Sunday, November 24, 2024

Nov 23– Blaise Pascal’s "Thoughts" (1670) translated by W F Trotter

 Blaise Pascal loves Owlman

Nov 23– Blaise Pascal’s Thoughts (1670) translated by W F Trotter

Summary: Pascal interrupts his version of Meditations for a villain monologue about how we're all insignificant and know nothing. Also, he hates imagination.

Commentary: This was a trip and a half. It starts out with a couple Mediations style chunks (which makes sense, since the title is Thoughts) that definitely lean in the "snobbish asshole" directions (NO ONE TEACHES YOU HOW TO BE A GENTLEMAN BUT EVERYONE THINKS THEY'RE ONE! Apparently etiquette classes/books [or philosophy/ethics in that context] don't exist in the Pascal-verse). I wasn't thrilled with most of them, but they were easy reading. I did like:

71. Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.

Very Ben Franklin.

Then, I got to thought 72, which is the focus of this selection. It's a six page rant about how we can't know anything, we're pointlessly insignificant, even knowing we don't know things is itself a form of self-deception, etc. I'll circle back to my own personal philosophical take on this, but I'll do a couple quote pulls first.

 Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness. For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach? He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption.

Thank you for your cliché nihilistic villain speech, Pascal. Without you, T5FSOB and 15MAD would be under the requisite emo/edgelord quota. Even better that the next line is: "For, in fact, what is man in nature?"

A MISERABLE LITTLE PILE OF SECRETS!

He goes on in this general manner for several pages, eventually revealing that he turned to villainy when he failed middle school math: 

Too great length and too great brevity of discourse tend to obscurity; too much truth is paralysing (I know some who cannot understand that to take four from nothing leaves nothing).
By the end, he's gone full Owlman and started musing about how pointless life is in the face of the multiverse:

In comparison with these Infinites, all finites are equal, and I see no reason for fixing our imagination on one more than on another. The only comparison which we make of ourselves to the finite is painful to us.

He asks, "How can a part know the whole?" and I feel like I read something about that recently in an eastern philosophy article. That everything is made up of parts, but those parts also contain the whole. The example they gave was the human body, which is made of cells, which contain the DNA of the body.

After another page or so he starts ranting about how much he hates imagination, figurative language, etc.: "Instead of receiving the ideas of these things in their purity, we colour them with our own qualities, and stamp with our composite being all the simple things which we contemplate." In this case, he's referring to the idea that we personify physics by saying things like, "objects are attracted to each other by gravity." It's not totally wrong, but is pointlessly pedantic and unreasonable. Pascal is that guy who refuses to believe that there can be more than one definition for a word.

Pascal also hates education:

80. How comes it that a cripple does not offend us, but that a fool does? Because a cripple recognises that we walk straight, whereas a fool declares that it is we who are silly; if it were not so, we should feel pity and not anger.

I think we generally think of a "cripple" as someone with an uncurable physical ailment. You got polio as a kid, got your arm run over by a train, etc. A "fool" implies that you're just dumb. I guess it could also mean someone with some kind of mental disability. I could be generous and assume it's a time/translation issue, not Pascal just saying people can't learn stuff. I'm not.

The remainder is more yelling about imagination:

82. Imagination.—It is that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity, the more deceptive that she is not always so; for she would be an infallible rule of truth, if she were an infallible rule of falsehood. But being most generally false, she gives no sign of her nature, impressing the same character on the true and the false.

[...]

Those who have a lively imagination are a great deal more pleased with themselves than the wise can reasonably be. They look down upon men with haughtiness; they argue with boldness and confidence, others with fear and diffidence; and this gaiety of countenance often gives them the advantage in the opinion of the hearers, such favour have the imaginary wise in the eyes of judges of like nature. 

He's now shifted from nihilistic villain to autistic supervillain. Honestly, I think a lot of villains are spectrum-coded.

I wonder if Pascal literally thinks people who write fantasy novels and stuff are crazy. 

So, circling back to why I decided to write one of the longest posts of the year about this, two things:

1. I'm pretty sure you could have taken my entire undergrad philosophy course and compressed it down to Plato's Allegory of the Cave and this reading. "You're all idiots, no one knows anything, and you're not even smart enough not to know anything," was basically all my professor ever said, in between whining about hating his job and telling us stories about his bong collection. He literally walked out of the room for the final exam to go polish it or something. He was completely nuts (in a very Pascal-esque way) and certainly one of the worst professors I'd ever had. (The fact that he's only one of is a fairly damning indictment of my undergrad, but he didn't spend all of geology class talking about street fighting and bigfoot, or teach us that vaccines caused autism, or any number of other literally batshit things that some of the others did.)

2. I think it's very easy to arrive at (and I think I've written in this blog before about) some variation of, "nothing matters because we're insignificant, free will isn't real, etc." And you can be a Pascal and get there and just decide that everything is pointless and you hate everything, but I don't think that's a productive way to get through life. Also, why make all these mathematical discoveries and stuff if you think they're pointless and not really knowable? There are basically four responses at that point:

1. Nothing matters, so nothing matters. 



2. Talk yourself into some kind of "God of The Gaps" version of free will like some Compatibilists.

(I don't have a picture for this one.)

3. Post cringey memes like this:

to attempt to compensate.

4. Post slightly less cringey memes like this:



I like number four. At a minimum, going and doing stuff makes me feel better. Even if nothing I do ever matters to anyone or anything else (I like to think I at least occasionally improve the life of someone else) I still would rather enjoy my life than sit around wallowing in the pointlessness of it all.

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