God has given religious faith by moving their hearts are very fortunate and feel quite legitimately convinced. But to those who do not have it, we can only give such faith through reasoning until God gives it by moving their heart. Without such, faith is only human and useless for salvation. So this goes right to the fact that it's not through our willing that we know God, it's through God's grace. We're stuck with reason, especially with regards to knowing things like God. And maybe we know things about the world through our heart. And maybe through our heart is a way of getting to know the truth of God. But in the end we will only know God through God's grace, opening up our intuition and our heart. It wouldn't be through our own activity of doing that.

20:41 Mark: Right. I think we need to be pretty careful about faith versus reason because he goes back and forth quite a bit on it. There's a very delicate balance that it's not that it sounds like in the Wager, like reason just can't tell you whether you should have faith or not. So you have to use something else. You have to use this prudential argument of making a bet. But on the other hand, he says, I do not demand of you blind faith. So he thinks that there are proofs. And he spends a lot of time. All that tedious part that I didn't like of the book when I was listening to it, of trying to give proofs.

They don't sound like Thomas Aquinas proofs. It's not that kind of proof. Like, he thinks those things are not very convincing even if they work. But he says a lot about miracles. Like people were actually convinced and they should have required this by miracles at the time, that it was because Jesus actually could do magic tricks. That is what justified people in believing him. And he even quotes Augustine of like, you know, I wouldn't have been a Christian if it weren't for the miracles. We don't need those now.

21:45 Dylan: Well, he has them in his life, right?

21:47 Mark: I mean, yeah, he thought his niece was miraculously cured. And it was like it wasn't just him thinking that. That was like the church by a

21:55 Dylan: thorn from Jesus crown.

21:57 Mark: Yep. It was certified by the church that

21:59 Wes: a street vendor sold him. What do they call those?

22:03 Mark: Huckster.

22:05 Wes: That's what the Protestant. Yeah, the Protestant Reformation was. I mean, one of the complaints about the Catholic Church was this sort of corruption. Selling indulgences. Indulgences.

22:14 Dylan: Yeah. Maybe this is a good point to move to the wager, because we just brought it up again, but also that it has a different version of this reasoned argument for at least behaving faithfully that will take you to opening your heart. So it's an example of trying to bridge between reason and heartfulness in getting to God.

22:36 Mark: Sure. And it's interesting reading this, knowing that he basically invented probability theory so that there's as much as science could be behind this, the probability theory of his day, such as it was packed in here.

22:53 Dylan: Well, as I said earlier, there's also the thinking about infinity and finiteness, which is right at the center of the conversation about the calculus, which is stuck in here, too.

23:02 Wes: Does one of you guys want to summarize the wager thing?

23:05 Dylan: Go ahead, Mark.

23:08 Mark: Yeah, well, there's so many interesting points packed in here. The wager itself, as people are probably familiar with, is reason can't tell us definitively whether there is a God or not. And I want to throw in that what I was saying before, that disclaimer, that he does think that there are proofs that can make it so it's not unreasonable to believe, you know, that you can't think that the idea of Jesus or miracles or anything are simply absurd. So reason does get us that far, but it doesn't push us over the line. And the way it sounds, the way it's normally put, is you have to decide.

I want to see how he actually says it here. This is page 121. There's a lot of run up to it. All right, well, let me give you the stupid version of it before we get into the way you should actually interpret. It's. You have the ability to choose whether you believe or not. And again, I don't think Pascal actually believes that, but this is the way it's usually put, so you can make a little matrix. I choose to believe, and there is a God, then I get infinite reward. I choose to believe, but there is not a God. Well, I wasted a little time going to church, and really, he thinks that our lives are so wretched that all these diversions that we would be doing besides going to church, besides being holy, like, they're just completely worthless.

So really, according to his Analysis, we give up nothing.

24:22 Wes: You just need a church with good music.

24:24 Mark: Then you're saying, and then choose not to believe. But there is in fact a God. Well, I'm damned for eternity. I choose not to believe and there isn't a God. Well, I'm right, I win the bet. But like, what do I win? The time that I didn't spend going to church. So given those odds and given the fact that infinity is on the line, an infinite amount of afterlife that could be hellish or heavenly compared to that our lives are just a blip, are just nothing compared to the infinite. Of course we should choose to believe.

24:56 Dylan: He says on 123. Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us assess the two cases. If you win, you win everything. If you lose, you lose nothing. Do not hesitate. Then wager that he does exist.

25:11 Wes: Does God condone gambling?

25:17 Dylan: It's funny because there's the part about just getting you enough to go to church. As Mark was saying, there's a part of the argument which amounts to, look, just go through the motions. Even if you don't believe, go through the motions because it's better for you. There's the betting part, but there's also the your life will be better and more peaceful if you do it. And then eventually your heart will come around. There's a habit argument, especially at the end towards it. But the argument about for the wager is all this infinity and finiteness, where once you acknowledge that you're a finite being and then you buy into the fact that whatever that God and the afterlife have the possibility of infinite goodness or infinite pain and suffering, there's no going back from there because they're simply incomparable. In his mathematics of the soul.

26:13 Mark: I like the comparison to Descartes. He doesn't make this comparison, obviously, but he was familiar with Descartes and the sort of rationalist arguments for how do we have a notion that there is a God? A lot of it came from reflections on mathematics. And so the way that he puts it, we know that the infinite exists without knowing its nature, just as we know that it is untrue that numbers are finite. Thus it is true that there is an infinite number, but we do not know what it is. It is untrue that it is even, untrue that it is odd. For by adding a unit does not change its nature, yet it is a number, and every number is even or odd. Therefore we may well know that God exists without knowing what he is Just

26:48 Dylan: as an aside, it's not true that the infinite is a number. I want to give him slack on it, but I think that that's part of the source of this problem that he has. I think the key there to me following something like Descartes as well is that you don't have to know its nature to know that it exists. And that would amount to the strongest defense he has against someone who says, well, because I don't understand, or I don't know God, I don't know that God exists. He says, well, you don't have to understand it to know that it exists.

27:21 Mark: At the top of page 122 here, this is still on the same thing. Thus, we know the existence and nature of the finite because we too are finite and extended in space. We know the existence of the infinite without knowing its nature, because it too has extension, but unlike us, has no limits. But we do not know either the existence or the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits, but by faith we know its existence. Through glory we shall know his nature. So that sounds like it's supposed to be kind of a proof, but I'm not really sure.

It's sort of. It's giving us levels of conceptual abstraction that is at least not implausible that a God might exist. Or like, you know, we can think the term God and it has a meaning, even though God in his essence is so huge we can't even conceive of him. Just what you were saying, you might say, why are we even arguing if there is a God or not? Because his nature, by your own admission, by your own definition of God, it's so huge and crazy that we couldn't say anything at all about him in the beginning.

28:18 Dylan: Here you feel like he's going to be making a proof for the existence of God based upon this question of the infinite and the finite. And as you pointed out, Mark, there's a kind of plausibility here that's put forth that, I guess, is the way in which you move into the wager. Because even though he starts at the beginning with the infinite and the finite and allowing us a window into God, that is, just because you don't know it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. And he moves basically at the bottom of the page to this question of the wager and again leverages the mathematics, but in a different way regarding the thing that you're risking and the thing that you know.

So first of all, you have to make a choice. You would have to play, since you must necessarily play, and it would be unwise of you once you are obliged to play, not to risk your life in order to win three lives at a game in which there is an equal chance of losing and winning, but there is an eternity of life and happiness. That being so, even though there were an infinite number of chances of which only one were in your favor, you would still be right to wager one in order to win two. You would be acting wrongly, being obliged to play and refusing to stake one life against three in a game.

It's not making as much sense as one would hope. But he basically sets it up so that to be convincing, he's saying, well, okay, I can understand that you would not wager for God when things were sort of even Steven. But look, this is about infinity, man, and about your infinite happiness and your infinite wretchedness, and you don't have any choice but to wager that way.

29:56 Mark: Yeah, we should remind ourselves that these are his notes scrawled to himself. This is not his ready for publication presentation of this. So if it seems a little confusing in the details, that might be why. Yeah, but just the idea, you know, if you're talking about two lives, three lives, like, that's a weird, artificial, you know, was I talking about two lives or three lives? But just, it's just by comparison to the infinite. And again, seeing the infinite as an infinite number of lives as opposed to one life that is infinitely long, you know, there's no real difference between those. So you could say lifespans, maybe.

30:26 Wes: So what's wrong with the argument?

30:28 Mark: Well, I think he has responses in this book to most of the things that people say in response to it. So one of the obvious ones, which I just happen to see Penn Jillette delivering this on, there's a HBO show about a Judd Apatow thing called Crashing that's about comedians.

30:47 Wes: That's up now.

30:48 Mark: Yes. The season two just started. In the first episode of season two, the main character, who's a Christian, runs into Penn Jillette. And Penn Jillette manages to convince him by just saying there aren't just two choices. Not just believe in this God or don't believe it's, what if there's Zeus? What if there are other gods that you could choose to believe in? But those gods are pissed off that you believe in the Jesus God. Right. And that's why I think Pascal recognizes that that kind of response is available. And this is why he spends basically the whole rest of his book after this spelling out why exactly the Jews are wrong.

Why the pagans were wrong. But we've already given the thumbnail sketch, which is that Christianity, he thinks, uniquely captures the human condition, the human condition of fallenness. And no other religion does that. So that is at least covered. What else is wrong with it?

31:38 Dylan: I get stuck on the finite versus infinite thing. This kind of pseudo mathematics, which was supposed to be convincing, is that I have a finite life and a finite perceived good tallied up against infinite badness, for instance, if I go to hell, or infinite goodness if I am blessed. And there's just no way of comparing those two things. It's not quite a shell game of an argument, but it's intellectually disingenuous. But maybe to be a little more gracious is it's misunderstanding the relationship between the finite and the infinite and the way you would make that kind of argument. And it's also making it a funny kind of mathematical argument in a case that should be a matter of the heart, which also makes me skeptical of it.

32:25 Wes: This is actually the least interesting part to me as well, because the other stuff is just so rich to me. And this is. I mean, the math of it to me doesn't have to work that well. I'm reminded of every once in a while when the lottery gets big. You'll see something in the New York Times or elsewhere which will explain why it's such a bad bet. And the way they do that is the way a poker player would calculate odds. And what you're thinking about doing is, okay, if I made a habit of this, if I just kept putting down a dollar or two dollars on these tickets, would in the long run it work out for me?

Would I profit? And that's actually not a good way to make that calculation because to the average person, winning the lottery is for all intents and purposes infinite. When someone asks if that's a good bet, they're not asking whether they could grind out a living at that if they did it enough eventually within a human lifetime. And so it's a life transforming thing. And so the wager you're making is, well, how much can I spend on this? That's really an insignificant amount. That's not going to hurt me. Intuitively, the wager is not convincing to me and I don't have the most solid arguments against it because I just didn't have time to think a lot about it.

But my gut reaction is that, well, like Peter Singer, it's actually underestimating the costs. First of all, there are actually enormous psychological costs to acquiescing to beliefs that at a gut level one doesn't really believe, allowing that sort of contradiction in oneself. And then on the other hand, it seems to overestimate the benefits if, according to my intuitions, because I don't think of heaven and hell as even logically coherent. So to me, it's like you're asking me to put a bet. If you say, okay, here's the money you might win, here's the money you're spending, I know what I'm doing, wager wise, I know I could figure the odds and all that stuff.

But if you're asking me to bet regarding things, that's fine if they're unknown, okay, I'll grant you that, Pascal. But what if I think that they're not even logically coherent objects that I'm trying to avoid or gain? I don't think of a true depiction of God, for instance, as involving him sending the people to hell or as involving some sort of heaven. That doesn't make any sense to me. So in a way, it's like the Zeus problem that Mark mentioned. It's like, well, I have a different God and you're asking me to believe in your heaven and hell God.

Anyway, that's the best I can do.

34:52 Dylan: Sure. What do you think about in the end of him just wanting to try to get people to act nicer, to go through the motions? Even at the end, after he's made this argument, it's conclusive. And then he says, if you're unable to believe, it is because of your passions, since reason impels you to believe and yet you cannot do so. Concentrate then, not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God's existence, but by diminishing your passions. You want to find faith and you do not know the road. You want to be cured of unbelief, and you ask for the remedy.

Learn from those who were once bound like you, and who now wager all they have. These are people who know the road you wish to follow, who have been cured of the affliction of which you wish to be cured. Follow the way by which they began. They behaved just as if they did believe. Taking holy water, having masses, said and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally and will make you more docile. And then just afterwards, he said, just sort of characterizing a question. Now, what harm will come to you from choosing this course? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a sincere, true friend.

It is true you will not enjoy noxious pleasures, glory and Good living, but will you not have the others?

36:09 Mark: Right. So there's sort of three objections besides the what if there's Zeus or something else? One that Wes pointed out is there has to be a greater than zero chance that there is a God of the appropriate sort. And I think of the appropriate sort includes this picture of heaven and hell. And I agree. And he doesn't dwell on it, so I don't think we should dwell on it. That's perhaps an issue for another podcast. But yeah, I recall arguing myself in earlier podcasts that even the notion of a God itself is self contradictory because there's these issues of can he make a sandwich bigger than he can eat?

Or whatever. And somehow, somehow in reading some of the readings subsequent to that, I was convinced that it's not quite that simple, that we can't say by definition there can be no God. But I think the idea of there might be some actual logical coherence, not just it doesn't make sense that a God would sentence people to hell because who are we to judge his rationale? That's Pascal's response to that. But I think maybe we could try to outline something that actually makes the notion of eternal life of any sort and then eternal non bodily life in pain or pleasure.

These certainly sound like they're packed with contradictions, like how can I have a blissful life when bliss actually is a matter of brain responses to things? But I'm not going to have my brain. There's a back and forth available there. So that's at least one of the things. There has to be a non zero chance. And I think that it's very possible that it is not possible that there's a God. So there are these sort of modal proofs for or against God's existence. I think we've referred to in passing before. And then what Dylan was just talking about, the one that he anticipates right here, is you could choose to believe or choose not to believe, but you can't really choose to believe.

You can't control yourself that way. So he does give. His response is, you know, just go through the motions and eventually hopefully you'll get God's grace. As we know from his Jansenism, he doesn't really think that for sure that's going to happen.

38:03 Dylan: He goes even a little bit further than that. Right. He says, I tell you that you will gain even in this life and that at every step you take along this road you will see that your gain is so certain and your risk so negligible. That in the end you will realize that you have wagered on something certain and infinite for which you have paid nothing. So at the end, he wants to say, it's going to be better for you in this life right now. And that to me, that's where he's being the most persuasive. But he's actually most. Dismissing everything he said before. He's basically saying, if you go through these motions, you will feel better about your life.

38:39 Wes: What if going to church makes you miserable?

38:42 Dylan: I hear what you're saying.

38:43 Wes: I mean, I recently. So over Christmas, I actually had to go to church because my father and his wife, who are not religious and haven't ever gone to church until recently, and they're doing it for the community. So my father was singing in the choir, which in and of itself is a sight to behold. I don't know, just the whole feeling of church for me is not a good one. And I was also reading Hannah Arendt and thinking about the Holocaust, and I was feeling depressed about it, and going to church made me feel even more depressed. Now, granted, part of that is because there's no.

This is making me sound terrible. But anyway, we were the only somewhat young people, almost me and my siblings, who actually were there, which made it feel like, well, this is a dying institution. And it's sort of like people are trying to hold it together and they're trying to make it a basis of community. But it's not anymore. It doesn't make any sense anymore. It doesn't fit into our world anymore. And that in and of itself is depressing, maybe in a time and place where it actually successfully serves that function. But what if it's not even functional anymore?

What if God is dead? To put it in Nietzsche's way, I

39:52 Mark: think what you just. The story is a great segue to what could be perhaps our last topic here, which is my third possible response to this argument, which is. Or really the fourth, which is, can't you just not choose? In other words, can't you ignore the whole thing, which is what you're kind of saying that we do. If God is dead, that means we now are not interested in this question. And that is definitely the way I presented my own views on this whole philosophy of religion topic in early episodes. And sure, somebody emailed me like, wow, that just blew me away, you saying that.

Because it's so silly. How could you not care about your eternal soul? It's not that. Just God's existence the way I'd rationalized it is if there's a God. God is not enough of an asshole that he's going to condemn me to hell just because I am following the best lights of my reason. God gave us reason, we should follow it. If God is good, God is not going to give us bad things. So do your best, think your hardest. And if you don't end up dwelling on these traditional Christian things, well, then that's probably best. Or at least it's not that objectionable.

But I think Pascal's whole project is to call people that are kind of indifferent about religion like that. Or maybe have rationalized in the way I just described to say that that is actually a. He uses the word monstrous multiple times. So much of what he argues of. Like, you know, I've been emphasizing the stoicism, but also the skepticism. It's like stuff straight out of Sextus Empiricus. Why the senses deceive us in so many ways, why reason deceives us. And so Sextus, of course, says we should hold in abeyance these judgments. We should not commit ourselves too much.

But as Dylan was just reading it like, you are committed. You have to make the wager. You have to. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

41:44 Wes: Yeah, I was just looking at a Rush song, Rush's Freewill that. So that lyric was just going through my head. Can you sing that if you choose not to decide?

41:58 Mark: No, I can't do that.

41:59 Dylan: I still made a choice.

42:02 Wes: Sorry, Dylan.

42:04 Dylan: No, I never got into Russia. I don't even know any of their songs. I never understood it. I knew people who are just deeply passionate about Russia, like.

42:12 Wes: Like a hardcore libertarian to.

42:16 Mark: You have to. Just like drums, that's all. What kind of freak then is man? How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious. Judge of all things, feeble, earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and a refuse of the universe. That's his response to skepticism in 131,

42:41 Dylan: 434 on this point. Do you think that he thinks there are these three categories, the believer, the explicit non believer, and then below them, the skeptic.

42:54 Mark: I think the categories he gives are the one who has belief and is right in it, the one who doesn't have belief, but is seeking it. He thinks those are both reasonable. And the one who ignores the whole thing is the monster.

43:05 Dylan: Yeah. And so then someone who is an explicit non believer would be sort of in that same category. You're right. There's the two categories, the believer and the person who really thinks they ought to believe, but they don't believe.

43:18 Mark: Yeah. Or is seeking maybe just. I don't know. I don't understand any of this. That's a pretty reasonable reaction to our own wretchedness, to our own confusion, to say, like, I just don't understand any of this. Help me out here. But he still thinks that we should be oriented toward wanting to know, wanting the good, a religious curiosity.

43:38 Wes: Well, there's an argument here where he's making an analogy between Socratic ignorance and knowledge of our own wretchedness. So it's not enough just to be ignorant and not inquisitive, but ultimately you're working on your knowledge of your own ignorance, which is actually, some might think that's basically what philosophy is. It's just there to flesh that out. And that's a much better state to be in than what Plato calls doxosophia or conceit of wisdom, where you think you know things. I think Pascal calls it being in the middle. Yeah, it's in chapter five, causes and effects, 83, 327.

Those who have gone halfway towards real wisdom and between real wisdom and natural ignorance, they think they know things, but they don't. So it's better to know your own ignorance, and likewise it's better to have some knowledge of your own wretchedness. And then the question is, can you really have knowledge of your own wretchedness without this relation to God? And can you really successfully cope with one's dependence and one's wretched state without that relation? And that's sort of a practical way of arguing for the importance of God. That, I think, is more effective than just the wager because it's no longer about the heaven and hell.

It's about whether one can be happy and virtuous and healthy and all those other things without that relation. Does that make sense?

45:03 Dylan: It makes sense. But I'm also just thinking about this question of indifference. If we take it out of religious terms. Isn't part of what Pascal is that quote that Mark had of saying how horrible we are as skeptics, is. You should be concerned about the state of your soul, and you should be concerned about the state of who you are, of your being. And to be indifferent about that, to be indifferent about who you are as a human being, is a terrible thing. It's not merely ignorance. It's a kind of debasement of your humanity.

45:38 Mark: Yeah. Even by worldly standards. It's like you stay up late worrying about the promotion that you might or might not get. And you're not worried about an eternity of flames. That is messed up, being so carefree. Like if you think, la la la, I'm carefree, no, that is irresponsible. And we should not trust a person like that with our kids or with any responsibility at all. That is just so irresponsible.

46:04 Dylan: I wanted to pull it away from the notion of eternity and that religious point of view, but to the notion that we should be concerned about the state of our souls, the state of who we are, which seems to me actually pro cuts across almost any kind of philosophical disposition at all. And that just merely asking the question of what kind of person am I and what kind of person should I be?

46:29 Wes: I was trying to sort of frame that argument. So Pascal talks a lot about our dual nature, and for De Beauvoir it was our ambiguity. And in Pascal's case, the dual nature is that in its most basic level, it's our divine part and our animal part. But what it comes down to is our capacity for truth and for happiness and for virtue and all of those things in the abstract and purely impotential. And then the fallenness, the wretchedness, and that wretched state is that we can't actually obtain those things, at least by ourselves. So if you bought that, if you buy this idea that, look, we're really inherently screwed up, in order to be happy we need truth and we need to escape the inconstancy of the world and the sense of being completely dependent and the notion that we're going to die and all those things, there's just no way around it.

And then you come to the conclusion, well, look, the only way to do that is this weird paradoxical self referential thing where you get rid of diversions and you come to know all of those in more profound terms. But that knowledge in turn depends upon to know that is to know one's relation to this higher being. It's impossible without doing that. Then the question is whether or not you really are forced from a pragmatic standpoint to say, okay, my virtue and happiness as a person, my fulfillment of my end, let's say, my natural end, really rely on me believing this.

And I think that would be, of course there are lots of assumptions and things leading up to that, but I think that would be the more powerful argument, more powerful than the wager. And I think it's in there.

48:08 Mark: So this whole section, it's page 127 and 133, 427 and 428 as the Penguin numbers against indifference, where he's talking about how you should not. It's like he's the anti Camus or Camus the anti Pascal. Do they profess to have delighted us by telling us that they hold our soul to be only a little wind and smoke? Especially by telling us this in a haughty and self satisfied tone of voice. Is this a thing to be said gaily? Is it not, on the contrary, a thing to say sadly as the saddest thing in the world? So you can definitely see the existentialism in there, whereas somebody like Camus is going to say, you absolutely have to just hold on to the absurd.

Yes, it is true that we are suspended between two abysses of the greatness of the. We're so puny in regard to the universe. And the other abyss that Pascal points out in another famous passage here is just the microcosmic universe, like. Like there's just so much that we don't understand even about the natural world. You know, our lives are so short, it's all so pathetic. And for a Nietzsche, for a Camus, you say, yeah, and that's fine, I'm going to ride that. You know, the Romantic, or I think they're following Romanticism in saying this, that, yeah, you acknowledge that life is fleeting and you come to terms with that.

You grasp that by the horns. And that's what affirming the absurd is. But Pascal is going to not only say, no, we have to object to the absurd. This is sort of a practical argument for saying there has to be some kind of redemption, there has to be a way out, there has to be hope. But even if you admitted it, it would be a very, very sad thing.

49:39 Wes: Well, what if the absurd were not obtainable except with God? I'm not going.

49:43 Dylan: You're going Kierkegaard on us now, right?

49:45 Wes: Exactly. So there are points that just sound a little bit. They echo a little bit of de Beauvoir to me and existentialism and the sense, the thinking Reed stuff where he. So in 113, 348, he says, thinking read, it is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space, the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck. Through thought I grasp it. There's an analogy there, I think to embrace the lack for de Beauvoir, to embrace the absurdity, is just to ground things in one's subjectivity and she even does that ethically, right?

So one's freedom as a subject sort of becomes the ground for an ethics and one's respect for the subjectivity of others. And then the other point where he mentions the Reed. Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water, is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.

And so again, this sort of points to the mere fact of being a knower, of having a subjectivity. He goes on to say, thus all our dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well. That is the basic principle of morality. Again, all of this to me is evocative of existentialism, except that I think he gets to the point where none of that is possible. None of this dignity and subjectivity is possible for him without God. And that's where the two diverge.

51:28 Dylan: I was resisting just jumping in because those quotes that you have are like the part where when I first read Pascal, oh, I found it pretty capturing and familiar, but articulate and enlivening. But then to me, he just goes off this deep end of diverges, as you say, being so consumed by the immortality of the soul, by our wretchedness. This is in the section we were just reading from earlier, against indifference. One needs no great sublimity of soul to realize that in this life there is no true and solid satisfaction, that all our pleasures are mere vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and finally, that death which threatens us at every moment, must in a few years infallibly face us with the inescapable and appalling alternative of being annihilated or wretched throughout eternity.

So you see the beginning of existentialism in there, of there not being things being true and solid. We can't have certainty. But his solution, his turn on there for how to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty is a kind of wallowing in wretchedness and eternal damnation.

52:44 Wes: Yeah, I mean, another way to put that in existentialist terms, the notion of wretchedness is Heidegger's word, thrown Ness right. To be thrown, I think, is to be wretched. Or for de Beauvoir, it's the ambiguity. It's to not just be in existence, but also to be in essence, to be something that is material and determined and not just pure freedom. So that's where the wretchedness comes in. And then if you think, well, how can I redeem myself and just get all the good stuff, get all the free, autonomous subject stuff, and not have to worry about all the material stuff, I think again, for the existentialists, there's just something about the embrace of that ambiguity.

But I think for Pascal, you have to at least consider the possibility that you can't embrace the ambiguity without embracing wretchedness or knowledge of wretchedness is just required subjectivity, just is wretchedness. And to embrace it, you have to embrace wretchedness. And to embrace wretchedness, there's no way to do that without being really depressed and destroying yourself, without God. That's the chain of argument. I'm not saying I agree with it.

53:53 Dylan: I agree with you that that's the chain of the argument. And I agree with you that we should be linking up these ideas of wretchedness and ambiguity and thrown ness, except for the fact that wretchedness comes with two things. One is this notion of fallenness or corruptness. Both thrown ness and ambiguity don't have that sense. They don't have the sense of I was once perfect, but now I am fallen. And it doesn't have the added moral component in lack of perfection. Also being unworthy, shameful, decrepit. Those kinds of things, the ambiguity and the thrown ness have everything to do with uncertainty and having to do with being at sea and not having things be solid.

And how do you deal with that? I completely agree that there's that awareness in Pascal of that kind of character that makes it feel existential. And there's parts of it that really read existential, especially the parts where the solace is found in one's thinking and one's thought and the relationship between mind and body. But in these sections, so I'm not

55:09 Wes: so sure, at least remembering de Beauvoir, she has all these chapters on the different types of men, including what the submen, different ways you can screw up, different forms of wretchedness. And also, maybe here's a simpler way to put it, don't we all agree that human beings suck? Don't they actually suck?

55:28 Dylan: Well, I mean, I don't agree.

55:29 Wes: After millennia of bloodshed and genocide and racism.

55:35 Dylan: Well, okay, so let's put another list up there, right? Of love and raising our children and building growing things.

55:44 Wes: And Pascal says we are great as well, so it's not just we're wretched. We're wretched and we're great. We shouldn't leave that part out.

55:50 Dylan: I was just disagreeing. You just said, don't we all just agree that human beings suck?

55:54 Wes: Yeah, I didn't say only that. They only. Only suck.

55:57 Mark: The suckage gets the news coverage, but the suckage is the exception. But it gets all the press.

56:02 Dylan: So suckage not as a state of being, suckage as being an adjective.

56:07 Wes: Listen, I get it. In other words, we really. Well, I mean, yeah, of course I wasn't just trying to say human beings only suck, that they're only bad. But for each individual, at least for me, if I began writing out the list of flaws, that would be a large project. It would take a long time. Or all the shitty things I've done.

56:27 Mark: Oh, Wes, those vices are just virtues that haven't conformed themselves to other virtues.

56:32 Wes: I'm sympathetic and I don't see it as inconsistent with existentialism, but that's probably not something we should dwell on. I think that existentialism might not need it, I'm not sure. But it seems to me that the flaws are kind of built into the system. So if you were to talk about human beings, you'd have to do the Shakespeare thing. What a piece of work is man. How noble. And what's the other one? It's very telling that I can't remember the wretched part, but I don't see how we get around acknowledging that.

57:01 Mark: How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel. And yet it goes on. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights, not me. It wasn't immediately dissing it. There's more praise. That's why it was escaping me.

57:20 Wes: Right, right. We're vain. I'm reminded of that list in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, where he goes on and on about our vanity and our tendency to superstition and paranoia and our envy of people and all these nasty emotions. The way we mistreat people. We're arrogant. That's what I'm talking about. And that's what Pascal's talking about. And we can't get around that. No matter how good a people we are, we don't jettison that. And I think that's part of Pascal's. I think the anxiety for someone who's religious like Pascal is that we are going to be presumptive, that we're going to be prideful that we're going to have some illusion that we've left that stuff behind.

And that's a fatal sort of delusion, right? We do even worse things, not that he says this exactly, but in our sense of self righteousness. And when we embrace the idea that we're perfect, we're more prone to some sense of certainty and moral certainty that allows us to do terrible things under the guise of the good.

58:21 Mark: I just think if you say get around that, like, yeah, okay, maybe we're not able to become like gods and actually act according to all these standards. But getting around it, the much shorter way to get around it is to ditch the standards. And so that is the reaction, that's the response of somebody like Nietzsche is that Pascal is going to say it's actually our greatness, it's right there in our human nature that we both fail and that we have these standards, these standards themselves kind of come straight from God. But at the same time, because Pascal is so dismissive of human reason and human imagination, he admits how even though custom, he thinks, like we're saying maybe somehow comes out of human nature.

But ultimately all these things are rootless. All these ideas of ideals that we have floating around in our heads are probably not mostly from God. They're from historical circumstance. So it's really not a historical inevitability that all human beings will feel guilty in this way because they'll both have enormous ideals and fail to live up to them. That maybe we should be more like the master morality, where they had ideals that they could actually achieve. For the most part, they set their sight differently. I don't want to say lower exactly, but more in line with what human nature actually is.

And so being more human would mean being more virtuous by definition, that we're not stuck with a particular morality handed down straight from God.

59:48 Wes: Right, but the master morality, which even Nietzsche ultimately rejects, right, that's the blond beast morality. That's knights going around killing peasants indiscriminately, that's slaveholders, that's all that stuff.

1:00:01 Mark: Well, right, but that was just supposed to inspire, just like in Nietzsche. It's not like supposed to then go follow the master morality, but that's supposed to inspire us to say, hey, can't we have a morality that doesn't have guilt in this way?

1:00:13 Wes: Yeah, the gay science we have to fuse.

1:00:15 Mark: Whereas just walking around being gay like that Pascal, that's monstrous. That is horrible. So we'll just have to agree to disagree with him.

1:00:27 Wes: Turn the gay science into a gay joke.

1:00:31 Mark: I wasn't even using it that way. You were interpreting it that way. What? I meant being cheerful.

1:00:35 Unknown speaker: What?

1:00:36 Wes: No, I wasn't.

1:00:39 Mark: This is what he like to walk around cheerfully saying, yes, we're but a wisp of smoke. That's messed up according to Pascal.

1:00:47 Wes: Oh, I see.

1:00:48 Mark: I was aware of the double entendre, but I was not trying to make it.

1:00:51 Wes: I think it was just the tone in your voice that made me think. Yeah. All right.

1:00:56 Mark: Any last closings, any favorite verse that we haven't said yet or anything like that?

1:01:02 Wes: There's a lot. But yeah, I don't think we have time.

1:01:07 Mark: I would encourage some religion podcast to follow up on this and have a go through your greatest hits of why Christianity is better than Islam and stuff like that that we could not care less about.

1:01:19 Dylan: The one that we didn't mention and, well, that we implicitly do is one of the most famous ones. The heart has its reasons, for which reason knows nothing. We know this in countless ways.

1:01:31 Mark: So you use that out of context.

1:01:33 Dylan: Definitely, yes.

1:01:35 Mark: It sounds like it invites you to use it out of context. And perhaps out of context is the best way to use the best of what Pascal has to say. Because you don't want to be in this guy's context.

1:01:46 Dylan: It's wretched.

1:01:46 Mark: He would like whip himself. Yeah, he was not a happy guy. More so than Nietzsche. More so. You know, that's again, why he was writing in little fragments, is because he had headaches just like Nietzsche. He was like riddled with cancer. Apparently toward the end they found giant tumors and holes in his brain after he died, like his whole insides had been turned into mush from tumors and things. But his was the wretchedness of a great lord, a dispossessed king. So there you go. Folks should tell us what they think of this discussion. Maybe join in at partiallyexaminelife.com or via our Facebook group or following us on Twitter or any number of other things.

People aren't taking advantage of the greater number of Twitter characters to respond, defending Pascal and other people that we talk about. They should do that because you can do that now. You can even have a 90 part Twitter thing and you just keep pushing that plus button to add to the previous conversation. You don't have to reply to yourself anymore. I don't actually want to have long conversations with people on Twitter like this, but it is now possible. I don't know if everybody knew that

1:02:51 Wes: I responded to Sam Harris on Audis on Twitter.

1:02:54 Mark: That's right. You use that feature very well. Did he respond to you ever got

1:02:59 Wes: a lot of attention? No. And I think my response went to the top of the heap because it got the most likes, but he still didn't respond to it.

1:03:08 Mark: Next time we are going to read Homer's Odyssey. That's a nice philosophy adjacent thing. And we will have guest Emily Wilson, who has a new translation with an awesome introduction. It's like an 80 page introduction I've been reading that already is like pointing out all these cool sort of philosophical themes about hospitality and things that come up in the book that I might not have thought of and how his treatment of the Cyclops shows something about Greek imperialism. It seems very cool. It has a pretty, very pretty cover. Literally beautiful book. Today's closing song is by a man named Todd Long from his days with a band called Dutch Henry. The song is called 44 Days. I thought it reflected well the emptiness that Pascal expresses. You can hear me interview Todd on Nakedly Examined Music Episode 34. Check it out at nakedly examinedmusic.com Good night, everybody.

1:04:00 Dylan: Good night.

1:04:25 Unknown speaker: And like a bread brand new pilots. I think we need a new start, a bigger commitment. But you're the queen of my world Stand right here I need you to know I love you girl Till death will reborn A backup fight cracked up by I'm a little messed up over you 44 days I'm sorry 44 days I've got 44 days I'm empty and I 44. I've got an ugly picture I've got an ugly picture Hanging up with my doesn't call you from the road I need you to know I love you girl But I feel el sayin' 44 days I'm sorry 44 days I'm gone 44 empty and I'm sorry 40 more days I'm gone 44 days I'm empty and I ris 44 days Sam. 114.