A Guide to Reading Pascal’s Pensées

Fall 2022 Community Read

Who Was Blaise Pascal?

A French mathematician, scientist, philosopher and thinker, Blaise Pascal is best known for his invention of the calculator and the arithmetical triangle; his contributions to probability theory, fluid dynamics, and the study of vacuums; and the book you hold in your hands, the Pensées or “thoughts.” Pascal died quite young, just short of his fortieth birthday. But in his thirties he had a mystical experience that changed his life's purposes, an experience he told no one about. We know of it only through a brief, mysterious document (known as the "Memorial,” see p. 285 of the Penguin Classics edition), discovered posthumously among his papers.

What Is the Pensées?

The Pensées is not a book Pascal wrote; it is a collection of notes working out ideas for a book he never wrote, meant to convert readers to serious Christian belief and observance.  He took these notes on separate slips of paper, to some of which he gave a rough preliminary organization, but most remained unsorted at his death. As you'll see, some of the pensées are drafts of arguments, several pages long; others are brief observations, others mere one-liners, and others just phrases meant to remind him of points he meant to elaborate. (Several are riddling, and a few are simply opaque.) He never made a final outline of the projected book, and so we cannot know for certain what arguments he would include, what arguments he would revise, omit, or reject, and what shape the whole would have.

Pascal does not try to win converts by demonstrating the existence of God. He specifically rejects such demonstration for several reasons; the most important is that a human instinct to avoid fearful thoughts gives us a predisposition not to believe which bare logical demonstration is ill designed to overcome. Instead, he plans to convince readers to face the difficult issues they least wish to face, and then to see that Christian revelation offers an efficient and powerful explanation both of those issues and of our unwillingness to face them.

“Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. 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. 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.”
— Pensée 200

Why Read the Pensées?

The Pensées isn’t just a work of Christian apology. In seeking to make a convincing argument for belief in God, Pascal explores the nature of decision making and belief as such.

How do we decide what to believe about life’s biggest questions?

For Pascal, this isn’t merely a question of whether we’ll make the right choice but how we will actually live our lives in the midst of profound uncertainty. We live in our decisions and commitments; we become more and more the kind of people who make the decisions we make, and yet those decisions feel impossible, our knowledge about them profoundly insufficient.

We find ourselves already committed: How do we decide in the midst of antecedent commitments and beliefs?

The question of how we decide what to believe is made even murkier for Pascal by the fact that we do not get to ponder philosophically rich or imminent life questions from a neutral or uncommitted position. We come to decisions and find ourselves already committed just by living in one way or another. You do not get to decide whether or not to decide. Pascal writes, “you are already committed”—literally, in his French, “you are already embarked.” (See pensée 418, the famous “Wager.”)

Once we’ve made a decision, how do we commit to it? How do we go on living according to that decision beyond the moment in which we make it?

One of Pascal’s most interesting and compelling observations is how difficult it is to go on believing something we have already decided to believe. Our faculty of reason, he thinks, can be useful in decision-making up to a point, but reason alone is not very helpful in sustaining a decision across time; it can just as easily convince us to make a completely opposite decision later on. How do we fully commit to the decisions we make about big, philosophical questions?

“What sort 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 refuse of the universe! Who will unravel such a tangle? This is certainly beyond dogmatism and scepticism, beyond all human philosophy. Man transcends man.”
— Pensée 131

How to Read the Pensées

This book is not one that is easily read cover to cover. It does not advance its argument in a linear fashion. Pascal is trying out arguments and ideas, circling back to different themes, thinking as he writes (see pensée 136 in which Pascal seems to discover an idea he didn’t know he had), even “tagging” some pensées with words and phrases like “Order,” “Weakness,” “Thinking reed,” and “Cause and effect.” Below we’ve organized some of the pensées into thematic “threads” that will hopefully provide a way into this strange book that is less daunting than reading straight from the beginning. These threads represent philosophically rich and relevant questions that Pascal explores on his way to an argument for choosing to believe in God.

  • Pensées 10, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 33, 34, 36, 44, 45, 48, 53, 56, 75, 96-99, 106, 113, 114, 116-200, 121, 122, 124, 127, 130, and 131

  • Pensées 68, 99, 109, 110, and 131

  • Pensées 10, 24, 36, 39, 48, 70, 77, 79, 132, 133, 134, and 136

  • Pensées 5, 7, 11, 26, 55, 119,125, and 126

  • Pensées 76, 110, and 131

  • Pensées 109, 131, 418-426

  • Pensées 7, 23, and 99