Tuesday 26 December 2017

Numbering Pascal's Thoughts

Blaise Pascal did not number his thoughts. The various editors combined different bits and pieces of the textual tradition here and there with their own numbering. This can make it hard to locate a thought. A precise concordance is impossible in the nature of things but, thankfully, Prof. em. Dr. Dr. Thomas Bonhoeffer has created an excel sheet which points to broadly equivalent passages in  several French editions. See the link to his "flexible concordance" here.
Maybe Pascal's most famous aphorism comes from this thought:
Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point; on le sait en mille choses. Je dis que le coeur aime l’être universel naturellement, et soi-même naturellement selon qu’il s’y adonne; et il se durcit contre l’un ou l’autre à son choix. Vous avez rejeté l’un et conservé l’autre: est-ce par raison que vous vous aimez?

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and also itself naturally, according as it gives itself to them; and it hardens itself against one or the other at its will. You have rejected the one, and kept the other. Is it by reason that you love yourself?

This is Brunschvicg 277 = Strowski 89 = Chevalier 477 = Lafuma 423 = Kaplan 85. In the editions by Brunschvicg, Strowski, and Lafuma this is followed by this thought (which is Chevalier 481 and Kaplan 83):
C’est le coeur qui sent Dieu et non la raison. Voilà ce que c’est que la foi: Dieu sensible au coeur, non à la raison.
It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.
 English translation from Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, translated by W. F. Trotter, The Harvard Classics XLVIII, Part 1 (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14); www.bartleby.com/48/1/ [2001; accessed 26 Dec 2017].