Examples of first principles, items known by the heart, truths known only by the heart.
That there are three dimensions of space.
I can't prove this, but I can recognize it.
It's not reason but the heart that grasps this.
And that there's an infinity of numbers.
I can’t prove that, but I can see that, he thinks.
The existence of the self seems also to be an object of this intuition of the heart.
What does he say about God, though?
This is my second question.
We know God with the heart and not with reason.
I ask you to think about that in the context of the wager.
How does the wager reflect that sort of thinking?
So is he saying if anybody has knowledge of God, they have it through their heart, not
through their reason.
So if somebody fails to have knowledge of God, it’s not that they are irrational,
or following the wrong rule.
It’s that something’s gone wrong with their heart and they haven't grasped something
that they should be able to grasp just intuitively.
The wager, the wager does not give us a rational proof for God.
What does it give us instead?
[student] Choice.
[professor] Choice, and reasons for making a certain choice.
And he’s saying since reason can't compel you to make one choice over the other…
Maybe another way to say that is that they're… neither choice is totally irrational.
There are many good reasons for choosing either one, just considering by reason alone.
So, it will be to your advantage to reason like a gambler, and choose the more advantageous path.
Not the one that has a guarantee, but the one that is likely to produce a better result.
So we can see the heart, the wager fits in with the heart in the sense that if we can’t
give a locked-down rock-solid rationalist proof of God, the way Descartes does, then
maybe we can give a sort of proof which removes obstacles to rational belief and then makes
room for the heart to just have its moment of intuitive recognition.
The way it works with intuition is it just snaps to.
You don’t reason yourself into an intuition, you simply have it.
People who don’t believe in God haven’t had the intuition yet.
So I think the wager is a way of trying to put them in such a state that intuition can
happen for them.
They can recognize this truth.
Pascal talks about the limits of reason, in the final section here, and my third question
dealt with Pascal's observation that man is incomprehensible to man.
We cannot understand ourselves using reason.
That we are a kind of monster, a paradox.
These terms all contrast very strongly with the type of description that Descartes gives
of the self, where he knows his self, the existence of his self, with a crystal clarity.
And in addition to this clarity and certainty, he also knows his essence, which is to think.
And he can deduce all sorts of things from this essence, from these innate ideas which
he discovers in his mind.
So my third question was: what role does Pascal see for philosophy in human life?
Focus especially on the top of page 91.
What's the role for philosophy in human life, if it's not going to use reason to give us
certain knowledge of the self, certain knowledge of God, and then eventually, by use of the
method, certain knowledge of everything else?
What’s philosophy for?
The bottom of [page] 90.
“Nature confounds the sceptics, and reason confounds the dogmatists.”
So people who want to be skeptical find that their nature, their human nature, forces them
to believe things they’d like to be skeptical about.
Dogmatists (here he’s thinking of Descartes especially) dogmatists would like to say ‘Here's
the absolute certain truth.’
Then he says reason confounds the dogmatists.
So we take a critical perspective on this certain knowledge, and discover that it’s
fake, it’s full of holes.
“What then will become of you, O men! who by your natural reason search out your true condition?
You can neither avoid both these sects nor live in either.”
You can’t be a dogmatist, you can’t be a skeptic.
What do you do?
Reason seems to lead us in no direction.
Top of [page] 91: “Know then, proud man, how great a paradox thou art to thyself.
Bow down thyself, weak reason; be silent, thou foolish nature; learn that man is altogether
incomprehensible by man, and learn from your master your true condition which you ignore.
Hear God.”
In the end I think Pascal is turning the system of philosophy towards converting people
to a kind of religious faith which he thinks can do the things that philosophy can’t:
provide meaning for life, etc. [student] He also goes on to say that corruption
basically corrupts us, and that… [unintelligible] securely in virtue…
[professor] Right. What does that mean? Can we parse that out?
[student] I think our experiences of that doesn’t allow us to see, or prevents us,
I’m not sure how to put it further.
[professor] Our corruption prevents our happiness, prevents us from being happy.
Because we’re fallen and corrupt, we can’t have the kind of secure system that Descartes
wants out of philosophy.
Philosophy can't be what Descartes wants it to be.
Instead he thinks it should be a system which leads to its own undoing, a system which leads
to its own transcendence.
It needs to recognize that human beings are corrupt and paradoxical and can never know
themselves under our their power, which means philosophy as a purely human project is doomed.
That’s his diagnosis of Descartes.
But then what does he say?
Philosophy can still serve a purpose, it can confound reason, and lead people to turn toward
the heart and toward God.
That I take to be Pascal’s final word on this project.