Pensées

What It Is

Not a book. Pascal died in 1662 with a defence of Christianity unwritten, and what remained were roughly nine hundred fragments: some polished paragraphs, some single lines, some notes he made to himself and no longer needed to explain. He had sewn a number of them into bundles, which is the only evidence we have of the order he intended. His family and the scholars of Port-Royal published a tidied, softened selection in 1670.

So the central fact about the Pensees is that its arrangement is a scholarly decision, and different editors have made it differently. The numbering is not a technicality. Choose your edition and you have chosen which book this is.

The tone is cold, exact and entirely without comfort. Pascal had done foundational work in geometry, proved that the vacuum exists, built a calculating machine, and invented probability theory in correspondence with Fermat. He turned that same mind on the human condition, and he did not flinch.

Why It Matters

Two things in here have escaped the book and entered the general mind.

The first is the wager, the most famous argument in the book and the one that refuses to leave people alone, believers or not. Whatever you think of the theology, decision theory begins in these pages.

The second is what Pascal called diversion. It is his account of what we are all really doing when we are busy, and it is not flattering. He wrote it in the 1650s. It is still the best thing anyone has written about why you check your phone.

His influence runs through people who wanted nothing to do with his religion. Nietzsche loathed Christianity and could not stop reading Pascal. Kierkegaard, Eliot, Camus and the existentialists all worked in the space he opened: the question of what a person does with a life he did not ask for, in a universe that does not answer.

Before You Read

A few hours to read and years to use. The sentences are simple; the compression is not. Do not read it front to back for momentum, because there is none to find.

Some fragments are notes he made for himself and will mean nothing to you. Pass over them without guilt. The long polemical sections on prophecies and miracles are the least rewarding for a modern reader, and are commonly skimmed.

Read a handful at a sitting and let them work. Then keep the book near you for a year.

Which Translation to Read

• A. J. Krailsheimer (Penguin Classics, 1966, revised 1995) — recommended. The English is plain and fast and carries the sting of the French, and it follows Lafuma's ordering, which restores the bundles Pascal himself assembled instead of a Victorian editor's tidy themes. This is the text most people quote and the best one to read. The cost: the introduction and notes are slim, and Lafuma's arrangement has since been improved on by scholars. View on Amazon →
• Roger Ariew (Hackett, 2005). The first complete English version built on Philippe Sellier's ordering, now the arrangement most specialists prefer, and well annotated throughout. Take it if you want to be on the current scholarly ground. The cost: clear rather than electric. It is a study text.
• Honor Levi (Oxford World's Classics, 1995), published as Pensees and Other Writings. Prints the dossiers Pascal classified himself, along with the Writings on Grace and other pieces, with a first-rate introduction by Anthony Levi. The cost: it is a selection, not the whole thing.

Take Krailsheimer to read Pascal, Ariew to study him, Levi to see what else he was writing. Avoid the free Trotter version circulating online: it follows Brunschvicg's nineteenth-century thematic rearrangement, which imposes an order Pascal never chose and quietly turns a jagged book into a smooth one.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the introduction first, for once. You need to understand the ordering problem before you start, or you will not know what you are holding.

Argue with him. Pascal is not writing for the devout; he is writing at a specific opponent, the intelligent worldly man who thinks the question can safely be postponed, and every page is designed to make postponement uncomfortable. If you feel got at, the book is working.

Watch for the one-line fragments. Several of them are the finest sentences in the French language, and they are easy to read straight past at speed.