It was certainly not reason, manipulated by unbelievers, that frightened Pascal. He could run it through with a few sword thrusts. What worried him, instead, was the credulity of the unbelievers: the inclination to abandon themselves to precariousness, being well aware of how precarious it was—faith kept whole in fleeting simulacra. An earlier believer, of that species to which Pascal could not and would not belong, wouldn’t have felt so exasperated: he would have pointed to the world and the stars, would have invited us to heed the signs of a divine scheme that reverberated there.
Pascal shared with unbelievers the perception of the divine absence from the visible world. For him, the world could serve only as a theological catapult to project us into something that spurned contact with the world. But proof through absence is most difficult. Watching men rapt in their divertissement—their horrifying seriousness in stalking their prey as they hunted; or in trying out a dance step; or feeling a piece of cloth—he recognized in them the scorned image of ancient devotion, when the world’s signs were enough to fill the soul with reverence.
Fénelon, in his implacable mildness, saw clearly the enemy of his spiritual counsels: “Within, you have to overcome your taste for a delicate life, your proud and scornful nature, along with your long tendency to dissipation,” he wrote to the Comtesse de Grammont. That new form of evil might seem bland, and yet such an idiosyncratic vortex acted “like a torrent that sweeps everything away in spite of the best intentions.” Noble whim, hierarchical distance, now removed from all contact with the land, from all reciprocal feudal responsibilities, from all immediate function, but abandoned solely to the cruel game of favors at Court, now reemerged, and flared up again, to the point of a tacit fanaticism—in the development of taste, in the pursuit of sensitivity, in the gradual discovery of a uniqueness in style. And pride now came to govern all of this, as in the quarrel over a footstool, or for a place in a carriage. In each of those sudden, passionate exasperations of sensibility Fénelon recognized “the breaches that the world has opened up.” And so the pleasures of conversation could become lethal—and virtually the most concrete and lasting image of ultimate Evil: “It will never be possible for you to abstain too sternly from the pleasures of social conversation.”
Pascal’s Pensées, which are now read as a breviary of inner restlessness, were intended by the author as an arsenal of sharp, deadly weapons, to be unleashed upon the world. The vibrant urgency of the entries is not supposed to make the writing resemble the palpitations of the soul (how futile that would be!): it is the impatience of someone who wants to strike his blow an instant before that of his enemy.
Modernity is born when the eyes that watch the world see in it “this chaos and this monstrous confusion,” but are not unduly alarmed—indeed, they are excited by the prospect of inventing a strategy for moving into that chaos, a new game that would make all that went before seem Ciceronian. It is an impious view of which only mystics are capable (Pascal was foremost among them).
History, as we encounter it here, is “synoptic and simultaneous,” it is the immense borderless carpet where “the most diverse and distant events can be brought together and tightly knotted before our eyes,” where events and comments on events and the inventions around events and the ghosts of events remain perpetually bound together in a bed of torture and of pleasure, where forms and forces cannot be separated, where the eye is always aware of the “terrible danger of touching symbols.” Any judgment here is one thread lost among the tangle of knots in the carpet, and its only claim is that of adding its tenuous color to the overall weave.
Talleyrand: “There was something in Necker that prevented him from sensing, and fearing, the consequences of the measures he himself was taking. He was convinced he would have an all-powerful influence over the States General, that the members of the Third Estate in particular would heed him like an oracle, would see only through his eyes, would do nothing without his approval, and would not disobey him when using the weapons he himself was putting into their hands. An illusion that was bound to be short-lived. Once toppled from that peak where his own amour propre had placed him, and from where he had flattered himself into thinking he was controlling events, he withdrew to his retreat to grieve over those evils he had not wanted to cause, over those crimes his integrity viewed with horror, but from which, if he had been more expert and less presumptuous, he could perhaps have saved France and the world.
“His presumption made him totally incapable of seeing that the movement that existed in France at that time was produced by a passion, or rather by the excesses of a passion shared by all men—vanity. Among almost all nations, it exists only in an inferior form, and represents just one aspect of the national character, or else it is directed firmly toward one single object, whereas with the French, as with their ancestors, the Gauls, it is mixed up with everything and dominates all things with an individual and collective energy that makes them capable of the greatest excesses.
“In the French Revolution, vanity wasn’t the only guiding passion; it aroused other passions, which it summoned in support. But these others remained subordinate; they took its color and its spirit, they acted on its behalf and for its ends. It gave the impetus and directed the movement to such an extent that it can be said the French Revolution was born out of vanity.”
Benjamin Constant: “Nearly all men are obsessed with demonstrating they are something more than they are; the obsession of writers is to show they are statesmen. As a result, every great extrajudicial process, every use of illegal measures in situations of danger, century after century, has been recounted respectfully and described with satisfaction. The author, sitting peacefully at his desk, hurls his arbitrary ideas in all directions and attempts to introduce into his own style the same urgency that he recommends for the measures to be adopted; he believes for a moment that he holds power, as he preaches against its abuse; and his life of speculation is fired with the same demonstrations and strength and power that adorn his sentences; and in this way he gives himself some of the pleasures of authority, he yells out great words about salvation of the people, supremacy of law, public interest; he is awed by his own intelligence and amazed by his own energy. Poor fool! He is talking to men who are very happy to listen, and who, at the first opportunity, will try his theory out on him.
“This vanity, which has warped the judgment of many writers, has led to more problems than we realize in our civil conflicts. All second-rate spirits, having obtained a share of authority, were inflated with all these maxims that appealed all the more to their stupidity since they were useful for cutting through the knots that couldn’t be unraveled. They dreamed of nothing else than precautions for public safety, great measures, coups d’état.”
Constant gives solid support for an idea that might seem like a paradox when we find it in Talleyrand—the idea that vanity had some relevance as a motivation behind the great events of the revolution. There is, in fact, a complicity between an emerging democratic half-wittedness and the blustering of certain gens de lettres who perhaps find themselves in a wretched position in society and now suddenly imagine they can rule the world from their desks. All this reaches its culmination and is reversed with Max Stirner. His predecessors were timorous, they felt the need to hide Whim behind some form of Good, and the first people they deceived were themselves. Stirner goes much further: he goes as far as to establish the most radical antisociality (as applied to the egoist and to the aphasic gang of egoists) as a reaction to the stifling pretense of pointing out to society what is its Good, compelling it to adhere to it.