“Oh, I know Hamlet. And what he might say with irony, I say with conviction!”
— Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek
Blaise Pascal never met William Shakespeare.
He was born in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, into a France largely ignorant of Hamlet and Macbeth and that singular combination of lyricism and drama unique to the Bard. (Shakespeare’s works would not be widely translated into French until 1745, and would not achieve popularity until the following century.)
Pascal was a physicist, not a playwright; his primary literary output was theological, not thespian; and his most famous work, the posthumously published Pensées (Thoughts), appears closer in structure to contemporary microblogging than leather-bound folios. His style is antiquated and verbose. His tonality is irregular and paradoxical. His content is oscillating and borderline-schizophrenic. (Seriously. What kind of rambling freak writes about apologism, parrots, and concupiscence all on the same page? Pascal did.)
And yet, to me, Blaise Pascal is a paragon of Shakespearian humanism: noble in reason, infinite in faculty, express and admirable. These words of Hamlet’s, uttered in satire, were never designed to volunteer tribute—they were the desperate pangs of an intolerable virtue forever disconnected from everyday hardship. And while I agree with Captain Picard’s passionate inversion of the dramatised sentiment (taking the lines at face value as the greatest endorsements of people in literature), it is this slippery contradiction itself that connects both Pascal and Shakespeare with the orbiting natures of intentional progress. People are both wise and ignorant, virtuous and wicked, beautiful and foul. Our power is indivisible from our impotence, and our potential is inseparable from our constraint. This is the truth Hamlet failed to see: the rejection of utopianism does not condemn us to dystopianism. Quite the opposite. Pascal knew exactly this, and wrote as much himself. Within his Pensées lies a suspiciously Hamletean decree on the nature of man whose style and format fraternise plagiarism*—but whose deeper contents refute and supersede Shakespeare’s own to detail a portrait of man unbounded in its hope, ambition, glory, and light. Within these two quotes (and the distances between them) exist every facet of fallible good. The beauty and virtue of everything in 111 words.
*Again, Pascal likely never read Shakespeare. The dual discovery, if at all connected, is most attributable to their shared influence from Montaigne. Or just coincidence.
In the spirit of Jean-Luc Picard I want to discard literary contexts and analyse the propositional content of the words in a vacuum. Both quotes carry distinct (and distinctly contradictory) moral arguments. Both are undeniably beautiful, yet one holds more truth. Here is Hamlet, first, with the qualifier excised:
“What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals.”
Here we see Hamlet speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern following the death of his father. He is disillusioned, and recounts the spiritual vacuum through which he now sees the world. Some lines before these, he confounds every wonderist description of life with denial: the Earth—”this goodly frame”—is reduced to a “sterile promontory”; the sky, “this brave o’erhanging firmament”, is abjected: “[A] majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” rots away to reveal “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.” (This is reminiscent of Stephen Hawking’s physicalist summarisation of humanity as “chemical scum” i.e. missing the point.) But this is context. I digress.
(Strike that. Quick tangent: former crypto tycoon SBF recently went viral for his Bayesian analysis of Shakespeare and literary canon more broadly. He argued that a man born in 1564, when the world population languished around 450 million and literacy rates around 15 percent, is very unlikely to be a good writer, let alone the greatest of all time. (This coming from a man who went on record stating that all books are failed blogs.) The problem with judging Shakespeare by population statistics alone is precisely that: you can do so without having read a single line of Shakespeare (or without being able to read at all). I actually did a similar analysis of canonical greatness in art with inverted logic: we know, by every literary explanation, that Shakespeare et al. are exemplary. The explicanda is: how did they do it? Not: why are we lying to ourselves? BUT THIS IS CONTEXT. I double digress.)
Here is Pascal’s declaration, included in Pensées section VII, Morality and Doctrine. Once again, I am purposefully ignoring the specific criticism of sceptic philosophy, and the overarching apologist sentiment, that defines the chapter and collection more broadly. The pronouncement itself holds so much philosophical weight independent of the context as to justify its own analysis. (Enough, even, to epigraph Steven Pinker’s optimist tour de force The Better Angels of Our Nature—my introduction to Pascal.) He states:
“What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.”
The similarities are undeniable. I was first made aware of the connection by friend and musical theorist Dorian K Bandy. He tweeted me:
Yet, at closer inspection, the two soliloquies could scarcely be more different. Hamlet’s words are exclusively exalting: man is said to be “noble”, “express”, “admirable”, “infinite”. We are comparable to both angels and gods (a tantalisingly heretical sentiment in 1603), and are set apart from our biological heritage as something altogether more fair. Pascal, on the other hand, counterpoints every tribute with a disproof: we are a novelty, yes, but we are also a chaos; we are grand—the “Judge of all things”—but we are also small: “an imbecile worm”. His passion for the contrary borders frenzy. Where Hamlet floats across commas like corollas in wind—embodying within his prose the sort of extraterrestrial grace usually reserved for Shakespeare’s greatest verse—Pascal is manic. He begins with a cry: “What a chimera is man!” Shocking from the first, he sketches people as both beast and myth. Terrible and false. He goes on to interleave all the worship of Hamlet with the slander of Abraham: annelid and excrement. Is this nonsense? How can one be both prodigy and monster, glory and refuse? Is Pascal’s chimerical man itself an illusion, or is there some higher wisdom in his oscillating faith? Is contradiction the key to progress?
Beginners or Beginnings or Both?
Pascal is right: people really are both. Necessarily so. The lyrics of Hamlet are only half of the story; they are the conclusion to Pascal’s argument: in order to be great, we must first be small. In order to be glory, we must first be refuse. In order to begin, heroically, the journey towards an unbounded wisdom, we must first stand, modestly, at the beginning of an infinite ignorance. Pascal’s inversions, at first glance desolate, reveal themselves as optimist talismans for a future whose prospects derive from its flaws. Others have said similar. Goethe, Pascal’s 18th century equal in sheer diversity of achievement, believed that man, in his quest for growth and self-education, should embrace internal contradiction as the engine for renewal. This very German philosophy (“Bildung”) led him to state: “Live always as if life was just beginning.”
Even the title of this essay itself, adapted from Alexander Pope’s fallibilist aphorism “To err is human; to forgive, divine" speaks to a condition where mistakes, not successes, take precedence. Indeed, only once we have erred can we be forgiven. This philosophy, common enough throughout history yet seldom understood, was at last formalised by the philosopher Karl Popper. Unlike the traditional dispositive rationalities of early Enlightenment figures, whose express directives were to justify knowledge and answer questions with a utopian finality, Popper’s opposing “critical rationalism” sought only to correct existing mistakes in imperfect thought. He was building on the traditions laid out by pre-Socratic Ionian philosophers—most notably Xenophanes—whose poetical epistemics “But as for certain truth, no man has known it, / Nor shall he know it, neither of the gods / Nor yet of all the things of which I speak. / For even if by chance he were to utter / The final truth, he would himself not know it: / For all is but a woven web of guesses” would lay the foundations for Popperian thought millennia hence.
In his critical rationalism, Popper carried the doctrine that all endeavours are liable to error to its logical conclusions: nothing can be certain; everything is guesswork; and the unit of human progress is precisely this ignorance that affords us improvement (“Problems”). He did so all while rejecting postmodernism, I might add (as Pascal also would have) maintaining that truth exists albeit unknowable to us with guarantee. In his Pensées, Pascal anticipated our greatest epistemology by 300 years with the lines “depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt,” and went on some paragraphs later to add: “[Man is] incapable of absolute ignorance and of certain knowledge.” This is raw optimism.
Deutsch’s Taijitu
As Blaise Pascal advanced William Shakespeare, David Deutsch continues to advance Karl Popper. In his two popular science books (The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity—buy them now) the physicist applies and expounds critical rationalism with illimitable reach. The basis for his optimism can be rendered into two short edicts.
Problems are inevitable.
Problems are soluble.
The metaphor Deutsch uses to illustrate these statements is that of two stone tablets. He does so to emphasise their importance—an endeavour I support. Yet, in light of Pascal’s vacillating disruptions, I now view marble and its fixity altogether unfit to immortalise our most dynamic truths. In order to represent the opposing-yet-complementary natures of conjecture and criticism, inevitability and solubility, ignorance and progress—we must take inspiration from more fluid traditions. Progress is a taijitu.
Behold. Many will recognise this symbol from Eastern philosophy: Yin and Yang. Indeed, dualism is the veil draping this essay. Over Hamlet’s anguish and Pascal’s rebuke, Goethe’s improvement and Pope’s forgiveness, Popper’s knowledge and Deutsch’s optimism. In place of stones, cold and immutable, there is motion, darkling and bright: Yin, negative, refuse; and Yang, positive, glory. The one contains the other and the both transcend the whole. It is in this sense that Pascal, not Hamlet, succeeds in outlining a vision of mankind worthy of Shakespeare. By erring divine. And it is only through this—his frenzy—I would argue, that we might hope to achieve it.
And yet…
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