Blaise Pascal: Pensees: On Human Duality. (01/01/2002)
As much, as often, as Christianity has attempted to avoid duality in all realms of its ideology, that task has continually been thwarted by the basic illogic and contradiction that has always characterized its belief. Blaise Pascal, a 17th Century French mathematician turned theologian, who should probably know better, first denies the existence of contradiction in Christian belief, then resorts to it, even as often as you please, to articulate basic tenets of faith in his "Apology for the Christian Religion" (Pensees). To say that Pascal projected something akin to intellectual oddity in his thinking might be an exaggeration, since many thinkers after him have done essentially the same, but it is true that, as a "scientist" in the early years of that discipline's emergence as a methodology, he summarily dismissed the theory of Copernicus (that the sun was the center of the solar system) as false: "I approve of not examining the opinion of Copernicus" (paragraph, 218); and also condemned Descartes, a "father" of Enlightenment Rationalism, by saying, "I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God." And: "Descartes useless and uncertain" (paragraphs, 77 and 78). Pascal, here, essentially, and even for the first time in history, clearly articulates a view that has stood as a primary distinction in Western culture between the validity of science and religion as rival points-of-view, one against the other, in terms of which one might be the best way to understand and express the nature of the human condition. Pascal clearly favors the religious point-of-view against the scientific.
This same issue is currently enjoying a revival of sorts in the American Academy, not unlike a worrisome, rabid dog that refuses to go away, in the form of yet another attempt by creationists to displace evolution and biology and replace them with a renamed ideology called "Intelligent-Design" that claims existing human and animal forms are too complex to have occurred randomly but were made by God according to His supernatural designs. One of the problems this view raises, but never addresses, concerns the fact that a Christian perception of human reality has always claimed that people were fashioned by an "intelligent" God to be slaves to their passions while condemned to resist that enslavement by the function of their rational souls, or, as Pascal puts it: "[t]here is internal war in man between reason and the passions" (412). What bothers me about this notion is that individuals are driven to behave irrationally (out of passion) but are always equally conflicted to restrain themselves from acting that way by reason. Pascal carries this notion forward by asserting that two different kinds of people emerge in the world in their efforts to escape from this essential duality; that is,
"This internal war of reason against the passions has made a division of those who would have peace into two sects. The first would renounce their passions and become gods; the others would renounce reason and become brute beasts. (Des Barreaux.) But neither can do so, and reason still remains, to condemn the vileness and injustice of the passions and to trouble the repose of those who abandon themselves to them; and the passions keep always alive in those who would renounce them." (413)
In this statement, of course, Pascal introduces the primary distinction between God and Beast that has always evolved out of the duality between passion and reason in Christian ideology. Any and every passionate act is characterized by its inherent and inescapable "vileness." Every rational act, on the other hand, is seen as being essentially good. If you act rationally, you become God-like. If you act passionately, you become Beast-like. Pascal makes this same point in the following terms:
"It is dangerous to make man see too clearly his equality with the brutes without showing him his greatness. It is also dangerous to make him see his greatness too clearly, apart from his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both. But it is very advantageous to show him both. Man must not think that he is on a level either with the brutes or with the angels, nor must he be ignorant of both sides of his nature; but he must know both." (418)
The difficulty I have always had with this theory of human reality stems from its dependence on dialectical and differential thinking, a basic distinction between one thing and another, beastly vileness as opposed to angelic goodness, where the first has never actually been demonstrated to exist in reality, that beasts are necessarily vile, while the second posits the existence of an empty signifier, angel, as the only repository of goodness. To say that animals act only out of passion, and that whatever they do is therefore vile, falls so far from any circle of truth of which I am aware that the notion is simply ludicrous. In the fall, squirrels spend much of their time gathering food to carry themselves across the bleak and empty months of winter. This activity is not based on passion, may or may not have anything to do with reason, and certainly cannot be characterized as vile. I question whether the activity is based on instinct, which is how every European sees it, which summarily reduces it to the level of passion, I suppose, for the simple reason that Christian ideology depends so heavily on the idea that human beings are necessarily elevated above the "brute beasts" by virtue of the fact that God gave them a faculty of reason in the human soul which He has universally denied to animals at the same time. To see the gathering and storing of food by squirrels as anything other than instinct necessarily calls into question the exclusivity of reason in human beings and undercuts the notion that people are superior to animals by virtue of having something that they do not. The fact that all squirrels gather food does not prove that the activity is instinctual; rather, it tends to demonstrate that very few squirrels are stupid.
People generally do not fare as well. Take Cabeza de Vaca as an example. He, and the other Spaniards who accompanied him into the unknown interior of America in the 16th Century, were not able to hunt, fish, or gather any edible food whatsoever, for the simple reason that they were trained as professional soldiers who did know how to feed themselves, and were forced to raid the villages of native Americans in order to steal enough food to survive. Eventually they had to resort to cannibalism to sustain themselves. As far as I know, squirrels, even without benefit of a rational soul, generally manage to avoid eating each other when they fail to gather enough food to last out the winter.
Squirrels also are not in the habit of organizing themselves in vast armies so they can attack and annihilate other vast armies of squirrels who behave in ways one group finds offensive to the standards and values it has established for itself. Squirrels who live in oak trees and eat acorns do not attempt to annihilate the ones who choose to live in pecan orchards. Now, exactly why the capacity, if not the irresistible impulse, to destroy everyone who perceives reality differently than you do is referred to as a sign of the possession of a rational soul that leads one to goodness, where animals have no such capacity in the absence of the same thing, must stand as a question as baffling as any that has ever been asked. Carrying this idea to the level of Pascal's assertions that acting like a "brute beast" is worst than acting like an angel, in the face of humanity's inability to escape from passionate action (vileness), where he might perceive wars of annihilation as evil, if directed at his fellows, but as infinitely good if waged against his enemies, one again must wonder how this ideology of dualism serves any purpose other than to justify certain kinds of brutish behavior as goodness and certain other kinds of angelic behavior as evil. Refraining, through an exercise of reason, from attempting to annihilate your enemies in a just and holy war against non-believers, for instance, while a certain exercise of reason against irrationality and passionate vileness, only ends up as being perceived as the worst kind of evil by those of your fellows that your actions betray. That Pascal was capable of pursuing his ideology along these twisted paths can be inferred from statements like this one: "It is a singular thing to consider that there are people in the world who, having renounced all the laws of God and nature, have made laws for themselves which they strictly obey, as, for instance, the soldiers of Mahomet, robbers, heretics, etc." (393). During the Inquisition, which Pascal also mentions, being declared a heretic, a Jew, or a Muslim, in Christian Europe brought the same capital punishment. To his credit, Pascal usually defended Jewish people at a time when they were fair targets for everyone's bigotry. People of Islam, however, did not merit that same regard and are here cast as deserving recipients of the same punishment meted out to ordinary thieves and heretics.
The point this brings along in its wake is that God's design to create human beings as creatures fighting an internal war of passion against reason every day of their lives, a struggle that often leads to bloody wars of reprisal against anyone who is different from the norm, even against anyone who refuses to accept the notion of the internal war of reason against passion, seems anything, if actually true, other than an intelligent one. One must explain here why its is better to be split into this duality characterized by passionate animalism, where animals have no such distinction of vileness, on the one hand, and by angelic goodness, where no proof can be found that anything like an angel actually exists, on the other, than it would be to admit simply that people are the same as any other animal with the single exception that their capacity to reason renders them susceptible to behavior so brutish and appalling, like the Inquisition, that any animal, if any were capable, would exclude human beings from their ranks altogether. Articulated reason, if nothing else then, has given human beings the capacity to invent a Creator who has fashioned a world dominated by a creature torn in opposite directions by impulses so powerful that the internal conflict they engender must be characterized as a war between greatness and villainy, between Good and Evil, between reason and passion. Not surprisingly, of course, the history of this ideology is littered with the corpses of countless millions of victims who have fallen along the way in wars of one passion against another, of one version of this myth against another slightly different one, where all have been excused on the ground of the necessity of establishing and preserving God's truth across the face of the whole earth.
If God really is all-powerful, I wonder why He did not create a human being unified in his/her purpose toward only the Good, why He chose instead to create an entity twisted between the vileness of the animal and the goodness of the angel. Calling that decision the result of "intelligent design" is an insult to reason, not an affirmation of it.