Blaise Pascal on Duplicity, Sin, and the Fall: The Secret Instinct (Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology) 9780199656363, 0199656363

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CHANGING PARADIGMS IN HISTORICAL AND SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY General Editors Sarah Coakley Richard Cross This series sets out to reconsider the modern distinction between “historical” and “systematic” theology. The scholarship represented in the series is marked by attention to the way in which historiographic and theological presumptions (“paradigms”) necessarily inform the work of historians of Christian thought, and thus affect their application to contemporary concerns. At certain key junctures such paradigms are recast, causing a reconsideration of the methods, hermeneutics, geographical boundaries, or chronological caesuras which have previously guided the theological narrative. The beginning of the twenty-first century marks a period of such notable reassessment of the Christian doctrinal heritage, and involves a questioning of the paradigms that have sustained the classic “history-ofideas” textbook accounts of the modern era. Each of the volumes in this series brings such contemporary methodological and historiographical concerns to conscious consideration. Each tackles a period or key figure whose significance is ripe for reconsideration, and each analyses the implicit historiography that has sustained existing scholarship on the topic. A variety of fresh methodological concerns are considered, without reducing the theological to other categories. The emphasis is on an awareness of the history of “reception”: the possibilities for contemporary theology are bound up with a careful rewriting of the historical narrative. In this sense, “historical” and “systematic” theology are necessarily conjoined, yet also closely connected to a discerning interdisciplinary engagement. This monograph series accompanies the project of The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Christian Theology (OUP, in progress), also edited by Sarah Coakley and Richard Cross.

CHANGING PARADIGMS IN HISTORICAL AND SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY General Editors: Sarah Coakley (Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge) and Richard Cross (John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame) recent series titles Calvin, Participation, and the Gift The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ J. Todd Billings Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England Benjamin J. King Orthodox Readings of Aquinas Marcus Plested Kant and the Creation of Freedom A Theological Problem Christopher J. Insole

Blaise Pascal on Duplicity, Sin, and the Fall The Secret Instinct

WILLIAM WOOD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University press in the UK and in certain other countries # William Wood 2013 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–965636–3 As printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Acknowledgments In one form or another, I have been working through the ideas in this book for well over a decade, and along the way I have accumulated a great many debts, both intellectual and (alas) financial. Straightaway I want to thank my parents, Horace and Sandra Wood, for supporting me, in all senses of that word, for my entire life, even when they probably shouldn’t have. I am profoundly grateful to them. My first encounter with Pascal was in a class called “Luther, Calvin, and Pascal on the Hidden God,” taught by Susan Schreiner and David Tracy at the University of Chicago Divinity School in the Winter of 1999. I was required to hand in a ten-page paper on Pascal. Months later (as is the custom at Chicago), when I finally got around to writing it, I found that once I started, I couldn’t stop. I wrote draft after draft, never quite satisfied that I had come to grips with Pascal, but also far too absorbed to stop. Eventually, I decided to stop stopping, and that modest seminar paper grew into my doctoral exam paper, then my dissertation, and now this book. So thanks to Susan Schreiner and David Tracy for offering the class. I next wish to thank my dissertation advisor, Chris Gamwell, and the members of my dissertation committee, Kathryn Tanner and Paul Griffiths. They were the perfect committee: they frequently disagreed with each other, and with me, and between the three of them, they know just about everything, but they were all incredibly generous and kind. I learned so much from them. Sarah Coakley invited me to give a paper on Pascal to the D Society in Cambridge, and when I survived the experience (barely!), she suggested that I submit a manuscript to this series. She has been an invaluable interlocutor and all-around source of wisdom during my time in Oxford, and I am pleased and grateful to find myself suddenly in her orbit. I would also like to thank my colleagues, students, and friends in Oxford. I presented a version of Chapter 3 to the University of Oxford Modern Theology Seminar, and received very useful feedback, especially from Johannes Zachhuber, Joel Rassmussen, Tim Mawson, and Philip Endean. I presented a version of Chapter 2 to the Cardinal Allen Society of Oriel College. I thank all those in attendance for their

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challenging questions. Many thanks as well—and for so much—to Madhavi Nevader. I also thank Brian Leftow for advice, support, and conversations about NFL football. I hope that Karin Meyers will always be one of the first readers of anything that I write. I value her insights and friendship enormously. Ed Upton and Lea Schweitz also offered valuable suggestions, and Marsaura Shukla and Claire Bowen commented on dissertation-stage drafts. I thank them all. Finally, special thanks to Gillian Hamnett, who read the entire manuscript at short notice. The book is much better as a result of her suggestions. I have been supported by a William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship and a Martin E. Marty Center Dissertation Fellowship, both from the University of Chicago, as well as a postdoctoral fellowship from the Center for Philosophy of Religion, University of Notre Dame. I thank both institutions. Some of the material in this book has appeared in two published essays: “What is the Self? Imitation and Subjectivity in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées,” Modern Theology, 26 (2010), 417–36; and “Axiology, Self-Deception and Moral Wrongdoing in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 37 (2009), 107–36. I am grateful for permission to reuse that material here.

Contents Introduction The Secret Instinct The Fall, Self-Knowledge, and the Aversion for the Truth Sin and Self-Deception Sin, Paradox, and Self-Estrangement Outline of the Argument Interpreting Pascal on the Fall into Duplicity

1 2 5 9 12 14 15

1. The Evaluative Fall: Disordered Love and the Aversion to Truth Pascal’s Augustinian Anthropology: Amour-Propre and Pride From Pride to Disordered Love The Evaluative Fall The Evaluative Fall and the Cycle of Desire Rapport, Truth, and Attractiveness Ennui and Diversion as Signs of the Fall into Duplicity Objection: Am I Really So Unhappy?

20 25 30 34 38 42 46

2. The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology Imagination, Illusion, and Political Order That “Proud Power”: Pascal’s Critique of the Imagination The Political Imagination and the Duplicitous Social Order The Pretenses of Power Politics as a Diversion from Truth Blaise Pascal, Critical Theorist Political Progress, True Justice, and the Church

51 52 57 68 70 76 79 87

3. The Imaginary Self in a World of Illusion: Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject What is the Self? The Moi: The False Self The Moi and Self-Interpretation What is it like to be a False Self? An Example from George Eliot’s Middlemarch

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92 94 97 105 107

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Nicholas Bulstrode as a Pascalian Moi Parodying God by Performing the False Self

111 117

4. Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology Sinful Self-Deception as Culpable Self-Persuasion Pascal on Moral Wrongdoing: The Wider Context Self-Deceptive Moral Judgments are Interpretive Pascal on Moral Judgment: The Heart, Sentiment, and Finesse The Imagination Bestows Value How Moral Reasoning Goes Wrong: Self-Deception Conclusion: What is Self-Deception?

129 137 140 144

5. On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception From “Lying To Oneself ” to “Irrational Belief-Formation” Paradox! Paradoxes of Attention and Awareness “Perpetually Holistic Self-Transparency” Conclusion: Pascal Contra Self-Transparency

146 149 163 169 172 176

6. A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception: Morally Culpable Self-Persuasion Lying to Oneself as a Form of Culpable Self-Persuasion Persuasion, Reason, Rationalization The Steps of Self-Persuasion Self-Persuasion, Self-Deception, and Human Agency Paradox Dispelled How to Construct a False Self Conclusion: Self-Deception, the Fall, and the Hiddenness of God

121 121 123 125

179 180 182 184 195 198 204 209

7. The Way Back: On Loving the Truth Grace as Pleasure and Delight in the Good Loving the Truth as a Religious Stance Subjectivity without Duplicity: The True Self Imitates Christ The Final Word

212 212 215 217 225

Bibliography Index

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Introduction Blaise Pascal on Duplicity, Sin, and the Fall presents Pascal’s account of the cognitive consequences of the Fall. The central claim is that for Pascal, the Fall is a fall into duplicity. He holds that, as fallen selves in a fallen world, human beings have an innate aversion to the truth that is also, at the same time, an aversion to God. According to Pascal, we are born into a duplicitous world that shapes us into duplicitous subjects, and so we find it easy to reject God continually and deceive ourselves about our own sinfulness. Contemporary theologians who turn to Pascal will find an account of the noetic effects of sin that is both traditional and innovative.1 It is traditional in that it is robustly Augustinian, with a strong emphasis on the fallen will, the darkened intellect, and the fundamental sin of pride. Yet it is innovative in that it presents the noetic effects of sin as both personal and social, and thereby embraces a view of subjectivity and human agency that seems strikingly contemporary. For Pascal, the self is itself a fiction, constructed from without by an already duplicitous world. It follows that even some of the seemingly “interior” and cognitive consequences of the Fall must also be understood as broadly social and external; similarly, some apparently social consequences of the Fall (like the fallen political order, for example) must be understood as broadly cognitive, since they reproduce and reinforce the duplicity that we find at the heart of the human subject. For Pascal, both the fallen self and the fallen world display the noetic effects of sin.

1 I use the expressions “noetic effects of sin” and “cognitive consequences of the Fall” interchangeably.

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Introduction THE SECRET INSTINCT

The book’s subtitle—The Secret Instinct—comes from fragment L136/ S168 of Pascal’s Pensées.2 In a long but unpolished fragment, Pascal marvels at the fact that people obsessively pursue diversions like gambling, hunting, and game-playing as if they desired those things intrinsically, for their own sakes, when it is so plain (to Pascal, at any rate) that what they really desire is simply to be diverted from thinking about the human condition. What troubles Pascal is not that people enjoy diverting activities, but that they persistently misunderstand their own desires. They do not understand why they feel a ceaseless desire for diversion. As Pascal recognizes, there is a sense in which we must misunderstand what we want from diverting activities if we are to be diverted successfully. He points out that a man cannot enjoy gambling if he has nothing of value at stake. In such situations, he must engage in a simple form of self-deception: It might be argued that what he wants is the entertainment of gaming and not the winnings. Make him play for nothing; his interest will not be fired and he will become bored, so it is not just entertainment he wants. A half-hearted entertainment without excitement will bore him. He must have excitement, he must delude himself (se pipe lui-même) into imagining that he would be happy to win what he would not want as a gift if it meant giving up gambling . . . (L136/S168)

Pascal’s description of this simple form of self-deception quickly broadens into a deeper theological critique. In the same fragment, he says that we misunderstand the real character of our desire for diversion because of an ever-present tension between our pre-fallen and fallen human nature. This tension manifests as a conflict between what we take (falsely) to be a desire for rest, but which is really an aversion toward rest: whereas we think we desire rest, we really desire its opposite, ceaseless activity. Because hunters—and by extension, 2

Unless otherwise noted, I cite the Pensées by fragment number from A. J. Krailsheimer’s translation (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), which uses the Lafuma numbering scheme. In addition to the Lafuma number (“L”), I also cite each fragment by Sellier number (“S”), which is used in both Roger Ariew’s translation (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2005) and in Honor Levi’s abridged edn, Pensées and Other Writings (New York: OUP, 1995).

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everyone—do not really know themselves, they believe that they seek the kill, the object of the hunt, but what they really seek is the diversion provided by the hunt itself. When men are reproached for pursuing so eagerly something that could never satisfy them, their proper answer, if they really thought about it, ought to be that they simply want a violent and vigorous occupation to take their minds off themselves, and that is why they choose some attractive object to entice them in their ardent pursuit . . . but they do not answer like that because they don’t know themselves . . . They think they genuinely want rest when all they really want is activity. They have a secret instinct driving them to seek external diversion and occupation, and this is the result of their constant sense of wretchedness. They have another secret instinct, left over from the greatness of our original [i.e. prefallen] nature, telling them that the only true happiness lies in rest and not in excitement. These two contrary instincts give rise to a confused plan buried out of sight in the depths of their soul, which leads them to seek rest by way of activity and always to imagine that the satisfaction they miss will come to them once they overcome certain obvious difficulties and can open the door to welcome rest. All our life passes this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces . . . (L136/S168)

Terminology like “a secret instinct” and “a confused plan buried out of sight in the depths of their soul” (un projet confus, qui se cache à leur vue dan le fond de leur âme) suggests a kind of ubiquitous selfdeception, but determining the precise contours of this confused plan requires interpretive work. At first blush, the claim that we have two competing “instincts” connotes something like conflicting, animalistic impulses. But in the Pensées, Pascal clearly uses the term “instinct” to describe a kind of implicit knowledge. As Buford Norman writes, instinct is “a less abstract, perhaps less intellectual awareness of something that we have always known but never verbalized.”3 Pascal generalizes from his critique of gamblers and hunters, and claims that the human condition as such is characterized by an incoherent aversion to rest. The people in this fragment “think they genuinely want rest when all they really want is activity . . . they do not know themselves.” It is clear that they do not know themselves, 3 Buford Norman, Portraits of Thought: Knowledge, Methods, and Styles in Pascal (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1988), 29.

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because the rest that they ostensibly desire is displaced by the very means by which they seek it. The ostensible purpose of their frenzied activity is to arrive at a point of rest, where activity is no longer necessary. Yet the real purpose of their activity is the reverse: preventing themselves from arriving at a point of rest. Their “confused plan,” to pursue rest by means of frenzied activity, is incoherent and, by definition, it cannot succeed. Indeed, the only way they can attempt such a plan at all is by deceiving themselves about what they really desire. Throughout the Pensées, Pascal launches the same critique against even bigger quarry: the universal human desire for happiness, which he holds to be nothing other than a universal desire for God (see especially L148/S181). The person who “finds delight in diversion” only imagines that he is happy; he can sustain this illusion only because he refuses to attend to his deeper unhappiness.4 According to Pascal, true happiness and true rest are coextensive: “Telling a man to rest is the same as telling him to live happily. It means advising him to enjoy a completely happy state, in which he can contemplate at leisure without cause for distress. It means not understanding [human] nature” (L136/S168). Furthermore, if we were to attend to our unhappiness, we would see that we cannot be truly happy as long as we are estranged from God: “It is quite certain that there is no good without the knowledge of God; that the closer one comes, the happier one is, and that ultimate happiness is to know him with certainty; that the further away one goes, the more unhappy one is” (L432/S684, see also L399/S18, L407/S26). Because we all have a deep desire for happiness, we also have a deep desire for God; moreover, these desires are one and the same. Yet instead of nurturing our deep desire for God, we systematically try to extinguish it. “When we wish to think of God is there not something which distracts and tempts us to think of something else?” (L395/S14, see also L399/S18). Yet when we divert our attention from God, we also divert our attention from the remedy for our own unhappiness, since Pascal identifies happiness with rest in God. Insofar as the apologetic project of the Pensées is an effort to lead its readers to

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See also fragment L44/S78, where Pascal ties our false conceptions of happiness to the faculty of the imagination: “Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason, which only makes its friends wretched . . . ”

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attend to this natural desire, a desire that all feel and few recognize, the entire project of the Pensées is also an effort to awaken us from selfdeception.

THE FALL, SELF-KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AVERSION FOR THE TRUTH To the extent that there is anything like a dominant scholarly consensus about Pascal’s account of the Fall, it does not emphasize duplicity and self-deception.5 On the dominant consensus, Pascal tells—albeit in striking fashion—a fairly conventional Augustinian story about the fallen will, which tends toward prideful self-love, and fallen reason, which can no longer grasp the saving truths of faith. On this telling, the fallen human being retains only a formal capacity for happiness and truth. This formal capacity is experienced as a kind of restless desire. We long for stable happiness, and so we implicitly long for God, the sole source of happiness. Similarly, our restless desire to know is also an implicit longing for God, the source of all truth. Even though we retain the capacity for happiness and truth after the Fall, this capacity is just that: a bare capacity, a formal possibility that remains substantively unfilled (L75/S110, L131/S164, L401/S20, L406/S25, L599/S496). The fact that we have a capacity for happiness and truth and yet are doomed to be unhappy and ignorant (apart from grace) explains a wide 5

For examples of the dominant scholarly consensus on the Pensées as a whole see A. J. Krailsheimer, Pascal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), chs 4–6; Hugh Davidson, Blaise Pascal (Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1983), ch. 4; Jean Mesnard, Les Pensées de Pascal, 3rd edn (Paris: Société d’édition d’énseignement supérieur, 1993); and esp. Philippe Sellier’s authoritative introduction to his own edited edn of the Pensées (Paris: Bordas, 1991), 5–92. Sara Melzer’s Discourses of the Fall: A Study of Pascal’s Pensées (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986) is one of the few booklength treatments of Pascal’s understanding of the Fall. It offers a post-structuralist account of the Fall as a fall from truth into language. Another is David Wetsel, L’Écriture Et Le Reste: The Pensées of Pascal in the Exegetical Tradition of Port-Royal (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1981), which argues that Pascal hopes in the Pensées to demonstrate the Fall’s historicity. See also Jan Miel, Pascal and Theology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 66–74; Philipe Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin (Paris: A. Colin, 1970), chs. 1–2. Michael Moriarty’s Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), are especially valuable, and both discuss the theme of self-deception.

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range of human behavior, according to Pascal. It explains our desire for diversion, our natural passion for inquiry, and even our politics. Pascal thus treats the doctrine of the Fall as an empirical hypothesis that functions as an indirect proof of the truth of Christianity.6 We can infer that Christianity is true because only Christianity explains the data that we do in fact observe: human beings are both great and wretched, with a capacity for truth and happiness that nevertheless remains empty. We are great because we are created in the image of God, but wretched because we are no longer in the pristine state of our creation. Only Christianity understands why human beings are both great and wretched, and never either one or the other alone. Our wretchedness testifies to our greatness, which in turn points to our wretchedness, in an endless dialectic (L122/S155). This seeming paradox impels us towards Christianity, the sole philosophy that can comprehend our dual nature and, through grace, resolve it. Pascal insists that we must come to know God in order to be happy, but we must first know ourselves in order to know God. He thereby embraces the Augustinian imperative of self-knowledge that Etienne Gilson calls “Christian Socratism.”7 According to Pascal: “Man’s true nature, his true good and true virtue, and true religion are things that cannot be known separately” (L393/S12). Yet for the Christian, unlike for the ancient Greek, to know one’s “true nature” is to know oneself as fallen. For a religion to be true, it must have known our nature; it must have known its greatness and smallness, and the reason for both. What other religion but Christianity has known this? (L215/S248) There are in faith two equally constant truths. One is that man in the state of his creation, or in the state of grace, is exalted above the whole of nature, made like unto God and sharing in his divinity. The other is that in the state of corruption and sin he has fallen from that first state and has become like the beasts. (L131/164)

To recognize that we are fallen is also to recognize that we must turn to Christ, our redeemer. The doctrine of the Fall unlocks the mysteries of the human condition, but the doctrine of the Fall is revealed 6 For a discussion of the way Pascal treats the Fall as an explanatory hypothesis, see Daniel C. Fouke, “Argument in Pascal’s Pensées,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 6 (1989), 57–68. 7 Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 209.

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only with the coming of Christ. Christ is the real key to self-knowledge: “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves” (L417/36).

The Aversion for Truth In summary, the apologetic strategy of the Pensées depends on first showing that Christianity offers the best account of human nature and the only remedy for the human condition, and then persuading its readers to “wager” on the value of the Christian way of life.8 This is the conventional interpretation of Pascal. In my view, this interpretation ignores some of Pascal’s most striking insights about the cognitive consequences of the Fall, and especially the insight that the Fall is a fall into duplicity. Pascal presents humankind not merely as ignorant of our own fallenness, but as willfully ignorant. We hate the truth about ourselves and so we reject it. “Ordinary people have the ability not to think about things they don’t want to think about,” he writes (L815/S659). Above all they do not want to think about their own sinfulness, and so “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true” (L12/S46). Accordingly, the proofs of the Christian religion “lie before their eyes, but they refuse to look” (L428/S682). The doctrine of the Fall unlocks the mystery of human nature, but it is so repugnant that reason “draws away” when presented with it: Without doubt nothing is more shocking to our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has implicated in its guilt men so far from the original sin that they seem incapable of sharing it . . . Certainly nothing 8 In the 1970s and 1980s, under the influence of post-structuralist literary theory, several prominent interpreters argued that Pascal did not intend to write an apology at all, and others argued that he intended to produce a fragmentary work. In addition to Melzer, Discourses of the Fall, see also Louis Marin, La Critique du discourse (Paris: Minuit, 1975), Emmanuel Martineau, Discours sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujects de Blaise Pascal (Paris: Fayard/Armand Colin, 1992). These interpretations are usefully provocative, but I side with the dominant scholarly consensus discussed in n. 5. For a persuasive discussion of the interpretive controversy, see David Wetsel, Pascal and Disbelief: Catechesis and Conversion in the Pensées (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 1–18.

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Introduction jolts us more rudely than this doctrine, and yet, but for this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we remain incomprehensible to ourselves. (L131/S164) Original sin is folly in the eyes of men, but it is put forward as such. You should therefore not reproach me for the unreasonable nature of this doctrine, because I put it forward as being unreasonable. But this folly is wiser than all men’s wisdom . . . For without it what are we to say man is? His whole state depends on this imperceptible point. How could he have become aware of it through his reason, seeing that it is something contrary to reason and that his reason, far from discovering it by its own methods, draws away when presented with it? (L695/S574)

In short, far from seeking saving knowledge about God and self—and thereby genuinely seeking our own happiness—we are infected with an incoherent “aversion for the truth” (L978/S743). This aversion for the truth is incoherent because we need to know the truth about ourselves, God, and Christ in order to be happy. Indeed, the universal desire for happiness is also a universal desire for truth. After all, our “ultimate happiness” comes from knowing God “with certainty” (L432/S684). Moreover, just as Pascal is prepared to identify God with goodness as such, he is also prepared to identify God with truth as such (L99/S132).9 Thus, in order to be genuinely happy, we must first know that happiness and truth are found in God, and we must know what prevents us from attaining God. Our desire for happiness is therefore also a desire for truth. We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness. We have been left with this desire as much as a punishment as to make us feel how far we have fallen. (L401/S20) Ecclesiastes shows that man without God is totally ignorant and inescapably unhappy, for anyone is unhappy who wills but cannot do. Now he wants to be happy and assured of some truth, and yet he is equally incapable of knowing and desiring not to know. He cannot even doubt. (L75/S110) 9

The claim that, in some sense, God is identical with the truth as such is found in a wide variety of Christian intellectual settings. It is biblical, of course (John 14: 6, 16: 13). It is also defended in the metaphysical systems of classical theism, and in the Reformed Church’s Westminster Confession (see ch. 1, }4). For a study of this claim in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, see William Wood, “Thomas Aquinas on the Claim that God is Truth,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 51 (2013): 21–47.

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This, then, is the real condition of the fallen human being, according to Pascal. We desire both happiness and truth and yet we continually reject God, the only stable source of happiness and truth. The fallen human subject is internally divided, torn apart by desires that are ever felt and never satisfied. Because no worldly good can satisfy our innate desire for happiness and truth, we face a stark choice. We can recognize our own limitations, accept our fallen nature, and turn to God through Christ for redemption. Or we can lie to ourselves, and to others, and pretend to be happy even though we know deep down that we are not. This path is the one most people take, according to Pascal. As fallen selves in a fallen world, human beings have an innate aversion to the truth that is also, at the same time, an aversion to God. The Fall is a fall into duplicity.

SIN AND SELF-DECEPTION Christian theologians distinguish between “original sin,” which describes a systemic corruption that pervades all the structures of human life, and personal “sins,” which are the voluntarily acts of individual agents. Original sin is inherited, in a broad sense of that term: humans are always born into a world already shaped by sin, and we are warped by its malign effects deep within our own subjectivity. Not surprisingly, theological proposals differ about the nature and effects of original sin. Some emphasize its social character, and focus, for example, on the ways in which supra-personal cultural, political, and economic forces shape people into sinful subjects who then reproduce those same sinful structures. Others emphasize the interior dimension of original sin, and locate it first of all in the fallen will, which cannot love God above all things, and the darkened intellect, which cannot perceive God clearly.10 Pascal’s account is valuable because it captures both the social and personal dimensions of sin. 10 With few exceptions, contemporary systematic theologians have largely neglected the cognitive consequences of the Fall. The only extended treatment remains Stephen K. Moroney, The Noetic Effects of Sin: An Historical and Contemporary Exploration of How Sin Affects our Thinking (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 1999), which focuses almost entirely on the Reformed tradition. Several important recent books on sin also do not discuss the noetic effects of sin in any detail, though they may discuss the fallen will: Paula Fredrikson, Sin: The Early History of an Idea

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But what is sin? Sin is at root a kind of turning, an incoherent turn away from God and toward some worldly object of delight that is, necessarily, less than God. Instead of loving God as the highest good, the center and source of all value, sinners raise up something else alongside God, treat it as a rival source of value, and love it improperly. As Pascal writes, “If God exists, we must love him alone, and not transitory creatures . . . Thus, everything which drives us to become attached to creatures is bad, since it prevents us from serving God, if we know him, or seeking him if we do not” (L618/S511). We ought to love God above all things, but as a result of our sinful condition, we are constantly tempted to turn away from God (L395/S14). The best theologies of sin establish a dialectic between original sin and personal sin, such that the condition of original sin makes personal sin easier and more tempting.11 If I am born into a world that teaches me to hate my neighbor, the concrete actions that manifest this hatred will come easily to me. Similarly, if my will is warped and my mind is dark, I will hate those whom I should love. In both cases, original sin supports personal sin. At the same time, in both cases, personal sin reinforces and builds up the broader structures of original sin. A person who sins repeatedly acquires sinful dispositions and habits, and begins to lose whatever virtuous dispositions and habits he may have. By sinning, he becomes a sinner, the sort of person who helps make the world a sinful place. Pascal’s insight is that the dialectic of sin is also a dialectic of selfdeception. The Augustinian tradition holds that pride is the archetypal sin. The prideful sinner loves himself with an immoderate love (Princeton: PUP, 2012); Ian MacFarland, In Adam’s Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Matt Jenson, The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther, and Barth on Homo Incurvatus in Se (New York: Continuum, 2006); Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The topic of the noetic effects of sin is more likely to be discussed by philosophers of religion who take themselves to be in dialogue with “reformed epistemology.” I note esp. Alvin Plantinga, “Sin and its Cognitive Consequences,” ch. 7 of Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Michael Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), esp. chs 6–7. See also Paul K. Moser’s The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) which may be read as a sustained argument that philosophers of religion should take the noetic effects of sin more seriously. 11 E.g. MacFarland, In Adam’s Fall, 10, 18–22. With this usage of “original sin,” I do not mean to describe the first sin, but the inherited condition of sinfulness.

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that ought to be directed to God. Yet pride may also be understood as a form of self-deception. The prideful person often exhibits the peculiar double-consciousness, the knowing ignorance, of the selfdeceiver. He seems both to know and not to know that his excessive self-devotion is undeserved.12 This point generalizes to sin as such. By its very nature, sin hides in the shadows of consciousness because it cannot survive if it is exposed for what it is. Self-deception is one of its major tools, and so an adequate account of sin will also be an account of self-deception, and of how the sinner deceives himself about his own value and the value of his projects. From one direction, because projects of self-deception feature an aversion to the truth, they are sinful, since an aversion to truth is also an aversion to God. From the other direction every sinful act is also an act of self-deception. This is a trickier case to make. Certainly, it is possible for someone to act immorally (or sin) knowingly and in full awareness. At a relatively superficial level of analysis, a thief will usually recognize that he steals, for example. But at a deeper level, every sinner does deceive himself. He deceives himself about the fact that he implicitly recognizes that God is the highest good and the true source of value. He also deceives himself about whether he is deeply and fundamentally satisfied even though he is estranged from God. The moral incoherence of sin has the same structure as the epistemic incoherence of self-deception. The characteristic aversion of sin, the turn away from God, is isomorphic with the characteristic aversion of self-deception, the turn away from truth. In the relevant forms of self-deception, one deceives oneself precisely because one knows and rejects the truth. The self-deceiver recognizes the truth and recoils from it, and intentionally tries to replace it with a lie. As Pascal writes, he “would like to do away with the truth, and not being able to destroy it as such, he destroys it, as best he can, in the consciousness of himself and others” (L978/S743; slightly emended). Like the turn away from God that constitutes sin, the turn away from truth that constitutes self-deception is motivated by our fallen, disordered love. In mundane, day-to-day matters, we have a Reinhold Niebuhr also makes a similar point. He writes: “Man loves himself inordinately. Since his determinate existence does not deserve the devotion lavished upon it, it is obviously necessary to practice some deception in order to justify such excessive devotion.” It is clear that by “deception” Niebuhr means, above all, selfdeception. See The Nature and Destiny of Man, i (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941), 203–4, esp. 204 n. 2. 12

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utilitarian motivation to seek the truth, since knowing the truth helps us to carry out our projects. But when the truth is unwelcome, as it often is in moral or spiritual matters, and when it opposes our desires and our projects, then we have a motive to reject it, and to embrace beliefs that are more welcome, even though they are false. In other words, when we love some private good more than we love the truth as such, we have a motive for self-deception. This isomorphism between sin and self-deception is just what one would expect if God is truth itself, as the Christian tradition maintains. If God is truth, it follows that to turn away from the truth is to turn away from God, which is the very paradigm of a sinful action. It is therefore not surprising that the structure of self-deception should mirror the structure of sin. Yet the isomorphism between sin and selfdeception extends beyond the characteristic aversion at the heart of both. The relationship between original sin and personal sins may also be understood as a relationship between the social conditions of self-deception, on the one hand, and personal projects of selfdeception, on the other. Because we are born into a duplicitous world that shapes us into duplicitous subjects, and because our loves are disordered, we find it easy to deceive ourselves. Any would-be selfdeceiver will already have acquired the skills of self-deception, because one must acquire exactly these skills in order to become a functioning member of society. Having been habituated into patterns of deception, he will persistently be able to refuse to attend to his own beliefs and intentions, and therefore he will be able to deceive himself. Moreover, insofar as he deceives himself, it is highly likely that he also deceives other people, and contributes to their self-deception, thereby reproducing and reinforcing the reign of duplicity into which we are all born. Again, Pascal: “we are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves” (L655/S539). In short, “this is not the home of truth; it wanders unrecognized among men” (L840/S428).

SIN, PARADOX, AND SELF-ESTRANGEMENT Throughout the Pensées, Pascal argues that the Christian doctrine of original sin empirically explains a wide range of human behaviors that would otherwise be inexplicable. Yet he does not offer anything

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like a rational explanation of sin. Frankly, I suspect that he would regard the quest for a rational explanation of sin as itself quite sinful—an all too common instance of the pride of the philosophers. In any case, many Christian thinkers have agreed with Pascal and asserted that sin is deeply paradoxical. One thinks, for example, of Reinhold Niebuhr’s oracular claims that sin is “inevitable but not necessary,” that “sin posits itself,” and that “man could not be tempted if he had not already sinned.”13 Similarly, in The Concept of Sin, Josef Pieper asks, “How can a human being with full deliberateness undertake an act of resistance to the very meaning of his own existence?” He goes on to answer that “We seem to have reached the furthest border beyond which not only language but also thought itself begins to encounter the impassible . . . All we can do is admit that we are faced with, so to speak, a reductio ad mysterium.”14 Although I do not regard sin as utterly inexplicable, I do agree that it is deeply puzzling. A sin is always a performative self-contradiction and, as such, it can never be treated as a fully rational action. The sinner, by definition, undermines his own happiness even while he believes, falsely, that he seeks it. He also cultivates an understanding of himself and his own value that is self-contradictory. This residue of inexplicability also colors the phenomenology of sin and ensures that the sinner himself will remain puzzled by his own sins. We can imagine interrogating a sinner by recursively asking him to account for his actions. Eventually we will reach a bedrock level and find ourselves asking: Why did you choose that lesser good in favor of God, the highest good? Whether at this bedrock level or before, even the most philosophically sophisticated and self-aware sinner will eventually reach a point where has nothing to say for himself other than: I don’t know why I did that. I just did. The phenomenology of sin mirrors the phenomenology of self-deception. When we say that a person is self-deceived, we mean to say that some of his behavior is initially puzzling, even inexplicable, in light of his own avowals, the rest of what we know about him, and what we assume about his beliefs and desires. Likewise, from the first-person point of view, when the sinner looks at his own past, he expresses the same kind of puzzlement about himself. He asks himself: How could I have done 13

See Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, i, chs 7–9. Josef Pieper, The Concept of Sin (South Bend, Ind.: St Augustine’s Press, 2001), 33, 81–2. 14

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that, when I knew that it was wrong? Both as a self-deceiver and as a sinner, he is opaque to himself, estranged from his own deepest beliefs and desires.

OUTLINE OF THE ARGUMENT The book begins with a focused study of Pascal’s account of the way the Fall has affected our various cognitive and affective faculties by warping our capacity to love and to evaluate competing goods. I argue that Pascal understands the Fall fundamentally as an evaluative fall, rather than a fall of the reason or the will, narrowly construed. Next, I discuss Pascal’s often-overlooked contribution to the tradition of Augustinian reflection on the fallen nature of state power. Pascal developed an account of the concrete mechanisms by which citizens are socialized into accepting state rule that predates the work of critical theorists like Althusser, Foucault, and Bourdieu by some 300 years. In Chapter 3, I move from the duplicitous political order to the duplicitous social order and, finally, to the duplicitous subject. According to Pascal, each individual person’s disordered self-love is changed into something different, the desire to deceive and be deceived, as a result of his interactions with other members of society. As a result, even our very selfhood is false and imaginary, a social figment rooted in duplicity. To help make Pascal’s ideas clearer, I offer an extended example of a false self drawn from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Eliot is not a contemporary of Pascal, and did not take herself to be illustrating his thought. Nevertheless, her concrete narrative depiction of the self-deceptive banker Nicholas Bulstrode helps us understand Pascal’s very abstract account of the false self. Cumulatively, across the first three chapters, I build up a Pascalian picture of the human subject as one who is habituated to deception because it is the essential glue that holds his world together. In Chapter 4, I narrow the focus still further, and discuss the ways in which the Fall has affected our capacity for moral reasoning and moral judgment. Not surprisingly, Pascal argues that the chief threat to the moral life is self-deception. His central claim is that, in a moral dilemma, an agent usually perceives a sinful choice as more attractive than a moral choice precisely because the sinful choice is rooted in

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self-serving imaginative fantasy. He then convinces himself that the sinful choice is, in fact, morally licit. On my reading, the Pascalian sinner deceives himself, but what exactly is self-deception and how is it possible? Whereas Chapters 1 through 4 are more exegetical, Chapters 5 through 7 are more constructive. In pursuit of this question, Chapter 5 departs somewhat from Pascal to discuss various criticisms, drawn from contemporary analytic philosophy, of the very possibility of self-deception. Against the analytic consensus, I argue that lying to oneself—the form of selfdeception that Pascal makes central—is possible. Chapter 6 presents my own Pascalian model of sin as self-deception, understood as morally culpable self-persuasion. Whereas previous chapters argued that Pascal can serve as a constructive theological resource, Chapter 6 shows this by example. Chapter 7 concludes with Pascal’s account of what it is to be a non-duplicitous self, one that loves God above all things and, in so doing, loves the truth as such.

INTERPRETING PASCAL ON THE FALL INTO DUPLICITY Presenting and exploring Pascal’s insight that the Fall is a fall into duplicity is the task of the book as a whole, and especially of Chapters 1 through 4. The argument depends less on proof-texting from specific fragments and passages of Pascal’s work than on developing an overall, holistic interpretation of his thought. There are only a few straightforward references to duplicity and self-deception in the Pensées. Fragment L978/S743 speaks of the evil of “deliberate self-delusion.” That fragment also argues that routine social interactions depend on the subtle interplay of deceit, pretense—including self-pretense—and hypocrisy. It is a major fragment to which I return many times. Elsewhere we read that human beings both see and do not see their own fallen condition: He must not see nothing at all, nor must he see enough to think that he possesses God, but he must see enough to know that he has lost him. For, to know that one has lost something, one must see and not see: such precisely is the state of nature. (L449/690)

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The language in this fragment indirectly suggests self-deception. Similarly, Pascal frequently asserts that we perceive an “image” or “idea” of the truth, even though we also “possess nothing but falsehood” (L131/S164; see also L20/S54, L25/S59, L208/S240). This juxtaposition also evokes the peculiar knowing ignorance that we associate with self-deception. He also says that reason and the senses “deceive” each other (L45/S78) and that everyone is the victim of an illusion (L92/S126). Moreover, he points out that people behave as if they are ignorant of crucially important truths—above all the truth that they will die—that are obvious and easily grasped. Again, we tend to associate this kind of willful ignorance with self-deception. Finally, Pascal does say that we have an “aversion to the truth” (L978/S743) and arguably one cannot be averse to the truth as such without first knowing it as truth, which implies something stronger than simple ignorance. So there can be no doubt that Pascal holds that fallen human beings live under the spell of a variety of self-spun illusions. But these scattered references on their own are not enough to warrant the grander claim that Pascal regards the Fall as a fall into duplicity. The interpretive challenge of defending that claim is further complicated by the philosophical challenge of understanding exactly what counts as a genuine case of deception or self-deception. Does the fall into “duplicity” mean that most people consciously, explicitly lie to each other most of the time? Does it mean that they lie to themselves most of the time? Is lying to oneself even possible? (It is difficult to understand how a single subject can intentionally deceive himself, since presumably he must both know the truth as deceiver, and yet also cause himself to believe its opposite, as deceived.) These questions are important, and at various points—especially in Chapters 5 and 6—I do address them. Yet I do not offer any set of putatively necessary and sufficient conditions for, for example, “duplicity” or “self-deception.” Instead, I allow the contours of those concepts to emerge on their own, from my engagement with Pascal’s texts. I develop an account of lying to oneself as culpable self-persuasion, because I believe—with Pascal—that this form of self-deception is the most virulent threat to the moral life. One might also object that it is not useful to discuss the kind of selfdeception that infects the moral life without first saying what moral judgments are and what moral responsibility entails. I recognize that these are important, foundational questions. I do give a brief account of moral reasoning, drawn from Pascal, in Chapter 4. But I also do not

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intend to give any account of moral responsibility, other than to say that I assume a basic moral realism which holds that moral values and moral responsibility are not illusory or socially constructed. Granting that assumption, my treatment of sin and self-deception can supervene on any plausible account of moral responsibility. By now it should be clear that my project is not purely historical or exegetical. The claim that Pascal regards the Fall as a fall into duplicity is solidly grounded in a reading of the Pensées. But I intend the argument of the book as an example of constructive theology and not just historical exegesis: it is my “Pascalian” analysis of the cognitive consequences of the Fall, as much as it is Pascal’s own analysis. The Pensées are a fragmentary, unfinished text, filled with rhetorical feints, intellectual experiments, and blind alleys. Strictly speaking, on purely historical and exegetical grounds, I am not convinced that we can really say that Pascal had an “account” of anything whatsoever, including the Fall. To a greater degree than with other texts, any interpretation of the Pensées must be partial and tentative, an example of thinking with Pascal rather than just reporting what he thought. When we try to think with Pascal, however, we encounter the Pensées as a text that opens up a world to us, a world that presents a certain vision of the nature of sin and the Fall.15 As a constructive theologian, I aim to take that vision seriously, respond to it, and develop its implications. I therefore hope to do more than simply offer a new interpretation of Pascal. Rather, my deeper purpose is to demonstrate, first, that Pascal offers a viable and long-neglected constructive resource for contemporary theology and, second, that theologians should change the way they understand the noetic effects of sin in light of his thought. There can be little doubt that constructive theologians have largely ignored Pascal. The interpretive problems posed by the Pensées are at least partly to blame for the dearth of Pascalian theology. Furthermore, the secondary literature on Pascal is spread across disciplines that include history, postmodern literary 15 Hugh Davidson best articulates the spirit with which to approach the Pensées: we should watch Pascal at work, describe his practice, and see to what extent his practices can be related to a more general topic of inquiry. When we proceed in this way, we see “not only recurrent problems, but also reappearing lines of attack on them, tendencies that bespeak something conscious and deliberate.” Hugh M. Davidson, Pascal and the Arts of the Mind (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. xiii.

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criticism, analytic and continental philosophy, and critical theory. Much of that literature is in French. In part because few theologians are even aware of it, they rarely regard Pascal as a constructive resource for their own work. Finally, English-language scholarship on Pascal has tended to focus heavily on the wager argument, Pascal’s supposed fideism, or his religious epistemology.16 All of these topics are important, but they do not exhaust the resources Pascal offers. Contemporary theologians frequently describe their work as, for example, “Augustinian,” “Thomistic,” or “Barthian.” Such labels signify something more than exegetical fidelity to a great figure from the past. They also signify the creative innovations of a living tradition. I similarly seek to show, by exegetical argument and constructive example, that “Pascalian” theology is both possible and fruitful.17

16 E.g. James R. Peters, The Logic of the Heart: Augustine, Pascal and the Rationality of Faith (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2009). 17 It also bears saying that “Pascalian” theology need not slavishly follow Pascal. Accordingly, I have little to say about some of the theological controversies that most preoccupied Pascal himself—e.g. disputes between Jesuits and Jansenists about nature and grace or how to reconcile human freedom with divine predestination.

1 The Evaluative Fall: Disordered Love and the Aversion to Truth Pascal firmly believes that the human condition as we now experience it is founded on the sin of our first parents. He reads the Genesis narrative as factual history and he completely accepts a literal picture of the Fall. According to Pascal, we must accept that Adam’s mind was “very strong, very just, very enlightened,” that his will desired “what he knew to be best for his happiness,” and that, with divine aid, he could attain his true beatitude. Despite all this, we must also accept that Adam disobeyed God, presumably in full awareness of the consequences of his disobedience, because he “wanted to be independent of God and be his equal,” something that he must have known was impossible. The sheer irrationality of Adam’s sin is bequeathed to us as punishment: our minds are “dulled and deadened,” and our wills “voluntarily, and quite freely and joyfully” embrace evil as if it were good. In short, we are born into darkness, concupiscence, and death, aptly likened to “a fruit bred from rotten seed.”1

1 The above quotations are from Pascal’s unpublished and unfinished treatise, Writings on Grace, 221–2. An excerpt in English (from which they are taken) may be found in Levi (ed.), Pensées and Other Writings, 205–26. The French may be found in the second volume of Michael Le Guern’s edn of Pascal’s complete works: Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2000), 288–9 (hereafter abbreviated as OC). For a study of the way Pascal reads Genesis 3, see Wetsel, L’Écriture et le reste. For studies of the Writings on Grace, see Hervé Pasqua, Blaise Pascal: Penseur de la grâce (Paris: P. Téqui, 2000); Hélène Bouchilloux, Pascal (Paris: Vrin, 2004), 183–96; Michael Moriarty, “Grace and Religious Belief in Pascal,” in Nicholas Hammond (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Pascal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 144–61. See also Le Guern’s introduction to his edn in OC ii. 1210–16.

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There is no need to accept the historicity of the Genesis narrative to find real insight in Pascal’s account of the cognitive consequences of the Fall. The most important such consequence, which preoccupies Pascal throughout his writings, pertains to our capacity to love. Pascal believes that our capacity to love has been deformed and disordered by the Fall and that, as a result, we can no longer love coherently. Pascal identifies the capacity to love with the capacity to evaluate competing goods, and so he holds that that every aspect of human life is affected by its deformation. As a result of the Fall, our capacity to love and evaluate goods is warped. It follows that we are warped—we desire, believe, and act incoherently. The Fall is a fall into duplicity because we no longer love God, or truth, as we should but instead love lesser worldly goods, and especially our own fallen selves.

PASCAL’S AUGUSTINIAN ANTHROPOLOGY: AMOUR-PROPRE AND PRIDE Pascal pursues his indictment of disordered love by using a closelylinked set of terms like concupiscence, self-love (amour-propre), and pride (orgueil). He also speaks of the divided will or our divided human nature. All these terms are drawn from the Augustinian Christianity that furnishes his master narrative.2 Regardless of his terminology, however, throughout his writings Pascal claims that we love ourselves with an unrestricted love that is properly directed towards God alone. One of the richest passages about disordered love in the entire Pascalian corpus is found in a letter to his sister Jacqueline, dated October 17, 1651. Their father had recently died, and Pascal comforted Jacqueline with a meditation on how a Christian should understand death, providence, and consolation. The fact that we recoil at death, writes Pascal, is a clear sign that human nature has fallen. This insight leads him to discuss the origin of sin:

2

Valuable treatments of Pascal’s anthropology include Christian Lazzeri, Force et justice dans la politique de Pascal (Paris: PUF, 1993), 3–55, and Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin, chs. 1–2.

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I am obliged to tell you in general about the origin of all vices and all sins . . . The truth that opens up this mystery is that God has created man with two loves, the one for God and the other for himself, but with this law: that the love for God would be infinite, that is to say, without any other end than God himself, and that the love of self would be finite and referred to God . . . Since, with the arrival of sin, man has lost the first of these loves, the love of self alone remained in this great soul that is capable of an infinite love, and this self-love has spread out and overflowed into the vacuum that the love for God has left. And so, he has loved himself alone, and all things for himself, that is to say, infinitely. Behold the origin of amour-propre. It was natural to Adam and just in his innocence, but it has become both criminal and immoderate, as a result of his sin.3

In this passage, Pascal posits an original self-love (l’amour pour soimême) that is good, because it is derived from an infinite love for God. After the Fall, this wholesome self-love is corrupted into amourpropre, an infinite love directed at the self instead of God. When we lost the love for God, it left behind a “vacuum” or “void” (vide). The imagery is clear: before the Fall, the love for God restrained our innate self-love, but when that love was lost in the Fall, it left behind a vacuum that self-love expanded into and filled, thereby becoming immoderate and unrestrained.4 The specific concept of amour-propre plays an important role in seventeenth-century French thought, and pinning down its exact meaning in any given context is not always easy. Significantly, Pascal here describes amour-propre not merely as immoderate self-regard but as the condition of human nature after the Fall: it is both the consequence of Adam’s original sin and the origin of all our subsequent sins. By tying it to the first and prototypical human, Pascal suggests that amour-propre is ubiquitous because it flows from the disordered human nature bequeathed to us by Adam. Furthermore, this disorder manifests as a disorder of our loves: whereas God 3

My tr. from OC ii. 20. The image of the vacuum is deliberately chosen, since Pascal had spent several years proving experimentally, against the a priori Aristotelian and Cartesisan physics of his day, that it was possible for a vacuum to exist. See Préface sur le Traité du Vide in OC ii. 452–8. In contrast to Descartes’s “retrograde” project of “grounding physics in apriori principles and deductive metaphysics,” Pascal’s own experiments are “still admired for their rigour and held up as models of empirical investigation.” Daniel C. Fouke, “Pascal’s Physics,” in Hammond, Cambridge Companion to Pascal, 75–6. 4

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created us with two loves, only one love remains; whereas we should love God without reservation, we instead love ourselves without reservation. The broader currents of seventeenth-century French Augustinianism are also on display in this passage. The master narrative of Augustinian Christianity tells the story of the disordered human self, which perpetually renders itself incoherent by loving incoherently. Pascal’s description of our two fundamental loves evokes Augustine’s account of the two cities in The City of God. In that work, Augustine opposes the earthly city, characterized by amor sui (love for self) to the heavenly city, characterized by amor dei (love for God). The former is marked by the lust for power (libido dominandi) and the latter by mutual self-giving love.5 Elsewhere, like his follower Pascal, Augustine claims that disordered self-love is the origin of all sin: The first ruin of man was amor sui. For if man had not loved himself, and had instead put God before himself, he would always have been willing to be subordinate to God, and he would not have redirected himself toward neglecting God’s will and doing his own. For that is what it means to love oneself: one wills to do one’s own will. Put the will of God before all that—learn to love yourself by not loving yourself, so that you will know that to love oneself is a crime, as the Apostle says: “for men will be lovers of themselves.” (2 Tim. 3: 2)6

Augustine more often describes the act of putting oneself before God as the sin of pride (superbia). Whether he calls it amor sui or superbia, however, Augustine says that pride is at the root of every sin because it is the origin of human sinfulness and the beginning of Adam’s fallen will.7 As such, pride is closely linked with the disordered love that Augustine calls concupiscence. In Augustine’s thought, concupiscence is a many-headed monster. It is, first, an “anti-divine 5

See Augustine, De civitate dei 14.28. Sermon 96.2. My tr.: ‘prima hominis perditio, fuit amor sui. si enim se non amaret, et deum sibi praeponeret, deo esse semper subditus uellet: non autem conuerteretur ad negligendam uoluntatem illius, et faciendam uoluntatem suam. hoc est enim amare se, uelle facere uoluntatem suam. praepone his uoluntatem dei: disce amare te, non amando te. nam ut sciatis uitium esse se amare, sic apostolus dicit: erunt enim homines se ipsos amantes.’ 7 De civitate dei 12.1, 12.6, 14.13; De trinitate 12.14, 13.23. See also “Pride” in Allan Fitzgerald and John C. Cavadini, Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1999). 6

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disposition” or an inclination toward sin; but it is also a description of our divided will and, in general, the state of fallen humanity.8 Concupiscence is thus both sin and penalty, associated with disordered desire and inevitable death: as a result of Adam’s illicit presumption, says Augustine, “the human nature in him was vitiated and mutated, so that in his members, he suffered a rebellious, disobedient desiring and was put under the necessity of death . . . ”9 Throughout his works, Augustine describes this “rebellious, disobedient desiring” as the incoherent love of lower, earthly goods in place of higher, spiritual goods. And in his Confessions, he offers a poignant description of the consequence of his own disordered love: “I slid away from you, my God, and in my adolescence, I wandered, straying from your stability. I made myself an empty wasteland of want.”10 This, then, is the master narrative of Augustinian Christianity. (More precisely, this is that narrative’s description of human beings under the reign of sin, apart from grace.) Disordered love, paradigmatically manifested as the sin of pride, is all-pervasive. It is the natural condition of the fallen human being, and part of the psychological motivation of all human actions. When the moralists of seventeenth-century France looked to this Augustinian narrative, they found more than a theological diagnosis of human sinfulness; they found a worldview that seemed perfectly suited to their own times. They thus took all the negative theological valences that Augustine had given to excessive self-love and concupiscence and bestowed them on the term amour-propre. To be sure, the French moralists also used this term with a more psychological sense, to mean something like the desire for esteem and self-esteem, but the theological valences remained beneath the surface.11 In the 8 The phrase “anti-divine disposition” comes from “Concupiscence,” in Fitzgerald and Cavadini, Augustine through the Ages. 9 De civitate dei 13.3. My tr.: ‘sed hactenus in eo natura humana uitiata atque mutata est, ut repugnantem pateretur in membris inoboedientiam concupiscendi et obstringeretur necessitate moriendi.’ 10 Confessions 2.18. My tr.: ‘defluxi abs te ergo et erravi, deus meus, nimis devius ab stabilitate tua in adulescentia, et factus sum mihi regio egestatis.’ 11 On amour-propre as the desire for esteem and self-esteem, see John Elster, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 85ff. David Westgate and Anthony Levi present a useful corrective to Elster’s purely psychological account of the nature of amour-propre. They emphasize its theological roots and argue that much of the time the French Moralists treated amour-propre as equivalent to the sin of pride. David Westgate, “The Augustinian Concept of Amour-Propre and Pascal’s Pensées,” Nottingham French Studies, 10 (1971), 10–20; Levi, French Moralists, 225–34.

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latter part of the seventeenth century, well after Pascal, the term amour-propre began to lose its original, Augustinian associations and came to mean bare self-interest or vanity. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Rousseau could claim that amour-propre is a result of improper socialization; he then opposes it not to the love of God, but to another, innate and beneficial self-love, amour de soi.12 But a hundred years earlier, Pascal and his contemporaries treated amour-propre as a theological concept equivalent to the sin of pride and associated with concupiscence. Even a cursory reading of Pascal shows that he faithfully thinks and writes from within this Augustinian narrative. His terminology varies, which is not surprising, given the fragmentary character of his writings, but his underlying message does not. For Pascal as for Augustine, pride and concupiscence destroy the human soul and cut it off from God, its only true source of happiness: The Christian God is a God who makes the soul aware that he is its sole good: that in him alone can it find peace; that only in loving him can it find joy: and who at the same time fills it with loathing for the obstacles which hold it back and prevent it from loving God with all its might. Amour-propre and concupiscence, which hold it back, are intolerable. This God makes the soul aware of his underlying amour-propre (ce fond d’amour propre) which is destroying it, and which he alone can cure. (L460/S699) Anyone who does not hate the amour-propre within him and the instinct which leads him to make himself into a God must be really blind. Who can fail to see that there is nothing so contrary to justice and truth? For it is false that we deserve this position and unjust and impossible to attain it, because everyone demands the same thing. We are thus born into an obviously unjust situation from which we cannot escape, but from which we must escape . . . (L617/S510)

Pascal therefore thoroughly embraces the Augustinian claim that the human condition is constituted by disordered love, which paradigmatically manifests as immoderate self-love. Indeed, some of Pascal’s most uncompromising fragments present the self as relentlessly tyrannical, always trying to usurp God’s place as the center of value. 12 See his “Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Men [1755],” in Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella (eds), Rousseau’s Political Writings, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), 3–57, esp. 27–8.

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According to Pascal, each person thinks that he is the center of the universe per se because he is the center of his own universe, which comes to an end when he dies (L668/547). As a result, each egoistic self relentlessly tries to dominate others: “The self is hateful . . . In a word, the self has two characteristics, it is unjust in itself for making itself the centre of everything: it is a nuisance to others in that it tries to subjugate them, for each self is the enemy of all the others and would like to tyrannize them” (L597/S494). In other words, Pascal seems to hold that the most fundamental fact of human nature is that each person is guilty of the sin of pride. In the Pensées, Pascal uses the word for pride (orgueil) more often than the term amour-propre, but they both play essentially the same roles in his thought. Both can name Augustinian superbia, as well as ordinary vanity. The terms amour-propre and orgueil are polyvalent in the Pensées; that is, they always carry both their fully theological and ordinary psychological meanings at the same time. Pascal wants his readers to see their own routine actions as instances of petty selfregard and, at the same time, as manifestations of the sin of pride. He therefore implicitly grounds his indictment of the selfishness, hypocrisy, and bias that people display in ordinary life in his fully theological vocabulary.13 It is clear that “pride” is equivalent to amourpropre, since both are linked to concupiscence (e.g. L149/S182, L216/ S249) and pride, like amour-propre, is a fundamental source of sin (L208/S240, L774/S638). “Pride” is the more important term in the Pensées, since it plays a role in the work’s central dialectic. That is, Pascal usually juxtaposes pride not with its corollary, concupiscence, but rather with various dialectical opposites: “wretchedness” (e.g. L192/S225, L352/S384, L358/S390, L477/S712, L931/S759), “despair” (L192/S225, L212/S245, L352/S384, L354/S386), or “sloth” (L208/ S240, L774/638).

FROM PRIDE TO DISORDERED LOVE At the risk of undercutting Pascal’s impeccable Augustinian credentials, there is a problem with the above account, which equates 13 See Nicholas Hammond, Playing with Truth: Language and the Human Condition in Pascal’s Pensées (New York: Clarendon Press, 1994).

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disordered love with excessive self-love, or pride. Discussing this problem requires a brief detour into contemporary work in theological anthropology. It seems descriptively inadequate—untrue to the human condition—to say that all people are guilty of excessive self-love. This objection simply reiterates the charges made by feminist theologians and their allies, who argue that many Augustinian accounts of sin overlook the particular form of sinfulness exhibited by those who love themselves too little. Some people are tempted less by self-assertion than by self-abasement, and so some people engage less in the sin of pride than in the sin of self-dispersal or self-evacuation. By “self-dispersal” and “self-evacuation,” I have in mind, for example, Valerie Saiving’s list of characteristic temptations that are not easily traced back to pride: “triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus; dependence on others for one’s own self-definition, tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence . . . in short, underdevelopment or negation of the self.”14 Even with no elaboration at all, it is clear that many of these descriptions would not typically be associated with prideful self-assertion. In short, as Gene Outka writes, “indolent inertia and arrogant soaring remain distinct temptations. We miss too much on each side that deserves attention in its own right when we try to reduce one to the other.”15 This is an important point for my own constructive project. I base my account of sinful self-deception on Pascal’s account of disordered love, and it seems descriptively inadequate to say that all sin is motivated by excessive self-love. In fact, Pascal himself may have anticipated this point. As he develops his overall dialectic of greatness and wretchedness, Pascal sometimes says that sin has two roots. In a minor chord that nevertheless sounds throughout his treatment of human nature, pride is only one of those roots. The other is paresse, a French word that

14 Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion, 40 (1960), 109. Similarly, in a review of feminist theologies of sin, Alistair McFadyen presents the following list of verbs as characteristically associated with the diminution of selfhood: failing, hiding, abdicating, abnegating, denying, fleeing, participating, being complicit, acquiescing in, accepting, consenting to, complying, and cooperating with. See Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 142–3. 15 Gene H. Outka, Edmund N. Santurri, and William Werpehowski, The Love Commandments: Essays in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1992), 54.

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translates the Latin acedia—spiritual apathy, otherwise known as the sin of sloth. In two fragments, Pascal describes paresse (usually rendered as “sloth” in English translations) as one of the twin sources of sin, alongside pride. Against those who, trusting in the mercy of God, remain indifferent, without performing good works. Since the twin sources of our sins are pride and paresse, God has revealed to us two of his attributes to cure them: his mercy and his justice. The proper function of justice is to bring pride low, however holy the works (‘enter not into judgment’ [Psalm 143: 2]); the proper function of mercy is to combat paresse by encouraging good works . . . (L774/S638) Without this divine knowledge, how could men help feeling either exalted at the persistent inward sense of their past greatness or dejected at the sight of their present weakness? For unable to see the whole truth, they could not attain perfect virtue. With some regarding nature as incorrupt, others as irremediable, they have been unable to avoid either pride or paresse, the twin sources of all vice, since the only alternative is to give in through cowardice (lâcheté) or escape through pride. For if they realized man’s excellence they did not know his corruption, with the result that they certainly avoided sloth but sank into pride, and if they recognized the infirmity of nature, they did not know its dignity, with the result that they were certainly able to avoid vanity, only to fall headlong into despair . . . (L208/S240)

Although Pascal’s treatment of paresse is cursory compared to his treatment of pride, it is nevertheless historically significant. Both fragments suggest that the sin of paresse maps nicely onto the medieval sin of acedia (sloth), since paresse, like acedia, causes us to become indifferent to God and unconcerned with good works. Moreover, the textual connection between paresse and acedia is straightforward in the Pascalian corpus. In the ninth provincial letter, Pascal himself uses the word paresse to translate acedia, in a context that provides a further clue about its meaning. Pascal mocks his Jesuit interlocutor’s suggestion that acedia means only “being dejected at the fact that spiritual things are spiritual, for instance being distressed because the sacraments are the source of grace.”16 Interestingly, Pascal’s Jesuit parodies Thomas Aquinas, who writes that acedia is 16 Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, tr. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1982), 139.

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“sorrow for the spiritual good,” an “oppressive sorrow which so oppresses a man’s mind that he wants to do nothing,” “a certain weariness of work,” and the “paralysis of the mind which neglects to begin good things.”17 By mocking the Jesuit’s degenerate treatment of acedia, Pascal implicitly endorses the more robust scholastic definition from which it departs, which he renders with the French word paresse. His implicit endorsement is significant because it means that he uses the word paresse in a fully theological way, to name the sin of acedia. That is, for Pascal, paresse is more than a psychological feeling of laziness or cowardice, in exactly the same way that the sin of pride is more than mere egoism. Rather, paresse, like acedia, describes a deep-seated weariness that manifests as an indifference or aversion to spiritual goods. Pascal also links paresse with despair, suggesting that paresse results from despair over the fallen human condition. The pride–sloth dialectic reinforces the overarching dialectic between human greatness and wretchedness at the heart of the Pensées: we fall into sin when pride causes us to ignore our wretchedness, but also when paresse causes us to ignore our greatness. The dialectic between pride and sloth also plays a major role in Pascal’s “Discussion with Monsieur de Sacy,” which discusses the religious value of the philosophers Epictetus and Montaigne.18 According to Pascal, whereas Epictetus recognizes that there is a God and that true happiness is found only in God, Montaigne recognizes that human nature is weak and human reason is uncertain. Yet both Epictetus and Montaigne, without the virtues of the other, can see only one side of human nature. As a result, each falls into pride or sloth, respectively. Although the term paresse is used only a handful of times in the Pensées, the condition that it describes plays a central role in Pascal’s thought. Nevertheless, many scholars miss its importance. For example, Philippe Sellier claims that Pascal’s distinction between paresse and pride is only superficial and that the former simply reduces to the latter. According to Sellier, paresse is not really a separate source of sin but only “the worn-out face of pride,” 17 My trs, respectively, of: ‘tristitia spiritualis boni; ita deprimit animum hominis ut nihil ei agere libeat; quoddam taedium operandi,’ and ‘torpor mentis bona negligentis inchoare.’ All are from Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 35, art. 1. 18 “Entretien de Pascal avec Monsieur de Sacy sur Épictète et Montaigne,” in OC ii. 82–98.

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a concept that captures the idea that “we will ourselves to be exceptional until we are in despair.”19 Sellier’s interpretation ignores both Pascal’s own statement that paresse is a separate source of sin alongside pride, and the implications of the textual link between paresse and acedia. Pascal’s own thought on the sources of sin is therefore surprisingly contemporary, since he allows that self-abnegation and despair are sources of sin that are distinct from the sin of pride. For my part, I will go still further and adopt “disordered love” as the key analytical category that describes our fallen capacity to love. This move allows me to say that our sinful projects can be motivated by a disordered love for finite goods in general—whether those goods include the self, other people, or even relative abstractions like race and nation. As an exegetical matter, however, I will not stop to qualify Pascal each time he equates disordered love with excessive self-love. Theologians who do finally reduce all forms of disordered love to the sin of pride might claim that I confuse pride with its typical manifestations, which are usually, but not necessarily, acts of selfassertion.20 They would say that pride—Augustine’s superbia—is simply any act of willing that is contrary to the will of God. On this view, even to will one’s own self-abasement is to will something that God does not will, which, by definition, is superbia. It seems to me, however, that the more one pushes pride/superbia in this direction, the more it loses its own distinctive characteristics and begins to take on the purely formal sense of disordered love: excessive love of something other than God, with no particular object of love necessarily implied. So I shall instead say that disordered love per se is at the root of all sin and that pride is one way—but not the only way— that disordered love manifests.21

19

See Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin, 185–6. See e.g. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991), ii. 243 n. 33. 21 Though subsequent thinkers who have been influenced by Augustine do explicitly claim that every sin is rooted in pride, Augustine and Pascal might be amenable to the above interpretation. For all their condemnations of pride, both of them also attend carefully to the “triple concupiscence” presented in 1 John 2: 16 (“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world”), of which pride is only one species of sin. In Pascal, see esp. fragments L933/S761 and L545/S460. 20

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The Evaluative Fall THE EVALUATIVE FALL

The cognitive consequences of the Fall result from disordered love. Since we are fallen, we are not able to love and evaluate goods properly. We resist the truth about ourselves and God because we do not love them as we should. Thus, the Fall has cognitive consequences because it is first and foremost an evaluative fall. Most studies treat Pascal’s account of the Fall in straightforwardly conventional terms as a fall of the reason or the will.22 In my view, we may arrive at a better understanding of Pascal’s account of the Fall by looking beyond the Fall of the reason and the will—understood narrowly as the faculties of calculating and choosing—to an even deeper fall, a fall in our ability to perceive and respond to value. Certainly, Pascal does launch a variety of attacks on our rational and volitional faculties in the Pensées. He calls reason “corrupted” (L60/S94, L600/S497) and “impotent” (L131/S164), suggests that reason is not reasonable (L76/S111), and says that reason and the senses are engaged in mutual deception (L45/S78). In fragment L199/ S230, surely one of the most important in the Pensées, he presents the human being as suspended between the twin infinities of the microscopic and the super-terrestrial, and cut off from the knowledge of either. Yet Pascal often uses the word raison with a technical meaning, to name that faculty concerned with deducing conclusions from premises, i.e. with syllogistic reasoning (L298/S329).23 Many of Pascal’s attacks on reason simply point out how few areas of human life lend themselves to this kind of inquiry. Furthermore, the many fragments in which Pascal straightforwardly praises human reasoning frustrate any attempt to tie him to anti-rationalism as such. For 22

For some standard treatments of Pascal on the Fall, see the Introduction, n. 5. The most detailed treatment of Pascal’s use of the technical sense of raison is found in Norman, Portraits of Thought, 45–60. See also Hugh M. Davidson’s two works, The Origins of Certainty: Means and Meanings in Pascal’s Pensées (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 44, and Pascal and the Arts of the Mind, 13; An excellent discussion of the various meanings given to the word raison by 17th-cent. writers, including Pascal, may be found in Jeanne Haight, The Concept of Reason in French Classical Literature 1635–1690 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). In French, see Jean Laporte, Le Cur et la raison selon Pascal (Paris: Elzévir, 1950), 13–26, 101; Dominique Descotes, L’Argumentation chez Pascal (Paris: PUF, 1993), 151–89. See also Hélène Bouchilloux, Pascal: La Force de la raison (Paris: Vrin, 2004) and Apologétique et raison dans les Pensées de Pascal (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995). 23

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example, he writes that reason “constitutes [our] being” (L491/S736), that “all our dignity consists in thought” (L200/S232), and that we should form beliefs on the basis of our “own inner assent and the consistent voice of [our] reason” instead of on the basis of authority (L505/S672). If Pascal condemns the reason as fallen, his condemnation is also more qualified than many scholars are willing to admit. In addition, the condition of disordered love that characterizes fallen human willing is more than merely an inability to choose the good. To be sure, like Augustine, Pascal says that the human will is fallen and divided, unable to will its own genuine good. In fragment L502/S738, he is especially straightforward: “the will of man is divided between two principles: cupidity and charity . . . cupidity makes use of God and delights in the world, while charity does the opposite.” Sometimes the two wills are presented as two natures: “Concupiscence has become natural for us and has become second nature. Thus there are two natures in us, one good, the other bad” (L616/S509). And Pascal also makes the same point using the terminology of the “heart”: “I say that the heart loves the universal being naturally and itself naturally, according to its devotion. And it hardens itself against one or the other as it chooses . . . ” (L423/S680).24 In any case, regardless of his terminology, Pascal’s central claim about the divided will is that we incoherently seek private, particular goods to the exclusion of the more general goods (and ultimately, God, the universal good) of which they are a part: “For everything tends towards itself: this is contrary to all order. The tendency should be toward the general, and the bias toward self is the beginning of all disorder in war, politics, economics, and in man’s individual body. The will is therefore depraved” (L421/S680). At the same time, however, Pascal also holds that appeals to the will have little explanatory power. To talk of “willing” some goal— even willing a goal out of concupiscence—is merely to assert that we want what we want, without specifying why we want what we want. In the Writings on Grace, Pascal discusses what it means to be a “slave of delight,” and writes: “For what is more clear than this proposition, that one does always what delights one the most? Since this is nothing other than saying that one always does what pleases one most, that is, one always wants what pleases one, that is, one always wants what one

24

My tr. I discuss the heart as a cognitive faculty in Ch. 4.

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wants.”25 If Pascal treats the operation of the will as a tautology, then it is difficult to affirm that he believes the Fall has most fundamentally damaged the will’s faculty of choice. That would have to mean that, after the Fall, the will no longer wants what it wants—an absurdity. Rather, when Pascal says that the will is “depraved,” he means that it is fundamentally oriented toward some false conception of the good, and that this basic orientation affects every concrete instance of willing. The fundamental love that Pascal names “love of self ” or “love of God” is not just one particular emotion, attitude or desire among others. It is more like a comprehensive orientation or stance. As such, it shapes all of one’s emotions, attitudes, and desires. When Pascal says that concupiscence automatically makes all our decisions for us because it has become our second nature, he makes this very point (L119/S151, L616/S509). A person doesn’t wake up in the morning and decide: Today, I want to do three things—get a haircut, clean my apartment, and idolatrously love myself instead of God. Rather, the fact that he loves himself instead of God disposes him to value certain things and reject others, to pursue certain projects and not others, and so on. It disposes him to engage with the world selfishly, no matter what he does, and so it shapes his life as a whole.26 In fact, to extend Pascal’s reflections a bit, every instance of love is the adoption of a stance. Love is always a stance because it always comes packaged, as it were, with a principle of interpretation. It orders the lover’s values and engagements by deriving them from the needs and interests of the beloved. As such, love always shapes one’s attitudes and dispositions, more or less comprehensively, depending on the nature of the beloved object.27 As Pascal succinctly writes, “the heart calls good that which it loves” (L255/287).

25 My tr. of OC ii. 272. (Car qu’y a-t-il de plus clair que cette proposition, que l’on fait toujours ce qui delecte le plus? Puisque ce n’est autre chose que de dire que l’on fait toujours ce qui plaît le mieux, c’est-à-dire que l’on veut toujours ce qui plaît, c’est-a-dire qu’on veut toujours ce que l’on veut.) In this analysis of Pascal’s understanding of the will as a tautology, I follow Miel, Pascal and Theology, 153–7. 26 Conversely, the desire to turn away from himself and back toward God is also not one desire among others. It results from conversion. He must adopt (be given) an entirely new vantage point from which everything looks different. 27 Harry G. Frankfurt puts it nicely (and sounds properly Pascalian) when he says: “Loving something has less to do with what a person believes, or with how he feels, than with a configuration of the will . . . This volitional configuration shapes the dispositions and conduct of the lover with respect to what he loves, by guiding him

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Pascal amplifies the traditional Augustinian account of love by emphasizing that our inability to love God above all things concretely manifests as an inability to perceive the true value of spiritual goods. Throughout his writings, Pascal pursues this point by metaphorically linking love and visibility.28 In one of his most important fragments, Pascal presents a developed picture of the relationship between love, value, and perception. In fragment L308/S339, he sets up three hierarchically arrayed orders of reality—body, mind, and charity— and characterizes each with an appropriate kind of perfection, roughly described as physical power, intellectual acumen, and saintliness, respectively. The three orders of being are also three orders of value and, as such, three orders of visibility: All the splendor of greatness lacks luster for those engaged in pursuits of the mind. The greatness of intellectual people is not visible to kings, rich men, captains, who are all great in a carnal sense. The greatness of wisdom, which is nothing if it does not come from God, is not visible to carnal or intellectual people. They are three orders differing in kind. Great geniuses have their power, their splendor, their victory, their luster, and they do not need carnal or intellectual greatness, which has no relevance for them . . . Saints have their power, their splendor, their victory, their luster, and do not need either carnal or intellectual greatness, which has no relevance for them . . . (L308/S339)29

Pascal claims that denizens of each order cannot properly evaluate the goods of the other orders because they cannot see them. The “splendor” and “luster” of intellectual greatness is not visible to carnal people, he writes, because intellectual greatness has no “relevance” (the French is rapport) for them. Similarly, the luster of

in the design and ordering of his relevant purposes and priorities.” Harry G. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 43. 28 The best discussion of the motif of sight in the Pensées is found in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s chapter on Pascal in his The Glory of the Lord, iii. Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, tr. Andrew Louth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), 179–88. 29 There are important exegetical questions that I must pass over about whether the three orders should be understood as incommensurable or interpenetrating. For a study of the importance of the three orders to Pascal’s thought, see Jean Mesnard, “Le Thème des trois orders dans l’organisation des Pensées,” in Lane M. Heller and Ian M. Richmond (eds), Pascal: Thématique des Pensées (Paris: Vrin, 1988).

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saints cannot be recognized by inhabitants of lower orders. Objects from outside of one’s own order seem alien and unattractive, and because one does not see them as valuable, one does not really see them at all. This is, of course, literally false, but it does point toward an important idea. To return to the language of love (for the three orders can be seen as three different stances of love), Pascal claims that I necessarily experience the world—my world—as the world that I love.30 Yet Pascal is certainly no subjectivist. The three orders are best seen as an objective hierarchy that presupposes a robust axiological and moral realism. Even if we are not always able to recognize and properly evaluate the real worth of some perceived good, the objective standard of value remains in place. It is simply a feature of the world, on Pascal’s account, that it exists within a framework of objective, hierarchically ordered values. With the three orders, Pascal highlights the difference between love as a response to the inherent, pre-existing value of an object, on the one hand, and love as what invests a beloved object with value, on the other. It is natural to say that one ought to love things that are worth loving and, further, that one ought to love them in the right way.31 This insight returns us to the distinction between ordered and disordered love: sometimes we invest beloved objects with a value they cannot objectively bear.

THE EVALUATIVE FALL AND THE CYCLE OF DESIRE One sure sign that the will is depraved, according to Pascal, is that we have lost the ability to evaluate goods properly. Since we do not affirm that God, the universal good, is the standard of value, anything can seem like the highest good. Accordingly, Pascal delights in pointing out the bewildering array of things that philosophers—certain that their opinions are grounded in reason—have identified as the 30 See Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 132–42, for an interesting version of this idea from a psychoanalytic perspective. 31 Susan Wolf pursues this point at some length in her critique of Harry Frankfurt in “The True, the Good, and the Lovable: Frankfurt’s Avoidance of Objectivity,” in Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 236 ff.

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supreme good: virtue, pleasure, truth, peaceful ignorance, idleness, indifference, and more (L76/S111). Ordinary people fare no better: Pascal grants that all people naturally seek happiness, but points out that no one agrees about what happiness consists in. Since humankind abandoned God: It is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to take his place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war, famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his true good, man is capable of seeing it in anything, even his own destruction, although it is so contrary at once to God, to reason, and to nature. (L148/S181)

This is a bizarre list, to be sure, but according to Michael Moriarty, each element on it has either been the explicit object of worship by some human community, or has been sought as a form of “transcendence through transgression,” which is an implicit form of self-worship.32 Of course, it is even easier to imagine more typical substitutes for the highest good: wealth, power, and national identity come readily to mind. In any event, the salient fact about the human will, according to Pascal, is that it tries (and fails) to invest finite goods with an infinite value that they cannot bear. Because it has no genuine standard of value, the will cannot evaluate goods properly and is buffeted by an unceasing stream of desire. Pascal’s account of the will also yields an important psychological fact. According to Pascal, human desire is multi-tiered and is not exhausted by the day-to-day felt desires that one occurrently experiences and avows. These desires cannot be explanatorily basic, because they are not the psychological bedrock of the human person. Rather, a person’s felt desires, goals, and actions are shaped by whatever he affirms (implicitly or explicitly) as a comprehensive good: a lover of money will have a different set of desires than, say, a lover of justice. (This is not to say that each person explicitly affirms

32 Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought, 132. Moriarty doesn’t say any more about just who it is who worshipped all these things. But further research shows that— who knew?—it was apparently a commonplace of early modern thought that the ancient Egyptians worshipped vegetables, especially leeks and onions. Rampant Egyptian vegetable worship is mentioned by for example Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 4.44), David Hume, Natural History of Religion (ch. 12), and Nicholas Malebranche (The Search After Truth, 6.2.6).

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some good as “comprehensive,” or affirms exactly one false, comprehensive good.33) Furthermore, any false conception of the ultimate good is doubly incoherent, according to Pascal: incoherent in itself and incoherent as a basis for action. Anything other than God is logically excluded from being the highest good: a finite good cannot be possessed by everyone without diminishing it, as the universal good must be (L148/S181). And when we pursue a finite good as if it were infinite, we act incoherently. We always retain some love for God and so, no matter how furiously we pursue some finite good, we remain hardwired to pursue God, the ultimate good (L423/S680, L564/ S471, L148/S181).34 We are thus at cross-purposes with ourselves, pulled in different directions by the intra-psychic conflicts that our incoherent loves create, trying—and failing—to love God above all things. Because it is trapped by this doomed project, the will produces a ceaseless stream of desires. That is, each person constantly experiences his own psychic life as an endless series of plastic, unstable desires that, when satisfied, immediately produce further desires. This is because our occurrent (i.e. felt) desires are instrumentally related to the incoherent project of treating finite goods as the ultimate good. Regardless of their explicit target, occurrent desires also implicitly aim at a target they cannot reach, restful happiness. Even when our desires are satisfied at the explicit level, they still fail to attain this ultimate goal. Thus, in the fullest sense, no desire is ever finally satisfied, and so humans are trapped in a state of restless longing. This constant longing is what engenders further desires: Since nature makes us unhappy whatever our state, our desires depict for us a happy state, because they link the state in which we are with the pleasures of that in which we are not. Even if we did attain these pleasures, that would not make us happy, because we would have new desires appropriate to this new state. (L639/S529)

In order to stop the cycle of desire, people must be oriented toward the truly ultimate good. But instead of reorienting our fundamental 33 In other words, someone who e.g. treats money as the highest good would not necessarily assent to the claim “Money is the highest good” and may not experience anything like a constant, explicit, avowable, “desire for money”. 34 Pascal follows Augustine here, of course. See Charles T. Mathewes, “Augustinian Anthropology: Interior Intimo Meo,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 27 (1999), 195–221.

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idea of the good, we continue to pursue limited goods as if they were ultimate. Speaking about the universal quest for happiness, Pascal writes: A test which has gone on for so long, without pause or change, really ought to convince us that we are incapable of attaining the good by our own efforts. But example teaches us very little. No two examples are so exactly alike that there is not some subtle difference, and that is what makes us expect that our expectations will not be disappointed this time as they were last time. So, while the present never satisfies us, experience deceives us, and leads us on from one misfortune to another . . . (L148/ S181)

People do not understand why they remain deeply unsatisfied even when their immediate desires are gratified. They fail to see that the problem lies in the fact that their desires are oriented toward comprehensive goods that are false. In sum, our felt desires and day-to-day wants are instrumentally ordered toward the satisfaction of deeper desires for more comprehensive goods. This fact complicates standard models of rational agency and motivation, since it ensures that any causal story about the impact of desire on belief and action cannot stop with an account of occurrent desire, for occurrent desires themselves have causal stories. Moreover, because our desires (occurrent or deep) shape our beliefs and actions, it follows that, if our desires are conflicting and incoherent, then they are likely to shape our beliefs and actions incoherently. Our beliefs must be split along the same fault line as our wills—incoherent selves with incoherent wills could only have incoherent beliefs. The theory of the divided will therefore sets up a whole range of intra-psychic conflicts wherein a single human subject is wracked by belief divided against belief, action against action, and action against belief. We miss the full force of this anthropology if we succumb to the temptation of thinking that Pascal posits two autonomous wills or two subjectivities. He does not, and to do so would be to adopt the Manichean heresy. In fragment L629/S522, Pascal denies the suggestion that we have two “souls,” but the context is such that it is clear that he means to deny two centers of subjectivity. In a more modern parlance, we do not, strictly speaking, “have” wills in the way that we have some tool, for example, or even in the way that we have hands. The claim that our wills are incoherent is better understood as the claim that we are incoherent precisely to the extent that we cannot

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make sense of our own volitions, for when we cannot make sense of our volitions we cannot make sense of ourselves. Suppose I believe that a successful career will bring me lasting happiness. I succeed at one job after another, all of which fail to make me happy. Pascal’s point is that I don’t treat these specific experiences as falsifications of the general claim that a successful career brings lasting happiness. Instead, I focus on the situational particularities of each and imagine that the general claim remains valid. (I wasn’t happy at this job because of the boss, I wasn’t happy at that job because of the salary, etc.) I exploit the fact that each situation is slightly different in order to preserve an interpretation of happiness that does nothing more than constantly engender a new set of soonto-be frustrated desires. As Pascal succinctly puts it: “What causes inconstancy is the realization that present pleasures are false, together with the failure to realize that absent pleasures are vain” (L73/S107). As a result of the Fall, we have lost the ability to love God above all things. Although we retain a capacity for infinite love, we can find no infinite object in the world that answers to that capacity. We therefore strive to satisfy our infinite love with finite goods, an inevitable project inevitably doomed to failure. Moreover, the point of the theory of the divided will is not just the truism that we must choose among incompatible goods and that we often choose poorly. The theory of the divided will also captures the feeling of seeming alien to oneself and the concomitant sense of puzzlement that such self-estrangement is even possible. To say that we are estranged from ourselves is just to say that our actions and our beliefs are often in fundamental conflict. Our loves and desires help shape our beliefs (L539/S458). It follows that if we have incoherent desires—as we do, according to Pascal—then those incoherent desires can only shape our beliefs incoherently. It is no surprise, therefore, that human life is rife with self-deception.

RAPPORT, TRUTH, AND ATTRACTIVENESS Truth is among the goods that we are unable to value properly. Because we do not love the truth, we reject it in favor of self-serving falsehoods. Put otherwise, we are unable to value the truth properly because we do not find it attractive. This, too, is a consequence of the

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Fall: the Fall has left us with a fissure between beauty and truth. Pascal’s scattered thoughts on attraction and persuasion make this very point. In his most direct fragment on beauty, he writes that “there is a certain model of attractiveness and beauty consisting in a certain relation (rapport) between our nature, weak or strong as it may be, and the thing which pleases us” (L585/S486). It is instructive that Pascal locates the source of attractiveness in the rapport between our nature and the particular attractive thing and not in the thing itself. This often-overlooked fragment, and the concept of rapport, helps explain why the Fall is a fall into duplicity, and produces an aversion to truth.35 Pascal’s reference in L585/S486 to “our nature” is obviously a reference to our fallen nature, “weak or strong as it may be,” and therefore implies that the way we perceive beauty is determined by how far we have fallen. Because the integrity of our nature is one of the terms of the relation that establishes attractiveness, it follows that our aesthetic judgments also express our moral character. Pascal describes the relation itself as a relation of rapport.36 English editions of the Pensées usually translate rapport as “relationship” and rapporter as “to relate,” and, indeed, these are the ordinary renderings of these words. The French word rapport, however, has valences not quite captured by the English word “relationship”. Whereas “relationship” is a neutral term, rapport connotes value. This was also true in Pascal’s time: the relevant subsection of one seventeenth-century French dictionary begins its definition of rapport with convenance (fitness/propriety/seemliness) and continues with ressemblance and conformite (resemblance and conformity).37 To say, for example, that there is “a rapport between man and all he knows” (L199/S230) is to say more than that some relationship obtains between the two. It is to say that the relationship that obtains is appropriate and that a man’s knowledge befits his state as a finite human being. Similarly, it is not the case that there is no “relationship” between God and the human being (L418/S680). There is, Pascal would certainly affirm, at 35 The discussion below borrows from William Wood, “Reason’s Rapport: Pascalian Reflections on the Persuasiveness of Natural Theology,” Faith and Philosophy, 21 (2004), 519–32. 36 The word rapport and it variants appear in some of the key fragments of the Pensées (L199/S230, L298/S329, L308/S339, L418/S680, L733/S614, L826/S667, L919/ S750). 37 Academie Francaise. Le Dictionnaire de l’Academie francoise (Paris, 1694), 281.

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the minimum the relationship of creator to creature. But, despite this relationship, the fallen human being is not conformed to God, does not resemble God, and is not fitted to matters divine. The fallen human being has no rapport with God. According to Pascal, our evaluative judgments are driven by perceptions of rapport between ourselves as knowing subjects and the objects or situations we encounter. In other words, we are likely to be attracted to goods that fit in with, resemble, and conform to our already existing interpretations of ourselves and the world. Because we are fallen, however, our already existing interpretations of ourselves and the world are likely to be false and self-serving. It follows that evaluative judgment is frequently a self-referential process and that we often engage with reality by determining the degree to which it conforms with what we already believe. Thus, we are highly vulnerable to self-deceptive reasoning, and especially self-deceptive moral reasoning. It is no surprise that Pascal argues that we are more easily persuaded by attractiveness than by truth and that, as a result, our reasoning is often rationalization. Like any keen observer of the human condition, Pascal recognizes that, under the influence of desire, people often depart from the strict canons of rationality and believe just what they want to be true. In the Pensées, he makes this point using the faculty psychology of his day: The will is one of the chief organs of belief, not because it creates belief, but because things are [i.e. seem] true or false according to the aspect by which we judge them. When the will likes one aspect more than another, it deflects the mind from considering the qualities of the one it does not care to see. Thus the mind, keeping in step with the will, remains looking at the aspect preferred by the will and so judges by what it sees there. (L539/S458)

Even when the mind, the locus of belief, is in a position to form correct judgments, it often does not do so because it is led astray by its own desires. The image of the mind brought up short, captivated by the charms of one aspect (face in the French) of the matter it is judging and unable to turn away, evokes nothing so much as the rapt gaze of a lover caught in the fog of love. And like a lover so caught, the mind, believing that the object of its gaze is eminently worthy of attention, realigns its judgments of truth and falsity accordingly. Metaphorically, Pascal is making the point—now

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common in philosophical psychology—that desire can influence belief-formation.38 In a short treatise called “The Art of Persuasion” he makes the same point in less metaphorical terms. Although we should be convinced only by rationally demonstrated truths, according to Pascal, “every man is almost always led to believe not through proof but through that which is attractive . . . we believe almost only in the things we like.”39 It follows that the best way to persuade someone of something—the way with the greatest chance of success—is to show how the matter under consideration is connected to a state of affairs that he or she desires: whatever it is one wants to persuade people of, we must take into consideration the person with whom we are concerned, of whom we know the mind and heart, the principles admitted, and the things loved; and then we must take note, in the matter concerned, the relation it has with admitted truths or of the objects of delight through the charms we attribute to them. So the art of persuasion consists as much in pleasing as it does in convincing, humanity being so much more governed by whim (caprice) than by reason.40

We are highly likely to believe claims that are tied to what we already love or that otherwise reinforce what we already believe. Although the particular things that charm and delight us vary, they can be traced back to the “principles” and “prime movers” of each person’s will.41 Pascal’s account of disordered love shows how to understand this claim: a person is most charmed and delighted by those things that relate back to the comprehensive good that he affirms. Belief-formation therefore depends on a particular person’s disordered loves. In a way, this is common sense: a lover of money will have a different set 38 For a way into the empirical psychology literature on this topic, see Jonathan Haidt, “Morality,” in S. Fiske, D. Gilbert, and G. Lindzey (eds), Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th edn Hobeken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), 805–6. See also the discussion in Alfred R. Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 11–31. 39 “The Art of Persuasion” may be found in Levi (ed.), Pensées and Other Writings, 193–204. The French may be found in OC ii. 171–82. 40 “The Art of Persuasion,” in Levi (ed.), Pensées and Other Writings, 195. 41 “The Art of Persuasion,” in Levi (ed.), Pensées and Other Writings, 194: “These powers [the mind and the will] each have their principles and prime movers of their actions . . . Those of the will arise from certain natural desires, common to everyone, such as the desire for happiness, which no one is without . . . ”

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of desires than a lover of justice, and it will be easier to for him to believe something that advances his financial interests. Thus, on Pascal’s account, the Fall is a fall into duplicity because it is an evaluative fall. Because we no longer love or desire truth, we turn away from truth and embrace self-serving fantasies. At the level of our cognitive faculties, our disordered capacity to love affects the will, and through the will, belief-formation. This means that the Fall affects our capacity to reason, and that reason itself may be warped by disordered love. Once we understand its cognitive consequences, the Fall becomes both tragic and terrifying. Even if we accept as a general claim that our reason is fallen, we cannot accept it “from inside,” in the first person. If we are indeed more often persuaded by desire than by truth, then it is also the case that, in the moment, we cannot recognize this fact about ourselves. We cannot admit that we believe something just because we wish it were true. From our own point of view, we seem to rely wholly on our reason, and we take ourselves to be reasoning toward the truth even though we are not. The desirable seems like the true. Rationalization seems like reasoning. It may be correct that, as Pascal writes, that “It is your own inner assent and the consistent voice of your reason that should make you believe” (L505/S672), but it is also correct that, unbeknownst to us, the “voice” of our reason is more often the voice of the sophist than of Socrates.

ENNUI AND DIVERSION AS SIGNS OF THE FALL INTO DUPLICITY Thus, according to Pascal, we reason poorly under the all-pervasive influence of warped desire. Our reasoning often leads us away from the truth, and we frequently think in biased and self-deceptive ways without realizing it. Since we do not value truth and goodness properly after the Fall, and since the desires of our wills have the power to bias our reasoning, we are able to reject the truth about ourselves and God. At first blush, the claim that ordinary people routinely “reject the truth about themselves and God” may seem too extreme. Yet Pascal persuasively makes the case that some of the most routine and ubiquitous human activities manifest exactly this aversion. Consider

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again, for example, his critique of boredom (ennui) and diversion (divertissement). The heart of that critique is the claim that people try to convince themselves that they are happy, when in fact they suffer from profound existential boredom (ennui). They relentlessly pursue diverting activities (divertissement) in order to avoid confronting their own nullity and emptiness. Like concupiscence and vanity, ennui and divertissement are signs of the Fall, and they are ubiquitous because the consequences of the Fall are ubiquitous. In his critique of diversion and ennui, Pascal presents the fallen human subject as an incoherent self-deceiver, one who continually lies to himself about his own happiness. Although the French ennui is often translated by the English word “boredom,” and there is considerable semantic overlap between the two terms, Pascal’s ennui is more like a kind of existential despair. According to Pascal, ennui is the felt response to the “nullity” and “emptiness” that characterizes the fallen human condition as such. Ennui. Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness. And at once there wells up from the depths of his soul ennui, gloom, depression, chagrin, resentment, despair. (L622/ S515)42

Elsewhere, Pascal argues that, even when we do not explicitly attend to our own existential emptiness, we nevertheless feel it. We feel the Fall, and this feeling of our own fallenness drives us toward selfdeceptive diversions. Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future? But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could 42 Nicholas Hammond makes the point that the first series of terms (néant, abandon, insuffisance, dépendance, impuissance, vide) describes an objective state, while the second set (ennui, noirceur, tristesse, chagrin, dépit, désespoir) describes the subjective response to that state. Playing with Truth: Language and the Human Condition in Pascal’s Pensées (New York: Clarendon Press, 1994), 107. In theological terms, the first series describes the human condition after the Fall, while the second series describes what it feels like to be fallen.

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be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion. (L36/S70; my emphasis)

As soon as they are deprived of diverting activities, people feel their nullity even though they do not recognize its source. The Fall is therefore the cause both of ennui and of its seeming opposite, the ceaseless pursuit of diversion. By pursuing diversion, people try to prevent feelings of ennui, and thereby avoid confronting their fallenness, which is the cause of both. Thus men who are naturally conscious of what they are shun nothing so much as rest; they would do anything to be disturbed (L136/S168). Man is so unhappy that he would be bored even if he had no cause for boredom (ennui), by the very nature of his temperament, and he is so vain that, although he has a thousand and one basic reasons for being bored, the slightest thing, like pushing a ball with a billiard cue, will be enough to divert him . . . (L136/S168)

Divertissement and ennui are correlative concepts. They each express in opposite ways the “nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, [and] emptiness” of the human condition after the Fall (L622/S515). Of the two, divertissement is by far the more dangerous. Ennui, though painful, is an authentic reaction to the fallen human condition. Diversion is superficially pleasant and therefore a more insidious sign of the Fall. Diversion, unlike ennui, is a form of bad faith.43 Were we to allow ourselves to feel ennui, we might inquire about its true cause, come to recognize that we are fallen, and then seek redemption. We pursue diversions in order to avoid feeling ennui and to eschew self-knowledge. The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion. And yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is that above all which prevents us thinking about ourselves and leads us imperceptibly to destruction. But for that we should be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek some more solid means of escape, but diversion passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to our death. (L414/S33)

43 Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin, 166. According to Sellier, Pascal’s divertissement is similar to Augustine’s aversio, a culpable turn away from God.

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We distract ourselves from our unhappiness and then pretend that we are happy. This project is incoherent, according to Pascal, because diversion leads away from genuine happiness: properly understood, the pursuit of diversion is really the pursuit of unhappiness. . . . is a man not happy who can find delight in diversion? No: because it comes from somewhere else, from outside; so he is dependent, and always liable to be disturbed by a thousand and one accidents, which inevitably cause distress. (L132/S165) [I]f our condition were truly happy, we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it. (L70/S104)

The pursuit of diversion therefore manifests the performative incoherence of sin: we seek happiness by means of the very activity that makes true happiness impossible to find. Elsewhere, Pascal makes it clear that diversion is a kind of willful ignorance. We actively avoid learning the truth about ourselves and so we implicitly reject God, the only source of genuine happiness. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things. (L133/ S166) When we wish to think of God, is there not something which distracts us and tempts us to think of something else? All this is evil and innate in us. (L395/S14)

The turn away from God is a turn away from happiness and a turn away from truth. People persistently refuse to notice their own ennui and so they mistake the unstable happiness of diversion for the stable happiness that only comes from rest in God. They “do not know themselves” because “they think they genuinely want rest when all they really want is activity” (L136/S168). These displays of willful ignorance are experiential proofs of the Fall, according to Pascal (L131/S164). Yet these proofs “lie before our eyes, but we refuse to look” (L428/S682; slightly emended). Pascal’s critique of ennui and divertissement presents one of the most important, admired, and fruitful themes of the Pensées. It connects Pascal backward, to medieval treatments of acedia, and forward, toward contemporary critiques of the ubiquitous boredom produced by modernity itself. Pascal’s theological anthropology therefore plays a central role not only in the history of the concept of boredom, but in the history of the modern subject as such. After all,

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some scholars have argued that boredom and ennui are the defining experiences of modernity. In a time when the drives to novelty and innovation, speed and progress that have always defined modernity become the foundation of a process of continuously accelerating transformation, boredom haunts the western world . . . Boredom epitomizes the dilemma of the autonomous modern subject, for whom enlightenment has also meant fragmentation . . . If rationality is the sustaining myth of modernity, boredom, as an everyday experience of universalized skepticism, constitutes its existential reality.44

At the very start of modernity, Pascal makes a version of the same criticism, and there can be no doubt that his thoughts about ennui are central to the way the concept developed in Western thought.45 Yet Pascal’s own critique of ennui is irreducibly theological. It is a critique of the human condition after the Fall. Pascal shows us that the Christian doctrine of the Fall is the secret center of the experience of modernity itself. Indeed, if Christianity is true, then a full critique of the ills of modern society—and especially any critique of modern boredom—must be theological. We should look beyond the Enlightenment, industrialization, or capitalism, for example, and seek the ultimate source of boredom in the fact that we are fallen. Pascal offers us a set of lenses that allow us to explain common human behavior in theological terms. Boredom and diversion are revealed as correlative expressions of the nullity of the human condition after the Fall. Furthermore, on this analysis, diversion becomes incoherent and self-deceptive. People who pursue happiness by means of diverting activities contradict themselves. They pursue happiness by running frantically away from it. Pascal’s account of the Fall helps us to understand this otherwise puzzling behavior.

OBJECTION: AM I REALLY SO UNHAPPY? According to Pascal, and according to the Augustinian tradition from which he draws, human beings can only be truly happy when they 44 Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 1–4. 45 Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), ch. 4; Goodstein, Experience without Qualities, 36–7.

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orient their lives around God as the comprehensive good. Because we retain some basic love for God even after the Fall, the choice to orient our lives around some good other than God is not only futile but selfdeceptive and incoherent. As a descriptive generality about the human condition, Pascal’s critique certainly has some bite, even for the non-Christian. Many of us really are restless in just the way Pascal describes: seeking always a new object of delight, finding always that it fails to satisfy, once attained. Surely just as many also feel the dark weariness of ennui. Nevertheless, Pascal does not intend his critique merely as a widely applicable descriptive generality. He wants us to treat his observations as something like empirical confirmation of the theological axioms that ground them. His observations are meant to apply without restriction to every human being, and he treats them as evidence that we all retain the desire for an unlimited good, which is to say that he treats them as evidence that we are all fallen. We are indeed restless—or at least some of us are—but does our restlessness really demonstrate that we are fallen? Put most forcefully: Pascal’s claims about happiness and boredom seem like empirical claims that are easily falsified. Consider, for example, the case of John, who wants above all to be a great concert pianist. Certainly, if he never practices the piano and spends all his time in the pub, we would say that his desires are incoherent and that his stated goal is objectively unattainable for him. But suppose instead that he is diligent and talented; suppose further that John actually does achieve his goal and becomes a great concert pianist. On this telling, there appears to be no incoherence between his actions and his ultimate goal. Nor does the goal itself seems internally inconsistent, or even especially unworthy. Even this little story therefore appears to refute Pascal’s claim that it is incoherent to orient one’s life around any good other than God. The story so far misses the real force of Pascal’s critique, however. He would not deny that people often pursue their explicit projects and goals coherently, nor that they sometimes satisfy their desires and experience feelings of pleasure as a result. Rather, Pascal would insist that even if John attains his stated goal and becomes a great concert pianist, he will find that he still remains deeply restless and unhappy. It is this tension, the tension that arises when all our avowed desires are satisfied but we still find ourselves inexplicably dissatisfied, that Pascal takes to be a sign of the Fall. In John’s case, the supposed incoherence lies in a conflict between his avowed goal (becoming a

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great concert pianist) and another goal, one that he himself does not avow, but one that, according to Pascal, John necessarily pursues in spite of himself: the goal of finding true happiness in God. Pascal must insist that John can never be satisfied as long as he pursues an explicit goal that is in conflict with that other, unrecognized, goal. Moreover if John were to attend to his own true feelings, he would realize that his stated goal, and the life he builds around attaining it, is not fulfilling. He will know this because he will see that he is not fulfilled. The fact that he believes that he is fulfilled is a result of his self-deception. His apparent happiness is just another sign of the Fall. In short, Pascal is committed to the view that, even after he is a great concert pianist, John will remain existentially unhappy and can come to realize this fact about himself, his own protestations to the contrary. Pascal thereby sets himself up as a better judge of John’s psychic economy than John himself. Pascal is surely correct that it is often the case that the very act of fulfilling a desire reveals that desire retrospectively to have been unstable or unsatisfying. The psychic tension that Pascal identifies is a real phenomenon. We see it with desires both trivial (I want cake!) and profound (I want to be a concert pianist). The trope of the seemingly successful person who gains everything only to realize that he remains unhappy is ubiquitous. Still, an appeal to lingering existential dissatisfaction only pushes the site of our criticism of Pascal back one level, from his views on happiness to his views on ennui. The tension to which Pascal points may be a widely recognized phenomenon, but it is only a sign of the Fall if it really is the case that all human beings have a persistent feeling of ennui that can only be dispelled by orienting our lives around God as the comprehensive good. The twin claims that we can find happiness only in God and that we remain mired in ennui without God both seem quite problematic. We can grant that many people remain existentially unhappy even when their desires are satisfied. It does not follow that this generalization applies universally. The counterfactual claim—that everyone who orients their life around God finds restful happiness—does not follow either. In my view, we should applaud Pascal for recognizing that the tradition of Christian reflection on happiness has this empirical core. Surely the human condition must be roughly as Pascal presents it if the basic Christian story is true and God really is the sole source of goodness. On the other hand, if it is possible to be fully satisfied when

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one attains some limited good, then Pascal’s empirical claims are false, and their falsity counts as evidence (though not necessarily as decisive evidence) against the basic Christian narrative that they support. It is salutary for Christians to confront this dilemma. Nevertheless, the dilemma does suggest that further argument is called for.46 In order to show that everyone implicitly desires restful happiness in God, we need an argument that the desire for any good whatsoever presupposes some desire for the comprehensive good, and that only the Christian God can serve as a comprehensive good in the relevant sense.47 Such an argument may be called for, but Pascal does not offer one. One line of defense would be to say that Pascal simply stipulates that God is the comprehensive good, that humans are happy only when they are properly related to God, and so forth. After all, in any line of inquiry, there is nothing methodologically suspect about treating some claims as undefended axioms, and Pascal’s claims about happiness form the bedrock of the Christian tradition from which he argues. Perhaps he has no obligation to defend them. It is more instructive, however, to pay closer attention to what Pascal offers instead of linear arguments. Instead of arguments, he presents suggestive portraits of people mired in the cycle of ennui and frustrated desire. In the long fragment on diversion, for example, he describes an array of people who are unable to quell their deep sense of ennui and find restful happiness: the wealthy, soldiers, kings, gamblers, hunters, billiard players, and holders of high office (L136/S168). He implicitly invites his readers to identify themselves imaginatively with these portraits and thereby accept that they, too, seek diversion not for its own sake but as a way of distracting themselves from the ennui that is a sign of their own deep desire for God. In other words, Pascal makes his case not with direct arguments aimed at the faculty of reason, but with indirect portraits that seek to shift the way his readers understand themselves. The fact 46 Obviously a great deal also hangs on what it means to be “fully satisfied.” This is an interesting question that I cannot pursue here. 47 The cumulative argument that Thomas Aquinas presents in the first five questions of Summa Theologiae I–II could help Pascal here. There Aquinas discusses the purpose of human life, what happiness is, and how to attain it. For a very different, but no less rigorous, treatment of the same question from a process theology perspective, see Franklin I. Gamwell, The Divine Good (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1990).

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that he “argues” in this way is a methodological choice that is entirely consonant with the way he understands both the fallen human subject and his own intellectual task. Pascal’s own account of the cognitive consequences of the Fall requires him to argue obliquely. He takes himself to be addressing fallen rational agents who are sure to be hostile to the conclusions he wishes to establish. Their hostility exists at the level of reason: the claim that they are fallen strikes most people as rationally repugnant (L695/S574). Even when the truth about the human condition is rationally available to us, we turn away from it because we are unable to value it properly. We eschew painful truth in favor of easy falsehood; we implicitly grasp the truth but explicitly refuse to recognize it. At the same time, our deep desire for God remains. Pascal’s challenge is to draw our attention to this deep desire in a way that bypasses our rational objections. Given his views about the evaluative fall, it makes sense that he would offer portraits and narratives instead of rational arguments. By his own reckoning, arguments about our fallen nature will not command assent even when they are sound. Because we find the claim that we are fallen so deeply unattractive, we also find it easy to reject. Given that this is our state, arguments meant to establish the rational truth of Christianity will not succeed. Instead, the adroit apologist must mount an appeal that is more affective and aesthetic. This is why Pascal gives us imaginative portraits and brief vignettes instead of straightforward argument. None of this is meant to solve the philosophical problems and objections raised above. Pascal is committed to the view that most people deceive themselves about their own happiness and about what they really want. After all, “if our condition were truly happy, we would not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it” (S104/ L70); thus people like John “feel their nothingness without recognizing it” (L36/S70). Yet John’s story is only a tragic story about lifelong self-deception—and not, say, a triumphant story about the value of hard work—if we already agree that John (and everyone else) retains a deep desire for God that manifests as a persistent feeling of ennui. Pascal’s appeal to self-deception already presupposes that claim. Contra Pascal, the claim may well stand in need of rational argument. But to reject it altogether is to cease thinking as a Christian at all.

2 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology Pascal is primarily known as a mathematician, scientist, and religious apologist, but he is also a provocative political theorist with an interestingly Augustinian account of the relationship between state power and state duplicity. According to Pascal, a stable society can exist only when its members systematically misapprehend the true character of power and treat force as worth. Any functioning state must induce its citizens to believe that the social order is held together by bonds of justice and mutual respect. In so doing, the state must induce them to believe a falsehood, according to Pascal, since the social order is actually held together not by justice, but by the will-topower born of concupiscence. Pascal’s political theory grows out of his famous critique of the deceptive faculty of the imagination. The supposition that the social order rests on justice rather than force is a fantasy, an act of the imagination. By joining his critique of politics to his critique of the imagination, Pascal makes a signal contribution to the tradition of Augustinian political theology. He presents a sophisticated account of the concrete mechanisms by which citizens are socialized into accepting state rule. According to Pascal, each person’s selfish desire to dominate others must be transmuted into “admirable rules of polity, ethics and justice” (L211/S244) by a socially produced and reinforced system of illusion. A functioning society can neither come into being nor long remain stable without some such system of illusion, and so widespread duplicity is a necessary condition of political order.

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The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology IMAGINATION, ILLUSION, AND POLITICAL ORDER

It is not surprising that Pascal’s remarks on politics grow out of his broader critique of disordered love. Concupiscence has become our “second nature” (L616/S509), and its effects on human life are ubiquitous. Moreover, prior to all socialization, fallen human beings are already born with biased wills that incline toward the private good of the self instead of the common good of all. When people enter into society, they bring their disordered love with them. In order for a stable society to emerge out of this egoistic miasma, each person’s individual will must somehow be tempered and bent toward the pursuit of a (relatively) common good. Yet even though the political order may appear just, its apparent justice only masks its true foundations—the will-to-power which comes from concupiscence: All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we could to make it serve the public good, but this is only to feign a false image of charity, for at root it is only hate. (L210/S243)1 We have established and developed out of concupiscence admirable rules of polity, ethics and justice, but at root, the evil root of man, this figmentum malum is only concealed; it is not pulled up. (211/S244)

Pascal’s ideas about political order are well-captured by the claim that when we attempt to serve the public good we merely “feign a false image of charity.” According to Pascal, the “admirable rules of polity, ethics, and justice” that characterize a well-functioning society are deceptive, and only conceal the fact that fallen human beings “naturally hate each other.” We might well wonder how such “admirable rules” developed in the first place. Like his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, Pascal tries to uncover the true nature of society with a thought experiment that narrates the origin and development of social bonds. And, like Hobbes, Pascal supposes that a functioning social order emerges out of a state of war, which must cease before order can prevail: 1

My tr.: Tous les hommes se haïssent naturellement l’un l’autre. On s’est servi comme on a pu de la concupiscence pour la faire servir au bien public; mais ce n’est que feindre, et une fausse image de la charité; car au fond ce n’est que haine. The key word is feindre. The 1694 Dictionnaire de l’Academie francoise defines it as: Simuler, Se servir d’une fausse apparence pour tromper, Faire semblant (442).

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The bonds securing men’s mutual respect are generally bonds of necessity, for there must be differences of degree, since all men want to be on top and all cannot be, but some can. Imagine, then, that we can see them beginning to take shape. It is quite certain that men will fight until the stronger oppresses the weaker, and there is finally one party on top. But once this has been settled, then the masters, who do not want the war to go on, ordain that the power which is in their hands shall pass down by whatever means they like; some entrust it to popular suffrage, others to hereditary succession, etc. And that is where imagination begins to play its part. Until then pure power did it, now it is power, maintained by imagination in a certain faction, in France the nobles, in Switzerland commoners, etc. So these bonds securing respect for a particular person are bonds of imagination. (L828/S668)

This fragment presents a genealogy of social order, understood as the “bonds securing men’s mutual respect.” A functioning society must have such bonds—they are “bonds of necessity”—since the desire to dominate one’s neighbors is universal but cannot (logically cannot) be universally satisfied. Pascal thus inquires about the condition of the possibility of creating successful social bonds out of the universal desire to dominate.2 In contrast with the better-known scenario of Hobbes, it is striking that Pascal’s version of the war-of-all-against-all makes no mention of individuals. It is assumed that groups have already coalesced and that the victor is not a person, but a party. Presumably, the conquered form a similar collective. One might wonder how these collectives came to be, if Pascal intends this thought experiment as an account of the birth of all forms of social cooperation.3 The fragment itself does not address this issue explicitly, but it does invite grounded speculation. Note that Pascal does not say, with Hobbes, that people flee into society because they fear violent death. Instead, he seems to suggest that people band together out of a positive desire to dominate others: 2

Lazzeri, Force et justice, 56–64. It is possible that Pascal did not intend the fragment as a conceptual account of an utterly pre-social state of nature, but as an empirical description of how social order coalesces in societies (like his own) wracked by civil war. I myself am partial to the idea that this fragment implies that, for Pascal, society goes “all the way down,” that no human individual can exist completely apart from society. Even without this supposition, however, I see no reason why the dynamics in this fragment cannot be recursively applied to smaller and smaller groups, including the interactions of two individuals. 3

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“all men want to be on top and all cannot be, but some can.” Thus, the initial logic of society is not exactly Hobbesian, in which isolated individuals are more vulnerable to attack and so join together to ward off potential threats. Pascal’s logic seems even darker: a single individual can only dominate other people to a limited degree, but widescale domination is possible for a group. By identifying oneself with a group, one maximizes one’s own opportunities for domination.4 Pascal next points out that, once a group attains dominance, it will want hostilities to cease immediately. This is a matter of straightforward self-interest. From the point of view of the dominant, continued war can only have two effects, equally undesirable: more war will either erode the group’s already-dominant position or needlessly diminish the resources (real and psychic) it can extract from the conquered. Yet even if peace is in the interest of the dominant group, it is not clear how a stable peace can emerge. A social order cannot be founded exclusively on the power of the dominant group. Members of the subordinate group must also believe that they have something to gain by laying down their arms, after all. It is here that the fear of violence enters the picture. Despite their collective dominance, individual members of the victorious group still lack personal security. After all, any given member of the subordinate group could still harm any given member of the dominant group. For hostilities to cease, the dominant group’s fear of violent reprisal must be assuaged. And so members of the subordinate group must somehow be induced to signal consistently to the dominant group that they accept their own subordination. As Michael Moriarty puts it, “It is not enough for the individual to be recognized as a member of a group: his or her membership must be recognized as necessitating a consistent pattern of behavior toward him on the part of members of the opposite group. Submission to violence must be made permanent.”5 The key is that submission to violence must be made permanent, if violence is to be made temporary. There can be no stable monopoly on coercive force unless both sides jointly legitimate it. Pascal’s insights about the foundation of the social order anticipate those of Michel Foucault, and a quotation from Foucault makes 4 See Eric Méchoulan, “On Power: Theology and Sovereignty in Pascal’s Pensées,” Romance Quarterly, 50 (2003), 87–8. 5 Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought, 113. My argument in this chapter depends heavily on Moriarty. See also Lazzeri, Force et justice, 229–62.

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Pascal’s own point succinctly. Foucault inverts the famous dictum of Carl von Clausewitz and argues that “politics is the continuation of war by other means”: And while it is true that political power puts an end to war and establishes or attempts to establish the reign of peace in a civil society, it certainly does not do so in order to suspend the effects of power or to neutralize the disequilibrium revealed by the last battle of the war. According to this hypothesis, the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force, and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals . . . Politics, in other words, sanctions and reproduces the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war.6

Politics is the continuation of war by other means because, on Foucault’s account, the dominant group founds a regime and establishes a political order precisely in order to preserve the balance of power that obtained at the end of the general war. The dominant group tries to naturalize, and thereby make permanent, the submission of rival groups. This is exactly Pascal’s point. In order to prevent further hostilities, and to secure its own dominance, the victorious group needs to found a regime and establish procedures for the orderly transfer of power. But in order to do this, it needs a way of transmuting the fear of violence into the social bonds of mutual respect. Ideally, from the point of view of the dominant group, the subordinate group’s members should come to interpret themselves as essentially subordinate, not just contingently weak. In this light, fragment L828/S668 concludes with an interesting turn: And that is where imagination begins to play its part. Until then pure power did it, now it is power, maintained by imagination in a certain faction, in France the nobles, in Switzerland commoners, etc. So these bonds securing respect for a particular person are bonds of imagination. (L828/S668)

Pascal now answers the question with which he opened the fragment—what are the bonds of mutual respect that constitute the social order? His answer: they are bonds of the imagination. Sheer force can bring a recalcitrant group to heel. Perhaps it can even eradicate that 6 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003), 15–16.

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group altogether. But sheer force alone cannot found a functioning social order. A stable social order can only emerge when most members of society believe that the social order is founded on justice instead of force. This false belief is the product of habit and the imagination, according to Pascal. Pascal’s claim in L828/S668 that “the bonds securing respect for a particular person are bonds of imagination” is another way of saying that society functions best when the socially subordinate construe the socially dominant as deserving of their power. This construal is an act of the imagination: because of their outward trappings, the dominant are imaginatively invested with a patina of respectability, virtue, and worth that is, strictly speaking, unearned: The fact that kings are habitually seen in the company of guards, drums, officers, and all the things which prompt automatic responses of respect and fear has the result that, when they are sometimes alone and unaccompanied, their features are enough to strike respect and fear into their subjects, because we make no mental distinction between their person and the retinue with which they are normally seen to be associated. And the world, which does not know that this is the effect of habit, believes it to derive from some natural force, hence such sayings as: “The character of divinity is stamped on his features.” (L25/S59) Our magistrates have shown themselves well aware of this mystery. Their red robes, the ermine in which they swaddle themselves like furry cats, the law-courts where they sit in judgment, the fleurs de lys, all this august panoply was very necessary . . . We only have to see a lawyer in cap and gown to form a favorable opinion of his competence. (L44/ S78)7

Elsewhere, Pascal makes the same point even more succinctly: “Cannibals laugh at an infant king” (L101/S134). This is drawn from Montaigne, who reports that when some native Brazilians visited France, they were surprised at the deference shown to the young Charles IX. Because they had not been socialized into the cultural and political habits of European monarchies, “they thought it very strange that so many grown men, bearded, strong, and armed, who were around the king . . . should submit to obey a child, and that one 7 As I go on to discuss, Pascal’s work on the imaginary foundations of social order is regarded as a precursor of 20th-cent. ideological criticism, and several prominent critical theorists, including Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and Slavoj Žižek explicitly acknowledge their debt to Pascal.

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of them was not chosen to command instead.”8 Their question is eminently reasonable: why does a child king command respect? Pascal’s answer is that the bonds of imagination, reinforced and reproduced across the society, shape the way the king is perceived by his subjects, making him seem inherently fit to rule. In order to understand this point fully, it is necessary to discuss Pascal’s account of the imagination, custom, and habit.

THAT “PROUD POWER”: PASCAL’S CRITIQUE OF THE IMAGINATION Early on in the Pensées, Pascal launches what is arguably the sharpest attack on the imagination in Western intellectual history. He calls it the “dominant faculty in man,” and even goes so far as to say that it has established a second human nature in each person (L44/S78). He opposes the power of the imagination to the weakness of reason. The imagination “checks and dominates its enemy, reason, for the pleasure of showing the power it has in every sphere.” In its war with reason, the imagination is the “master of error and falsehood” because its products are not always false and so are even more insidiously duplicitous: the imagination sets “the same mark on true and false alike” (L44/S78). Moreover, Pascal notes that, far from being immune to its seductions, intellectual sophisticates are the most vulnerable to them: “I am not speaking of fools, but of the wisest men, among whom imagination is best entitled to persuade. Reason may object in vain, it cannot fix the price of things” (L44/S78). To say that the imagination can, and reason cannot, “fix the price of things” is to give the imagination the power to bestow value.9 Because it has this power, the imagination instantiates and reinforces the duplicitous reign of disordered love. The imagination can satisfy desires for domination, knowledge, and pleasure (i.e. the “triple

8 “Of Cannibals,” Essays, 1.31. In Michel de Montaigne, Complete Essays, tr. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), 159. 9 See Matthew W. Maguire, The Conversion of Imagination: From Pascal through Rousseau to Tocqueville (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 17–21.

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concupiscence” of 1 John 2:16, discussed in L545/S460 and L933/ S761). In each of these spheres, the imagination asserts its power to create objects of value: Imagination has its happy and unhappy men, its sick and its well, its rich and poor; it makes us believe, doubt, deny reason; it deadens the sense, it arouses them; it has its fools and sages, and nothing annoys us more than to see it satisfy its guests more fully and completely than reason ever could. Those who are clever in imagination are far more pleased with themselves than prudent men could reasonably be. They look down on people with a lofty air; they are bold and confident in argument, where others are timid and unsure . . . Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason which only makes its friends wretched: one covers them with glory, the other with shame . . . Imagination decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness which is the world’s supreme good. (L44/S78)

The imagination can satisfy the desire for power and domination (the clever in imagination “look down on people with a lofty air”), knowledge (the imagination “makes us believe, doubt, deny reason”), and bodily pleasure (it deadens and arouses sense, and it creates beauty and happiness). Pascal seems to imply that, from a subjective point of view, imaginary satisfaction is no different from real satisfaction. It doesn’t really matter whether I am superior to someone else— imagining that I am feels just as good. The imagination makes fools happy because it allows them to desire objects that aren’t real, conjures up groundless pleasures, and invests real objects with more value than they can bear. There is a direct relation between the way we value beloved objects and the way we see them, which affects the beliefs we form about them. Because love is always a more-or-less comprehensive stance toward the world, it influences the way we perceive things and thereby influences our beliefs about them. When we love something, we not only respond to its value, we also invest it with value. One way we do this is by imagining it in its ideal form—as bigger than life, wonderful, and perfect. We thereby imaginatively invest beloved objects with a psychic sheen that reinforces our loving attachment to them. One such object is the self. Pascal calls the imagination a “proud power” (superbe puissance), and regards it as the handmaiden of pride

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(L44/S78).10 How else could the self “make itself the center of everything” (L597/S494) except by imagining that it is? A real person faces indefeasible limits; only an imaginary person can be like a god.11 Not only do we privately imagine that we are perfect, according to Pascal, we also try to “lead an imaginary life in the minds of others” by pretending to be better than we are (L806/S653). The desire for the esteem of others is “the most indelible quality in the human heart” (L470/S707), and only the imagination finally satisfies this desire: “Who dispenses reputation? Who makes us respect and revere persons, works, laws, the great? Who but the faculty of imagination? All the riches of the earth are inadequate without its approval” (L44/S78).

The Imagination and the Habituated Body So far, Pascal’s indictment of the imagination is severe, but it remains squarely within our own thought-world. That is, we can map Pascal’s critique onto our own contemporary understanding of the imagination and see why he criticizes its power. As his main fragment on the imagination continues, however, close reading shows that Pascal soon takes a puzzling turn away from our own understanding.12 Consider his well-known example of a wise and dignified magistrate who reacts badly to an odd-seeming preacher: Would you not say that this magistrate, whose venerable age commands universal respect, is ruled by pure, sublime reason, and judges things as they really are, without paying heed to the trivial circumstances which offend only the imagination of weaker men? See him go hear a sermon in a spirit of pious zeal, the soundness of his judgment strengthened by the ardor of his charity, ready to listen with exemplary respect. If, when the preacher appears, it turns out that nature has given him a hoarse voice and an odd sort of face, that his barber has shaved him badly and he happens not to be too clean either, then, whatever great truths he must announce, I wager that our senator will not be able to keep a straight face. (L44/S78) “Arrogant force” is Krailsheimer’s translation of superbe puissance. “Proud power” is a better translation, because it captures Pascal’s associative link between the imagination and the sin of pride (superbia). 11 I return to Pascal’s treatment of the false, imaginary, self in Ch. 3. 12 The following discussion of the magistrate in fragment 44 is drawn from Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought, 102–21. 10

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Pascal’s phrase at the end of this passage ( je parie la perte de la gravité de notre sénateur) suggests that the magistrate is so struck by the preacher’s lack of decorum that he loses control of his own body and laughs involuntarily. This is certainly an amusing scene, but it is somewhat curious that Pascal blames the magistrate’s behavior on his imagination. After all, the magistrate does not dream up a vivid but false scenario to distract himself from the preacher’s message. There is no suggestion that, in truth, the indecorous preacher does not have an odd face, a hoarse voice, and so forth. Thus, it would seem to make more sense for Pascal to blame the magistrate’s behavior on his faculty of sensation, or his will. For example, he might say that vividly concrete sensations impede the magistrate’s grasp of abstract truth, or that his will errs in failing to assent to the truth because it is distracted by considerations that are rationally irrelevant. Instead, Pascal criticizes the imagination. In order to understand more precisely what Pascal means in passages like this, it is important to recognize that early modern conceptions of the imagination differ from typical present-day conceptions.13 Early modern thinkers did not strongly associate the imagination with artistic creativity or speculative genius, for example. Rather, their point of departure was scholastic thought, in which the imagination was closely linked to the body and to ordinary sensation. Aristotle regarded the imagination chiefly as a faculty that mediates between the external senses and the intellect. To Aristotle and his scholastic followers, it is one of the four “interior senses,” along with the common sense, the estimative power, and the memory. The imagination allows us to represent inwardly, with mental images, the things that we perceive outwardly, with our senses. On this conception, the imagination could err (unlike the senses) because it is partly under our own control, since we can voluntarily produce mental images that do not correspond to present-at-hand objects, and it is especially vulnerable to the passions, but it should not be regarded as highly deceptive.14

Here I draw from Gérard Ferreyrolles, “Compendium sur l’imagination dans les Pensées,” Littératures classiques, 45 (2002), 139–45. This article is a précis of his longer work, Les Reines du monde: L’Imagination et la coutume chez Pascal (Paris: Champion, 1995). 14 See e.g. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 78, on the powers of the soul, and q. 84, art. 7, and q. 85 art. 1, on the intellect’s need for “phantasms.” See also 13

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By the time of Pascal, different conceptions of the imagination had evolved, but they still preserved the fundamental link with the body, material objects, and sensation. For example, Montaigne treats the imagination as a bridge between the external world and the power of judgment: it allows us to alter the way we perceive physical things and it can even cause physical changes in the body.15 And Descartes denies that the imagination is an essential part of the mind—and therefore of the self—by associating it even more closely with the body.16 But for Descartes, too, the imagination is “a special way of thinking about material things.”17 The fact that early modern thinkers tended to associate the imagination with the body and the senses helps explain why Pascal blames the imagination in the scenarios he constructs in fragment L44/S78. For Pascal, the imagination is the faculty that controls the salience of our sense perceptions. He writes within a tradition that views the imagination as an essential part of ordinary judgment, but he radicalizes this tradition by emphasizing the imagination’s deceptiveness. The imagination is usually (though, again, not inherently) deceptive, according to Pascal, and it exerts its power prior to the act of judgment by biasing our perceptions. Thus, when the dignified magistrate loses his composure while listening to the preacher, he does not “imagine” anything at all, in our contemporary sense of the term: he perceives the preacher directly and accurately. But some aspects of what the magistrate perceives (the preacher’s appearance and tone of voice) are so salient that they dominate his Aristotle’s discussion in De anima. 3.3: “Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgment” (427b28). 15 He mentions coughing, fevers, and even death. See John D. Lyons, Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 47. According to Lyons, Montaigne also says that the imagination is what distinguishes us from animals. 16 In the sixth meditation Descartes makes a rather startling claim: “I consider that this power of imagining, which is in me, differing as it does from the power of the understanding, is not a necessary constituent of my own essence, that is, of the essence of the mind. For if I lacked it, I should undoubtedly remain the same individual that I now am.” The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ii, tr. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 51 (at 7.73). Ultimately, Descartes disperses the traditional powers of the imagination among the body (esp. the pineal gland), the intellect, and the will. See Dennis L. Sepper, “Descartes and the Eclipse of the Imagination, 1618–1630,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 27 (1989), 379–403. 17 Discourse on Method, part 4, in Philosophical Writings, i. 129 (at 6.37).

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attention and prevent him from focusing on the substantive content of the preacher’s message. According to Pascal, the imagination structures the way we interpret our experiences and thereby allows us to make judgments that are not necessitated by brute sense data. At the level of uninterpreted sense data, there is no such thing as a “hoarse voice and an odd sort of face” (L44/S78). It is the faculty of imagination—always operative and usually deceptive—that allows the preacher to be described with these terms. Again, the magistrate’s imagination isn’t deceptive in one sense: the preacher really does have a certain tone of voice and certain facial features. Pascal does not have Descartes’s skeptical worry that sense impressions can be thoroughly and systematically deceptive. The imagination is deceptive in a more subtle sense, since it leads us to focus on the superfluous at the expense of the pertinent.18 The tight link that Pascal establishes between the imagination and the salience of our sense perceptions is one reason why his portrait of the magistrate and the preacher belongs in his general critique of the imagination. We can delve even deeper into Pascal’s conception of the imagination, however, by paying close attention to just what it is about the preacher that so shakes the magistrate’s composure. The magistrate is struck by the preacher’s shabby, indecorous, and unseemly demeanor. Pascal writes: “If, when the preacher appears, it turns out that nature has given him a hoarse voice and an odd sort of face, that his barber has shaved him badly and he happens not to be too clean either, then, whatever great truths he must announce, I wager that our senator will not be able to keep a straight face” (L44/S78). Note that, in the relevant context, there is nothing inherently humorous about a hoarse voice or an unkempt appearance. Indeed, these qualities might be thought to inspire reverent awe instead of laughter. They might be taken as proof that the preacher is a genuinely holy man who is properly contemptuous of the world’s secular values, for example. But this is not the magistrate’s reaction at all. The passage therefore presents another interpretive puzzle: why does the magistrate have this particular reaction—laughing at the

18 “The problem is not, as for Descartes, that sensation might be deceptive (how do we know that the preacher is not really a baboon or a hallucination?), but that it is always excessive: that we cannot receive any sensory information without the possibility of receiving too much—too much, that is, from the viewpoint of our needs and purposes, as assessed by reason.” Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought, 104–5.

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preacher’s demeanor—and why does Pascal blame this reaction on his imagination?

Custom and the Social Imagination By tying the magistrate’s behavior to his imagination, Pascal suggests that the imagination does more than allow us to dream up wishful fantasies or impart salience to our sense perceptions. The imagination also shapes our spontaneous experience by functioning as a socially constructed repository for our dispositions and tacitly held values. As a result, it is internally related to the body, custom, and habit.19 As John D. Lyons puts it, the Pascalian notion of custom “is so closely linked to the imagination that the two forces are two facets of the human condition. One appears to be more concerned with action (custom) and the other with perception (imagination), but they act together, strengthening each other. What we have the habit of doing shapes what we see, and vice-versa.” With this link in mind, it is reasonable to assume that that the magistrate laughs at the preacher because he has internalized the customary values of his wider social world. Consider two related fragments: Custom makes masons, soldiers, roofers. “He is an excellent roofer,” they say, and, speaking of soldiers: “They are quite mad,” while others on the contrary say: “There is nothing as great as war, everything else is worthless.” From hearing people praise these trades in our childhood and running down all the others we make our choice. For we naturally love virtue and hate folly; the very words will decide, we only go wrong in applying them. So great is the force of custom that where nature has merely created men, we create every kind and condition of men. For some regions are full of masons, some of soldiers, etc. There is no doubt that nature is not so uniform: it is custom then which does this, for it coerces nature, but sometimes nature overcomes it and keeps man to his instincts despite all customs, good or bad. (L634/S527)

19 Although “habit” connotes personal practices and “custom” connotes social mores, I use the two terms interchangeably here. According to Hugh Davidson, there is no strong distinction between them in 17th-cent. French (Origins of Certainty, 77–8).

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“How well-made that is! What a skillful workman! What a brave soldier!” That is where our inclinations come from and our choice of careers. “What a lot that man drinks! How little that man drinks!” That is what makes people temperate or drunkards, soldiers, cowards, etc. (L35/S69)

Both of these fragments make the point that what we often take to be innate, natural inclinations are really the product of habituation (see also L125–6/S158–9). Nature creates human beings, but custom creates each specific “kind and condition” of human being. Furthermore, in these fragments, the vehicle of habituation is language. Each person internalizes an evaluative vocabulary that tells him what to praise and blame. A person brought up to love war will have been habituated into a particular set of dispositions and values—about courage, patriotism, and so on—that shapes the way he spontaneously acts. When he encounters both a soldier and a roofer, for example, he might admire the soldier more than is strictly warranted and ignore the virtues of the roofer. Returning to the magistrate of fragment L44/S78, to say that his concern for decorum shows that he has internalized the values of his society is simply to say that his unreflective reaction to the preacher is a product of a lifetime of habituation and training. When he looks at the preacher, he sees what he has been trained to see. Myriad social pressures—his family life, his concern for his self-image, his political and economic interests, etc.—have collectively shaped his character and turned him into someone who laughs at a preacher with “a hoarse voice and an odd sort of face.” Presumably, however, the magistrate does not explicitly regard himself as the kind of person who mocks and ignores the unsophisticated. He does go to hear the preacher “in a spirit of pious zeal . . . ready to listen with exemplary respect,” after all. Yet his behavior shows us what he really values: not truth, but decorum. He is so struck by the preacher’s lack of decorum that he cannot keep a straight face. Moreover, the fact that his reaction is spontaneous and bodily suggests that he holds these values tacitly. The magistrate’s body expresses the underlying beliefs and values that he would never explicitly avow. We can assume that, if asked, the magistrate would not explicitly assent to a claim like: one should not pay attention to people who appear disheveled. But his behavior shows that he does believe it, nevertheless. The imagination, custom, and the body are all

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tightly connected. The magistrate’s dispositions and values are those of the society in which he is embedded. The fact that he manifests them physically and not reflectively shows that they subsist at a level beneath his explicit awareness. He has internalized them so thoroughly that, in Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, they are “inscribed on his body.”20 Pascal has his own terminology to describe the mechanism by which belief is inscribed on the body. He calls it “the automaton” or “the machine” (L7/S41, L11/S45, L821/S661). This mechanism is most prominently featured in the wager fragment, which urges an unbeliever who nevertheless wants to become a Christian to “act as if ” he already believes, by “taking holy water, having masses said, and so on” (L418/S680). Pascal claims that his behavior will soon produce explicit belief. The theoretical underpinning of this program of habituation is found in fragment L821/S661: For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind. As a result, demonstration is not the only instrument for convincing us. How few things can be demonstrated! Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the automaton, which leads the mind unconsciously along with it. Whoever proved that it will dawn tomorrow, and that we shall die? And what is more widely believed? It is, then, habit which convinces us and makes so many Christians. It is habit that makes Turks, heathen, tradesmen, soldiers, etc. . . . With no violence, art or argument, it makes us believe things, and so inclines all our faculties to this belief that our soul falls naturally into it. When we believe only by the strength of our conviction and the automaton is inclined to believe the opposite, that is not enough . . . (L821/S661)

Scholars sometimes understand the automaton simply as the body.21 It is true that Pascal establishes close links between habituation and the body. In the wager scenario, for example, the unbeliever is promised explicit belief only after he performs certain bodily rituals. And in the dossier titled “Causes and Effects” Pascal argues that commoners are habituated into believing that noblemen are superior

20 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 171. As I discuss below, Bourdieu explicitly regards Pascal as a major influence on his work. 21 See e.g. Ferreyrolles’s comments on fragment L7/S41 in his edn of the Pensées. Gérard Ferreyrolles (ed.), Pensées (Paris: Librairie générale de France, 2000), 55.

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because they are compelled to bow down and genuflect before them (L80/S115, L89/S123). This argument captures the basic insight behind the automaton: repetitive actions can cause belief. These actions are paradigmatically, though not exclusively, physical gestures. (Recall that in L634/S527 (above), Pascal also says that repetitive speech—in the form of praise and blame—can contribute to habituation.) Hugh Davidson gives a good account of the automaton when he argues that it is not just a part of a person (i.e. the body), but the whole person, with all his powers of thought, feeling, and action “insofar as they are capable of habituation, of being bent in new directions and . . . insofar as they do their work in the absence of . . . explicit or deliberate thought or desire.”22 This understanding of the automaton leaves out something important, however. It leaves out the idea that the automaton is a mechanism of belief because the body is a bearer of meaning.23 In this sense, it might be even better to say that the automaton is the whole person, insofar as that person habitually participates in the intersubjective realm of meaningful behavior. This point is easily overlooked and, in fact, it is possible that Pascal himself did not recognize it. In the wager, he tells the unbeliever to “stupefy himself ” (he uses the word abêtira) by acting unthinkingly, as a machine or an animal would. But note also that he doesn’t urge the unbeliever to perform just any empty, irrelevant action—he doesn’t say, for example: hop on one leg until you believe in God. Nor, for that matter, does he tell the unbeliever that he will be converted if he kneels down while gardening or sprinkles his forehead with ordinary drinking water. The unbeliever must kneel down in a context of worship and he must cross himself with holy water. These gestures are thick with meaning; indeed, they are intrinsically meaningful, in the sense that the unbeliever’s private attitude toward them is not what invests them with meaning. Rather, their meaning is intersubjective, public, and already fixed, regardless of the unbeliever’s own attitude toward them. This insight suggests a way of understanding the logic of the automaton, and why a certain kind of habitual action produces belief. It is not only the unbeliever’s mechanical behavior that converts him. It is the fact that his behavior, though mechanical, is also meaningful. 22 23

Davidson, Origins of Certainty, 76. The automaton is a “mechanism of belief ” in the sense that it can cause belief.

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He wants to believe in God, although he does not, and so he “acts as if ” he already believes in God. But in so acting, he shows that he recognizes that his behavior is intersubjectively meaningful and, in fact, he shows that he already knows its meaning. The very decision to perform this particular set of ritual actions habitually and not some other set, or none at all, reveals that he knows the meaning of his actions. His actions cause him to believe in God because they are themselves objective expressions of belief in God. In some obscure but real sense, he already believes in God when he decides to habitually cross himself, kneel, and pray. What happens to the unbeliever slowly over time is not just the process of coming to belief, but also the process of recognizing that he already believes. Over time, his mind makes explicit what his body has already learnt.24 In summary, the Pascalian imagination, closely tied to the body, and habituated by custom, is the point of intersection between the individual person and the intersubjective realm of meaning that comprises his social milieu. The imagination shapes the way one spontaneously perceives, judges, and acts. Through a dynamic interplay between the imagination, the body, and custom, one internalizes a set of dispositions and conceptual schemes about what is normal and abnormal, taken-for-granted and deviant. The will, the imagination, and habit play a role in all our experiences and, collectively, they manifest the effects of disordered love. Habits themselves may be understood as patterns of love and desire that flow from the fundamental orientation of the will. Augustine describes love as a weight, and it is clear that, for him, the weight of his love is his habitual pattern of loving and desiring.25 Pascal weds his own critique of the

As Slavoj Žižek aptly puts it: “What distinguishes Pascalian ‘custom’ from insipid behaviorist wisdom . . . is the paradoxical status of a belief before belief: by following a custom, the subject believes without knowing it, so that the final conversion is merely a formal act by means of which we recognize what we have already believed.” Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 40. The above reading of the automaton borrows from Žižek’s Lacanian reading of the wager, but is (I hope) somewhat less outré. Instead of focusing on the intersubjective realm of meaning, as I do, Žižek focuses on the Lacanian unconscious (33–43). 25 Confessions 8.21, 13.10. Discussing Augustine’s view of habit in de libero arbitrio, James Wetzel writes, “The history of how we have desired and acted on desire, registered in our present experience as the cumulative force of habit, will have an obstructive influence on our ability to allow new kinds of desires, for example, ones framed by beatific knowledge, to determine our willing.” James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 94. 24

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imagination to the Augustinian account of habit. For Pascal, habits— both personal habits and social customs—give content to the imagination. Our habits thereby shape the very possibilities we are able to consider. No fantasy, no possibility, is so novel that it is utterly free from the influence of established patterns of thought and action. In John Dewey’s vivid phrase, “Thinking is secreted in the interstices of habits.”26 Furthermore, the habituated imagination governs what we are able to see, because it spontaneously leads us to focus on some aspects of a situation and ignore others. Because the imagination shapes what we see, it shapes how we act, and as we act, we also strengthen our existing habits and acquire new ones, in a perpetual cycle. The fact that the imagination is shaped by a duplicitous world means that we are habituated into duplicitous patterns of thought and action.

THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION AND THE DUPLICITOUS SOCIAL ORDER Pascal’s account of the imagination, custom, and habit provides the key to his political theology. In particular, that account grounds his claim that a stable political order can only emerge when citizens are socialized into misunderstanding the true nature of state power. According to Pascal, most of our political beliefs, values, and associations are a product of the imagination. A subject who believes that “the character of divinity” is stamped on the features of his king has been led by his imagination to associate the mere sight of the king with the august panoply of his retinue (L25/S59). His judgment is rooted in an act of the imagination: the king possess no essential “character of divinity,” visible or otherwise. Moreover, when stripped of his imaginary divinity, the king can make no claim that he is inherently—by virtue of lineage alone—fit to rule. That fitness is also imaginary. The cords of respect that bind rulers and ruled may be imaginary, but they are not ephemeral mental constructs, according to Pascal, 26 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1946), 160.

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and they are not formed by happenstance. On the contrary, they are inscribed on the body, as people are physically habituated into construing force as worth. Respect means: inconvenience yourself. This is seemingly empty but quite right, for it says: “I would truly inconvenience myself if you needed it, since I do it even when it is of no use to you.” Further, respect serves to distinguish the great. Now if respect was shown by sitting in an armchair, we would be showing respect to everybody, and so no distinction would be made; but by inconveniencing ourselves, a distinction is very well made. (L80/S115; tr. Ariew) Cause of the Effects. This is remarkable: they do not want me to honor a man clothed in brocade and followed by seven or eight lackeys. Why, he will have me thrashed, if I do not salute him. His costume is his power . . . (L89/S123; tr. Ariew)

The first of these fragments points to the relationship between the imagination and the body, custom, and habit. The bonds of respect that unite rulers and ruled are bonds of the imagination, and here Pascal says that the point of respect is to distinguish the rulers—i.e. the great. Furthermore, the best way to show respect to the great is by accepting a measure of physical discomfort (standing, bowing, etc.) when one finds oneself in their presence. This transaction, though physical, shows how the imaginations of the commoners have been habituated: standing and bowing do not intrinsically manifest respect to one’s superiors any more than the magistrate’s robes intrinsically manifest his wisdom (L44/S78). Moreover, it is only partly true to say that the commoner bows because he imagines that the nobleman is superior. Properly understood, the causality also works the other way: the nobleman is superior because the commoner bows. The second fragment reveals the deeper origin of these imaginaryyet-physical bonds of respect. Would-be savants (the fragment’s nameless “they”) object that a powerful man is not worthy of respect simply because he wears elaborate clothes and is accompanied by an entourage. According to Pascal, these savants miss the point: such outward displays of status really signify the ability to deploy coercive force (“He will have me thrashed . . . his costume is his power”).27 The nobleman has the power to thrash the commoner who refuses to salute him. Originally, fear makes the commoner bow. Yet his 27

See Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981), 12.

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physical behavior, when constantly repeated, leads the commoner to associate the nobleman with divinity, and so he comes to believe that the nobleman’s superior status is well-deserved, even essential. Taken together, the two fragments show a concrete instance of Pascal’s general claim that the dispositions of the imagination are produced and reinforced by habituation and the constant training of the body— what Pascal elsewhere calls “the machine,” the most effective way of persuading the mind and fixing belief (L821/S661). This, then, is Pascal’s answer to the question of how bonds of violence and fear are transmuted into bonds of respect. The imagination, habituated by the body, effaces the real meaning of social transactions that manifest status. When the commoner bows to the nobleman, the transaction really shows that the nobleman has the power to harm. But over time, as the results of this pattern of habituation permeate society, the deeper message of such transactions is forgotten. We do not need to suppose that either the nobleman or the commoner grasps it explicitly. Instead, each party believes that when the commoner bows, he simply recognizes the nobleman’s essential superiority. And they are not wrong about that—both parties do believe in the nobleman’s essential superiority—but they are wrong to suppose that the nobleman really is essentially superior. This belief is false, a fantasy of the imagination. Pascal claims that, writ large, this mechanism explains how we come to believe that people generally deserve their positions in the social hierarchy. Social order ultimately rests on the desire to dominate and the fear of force, but it functions best when it seems to rest on respect for merit. The victors need to convince the vanquished that the social order rests on justice instead of force. But even if they succeed, the truth remains the same: “being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just” (L103/S135).

THE PRETENSES OF POWER Political stability rests on power disguised by the “wonders of human imagination” and so systematic illusion is a prerequisite of political order, according to Pascal (L60/S94). In the dossiers titled “Wretchedness” and “Cause of the Effects,” Pascal develops this claim further.

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Ordinary people, he says, falsely believe that the political order is just and so they respect their leaders, but for the wrong reasons. Cause of the effects. It is true, therefore, to say that everyone is under an illusion; for, although the opinions of the people are sound, they are not so as conceived by them, since they think the truth to be where it is not. Truth is indeed in their opinions, but not where they imagine it to be. It is true that we must honor gentlemen, but not because birth is an effective privilege, etc. (L58/S92; tr. Ariew)

In other fragments, Pascal even goes so far as to suggest that it is prudent that people are deceived about the true basis of political power: It is dangerous to tell people that the laws are not just, for they obey them only because they believe them to be just. That is why they must be told at the same time that laws are to be obeyed because they are laws, just as superiors are to be obeyed because they are superiors, not because they are just. (S100/L66; tr. Ariew) That is why the wisest of legislators used to say that men must often be deceived for their own good . . . The truth about the usurpation [of justice by force] must not be made apparent; it came about originally without reason and has been made reasonable. We must see that it is regarded as authentic and eternal, and its origins must be hidden if we do not want it soon to end. (L60/S94)

Ordinary people are “under an illusion” about the fact that political order rests on force instead of justice, but unbeknownst to them, that illusion serves a social good. People must be induced to obey their rulers, since a functioning society depends on preserving political order. After all, “it is dangerous to tell the people that the laws are not just,” and so “the wisest of legislators” say that “men must be deceived for their own good.” Fragments like these seem to suggest that Pascal does not really mean to criticize the deceptive nature of state power. Rather, he seems to affirm the tradition of the “noble lie” and claim that, for their own good, ordinary people must be deceived by their leaders about the real nature of politics (L91/S125).28 On this

28

Plato’s Republic 414b–415d is the source of this tradition in Western thought. Socrates proposes to deceive the citizens of his ideal city into believing that the city’s social classes are of divine origin. A stable social order depends upon duplicity. “The good city is not possible then without a fundamental falsehood; it cannot exist in the element of truth, of nature,” writes Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 102.

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reading, Pascal becomes an advocate, rather than a critic, of statesponsored deceit—an apologist for the Fall into duplicity.

Sinful Illusion or Noble Lie? In any case, we should recoil from this cynical vision of politics, whether or not it is Pascal’s. A wider view of the Pensées shows us that this cynicism is only superficial, however. First, it is significant that the fragments in which Pascal most clearly seems to endorse political deception are found in the dossier “Wretchedness” (L60/S94, L66/S100). The fact that he placed them there implies that they do not present his own final, considered views on politics. The claim that the people must be deceived for their own good is thus a rhetorical halftruth, only one side of the overall Wretchedness/Greatness dialectic that governs the logic of the Pensées. The cynical views expressed in that dossier must therefore be set against his more positive vision of politics, found elsewhere in the Pensées. Moreover, the fact that these fragments obviously borrow from Montaigne (especially from his “Apology for Raymond Sebond”) is further evidence that they do not present Pascal’s own unqualified views, since Pascal treats Montaigne as a paradigm case of someone who is only half-correct.29 Given this evidence, and given the dialectical character of his thought, we would expect Pascal to resolve these opposing views of politics with some further appeal to the higher truth of Christianity. Second, it seems unlikely that Pascal would endorse anything so crude as explicit deception from the ruling party. After all, as we have seen, he gives a very sophisticated account of the way that custom and the habituated imagination function as implicit, transpersonal mechanisms of socialization. These mechanisms operate apart from the explicit, conscious intentions of the ruling party and can successfully socialize citizens into believing that the political order is just. Surely the members of the ruling party are also under the spell of these transpersonal mechanisms, and have also been socialized to see themselves as just. There is therefore no need to suppose that they recognize their own injustice but cravenly deceive the people.30 Of 29 For a list of Pascal’s allusions to Montaigne in this dossier, see the commentary on the relevant fragments in the Ferreyrolles and Sellier edns of the Pensées. 30 Compare Althusser’s rejection of the antiquated view that “Priests and Despots” have forged “Beautiful Lies” and cynically foisted them on the masses in order to

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course, some individual elites might be explicitly deceitful (L60/S94), but as a general account of the way that the power relations of a society come to be systematically obscured, deliberate deceit from the ruling party is not the best explanation. It is far more likely that the ruling elite believe their own falsehoods and regard themselves as truly just. Finally, suppose that the ruling elites do consciously recognize their own injustice and set out deliberately to deceive the populace. On such an assumption, the ruling elites would have to be fully lucid about their own injustice and therefore—paradoxically—immune from the cognitive consequences of the Fall, since amour-propre and disordered love of self are among the chief effects of the Fall. Such an assumption would render the ruling elites almost unintelligibly demonic, on the one hand, even while denying the real force and ubiquity of the cognitive consequences of the Fall, on the other.

The Fallen Political Order as a Sign of God’s Wrath In fact, it is clear that on Pascal’s considered view, even though the political order is unjust in one respect, there is another, higher respect in which it is just after all. So, strictly speaking, when the people come to believe that laws are just, they are not completely wrong, but partly right for the wrong reasons. The political order is unjust insofar as the laws and political arrangements in a given society really do depend on force and the bonds of imagination. Yet in a higher sense, even though the political order depends on force, it remains just: the political order figures God’s wrath toward sinners and so exemplifies God’s just punishment on a fallen world. True Christians are, however, obedient to [political] follies; not that they respect follies, but rather the divine order which has subjected men to follies as a punishment. (L14/S48) God . . . has allowed societies to make their own laws to divide [worldly goods]. Once these laws are established it is unjust to violate them.31

exploit and enslave them: Lenin and Philosophy, tr. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 110. 31 Pascal, “Premier discours sur la condition des grands,” in OC ii. 195.

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But because God in his providence has been pleased to preserve human society, and punish the wicked who disrupt it, he has himself established laws for taking the life of criminals . . . It is therefore certain, Fathers, that God alone has the power to take life, and yet, in establishing laws for the execution of criminals, he has entrusted this power to kings and states.32

So even though the people are wrong to believe that the political order depends on (worldly) justice rather than force, they are not wrong that the political order is just in a higher sense. They are right for the wrong reasons, because God has ordained that people should be subject to their rulers, as a punishment for sin. God therefore uses the pervasive illusions of the fallen political order and bends them toward something good. We see again the basic Augustinian point that, even as people sin, they somehow continue to serve God unknowingly and work out his mysterious will.

Political Self-Deception This is a less cynical vision of politics, but it is certainly no less dark. Pascal does not claim or commend the view that the dominant members of society knowingly deceive their subordinates about its true foundations. On Pascal’s account, the system of illusion that transmutes fear of violence into mutual respect is a social mechanism, not a personal-agential one. Yet outside the text and in between the lines, we can go a bit further: the mechanisms of political order should also be understood as mechanisms of self-deception. Custom, habit, and the imagination each enable ruler and ruled alike to deceive themselves about the real basis of political authority. This claim is not obviously correct, even if we allow that it goes beyond the letter of Pascal’s own text. The social transactions that Pascal discusses are certainly sinful, since they are not oriented around charitable love of God and neighbor. They are also duplicitous, because they only work to the extent that they induce people to believe something false. A political gesture like the commoner’s bow to the nobleman only succeeds to the degree that its real meaning is effaced. (Both the commoner and the nobleman believe that the bow

32

14th Provincial Letter, tr. Krailsheimer, 208.

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expresses the deference due to natural superiority; it really expresses the fear-born deference due to raw power.) Still, it is not obviously the case that members of society really deceive themselves about the nature of political order. Put another way: why are the mechanisms of social illusion also self-deceptive mechanisms? After all, when Pascal’s commoner bows to the nobleman, both the nobleman and the commoner sincerely believe that their actions express their inherent respective worth. Perhaps we should say instead that they are simply in error—they embrace a false account of themselves and their actions, but nevertheless do not deceive themselves. Yet it is clear that both the nobleman and the commoner have a strong motive to embrace the founding illusion that force is worth, and Pascal would certainly agree that both sides want to believe in the inherent fitness of the established social order. Their disordered selflove—their amour-propre—gives them an incentive so to believe. This is obvious with respect to the nobleman. Members of the ruling party would naturally want to believe that a social order that strongly promotes their own interests is actually rooted in justice. But members of the subordinate group also wish to embrace a flattering self-image. The nobleman needs the commoner to submit, but he also wants to believe that he is genuinely worthy of the commoner’s esteem. Similarly, the commoner needs to submit (lest the nobleman respond violently) but he also wants to believe that he himself is not simply weak. He wants his submission to be valued as a natural and appropriate response to an innate superior.33 Both sides have a personal incentive to transmute an uncomfortable truth into a comforting falsehood. In this sense, they are all-too-willing victims of this social mechanism of illusion. Moreover, even in Pascal’s own text, it is clear that the truth about the illusory foundations of social order is easily grasped, only barely out of our sight, and only then because we conveniently fail to look in the right direction. Citizens must actively avoid the truth about state power because that truth is so readily available to them. After all, Pascal holds that even the “half-clever” are able to see through the illusion that noble birth and merit are coextensive (L90/S124). Moreover, his obvious worry that “ordinary people” can be incited all-too-easily into civil

33

Lazzeri calls this submission a “voluntary servitude” (Force et justice, 251).

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war suggests that ordinary people are also very quick to recognize that state power really rests on force instead of justice: The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice . . . There is no surer way to lose everything; nothing will be just if weighed in these scales. Yet the people readily listen to such arguments, they throw off the yoke as soon as they recognize it . . . (L60/S94)

The people “throw off the yoke” of unjust rule as soon as they recognize it, and they recognize it very easily. Yet this fact alone suggests self-deception, since it implies that the people have always known the truth about the real foundations of society, but kept that truth hidden from themselves. After all, if it is even so much as possible for members of society to unmask the pretenses of power, then they must retain some sense of true justice, against which the failures of their own society can be measured. If their only concept of justice were derived from the ideological interests of their own rulers, then the people could never (even in principle) repudiate those rulers as unjust. Nor is it the case that people require some special act of divine illumination before they can recognize that the political order is based on force. While it is true that only “perfect Christians” can grasp that the political order actually dispenses God’s just punishment on sinners, one need not be a Christian at all to recognize that, on a human level, it is grounded in force (L90/S124, L93/S127). The sheer possibility of political insurrection therefore implies that the people have always had some grasp of true justice, on the one hand, even as they also believed (falsely) in the justice of their own fallen political order, on the other. The cognitive conflict exhibited by such conflicting beliefs is surely a form of self-deception.

POLITICS AS A DIVERSI ON FROM TRUTH The value of Pascal’s political theology is best seen when we apply it to the duplicity and concupiscence of our own society.34 It should be 34 A few caveats. First, I should say that by “our” society I mean the late-capitalist democracies of the Western world, and paradigmatically the United States. Second, when I criticize “politics” I do not mean to criticize professional politicians

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obvious that much of our own politics falls directly under Pascal’s critique. A Pascalian critique of politics will be irreducibly theological, but it should also allow us to see things that are hidden to secular critics, or to see more familiar things in a new way. In my view, we should join Pascal’s critique of diversion to his critique of politics. Then we can see the full theological implications of Pascal’s claim that the mechanisms of imagination and custom reproduce the power relations that really ground the political order. In a fallen world—in our fallen world—political practices themselves are often imaginary. Our common political practices turn citizens away from the truth, prevent them from thinking about what a good and just society really looks like, and distract them from thinking about what their own society looks like in comparison.35 Our politics is a diversion that turns us away from the truth. At the textual level, the links between politics, the imagination, and diversion are clear in the Pensées. The imagination’s ability to bestow value on otherwise trivial activities is what allows us to divert ourselves successfully, and Pascal’s typical examples of people who are owed deference because they are imaginatively invested with respect are all political figures: noblemen, magistrates, and royalty (L44/S78). Moreover, his paradigmatic example of someone who diverts himself from realizing his own unhappiness is a king. He also frequently describes political behaviors like war or court intrigue as diversions (L136/S168, L137/S169). To be sure, Pascal’s own critique of diversion is aimed at the individual subject, and argues that we pursue diversions as a way of individually confronting our own sense of nullity and despair. Yet it is natural to extend this critique to the intersubjective political realm, and argue that, because our politics takes the form of diversion, we are similarly diverted from truths about our fallen societies.

exclusively. The relevant political class includes those at every level of political engagement: politicians, media, citizens, and so forth. Finally, it is not the case that a Pascalian critique applies without exception to every political actor in a given society. Nevertheless, it surely applies widely enough to be an insightful critique. 35 Note that it is possible for two people agree with the claim that politics are a diversion even if they do not agree about the substantive question about what the just society should look like. For example, a Marxist and a libertarian could both agree that contemporary politics serves mainly to divert our attention away from the problems of society. They would just disagree on what the real problems of society are.

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The first step in a Pascalian critique of politics is empirical: one must make the case that political activity typically looks like other diverting activities and seems to serve the same function. Yet it is easy—almost trivial—in our media-saturated, sound-bite culture to show that the line between entertainment and politics has nearly vanished. Anyone who pays attention to a contemporary election campaign, or watches political talk shows on television, or reads the way political disagreements are covered in contemporary newspapers should readily agree that political discourse functions often like a game or, at best, a semi-scripted reality television show. Someone who disagrees, and believes that contemporary political debates typically present reasoned, substantive arguments about the pressing issues of the day, may abandon my Pascalian critique here, at the first step. It seems obviously true to me that the first step is beyond secure. The second step requires us to look deeper. Granting that politics has become a form of diversion, we must ask about the “cause of the effects”—the real point of the diversion. For Pascal, the real point of diversion is to prevent ourselves from thinking about our own existential unhappiness. If we were to think about our own unhappiness, we would realize that we are fallen, and turn to God and Christ for help. Our aversion to self-knowledge, which causes us to pursue constant diversion, is also an aversion to God. We can and should treat politics in the same way. On this account, members of the political establishment and ordinary citizens alike frequently use politics as a distraction from their own existential despair. In this sense, politics can be like gambling, hunting, or any other kind of diverting activity: a way of avoiding boredom and rejecting God. Deeper still, we can say that when politics becomes a diversion, our political activity itself becomes the means by which we avoid thinking uncomfortable truths about our society. Fallen politics turn us away from our society’s defects and hide them from our view. This claim takes Pascal’s point about the imaginary nature of political transactions and extends it. When a commoner elaborately bows to a nobleman, as in Pascal’s day, or when political debates take the form of ritualized, game-like performances, as in our own day, these imaginary transactions divert our attention from the fact that the political order rests on force instead of worth. In both cases, political transactions serve the interests of the ruling elite. Indeed,

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that is their purpose. We focus on the game but not on the real reason that it is played. If political action has indeed become a form of diversion, then on Pascal’s analysis we will also find in our politics the performative incoherence of sin. It is incoherent and self-defeating—a form of collective self-harm—to use politics as a way of systematically avoiding the project of building a better society. And yet a Pascalian analysis suggests that this is the real meaning of much political behavior. We may mean well, and enter the political arena because we want to bring about social justice. Yet the rules and norms of that very arena are structured to make it difficult to bring about social justice. The arena itself is fallen, and serves other, darker purposes altogether. Finally, Pascal’s analysis of boredom and diversion explicitly describes diversion as a kind of self-deception (L136/S168). The truth about the real meaning of diversion is easily grasped, and the fact that so few grasp it is a sign of the Fall. When we apply this insight to politics, it implies that the truth that politics has become diversion is also easily grasped: something that we all already know, even while we resist attending to it. We feel the nullity of contemporary politics even when we do not explicitly recognize it (S70/L36).

BLAISE PASCAL, CRITICAL THEORIST Just by virtue of being members of society, we are already burdened with habits of mind that point us away from truth. Pascal’s political theology argues that society can exist only when its members systematically misapprehend the true character of power and treat force as worth. As a result, everyone has been socially constructed to see as necessary certain connections that are not necessary—to believe that certain outward signs (e.g. the magistrate’s robes) necessarily signify inward worth. On Pascal’s account, we have been conditioned to accept relatively superficial explanations of social phenomenon because deeper explanations come with real costs, both psychic (lost self-esteem) and physical (the threat of violence). Thus the conundrum: although we do retain some concept of genuine justice, all actually existing societies are grounded not in justice but in force. The best explanation for this state of affairs, according to Pascal, is that

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most people want to preserve the illusion that state power rests on justice instead of force and so they learn to ignore the truth that it does not. He appeals to custom, habit, and the imagination in order to explain how people are socialized into a political order that makes it easy for them to avoid the truth. In a similar way, contemporary critical theorists appeal to the mechanisms of ideology. In both cases, members of society learn, through uncountably many small lessons, that it is easy and natural to serve the state, and that probing its real foundations has considerable psychic and physical consequences, even when the threat of genuine violence is absent. Pascal’s work on the imaginary foundations of political order should seem strangely familiar to students of modern ideological criticism. Ideological criticism examines the way certain false, broadly harmful assumptions diffuse through society until they become neutral, natural, and taken-for-granted. It also concerns the way people are shaped into ideological subjects. Pascal’s thought anticipates modern ideological criticism, and some of the most important twentieth-century critical theorists explicitly acknowledge their debt to him. Yet even though critical theorists like Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu affirm the influence of Pascal on their work, they also divorce his account of state power from his theological account of the Fall. We should resist this divorce. The full value of Pascal’s political theology is more easily seen by comparing it to contemporary critics who would strip Pascal of his theological moorings and redeploy his thought for purely secular purposes.

Althusser and Bourdieu’s Debt to Pascal According to Althusser “the whole theory of ideology, of misrecognition and recognition, is to be found in Pascal.”36 In Althusser’s own famous example, when a police officer yells “Hey, you there!” to someone in a crowded street, the person addressed by the officer turns around, somehow recognizing that he is the one being hailed. Yet how does he know that he is the one addressed and not someone else? And, stipulating that he isn’t doing anything wrong, why is his automatic response to turn around rather than to ignore the officer’s 36 Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87, ed. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet (New York: Verso, 2006), 269.

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call? His spontaneous deference shows that he has already been formed as a subject—in a process that Althusser calls “interpellation”—by the reigning ideology of the state. He automatically and implicitly recognizes the authority the officer has over him because he has been taught from birth to defer to agents of the state. To respond as he does is obvious and natural.37 Althusser’s policeman is merely Pascal’s nobleman (L89/S123) in modern dress: the underlying mechanisms of call and response are exactly the same. Like Pascal, Althusser insists that the underlying mechanisms of ideological interpellation are physical and bodily, rooted in the routine, ritualized performance of daily activities.38 Moreover, perhaps because Althusser follows Pascal, he is able to advance beyond an earlier and cruder theory of ideology according to which the ruling classes consciously use ideology as a weapon to mystify the ruled and render them docile. Following Pascal, Althusser recognizes that the ruling class has also been formed by ideology and therefore sees its superior social position as natural and virtuous.39 Althusser also argues—again like Pascal—that the entire system of ideology is an illusion that masks the truth about the relations of power and domination that really constitute society. Ideology is “an imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”40 Our recognition (reconnaissance) is always a misrecognition (méconnaissance). The natural, seemingly innate categories by which we recognize ourselves and navigate our world are really the product of ideology. The ideological illusion serves the need, felt by both rulers and ruled alike, to regard the social relationships that structure their world as rooted in something grand, something other than sheer force. Althusser is correct that this theory of ideology is already found in Pascal. Bourdieu’s debt to Pascal is even more explicit. In the opening pages of his fittingly titled Pascalian Meditations, he writes that his own work on symbolic power owes more to Pascal than to Marx. On the submission to “symbolic violence”—Bourdieu’s version of ideology— he adds: “This submission . . . is itself the effect of a power, which is 37

Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 118–19. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 113–14. He explicitly mentions Pascal and the argument of the wager fragment on 114. 39 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 110. 40 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 109. 38

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durably inscribed on the bodies of the dominated, in the form of schemes of perception and dispositions (to respect, admire, love, etc.) . . . It is these dispositions, in other words, more or less what Pascal puts under the heading of ‘imagination’ which dispense ‘reputation’ and ‘glory’, give ‘respect and veneration to persons, works, laws, the great.’”41 Bourdieu’s reference to “schemes of perception and dispositions” recalls one of his own central analytical concepts, habitus, which in turn suggests a further debt to Pascal on custom, habit, and the imagination. Habitus refers to the culturally inculcated, durable dispositions that give rise to particular practices.42 Bourdieu appeals to the concept of habitus to explain how people unconsciously internalize and follow social rules. Pascal deploys the concepts of custom, imagination, and habit to do exactly the same conceptual work.

Sin and Ideology It is possible to find similar conceptual debts to Pascal in other contemporary critical theorists.43 More interesting, however, is to ask what it means that modern critical theorists find Pascal’s thought so fruitful. After all, Pascal’s own social theory is avowedly Christian and Augustinian. It seems more likely that he would be a target rather than a source of ideological criticism. Critical theorists like Althusser and Bourdieu need to explain how dominant classes can maintain their dominance and why subordinate classes participate in their own subordination. They therefore posit impersonal—or rather, transpersonal—mechanisms by which the ideology of the dominant classes continually reproduces itself throughout society. These mechanisms are transpersonal because they are seldom the explicit product of conscious intentional agency. Rather, agents make explicit intentional decisions by choosing from a field of potential actions that has already been shaped by ideological mechanisms. Althusser’s man in the street may never have been explicitly taught to defer to agents of the state, 41

Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 1–2, 171 (my emphasis). Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72; Logic of Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 53. 43 Slavoj Žižek also depends on Pascal in several places (see e.g. Sublime Object of Ideology, 36–43). See also Michael Moriary, “Zizek, Religion and Ideology,” Paragraph, 24/2 (July 2001), 125–39. 42

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but he nevertheless turns around because he somehow knows that it is he who is being hailed by the policeman. It does not occur to him not to turn around. A lifetime’s worth of small, unremarkable lessons about his own place in the social hierarchy has taught him to defer to state power automatically. Critical theorists argue that transpersonal mechanisms and social forces shape human beings into particular kinds of subjects. Yet they also need to explain why the real character of these mechanisms is obscured, with the result that the ideology of the dominant classes seems obvious and natural to all levels of society. Pascal has a similar theoretical need. Like contemporary critical theorists, Pascal wants to explain why human beings persistently misunderstand their real interests and reject evident truths about themselves, their own happiness, and God. Whereas critical theorists appeal to the mechanisms of ideology, Pascal appeals to the mechanisms of original sin and the Fall. According to the Christian tradition, original sin—like ideology— is a transpersonal force that shapes personal agency. The condition of original sin is a transpersonal force, but individual sinful acts are expressions of personal agency. Feminist theologian Serene Jones usefully describes original sin as a “false performative script” into which we are born. Like the mechanisms of ideology, these scripts do not wait for us to act but . . . , more often than not, “perform us”—as part of the nexus of oppressive relations within which . . . subjectivity comes into being. As original sin, they are scripts that we inherit (they are inborn), and yet, as performances, they cannot be said to be intrinsic to our humanity (they are not inherent). Likewise, they are not scripts we could choose to avoid (they are inescapable), and yet, because we are given a counter role to inhabit in faith, they are performances that can be contested (they are not irredeemable).44

Pascal’s account of sin and the Fall presents an early version of the idea that sin is a performative script, and thereby anticipates both contemporary ideological criticism and contemporary feminist theologies of sin. He understands that sin is always personal, in that it is a product of intentional agency, but also structural, in that it is also a 44 Serene Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology, 119. I elided the word “women” in this quotation because I believe that this programmatic statement about sin applies equally to both women and men. (I should also say that I expect Jones herself would agree.)

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product of broader social mechanisms that are prior to individual human decisions. In more concrete terms, he locates the source of sin in disordered love, but he also recognizes that custom, habit, and the socially constructed imagination shape human agents into sinful subjects. The Pascalian sinner makes sinful choices and is justly condemned, but he also inherits a fallen world that elicits and reinforces those choices. Someone who is born into a society that inordinately values wealth, for example, will be taught in thousands of near-imperceptible ways to love wealth and to pursue it at the expense of higher goods. Even if such a person becomes, say, a teacher instead of a banker, the love of wealth will continue to infect his choices and distort his relationships. He will therefore find it more difficult, well-nigh impossible, to love God as the highest good. Of course, no actually existing society is completely oriented around exactly one false good. Rather, societies valorize wealth, power, fame, race, nation, self-esteem, and so forth—a near infinity of false goods that individually and collectively serve to obscure the fact that God is the genuine source of value and the sole ground of stable happiness.

Theology Beyond Ideology However interesting these resonances with contemporary critical theory may be, Pascal’s own project is irreducibly theological. Needless to say, modern critical theorists have very different agendas, and so they sever Pascal’s early insights into ideology from their theological source. It is reasonable to ask whether we should follow them. It is certainly of historical interest that one of the earliest theories of ideology and interpellation was developed in the service of a Christian apologetic, but is it also of constructive interest? Put another way: what is the value of tying the genealogy of state power to a specifically Christian account of the Fall? Because I share (roughly) Pascal’s Christian commitments, my bedrock answer to this question must be: because that Christian account is true. To the extent that the basic narrative of Augustinian Christianity is true, it provides us with deeper levels of explanation that help us to understand the mechanisms of state power better than we otherwise could. Pascal can go beyond the typical explanations of secular political theory, whether liberal or Marxist. Because he is

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committed to a theological narrative, Pascal can offer a deeper account of why the ruling classes have the interests that they do, why existing economic and political arrangements are likely to be unjust, and why power so rarely serves justice. On his account, human beings enter society bearing their disordered love and their aversion to truth. The cognitive consequences of the Fall are logically prior to the formation of disordered political arrangements, even as those disordered political arrangements ramify the effects of the Fall. Pascal can appeal to a more fundamental explanation that is not available to secular political theorists. In addition, because his account of state power rests on an account of the Fall, and because he understands the Fall as a fall into duplicity, he is able to show how the mechanisms of ideology are, at the same time, both cognitive and epistemic, on the one hand, and embodied and social, on the other. This is one of Pascal’s most important insights. Unlike other theologies of sin, Pascal’s account shows that the cognitive consequences of the Fall imply a critique of politics. For Pascal, the cognitive consequences of the Fall go beyond the interior faculties of the darkened intellect and the disordered will. The cognitive consequences of the Fall are also political and social. Pascal therefore sees more clearly than secular political theorists that the mechanisms by which state power reproduces itself are deceptive and self-deceptive. The notion that ideology should be understood in epistemological terms as something like “false consciousness” is no longer widely defended, for example. According to Terry Eagleton, truth and falsity are “irrelevant” to Althusser’s theory of ideology because “ideology is less a matter of representations of reality than of lived relations.”45 Pascal shows how it can be both. The fallen subject is shaped not only by the real relations in which he actually stands, but also by the relations in which he takes himself to stand. Thus, on the one hand, subjects are necessarily shaped by the fact that they stand in certain real, objective relations with God, other citizens, the state, and the means of production. On the other hand, however, they also stand in a series of imaginary relationships that render those real relationships obscure. Pascal’s insight is that because people stand in doubled, conflicting relationships with the wider world, they are 45 See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991), 10–31, esp. 18, 20.

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shaped into doubled, conflicting subjects that are cognitively at war with themselves. With this insight, we can explain both why ideology functions—we want to believe the foundational illusions of our society—and also why it can be unmasked: we remain fundamentally oriented toward the truth, even as we attempt to steep ourselves in illusion. In Pascal’s terminology, we are both great and wretched at the same time. His account of the conflicting subjectivity of the fallen human being implies both an epistemological theory of false consciousness and the physical, embodied relations by which ideology reproduces itself.46 Because Pascal’s account of state power grows out of his account of the Fall, his political theology is also anti-utopian and properly critical.47 He therefore offers a necessary corrective to the temptation toward utopian thought. A Pascalian political theorist will never make the mistake of identifying any existing political order with true justice, for example. We might be tempted to imagine that a society founded under exactly the right conditions—by upright, just people acting justly—would inaugurate an ideal political order that reproduces those pristine original conditions. (Indeed, this fantasy more-or-less describes both the founding myth of the American republic, as well as the founding myth of a proletarian revolution leading to a utopian classless society.) Pascal blocks this temptation. 46 There is a certain circularity to Pascal’s account, but it need not be vicious. People are formed into duplicitous subjects by already-existing duplicitous social mechanisms, but surely the social mechanisms themselves could only have been produced by already-existing duplicitous subjects. Pascal’s Augustinian commitments lead him to resolve this circularity in the direction of individual agency. (Though he may well ultimately resolve it with an appeal to the very first sin, itself inexplicable. For the moment, however, I can sidestep this worry because I am not trying to answer the vexing question of how sin entered the world at all.) The final “unit of analysis”— so to speak—of Pascal’s account of sin is indeed the fallen will and its disordered loves. The duplicitous political order is the collective result of the individual choices of fallen human beings. This is not to say that the sinful social mechanisms that he identifies are the simple aggregation of those choices. Along with contemporary critical theorists, Pascal recognizes that social mechanisms can acquire a kind of quasi-agency that supervenes on individual choices. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, social mechanisms do depend on the actions of fallen human agents. 47 Here Pascal follows Augustine. For an analysis of the anti-utopian character of Augustine’s political theology see R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For a defense of the claim that modern utopian thought is “gnostic” because it perverts the eschatological vision of genuine Christianity, see Eric Voeglin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).

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For Pascal, the political order is fallen, and so every actually-existing society will reproduce the duplicity and concupiscence that are the results of the Fall.

POLITICAL PROGRESS, TRUE J USTICE, AND THE CHURCH In short, Pascal sees politics as tragedy because the unavoidable incoherence of sin always brings with it an element of tragedy.48 His vision is bleak, and even if we embrace the idea that a properly Christian political theology must remain essentially critical, we would do well to ask whether Pascal’s vision of politics is nevertheless too bleak. For example, as an exegetical matter, it is not clear that Pascal would ever admit that citizens should rebel against an unjust regime, or whether he simply counsels them to accept their lot and turn their eyes heavenward.49 Regardless of his own intentions, however, we can find in Pascal the building blocks of an account of politics that does value the pursuit of social justice. Contrary to Hobbes and Montaigne, Pascal 48 This statement evokes the thesis of Lucien Goldmann’s Marxist classic The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine (New York: Humanities Press, 1964). According to Goldmann, the apparent contradictions, aporias, and paradoxes of the Pensées are not signs of an unfinished fragmentary text, but express the fact that Pascal, at one and the same time, completely embraces a world that he can only regard as meaningless, and yet also completely rejects that world in the service of a God who never appears. The contradictions of Pascal’s text express the contradictions of Pascal’s worldview and make him a forerunner of Marxist dialectics. Goldmann’s reading of Pascal is often strikingly insightful, but ultimately too partial and theologically illiterate to convince. “So much of what seems to be paradoxical in the Pensées arises . . . not, as Goldmann would have it, [from] a refusal of the world from within the world: it is rather a total acceptance of the world in the knowledge that all our aspirations are other worldly; it is the application to our intellectual life of the mystery of the Incarnation” (Miel, Pascal and Theology, 192). See also Wetsel, Catechesis and Disbelief, 295–7. 49 Hélène Bouchilloux writes that Pascal’s “entire oeuvre” argues that “we should revolt and declare our revolt against tyranny” (“Pascal and the Social World,” in Hammond, Cambridge Companion to Pascal, 211). A. J. Beitzinger is more restrained: Although Pascal takes “a firm stand for active defense of truth” in the sphere of politics, “Resistance beyond the means of nonviolent remonstrance, argument and non-compliance is not specified” (“Pascal on Justice, Force, Law,” Review of Politics, 46/2 (1984), 233.

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does affirm that true justice exists and that people retain some dim but real cognitive grasp of it.50 We should certainly agree with Pascal that no fallen human community can perfectly instantiate true justice, but when we renounce utopia, we do not thereby renounce the possibility of making political advances at all. Given that we do have some grasp of true justice, surely we can judge actual communities according to how well they approximate it. And given the possibility of such judgments, surely it is also possible to explicitly try to make our own communities more just. To be sure, we remain fallen and so our grasp of true justice remains dim. A Pascalian theologian must admit that enduring political communities have been founded upon nearly every depravity imaginable, from slavery to infanticide (L29/S63, L148/S181, L60/ S94). One must also admit that these communities surely seemed just to their contemporary defenders. A certain epistemic humility about our own sense of justice is therefore in order. The lesson Pascal teaches is that we can easily be wrong about whether our projects really do serve social justice, or whether they are instead sinful, idolatrous, or utopian.51 Even so, it is not tenable to deny the bare possibility of political progress. Although we remain fallen, we can now recognize, for example, that slave-based societies are unjust. We can grasp this truth, while some of our forebears could not. The fact that we disagree with our forebears about the justice of slavery is not evidence that fallen human beings can never grasp true justice. It is a sign that moral progress is indeed possible in the political sphere, even for fallen human beings.

See Hélène Bouchilloux, “La Politique Pascalienne: Contre Montaigne et Hobbes,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, 183/4 (1993), 661–82; Gérard Ferreyrolles, Pascal et la raison du politique (Paris: PUF, 1984), 147–202; Virgil Martin Nemoianu, “The Order of Pascal’s Politics,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 20 (2012), 1–23. 51 For a brief, powerful statement of Pascal’s anti-utopian politics, see his 1657 letter to his brother-in-law, Florin Périer. Pascal writes: “We act as if we have a mission to make truth triumph, instead of a mission to fight for it. The desire to conquer is so natural that when it covers the desire of making the truth triumph, we often take the one for the other, and believe that we are seeking the glory of God instead of our own.” OC ii. 40. Paul J. Griffiths uses Pascal’s 1657 letter to advocate political quietism, and the view that “Christian advocacy of a political proposal assumes that justice in the political sphere is not attainable but must nonetheless be sought.” “The Quietus of Political Interest,” Common Knowledge, 15 (2009), 18. 50

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Still, moral progress is always hard won. Pascal’s central insight about politics is that disordered political systems reproduce themselves through mechanisms of physical and psychological habituation. These mechanisms inculcate in us dispositions that are causally prior to our explicit acts of conscious reflection and deliberation. On a Pascalian analysis, it follows that social justice and political progress can only result from an equally effective program of counter-habituation. In the words of Bourdieu, “It is quite illusory to think that symbolic violence can be overcome solely with the weapons of consciousness and will.”52 The broadly social mechanisms that support duplicitous state power can only be opposed by a rival set of similarly broad mechanisms. True justice can be little more than a barely graspable abstraction unless it is made concrete in the bodies, practices, and habits of human subjects living together in society. Only counter-institutions oriented around truth can resist the duplicitous institutions of state power, and shape subjects into just political agents. Where shall we find such a community of truth? It is natural for a Christian to look first to the church. Pascal—no mean critic of the church of his own day—writes that “The history of the church must properly be called the history of truth” (L776/S641), and calls the church the only place where we find “true justice without violence” (L85/S120; see also L974/S771). Indeed, there is at least a formal sense in which the true church must be identified with the community of the just. From an eschatological perspective, the true church is the transhistorical community of saints who stand in the right relationship with God, who love God above all things, and who derive all value from the divine good. Such a community simply is the community of the just, by definition. We live on this side of the eschaton, however, where it is not obvious that any actually-existing ecclesial community functions as a community of truth, standing against the ideologies of state power. The pilgrim church on earth should not be too easily identified with the triumphant church of the saints in heaven, and all too often the church has been a servant of state power instead of a critic. There is a real danger, then, of valorizing the church uncritically by identifying it with the community of the just. Here too Pascal is a valuable corrective. Although he remained a faithful Catholic, he spent most of the last decade of his life in opposition—sometimes private,

52

Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 180.

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sometimes open—to the institutional church of his day. Any follower of Pascal should be appropriately wary of overidentifying any actually existing ecclesial community or authority structure with divine justice per se.53 And it is surely noteworthy that the same Pascal who urges citizens to submit docilely to political authorities that manifest God’s wrath toward sinners did not himself submit docilely to ecclesial authorities when called upon to do so. Perhaps we can have a truly just politics only when the church militant has become the church triumphant; if so, that day has not yet arrived. As with the just society in general, however, we need not view this state of affairs in binary terms. Just because the church on earth is not perfect, it does not follow that it cannot improve, and that Christians should not work to improve it. At its best, the Christian tradition embraces self-critique. A Pascalian political theology would expect to find in the church the same tension or dialectic that exists with respect to the state. On the one hand, its members do have some grasp (maybe even a greater grasp) of genuine justice and goodness; on the other hand, the same tendency toward duplicity and self-deceit that we find in society at large exists in the church as well. How could it be otherwise, given that the church is comprised of fallen human beings? The church is at one and the same time both the community of the fallen and the community of the redeemed. When we accept this fact, we can take a realistic yet hopeful attitude toward its potential to be an engine of social justice. History also shows that the church can be an agent of justice in opposition to the state. Yet we should not forget—and we should not forget on properly theological grounds— that the church remains vulnerable to duplicity and self-deceit.

CONCLUSION For Pascal, then, the political order is duplicitous because it is fallen, and no political order can be free from the effects of the Fall. Political 53

Pascal would agree that the true teachings of the Church are formally identical with divine justice. On the other hand, he is certainly no unthinking servant of ecclesial authority: “when we no longer listen to tradition; when the Pope alone is proposed to us; when he has been manipulated, and thus the true source of truth, which is tradition, has been excluded; and the Pope, who is its guardian, has become biased; the truth is no longer free to appear” (L865/S439; tr. Ariew).

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agents with fallen minds and wills can only set up duplicitous societies. Since people inevitably acquire their particular dispositions and habits from the societies into which they are born, it follows that a political order rooted in duplicity will inevitably shape people into duplicitous subjects who have every incentive to immerse themselves in illusion.

3 The Imaginary Self in a World of Illusion: Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject It is a truism of contemporary theological anthropology that the Enlightenment has bequeathed to us an impoverished conception of the self. Fairly or not, this conception is often traced back to Rene Descartes. The so-called Cartesian self is a fully autonomous, disembodied, and self-transparent thinker. It is not essentially related to other persons, whether human or divine. Indeed, this self is not even essentially related to its own body.1 Yet even as theologians hurry to distance themselves from the Cartesian subject, they often overlook Pascal, one of its first and greatest critics. This oversight is unfortunate, since Pascal presents a robust account of subjectivity that is not only anti-Cartesian but theologically rich. To be sure, it is widely recognized that Pascal wrestles with the deep paradoxes of human subjectivity in his Pensées. He famously declares that the human being is “a thinking reed,” a creature that is simultaneously great and wretched. Our wretchedness testifies to our greatness, which in turn reinforces our wretchedness, in an endless dialectic (L122/S155). The most plausible explanation for this paradoxical dialectic, according to Pascal, is that we have fallen from some previously ideal state, exactly as Christianity teaches. The dialectic of greatness and wretchedness is a relatively transparent theme in an otherwise opaque text and so it has been much discussed.2 Pascal’s theological account of subjectivity stretches 1 This picture is certainly a stereotype. Specialists do not find it in the work of Descartes himself. Nevertheless, even if Descartes is no Cartesian, there is no doubt that the “Cartesian subject” has had a life of its own in modern thought and has been an object of virulent theological criticism. 2 See e.g. Mesnard, Les Pensées de Pascal, 178–210; Davidson, Blaise Pascal, 78–9.

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considerably beyond the dialectic of greatness and wretchedness, however. In the 1980s and 1990s, Jean-Luc Marion and Vincent Carraud, brilliantly analyzed the anti-metaphysical—and therefore anti-Cartesian—character of Pascal’s account of subjectivity.3 Both scholars recognize that Pascal is frequently motivated by theological concerns. Still, without wishing to denigrate their work, it is also the case that neither Marion nor Carraud gives Pascal his full due as a theological thinker. Their account of human sin is thinner and less nuanced than Pascal’s own. For Pascal, as for Augustine, sin is duplicity and so duplicitous subjectivity is sinful subjectivity. Once we recognize this point, we can read the Pensées as a theological text from beginning to end. By contrast, Carraud insists that Pascal’s only properly theological account of the self is found in the dialectic of greatness and wretchedness; he thereby misses the fact that the rest of Pascal’s thoughts about duplicitous subjectivity also concern fallen subjectivity and are therefore equally theological.4 Marion, for his part, correctly argues that Pascal’s Augustinian account of the self equates subjectivity with love, but he does not fully explore Pascal’s own insight that excessive, tyrannical selflove is also socially expressed and duplicitous and therefore can

3 See Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, tr. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 277–345. According to Marion, Pascal identifies Cartesian thought with the second of his well-known “three orders” (body, mind, and charity, from fragment L308/S339) and tries, in various ways, to show that the third order (the order of love and grace) transcends the second. See also Vincent Carraud, Pascal et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1992), esp. 217–345. In general, the current scholarly consensus holds that Pascal was not only well-acquainted with, but even somewhat sympathetic to Descartes’s philosophy. At the same time, the consensus also holds that, in the Pensées, Pascal tried to undermine elements of that philosophy by showing its limitations. See e.g. Henri Gouhier, Blaise Pascal: Conversion et apologétique (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 108–93; Michel Le Guern, Pascal et Descartes (Paris: Nizet, 1971). 4 See Carraud’s “Remarks on the Second Pascalian Anthropology: Thought as Alienation,” Journal of Religion, 85 (2005), 539–54. Carraud distinguishes between a theological anthropology found in the fragments on greatness and wretchedness and a phenomenological and philosophical anthropology that concerns “the discourse of human existence” and is found in the fragments on glory, the imagination, justice, and diversion (545). According to Carraud, this second anthropology “is not ruled by any theological principle” (546). Carraud’s readings of particular fragments are often quite insightful but the strict separation he finds between the philosophical/existential, on the one hand, and the theological, on the other, is his own. It is not Pascal’s.

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manifest, paradoxically, as a kind of dependence.5 More work therefore remains to be done. In this chapter I aim to develop a fully theological, yet still Pascalian, account of human subjectivity. Pascal presents a portrait of fallen subjectivity, selfhood under the reign of sin. On this account, Pascal argues that the self is imaginary, in a special sense. It is one’s own imaginative construal of oneself. What I call my “self ” is just the story that I tell to myself about myself, my subjective narrative identity. This subjective self is an imaginary construct that typically does not correspond to the way I really am. In fact, the self is doubly imaginary, according to Pascal. One always sees oneself through the (imagined) eyes of other people. My subjective narrative identity is therefore the story that I imagine that other people would tell about me: my fantasy about your fantasy about me. I want to loom large in the thoughts of other people, and so I tell myself that I do. Pascal calls this doubly imaginary self the moi. I first present Pascal’s account of the moi, the false self, and then, as a way of making Pascal’s thought clearer, I present an extended example of a false self drawn from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Finally, I use Pascal’s account constructively to argue that at the deepest core of our subjectivity we cannot help but imitate God. Even after the Fall, to be a self is to imitate God. As sinners, our duplicitous subjectivity is a dreadful parody of God’s loving act of creation.

WHAT IS THE SELF? Before I present Pascal’s account of subjectivity, it is helpful to see how Pascal himself frames the question that account is meant to answer. In fragment L688/S567, Pascal straightforwardly asks: What is the self? (Qu’est-ce le moi?). Pascal asks but does not answer this question—the fragment ends in aporia. As he dismisses various solutions to his question, it becomes apparent that to be a self is to be a proper object of love but we are not told what kind of self, if any, could be such an object. 5 Furthermore, as I discuss in Ch. 7, neither Marion nor Carraud grasp the full weight of Pascal’s brief account of non-duplicitous, Trinitarian subjectivity.

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What is the self? (Qu’est-ce le moi?) A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I pass by, can I say he went there to see me? No, for he is not thinking of me in particular. But what about a person who loves someone for the sake of her beauty; does he love her? No, for smallpox, which will destroy beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her. And if someone loves me for my judgment or my memory, do they love me? Me, myself? No, for I could lose these qualities without losing myself. Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul? And how can one love the body or the soul except for the sake of such qualities, which are not what make up the self, since they are perishable? Would we love the substance of a person’s soul, in the abstract, whatever qualities might be in it? That is not possible, and it would be wrong. Therefore, we never love anyone, but only qualities. Let us then stop scoffing at those who win honor through their appointments and offices, for we never love anyone except through borrowed qualities. (L688/S567)

Rather than giving a direct answer to the fragment’s opening question, Pascal presents three scenarios: a pedestrian casually spotted from a window, a woman loved for the sake of her beauty, and someone else loved for the sake of his mental attributes. It is immediately striking that in all three scenarios, the “self ” in question is presented not as an agent, but as the passive recipient of the attention of others. Furthermore, the nature of that attention is also specified. In this fragment, at least, to be a self is to be the object of love.6 Even in the first situation, the wish that the man in the window should be “thinking of me in particular” connotes a desire for love. This fragment bears close scrutiny. It is significant that Pascal investigates the nature of the self by asking “what is the moi?” rather than “what am I?” as Descartes asks in his Meditations.7 The French word moi has no exact English equivalent. It corresponds to the regular pronoun “me,” of course, but it can also mean “the self ,” Here I straightforwardly follow Marion: “To become a self, I need to be neither seen, nor thought, nor known, but nothing less than loved” (On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, 324). 7 “What then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions.” Meditation II, in Descartes, Philosophical Writings, ii. 19 (at 7.28). For commentary, see Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, 322–33; Carraud, Pascal et la philosophie, 315–26; Paulette Carrive, “Lecture d’une Pensée de Pascal: ‘Qu’est-ce que le moi?,’ ” Les Études philosophiques, 3 (1983), 353–6. 6

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“myself ,” “the I,” or personal identity generally. As I discuss below, Pascal also uses the ordinary term le moi in a theoretical way, to name the doubly imaginary, socially constructed persona. In this fragment, Pascal’s emphasis on the accusative case instead of the nominative (Qu’est-ce le moi?) is clearly a methodological choice that anticipates the major themes of the fragment. The picture of the self on display here is seen most clearly when contrasted to that of Descartes. Indeed, many scholars believe that this fragment is a direct reaction to the Meditations, and that Pascal deliberately borrows and subverts key Cartesian images in it. At the broadest level, this fragment rejects Cartesian claims of autonomy and self-transparency. Pascal implies that introspection cannot reveal the nature of the self because the self is partly constituted from without. Whereas the Cartesian subject is separate from the world, separate even from the body that it inhabits, Pascal takes it for granted that to be a self is to be embedded in a network of relations, a world. Indeed, the “self ” considered as moi is dependent upon others for its very existence. Alone, I am “I” but I need others to be “me.” Consequently, if it is “me” that I am investigating (or, better, if I am not really an “I” at all, but a “me”) then I cannot properly study myself in isolation. Recall that toward the end of his second meditation, as Descartes seeks to understand the nature of the self, he speaks of looking out his window at the men on the street below. He judges that they are indeed men even though, strictly speaking, all he really sees are coats and hats. He concludes from this experiment that it is his mind, and not his bodily senses, that grasps the men, just as it is his mind that grasps the underlying essence of a piece of wax that is melted and reshaped until all its contingent qualities are stripped away. He then concludes that he himself is fundamentally mind, not body, and that he can perceive his own mind more clearly than anything else.8 Pascal presents a similar scene, but he inverts it. In Descartes, the self is the watcher at the window, the one who melts the wax, the one who voluntarily performs the philosophical therapy of meditation in order to establish its own certain existence and (only after so doing) the existence of others. In Pascal, the self is watched from the window, and its qualities are progressively stripped away as if it were the wax.

8

Philosophical Works, ii. 21–3 (at 7.33–4).

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When its qualities are stripped away, Pascal seems to suggest, nothing at all remains of the self and so nothing remains to be known or loved. In the fragment’s first scenario, the self as such is not really encountered at all, because it not made the object of loving attention. The second scenario declines to identify the self with the transient physical attributes that often elicit love. The third rejects the equation of the self with one’s subjective mental life (one’s judgment or memory) for the same reason. Pascal also specifically declines to identify the self with the substance of the soul. He thereby departs from the Aristotelian and scholastic traditions, since in classical metaphysics, a substance, by definition, is what underlies change.9 In those traditions, the substance of my soul could indeed be construed as that which I most truly am because the substance of my soul would preserve my identity through all temporal and physical changes. Pascal refuses to identify the self with the substance of the soul, because an abstract “soul-self ” cannot be a proper object of love. In this fragment, Pascal thus presents what might be called a negative ontology of the self. We are told that the self is not isolated from the world, not fully autonomous, not exclusively an agent, and not a unitary, imperishable substance. As is frequently the case with viae negativae, however, the fragment seems to end in aporia: it does not tell us anything about what the self actually is. Pascal suggests that we need to be seen, thought about, and, ultimately, loved in order to be; but what others see, know, and love is not us, but only “borrowed qualities.” At the fragment’s end, we have been given no answer to its opening question, nor have we learnt what kind of self can be an object of love.

THE MOI: THE FALSE SELF We learn Pascal’s first answer to this question elsewhere in the Pensées. If our subjectivity is called into being by love, it follows that the kind of self we are is determined by the kind of love that calls us into being. Thus, in the fallen world, under the reign of sin, our idolatrous, disordered love can only call into being a false, 9

See Edouard Morot-Sir, La Metaphysique dePascal (Paris: PUF, 1973), 56–8.

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imaginary self. The story of the birth of the false self is also Pascal’s account of fallen human subjectivity. According to Pascal, only an imaginary self can seem worthy of love and so each person pretends to possess desirable qualities that he does not really have: We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we try to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one. And if we are calm, or generous, or loyal, we are anxious to have it known so that we can attach these virtues to our other existence; we prefer to detach them from our real self so as to unite them with the other. We would cheerfully be cowards if that would acquire for us a reputation of bravery. How clear a sign of the nullity of our own being that we are not satisfied with one without the other and often exchange the one for the other! For anyone who would not die to save his honor would be infamous. (L806/S653)

Pascal here posits a duality in the self, a separation between our “imaginary being” that exists only in the minds of others and our own, “real” being, the precise nature of which is not specified. It seems fairly straightforward to map the imaginary being of L806/S653 onto the moi of L688/S567 (discussed above) and conclude that the imaginary being, the self as it exists “in the eyes of others,” is the moi that is constructed by the world.10 In contrast with the motif of passivity in the earlier fragment, however, now it appears that each person actively welcomes and constructs this separation. Pascal uses an array of first-person-plural action verbs to paint a picture of a self that is not only an agent but a whirlwind of activity. It thus corrects the rather one-sided picture of the self offered by L688/S567. We are not merely constructed by the world with no agency of our own; rather, we are co-authors of our imaginary selves. But we must also note the kind of activity to which fragment L806/S653 refers. The verbs Pascal deploys are, without exception, verbs of desiring, and collectively they paint a picture of the self as an agent whose only activity is craving: “we are not satisfied . . . we want . . . we try . . . we strive constantly . . . we are anxious . . . we prefer . . . ” And what we crave, without exception, is the

10 I return in due course to the point that an imaginary self with imaginary being seems to presuppose a real self with real being.

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esteem of others. Note, however, that our desire for esteem is markedly not the desire actually to be worthy of esteem, but rather a desire for esteem as such, regardless of whether we deserve it. Greatness of man. Our idea of man’s soul is so lofty that we cannot bear to be despised and not enjoy the esteem of a given soul. All the happiness of men lies in this esteem. (L411/S30) For whatever possession he may own on earth, whatever health or essential amenity he may enjoy, he is dissatisfied unless he also enjoys the good opinion of his fellows. He so highly values human reason that, however privileged he may be on earth, if he does not also enjoy a privileged position in human reason, he is not happy. This is the finest position on earth; nothing can deflect him from this desire, and this is the most indelible quality in the human heart. (L470/S707)

The “most indelible quality in the human heart” is the desire to “enjoy the good opinion of his fellows.” Yet this desire does not call forth virtuous projects of self-improvement, in which we seek to become ever more worthy of the esteem of others. Far from it. The desire for esteem is essentially duplicitous. In a slogan: the desire for esteem creates the desire to seem. It is easy to miss the full force of Pascal’s critique. He does not claim merely that the desire for esteem is one activity among others, activities performed by an otherwise substantial self. Rather, the relentless activity by which we pursue the esteem of others just is the moi, the false self identified by the fragments discussed above (L688/S567, L806/S653), and, furthermore, the moi just is the self—or at least the only self to which we have any epistemic access. Thus, for Pascal, the self is essentially duplicitous. Better—it is essentially an act of duplicity, duplicity in act. Elsewhere in the Pensées, Pascal presents and develops this claim. In a long and polished fragment entitled “self-love” (amour-propre), he argues that our subjectivity depends on social relationships, which themselves depend on joint projects of deception, pretense, and hypocrisy (L978/S743). The dialectic is complex. A person’s amourpropre causes him to deceive both himself and others, but it also causes him to pretend to believe those trying to deceive him. Pascal intends this complex dialectic as an account of subjectivity as such. Indeed, the fragment’s opening line asserts an equivalence between selfhood and self-love: “The nature of amour-propre and of this human self is to love only self and consider only self ” (La nature de

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l’amour-propre et de ce moi humain est de n’aimer que soi et de ne considerer que soi. L978/S743). The nature of amour-propre and of this human moi is to love only self and consider only self. But what is it to do? It cannot prevent the object of its love from being full of faults and wretchedness: it wants to be great and sees that it is small; it wants to be happy and sees that it is wretched; it wants to be perfect and sees that it is full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only their dislike and contempt. The predicament in which it thus finds itself arouses in it the most unjust and criminal passion that could possibly be imagined, for it conceives a deadly hatred for the truth which rebukes it and convinces it of its faults. It would like to do away with this truth, and not being able to destroy it as such, it destroys it, as best it can, in the consciousness of itself and others and it cannot bear to have them pointed out or noticed. It is no doubt an evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and unwilling to recognize them since this entails the further evil of deliberate self-delusion (illusion volontaire). We do not want others to deceive us; we do not think it is right for them to want us to esteem them more than they deserve; it is therefore not right either that we should deceive them and want them to esteem us more than we deserve . . . (L978/S743)11

The link between selfhood and self-love asserted in the fragment’s opening line follows from Pascal’s claim that love calls the self into being (L688/S653). It quickly becomes apparent that any self called into being by self-love must be essentially duplicitous. Accordingly, in

11 The term that Krailsheimer translates as “deliberate self-delusion” is illusion volontaire. In context, this term clearly refers to self-deception. Indeed, in 17th-cent. French, the term illusion by itself connotes delusion, possibly of demonic origin. The 1694 Dictionnaire de l’Academie francoise (p. 588) defines it as “an appearance or artifice by which one deceives a man . . . It is said more usually of the deceits that demons make, by making things appear otherwise than they are to the interior or exterior senses . . . It also signifies a thought, a chimerical imagination: This man has some illusions, is subject to illusions, feeds on illusions.” Furthermore, Pascal’s contemporary Pierre Nicole clearly uses illusion volontaire to mean self-deception. In his essay “On Self-Knowledge,” he writes: “Finally, if they do not disguise the laws of God, they disguise themselves to themselves. They attribute to themselves reasons and intentions which they do not have; and do not want to see those which they have. Thus while making a false assessment of their actions, they justify themselves to themselves throughout their whole life by the means of this illusion volontaire. Behold the sleep from which one must demand to be preserved . . . ” Pierre Nicole, Essais de Morale (1675), iii. 28–9.

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the fragment’s opening salvo, Pascal opposes self-lucidity to the desire for the love and esteem of other people. In the French, Pascal’s alliterative repetition of the verbs vouloir (to want) and se voir (to see oneself) draws attention to the gulf between what the self desires and what it knows to be true: il veut etre grand, il se voit petit; il veut etre heureux, et il se voit miserable . . . 12 The self doesn’t just notice the gulf between what it wants and what it is, however; it also actively tries to hide this gulf from itself and others. It “conceives a deadly hatred for the truth which rebukes it” and it “would like to do away with this truth” but it cannot. Instead, it destroys the truth “in the consciousness of itself and others”—not completely, however, but only “as best it can.” I think that there can be no doubt that this fragment describes a recognizable project of self-deception. The self not only wants esteem of others, it also wants to deserve it. But it also sees that it is wretched, small, and imperfect. Pascal writes that the self “wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only their dislike and contempt.” Since it cannot (we may suppose) successfully attack its own imperfections, it attacks the awareness of its imperfections, both in its own consciousness and in the consciousness of others. It is clear that Pascal is describing a complex process of outwardly directed pretense and inwardly directed self-deception. Yet, recalling the fragment’s first line, we must understand this process as an account of the self as such: selfhood as duplicity in act, once again. As the fragment proceeds, Pascal complicates his claim that we deceive others to earn their esteem. Although we do act deceivingly toward others, it turns out that they are not innocent victims and, in this fragment at least, they are not really even deceived. Rather, they see through our deceptions and deceive us in turn. What Pascal first calls deception is actually more like collusion in hypocrisy, since both sides pretend to accept the false appearances presented by the other. This aversion for the truth exists in differing degrees, but it is in everyone to some degree because it is inseparable from self-love. It is this false delicacy which makes those who have to correct others choose so many devious ways and qualifications of giving offense. They must minimize our faults, pretend to excuse them, and combine this with Nicholas Hammond makes this point in “Pascal’s Pensées and the Art of Persuasion,” in Hammond (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Pascal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 244. 12

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praise and marks of affection and esteem. Even then such medicine still tastes bitter to amour-propre . . . The result is that anyone who has an interest in winning our affection avoids rendering us a service which he knows to be unwelcome; we are treated as we want to be treated; we hate the truth and it is kept from us; we desire to be flattered and we are flattered; we like being deceived and we are deceived . . . Thus, human life is nothing but a perpetual illusion; there is nothing but mutual deception and flattery. No one talks about us in our presence as he would in our absence. Human relations are only based on this mutual deception; and few friendships would survive if everyone knew what his friend said about him behind his back, even though he spoke sincerely and dispassionately . . . ( L978/S743; see also L792/S646)

There is a shift in perspective in this passage. It is no longer just we who deceive others; those same others also deceive us. They “pretend” to excuse our faults, and pursue “many devious ways and qualifications” to avoid offending us. Of course, we are meant to understand that each person continually plays both the role of flatterer and flattered in this scenario, since “human relations are only based on this mutual deception.” Pascal’s claim that everyone deceptively flatters other people is actually somewhat unexpected. After all, the “aversion for the truth” and the “false delicacy” that Pascal criticizes are qualities that spring from disordered love of self, and yet they cause us to flatter the selfimage of others. We might expect him to say the opposite, since he holds that everyone wants to dominate everyone else (L597/S494). After all, if a person wishes to seem great, it would make sense for him to denigrate others, not flatter them, so that he himself would seem greater by comparison. Pascal’s insight to the contrary exposes the real dynamics of self-love. Universal self-love has the unintended consequence of creating universal flattery. My own purely selfish goal gives me a motive to advance your equally selfish goal. In his examination of self-love in the Pensées, Christian Lazzeri argues that, for Pascal, this system of deceptive flattery is actually a structural requirement of the disordered self-love that is a product of the Fall.13 Pascal holds that the human self is finite, but is the object of its own infinite love. Only an infinite entity can serve as the proper object of an infinite love, however, and so the self faces two choices. It 13

Lazzeri, Force et justice, 9–10, 40–52.

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can either redirect its infinite love toward a properly infinite object, or it can try to modify its own dimensions until it seems like an infinite object. The first option, conversion, is at the heart of Pascal’s apologetic project. The second option is the one that most people pursue. On the second option, the self tries to become everything, to arrogate to itself all possible reality (L149/S182, L421/S680, L617/510). It is not at all clear how the self could attain this goal, however. Certainly, it cannot really become everything. Infinity necessarily remains out of reach, but another option seems promising. If the self cannot modify its actual dimensions, it can at least modify its apparent dimensions. More precisely, it can modify its own knowledge of its true dimensions so that it seems infinite to itself, and therefore seems like a proper object of its own infinite love. Yet reality constantly intrudes—the self is always embedded in a society of other selves and each of these others, by their very existence, contradicts the self ’s own claims to infinity. So in order to achieve its goal, the self needs a way of drawing these other selves into its own project of selfdeification. The self therefore adopts an external point of view on itself and its activities. It tries to expand its own dimensions by expanding the space that it takes up in the thought of others. When the self is esteemed by others to the greatest possible degree, it will have arrogated to itself the greatest possible being, and thereby achieved a cheap version of its corrupt goal.14 As fragment L978/S743 draws to a close, Pascal returns to the idea that the source of this mutual deception lies in the human subject as such: Man is nothing therefore but disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard to others. He does not want to be told the truth. He avoids telling it to others, and all these tendencies, so remote from justice and reason, are naturally rooted in his heart. (L978/S743)

This final move is significant because it emphasizes that, according to Pascal, the mutual deception that characterizes all social relationships is not just a culturally contingent feature of his own (admittedly duplicitous) society. Mutual deception is a precondition of any 14 Lazzeri’s analysis is correct as an exegesis of Pascal, but as discussed in Ch. 1, it seems descriptively inadequate to say that every person always wishes to dominate all others. Fortunately, the dialectic at work here can easily be modified to accommodate the claim that sometimes people identify themselves with some other object—another person, an ideology, a nation, etc.—and try to lend all possible being to it.

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human relationship because it is “naturally rooted” in the heart, the seat of love and subjectivity. The human being as such just is “disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard to others” (L’homme n’est donc que déguisement, que mensonge et hypocrisie, et en soi-même et à l’égard des autres). By reading the fragments on the desire for esteem alongside the fragments on the moi and on self-love, it is clear that, for Pascal, the self just is the moi, the imaginary, socially constructed self formed by dynamic interaction with other people. This imaginary self is the only proper object of a most improper self-love. Pascal’s logic is brutal: to be a self is to be an object of love (L688/S567), but the self, considered in itself, is “full of faults and wretchedness,” and possesses no qualities that can compel real love (L978/S743). It follows that to be a self at all is to be an imaginary self that compels only duplicitous love (L806/ S653). In all of these fragments, the self is de-centered: it is not found in Cartesian self-presence but in the imaginations of other people. It is true that Pascal writes elsewhere that “my self [significantly, le moi] consists in my thought” (L135/S167), but fragment L806/S653 shows us how to interpret this statement. My self may consist in my thought, but my thought consists in thinking about myself in the thoughts of another.15 My self is thus doubly imaginary. It is my own imaginary projection of how I exist in the thoughts and imaginations of other people.16 Although he himself doesn’t quite put it this way, according to Pascal, our selfhood is a fantasy. The moi is the only self to which we have access, and it is inherently false and duplicitous. According to Pascal, the selves that we manifest to the world are only polite fictions that conceal our libido dominandi. To be a self at all is to be a false, imaginary self that exists for the sake of imagined esteem. The tendency toward duplicity that infects our interpersonal relationships also infects our very subjectivity. We are multiply oriented away from Here I follow Carraud, “Remarks on the Second Pascalian Anthropology,” 552–3. Contra Carraud, however, I read this fragment as a key instance of Pascal’s fully theological anthropology. To think oneself in the thought of another is itself a form of sinful pride, in which the self tries to become everything, if not in reality, then in the imaginations of other people. 16 It might be more accurate to say one’s subjective narrative identity is a single imaginary story, doubly told, because it is the identity that one imaginatively constructs for oneself, as filtered through one’s imaginative reconstructions of the thoughts of others (which are sometimes based on actual interactions, of course). 15

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the truth. We eschew self-knowledge about who we are and what we do, as we lovingly attend to our imaginary selves and manifest them to the world. Pascal’s claim that to be a self is to be a false, duplicitous, self requires qualification. As a formal matter, the distinction between true and false selves inevitably collapses if there are no true selves at all. And it is obviously not the case, as he would have it, that no one ever has any qualities that genuinely deserve love or that no one ever loves others because of their genuinely lovable qualities. These claims are best read as the work of a moralist and not a metaphysician, one who exaggerates for effect in order to reveal deep truths about human nature and human relationships. Pascal’s exaggerated language advances the robustly theological claim that only God is worthy of unrestricted love. On this understanding, the true self is the self that ceases to be a moi precisely insofar as it imitates Christ by loving God above all things. I return to this point in Chapter 7. For now, I would like to separate Pascal’s claim that all selves are false selves into distinct ontological and epistemological claims. The ontological claim is simply that the false, socially constructed, imaginary self (the moi) does not correspond to the way one really is— that is, to an objectively accurate account of one’s dispositions, engagements, and so forth. The epistemological claim is that it is very difficult—I do not quite want to say impossible—to distinguish the moi from an accurate depiction of oneself. We are never finally “alone” with ourselves, because we are always imagining ourselves as we exist in the minds of others, even if this means reflexively becoming an other to ourselves. Thus, we are never completely separate from the moi, or from the patterns of deception that call it into being.

THE MOI AND SELF-INTERPRETATION If every self is a false self, a moi, it is equally clear that this condition is no accident, according to Pascal. We do not just find ourselves trapped by the patterns of deception and self-deception that create the moi. Instead, as fallen subjects we actively construct our imaginary selves in a joint performance of tacit cooperation with other duplicitous subjects. The duplicitous subject, like a player on the stage, enacts his own false self-understanding and in so doing,

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reinforces it and maintains it in being. We actively construct our imaginary selves, we want to become them, and we try to manifest them in the world. We want to inhabit these false selves utterly and so we try to divert our own attention from the fact that they are false. Consider again fragment L978/S743, the long fragment on self-love and self-deception. That fragment is about the immoderate love that people have for themselves, and their concomitant demand that others ratify that love. For Pascal, the moi results from an axiological blunder about the value of the self. The relevant notion of value is a thick conjunction of moral worth, beauty, and fulfillment. What the self desires, and knows it does not possess, is a sheen of greatness and perfection that compels the love of others. Yet the qualities the self does possess are, in the classical Greek sense, shameful: wretchedness, faults, and flaws that deserve only the contempt of others. The self ’s axiological blunder is not an isolated mistake, but a form of moral perversity that infects its every engagement and facilitates its tyrannical behavior toward the world at large. How can we so thoroughly misapprehend our own value? Pascal’s answer begins with claim that the will is disordered, bent away from the true source of value and lovingly oriented toward false goods. As we attempt to satisfy our disordered desires, we develop habitual patterns of thought and action that shape us into moral agents who are prone to deception and self-deception. Furthermore, these habitual patterns are reproduced and reinforced by the duplicitous social world in which we are embedded. In a more contemporary idiom, we can say that the sinner performs the moi when he falsely interprets himself and his projects. Insofar as he is a moi, the sinner lacks self-knowledge, because if he were truly to know himself, he would know himself as sinful and fallen. His self-knowledge would result in moral change. It follows that the sinner, as sinner, cannot really know himself. As Charles Taylor puts it: There is such a thing as self-lucidity . . . but the achievement of such lucidity means moral change, that is, it changes the object known. At the same time, error about oneself is not just an absence of correspondence [to the facts about oneself]; it is also in some form inauthenticity, bad faith, self-delusion, repression of one’s human feelings, or something of

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the kind; it is a matter of the quality of what is felt just as much as what is known about this . . . 17

Elsewhere in the same work, Taylor argues that one’s beliefs about one’s own mental life partly constitute that mental life. Regardless of whether that further thesis is true, it is certainly the case that one does not come to know oneself in exactly the same way as one comes to know some external state of affairs. The project of attaining genuine self-knowledge is also a project of moral development. Conversely, being wrong about the value of oneself and one’s projects is less a matter of being mistaken than of being duplicitous. This is what it means to say that we enact the false self: we deceive ourselves and others about our own moral worth. When we join Pascal’s analysis of the moi to his analysis of attractiveness and rapport, we can see again why the fallen self so often hates the truth. As discussed in Chapter 1, Pascal writes that “there is a certain model of attractiveness and beauty consisting in a certain relation (rapport) between our nature, weak or strong as it may be, and the thing which pleases us” (L585/S486). If we are attracted to things that fit in with, resemble, and conform to our natures, and if we also have a false understanding of our natures, then we are likely to be attracted to false beliefs, beliefs that reinforce that false understanding. Conversely, we are likely to reject beliefs—like the belief in God, or the belief that we are fallen—that threaten to destabilize our false self-understandings. According to Pascal, such is our situation. Our attraction to the beautiful but empty forms of the imagination has led each of us to construct a moi, a “self ” that is a mere fantasy.

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A FALSE SELF? AN EXAMPLE FROM GEORGE ELIOT’S MIDDLEMARCH Pascal’s account of fallen subjectivity is provocative, but opaque. According to Pascal, every self is a false self, a moi. However striking, it is not entirely clear what this claim amounts to in practice. Nor is Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 26. 17

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entirely clear what it means to say that, on Pascal’s account, our subjectivity is performative, that we enact the false self and thereby hold it in being. Yet the moi is a key concept for understanding Pascal’s views about the cognitive consequences of the Fall. Moreover, my own account of self-deceptive moral reasoning presupposes it.18 It is therefore worthwhile to present a fuller and more concrete picture of the false self. I have chosen a literary example of a false self, drawn from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The example that I have in mind comes near the end of the novel, in chapter 70, when the ostensibly pious Nicholas Bulstrode hastens the death of his sick enemy, John Raffles, even though Raffles had been entrusted to his care. Of course Eliot did not take herself to be depicting the Pascalian moi as such, but her portrait of the self-deceptive Bulstrode nevertheless reveals very well what it is like to perform the false self. The facts of the case are these: Nicholas Bulstrode is a pious, wealthy banker who has always presented himself to the people of Middlemarch as a pillar of social respectability. Unbeknownst to the community, however, in his younger days, he was an active member of an illegal fencing operation that trafficked in stolen goods. Worse, he lied to his first wife about her missing daughter and grandson just so that he himself could inherit her estate. John Raffles, an itinerant ne’er-do-well, knows Bulstrode’s secrets and threatens blackmail. When Raffles falls ill and begins raving, Bulstrode needs to know whether Raffles has revealed his secrets, or whether they remain safe, so he summons Dr Lydgate to treat him. Although Raffles is very sick, Lydgate concludes that he will likely recover, as long as he is watched carefully and given no alcohol whatsoever, under any circumstances. At Bulstrode’s insistence, he alone hears Dr Lydgate’s instructions and he promises to watch over Raffles. Naturally, it would be quite convenient for Bulstrode if Raffles were to die. Over the course of the next day and night, Bulstrode wrestles with his conscience about his desire to be rid of his blackmailer forever. He repeatedly fantasizes about Raffles’s death, and hopes that divine providence will deliver it. Whatever prayers he [Bulstrode] might lift up, whatever statements he might inwardly make of this man’s wretched spiritual condition, and the duty he himself was under to submit to the punishment divinely 18

I develop this account across Chs 4 through 6.

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appointed for him rather than to wish evil for another—through all this effort to condense words into a solid mental state, there pierced and spread with irresistible vividness the images of the events he desired. And in the train of these images came their apology. He could not but see the death of Raffles, and see in it his own deliverance . . . Should Providence in this case award death, there was no sin in contemplating death as the desirable issue—if he kept his hand from hastening it—if he scrupulously did what was prescribed . . . intention was everything in the question of right and wrong.19

Because he holds that “intention is everything in the question of right and wrong,” he tries to put aside his desire to harm Raffles and so he resolves to obey Lydgate’s orders: “Why should he have got into any argument [with himself] about the validity of these orders? It was only the common trick of desire—which avails itself of any irrelevant skepticism, finding larger room for itself in all uncertainty about effects, in every obscurity that looks like the absence of law” (673). Later in the day, Bulstrode reverses a previous decision and agrees to lend money to Dr Lydgate. Eliot writes that he does not examine the purity of the intentions that led to this reversal: “He did not measure the quantity of diseased motive which had made him wish for Lydgate’s goodwill, but the quantity was none the less actively there, like an irritating agent in his blood” (675). Bulstrode’s “diseased motive” is, of course, the desire to co-opt Lydgate and keep him from asking uncomfortable questions, should Raffles happen to die during the night. In the hidden recesses of his heart, Bulstrode’s desires are getting the better of him: A man vows, and yet will not cast away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow. (676)

Eventually, he tires of staying with Raffles and summons his servant, Mrs Abel, to keep watch in his place. Though she explicitly asks about the details of Raffles’s care, Bulstrode does not forbid her to give him alcohol, and later, when she asks for permission to give him some brandy, he even gives her the key to the wine cellar. Eliot tells us that 19 George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 672. Further citations of this edn will be given in the text.

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Mrs Abel’s request prompted a “struggle” within Bulstrode and emphasizes the “husky” quality of his voice when he agrees to give Mrs Abel the key. But she doesn’t tell us what, if anything, he thought at the time, only that by the next morning, his conscience was untroubled: Early in the morning—about six—Mr. Bulstrode rose and spent some time in prayer. Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action! Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections? Bulstrode had not yet unraveled in his thought the confused promptings of the last four-and-twenty hours. (678)

Raffles soon falls into a sleep from which he will never awake. As Bulstrode watches him die, his conscience is still clear: As he sat there and beheld the enemy of his peace going irrevocably into silence, he felt more at rest than he had done for many months. His conscience was soothed by the enfolding wing of secrecy, which seemed just then like an angel sent down for his relief. (678)

Note that Bulstrode’s first reaction is relief that “the enfolding wing of secrecy” will protect him from any accusation of wrongdoing. This suggests that he is aware of his misdeed. On the other hand, Eliot also emphasizes that Bulstrode does not acknowledge his complicity in Raffles’s death, not even to himself. He dismisses his own responsibility with rationalizations. He asks himself overly narrow questions that imply his innocence: “And who could say that the death of Raffles had been hastened? Who knew what would have saved him?” (679). He persuades himself that the real cause of Raffles’s death is unknowable, since he might have died anyway, even if Lydgate’s orders had been followed exactly. Similarly, he preserves his own sense of innocence by focusing on the (morally irrelevant) fact that his guilt cannot be proven publicly. Even five days later, “He had not confessed to himself yet that he had done anything in the way of contrivance to this end [Raffles’s death]; he had accepted what seemed to have been offered. It was impossible to prove that he had done anything which hastened the departure of that man’s soul” (685). Henceforth when he prays, he represents his sins toward Raffles as hypothetical and prays for forgiveness “if I have herein transgressed” (692). Needless to say, despite his too easy conscience,

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Bulstrode does not ever tell Dr Lydgate about the brandy and— interestingly—Lydgate doesn’t ever ask whether his instructions were properly carried out, although he is suspicious.

NICHOLAS BULSTRODE AS A PASCALIAN MOI According to Pascal, after the Fall our very subjectivity is duplicitous and false. Moreover, we jointly construct our false selves in complicity with the wider world. The claim that we performatively enact our false selves is just the claim that every sinner engages in a mutually reinforcing play of deception and self-deception. Thus human life is nothing but a perpetual illusion; there is nothing but mutual deception and flattery . . . Human relations are only based on this mutual deception . . . Man is therefore nothing but disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy; both in himself and with regard to others. He does not want to be told the truth. He avoids telling it to others, and all these tendencies, so remote from justice and reason are naturally rooted in his heart. (L978/S743)

Eliot’s Bulstrode is an apt example of the fallen, false self—“this human moi”—because he exposes the “mutual deception and flattery” and aversion to the truth that characterizes both the fallen world and the fallen human subject. In that light, Eliot’s portrayal suggests four descriptive theses about the moi. These theses are not necessary or sufficient conditions. They are more like thick descriptions about this particular case that plausibly generalize to other cases. They allow us to get a better grip on what it means to say that after the Fall, every self is a false self. Of course, I hope that even Pascal would not say that every human being is a moral monster on the level of Nicholas Bulstrode. Still, the Bulstrode case reveals some of the general contours of the false self very well.

(i) Performing the False Self is an Ongoing, Habitual Project The first thesis concerns the way the false self is enacted. Performing the moi is an ongoing “project” and not just the result of a single

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discreet duplicitous act. Moreover, it is a habitual project, which means that it is rarely the result of explicit, consciously avowed, deception at all. Rather, over time, our deceptive dispositions and behaviors tend to harden into habits, which allows us to continue pursuing them without explicit self-monitoring. To be sure, as an analytical tool, we can say that Bulstrode falsely believes a series of individual propositions like: “I did not hasten the death of Raffles” or “I am not morally responsible for Raffles’s death.” But this way of describing his case obscures as much as it clarifies. For Bulstrode could plausibly be said to deceive himself about countless additional connected propositions, e.g. that he does not wish to buy Lydgate’s silence, that his desire for Raffles’s death played no role in his decision to allow him to receive alcohol, that Raffles’s death could not have been prevented, that he is morally exonerated by the absence of empirical proof of his guilt, that he is not the kind of person who would hasten the death of an enemy, that he is a good Christian who only does the will of God, that he deserves all his wealth, that he deserves the esteem of his fellow townsmen, etc. These can be multiplied almost ad infinitum. There is no conceptual barrier to treating each one in isolation, but this seems quite artificial. Instead, all of these beliefs are ingredients in a single project of duplicity. This ongoing project is what it means to say that Bulstrode enacts his false self.

(ii) The False Self is Socially Expressed and, Therefore, Interpersonal As Eliot describes him, Bulstrode is not only a self-deceiver but also a hypocrite and a deceiver of others who is very concerned about his public identity. Eliot’s portrait thereby serves as a clear example of the value of Pascal’s analysis of the moi as a social fiction, as well as the socially expressed nature of amour-propre. Bulstrode is a hypocrite because he lords his supposed virtue over the rest of the town, and does not admit that he himself conspicuously fails to live up to his own ideals. He is also a deceiver, by commission and omission, because he hides his true past from other townsfolk, including his own wife. In a deeper sense, Bulstrode’s hypocrisy goes beyond his specific actions and assertions. It is woven into his way of life. This paragon of country respectability made his money by trafficking in

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stolen goods and hoarding a fortune that properly belonged to a penniless widow and her son, after all. He will do almost anything to protect his carefully crafted public persona, and he fears exposure above all because it would mean that “he must quail before the glance of those towards whom he had habitually assumed the attitude of a reprover” (694). Though he is a deceiver and a hypocrite, it must also be noted that Bulstrode’s project of duplicity succeeds only through the tacit cooperation of other people. Although the town eventually turns against him, Bulstrode’s self-deceit is enabled by some of his fellow citizens, in particular Dr Lydgate and Mrs Abel. While it cannot be said that either of them intentionally conspired with Bulstrode, Eliot does say that they both had suspicions about him that they did not voice. Their silence allows Bulstrode to continue to divert his attention from his deeds and so furthers his project of self-deception. Eliot’s point is an important one. The actions and, especially, the omissions of our colleagues—the unasked question, the unpressed argument—these are mechanisms of self-deception no less than our own secret desires and intentions.

(iii) The False Self is a False Interpretation of the Self As Pascal insists, and as the Bulstrode episode shows, sinful selfdeception is essentially a first-person affair. Bulstrode deceives himself about his own moral responsibility, his own motives, and his own engagements. In a broader sense, he deceives himself about his own moral character and, what amounts to the same thing, about his identity. It is clear that Bulstrode’s belief that he is morally virtuous is constitutive of his sense of identity. Eliot says that imagining that other people know the truth about how he made his fortune is like imagining his own death.20 Not all beliefs about the self are similarly constitutive of one’s identity. For example, suppose that, late in life, Bulstrode learnt that he had actually been born in Manchester instead of in London. He might be shocked, but he would still be recognizably the same person, to himself and others. Learning that 20 “ . . . his fears were such as belong to a man who cares to maintain his recognized supremacy: the loss of high consideration from his wife as from every one else who did not clearly hate him out of enmity to the truth, would be as the beginning of death to him” (585).

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he is not, finally, a good person would not be at all like learning that he is from Manchester. Learning that he is not a good person would entail fundamentally re-evaluating himself and crafting a new identity, a new picture of himself. He engages in his project of sinful self-deception precisely in order to avoid confronting the truth about himself, and to protect his prideful self-image. It is also worth attending carefully to the matters about which Bulstrode does and does not deceive himself. As a heuristic device, we can group some of the above propositions together and say, summarily, that Bulstrode deceives himself about whether he is morally responsible for Raffles’s death. By contrast, note that he does not deceive himself about the empirical fact that Lydgate issued certain instructions or even about whether he gave the wine cellar key to Mrs Abel. Indeed, if he were to sincerely deny that he gave the wine cellar key to Mrs Abel at all, we might be forced to say that he was more than self-deceived. We might even have to say that he was mentally unbalanced. Similarly, the sinner does not just deceive himself about whether some specific action or project is good. The sinner also deceives himself about the self—about what a self fundamentally is, and about what kind of autonomy it can have. The Pascalian sinner is moi because he is both a deceiver and a self-deceiver who constructs a false, godlike self and tries to convince himself and the world that this false self is real and beautiful.21 Thus to be a sinful moi is to interpret oneself and one’s moral engagements falsely. Sinful self-deception takes place at the level of evaluation and interpretation, and not only at the level of observation or bare factual description, and so when Bulstrode deceives himself, he does not just make false empirical judgments. For example, he does not come to believe the false proposition “I, Bulstrode, am not responsible for Raffles’s death” solely because he misapprehends empirical evidence. He also must misinterpret a range of different considerations about what moral responsibility entails, whether there 21 Bearing in mind that not all sinners are guilty of the sin of pride, we can also imagine a sinner who has steeped himself not in prideful self-assertion but in sloth, apathy, and despair. Here the sinner’s disordered love would take the form of treating some created good other than the self as the center and source of value, or of simply failing to recognize the self ’s genuine worth. Such a case could still be one of sinful self-deception. The sinner would still acquiesce to an order of value derived from the world, rather than God, and accept instead an imagined portrait of himself as unduly weak or powerless, but still no less false.

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are mitigating factors, what God wills, and so forth. Bulstrode deceives himself about his moral responsibility because of the way he misinterprets these considerations.

(iv) The Sinner Sustains the False Self by Lying to Himself The foregoing theses all suggest that the duplicitous performance that constitutes the moi is directed at the self as much as at the world. Moreover, that performance is not merely an act of self-deception (a phenomenon that can take many forms) but something even darker. The false self can only be sustained by the strongest form of self-deception, lying to oneself. As I discuss in the next two chapters, even the idea of lying to oneself smacks of paradox, because it seems to require that a single agent believes the truth (as liar) and yet also believes its contradiction (as the victim of the lie). It also seems to require that a single agent intentionally puts himself into this conflicting mental state. Yet this paradoxical mental state is exactly the state that nourishes the Pascalian moi. On a plausible reading, Eliot presents Bulstrode as someone who lies to himself because he intentionally cultivates contradictory beliefs in order persuade himself that he is morally blameless. On the one hand, Bulstrode seems to recognize that he is morally responsible for Raffles’s death even though never attends to this belief in explicit consciousness. He certainly knows that he failed to relay Lydgate’s direct orders and that he gave Mrs Abel the key to the wine cellar. His relief that “the enfolding wing of secrecy” would hide the true circumstances of Raffles’s death also suggests that he knows that he is at fault. On the other hand, Eliot does not present Bulstrode simply as an opportunistic liar, since she says that he does not admit his immoral acts even to himself. And in an earlier episode of selfdeception, in which Bulstrode deceives himself about the morality of lying to his wife about the location of her daughter and grandson, Eliot strongly suggests that he successfully cultivated a false belief in his innocence even though he also knew the truth of his guilt.22 In the 22 “ . . . his soul had become saturated with the belief that he did everything for God’s sake, being indifferent to it for his own” (588). See also: “There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires

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episode presently under discussion, Eliot also repeatedly says that Bulstrode attributes Raffles’s death to divine providence, which implies that he believes that he himself is not responsible for it.23 Finally, note that when he is directly confronted with his crimes at a town meeting, Bulstrode’s conscience “turned venomously on him with the full-grown fang of a discovered lie” (694). It seems reasonable to say that his conscience strikes back with such surprising venom only because he both did and did not believe that he was not morally responsible for Raffles’s death. So it seems likely that Bulstrode believes that he is responsible for Raffles’s death and yet also believes that he is not.24 Eliot also presents Bulstrode as someone who intentionally cultivates his conflicting beliefs. To be fair, she does write that Bulstrode does not “distinctly mean” to let Raffles die, and says instead that homicidal desires are “at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles” even as he tries to resist them (676). This could suggest a diagnosis of unintentional self-deception, in which Bulstrode’s evil desires directly cause his beliefs and actions, without the mediation of any intentional agency. On the other hand, Bulstrode’s relevant behavior unfolds over the course of days, adapts to changing circumstances, and is complex and goal-directed. At least five days separate his initial decision to loan money to Lydgate from his exposure at the town meeting, and Bulstrode does not admit his guilt to himself during this entire time. Given the duration of this episode of self-deception, it seems more plausible to say that he intentionally deceives himself. Indeed, according to Eliot, Bulstrode deceives himself with a persuasive inner dialogue that sometimes takes the form of prayer. He into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs” (590). The story of this episode of selfdeception, which lasts for many years, is told in Eliot’s ch. 61. 23 See Eliot, Middlemarch, 676 and 685, and also the foreshadowing on p. 585: Bulstrode “felt a cold certainty at his heart that Raffles—unless providence sent death to hinder him—would come back to Middlemarch before long. And that certainty was a terror.” 24 I admit that these passages are more suggestive than decisive. In each of these examples, it is also possible that Bulstrode simply diverts his attention from his knowledge that he is responsible. He could do this without also forming the contradictory belief that he is not responsible. Close reading alone allows but does not entail the further claim that Bulstrode actually believes the contradictory proposition that he is not responsible for Raffles’s death. I take this ambiguity as a sign that Eliot’s example is psychologically realistic. A real-world example would be equally hard to parse.

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uses inward prayer to chip away at his own conscience both before and after his misdeed: Raffles dead was the image that brought release, and indirectly he prayed for that way of release, beseeching that, if it were possible, the rest of his days here below might be freed from the threat of an ignominy which would break him utterly as an instrument of God’s service. (676; see also 678)

Eliot also says that, throughout the course of his life, Bulstrode has used self-talk and prayer as a form of rationalization. For instance, in his youth, he had to rationalize away his worries about joining the illegal fencing operation: He remembered his first moments of shrinking. They were private, and were filled with arguments; some of these taking the form of prayer . . . And it was true that Bulstrode found himself carrying on two distinct lives; his religious activity could not be incompatible with his business as soon as he had argued himself into not feeling it incompatible . . . his soul had become more saturated with the belief that he did everything for God’s sake, being indifferent to it for his own. (587)

It seems clear that Bulstrode knows that he is guilty of moral wrongdoing, but soothes his conscience with interior speech. In other words, Bulstrode persuades himself to believe something that he knows is false. In short, Bulstrode lies to himself about his own moral responsibility. He intentionally cultivates the false belief that he is not responsible for Raffles’s death, even while he also recognizes that he is responsible. On Pascal’s analysis this behavior is exactly what we should expect. Bulstrode is a clear example of the Pascalian moi, who lies to himself and to the world in order to win the esteem of a fallen world.

PARODYING GOD BY PERFORMING THE FALSE SELF As presented so far, Pascal’s account of the false self, however striking, could easily be construed as moralistic, existential, and wholly secular, without reference to the divine. Yet the performance of the false self is at root a sinful performance. The patterns of deception and

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self-deception that call the false self into being are nothing other than a perverse imitation of God’s own good activity of creating and sustaining the world. The false self is best understood as a parodic imitation of God. The project of enacting the false self certainly displays the performative incoherence of sin. Pride and the desire for esteem often walk hand-in-hand and so it is easy to overlook the fact that they are not natural partners at all. Whereas pride seems like a kind of selfassertion, the desire for esteem seems more like a form of selfdispersal, a kind of dependence on others. Although the desire for esteem is spawned by an idolatrous love of self, and although it may be “the most indelible quality of the human heart” (L470/S707), it surely cannot be the desire of someone who genuinely believes himself to be an autonomous god-man, secure in the knowledge that he is a self-contained law unto himself. Rather, the desire for esteem is more like a kind of dependence. If “all the happiness of men” lies in the approval of others (L470/S707), then surely we each depend on that approval in a very basic way. Everyone pursues an incoherent project of self-glorification through obsequious, selfabnegating dependence. This incoherent project is, again, nothing other than the project of publicly performing the false self. Yet now it seems that this performance has two moments. Interestingly, each moment corresponds to a traditional kind of sin, pride (self-assertion), on the one hand, and sloth (self-dispersal), on the other. In the moment of self-assertion, the duplicitous subject rejects the world as it is and cognitively tries to remake it in some favored image. In more conventional terms: because he finds the truth about himself and his projects threatening, he rejects it in favor of a falsehood. This can be understood as a kind of prideful self-assertion, willfully imposing one’s own desired interpretation on the world. In the moment of self-dispersal, on the other hand, the duplicitous subject consents to the deceptive order of the world by agreeing to play a character in a social drama that aims at hiding the truth about himself and others. He conspires with other people to construct and inhabit an imaginary world that is designed to enable everyone to preserve their false self-understandings. I choose the words, “consent,” “conspire,” and “enable” with care, in order to signal that the agency involved in constructing the false self is peculiar. It is both active and passive at the same time. Selfassertion describes the way the duplicitous subject constructs his false

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interpretations in the first place. In the moment of self-assertion, the duplicitous subject recognizes and rejects the truth about himself, and so he is not merely ignorant, mistaken, or a victim of the deception of others. Yet the duplicitous subject can successfully construct and inhabit an imaginary self only because his fellow human beings are themselves also deceivers and self-deceivers. All sides work together to facilitate mutual duplicity. The social mechanisms of self-dispersal therefore enable the duplicitous subject to preserve his false selfunderstanding. Without them, he could not divert his attention from unwelcome truths about himself; nor could he continue believing the more welcome falsehoods. This dual structure reveals the deepest, most incoherent structure of sinful subjectivity. Whereas we should passively accept the truth wherever we encounter it, we instead actively impose our own false interpretations on the world (self-assertion). And whereas we should actively resist the world’s corrupt blandishments and try to develop a coherent and virtuous self, we instead passively consent to the duplicitous, imaginary self suggested by the world (self-dispersal). Because Pascal treats the moi theologically, and because he holds that the fall into duplicity is an evaluative fall, he also enables us to see the aesthetic and evaluative dimensions of the sinner’s self-deceit. The Pascalian sinner does not simply fail to recognize the true order of value. He does not just make a mistake about the good. Rather, when he tries to impose his own order of value on the world, he makes a willful mistake: he lies to himself about the good. He tries to imbue created goods with a moral value derived from some source other than God. In so doing, he seeks to usurp God’s role as the ultimate source of goodness. The sinner may strive to usurp God’s role, but he necessarily fails to succeed, and thereby displays the incoherence of sin, the inversion of activity and passivity. In the Raffles affair, for example, Bulstrode is active where he should be passive: instead of passively accepting the objective moral order and realizing that a human life is more valuable than his own reputation, he actively tries to remake the moral order in his own image by reversing its real values. Similarly, he is passive where he should be active. The townspeople want to see him as an upright country banker; instead of actively repudiating this portrait as false, he passively accepts their portrayal of him and thereby sustains his belief in his own innocence. He passively takes refuge in the mutual interplay of vanity, hypocrisy, and deception that

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characterizes Middlemarch social life and lets it support his false sense of self. Bulstrode rejects God instead of rejecting the fallen world. With his analysis of the moi, Pascal allows us to see the full dimensions of his sinful project. Thus, in the full light of a robust theology of sin, the false self appears as not just logically incoherent but morally dreadful. The false self is nothing but the product of an attempt, ever frustrated, to imitate the Creator. When the duplicitous subject turns away from God in his duplicity, he mocks and parodies God’s own good activity. God loves and creates the world—that which is not God—and thereby holds it in being; creation is good because God makes it so. The duplicitous subject loves not God, nor the world as it is, nor even himself as he is. Instead, he loves a constructed, imaginary self, which can flourish only in an imaginary world of his own devising. That is what he lovingly creates and holds in being; he tries to make it good but he cannot. With this incoherent activity, he inverts the dialectic of presence and absence that characterizes God’s agency in the world. On Pascal’s understanding, God’s kenotic absence from the world allows the world to exist, and is therefore more real than the presence of anything that is not God (see fragment L449/S690). On the other hand, the duplicitous subject’s mode of being in the world is thoroughly false: insofar as he is a moi, a false self, he is present in the world at all only to the degree that he is not real, only to the degree that he withdraws from the real world and into an imaginary world of his own contrivance.25 Whereas Pascal’s God hides from the world because the world cannot bear God’s goodness, the duplicitous subject hides from the world because the world cannot bear his own sinfulness. It may seem strange to say that a thoroughly fallen world cannot bear the presence of sin. Yet even in a fallen world, we are not like Milton’s Satan. “Evil be thou my good” is not the cry of an intelligible human agent. Even in a fallen world, sin must appear in the guise of the good, which is why duplicity is its ever-present henchman. This, then, is Pascal’s account of fallen human subjectivity.

25

evil.

With this talk of withdrawal, I mean to echo Augustine’s privative account of

4 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology It is in the moral life that we most dramatically experience the dark effects of the Fall. Even when we try to be good, we fail. More often, we do not try at all. Worse, we convince ourselves that we are good when we plainly are not. Pascal’s account of the moral life presupposes his indictment of the selfish moi. The Pascalian moi is a false, imaginary self, and it is inherently duplicitous. Indeed, the moi is itself a fiction, constructed jointly by self and world, purposefully—and lovingly—created to allow us to pursue immoral goals under the cloak of apparent virtue. It is not surprising that this division and duplicity at the core of the self produces division and duplicity in our moral judgments, nor that the moral life is rife with self-deception.

SINFUL SELF-DECEPTION AS CULPABLE SELF-PERSUASION There are various phenomena that we call “self-deception” in ordinary language. Some are harmless. Some are monstrous. Across the next three chapters, I aim to give a Pascalian account of sinful selfdeception. The sinner deceives himself about his own moral character, and the morality of his actions, desires. and emotions. He may also deceive himself about such morally fraught issues as whether his life has meaning or whether he is really happy. Many of the great characters of literature are sinful self-deceivers. In addition to Nicholas Bulstrode (Chapter 3), I think of Emma Bovary, who systematically evades mundane reality and immerses herself in an imaginary

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world of glamour and romance; or of Tolstoy’s Ivan Illyich, who cannot admit that he soon will die. On a more sinister front, the annals of history are also filled with sinful self-deceivers. Here I think above all of moral monsters, like the collaborators in Hitler’s final solution, who managed to rationalize away any admission of their own guilt. On the other hand, as I understand it, sinful self-deception is not confined to extreme cases like these. One might deceive oneself about whether one is a true friend or a loving spouse, for example. Indeed, self-deception is important and interesting precisely because it is such a ubiquitous feature of the moral life. Ilham Dilman puts the point nicely: self-deception in the moral life is “the kind of selfdeception, for instance, into which people fall in their struggles to live a decent life, to make something of their lives, to find some sense or significance in life, or alternatively the deception they fall into in growing indifferent to moral considerations, in taking no notice of them.”1 According to Pascal, virtually everyone is guilty of selfdeception in this sense. From this point forward, I propose to focus on the strongest form of self-deception, lying to oneself. From a theological perspective, self-deception is sinful because it features a rejection of the truth. The sinful self-deceiver recognizes the truth about himself and his moral engagements, but then persuades himself to believe a falsehood about them. We can therefore understand this form of self-deception as morally culpable self-persuasion. Self-persuasion is morally culpable when it is aimed at cultivating false beliefs about one’s moral engagements. Sinful self-deception is culpable because it is a lie to oneself and a lie to the world. Lying to oneself plays a special role in moral wrongdoing. It is relatively easy to charge a subject with contradictory believing about moral matters. Certainly this is the case if one affirms that people have innate moral knowledge. But one need not hold that the moral law is hidden away in the heart to imagine cases where acting immorally entails believing something that is also believed to be false. Let us say that I believe that stealing is always wrong. So, if I steal something, it is reasonable to say that I believe that my own case is an exception to the general prohibition on stealing, and also that I believe that it is not, because I know that there are no such 1 Ilham Dilman and D. Z. Phillips, Sense and Delusion (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), 63.

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exceptions. It would seem odd, for instance, to say that I just happen to forget, at just the right time, my earlier belief that stealing is wrong. In short, many cases of sinful self-deception seem to be cases in which the sinner lies to himself. Furthermore, if we deny that the sinful selfdeceiver holds contradictory beliefs about his moral engagements, we also have to explain away phenomena like the pangs of conscience and flashes of insight that often accompany moral wrongdoing. But if we accept that sinful self-deceivers hold contradictory beliefs, it is easy to account for these persistent feelings of guilt: they arise when a person knows, but self-deceptively denies, his own immoral acts.

PASCAL ON MORAL WRONGDOING: THE WIDER CONTEXT How can a person persuade himself that he is good (or that he acts morally) when he knows otherwise? Pascal’s answer to this question would not begin with particular acts of believing, but with a broader account of fallen human nature and our warped cognitive, volitional, and affective faculties. I provided the key elements of such an account in Chapter 1. The answer properly continues with a discussion of the political and social forces that shape us into sinful, duplicitous subjects. Presenting that discussion was the burden of Chapter 2 and 3. On Pascal’s account, disordered love creates an aversion toward truth. Each individual person’s self-love is changed into something different, the desire to deceive and be deceived, as a result of his interactions with other members of society.2 According to Pascal, pervasive duplicity is a necessary condition of political order, successful social relationships, and even of the formation of the self. Cumulatively, in discussing these three domains, Pascal builds up a picture of the human subject as one who is habituated to deception because it is the essential glue that holds his world together. With this broad background in place, I turn to Pascal’s account of moral wrongdoing. My discussion has four parts. First, I argue that 2 For a similar argument, see Elster, Alchemies of the Mind, ch. 5, and in particular the social mechanisms that he calls “transmutation” (unconscious transformation of an undesirable motivation or belief into a desirable one) and “misrepresentation” (conscious pretense about one’s motivations or beliefs).

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moral judgment is holistic and interpretive, as opposed to narrowly evidence-based and empirical. Second, I present Pascal’s account of interpretive moral judgments. He posits a special cognitive faculty, which he calls “the heart,” that intuitively perceives moral value. The heart responds to moral value by producing a sentiment, a spontaneous moral judgment that is both cognitive and affective. A sentiment is inherently compelling: our sentiments seem true and so we naturally want to believe them. Pascal also gives a unique account of moral reasoning. That account centers around finesse, an interpretive form of reasoning that is prominent in the moral life. Third, I present Pascal’s account of how agents invest moral goods with subjective value. If it is the heart that perceives value, it is the faculty of imagination that bestows value. According to Pascal, the imagination determines the subjective value of objects and situations by shaping the way we construe and interpret them. The imagination is often, but not always, a deceptive, self-serving faculty. Thus, fourth, because Pascal holds that belief-formation is largely determined by our subjective perceptions of value (via the imagination), he emphasizes that our moral reasoning is often self-serving and deceptive. In the absence of God’s grace, every moral agent is also a duplicitous, sinful moi. It is not surprising, then, that Pascal holds that the central threat to the moral life is neither ignorance of the moral law nor moral weakness. Rather, the central threat to the moral life is self-deception. According to Pascal, moral wrongdoing is usually a product of selfdeceptive moral reasoning: a sinful moral agent spontaneously recognizes that some course of action is immoral but persuades herself that it is moral after all. The primary aim of this chapter is to understand better Pascal’s account of moral wrongdoing and develop his claim that the central threat to the moral life is self-deception. In so doing, however, I also make the case that Pascal has been unfairly ignored as an ethical theorist. Few would deny that Pascal is a keen observer of the human condition, one who dissects the vanity and hypocrisy of his targets with wit and flair. But although his reputation as a moraliste is secure, his reputation as a moral theorist is virtually nonexistent. There can be no question that contemporary ethicists—both theologians and philosophers—have largely neglected Pascal as a constructive resource. In addition, there is a striking dearth of scholarly work in English about Pascal’s ethics. In fact, A. W. S. Baird’s Studies in Pascal’s Ethics, published in 1975, remains the only full-length

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treatment of its topic in any language.3 Of course, it could be that Pascal’s ethical theories have not received much scholarly attention because Pascal does not have much of interest to say about ethics. However, even a cursory reading of the Pensées suggests that Pascal has a great deal to say about many topics that are central to contemporary ethical theory.4 Scattered among its fragments, we find Pascal’s thoughts about the nature of the good, for example, as well as an account of moral motivation and a fairly well-developed theory of moral judgment. Pascal is much more than a religious moralist with a fine prose style. He is also an important moral theorist, one who deserves a place alongside the other, more systematic, ethicists of the early modern pantheon.

SELF-DECEPTIVE MORAL JUDGMENTS ARE INTERPRETIVE On my Pascalian account of self-deception, the sinner falsely interprets the moral worth of his own actions or character. In so doing, he 3 Baird’s work remains useful. Baird does emphasize, rightly, that Pascal’s ethics are teleological and axiological. Baird also recognizes that Pascal classifies moral goods on a hierarchical scale, “with the different orders representing at once categories of moral value and orders of being.” A. W. S. Baird, Studies in Pascal’s Ethics (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1975), p. vii. Moreover, Baird is not wrong when he claims that the fragment which outlines that scale’s three major categories—body, mind, and charity (L308/S339)—is of signal importance to Pascal’s ethics. At times, however, Baird focuses too heavily on supposed tensions and inconsistencies in Pascal’s thought, such as whether his “natural ethics” lose their value from the perspective of the supernatural order of charity. This focus prevents him from devoting sustained attention to other important aspects of Pascal’s ethics. 4 Of course, there are many publications in French—and some in English—that discuss aspects of Pascal’s ethics in the course of treating other matters. See Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin, ch. 2; Lazzeri, Force et justice, chs 1–3; Pierre Magnard, Pascal: La Clé du chiffre (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1991); Pierre Cariou, Pascal et la casuistique (Paris: PUF, 1993); Beitzinger, “Pascal on Justice, Force, and Law.” Many discussions of Pascal’s ethics of belief may be found in English-language philosophy, but their concern is largely epistemological. See, for instance, Thomas Hibbs, “Habits of the Heart: Pascal and the Ethics of Thought,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 45/2 (2005), 203–20. Similarly, despite its title, Ann T. Delehanty’s “Morality and Method in Pascal’s Pensées,” Philosophy and Literature, 28 (2004), 74–88, mainly seeks to show that Pascal’s religious epistemology responds to protodeconstructionist worries about the perspectival character of moral language and moral truth.

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comes to hold various false beliefs about himself and the world. Before continuing, it is worth asking about the nature of the believing and judging that characterizes self-deception. In my view, the sinful self-deceiver falsely interprets himself and his moral engagements but he does not become a self-deceiver primarily by drawing false conclusions from empirical evidence. All beliefs are not formed in the same way. Not all beliefs are formed by drawing conclusions from empirical evidence. That is, not all believing is empirical believing. In my view, morally self-deceptive believing is not empirical believing.5 Whatever their differences, many contemporary philosophical models of self-deception assume that any self-deceiver comes to believe (falsely) that p because his desire, fear, anxiety, or whatnot causes him to misconstrue external, empirical evidence that bears on the truth value of p. In other words, these models assimilate all forms of self-deception to self-deception about empirical states of affairs. I self-deceptively believe that my wife is not having an affair, for example, or that I do not have a terminal illness, and I believe these things because I misapprehend or ignore evidence to the contrary. In such cases there is a plain fact of the matter, and anyone who is not self-deceived, and who has access to the same evidence that I do, would believe differently.6 Whether or not this paradigm suffices for other forms of self-deception, it does not capture self-deception in the moral life very well. Accordingly, I would like to draw a distinction between beliefs formed as a result of empirical judgments and those formed as a result of interpretive judgments and argue that lying to oneself is best treated as a case of the latter. On my account, the self-deceiver falsely interprets the moral worth of his own actions or character. He might also make false empirical judgments in the course of his interpretive activity, but they are not the primary element of his project of selfdeception. In a short space, it probably isn’t possible to distinguish between empirical and interpretive judgments in a way that is not at least slightly tendentious. But my theoretical needs are quite modest. 5

Note that my argument is untroubled by those who would object that all believing is interpretive believing. My concern is only with those who would restrict the believing that characterizes moral self-deception to hypothesis-driven, evidencebased, empirical believing. 6 E.g. see Mele’s discussion of the “impartial observer test,” in Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked, 106–10.

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Although the line between empirical and interpretive judgments may not be exactly where I say it is, there is surely some relevant line to be drawn. In my view, moral self-deception lies on the interpretive side of that line, wherever it is drawn. I certainly do not want to draw the line by denying that interpretive judgments can be true or false. The picture I have in mind looks something like this: empirical judgments are like hypotheses in that they are, in principle, subject to decisive, intersubjective, disconfirmation on the basis of objective, publicly available evidence. All of these elements work together: empirical disconfirmation of p can be decisive because intersubjective agreement can be reached about whether the evidence supports or disconfirms p, which implies that the relevant evidence is publicly available and that it objectively points only one way.7 By contrast, interpretive judgments do not depend primarily on publicly available evidence that objectively points only one way and so intersubjective agreement about their truth cannot always be rationally compelled, as it can with empirical judgments. Instead, agreement usually must be sought, elicited, by means of persuasion.8 Put another way, an interpretive judgment is holistic and evaluative. Consider a simple analogy from literature. Two people can still disagree about whether Achilles or Hector is the main character of the Iliad even though they both agree about all the relevant empirical evidence (e.g. that the poem itself claims to be about the rage of Achilles, or that it ends with the funeral of Hector). Neither can decisively vindicate his own interpretation with a simple appeal to evidence, and so each also must bring different kinds of considerations to bear and make different kinds of appeals. In short, each person must engage in a project of persuasion. When I say that sinful self-deception is not really a matter of empirical judgment, I mean that it is not primarily driven by a failure to grasp the force of objective, empirical evidence. In part this is because the self-deceiver, by definition, deceives himself about a moral matter, and so his self-deceptive judgments are also moral judgments. Moral judgment cannot be straightforwardly assimilated 7

In this conception of evidence, I am relying on W. V. O. Quine’s discussion of observation sentences in Pursuit of Truth, rev. edn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–22. 8 Again, I do not mean to deny e.g. that a great deal of scientific inquiry also depends on interpretive, and not empirical, judgments. Nor do I wish to deny that it is impossible to reach intersubjective agreement regarding interpretive judgments.

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to empirical judgment. Even moral judgments that do seem straightforwardly empirical are better treated as cases of false interpretation. A straightforwardly empirical claim ultimately rests on a relatively uninterpreted level of factual evidence. Yet with a moral judgment, a great deal of interpretation is usually built in: the way we describe a moral situation is what makes it the kind of situation it is for us. Consider Pascal’s own critique of dueling in the Provincial Letters. In the seventh letter, he notes that people can self-servingly manipulate their own evaluative vocabulary and repeatedly mocks the way the “Jesuits” sanitize immoral acts by redescribing them as innocent. For example, his Jesuit interlocutor helpfully points out that while dueling is immoral, defending oneself against attack is permitted. And so (the Jesuit innocently inquires): how could it be wrong merely to stand at an appointed spot at an appointed time? And if someone else should happen by at that time and try to shoot you, well then . . . what choice do you have, really, but to defend yourself? As Pascal ironically notes, “That is not really permitting the duel. On the contrary, he avoids saying that it is one, in order to make it lawful, so sure is he that it is forbidden.”9 Under the description, “fighting a duel,” I am culpable, but under the description, “defending myself,” I am blameless, even though I agree that “dueling” is immoral. Similarly, Nicholas Bulstrode might well agree about the factual chain of events that culminates in the death of Raffles, but he describes those events to himself as an act of Providence instead of his own act of homicidal neglect. In making this point, I anticipate the argument of Chapter 6, since a theory of self-deception needs to explain how we are able to adopt such biased descriptions. I advance the claim here only to emphasize that beliefs about one’s moral engagements, even those that seem straightforwardly empirical, are still interpretive in the relevant sense. A statement like “I am a good person” can be treated like any other proposition—it can be formalized with the sentence letter “p”—but when I deceive myself about whether I am a good person, there is much more going on than the fact that a single wayward proposition managed to sneak into my otherwise well-regulated epistemic house. Rather, since my very identity is at stake, the falsehood goes further down. Instead of speaking of believing a false proposition, it seems more apt to speak of living an inauthentic life. One does not

9

Provincial Letters, tr. Krailsheimer, 106.

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misconstrue the authenticity of one’s life solely because one fails to gather evidence properly. It therefore seems clear that we cannot account for all the dimensions of sinful self-deception by treating it as the result of a series of false empirical judgments. On the other hand, it is natural to say that when I misconstrue my moral character, I misinterpret myself. This claim has important implications for the task of understanding self-deception. As I noted above, intersubjective agreement about the truth of interpretive judgments cannot be compelled by an appeal to empirical evidence alone, and must be sought by means of persuasion. If self-deceptive judgments really are false interpretative judgments, in the sense I have outlined, then persuasion must play a similar role in fixing the beliefs of the individual self-deceiver. Lying to oneself would then be a type of culpable self-persuasion.

PASCAL ON MORAL JUDGMENT: THE HEART, SENTIMENT, AND FINESSE Pascal understands the difference between interpretive and empirical believing very well. He furnishes us with a language with which to describe the self-deceiver’s interpretive judgments and conflicting beliefs. Pascal’s account of moral judgment depends on a unique faculty, the heart. The heart has a characteristic operation, feeling or intuiting (sentiment), and a characteristic form of reasoning, finesse. On Pascal’s account, moral judgments are judgments of finesse.

Le Cœur The Pascalian heart is a cognitive faculty that unifies key operations of the will and the intellect. It is a faculty of tacit, intuitive knowledge, including moral knowledge—it might be glossed as, among other things, the seat of conscience. According to some commentators, Pascal posits the heart in order to free his philosophical anthropology from the rigid faculty psychology of his day. Late medieval and early modern thinkers sharply distinguished the intellect, a speculative and ratiocinative faculty, from the will, an appetitive and executive

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faculty. This separation presented special problems in the moral sphere because it inevitably raised questions about which faculty has priority in moral action. If the intellect has priority, then the moral life seems at its root to become a desiccated matter of rational calculation, which threatens to undercut the traditional Christian emphasis on love. Alternatively, if the will has priority, then love itself seems to become non-rational. Other thinkers of the era appealed to “the heart”—a suitably biblical and Augustinian term— as a way out of this dilemma, but still ended up collapsing the heart into the will. The Pascalian heart, on the other hand, does successfully reconcile various aspects of the intellect and the will without finally collapsing into either.10 Scholarship on Pascal’s cur is voluminous and does not tend toward mutual agreement.11 Exegetical debates and distinctions abound. Matters are complicated by the fact that Pascal uses the term “heart” both as a technical term in his new faculty psychology and as a biblical, metaphorical term that means something like “subjectivity.” For example, “How hollow and foul is the heart of man!” (L139/S171).12 It isn’t always easy to see which sense is in play in a given passage. Furthermore, Pascal sometimes uses “heart” and “will” interchangeably, and in places where a sensitive reader expects the one term, Pascal sometimes supplies the other. In any case, it is clear that the Pascalian heart does unite various cognitive, affective, and volitional operations of the person. The cognitive dimensions of the heart are most clearly outlined in fragment L110/S142. It is the heart that furnishes us with the knowledge of first principles that cannot be demonstrated. It operates by means of its own kind of perception, characterized by the verb sentir and its derivations (usually translated as “to feel,” but used by Pascal to signify any immediate apprehension).

10

See Martin Warner, Philosophical Finesse: Studies in the Art of Rational Persuasion (New York: OUP, 1989), 161; Levi, French Moralists, 326–8. Philipe Sellier says that the heart includes the will but exceeds the will, because it also includes the memory and various other intellectual operations (Pascal et Saint Augustin, 128). 11 See esp. Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin, 117–39. See also Norman, Portraits of Thought, 3–18, 38–44; Warner, Philosophical Finesse, 152–82; Davidson, Origins of Certainty, 106–11. 12 Sellier, waxing rhapsodic, says: “The heart therefore represents depth and inwardness, our true being” (Pascal et Saint Augustin, 135).

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We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. . . . For knowledge of first principles like space, time, motion, and number is as solid as any derived through reason, and it is on such knowledge, coming from heart and instinct, that reason has to depend and base all its argument. The heart feels (sent) that there are three spatial dimensions and that there is an infinite series of numbers. . . . Principles are felt (se sentent), propositions proved, and both by certainty though with different means . . . (L110/S142)

The heart is also the faculty that allows us to perceive God and the truths of faith: “As if reason were the only way we could learn! Would to God that we never needed it and knew everything by instinct and feeling (sentiment)! . . . That is why those to whom God has given religious faith by moving their hearts are very fortunate” (L110/S142). Pascal never repudiates his claim that the heart has an immediate, intuitive grasp of the first principles of reasoning, but it is the heart’s grasp of moral and religious principles that interests him the most: “It is the heart which perceives God, and not the reason. That is what faith is, God perceived by the heart, not by the reason” (L424/S680). Although this fragment suggests a sharp disjunction between the heart and the reason, in another important fragment, Pascal says that the operations of the heart unite aspects of love and reason: The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We know this in a thousand things. I say that the heart loves the universal being naturally and itself naturally, according to its devotion. And it hardens itself against one or the other as it chooses . . . (L423/S680)13

The first line of this fragment, arguably the most famous line in the Pensées, is often misunderstood as a plea for rank emotivism. In fact, Pascal emphasizes that the heart is a rational faculty—the heart has its reasons—even though it is not a deductive, ratiocinative faculty.

My tr. Krailsheimer translates Pascal’s et with “or” in L423, which changes the meaning of the passage by suggesting a complete disjunction. Krailsheimer writes: “it is natural for the heart to love the universal being or itself, according to its allegiance, and it hardens itself against the other as it chooses.” But Pascal writes: Je dis que le cur aime l’être universal naturellement, et soi-même naturellement, selon qu’il s’y adonne. Et il durcit contre l’un ou l’autre, à son choix. 13

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To say that the heart is both a cognitive and a volitional faculty is just to say that it is first of all an evaluative faculty.14 By positing the faculty of the heart, which unites key operations of the intellect and the will, Pascal shows how the propositions of faith and morality can be simultaneously true and attractive. The heart can grasp that a proposition is true, but its judgment of truth is also an aesthetic judgment of beauty. In this regard, I want to emphasize that the cognitive dimension of the heart aims at truth, full-stop, and not at something less than or different from truth. To speak somewhat awkwardly, nothing could be more solidly true than the first principles of time, space, and number. The truths of faith and morality, which the heart also intuits, are just as true as these first principles, according to Pascal. At the same time, because the heart is also a volitional and affective faculty, it is by means of the heart that we find ourselves attracted to moral truth and goodness. Consider the richly aesthetic language with which Pascal describes the heart’s perception of Jesus: “Jesus without wealth or any outward show of knowledge has his own order of holiness . . . With what great pomp and marvelously magnificent array he came in the eyes of the heart, which perceive wisdom” (L308/339). The true form of Jesus, which is visible only to the eyes of the heart, is presented as possessing a kind of moral beauty that also has a cognitive value, since the beauty of Jesus is tied to his wisdom. Here, as elsewhere, Pascal regards ethics and aesthetics as closely linked. Many contemporary thinkers, especially those working in the “continental” tradition, agree.15 Accordingly, Pascal provides a concrete resource from which they may draw. For example, he argues that divine grace operates on the soul by overwhelming it with aesthetic delight, which causes it to love spiritual goods over carnal goods.16 This view may resonate in interesting ways with contemporary

14

Warner, Philosophical Finesse, 201–2; Norman, Portraits of Thought, 40. For important foundational statements of this idea, see Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 480–91, and Jean François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Sections 23–9 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 23–9. See also the work of Richard Kearney, esp. Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995). The move to rejoin ethics and aesthetics is not confined to continental philosophy, however. See Roberts M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: OUP, 1999). 16 See Ch. 7. 15

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discussions about the ethics of receptivity to the Other, or the overwhelming power of the ethical sublime.

Sentiment Pascal’s account of the heart may be understood as an attempt to provide a psychological and rational basis for the traditional medieval slogan “love itself is a form of knowledge.”17 Love itself may be a form of knowledge, but just what does love’s knowledge look like? To find Pascal’s answer to this question, one must turn to the heart’s characteristic operation: sentiment (feeling or intuiting). One can get a sense of the full meaning of sentiment from the various ways Krailsheimer translates it: realization, feeling, intuition, persistent inward sense, perception, instinct, opinion, heartfelt.18 Another appropriate term would be “insight.” A sentiment is a spontaneous insight that does not result from a chain of progressive reasoning. It may or may not be explicitly formulated in words. The word sentiment names both an operation of the heart (feeling) and the product of that operation (a feeling). A spectrum of quotations confirms this initial picture: Those who are accustomed to judge by sentiment have no understanding of matters involving reasoning. For they want to go right to the bottom of things at a glance, and are not accustomed to look for principles. The others, on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason from principles, have no understanding of matters involving sentiment, because they look for principles and are unable to see things at a glance. (L751/S622) Reason works slowly, looking so often at so many principles, which must always be present, that it is constantly nodding or straying because all its principles are not present. Sentiment does not work like that, but works instantly, and is always ready. We must then put our faith in sentiment, or it will always be vacillating. (L821/661) Memory, joy are sentiments and even geometrical propositions become sentiments, because reason makes natural sentiments and natural sentiments are erased by reason. (L646/531; my tr.)

The last fragment is especially interesting because it suggests that, over time, even propositional knowledge can become a tacit, innately 17 18

amor ipse notitia est. See Gregory the Great, Homelia in Evangelium 27.4. Noted in Norman, Portraits of Thought, 4–5.

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known sentiment.19 Conversely, by reasoning about one’s sentiments, one can alter or overturn them. Even though the reason and its operations are distinct from the heart and its operations, both sides can still affect one another. In sum, a sentiment is a judgment of value that imposes its truth immediately on the reason.20

Moral Judgment as Intuitive Reasoning: Finesse The heart and sentiment furnish the building blocks for a Pascalian account of moral judgment. When the heart perceives a moral good, it responds by producing a sentiment, a spontaneous insight that seems true, and therefore seems compelling by its very nature. One may think of a moral sentiment as something like a spontaneous deliverance of the conscience. It is an immediate moral judgment that one should (or should not) do something or that some course of action is morally good. A sentiment of the heart is innately compelling because it has the felt sense of truth. It is possible to collect Pascal’s scattered thoughts about the heart and sentiment into a unified picture of moral judgment. Pascal himself offers the key concept around which such an account centers: finesse. He famously distinguishes between the “geometrical mind” and “the mind with finesse” (l’esprit de géométrie and l’esprit de finesse) in fragments L512–13/S670–1. The geometrical mind is linear, analytical, and deductive: its preferred principles, like the propositions of geometry, 19 Pascal’s point in L646/S531 is that, through repetitive reasoning, we can develop an intuitive grasp of even the most abstract principles. As Pierre Force writes, “In other words, habitual reasoning can turn some propositions into principles that have the same status as the first principles we know by the light of nature. Conversely, critical reasoning can demote some first principles and make them appear conventional and artificial, instead of obvious and natural.” Pierre Force, “Pascal and Philosophical Method,” in Hammond, Cambridge Companion to Pascal, 226. This fragment also makes it clear that Pascal does not think that the knowledge born of sentiment must always be non-discursive. One’s knowledge of a mathematical proposition could become so innate that it becomes a sentiment, but presumably one would still be able to express it in language. The fact that sentiment plays a role in Pascal’s scientific writings also weighs against the view that knowledge born of sentiment is non-discursive. Matthew L. Jones, “Writing and Sentiment: Blaise Pascal, the Vacuum, and the Pensées,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 32 (2001), 139–81. 20 Gouhier, Conversion et apologétique, 72.

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are obvious, but remote from ordinary usage, so that from want of practice, we have difficulty turning our heads that way, but once we do turn our heads, the principles can be fully seen; and it would take a thoroughly unsound mind to draw false conclusions from principles so patent that they can hardly be missed. (L512/S670)

By contrast, the mind with finesse is holistic and hermeneutical, and characteristically focused on everyday life. It grasps both the whole picture of a given situation as well as the texture and details of its parts. The mind with finesse treats principles that are “in ordinary usage and there for all to see” and so: There is no need to turn our heads, or strain ourselves: it is only a question of good sight, but it must be good; for the principles are so intricate and numerous that it is almost impossible not to miss some . . . These things are so delicate and numerous that it takes a sense of great delicacy and precision to perceive them and judge correctly and accurately from this perception: most often it is not possible to set it out logically as in mathematics . . . The thing must be seen all at once, in a glance, and not as a result of progressive reasoning, at least up to a point. (L512/S670)

Pascal goes on to say that the intuitive mind makes judgments “tacitly, naturally, and artlessly” (L512/S670) and in the next fragment he connects judgment, finesse, and sentiment: “For judgment pertains to sentiment, just as the sciences pertain to mind. Finesse is the part of judgment, geometry the part of mind” (L513/S671; my tr.). Pascalian finesse, then, is a kind of informal, intuition-based reasoning. Just as proof is the proper goal of the demonstrative mathematical mind, persuasion is the proper goal of finesse. The spontaneous insight of sentiment is the foundation of this form of reasoning, which grasps things “all at once, in a glance.” Still, unlike sentiment, finesse is a form of reasoning, so it cannot really be instantaneous. Thus, even though Pascal is obviously much taken with the contrast between spontaneous, synoptic finesse and plodding, analytical ratiocination, he is right to qualify this contrast at the conclusion of the above fragment. In sum, we might say that finesse is the kind of reasoning that is appropriate for the heart’s evaluative domain.21 Ordinary moral reasoning typically takes the form of 21 Other scholars have made similar claims about finesse and evaluation. Martin Warner relates Pascal’s finesse to the evaluative and hermeneutical elements of literary

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finesse. By “ordinary” moral reasoning, I mean everyday deliberation about moral matters, as opposed to, say, theoretical reflection about the nature of moral goods. Everyday moral judgments are usually spontaneous and intuitive and everyday moral reasoning is usually digressive and associative, rather than progressive and deductive (L298/S329). In contemporary terms, Pascal’s account of finesse-based moral judgment may be understood as a version of ethical intuitionism.22 Ethical intuitionism claims that when people grasp moral truths, “they do so not by a process of ratiocination and reflection but rather by a process more akin to perception, in which one just sees without argument that they are and must be true.”23 In Pascal’s terminology, a sentiment of the heart is an immediate perception that some situation or course of action is morally desirable (or morally forbidden). To say that a sentiment has the felt sense of truth is just to say that when the moral agent forms a sentiment that some state of affairs is licit or illicit, she judges automatically, without deliberation. It is simply selfevident to her that some course of action or situation is morally good (or bad). For example, if I see someone robbing a bank, I do not initially respond to that state of affairs by deliberating about whether theft is morally justified. Rather, I immediately judge that this instance of theft is wrong. Subsequent deliberation may overturn my initial view, but the spontaneous moral judgment still precedes, and does not follow, any deliberation. Ethical intuitionism is very much in vogue at the moment, in both philosophical ethics and contemporary moral psychology, in part because a wealth of empirical data suggests that it offers a descriptively correct account of moral judgment.24 The fact that Pascal is an important early-modern proponent of ethical intuitionism has not criticism, and John D. Lyons says that Pascalian finesse is what allows us to understand other people by imaginatively identifying with them. See Warner, Philosophical Finesse, 202; Lyons, Before Imagination, 94–121. 22 For important recent discussions of ethical intuitionism, see Robert Audi, The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (Princeton: PUP, 2004), and Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review, 108 (2001), 814–34. The classic statement is W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930). 23 Haidt, “Emotional Dog,” 814. See also Haidt, “Morality,” 802. 24 See Jennifer Nado, Daniel Kelly, and Stephen Stich, “Moral Judgments,” in John Symons and Paco Calvo (eds), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology (New York: Routledge, 2009), 621–33.

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been recognized in this literature. Pascal’s status as an overlooked forebear of ethical intuitionism should not exhaust contemporary interest in his ethical thought, however. His most important contribution to ethical theory lies in his account of how and why we fail to live up to our ethical intuitions.

THE IMAGINATION BESTOWS VALUE The preceding analysis raises an important question. If the heart produces immediate moral sentiments, and if those sentiments are both true and compelling, then why does anyone ever act immorally? Why do we not always act in accordance with our sentiments? Pascal’s response to this question leads back to his famous critique of the imagination. Even though our moral sentiments have the felt sense of truth, according to Pascal, we are also strongly motivated to believe that our imaginative fantasies are true. If it is the heart that responds to the perceived value of moral goods, it is the imagination that bestows value on them in the first place. As a result, even though we do respond immediately to moral goods, we typically perceive those goods only after they have already been filtered through a haze of imaginative fantasy. Without repeating the discussion of the imagination in Chapter 2, recall that, according to Pascal, the imagination can “fix the price of things” and so invest moral goods with value. Moreover, “Imagination decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness which is the world’s supreme good” (L44/S78). Pascal’s account of the socially constructed imagination reveals that he is not just an ethical intuitionist but a social intuitionist. A social intuitionist recognizes that people are “intensely social creatures whose moral judgments are strongly shaped by the judgments of those around them.”25 While some moral intuitions may be innate to everyone, social intuitionists claim that people acquire most of their particular moral intuitions through custom and habituation—that is, through their participation in thick cultural webs of moral practice. Once again, although social intuitionism currently enjoys pride of place among empirically oriented moral psychologists, there has been 25

Haidt, “Emotional Dog,” 828; “Morality,” 808–21.

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no recognition that Pascal is an early advocate of its key claims. Social intuitionists often look for inspiration from David Hume, or even Aristotle, without ever recognizing that Pascal is an even closer cousin to their own work. Moreover, Pascal is able to wed a social-intuitionist ethics to a full-blooded account of moral and axiological realism, something that contemporary social intuitionists often find themselves unwilling or unable to do.26 Both the imagination and the heart are cognitive and affective faculties. The heart intuitively grasps moral and spiritual goods, and perceives moral beauty (L308/S339). Yet it is also an affective faculty associated with loving and desiring. Like the heart, the imagination also unites various cognitive andsh affective functions into a single faculty. In its cognitive aspect, the imagination allows us to form mental representations. These representations include the everyday images by which we inwardly grasp the things that we perceive with our external senses. In its affective dimension, the imagination bestows value on goods. Although Pascal does not directly speculate about how the heart and the imagination would work if human beings had not fallen, it seems clear that the heart should perceive moral goods accurately, leading us to love and desire them according to their true value. Similarly, the imagination should also correspond to the world as it is, and supply us with accurate mental representations. In both cases, there should be no conflict between what is true and what we find beautiful. A moral agent that is not fallen would accurately perceive the beauty of spiritual goods and would love them as a result. Instead, after the Fall, the imagination has become a “proud power” that oversteps its bounds and creates moral value independently, 26 See e.g. Jonathan Haidt’s interview with Tamler Sommers in The Believer, in which—at least, in my judgment—he finds himself a bit flummoxed at his inability to dismiss questions about what grounds moral truths (“Jonathan Haidt,” The Believer, 3/6 (Aug. 2005), 71–85. According to Haidt, moral truths are “anthropocentric truths”: “When people make moral claims they are pointing to moral facts outside of themselves—they intend to say that an act is in fact wrong, not just that they disapprove of it . . . On our account, moral facts exist, but not as objective facts which would be true for any rational creature anywhere in the universe. Moral facts are facts only with respect to a community of human beings that have created them.” Jonathan Haidt and Fredrik Bjorklund, “Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions about Moral Psychology,” in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, ii. The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 213–14.

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setting “the same mark on true and false alike” (L44/S78), and the heart has become “hollow and foul” (L139/S171). The sinner rejects the sentiments of the heart—the seat of conscience—and instead acts on the basis of the false, self-serving fantaisies of the imagination. Although Pascal usually focuses on the way we excessively magnify the value of our own selves, any object may be imaginatively invested with more value than it can bear: one may build up a fantasy about a commodity (a new car, for example), a specific self-understanding (of oneself as being just the kind of dashing person who would drive such a car), or some other pursued goal (making enough money to buy the car). The possibilities are endless. In each case, however, the perceived value of the object sought is a function of how it is imaginatively construed. Although Pascal recognizes that the imagination is central to the moral life, his thought challenges the sometimes facile claims of contemporary narrative ethicists and those who would look first to the “narrative imagination” for moral renewal.27 Pascal reminds us that the imagination is not just the locus of individual creative genius and speculative possibility. It is also a socially constructed repository for the (often immoral) dispositions and values of the wider world. Far from being the initial launching pad for moral critique, the imagination is often itself the faculty most in need of such critique. Furthermore, Pascal would remind us that reorienting the moral imagination is no simple matter. Certainly it is not just a matter of reading the right novels or passages from scripture, imaginatively identifying with the right moral exemplars, or trying to dream up new possibilities for moral community. Because the imagination is socially constructed, reorienting the imagination requires something like a massive program of counter-habituation, comparable to becoming a native member of a wholly new society. In short, reorienting the imagination would require something that looks quite a lot like an ongoing program of religious conversion. Pascal therefore sounds an important note of caution about the moral possibilities of the imagination.

27

Without a detailed engagement with the writings of others, this assertion barely rises to the level of an accusation, let alone an argument. Since I lack the space to support it, I judge it best to pass over its specific targets in silence.

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Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology HOW MORAL REASONING GOES WRONG: SELF-DECEPTION

According to Pascal, moral judgments are spontaneous responses to perceived moral values, and the deceptive faculty of imagination bestows value on moral goods. It is no surprise, therefore, that Pascal also thinks that our moral reasoning is highly vulnerable to selfinduced error. By “moral reasoning,” again, I mean the ex post facto deliberation that often follows spontaneous moral judgments of the heart and that Pascal calls finesse. Pascal claims that, even when our moral sentiments are veridical, we often reject those sentiments as a result of self-deceptive moral reasoning. Accurate moral reasoning requires that our spontaneous moral sentiments be veridical. There is no guarantee that our sentiments are veridical, however. Worse, they can seem veridical even when they are not. As a result, we can easily mistake false fantasies for truthful sentiments. All our reasoning comes down to surrendering to sentiment. But fantaisie is like and also unlike sentiment, so that we cannot distinguish between these two opposites. One person says that my sentiment is mere fantaisie, another that his fantaisie is sentiment. We should have a rule. Reason is available but can be bent in any direction. And so there is no rule. (L530/S455)

Whereas a sentiment comes from the heart, a fantaisie comes from the imagination. But from the subjective point of view, it can be difficult to distinguish between the two. A veridical sentiment and a false fantaisie both come with the same self-certifying warrant of felt truth. As a result, we often treat false, self-serving fantaisies as if they were veridical sentiments. It is dangerous to turn to reason for help, since reason can “be bent in any direction” by desire and disordered love. Furthermore, this error—treating false fantaisies as veridical sentiments—is often far from innocent, according to Pascal. Indeed, it is most often a willful mistake, which means that the central threat to the moral life is not just error but self-deception. In fragment L975/ S739, Pascal succinctly outlines his account of how the imagination affects moral reasoning: “Men often take their imagination for their heart, and often believe they are converted as soon as they start

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thinking of becoming converted.”28 To take the imagination for the heart is to self-deceptively believe that one’s own self-serving fantasies reveal the felt sense of conscience. The unbeliever who falsely believes that he is converted takes his imagination for his heart when he willfully fails to discern the difference between what he merely wants to be true (an imaginative fantasy) and what he really knows to be true (a deliverance of the heart). Thus, according to Pascal, moral reasoning typically goes wrong when a moral agent persuades herself that her immoral beliefs and actions are, in fact, moral after all. Very often, when one is faced with a morally fraught situation, what one perceives as the moral choice is relatively unattractive, but the immoral choice is highly alluring. Pascal gives us a technical vocabulary in which to describe this state of affairs, a vocabulary that is grounded in an interesting and plausible philosophical psychology. However, Pascal’s contribution to moral theory is more than just another technical description of moral wrongdoing. Pascal’s chief contribution is the insight that the conflict between sentiment and fantaisie is an evaluative conflict, driven by the moral agent’s response to the perceived attractiveness of competing goods. Pascal’s central claim is that, in a moral dilemma, an agent usually perceives an immoral choice as more attractive than a moral choice precisely because the immoral choice is rooted in self-serving imaginative fantasy. The typical sinner does not act immorally as a result of a clear-eyed decision for evil (he is not a moral monster). Nor does he explicitly choose to do wrong all the while desiring to do right (he is not morally weak). Nor does he fail to understand what the moral law requires (he is not morally ignorant). Rather, his immoral choice is attractive to him because he is able to call up imaginative fantasies that allow him to quash his pangs of conscience and spontaneously reinterpret his actions as morally licit. Pascal probably would not assert that moral wrongdoing must always proceed in exactly this way. That is, I doubt that he would deny that reflective, fully self-aware moral wrongdoing is possible. Even in such cases, however, we still might want to say that moral 28

Of course, the explicit topic of the fragment is religious conversion and not moral reasoning, but the obstacles that impede conversion are also the obstacles that impede successful moral reasoning. Moreover, even though Pascal would take care to leave room for the operation of divine grace in conversion, it is also the case that the trajectory of Pascal’s apology in the Pensées depends on his ability to present the choice to become a Christian as both a rational and a moral choice.

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wrongdoing includes an element of self-deception. Suppose, then, that Nicholas Bulstrode knows perfectly well that his immoral actions are wrong, and suppose that he justifies them only by saying to himself: Ha! All this “right and wrong” stuff is for losers! Granting that Bulstrode initially forms a veridical sentiment that stealing is morally wrong, when he later embraces the imaginative fantasy that he is somehow beyond good and evil (so to speak), he has persuaded himself of something that, as a result of his sentiment, he already knows to be false: that he is not bound by the relevant moral standard. Thus, this justification still seems like a form of self-deception. So, Pascal argues that we are highly vulnerable to self-deception as a result of the way we respond to value—in this case, to the value of different moral goods. The will has no choice but to desire those goods that seem most attractive, and it also has the power to make attractive goods seem more salient to the mind. As a result, the will has the power to shape our beliefs according to our desires. The will is one of the chief organs of belief, not because it creates belief, but because things are [i.e. seem] true or false according to the aspect by which we judge them. When the will likes one aspect more than another, it deflects the mind from considering the qualities of the one it does not care to see. Thus the mind, keeping in step with the will, remains looking at the aspect preferred by the will and so judges by what it sees there. (L539/S458)

It is easy to see why we are highly likely to come to believe that our self-serving but enticing imaginative fantasies are true. Our imaginative fantasies are so enticing because we ourselves voluntarily construct them as maximally alluring. The faculty of the imagination is partly under our control, after all. Of course, sometimes we seem to be passive recipients of fantasies that wash over us unbidden, but it is equally clear that sometimes we actively, explicitly construct attractive fantasies. Moreover, even in the former case, we can usually exercise enough control to interrupt unwelcome fantasies or dismiss them from our minds, so it is still accurate to say that the imagination is under our voluntary control, in the relevant sense. Our imaginative fantasies give us a way to preserve an image of ourselves as morally upright and blameless, even when we are not. Because fantaisies are inherently compelling, the very activity of imagining our own moral innocence comes with built-in persuasive power that can shape our beliefs self-deceptively. Bulstrode may

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initially realize that he let Raffles die, but as he continues to turn the fantasy of his innocence over in his mind, reinforcing it with loving attention and psychic energy, he soon comes to believe in it wholeheartedly. Moreover, because this imaginative activity is something over which Bulstrode has voluntary control, it seems apt to say that, by steeping himself in his imaginative fantasies, he deceives himself. To return to the terminology above, in the moral arena, taking the imagination for the heart—mistaking fantaisie for sentiment—is usually a willful misconstrual. Pascal explicitly makes this claim in the fragment on self-love and the formation of the self. In that fragment, Pascal presents the sinful self (the moi) as fully aware of its own “faults and wretchedness”: The nature of self-love and of this human moi is to love only self and consider only self. But what is it to do? It cannot prevent the object of its love from being full of faults and wretchedness: It wants to be great and sees that it is small; it wants to be happy and sees that it is wretched; it wants to be perfect and sees that it is full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only their dislike and contempt. (L978/S743)

Precisely because the self is aware of its imperfections, it forms a “deadly hatred of the truth” about its own sinfulness: The predicament in which it thus finds itself arouses in it the most unjust and criminal passion that could possibly be imagined, for it conceives a deadly hatred for the truth which rebukes it and convinces it of its faults. (L978/S743)

It therefore tries to destroy that truth altogether, in a project of duplicity that is directed both at the self and at the wider world. It would like to do away with this truth, and not being able to destroy it as such, it destroys it, as best it can, in the consciousness of itself and others and it cannot bear to have them pointed out or noticed. It is no doubt an evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and unwilling to recognize them since this entails the further evil of deliberate self-delusion . . . (L978/S743)

We are vulnerable to self-deception because we are fallen subjects in a fallen world. We must appeal to the specifically Christian terminology of the Fall in order to understand the specific form of moral weakness that human beings typically exhibit. Our moral judgment is not just error-prone. It is fallen, and this is a determination that makes a

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difference. Pascal’s theological account explains why our moral reasoning takes the particular form that it does, and why it so frequently goes wrong.

CONCLUSION: WHAT IS SELF-DECEPTION? Because the Fall is a fall into duplicity, we have an innate aversion to moral truth. According to Pascal, we find deep truths about ourselves and God hateful, and so we reject them, and try to persuade ourselves that we do not feel their pull. Furthermore, the Fall is an evaluative fall, and so its noetic effects are also evaluative. We have lost the ability to value moral goods properly and so we find them unattractive and are able to persuade ourselves to turn away from them. When we sin, we turn away from evident truths about God and self, and instead steep ourselves in imaginative fantasy. We pretend that we are happy when we know that we are not. We pretend to be good citizens of just societies. We pretend to be moral. We pretend to be real. Pascal gives us a vocabulary with which to express these claims, and tools to help us understand them. After the Fall, to be a self is to be a doubly imaginary moi. As such, we experience the moral life as an endless series of conflicts between the imagination and the heart. When we “take the imagination for the heart” we treat the fantaisies of the imagination as veridical sentiments. Whether expressed in Pascal’s own vocabulary or in a more modern idiom, all of these claims assert the same central truth. To be a sinner is to be a self-deceiver. The Pascalian sinner prevents himself from attending to truths that he finds threatening. (After all, “Ordinary people have the ability not to think about things they do not want to think about”: L815/S659.) The sinner lies to himself and persuades himself to believe something that he also recognizes as false. These claims are puzzling, even paradoxical, but they are entailed by Pascal’s account of the duplicitous moi as well as his account of moral wrongdoing. Whether or not we accept Pascal’s particular theological claims, most of us accept that self-deception is a real and pervasive phenomenon. Any adequate moral psychology or philosophy of mind— indeed, any effort to understand what it means to be a human being—surely must address it. But the very idea of self-deception, and especially of lying to oneself, smacks of paradox. Perhaps we

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should rest content with that paradox. Alternatively, perhaps we should seek to dispel it. In any case, Pascal’s account of sin and the Fall seems to entail that a very paradoxical form self-deception is widespread, even ubiquitous. It therefore makes sense to try to understand the vexing phenomenon of self-deception better.

5 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception Across the first four chapters, I have argued that Pascal construes the Fall as a fall into duplicity, and that as a result, deception and selfdeception warp the political order, the social order, and even the way we are formed as subjects. Above all, deception and self-deception are ubiquitous in the moral life. In Chapter 6, I offer my own Pascalian account of sin as self-deception. Before I can offer that account, however, I must raise and address some pressing philosophical objections about the puzzling phenomenon of self-deception. If the Fall is a fall into duplicity and the moral life is rife with self-deception, then in order to understand the cognitive consequences of the Fall, we need to understand self-deception better. Accordingly, in this chapter, I depart somewhat from Pascal, and focus instead on philosophical debates about self-deception drawn from contemporary analytic philosophy. Self-deception has been an object of study in a variety of intellectual traditions, but—perhaps unsurprisingly—it is in the tradition of analytic philosophy that we find the most vigorous arguments that lying to oneself is not even so much as possible. Pascal does not offer anything like a philosophical analysis of selfdeception, of course, nor does he directly defend its conceptual possibility. In fact, he might even argue that any such defense presents yet another sinful example of the pride of the philosophers. He certainly would not be bothered by the fact that lying to oneself seems “paradoxical.” After all, his entire apologetic strategy depends on showing that human life is rife with paradox. Analytic philosophers may flee from paradox, but Pascal embraces it, and he would likely assert that the paradoxical nature of self-deception is just a further sign of the Fall: mired as we are in the paradox of greatness

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 147 and wretchedness, fallen human beings inevitably engage in paradoxical behavior like lying to themselves. This behavior is exactly what we should expect to see, on Pascal’s account of human nature. I therefore intend the argument of this chapter as a Pascalian critique of contemporary analytic philosophy on self-deception. It is Pascalian because it imitates Pascal’s own attitude toward the leading philosophical schools of his day: I refuse the terms in which the analytic inquiry poses the question of self-deception. As a follower of Pascal, I engage with analytic philosophy as a way of showing its limitations and revealing exactly what it leaves out. This attitude toward philosophy is demonstrably Pascalian. Throughout the Pensées Pascal criticizes the vanity of philosophers. “To make light of philosophy is to philosophize truly,” he writes (L513/S671). Yet Pascal also offers much more than mocking aphorisms. Despite his own protests to the contrary, he does engage with philosophy—in order to overcome it and subvert it from within. As we have seen, he transforms the foundational Cartesian ego into the fallen, sinful moi in order to show that Descartes, for all his philosophical acumen, remains “pointless, uncertain, and arduous” (L84/ S118; L887/S445). Yet he can only assume this stance toward Descartes’ philosophy to the degree that he thoroughly grasps its inner logic: Pascal can revoke Descartes, for the sake of eventually overcoming what is metaphysical in him, only insofar as he reaches an authentic understanding of him . . . In short, the sought after debate [between Pascal and Descartes] will take place only if one demonstrates that Pascal read Descartes before he criticized him and precisely in order to do so—in a word, it will happen only if Pascal is confirmed as a Cartesian.1

Similarly, even though I rarely quote Pascal in this chapter, I do my best to imitate him. I take analytic philosophy on self-deception seriously because I wish to undermine and go beyond it. Nevertheless, analytic philosophy on self-deception poses a genuine challenge to Pascal’s account of the cognitive consequences of the Fall, and that challenge must be answered. I am more sympathetic to analytic philosophy than Pascal was to Descartes. For example, I do not believe that analytic philosophy as such is “pointless, uncertain, and arduous,” and I certainly do not claim to be subverting it 1

Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, 280.

148 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception wholesale. Still, analytic philosophy on self-deception richly deserves a Pascalian critique. At the heart of the analytic inquiry on selfdeception, at its very foundation, there is a gaping hole—just where we expect to find a knock-down argument that lying to oneself is impossible, we find nothing at all. If the philosophers working on selfdeception agree about anything, they agree that insurmountable paradoxes arise when we try to model self-deception on lying to oneself.2 Yet, somewhat shockingly, across almost half a century of analytic debate, very few philosophers have actually made any explicit arguments that this is so. Furthermore, the arguments they have made are not cogent, because they depend on overly strict analogies with interpersonal deception, easily avoidable errors about the logic of believing, or implausibly strong claims about mental self-transparency. The typical self-deceiver in analytic philosophy looks suspiciously like the stereotype of the disembodied Cartesian ego. By contrast, as we have seen, the Pascalian sinner is a fallen self embedded in a fallen world. His very selfhood is a lie, a hateful moi pretending to be a charitable, autonomous agent. It is therefore not surprising that the Pascalian sinner can lie to himself. Thus, this chapter presents both a narrative and an argument. The narrative is about disciplinarity and how a trajectory of inquiry develops in an intellectual tradition. It is the story of how one question (“How can a person successfully lie to himself?”) is quickly transformed into another, more congenial, question (“How can a person form a false belief against the clear weight of contrary evidence?”) even though the original question was never shown to be incoherent or intellectually sterile. The argument is that the original question is not incoherent or intellectually sterile. Lying to oneself remains a viable way to understand some forms of self-deception, including the sinful self-deception that infects the moral life.3 Pascal’s account of the cognitive consequences of the Fall remains on solid ground. 2 Dion Scott-Kakures makes one of the few indisputable claims about selfdeception when he says that “few, these days, would aim to understand self-deception as lying to oneself.” Dion Scott-Kakures, “At ‘Permanent Risk’: Reasoning and SelfKnowledge in Self-Deception,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 65 (2002), 577. 3 Just to be clear: I do not hold that all forms of self-deception must be analyzed as cases of lying to oneself. But I do argue that lying to oneself is possible, and that it is a good way to understand self-deception in the moral life.

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 149 FROM “LYING TO ONESELF” TO “IRRATIONAL BELIEF-FORMATION” In 1960, Raphael Demos of Harvard University published a modest article in the Journal of Philosophy titled, “Lying to Oneself .” This article provoked a series of sharply critical responses, which provoked more responses, and so on, and soon a lively conversation on self-deception developed among analytic philosophers. It is a conversation that continues still, as diverse philosophers endeavor to construct an account of self-deception that avoids the taint of paradox but remains true to the way we use the concept in ordinary language. No single model has commanded assent, and every aspect of the problem of self-deception—even its very existence—has been the source of vehement debate. There is, of course, no reason to expect that philosophers would reach fundamental agreement on every question provoked by the complex phenomenon of self-deception but, nevertheless, it is striking how fractious the analytic conversation has been. Not for nothing does the relevant Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry begin: “Virtually every aspect of the current philosophical discussion of self-deception is a matter of controversy, including its definition and paradigmatic cases.”4 Fatefully, given the trajectory of responses that his article would soon provoke, Demos sets the philosophical problem of self-deception in motion by modeling self-deception on intentional interpersonal deception and, furthermore, by equating deception with lying. Thus, according to Demos, a self-deceiver is someone who lies to himself: I will say that “B lies to (deceives) C” means: B intends to induce a mistaken belief in C, B succeeds in carrying out this intention, and finally B knows (and believes) that what he tells C is false. All three: intention, results, and knowledge, are included. From this meaning of lying and deceiving, I will proceed to a discussion of “lying to oneself ” or “deceiving oneself ” . . . Self-deception exists, I will say, when a person lies to himself, that is to say, persuades himself to believe what he knows is not so. In short, self-deception entails that B believes both p and not-p at the same time. 4 Ian Deweese-Boyd, “Self-Deception,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2006), .

150 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception Thus, self-deception involves an inner conflict, perhaps the existence of a contradiction. But this would seem to be an impossibility . . . 5

There is plenty to quibble with here. There are other forms of deception besides lying—among other things, a lie is a speech act, but not all acts of deception are speech acts—and, arguably, there are other forms of interpersonal deception besides intentional interpersonal deception—one may deceive someone else by inadvertently misleading him, for example.6 But still, from a methodologically innocent, pretheoretical point of view, Demos’s rough-and-ready analysis of self-deception seems perfectly reasonable: when a person deceives himself, he persuades himself to believe what he knows is not so, and he is in a state of “inner conflict,” because he believes both p and not-p at the same time. This is almost precisely the mental state that I ascribed to Nicholas Bulstrode in Chapter 3, and discussed in Chapter 4. As a quick contrast with Demos, and as a revealing indictor that shows how the analytic conversation on self-deception developed, consider one of the currently reigning models of self-deception. According to the influential model of Alfred R. Mele, S enters the state of self-deception in acquiring the belief that p if:7 (a) The belief that p which S acquires is false. (b) S treats data relevant, or at least seemingly relevant, to the truth value of p in a motivationally biased way. (c) The biased treatment is the cause of S’s acquiring the belief that p. (d) The body of data possessed by S at the time provides greater warrant for not-p than for p.8

Raphael Demos, “Lying to Oneself,” Journal of Philosophy, 57 (1960), 588. On the distinction between deception, intentional deception, and lying, see Roderick M. Chisholm and Thomas D. Feehan, “The Intent to Deceive,” Journal of Philosophy, 74 (1977), 143–59; Thomas L. Carson, “Lying, Deception and Related Concepts,” in Clancy Martin (ed.), The Philosophy of Deception (New York: OUP, 2009). 7 Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked, 50–1. Since 2001, Mele has some minor concessions in response to critics, but no major changes. See his “Have I Unmasked SelfDeception or am I Self-Deceived?,” in Martin, Philosophy of Deception, 260–76. 8 Mele means to say that S does not recognize that the data warrant not-p. 5 6

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 151 Mele’s model is a fine example of what is now the mainstream analytic view about self-deception.9 Note just what has gone missing in the forty-one years that intervene between Demos and Mele. The self-deceiver no longer believes contradictory propositions, or believes the truth at all. He no longer recognizes the force of the evidence, at any time, or on any level. And he no longer intends to deceive himself, let alone lie to himself. (Mele intends his causal language in (c) to mean efficient, non-personal causation.) There is not even any suggestion that the self-deceiver is aware that he desires p or that he reasons under the influence of that desire. As he gathers evidence, trying to decide whether p, he simply makes a mistake: a motivated mistake, to be sure, but a mistake nevertheless. That, according to Mele, is all that self-deception amounts to. There is not even the faintest gesture toward Pascal’s claim that self-deception is morally dreadful. After all, it is far from obvious that I am morally responsible for the fact that I inadvertently draw a biased inference from a body of evidence. No one can believe both sides of a contradiction in full awareness of the contradiction. Therefore, in order to defend his analysis, Demos needs to explain how the self-deceiver can put himself into such a state. Here one might naively expect an appeal to Freudian ideas like repression or a censoring superego, ideas that were wellentrenched in the common parlance of the 1960s. No such appeals are forthcoming from Demos, however, and with notable exceptions, Freudian concepts do not figure prominently in future analytic discussions about self-deception either.10 Demos very quickly dismisses any suggestion that the self-deceiver’s true belief is “repressed into the unconscious.”11

9 Mele intends these conditions as empirical hypotheses about what real-world self-deceivers do. That way of construing the philosophical task would have been utterly alien to the philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s. See e.g. H. O. Mounce’s rebuke of D. W. Hamlyn on just this point in their exchange of 1971 (H. O. Mounce, “Self-Deception,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 45 (1971), 61). 10 I mention Freud not to make any substantive point, but only because, when I discuss the analytic debates on self-deception with colleagues who are not wellversed in analytic philosophy, they are struck by its minimal engagement with extraanalytic traditions like psychoanalysis and phenomenology, both of which have devoted sustained attention to the problems of understanding conscious awareness and unconscious mental activity. 11 Demos, “Lying to Oneself,” 591.

152 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception Instead, he makes the seemingly innocuous claim that the person who believes both p and not-p “is capable of doing so because he is distracted from the former.”12 Though Demos is not especially clear about how this works, the thrust of his argument is plain: he means to say that a person distracts himself from his own unwelcome beliefs. Because both the true belief and its contradiction exist “in the consciousness of the person,” Demos appeals to our ability to manage our awareness in order to explain how someone can simultaneously believe them both: There are two levels of awareness possible; one is simple awareness, the other awareness together with attending, or noticing. It follows that I may be aware of something without, at the same time, noticing it or focusing my attention on it. This comes about because I may be distracted by something else, or because I may deliberately ignore it, or because I may not wish to think about it. This not-noticing need not be something that just happens to me . . . 13 Such an analysis “saves” the phenomenon while at the same time conforming to the requirements of the law of contradiction. For, indeed, we are saying that the person who lies to himself believes both p and not-p at the same time, and is capable of doing so because he is distracted from the former. Finally, this account is not far different from the way in which people express the facts in ordinary language. Thus they would say of the mother who has come to believe that her son is a fine fellow, that she knows all along in some corner of her mind that he is not much good.14

Like his analysis of self-deception, Demos’s account of awareness invites some obvious questions. One wants to know how the selfdeceiver can successfully intend a project of “not noticing” his own contradictory beliefs, for example. Surely he must already have noticed the contradiction in order to intentionally divert his attention from it, which should suffice for dispelling it, on the assumption that no one can believe an explicit contradiction in full awareness.15 This is a puzzle that Demos does not fully solve. Again, however, like his analysis of self-deception as lying to oneself, Demos’s claim that we can deceive ourselves by managing our own attention and awareness 13 Demos, “Lying to Oneself,” 194. Demos, “Lying to Oneself,” 593. Demos, “Lying to Oneself,” 594–6. 15 For a criticism along these lines, see Herbert Fingarette, Self-Deception (London: Routledge, 1969; repr. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000), 16. 12 14

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 153 seems quite promising.16 It could easily have elicited a productive series of sympathetic amplifications from the philosophical community. That is not what happened. Before continuing, let me introduce some largely self-evident terminology. I will call the claim that a self-deceiver believes contradictory propositions the dual-belief condition. (Granting that knowledge implies belief, the dual-belief condition can also capture the claim that the self-deceiver knows not-p and believes p.) I will call the claim that the self-deceiver intentionally executes a plan to deceive himself the agency condition.17 A case of self-deception in which the self-deceiver satisfies both the dual-belief and agency conditions will be called strong self-deception, and a case in which the self-deceiver satisfies neither the dual-belief nor the agency condition will be called deflationary self-deception. Demos, for example, offers a model of strong self-deception because he affirms the dual-belief and agency conditions, whereas Mele offers a deflationary model because he does not. By definition, a philosophical account of strong self-deception models self-deception on intentional interpersonal deception, and therefore treats self-deception as a lie to oneself. What happened in the forty-one years that intervene between Demos and Mele? How did the philosophical debate on self-deception develop in such a way that Mele’s account seems like a viable model of self-deception, even though it is in no way an answer to Demos’s original question? Instead of trying to answer Demos’s

16 Demos also makes an interesting comparison between his own account of awareness and Aristotle’s account of akrasia. Like the Aristotelian akrates, perhaps the self-deceiver can believe contradictory propositions because she construes each side of the contradiction in a way that diverts her attention from their contradictory character. E.g. although a self-deceiving mother may not be able to believe, in full awareness, two propositions that directly contradict (“My son is good” and “My son is not good”), she may be able to represent those propositions to herself in a way that masks their contradictory character: “My son is not much good” and “My son is a fine fellow.” Whether this solution finally satisfies or not, it is intriguing, and deserves further thought. See “Lying to Oneself,” 593–4. 17 Note that the dual belief and agency conditions do not necessarily hang together. There are philosophers, like William Talbott, who affirm the agency condition but not the dual belief condition, and there are philosophers, like Brian McLaughlin, who affirm the opposite. W. J. Talbott, “Intentional Self-Deception in a Single Coherent Self,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 55 (1995), 27–74; Brian P. McLaughlin, “Exploring the Possibility of Self-Deception in Belief,” in Brian P. McLaughlin and A. O. Rorty (eds), Perspectives on Self-Deception (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988), 29–62.

154 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception question (“how can one lie to oneself ?”), philosophers took a different course, both in the initial wave of responses to his paper, and in the trajectory that followed. They emphasized the fact that modeling self-deception on interpersonal deception, as Demos does, seems to generate vexing paradoxes. The ubiquitous theme of paradox is what intervenes between Demos and Mele and what causes the analytic debate to develop as it does.18 Ironically, the very first response to Demos’s paper, John Canfield and Patrick McNally’s “Paradoxes of Self-Deception,” points out that there is no formal, logical contradiction involved in saying that the same person believes p and believes not-p at the same time. They write: “Because p and not-p are not truth-functional components of [Jones believes p and Jones believes not-p], it is not self-contradictory and in fact will often be true.”19 I will say much more about this claim in the next section. For now, the important point is that from the very beginning of the analytic debate, it was frankly conceded that Demos’s own analysis of self-deception is not logically contradictory. So whatever it might mean to say that believing p and not-p is “paradoxical,” it is clear from the outset that “paradoxical” cannot mean formally incoherent. Notwithstanding this concession, the immediately following paper, Canfield and Don Gustavson’s “Self-Deception” (1961), established the pattern of argument that would prevail for the next half-century. First, they note that modeling self-deception on intentional interpersonal deception requires us to say things that are “extremely oddsounding, if not contradictory.”20 The phrase “if not contradictory” must be read as “although not contradictory,” given that Canfield is a co-author of the earlier paper making this very point. In effect, then, Canfield and Gustavson reject the possibility of lying to oneself not on any formal, logical basis, but simply because it seems “suspect.”21

18 See Mele’s 1987 review article (Alfred R. Mele, “Recent Work on Self-Deception,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 24 (1987), 1–17), and the first chapter of Fingarette, Self-Deception. 19 John Canfield and Patrick McNally, “Paradoxes of Self-Deception,” Analysis, 21 (1961), 142. Canfield and McNally also raise objections to Demos that (in hindsight) seem frankly irrelevant: he does not account for contradictory dispositional beliefs, nor for “disbelieving,” which they apparently take to be an intentional act that is distinct from both “believing that not” and “not believing.” 20 John Canfield and Don Gustavson, “Self-Deception,” Analysis, 23 (1962), 32. 21 Canfield and Gustavson, “Self-Deception,” 33.

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 155 They argue that, even in cases where “in some sense, the person ‘knows’ what he believes and asserts to be false,” the word “knows” takes on an unusual meaning.22 I take it that their point is that if “knows” has an unusual meaning in cases of self-deception, it does not make sense to say that a self-deceiver really knows the truth, from which it follows that he does not really deceive himself at all, in the usual meaning of “deceive” (presumably on the assumption that if A deceives B about p, then A knows p). But even granting these (rather implausible) general claims about the univocal meaning of “knows” and “deceives,” this argument shows only that self-deception cannot be exactly like interpersonal deception in every respect—a claim that is trivially true. It is correct that a single person cannot be explicitly, occurrently aware (as deceiver) that he knows not-p even while he deceives himself (as victim) into explicitly, occurrently believing that p. But it does not follow that there is no way to model self-deception on interpersonal deception. Canfield and Gustavson seem to assume that it does. The argument pattern originally exhibited by Canfield and Gustavson in 1961 continues unabated through the present day. Despite the rhetoric of paradox, few philosophers expressly argue that the belief-state that Demos associates with self-deception—believing that p and believing that not-p—is impossible. At virtually every point, the basic move is the same: a philosopher first introduces the threat of paradox, then he uses that threat as a warrant that allows him to turn directly to his own “less paradoxical” model, even though he never argues that the relevant sense of “paradoxical” is equivalent to “incoherent,” or “impossible,” or to anything stronger than Canfield and Gustavson’s original “extremely odd-sounding, if not contradictory.” Merely raising the specter of “paradox” suffices to show that certain conceptions of self-deception should be avoided at all costs. The relevant argument form is a version of what David Lewis calls the “refutation by incredulous stare,” and it appears again and again (the emphasis is mine throughout): Terrence Penelhum, 1964: The concept of self-deception has seemed to some to generate paradoxes, to make us claim, for example, that a man both does and does not believe the same proposition. Such difficulties come, as has recently been shown, from trying to understand the idea of

22

Canfield and Gustavson, “Self-Deception,” 35.

156 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception deceiving oneself on the model of that of deceiving others. If we resist this temptation, a non-paradoxical rendering seems less difficult.23 Frederick Siegler, 1968: . . . But if A and B are the same person, this would imply that A believed that p was not true and that p was true, which is if not impossible, at least paradoxical. We need some analysis of the notion of self-deception that avoids this apparent paradox.24 Richard Reilly, 1976: Since this suggests that the self-deceiver intentionally, and hence knowingly, believes what he does not believe, selfdeception has been thought at least paradoxical, if not impossible. What I shall argue is that Demos’ . . . formulation is fundamentally mistaken.25 Robert Audi, 1982: Self-deception has widely been regarded as paradoxical. Perhaps . . . deceiving oneself would typically require getting oneself to believe something one knows is not true. It is not clear how this is possible, if indeed it is; and most philosophers writing on selfdeception have tried to avoid conceiving it in this way.26 Alfred R. Mele, 1987: What I shall call the paradox of belief may be formulated as follows for the purposes of introduction . . . “A must simultaneously believe that not-p and believe that p. But how is this possible?” The purpose of the present chapter is to show that this paradox can be resolved [by denying that the self-deceiver holds contradictory beliefs].27 David Hales, 1994: A prominent view about self-deception, probably the predominant one, is that self-deceivers both believe p and believe not-p. . . . Many have thought that these seeming facts are a contradiction in the making, or some kind of paradox . . . The central project of this paper is to undercut this entire approach.28 Kent Bach, 1998: Much of the mystery of self-deception is lifted once we abandon the assumption that the self-deceiver must be acting intentionally if he is to be acting purposefully . . . If there is an orthodox view of what [self-deception] involves, it is that [the self-deceiver] gets himself to form a contrary belief . . . No wonder paradox looms, for the 23 Terrence Penelhum, “Symposium: Pleasure and Falsity,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 1 (1964), 87–8. 24 Frederick A. Siegler, “An Analysis of Self-Deception,” Noûs, 2 (1968), 147. 25 Richard Reilly, “Self-Deception: Resolving the Epistemological Paradox,” Personalist, 57 (1976), 391. Later in the paper, he glosses “believes what he does not believe” as “believes p and not-p” (393). 26 Robert Audi, “Self-Deception, Action, and Will,” Erkenntnis, 18 (1982), 133. 27 Alfred R. Mele, Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self-Deception, and SelfControl (New York: OUP, 1987), 121. 28 Steven D. Hales, “Self-Deception and Belief Attribution,” Synthese, 101 (1994), 273.

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 157 orthodox view has it that the self-deceiver incoherently intends to form a belief that conflicts with another belief that he does not abandon.29 Neil Levy, 2004: Both requirements [that the self-deceiver holds contradictory beliefs and intends to deceive himself] still have their defenders. But both seem to give rise to paradoxes . . . In the face of these paradoxes, defenders of the traditional conception of self-deception are forced to resort to some rather untraditional hypotheses . . . Given the paradoxes threatened by each requirement, however, if we can account for self-deception without invoking them we ought to do so.30 D. S. N. Van Leeuwen, 2007: More formally, [the supposed selfdeceiver] believes that p and believes that ~p. But this seems psychologically absurd. So we have arrived at the well-known paradox of self-deception: start with an ordinary description of everyday mental life . . . and on quite straightforward analysis of the terms involved in the description see that it entails absurdity.31

These (wholly representative) quotations illustrate two key argumentative moves that are prevalent in the analytic debate on self-deception. First, as noted above, philosophers simply assert that lying to oneself is “paradoxical,” and then repudiate that conception of self-deception immediately, without further argument. In most cases, these quotations provide the full extent of any actual arguments offered about why lying to oneself is so paradoxical. Merely introducing the charge of paradox is enough to dismiss this conception of self-deception. Second, philosophers rarely use their own, active voice to assert that self-deception is paradoxical. This is somewhat surprising, given that the charge of paradox is so important, and I do not think it is a mere stylistic peccadillo. In the quotations above, note that the assertion of paradox is attributed to an impersonal “some” (Penelhum), and also to “many” (Hales), as well as to a passively voiced, “widely held” view (Siegler, Reilly, Audi). The prevalence of the passive voice expresses a certain argumentative unease born of the fact that these philosophers all regard lying to oneself as “paradoxical” even though they have not

Kent Bach, “(Apparent) Paradoxes of Self-Deception and Decision,” in Jean Pierre Dupuy (ed.), Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality (Stanford, Calif.: CSLI, 1998), 166. 30 Neil Levy, “Self-Deception and Moral Responsibility,” Ratio, 17 (2004), 296. 31 D. S. N. Van Leeuwen, “The Product of Self-Deception,” Erkenntnis, 67 (2007), 420. 29

158 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception shown that the relevant sense of “paradoxical” amounts to anything stronger than “difficult to understand.”32 In any case, by the late 1980s, the theme of paradox had been so well established that the paradoxes of self-deception were even given distinct names and canonical formulations. The first, which I will call the “doxastic paradox,” concerns what the self-deceiver believes. Here is a tidy formulation of the doxastic paradox, from William Talbott: It seems that a person who is self-deceived in believing a proposition p must, as the deceiver, believe that p is false, and as the deceived, believe that p is true. But how is one to make coherent sense of the supposition that a single self could believe both parts of an explicit contradiction?33

The doxastic paradox has received the most attention in the literature overall, but there is also a second paradox of self-deception, which I will call the “strategic paradox,” and it is more prominent in contemporary discussions.34 It concerns what the self-deceiver does in order to deceive himself. In central cases of interpersonal deception, the deceiver knowingly and intentionally causes his deceived victim to believe a falsehood. When deceiver and deceived are the same person, however, the strategic paradox ensues. Here is a formulation of the strategic paradox, from Mele: In general, A cannot successfully employ a deceptive strategy against B if B knows A’s intention and plan.35

This is the idea behind the strategic paradox: if a person (as deceiver) believes that some proposition is false or unwarranted, it seems

32 Interestingly, several of the most recent wave of articles on self-deception barely mention the paradoxes. Their authors have so thoroughly assimilated the claim that we cannot model self-deception on lying to oneself that this possibility is not raised at all, not even to be immediately dismissed. See e.g. Kevin Lynch, “On the ‘Tension’ Inherent in Self-Deception,” Philosophical Psychology, 25 (2012), 433–50, and Eric Funkhouser, “Self-Deception and the Limits of Folk Psychology,” Social Theory and Practice, 35(2009), 1–13. Tamar Szabó Gendler’s “Self-Deception as Pretense,” Noûs Supplement: Philosophical Perspectives, 21 (2007), 231–58, does raise (and then dismiss) the possibility that we should model self-deception on interpersonal deception, though she does concede that the interpersonal model gets some things right. 33 Talbott, “Intentional Self-Deception in a Single Coherent Self ,” 28. 34 The terms “doxastic paradox” and “strategic paradox” come from Annette Barnes, Seeing through Self-Deception (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4–17. Mele uses the terms “static” and “dynamic” paradoxes in “Recent Work on Self-Deception,” 1. He also uses “paradox of belief ” and “strategy paradox” in Irrationality, 121, 38. 35 Mele, Irrationality, 138.

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 159 impossible that he could also make himself (as deceived) believe that the proposition is true. We do not appear to have the kind of active, decisional control over our beliefs that a successful plan of selfdeception requires. I am now in a position to make some general observations about why the trajectory of analytic thought developed as it did after Demos. The initial barrage of papers on self-deception, from 1960 to about 1970, shows that the philosophical problem of self-deception came to be posed very minimally. With any philosophical inquiry, there is a natural “fit” between question and answer, problem and solution: the range of solutions to a philosophical problem that are considered viable is constrained by the way the problem is posed. Yet the reverse also holds. If the answer to a given question seems impossible, the question itself can only seem incoherent. Questions that only seem to elicit impossible answers soon cease to be asked altogether. They are replaced by different, more answerable, questions. Under the threat of paradox, philosophers abandoned the dualbelief condition right away. They began to treat self-deception as a special kind of false, but not contradictory, belief: belief against the obvious weight of the evidence. After Demos, analytic philosophy on self-deception may be seen as a series of attempts to resolve or avoid the doxastic and strategic paradoxes while answering the question “what must be added to false belief to yield a condition of selfdeception?”36 That was not Demos’s original question at all, but it is the question that analytic philosophers have been trying to answer for almost fifty years. Once the problem is posed this way, the challenge then becomes one of specifying just what it is about selfdeceptive false believing that distinguishes it from other kinds of false believing, such as error, prejudice, wishful thinking, stubbornness, etc. For example, against Demos’s claim that the self-deceiver believes p and not-p, Canfield and Gustavson argue that the self-deceiver need only believe p in “belief-adverse circumstances,” i.e. circumstances in which the evidence points overwhelmingly to not-p. In response, Terrence Penelhum points out that this analysis of self-deception is not sufficiently restrictive, since people who are merely mistaken,

36

Mele, Irrationality, 128.

160 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception ignorant, or stupid also believe p against the weight of evidence that objectively favors not-p. What we need, according to Penelhum, is a further condition that the self-deceiver recognizes the force of the evidence, even though he does not believe the true proposition to which it points and, in fact, believes its opposite.37 Against this claim, however, Patrick Gardiner argues that, if the self-deceiver recognizes the force of the evidence for p, then by that very fact, he must also believe p. (On many analyses of the relationship between evidence and belief, to recognize that the weight of one’s evidence favors p just is to believe p.) Since the self-deceiver also believes the counterevidential proposition, not-p, Penelhum’s analysis simply reinstates the doxastic paradox, according to Gardiner.38 Gardiner’s paper is an ancestor of the most prominent current models of self-deception—deflationary models that deny both the dual-belief and the agency conditions—because Gardiner wonders whether, after all is said and done, “self-deception really comes down to no more than being mistaken with a motive.” He speculates that perhaps “a self-deceiver is simply a man who wrongfully believes something to be true which he would not have believed to be true in the absence of the particular interest in the matter concerned that he has.”39 Gardiner himself ultimately demurs, but it is just this view that Mele, for example, now defends. The crucial conceptual shift in this early analytic debate occurred almost immediately and had far-reaching consequences for the way subsequent debate developed. Again, Demos’s original question was: how can one successfully lie to oneself? His question assumes that the self-deceiver knows the truth, for it is precisely because he knows the truth that a puzzle arises about how he can come to believe his own lie. This assumption was quickly left by the wayside. Driven by aversion to the paradoxes, the philosophical problem of self-deception was transformed from a problem about the self-deceiver’s conflicting beliefs into a problem about the nature of his relationship to a body of evidence. The relevant question becomes: how can the selfdeceiver believe p and fail to believe not-p, given the overwhelming evidence for not-p? This question, more-or-less implicit in the early Penelhum, “Symposium: Pleasure and Falsity,” 88. Patrick L. Gardiner, “Error, Faith, and Self-Deception,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 50 (1970), 234 ff. See also Fingarette, Self-Deception, 25–8. 39 Gardiner, “Error Faith and Self-Deception,” 242. 37 38

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 161 discussion from Canfield and Gustavson to Gardiner, is the question that is passed on to subsequent philosophers. Soon the puzzle of self-deception explicitly becomes a puzzle about how to explain cases “when someone presents himself as believing that something is so in the face of what the accuser himself sees as amply obvious evidence that it is not so.”40 Phrased differently, the question at hand becomes, “how does a subject who is competent to detect the irrationality of a belief that p form her belief against weighty or even conclusive evidence to the contrary?”41 It can even be glossed as merely “the puzzle of how irrational belief is formed.”42 Construed so minimally, the problem of self-deception becomes simply a problem about how a person can draw a false, biased inference from a straightforward body of evidence. There are at least three unintended consequences of this conception that deserve brief mention. First, the emphasis on empirical evidence tends to sever the traditional connection between self-deception and self-knowledge, and also tends to sever strong connections between self-deception, moral responsibility, and moral agency. There are many alternative ways in which the philosophical problem of self-deception could have entered into the mainstream of analytic philosophy. Even Demos’s own paper could have been viewed through the prism of philosophical ethics. It could have provoked a series of questions about moral responsibility, moral psychology, and the moral consequences (for good and ill) of reasoning under the influence of emotion and desire. To be sure, at many points in the analytic conversation, a great deal of interesting work does address these questions. For the most part, however, the philosophical problem of self-deception has always been treated as a problem in epistemology and the philosophy of mind: The question “What is self-deception?” is similar, in an interesting respect, to the question “What is knowledge?” The latter question has often been formulated as follows: “What must be added to true belief to yield knowledge?” A parallel formulation of the former question, as

David Kipp, “On Self-Deception,” Philosophical Quarterly, 30 (1980), 306. Ariela Lazar, “Deceiving Oneself or Self-Deceived? On the Formation of Beliefs under the Influence,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Philosophy, 108 (1999), 265. 42 Ariela Lazar, “Division and Deception: Davidson on Being Self-Deceived,” in Dupuy, Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Irrationality, 26. 40 41

162 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception least as it has often been understood, is natural—namely, “What must be added to false belief to yield a condition of self-deception?”43 . . . to me, the real interest of self-deception is whether certain tough cases are possible, and how they are if they are, and why they are not, if they are not . . . Investigating those may reveal something of importance about mental architecture.44

When the chief philosophical interest of self-deception lies in its implications for “mental architecture,” it is clear that moral considerations have been left far behind.45 Indeed, the flight toward deflationary models of self-deception runs exactly parallel with a concomitant flight away from treating self-deception as the sort of thing for which one is morally responsible.46 Second, to someone who is not steeped in the assumptions of analytic philosophy, “the puzzle of how irrational belief is formed” may not seem very puzzling. As Jon Elster points out, more than three hundred years ago, French moralists like La Rochefoucauld (and Pascal) offered very sophisticated discussions of the causal effects of emotion and desire on mental life.47 From the long perspective of history, it is quite strange to see twentieth-century analytic philosophers argue about whether desire can unintentionally cause biased reasoning. Of course it can. The interesting question is whether that is all there is to self-deception. Finally, even within the analytic tradition, once the problem of selfdeception gets posed so minimally, the pressure to deny the dual belief and agency conditions and adopt a deflationary model of selfdeception becomes almost overwhelming, because anything else really does look like massive theoretical overkill. Anti-intentionalists like Mele argue that self-deception can be fully explained as the unintentional byproduct of, for example, selective evidence gathering 43

Mele, Irrationality, 128. Brian P. McLaughlin, “On the Very Possibility of Self-Deception,” in Roger T. Ames and Wimal Dissanayake (eds), Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 46. 45 Moral questions, of course, are primary in ancient and early-modern discussions of self-deception. Given his interest in classical philosophy, it is not surprising that they are present in Demos, as well. See Demos, “Lying to Oneself ,” 589–90. 46 The logical conclusion of this trajectory is Levy, “Self-Deception and Moral Responsibility,” 294–311. 47 Elster, Alchemies of the Mind, 76 ff. One might add that La Rochefoucauld and Pascal are themselves nourished by a millennium and half of Christian reflection on the same topic. 44

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 163 and selective attention. These behaviors are broadly purposive, but they are not intentionally aimed at acquiring some favored false belief. If both sides are only trying to answer the question of how can someone form a false belief that p in the face of evidence that strongly favors not-p, then the very parameters of the debate favor the anti-intentionalist. Unintentionally biased reasoning is straightforwardly possible, whereas intentionally biased reasoning is much more problematic. Famous experiments in empirical psychology show that people often reason poorly when they are influenced by desire and emotion. It is highly unlikely that the subjects of these experiments intend to reason badly. Anti-intentionalists like Mele can appeal to these data, but intentionalists have no comparable body of empirical evidence to which they can appeal. This is what I mean when I say that Mele’s theoretically minimal model of self-deception is the logical conclusion of the initial response to Demos. It is the logical conclusion of any trajectory of inquiry that aims to answer the very minimal question, “how can someone form a false belief that p in the face of evidence that strongly favors not-p?” Mele can answer this question with admirable parsimony, asserting that there is nothing more to self-deception than biased belief, thereby rendering entirely superfluous the contradictory beliefs and hidden intentions posited by his opponents. It is surely correct that contradictory beliefs and hidden intentions are not needed to explain “the puzzle of how irrational belief is formed.” But they might still be needed to explain how someone can lie to himself successfully—which is, after all, the problem that Demos originally set out to solve.

PARADOX! Of course, the doxastic and strategic paradoxes are supposed to rule out lying to oneself. If they really do rule it out, then the move toward deflationary models of self-deception is not only warranted, but required. As discussed above, worries about the doxastic and strategic paradoxes have driven the analytic debate on self-deception by constraining the field of possible solutions to its central problems. Yet surprisingly few philosophers have explicitly argued that the paradoxes are insurmountable. As far as anyone has actually shown, the

164 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception paradoxes of self-deception are really puzzles that can be solved, instead of paradoxes that must be avoided. All sides agree that modeling self-deception too closely on interpersonal deception generates paradoxes. But how closely is “too closely?” It is possible to generate different versions of the doxastic and strategic paradoxes, depending on how the underlying relationship between self-deception and interpersonal deception is construed. At one extreme, the paradoxes do present logically insurmountable barriers. But on more plausible construals, they do not. For example, consider this formulation of the relationship between interpersonal deception and self-deception, which does describe a logically impossible state of affairs: In typical cases of deception: at time t, B (the deceived) does not believe that p. A (the deceiver) believes that not-p and does not believe that p. Then, at t + 1 (a suitably short interval), A knowingly and intentionally causes B to believe p. At t + 1, A still believes that not-p and it is still not the case that A believes p, nor is it the case that B believes not-p. In typical cases of self-deception, A = B.

This formulation generates a doxastic paradox that is logically insurmountable, because it entails that a formal contradiction is true: “A believes that p” and “It is not the case that A believes that p.” It also generates a strategic paradox that is psychologically insurmountable, because it asserts that A instantly, knowingly, and intentionally causes himself to believe that p is true when he already believes that p false. This may or may not be logically impossible, but it is surely psychologically impossible—human beings just aren’t wired that way.48 But there is no reason to assume that self-deception must be modeled on this particular construal of interpersonal deception. Moreover, this is not even the construal that most advocates of strong self-deception embrace. Consider instead a softer formulation, like: In typical cases of deception, A believes not-p, and B believes p, because A intentionally causes B to believe p.

I do not claim that this is a satisfactory analysis of deception, but it is the rough conception of interpersonal deception that generates the 48 This disjunction between logical impossibility and psychologically impossibility is not meant to be theory-laden, and my argument does not really depend on it. The point is simply that believing at will does seem impossible, but it isn’t clear that it is impossible in the way that collecting a bouquet of colorless red roses is impossible.

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 165 most common formulations of the doxastic and strategic paradoxes, like those of Talbott and Mele, above. Roughly: Doxastic Paradox: S believes that not-p and S believes that p. Strategic Paradox: S intentionally causes himself to believe p, when he also believes that p is false.

These formulations of the paradoxes do not describe impossible states of affairs, and they are the only formulations that must be addressed by someone who wants to show that the dual-belief and agency conditions can be satisfied. To show that these formulations do not describe impossible states of affairs, I will consider each in turn.

The Doxastic Paradox: Puzzling, Not Paradoxical Given all the attention devoted to the doxastic paradox—“often regarded at the paradox of self-deception”49—it is quite remarkable that there is nothing formally incoherent about the claim that a single subject believes contradictory propositions. That is, it is not logically impossible for a single subject to believe p and believe not-p at the same time. Everyone agrees that it seems impossible to believe explicitly contradictory propositions in full awareness of both sides of the contradiction, and, conversely, everyone agrees that believing inconsistent—as opposed to directly contradictory—propositions is common enough. But even beyond these points of near-complete accord, there is also widespread agreement that there is nothing formally incoherent about the mere fact of holding contradictory beliefs. Indeed, I think it is safe to say that nearly all philosophers who have carefully considered the matter agree that “S believes p and S believes not-p” is not a logically incoherent proposition—not a formal contradiction.50

49

Mele, Irrationality, 121. In other words, I do not take myself to be saying anything new or controversial in the discussion which follows. In the self-deception literature e.g. see Donald Davidson, “Deception and Division [1986],” in Problems of Rationality (New York: OUP, 2004), 199–200; Canfield and McNally, “Paradoxes of Self-Deception,” 142; Ronald B. de Sousa, “Self-Deception,” Inquiry, 13 (1970), 308; Mike W. Martin, SelfDeception and Morality (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 18–24; José Luis Bermúdez, “Self-Deception, Intentions, and Contradictory Beliefs,” Analysis, 60 (2000), 309–19. 50

166 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception One quick and dirty way to see that “S believes p and S believes not-p” cannot be a formal contradiction is to note that, if it were, then it could never be true, and if it could never be true, then it could never be legitimate to assert it. But then it could never be legitimate to accuse someone else of directly contradicting himself, a practice that most philosophers would surely be reluctant to abandon. Somewhat more formally, consider these four statements: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Marge believes that Bart is good. Marge believes that Bart is not good. Marge believes that (Bart is good and Bart is not good). Marge does not believe that Bart is good.

Applied to Marge, the dual-belief condition asserts that the conjunction of (1) and (2) is true. And there simply is not any way in classical logic (propositional logic and first-order predicate logic with identity) to schematize the conjunction of (1) and (2) in a way that produces a formal contradiction.51 There are formal systems of doxastic logic that aim to capture the logic of belief, but they are normative systems that capture the logic of ideally rational belief—what perfectly rational, logically omniscient believers would believe—and are not descriptive systems that capture the way people actually do believe.52 They are not relevant to disputes about the doxastic paradox. 51 In propositional logic, these two statements can only be paraphrased as e.g. “q” and “r,” which do not contradict. They cannot be paraphrased as “q” and “–q,” because the statements do not have the same content: “S believes that p” and “S believes that not-p” are not semantically equivalent, obviously, and so they cannot both be paraphrased by a single sentence-letter and its negation. In predicate logic, it is possible to define a two-place “belief ” relation, “Bxy,” that takes a person as its first argument and a proposition as its second argument, so that “S believes that p” would be paraphrased “Bsp.” But then “S believes that not-p” would have to be paraphrased as “Bs p” which also does not directly contradict “Bsp.” Of course, it is possible to introduce premises and axioms that ensure the two will contradict, but that is always possible for any two propositions, and doesn’t mean that there is something inherent in the belief-relation entailing that one person cannot believe a contradiction. 52 Compare the statement from the formal linguist and philosopher Barbara Partee, who writes: “a formal system which disallows inconsistent beliefs, no matter how elegant it may be, is of dubious value as an explanation of the meaning of belief sentences in ordinary language unless it can be argued that all purported attributions of inconsistent beliefs to a person are necessarily in error.” Barbara Partee, “The Semantics of Belief-Sentences,” in Jaakko Hintikka et al. (eds), Approaches to Natural Language: Proceedings of the 1970 Stanford Workshop on Grammar and Semantics (Boston, Mass.: Reidel, 1973), 317. The same point holds for directly contradictory beliefs.

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 167 Note also that even (3), which asserts that Marge believes a single proposition with contradictory content, does not itself express a formal contradiction, though I cannot really imagine a case in which it is true. It might be thought that (1) and (2) jointly entail (3), but this is false: it is certainly possible to believe several individual propositions without also believing their conjunction.53 (For example, I do not now believe one proposition, p, that is the conjunction of all the indefinitely many true-but-trivial mathematical propositions that I believe singly.) The conjunction of (1) and (4) is indeed a formal contradiction, and must be avoided at all costs.54 It might be thought that (2) entails (4), since we usually assume that someone disbelieves p when we attribute to him the belief that not-p. If this is indeed a logical entailment, then the dual-belief condition (the conjunction of (1) and (2)) would, after all, express a hidden contradiction. But it is not a logical entailment. Ordinarily, when we take a proposition like (2) to be true, we are justified in assuming that (4) is true as well. But the connection does not hold as a matter of logic. In sum: only the conjunction of (1) and (4) produces a formal contradiction, but the dual-belief condition requires merely the conjunction of (1) and (2). Therefore, however puzzling or logically odd the dual-belief condition may be, it cannot be ruled out as impossible.

The Strategic Paradox: A Matter of Degree Although the strategic paradox does not even purport to raise a formal contradiction, it still has more bite than the doxastic paradox. At first blush, it really does seem impossible to cause oneself to believe something that one also believes to be false or groundless. Bernard Williams provides a canonical defense of this claim (although not in the context of disputes about self-deception): If I could acquire a belief at will, I could acquire it whether it was true or not; moreover I would know that I could acquire it whether it was true 53

Mele agrees: see his Self-Deception Unmasked, 131 n. 1. In ordinary language, the meaning of statements like (4) is sometimes ambiguous. Sometimes (4) can express no more than (2), but more often it expresses something stronger, “S disbelieves p,” where this means, “It is not the case that S believes that p.” That is the way I read it here. 54

168 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception or not. If in full consciousness I could will to acquire a ‘belief ’ irrespective of its truth, it is unclear that before the event I could seriously think of it as a belief, i.e. as something purporting to represent reality.55

According to Williams, there are conceptual connections between “believing that p” and “believing that p is true”: if one does not believe that p is true, one cannot believe p. As Mele puts it, “any project describable as ‘getting myself to believe what I know [or believe] to be false,’ is bound to be self-defeating.”56 If a self-deceiver is to satisfy the agency condition, it seems that he must engage in just such a project. Yet it is clear that Mele does not really think that intentional projects of belief cultivation are always self-defeating. For example, he agrees that an unbeliever who wants to believe in God and submits to Pascal’s post-wager program of habituation really will come to believe in God.57 Moreover, in the self-deception literature, at least, it is regarded as unproblematic that these kinds of indirect, longer term projects of belief cultivation are possible. Yet, on their own terms, these are precisely projects in which a person intentionally employs a deceptive strategy against himself in order to cultivate a belief that he does not regard as true.58 Philosophers who consider the issue invariably accept that wagertype projects are possible, but deny that they are really projects of selfdeception. Rather, such projects are assimilated to highly irregular projects of “self-caused” deception, in which a “present self” deceives a “future self.” Consider a man who falsifies his own diary, confident that at some future date he will have forgotten that he did so; when he later reads the diary, his “future self ” will have been deceived by his “past self .” Philosophers typically accept that projects like this are possible, but deny that they are really projects of self-deception, properly so-called.59 55 Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 148. Though Williams is often cited as a decisive refutation of doxastic voluntarism, there is a growing body of literature criticizing his argument and defending various forms of doxastic voluntarism. See e.g. the symposium on doxastic voluntarism in The Monist, 85/3 (2002), 343–478. 56 Mele, “Recent Work on Self-Deception,” 1. 57 Mele, Irrationality, 132–4. 58 I emphasize “on their terms” because I do not believe that the convert in Pascal’s wager engages in “deceptive” strategies. 59 See Mele, Irrationality, 132–4; Barnes, Seeing through Self-Deception, 112–14; Mark Johnston, “Self-Deception and the Nature of Mind,” in McLaughlin and Rorty, Perspectives on Self-Deception, 77–8; McLaughlin, “Exploring the Possibility of SelfDeception in Belief ,” 41.

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 169 So as far as I can see, then, this is philosophical state of play regarding the strategic paradox: everyone accepts that immediate, decisional control over belief-formation is impossible, but everyone also accepts that indirect, long-term control over belief-formation is straightforwardly possible. There is plenty of conceptual space in between those two extremes, however—between immediate decisional control (which might count as self-deception but is impossible) and long-term, indirect control (which is clearly possible but does not count as self-deception). Somewhere in that conceptual space, perhaps there is a project that is just decisional enough to count as a successful project of intentional self-deception and just long-term enough to succeed.60 I see no reason to rule out that possibility in advance, at any rate. The claim that one cannot coherently execute a plan to deceive oneself simply ignores a vast middle ground in which self-directed control over the process of belief-formation is possible. I conclude that neither the doxastic paradox nor the strategic paradox presents an insurmountable barrier to strong self-deception. Analytic philosophy on self-deception might have developed very differently. The seemingly paradoxical character of self-deception might have served as a philosophical goad instead of a philosophical barrier. Demos’s original paper might have provoked a half-century of attempts to show that the dual-belief and agency conditions can be satisfied after all, despite the threat of paradox. Instead, with notable exceptions, Demos provoked a half-century of attempts to show that genuine self-deception does not require those conditions to be satisfied, because of the threat of paradox.

PARADOXES OF ATTENTION AND AWARENESS The paradoxes of self-deception have bite because people cannot knowingly believe both sides of a contradiction or intend to deceive themselves if they explicitly focus on what they intend. The real issue is awareness: no one can believe both sides of a contradiction in full awareness and no one can successfully employ a deceptive strategy against himself in full awareness. Given the near-universal rejection 60 For a suggestion along these lines, see Roy A. Sorensen, “Self-Deception and Scattered Events,” Mind, 94 (1985), 64–9.

170 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception of strong self-deception, it appears that philosophers on all sides of the analytic debate assume that our immediate, spontaneous awareness of our own beliefs and intentions renders strong self-deception impossible. This assumption is false. If the paradoxes may really be understood as puzzles about attention and awareness, then they present insurmountable barriers to strong self-deception only on the assumption that two highly implausible claims about believing and acting are true: (BFA) If S believes that p and forms the belief that not p, then S also focuses on (p and not-p), in full awareness. (AFA) For any action, X, X-ing intentionally entails X-ing in fullawareness that one is X-ing.61

Both claims assume that awareness is a binary state: one is either wholly, completely aware of one’s beliefs and intentions, or else one has not really formed those beliefs or acted intentionally at all. The dual-belief condition is blocked by (BFA) because (BFA) asserts that we would always notice that we are about to believe a contradiction, which would prevent us from forming the contradictory belief. The agency condition is blocked by (AFA) because (AFA) assumes that we would explicitly focus on any intention to deceive ourselves, which would prevent us from executing that intention successfully. If (AFA) were true, however, one of two things would have to follow: we would either have to admit that virtually none of our actions are intentional, or we would have to suppose that everyone fully, explicitly attends to what they do almost all the time. I take it that neither is plausible. Consider the utterly common phenomenon of rote actions performed by habit—for instance driving along a customary route. A driver typically performs scores of intentional actions—unlocking the car, starting it, minutely adjusting to road conditions while driving, etc.—and he is aware of performing these actions (after all, he isn’t literally unconscious) but he does not explicitly attend to them. Contra (BFA), consider a related claim that is clearly false: “If S believes that p and forms the belief that q, then S also focuses on (p and q), in full awareness.” It is obvious that this more general claim about awareness and belief-formation does not hold. If it did, then each time we form a new belief, we would also, explicitly, occurrently 61

“(BFA)” and “(AFA)” for, respectively, Belief/Action in Full-Awareness.

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 171 focus on its conjunction with all our existing beliefs. Furthermore, even diehard non-contradictionists admit that people routinely fail to notice that they hold inconsistent beliefs, so it is also clear that we are not generally aware of all the logical implications of what we believe. When we already believe p, for example, it is clear that we frequently form the belief q without ever noticing that “if q then not-p.” So someone who affirms (BFA) must assume that our spontaneous awareness of our own beliefs is such that we guard against any contradiction, even though we recklessly tolerate inconsistency, and even though we do not, in general, monitor the conjunctions of what we believe. This is narrow ground, indeed. Perhaps some philosophers would respond that human beings really do exemplify just this peculiar mixture of rationality and irrationality. It seems to me, however, that defending just-and-only this position is a form of special pleading, a maneuver that would only be adopted by someone who wanted to guarantee that people never held contradictory beliefs, even though contradictory believing is not logically impossible. I don’t find (BFA) or (AFA) even remotely plausible, and one doesn’t exactly have to be a doctrinaire Freudian to believe they are badly mistaken. If I am not entitled simply to dismiss these claims, then at a minimum, I can at least lay down a marker noting that this is the price that someone who denies the possibility of strong self-deception must pay: he or she is committed to this very picture of unrestricted mental self-transparency. For it is a fact that claims about awareness that are even slightly weaker than (BFA) and (AFA) will not generate the insurmountable paradoxes needed to rule out the dual belief and agency conditions. In particular, the paradoxes are not insurmountable if we soften (BFA) and (AFA) into the following modal variants: (BFA-P) If S believes that p and forms the belief that not-p, then S can focus on (p and not-p), in full awareness. (AFA-P) For any action, X, X-ing intentionally entails that one can become fully aware that one is X-ing or has X-ed.62

I doubt that even these revised claims are true, but they are at least defensible. They also allow that strong self-deception is possible, even without positing any new theoretical entities like subagents, mental partitions, or unconscious beliefs. On these two modal claims, a 62

In “BFA-P” and “AFA-P,” the “P” is for “possibility.”

172 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception successful account of strong self-deception would merely be an account of how a self-deceiver manages his awareness so that he does not attend to his beliefs and intentions while he is deceiving himself, even though he can attend to them. I therefore suggest the following rough-and-ready picture of strong self-deception: While the self-deceiver remains in the state of selfdeception—while he continues to deceive himself—he does not ever attend to the fact that he believes not-p, and he does not ever attend to the fact that he is intentionally deceiving himself into believing p. But he is still able—he still has the capacity—to notice these facts about himself. Presumably, if he were to notice them, he would thereby cease deceiving himself, by definition. While it is impossible for him to notice his beliefs and intentions and still continue deceiving himself, it is perfectly possible that he does not notice them at any particular point during his self-deception. Obviously, I don’t claim that this bare description is an analysis of self-deception or a full explanation of how someone can deceive himself. But it does suggest that, on any remotely plausible construal of self-awareness, the very possibility of strong self-deception cannot be ruled out.

“PERPETUALLY HOLISTIC SELF-TRANSPARENCY” The claims about awareness captured by (BFA) and (AFA) are at the very root of the nearly universal analytic assumption that self-deception is highly paradoxical. The early opponents of strong self-deception explicitly relied on (BFA). Indeed, without (BFA), it is possible that self-deception would never have been regarded as paradoxical in the first place.63 On the other hand, I doubt that most contemporary philosophers working on self-deception would assent to (BFA) and (AFA), were they presented with these claims as general claims about human awareness. But they still advance arguments that implicitly depend on them.

63 See F. A. Siegler, “Self-Deception,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 41 (1963), 30; Siegler, “Demos on Lying to Oneself ,” Journal of Philosophy, 59 (1962), 472; Stanley Paluch, “Self-Deception,” Inquiry, 10 (1967), 269–70; Béla Szabados, “Self-Deception,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 4 (1974), 54.

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 173 When pressed, most contemporary philosophers would probably insist that they rely only on the plausible (BFA-P) and (AFA-P) and not on their more implausible cousins. But their own arguments belie this assertion. For example, (AFA) is prevalent in Mele’s work. He writes: [Self-deceivers] rarely act with the intention of deceiving themselves. Unless there are unconscious intentions, this would involve consciously aiming at getting oneself to believe (or think, sincerely avow, etc.) something that one consciously knows or believes to be false. And although this is possible (e.g., I might hire a hypnotist to induce in me a false belief that my business is prospering), it also seems to be rather distant from common cases of self-deception generally treated in the literature on this topic.64

When Mele says that intending to deceive oneself “would involve consciously aiming at getting oneself to believe . . . something that one consciously knows or believes to be false,” he appears to treat consciously intending as synonymous with explicitly intending—i.e. with intending in full self-awareness. That is, he appears to be relying on a principle like (AFA). With all his talk about hypnotists and so forth, it is clear that he assumes that someone who intends to deceive himself must formulate an explicit plan, represent it to himself in full awareness as “an intention to deceive” and then carry it out. He does not seem willing to accept that anything else could count as intentionally deceiving oneself. Yet as a general claim about what intentional action requires, this is surely an overly restrictive view, for all the reasons I have already presented.65 A bit of detective work shows that the same implausible assumptions about self-awareness also lurk behind many other contemporary 64

Mele, Irrationality, 123. Against this restrictive view, Bermúdez cites Mele’s own work on the philosophy of action. “It is highly implausible that doing something intentionally entails doing it knowingly (cf. Mele 1992a, 112), and nothing less than this will generate the dynamic paradox. Even the view (which entails the falsity of all Freudian accounts of repression) that when one is acting intentionally, what one is trying to do is accessible to introspection, will not generate the paradox because an intention can be accessible to introspection (in the sense that it could be brought to consciousness) without actually being conscious, and unless the intention is actually rather than potentially conscious, there is no reason for it to undermine the strategy of self-deception.” José Luis Bermúdez, “Defending Intentionalist Accounts of Self-Deception,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20 (1997), 108. The internal citation is to: Alfred R. Mele, Springs of Action: Understanding Intentional Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 65

174 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception dismissals of strong self-deception, even when those assumptions are not immediately apparent. Consider, for example, Eric Funkhouser’s, “Do the Self-Deceived Get What They Want?” (2005).66 Understandably enough at this point in the analytic conversation, Funkhouser feels entitled to dismiss the possibility of strong self-deception in a single sentence: “Well-known paradoxes arise when self-deception is viewed on the model of interpersonal deception, and theorists must deny a parallel at some point.”67 In the footnote to that sentence, he refers his readers to the first chapter of Mele’s Self-Deception Unmasked (2001). In that chapter, Mele does describe the doxastic and strategic paradoxes at considerable length, but the two statements below are the closest he comes to arguing directly that they should be regarded as prima-facie barriers to strong models of self-deception: Some theorists take this to entail that, at some time, self-deceivers both believe that p and believe that not-p (e.g., Kipp, 1980, p. 309). And, it is claimed, this is not a possible state of mind: the very nature of belief precludes one’s simultaneously believing that p is true and believing that p is false. Thus, we have a static puzzle about self-deception: selfdeception, according to the view at issue, requires being in an impossible state of mind. . . . it is hard to imagine how one person can deceive another into believing that p if the latter person knows exactly what the former is up to, and it is difficult to see how the trick can be any easier when the intending deceiver and the intended victim are the same person.68

The second cited passage merely makes the weak claim that “it is hard to imagine” how the agency condition could be satisfied. As it stands, this is not quite an argument—lots of things that are hard to imagine turn out to be true. 66 Eric Funkhouser, “Do the Self-Deceived Get What they Want?,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 86/3 (2005), 295–312. The answer to his title question is “no,” incidentally. According to Funkhouser, self-deceivers believe that not-p, want to believe that p, and so form two false, second-order beliefs: that they do not believe not-p and that they do believe p. But they don’t get what they want, because they don’t actually form a false, first-order belief that p. 67 Funkhouser, “Do the Self-Deceived Get What they Want?,” 298. 68 Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked, 6–7, 8. It is correct, though somewhat unfair, to say that these statements are the closest Mele comes to arguing directly against strong self-deception. Mele believes that his own model is superior to strong models because his model is a more parsimonious explanation of self-deception, and so as an inference to the best explanation, his simpler model is better. Thus, he sees little need to argue against strong self-deception directly (17).

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 175 On the other hand, the first passage does make an argument, but not in Mele’s own voice. It alleges that “it is claimed” by “some theorists” that the dual-belief condition describes an impossible state of mind.69 Accordingly, someone who does not immediately agree that contradictory believing is paradoxical, and who innocently traces Funkhouser’s citation back to its source, might still be perplexed. If he were particularly curious, he might notice that Mele himself cites David Kipp (1980) as one of the theorists who holds this view, and so turn to Kipp for further explanation. Here his search would end, for Kipp offers as clear a statement as anyone could ever want about why strong self-deception is paradoxical. On the page cited by Mele, Kipp writes: The literalist view thus seems to require that the self-deceiver should be simultaneously deceiver and deceived. This, in turn, seems to require that two mutually opaque, autonomously thinking and willing consciousnesses should exist within the soul of the self-deceiver, yet that these consciousnesses should also exist within a unified consciousness that grounds the self-deceiver’s identity as a self.70

What a leap! According to Kipp, if a self-deceiver believes both p and not-p, he must be the bearer of “two mutually opaque, autonomously thinking and willing consciousnesses.” That is indeed a very high theoretical price to pay for affirming the dual belief-condition. But why does Kipp think that such an exorbitant price must be paid? He continues directly: What all of this requires, of course, is that consciousness should not be exactly what, in my view, it most inexorably shows itself to be, namely, something whose “parts” are by nature consubstantially unified in a state of perpetually holistic self-transparency.71 69 Interestingly, throughout his many publications on self-deception, Mele is very careful not to make this claim in his own voice. In fact, he occasionally makes the opposite claim: “Again, I have not claimed that simultaneously believing that p and believing that not-p is conceptually or psychologically impossible” (Self-Deception Unmasked, 132 n. 3); “I have no wish to claim that it is impossible for an agent to believe that p while also believing that not-p. My claim, to be substantiated further, is that there is no explanatory need to postulate such beliefs” (Alfred R. Mele, “Real SelfDeception,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20 (1997), 98). 70 Kipp, “On Self-Deception,” 309. 71 My emphasis. Naturally, Kipp’s very next sentence begins “There is no possibility of arguing this complex issue here” (309).

176 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception Kipp thinks that a self-deceiver can satisfy the dual-belief condition only if he has two separate, autonomous centers of consciousness. He holds this view because he also thinks that any single center of consciousness is perfectly self-transparent. This is the argument that grounds Kipp’s own denial of the dualbelief condition, and therefore—whether Mele would explicitly assent to it or not—it is also the argument that objectively grounds Mele’s own allegation, citing Kipp, that strong self-deception is not a possible state of mind. And, finally, this argument also grounds Funkhouser’s breezy assertion, citing Mele, that “well-known paradoxes arise when self-deception is viewed on the model of interpersonal deception.” The “well-known paradoxes” of self-deception turn out to be paradoxical only on the assumption that consciousness is “by nature consubstantially unified in a state of perpetually holistic selftransparency.” If this assumption is rejected—as it surely must be— then the claim that strong self-deception is highly paradoxical has been given no basis in argument, despite a chain of citations that stretches back for twenty-five years.

CONCLUSION: PASCAL CONTRA SELF-TRANSPARENCY If my study of analytic philosophy on self-deception is correct, then the argument that lying to oneself is “paradoxical” depends on some very implausible claims about human awareness. By contrast, the argument of Chapters 1 through 4—indeed, even the briefest resume of Pascal’s thought—suffices to show that he thoroughly rejects the assumption that we are transparent to ourselves. Pascal indicts the “nullity of our own being” (L806/S653) and calls the seat of our subjectivity “hollow and foul” (L139/S171). Far from being transparent to ourselves, we cannot even be sure whether we are asleep or awake (L131/S164). We are “always torn by inner divisions and contradictions” (L621/S514). To the extent that Pascal’s description of the human subject is apt, it refutes analytic assumptions about mental self-transparency. Instead, in the Pensées, self-knowledge is not simply a matter of introspection, or directing one’s conscious awareness towards one’s own mental life. Self-knowledge is always a theological project. To

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 177 know ourselves is to know ourselves as fallen and in need of redemption. “Man’s true nature, his true good, true virtue, and true religion are things that cannot be known separately” (L393/S12). “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves” (L417/S36). The only self-knowledge worth having is that “we are wretched, corrupt, separated from God, but redeemed by Christ” (L431/S683). Until we are redeemed by Christ, we remain fallen and corrupt, internally and externally wracked by the consequences of the Fall. Internally, our wills are divided against themselves and caught up in the perpetual cycle of unsatisfied desire. Our rational faculties are also fallen. We are still able to reason deductively, but calculative reason must start from true premises in order to succeed, and both sides of a contradiction often seem true to us (L177/S208). The faculty of the imagination, which is not oriented toward truth, is so powerful that it has set up a “second nature” in us (L44/S78). Externally, we are all members of a social world that systematically conditions us to eschew truth. The political order is founded on mechanisms of deception that reproduce themselves by becoming customary and natural. Human social interactions are often little more than mutual collusions in pretense, hypocrisy, and self-deception. Even my subjective sense of self is doubly imaginary, my fantasy about the way other people think about me. In short, according to Pascal, we are not isolated, selftransparent, maximally-rational minds. We are duplicitous subjects thrown into a duplicitous world. It is therefore not surprising that we can lie to ourselves. It would be surprising if we could not. “We are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves” (L655/S539). Or again: “this is not the home of truth; it wanders unrecognized among men” (L840/S428). Pascal’s theological anthropology therefore provides a necessary corrective to contemporary analytic philosophy on self-deception. He teaches us that a properly robust account of self-deception should not merely be a story about what happens in the isolated mind of the individual self-deceiver. Rather, it must also be a story about moral subjectivity and the myriad influences that shape people into moral agents capable of deceiving themselves. Moreover, that story must also be about the wider world. Everyone will already have acquired the skills of deception and self-deception, because one must acquire

178 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception exactly these skills in order to become a functioning member of society. Having been habituated into patterns of deception, he will have acquired the skill of persistently refusing to attend to his own beliefs and intentions, and therefore he will be able to lie to himself. Moreover, insofar as he does lie to himself, it is highly likely that he also lies to other people, and contributes to their self-deception, thereby reproducing and reinforcing the reign of duplicity into which we are all born.

6 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception: Morally Culpable Self-Persuasion In this chapter I present my own Pascalian model of sin as self-deception by developing an account of morally culpable self-persuasion. Morally culpable self-persuasion is a form of strong self-deception, of lying to oneself. (I use the terms “self-deception,” “immoral selfdeception,” and “sinful self-deception” more-or-less interchangeably, to mean lying to oneself.) Compared to other accounts, my Pascalian model treats self-deception more like an ongoing activity than a mental state. Narrowly, I explain how a person can intentionally cultivate false beliefs. More broadly, I argue that, because the immoral self-deceiver interprets himself and his moral situation falsely, he intentionally crafts a false self, as discussed in Chapter 3. The narrow and broad aspects of immoral self-deception reinforce one another. A person falsely interprets himself when he embraces a relatively comprehensive story about himself and his activities as a moral agent. Yet embracing such a story also implies embracing various false beliefs about his moral situation, because an interpretation of oneself is always also an interpretation of the world in which one acts. So, for example, when a self-deceptive thief falsely interprets his moral situation, he falsely interprets his own specific acts of thievery, but he may also falsely interpret the chain of events leading up to them and following from them. I show that an immoral self-deceiver can first believe a true interpretation of his situation, then persuade himself to believe a false interpretation, and yet still continue to believe the true interpretation. My argument is Pascalian throughout. The basic claim is that the self-deceiver can avow his self-deceptive activity, but he habitually does not, not even to himself. The picture of human agency described

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by Pascal’s wager shows how this is possible. Sinful self-deception begins in the imagination, as the self-deceiver is spontaneously presented with an array of different interpretations of his moral situation. In the terminology that I develop below, he then accepts a false interpretation, and persuades himself that it is true with rhetorical and behavioral techniques. He engages in a persuasive program of internal rhetoric, and he acts as if his favored interpretation is true. This project of self-persuasion mechanically causes him to believe his favored, false interpretation. This project of sinful self-deception is also the project of constructing the false self, the Pascalian moi. The self-deceiver creates a false self and projects it into the world.

LYING TO ONESELF AS A FORM OF CULPABLE SELF-PERSUASION I emphasize that sinful self-deception is “culpable” self-persuasion. It is an open question whether we are generally culpable for our (unavoidable) participation in the “inherited” duplicity that characterizes a fallen world. Yet we are certainly culpable for our personal projects of self-deception. Sinful self-deceivers pursue their projects in order to persist in, or avoid taking responsibility for, their immoral activities, and throughout their projects, they continue to deceive themselves and so remain complicit in those activities. Although I do not equate self-persuasion per se with self-deception, I argue that the techniques and habits that make self-persuasion possible also make lying to oneself possible. There are other forms of self-deception besides lying to oneself, and many of those forms are surely also sinful. Suppose a sinner first recognizes the truth about his moral culpability (he believes that p), but then persuades himself to believe that he is blameless (and so comes to believe that not-p), but does not continue believing that he is culpable (and so loses his belief that p). He would not have contradictory beliefs at any point, but his self-deception would still be sinful because he has still rejected the truth about himself and his projects. His turn away from truth is itself sinful—indeed, it is the essence of sin. Similarly, suppose the sinner does not ever form the false belief that not-p, but merely persistently diverts his attention from his true

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belief that p so that he can act on the basis of not-p. This still-weaker project of self-deception remains sinful—and for the same reason: it features an intentional rejection of the truth. My Pascalian account of self-deception as self-persuasion can also explain these weaker forms. I focus on lying to oneself, the strongest form of self-deception, because, following Pascal, I believe that it is a common phenomenon, especially in the moral life. I hold that lying to oneself is common precisely because—in contrast with many contemporary philosophers—I do not regard it as especially paradoxical. On the other hand, a philosopher who regards lying to oneself as extremely paradoxical is more likely to hold that it is also very uncommon. Such a philosopher has an incentive to seek an account of self-deception that does not require the self-deceiver to lie to himself. I have no such incentive. Moreover, someone who holds that lying to oneself is very uncommon also faces certain theoretical demands. She must explain away the signs of psychic tension and conflicting behavior that we associate with self-deceivers: pangs of conscience, vacillation, avoidance, and so on. She must attribute these behaviors to something other than the self-deceiver’s contradictory beliefs and intentions. I face no similar theoretical demands, because I hold that lying to oneself is common. I treat lying to oneself as a form of self-persuasion. Self-persuasion itself need not be regarded as inherently exotic or paradoxical. Indeed, in a weak sense, it can even be equated with the activity of interpreting. To say that I persuade myself that Hector is the main character of the Iliad is just to say that as a result of interpreting the poem—whatever that involves—I come to believe that Hector is its main character. This is conceptually possible even if, at the outset, I firmly believe that Achilles holds this honor. In this sense, selfpersuasion is simply the project of thinking about a problem and deliberating about it with the goal of reaching a state of subjective satisfaction with a possible solution. Of course, the self-persuasion that characterizes self-deception cannot be exactly like this, since one cannot concurrently avow a project of self-deception, and the interpreter in the Iliad example can concurrently avow his interpretive activity. This difference raises the specter of the doxastic and strategic paradoxes (as discussed in the previous chapter). To avoid them, I must also explain how a self-deceiver can engage in goal-directed behavior (e.g. intentionally cultivating false beliefs) without ever attending to his operative goal. I do address this issue, but only after

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presenting the account of self-persuasion. As a result, it may initially seem that my account renders self-persuasion too explicit and conscious to capture the distinctive phenomenon of self-deception.

PERSUASION, REASON, RATIONALIZATION Before discussing self-persuasion in detail, I would like to say a bit more about persuasion as such, and how Pascal understands it. According to his contemporary, Antoine Arnauld, Pascal “knew as much about true rhetoric as anyone has ever known.”1 It is certainly the case that his two most famous works, the Provincial Letters and the Pensées, are properly regarded as masterpieces of persuasive writing.2 He even wrote a short—though unfinished and unpublished—treatise called “The Art of Persuasion.” It therefore makes sense to look at what Pascal has to say about persuasion and belief-formation. As discussed previously, he argues that we are more easily persuaded by attractiveness than by truth. As a result, our reasoning is often rationalization: “every man is almost always led to believe not through proof but through that which is attractive . . . we believe almost only in the things we like.”3 Because each person has a different set of desires, and because successful persuasion depends on the manipulation of those desires, successful persuasion is relative to the person to be persuaded. We are more likely to believe claims that reinforce what we already believe, because our beliefs have already been shaped by our disordered desires and loves. [When we wish to persuade someone,] we must take into consideration the person with whom we are concerned, of whom we know the mind and heart, the principles admitted, and the things loved; and then we must take note, in the matter concerned, the rapport it has with 1 Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking (1662–83), tr. Jill Vance Buroker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 208 (3.20.6). 2 There are two book-length works in English that discuss Pascal’s use of rhetorical techniques: Erec Koch, Pascal and Rhetoric: Figural and Persuasive Language in the Scientific Treatises, the Provinciales and the Pensées (Charlottesville, Va.: Rockwood Press, 1997); Patricia Topliss, The Rhetoric of Pascal: A Study of his Art of Persuasion in the ‘Provinciales’ and the ‘Pensées’ (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1966). 3 “The Art of Persuasion,” ed. Levi, 193.

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admitted truths or of the objects of delight through the charms we attribute to them.4

Self-persuasion is not excepted from the general logic of persuasion. An account of self-deception as self-persuasion should not begin with the assumption that a person is a perfectly rational agent and then treat any departure from perfect rationality as something exceptional that must be explained. When we reason with ourselves, our reasoning is still influenced by desire and disordered love. A long philosophical tradition claims otherwise, however, and treats private deliberation as a paradigm case of logical reasoning. On this picture, a person deliberating alone would not need to engage in any special pleading to advance a particular point of view, and would consider all relevant arguments solely on their merits. He would treat himself as an ideal-typical representative of the universal audience of human minds and address himself only with objectively rational arguments.5 Put another way, the “secrecy of self-deliberation seems to guarantee its value and sincerity.”6 Pascal shows why this picture is mistaken. In fact, a person does not hold himself to especially elevated standards of argumentation—quite the opposite, it seems. When a person deliberates, he may indeed imagine that he is an ideal representative of the universal audience, and he may equate his own feelings of subjective certainty with objective validity. But this imaginary projection is just that—imaginary. Far from being a genuine exemplar of universal rationality, the “self” that one addresses in private deliberation is simply another false self, spun out of disordered love and constructed precisely because it is ideally persuadable. In more mundane terminology: on Pascal’s understanding, putatively rational arguments directed at oneself are usually rationalizations intended to satisfy one’s own desires.7

“The Art of Persuasion,” ed. Levi, 195. Charles M. Natoli, Fire in the Dark: Essays on Pascal’s Pensées and Provinciales (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 81. I should be clear that Natoli is not endorsing this tradition. 6 Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971), 41. Again, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are critical of this tradition, and are not defending it. They cite Arthur Schopenhauer and J. S. Mill as clear proponents of the view they attack. 7 Indeed, Pascal would say that, apart from faith, a person cannot really constitute himself as an ideal exemplar of universal rationality because this is precisely to adopt 4 5

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None of this entails that there is no such thing as objective validity, nor that it is impossible to follow the proper canons of rationality. Pascal simply makes the empirical observation that people believe that they follow the canons of rationality even when they do not, and so their subjective certainty seems like objective validity even when it is not. To be sure, these observations raise interesting meta-epistemological questions about how we can know that we know, but it is not necessary to address such questions in this inquiry.

THE STEPS OF SELF-PERSUASION This excursus into Pascal’s ideas about persuasion sets the stage for the discussion of self-deception that follows. In the rest of this chapter, I advance the claim that the self-deceiver knows the truth but persuades himself that a false interpretation of his moral situation is true.8 Even when the specific techniques of persuasion that he uses on himself are not exactly the same as those he would use on other people, the underlying dynamics are the same. Like everyone else, a self-deceiver is a fallible person who often reasons poorly and is always vulnerable to a variety of non-rational pressures and emotional appeals. These pressures and appeals work on him mechanically, as it were, even when it is he himself who brings them to bear.

Taking the Imagination for the Heart Immoral self-deception begins as a conflict between the imagination and the heart, the seat of conscience. According to Pascal, “Men often take their imagination for their heart” (L975/S739). Using the terminology I discussed in Chapter 4, this means that we often mistake the fantaisies of the imagination for the veridical sentiments of the heart. Accurate moral reasoning requires that our spontaneous insights are truthful, but they can seem truthful even when they are not.9 From God’s own point of view. Only when we are joined to God in faith is true objectivity possible, according to Pascal. 8 I will address the specter of the doxastic and strategic paradoxes in due course. 9 “All our reasoning comes down to surrendering to sentiment. But fantaisie is like and also unlike sentiment, so that we cannot distinguish between these two opposites.

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the subjective point of view, it can be difficult to distinguish between the two, since a truthful sentiment and a false fantaisie both seem veridical. When one tries to distinguish between them, one has recourse only to reasoning, which itself depends on initial principles produced by sentiment, and so remains vulnerable to the persuasive power of imaginative fantasy. A more concrete example of what I mean might be helpful. Consider the case of Tom, a businessman who is out to defraud his clients:10 Tom is an employee for a large corporation involved in a systematic and illegal price-fixing scheme. He knows about the scheme and has himself participated in illegal activity, but he deceives himself about his own moral culpability, and comes to believe that he has done nothing wrong. Spurred in part by greed and in part by a vague fear of taking a stand against his colleagues, he struggles to believe that his actions are permissible. He tells himself that consumers actually benefit from the price-fixing scheme because it helps stabilize the market and protects it from vacillations caused by cut-throat competition. He makes every effort to talk, think, and act confidently as he carries out his part at secret meetings; he even reassures a colleague who expresses qualms about the activities. He does much the same with his own qualms, which occasionally bring with them a deflating awareness that his self-pretense is a charade. He often boosts his confidence by imagining how good things will be for him when the scheme yields its expected financial windfall. Over time, Tom actually succeeds in convincing himself that his actions, while “technically illegal,” are not wrong or unethical. Yes, a law was being broken, but it was a bad law and it hurt business. Participants in the price-fixing scheme were not criminals out to gain personal advantage, they were serving the interests of the shareholders. Tom would not have said this about other white-collar criminals, and his evaluation of his involvement in the conspiracy is surprisingly at odds with his general sensitivity in moral and religious matters. His selfdeception arose as an effort to silence an otherwise anguished conscience.

One person says that my sentiment is mere fantaisie, another that his fantaisie is sentiment. We should have a rule. Reason is available but can be bent in any direction . . . . And so there is no rule” (L530/S455). 10 This example is lightly adapted from Michael W. Martin. Most of the specific words and phrases in this description come directly from his Self-Deception and Morality, 6–9. I combined several of Martin’s examples into a single case. I use this example instead of Nicholas Bulstrode (as in Ch. 3) because I want to be able to illustrate my central claims by making up further details as needed.

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On my Pascalian account, when Tom is initially presented with the opportunity to participate in the scheme, he spontaneously forms a veridical sentiment—he might experience it as a “pang of conscience”— that his participation would be wrong because the scheme is illegal and immoral. He believes this spontaneous insight, because sentiments are subjectively self-certifying. At the same time, his deceptive and socially formed imagination produces a range of false, exculpatory, and self-serving fantasies. These imaginative fantasies suggest ways in which his participation in the scheme would be licit after all, and function as temptations that incite him spontaneously to reinterpret his own engagements. This is the first stage of his project of immoral self-deception.

Accepting a False Interpretation The next stage of immoral self-deception is acceptance. When a person embraces or otherwise identifies himself with a particular interpretation of his moral situation he accepts that interpretation. The idea that acceptance is an epistemic category distinct from belief has a fine philosophical pedigree. As I discuss below, it plays an important part in Pascal’s famous wager argument. But, for the sake of economy, rather than exegetically teasing out the material that I need from Pascal, I turn to two contemporary analytic philosophers, L. Jonathan Cohen and Robert Stalnaker. Cohen and Stalnaker do not draw the distinction between belief and acceptance in exactly the same way, but for my own modest purposes, their accounts are complementary. On both, acceptance is voluntary but belief is involuntary. Any account of the nature of belief is philosophically controversial, and I want to proceed with a minimum of controversial commitments. So, for the present purposes, I fully endorse only their claim that acceptance is different from belief—however belief is finally understood—and that acceptance is voluntary. According to Cohen, to accept that p is “to have or adopt a policy of deeming, positing, or postulating that p—that is, of going along with that proposition . . . as a premise in some or all contexts for one’s own and others’ proofs, argumentations, inferences, deliberations, etc.” By contrast, belief that p is “a disposition to feel it true that p, whether or not one goes along with the proposition as a premise.” Acceptance

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executes a choice, and so one answers the question whether one accepts that p by reporting a decision. On the other hand, one answers the question whether one believes that p by introspecting and reporting what one is “disposed to feel about the matter.”11 For his part, Stalnaker allows that the act of acceptance can be less than fully explicit: “To accept a proposition is to treat it as a true proposition in one way or another—to ignore, for the moment at least, the possibility that it is false. One may do this . . . more or less tentatively, more or less self-consciously, with more or less justification, and with more or less feeling of commitment.”12 He also allows that acceptance can have a social dimension, can be momentary, and can be “compartmentalized.”13 Belief and acceptance typically go together, but need not. A lawyer can accept that his client is innocent, for instance, and organize a defense around this assumption, while believing all along that he is guilty. I said earlier that the self-deceiver spontaneously seizes on a false interpretation. This can be understood as equivalent to the claim that the self-deceiver begins by accepting a false interpretation, which he then uses as the basis for his reasoning and acting. On this understanding, in which accepting an interpretation means more than merely entertaining it, even the bare act of acceptance is already sinful, since it features an intentional rejection of the truth. A selfdeceiver would be culpable solely for accepting the false interpretation, since he also knows the true interpretation of his moral

11 These quotations are all from L. Jonathan Cohen, “Belief and Acceptance,” Mind, 98 (1989), 368. In a book based on this article, Cohen presents an analysis of self-deception in which the self-deceiver believes p and accepts, but does not believe, not-p. See L. Jonathan Cohen, An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (New York: OUP, 1992), 133–60. In contrast to Cohen, I argue that the self-deceiver does fully believe not-p (or p, as the case may be) because, over time, the act of accepting a proposition is highly likely to cause him to believe it. This, I take it, is one of the lessons of Pascal’s account of habituation. 12 Robert Stalnaker, Inquiry (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), 79. 13 On the first point: “In a cooperative inquiry, a dialogue or a debate, what we accept may be more important than what I accept. It is our common beliefs and assumptions, or what we take to be our common beliefs and assumptions.” On the second and third points: a person “may accept a proposition for a moment without the expectation that he will continue to accept it for very long” and may “accept something in one context while rejecting it or suspending judgment in another. There need be no conflict that must be resolved when the difference is noticed, and he need not change his mind when he moves from one context to the other.” Stalnaker, Inquiry, 80–1.

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situation. Accepting the false interpretation, even without fully believing it, would already imply that the self-deceiver had made a decision to avoid his moral responsibility. Unlike non self-deceptive forms of acceptance, however, the immoral self-deceiver accepts the false interpretation because the true interpretation is unwelcome and because he wants to believe the false interpretation. It follows that his act of accepting is not an isolated mental act. When Tom the white-collar criminal accepts that his activity is licit, he also “makes every effort to talk, think, and act confidently as he carries out his part at secret meetings.” In other words, when he accepts the false interpretation, he also adopts the patterns of thought and action of a person who genuinely believes in it. I discuss these patterns below, under the headings of “internal rhetoric” and “acting-as-if, ” respectively.

Internal Rhetoric It is unproblematic to assert that there is such a phenomenon as selfdirected interior speech. It is somewhat more problematic to treat self-talk as a genuine instrument of self-persuasion, yet we do easily use expressions like “I talked myself into it.” This is a figure of speech, to be sure, but it is nonetheless true that sometimes we do talk ourselves into things, and that “I talked myself into it” is more than just an oblique way of saying, “I made up my mind.”14 It is reasonable to ask how this process works. I focus on self-talk because it is the paradigm case of the broader phenomenon of internal rhetoric. By self-talk, I mean explicit, inwardly directed speech acts. Internal rhetoric does not always take this form. People do not always think in words. They also call up images, feelings, vague impressions, and so forth. All of these can have persuasive force.15 When a person thinks 14 See Jean Nienkamp, Internal Rhetorics: Toward a History and Theory of Self Persuasion (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001). 15 According to Nienkamp mental activity is by nature rhetorical because thought itself has “persuasive, hortatory, or sermonic” functions (Internal Rhetorics, p. ix). Similarly, according to Kenneth Burke, insofar as thought is semiotic, it is rhetorical. Rhetoric “is rooted in an essential function of language itself . . . the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.” Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1969), 43. Burke’s claim that human beings respond to symbols “by nature” ties in nicely with Pascal’s suggestion that speech is inherently persuasive (see fragments L99/S132 and L814/S658).

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about some matter with the goal (implicit or explicit) of persuading himself, he engages in internal rhetoric. In a fairly literal sense, the self-deceiver talks himself into believing a false interpretation. An interesting fragment from the Pensées presents the important features of self-talk and hints at how it can persuade: Why does a lame person not annoy us, but a lame mind does? Because a lame person recognizes that we are walking straight, whereas a lame mind says that it is we who are limping . . . So, being certain only to the extent that we see with all our vision, it puts us into suspense and surprises us when another sees the opposite despite his vision, and still more so when a thousand others deride our choice. For we must prefer our own lights to those of so many others, and this is daring and difficult . . . Man is so made that, by virtue of telling him he is a fool, he believes it. And by virtue of telling it to ourselves, we make ourselves believe it. For man alone holds an internal conversation with himself, which it is important to keep well in check. Evil communications corrupt good manners [1 Cor. 15: 33]. We must maintain silence as much as possible and talk with ourselves only of God, whom we know to be the truth, and in this way convince ourselves of it (L98–9/S132; tr. Ariew)

Pascal asserts that, as a matter of fact, self-talk can end in selfpersuasion (“by virtue of telling it to ourselves, we make ourselves believe it”). It is also interesting that Pascal calls this an interior “conversation,” which implies multiple partners, and not an interior monologue, which implies a single speaker. On my reading, the fragment also makes three important points about how the process of self-persuasion works. First, it includes an exhortation from Pascal implying that we can control our self-talk to some extent (“We must maintain silence as much as possible and talk with ourselves only of God, whom we know to be the truth, and in this way convince ourselves of it”). Second, it recognizes that we talk to ourselves in the face of normative pressure exerted by external speech from other people. Finally, it assumes that self-talk presents itself as a “conversation” among multiple interior voices. I will discuss each of these and how they bear on immoral self-deception. First, because we can control our self-talk to some extent, we can use it to intervene in the process of belief-formation. One way we can do this is by directing our attention: we can use inner speech to distract ourselves from unpleasant thoughts and direct our focus toward pleasant ones. As Pascal recognizes, “Ordinary people have

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the ability not to think about things they do not want to think about” (L815/S659; see also L70/S104, L133/S166, L889/S445).16 Many contemporary philosophers note that selective attention to external evidence plays a role in self-deception. My point here is that self-talk is itself a form of attention that has its own persuasive power. If a person frequently cultivates thoughts and imaginative fantasies that he is an especially honest person, he will soon believe that he is such a person, even if he genuinely is not. This will happen naturally, almost automatically. It also seems possible to use self-talk to persuade oneself of something that one knows to be false. Take the case of Tom, the whitecollar criminal. Suppose that he knowingly does something illegal and unethical. To avoid this knowledge, he focuses intensely on a highly tendentious interpretation of his actions under which the law itself is “illegal” because it violates the spirit of some obscure regulation; on this interpretation he is a moral hero for exposing its injustice. Whenever he can, he rehearses this interpretation to himself sotto voce. Over time, he comes to believe it. If this seems like a plausible scenario, then we have a case where Tom talks himself into believing something that he initially knew to be false.17 Second, this fragment shows that it is a mistake to isolate internal rhetoric from the wider project of persuading others and being persuaded by them. We always talk to ourselves in the face of normative pressure exerted on us by other people. Pascal rightly notes that it is difficult to “prefer our own lights” when “a thousand others deride our choice.” Indeed, one might say that it is so difficult that it rarely happens at all. Surely it is far more common to internalize the voices of one’s peers and so begin to think as they think. It is easy to see how this process can yield a system of mutual complicity in deception and self-deception, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. It is even easy to see how such a project could be intentional. For example, Tom wishes to avoid confronting his immoral behavior, and so he initially pretends to his co-workers that all is well and that their firm is on the level; they pretend likewise to him and in the end, they all

16 Of course, he also recognizes the opposite, that sometimes unwelcome thoughts seem to wash over us (L542/S459, L656/S540, L395/S14). 17 Talking oneself into something that one knows is false is not necessarily a case of self-deception, on my definition, because it could simply be a case of changing one’s mind and believing differently.

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believe each other. They tacitly work together to replace their internal voices of criticism with voices of collaboration. In a way, such a project is merely another form of selective attention. Of course, it is not the case that all of Tom’s colleagues always ratify his false interpretations. So he sometimes seeks out just those colleagues who will. It is impossible to specify general rules about how an immoral self-deceiver enlists other people in his project of self-deception. This is just to say again that self-deception must be studied in its particulars, and in its context. Third, the claim that we internalize the voices of our peers presents a way of understanding the claim that we hold an interior “conversation” with ourselves. The speakers, and the audience, in this conversation are the social voices that we have internalized. These voices comprise what rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke calls a “parliament, with conflicting interests.”18 If the self is a parliament of conflicting interests, then self-persuasion is also a form of persuading others, even if those “others” are only the social voices one has internalized. This picture of the self offers a way of understanding the goal of the immoral self-deceiver. Some of the self-deceiver’s inner critics will support his self-deceptive project and some will impede it. To persuade himself that a false interpretation is true, he must vindicate the former and silence the latter. Here it is important to note again that persuasion, including selfpersuasion, is always particular. The self-deceiver does not have to meet universal, objectively valid standards of rational proof in order to persuade himself. He only has to satisfy his inner critics. And, of course, those critics are not real people at all but internalized voices filtered through his own self-serving imagination. In other words, the burden of proof may be quite low. Nevertheless, the self-deceiver allows himself to think that, because he has defeated his inner critics, he has reached the truth of the matter. Thus, in the end, the project of self-persuasion works just like any project of persuasion: a person addresses himself with a mix of argument, rationalization, emotional appeals, and so forth. It is a truism that rigorous argument is not the only means of persuading others—and, in fact, rarely persuades at all. There is little reason to think internal rhetoric differs from external rhetoric in this regard.

18

Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 38.

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I should say that by “voices,” and “inner critics,” I mean to describe a perfectly ordinary phenomenon. Among the store of human capacities is the capacity to imagine alternative points of view and talk to ourselves from those imagined perspectives.19 This can be an automatic process, but it can also be consciously directed. The selfdeceiver is one person, a unified agent who (like all of us) has internalized a multiplicity of voices, roles, and identities which make competing claims on him. He has the further capacity (as we all do) to accept some elements of this multiplicity and reject others. When he deceives himself, he accepts and acts on false interpretations, and over the course of time persuades himself that they are true. This picture of internal rhetoric is not especially mysterious. To be sure, it is natural to ask: among the cacophony of one’s internalized voices, which voice may be regarded as “one’s own” voice? Although the question is natural, I do not believe that it requires a detailed answer. Again, the relevant picture is that of a single person deliberating. My voice—my self—is simply the voice that governs the deliberation, chooses among competing interpretations, and decides what to do. My voice is simply my capacity to do these things. I take it that this is an easily recognizable phenomenon. If pressed to say more, I would say that a person’s own-most voice is the putative voice of universal reason—“putative” because subjectively internalized in the sense discussed above. But I hope that I am not so pressed, and that the picture as it stands is sufficiently clear. Another objection is not so easily dismissed. Self-persuasion seems ordinary and unproblematic only when a person is genuinely unsure of the truth or of what to do. It is hard to see how immoral selfdeception can be assimilated to self-persuasion without reinstating the doxastic and strategic paradoxes in an especially virulent form. How can the self-deceiver succeed in persuading his inner critics when he knows that they speak the truth? And how can he do this intentionally without being undermined by his own knowledge? I would like to defer these questions for a bit longer. Before answering them, I will add the final component to the model of immoral selfdeception as self-persuasion by turning to Pascal’s wager, and his claim that “acting as if” one believes (in God, for Pascal) can induce 19 Here I mean to recall Pascal’s ideas about the false self, which is constructed, in part, by imagining oneself from the point of view of another (L806/S653).

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belief mechanically. I wish to connect this account to my treatment of acceptance and internal rhetoric. Accepting a false interpretation, engaging in internal rhetoric about it, and “acting as if ” it is true, while conceptually distinct behaviors, are fused together in a single process that can easily lead to self-deception.

Acting-As-If (The Wager) My treatment of acceptance and internal rhetoric recalls Pascal’s famous wager fragment (L418/S680). On typical readings of the wager, Pascal uses a probabilistic argument to advance the claim that belief in God is rational, even if one cannot settle the question whether God exists. The target of this argument is convinced that belief in God is practically rational, but he remains unable to believe by fiat. In response, the fragment’s Christian interlocutor tells the unbeliever that he should adopt a policy of acting as if he believed, because eventually this will make him truly believe. I turn to the wager because it clearly reveals the important dynamics of self-persuasion. Since, on my account, immoral self-deception is a form of self-persuasion, the wager therefore also reveals the important dynamics of immoral self-deception. Not all self-persuasion is self-deception, however, and I do not claim that the unbeliever in the wager fragment deceives himself into believing in God. To be sure, many philosophers do treat the wager as a paradigm case of a certain form of self-deception. From Pascal’s own point of view, it certainly is not—one can only regard the wager as a case of self-deception if one assumes that God does not exist. (In any event, it is clear that the unbeliever in the wager does not meet my own criteria of immoral self-deception because he does not meet the dual-belief condition.) The bulk of the philosophical attention paid to the wager fragment focuses not on self-deception but on its probabilistic arguments. However philosophically fruitful these arguments are, however, I have argued elsewhere that fragment L418/S680 also tries to overturn the unbeliever’s false self-interpretation and replace it with a new, Christian, self-interpretation.20 I won’t rehearse that argument 20 “The unbeliever is so attached to ‘noxious pleasure, glory, and good living’ (L418/S680) that he identifies his true self with the body and then falsely concludes that his bodily existence makes God unintelligible to him.” Wood, “Reason’s Rapport,” 530.

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here, except to note that insofar as the wager aims at conversion, by that very fact, it aims at replacing a false self-interpretation with a true one. Whatever else it may be, conversion is at least an ongoing process of inhabiting a new, wholly comprehensive stance, from which everything, and especially oneself, must be interpreted differently.21 Leaving aside questions about the role of grace in conversion, then, it makes sense to treat the wager’s account of the ongoing process of conversion as an ongoing process of self-persuasion. The wager fragment reveals another important dimension of selfpersuasion, in addition to acceptance and internal rhetoric. As discussed above, when the self-deceiver accepts a false interpretation of his moral situation, he must reinforce that interpretation to himself with internal rhetoric. Yet because a person is never cut off from the wider world, he must also act as if that false interpretation were true. In the wager fragment, Pascal establishes a close connection between accepting a claim and acting as if it is true. It is natural to say that the unbeliever initially accepts that God exists, even though he does not yet so believe. This initial moment of acceptance is purely cognitive. But Pascal then tells the unbeliever to “behave just as if he did believe, taking holy water, having masses said, and so on.” This program of habituation is not cognitive. As Pascal notes elsewhere, “habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed” (L821/ S661).22 Pascal recognizes that, over time, a policy of acting-as-if can induce belief mechanically, even in the absence of any explicit thought or deliberation on the part of the agent himself. If a program of behavioral habituation (acting-as-if) can produce explicit belief, then belief should follow even more readily when that program is reinforced by persuasive internal rhetoric. There is no question that Pascal establishes a close connection between acceptance and acting-as-if. He does not explicitly mention self-talk or

21 As Pascal writes in fragment L378/S410: “True conversion consists in selfannihilation before the universal being.” For a study of Pascal’s understanding of conversion, see Wetsel, Pascal and Disbelief, 327ff. 22 As Jean Mesnard writes in his commentary on this fragment, “The analysis of belief and the practice of persuasion could not be unaware of the role of custom, this automatism of the body. The apologist has to consider it. The opinions of the libertine have been made habitual, and the weight of these habits impedes him from hearing the reasons for converting. It is necessary, then, at one stage of the apologetic project, to cause a change in habit in order to reform the automaton.” Mesnard, Les Pensées de Pascal, 87.

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internal rhetoric in the wager fragment, but it is likely that self-talk would play a role in any successful program of auto-conversion. This is implied by other fragments of the Pensées, especially L99/S132: “We must maintain silence as much as possible and talk with ourselves only of God, whom we know to be the truth, and in this way convince ourselves of it.” In any case, it is hard to see how any program of acting-as-if could produce its desired effects were it constantly undermined by skeptical self-talk. Accordingly, it makes sense to posit an organic connection between the elements of self-persuasion: accepting a proposition entails interpreting one’s experience in light of that proposition, which entails adopting characteristic behaviors that in turn further shape one’s dispositions, habits, and beliefs. All three go together: to accept a proposition just is to interpret relevant situations around that proposition and so to act as if it were true. Since wager-style projects of belief cultivation do in fact succeed, it seems to be empirically true that, in appropriate circumstances, a person can cultivate a particular belief. It is just a feature of our psychic makeup that we are persuadable in this way.23

SELF-PERSUASION, SELF-DECEPTION, AND HUMAN AGENCY Still, the most important feature of the wager fragment is not its empirical claim that self-persuasion is possible, but the philosophical account of human agency that it assumes. Pascal’s program of habituation can succeed because it exploits the temporal character of selfhood, persuasion, and intentional agency. Throughout the Pensées, Pascal makes the important point that the self exists in time and is always subject to change. Over time, people change fundamentally: “Time heals pain and quarrels because we change. We are no longer the same persons; neither the offender nor the offended are themselves anymore. It is as if one angered a nation and came back to see them after two generations. They are still Frenchmen, but not the same 23

Of course, citing Pascal does not suffice to establish the empirical claim that a wager-style project of self-persuasion is possible. But I am not aware of any philosopher or psychologist who disputes this claim.

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ones” (L802/S653). Thought is doubly temporal, according to Pascal. It occurs in temporal sequence, and is usually about the past or the future: We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is . . . (L47/S80)

Because internal rhetoric is a form of thought, it too is temporal, and so it follows that self-persuasion is a temporal process. Once a person accepts a particular interpretation and then begins to use it as a premise in his reasoning and a guide for his actions, he will likely come to believe it. Accepting, reasoning, and acting-as-if all work together to cause self-persuasion. A process of self-persuasion can succeed because the self is temporal, and all its actions are temporal. This claim, however obvious, has important consequences for any account of self-deception. On most occasions, the immoral self-deceiver does not instantaneously enter the full-blown state of self-deception, as if some mental switch were flipped. Rather, he rationalizes his way into self-deception, actively working to shape his own beliefs over time.24 Because a person changes over time, he can act upon himself to bring about particular changes, including changes in belief. In the most important philosophical contribution of the wager fragment, Pascal shows that it is possible to intend a temporally extended process of self-persuasion. Simply put, executing an intention need not be a single, instantaneous act. Intentional agency extends through time. To borrow an example from José Luis Bermúdez, suppose I have a longterm intention to advance my career. It is natural to suppose that this long-term intention influences everything I do in my professional life, and it would be correct to say of any particular such action that I perform it in order to advance my career.25 Similarly, in the wager, the unbeliever carries out a long-term intention to believe in God.

24 I do not want to make any conceptual or empirical claims about the typical duration of such a process, however. For a related claim, that self-deceivers in general must engage in “reflective reasoning” as a necessary condition of entering the state of self-deception, see Scott-Kakures, “At ‘Permanent Risk,’ ” 576–603. 25 Bermúdez, “Self-Deception, Intentions, and Contradictory Beliefs,” 314.

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Understanding the temporal character of agency enables us to see one way that a project of immoral self-deception can be intentional. Some intentional activities can cause a person to forget, reinterpret, or otherwise fail to notice the long-term intentions that launched them. Immoral self-deception is like this. Again, Bermúdez: “As Pascal pointed out, acquiring a belief is a long-term process . . . It seems likely that the further on one is in the process, and the more successful one has been in the process of internalizing the belief, the more likely one will be to have lost touch with the original motivation.”26 Bearing in mind that I do not regard the wager scenario as a case of selfdeception, it is still instructive on this point. Presumably, the newly converted believer doesn’t say: “Yep. I tried to trick myself into believing in God and it worked. Good for me!” He says something like: “I thought I was trying to trick myself into believing in God, but now I see that God really was calling me to conversion all along . . . ” By virtue of engaging in religious activities and cultivating religious habits of mind, the convert spontaneously reinterprets the intentions that guided him. The activity itself—the mechanical behavior of “acting as if ”—causes these effects. As a natural result of carrying out his intentions, the believer reaches a point at which he reinterprets them. Similarly, we may suppose that by the very fact of engaging in his project of self-deception, the self-deceiver spontaneously reinterprets his own intentions. Philosophers recognize that this kind of temporally extended selfdeception is possible, but they tend to treat it as something exotic that is remote from ordinary self-deception. It is often assimilated to the “self-deception” that results when, for example, a man falsifies his own diary, confident that at some future date he will have forgotten that he did so; when he later reads the diary, his “future self ” will have been deceived by his “present self.” It is true that such cases do not seem like typical cases of self-deception. But the phenomenon they trade on—the tendency to ignore, forget, or reinterpret one’s own intentions as a result of carrying them out—is far from exotic. Here is a more pedestrian example: John is trying to decide whether to quit his high-paying job and pursue a career in music. He knows that his brother, Chris, is highly likely to encourage him to quit, since Chris is a musician who hates the corporate lifestyle. He also knows that his

26

Bermúdez, “Self-Deception, Intentions, and Contradictory Beliefs,” 314.

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father would give the opposite advice. John chooses to talk to Chris, aware of the fact he is stacking the deck in favor of quitting. He even jokes to a friend: “It’s probably true that I want to be talked into quitting. Otherwise, I’d go to my father instead.” After a long conversation with Chris, John emerges confident that he should quit his job. He does not attend to the fact that he intentionally sought biased advice from Chris. When his friend reminds John of his earlier statement, John sincerely replies: “I may have said that, but I really went to Chris because he understands what it takes to make it in the music business. Anyway, he gave me good advice, and that’s what matters.” In my view, scenarios like this one are plausible and quite common because people regularly forget or reinterpret their own intentions.27 In brief, then, this is my account of immoral self-deception as selfpersuasion: having spontaneously imagined a false, but alluring, interpretation of his moral situation, the self-deceiver accepts that interpretation, and reinforces it both internally, with self-talk, and externally, by acting as if it were true. He does all this intentionally, by forming long-term intentions that guide his behavior even when he does not explicitly attend to them. As he continues to divert his attention from his knowledge and his reasons for acting, his attention policies become habitual, which further enables him to persist in his project of self-deception.

PARADOX DISPELLED Still, one might object that, however ordinary, the account of selfpersuasion described above is still too explicit to reflect the distinctive phenomenon of self-deception. In the wager, for example, a person explicitly decides to cultivate a specific belief. It seems unlikely that the self-deceiver ever explicitly decides to cultivate a belief, even if— like the convert in the wager—he subsequently reinterprets this decision. We must therefore suppose that at no point in time does the typical self-deceiver explicitly intend to deceive himself. How, then, is 27

As it stands, this is not a case of self-deception (on my understanding of selfdeception), though it could easily be turned into one. Rather, it is a case in which a person retroactively reinterprets his own intentions.

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his self-deception intentional? To raise this question is to raise at last the problem of the doxastic and strategic paradoxes. How can a selfdeceiver intentionally persuade himself to believe something false, especially if the true and false beliefs continue to coexist in his mind? This question vexes regardless of whether we construe self-deception along narrow lines, as a matter of false believing, or broader lines, as a matter of cultivating a false interpretation of oneself. The doxastic and strategic paradoxes have bite because they rest on a plausible assumption about self-awareness: in appropriate circumstances, people can avow their own intentions and beliefs. (I use “avow” and “avowal” to capture the idea of explicit selfacknowledgement, with or without explicit verbal assent.) Many philosophers hold that for a given act, A, a person must be able to avow his intention to A, if he can be said to A intentionally.28 A similar condition holds for believing. A person who believes that p can, in appropriate circumstances, avow that p. Note that these are modal claims that are meant to capture the logical grammar of intending and believing. It is clearly false that, empirically, only a person who explicitly attends to his reasons for acting acts intentionally. When I walk into a dark room and turn on a light, I may not explicitly reflect on the darkness of the room, the desirability of light, and so forth. Likewise, I often drive along an accustomed route without ever noticing all the decisions I make along the way. In both of these examples I do not attend to my reasons for acting, but I could avow them, or at least some of them, if asked. Presumably, the self-deceiver cannot and therefore (so the objection runs), he cannot intend to deceive himself in any ordinary sense of “intend.” A similar story can be told about believing. On most accounts of believing, a person has a nearly infinite storehouse of beliefs that he does not attend to at a given moment, but that he could avow, if pressed to do so. There are many ways to respond to the doxastic and strategic paradoxes by positing unconscious beliefs and intentions of one stripe or another. I myself do not regard unconscious mental activity as philosophically dubious. Indeed, there are several philosophical accounts of the unconscious that I find persuasive, and to which 28 See e.g. Barnes, Seeing through Self-Deception, 92ff. Barnes does not make this argument in terms of “avowal,” but she says that an intentional action is an action performed for a reason the agent can acknowledge, and of which he can become noninferentially aware. This seems equivalent to the claim at issue.

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I could appeal.29 I do not want to defend some particular account of unconscious mental activity, however. I also do not want to import one without argument, since that would be to sidestep most of the key battles about how self-deception works. I prefer to draw on my discussion of awareness in Chapter 5, and shift the battleground altogether. For the sake of argument, I will grant “the avowal condition,” that an agent must be able to avow his intention to A and his belief that p if he can be said to A intentionally or believe that p. Yet because this is a modal claim, from the fact that the self-deceiver does not avow his intentions and beliefs in appropriate circumstances it does not follow that he cannot avow them. It is possible—there is conceptual space to say—that he can avow them but that he does not, habitually, not even to himself. What he cannot do is avow them and still remain in the state of self-deception. The following analogy shows the point I wish to make. Even if a virtuoso conductor can critique his own interpretation of a piece of music, he cannot do so while conducting. The two activities are mutually exclusive: engaging in one rules out engaging in the other. Yet it would be misleading to say that the conductor cannot critique his interpretation at all, just because he cannot not do so while conducting. It is similarly misleading to say that the selfdeceiver cannot avow his self-deceptive intentions and beliefs just because he cannot do so while continuing to deceive himself. Thus, on my account, what needs explaining is not why the selfdeceiver cannot avow but why he does not avow. And to answer this question, we should consider how avowal functions rhetorically in the thick, social context of a project of self-deception. I address the strategic paradox first, and then the doxastic paradox. An adequate solution to the latter depends on a solution to the former, since the doxastic paradox results from the intentional activity of cultivating false and contradictory beliefs. In my view, the right question to ask is: what happens when the demand for avowal arises? I argue that the demand for avowal is as likely to reinforce a project of self-deception as dispel it. Sometimes the demand for avowal is what rules avowal out.

I am especially partial to David H. Finkelstein, “On the Distinction between Conscious and Unconscious States of Mind,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 36/2 (1999), 79–100. 29

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Of course it is possible—even likely—that amid an ongoing project of self-deception, the demand for avowal does not arise at all because the self-deceiver never attends to his own intentions. Tom the whitecollar criminal doesn’t explicitly decide to deceive himself about the morality of his behavior. He just starts rationalizing away competing interpretations and acting in such a way that self-deception naturally follows. Tom’s actions are nevertheless intentional. Granting (a) that one doesn’t have to attend to one’s intentions to act intentionally, and (b) that one has already been habituated into patterns of deception, self-exculpation, and rationalization (from Chapters 1 through 3), it seems straightforward to say that Tom intentionally but spontaneously seizes on a false interpretation of his situation, acts as if it is true, and comes to believe it. It doesn’t matter whether he could avow that he intends to deceive himself. He does not so avow. It never comes up. Suppose that the demand for avowal does arise. One possibility is that it arises from within the self-deceiver himself. For whatever reason, he takes a reflexive stance toward his actions and asks himself what he is doing, or what he really believes. But we should not assume that this self-critical attitude is some sort of confrontation with a relentless inner Javert. It is a psychic event with its own history and its own effects. It arises amid his project of self-deception, and the fact that it arises does not mean that it will bring that project to an end. It might instead reinforce him in his self-deception by leading him to defend himself more vehemently against his inner critic. He might then feel more confident about his actions, since he has virtuously “examined” his own conscience and found it clean. Yet another possibility is that someone else confronts the selfdeceiver and asks him to give an account of himself. This scenario is just an intensified version of the previous one. Why suppose that such a confrontation will provoke honest self-scrutiny? An accusation of moral wrongdoing seems more likely to cause the accused to dig in and mount a hot defense of his rectitude. Anger, shame, or amour-propre take over and drive the accused further away from self-lucidity, not closer to it. Once again, the point is not that the self-deceiver cannot avow his intentions; the fact is that he does not, and this is why he persists as a self-deceiver. This, then, is my solution to the strategic paradox: the self-deceiver can avow his intentions, but he does not, because the demand for avowal itself makes it likely that he will not.

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Since my account of immoral self-deception embraces the dualbelief condition, I need to solve not only the strategic paradox but also the doxastic paradox. How can a person believe that p and persuade himself to believe that not-p, especially when he continues to hold the former belief ? My solution to the doxastic paradox follows the same lines as my solution to the strategic paradox. I reframe the problem as a rhetorical dilemma rather than a conceptual or psychological one and argue that it can be solved by setting it in its appropriate rhetorical context. The doxastic paradox, when unpacked, poses three different problems. The first is the logical problem of whether it is possible for a single person to believe contradictory propositions. As discussed in Chapter 5, this problem is easily solved: as all parties admit, there is no formal, logical, contradiction at all in the claim that a subject, S, believes that p and believes that not-p. Since it poses no formal contradiction, the state of affairs captured by the doxastic paradox cannot be ruled out as logically impossible. Second, however, even if it does not describe a logically impossible state of affairs, the doxastic paradox does seem to describe a psychological impossibility. It seems psychologically impossible for a single subject to believe contradictory propositions at the same time. If it were possible (so the objection runs) a person would be able to avow explicitly the joint proposition “p and not-p.” But no one can do this. The problem of psychological impossibility is more difficult, but it can also be solved. Granting that it is possible to believe contradictory propositions but impossible to believe them explicitly, it follows that the selfdeceiver must only keep himself from attending to (a) both propositions at the same time and (b) the fact that he believes both. The objective fact that the two beliefs are contradictory does not dispel the contradiction unless he attends to both at the same time. His habitual practices of self-persuasion—acceptance, internal rhetoric, and acting-as-if—all allow him to manage his attention and ensure that he does not explicitly focus on the contradiction. He attends to his contradictory beliefs only when these strategies are thwarted, when the world exerts some rational pressure on him to resolve the contradiction. To the extent that a self-deceiver is able to avoid encountering such pressure, he can continue to hold both beliefs. Here I follow the same line of reasoning that I did with the demand that the self-deceiver avow his intentions. It may be that no such pressure arises. Even if it

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does, it is a mistake to assume that any challenge, whether from himself or another, will automatically bring to bear the pressure needed to dispel the contradiction. After all, beliefs are not mental items that one can just look at with an inner eye. The self-deceiver, like anyone else who decides to examine what he really believes, faces an arduous task: he must ask himself how he feels about certain matters, why he acts in certain ways, and so on. He can easily fail to ask himself the right questions, thus allowing his contradictory believing to continue. On the other hand, suppose someone else confronts him about his seemingly contradictory beliefs. In a real-world argumentative setting, it is not always easy to recognize contradictory believing, let alone confront it, let alone successfully overturn it. People do not usually directly contradict themselves, in the sense that few people baldly assert both p and not-p over a short period of time. It is far more likely that the scenario is more convoluted: they assert (or otherwise seem to believe) first q and then r, for example, and never attend to the fact that q implies p and r implies not-p. In general, the harder an interlocutor has to work to convince the self-deceiver that he holds contradictory beliefs, the more room there is for the selfdeceiver to avoid confronting the charge. His beliefs may even harden as the dynamics of the argument take over. The third problem captured by the doxastic paradox concerns belief-formation. Even if it is logically and psychologically possible to be in the state of contradictory believing, how could the selfdeceiver come to believe that not-p when he already believes that p (or vice versa)? Why would he be able to form the belief that not-p at all, and, if he does, why wouldn’t the newly formed false belief that not-p simply cancel out the already-held true belief that p? My answer to these questions depends wholly on my answers to the previous two dilemmas. If it is logically and psychologically possible to hold contradictory beliefs, it is obviously the case that it is possible to form them. So if the previous two answers are convincing, this third problem is not especially troubling. Properly understood, it simply asks an empirical question about how the process of selfdeceptive belief-formation works. And my answer to that question is the whole of Chapters 1 through 4. Reduced to their essence: the sinful self-deceiver believes that p. He wants to believe not-p, and with the cooperation of the wider world he engages in a project of selfpersuasion. Eventually he does persuade himself that not-p is true.

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For his activity of self-persuasion to succeed, however, he must cease avowing or attending to his belief that p. Yet it is clear that he still believes p because it continues to figure into some of his reasoning and activity. (Tom the white-collar criminal doesn’t go home and cheerfully tell his wife that he falsified 100 records during that day’s work, as he might if he genuinely ceased believing that his actions were illegal and immoral.) Philosophers emphasize that a self-deceiver cannot avow his project of self-deception because, as a conceptual matter, they wish to distinguish self-deception from lying, pretense, and hypocrisy. In my view, this emphasis is misplaced precisely because it makes the boundaries between these activities too sharp and thereby obscures the way self-deception really works. In a certain sense, it is correct— indeed, it is a truism—that the self-deceiver cannot avow contradictory beliefs, or an intention to deceive himself. Were he to do so, he would no longer be deceiving himself. But he can still intend to deceive himself. As all sides agree, a person can act intentionally without avowing the reasons for which he acts. It is only one step further to say that the self-deceiver acts intentionally without ever avowing his self-deceptive intentions because the demand for avowal—should it arise at all—is so easily dismissed.

HOW TO CONSTRUCT A FALSE SELF We might expect that the immoral self-deceiver’s knowledge of the truth about himself would exert a persuasive force that works against the formation of inconsistent, self-deceptive beliefs. But he instead pursues a coherence of identity that is deeper, for him, than mere logical consistency. Accordingly, I now turn to the broader aspects of immoral self-deception, which focus on the self-deceiver’s interpretation of himself. I adapt Pascal’s account of the moi, the false self, and argue that the immoral self-deceiver intentionally constructs a false self so that he can avoid confronting his own immoral engagements. In the Pensées, a moi is simply a person’s socially constructed (and therefore partially duplicitous) persona. I extend Pascal’s treatment by suggesting that an immoral self-deceiver can intentionally exploit the mechanisms of self-formation for the specific purpose of

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constructing a false self that will help him evade his own moral responsibility. The sinner deceives himself about his own identity, and he therefore leads an inauthentic life. Recall again the case of Tom, the businessman engaged in an illegal price-fixing scheme. Pascal provides the resources that can allow us to understand the broader dimensions of Tom’s project of self-deception. As a result of his disordered loves, his socially constructed and duplicitous imagination allows him to craft a false identity that he projects into the world. The world, in turn, ratifies and reinforces that identity, which further enables him to persist in his self-deception. He then reinforces and projects his intentionally constructed false self by means of a process of self-persuasion. The mental and behavioral techniques of self-persuasion are the very same techniques that allow him to construct and manifest the false self. Tom accepts that he really is the blameless construct that he imagines himself to be. As he imagines himself from the point of view of others, he also imagines talking to them about himself and convincing them of his innocence. In his interior dialogues, he reinforces the voices that exonerate him and rationalizes away his lingering worries. He acts as if he is morally blameless, thereby enlisting the reinforcement of other people and convincing himself further. All of these activities are ways of cultivating particular beliefs and attitudes, but, cumulatively, they also allow him to construct and inhabit a false, self-deceptive identity.

Imaginatively Constructing the Self Tom’s project of self-deception begins with the spontaneous activity of his imagination, which is rooted in his disordered loves. More precisely, and building on the previous chapters, let us say that Tom was first approached by a superior who artfully suggested that he falsify some records. Faced with this illegal and unethical demand, Tom spontaneously redescribed the situation to himself as merely an invitation to help out a colleague or to help the company become more profitable, both virtuous activities in themselves. As Tom gets pulled deeper into the scheme, he allays any feelings of guilt by imagining his future wealth. He also focuses on the way he imagines that others see him—as a sharp businessman, a family man, and a

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respected citizen. Tom’s imagination is active on multiple levels. It shapes the several ways in which he spontaneously interprets his activities, suggests ways in which he should not be blamed for them, and helps him divert his attention from the truth. At a deeper level, Tom’s imagination is driven by his own fundamentally disordered loves—his greed, self-interest, and his excessive identification with the corporation. He also loves himself improperly, which is to say that he loves a particular version of himself, in which he seems morally upright and blameless, both to himself and to the world, even when he is not. On the Pascalian model, the self-deceiver imagines his false self into being by imagining himself from the point of view of other people. In a broader sense, then, the false self is also built from the store of material furnished by his socially constructed imagination.

Acceptance and Avowal When he accepts a false self-interpretation, he avows a false identity, a false conception of himself, and, at the same time, he disavows the truth about himself and his engagements. When I say that Tom cultivates, projects, and ultimately believes in a false self, I mean that he centers his thoughts and interprets his actions around a particular aspect of his identity, to the exclusion of other relevant aspects. Tom will have imaginatively internalized a store of readymade social identities and roles that he can inhabit in order to persist in his self-deception. Because he is already skilled at inhabiting these roles, he can perform them with minimal attention to his deeper motivations.30 Each of us has many such identities and roles readyto-hand, and they can all be a means of self-deception. Tom can easily play the part of the loyal employee, the pillar of the community, or the family man, for example. By accepting, avowing, and projecting these identities, he is able to divert attention from the illegal and unethical engagements that he disavows.

30

See Stanley Hauerwas and David B. Burrell, Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 87; and Fingarette, Self-Deception.

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Internal Rhetoric As Tom imagines himself from the point of view of others, he also imagines talking to them about himself and convincing them of his innocence. In his interior dialogues, he reinforces the voices that exonerate him and rationalizes away his lingering worries. In so doing, he uses internal rhetoric to fashion a false, self-serving identity in which he is morally blameless. Recall that Kenneth Burke calls the self a “parliament, with conflicting interests.”31 Michael Walzer describes the self in a similar way, and sounds like a good Pascalian: My inner world is thickly settled . . . I am in fact assaulted by different critics making different claims on behalf of different and often inconsistent notions of a more perfect self . . . The critics that crowd around, speaking for different roles and identities have not been chosen by me. They are me, but this “me” is socially as well as personally constructed; it is a complex, maximalist whole. I am urged to conduct myself, let’s say, as a good citizen, doctor, or craftsman . . . Many external “causes” are represented in my critical wars, and the representatives come from and still have connections outside. They have been internalized, in the common phrase, and, if I am lucky, naturalized—adapted to their new environment, (my mind and heart) and to the requirements of competitive co-existence.32

This picture of the self offers a way of understanding how the identity of an immoral self-deceiver coalesces around his project of selfdeception. Suppose that Tom assumes the persona of the dutiful family man who wants only to provide for his family. He does not attend to the fact that his illegal activities actually endanger his family’s welfare; rather, he uses interior speech in order to ensure that his self-interpretation runs the other way. He says to himself, in effect: “I could never engage in illegal activity, because I’m not that kind of person. I’m a dutiful family man.” By cultivating this conception of his identity, he can avoid acknowledging his own unethical behavior. Though Tom may, in fact, be a dutiful family man, this constructed self-image is still a false identity, a false self, because it does not capture the whole story about Tom and his engagements. He

31

Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 38. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 96. 32

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uses interior speech to divert his attention away from a true selfinterpretation and toward a false self-interpretation that is internally “consistent” with his avowed identity only because it does not incorporate relevant facts about his engagements.

Acting-As-If Just as Tom reinforces his false self-interpretation with interior speech, he also publicly acts as if he is morally blameless, thereby enlisting the reinforcement of other people and hardening his own self-deceptive identity. Pascal’s analysis of the moi suggests that Tom’s project of acting as if he is morally blameless will be reinforced and supported by his wider social environment. Thus, an important dimension of Tom’s self-deception does not derive from any desire for financial success, but from a fear of social ostracism and estrangement from his peers. We can imagine, for example, that Tom’s colleagues at the firm, including his respected superiors, all tacitly support the price-fixing scheme either by remaining silent about it, or even by discussing it in morally neutral or positive terms. At the same time, we can also imagine that his family and friends support his selfdeception in various ways. For example, perhaps they fail to respond appropriately to his occasional tentative hints that something may be awry, saying only that it would be foolish for Tom to do anything that jeopardizes his “promising” career.

The False Self and the Aversion for Truth The Pascalian moi is like an outlandish story that everyone tacitly agrees to treat as true. Its plausibility depends on this general suspension of disbelief. Self-deception can arise when the important stories that a person tells about himself no longer seem plausible but he is unwilling to qualify them or give them up because he loves them— and his role in them—too much. Thus, the link between immoral selfdeception and one’s identity rests on a deeper link between one’s identity and one’s disordered loves. The entire project of immoral self-deception is rooted in the selfdeceiver’s aversion for the truth. He hates the truth about himself and his immoral projects, and instead loves an imaginary self that appears good when it is not. Pascal’s account of the moi, the false self, is an

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elucidation of what it means to love the self more than the truth, and more than God, who is truth (L99/S132). A person loves himself improperly when he does not derive his own value from God, the true source of all value. The self that he fashions and projects into the world is false because it is centered around a false, unstable source of value. As a result, his thoughts, desires, and habits are shaped and disfigured by his disordered self-love. Yet this claim just is the claim that his very identity is disfigured by his disordered love, for one’s identity is nothing but the sum of one’s thoughts, desires, and habits.

CONCLUSION: SELF-DECEPTION, THE FALL, AND THE HIDDENNESS OF GOD To say that we are fallen is to say that we have turned away from God. Worse, the turn away from God is not some unrepeatable event that can be safely confined to a barely remembered ancestral past— whether we construe that past as historical or mythological. To say that we are fallen is to say that every man is Adam, and every woman Eve. We continually re-enact the Fall by repeatedly turning away from God and toward created objects of delight that are by definition less beautiful, less desirable, and less true. This drama is perverse, and we can only continue acting in it by deceiving ourselves about the part we play. The Fall is a fall into duplicity because pervasive duplicity is a necessary condition of remaining fallen. Pascal shows us what it is means to be fallen by showing us that the cognitive consequences of the Fall are wider than we might assume. We cannot understand the noetic effects of sin by focusing only on the fallen will and the darkened intellect. We must also account for the duplicitous imagination, which in turn directs us outward, first to our own habituated bodies, and then still further outward to the duplicitous customs of the wider world that shapes us into the fallen subjects that we are. A proper account of the cognitive consequences of the Fall must also explain how we are formed as subjects, and any such account must be both personal and social. According to Pascal, our very subjectivity is a social fiction that renders us unable to attend to God. Only after we understand what we are can we profitably turn toward the task of understanding why we think and act as we do.

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What we do, mainly, is sin—and then try to persuade ourselves that we are innocent. Sin and self-deception go hand in hand precisely because we are fallen. That is, we are fallen, but we are not demonic. While it is true in a way to say that the sinner rejects God, it is not the whole truth. We do not—cannot—reject God explicitly, in full awareness. We do not consciously hate goodness and truth as such. Rather, we lie to ourselves about what really is good and true. Only then can we preserve the fiction that we love truth and goodness, although we repeatedly turn away from them. Yet even our lies witness to our love of truth. We care about the truth just enough to pretend to love it, and no more. Someone utterly unmoved by the truth cannot be bothered to pretend. We pretend because we are fallen—and therefore both great and wretched at the same time. The Fall has left us with a secret instinct that draws us toward God and truth, in addition to the secret instinct that drives us away (L136/S168). Theologians appeal to the Fall and its cognitive consequences in part to explain why God appears hidden to us. Scripture tells us that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against . . . those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (Rom. 1: 18–19). God has revealed himself through his creation, and only our own wickedness prevents us from seeing him there: “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Rom. 1: 20). Indeed, our wicked rejection of God is both crime and punishment. Because we reject God, we find it ever easier to go on rejecting God, and our cognitive faculties pay the price: “So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened” (Rom. 1: 21). Because our minds have grown dark as a result of our own wickedness, we find it difficult to see God in his creation. The claim that God hides is hard to understand. Surely a perfectly loving God would reveal himself to all those who seek him. At the very least, surely a perfectly loving God would reveal himself to everyone who is not culpably ignorant of God. On Pascal’s account of divine hiddenness, there is no such thing as innocent ignorance of God. The claim that God hides is equivalent to the claim that we are culpable for our non-belief.

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If he had wished to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, he could have done so by revealing himself to them so plainly that they could not doubt the truth of his essence . . . This is not the way he wished to appear when he came in mildness, because so many men had shown themselves unworthy of his clemency, that he wished to deprive them of a good they did not desire . . . Thus wishing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart and hidden from those who shun him with all their heart, he has qualified our knowledge by giving signs which can be seen by those who seek him but not by those who do not. There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition. (L149/S182)

We are deprived of God only because God is a good that we do not really desire. On the other hand, when we do desire God, when we sincerely seek God, we can see the signs that lead us to God. There really are signs in nature that reveal God, for those who are disposed to look for them: It is true then that everything teaches man his condition, but there must be no misunderstanding, for it is not true that everything reveals God, and it is not true that everything conceals God. But it is true at once that he hides from those who tempt him and that he reveals himself to those who seek him, because men are at once unworthy and capable of God: unworthy through their corruption, capable through their original nature. (L444/S690)

God is partly concealed and partly revealed, and so we are culpable for the fact that God appears hidden to us. According to Pascal, it would be more accurate to say that we hide from God, instead of the reverse. The claim that God is partly concealed and partly revealed fits well with the claim that sin is self-deception. Just as the self-deceiver both knows and rejects the truth, so does the sinner both know and reject God. Moreover, if every sinner is a self-deceiver, then it is easy to understand why we are culpable for our non-belief. We are culpable for our non-belief because we actively persuade ourselves to turn away from God. Both sinner and self-deceiver grasp the truth just enough to choose to turn away from it. Finally, according to the doctrine of the Fall, every human being is fallen, and so every human being is a sinner and self-deceiver. There can therefore be no innocent unbelief. Such are the cognitive consequences of the Fall, according to Pascal.

7 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth The fallen sinner turns away from the truth about his own sinful condition, and away from God, who is truth itself. The Fall is a fall into duplicity, and sin is a kind of self-deception. Yet if the turn away from truth is a turn away from God, then a turn toward truth must be a turn toward God. In order to love God above all things, we must love the truth above all things. Furthermore, if sin is self-deception, then self-lucidity must be its remedy. But to say only this is to say far too little. It implies that the path to salvation may be found through introspective self-knowledge alone. Pascal would never agree that we can simply strive to know ourselves better and then stop sinning. Loving the truth requires reorienting one’s loves around God or Christ, and that is the work of grace, not something that we can just choose to do on our own. Introspection is not grace.

GRACE AS PLEASURE AND DELIGHT IN THE GOOD Pascal’s account of grace is not unconnected to his account of the Fall, however. According to Pascal, the Fall is a fall into duplicity because it is an evaluative fall, which has left us unable to judge the true value of moral goods. It should not be surprising that he also describes the remedy for the Fall in similarly aesthetic and affective terms. He holds that God’s grace is received as a kind of pleasure: a delight in goodness and truth.1 In his short work “On the Conversion of the 1

This is the delectatio victrix (victorious delight) of Jansenist Augustinianism. The source of this idea in Augustine may be found in De peccatorum meritis et remissione 2.19.33 and De spiritu et littera 1.29.5. See also Moriarty, “Grace and Religious Belief ,”

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Sinner,” Pascal presents a Neoplatonic itinerary that uses the language of delight and pleasure to describe the soul’s turn from lower to higher goods.2 The turn toward God is also a turn toward true knowledge of the self that brings with it moral change. In the first stage of conversion, God gives the soul a new form of self-knowledge that also reorients its desires: The first thing that God inspires in a soul that he truly deigns to touch is an understanding and an extraordinary view through which the soul considers material things and itself in a whole new way. This new light causes the soul to fear and brings a disturbance that thwarts the repose it found in the things that were its delights. The soul can no longer taste with tranquility the things that charmed it before. Continuous doubt assaults its enjoyment, and this inwardlooking view causes the soul no longer to find the accustomed sweetness among the material things to which it was so effusively addicted.3

Grace is here presented as both cognitive and affective. It first produces “an understanding and an extraordinary view” that causes the soul to begin to reject “the things that were its delights.” The extraordinary view is an “inward-looking” interior view, a turn toward self-knowledge, and the first stage of the classic Neoplatonic and Augustinian ascent— we turn inward, before we turn upward. As the soul continues its ascent toward God, it comes to understand that worldly goods are ephemeral, and this same understanding saps them of their capacity to give pleasure: The soul views perishable things as perishing and even as already perished; and in view of the certain annihilation of everything that it loves, the soul is frightened, seeing that each instant rips away the joys of its goods, and that which is the most dear flows away at all moments, and at last a day will come when the soul will find itself stripped of all the things in which it had placed its hopes . . . In this way the soul perfectly comprehends that its heart was only attached to things that are fragile and vain, that it must find itself alone and abandoned at the

in Hammond, Cambridge Companion to Pascal, 148; Gouhier, Conversion et apologétique, 71–81; and Magnard, La Clé du chiffre, 248. 2 The Écrit sur la Conversion du Pecheur may be found in OC ii. 99–102. Jean Mesnard dates this work to 1657–8, a period contemporaneous with the early fragments of the Pensées. Le Guern dates it to 1655, on the basis of comparisons with the wager fragment (L418/S680). See Le Guern’s remarks at OC ii. 1166–7. 3 My tr. from OC ii. 99.

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end of this life, since it did not care to join itself to a true and selfsubsistent good that could sustain it during and after this life.4

A cognitive insight again yields an affective reorientation. Once the soul recognizes the finitude of perishable goods, those goods no longer retain their power to delight. Finally, when the soul turns to God, who is the highest, universal, and most stable good, knowledge unites with desire as the soul moves from an intellectual understanding that God is the most lovable good to a felt desire for God. The soul traverses all the creatures, and cannot stop its heart until it arrives at the throne of God, where it begins to find repose and that goodness such that there is nothing more lovable, a goodness that can only be taken from the soul by its own consent. For although the soul does not yet feel the charms with which God rewards the habit of piety, it nevertheless understands that creatures cannot be more lovable than the Creator, and its reason, assisted with the light of grace, makes it understand that there is nothing more lovable than God and that he can only be taken from those who reject him, because to desire him is to possess him, and to reject him is to lose him. And so the soul rejoices that it has found a goodness that cannot be taken away as long as it desires that goodness, a goodness of which there is none higher.5

The continuing reception of grace is experienced as a growing aesthetic pleasure. The soul’s reason—“assisted by grace”—first recognizes intellectually that God is the most lovable good. This recognition gives way to a joyful desire for God, since to desire God is to possess God. Divine grace operates on the soul by overwhelming it with aesthetic delight, which causes it to love spiritual goods over carnal goods. The “Writings on Grace” also express this view of graceas-pleasure: To save his elect, God sent Jesus Christ to carry out his justice and to merit with his mercy the grace of Redemption, medicinal grace, the grace of Jesus Christ which is nothing other than complaisance and delectation (suavité et délectation) in God’s law diffused into the heart by the Holy Ghost, which, not only equaling but even surpassing the concupiscence of the flesh, fills the will with a greater delight in good than concupiscence offers in evil; and so free will, entertained by the 4

My tr. from OC ii. 99–100.

5

My tr. from OC ii. 101.

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sweetness and pleasures (charmé par les douceurs les plaisirs) which the Holy Ghost inspires in it, more than the attractions of sin, infallibly chooses God’s law for the simple reason that it finds greater satisfaction there, and feels its [i.e. the law’s] beatitude and happiness.6

As with his essay “On the Conversion of the Sinner,” Pascal here describes the reception of grace and the moral development that it causes by appealing to the terminology of delight and pleasure. God’s grace is experienced as pleasure. The recipient of grace unexpectedly finds that he enjoys following God’s law more than he enjoys “the concupiscence of the flesh.” When the sinner receives grace, his fundamental stance, his orientation toward the world, is changed. Although Pascal describes this change mainly in volitional and affective terms, it also yields a cognitive shift that alters what the sinner believes. Before receiving grace, the sinner believes that worldly goods are intrinsically more pleasurable than spiritual goods. He may find the moral life desirable in an abstract, intellectual way but does not actually believe that it can lead to his own happiness. More precisely, even if the sinner would assent to the claim “Following God’s law is the moral course of action,” he would also assent to the claim “Sinning is inherently more pleasurable than following God’s law.” And, indeed, before he receives grace, the sinner does find sinning more pleasurable than following God’s law. Nevertheless, this second claim is false. When the sinner receives God’s grace, he comes to know that it is false because he begins to take greater pleasure in God’s law. His pleasure allows him to see the world differently. He becomes more skillful at evaluating competing goods, which in turn allows him to acquire moral knowledge to which he previously had no cognitive access. Before he received grace, his fallen incapacity to experience real pleasure blocked him from truly understanding his own world.

LOVING THE TRUTH AS A RELIGIOUS STANCE The connections between desire, pleasure, and truth structure both Pascal’s account of the Fall and his account of grace. The Fall is a fall 6

“Writings on Grace,” ed. Levi, 223 (OC ii. 289–90).

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into duplicity precisely because it is an evaluative fall. Our beliefs are highly influenced by our desires, and so when we lose the capacity to appreciate and desire moral goods, we lose the capacity to form true beliefs about our world, with its objective hierarchy of goods, and ourselves, as moral creatures. Or rather, we seem to lose this capacity, but we do not—not really. Even after the Fall, we retain an implicit love for God, traced back to our original nature, and with it some knowledge, however dim, that God is the highest good and our only source of genuine happiness. Our implicit love and knowledge of God battles with our explicit desire for worldly goods and our false belief that we can be happy when orient our lives around them. Grace, received as pleasure in the good, restores coherence to the self by restoring coherence to its desires and the beliefs they shape. Grace reorders our desires and reorients our intellects toward truth. Apart from grace, the truth is often unwelcome, and so we often have a motive to deceive ourselves. In order to avoid sinful selfdeception, we must love the truth more than we love ourselves and our projects. It may seem strange to suggest that the “the truth” is an object that can be loved. Yet the phrase “love of truth” does not describe a particular attitude toward a particular object. Rather, it describes a fundamental attitude toward reality as such. In Chapter 1, I said that love is always an interpretive stance. The love of truth describes an interpretive stance in which we want all our judgments to be determined by objective reality instead of by our own desires. I think that it can fairly be described as a religious stance. I have in mind a well-known quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein: It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it is a belief, it is really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It is passionately seizing hold of this interpretation. Instruction in a religious faith, therefore, would have to take the form of a portrayal, a description, of that system of reference, while at the same time being an appeal to conscience.7

Wittgenstein is often opaque to me, but I think that by a “system” of reference he must mean a comprehensive set of concepts, a way of describing and interpreting whatever one happens to encounter. 7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1947), tr. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 64e.

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Furthermore, because it is a system of reference, it cannot be just one particular belief among others. And perhaps most important of all, he describes religious belief not as the system of reference itself, but as a “passionate commitment” to it, which he glosses as “a way of living, or a way of assessing life.” It seems clear that a love of truth must also be a “passionate commitment to a system of reference” in exactly the sense that Wittgenstein intends. The relevant system of reference may be understood as a comprehensive set of concepts—the exact set of concepts that one must have if one is to engage with the world as it really is. In order to get, keep, and appropriately deploy this special set of concepts, one must be passionately committed to the truth. As Wittgenstein suggests, achieving the stance of passionate commitment is not easy. To be sure, if one is passionately committed to the truth, one must possess the habits and skills of rationality—the ability to weigh evidence, draw conclusions, etc. But a person with this skill will not automatically love the truth. We learn to love properly by exercising moral virtues, and so the failure to love the truth is really a moral failure. It is easy to see that this is the case by looking at the ways in which people characteristically fail to love the truth. Someone filled with pride effectively views himself as the center of the universe; consequently, he treats external objects and other people either as obstacles to his projects or as means of achieving them. He cannot see the world as it truly is because of his self-love. Someone mired in spiritual apathy might have an opposite reaction, and treat himself and his goals as nothing more than hateful obstructions to the good of another. The claim that disordered love is the fundamental motivation of self-deception suggests that the rational blindness of selfdeception is tied to the moral blindness of false self-love. We cannot be formed as properly rational subjects without also being formed as properly moral subjects, because in order to reason well about the world, we must first keep our disordered love in check.

SUBJECTIVITY WITHOUT DUPLICITY: THE TRUE SELF IMITATES CHRIST Pascal would add that a passionate commitment to the truth must refer back to God and Christ. To love the truth, to see the world as it

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really is, is to try to see the world from God’s point of view, which is to imitate God. This is also what it means to become a true self, a self that is free from self-deception because its loves are properly ordered towards God. It is clear that we can never fully succeed at this task, but it always remains a goal and a moral norm. And the only way to imitate God without falling into further sin and self-deception is to have one’s loves reordered in such a way that one loves God above all things, and loves everything else through God. Otherwise, “we make an idol of truth itself, for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and an idol that we must not love or worship” (L926/S755).8 Pascal would also say that finite human beings can genuinely imitate God only by imitating Christ, the God-man and the paradigmatic human being. Pascal’s Christocentrism is apparent throughout the Pensées, but it is especially prominent in a series of fragments on “the body of thinking members” (L360–74/S392–405). These fragments use the metaphor of membership in the body of Christ to argue that one can only know oneself, and be free from self-deception, when one’s loves are properly ordered.9 8 The fragment continues, “Still less should we worship its opposite, which is falsehood . . . ” 9 Scholars who have discussed the fragments on the body of thinking members typically have not emphasized that they present Pascal’s positive account of authentic human subjectivity. Miel treats the relevant fragments, first, as a metaphor for predestination that shows what it means for the human will to be moved by the divine will; and, second, as “a bridge between Pascal’s theology of grace and his notions concerning the Christian in society” (Pascal and Theology, 178–9). Jacob Meskin provides the best discussion in English in his “Secular Self-Confidence, Postmodernism and Beyond: Recovering the Religious Dimension of Pascal’s Pensées,” Journal of Religion, 75 (1995), 487–508. Meskin correctly sees that Pascal argues in the relevant fragments that we must identify with Christ in order to transform our subjectivity. Meskin does not set this insight in dialectical opposition to Pascal’s thoughts on the false self (the moi) and sinful subjectivity, however, and he does not remark on the Trinitarian theme of fragment L372/S404. Nor does Miel. Ferreyrolles reads the fragments on the body of thinking members in social-political terms (Pascal et la raison du politique, 246). Michel Le Guern, in his book on “the image” in Pascal, recognizes the prominence of the image of the body of thinking members in Pascal’s thought, but draws no philosophical or theological conclusions about this fact (L’Image dans l’uvre de Pascal (Paris: Colin, 1969), 146–50). Pierre Magnard presents a fine, rich discussion but his treatment is also primarily historical and exegetical (“Un corps plein de membres pensants,” in Dominique Descotes, Antony McKenna, and Laurent Thirouin (eds), Le Rayonnement de Port-Royal: Mélanges en l’honneur de Philippe Sellier (Paris: Champion, 2001), 333–40. I am not aware that Marion discusses the relevant fragments at all, though he certainly recognizes that, for Pascal, authentic subjectivity must be centered on Christ, as the universal object of love (See On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, 329–31). Finally, Carraud does discuss

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In fragment L417/S36 of the Pensées, Pascal famously claims: “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves.” The fragments on the body of thinking members develop this claim. In these fragments, he takes the idea that Christ is the object and center of all things and applies it to the task of attaining genuine self-knowledge and authentic subjectivity. The basic insight that underpins Pascal’s account of the true self is not surprising. Given that to be a self is to be an object of love, it follows that a true self can only be called into being by a true, because rightly ordered, love. To say that our loves are rightly ordered is to say that we love God above all things, and love everything else, including the self, through God and for God. This is a standard Christian claim, of course, but Pascal develops it in an especially interesting way, in a series of fragments on what it means to be a member of the body of Christ. As with his account of sinful subjectivity, the theme of imitation is central. Just as a false self, a moi, parodically imitates God, so also a true self imitates Christ, who loves God above all things. By imitating Christ, the true self virtuously imitates God. In the fragments on the body of thinking members Pascal shows that when the self attains genuine self-knowledge, it will not only love itself differently but will in fact become a different kind of self altogether. Pascal believes that sinful, duplicitous subjects inevitably try to make themselves the center of everything and tyrannize everyone else (L597/S494). As a way of resisting our innate self-love, he therefore suggests a thought experiment. If we imagine that we are each parts of a greater whole, a body of thinking members, we will subordinate our own value to the value of the whole and thereby love ourselves properly. “In order to control the love we owe to ourselves, we must imagine a body full of thinking members (for we are members of the whole), and see how each member ought to love itself, etc.” (L368/S401). To be a member is to have no life, no being, and no movement except through the spirit of the body and for the body. The separated member,

the body of thinking members and even recognizes their Trinitarian character, but he reads the fragments in question quite differently. See n. 11 below.

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no longer seeing the body to which it belongs, has only a wasted and moribund being left. However, it believes itself to be whole, and, seeing no body on which it depends, it believes itself to be dependent only on itself and tries to make itself its own center and body. But not having in itself any principle of life, it only wanders about and becomes bewildered at the uncertainty of its existence, quite conscious that it is not the body and yet not seeing that it is a member of a body. Eventually, when it comes to know itself, it has returned home, as it were, and only loves itself for the body’s sake . . . (L372/S404)

It is clear that the fragments on the body of thinking members are inspired by Paul’s discussion of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12. There are also further allusions in this fragment to the biblical story of the prodigal son: the separated member “wanders about and becomes bewildered at the uncertainty of existence” until it “comes to know itself ” and returns “home.” On my reading, these biblical tropes also work to emphasize the conceptual relations that bind the self ’s being, its self-knowledge, and its self-love. Pascal begins with ontology. Separated from the body, the self has only “wasted and moribund being left,” yet Pascal treats this ontological separation as a failure of self-knowledge: the self ’s being is moribund because it no longer sees the body to which it actually still belongs and so falsely “believes itself to be whole.” Furthermore, when the self overcomes this failure of self-knowledge, and comes to know itself truly, its self-love is immediately transformed. Once the self no longer falsely believes itself to be whole, it “comes to know itself,” and then it “loves itself for the body’s sake.” To unpack Pascal’s metaphor, when the self knows itself rightly, it also loves itself rightly, and— circling back to ontology—it thereby becomes a different kind of self altogether: whole but not alone, no longer isolated but a member of the body. To be sure, we recognize a sense of “self-knowledge” that is unrelated to the self ’s being or its love. That is, there is a sense of “selfknowledge” in which we could say simply that a person knows certain facts about himself. But this thin sense of “self-knowledge” is not the sense that Pascal develops with his image of the body of thinking members. Enlightenment modernity is accustomed to treating being, love, and knowledge as sharply distinct, but for Pascal, it is not possible to separate them when it comes to discussions of the self. For example, in another fragment he writes:

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If the foot had never known it belonged to the body, and that there was a body on which it depended, if it had only known and loved itself, and if it then came to know that it belonged to a body on which it depended, what regret, what shame it would feel for its past life . . . How submissively it would let itself be governed by the will in charge of the body . . . (L373/S405)

Pascal seems to assume that the foot would automatically love itself properly and submit its will to the will of the body when it comes to know itself. He does not leave any room for a foot that knows that it belongs to the body and yet refuses to love the body as the source of its own being. The next fragment explains why there is no such room. There is no such room because the very idea of rejecting the general source of happiness in the name of private happiness is incoherent: If the feet and hands had their own wills, they would never be properly in order except when submitting this individual will to the primal will governing the whole body. Otherwise they would be disorganized and unhappy, but in desiring only the good of the body they achieve their own good. (L374/406)

In the idiom of these fragments, it would be incoherent for the hands and the feet to come to know that their happiness is a function of the good of the body without thereby also loving the good of the body. Because it would be incoherent, it seems natural to say that if they do not, in fact, love the good of the body, then the hands and feet do not really believe that their happiness is a function of the good of the body. It is in this sense that genuine self-love and genuine selfknowledge are inseparable. A change in self-knowledge entails a change in self-love, and surely these two changes together entail a change in the kind of self that one is. A self that loves itself above all and regards itself as an isolated, wholly autonomous source of value is simply not the same kind of thing as a self that subordinates its own good to the universal good of all. In Pascal’s terms, a self that subordinates its own private good to the universal good has ceased to be a moi. Pascal himself gave the title “Christian morality” to the bundle of fragments on the body of thinking members. The lesson is clear: a genuine change in selfknowledge and self-love could not be merely an internal, inwardly directed affair. As selves in a world, we necessarily project our selfunderstandings—both true and false—into the world. When we attain real self-knowledge, we not only love ourselves with a rightly

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ordered love; we also engage differently with the world. Our tyrannical self-love is transformed (through the help of God’s grace) into an impartial love that desires the good of all. And if the member truly desires the good of all, then surely its actions must express this desire. In other words, under sin or under grace, our self-knowledge and selflove are always socially expressed and, again, performative. We perform our selves, according to Pascal, and so it follows that the project of performing agapic love will necessarily shape one into a different kind of self, something other than a selfish, tyrannical moi. Another interpretative difficulty looms, however. Once the self has ceased to be a moi what else is left for it to be? Recall that elsewhere in the Pensées Pascal claims that a true self is a self that is worthy of love (L688/S567). Perhaps unsurprisingly, he also claims that only God is finally worthy of love. The true and only virtue is therefore to hate ourselves . . . and to seek for a being really worthy of love in order to love him. But as we cannot love what is outside us, we must love a being who is within us but is not our own self . . . Now only the universal being is of this kind: the kingdom of God is within us, universal good is within us, and is both ourselves and not ourselves. (L564/S471)

It appears that we are left with two alternatives: either there are no true selves, because there are no selves worthy of love, or a true self must, in some sense, be identified with God. Pascal chooses both alternatives at once. To the extent that every self is an imaginary self, a moi, there really are no true selves; but to the extent that one ceases to be a moi, one thereby becomes something wholly different just insofar as one’s self-knowledge and self-love have been transformed. At the root of our subjectivity we find a self that is both a worthy and a possible object of love. This self is “both ourselves and not ourselves.” Elsewhere he says that “Happiness is neither outside nor inside us: it is in God, both outside and inside us” (L407/S26). We cannot truly love ourselves unless we know and love God, a project which somehow entails that we are also identified with God. Yet according to Pascal, we cannot come to know and love God without first knowing and loving Christ: “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ” (L417/S36). Surely Christ is also the self that is “both ourselves and not ourselves” mentioned in L564/S471. The Pascalian true self is the

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self that is utterly conformed to Christ, with properly ordered loves. One becomes a true self when one is conformed to God through the imitation of Christ; one becomes worthy of love by virtue of being so conformed. Thus, on my reading, Pascal holds that the true self is the self that knows and loves God by imitating Christ’s own virtuous love for God. Christ is the only perfect human subject because his natural human self-love is also fully identical to love for God. Only when we imitate Christ can we love God above all things and thereby become true selves. In the fragments on the body of thinking members, Pascal takes the idea that Christ is the object and center of all things and applies it to the task of attaining true subjectivity. I argued above that the sinful, false self is best understood as a parodic imitation of God. Yet the converse also holds. To be free from duplicity, we must imitate God rightly, by imitating Christ, who is the God-man and the paradigmatic human being. This is what authentic subjectivity is for Pascal: subjectivity without duplicity, selfhood that is called into being by a love that is properly ordered towards God. For Pascal, true subjectivity is Christocentric subjectivity. It could not by nature love anything else except for selfish reasons and in order to enslave it, because each thing loves itself more than anything else. But in loving the body it loves itself, because it has no being except in the body, through the body, and for the body. He who adheres to God is one spirit [1 Cor. 6: 17] The body loves the hand and if it had a will the hand ought to love itself in the same way as the soul loves it; any love that goes beyond that is wrong. Adhering to God is one spirit, we love ourselves because we are members of Christ. We love Christ because he is the body of which we are members. All are one. One is in the other like the three persons [of the Trinity]. (L372/S404)10

The body of thinking members is not just any human collective. Pascal’s claim is not merely that selfish individuals should subordinate their private desires to the good of the whole. The body of thinking members is the body of Christ. To recognize that one is a 10

In the original, the internal quotations are in Latin, as Pascal cites from the Vulgate Bible: Qui adhaeret Deo unus spiritus est and Adhaerens Deo unus spiritus est, respectively.

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member of the body of Christ is to cease to be a false self, a moi, and to become something altogether new. After all, it is constitutive of the moi that it cannot recognize that it is a member of the body. Once it does recognize that it is a member of the body, it immediately ceases to be a moi. Having ceased to be a moi, the only thing left for it to be is a member of the body of Christ, the one who loves God above all things. And surely to be a member of the body of Christ is also to imitate Christ and thereby become Christ-like. Indeed, it is striking that the self ’s transformation is described in explicitly Trinitarian terms. In the fragment above, Pascal’s model for authentic self-love, and therefore authentic subjectivity, is nothing other than perichoresis, the perfect, self-giving love of the Father, Son, and Spirit: “we love ourselves because we are members of Christ. We love Christ because he is the body of which we are members. All are one. One is in the other like the three persons [of the Trinity]” (L372/ S404). Indeed, this fragment goes so far as to equate subjectivity with theosis: by adhering to Christ in the mystical body we become one spirit with God, and this is just what it means to be a genuine self. Theosis is the goal of authentic selfhood. We are true selves—we are truly selves—when we are a part of Christ, in the mystical body, constitutively joined with God and neighbor by mutual, self-giving love, just as Christ is constitutively joined with the Father and Spirit in the perichoretic union of the holy Trinity. Scholars rarely explore the theological depths of Pascal’s thoughts about duplicitous subjectivity. They discuss the fragments on the body of thinking members even more rarely.11 This omission is especially regrettable, because these fragments are a necessary 11 See n. 9, above. Interestingly—though, I would say, unfortunately—Carraud reads the fragments on the body of thinking members as anti-Augustinian. According to Carraud, Pascal, unlike Augustine, does not say that all human beings find themselves with two mutually opposing loves (self-love and the love for God). Nor, according to Carraud, does Pascal call for a change in the object of one’s love (from the self to God) but rather for a change in the nature of one’s love: to love oneself justly one must love oneself as one is loved by God, which presumably means impartially (“Pascal’s Anti-Augustinianism,” Perspectives on Science, 15 (2007), 461; see also his Pascal et la philosophie, 341). This claim fits in with Carraud’s overall reading (which I share in part) that, for Pascal, to be a self is to think about oneself in the thought of another. It would follow that the right kind of self is a self that thinks about itself in the thought of the right kind of Other—God. Carraud’s picture, then, is of a self that changes the way it knows and loves itself, but does not change in its being, when it comes to recognize that it is a member of the mystical body. E.g. Carraud says explicitly that for Pascal, unlike for Augustine, self-love does not need to be

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complement to Pascal’s account of sinful subjectivity. Moreover, when one overlooks the fragments on the body of thinking members, one can easily overlook Pascal’s role in the history of modern theological thought about the self. If my reading is correct, in these fragments it is Pascal who launches—however inchoately—a tradition of Trinitarian retrieval that is of the greatest contemporary interest. This tradition holds that the modern individualistic subject is a pernicious illusion and that true subjectivity is relational and Trinitarian.12 This tradition of inquiry looks back to the premodern, to be sure, but insofar as it is also explicitly counter-modern, it necessarily occurs within and after modernity. Pascal, writing at the very dawn of modernity, can fairly claim to be its originator.

THE FINAL WORD Pascal’s account of sinful subjectivity presents selfhood as duplicity: under the conditions of the Fall, we are false, imaginary selves called into being by improper self-love, performing our subjectivity in a dark parody of divine goodness. Conversely, we slough off the false self and attain genuine subjectivity when (by grace, Pascal would surely say) we truly imitate God and conform ourselves to Christ, who loves God above all things. A person who loves God as the highest good also loves all things according to their true value. In so doing, he loves the truth and is passionately committed to it. Pascal shows that this commitment to the truth may be understood as a fully Christian commitment. Because Christians have a moral obligation to love the truth, it follows that they cannot finally distinguish between “converted” but only “controlled” (“Pascal’s Anti-Augustinianism,” 461). He thereby implies that there is no fundamental change in the self as it exists before and after it comes to see that it is a member of the body. On my reading, Carraud does not pay enough attention to the Christological and Trinitarian elements of the relevant fragments and so he does not appreciate the fact that the self is not only converted but essentially transformed when it comes to regard itself as a member of the body. 12 For one example among many, see Catherine Mowry La Cugna, God for us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 243–317, ch. 8, “Persons in Communion.” For adroit resistance to the claim that personhood is relational, see Harriet A. Harris, “Should we Say that Personhood is Relational?,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 51 (1998), 214–34.

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intellectual virtues and religious or moral virtues. A Christian can legitimately say that every time she utters something true, no matter how mundane, she worships God in the very act of speaking truly. Christians may therefore understand their every word and gesture as an opportunity to draw closer to God and to make themselves and the world more hospitable to the truth. Indeed, this may be the only way to be free from self-deception. It is also, I suggest, one way to understand the biblical exhortation to “Pray without ceasing.”

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Index acceptance 186–8, 194, 206 acedia 27–8, 45 see also paresse; sloth acting-as-if 193–5, 208 see also habituation Adam 19, 21–3 Adams, Roberts M. 132n15 agency condition 153, 160, 162, 165, 168–71, 174 akrasia 153n16 Althusser, Louis 72n30, 80–1, 82, 85 Ames, Roger T. 162n44 amor dei 22 amor sui 22 amour-propre 20–4, 73, 75, 99–100, 112 see also pride; self-love Anderson, Gary A. 10n10 Aquinas, Thomas 8n9, 27, 49n47, 60n14 Ariew, Roger 2n2 Aristotle 60, 61n14, 153n16 Arnauld, Antoine 182 attention 189–90 paradox of 169–72 attractiveness 38–42, 107 and truth 40–1, 182 Audi, Robert 136n22, 156, 157 Augustine 31, 36n34, 86n47, 93, 120n25, 212n1, 224n9 Confessions 23 The City of God 22 Augustinian doctrine 5, 6, 10, 14, 18, 20, 22–6, 33, 46, 51, 68, 74, 82, 84, 93, 114, 130, 213 automaton 65–6 avowal 199–201, 204, 206 awareness 152, 169–72, 173 Bach, Kent 156–7 Baird, A. W. S. 124, 125n3 Barnes, Annette 158n34, 199n28 beauty 39 Beitzinger, A. J. 87n49, 125n3 belief: dual-belief 153, 160, 165–7, 169–70, 175–6, 193

in God 67, 106 logic of 166 system of reference 216–17 belief-formation 41–2, 124, 126, 142, 149–63, 167–70, 182, 203–4 beliefs 37–8, 65–6 conflicting 76, 115–16, 129, 165, 171 believing, empirical 126–9 Bermúdez, José Luis 165n50, 173n65, 196–7 body of thinking members 218, 219–20, 223, 224–5 boredom 43–7 Bouchilloux, Hélène 19n1, 30n23, 87n49, 88n50 Bourdieu, Pierre 65, 80, 81–2, 89 Burke, Kenneth 188n15, 191, 207 Burrell, David B. 206n30 Buss, Sarah 34n31 Calvo, Paco 136n24 Canfield, John 154–5, 159, 165n50 Cariou, Pierre 125n3 Carraud, Vincent 93, 94n5, 95n7, 104n15, 218n9, 224n11, 225n11 Carrive, Paulette 95n7 Carson, Thomas L. 150n6 Cartesian: ego 148 subject 92, 96 Charles IX 56 Chisholm, Roderick M. 150n6 Christian Socratism 6 Christianity: Augustinian 20, 84 truth of 6, 48–9 church, the 89–90 Clausewitz, Carl von 55 coeur, see heart Cohen, L. Jonathan 186–7 concupiscence 20, 22–4, 31–2, 51–2 in our society 76–9 triple 57–8 1 Corinthians 12 220

238

Index

custom 63–8, 63n19, 77 see also habit Davidson, Donald 165n50 Davidson, Hugh M. 5n5, 17n15, 30n23, 63n19, 66 de Sousa, Ronald B. 165n50 deception: interpersonal 148–50, 153–5, 158, 164, 174, 176 mutual 103 Delehanty, Ann T. 125n3 Demos, Raphael 149–54, 155, 159–61, 163, 169 Descartes, Rene 21n4, 61, 62, 92, 93n3, 147 Meditations 94, 96 Descotes, Dominique 30n23, 218n9 desire 182, 213 and belief-formation 41 cycle of 34–8 for diversion 2 effects of 162, 163 for esteem 99, 101, 118 for God 4 for happiness 4, 8 for love 95 for truth 8 unsatisfied 177 warped by 42 Deweese-Boyd, Ian 149n4 Dewey, John 68 Dilman, Ilham 122 Dissanayake, Wimal 162n44 diversion 43–4 desire for 2 from truth 76–9 portraits describing 49 pursuit of 45 divertissement 43–4, 45 dueling 128 duplicity 1, 14 fall into 15–18, 20, 42 mutual 119 in Pascal's political theology 51–91 in our society 76–9 and state power 51 see also lying to oneself; self-deception Dupuy, Jeam Pierre 157n29

Eagleton, Terry 85 Eliot, George, Middlemarch 14, 94, 107–17 Elster, John 23n11, 123n2, 162 emotion 162, 163 emptiness 43–4 Enlightenment 92 ennui 43–4, 45–6, 47–9 Epictetus 28 esteem 99, 101, 118 ethical intuitionism 136–7 ethics 124–5, 132–3, 161 Fall, the 5, 83 Christian doctrine of 46 cognitive consequences of 1n1, 7, 17, 30, 85, 108, 146, 209–10 into duplicity 1, 7, 15–18, 20, 42–6 evaluative 14, 30–8 noetic effects 144, 209 false-self 97–105, 148, 180, 204, 222, 224 construction of 204–9 definition 94, 95–6 habitual project 111–12 imaginary 144 interpersonal 112–13 in Middlemarch 107–17 parodic imitation of God 117–20 performance of 108, 111, 118–19 as self-deception 113–17 and self-interpretation 105–7 see also self fantaisies 140–3, 144, 184–5 see also imagination fear 54–5, 70 feminist theologians 26 Ferreyrolles, Gérard 60n13, 65n21, 72n29, 218n9 finesse 124, 134–7, 140 Fingarette, Herbert 152n15 Finkelstein, David H. 200n2 Fitzgerald, Allan 22n7, 23n8 force 59n30, 69–70, 79 Force, Pierre 134n19 Foucault, Michel 54–5 Fouke, Daniel C. 6n6, 21n4 Frame, Donald M. 57n8 Frankfurt, Harry G. 32–3n27, 34n31 Fredrik Bjorklund 138n26

Index Fredrikson, Paula 9n10 Freud, Sigmund 51n10 Funkhouser, Eric 158n32, 175 Gadamer, Hans Georg 132n15 gambling 2 Gamwell, Franklin I. 49n47 Gardiner, Patrick L. 160–1 Gendler, Tamar Szabó 158n32 Genesis 19 Gilbert, D. 41n38 Gilson, Etienne 6 God 105, 177 belief in 67, 106 desire for 4 hiddenness of 209–11 identification with 222–3 imitate 223 love for 216, 218 and objectivity 184n7 parodying 117–20 rational 193 rejected 1, 78, 144 source of goodness 48–9 truth 212 God's wrath 73–4 Goldmann, Lucien 87n48 goods, evaluation of 34–6 Goodstein, Elizabeth S. 46n44 Gouhier, Henri 93n3, 134n20 grace 212–15, 216 Gregory the Great 133n17 Griffiths, Paul, J. 87n51 Gustavson, Don 154–5, 159 habit 63n19 see also custom habitual project 111–12 habituated body, and imagination 59–63 habituation 64, 89, 194, 195, 197 see also acting-as-if Haidt, Jonathan 41n38, 136n22, 137n25, 138n26 Haight, Jeanne 30n23 Hales, Steven D. 156, 157 Hamlyn, D. W. 51n19 Hammond, Nicholas 19n1, 25n13, 43n42, 101n12, 134n19, 213n1 happiness 4, 8, 48 Harris, Harriet A. 218n12

239

Hauerwas, Stanley 206n30 heart 124, 129–33, 137–9 Heller, Lane M. 33n29 Hibbs, Thomas 125n3 Hintikka, Jaakko 166n52 Hitler, Adolf 122 Hobbes, Thomas 35n32, 53, 87 human agency 195–8 human subject 92–120 Hume, David 35n32, 138 hunters 2–3 hypocrisy 101–4 ideology 80, 81 and sin 82–4 and theology 84–7 illusion 51, 52–7, 70–1, 72–3, 80, 81 illusion volontaire 100 imagination 52–7, 180 cognitive and affective 138–9 early concepts of 60–1 and the habituated body 59–63 Pascal's critique 51, 57–68 political 68–70, 77 and self 58–9, 92–120, 205–6 social 63–8, 177 and value 124, 137–9 intellect 129–30 interpellation 81 interpretation 179–80, 181, 186–8 Jesus Christ 7, 105, 177 imitation of 217–25 Johnston, Mark 168n59 Jones, Serene 83 justice 79, 87–8, 89 Kearney, Richard 132n15 Kelly, Daniel 136n24 Kipp, David 161n40, 174, 175, 176 knowledge 133 Koch, Erec 182n2 Kosky, Jeffrey L. 93n3 Krailsheimer, A. J. 2n2, 5n5, 59n10, 74n32, 100n11, 128n9, 131n13, 133 Kuhn, Reinhard 46n45 La Rochefoucauld 162 Lafuma number (L) 2n2 language 64 Laporte, Jean 30n23

240

Index

Lazar, Ariela 161n41 Lazzeri, Christian 20n2, 53n2, 75n33, 102, 103n14, 125n3 Le Guern, Michel 19n1, 213n2, 218n9 Lear, Jonathan 34n30 Levi, Anthony 23n11, 130n10 Levi, Honor 2n2, 19n1, 41n39, 182n2, 215n6 Levy, Neil 157 Lewis, David 155 lie, noble 72–3 Lindzey, G. 41n38 logic 166 Louth, Andrew 33n28 love: capacity to 20 desire for 95 disordered 20, 25–9, 52, 73, 84 and knowledge 133 rightly ordered 219 a stance 32–3 and visibility 33 see also self-love Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca 183n6 lying to oneself: analytic philosophy and 146–78 as culpable self-persuasion 122, 129, 179, 180–2 and the false-self 115–17 see also duplicity; self-deception Lynch, Kevin 158n32 Lyons, John D. 61n15, 63, 136n21 Lyotard, Jean François 132n15 McFadyen, Alistair 26n14 MacFarland, Ian 10n10 machine 65, 70 McKenna, Antony 218n9 McLaughlin, Brian P. 153n17, 162n44, 168n50 McNally, Patrick 154, 165n50 Magnard, Pierre 125n3, 213n1, 218n9 Maguire, Matthew W. 57n9 Malebranche, Nicholas 35n32 Marin, Louis 69n27 Marion, Jean-Luc 93, 94n5, 95n6, 147n1, 218n9 Martin, Clancy 150n6 Martin, Michael, W. 165n50, 185n10 Martineau, Emmanuel 7n8 Marx, Karl 81 Matheron, Francois 80n36

Mathewes, Charles T. 36n34 Méchoulan, Eric 54n4 Mele, Alfred R. 126n6, 150–1, 153–4, 156, 158, 159n36, 160, 163, 165, 167n53, 168, 173, 175–6 Melzer, Sara 5n5, 7n8 Meskin, Jacob 218n9 Mesnard, Jean 5n5, 33n29, 92n2, 194n22, 213n2 Miel, Jan 5n5, 218n9 moi, see false-self Montaigne, Michel de 28, 56, 57n8, 61, 72, 87 moral agency 161 moral facts 138n26 moral judgements: interpretive 124, 125–9 as intuitive reasoning 134–7 moral life 124, 125–9, 126, 130, 139, 141, 144 moral reasoning 124, 140–4 moral theology 121–45 moral wrongdoing 123–5 Moriarty, Michael 19n1, 35, 54, 59n12, 62n18, 82n43, 212n1 Moroney, Stephen K. 9n10 Morot-Sir, Edouard 97n9 Moser, Paul K. 10n10 Mounce, H. O. 51n9 Murdoch, Dugald 61n16 Nado, Jennifer 136n24 Natoli, Charles M. 183n5 Nicole, Pierre 100n11, 182n1 Niebuhr, Reinhold 11n12, 13 Nienkamp, Jean 188n14 Norman, Buford 3, 30n23, 133n18 normative pressure 190–2 nullity 43–4 orgueil 20, 25 see also pride original sin 8, 9, 12, 83 Outka, Gene H. 26 Overton, Lee 34n31 Paluch, Stanley 172n63 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 29n20 paradox 12–14, 146, 154, 155–8, 163–9 of attention and awareness 169–72 dispelled 198–204

Index doxastic 158–9, 163–6, 169, 174, 181, 192, 199, 200, 202–3 strategic 158–9, 163–5, 167–9, 174, 181, 192, 199, 200, 202 paresse 26–7, 28–9 see also acedia; sloth Partee, Barbara 166n52 Pascal, Blaise: as critical theorist 79–87 "On the Conversion of the Sinner" 212–13 "Discussion with Monsieur de Sacy" 28 Pensées 2–5, 7, 13, 15, 17, 19n1, 25, 28, 30, 33n28, 39, 40, 45, 57, 72, 77, 87n48, 93, 97, 99, 103, 125, 131, 142n28, 147, 182, 184, 189, 195, 204, 213n2, 218–19, 222 "The Art of Persuasion" 41, 182 Post-wager problem 168 Provincial Letters 128, 182 three orders 93n3 wager fragment 66–7, 180, 193, 196, 198 "Wretchedness" 72 "Writings on Grace" 19n1, 31, 214–15 Penelhum, Terrence 155–6, 157, 159–60 Perelman, Chaïm 183n6 perichoresis 224 Périer, Paul J. 88n51 persuasion 182–4 see also self-persuasion Peters, James R. 18n16 Phillips, D. Z. 122n1 philosophers, vanity of 147 philosophy of mind 161 Pieper, Josef 13 Plantinga, Alvin 10n10 Plato 71n28 pleasure, aesthetic 214 political discourse 78 political imagination 68–70 political order 52–7, 73–4, 177 political progress 87–90 political self-deception 74–6 political system 76 political theology 51–91 politics: anti-utopian 88n51 as diversion 76–9 illusion or lie 72–3 and self-deception 74–6

241

as tragedy 87 as war 55 power 57–68 lust for 22 pretenses of 70–6 state 14, 51, 89 see also will-to-power pride 114n21, 118, 217 Augustinian 10–11, 20, 22 destroys the soul 24 and disordered love 25–9 and paresse 28–9 see also amour-propre; orgueil prodigal son 220 raison 30 rapport 39–40, 107 rationalization 40, 42, 117, 182–4 reality, orders of 33–4 reason 30–1, 40, 42, 50, 57, 177, 182–4 reasoning: critical and habitual 134n19 intuitive 134–7 moral 124, 140–4 unintentionally biased 163 Reilly, Richard 156, 157 religious conversion 32n6, 67n24, 103, 139, 141n28, 194–5, 197, 213 repetition 66 respect 55, 69–71, 77 rest, aversion to 3–4 rhetoric, internal 188–93, 194–5, 207–8 Richmond, Ian M. 33n29 Rorty, A. O. 153n17, 168n50 Ross, W. D. 136n22 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 22 Saiving, Valerie 26 Santurri, Edmund N. 26n15 Scott-Kakures, Dion 148n2, 196n24 secret instinct 2–5 self: conflicting interests 191 as fiction 1 and imagination 58–9, 92–120 negative ontology 97 what is it? 94–7 see also false-self; moi self-assertion 119 self-deception 2–6, 13, 101, 113–17 analytic philosophy on 146–78 controversy 149–50

242

Index

self-deception (cont.) deflationary 153, 160, 162, 163 diversion as 79 mechanisms 75 moral judgements 124, 125–9 moral reasoning 140–4 political 74–6 as self-persuasion 183 sinful 9–12, 121–3, 144–5, 179–211 strong 153, 164, 169–72, 174–6 unintentional 116 see also duplicity; lying to oneself self-dispersal 26, 119 self-estrangement 12–14 self-evacuation 26 self-interpretation 105–7, 113–17 self-knowledge 6, 78, 106–7, 161, 176–7 self-love 20–2, 93 see also amour–propre; love self-persuasion: morally culpable 122, 179–211 self-deception as 183 steps of 184–95 a temporal process 196 self-talk 188–93 self-transparency 172–8 Sellier number (S) 2n2 Sellier, Philippe 5n5, 20n2, 28–9, 44n43, 72n29, 125n3, 130n11 sentiment 124, 131, 133–4, 135, 137, 140, 142, 144, 184–5 Sepper, Dennis L. 61n16 Siegler, Frederick A. 156, 157, 172n63 sin 9–12, 210 explanation of 13 and ideology 82–4 incoherent 11–12, 79, 118 nature of 10 noetic effects of 1n1, 10n10, 17 origin of 20–1 original 8, 9, 12, 83 performative script 77, 83 of pride 25 and self-deception 9–12, 121–3, 144–5, 179–211 of sloth 27 two roots 26 Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter 138n26 sloth 27, 114n21 see also acedia; paresse social imagination 63–8 social intuitionist ethics 137–8

social justice 87–8 social order: duplicitous 14, 68–70 emergence of 52–4 Socrates 42, 71n28 Sommers, Tamler 138n26 Sorensen, Roy A. 169n60 soul 97, 213–14 Stalnaker, Robert 186–7 state power 14, 51, 89 status 69–70 Stich, Stephen 136n24 Stoolhoff, Robert 61n16 subjectivity 92–120, 130 Sudduth, Michael 10n10 superbia 22, 25, 29 see also pride; orgueil Symons, John 136n24 Szabados, Béla 172n63 Talbott, W. J. 153n17, 158, 165 Taylor, Charles 106–7 theological anthropology 177 theology, and ideology 84–7 thinking reed 92 Thirouin, Laurent 218n9 Thomas D. Feehan 150n6 Tolstoy, Leo 122 Tom, white-collar criminal 185–6, 188, 190, 201, 204–7, 208 Topliss, Patricia 182n2 transmutation 123n2 transpersonal mechanisms 82–3 Trinity, the 224, 225 truth 38–42 and attractiveness 40–1, 182 aversion for 1, 7–9, 208–9 and beauty 39 desire for 8 hatred of 143 loving the 212–26, 215–17 and politics 76–9 unattractive 38 unconscious mental activity 199–200 unhappiness 45, 46–50, 78 value 124, 137–9, 142 Van Leeuwen, D. S. N. 157 violence 54–5, 70, 81 Voeglin, Eric 86n47 von Balthasar, Hans Urs 33n28

Index Walzer, Michael 207 war 54–5 Warner, Martin 130n10, 132n14, 135–6n21 Werpehowski, Willam 26n15 Westgate, David 23n11 Wetsel, David 7n8, 194n21 will 5, 67, 129–30, 142, 177 divided 20, 31–2, 37–8

Williams, Bernard 167–8 Will-to-power 51, 52, 53–4 see also power Winch, Peter 216n7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 216–17 Wolf, Susan 34n31 Wood, William 8n9, 39n35, 193n20 Žižek, Slavoj 67n24, 82n43

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