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The Night of Fire
Blaise Pascal, mathematician, scientist, inventor, and philosopher, a man who from the age of 16 had been making historic contributions to mathematics and the physical sciences, who, despite a sickly constitution and a capacity for intense abstraction nonetheless oversaw the material construction of his experiments and inventions with great zest, was barely past 30 when saw something unexpected one raw November night. He saw fire. The vision of it so branded him that he sewed the record he made of it, his Memorial, into his coat, carrying it with him the rest of his life:
In school, I was taught that Pascal meant it when he said, “GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob / not of the philosophers and of the learned” – that after his night of fire that fateful November, Pascal really did renounce all scientific thought as libido excellendi, the concupiscence of the mind. Bertrand Russell called this renunciation “philosophical suicide.” Nietzsche called Pascal “the most instructive victim of Christianity.” By contrast, Pascal’s sister and hagiographer, Gilberte, who first related the renunciation, regarded it as a triumph of faith over the illusions of this world. Years earlier Jansenists had stayed with the Pascal household, and young Blaise had convinced his sisters to adopt Jansenist teachings – teachings so passionately attached to Augustine’s vision of man’s total depravity as to be almost Calvinist despite their nominal Catholicism — so attached as to believe even reason itself was corrupt, a chimera, a mirage misleading the minds of men. The mirror we see in so dimly is far too dim to show reason undistorted, or at least not the reason that matters.
Hence “not of the philosophers and of the learned.” Quite a grim prospect for any of us trained to believe that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is also the God of the cosmos and of all who study it. And what would it mean if the “not” were true? What would it be like to abandon the whole edifice of scientific understanding, to kick off the twin traces of evidence and proof, and plunge, headlong and burning into… something else altogether. I am not sure what. Only that for a very long time, it has been hard for me not to wonder.
And so, the story goes, the man who, only months before, had been collaborating with fellow mathematician Fermat in founding an entire new discipline, probability theory, abandoned it all to become first a sarcastic theological crank (see the Provincial Letters), and finally the tortured soul dying tragically young, leaving his magnum opus, an existential defense of Christianity, so unfinished that only scattered fragments and notes could be gathered and published – the Pensées.
Or at least that’s the story as it’s commonly told. The real story is not quite so pat. Accounts differ as to how deep Pascal’s renunciation of scientific thinking went. Like Nietzsche and Russell, the folks at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy seem to believe it went pretty deep. Other sources, though, point out he never did fully abandon his interest in math and science, and still pursued the odd project here and there. Moreover, scientific habits of mind do not disappear overnight, even if you’re not doing science. Certainly, the famous Wager of Pascal’s Pensées shows a mathematical mind still at work. It isn’t often that a theological conceit with all the deference of a mugging is credited with mathematical innovation, but Pascal’s Wager is counted as one of the first uses, ever, of decision theory. (As well as a kind of argument irresistible during election seasons: “Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then?” – of course Pascal, already believing his beliefs, thought everyone must see themselves as already embarked, as already consigned to his binary choice, no matter how much unbelievers might see it otherwise.)
Still, it’s worth asking why the renunciation went as deep as it did, when it did. After all, Pascal had been a Jansenist for years while remaining active in scientific circles. His mind had been converted long before. The night of fire, though, was a conversion of the heart.
For Pascal, the heart was supremely important, though not in the romantic or emotional sense, or even, necessarily, in the same sense other pious Christians speak of it. Perhaps the heart meant the faculty of perception “transcending reason and prior to it”[2], what Schumpeter (and Sowell after him) called Vision. Within mathematics, Pascal spoke of an esprit de finesse that leaps ahead of reason and draws it onward. Polya would later quite charmingly call this intuitive spirit just “guessing,” though Polya would make guessing into an art. Polanyi would point out that this intuition, though not emotion itself, demands emotional commitment. Pascal opposed l’esprit de finesse to l’esprit géométrique, the “geometric spirit” of articulated, deductive reasoning – the faculty of the mind that, however persuasive it might be, is often just on janitorial duty, tidying up the syllogisms after l’esprit de finesse has passed. The “heart” (coeur), as Pascal spoke of it, seems to encompass the intuition preceding reason just as it encompasses the “revelation” that reason is in vain. If this seems contradictory, perhaps Pascal would point to Jeremiah 17:9: “the heart is deceitful above all else.” Even so, “some faint glimmer or trace of the instantaneous, clairvoyant understanding that the unfallen Adam was believed to enjoy in Paradise”[2] must remain, else faith and reason would both be blind.
And the eyes of Pascal’s heart saw fire.
Fire – fire consuming the flowering thorns on sun-bleached prairies; fire arcing from the tips of the branches of roadside trees, from towers and steeples, weaving a net as visible to the mind’s eye as it is invisible to the body’s eye: these visions are not hard to have, and not particularly special, either, if no moral sense gives them meaning. There’s speculation that Pascal, like Hildegard of Bingen before him, suffered migraines, headaches causing hallucinatory auras. If so, both visionaries made something out of those auras, they made them into something revelatory, unlike other sufferers who may just regard the auras as a nuisance, an impediment to everyday adult responsibilities, and all the more painful for being so.
But then, Pascal, for all his accomplishments, never did lead what most of us would call a life of adult responsibility. He never held a job. If his sister’s account is to be believed, not only was he so sick in infancy that he screamed continually for over a year, but he “continued to be so ill that, at the age of twenty-four, he could tolerate no food other than in liquid form, which his sisters or his nurse warmed and fed to him drop by drop.”[1] Pascal relied on nursing care not only throughout his sickly childhood, but throughout adulthood as well, exhibiting “an almost infantile dependence on his family.”[1] By contrast, I suspect the attitude in most modern American households would be, “If you’re well enough to scale the heights of intellectual and spiritual achievement, well enough to mortify your own flesh in penance (something Pascal did in his later years), then you’re also well enough to feed yourself like a normal adult, thank you very much!”
In some circles, habitual suffering does seem to excuse a body from everyday obligations. In others, it seems to impose extra duties. (Thou Shalt Suffer Extra-Discreetly. Thou Shalt Endeavor Doubly To Not Impose.) Not that these circles are mutually exclusive – there’s no rule saying the same social circle must treat all who suffer equally, despite differences in social standing, other gifts, and the suffering’s nature. We ordinary mortals sometimes surmise that suffering spurs not stifles genius, as if suffering itself could cause genius. We may overlook, though, how much the great suffering geniuses rely on their caretakers to manage life’s little inanities for them. Stephen Hawking certainly had to depend on others to turn his paralysis into opportunity. Pascal was, by comparison, far more able-bodied. Though Pascal suffered greatly, he was also cared for greatly, so greatly it’s not hard to suspect he could have gotten by on less.
Had Pascal been expected to shift for himself more, would he have burned as brilliantly? Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not.
The world of math can be an escape from suffering, a winter Eden – the bones of the trees of life and wisdom freed from the flesh of their leaves, the pages of innocent snow awaiting inscription, all stilled, all crystallized – a nature “out of nature,” set apart from the bloody, sticky summer which commends “whatever is begotten, born, and dies.” The mental stillness demanded by l’esprit géométrique beckons as a refuge from the ravages of mind and body, but entrance to this refuge costs a fee. Some of my own most peaceful memories are of solving math problems to escape life’s vicissitudes – while feverish, in a hospital, in the rubble of a shattered future. But even then, no matter how restorative, the problems demanded something of me first: If I couldn’t muster that something, the hope of refuge was lost.
It’s not hard to imagine that a man like Pascal, dogged since infancy by suffering, first fell in love with math because he could make it a refuge, a pursuit absorbing enough that his suffering ceased to matter. Is it possible that he fell away from math and into theology and mysticism when, despite all the care he received, he reached a point where he could no longer get his suffering to cease to matter?
Neither mathematical nor scientific reasoning is intended to answer suffering. The freedom they offer from suffering is just the freedom of a perspective where suffering doesn’t matter either way. That perspective can be a great comfort as long as there’s enough oomph to maintain it. When the oomph is gone, though… Inhabiting a winter Eden means fueling your own fire, else you freeze. When your own fuel runs out, where do you turn? Perhaps to some greater fire outside yourself. Perhaps to the fire so great it appears to be a God. And perhaps that great fire is an illusion. Or perhaps it isn’t. The only witness to the fire is the heart, as clairvoyant as it is deceitful.
No wonder Pascal wagered.
For @nanda-panjandrum.
Now, your other argument about ‘odd hypertrophy’ is another example of a specifically modern turn of mind that makes it difficult for people to see that they are modern people. If something can be done to a human being, then that counts as part of human being. I believe you should reconsider this. I will not get gruesome. I think it’s hilarious that you elide entirely the distinction between stating a fact & its moral implications.
The formal statement of this modern turn of mind is this. You dislike something about nature or what is alleged to be nature. You find an exception you like. You destroy any sense of the relation between the rule & the exception ostensibly to save the individual exception you give as example. Then you claim to have found a new rule of nature or order or classification or thought.
Whoever hews to common sense would laugh at this. But there is a moral force to this argument: Always defending the exception against the rule seems to be inclusive, democratic, & less haughty than the old philosophers.
Unfortunately, it has crazy consequences. In your speech, speculation turns out to work as a reversal of the rule between what is & what appears, as though that difference made no sense in geometry or science. Perhaps in modern thought it does not. Whether it might have otherwise never even comes up–explaining is always explaining away.
Just because something can be done, does not mean it should be done.
I realize there are moral implications, not all of them good, but yes, I was brought up to believe that some forms of “odd hypertrophy” are morally good, as one would in a household where children are brought up to admire great accomplishments in the arts and sciences. That odd hypertrophy is possible doesn’t make it good, but there do seem to be good, admirable forms of odd hypertrophy. It would be almost un-American to not admire outstanding individual achievement, no?
Well, which? By what criteria? Unless it’s total war on the distinction between rules & exceptions, your brief but utter reversal of the relation between being & appearance would benefit not at all by your patriotism or faiblesse for music…
Which achievements? Or which moral implications?
Yes!
yes
My mind is buzzing. I think several versions of you quantum-superposed from parallel worlds just dumped a mess of tenuously-related stuff into this one comment.
Is that correct? You mean bend, or tip like a teeter-totter?
Heck, I’ve been lost for a couple of pages.
In your earlier comment about “axiom”, I think I understood you, and agree with you … unless MFR can talk me out of it. I’m lurking in your dialogue with MFR (or maybe just standin’ about) with interest.
Too abstract for my tiny mind. It’s like reading a Unix man page that gives no examples and requires the reader to parse it and assemble his own uses of the Unix command.
You guys are gas-lighting us, right? Right? You’re just pretending to understand one another, right?
No, perfectly understandable. Just translate it all into Romanian and then back into English with a different dictionary.
I haven’t read the intervening three pages of comments, but thanks for your post, MFR.
This reminds me very much of St. Thomas Aquinas, who after experiencing a vision, ceased writing. He explained to his secretary, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.”
I had the same thing in mind. I think this was the winter before his death?
We live in an age that makes people deeply uncomfortable with rules; to a very large extent, it has become impossible make general statements, lest someone will say, ah, but there’s an exception!, so I’ve disproved your rule.
Say some poor fellow should say men are taller than women. Someone else is bound to take that as: All men are taller than all women. Thus translated, it suddenly allows of contradiction by finding one woman taller than one man, or comparing Kenyan women to Inuit males. Now, no one needs to take the natural fact seriously any more. It has been disproved by the magic of modern thinking.
General statements–broader than particular but not yet universal–have a strange sense about them of carrying moral implications. Even height, but of course strength even more so; there are others, too. Common sense teaches that they’re not to be trifled with in the arrangement of the various human things.
But general statements about man & world usually imply inequalities that are now unbearable. Universal statements, but even particular statements are only tolerable if they obey or proclaim scientific equality.
General statements, as a way of thinking about the world, have been attacked by the modern value-free social science as stereotypes. This is a term taken from science to show that science is superior to mere man, so that when scientists accuse mere men of being prejudiced, bigoted, or narrow-minded, they do so even in a language of their own choosing. At this point, even the defenders of common sense are busy employing as much as they can the monkey-language of the value-free social science. There is a deep lack of confidence in man’s ability to reason about his situation in this attitude. It reverses the order of life & thought. The old language of common sense has been upended, so now before anyone can live as a human being, he must find out what ‘studies show’ constitutes humanity…
But general statements have a more dangerous propensity than mere prejudice. They are a constant appeal to virtue & a bane to vice. They rely on people not only for thinking about them, but for making them true by acting. In the world of common sense, all general statements also constitute good advice, subject to some thinking about circumstance, of course. So that men’s relative strength advantage would imply a need to keep it up & keep it employed.
Far worse than prejudice, it is the sense that man’s mind guides man to improve his way of life, & therefore preempts scientific transformation of it.
In the very vagueness of the general statement–for thing generally true are not universally or necessarily or indefeasibly so–there is not only a statement about how things are, but also an inducement to virtue, holding out a prospect of how of right they should be. They are invitations to people to act; they allow people the freedom to act, not being universal; they supply some guidance rather than bully people with rationality; they are, at the same time, open to proclamation & available to mankind at large in common sense, rather than to a sect of experts only, so that they offer any community a way to assign honors & to reward with its good opinion or reputation those who live up to the proclamation.
Ultimately, this is what’s intolerable about general statements. They do not obey the fact-value distinction, but presume to find not values, but clues about how human beings should live in their actual speeches, deeds, & secret councils of the heart. They claim to speak for the whole human being in order to defend that wholeness, not merely body or merely mind.
But common sense is always already a political matter. Observing how we live, in order to praise or to blame, even aside from the political character of praise & blame, relies on the assumption that how we do live is in the main reasonable or amenable to reason without a rational hijacking through social science. & then there is no justification for radical transformations-
General statements do not quite have the status of axioms. Those used to be understood more or less as self-evident truths. If you want to disturb your faith in your country’s future, ask your youth to read your forefathers’ famous Declaration & see if they believe in self-evident truths, those there stated or others. But the modern understanding of axiom seems to be any hypothesis. If you want to take the affirmative of a proposition or if you want to take the negative, there is no difference; either way, axioms could be constructed.
Let me state here briefly my attack on what passes for reasonable among many conservatives. We are not infrequently told that you have to state your ‘givens’ or beliefs, hypotheses, assumptions or first principles. Rationality is then mutilated to mean only what should seem reasonable from your assumptions.
This would imply that human beings are not capable of conversation. Conversation assumes a reasonable common human nature, as it can be gleaned in the political lives we live–for we always live in certain political arrangements, with certain turns of thought already learned from childhood, which are in need of scrutiny. Instead, conversation degenerates, under the pretense of politeness, into a mockery of logical engineering. We cannot know we’re human, but we can check whether we move in a so-called logical way from admittedly irrational, but tightly clutched, assumptions to conclusions which cannot compel assent or persuade people to come to a reasoned agreement.
Say the sea is to the east of me and I am standing on the shore. If I look north, I see the unobstructed horizon as a horizontal line segment stretching out to the east. If I look east, it appears a horizontal line from north to south, if I look south another horizontal segment to the east. The effect, if I sweep my eyes from over my left shoulder to over my right, must be one of a curve, if the horizon heads out east, turns south, and then back in from the east, as it does. On the other hand, had I been looking at some real, concrete straight lines, like railroad tracks running from north to south a few yards to the east of me instead of the sea’s horizon, unlike the horizon these would not appear horizontal whichever way I looked, but would tilt relative to horizontal according to the rules of perspective. I would see \ looking north, — looking east, and / looking south. That is what I was trying to describe by “tilt”.
I may be a bad example, because it seems my intuition really is a little odd, and moreover was odd even before an education made it even more comfortable with what are called abstractions than it was before. I had not been much educated in abstractions at all, for example, when I stood on the seashore (or near railroad tracks – I spent time in my youth conveniently close to both) and saw what I saw, noticing that the panorama I saw during a sweep of the eyes from one side to another seemed to imply the straight lines were also curved.
Nor was it lost on me what happens when you try to draw on a surface that isn’t flat. Planar geometry, confined as it is to a plane or sheet, contains, in that sense the “seeds of its own destruction” (though I would not call it destruction) once you account for real-life materials, many of which are not perfectly flat. We do meet sheets with both positive and negative curvature in daily life. For example, I was never a sewing whiz, but even I sewed enough to get the intuitive idea of the difference between fabric not lying flat because of positive curvature (a cap) and not lying flat because of negative curvature (ruffles or some full skirts).
Is it “piling on abstractions” to expand common notions to accommodate what is really witnessed in this world? Many seem to say yes without hesitation. I wouldn’t.
Midge, now you’re conflating everything into what is seen.
Before this, you were in the hilarious situation of reversing what you yourself admitted was a relation between being–you even added, being measurable!–& appearance.
Now you’re moving into a situation where the word illusion no longer makes sense, so to speak.
You continuously leap in-between this desired abstract space–it is an abstraction from our natural experience, where we constantly think about what’s real & what’s an illusion, what’s really there & what appears to be there…–& the world of modern mathematics, which is also abstract in a radical way, but different, because it’s built by rules.
What you avoid is the world of common sense in which we actually live.
The way you started, such as with talk of parallel lines, you were within the ambit of common sense, that which makes sense of our experiences & which is thought through by Euclidian geometry. How do you know there are such things as parallel lines? How do you understand what it means for things to be parallel?–But you reversed the order of being & appearance & were off to the races then.
(You’re new example, drawing on non-flat surfaces: Again, an attempt to reverse the relation of being & appearance by image-play.)
That is true, more or less (modulo a “desired” or so). But it is, as far as I can tell, what I really see, and whatever political disadvantages it has, it is occasionally an advantage in other ways.
I agree this ends up being a problem. Obviously, rationality includes being able to tell what is entailed from a set of givens, but that is not the whole story, else there’d be no reason to entertain different givens, try to see something from another’s point of view, to account for experience.
Pascal’s experiences seem to have been quite odd, for example. Having visions? It is not normal! Certainly not in modern life, probably not in premodern life, either.
I am maybe less worried than you about finding the exceptions to general rules interesting. Pascal himself would seem to be an exception of some sort, and yet Christians – and even many conservatives – believe there is something to be gained by studying him, despite (because of?) his oddity.
I am not sure what it is about finding exceptions interesting that should make general statements intolerable. Nor why looking for clues as to how to live by observing how humans do live should be an offense to what you seem to be calling my modern mind. My perspective is a little odd, but it’s a small (very small) part of how humans do live, too, after all, and, well, we’re having a conversation.
Pascal was a “sick” man in many ways – mentally as well as physically, if you compare him to what’s ordinary. Who among us will be great as Pascal was great? But if we are odd in ways similar to him, might it not make sense to look to his example for some kind of guidance?
Midge, you’re playing with two different meanings of rule, exception, &c.
It is a matter of convention & politics that Christians mostly look the way they do. Pascal was an exception to the rule primarily in the sense that he took the faith seriously in a way most people don’t. You could call him a fanatic, as opposed to the profane many.
But it is not a matter of convention whether there is a distinction between being & appearance, between nature & phenomenon, & so forth. The relation of rule & exception means something else in this case.
My brief discourse on the modern mind & the ongoing attack on general rules in the name of saving the exception is not meant as a description of your situation. I believe it applies to your mishandling of ancient & modern mathematics.
But if you want to know where you stand to this, you should reflect on nature. There really is a crisis of individual & general, of exception & rule. Anyone who knows a bit about thinking before modern times would realize how shockingly new the modern interest in aberrations is & its relation to experimenting.
Even as a matter of thinking, we say it’s by nature that the dog is a four-legged animal, but we’re aware not all dogs do have even at birth four legs. But is the exception enough to cancel the rule?
Well, how about when you apply it to humans? If they have a nature, how about the exceptional individuals!
Let’s not forget what Kant had to say about this.
Kan’t we? Just this once?
Oh, goodness, this is one or two comments from Dime dropping to say, imANNIEuel get your gun!
It is true I never showed net aptitude for math till calculus. I may be particularly ill-suited to distinguishing between ancient and modern here.