Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our databases.

This functionality is provided solely for your

convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any
representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS
AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY
AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY,
ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning
Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale Literature Resource Center Terms and Conditions and by using the machine
generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the
machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom.

Pensées: Dialectic and Rhetoric

Author: Erec R. Koch
Date: 1997
From: Pascal and Rhetoric: Figural and Persuasive Language in the Scientific Treatises, the Provinciales and the Pensées
Publisher: Rookwood
Reprint In: Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800(Vol. 255. )
Document Type: Critical essay
Length: 16,229 words

Full Text:
[(essay date 1997) In the following essay, Koch explores how Pascal structured his argument, employed systems of biblical
interpretation, and used rhetorical devices in the Pensées to convince his readers of the value of Christian belief.]

In this century, criticism of the structure and strategies of the Pensées has largely centered on the problematic term “dialectic.” Jean
Mesnard has concisely outlined the two major acceptations of this term, the first of which underscores the necessary association of
dialectic with rhetoric:

Le mot [“dialectique”] désigne d’abord l’art de l’argumentation, c’est-à-dire l’ensemble des techniques qui permettent de
conduire un raisonnement en vue de convaincre un interlocuteur et de réfuter ses objections. En ce sens, un rapport étroit
existe entre le mot “dialectique” et celui de “dialogue,” auquel il est apparenté. Pour nous en tenir aux oeuvres écrites, la
forme littéraire du dialogue permet une démarche plus souple que celle du raisonnement théorique; elle rattache les idées
à l’humain. Pour qu’un tel dialogue devienne dialectique, il faut, non pas nécessairement que l’un des interlocuteurs soit
muet, mais que l’un d’eux mène le jeu, établisse dans l’échange des idées un ordre méthodique et le conduise à une
conclusion. Dans son schéma fondamental, le raisonnement correct demeure géométrique, mais sa présentation se
modèle sur la réalité complexe de l’homme.1

Dialectic, with its complex history and development, is presented here as the art of discursive reasoning, an art that must include
consideration of its counterpart, rhetoric. As the borders and fields of applicability of these two arts have shifted throughout their
history, we must first elucidate just how—and in what form—rhetoric is implicitly situated in this passage as the counterpart of
dialectic, the hidden partner in the art of argumentation. As we have seen in Chapter 1, with the codification of the former art by
Aristotle, rhetoric assumes considerable independence from dialectic as a separate art of argumentation or discursive reasoning:
whereas dialectic always bears an intention of truth in speculative matters, albeit probable, rhetoric opines within the realm of
practical affairs. Rhetoric is not merely an alternative to dialectic employed for a vulgar audience, nor does dialectic stand opposed to
rhetorical doxa as truth to falsehood, but the two are distinguished by the nature of their functions and their fields of applicability.
Rhetorical argumentation is founded on practical reasoning and establishes opinions and valorizations in this domain that are
opposed to other opinions. Dialectical argumentation, on the contrary, is founded on speculative and epistemologically sound
reasoning that establishes (probable) truth as opposed to (probable) falsehood. Each is an art of persuasive reasoning directed to
questions proper to it. The historical development of dialectic and rhetoric progresses to a different articulation of the two arts, which
redefines the function of each and subordinates the latter to the former. Rhetoric becomes the source of ornamental and manneristic
devices of persuasion, and these, in order to avoid abuse, must be used in the service of dialectic, which becomes the art of
discursive reasoning, of argumentation, and finally of structuring logic. According to this division of labor, the field of dialectic
comprises the discursive elaboration of thought, and rhetoric formal exposition. Rhetoric thus becomes synonymous with those
elements of form that circumscribe the literary aspects of discourse, such as ornamentation, style, and manner of expression. In this
capacity rhetoric makes its somewhat surreptitious appearance in Mesnard’s representative definition of the first sense of dialectic.
Rhetoric accounts for the techniques of successful “presentation” of thought, and most notably in the deployment of literary devices.
These include not only the use of open-ended dialogue instead of “geometric” reasoning, but also that general formal law which
Mesnard cites with the Pensées specifically in mind, namely the metaphoric “linkage” of concrete human experience with abstract
and speculative thought. Among innumerable possible examples, one could cite in this context fragment 199/230 of the Pensées,
“Disproportion de l’homme”. In the tonality of pathos founded on human alienation and insignificance in the vertiginous,
unbounded universe of the two infinities, that fragment is the stylized and aestheticized version of formal argumentation and proof of
the same truth in the first part of Pascal’s Réflexions sur la géométrie en général.2 The dialectical techniques that Mesnard
circumscribes necessitate the co-presence of rhetoric and rhetorical devices to achieve the effect of persuasion in the “presentation”
of thought. Dialectic here presupposes the articulation of discursive reasoning with rhetoric, the purveyor of formal and ornamental
devices.
Mesnard goes on to outline the second and more commonly debated acceptation of “dialectic,” which qualifies the precise nature and
mode of discursive reasoning employed in the Pensées. Dialectic in this sense consists in

un mode de pensée qui se plaît à procéder par opposition de contraires. Que deux affirmations contraires puissent être
posées simultanément est scandale pour la raison. Il faut alors, ou bien que l’une soit vraie et l’autre fausse, ou bien
qu’elles soient toutes les deux fausses, ou encore qu’elles soient toutes les deux vraies d’une vérité partielle, invitation à
chercher une vérité plus totale. Dans tous les cas, la saisie des contraires fournit une occasion privilégiée d’atteindre la
vérité. Placés en deux sujets différents dans le dialogue proprement dit, les contraires, s’ils sont posés par un même
sujet, entreront dans un raisonnement de type dialectique, où la progression, au lieu d’être uniforme et continue,
comportera des ruptures et des bonds en avant: démarche plus proche de la vie que celle du raisonnement géométrique,
mais qui se fonde, comme celui-ci, sur le principe de la non-contradiction.3

Dialectic in this second sense, as it concerns the mode of reasoning and the substance of Pascal’s thought, has assumed greater
importance in critical studies of the Pensées, including Mesnard’s, than its correlate, which would seem to be as concerned with
discursive “presentation” and rhetorical style. Dialectic in the second acceptation structures and directs the movement of thought in
the Pensées according to the third pattern that Mesnard mentions, namely that opposing propositions must both be “partially” true
and can be reconciled through some form of sublation. Dialectic in this sense would provide the line of reasoning or argumentation in
the Pensées, the principal law of its composition, which guides us dia tôn lôgon, that is, through the course of the text and the
unfolding of thought.
Dialectic in the second acceptation has provided the most far-reaching insights on the structure and interpretability of the Pensées.4
The ability of dialectic to install, preserve, and overcome difference within unifying totality accounts for the economy of opposition and
reconciliation of bipolar and dyadic elements within fragments, as well as among fragments. In the course of this analysis of dialectic
in the Pensées, we will be compelled to revise Mesnard’s exposition in two important ways. Firstly, we will establish that the dialectic
developed in the Pensées, far from being one mode of reasoning among others and one consciously chosen by Pascal, is presented
as the necessary and universal movement of thought. Secondly, this insight will require us to reconsider the status of one rhetorical
figure, the chiasmus, as being not merely an ornament but as defining and directing the necessary pattern or form of thought that
allows for opposites to be combined into unity.5 We will question whether dialectic as it is developed in the Pensées is able to
achieve this totalizing function.

We begin by establishing the scope and function of dialectic in the Pensées and turn to a fragment—and significantly one of the
barred fragments destined to be suppressed—on the necessity and universality of dialectic:

Nature ne p

La nature nous a si bien mis au milieu que si nous changeons un côté de la balance nous changeons aussi l’autre. Je
faisons, zoa trekei.

Cela me fait croire qu’il y a des ressorts dans notre tête qui sont tellement disposés que qui touche l’un touche aussi le
contraire.(Pensées, 519/453)

This text can be grouped with those anthropological fragments that represent the predicament of man as mediate in the sense that he
participates equally in symmetrically opposed categories, most notably “grandeur” and “misère.” The point of balance here is
valorized as the locus of conjunction of symmetrical opposites, such as the positive and the negative valences of the balance. Here
as is frequently the case in the Pensées, the anthropological predicament determines man’s epistemological predicament. Let us
pass over for the time being the linguistic example, to which we will return shortly, and turn to the final paragraph, which directly
addresses the question of thought. In this passage Pascal deploys the familiar strategy of the phenomenalization of consciousness:
that is, processes of thought are modeled on the phenomenal world, and in this case on the mechanics of cause and effect that
govern the triggering mechanism of a machine. When the intellectual machine is triggered, a thought is brought into consciousness.
But this is just a first step; it is a cause that produces by pressure, by triggering a response of its own, the effect of bringing into
consciousness its other, its symmetrical opposite. This sequential movement proceeds with the natural necessity of an effect
produced by a cause. What is to the side of the original thought and should be excluded by it in any reasonable logic governed by the
principle of non-contradiction—that is, what should mechanically be repressed and blocked out of consciousness, namely the
negative—is necessarily brought to the fore of consciousness. This negative must just as necessarily cancel out the original thought
that it supplants. Moreover, this reversal is not merely a onetime act; within such a balance, as we know from the Pensées, is the
play of “balancement.” The effect produced in turn becomes a cause governing its own effect. It triggers, by the pressure of its own
movement in coming into consciousness, the coming to the fore of its other, its symmetrical opposite.
This sequential movement of thought occurs as naturally and necessarily as the physical law of cause and effect. The thought
brought into consciousness must always, by the pressure of the triggering mechanism, also trigger the other, bring the other into
consciousness in place of the original thought. Thought must always necessarily proceed by reversal. Such a sequential movement
would seem to be infinitely repeatable, that is, it would produce an eternal “balancement” that could be terminated only arbitrarily. To
extend Pascal’s analogy, the pressure that draws an effect from a cause could only be annulled by the counterforce of repression, by
forcing the other from the scene of consciousness. And like its analogical correlate in the realm of the psyche, such a force of
repression would be merely a covering over of the other thought, an imposed absence that would nevertheless manifest the other by
the very presence of the thought that would block it out.

While the second example establishes the necessity of “antithetical,” dialectical thought, which moves sequentially from the selfsame
thought to its symmetrical opposite in the manner of a cause producing an effect, the first example examines the form and structure
of dialectic. In the example cited, “je faisons, zoa trekei,” 6 the passage from one statement to the other is inscribed in the same
scheme of causality: one proceeds from the first statement to the second as naturally and necessarily as from cause to effect. In this
example, however, the two elements to be brought into relation, subject and verb, are set in place from the start, and they are
associated in “je faisons” with the opposing attributes of singularity and plurality respectively. The change that takes place in the
passage from the first statement to the second, as naturally and necessarily as the movement from cause to effect, occurs strictly at
the level of grammar. In the statement “zoa trekei,” the association of the same two antithetical properties, singularity and plurality,
with the grammatical elements has been reversed: the subject is now plural, the verb singular. This reversal or inversion defines the
grammatical and rhetorical figure known as chiasmus, which corresponds basically to inverted parallelism. Most frequently chiasmus
affects the syntax of two balancing phrases or clauses: the order of the first is reversed in the second by an exchange of properties
(i.e., firstness of subject, secondness of verb) to produce the crisscross effect of the Greek letter “X” (chi) on which the figure is
based. A similar effect is produced at the level of grammar by the exchange of singularity and plurality of subject and verb in the
example taken from fragment 519/453. In its capacity to effect syntactic inversion, the figure chiasmus serves a strictly ornamental
rhetorical function; it is merely a stylistic embellishment, a device of formal presentation capable of producing an aesthetic effect.
Chiasmus would provide one of many stylistic and rhetorical devices appropriate to the formal presentation of Pascal’s thought. By
the inverted order that it governs, chiasmus would function as the formal medium of expression that corresponds perfectly to the
substance of Pascal’s paradoxical and contradictory thought. This figure would provide, in the words of one of its noted specialists,
the fitting “skeleton upon which thoughts and words are attached.”7 This contention accords with Pascal’s well-known attentiveness in
his own writings to the appropriateness of style to subject matter. Indeed, Pascal’s condemnation in the Pensées of the abuse of the
related figure antithesis conversely establishes such a rule for the proper use of this and other ornaments:

Miscellan. Langage.

Ceux qui font les antithèses en forçant les mots sont comme ceux qui font de fausses fenêtres pour la symétrie.

Leur règle n’est pas de parler juste mais de faire des figures justes.(559/466)

As it occurs in the context of fragment 519, however, in conjunction with the second example, chiasmus cannot be relegated to the
role of ornament but is raised to the level of structuring principle of thought. In this fragment on the necessary movement of thought,
the first example tells us that dialectic does not simply proceed by contradiction but is impelled by chiasmic inversion based on the
exchange of symmetrically opposed properties. Paul de Man has observed that the chiastic pattern structures the very unfolding of
dialectical thought in the Pensées. This pattern motivates and structures the necessary pattern of development of thought, whose
reversals are governed by the mutual exchange of opposing properties. The interplay of binary oppositions that constitute the
fragments of the Pensées follows a chiastic motion that repeatedly “reverses the order of association of the entities [in question] and
their properties.”8 There is no contradiction between the chiastic structure of dialectical thought developed in the first example of
fragment 519/453 and the necessary process of passage from selfsame thought to symmetrical opposite in the second example. The
structure of the chiasmus is implicit here, for the thought foregrounded in the first moment is associated with truth while the other
excluded in this moment—and “present” by this very fact—is associated with error. The second moment proceeds by reversing the
association of truth and error with the symmetrically opposed thoughts in question.

Chiasmus is the one rhetorical figure that, by Mesnard’s scheme, cannot simply be relegated to the role of stylistic device for the
presentation of thought since it structures thought itself and the unfolding of thought. As the figure for dialectic, chiasmus installs the
division of binary elements by a first order of association, and it reinstalls division by an inverted second association. At the same
time, the inversion produced by the very exchange or sharing of properties links the opposing poles within an underlying whole. The
back-stretched connection of the chiasmus assures the underlying unity of differential elements. Chiasmus thus accounts for the two
principal features of dialectic. On the one hand, dialectic is asymmetrical and hierarchical: each stage, each reversal serves to enrich
one of the poles and thus reinstalls in reversed form the difference and division with which the movement began. At the same time,
the dialectical chiasmus serves to draw opposing poles together within an underlying unity. Chiasmus, by the crisscross exchange of
opposing properties, serves to draw symmetrical opposites together through this back-stretched act of linkage. This repeated process
of exchange serves to draw the opposing poles within an underlying but deferred totality that reconciles them and heals their division.

Fragment 519/453 is perhaps the most rich and concise statement on the dialectical movement of thought, which proceeds
necessarily by chiastic inversion. In a manner as natural as effect following from cause, thought or reasoning must always turn in
chiastic fashion to its symmetrical opposite, to the other locus of truth in a sequence that is infinitely repeatable. This scheme, which
may appear to succumb to the temptation of arbitrarily elevating one isolated fragment to the position of mastery over others, is in fact
borne out by the binary structure and development of innumerable fragments, where the central elements set in opposition follow the
pattern that we have described. For example, fragment 646/531, headed by the problematic term “sentiment,” reads as follows:

La mémoire, la joie sont des sentiments et même les propositions géométriques deviennent sentiments, car la raison rend
les sentiments naturels et les sentiments naturels s’effacent par la raison.

The self-evident assumption from which the fragment begins is that sentiment is natural, a given of experience that is immediate.
Moreover, as the status of sentiments is to be natural, they are as constant as nature itself. Jansenist anthropology postulates that
reason has become a secondary human attribute. In Fallen man, reason must acknowledge the precedence of natural sentiment;
reason is a faculty that must be cultivated, as we know from the polemical position taken in the Logique de Port-Royal, by the reform
and education of man. Reason is the faculty that we know, by experience, to be effaceable, whereas sentiments, such as those listed
in the fragment, are natural and permanent. The fragment, however, moves precisely to reverse the priority of these polar opposites.
Products of reason, such as propositions of geometry, can become natural, and reason thus can step into the position of priority over
what had been natural sentiment. The weight of this reversal is borne by the conjunction “car,” which makes natural sentiments a
consequence of reason. The attributes of sentiment and of reason have been chiastically exchanged. Reason decides what is natural
and permanent, and reason makes its own products “sentiments.” By reversal, reason and its products are now constant and natural,
and the formerly natural sentiments are effaceable and thus secondary.
The dialectical pattern that governs this fragment is repeated in innumerable anthropological fragments, such as those on the
reversible relations of priority of nature and custom, but the pattern itself governs the analysis of the economy of other binary
oppositions that extend to the full range of themes developed in the Pensées. Dialectic begins to bind together the diversity of the
Pensées as elements of binary pairs are grafted and reabsorbed within the dialectical development of other fragments. Moreover, as
is frequently the case in this text, the final word in fragment 646/531 is not the final word on the subject itself. The privileged place of
reason as first, natural, and constant is in its turn undermined in other fragments, as all readers of the Pensées are aware. The full
development of the dialectical pattern itself is demonstrated in the more extensively discursive fragments. This is the case, for
example, of fragment 131/164, which turns from the question of anthropological knowledge to questions of knowledge of the outside
world and self-knowledge that are implicit in the dogmatist and Pyrrhonian philosophical traditions:

Les principales forces des pyrrhoniens, je laisse les moindres, sont que nous n’avons aucune certitude de la vérité de ces
principes, hors la foi et la révélation, sinon en (ce) que nous les sentons naturellement en nous. Or ce sentiment naturel
n’est pas une preuve convaincante de leur vérité, puisque n’y ayant point de certitude hors la foi, si l’homme est créé par
un dieu bon, par un démon méchant ou à l’aventure, il est en doute si ces principes nous sont donnés ou véritables, ou
faux, ou incertains selon notre origine.

De plus que personne n’a d’assurance hors de la foi—s’il veille ou s’il dort, vu que durant le sommeil on croit veiller aussi
fermement que nous faisons. Comme on rêve souvent, qu’on rêve entassant un songe sur l’autre. Ne se peut-il faire que
cette moitié de la vie n’est elle-même qu’un songe, sur lequel les autres sont entés, dont nous nous éveillons à la mort,
pendant laquelle nous avons aussi peu les principes du vrai et du bien que pendant le sommeil naturel. Tout cet
écoulement du temps, de la vie, et ces divers corps que nous sentons, ces différentes pensées qui nous agitent n’étant
peut-être que des illusions pareilles à l’écoulement du temps et aux vains fantômes de nos songes.

This fragment begins in midstream, referring to the previous assumption of “those principles” elaborated by dogmatism, of the
dogmatist’s blind faith in them, and in the knowledge to which they give access. The development of the topos of dream and
wakefulness in the second paragraph is a central point of intersection between the works of two exemplary representatives of the
dogmatist and Pyrrhonian camps, Descartes and Montaigne. In the Méditations, the dream-wakefulness problem, which Pascal
develops along similar lines in fragment 131/164, inaugurates the movement of methodical doubt on knowledge of the outside world.
The state of wakefulness is naturally associated with knowledge of the outside world that is claimed by the dogmatists and dream
with the state of epistemological uncertainty and illusion claimed by Pyrrhonians. Is it not possible, asks Pascal paraphrasing both
Montaigne and Descartes, that the state of wakefulness is itself merely a dream, and consequently that all of our knowledge is merely
illusion, the mystified and imaginary product of sleep? In the first movement of the fragment, dogmatism is paired with error and
Pyrrhonism with truth.
Can the destructive negativity of doubt be brought to bear on all knowledge? Pascal, after listing the strengths of the Pyrrhonian
position turns to the only apparently unshakable claim of dogmatism: “Je m’arrête à l’unique fort des dogmatistes qui est qu’en
parlant de bonne foi et sincèrement on ne peut douter des principes naturels.” Such principles are natural, given by nature, and they
cannot be said to derive from imagistic illusion like knowledge of the outside world. And as these principles are the product of natural
and unshakable intuition, and not of the deceptive world, they can serve as the Archimedian point that grounds knowledge. In a first
reversal, truth is now paired with dogmatism and error with Pyrrhonism.

Pyrrhonism, however, can operate a new reversal by turning doubt away from unshakable natural principles and targeting instead our
own nature, or self-knowledge: “Contre quoi les pyrrhoniens opposent, en un mot, l’incertitude de notre origine enferme celle de notre
nature. A quoi les dogmatistes sont encore à répondre depuis que le monde dure.” The subject that thinks natural principles is itself
targeted by doubt and uncertainty, and, as it could never assure its very nature as a thinking and knowing subject, it could never lay
claim to the knowledge that it entertains. By reversal, Pyrrhonism is again placed in the position of truth, and dogmatism, left
powerless to respond, in the position of error.

This is by no means the final reversal, for the silence of dogmatism is only provisional. The fragment goes on to consider the truth of
Pyrrhonism as follows:

Que fera donc l’homme en cet état? doutera(-t-)il de tout, doutera(-t-)il s’il veille, si on le pince, si on le brûle, doutera(-t-)il
s’il doute, doutera(-t-) s’il est?

On ne peut venir là, et je mets en fait qu’il n’y a jamais eu de pyrrhonien effectif parfait. La nature soutient la raison
impuissante et l’empêche d’extravaguer jusqu’à ce point.

Pyrrhonian doubt must end somewhere, and this predicament is not simply a matter of bad faith on the part of the skeptic, as the
passage would seem to suggest, but a structural necessity of doubt. Doubt must end somewhere because of its parasitic and hence
terminal nature: it must always doubt something even if it doubts “everything”; skepticism must affirm its final and concluding doubt.
Such an affirmation of doubt, whatever its content might be, is present to the subject as thought. The very fact of thought allows
Descartes to break with methodical doubt in the beginning of the second Méditation.9 At this moment, by reflexively doubling back
upon the doubt that it entertains, the Cartesian subject is able to recognize and to know with certainty the fact of the effective
existence of its thought. Drawing from what is implicit in doubt itself as thought, the moment of self-reflexivity becomes a cognition (“je
pense, je suis”) that makes the subsequent construction of the Cartesian epistemological and metaphysical edifice possible. This
structural necessity of doubt is one that Pascal himself acknowledges by charting similarly the way in which the Pyrrhonian Arcésilas
must become a dogmatist in fragment 520/453. Once again in fragment 131/164, dogmatism is paired with truth and Pyrrhonism with
error—and once again, it is hardly surprising that this reversal is not final: “[l’homme] dira(-t-)il donc au contraire qu’il possède
certainement la vérité lui qui, si peu qu’on le pousse, ne peut en montrer aucun titre et est forcé de lâcher prise.” Dogmatism cannot
claim a final and decisive victory, for once what is implicit in the act of thought becomes via reflection explicit as a cognitive claim, it is
again subject to doubt and must be relinquished. This predicament prompts a new reversal of the polar associations of truth and
error.
This process of chiastic inversion is carried on infinitely, and each reversal installs a higher level of dialectical complexity that would
claim to account for all of the stages that preceded it. Any such moment, however, must in its turn be undone by reversal. This
dialectic cannot be brought to an end by suspension of debate, for he who adopts such neutrality “sera pyrrhonien par excellence.”
This dialectic can be brought to an end only by repression, by the forcible disruption of the necessary and sequential passage from
cause to effect, for example, from dogmatism to Pyrrhonism and vice versa. Man, in his attempt at self-knowledge, cannot finally,
decisively determine whether he is the man of dogmatism or of Pyrrhonism. 10 Man is a perpetual dialectical motion beyond himself:
“L’homme passe infiniment l’homme.” An eternal “war” is opened between dogmatism and Pyrrhonism as each is implicit in and
required by the other while attempting necessarily to cancel out its symmetrical opposite. Although the process of reversal and
negation is infinite, there is the consequent and necessary effect of drawing the opposing poles together within a single, underlying
unity that constitutes man. Although each reversal effects an exchange of the attributes that, at that moment, reinstalls difference in
an inverted fashion, the continuous repetition of the back-stretched and connected form of the chiasmus binds dogmatism and
Pyrrhonism together by the shared properties of truth and error into a problematic and as yet undetermined whole. Rather than
conceiving at any given moment of this dialectic the dominance of dogmatism or Pyrrhonism in making man what he is, it becomes
possible, in looking back “[de] concev[oir] donc que la condition de l’homme est double”: that is, the two are drawn together within an
underlying unity.

In the Pensées, the dialectic of man’s double condition is summarized by the binary pair “grandeur” and “misère,” which for many
Pascalisants constitute the generic categories that subsume particular dialectical developments such as dogmatism and Pyrrhonism.
The dialectic of “grandeur” and “misère” is again developed by signaling the two necessary aspects of man’s being and is elaborated
by the process of reversal:

APR. Grandeur et Misère.

La misère se concluant de la grandeur et la grandeur de la misère, les uns ont conclu la misère d’autant plus qu’ils en ont
pris pour preuve la grandeur, et les autres concluant la grandeur avec d’autant plus de force qu’ils l’ont conclu de la
misère même. Tout ce que les uns ont pu dire pour montrer la grandeur n’a servi que d’un argument aux autres pour
conclure la misère, puisque c’est être (d’)autant plus misérable qu’on est tombé de plus haut, et les autres au contraire. Ils
se sont portés les uns sur les autres, par un cercle sans fin, étant certain qu’à mesure que les hommes ont de lumière ils
trouvent et grandeur et misère en l’homme. En un mot l’homme connaît qu’il est misérable. Il est donc misérable puisqu’il
l’est, mais il est bien grand puisqu’il le connaît.(122/155)

This fragment summarizes the movement of the dialectic that we traced in fragment 131/164. Indeed, “misère” must follow
necessarily from “grandeur” and vice versa because each is implicit in the other and impels the process of reversal. This infinite
dialectic is characterized by its repetitiveness as it is borne in an endless and vicious circle in which one of the elements supplants
the other only in turn to be supplanted. It is also endlessly progressive, that is, graded in terms of the increasing degree of light that is
shed on the question of man’s nature, for each moment of the infinite dialectical unfolding accounts for those that had preceded it.
The necessary movement of reversal, as both repetitive and progressive, is borne out in the very enunciation of the fragment, and
particularly in the last two sentences. The misery of man’s being must be enunciated as a cognition (“Il est donc misérable puisqu’il
l’est”). To know misery, as was just claimed, is to be great: it is now possible to claim, as the fragment does in closing, the greatness
of man’s being. Nevertheless, man’s greatness is founded on the knowledge of his state of misery, and therefore one cannot claim it
to be true greatness—and so on. The dialectical process repeatedly inverts the association of grandeur and misery of being with truth
and error, but it progressively moves to account for the moments that precede it.
The dialectic that we have analyzed in the fragments above cannot merely be defined as the static opposition of contraries or
antinomies, as Mesnard has suggested. Rather than consisting in the simultaneous positing of conflicting propositions, dialectic is a
chiastic structure that installs an infinitely productive and sequential movement; it is an unfolding of thought that proceeds by reversal
as necessarily as the passage from cause to effect. This dialectic defines a progressive or graded movement of increasing
complexity: each moment of reversal, although not final or closural, may be said to account for the stages that precede it: that is,
each moment goes beyond and reveals what is implicit in the preceding stages. While this dialectic is progressive or graded, it is also
repetitive. The dialectical progression examined in each of the examples above is framed within a single binary opposition (e.g.,
sentiment/reason, dogmatism/Pyrrhonism, grandeur/misery), and each reversal turns on the same properties alternately ascribed to
the opposing poles in such a way that, in essence, every advance, every progress in complexity is also a return to the provisional
dominance of one of the two opposing poles.11 Each dialectical reversal serves to enrich one of the poles and to reinstall division and
difference in a higher form. However, the process of reversal is effected by the repeated exchange of properties, and this very
repetition, which enforces the sharing of properties by opposing poles, serves to draw them into an underlying unity, linking them
through the backstretched connection of the chiasmus.

Graded progression and repetition are the necessary properties of dialectic. We can turn to the Pensées itself for a model of the
interaction of these properties of dialectic, a model that is again taken from the natural and necessary processes of the phenomenal
world:

La nature agit par progrès, itus et reditus. Elle passe et revient, puis va plus loin, puis deux fois moins, puis plus que
jamais, etc.
 Le flux de la mer se fait ainsi, le soleil semble marcher ainsi:

(771/636)12

In order to make sense of the fragment’s claim of natural progress in terms of both graded change (“puis va plus loin, puis deux fois
moins, puis plus que jamais”) and repetition (“itus et reditus. Elle passe et revient”) in terms of the accompanying graph that
illustrates these procedures for two phenomena, we would have to rotate the graph itself and situate it on horizontal and vertical axes.
Each ascent and descent on the graph marks the symmetrical movement to and fro centered on the horizontal axis. The chart of the
temporal progression of the phenomena from point of origin is graded, that is, it is marked by the variation in the peaks of the zigzag
graph. By charting the symmetrical movement of return against the progressive gradation, as the description requires, the graph
appears as follows:
Viewed from the horizontal axis, the phenomena are marked by the progressive motion and modification of the peaks during the
temporal development. From the vertical axis it is marked by the repetitive symmetrical departure and return for each movement of
ascent and descent, or more generally the symmetrical fluctuation from the positive to the negative field of the graph. The gradation
and repetition of dialectical thought, the process of chiastic inversion that installs, perpetuates, and overcomes difference, is as
natural and necessary as the phenomena of cause and effect, of the flux and reflux of the sun and the sea.13

What remains to be determined is precisely why thought and its discourse must proceed by reversal. What mechanism necessarily
triggers the rotating motion of the chiasmus, and in what way is the negative, the symmetrical opposite of thought implicit in the
selfsame thought? The answers to these questions are vital to the interpretation of the Pensées, not only to understanding the
development of binary oppositions within fragments, but also to any attempt at determining the economy of diverse anthropological
and philosophical themes and at binding them into a whole, weaving the many fragments dia tôn lôgon into a single text. We would
do well to look at a more extensive example of dialectic in the context of the development of a frame of reference for the entire text of
the Pensées. The Entretien avec M. de Saci most clearly exposes the nature and structural necessity of dialectic within a possible
and hypothetical construction of Pascal’s presumed apology.14 This text has the unique and problematic status of being both inside
and outside of Pascal’s oeuvre. The dialogue appears in the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Port-Royal of Nicolas Fontaine, who
had served as secretary to Sacy. Debate on the authenticity of the Entretien has centered on the extent to which it faithfully
transcribes the thought of Pascal and Sacy. Literary historians and philologists who have addressed this question have investigated
the extent to which the Entretien is citational, and most concur that it is faithful, their analyses differing only in speculation on the
mode of transmission to Fontaine. There is divergence of opinion on whether the discussion was real or fictitious and, if real, whether
its sources were oral or written, transcribed from memory or stenographically, or derived from notes left by the interlocutors, and, if
from notes, whether these were written before or after the discussion. On one point at least all scholars and editors who have labored
to situate this text, beginning with the abbé d’Etamare, agree: the substance of debate in the Entretien is not the invention of
Fontaine. Regardless of the way in which the text came to be written, it is substantially the citation of Pascal’s thought, and it is
developed along lines wholly consistent with the Pensées. One of the most recent and perhaps most thorough and skillful editors of
the Entretien, Pierre Courcelle, has advocated this position most persuasively in his account of the production of the text. Courcelle
has convincingly argued that Fontaine was, in fact, the first editor of this text as he wove together a series of personal, concise notes
of both interlocutors. Pascal’s notes in the primary form of citations of Epictetus and Montaigne bear the mark of a sort of “reader’s
digest d’un lecteur fervent.”15 The presence of the hand of the editor Fontaine can be detected primarily by the awkward transition
between segments of these notes:

L’Entretien tel qu’il nous est parvenu est bien, en un sens une “fabrication” de Fontaine. Comme pour ses autres
Entretiens, il a utilisé diverses pièces qu’il possédait dans ses archives, et les a raccordées de son mieux. Les points de
suture sont aisément reconnaissables à leur maladresse, au style diffus et aux formules de politesse. Fontaine intervient
encore peu ou prou, assurément, lorsqu’il place des discours au style indirect dans la bouche de ses personnages: c’est
le cas du début de la première tirade de Sacy et de toute la seconde.

Mais son rôle se borne là. Les propos prêtés aux deux interlocuteurs Pascal et Sacy correspondent à la pensée et au
style de chacun d’eux.16

It is noteworthy that the question concerning the status of the Entretien as the citation of its two interlocutors doubles the substance
of the debate within the dialogue itself. The dialogue consists of the excerption and juxtaposition of citations of Epictetus first, then of
Montaigne, by which these two philosophical discourses on man are necessarily drawn into relation to one another. The insertion of
Sacy’s paraphrase of Augustine occurs as a brief intervention to this development. The introduction to the dialogue is essential for
situating the citations of Epictetus and Montaigne. Here Fontaine notes Sacy’s ability to address the penitent in a way that is
proportionate to his interests, and thus he would discuss medicine with a doctor, painting with an artist, and so on. With a savant of
Pascal’s well-known abilities, Sacy similarly attempts to “mettre M. Pascal sur son fonds,”17 that is, in this case, to draw from the
sources that determine Pascal’s part in the dialogue. To the extent that the Entretien itself forms a coherent whole, which is not
always evident because of the awkward transitions between segments that do not flow naturally, this text can be divided into four
principal sections: the exposition of the thought of Epictetus and Montaigne by Pascal; the paraphrase of Augustine on worldly
philosophers by Sacy; the return to the thought of Montaigne by Pascal; the concluding remarks of Pascal on Epictetus, Montaigne,
and their relation to theological “truth.” We focus our remarks primarily on Pascal’s contribution to the dialogue which deal principally
with Epictetus and Montaigne and the philosophical question of man’s nature.

Epictetus and Montaigne are cited by Pascal as exemplifying the two possible discourses on man. He associates their philosophical
positions with the values of “grandeur” and “faiblesse” respectively. Courcelle has definitively determined the precise source of each
of the affirmations glossed from Epictetus’s Manual and Discourses and Montaigne’s Essais. Pascal extracted and excerpted
verifiable citations from these works that were culled and woven together in his exposition of the thought of these philosophers. The
citations of Epictetus expose the principal themes of Stoic doctrine: the duty of man is to recognize and follow voluntarily the will of
God; in and by thought man is free from all coercion and capable of perfection; by the use of thought man can know the true and the
good, and in this very way he participates in the divine. At this point Pascal qualifies Stoicism in terms of “orgueil” and “superbe
diabolique,”18 for Epictetus presumes that man’s determination of the true and the good is consistent with the divinely instituted order
of things and that he can thus come to participate in the essence of divinity. The founding presupposition of Stoicism is exposed not
by Pyrrhonism but by reflection on the place of the subject in the act of thought. In any determination of the true and the good,
thought reflecting back on itself must recognize its activity as purely positional: “belief” underlies and motivates any thought on the
true and the good, which are merely posited at the insistence of the subject. The act of thought as positing of truth undermines the
truth claim made in thought: the determination of the true and the good is merely the product of opinion, of doxa. In fact, the
disjunction signaled in the self-reflexive moment is already contained in the citations of Epictetus themselves—that is, in the
necessary distinction that must be made between the representational statement, the énoncé, and, reflexively, the act of
representation or utterance, the énonciation.19 And what is signaled in this way is the disjunction between the two aspects of
Epictetian thought. In reflexively turning the representational statements of truth in the propositions of Epictetus back upon
themselves, the status of the utterance is revealed: such statements of truth are necessarily positional in that the mode of their
enunciation bears the insistent force of “belief,” of doxa, and this undermines the truth value of the statement itself. In other words,
there is a necessary disjunction between what the cited propositions of Epictetus say as statements of truth and what they must come
to mean in the context of their enunciative or, more properly, illocutionary mode. The illocutionary mode of the Epictetian citation
undermines its status as a cognition, as a transparent and transitive statement of a pre-existing truth.

The disjunction between what the citations of Epictetus say and what they must come to mean in fact can only occur by the reflexive
doubling back that exposes and recognizes the illocutionary status of the statement. The “truth” that is implicit in the citation of
Epictetus, namely that claimed knowledge of the true and the good is in fact positional and doxic, is stated explicitly in the discourses
of Montaigne, whose text, by reversal, is now associated with truth and Epictetus with error. In the Entretien, Montaigne’s
propositions are “true” because they reveal the practice of doxa and because the expression of his thought is deprived of any
“positive term”;20 that is, of any value as cognitive affirmation. For Montaigne, the appearances are the same on all sides, namely,
they are all merely posited appearance, and any determination of the true and the good, whether positive or negative, must be doxic.
This is the thrust of Pyrrhonian negativity. Without knowledge of truth, the only path open to follow is that of custom and common
notions. But neither can Montaigne remain perfectly consistent, for he does not proceed by doxic positing indifferently for and against
but by affirming doxa as a cognition. This, as Pascal notes, is “la seule chose qu[e Montaigne] prétend établir.”21 The statement that
all apparent knowledge is doxic and positional must itself be affirmed, enunciated as a cognition and, in turning reflexively back upon
itself, must recognize itself as such.

This predicament is most evident in the development of the theme of movement in Montaigne, which qualifies Pyrrhonian negativity
as the dislodging of “repos,” the calm certainty of Epictetus or any other dogmatist. Montaigne’s discourses are set in motion by this
principle, which qualifies the ethos and the epistemology of Pyrrhonism. The statement of the fact of such perpetual motion must,
however, be uttered as an affirmation, a cognition, and thus it undermines the authority of what it explicitly says as statement. This is
precisely the situation of the Pyrrhonian Arcésilas in the Pensées:

J’ai passé longtemps de ma vie en croyant qu’il y avait une justice et en cela je ne me trompais pas, car il y en a selon
que Dieu nous l’a voulu révéler, mais je ne le prenais pas ainsi et c’est en quoi je me trompais, car je croyais que notre
justice était essentiellement juste, et que j’avais de quoi la connaître et en juger, mais je me suis trouvé tant de fois en
faute de jugement droit, qu’enfin je suis entré en défiance de moi et puis des autres. J’ai vu tous les pays et hommes
changeants. Et ainsi après bien des changements de jugement touchant la véritable justice j’ai connu que notre nature
n’était qu’un continuel changement et je n’ai plus changé depuis. Et si je changeais, je confirmerais mon opinion. Le
pyrrhonien Arcésilas qui redevient dogmatiste.(520/453)

Knowledge of justice is impossible and is merely the product of the mutability of our nature and the variable judgments that we form.
For this statement of the doxic nature of all judgment to be enunciated, however, it must be uttered as a cognition, as knowledge of
truth. To change opinion again would simply provide another example that confirms the truth value of the cognition. In this fashion,
Arcésilas and any Pyrrhonian must become a dogmatist again. Because the Pyrrhonian position must always rest on prepositional
knowledge, a new reversal takes place. The epistemologically sound knowledge of dogmatism, represented in the Entretien by
Epictetus, triumphs again, and Montaigne and Pyrrhonism are placed in the position of error. But this triumph is short-lived, as this
configuration must necessarily in its turn be reversed.
The exemplary case of the exegesis of Epictetus and Montaigne in the Entretien underscores the nature and the structural necessity
for thought and the discourses of and on man to proceed by dialectical reversal. This exegesis underscores the way in which the
negative, the symmetrical opposite is implicit in the selfsame thought. Dialectic as it is developed here through the citation anticipates
Barthesian “bathmologie.” Proceeding by regression, this metadiscursive practice accounts for levels of meaning produced by the act
of enunciation.22 In the case of Epictetus and Montaigne in the Entretien, the sects that represent the two possible discourses of and
on man, a metadiscursive account reveals that the illocutionary mode of the citation undoes its cognitive or positional status and
leads necessarily to the truth of its symmetrical opposite. This is a structural necessity for all thought and its discourse, a dialectical
process based on mutual necessity and mutual subversion of the juxtaposed citations that proceed in an endless spiral.

In this fashion, an endless and destructive “war”23 is opened between Epictetus and Montaigne, and the intertwining of the two
possible discourses of and on man moves in an endless series of reversals. It becomes impossible to decide whether the discourse
on man and his attempts at self-knowledge maintains the status of epistemology or of positional doxa. In the Entretien, this
predicament is seen to be the human predicament centering on man’s attempt at self-understanding. Insofar as the propositions of
Epictetus and Montaigne are each necessary to the other, insofar as each inscribes the other in its very enunciation, the values of
“grandeur” and “bassesse” or “misère” that they govern respectively are drawn together into a whole in which they both participate.
Each sect is marked or bears the “trace”24 of the truth of man as it is revealed in theology, which assists in drawing the polar
opposites into a unified whole. Significantly in the Entretien, the model for the participation of these opposing parts within a whole is
the metaphoric, imagistic relations of nature and the supernatural:

J’ai pris un plaisir extrême à remarquer dans ces divers raisonnements [d’Epictète et de Montaigne] en quoi les uns et les
autres sont arrivés à quelque conformité avec la sagesse véritable qu’ils ont essayé de connaître. Car s’il est agréable
d’observer dans la nature le désir qu’elle a de peindre Dieu dans tous ses ouvrages, où l’on en voit quelque caractère
parce qu’ils en sont les images, combien estil plus juste de considérer dans les productions des esprits les efforts qu’ils
font pour imiter la vertu essentielle, même en la fuyant, et de remarquer en quoi ils y arrivent et en quoi ils s’en égarent,
comme j’ai tâché de faire dans cette étude!25

Just as nature can be an image, a metaphor for the supernatural, Epictetus and Montaigne in their mutual necessity and
interdependence can imitate, figure the truth of revelation, even in their flight from it. This scheme of metaphoric correspondence of
the two discourses to divine revelation is temporalized, for the discourses of Epictetus and Montaigne at every moment of the
dialectic evoke the past and present condition of man before and after the Fall. The unfolding of the endless and open dialectical war
of Epictetus and Montaigne literally tells the story of man’s destruction and annihilation, but every moment figures another story, and
all moments are drawn together in an allegory of the Fall and the Redemption in Jesus Christ. For this reason Pascal notes in
conclusion that any consideration of the two possible philosophical discourses on man lead necessarily to theological truth.26
According to the model provided by the Entretien, dialectic in the Pensées is not simply localizable in the thematic content of
fragments that are built around such binary oppositions as nature/custom, vanity/plenitude, imagination/reason, and so on. The
dialectic that we have witnessed at work in the Entretien serves a necessarily structural function in the Pensées because it governs
the very situation of the enunciation of the anthropological and philosophical fragments—that is, the illocutionary status of the
discourses of and on man—that editorial tradition has deemed to constitute the core of the first movement of Pascal’s presumed
apology. This dialectic draws fragments and segments of the Pensées together within a “whole” text by charting the mutual necessity
and interference of epistemology and positional doxa.

The dialectic that focuses on the enunciation of the thoughts of the Pensées would account for the extensive practice of citation in
the text. The Pensées, as all major critical editions have made clear, is largely citational, drawing extensively, to name just a few
sources, from Montaigne, Charron, Bérulle, Cusanus, Epictetus, Descartes, and popular maxims, in addition to the Bible and
theological texts. Citations participate in the general economy of the Pensées as segments of those discourses are cut up and
intertwined within fragments and among fragments. Pascal himself has elaborated the importance of citation in the construction of the
Pensées:

Qu’on ne dise que je n’ai rien dit de nouveau, la disposition des matières est nouvelle. Quand on joue à la paume c’est
une même balle dont joue l’un et l’autre, mais l’un la place mieux. J’aimerais autant qu’on me dise que je me suis servi de
mots anciens. Et comme si les mêmes pensées ne formaient pas un autre corps de discours par une disposition
différente, aussi bien que les mêmes mots forment d’autres pensées par leur différente disposition.(696/575)

This fragment is most frequently glossed as a protestation of originality on the part of Pascal according to the rhetorical operation of
dispositio, which distinguishes the Pensées from its apologetical sources. Citational debts cannot, however, be restricted to a single
source, not even to a single category of text. Citation in the Pensées is both empirically and necessarily plural, and it consists of the
integration of numerous texts within the Pensées. Once again Epictetus and Montaigne are exemplary, for these two authors are, in
principle as well as in practice in the Pensées, “the most cited” (745/618). The disposition of, for example, these two exemplary
authors consists in cutting their texts up, reordering, segmenting and grafting them with other texts to constitute a new text distinct
from the individual parts and even the sum of the parts. The fragment in question reveals just what this difference is by establishing
the structural continuity of citational discourse at all levels in the production of a text. The syntagmatic unit of the sentence may be
broken up, fragmented into component words, and each may be cited in a reordered syntagma to produce a different meaning.
Similarly, these units, these thoughts that constitute a “corps de discours,” are cut apart, fragmented then cited within a reordered
sequence to constitute a different text and a different meaning. To cite Montaigne in the Pensées is to reveal precisely that to which
his discourse, as énoncé, is blind—namely the meaning implicit in his discourse as énonciation. And this citation must be brought into
relation with other citations, other segments of text, such as Epictetus’s, because each tries to say the truth of what the other must
come to mean through the very act of its enunciation. The “corps de discours” reordered and reorganized is different from its multiple
and plural sources in that this new discourse displaces the meaning of the citations. The Pensées signals the discrepancy between
what the citations state and what they must come to mean in the context of their enunciation.
In the Pensées, the dialectic of epistemology/doxa receives its most extensive treatment in the fifth dossier entitled “Raison(s) des
effets.” These fragments have received considerable critical attention of late in the context of Pascal’s political thought, and they
would seem to develop thematically a wide array of moral and political “effects” such as justice, force, custom, respect, diversion,
themes also treated in the preceding dossiers and especially the second and third. 27 What is at issue again, and what subtends the
development of these themes, is the language of epistemology and doxa. This is initially established by the original title of the
dossier, “Opinions du peuple saines,” that is, popular wisdom or doxa, which is brought to stand symmetrically against epistemology.
The central thematic opposition of force and justice, as true justice, underscores the same point. Fragment 85/119, headed “summum
jus, summa injuria,” refers the abbreviated discussion of the economy of force and justice to the twelfth Provinciale (“Autrement on
verrait la violence d’un côté et la justice de l’autre. Fin de la 12e Provinciale”), which, as we have seen, explores the conflict and
disjunction in the moral sphere of truth and force as rhetorical doxa. The consistent form of argumentation in the most fully developed
fragments, despite thematic variation, defines a movement of graded and repeated regression from “effet” to subtending “raison” that
at the same time incorporates a movement of reversal, of “renversement du pour au contre.” The movement of rendering “raison des
effets,” as the rational and temporal aspects of the expression connote, is founded on both logical and teleological priority, and it is
carried out by means of metadiscourse on doxic and epistemological discourse.

The movement of rendering “raison des effets” begins with the “proposition” cited from the people “il faut honorer les gentilshommes”
(92/126). For the people, the normative prescription to honor and respect gentlemen, several concrete examples of which are given in
the dossier, is just in the sense of both justice and justesse. The people believe that this prescription is deduced, in a fashion
presumably beyond their comprehension, from knowledge of the just, the good, and the natural order of things. This presupposition is
explicitly stated not in the dossier itself but in fragment 525/454 of the unclassified dossiers in which the people are shown to believe
“que la vérité se peut trouver et qu’elle est dans la loi et les coutumes [et qu’] il les croit et prend leur antiquité comme une preuve de
leur vérité (et non de leur seule autorité (téméraire) sans (raison) vérité).” Truth is not “in” the proposition cited because it is not itself
nor is it grounded in knowledge of being and the just. The proposition is the product of coercive necessity, like the command or force
contained in its very enunciation, and that establishes it as law, a mere product of doxa. That it is just to honor gentlemen is not
epistemologically sound, a logical consequence, as the people would have it, of the equally unfounded proposition that birth is a real
and effective advantage (92/126). The maxim of the people is the necessary consequence of authority and force, which impose the
law and relegate it to the status of doxa.

The recognition that the proposition of the people is doxic is, first, the insight of the “demi-habile.” The opinion of the people is “vain,”
that is, empty, because it is not the product of knowledge: it is not just to honor gentlemen because, as the “demi-habile” knows, birth
is not an effective advantage. Knowledge is on his side because he sees the blindness and error of the people for what it is, and it is
he who can claim to speak for both justice and justesse. But this knowledge of error is itself vain, for the “demi-habile” cannot
substitute true justice for the blindness of the people: “Veri juris. Nous n’en avons plus” (86/120). The discourse of justice of the
“demi-habile,” which claims to be grounded in knowledge of the true and the good, is itself unsound: whereas the people honor and
respect gentlemen, “les demi-habiles les méprisent, disant que la naissance n’est pas un avantage de la personne, mais du hasard”
(90/124). Although it is not epistemologically “juste” that it is just to honor gentlemen, it is also not true that it is just to scorn them.
The justice of the “demi-habile” is itself the product of coercive imposition, and his pronouncements, like those of the people, are
doxic.

At this point in the unfolding of the argument, the register of diction shifts from the fixed epistemological predicates of vanity and truth
to the normative, pragmatic, and flexible values “sain/malsain.” The “demi-habiles” who believe that they “font les entendus” (83/117),
but who in fact do not possess true “science” or knowledge, are precisely those who “troublent le monde et jugent mal de tout”
(83/117). Their opinions, which they claim to be grounded in knowledge of true justice, are not only merely opinion, but they are
opinions that are “malsaines” and represent a threat to social order. The opinions of the people, however, remain vain but are now
ascribed the value of “saines” (101/134). By reversal, the proposition of the people is again associated with the just, and the unjust
with the discourse of the “demi-habile.” The return to the position of the people, however, has occurred with a substantial change.
The complex fragment that makes this point is headed “raison des effets.” It accounts for the effects of both the people’s opinion and
the “demi-habile’s” misguided truth, for both are ultimately in a state of illusion:

Il est donc vrai de dire que tout le monde est dans l’illusion, car encore que les opinions du peuple soient saines, elles ne
le sont pas dans sa tête, car il pense que la vérité est où elle n’est pas. La vérité est bien dans leurs opinions, mais non
pas au point où ils se figurent. Il est vrai qu’il faut honorer les gentilshommes, mais non parce que la naissance est un
avantage effectif, etc.(92/126)

True justice escapes, “Veri juris. Nous n’en avons plus” (86/120). The claim that it is just to honor gentlemen is not epistemologically
“juste,” but the claim that it is just to scorn them is also not “juste.” The people think that the truth is where it is not, and that
mislocation of the truth, according to fragment 525/454, was in the law, in the opinions themselves as grounded in truth. How then
can there be truth in their opinions but not in the place where they believe it to be, as we are told in fragment 92/126? The truth is not
in the opinion as a sound maxim based on knowledge of the just. The truth is in the recognition of necessity, of the necessity of doxa
and not truth that grounds the maxim of the people on the just: “il est vrai qu’il faut honorer les gentilshommes.” The truth lies in the
recognition that the opinion of the people is not founded on knowledge of being, the good, and the just, but that it is the product of
imposition, of force. This is the recognition that the proposition is doxic, “vaine” but “saine,” that it is opinion and must be
opinion—“Veri juris. Nous n’en avons plus.”—, and therefore not true justice but error. Herein lies the “raison des effets.”
This is the position occupied by the “habile,” who talks like the people, cites the people while maintaining a “pensée de derrière”:
““Raison des effets”. Il faut avoir une pensée de derrière, et juger de tout par là, en parlant cependant comme le peuple” (91/125);
“les habiles honorent [les gentilshommes], non par la pensée du peuple, mais par la pensée de derrière” (90/124). The “habile” by the
“pensée de derrière” does not precisely see behind the appearance of things, as Paul de Man says,28 but sees the appearance of
things from an ironic distance and sees them as such. This is the place of the truth of the people’s opinion, in and outside of it:
namely, that the opinion is doxic and not a statement of true justice, that it is in error, but that there must always be this error. Two
sequential fragments in the untitled papers speak of this error as common error and of this necessity where truth is not possible:

Lorsqu’on ne sait pas la vérité d’une chose il est bon qu’il y ait une erreur commune qui fixe l’esprit des hommes comme
par exemple la lune à qui on attribue le changement des saisons, le progrès des maladies, etc., car la maladie principale
de l’homme est la curiosité inquiète des choses qu’il ne peut savoir et il ne lui est pas si mauvais d’être dans l’erreur que
dans cette curiosité inutile.(744/618)
The first fragment underscores the beneficence of the fact of common error where knowledge is lacking, and it extends the field of
doxa from the practical, political sphere to the domain of the natural sciences, which should belong to epistemology. The second
fragment opens by praising the style of Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie, the acronym of Louis de Montalte,
pseudonymous author of the Provinciales, which makes them more apt to be cited. Pascal goes on to give an example, a self-
citation that establishes the explicit link with “Raisons des effets”:
On ne manquera jamais de dire que Salomon de Tultie dit que lorsqu’on ne sait pas la vérité d’une chose il est bon qu’il y
ait une erreur commune, etc. (qui est la pensée de l’autre côté).(745/618)

Again the beneficence of the shared error is noted, but we are invited to recognize with Salomon de Tultie the status of opinion, of
doxa as such by the “pensée de l’autre côté,” a clear variant of the “pensée de derrière.” We are compelled to recognize that
epistemologically sound knowledge is impossible—here, in the domain of nature and, in “Raison des effets”, in the domain of
justice. Knowledge is reduced not only to opinion or doxa but furthermore to common error.

With the triumph of doxa, we return to the traditional rhetoric as persuasive discursive reasoning founded on opinion. The distinction
between rhetorical doxa and epistemology and the status of each is drawn in succinct fashion in fragment 512/670 of the Pensées on
the well-known distinction between the “l’esprit de finesse” and “l’esprit de géométrie.” These two are distinguished as distinct modes
of reasoning characterized by their fields of applicability: to geometry belongs speculative matters (“choses spéculatives”), that is,
epistemology, and to finesse worldly matters of the practical realm, that is, the field of rhetorical doxa. The “principles” employed by
finesse are “dans l’usage commun et devant les yeux de tout le monde” (512/670). These principles are common in the sense that
they are shared by all, given to all who would only “look” at what is presented to them in the world of practical affairs. The distinction
between geometry and finesse is most forcefully drawn by the principal attributes accorded to each: to the former belongs cognition,
the faculty of reason, the interiority of the mind, and to the latter, the sensuous, exterior contact with the world. With repeated
insistence, the fragment draws the force of finesse not from knowledge but from the experience of vision (“voir la chose d’un seul
regard,” “la vue bien nette,” “[la] bonne vue”), from nature and sensation (the principles of finesse are sensed, “on les sent”), both of
which are to the side of truth, and give access only to the world of appearances.

As we have seen, rhetorical doxa as opinion is invested from the start with the notions of the will and the passions, of the body and
sensation, of the world of appearances, and of values governed by the nonepistemological categories of pleasure and pain. Gadamer
has shown that “sensus communis” constitutes the core of the traditional rhetoric, and he notes that both segments of the bifurcated
etymology of “sensus” determine the rhetorical, for it is at once to articulate a common opinion (“sentire” = to have and to express a
judgment, to opine) and to sense, to perceive by the senses.29 Rhetorical doxa, finesse, is shared opinion or judgment based on
shared sensation and experience that founds the community. We have seen that the Logique de Port-Royal, in its discussion of
sophisms in the context of the traditional rhetoric, analyzes the epistemological status of such discursive reasoning by which
sensation, pleasure and pain, and the passions engage in the transport of their properties to the outside world. This process was
shown to be based not on a phenomenal model but instead on a linguistic model by which “sophistic” and rhetorical propositions act
by imposing or positing a truth. Rhetorical doxa is a distinct mode of discourse that is not cognitive and constative but performative,
and this fact defines its error. The sensus communis of rhetoric is also error communis, and this would determine the “erreur
commune” of rhetorical doxa that the “habile” recognizes in the dialectical process of rendering “raison des effets.” In speaking like
the people, the “habile” sees what the people are blind to: that the words they both speak are founded in rhetorical doxa and are thus
in error. But the “habile” also recognizes that this error is necessary in any discourse in the practical sphere of political and moral
justice. Thus the prescriptive categorical imperative—one must honor gentlemen—is not simply a localized example of the
performative use of language in moral and political discourse. All cognitive statements on the good, the just, and the natural order of
things are founded on and are examples of positional speech acts, of the rhetorical language of the “will” as positing power.
Language as performance subtends the discourse of the good and of justice by positing always and everywhere the truth that it
states.

The triumph of the “habile” and of rhetorical doxa in “Raison des effets” is, however, only provisional. Fragment 90/124 follows the
movement of reversal that we have traced thus far and beyond in a movement that it defines as hierarchically graded:

Gradation. Le peuple honore les personnes de grande naissance. Les demi-habiles les méprisent, disant que la
naissance n’est pas un avantage de la personne, mais du hasard. Les habiles les honorent, non par la pensée du peuple,
mais par la pensée de derrière. Les dévots, qui ont plus de zèle que de science, les méprisent, malgré cette considération
qui les fait honorer par les habiles, parce qu’ils en jugent par une nouvelle lumière que la piété leur donne. Mais les
chrétiens parfaits les honorent par une lumière supérieure.

Ainsi se vont les opinions succédant du pour au contre selon qu’on a de lumière.

It is now possible to target the “pensée de derrière” of the “habile,” the position from which he cites the people on the just.
Recognition of error is, nevertheless, a cognition, the knowledge of error, and the devout man sees what the “habile,” while speaking
like the people, tacitly confirms as true, namely that worldly justice is epistemologically unsound. In a new reversal, we return to the
proposition of the “demi-habile,” but at a new gradation of insight. In the higher light of divine inspiration, the devout man sees the
injustice of the claims of the “habile,” and he also realizes that divine institution has established a true justice for which he speaks. But
this reversal must in turn be reversed, for indeed the devout man has more zeal than knowledge. In accordance with Augustinian
doctrine, the perfect Christian, who sees by yet a higher light, realizes that the true justice of God remains forever unknown and that
in the order of the world it is necessary to substitute the imposed justice of the world for it. The dialectic of epistemology and doxa is
pursued in the endless process of the “renversement continuel du pour au contre” (93/127).
The development of “Raison des effets” elaborates the way in which the Pensées may be said to be about thought and its
discourse, whatever specific subject or theme it may treat. This is because the dossier charts the mutual dependence and mutual
interference of epistemological and doxic language. Perhaps more explicitly than others, this dossier centers on metadiscourse that
targets cited segments of epistemological and doxic discourse, exposes their dialectical economy, and specifies the linguistic
operations and illocutionary status of each in the enunciation of thought. Effaced to some extent in the fragments we have examined,
the presence of this cognitive metadiscourse emerges in the exposition only as the mastery of the dialectic of epistemology and doxa.
Metadiscourse is more clearly marked in the fragments on justice and force. Most critics agree that this pair constitutes the central
binary opposition of the dossier and establishes the symmetrical poles according to which all thematic elements in the dossier are
distributed.30 We turn to the most extensive fragment on justice and force, which is situated as the culmination of “Raison des
effets”:

Justice, force.

Il est juste que ce qui est juste soit suivi. Il est nécessaire que ce qui est le plus fort soit suivi.

La justice sans la force est impuissante. La force sans la justice est tyrannique.

La justice sans force est contredite parce qu’il y a toujours des méchants. La force sans la justice est accusée. Il faut donc
mettre ensemble la justice et la force, et pour cela faire que ce qui est juste soit fort ou ce qui est fort soit juste.

La justice est sujette à dispute. La force est très reconnaissable et sans dispute. Ainsi on n’a pu donner la force à la
justice, parce que la force a contredit la justice, et a dit qu’elle était injuste, et a dit que c’était elle qui était juste.

Et ainsi ne pouvant faire que ce qui est juste fût fort, on a fait que ce qui est fort fût juste.(103/135)

The fragment opens with the distribution of essential properties to justice and force: to the former belong truth and innocence; to the
latter, sheer coercive power. These associations are expressed in the opening sentences as propositional cognitions. The
prescriptive laws of justice are deduced from propositions on the just, the good, and knowledge of the true order of things. It is
therefore just, in the sense of both legitimate justice and justesse, that the prescriptions on the just be followed. Force, however, has
no truth on its side: its prescriptive laws rely on coercive necessity. Justice, then, has truth but lacks power; force has power but lacks
truth. It is significant that at this point the analysis should turn to the language of justice and force. Force in speaking has the power to
contradict justice and to impose its prescriptions. When justice, which is powerless, speaks, it can only accuse force; it can only
expose in the name of what is “juste” that force is unjust, that force is merely force and that it merely acts by imposition. The situation
is reminiscent of the twelfth Provinciale, and indeed, as we have noted, fragment 85/119 headed “Summum jus, summa injuria”
parallels the same development of the economy of force and justice and refers to “[la] fin de la “12”e Provinciale.” This section of
the Provinciales is the culmination of the discussion of the language of truth and the language of force. The latter acts by
imposition—that is, its propositions are positional—and by inscribing the statement within such a performative act, the propositions of
force merely bear the illusion of transitive referential truth. The former, however, does not act but merely states the fact of referential
truth, and it can expose the error of force as a cognition. In fragment 103/135, the outcome of the confrontation of the language of
justice and force is predictable. Justice can be disputed, because it must allow force to speak as well as itself; force is monological,
allowing no dispute. Force, in acting by imposition, proclaims and commands that the just is unjust and that it is itself just. But this
analysis of the discourse of justice and force is possible only because it is developed as a metadiscursive cognition. For this reason
only is it possible to cite what force has said and to state as a cognition what its propositions do and how they operate. It is for this
reason that we can come to know the power of the language of force to posit and the error of its usurpation.

The fragment is largely consistent with other fragments that center on the “opinions du peuple saines” and with our analysis of
epistemology and doxa. Fragment 103/135 and those related to it in the dossier “Raison des effets” are written in a tonality of
greater pathos, but it is tempting to see in them, as Laurent Thirouin has argued, Pascal’s final word on his horror for and admiration
of the political and social order.31 Before succumbing to this temptation, we would first have to consider most seriously Paul de Man’s
invitation to examine in the rhetoric of the analysis of justice and force the extent to which the rhetorical, positing power encroaches
upon the field of cognition. Only through metadiscourse is it possible to understand the disjunctive operations of justice and of force.
As de Man has argued, force in speaking for itself has the power to declare itself epistemologically “juste” and to declare justice
unjust; it can declare itself, with concealed imperative force, cognitive when in fact it simply acts as performance:32 “ainsi on n’a pu
donner la force à la justice, parce que la force a contredit la justice, et a dit qu’elle était injuste et a dit que c’était elle qui était juste.”
Such rhetorical force always and everywhere has the power to impose itself and to usurp the field of cognition, that is, surreptitiously
to substitute the performative act for the statement of fact. If this is the case, then it becomes impossible to decide whether this
fragment and the others of the Pensées are enunciated in the performative or the cognitive mode; whether they are positional acts or
statements of truth.

This predicament defines one interpretation—and a properly dialectical interpretation—of aporia as an impossible choice between
two competing alternatives. This is a position that de Man would seem to endorse in a first, cursory reading of his argument in which
he concludes his analysis of the fragment on justice and force by noting that “language in Pascal … separates into two distinct
directions: a cognitive function that is right (juste), and a modal function that is mighty (forte) in its claims to rightness.”33 As it is
formulated here, the relationship between the two competing discursive modes would lead to the negative knowledge that the
necessary choice between them is impossible. But the break that de Man signals is even more radical, for it is not even possible to
situate the aporia as one between two identifiable modes of language: that is, cognitive or epistemological, on the one hand, and
rhetorical, doxic, or performative on the other. In order to show just how the predicament is nondialectical, we will have to push the
analysis farther. For one thing, in the closing sentences of fragment 103/135, force is the impersonal subject “on” that imposes its
own usurpation of justice and justesse. Force in speaking imposes from the start the essence of justice and force and the difference
between them; force as metadiscourse establishes by imposition the two modes of discourse, and allows each to unfold. Rhetorical,
performative force has always already triumphed, has always already usurped the field of cognition. Force in this passage reflects on
itself as metadiscourse and tells us in the guise of a cognition that it acts by imposition.34 But force as performance can only name
itself as such in the mode of the epistemological cognition that it discredits and whose place it usurps. Again, as we have seen,
rhetorical doxa presents as a referential statement of truth, as representation, what is just a linguistic act, the positing in the
imperative mood of a referential truth. Doxa marks the illusion of an epistemological, cognitive statement where there is just
performance, the self-reflexive, self-referential linguistic act. The referential meaning of a doxic statement is illusory precisely
because it is merely the product of positing, and thus the statement is deprived of all cognitive value. In fragment 103/135, we are
confronted with metalanguage that tells us how the discourses of force and justice function and what the essential difference between
the two is. But this metalinguistic cognition is itself just the product of force. Force attempts to name itself as if it would recognize itself
and could produce a statement on itself—namely, that it is performative and acts by imposition. Such a cognition, however, would
have to be just another illusory product of force. An act or a force such as this must be blind to itself, although “act” and “force” are no
longer valid here as terms of metadiscursive mastery: we can no longer speak of the speech act in terms of a cognition on doing and
imposing. If language must always be doxic, performative, if it is always a force before it is cognitive, and if the act first discredits as
illusion any referential statement of fact, then the knowledge gained by this insight is precisely what is excluded as illusion. The final
illusion to be dispelled is to think that we can know what it means in terms of referential meaning and truth for language to be a
rhetorical force, a positing power. The knowledge that language as force acts by positing imperatively is just one more example of
such referential illusion.

As metadiscourse on epistemological and doxic discourse, fragment 103/135 tells us that this determinate distinction is the effect, the
product of a first rhetorical doxa, a force that cannot be known and named. Language is first this originary rhetorical doxa, this force
over which there can be no cognitive mastery, for this first performative, this first force, supersedes cognitive or constative language.
Thus language can claim no theoretical or regulatory control over this force. This ultimately is the singular “raison” that produces the
dialectical effects of epistemology and doxa. It is, however, always necessary to transform and translate this first force into cognitive
terms, into referential meaning in order to speak of it as a determinate act, or simply as an act, which the act in turn must just as
necessarily undo as mere illusion. In other words, such translation always puts an illusory statement of truth, of meaning, where there
is only rhetorical force. As rhetorical doxa, language says nothing as referential statement—this is the illusion that it condemns. This
first rhetorical doxa, this first force, must always be converted into referential meaning—that is, into something—whether this be
positive or negative, whether this be Pascal’s meaningful vision of the truth of man and God or, symmetrically, the absence or
ambivalence of determinate meaning. The predicament we encounter in “Raison des effets” tells us that any attempt at
understanding language as saying something, any conversion of rhetorical doxa into meaning, whether in positive or negative terms,
must necessarily be aberrant. And as the Pensées is a text, an example of the discourse of this first rhetorical doxa, of this first force,
any attempt at understanding the Pensées, any interpretation eliciting meaning, whether positive or negative, will always be aberrant
because it turns force into meaning, into the very illusion that force denounces and disqualifies. This is not just true of positive
interpretations of the Pensées but also of those “deconstructions” that would undo them and substitute for this some form of negative
knowledge.35 In fact, such negative knowledge becomes the referential meaning of the Pensées, and thus it is just another example
of the referential illusion that language as rhetorical doxa dispels. As first force, first rhetorical doxa with no possible reflexive
knowledge of this fact, language becomes a third possibility in the dialectical pairings of symmetrical opposites: it does not yield
absence of meaning as opposed to presence of meaning, but non-meaning; not absence of truth as opposed to presence of truth, but
non-truth. The Pensées cannot say this in terms of a cognitive statement, a meaningful statement, but can only dramatize this
predicament, act it out in the fragmented sequence of thoughts on religion and various other subjects.

The text of the Pensées thus becomes the site of first or originary rhetorical doxa, the third, nondialectical possibility. This third
possibility is not the resolution of the dialectic of epistemology and doxa, but it is what precedes them and makes their dialectical split
and economy possible. We have traced dialectic from a necessary structural pattern of thought and discourse to the moment of true
aporia, which, again, does not yield a negative insight or found a negative interpretation of the Pensées. Instead, it is not possible to
make the rhetoric of the text as first doxa coincide with meaning, whether positive or negative. Furthermore, this predicament would
qualify the status of the fragmentary nature of the text and the way in which the question of the problem of the fragment must be
enunciated. For this question is almost always formulated in terms of interpretability as positive and negative meaning, that is, in
terms of dialectical symmetrical opposites and not in terms of the third possibility. Indeed, on the one hand, the positive hand, the
fragmentary nature of the Pensées would just be an unfortunate historical accident on the way to the completed apology, and the text
could be reconstructed with some measure of success as a meaningful whole. On the other hand, the negative hand, the fragment
becomes the necessary form of expression of the contradictions and subversion that underlie and structure the Pensées. These
contradictions and subversions make the constitution of the text as a meaningful whole impossible and void the text of determinate
meaning. But on the third hand, the third, nondialectical hand, at issue is the noninterpretable rhetorical status of the fragment as first
force, first doxa. This third predicament determines the fundamental problem of the interpretation of meaning of the text as the
undoing of language as meaning, whether positive or negative, in the Pensées.

Notes

1. Jean Mesnard, Les Pensées de Pascal, 173.

2. The case cited by Mesnard accords with the extensive use of the exemplum in the Pensées. Michel Le Guern argues that this
“imagistic” figure functions most commonly in the Pensées by establishing metaphoric relations between the concrete and the
abstract (L’Image dans l’oeuvre de Pascal, 190-207).

3. Mesnard, 173.

4. See, to name only a few such works: Hugh M. Davidson, The Origins of Certainty: Means and Meanings in Pascal’s Pensées;
Lucien Goldmann, esp. 216-27; and Mesnard, esp. 178-270.

5. The generalization of dialectic in this sense has led to the repeated accusation that some Pascalisants anachronistically import
nineteenth-century dialectic to a time in which it does not belong (see Jean Molino). Note, however, that this form of dialectic as a
general matrix for thought usually ascribed to Hegel did not emerge ex nihilo. Dialectic historically cannot merely be confined to
agonistic dialogic debate and argumentation. Indeed, Zeno of Elea, generally credited with being the inventor of dialectic according to
the prevailing representation in the history of ideas, used dialectical reasoning to demonstrate that every thesis contains the radical
opposite of what it confirms. In Zeno of Elea, this form of negativity is not merely destructive, but on the contrary presupposes and
promotes the idea of the reconciliation of opposites in the Parmenidian One.

6. Translated literally, the Greek citation reads: “the animals runs.” A neutral plural noun subject in Greek governs a third person
singular verb just as, by inversion, a first person singular subject governs a first person plural verb in idiomatic provincial French.

7. John W. Welch, introduction, 11.

8. Paul de Man, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” 14.

9. Descartes, Méditations métaphysiques, Oeuvres philosophiques 2: 414-29.

10. This dialectical state is concisely summarized in fragment 406/25: “Nous avons une impuissance de prouver, invincible à tout
dogmatisme. / Nous avons une idée de la vérité invincible à tout pyrrhonisme.”

11. It is from here that Goldmann’s notion of flattened, “tragic” dialectic and impasse in Pascal is derived. See esp. 216-27.

12. We follow the lesson of the Sellier edition here as it, unlike the Lafuma edition, faithfully transcribes the zigzags of the autograph
manuscript.

13. Pierre Force, following the lead of Fortunat Strowski, notes that the zigzag in this fragment corresponds perfectly to a modern
graph of the periodic oscillations of the sun and the sea in charting both temporal progression of the phenomena and the symmetrical
fluctuation from positive to negative fields (Pierre Force, “Itus et reditus: de l’impossible édition d’un zigzag,” 418-19).

14. I do not claim that the Entretien represents the decisive statement on Pascal’s plan for the (presumed) apology. My interest in the
Entretien is that, while clearly anticipating the dialectic of dogmatism/Pyrrhonism in the Pensées, this dialogue presents a clear
account of the stakes of dialectic—that is, its nature and structural necessity—in the Pensées. The Entretien also imposes an
interpretation of the Pensées, which I take to be just that: an interpretation, an example of interpretation. The more pertinent question
to which we shall return later is whether dialectic can live up to the promise of sustaining and substantiating this or any other
interpretation.

15. Pierre Courcelle, 166. In his edition of the text, Jean Mesnard distinguishes more rigorously than does Courcelle between
paraphrase or citation of Epictetus and Montaigne and mere thematic “resemblance.” However, Mesnard, like Courcelle, concludes
that Pascal’s contribution to the dialogue is based on a personal “recueil” of those two authors (Jean Mesnard, introduction, Entretien
avec M. de Sacy, OCM 3:102-06).

16. Courcelle, 165. André Gounelle’s subsequent study of the Entretien follows Courcelle’s assessment of the origins and
construction of the text (esp. 21-23).

17. Entretien avec M. de Saci, OCL 292b/OCM 3:130.

18. Entretien, OCL 293b/OCM 3:134.

19. François Récanati has traced the question of the reflexive status of the linguistic utterance to the analysis of the representational
sign in the Logique de Port-Royal and ultimately in Descartes. The problematic dates (at least) from speculation in the seventeenth
century on the sign as representation. In the authors mentioned, the analysis of representation accounts for both the reflexive status
of the sign qua sign and its transparent function as representation of some determinate content. In the context of Descartes and the
Logique, Récanati states that “une idée en effet n’est signe de son objet que si elle représente cet objet comme objet de
représentation, autre que la représentation elle-même; l’idée doit représenter son objet comme distinct de l’idée, et par conséquent
l’idée doit être, dans la représentation qu’elle opère de l’objet, réfléchie comme distincte de l’objet ainsi représenté. La différence
nécessaire du représentant et du représenté doit se refléter dans la représentation elle-même” (21).

20. Entretien, OCL 293b/OCM 3:137.

21. Entretien, OCL 293b/OCM 3:137.

22. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, 71. I am grateful to Pierre Force and John Gallucci for calling this passage to my attention.

23. Entretien, OCL 296b/OCM 3:153.

24. Entretien, OCL 296a/OCM 3:152.

25. Entretien, OCL 296a/OCM 3:151-52.

26. “Je vous demande pardon, Monsieur, dit M. Pascal à M. de Saci, de m’emporter ainsi devant vous dans la théologie, au lieu de
demeurer dans la philosophie, qui était seule mon sujet; mais il m’y a conduit insensiblement; et il est difficile de ne pas y entrer
quelque vérité qu’on traite, parce qu’elle est le centre de toutes les vérités; ce qui paraît ici parfaitement, puisqu’elle enferme si
visiblement toutes celles qui se trouvent dans ces opinions” (Entretien, OCL 296b/OCM 3:154).
27. See, for example: Erich Auerbach, 101-29; Gérard Ferreyrolles, Pascal et la raison du politique; Christian Lazzeri; Jean Molino;
Laurent Thirouin, “Raison des effets: essai d’explication d’un concept pascalien,” 31-50. Ferreyrolles and Lazzeri elevate Pascal’s
political thought to the status of privileged category within which to situate his anthropology of post-lapsarian man. Despite significant
differences in their analyses, both Ferreyrolles and Lazzeri have documented exhaustively the development within the political
dimension of themes such as concupiscence and morality, the orders of mind, heart, and body, and the imagination and reason, all of
which are central to Pascal’s vision of man and his world. Indeed, Ferreyrolles’s work is largely a function of demonstrating his initial
thesis that in Pascal “le politique engage bien une métaphysique” (11).

28. De Man, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” 22.

29. Gadamer, 19-28. Gadamer draws Pascal’s remarks on finesse into the rhetorical tradition of sensus communis. The rhetorical
tradition of sensus communis would also explain the distinction made in fragment 520/453 between finesse as judgment and
geometry as cognitive esprit. More recently, Martin Warner has underscored the close associations that obtain between Pascalian
finesse and the rhetorical tradition (159-208). Warner draws together sentiment, coeur, and finesse by signaling the cognitive as well
as the volitional aspects of all three; however, he goes on to grant epistemological soundness to all three. This last part of his
argument is unconvincing because the Pensées repeatedly emphasizes the dependence of l’esprit de géométrie on sentiment in
order to proclaim the epistemological unreliability of this foundation of geometric reasoning. For example, in fragments 418/680 and
419/680 Pascal argues that the primitive terms of geometry, which are characterized as sentiments, are the epistemologically
unsound product of custom and habit of the body. Finesse itself is based on opinion, sensation, and nature; in other words, on doxa.
This is, of course, the very basis of Aristotelian rhetoric, with which Warner himself allies Pascalian finesse (207). It is because of the
epistemological unreliability of rhetorical finesse that we should not be surprised, as Warner seems to be, that the Pensées does not
ever achieve the “unification of finesse and géométrie” (191).

30. Auerbach was the first to formulate the underlying unity of the fragments on justice/force and those on the “opinions du peuple
saines.” The former condense the movement of gradation in the latter. (“On the Political Theory of Pascal,” 124).

31. Thirouin, “Raison des effets: Essai d’explication d’un concept pascalien,” 48.

32. De Man, 22.

33. De Man, 23.

34. At issue in this fragment is the linguistic status of “force,” namely, what the language of force does (i.e., that it acts by imposing,
positing referential truth in the imperative mood rather than transitively reporting it in a neutral propositional constatation), or, in terms
of speech act theory, its illocutionary function or “force.” Louis Marin’s seminal and insightful analyses of this dossier, focusing on
fragment 103, in both La Critique du discours and Le Portrait du roi have elided the properly linguistic questions (i.e., what does the
language of force do as language? what is this force in language?) with the extralinguistic question of the power of the language of
force to produce an effect, or, in terms of speech act theory, the perlocutionary function. In Marin’s analysis of fragment 103 in Le
Portait du roi, force becomes the power of language not in its ability to perform a linguistic act but in its ability to produce an effect
outside of language (16-36). Marin’s charting of the transgression of the symbolic, i.e., language, into the imaginary seems to set this
course for resituating force in the domain of external effects of language. For Marin, empirical or spatio-temporal force, in putting itself
into signs, becomes the external referent of all discourse. What fragment 103/135 brings into focus, however, is that we must
first—because of what force does as language—examine force as a linguistic mode before turning to effects that it produces. As we
shall see, this first question asks about the status of a discourse that at once requires and undoes referential meaning. This force of
language, internal to language—and distinct from empirical, ideological, or political force—is precisely the issue raised by the
discourse of justice in Pascal, as Jacques Derrida has recently noted. In the context of the analysis of what force does in language in
fragment 103, Derrida argues that “this Pascalian pensée … concerns a more intrinsic structure, one that a critique of juridical
ideology should never overlook. The very emergence of justice and law implies a performative force, which is always an interpretive
force: this time not in the sense of law in the service of force, its docile instrument, servile and thus exterior to the dominant power but
rather in the sense of law that would maintain a more internal, more complex relation with what one calls force, power or violence …
[The] very moment of foundation or institution [of justice] (which in any case is never a moment inscribed in the homogeneous tissue
of history, since it is ripped apart with one decision), the operation that consists of founding, inaugurating, justifying law (droit),
making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpretive violence that in itself is neither just nor
unjust and that no justice and no previous law with its founding anterior moment could guarantee or contradict or invalidate” (“Force
of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” 941, 943).

35. This movement from positive to negative interpretation, from presence of meaning to its absence, is an eminently dialectical
predicament. In one variation of this form of deconstruction, Sara Melzer has charted the way in which the Pensées is a reflection on
its own language that is built on establishing “aporetic” conflicts between signifying functions, such as that obtaining between literal,
proper language and rhetorical, figurative language, which make language into a system of absence of determinate meaning and
truth, and the Pensées themselves consequently “uninterpretable” (esp. 109-45). Melzer’s analysis still constitutes an interpretation,
albeit negative, whereas a strong reading of de Man’s analysis, like the one I have developed here, calls into question the possibility
of this or any other interpretation.

Bibliography

Works by Pascal
Pascal, Blaise. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Louis Lafuma. Paris: Seuil, 1963.

Pascal, Blaise. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Jean Mesnard. 4 vols. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1964-(92).

Other Works Consulted

Auerbach, Erich. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. Paris: Seuil, 1979.

Courcelle, Pierre. L’Entretien de Pascal et de Sacy: Ses sources et ses énigmes. Paris: Vrin, 1960.

Davidson, Hugh M. The Origins of Certainty: Means and Meanings in Pascal’s Pensées. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979.

De Man, Paul. “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion”. Allegory and Representation. Ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1981. 1-25.

Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority”. Trans. Mary Quaintance. Cardozo Law Review 11.5 (1990):
920-1045.

Descartes, René. Oeuvres philosophiques. Ed. Ferdinand Alquié. 3 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1963-73.

Ferreyrolles, Gérard. Pascal et la raison du politique. Paris: P.U.F., 1984.

Force, Pierre. “Itus et reditus: De l’impossible édition d’un zigzag”. Romanic Review 79 (1988): 412-421.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, 1975.

Goldmann, Lucien. Le Dieu caché: Étude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de Pascal et dans le théâtre de Racine. Paris:
Gallimard, 1959.

Gounelle, André. L’Entretien de Pascal avec M. de Sacy: Étude et commentaire. Paris: P.U.F., 1966.

Lazzeri, Christian. Force et justice dans la politique de Pascal. Paris: P.U.F., 1993.

Le Guern, Michel. L’Image dans l’oeuvre de Pascal. Paris: Armand Colin, 1969.

Marin, Louis. La Critique du discours: Sur la Logique de Port-Royal et les Pensées de Pascal. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1975.

Marin, Louis. Le Portrait du roi. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981.

Melzer, Sara. Discourses of the Fall: A Study of Pascal’s Pensées. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986.

Mesnard, Jean, ed. Les Pensées de Pascal. Paris: SEDES, 1976.

Molino, Jean. “La raison des effets”. Mesnard, ed., Méthodes chez Pascal, 477-496.

Récanati, François. La Transparence et l’énonciation: Pour introduire à la pragmatique. Paris: Seuil, 1979.

Thirouin, Laurent. “Raison des effets: Essai d’explication d’un concept pascalien”. XVIIe siècle 34 (1982): 31-50.

Warner, Martin. Philosophical Finesse: Studies in the Art of Rational Persuasion. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989.

Welch, John W., ed. Chiasmus in Antiquity: Structures, Analyses, Exegesis. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2016 Gale, Cengage Learning

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Koch, Erec R. "Pensées: Dialectic and Rhetoric." Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 255,
Gale, 2016. Gale Literature Resource Center,
https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420121674/LitRC?u=naal_aub&sid=LitRC&xid=2835932e. Accessed 9 Apr. 2020. Originally
published in Pascal and Rhetoric, Rookwood, 1997, pp. 108-143.
Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420121674