16.
limited the machine’s success, however, and only seven are now extant. Nevertheless, by building a mechanism to perform mathematical functions that were previously calculated only by the mind, Pascal can be credited with the invention of an early precursor of the modern calculator. Unlike modern materialists, however, he never countenanced the notion that the human mind was reducible to a sophisticated machine.
Always a good Catholic, early in 1646 Pascal became converted to the teachings of Jean Duvergier de Hauranne (1581–1643), abbot of Saint-Cyran and friend of the reforming Catholic theologian Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638). His newfound reformist convictions were to have a profound effect on Pascal’s life and thought, but they did not entirely divert him from his work in mathematics and natural philosophy. In October of the same year, Pascal repeated the barometric experiments of Evangelista Torricelli (1608–47), which were then attracting a great deal of intellectual attention. By inverting a long glass tube full of mercury in a bowl of mercury, Torricelli noticed that the mercury in the tube dropped down until it was about 76 cm above the level in the bowl. The aim of the experiment was to confirm Galileo’s suspicions about the role of the atmosphere in the limitation of the height to which a pump could lift water, but it also suggested that the space remaining at the end of the tube when the mercury dropped down must be a vacuum. This contradicted not only the Aristotelian dictum that “nature abhors a vacuum,” but also the Cartesian metaphysical claim that matter and extension are essentially identical and that, therefore, empty space is a contradiction in terms.
When Pascal published the results of his own barometric experiments in his Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide (New Experiments Concerning the Vacuum) [1647]), Etienne Noël (1581–1660), a Jesuit metaphysician and friend of Descartes, argued that some ratified substance existed in the seemingly empty space between the mercury and the end of tube. On the basis of a series of detailed experiments, however, Pascal maintained that the appeal to some esoteric matter was unsubstantiated. After explaining his various experiments, he concluded: “Having demonstrated that none of the substances perceived by our senses and known by us fills this apparently empty space, I shall think, until I am shown the existence of a substance filling it, that it is really empty and void of all matter” (Pascal, “New Experiments Concerning the Vacuum,” 1952, 364). More generally, Pascal pointed out to his critic that, while a conformity of all of the facts with a hypothesis at best serves only to make the hypothesis probable, a single contrary phenomenon can prove the hypothesis false. Pascal’s response to Noël is greatly admired by philosophers of science as an accomplished statement of correct scientific methodology. It is important to note, however, that the probabilism inherent in Pascal’s account of scientific knowledge was later to play an important part in his defense of religion in the Pensées. According to Pascal, our reason and understanding can attain certainty only by logically deriving propositions from given axioms. Such supposed certainty is entirely dependent upon the assumption that the axioms are true, however. Yet, the truth of these axioms can never be independently established, since they must depend upon more fundamental presuppositions, which themselves must be taken on trust or acknowledged to depend on yet more fundamental unsupported assumptions. This leads Pascal to conclude that we can gain certain knowledge only through submission to God and acceptance of revelation.
Although he left notes and letters on his experiments, Pascal never finished his proposed treatise on the nature of the vacuum; but his preface to that intended work remains a lucid account of his pivotal contribution to the developing scientific method of the day. Matters of empirical investigation, Pascal averred, must be separated from the knowledge—such as history, geography, language, and theology—that justifiably rests on authority found in books. The ancients may have much to teach us in the areas of geometry, arithmetic, music, physics, and architecture, but their views are not beyond revision, given new knowledge derived through reliable scientific procedures. Challenging the deductivism of Cartesian physics and the Aristotelian tradition, Pascal maintained that, while nature “is always at work, her effects are not
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always discovered; time reveals them from generation to generation, and although always the same in herself, she is not always equally known. The experiments which give us knowledge of nature multiply continually” (Pascal, “Preface to the Treatise on the Vacuum,” 1952, 357).
Pascal believed that the long-standing resistance to the notion of a vacuum rested on experimental deficiencies and the force of unjustified tradition. Better experimentation and an openness to new empirical discoveries challenge static opinion not adequately supported by evidence. “For in all matters whose proof is by experiment and not by demonstration, no universal assertion can be made except by the general enumeration of all the parts and all the different cases” (Pascal, “Preface to the Treatise on the Vacuum,”
1952, 358). Despite the rigor of Pascal’s experiments and arguments, he remained open to empirical refutation. His exacting empirical method, coupled with his penchant for detailed mathematical explanation, helped develop a more mechanical view of nature that would challenge both Aristotelian teleology and Cartesian rationalism concerning supposed natural laws.
Pascal deemed the discovery of objective truth to be the aim of scientific study: “Whatever the weight of antiquity, truth should always have the advantage, even when newly discovered, since it is always older than every opinion men have held about it, and only ignorance of its nature could imagine it began to be at the time it began to be known” (Pascal, “Preface to the Treatise on the Vacuum,” 1952, 358). For Pascal, authority, reason, and observation all play distinctive, irreducible, and (ultimately) harmonious roles in acquiring objective scientific knowledge. In Pensées, Pascal later applied this basic insight regarding various ways of knowing to his analysis of religious rationality. In the case of Christianity, revelation, reason, and experience all contribute in different ways to justifying religious belief.
Christian Faith and Scientific Endeavor
After a mystical experience on November 23, 1654, Pascal turned most of his skills to defending the Christian faith. This transformative experience, sometimes called Pascal’s “second conversion” because it intensified and focused his religious devotion, was recorded on a scrap of paper that Pascal had sewn into the lining of his coat. The short, elliptical, and poetic statement recounts a profound and direct awareness of God during a two-hour experience that night.
Although this experience impressed upon Pascal the importance of the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and of the learned,” he by no means ceased to be a natural philosopher and mathematician. He had just completed a protracted correspondence with the mathematician Pierre Fermat (1601–65), in which they had both made great strides in the calculus of probability and which enabled Pascal to write his Traité du triangle arithmétique (Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle), an important study of combinatorial analysis and mathematical probability, which has been seen by modern historians of mathematics as the beginnings of a theory of decision. This, in turn, led to work in 1658 and 1659 on the mathematical theory of indivisibles first developed by Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598–1647) in 1635. Pascal was able to extend this work and the subsequent work of Gilles Roberval (1602–75) and Fermat to develop his own method. His work was later exploited by other mathematicians, most notably, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who were involved in the elaboration of infinitesimal calculus.
Increasingly, however, Pascal became concerned with religion. A two-week retreat to the convent of Port-Royal des Champs, and subsequent frequent visits there and to the Port-Port-Royal convent in Paris, mark the beginnings of increased identification with the Jansenism that Port-Royal represented. In collaboration with Antoine Arnauld (1612–94) and Pierre Nicole (1625–95), Pascal wrote the eighteen Lettres provinciales (Provincial Letters) that were printed as a collection in 1657. Highly regarded as a great literary masterpiece in France, the Lettres ridicule and condemn the casuistry and downright immorality of contemporary Jesuit
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theology. Unfortunately, the published collection was immediately placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, and Jansenism, which taught that grace and not good works was the key to salvation and which has been seen as a kind of Catholic Calvinism, was condemned by the pope shortly after. In 1661, the schools at Port-Royal were closed, and the nuns, secular priests, pious laymen, and others in residence had to submit to the church. This prompted Pascal’s Écrit sur la signature du formulaire (Pamphlet on the Signing of the Formulary), urging the Jansenists not to give in. He then withdrew from further controversy, perhaps because of a difference of opinion with the Jansenists, although he certainly did not sever his connection with them. By now, Pascal was scarcely capable of regular work owing to ill health, but he did come up with the idea of a large carriage with many seats and used it to set up, in Paris, the first public-transportation system. The aim of the enterprise was to raise money for the poor.
Pascal’s greatest religious achievement, however, was his unfinished Apologie de la religion chrétienne (Apology for the Christian Religion), which had taken up much of his time from the summer of 1657 to the summer of the following year. It was the notes for this that were subsequently published as his Pensées.
Pascal never renounced scientific endeavors as intrinsically unspiritual, nor did he see a conflict between scientific discoveries and revealed truths. Nevertheless, he warned of intellectual hubris, or “proud reason,”
which presumes to fathom mysteries beyond its ken. In a famous fragment in the Pensées, Pascal speaks of human knowers as stranded between the infinitely small and the infinitely great, such that absolute and comprehensive certainty is unattainable through unaided reason.
Pascal’s knowledge of science, combined with his Christian commitment, kept him from succumbing to either an excessively ambitious positivism or a despairing skepticism. F.X.J.Coleman notes that “as a man of science Pascal is never anti-scientific; yet he is opposed to the attitude that can be expressed as,
‘whatever is, is what science says’” (Coleman 1986, 152). Science discovers some truth, but it does not monopolize knowledge. Moreover, it is unable to speak to our deepest concerns. Under the heading “Vanity of science” in Pensées, Pascal observes: “Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science” (Pascal 1966, 36). Science is vain when it pretends to extend beyond its proper sphere or order.
Pascal believed that, because religious knowledge is situated within its own “order” of existence and is discerned by faith through “the heart,” it does not contradict scientific discoveries. The heart, for Pascal, is not merely the faculty of emotion but the organ of intuitive knowledge—whether knowledge of the unprovable but certain, or of first principles of mathematics, or of logic, or of God. Although Pascal’s unfinished apology appealed to many lines of reasoning to defend Christianity as existentially attractive and intellectually cogent, he gave primacy to divine revelation as the most significant source of knowledge.
Without revelation, Pascal claimed, we remain mysteries to ourselves, oblivious to our origin, nature, and destiny.
Pascal’s approach to divine revelation involved applying a kind of scientific method to its claims.
Although one cannot directly test by empirical means the deliverances of revelation on many matters (such as the origin of the universe, the creation of humanity, and the Fall into sin), Pascal thought that key theological claims offer the best explanation for the perplexing phenomena of human nature. “Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident,” he writes, “that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness” (Pascal 1966, 76). By adducing evidence from a wide diversity of situations, Pascal argues that the Christian view of humans as “deposed kings”—made in God’s image but now east of Eden—is the best way to account for the human condition. In so arguing, he employs an abductive method (that is, inference to the best explanation) similar to that used in much scientific endeavor.
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Although Pascal has sometimes been described as a fideist, he did not deem the acceptance of revelation in Scripture or the exercise of religious faith to be irrational. “Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them” (Pascal 1966, 85). Moreover, “[r]
eason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realize that. If natural things are beyond it, what are we to say about supernatural things?” (Pascal 1966, 85). When Pascal wrote of faith being above reason, he was not advocating that the principles of logic or scientific experimentation be abandoned. For him, “reason” referred to that which can be known through the discursive faculty when unaugmented by divine revelation. Pascal’s famous epigram,
“The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing; we know this in countless ways” (Pascal 1966, 154), emphasizes the diverse ways of knowing, not the primacy of emotion or imagination over rationality.
See also Cartesianism; Skepticism
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Calliet, Emile. Pascal: The Emergence of Genius. New York: Harper, 1945.
Coleman, F.X.J. Neither Angel nor Beast. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.
Dear, Peter. “Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature.” Isis 81 (1990):663–83.
Groothuis, Douglas. “Bacon and Pascal on Mastery over Nature.” Research in Philosophy and Technology 14 (1994):
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Harrington, Thomas More. Pascal philosophe: Une étude unitaire de la pensées de Pascal. Paris: Societe d’Edition d’Enseignement Superieur, 1982.
Koyré, Alexandre. “Pascal Savant.” In Metaphysics and Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution, ed. by Alexandre Koyré. Harvard University Press, 1968, 131–56.
Krailsheimer, Alban. Pascal. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980.
O’Connell, Marvin R. Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997.
Pascal, Blaise. “New Experiments Concerning the Vacuum.” In Pascal. Trans. by Richard Scofield. Great Books of the Western World. Vol. 33. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, 359–81.
——. “Preface to the Treatise on the Vacuum.” In Pascal. Trans. by Richard Scofield. Great Books of the Western World. Vol. 33. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, 355–8.
——. Oeuvres Completes (l’Integrale). Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963.
——. Pensées. Trans. by A.J.Krailsheimer. New York: Penguin, 1966.
Popkin, Richard. “Pascal.” In Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Paul Edwards. Vol. 8. New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967, 51–5.
Taton, René. “Pascal, Blaise.” In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. by C.C.Gillispie. Vol. 10. New York: Charles Scrib-ner’s Sons, 1974, 330–42.
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