Two opposing pessimisms: Pascal and Voltaire

Pascal’s philosophical career ended in 1662 upon his untimely death, a few decades before the start of the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual movement in Europe stretching from the 17th into the 18th centuries. Proponents of Enlightenment put forth new theories on the nature of Man as an individualist creature, capable of pursuing and creating his own happiness through education and knowledge acquired through the use of his senses and reason. Enlightened authors contributed radical new ideas in fields ranging from economics to the natural sciences, with a particular interest in government and politics. Europe at the time was dominated by absolute monarchies said to be legitimized by divine rule, which created a stronger and stronger dissonance between the state of their nations and the ideas that philosophers developed of liberty, religious tolerance, and the possibility of progress. These new theories ultimately resulted in new systems of government formed on the basis of the right of all citizens to contribute to the governance of their own nation. Throughout the Enlightenment, several philosophers attempted to respond to Pascal’s rather pessimistic viewpoint of man’s nature, as it directly opposed their espoused ideal of self-sufficiency. One particular opponent was François-Marie Arouet, better known under his nom de plume Voltaire.

Voltaire (1694-1778) was a prolific writer, satirist, and philosopher, whose work is best remembered for his advocacy for freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and the separation of church and state. He frequently attacked the most powerful institutions of his day–the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church–and lived the final years of his life at the border of France and Switzerland, allowing for a rapid escape if one of his censored publications was traced back to him. Voltaire criticized many philosophers of his time and of the past for espousing contradictory and impractical views, which failed to advance the betterment of humanity; for example, the overly idealistic Pangloss in his philosophical fairytale Candide is a satire of Leibniz. Voltaire took issue with many of Pascal’s views stemming from Pascal’s religious belief in determinism, the consequences of which opposed core Enlightenment values. 

Pascal’s dependence on God was especially repulsive to Voltaire, who rejected divine revelation along with other Enlightenment deists and turned instead to empirical reason as the source of our knowledge. Proponents of predestination held that all of mankind was doomed because of original sin, which we can only be purged of through God’s grace. We must strive to be worthy of his goodwill in the world of men, but only a select few who are truly good will be allowed to go to heaven in reward for their goodness. While this bears resemblance to many Christian conceptions of the afterlife as a reward, the controversial part of predestination lies within the fact that God’s chosen have already been determined, and no amount of good actions and virtues in your life can get you into heaven if you do not number among them. In opposition to determinist beliefs, the deists held that everyone is capable of self-betterment by attaining knowledge through the power of your own reason, with no respect to any kind of preconceived notion of your potential. 

The absolute authority of Pascal’s God also gave Voltaire some cause for irritation. While the deists were not atheists by their own admission, they attributed much less of the world’s daily function to God’s intervention, and preferred to view divine intervention as a benevolent creating force, which had gifted Man with free will and left him largely to his own devices. One might worship God for bestowing reason upon us, but the best form of religious worship in the deist’s eye is the exercise of one’s mind and God-given reason. Pascal’s God requires that people accept their own ignorance and turn to the divine source of reason, which would not allow for any self-sufficient improvement.

Voltaire critiqued Pascal’s Wager, deeming it to be a childish and insufficient truth, asserting that “the interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists.” While he railed against the wager’s logical inconsistency, he also found Pascal’s commitment to mankind’s misery off-putting and strange. Pascal’s religious zeal was motivated by his view of human existence as empty, meaningless and miserable, full of despair which could only be alleviated by inviting God into your life. Man seeks to fill the void inside him with frivolous amusements which shall have no bearing on his salvation. Voltaire, however, firmly believed in humanity’s potential for intellectual self-improvement. His pessimism attacked those like Leibniz who failed to live up to his standards of the enlightened man seeking out the truth and affirming his social, political and intellectual agency. Both Pascal and Voltaire despaired of mankind for different reasons: Voltaire because humans fail to exercise their potential, and Pascal because they never had any potential at all. One can imagine why Voltaire found Pascal especially frustrating: he criticized religious absolutism and would have fit in nicely with the Enlightenment’s tolerance, yet embraced religious zealotry and determinism which put him completely at odds with the free thinkers of the 18th century.

In comparing Pascal and Voltaire, we find two different accounts of inhumanity. For Pascal, worldliness is the cause of all evils: society brings men together out of boredom and despair, where, removed from God, sin runs rampant. He blames the Jesuits for acclimating men with society and sin, and retires as a misanthrope to the convent of Port Royal since the world is so hostile to God. For Voltaire, society is the means through which we can grow as people and exercise our rights: there can be no enlightened misanthrope. The true evil is the oppression of absolute religious authority, which imposes restrictions on our reason and ideas. Yet both were influenced by the skeptic Montaigne, and for all his rebuttals, Voltaire worked to excavate the real Pensées after Port Royal’s sanitization and ensured that Pascal’s final work would not be forgotten. Had Pascal been born fifty years later and witnessed a different religious conflict than that which drove him to abandon society, he may have found himself one of the philosophers at the heart of the Enlightenment.

Sources