Though the automaton concept allows him to thematize that element of subjectivity which thwarts the hegemony of reason, it is rather through his dialectic of divertissement, or distraction, that Pascal evokes most clearly the logical essence of the ethical invocation emerging from his formulation of Christianity’s subject of faith. In yet another anticipation of the Freudian ethos, distraction echoes the function of fantasy in psy- choanalysis: Severed by the structure of language from its mythical source of primary satisfaction, the speaking subject, under the principle of pleasure, installs an object of fantasy in its place. In general terms distraction is a modality of the general Pascalian concept of sin which, as I have suggested, anticipates the psychoanalytic notion of the essen- tial per versity of desire. For psychoanalysis, then, the subject, by definition, desires something more that what is of fered in any sociosymbolic landscape. Pascal, for his part, makes a parallel claim: Though we are weak, vulnerable creatures thrust into an indifferent
natural world over which we have little control, we cannot represent the reality of this situation to ourselves without immediately losing the will to live, without succumbing to what psychoanalysis calls aphanisis—a “fading” of the subject resulting from the evaporation of the psychical tension which fuels desire.
Pascal argues that the subject must conjure up a distraction for itself in order to veil the trauma of its fundamentally intolerable condition. Anyone who has tarried with the difficulties of meditation, for example, will immediately appreciate this Pascalian observation: “Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, with- out occupation, without diversion, without application” (38, TM).22 The
Pascalian subject is thus unable to look upon its actual state as a depen- dent being destined for death without installing a goal which fleshes out its desire and provides a cause—in both senses of a “mission” and of “that which produces an effect”—for living. For Pascal, humanity is fundamentally incapable of representing to itself the conditions of its existence. A characteristically lucid analogy ensues: Our condition re- sembles that of a guilty prisoner locked in his cell awaiting a judgment which may condemn him to death. The prisoner will sooner distract himself through a game of piquet (a card game popular during the ancien régime) than consider the true consequences of his situation. What the prisoner simply cannot admit to himself is the fact that, mo- mentarily, he may breathe his last breath (60). Startlingly, it should be noted here that Pascal’s example comes perilously close to admitting explicitly the finality of death: The properly irrational act of faith which has the believer qualify life’s temporality as infinite becomes allied with a paradoxical (and noncontradictory, from the perspective of Pascal’s logic) rational assertion of life’s finitude.
Human subjects thrive on conflict and tension, Pascal claims, in particular when they may observe this conflict from a safe distance. The salience of this observation extends to the very essence of the invest- ments of contemporary culture, as everything from sensationalist court- room television, to no-holds-barred extreme sports and talk shows, and survival-of-the-fittest (or most popular) reality programming plainly at- tests. Though we enjoy watching what he terms “clashes of opinions” and “struggles” between opposing groups and individuals, Pascal does not want us to assume that what draws our attention—what constitutes, in other words, the principle of suspense—is a desire to see a victor proclaimed, an argument settled. Rather, we watch, enraptured, to revel in the antagonism itself; we become invested in its prolongation, not its resolution. “We never seek things for themselves,” Pascal axiomatically claims, “but for the search” (38). Human desire is not for its presumed
object, but for desire itself; desire is thus a desire to desire. Indeed, Pascal’s subject will go to any length to avoid a confrontation with its underlying, fundamental abjection; strangely, this subject will even jeop- ardize its existence, propel itself onto the precipice of death, in order to prove that it can defy its mortality.
From the vantage point of the absolute, from the other side of its condition’s limits, humanity’s petty preoccupations appear superfluous, crazed, lacking a link with reality. To take up again the death sentence analogy, Pascal qualifies the prisoner’s inability to think about his des- tiny as insensé—mad. From one perspective, then, humanity is to be reproached for its inability to see things the way they really are. But Pascal finally refuses to chastise us for our weakness, since to do so would be tantamount to expecting the impossible. Our dependence on distraction may indeed render us ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as the Stoic philosopher, for example—or neo-Foucauldian, for that matter— who would want to “raise himself above humanity” in a deluded ambi- tion of ascetic self-mastery or affirmative aesthetic self-stylization (43). Humanity’s sinful kernel of perversity—its “insatiable cupidity,” as Pas- cal himself puts it—is properly ineradicable (41, TM). In fact, Pascal reserves his greatest scorn for those who claim that man can master himself, that he may reconcile himself perfectly with the scandal of his destiny. Distraction is thus a properly structural element of Pascalian subjectivity; without it man prefers simply not to live. Even the absolute monarch, whose every whim and fancy is satisfied, remains miserable, Pascal claims, if he does not distract himself through “the conversation of women, war, and grand occupations” (39, TM).
Pascal provides an intriguing example to illustrate a further conse- quence of distraction: Morally, the human subject is characterized by its constitutive deviation from the path of a purely disinterested will. The example runs as follows: The enthusiast of moralism who would insist on demonstrating that the scholar who secludes himself to solve a prob- lem of arithmetic acts in the name of glory, not of science, erroneously assumes, Pascal argues, that it is possible to act otherwise, that anyone is capable of dedicating his intellectual efforts purely and selflessly to the advancement of knowledge. Though this scholar for Pascal is ridicu- lous (though no more ridiculous, one would be required to state, than anyone else), Pascal reserves his judgment for his hypocritical denouncer, who acts not from a genuine concern for the advancement of knowl- edge, but simply to congratulate himself for showing that he knows the secret of the scholar’s motivation. Those who exhibit such self- righteousness are “the silliest of the lot,” Pascal acerbically avers (42, TM). The fault of men therefore lies not in their search for distraction,
but rather in the way they conduct this search “as if the possession of the objects of their quest would make them really happy” (39). Indeed, diagnosing the emergent philosophical hyperrationalism which would come into full bloom in the subsequent century, Pascal chastises those who “think people unreasonable for spending a whole day chasing a hare they would not wish to buy” (40, TM). The lesson of distraction is not that one should attempt to divest oneself of one’s object attach- ments, but rather to abandon the (unconscious) expectation that the object will satisfy one’s desire.
We begin to discern at this point the classically dialectical structure of Pascal’s argument on the topic of divertissement—the formal logic, as it were, supporting his claim that the dialectic of tragedy implies as its telos an undetermined, ex nihilo act of faith. I have just shown how Pascal negates his initial rationalist thesis on humanity’s vanity, on its passionate dedication to inessential amusements and diversions, by claiming that it is constitutionally unable to do otherwise. We should not be surprised to discover, then, that Pascal proceeds to negate this negation, to reverse and “sublate,” to use the conventional English verb form of the Hegelian term Aufhebung, his antithesis. Pascal accomplishes this dialectical move through a reversal of perspective which returns his analysis to its initial premise of man’s vanity, only with a difference—with the addition, that is to say, of an element of paradox, a redoubled point of view which out- wardly stands in contradiction with itself. Though humanity cannot be blamed for fortifying itself against the scandalous truth of its existence, it is nevertheless not beyond reproach. Or, perhaps more accurately, it cannot
not reproach itself for its addiction to distraction.
As he does so often in Pensées, Pascal has recourse to the motif of two antagonistic natures, or “two contrary instincts” in this case, both of which he qualifies as “secret,” to explain our inability to absolve our- selves of our failure to make the absolute perspective—God’s, that is— our own. As is everywhere apparent in experience, Pascal advances, human subjects do indeed have a first “secret instinct” which “impels them to seek out distraction and occupation outside themselves” as an escape from their inner turmoil; but they also have another secret in- stinct which arises, so we recall, from “the grandeur of [their] original nature.” So even though we learn from experience that we can only be happy after we have set ourselves a goal whose attainment will instantly dissipate that happiness, we know from our sense of our first nature that “happiness in reality consists only in rest, and not in activity [tumulte].” And crucially, Pascal’s subject cannot make itself aware of this contradic- tion between its two natures, which “hides from view” at the “bottom of [its] soul” (41, TM).
In a related fragment, crystalline in its clarity, Pascal brings greater logical precision to the dialectical trajectory of his meditation on distrac- tion by unpacking its paradoxical outcome. Though this fragment high- lights the formal features of the Pascalian dialectic, it also serves as an introduction to the tragic doctrine of redemption through grace. In each step of his dialectic, Pascal makes two pronouncements: the first on man’s being, the second on his “opinions”—on his ability to think his actions through rationally. At each step Pascal addresses the two natures of man: his nonempirical, divine essence or soul, in other words the absolute remnant of his first nature; and his innate but imperfect rational faculty— his opinions. Pascal’s tripartite reasoning develops as follows:
Thesis: Man is vain (his “opinions are destroyed”) because he values inessential things. He fails to incarnate the absolute perfection of God, and therefore his opin- ions are not sound.
Antithesis: Man is not vain (his “opinions are sound”) because his imperfect rationality provides him with some reliable knowledge. Since man is jettisoned from the absolute of his first nature, we may not judge him from so merciless a perspective. We must approach man from the perspective of his finitude.
Synthesis: Here Pascal’s own formulation is the most concise: “But we must now destroy this last proposition,” he writes, “and show that it remains always true that the people are vain though their opinions are sound. For they do not sense truth where it actually lies and, placing it where it is not, they have opinions which are always very false and very unsound.” (92, TM)
Each of the first two stages of the dialectic presents a judgment on people’s vanity followed by a justification referencing the soundness of their ideas. Notice that Pascal incorporates into his synthetical proposi- tion all the elements of the first two stages with the exception of the antithetical judgment. In other words, Pascal draws his synthesis by subtracting from his combination of thesis and antithesis the claim that man is not vain, a claim made from the relative perspective of the hu- man. The terminus of the dialectic of distraction is a definite judgment (man is vain) coupled with a contradictory justification (man’s opinions are both sound and unsound, depending on the adopted point of view). In sum, the only statement which is disallowed is the one which states
that man is not vain: Human vanity emerges safe and sound from the operation of Pascal’s logic. Pascal’s judgment on man’s opinions, in con- trast, changes from sound to unsound as the vantage point shifts from the limited human perspective to the absolute perspective of God. In the synthesis, then, Pascal retains the ambiguity concerning the value of man’s opinions, of his capacity for thought and right, rational action, while advancing a definite judgment on man’s being, which remains unambiguously vain, inadequate, guilty, perverse before the perfection of God. Here we uncover a rigorous reinforcement of Pascal’s central ar- gument about the ineradicable quality of sin, which remains the most
certain, unambiguous feature of the human predicament.
But what are we to conclude from Pascal’s argument? For Pascal, guilt qualifies our very being: No change of perspective, no dedication to a de- terminate Good, will alter our irreducible culpability before God. But the same cannot be said of humanity’s faculty of reason and the projects under- taken in its name. One must look upon human enterprise from two perspec- tives at once: It has value in that it distracts us from our contemplation of death, a contemplation which deprives existence of any significance or meaning; and its products can also provide us with material comfort and sensuous pleasure. At the same time, however, from the perspective of the absolute, people’s projects appear valueless in that they necessarily fail to assert themselves without ambiguity, to provide an adequate justification for themselves before the final judgment of God. Left to its own devices, then, reason proves to be an inadequate motivator of the human subject. If man were not characterized in his essence by the remnant of his divine prehistory, then reason would allow him to undertake projects which could satisfy him, which would not leave him with a residue of guilt accusing him of failure. And Pascal is not at all ambiguous in his belief that the projects of reason, when they do manage to lead to concrete action, tend to miss the point, failing to “sense the truth where it actually is,” which for the Christian Pascal is ultimately the mystery of the resurrection. Reason in itself does not indicate to the agent the full range of possibility of human action. Only grace, and the act of faith which is its condition, integrates the subject into the properly miraculous body of Christ, thereby allowing it to see beyond what is merely rationally possible.