Pascal on the Uses of Scepticism

Would it be too much to say that scepticism is the "bad conscience" of post-Christian philosophy? None of the main currents of modern thought can rightly be described as sceptical. On the contrary, they are constituted by an uneasy but antagonistic relationship to scepticism. Asserting that something foundational can be known with certitude, modern philosophical (and subphilosophical) systems tend toward dogmatism. Some would trace the modern horror of scepticism back to Descartes.¹ This is tempting but too easy. More than a century before Descartes, Luther faults Erasmus for failing to see that Christianity entails the flat denial of any scepticism. "A Christian ought . . . to be certain of what he affirms, or else he is not a Christian. . . . Anathema to the Christian who will not be certain of what he is supposed to believe, and who does not comprehend it. How can he believe that which he doubts?"² Some twenty years ago, reflecting on the question of Christian philosophy, Mark Jordan noted the possibility that Christianity will undo the "skeptical restraint of Greek philosophy" so as to produce a "worse dogmatism."³ Such a danger, Jordan suggests, "has often enough been witnessed in Christian thought." He adds,

There is a danger here for Christianity and a curse on post Christian philosophy. The danger for Christianity is that one will confuse the light of faith with the shadow of one's opinions and so begin to assert, with complete certainty, a system of claims about the world. The curse on post-Christian philosophy is the dream that a philosophy outside or against Christianity can have the same scope and same finality as a philosophy within Christianity. Behind both the danger and the curse lies . . . the temptation of literalism, namely the temptation to believe that one can have an exhaustive, transparent, and univocal account of being.⁴

If one takes this (Thomist) line of thought seriously, one may start to feel the force of the question: What should be done with scepticism? The familiar strategies of ignoring it or declaring it the enemy and opposing it with dogmatism start to appear unsatisfying. In the face of this, one might try simply to be a sceptic. But is this possible? ⁵ After paying tribute to the force of scepticism, Pascal poses a series of questions that recall the First Meditation of Descartes: "What then is man to do in this state of affairs? Is he to doubt everything, to doubt whether he is awake, whether he is being pinched or burned? Is he to doubt whether he is doubting, to doubt whether he exists?" Pascal answers: "No one can go that far ("On n'en peut venir là"), and I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray (131/434)."⁶

One might take Pascal's declaration that "no one can go that far" as a motive to avoid worrying about sceptical arguments, and to begin (or resume) the work of analyzing propositions or building systems. Scepticism can be dismissed as a phantom menace since no one can be a real sceptic anyway. But this construal of the claim that "a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed" would be the very opposite of Pascal's intention. Although Pascal denies the possibility of total scepticism, he does not infer that scepticism can be ignored or put aside. On the contrary, he regards it as an extraordinarily potent force that demands close attention.

In what follows, I will explore the important and positive appropriation of scepticism contained in the Pensées. Pascal's nuanced and complex relation to scepticism has received scant attention by historians of modern philosophy. Even Popkin, a reasonably subtle commentator on scepticism's history, glibly attributes to Pascal the non sequitur "because all is doubt, therefore one ought to accept Christianity on faith alone."⁷ As an antidote to all such trivializations of Pascal's thought, I will explore the multiple advantages of a positive engagement with scepticism that one finds in the "scattered lights" of the Pensées.^8...