Modern Theology 26:3 July 2010 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

WHAT IS THE SELF? IMITATION AND SUBJECTIVITY IN BLAISE PASCALS PENSES

moth_1616 417..436

WILLIAM WOOD
It is a truism of contemporary theological anthropology that the Enlightenment has bequeathed to us an impoverished conception of the self. Fairly or not, this conception is often traced back to Ren Descartes. The so-called Cartesian self is a fully autonomous, disembodied and self-transparent thinker. It is not essentially related to other persons, whether human or divine. Indeed, this self is not even essentially related to its own body.1 Yet even as theologians hurry to distance themselves from the Cartesian subject, they often overlook one of its rst and greatest critics, Blaise Pascal. This oversight is unfortunate, for Pascal presents a robust account of subjectivity that is not only anti-Cartesian but theologically rich. To be sure, it is widely recognized that Pascal wrestles with the deep paradoxes of human subjectivity in his Penses. He famously declares that the human being is a thinking reed, a creature that is simultaneously great and wretched. Our wretchedness testies to our greatness, which in turn reinforces our wretchedness, in an endless dialectic (L122/S155).2 The most plausible explanation for this paradoxical dialectic, according to Pascal, is that we have fallen from some previously ideal state, exactly as Christianity teaches. The dialectic of greatness and wretchedness is a relatively transparent theme in an otherwise opaque text and so it has been much discussed.3 Pascals theological account of subjectivity stretches considerably beyond the dialectic of greatness and wretchedness, however. In the 1980s and 1990s, Jean-Luc Marion and his onetime student, Vincent Carraud, brilliantly analyzed the anti-metaphysicaland therefore

William Wood Oriel College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 4EW, UK william.wood@oriel.ox.ac.uk
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418 William Wood anti-Cartesiancharacter of Pascals account of subjectivity.4 Both scholars recognize that Pascal is frequently motivated by theological concerns. Still, without wishing to denigrate their work, it is also the case that neither Marion nor Carraud gives Pascal his full due as a theological thinker. Their account of human sin is thinner and less nuanced than Pascals own. For Pascal, as for Augustine, sin is duplicity and so duplicitous subjectivity is sinful subjectivity. Once we recognize this point, we can read the Penses as a theological text from beginning to end. By contrast, Carraud insists that Pascals only properly theological account of the self is found in the dialectic of greatness and wretchedness; he thereby misses the fact that the rest of Pascals thoughts about duplicitous subjectivity also concern fallen subjectivity and are therefore equally theological.5 Marion, for his part, correctly argues that Pascals Augustinian account of the self equates subjectivity with love, but he does not fully explore Pascals own insight that tyrannical self-love is also socially-expressed and duplicitous and therefore can manifest, paradoxically, as a kind of dependence. Furthermore, as I discuss below, neither Marion nor Carraud grasp the full weight of Pascals brief account of non-duplicitous, Trinitarian subjectivity. More work therefore remains to be done. In this article I aim to develop a fully theological, yet still Pascalian account of human subjectivity. Exegetically, I argue that the Penses themselves present two such accounts, both developed as rival answers to Pascals explicit question What is the self? (L688/S567). The rst account is a portrait of fallen subjectivity, selfhood under the reign of sin. On this account, Pascal argues that the self is imaginary, in a special sense. It is ones own imaginative construal of oneself. What I call my self is just the story that I tell to myself about myself, my subjective narrative identity. This subjective self is an imaginary construct that typically does not correspond to the way I really am. It is in fact doubly imaginary because one always sees oneself through the eyes of other people. My subjective narrative identity is therefore the story that I imagine that other people would tell about me. Pascal calls this doubly-imaginary self the moi. Pascals second account of the self is a portrait of authentic subjectivity. This account is explicitly Christological and even Trinitarian. Pascal argues that authentic subjectivity derives from ones membership in the body of Christ. This account of authentic subjectivity is tantalizingly brief, but it is clearly present in the Penses.6 Constructively, I use Pascals two accounts to argue that whether sinful or saved, our subjectivity is performative and imitative: whether under sin or under grace, to be a self is to imitate God. As sinners, our duplicitous subjectivity is a dreadful parody of Gods loving act of creation. Conversely, as authentic Trinitarian subjects, we imitate Christ, the only fully real human being, by turning away from the self and loving God above all things. Either way, at the deepest core of our subjectivity we cannot help but imitate God.
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What is the Self? 419 What is the Self? Before I present Pascals two accounts of subjectivity, it is helpful to see how Pascal himself frames the question those accounts are meant to answer. In fragment L688/S567, Pascal straightforwardly asks: What is the self? (Qu est-ce le moi?). Pascal asks but does not answer this questionthe fragment ends in aporia. As he dismisses various solutions to his question, it becomes apparent that to be a self is to be a proper object of love but we are not told what kind of self, if any, could be such an object. What is the self? [Quest-ce le moi?] A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I pass by, can I say he went there to see me? No, for he is not thinking of me in particular. But what about a person who loves someone for the sake of her beauty; does he love her? No, for smallpox, which will destroy beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her. And if someone loves me for my judgment or my memory, do they love me? Me, myself? No, for I could lose these qualities without losing myself. Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul? And how can one love the body or the soul except for the sake of such qualities, which are not what make up the self, since they are perishable? Would we love the substance of a persons soul, in the abstract, whatever qualities might be in it? That is not possible, and it would be wrong. Therefore, we never love anyone, but only qualities. Let us then stop scofng at those who win honor through their appointments and ofces, for we never love anyone except through borrowed qualities (L688/S567). Rather than giving a direct answer to the fragments opening question, Pascal presents three scenarios: a pedestrian casually spotted from a window, a woman loved for the sake of her beauty, and someone else loved for the sake of his mental attributes. It is immediately striking that in all three scenarios, the self in question is presented not as an agent, but as the passive recipient of the attention of others. Furthermore, the nature of that attention is also specied. In this fragment, at least, to be a self is to be the object of love.7 Even in the rst situation, the wish that the man in the window should be thinking of me in particular connotes love. This fragment bears close scrutiny. It is signicant that Pascal investigates the nature of the self by asking what is the moi? rather than what am I?, as Descartes asks in his Meditations.8 The French word moi has no exact English equivalent. It corresponds to the regular pronoun me, of course, but it can also mean the self, myself, the I, or personal identity generally. As I discuss below, Pascal also uses the ordinary term le moi in a theoretical way, to name the doubly-imaginary, socially-constructed persona.
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420 William Wood In this fragment, Pascals emphasis on the objective case instead of the nominative (Quest-ce le moi?) is clearly a methodological choice that anticipates the major themes of the fragment. The picture of the self on display here is seen most clearly when contrasted to that of Descartes. Indeed, many scholars believe that this fragment is a direct reaction to the Meditations, and that Pascal deliberately borrows and subverts key Cartesian images in it.9 At the broadest level, this fragment rejects Cartesian claims of autonomy and self-transparency. Pascal implies that introspection cannot reveal the nature of the self because the self is partly constituted from without. Whereas the Cartesian subject is separate from the world, separate even from the body that it inhabits, Pascal takes it for granted that to be a self is to be embedded in a network of relations, a world. Indeed, the self considered as moi is dependent upon others for its very existence. Alone, I am I but I need others to be me. Consequently, if it is me I am investigating (or, better, if I am not really an I at all, but a me) then I cannot not properly study myself in isolation. Recall that toward the end of his second meditation, as Descartes seeks to understand the nature of the self, he speaks of looking out his window at the men on the street below. He judges that they are indeed men even though, strictly speaking, all he really sees are coats and hats. He concludes from this experiment that it is his mind, and not his bodily senses, that grasps the men, just as it is his mind that grasps the underlying essence of a piece of wax that is melted and reshaped until all its contingent qualities are stripped away. He then concludes that he himself is fundamentally mind, not body, and that he can perceive his own mind more clearly than anything else.10 Pascal presents a similar scene, but he inverts it. In Descartes, the self is the watcher at the window, the one who melts the wax, the one who voluntarily performs the philosophical therapy of meditation in order to establish its own certain existence and (only after so doing) the existence of others. In Pascal, the self is watched from the window, and its qualities are progressively stripped away as if it were the wax. When its qualities are stripped away, Pascal seems to suggest, nothing at all remains of the self and so nothing remains to be known or loved. In the fragments rst scenario, the self as such is not really encountered at all, because it not made the object of loving affection. The second scenario declines to identify the self that must be loved with the transient physical attributes that often elicit love. The third rejects the equation of the self with ones subjective mental life (ones judgment or memory) for the same reason. Pascal also specically declines to identify the self with the substance of the soul. He thereby departs from the Aristotelian and scholastic traditions, since in classical metaphysics, a substance, by denition, is what underlies change. In those traditions, the substance of my soul could indeed be construed as that which I most truly am because the substance of my soul would preserve my identity through all temporal and physical changes. Pascal refuses to
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What is the Self? 421 identify the self with the substance of the soul, because an abstract soul-self cannot be a proper object of love. In this fragment, Pascal thus presents what might be called a negative ontology of the self. We are told that the self is not isolated from the world, not fully autonomous, not exclusively an agent, and not a unitary, imperishable substance. As is frequently the case with viae negativae, however, the fragment seems to end in aporia: it does not tell us anything about what the self actually is. Pascal suggests that we need to be seen, thought about and, ultimately, loved in order to be; but what others see, know, and love is not us, but only borrowed qualities. At the fragments end, we have been given no answer to its opening question, nor have we learned what kind of self can be an object of love. The False Self We learn Pascals rst answer to this question elsewhere in the Penses. If our subjectivity is called into being by love, it follows that the kind of self we are is determined by the kind of love that calls us into being. Thus, in the fallen world, under the reign of sin, our idolatrous, disordered love can only call into being a false, imaginary self. The story of the birth of the false self is what I am calling Pascals rst account of human subjectivity. According to Pascal, only an imaginary self can seem worthy of love and so each person pretends to posses desirable qualities that he does not really have: We are not satised with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we try to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one. And if we are calm, or generous, or loyal, we are anxious to have it known so that we can attach these virtues to our other existence; we prefer to detach them from our real self so as to unite them with the other. We would cheerfully be cowards if that would acquire for us a reputation of bravery. How clear a sign of the nullity of our own being that we are not satised with one without the other and often exchange the one for the other! For anyone who would not die to save his honor would be infamous (L806/S653). Pascal here posits a duality in the self, a separation between our imaginary being that exists only in the minds of others and our own, real being, the precise nature of which is not specied. It seems fairly straightforward to map the imaginary being of L806/S653 onto the moi of L688/S567 (discussed above) and conclude that the imaginary being, the self as it exists in the eyes of others is the moi that is constructed by the world.11 In contrast with the motif of passivity in the earlier fragment, however, now it appears that each person actively welcomes and constructs this separation. Pascal uses an array of rst-person plural action verbs to paint
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422 William Wood a picture of a self that is not only an agent but a whirlwind of activity. It thus corrects the rather one-sided picture of the self offered by L688/S567. We are not merely constructed by the world with no agency of our own; rather, we are co-authors of our imaginary selves. But we must also note the kind of activity to which fragment L806/S653 refers. The verbs Pascal deploys are, without exception, verbs of desiring, and collectively they paint a picture of the self as an agent whose only activity is craving: we are not satised . . . we want . . . we try . . . we strive constantly . . . we are anxious . . . we prefer. . . . And what we crave, without exception, is the esteem of others. Note, however, that our desire for esteem is markedly not the desire actually to be worthy of esteem, but rather a desire for esteem as such, regardless of whether we deserve it. Pascal writes: Greatness of man. Our idea of mans soul is so lofty that we cannot bear to be despised and not enjoy the esteem of a given soul. All the happiness of men lies in this esteem (L41 1/S30). For whatever possession he may own on earth, whatever health or essential amenity he may enjoy, he is dissatised unless he also enjoys the good opinion of his fellows. He so highly values human reason that, however privileged he may be on earth, if he does not also enjoy a privileged position in human reason, he is not happy. This is the nest position on earth; nothing can deect him from this desire, and this is the most indelible quality in the human heart (L470/S707). The most indelible quality in the human heart is the desire to enjoy the good opinion of his fellows. Yet this desire does not call forth virtuous projects of self-improvement, in which we seek to become ever more worthy of the esteem of others. Far from it. The desire for esteem is essentially duplicitous. In a slogan: the desire for esteem creates the desire to seem. It is easy to miss the full force of Pascals critique. He does not claim merely that the desire for esteem is one activity among others, activities performed by an otherwise substantial self. Rather, the relentless activity by which we pursue the esteem of others just is the moi, the false self identied by the fragments discussed above (L688/S567, L806/S653) and, furthermore, the moi just is the selfor at least the only self to which we have any epistemic access. Thus, for Pascal, the self is essentially duplicitous. Betterit is essentially an act of duplicity, duplicity in act. Elsewhere in the Penses, Pascal presents and develops this claim. In a long and polished fragment entitled self-love (amour-propre), he argues that our subjectivity depends on social relationships, which themselves depend on joint projects of deception, pretense, and hypocrisy (L978/S743). The dialectic is complex. A persons amour-propre causes him to deceive both himself and others, but it also causes him to pretend to believe those trying to deceive him. Pascal intends this complex dialectic as an account of subjectivity as
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What is the Self? 423 such. Indeed, the fragments opening line asserts an equivalence between selfhood and self-love: The nature of amour-propre and of this human self is to love only self and consider only self (La nature de lamour-propre et de ce moi humain est de n aimer que soi et de ne considerer que soi. [L978/S743]). The nature of amour-propre and of this human self is to love only self and consider only self. But what is it to do? It cannot prevent the object of its love from being full of faults and wretchedness: it wants to be great and sees that it is small; it wants to be happy and sees that it is wretched; it wants to be perfect and sees that it is full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of mens love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only their dislike and contempt. The predicament in which it thus nds itself arouses in it the most unjust and criminal passion that could possibly be imagined, for it conceives a deadly hatred for the truth which rebukes it and convinces it of its faults. It would like to do away with this truth, and not being able to destroy it as such, it destroys it, as best it can, in the consciousness of itself and others and it cannot bear to have them pointed out or noticed. It is no doubt an evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and unwilling to recognize them since this entails the further evil of deliberate self-delusion [illusion volontaire]. We do not want others to deceive us; we do not think it is right for them to want us to esteem them more than they deserve; it is therefore not right either that we should deceive them and want them to esteem us more than we deserve . . . (L978/S743) The link between selfhood and self-love asserted in the fragments opening line follows from Pascals claim that love calls the self into being (L688/S653). It quickly becomes apparent that any self called into being by self-love must be essentially duplicitous. Accordingly, in the fragments opening salvo, Pascal opposes self-lucidity to the desire for the love and esteem of other people. The self not only wants esteem of others, it also wants to deserve it. But it also sees that it is wretched, small, and imperfect. Pascal writes that the self wants to be the object of mens love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only their dislike and contempt. Since it cannot (we may suppose) successfully attack its own imperfections, it attacks the awareness of its imperfections, both in its own consciousness and in the consciousness of others. The self conceives a deadly hatred for the truth which rebukes it and it would like to do away with this truth but it cannot. Instead, it destroys the truth in the consciousness of itself and othersnot completely, however, but only as best it can. It is clear that Pascal is describing a complex process of outwardly-directed pretense and inwardly directed self-deception. Yet, recalling the fragments rst line, we must understand this process as an account of the self as such: selfhood as duplicity in act, once again.
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424 William Wood As the fragment proceeds, Pascal complicates his claim that we deceive others to earn their esteem. Although we do act deceivingly toward others, it turns out that they are not innocent victims and, in this fragment, they are not really even deceived. Rather, they see through our deceptions and deceive us in turn. What Pascal rst calls deception is actually more like collusion in hypocrisy, since both sides pretend to accept the false appearances presented by the other. This aversion for the truth exists in differing degrees, but it is in everyone to some degree because it is inseparable from self-love. It is this false delicacy which makes those who have to correct others choose so many devious ways and qualications of giving offense. They must minimize our faults, pretend to excuse them, and combine this with praise and marks of affection and esteem. Even then such medicine still tastes better to amour-propre. . . . The result is that anyone who has an interest in winning our affection avoids rendering us a service which he knows to be unwelcome; we are treated as we want to be treated; we hate the truth and it is kept from us; we desire to be attered and we are attered; we like being deceived and we are deceived. . . . Thus, human life is nothing but a perpetual illusion; there is nothing but mutual deception and attery. No one talks about us in our presence as he would in our absence. Human relations are only based on this mutual deception; and few friendships would survive if everyone knew what his friend said about him behind his back, even though he spoke sincerely and dispassionately. . . . (L978/S743; see also L792/S646). There is a shift in perspective in this passage. It is no longer just we who deceive others; those same others also deceive us. They pretend to excuse our faults, and pursue many devious ways and qualications to avoid offending us. Of course, we are meant to understand that each person continually plays both the role of atterer and attered in this scenario, since human relations are only based on this mutual deception. Pascals claim that everyone deceptively atters other people is actually somewhat unexpected. After all, the aversion for the truth and the false delicacy that Pascal criticizes are qualities that spring from disordered love of self and yet they cause us to atter the self-image of others. We might expect him to say the opposite, since he holds that everyone wants to dominate everyone else (L597/S494). After all, if a person wishes to be great, it would make sense for him to denigrate others, not atter them, so that he himself would seem great by comparison. Pascals insight to the contrary exposes the real dynamics of self-love. Universal self-love has the unintended consequence of creating universal attery. My own purely selsh goal gives me a motive to advance your equally selsh goal.
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What is the Self? 425 As fragment L978/S743 draws to a close, Pascal returns to the idea that the source of this mutual deception lies in the human subject as such: Man is nothing therefore but disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard to others. He does not want to be told the truth. He avoids telling it to others, and all these tendencies, so remote from justice and reason, are naturally rooted in his heart (L978/S743). This nal move is signicant because it emphasizes that, according to Pascal, the mutual deception that characterizes all social relationships is not just a culturally contingent feature of his own (admittedly duplicitous) society. Mutual deception is a precondition of any human relationship because it is naturally rooted in the heart, the seat of love and subjectivity. The human being as such just is disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard to others (Lhomme nest donc que dguisement, que mensonge et hypocrisie, et en soi-mme et lgard des autres). By reading the fragments on the desire for esteem alongside the fragments on the moi and on self-love, it is clear that, for Pascal, the self just is the moi, the imaginary, socially-constructed self formed by dynamic interaction with other people. This imaginary self is the only proper object of a most improper self-love. Pascals logic is brutal: to be a self is to be an object of love (L688/ S567), but the self, considered in itself, is full of faults and wretchedness, and possesses no qualities that can compel real love (L978/S743). It follows that to be a self at all is to be an imaginary self that compels only duplicitous love (L806/S653). In all of these fragments, the self is de-centered: it is not found in Cartesian self-presence but in the imaginations of other people. It is true that Pascal writes elsewhere that my self [signicantly, le moi] consists in my thought (L135/S167), but fragment L806/S653 shows us how to interpret this statement. My self may consist in my thought, but my thought consists in thinking about myself in the thoughts of another.12 My self is thus doubly imaginary. It is my own imaginary projection of how I exist in the thoughts and imaginations of other people.13 Although he himself doesnt quite put it this way, according to Pascal, our selfhood is a fantasy. The moi is the only self to which we have access, and it is inherently false and duplicitous. According to Pascal, the selves that we manifest to the world are only polite ctions that conceal our libido dominandi. To be a self at all is to be a false, imaginary self that exists for the sake of imagined esteem. The tendency toward duplicity that infects our interpersonal relationships also infects our very subjectivity. We are multiply oriented away from the truth. We eschew self-knowledge about who we are and what we do, as we lovingly attend to our imaginary selves and manifest them to the world. Pascals claim that to be a self is to be a false, duplicitous self requires qualication. As a formal matter, the distinction between true and false selves inevitably collapses if there are no true selves at all. And it is obviously not the
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426 William Wood case, as he would have it, that no one ever has any qualities that genuinely deserve love or that no one ever loves others because of their genuinely lovable qualities. These claims are best read as the work of a moralist and not a metaphysician, one who exaggerates for effect in order to reveal deep truths about human nature and human relationships. Pascals exaggerated language advances the robustly theological claim that only God is worthy of unrestricted love. On this understanding, the true self is the self that ceases to be a moi precisely insofar as it imitates Christ by loving God above all things. Parodying God by Performing the False Self If every self is a false self, a moi, it is equally clear that this condition is no accident, according to Pascal. We do not just nd ourselves trapped by the patterns of deception and self-deception that create the moi. Instead, as fallen subjects we actively construct our imaginary selves in a joint performance of tacit cooperation with other duplicitous subjects. The duplicitous subject, like a player on the stage, enacts his own false self-understanding and in so doing, reinforces it and maintains it in being. We actively construct our imaginary selves, we want to become them, and we try to manifest them in the world. We want to inhabit these false selves utterly and so we try to divert our own attention from the fact that they are false. As presented so far, this account of the false self, however striking, could easily be construed as moralistic, existential, and wholly secular, without reference to the divine. Yet the performance of the false self is at root a sinful performance. The patterns of deception and self-deception that call the false self into being are nothing other than a perverse imitation of Gods own good activity of creating and sustaining the world. The false self is best understood as a parodic imitation of God. The project of enacting the false self certainly displays the performative incoherence of sin. Pride and the desire for esteem often walk hand-in-hand and so it is easy to overlook the fact that they are not natural partners at all. Whereas pride seems like a kind of self-assertion, the desire for esteem seems more like a form of self-dispersal, a kind of dependence on others. Although the desire for esteem is spawned by an idolatrous love of self, and although it may be the most indelible quality of the human heart, (L470/S707) it surely cannot be the desire of someone who genuinely believes himself to be an autonomous god-man, secure in the knowledge that he is a self-contained law unto himself. Rather, the desire for esteem is more like a kind of dependence. If all the happiness of men lies in the approval of others (L470/ S707), then surely we each depend on that approval in a very basic way. Everyone pursues an incoherent project of self-glorication through obsequious, self-abnegating dependence.14 This incoherent project is, again, nothing other than the project of publicly performing the false self. Yet now it seems that this performance has two
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What is the Self? 427 moments. Interestingly, each moment corresponds to a traditional kind of sin, pride (self-assertion), on the one hand, and sloth (self-dispersal), on the other.15 In the moment of self-assertion, the duplicitous subject rejects the world as it is and cognitively tries to remake it in some favored image. In more conventional terms: because he nds the truth about himself and his projects threatening, he rejects it in favor of a falsehood. This can be understood as a kind of prideful self-assertion, willfully imposing ones own desired interpretation on the world. In the moment of self-dispersal, on the other hand, the duplicitous subject consents to the deceptive order of the world by agreeing to play a character in a social drama that aims at hiding the truth about himself and others. He conspires with other people to construct and inhabit an imaginary world that is designed to enable everyone to preserve their false self-understandings. I choose the words consent, conspire, and enable, with care, in order to signal that the agency involved in constructing the false self is peculiar. It is both active and passive at the same time. Self-assertion describes the way the duplicitous subject constructs his false interpretations in the rst place. In the moment of self-assertion, the duplicitous subject recognizes and rejects the truth about himself, and so he is not merely ignorant, mistaken, or a victim of the deception of others. Yet the duplicitous subject can successfully construct and inhabit an imaginary self only because his fellow human beings are themselves also deceivers and self-deceivers. All sides work together to facilitate mutual duplicity. The social mechanisms of self-dispersal therefore enable the duplicitous subject to preserve his false self-understanding. Without them, he could not divert his attention from unwelcome truths about himself; nor could he continue believing the more welcome falsehoods. This dual structure reveals the deepest, most incoherent structure of sinful subjectivity. Whereas we should passively accept the truth wherever we encounter it, we instead actively impose our own false interpretations on the world (self-assertion). And whereas we should actively resist the worlds corrupt blandishments and try to develop a coherent and virtuous self, we instead passively consent to the duplicitous, imaginary self suggested by the world (self-dispersal). Thus, in the full light of a robust theology of sin, the false self appears as not just logically incoherent but morally dreadful. The false self is nothing but the product of an attempt, ever frustrated, to imitate the Creator. When the duplicitous subject turns away from God in his duplicity, he mocks and parodies Gods own good activity. God loves and creates the worldthat which is not Godand thereby holds it in being; creation is good because God makes it so. The duplicitous subject loves not God, nor the world as it is, nor even himself as he is. Instead, he loves a constructed, imaginary self, which can ourish only in an imaginary world of his own devising. That is what he lovingly creates and holds in being; he tries to make it good but he cannot. With this incoherent activity, he inverts the dialectic of presence and
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428 William Wood absence that characterizes Gods agency in the world. On Pascals understanding, Gods kenotic absence from the world allows the world to exist, and is therefore more real than the presence of anything that is not God (see fragment L449/S690). On the other hand, the duplicitous subjects mode of being in the world is thoroughly false: insofar as he is a moi, a false self, he is present in the world at all only to the degree that he is not real, only to the degree that he withdraws from the real world and into an imaginary world of his own contrivance.16 Whereas Pascals God hides from the world because the world cannot bear Gods goodness, the duplicitous subject hides from the world because the world cannot bear his own sinfulness. It may seem strange to say that a thoroughly fallen world cannot bear the presence of sin. Yet even in a fallen world, we are not like Miltons Satan. Evil be thou my good is not the cry of an intelligible human agent. Even in a fallen world, sin must appear in the guise of the good, which is why duplicity is its ever-present henchman. This, then, is Pascals rst account of human subjectivity. The True Self and Trinitarian Subjectivity Pascals account of duplicitous subjectivity is theologically fruitful, but it leaves some important questions unanswered. His rst account of subjectivity asserts that we are false, imaginary selves because we are called into being by socially-reinforced, idolatrous self-love. As a sheer matter of logic, however, any conception of a false self must depend on some prior conception of a true self, the norm from which one deviates. Yet nding any conception of genuine or authentic selfhood in the Penses requires considerable interpretive work. In my view, Pascal does present the outline of such an account in the set of fragments on the body of thinking members (L360374/S392-405).17 The basic insight that underpins Pascals account of the true self is not surprising. Given that to be a self is to be an object of love, it follows that a true self can only be called into being by a true, because rightly-ordered, love. To say that our loves are rightly-ordered is to say that we love God above all things, and love everything else, including the self, through God and for God. This is a standard Christian claim, of course, but Pascal develops it in an especially interesting way, in a series of fragments on what it means to be a member of the body of Christ. Once again, the theme of imitation is central. Just as a false self, a moi, parodically imitates God, so also a true self imitates Christ, who loves God above all things; by imitating Christ, the true self virtuously imitates God. In the fragments on the body of thinking members Pascal shows that when the self attains genuine self-knowledge, it will not only love itself differently but will in fact become a different kind of self altogether. As discussed above, Pascal believes that sinful, duplicitous subjects inevitably try to make themselves the center of everything and tyrannize everyone else (L597/S494). As
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What is the Self? 429 a way of resisting our innate self-love, he therefore suggests a thoughtexperiment. If we imagine that we are each parts of a greater whole, a body of thinking members, we will subordinate our own value to the value of the whole and thereby love ourselves properly. In order to control the love we owe to ourselves, we must imagine a body full of thinking members (for we are members of the whole), and see how each member ought to love itself, etc. (L368/S401). To be a member is to have no life, no being, and no movement except through the spirit of the body and for the body. The separated member, no longer seeing the body to which it belongs, has only a wasted and moribund being left. However, it believes itself to be whole, and, seeing no body on which it depends, it believes itself to be dependent only on itself and tries to make itself its own center and body. But not having in itself any principle of life, it only wanders about and becomes bewildered at the uncertainty of its existence, quite conscious that it is not the body and yet not seeing that it is a member of a body. Eventually, when it comes to know itself, it has returned home, as it were, and only loves itself for the bodys sake. . . . (L372/S404). It is clear that the fragments on the body of thinking members are inspired by Pauls discussion of the body of Christ in 1 Cor. 12. There are also further allusions in this fragment to the Biblical story of the prodigal son: the separated member wanders about and becomes bewildered at the uncertainty of existence until it comes to know itself and returns home. On my reading, these Biblical tropes also work to emphasize the conceptual relations that bind the selfs being, its self-knowledge, and its self-love. Pascal begins with ontology. Separated from the body, the self has only wasted and moribund being left, yet Pascal treats this ontological separation as a failure of self-knowledge: the selfs being is moribund just because it no longer sees the body to which it belongs and falsely believes itself to be whole. Furthermore, when the self overcomes this failure of self-knowledge, and comes to know itself truly, its self-love is immediately transformed. Once the self no longer falsely believes itself to be whole, it comes to know itself, and then it loves itself for the bodys sake. To unpack Pascals metaphor, when the self knows itself rightly, it also loves itself rightly, andcircling back to ontologyit thereby becomes a different kind of self altogether: whole but not alone, no longer isolated but a member of the body. Enlightenment modernity is accustomed to treating being, love, and knowledge as sharply distinct, but for Pascal, it is not possible to separate them when it comes to discussions of the self.18 For example, in another fragment he writes: . . . If the foot had never known it belonged to the body, and that there was a body on which it depended, if it had only known and loved itself,
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430 William Wood and if it then came to know that it belonged to a body on which it depended, what regret, what shame it would feel for its past life. . . . How submissively it would let itself be governed by the will in charge of the body . . . (L373/5405). Pascal seems to assume that the foot would automatically love itself properly and submit its will to the will of the body when it comes to know itself. He does not leave any room for a foot that knows that it belongs to the body and yet refuses to love the body as the source of its own being. The next fragment explains why there is no such room. There is no such room because the very idea of rejecting the general source of happiness in the name of private happiness is incoherent: If the feet and hands had their own wills, they would never be properly in order except when submitting this individual will to the primal will governing the whole body. Otherwise they would be disorganized and unhappy, but in desiring only the good of the body they achieve their own good (L374/406). In the idiom of these fragments, it would be incoherent for the hands and the feet to come to know that their happiness is a function of the good of the body without thereby also loving the good of the body. Because it would be incoherent, it seems natural to say that if they do not, in fact, love the good of the body, then the hands and feet do not really believe that their happiness is a function of the good of the body. It is in this sense that genuine self-love and genuine self-knowledge are inseparable. A change in self-knowledge entails a change in self-love, and surely these two changes together entail a change in the kind of self that one is. A self that loves itself above all and regards itself as an isolated, wholly autonomous source of value is simply not the same kind of thing as a self that subordinates its own good to the universal good of all. In Pascals terms, a self that subordinates its own private good to the universal good has ceased to be a moi. Pascal himself gave the title Christian morality to the bundle of fragments on the body of thinking members. The lesson is clear: a genuine change in self-knowledge and self-love could not be merely an internal, inwardly directed affair. As selves in a world, we necessarily project our self-understandingsboth true and falseinto the world. When we attain real self-knowledge, we not only love ourselves with a rightly ordered love; we also engage differently with the world. Our tyrannical self-love is transformed (through the help of Gods grace) into an impartial love that desires the good of all. And if the member truly desires the good of all, then surely its actions must express this desire. In other words, under sin or under grace, our self-knowledge and self-love are always socially expressed and, again, performative. We perform our selves, according to
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What is the Self? 431 Pascal, and so it follows that the project of performing agapic love will necessarily shape one into a different kind of self, something other than a selsh, tyrannical moi. Another interpretative difculty looms, however. Once the self has ceased to be a moi, what else is left for it to be? Recall that elsewhere in the Penses Pascal claims that a true self is a self that is worthy of love (L688/S567). Perhaps unsurprisingly, he also claims that only God is nally worthy of love. The true and only virtue is therefore to hate ourselves . . . , and to seek for a being really worthy of love in order to love him. But as we cannot love what is outside us, we must love a being who is within us but is not our own self. . . . Now only the universal being is of this kind: the kingdom of God is within us, universal good is within us, and is both ourselves and not ourselves (L564/S47 1). It appears that we are left with two alternatives: either there are no true selves, because there are no selves worthy of love, or a true self must, in some sense, be identied with God. Pascal chooses both alternatives at once. To the extent that every self is an imaginary self, a moi, there really are no true selves; but to the extent that one ceases to be a moi, one thereby becomes something wholly different just insofar as ones self-knowledge and self-love have been transformed. At the root of our subjectivity we nd a self that is both a worthy and a possible object of love. This self is both ourselves and not ourselves. Elsewhere he says that Happiness is neither outside nor inside us: it is in God, both outside and inside us (L407/S26). We cannot truly love ourselves unless we know and love God, a project which somehow entails that we are also identied with God. Yet according to Pascal, we cannot come to know and love God without rst knowing and loving Christ: Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves (L417/S36). Surely Christ is also the self that is both ourselves and not ourselves mentioned in L564/ S471. The Pascalian true self is the self that is utterly conformed to Christ, with properly ordered loves. One becomes a true self when one is conformed to God through the imitation of Christ; one becomes worthy of love by virtue of being so conformed. Thus, on my reading, Pascal holds that the true self is the self that knows and loves God by imitating Christs own virtuous love for God. Christ is the only perfect human subject because his natural human self-love is also fully identical to love for God. Only when we imitate Christ can we love God above all things and thereby become true selves. In the fragments on the body of thinking members, Pascal takes the idea that Christ is the object and center of all things and applies it to the task of attaining true subjectivity. I argued above that the sinful, false self is best understood as a parodic imitation of God. Yet the converse also holds. To be
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432 William Wood free from duplicity, we must imitate God rightly, by imitating Christ, who is the God-man and the paradigmatic human being. This is what authentic subjectivity is for Pascal: subjectivity without duplicity, selfhood that is called into being by a love that is properly ordered towards God. For Pascal, true subjectivity is Christocentric subjectivity. It could not by nature love anything else except for selsh reasons and in order to enslave it, because each thing loves itself more than anything else. But in loving the body it loves itself, because it has no being except in the body, through the body, and for the body. He who adheres to God is one spirit [1 Cor. 6:17]. The body loves the hand and if it had a will the hand ought to love itself in the same way as the soul loves it; any love that goes beyond that is wrong. Adhering to God in one spirit, we love ourselves because we are members of Christ. We love Christ because he is the body of which we are members. All are one. One is in the other like the three persons [of the trinity] (L372/S404).19 The body of thinking members is not just any human collective. Pascals claim is not merely that selsh individuals should subordinate their private desires to the good of the whole. The body of thinking members is the body of Christ. To recognize that one is a member of the body of Christ is to cease to be a false self, a moi, and to become something altogether new. After all, it is constitutive of the moi that it cannot recognize that it is a member of the body. Once it does recognize that it is a member of the body, it immediately ceases to be a moi. Having ceased to be a moi, the only thing left for it to be is a member of the body of Christ, the one who loves God above all things. And surely to be a member of the body of Christ is also to imitate Christ and thereby become Christ-like. Indeed, it is striking that the selfs transformation is described in explicitly Trinitarian terms. In the fragment above, Pascals model for authentic selflove, and therefore authentic subjectivity, is nothing other than perichoresis, the perfect, self-giving love of the Father, Son, and Spirit: we love ourselves because we are members of Christ. We love Christ because he is the body of which we are members. All are one. One is in the other like the three persons [of the trinity] (L372/S404). Indeed, this fragment goes so far as to equate subjectivity with theosis: by adhering to Christ in the mystical body we become one spirit with God, and this is just what it means to be a genuine self. Theosis is the goal of authentic selfhood. We are true selveswe are truly selveswhen we are a part of Christ, in the mystical body, constitutively joined with God and neighbor by mutual, self-giving love, just as Christ is constitutively joined with the Father and Spirit in the perichoretic union of the holy trinity.
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What is the Self? 433 Conclusion Pascals account of sinful subjectivity presents selfhood as duplicity: under the conditions of the fall, we are false, imaginary selves called into being by improper self-love, performing our subjectivity in a dark parody of divine goodness. Conversely, we slough off the false self and attain genuine subjectivity when (by grace, Pascal would surely say) we truly imitate God and conform ourselves to Christ, who loves God above all things. Scholars rarely explore the theological depths of Pascals thoughts about duplicitous subjectivity. They discuss the fragments on the body of thinking members even more rarely.20 This omission is especially regrettable, because these fragments are a necessary complement to Pascals account of sinful subjectivity. Moreover, when one overlooks the fragments on the body of thinking members, one can easily overlook Pascals role in the history of modern theological thought about the self. If my reading is correct, in these fragments it is Pascal who launches however inchoatelya tradition of Trinitarian retrieval that is of the greatest contemporary interest. This tradition holds that the modern individualistic subject is a pernicious illusion and that true subjectivity is relational and trinitarian.21 This tradition of inquiry looks back to the premodern, to be sure, but insofar as it is also explicitly counter-modern, it necessarily occurs within and after modernity. Pascal, writing at the very dawn of modernity, can fairly claim to be its originator. As David Tracy asks: At the very end of early modernity and with Enlightenment modernity on its way, who else [but Pascal] saw so clearly the possibilities and devastating limits of modernity?22 Pascals Penses present us with, on the one hand, a rich portrait of sinful human subjectivity and, on the other hand, a picture of authentic subjectivity that anticipates the work of contemporary Trinitarian theorists of the self by some three hundred years. Who else indeed?23

NOTES 1 This picture is certainly a stereotype. Specialists do not nd it in the work of Descartes himself. Nevertheless, even if Descartes is no Cartesian, there is no doubt that the Cartesian subject has had a life of its own in modern thought and has recently been an object of virulent theological criticism. For a more nuanced account of Descartes and for an entrypoint into the specialist literature on him see Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 3, Descartes forma futuri, pp. 5099. 2 I cite the Penses by fragment number from Krailsheimers translation (Blaise Pascal, Penses. Trans. A. J. Krailsheimer [New York, NY: Penguin, 1966]), which uses the Lafuma numbering scheme. In addition to the Lafuma number (L), I also cite each fragment by Sellier number (S), which is used in both Roger Ariews translation (Penses. Trans. Roger Ariew. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2005) and in Honor Levi, ed., Penses and Other Writings (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995). 3 See, e.g., Jean Mesnard, Les Penses de Pascal, third edition, (Paris: Socit ddition dnseignement suprieur, 1993), pp. 178210; Hugh M. Davidson, Blaise Pascal (Boston, MA: Twaine, 1983), pp. 7879.

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4 See Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes Metaphysical Prism, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 277345. According to Marion, Pascal identies Cartesian thought with the second of his well-known three orders (body, mind, and charity, from fragment L308/S339) and tries, in various ways, to show that the third-order (the order of love and grace) transcends the second. See also Vincent Carraud, Pascal et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1992), esp. chaps. 34, pp. 217345. In general, the current scholarly consensus holds that Pascal was not only well-acquainted with, but even sympathetic to, Descartes philosophy. At the same time, the consensus also holds that in the Penses, Pascal tried to subvert elements of that philosophy by showing its limitations. See, for example, Henri Gouhier, Blaise Pascal: Conversion et apologtique (Paris: Vrin, 1986), pp.108193; Michel Le Guern, Pascal et Descartes (Paris: Nizet, 1971). See Vincent Carraud, Remarks on the Second Pascalian Anthropology: Thought as Alienation, Journal of Religion Vol. 85 (2005), pp. 539554. Carraud distinguishes between a theological anthropology found in the fragments on greatness and wretchedness and a phenomenological and philosophical anthropology that concerns the discourse of human existence and is found in the fragments on glory, the imagination, justice, and diversion (p. 545). According to Carraud, this second anthropology is not ruled by any theological principle (p. 546). Carrauds readings of particular fragments are often quite insightful but the strict separation he nds between the philosophical/ existential, on the one hand, and the theological, on the other, is his own. It is not Pascals. A bit more ground-clearing is in order here. The Penses is a fragmentary text and so strictly speaking, it is not quite accurate to say that it contains Pascals account of anything whatsoever, on the ordinary understanding of that term. It follows thatto a greater degree than with other textsany interpretation of the Penses must be partial and tentative. Despite their fragmentary character, however, I believe that we do nd an underlying coherence to the Penses when we approach it in the right spirit. Hugh Davidson best articulates that spirit: we should watch Pascal at work, describe his practice, and see to what extent his practices can be related to a more general topic of inquiry. When we proceed in this way, we see not only recurrent problems, but also reappearing lines of attack on them, tendencies that bespeak something conscious and deliberate. Hugh M. Davidson, Pascal and the Arts of the Mind (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. xiii. I straightforwardly follow Marion: To become a self I need to be neither seen, nor thought, nor known, but nothing less than loved. (On Descartes Metaphysical Prism, p. 324). What then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, afrms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions. Meditation II, in John Cottingham, et. al., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19841991), p. 19 [AT VII: 28]. For commentary, see Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes Metaphysical Prism, pp. 322333; Vincent Carraud, Pascal et la philosophie, pp. 315326; Paulette Carrive, Lecture dune Pense de Pascal: Quest-ce que le moi? Les etudes philosophiques Vol. 3 (1983), pp. 353356. See note 8, above. Cottingham, et. al., The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. 2, pp. 2123. I return in due course to the point that an imaginary self with imaginary being seems to presuppose a real self with real being. I follow Carraud, Remarks on the Second Pascalian Anthropology: Thought as Alienation, pp. 552553. Contra Carraud, however, I read this fragment as a key instance of Pascals fully theological anthropology. To think oneself in the thought of another is itself a form of sinful pride, in which the self tries to become everything, if not in reality, then in the imaginations of other people. I discuss this claim further below. It might be more accurate to say ones subjective narrative identity is a single imaginary story, doubly told, because it is the identity that one imaginatively constructs for oneself as ltered through ones imaginative reconstructions of the thoughts of others (which are sometimes based on actual interactions, of course). For a good account of how the false self is actually a structural requirement of the disordered love that results from the fall, see Christian Lazzeri, Force et justice dans la politique de Pascal (Paris: PUF, 1993), p. 910, 4052. By distinguishing between self-assertion and self-dispersal, I intend to evoke feminist theologies of sin. These theologies argue that such temptations as underdevelopment and

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negation of the self are distinct from the traditional temptations associated with pride. See Valerie Saiving, The Human Situation: A Feminine View, The Journal of Religion Vol. 40 (1960), p. 109. Alistair McFadyen presents the following list of verbs as those characteristically associated with the diminution of selfhood: failing, hiding, abdicating, abnegating, denying, eeing, participating, being complicit, acquiescing in, accepting, consenting to, complying, and cooperating with. See his, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 142143. Interestingly, as Pascal develops his overall dialectic of greatness and wretchedness, he himself sometimes says that sin has two roots. In a minor chord that sounds throughout his treatment of human nature, pride is only one of those sources. The other source is paresse, a French word that translates the Latin acediaspiritual apathy, otherwise known as the sin of sloth (L774/S638, L208/S240). On the other hand, perhaps it is a mistake to suggest that there is a proto-feminist theology of sin buried in the text of the Penses. Philippe Sellier, for example, claims that Pascals distinction between paresse and pride is only supercial and that the former clearly reduces to the latter. According to Sellier, paresse is only the wornout face of pride, a concept that captures the idea that we will ourselves to be exceptional until we are in despair. See Pascal et Saint Augustin (Paris: Cohn, 1970), pp. 185186. I am convinced that Selliers interpretation is wrong, but I cannot argue the matter here. With this talk of withdrawal, I also mean to echo Augustines privative account of evil. Scholars who have discussed the fragments on the body of thinking members typically have not emphasized that they present Pascals positive account of authentic human subjectivity. Jan Miel, Pascal and Theology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), treats the relevant fragments, rst, as a metaphor for predestination that shows what it means for the human will to be moved by the divine will; and, second, as a bridge between Pascals theology of grace and his notions concerning the Christian in society, p. 178179. Jacob Meskin provides the best discussion in English in his Secular Self-Condence, Postmodernism and Beyond: Recovering the Religious Dimension of Pascals Penses, Journal of Religion Vol. 75 (1995), pp. 487508. Meskin correctly sees that Pascal argues in the relevant fragments that we must identify with Christ in order to transform our subjectivity. Meskin does not set this insight in dialectical opposition to Pascals thoughts on the false self (the moi) and sinful subjectivity, however, and he does not remark on the Trinitarian theme of fragment L372/S404. Nor does Miel. Without in any way claiming exhaustive knowledge of the French scholarship, the treatments I have found do not emphasize the themes I discuss here. Gerard Ferreyrolles reads the fragments on the body of thinking members in socialpolitical terms (Pascal et la raison du politique [Paris: PUP, 1984], pp. 246). Michelle Guern, in his book on the image in Pascal, recognizes the prominence of the image of the body of thinking members in Pascals thought, but draws no philosophical or theological conclusions about this fact (Limage dans loeuvre de Pascal [Paris: Colin, 1969], p. 146150). Pierre Magnard presents a ne, rich discussion but his treatment is also primarily historical and exegetical (Un corps plein de membres pensants, in Dominique Descotes, Antony McKenna et Laurent Thirouin eds., Le rayonnement de Port-Royal, Mlanges en lhonneur de Philippe Sellier [Paris, Champion, 2001], pp. 333340. I am not aware that Marion discusses the relevant fragments at all, though he certainly recognizes that for Pascal, authentic subjectivity must be centered on Christ, as the universal object of love (See On Descartes Metaphysical Prism, pp. 329331). Finally, Carraud does discuss the body of thinking members and even recognizes their Trinitarian character, but he reads the fragments in question quite differently (see note 20 below). To be sure, we recognize a sense of self-knowledge that is unrelated to the selfs being or its love. That is, there is a sense of self-knowledge in which we could say simply that a person knows certain facts about himself. But this thin sense of self-knowledge is not the sense that Pascal develops with his image of the body of thinking members. In the original, the internal quotations are in Latin, as Pascal cites from the Vulgate Bible: Qui adhaeret Deo unus spiritus est and Adhaerens Deo unus spiritus est, respectively. See note 17, above. Interestinglythough, I would say, unfortunatelyCarraud reads the fragments on the body of thinking members as anti-Augustinian. According to Carraud, Pascalunlike Augustinedoes not say that all human beings nd themselves with two mutually opposing loves (self-love and the love for God). Nor, according to Carraud, does Pascal call for a change in the object of ones love (from the self to God) but rather for a

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change in the nature of ones love: to love oneself justly one must love oneself as one is loved by God, which presumably means impartially (Pascals Anti-Augustinianism Perspectives on Science Vol. 15 (2007), p. 461; see also Pascal et la philosophie, p. 341). This claim ts in with Carraud s overall reading (which I share in part) that, for Pascal, to be a self is to think about oneself in the thought of another. It would follow that the right kind of self is a self that thinks about itself in the thought of the right kind of OtherGod. Carrauds picture, then, is of a self that changes the way it knows and loves itself but does not change in its being, when it comes to recognize that it is a member of the mystical body. For example, Carraud says explicitly that for Pascal, unlike for Augustine, self-love does not need to be converted but only controlled (Pascals Anti-Augustinianism, p. 461). He thereby implies that there is no fundamental change in the self as it exists before and after it comes to see that it is a member of the body. On my reading, Carraud does not pay enough attention to the Christological and Trinitarian elements of the relevant fragments and so he does not appreciate the fact that the self is not only converted but even essentially transformed when it comes to regard itself as a member of the body. 21 For one example among many, see Catherine Mowry La Cugna, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life, chap. 8, Persons in Communion, (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1991), pp. 243317. For adroit resistance to the claim that personhood is relational, see Harriet A. Harris, Should We Say that Personhood is Relational?, Scottish Journal of Theology Vol. 51(1998), pp. 214234. 22 David Tracy, Fragments: The Spiritual Situation of Our Times, in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds. God the Gift and Postmodernism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1999), p. 180. 23 Many friends and colleagues have read and commented on various ancestors of this article. I would especially like to thank the most recent set of commentators: Johannes Zachhuber, Joel Rasmussen, Philip Endean, Timothy Mawson, and the other members of the University of Oxford Modern Theology seminar. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for this journal.

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