“What Is the Self?”

“The self is hateful. You, Mitton, keep it under cover, but you don’t remove it. Thus you are still hateful” (494.) Pascal is addressing Damien Mitton, his libertine friend, a theoretician of the honnête homme. Honnêteté dissimulates the self, self-love, but does not annihilate it. Pascal attacks his friend: you are hateful, despite your altruism (494). The honnête homme is a hypocrite: thanks to his human civility, his self is not the “center of everything,” but only Christian piety can convert self-love into charity.

But the self is not always identified with self-love in the Pensées:I sense that I might never have been, for my self consists in my thought. Thus the I who thinks would never have existed, had my mother been killed before I had been brought to life. So I am not a necessary being. (167)

The use of the word moi, translated here as “self,” as a substantive in French, is recent. We find it in Descartes, and this fragment from the Pensées recalls Descartes’s second “Meditation”: “For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist” (Meditations, p. 37). Pascal, for his part, insists on the contingency of the self. The self lacks necessity, lacks substance, and natural philosophy is incapable of justifying its existence.

Another paradoxical fragment from the Pensées actually has “What Is the Self?” as its title:

Given a man standing at a window to see the passers-by: if I pass by, can I say that he was standing there in order to see me? No, for he is not thinking about me in particular. But consider the man who loves someone because of her beauty: does he love her? No, for smallpox, which will kill beauty without killing the person, will make him no longer love her. (567)

It has been noted that Pascal’s highly beloved sister Jacqueline had facial scars after contracting smallpox at the age of thirteen. But readers of Pascal have most often been reminded of a page in Descartes’s Meditations about men who are passing by in the street. How can we know, Descartes asks, whether the form that is passing under a hat is a man or an automaton? Pascal uses the scene differently. He does not ask whether, for the observer, the passersby are really men but whether the man at his window is expecting him, himself.The self here is not self-love but what distinguishes an individual, what makes someone a person. In the framework of natural philosophy, the self is an undeniable reality whose immediate presence we can sense, but this reality is incomprehensible. Every individual is a person, but that person is indefinable.

We must be careful not to get this wrong. Pascal does not maintain that there is no self but that it is impossible to determine the essence of any self. The self is neither a substance nor an accident. The love one has for someone is inseparable from that person’s beauty, and if the beauty disappears, Pascal asserts, the love is destroyed. What does it mean to love if one loves for beauty and if beauty is an accident? It means that the object of that love was not the being, the self, of the other. The self—that mysterious unity of the soul of which we nevertheless have immediate certainty—is inaccessible.

This question besets Pascal:

And if someone loves me for my judgment, for my memory, does he love me myself? No, for I can lose those qualities without losing myself. Where is this self, then, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul? And can one love the body or the soul apart from its qualities, which are not at all what makes the self, since they are perishable? For would one love the substance of a person’s soul abstractly, and no matter what qualities it might have? That cannot be, and it would be unjust. So we never love anyone, but only love qualities. (567)

It is no longer a question of the beauty of the body but of the faculties, judgment, and memory, intellectual realities emanating from the soul:

I can readily conceive of a man without hands, feet or head, since it is only experience that teaches us that the head is more necessary than the feet. But I cannot conceive of a man without thought. It would be a stone, or a beast. (143)

Judgment and memory are attributes of thought. But the self does not disappear in the person who loses them, in an insane person or someone with amnesia. We run up against an aporia, and the self remains a mystery: “Not knowing by ourselves who we are, we can only learn this from God” (182).

One never encounters only qualities. Why then should we not pay our respects to persons of high status? “For the self to be constituted as an authentic being,” as Jean Mesnard put it, “grace must link it with the only necessary being, which is God” (Les Pensées de Pascal, p. 305).

A Summer With Pascal

Antoine Compagnon