The Thinking Reed: Pascal's "Pensees" and the Wager on Meaning

Blaise Pascal was a mathematical and scientific genius who, in his thirties, turned the full force of his intellect toward religion and the human condition. The Pensées, his “thoughts,” are the fragments of a great work of Christian apology he never lived to complete, left as a pile of brilliant, unfinished notes. Because they are fragments, they read less like a system than like sparks struck off a restless, anguished, formidable mind. And what makes them unforgettable is not the religious argument so much as Pascal’s terrifyingly honest portrait of the human predicament: our greatness and our wretchedness, our restlessness, and our dread of the silence of the universe.

Here is what the Pensées taught me about the thinking reed, about our flight from ourselves, and about Pascal’s famous wager.

Key takeaways

• Man is a “thinking reed”: physically frail, but noble because he knows.
• We are caught between greatness and wretchedness, neither angel nor beast.
• “Diversion”: we fill our lives with distraction to avoid facing ourselves.
• The heart has reasons reason does not know; intuition reaches what logic cannot.
• Pascal’s Wager: a probabilistic argument for betting on God.

The thinking reed

Pascal’s most famous image captures the whole paradox of the human being. Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, he writes, but he is a thinking reed. A vapour, a drop of water, is enough to kill him; the universe could crush him without noticing. And yet, even as it crushed him, the human being would be nobler than what kills him, because he knows that he dies, and the universe knows nothing. Our dignity lies entirely in thought. We are physically insignificant, a speck between two infinities, the infinitely large cosmos and the infinitely small, and at the same time uniquely great, because we alone can comprehend our situation. I find this one of the most moving statements of the human condition ever made: frail beyond measure, and noble for knowing it.

The flight from ourselves

The insight that struck me hardest is Pascal’s analysis of what he calls “diversion.” Why, he asks, can people not sit quietly alone in a room? Because, he answers, the moment we are still and undistracted, we are confronted with our own condition, our mortality, our smallness, the emptiness and uncertainty at the heart of life, and we cannot bear it. So we fill every moment with diversion: work, entertainment, gambling, war, ambition, noise, anything to avoid being alone with ourselves. All of humanity’s troubles, he suggests, come from this inability to be quiet in a room. Writing centuries before our age of endless screens and notifications, Pascal diagnosed the restless distraction of modern life with uncanny precision. We are still running from the same silence.

The heart and the wager

Two more of Pascal’s ideas have entered the language. The first is his claim that the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing, his recognition that there is a kind of intuitive knowing, in matters of faith, love, and ultimate things, that logic alone cannot reach. The second is the famous Wager. Since reason cannot decide whether God exists, Pascal argues, we are forced to bet, and the rational bet is to wager on God: if we believe and are right, we gain everything; if we believe and are wrong, we lose little; whereas to disbelieve risks infinite loss for finite gain. The Wager is more subtle and more contested than it first appears, and I am not sure it works as an argument. But as a piece of psychological realism about how we actually live with uncertainty, it is fascinating, and characteristically bold.

What I’m taking with me

Whether or not one shares Pascal’s faith, the Pensées are a permanent treasury of insight into what it is to be human. What I am taking from them is the image of the thinking reed, frail and noble at once; the unforgettable diagnosis of diversion, our endless flight from the silence in which we would have to face ourselves; and the reminder that the heart has reasons reason cannot supply. Pascal was a scientist who looked unflinchingly at the human condition and refused to be comforted by easy answers. His fragments still cut, and they still console.

Frequently asked questions

What are Pascal’s Pensées?

They are the fragments of an unfinished work of Christian apologetics by Blaise Pascal, a collection of brief, profound reflections on the human condition, faith, reason, and our greatness and wretchedness.

What does “thinking reed” mean?

Pascal’s image of the human being as physically frail, easily destroyed by nature, yet noble and superior to the universe because, unlike it, we can think and know our own condition.

What is Pascal’s Wager?

An argument that, since reason cannot prove whether God exists, it is rational to “bet” on belief: if God exists the gain is infinite, and if not the loss is small, so the wise wager is to believe.

References & further reading

1. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. (Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer, Penguin Classics, 1966.)
2. Mesnard, Jean. Pascal: His Life and Works. Philosophical Library, 1952.
3. Krailsheimer, Alban. Pascal. Oxford University Press, 1980.