How to Live (23 page)

By his stove, Descartes gradually wound out a chain of reasoning, each link of which he considered to be riveted firmly to the previous one. His first discovery was that he himself existed:

I think, therefore I am.

From this secure point he proceeded to establish, using nothing but deduction, that God must exist, that his own “clear and distinct” idea of God’s existence must have come from God himself, and thus that anything else he had a clear and distinct idea about must be true as well. He put this last point even more boldly in a work called the
Meditations
, where he wrote, “Everything I perceive clearly and distinctly cannot fail to be true”—surely one of the most astonishing statements in the whole of philosophy, and one as far removed from Montaigne’s way of doing things as can be imagined. Yet it all grew out of Montaigne’s favorite brand of Skepticism—the one that threw everything into doubt, even itself, and thus raised a huge question mark at the heart of European philosophy.

Descartes’s supposedly infallible chain of reasoning can seem absurd, but it makes more sense in the context of the previous century’s ideas—ideas he wanted to escape.
These were, above all, the two great traditions transmitted to his generation by Montaigne: Skepticism, which took everything apart, and Fideism, which put it all together again on the basis of faith. Descartes did not want to end up at this point. He was anything but a Fideist. But in a way, that is just what happened; it was a hard tradition to get away from.

Descartes’s real innovation was the strength of his desire for certainty. Also new was his general spirit of extremism. Trying to get away from Skepticism, he stretched it to a hitherto unimaginable length, as one might pull a strand of gum stuck to one’s shoe. There could be no question of floating in doubt indefinitely, as on a “sea of speculation.” Uncertainty was not a way of life, as it was for Montaigne and the original Pyrrhonians. For Descartes, it was a crisis stage. One can feel his disorientation when he writes, in the
Meditations:

This was where the seventeenth century really separated itself from Montaigne’s world: in its discovery of the nightmare side of Skepticism. In that “Meditation of yesterday,” Descartes—always good at using vivid metaphors to make his points—had even personified his uncertainties in a figure of real horror:

Demons still seemed real and frightening in Descartes’s day, just as they had in Montaigne’s. Some thought they filled the world in clouds, like microorganisms in pollution; they and their master, Satan, could weave illusions out of air, or tie up rays of light or the very threads of your brain in order to make you see beasts and monsters. The thought that such a spirit might be systematically fooling us as to the nature of the entire physical world—and of ourselves—was enough to send anyone mad. The only thing worse was the possibility that God Himself might be such a deceiver, something Descartes hinted at fleetingly, then withdrew from.

Perhaps strangely for someone who advocated pure reason and swore enmity to tricks of the imagination, Descartes used every novelistic device in his power to play on the reader’s emotions. But, like most horror writers, his impulse was essentially conservative. The demon threatens the order of things, but he is then defeated and normality is restored on a more secure foundation—except that it isn’t. In horror fiction, the monster often threatens a comeback in a coda at the end: not truly defeated at all but only waiting for the sequel. Descartes did not want sequels. He thought he had
covered up the abyss forever, but he had not; his reassuring ending fell to pieces almost at once.

A practical way out of the mess was found at last, not through Descartes’s extremist challenge, but through a pragmatic compromise that has far more in common with the Montaignean spirit. Instead of seeking total certainty, modern science allows for an element of doubt, in theory, while in practice everyone gets on with the business of learning about the world, comparing observations to hypotheses according to agreed codes of practice. We live as though there were no abyss. Like Montaigne accommodating himself to his own fallibility, we accept the world as it appears to be, with just a formal nod to the possibility that nothing is solid at all. The demon waits in the wings, yet life goes on.

Descartes’s horror story was what ensued when Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism reached a more anxious, self-divided mind than the sixteenth century could generate. Montaigne was not without his moments of existential anxiety: he could write lines such as, “We are, I know not how, double within ourselves,” and “We have no communication with being.”
Still, Descartes’s feeling of drowning in doubt would have left him puzzled.

Today, many people might find Descartes’s terror easier to understand than the peculiar comfort that Montaigne and the original Pyrrhonians derived from their Skepticism. The idea that a void underlies everything we experience no longer seems an obvious source of consolation.

Our sense of this void has been inherited largely from Descartes’s very contrary reading of Montaigne. Some of it has also been passed down to us from Montaigne’s other great disciple and antagonist in the seventeenth century, a man who was even more unsettled by the implications of Pyrrhonism. This was Blaise Pascal: philosopher, mystic, and another great horror writer.

The work for which Pascal is best remembered, the
Pensées
(“Thoughts”), was never meant to terrify anyone except himself: it was a collection of disorderly notes for a more systematic theological treatise which he never
managed to write. Had he completed this work, it would probably have become less interesting. Instead, he left us one of the most mysterious texts in literature, a passionate outpouring largely written to try to ward off what he saw as the dangerous power of Montaigne’s
Essays
.

Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1623.
As a boy he showed precocious talents for mathematics and invention, and even designed an early calculating machine. At the age of thirty-one, while staying at the abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs, he had a visionary experience which he tried to describe on a piece of paper headed FIRE:

This epiphany changed his life. He sewed the piece of paper into his clothes so that he could carry it everywhere, and from then on devoted his time to theological writing and to the notes that became the
Pensées
. He did not have long for this work. At thirty-nine, he died from a brain hemorrhage.

Pascal had almost nothing in common with Descartes except for an obsession with Skepticism. Rapturously mystical, he disliked Descartes’s trust in reason, and deplored what he called the “spirit of geometry” taking over philosophy.
If anything, his aversion from rationality should have led him towards Montaigne instead—and it did, for he read the
Essays
constantly. But he also found the Pyrrhonian tradition, as transmitted through Montaigne, so disturbing that he could hardly get through a page of the “Apology” without racing to his notebook to pour out violent thoughts about it. Pascal cast Montaigne as “the great adversary,” to borrow a phrase used by the poet T.
S. Eliot to describe their relationship. Such language is normally reserved for Satan himself,
but the allusion is apt, for Montaigne was Pascal’s tormentor, his seducer, and his tempter.

(illustration credit i7.4)

Pascal feared Pyrrhonian Skepticism because, unlike the readers of the sixteenth century, he felt sure it did threaten religious belief. By now, doubt was no longer thought a friend of the Church; it belonged to the Devil, and must be fought against. And here lay the problem, for, as everyone had always seen, Pyrrhonian Skepticism was almost impossible to fight. Any attempt to quarrel with it only strengthened its claim that everything was open to dispute, while if you remained neutral this confirmed the view that it was good to suspend judgment.

In a short piece usually included with the
Pensées
, recounting a conversation with Isaac Le Maître de Sacy, director of the Port-Royal abbey, Pascal sums up Montaigne’s Pyrrhonian argument, or lack of it:

Montaigne is “so advantageously positioned in this universal doubt that he is equally strengthened both in success and defeat.” You can feel the frustration: how can anyone fight such an opponent? Yet one must. It is a moral duty, for otherwise doubt will carry everything away like a great flood: the world as we know it, human dignity, our sanity, and our sense of God. As T. S. Eliot also remarked:

Because Pascal could not fight against Montaigne, he could not stop reading him—or writing about him. He struggled against the
Essays
from such close quarters that he could get no angle for a blow. If La Boétie hovered over Montaigne’s page as his invisible friend, Montaigne hovered over Pascal’s writing as his ever-present enemy and coauthor. At the same time, Pascal knew that the real drama was taking place in his own soul. He admitted: “It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there.”

He could just as well have looked at his own notebook and said, “It is not from myself but from Montaigne that I have taken everything I see here”—for he was in the habit of transcribing quantities of material almost word for word.

Harold Bloom in
The Western Canon
calls the
Pensées
“a bad case of indigestion” in regard to Montaigne.
But, in copying Montaigne, Pascal also changed him. Even where he used Montaigne’s words, he set them in a different light. Like Jorge Luis Borges’s twentieth-century character Pierre Menard, who writes a novel which happens to be identical to
Don Quixote
, Pascal wrote the same words in a different era and with a different temperament, and thus created something new.