Pensées

What It's About

Pensées ("Thoughts") is a collection of notes and fragments that Blaise Pascal was gathering for a major defence of the Christian religion when he died. He never arranged them, so the book is a series of short aphorisms, longer meditations and unfinished arguments, published posthumously. Pascal's aim was to reach sceptical, worldly readers. He first shows them how contradictory and restless human beings are, then argues that Christianity alone explains that condition. Because the fragments were never put in a final order, editors have arranged them in different ways, and the sequence you read depends on the edition. Some of the best-known passages have also drawn criticism, particularly the wager, which has been challenged by philosophers as a calculation about belief rather than a route to it.

Key Concepts

The wager argues that, since reason cannot settle whether God exists, it is rational to stake everything on belief, because the possible gain is infinite and the possible loss small. Diversion describes how people fill their lives with activity and amusement to avoid facing their own mortality and emptiness. Pascal also presents human beings as poised between two infinities, too small to grasp the whole and too great to be nothing, a "thinking reed" that is frail but aware of its frailty. Running through the book is his claim that reason has limits and that the heart grasps truths that argument cannot reach. He also writes of a God who is partly hidden, so that those who seek him sincerely find him and those who do not are left in doubt.

About the Author

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French mathematician, physicist and religious thinker, a child prodigy who made his name in science while still young. After a profound religious experience in 1654 he turned increasingly to theology and became closely associated with the Jansenist community of Port-Royal. He suffered poor health for most of his life and died at thirty-nine.

About This Edition

This is a 1904 translation by W. F. Trotter.