Pensees

Summary

The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy. Because the order of the fragments is uncertain, every edition is an interpretation. The Port-Royal edition of 1670 smoothed and censored them, and the 1897 edition by Léon Brunschvicg, followed in Trotter's English, regrouped them into fourteen thematic sections. Section I gathers thoughts on mind and style, including the distinction between the geometrical spirit, which reasons from few clear principles, and the spirit of finesse, which grasps many subtle ones at once. Section II, on the misery of man without God, contains Pascal's most penetrating psychology. Man is suspended between two infinites, too large for the infinitely small and too small for the infinite. Imagination, 'that mistress of error and falsity', rules judges and physicians through robes and caps and can make the wisest philosopher sweat on a wide plank over a precipice. Disease and self-interest corrupt judgment. Above all, humans cannot bear to be alone with themselves. Weariness, the condition of being without passion, business or diversion, produces gloom and despair, so people hunt, gamble, make war and seek office to avoid thinking about death and their own condition. Section III contains the wager. Reason cannot decide whether God exists, but one must choose, and the infinite gain of a right choice outweighs any finite stake. Pascal advises the reluctant to act as if they believed, taking holy water and having masses said, to quiet the passions that block faith. Section IV distinguishes reason from the heart, which knows first principles and loves God directly ('The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know'). Section V on justice argues that custom and force, not reason, found laws. Section VI on the philosophers sets Epictetus's pride against Montaigne's despair and places man between greatness and wretchedness: a thinking reed, neither angel nor brute. Sections VII to XIII develop the positive case, through original sin as the key to human contradiction, the perpetuity of the true religion, Old Testament figures and prophecies, the proofs of Jesus Christ and miracles. This last subject was sharpened by the 1656 healing of Pascal's niece at Port-Royal by the relic of the Holy Thorn. Among them is 'The Mystery of Jesus', a meditation on Christ's agony in Gethsemane while the disciples sleep. Section XIV collects polemical fragments against the Jesuits. Unfinished and broken, the Pensées read less as a treatise than as the notebook of a mind arguing with itself, and their compression is a large part of why they have outlasted the apologetic project they were meant to serve.

Top Lessons

• Diversion as the flight from oneself

  Pascal argues that people seek constant activity, from hunting to war, because being alone with their thoughts is unbearable. The analysis anticipates later accounts of boredom, avoidance and compulsive distraction, though Pascal's remedy is religious rather than therapeutic.

• The imagination rules the judge and the physician

  Fragment 82 describes imagination as a power that can make people 'healthy and sick' and that gives authority to robed doctors whose real knowledge is thin. It is an early analysis of placebo, prestige and phobic fear, and also a warning that judgment is always embodied.

• Wagering under uncertainty

  The wager applies the newly invented mathematics of expected value to the deepest existential question. Whatever one thinks of its theology, it introduced decision theory under uncertainty and the idea that a refusal to choose is itself a choice.

• Greatness and wretchedness together

  Against Stoic pride and sceptical despair, Pascal insists that humans are both noble and miserable, a thinking reed, neither angel nor brute. Trying to be purely one or the other ends in its opposite.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Pensées offer one of the most acute early-modern phenomenologies of boredom, anxiety and avoidance. Weariness (131) lists the affective consequences of idleness in terms close to a description of depressive mood. Diversion (139 and following) explains compulsive activity, gambling included, as an escape from rumination on death. Fragment 82 credits imagination with making people healthy or sick, describes acrophobic fear in the face of known safety, and mocks physicians who rely on costume for authority. Fragment 109 notes how illness reshapes desire and how anticipatory fear outruns actual suffering. Pascal was chronically ill from youth: he had headaches, digestive disorders and an episode of leg paralysis, and the autopsy reported by his sister Gilberte Périer described abnormalities of the brain and intestines. Retrospective diagnoses (migraine, tuberculosis, gastric cancer, intestinal disease) remain speculative. His separate 'Prayer to Ask God for the Good Use of Sickness' and the Memorial of 1654, an ecstatic experience recorded in fragments of exclamation, are central texts for the history of illness, piety and altered states. The wager's advice to quiet the passions through habit is sometimes compared, cautiously, with behavioural therapy.

• Fragment 82, Section II

  Imagination as the 'mistress of error', able to make men healthy or sick; the philosopher sweating on a plank above a precipice; cats, rats and a crushed coal that 'unhinge the reason'; physicians in cassocks and mules; diseases that spoil judgment.

• Fragment 109, Section II

  Health and sickness each produce their own desires; we take medicine cheerfully when ill; our fears come from imagining a state we are not in.

• Fragment 131, Section II

  Weariness: at rest without occupation, man feels his nothingness and from his heart rise gloom, sadness, fretfulness and despair.

• Fragments 139–143, 164–171, Section II

  Diversion: gambling, hunting, war and court office as flight from thought; the king without diversion is wretched; death is easier to bear than the thought of it.

• Fragment 233, Section III

  The wager, ending with the counsel to act as if believing, taking holy water and having masses said, to abate the passions and 'deaden your acuteness'.

• Fragment 552, Section VII

  The Mystery of Jesus: Christ's self-inflicted agony in Gethsemane, the sleeping disciples, and the voice that says physicians will not heal.