“What a fantastic creature is man, a novelty, a monstrosity, chaotic, contradictory, prodigious, judge of all things, feeble earthworm, bearer of truth, mine of uncertainty and error, glory and refuse of the universe! Who can undo this tangle?”
Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French mathematician, physicist, moralist and Christian, knew how to write. For that alone, the Pensées, his most famous work, would make an enjoyable addition to any summer reading list. But as France celebrates the 400th anniversary of his birth this year, there are other reasons for the world to re-engage with the bracing quality of his thinking.
Amid rising concern over the future impact of artificial intelligence, and fears of digital overload, Pascal’s passions and preoccupations speak to our times as well as his. In his youth, the mathematical prodigy from the Auvergne was a tech bro avant la lettre, before later becoming a supreme analyst of the human condition. Pascal was responsible for innovations that paved the way for some of the possibilities of AI. In his 20s, at the request of a gambling acquaintance who couldn’t break a losing run at dice, he undertook groundbreaking studies in probability theory. Before that, he invented the world’s first mechanical calculator – the snazzily named Pascaline.
But mastery of tech didn’t assuage a sense of angst. Pascal’s “arithmetical machine”, as he puts it in the Pensées, “produces effects which approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals”. But human reason was something altogether more splendid and problematic, because it was bound up with a soul, a mortal body and a will. Unlike both animals and machines, humans were condemned to worry about the meaning of life. But as finite beings, seeing through a glass darkly, they were hopelessly ill-equipped to find a satisfactory explanation.
In prose that is celebratory, mordant, moralising and psychologically acute, the Pensées explored this inescapable human predicament. Indulging his misanthropic side, Pascal berated the tendency of his contemporaries to park the problem by seeking distraction in sport, sex and other ways to pass the time. “All of humanity’s problems,” he wrote, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” The real escape route from ennui and despair, he suggested, is to be found in the famous bet on the existence of God.
These days, the terms of “Pascal’s wager” – basically a “what have you got to lose?” argument – are an object of theoretical curiosity among academics interested in applied probability theory. In the secularised west, the religious assumptions underpinning it have largely disappeared. Nevertheless, in an age when modern faith in the powers of tech threatens to eclipse ethical reservations over its implementation, the Pensées’ focus on the unique “grandeur and misery” of human life offers a salutary reminder of what is at stake.
The thoughts of great philosophers are received differently in different eras. In the 20th century, Pascal’s sense of metaphysical jeopardy helped inspire postwar existentialism, becoming a point of reference for Jean-Paul Sartre, among others. In our own age, the spirit of his work might point the way to a new humanism – one that recognises both the remarkable possibilities that scientific reason can offer the world, and the need to safeguard humanity’s place within it. Four centuries after he was born, Pascal is still our intellectual fellow-traveller.
