Infini Rien: Pascal's Wager and the Human Paradox

164 Pages·1993·1.34 MB·English

by  Leslie Armour

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title: "Infini Rien" : Pascal's Wager and the Human Paradox
Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series
author: Armour, Leslie.
publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0809318393
print isbn13: 9780809318391
ebook isbn13: 9780585031415
language: English
subject Pascal, Blaise,--1623-1662.--Pensâees, God--Proof--
History of doctrines, Pascal, Blaise,--1623-1662--
Knowledge--Neoplatonism, Neoplatonism.
publication date: 1993
lcc: B1904.G63A76 1993eb
ddc: 230/.2
subject: Pascal, Blaise,--1623-1662.--Pensâees, God--Proof--
History of doctrines, Pascal, Blaise,--1623-1662--
Knowledge--Neoplatonism, Neoplatonism.
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The Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series
Edited by Richard A. Watson and Charles M. Young
Also in this series
Aristotle on the Many Senses of Priority
John J. Cleary
Kant's Newtonian Revolution in Philosophy
Robert Hahn
The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order
Ronald Hamowy
Shuzo Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre: Influence and Counter-Influence in the Early History of Existential
Phenomenology
Stephen Light
John Craige's "Mathematical Principles of Christian Theology"
Richard Nash
The Dream of Descartes
Gregor Sebba
The Philosophical Orations of Thomas Reid
D. D. Todd
Epistemology and Skepticism: An Enquiry into the Nature of Epistemology
George Chatalian
Descartes on Seeing: Epistemology and Visual Perception
Celia Wolf-Devine

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"Infini Rien"
Pascal's Wager and the Human Paradox
Leslie Armour
Published for
The Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Carbondale and Edwardsville

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Page iv
Copyright © 1993 by
The Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Edited by Patricia St. John-Doolin
Production supervised by Natalia Nadraga
96 95 94 93 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Armour, Leslie, 1931
"Infini rien" : Pascal's wager and the human paradox / Leslie Armour.
p. cm. (The Journal of the history of philosophy monograph series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Pascal, Blaise, 16231662. Pensées. 2. GodProofHistory of
doctrines. 3. Pascal, Blaise, 16231662KnowledgeNeoplatonism.
4. Neoplatonism. I. Title. II. Series.
B1904.G63A76 1993
230'.2dc20
ISBN 0-8093-1839-3
92-27762
CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

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Contents
The Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
A Note on the Texts and the Numbered References to the Pensées xv
1. Pascal, the Wager, and the Background 1
1
1.1 A Crisis of Knowledge and a Good Bet
3
1.2 Understanding Pascal in the Light of the Three Orders
4
1.3 Pascal and Self-Interest
9
1.4 Contre les libertins?
2. The Platonic Elements in the Historical Context 12
12
2.1 The Idea of Infinity and Pascal's Natural Theology
15
2.2 The Infinite and the Indivisible in the Thought of Pascal's Era
25
2.3 Pascal's Line of Sight

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Page vi
3. The Doctrine of Orders 27
27
3.1 The Three Orders and the Human Predicament
30
3.2 The Basis of the Three Orders
35
3.3 The Special Problem of the Natural World
41
3.4 Getting God into the Physical World
4. Human Dealings with God: The Development of the Neo-Platonist Responses 45
45
4.1 The Neo-Platonic Vision
47
4.2 Crousaz and Human Freedom
50
4.3 André and Creativity
5. The Human Predicament and the New Skepticism 60
60
5.1 The Terms of the Skeptic's Trade
61
5.2 The Human Condition
70
5.3 And Now to Bet
Notes 87
Works Cited 101
Index 107

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Page vii
The Journal of the History of Philosophy
Monograph Series
THE JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY MONOGRAPH SERIES, consisting of volumes averaging
80 to 120 pages, accommodates serious studies in the history of philosophy that are between article length and
standard book size. Editors of learned journals have usually been able to publish such studies only by truncating
them or by publishing them in sections. In this series, the Journal of the History of Philosophy presents, in volumes
published by Southern Illinois University Press, such works in their entirety.
The historical range of the Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series is the same as that of the
Journal itselffrom ancient Greek philosophy to the twentieth century. The series includes extended studies on given
philosophers, ideas, and concepts; analyses of texts and controversies; new translations and commentaries on them;
and new documentary findings about various thinkers and events in the history of philosophy.
The editors of the Monograph Series, the directors of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and other qualified
scholars evaluate submitted manuscripts. Those manuscripts concerning ancient and medieval philosophy should
be sent to Professor Charles M. Young, Department of Philosophy, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA
91711. Manuscripts on modern and recent philosophy should be sent to Professor Richard A. Watson, Department
of Philosophy, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130. Manuscripts should be between 35,000 and 50,000
words in length and double-spaced throughout, including quotations, notes, and bibliography. Notes should be
numbered separately for each chapter and placed in a section at the end of the manuscript.
Richard A. Watson
Charles M. Young
Editors

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Page ix
Acknowledgments
MANY PEOPLE HAVE HELPED WITH THIS WORK. THEY INCLUDE A NUMBER OF graduate students,
especially Susan Bradford, Louis Chenard, and Jim Thomas. Librarians play an indispensable role in such work. In
this case, thanks are due particularly to the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Bibliothèque
Municipale in Caen, the British Library in London, the Folger Library and the Library of Congress in Washington,
the National Library of Canada, the University of Ottawa, and Carleton University in Ottawa. On four extended
visits to Paris, the Fondation Nationale of the Cité Universitaire also provided hospitality at its Résidence Robert
Garric. Professor Richard A. Watson and two anonymous readers made valuable suggestions and steered me away
from much swampy ground. Most of all, thanks are due to Diana Armour for dozens of hours of editorial work and
proofreading.
Funds for the final phase of the research and manuscript preparation were provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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Introduction
PASCAL'S WAGER HAS BEEN SEEN IN TERMS OF THE CALCULUS OF PROBABILITIES, as a piece of
religious apologetic, as an event in the religious and psychological life of Pascal himself, and as an event in the life
of the Jansenist movement and its various expressions at Port-Royal. But what concerns me in this monograph is
the underlying logic of ideas brought to the surface by the intersection of two philosophical lines of thought.
Pascal, as Henri Gouhier argues, was not educated in the tradition of Aristotelian scholasticism. 1 Indeed, he came
to philosophy largely by way of two particular strands of Platonism or neo-Platonism:2 one, strongly mystical,
associated with the founder of the French Oratorian order, Pierre de Bérulle; and the other, the Augustinian
Platonism associated with Duvergier de Hauranne and Cornelius Jansen. It was in these philosophical outlooks that
many of Pascal's friends at Port-Royal saw their religion,3 and I argue that there are strong traces of various kinds
of Platonism in the Pensées themselves. At the same time, Pascal was engaged in a struggle with skepticismas
much within himself as with the Pyrrhonists to whom he refers more than twenty times in the Pensées fragments.
Pascal agrees with the skeptics that it is difficult to find God in physical nature. His own experiments with the
vacuum show that nature's abhorrence of the vacuum, a fact commonly alleged to demonstrate that being, and so
God, permeates everywhere, is simply a phenomenon of air pressure. But he disagrees with the skeptics' claim that
we know nothing of nature. The problem, indeed, is that the human being is both "infinite" and "nothing." Our
minds seem to know no limits, and yet when we try to find ourselves as objects in nature, we find only the
mundane bodies of physics. If this reduces the force of some skeptical claims, it surely gives rise to new ones.
What if we know nothing about the world and nothing about the knower?
Obviously there is a problem in relating the various sorts of neo-Platonism that influenced the Jansenists to the
skepticism that Pascal thinks he must take seriously. But it may not be so obvious that each of these strands of
thought was also undergoing its own crisis. The neo-Platonism of Yves de Paris was popular in Paris in the years
just before Pascal, and it continued to be developed after him in various forms by Nicolas de Malebranche (one of
Bérulle's Oratorians) and by the Jesuit Yves-Marie André, who was Malebranche's biographer. The traditional neo-
Platonism saw the emanations of the One everywhere and ultimately envisaged nature as returning to the One. The
One, in traditional Plotinian terms, was the source of everything and was truly without limits. Its unlimitedness was
taken

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Page xii
so literally that the One was said to be beyond being and nonbeing. Such an unlimited source would naturally
manifest itself everywhere and must ultimately, to preserve its unity, reabsorb whatever is differentiated from it.
Such theories seemed not only to run into trouble with Pascal's discoveries about the vacuum but also to sit
uneasily with a host of other scientific enquiries that hardly tended to show nature as reflecting the divine presence
and returning, of its own power, to the One. Pascal evidently saw this neo-Platonist philosophy as headed for
trouble with both science and religion.
Ideas develop over time and they are rarely intelligible if one looks at them only as they appear at a given moment;
they have a future as well as a past. To understand what is going on in front of one, it is often necessary to look
forward as well as backward. At the moment when Pascal wrote, the various Platonisms were showing signs of
strain, and to see what worried him, it is necessary to bring the latent tensions to the surface. Fortunately, some of
the philosophers who followed Pascal did that for us. As the strains grew more pressing, philosophers such as Jean-
Pierre de Crousaz and Yves-Marie André (the two founders of modern philosophical aesthetics) put more and more
weight on human freedom and on the need for human cooperation with the divine. In trying to reconcile their
theodicies with science, they seemed increasingly to depart from what someone of Pascal's cast of mind would
have thought of as Christian orthodoxy without finding anything like a scientific foundation for their beliefs.
Skepticism, too, was in a kind of crisis. The skeptic who knew what he or she was doing (who could tell doubting
from believing, for instance) obviously supposed that he or she knew something about a personal state of affairs
even if little or nothing could be known about the world. Descartes tried to confront this skeptic head-on. One who
admits the knowledge that thinking is going on knows too much to be a good skeptic. When Pascal says Descartes
is "useless," 4 he does so not because he rejects whatever proposition is implicit in the cogito but because the
problem is no longer that one does not know about the world but that one cannot find oneself in it. The
gentlemanly skepticism of François de la Mothe le Vayer who valued the humanities and gave weight to the inner
light of religion but doubted his knowledge of the external world was no longer adequate.
It is this situationone in which we know something and yet not enoughthat provokes Pascal's wager. Pascal thinks
we must bet because, to be anything at all, we must rise above the nothing, and we cannot succeed through our
own efforts. Human beings do have both mathematical knowledge and knowledge of their own condition as moral
agents, albeit faint knowledge surrounded by darkness. The need to bet, thus, has both intellectual and moral
foundations. But what are we to bet on? If we were perfectly rational, we might well bet on the God of Yves de
Paris and Yves-Marie André. If we followed a good scriptural and institutional tradition, we might bet on the rule-
loving God of René Rapinthe

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