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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:01.703)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Yuval Abnor, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Humanities Institute at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Dr. Abnor, wonderful to have you on today.
Yuval Avnur (00:18.04)
Thanks very much for having me. I'm delighted that anyone's interested in Pascal, so it's a great pleasure.
PJ Wehry (00:22.919)
I am. Yes. So and I normally my book like I ask why this book? That's the first question I ask. What I love is your book kind of asks that question in the title. Why read Pascal today? So why this book? Why why should we be reading Pascal today?
Yuval Avnur (00:36.206)
Yeah.
Yuval Avnur (00:42.862)
Yeah, so actually it's part of a series. It's a new series by Cambridge University Press. Why read them today? So, you know, there's a Why read Descartes today. I believe there's a Why read Maimonides today. So there's there's a lot of books coming coming out I gather in that vein and I got Why read Pascal? So that's that's the story with the book. I've been working on Pascal for
I don't know, several years now. You know, got a couple of things coming out. Actually, a companion to Pascal, one of those Blackwell companions just came out a few weeks ago. I co-edited that with Roger Ariav, who's sort of the the main, the guru, the Pascal guru. He's the sort of the the main translator. He did the sort of standard translation of the panse for Hackett.
And he's also a Descartes scholar.
PJ Wehry (01:45.287)
think I have that up on the shelf.
Yuval Avnur (01:50.028)
If you have the panse, it's probably that one, yeah, in English. So yeah, I've been doing a lot of Pascal stuff. If it's interesting, can tell you how I got into Pascal because this was not my... This is not what I signed up for, not what I got into philosophy for. And generally, I get into these historical projects sort of...
Despite myself, I do analytic philosophy. I'm just interested in the questions more than the people usually, but this guy really got me. So I guess I could tell this little story. I love teaching and I love especially teaching intro. And like many...
PJ Wehry (02:36.135)
Sure, go for it.
Yuval Avnur (02:46.52)
like many Intro to Philosophy courses, mine include a little thing on something called Pascal's Wager. And it's something that you do, maybe you and your listeners know or think you know about Pascal's Wager. And there's a kind of a standard way to teach it. You draw kind of square matrix on the board and you say, here's what happens if you believe that God exists.
believe that God doesn't exist and either God exists or doesn't exist. And then you work out, we can talk about it in detail later if you want, but you you work out the consequences. And then you assign like, I don't know, a two page excerpt from Pascal to go along with your lesson. And over the years, I just kept noticing and like, I don't think that the excerpt I'm assigning says what I'm saying. It says in class. I just don't get and there's so much else in there and I'm just not get it.
I don't feel comfortable teaching this classic argument from the history of philosophy. I there are few arguments that have been that famous and influential through the centuries. And I just don't, I just didn't feel like I had a handle on it. So one day I retired to my office and I got, oh my God, here's the panse. And I just kind of start flipping through. And...
I don't know how much you and your listeners are familiar with Augustine, the confessions. I think it's in the confessions. This might be my own confession here, not remembering well. I think there's a part in the confessions where he sort of like opens up the book and a particular song that he really needed at that point in his journey to read. sort of randomly or not randomly, you know, read it. I had something like that.
PJ Wehry (04:41.285)
I'm pretty sure you're talking about, is that the take up and read? Is that that passage? Yes, that's the confession. Yes. You are on track. Yeah.
Yuval Avnur (04:45.057)
Yeah, yeah. No, okay. Thank God. So I had kind of a experience like that with the ponce. You know, I opened it up. I'm just going to try to read it to understand the context. Maybe I can understand this argument better that I've been teaching apparently for years. And I opened it up to this passage that
This little passage in the panse is the one that really that still is the one that that I think that sort of motivates my interest in Pascal. And it's this it's this little excerpt about the sky and the birds and it's a little dialogue he's He and an imaginary interlocutor. It's kind of a lot like reading Wittgenstein where there's little dialogues in the middle of the middle of the page. And, know, the other guy says,
Something like, don't the sky and the birds prove God? And Pascal in his own voice says no. And the interlocutor says, but doesn't your religion say so? And Pascal says no. And then he says the darndest thing. He says, for while it is true for those with faith in their hearts, is, he's sorry, he says it's true in a sense, it's proof in a sense.
For those with faith in their hearts, it's false for the majority. And I thought, what is this guy confused? Like, what does that mean? I we're looking at the same, I'm standing here with my interlocker, looking at the same sky and birds. It's either proof or it isn't. And what is this in the sense, in a sense stuff? And you bet, you know, but then I realized, you know, Pascal is one of the great mathematicians of his age. So he, he was no stranger to
PJ Wehry (06:39.579)
Cough
Yuval Avnur (06:43.181)
It's not like he doesn't know what he's talking about. So I thought, okay, this is kind of interesting and what does this have to do with the wager? And so then I was kind of off reading that, reading a couple of his other essays, talking to people, trying to figure out, you know, what this seems a lot more interesting than we realize. here, know, several years later, I got like a couple of books and articles and,
And this is all anyone wants to talk to me about. So that's the story.
PJ Wehry (07:14.959)
Hahaha!
What was your original research on? What was your original kind of area?
Yuval Avnur (07:23.039)
I am kind of all over the place. I have to, you know, fess up to that. So my, my, the core of, of most, most of my work has been on the problem of skepticism. So, you know, I've written tons of stuff on, all kinds of skeptical problems about our knowledge or about our ability to
have justified beliefs about the world, about other things, and that kind of spread into an interest in whether we should be skeptical about our own political and social beliefs, given the way that we form them online. I got interested in this sort of the notion of an echo chamber on social media and so forth. So I got into applied epistemology that way. all along, know, since the beginning, was a
I've been interested in skepticism about religious beliefs and maybe their counterpart, strident atheistic beliefs. I've just always been interested in
why we're so sure about everything. that's kind of my main, that's always been my main philosophical focus, but I've gone all over the place. I went through a phase with David Hume, just like I'm going through a phase with Pascal now, a little over a decade ago. So was very interested in David Hume as well. A lot of people are surprised to know that Hume read Pascal. And actually, I think when you...
when you understand what Pascal was doing, turns out, although David Hume makes fun of him, I think it's plausible that Pascal had a huge influence on Hume. There are some passages in the panse, you could just lift them and put them into Hume. So that's been an interesting connection. And then I'll just mention this, there's this book I've been, book project I've been working on for like 12 years. That's kind of embarrassing.
Yuval Avnur (09:29.285)
I hope the editor for the press isn't watching this I'm not done. But yeah, I've owed this for a long time. It's a book about how we know what we think we know about the afterlife. If you ask people what they think happens after you die, most people you run into are pretty confident in their answer. They'll give you different answers. So I have a book about coming out.
hopefully in the next year or two about the afterlife. So that's an overview of what I'm into.
PJ Wehry (10:04.475)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (10:08.603)
Well, and it's you you kind of started by talking about how scattered it was, but it makes sense moving from skepticism to Hume to Pascal. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me.
Yuval Avnur (10:23.265)
Yeah, looking back, you can make sense of these things. But while it's happening, I just feel like a scatterbrain. But thank you. No, this is a good session. I feel like I should be paying you if this is making me feel better.
PJ Wehry (10:27.783)
No, no, I think it makes sense. Yeah
PJ Wehry (10:37.383)
I will so I and I this this is frustrating to me I read an online article and I've never been able to find it again because I kept telling people about this on Pascal's wager is what one of the first things I read about Pascal's interesting because the first time I heard Pascal's wager it was described in kind of the well called the classic way which doesn't really make sense and is really skewerable right like it
Atheists love to make fun of it. It's like, just believe this it's like that's not how belief works So you have to follow the evidence all these sorts of things And the article that I read Said that his point wasn't his point was that we have belief-forming practices and so that you should obey in order to believe so which Anyways, I don't know if that's what you came to but I was like
Oh, that's a considerably more interesting argument. what you see, and I think you, you know, this kind of comes in in your book. Let me pause here real quick. Also to say, I really appreciate that they're coming out with the series because when I look at Pascal resources and you're mentioning them to people, this book is $20 and 160 pages. And then the Blackwell companion.
is $180 and I think it's probably 600 pages and which is great for specialists but I think for the average person it's like so Pascal what's something you point me to and I'm like well there's this $200 book with highly split you're like it's I think it's a beautiful thing and I appreciate you contributing to it so I want to make sure to say that
Yuval Avnur (12:04.683)
Yeah.
Yuval Avnur (12:16.927)
Right. Yeah, yeah.
Yuval Avnur (12:24.333)
Thank you.
PJ Wehry (12:27.259)
But what is the role of the heart in rationality? And maybe we do get into Pascal's Wager, we talk about kind of the way that it has been taught, and then what you found as you were digging into the context.
Yuval Avnur (12:42.815)
Yeah, so these are the two great things you're bringing up, the wager and the heart in Pascal. These are two obviously giant topics and in the book, each of those topics gets its own chapter. But I will say that the wager, the way I set it up in the book, the wager is the second to last chapter. you really need to understand what he's doing there. I think you need to understand a lot else about
his philosophy and his theology. So, you know, and I'm happy to get into the details of the Wager or maybe what are the misconceptions of the Wager. I don't know what article you read, but...
PJ Wehry (13:28.231)
I can't find it. It's the most, it's the worst.
Yuval Avnur (13:30.605)
Yeah, look, there's, I mean, let me actually start out by telling you a couple of things that indicate that the standard picture of the wager is definitely wrong. So the standard picture of the wager is that Pascal is giving you an argument to convince you to believe something.
That's not true. So he says elsewhere more than once that believing in God on the basis of your reasoning
is useless for salvation. It's shallow in the sense that as soon as you turn your attention away from it, you may no longer be convinced. So it's pointless. And he says a lot of sort of derisive things about these proofs of God's existence. Some of them, frankly, sound a lot like Hume, as I mentioned before. You know, what's the use of these abstract reasonings, right?
So it would be weird, wouldn't it, if he thought that on the other hand, some practical argument for belief is what you need in your life, right? That would be bizarre. That doesn't really fit with the way that we understand the wager. That's one big clue to the reader of the... If you read the entire pansees, like, wait, Pascal's not aiming ultimately to get me to believe something by some strategic considerations.
That's one big clue. Another big clue is that he says throughout, and we know this in the panse, and know everything else he wrote from that period, and we know this because we know he was involved in Port Royal and the so-called Jansenist movements and so forth.
Yuval Avnur (15:27.149)
what's needed for salvation and not just salvation, but what's needed to escape the misery of the human condition as he described it.
as he described it very well in a way that I think applies to our contemporary situation very eerily. What you need is for your heart to be in the right place. You need to love the right things. So wouldn't it be odd if the point of the wager is to give you a cold calculated way of figuring out what you need or what you should do?
to for your own advantage.
without any consideration of whether or how that would change your heart. So it's very hard to square the kind of classical, sort of the now classic understanding of the wager with the rest of what he wrote. And when you read it in context, when you read the rest of the panse, these notes, and then you read the wager, I think you get a really pretty different thing. By the way, the fragment that we
call the wager, it's not entitled Paris, it's not, he doesn't use the French word for wager. It's infinirien, it's infinity nothingness is Roger's translation. And there's a good reason for that too. In fact, there are other lengthy fragments where he talks about the significance of the notion of infinity to human life. So,
Yuval Avnur (17:11.403)
I'm saying all of that to kind of whet your appetite. Like, so there's so much else in Pascal, you can't really pick out just this fragment and think you can, you know, make very good sense of it. You know, I'll just know one last thing that's puzzling about the wager if you don't know the rest of Pascal. On Pascal's view, it's only by God's grace that your heart gets put into the right place, if it ever does.
PJ Wehry (17:13.147)
Yeah.
Yuval Avnur (17:40.776)
And one of the classic objections to the wager is, well, if God knew that you were just scheming, why would he like that? But of course, for Pascal, God would have to have been involved to change your heart in the first place. So of course, there's no issue there. He's either going to do it or not. anyway, that's just a comment on how
alienated our understanding is of the Pascal, of the wager from what Pascal was actually doing. then you asked, you know, really asked the, you went to the heart of the matter, so to speak. You really asked the right question. What is the role of the heart in Pascal? This is a huge question. The heart plays a lot of different roles at different parts of Pascal's view. And there's never any place where he says, here's what I mean by the heart.
So we don't have a definitive passage on that. And I think it's worth explaining to people if they're not familiar why that is. So the main source of philosophical views that we have from Pascal is this thing called the panse. And if you notice, if you have more than one edition of it, chances are they're in a different order from each other. They look like different books, right?
PJ Wehry (18:50.876)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (19:05.158)
Yep.
Yuval Avnur (19:06.381)
ordered in completely different, sometimes they're numbered differently. If you try to find a passage from one, in one edition, they might not have the same number in the other edition, so you won't be able to match them. So what's up with that? Well, Pascal...
Yuval Avnur (19:27.06)
as decorated and incredible as he is for all of his accomplishments, know, inventor of the calculator and the first public transit system and, you know, the pioneered experiments to establish the existence of the void and invented probability theory and on and on and on. And, you know, was a polemicist in the provincial letters and so forth. He died before he was 40. So
PJ Wehry (19:32.039)
you
Yuval Avnur (19:54.122)
And he was in the middle of putting together a book, a kind of an apology for the Christian religion. And he died before he could complete the book. He died before he could write the book. And what we had on his, what they found on his desk were these collections of notes. He had organized some sheets of paper that he had notes on into bunches. But that's it. And, know, and, know, there were things crossed out and there were, you know,
things written in all kinds of ways. I mean, was clear he was just walking by and, you know, jotted an idea down. And that's what we have. they were, after his death, they were collected as the thoughts of Mr. Pascal. And over the centuries, you know, different editors have thought it appropriate to order them in different ways, because we don't know what the order was supposed to be. There, I'm going to stop geeking out on the history in a second, but there is an account or two of,
PJ Wehry (20:48.048)
No, it's fine.
Yuval Avnur (20:51.777)
talk or a conversation where Pascal describes to people his plan for the book. So we do have some idea. And there are headings on these bundles, right? And the headings are included in most good editions. So they're numbered differently according to different editors. They're published differently. It's a mess. And he never put the book together. So had he written the book, maybe he would have said, here's what I mean by the heart. But he never
does. What we have is the notion of Kuro, or the heart, appearing in different contests and actually doing different things. And now I have a view of my own about what he meant or what he thought he meant. It's not, there's no, as far as I know, consensus.
PJ Wehry (21:40.069)
Yeah.
Yuval Avnur (21:47.636)
know, view among the few scholars that there are that actually, you know, get into the details of Pascal. And there are greater scholars than I, but they're from, you know, and they have different contexts, they different things they're doing. I hesitate to push my own view, but I'm pretty sure we can make sense of the heart if we read broadly enough and see all the places that I'm... So the first thing...
that I think it's helpful to do is to first look at some of the uses that he makes of the heart and then think about what was he reading, what was he thinking about, why the heart? And I think you'll find that there are uses that he mentions in the Bible of the heart that are probably key to understanding what he meant and also in Augustine. Augustine had a huge, obviously,
Well, not obviously, but when you look at the history of Pascal the Man, Augustin was a key figure for him in this phase of his life. And by the way, when we say Jansenists, what we mean, or least what I think people mean, is followers of the sky Jansen, who wrote a treatise on Augustin that was very influential with a group of intellectuals in France at the time, centered around the Port Royal.
PJ Wehry (22:59.909)
Yes, you're here.
Yuval Avnur (23:12.449)
And so I think it's better to just call them Augustinians. I mean, they were really focused on Augustine and they were kind of rivals of Jesuits who, I guess, were kind of more into the Aquinas side of things. Now, of course, and I'm getting this from you. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (23:32.751)
Is that, forgive me, is that, is that Mullenism as well? Are we like, is that? Okay. Like, no, no, no, it's fine. It's fine.
Yuval Avnur (23:37.57)
That's slightly different. That's slightly different. Yeah. And the more, and I don't want you to ask me about that stuff because we're going to reach the limit of what I pretty soon, but like, but there's a lot, there's a long, there's a long history to these debates. But one thing that I've read that I think, you know, makes a lot of sense when you read the provincial letters and you read some of the criticisms of Pascal and his buddies, you know, you can't.
You can't be a Catholic and criticize Augustine. Augustine's one of the church fathers, maybe the church father, right? So you can't say like these Augustinians are wrong. You say Jansomus wrong, right? So they're Jansomus, right? So I think that was like a political thing. I think of Pascal as an Augustinian. And when I do and when I read Augustine, it really makes sense.
PJ Wehry (24:19.803)
But could say Jansenists are wrong.
Yuval Avnur (24:35.597)
So that's just a tip for those who want to read it. He was very taken by Augustine and the sort of Augustinian theory of the fall is, I think you can't understand Pascal without understanding that. And I say all of that, I want to actually make sure to include this too. I'm talking a lot about history and Christianity and theology right now.
You don't need to believe any of that to get a world of philosophical insight from Pascal. So we're just kind of, I'm talking too much because I had too much caffeine, but that's not Pascal's fault. Right? I'm giving you this background so we can talk about the heart. But, you know, I think once you do this little bit of work, a little bit of digging, you really get these big insights into human nature.
into our nature as believers, you know, we'll talk a little bit more about the heart in a second, but you know, the picture you get from Pascal is that, you know, the human being is really a heart with a belief-forming mechanism as an afterthought attached to it. And one mistake that a lot of philosophers made, according to Pascal, is to think that it's the other way around.
And so anyone who's interested in beliefs should really be interested in this. And I'll say that I think there's quite a bit of, if you like, empirical support for the kind of view that it turns out, the kind of picture that Pascal has of us as believers. So back to the heart. What do you know? Oh yeah, go ahead.
PJ Wehry (26:21.019)
Well, real quick, yeah. So I think it might be helpful at this point to say that the way I got interested in Pascal and I found your book is because I started reading Pierre Bordeaux, who's one of the more influential sociologists of the 20th century. And he was talking about belief-forming practices, which extends far beyond theology. And he literally...
Yuval Avnur (26:30.563)
yeah.
Yuval Avnur (26:43.853)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (26:49.383)
Pascal's one of his biggest influences. He wrote a book called Pascalian Meditations. From what I understand, I haven't gotten to that particular book yet that's pretty heavy reading. But it has to do with the... like he's reading the Ponsays and responding in a Ponse-like fashion. so enormous... so you can't understand it without the theology because it's what the 1600s? mean it is what it is.
But that's just one strand and there's many more. I mean, if you talk about Hume, you're gonna talk about huge philosophical impact. So anyways, I thought that might be useful.
Yuval Avnur (27:27.467)
Yeah, absolutely. absolutely is. You know, that's one of the reasons actually, I think, that Pascal's neglected, unlike all the other famous 17th century, 18th century philosophers, is there's a bit of an entrance price you pay. You know, you got to understand a little bit of the theology or the history of it to kind of get it. And that's because he never wrote the book.
I think he would have probably, I don't know what he would have done, but I think there's a good chance it would have been much more accessible if he had sort of set the table for us from scratch. But instead what we have are notes to himself to write. So that requires that we know a little bit more about the context. So I will put it like this. So there's like sort of two steps, I think, to understanding the heart.
PJ Wehry (28:01.553)
Yeah
Yuval Avnur (28:25.577)
in Pascal and then we can talk about whether we think it's true, whether we think it's interesting for our lives today. So the first thing is to what use did he put it? Like what is the heart supposed to do? And the really interesting thing to me is Pascal was in a sense a thorough going skeptic about reason and experience. He wrote in different places and in different ways. He thought that Montaigne, the great
you know, his great skeptical predecessor. And of course, Descartes was his contemporary. They knew each other. He thought that, let's say in the realm of geometrical reasoning, reason can only get you so far. Reason doesn't establish your natural sort of starting point, for example, that, you know, that any quantity can be doubled.
is not something that you reasoned to. It's just nature. You were just naturally so sure about that. You're more sure about it, he says, than any premises and a proof you could put together to try to prove it. So it's nonsense to try to prove it. And similarly with our basic concepts, he said, we can intuit concepts and things like this, but some concepts are so clear that if we tried to define it in other terms,
where we'd be defining a clearer thing by appealing to less clear things. So nature at this stage in his thought sort of gives us these starting points. Reason doesn't. Reason works on top of the starting points. So already we see here a limitation of what reason can get you. And it turns out he thinks a kind of a similar thing. There's a similar kind of limitation on experience. So he doesn't think that
There's any way by using reason or experience that you can know that you're not dreaming. He thought Pascal was wrong about this. Sorry, he thought Descartes was wrong about this. So Pascal thought Descartes was wrong about this. You know, he thinks he's very clear. It's only by faith that we know that we're not dreaming. Now we can come back and say what that means, what that is. It's less cheesy than it sounds. He actually has a really nice point there.
PJ Wehry (30:33.851)
Yes.
Yuval Avnur (30:51.819)
So there are these limits, we could go on and on, there are these limits on reason and experience and what they leave out, what they cannot establish is a heart-shaped void. So in every case, it's going to be the heart that somehow establishes the foundation or that which is outside the realm or the order of reason and experience.
So we already have one good task for whatever the heart is, it's going to be the thing that fills in for what reason and experience can't do. Because Pascal is not a skeptic in the sense that he thinks we don't know we're awake. He thinks we know we're awake, just not by reason and not by experience. He thinks we know the truths of geometry. It's just that not by reason alone, it requires something else.
So, so think of it as a heart shaped void, right? And we got some, we got some work for the, for the heart to do. Another thing the heart does is it determines what you want, what your will is. Heart, the heart determines the will. And because it determines the will, it can determine whether you're leading a miserable
pointless life or not. Because if you want the wrong things, if you want things that aren't really going to make you great or happy, then even if you satisfy your desires, you're not going to be happy. And you're going to be in this weird state where you're getting what you want, but you're not happy. And that insight, which he puts it much more compellingly and beautifully, you just have to read it yourself.
But I mean, that stuff really gets me, you know, because that really describes our moment that you constantly getting what you want. You want to see another video? Click the thing. You see another video. You want another snack? Go get another snack. You want to sit down? You're tired? Sit down. And we're still not satisfied. And this is something that Pascal was really onto. Why are we not satisfied when we're getting what we want? Look how pampered we are.
PJ Wehry (32:57.201)
Hmm.
Yuval Avnur (33:16.493)
It was like, oh, it's a little too hot for you. Turn on the AC. It's a little too cold. You're like, because we want the wrong things. We don't want the right things. And so that's problem of our heart. He says it's a problem with our heart. So the heart also has the task of determining what it is we want in such a way that if we don't want the right things, our lives aren't going to go very well. So in a deep way, what we want. So, wow, there's quite a I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (33:43.198)
Which
Yeah, I mean, and that I mean, you to talk about the Augustinian influence. That's the disordered loves. Right. Yeah.
Yuval Avnur (33:51.586)
Yes, yes, this is not a coincidence. He was a big Augustinian, as I said. So the idea of the heart as the sort of seat of the will, I guess, is one way to put it, is an Augustinian idea.
PJ Wehry (34:00.796)
Mm-hmm.
Yuval Avnur (34:04.791)
But then finally, just the one last little task, and then we can see what the heart actually is for Pascal. We're now, just, remember, we're just making a wish list of things that this thing, the heart, is going to be able to do. Another thing it does, very plainly, it's your affective part. It loves, wants, fears, you know, we already talked about wants, but...
It's what you love, it's what you hate. It's how you feel.
So one in the same thing does all of this. And so you have to start wondering like, hmm, did Pascal have a clear idea of what this was? Some people think no. Some people think that the heart is like a variable for a mathematician for Pascal, where it's just like, you know, it's a thing that does this. It's a thing that does that. And it's characterized by what it's not. So it's in some cases not reason. It's not experience. It's not.
one will, but it's another will or something like that. You could, you could, I believe, muddle through Pascal and think that I think there's so much more evidence in what he wrote that about the heart that I'm not. I don't like believing it that way. So if you take a look at the sort of most obvious bits of scripture and Pascal, for those who haven't read, says again and again, all he thinks the answers are in scripture, that he's like.
When there's a puzzle about what to do in Pascal world, you go to scripture. If it's not in scripture, don't do that. If it isn't scripture, do that, right? It's very simple. And the parts of scripture that he talks about that involve the heart, there's basically two. And one, probably the most obvious one, is the hardening of Pharaoh's heart in Exodus.
PJ Wehry (35:43.623)
Yeah
Yuval Avnur (36:03.413)
And he actually uses the term, I mean, he says hardened heart, like some people's hearts are hardened against this or that conclusion. And so, you know, the rough idea there, and as a Jew, I have to point out, you know, I think it was Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who pointed out it's not just hardened, there's other things that happen to Pharaoh's heart. It becomes heavier.
and a couple of other, does a couple of other things, but they're all in the vicinity of hardened. So it's okay to miss that, I guess. But know, but Pharaoh's heart, there's a couple of interesting features of it. It determines what he's sort of open to believing and what he's not open to believing. And it also determines, or doing, it determines what he's open, it's a kind of stubbornness, right? The hardness of the heart.
So if your heart is hardened against a corset action or against a belief, that means it's a lot harder to get you to do that. You're stuck. Your heart isn't open to it. And another interesting thing that's very salient when you read these parts of Exodus is that it's not always a matter of his own internal agency. Sometimes God hardens his heart. So it's an external thing that might change your heart.
PJ Wehry (37:08.817)
Mm-hmm.
Yuval Avnur (37:31.005)
And now this is a nice coincidence with the affect element of the heart because you can't just it's like Bonnie Raitt saying, you know, I can't make you love me if you don't like or you know your heart you can't make your heart feel something it won't it's a great song everybody look it up, but You know, you can't just decide to love something
The thing has to be lovable. You have to be moved. And so it's out of your hands in a certain way how your heart feels. Just like it's kind of out of Pharaoh's hands how hardened his heart is. In fact, God was trying to make a point. So he made his poor God, you know, like he hardened his heart. So those are two features that are crucial, I think, to how Pascal is thinking about this. Another place, another scriptural
PJ Wehry (38:15.559)
Mm.
Yuval Avnur (38:23.645)
use of the heart that I think Pascal probably had in mind is in, I think it's in the Psalm, inclined my heart. It's David saying, inclined my heart towards you. So God can also incline your heart towards a conclusion or a course of action, just like it can harden your heart against a conclusion. So we're getting a sense of the heart as that which makes you attracted to or repulsed.
PJ Wehry (38:32.54)
Hmm.
Yuval Avnur (38:55.263)
Yuval Avnur (38:59.085)
to something in the world or something to do or something to think. And this, it's really cool because this is what Pascal thought is in the center of the human being. It's the thing that it's pulling and pushing attraction and retraction from things in the world. We are essentially, that's what we really essentially are. Beliefs, it turns out, are kind of downstream from that.
In the same way that they are for Pharaoh, he doesn't believe that the God of Israel is the greatest God, is the highest one. He's just as hard as hardened against that. And so he manages the evidence that Moses keeps giving him accordingly. And and Pascal thought that's what we do. So our will at one point, he says, our will is the principle organ of belief. And he says, not because it produces belief, but because it kind of determines what we focus on and what we try to see in the world.
And so he's describing, you know, as someone who's familiar with some contemporary psychology, it's like he's describing motivated reasoning there, right? He's describing how our motivations can affect what we see and how we process what we see. So back to your amazing question, what is the heart in Pascal? I think it's something like that. And I think we can go through each of the functions that I just listed and see how it plays that role. We have to do a little work to do it, but I think we can do it. So
PJ Wehry (40:20.967)
Yeah.
Yuval Avnur (40:27.941)
and there's, there's exactly, exactly, exactly right. Exactly right. So that's why I don't go the route of, of some of my friends who think that, you think that, you know, it's just a variable. It's like, well, that's what it would look like if you just found a bunch of notes about something, but, know, but then you can do some work and, and unify them. And I think you, I think you can, I guess I'll leave it.
PJ Wehry (40:29.403)
Which you'd expect from fragments though.
Yuval Avnur (40:57.933)
for people to read my book to see how this function solves the geometry problem, solves the dreaming problem. You know, I mean, you can think about, can think, I mean, I guess it's fun to talk about a little bit about the dreaming problem because, and to see how the heart plays the role there because I think it's really intuitive there. So, you you recognize right now that it's technically possible that this is a dream. And there's nothing,
PJ Wehry (41:00.945)
Peace.
Yuval Avnur (41:28.237)
super convincing that you're going to come up with, you know, to tell you for sure that it's not. This is the old Cartesian thought that Pascal was obviously aware of. But you don't, you're not feeling it. You feel like this is clearly you're dealing with reality right now. Right? and the in French is, so like you feel.
that this is that you're awake, that this is reality. Now, how does this make sense? Well, one way to understand it is like the things you love, the things you want, the things that are most sort of moving to you are the things you're experiencing, the things in the realm of what you experience. so you want them as real. And so you can't really take serious your heart is hardened against the possibility that you're
that you're dreaming because you don't you don't will like that. We don't will like things. We don't will, you know, dream objects. We will things as real. So, you know, like I'm going to want to want a sandwich. I don't want to dream sandwich. I want to like a sandwich. so that's a bit of a simplistic way to put it. But I try to sort of work that out how that might work. Very, very important. I just want to know for your skeptical listeners.
This isn't supposed to be an argument. This is not, you don't have evidence that you're not dreaming. You know that you're not dreaming, but not through evidence, not through reason or experience. Pascal's very clear about that. So the skeptic is right about something and the dogmatist is right about something. Skeptics write that it's not reason or experience that gets us this knowledge. So it's a very big thing to be right about. Dogmatist is right though that we know.
Feeling something with your heart is a way of knowing something, according to Pascal.
PJ Wehry (43:33.159)
Yeah, and I think that idea of passion leading to purpose, like through desires, that our passions, if I can put it that way, you know, like our affections, you know, that terminology is really like has a lot of history, but gets to our purposes and our purposes determine in a lot of ways our questions. And I think that's
That's where I've become really interested. It's like where do we get our axioms to believe in? Where do we get the questions that we even start asking? It's because what we see and what we love, right? Like what I love is what I look at. I mean that just becomes obvious if you have kids or if you've ever taught kids. It's like you can tell what kids love because it's what they'll ask questions about, right? It's what they'll think about and that's gonna become
Yuval Avnur (44:23.041)
Right.
PJ Wehry (44:27.291)
that's gonna majorly form their beliefs because they're gonna ask specific questions which is gonna give them specific evidence. Is that kind of a way to think about it?
Yuval Avnur (44:37.301)
It's a way to think about it for sure. mean, he says things a little bit more... He goes into a little bit more detail than even I let on just now. I mean, he says, you know...
PJ Wehry (44:45.573)
Yes, yes.
Yuval Avnur (44:49.953)
something like, I'm just relying on memory now, which is dangerous, but he said something like, the heart determine what aspect of things or what perspective of things that you'll see. And so there's a very real sense in which two people standing next to each other looking at the same thing. I'm sorry, this thing keeps dinging. I don't know why it does that. There's a really, really very real sense in which two people might be looking at the very same thing, but if their hearts are in different...
places, they want different things, they love different things, they're repulsed and pulled towards different things, they'll see something quite different so much so that their experiences might be incommensurable. And this is such a key point, actually bringing it back to the beginning of our discussion about the birds in the sky, so the sky and the birds, right? So this dialogue with someone, so I could be standing, you I like to picture, you know, since Pascal was into the Psalms,
PJ Wehry (45:29.287)
Hmm.
Yuval Avnur (45:47.278)
Picture David looking at the sky. There's a famous Psalm, the sky declares God's glory. And so David's over here having a moment, looking at the sky, like this declares God's glory. And you can imagine someone, maybe like one of us, standing next to him thinking, oh, the sky looks nice. Maybe it even looks glorious, but I don't think it's declaring anyone's glory. Right?
We're seeing it differently. And I think we can understand this once we understand the role of the heart because you mentioned kids. I like to use the following thought experiment analogy. So say I go and pick up one of my daughters from her preschool. And while I'm waiting for her to come, I see a bunch of a wall full of
you know, finger paintings that all the kids made that day. And what am I doing? I'm just looking for the one that she made. Right? was just skipping all over all the other ones. was like, that's the one she, look how cute. Her little fingers made this and she's so talented. And you know, she's so interesting. And it's this experience I'm having of looking at her painting is, is has a different significance from the experience I have of all the other ones. But there's nothing
PJ Wehry (46:53.767)
Of course. Yeah.
Yuval Avnur (47:14.379)
like spooky or mysterious going on there, right? It's my seeing her painting is an episode in a relationship I have with her.
And another parent comes in and sees the exact same painting. Let's say she painted the sky and the birds that day. You know, the other parent is looking at the very same painting. They might think it's nice. They might think she's good or whatever, but they're not interested in it in the same way that I am. And, you know, let's say the parent thinks that I'm delusional and I actually don't even have a kid. And so what should
What should that parent say about my experience? That's what the secular person should say to David, looking at the sky, right? And they should think, well, look, it's not like I'm hallucinating. It's not like I'm seeing something that's not there. The painting's there. The sky is there. It's just that I have a bunch of misplaced emotions about it. I'm interpreting it wrong. And so it's this matter of interpretation that Pascal was sensitive to that I think
most modern philosophers weren't. And so that's what makes it so special. That's what makes it so exciting to read Pascal. So he really thought that...
That that's the sense in which some people see God everywhere in nature and in things and in each other and others don't. It's that very same sense of seeing an aspect of something, interpreting it a certain way, feeling a certain way towards it. And now there's this big question like, OK, so is it proof or not? Right. If the parent next to me doubted whether I even have a daughter, I could not appeal to the way that
Yuval Avnur (48:59.821)
that that painting makes me feel to prove it to her that I have a daughter. That's nuts. Right. And he says, Pascal says at certain points when he talks about these kinds of proofs where, you know, the theist says, look at the sky, isn't it amazing? This isn't the argument from design. That's a different that's a different argument. This is just sort of a look. And Pascal says it'll only arouse contempt and give them reason to think that the proofs of our religion are very weak.
It's not a good proof. But he does say, as I paraphrased before, it's proof for me in a sense. It's good question. Like, in what sense is that proof for me? Well, of course.
that her painting is right in front of my face and entails that she exists. So in a sense, it's like, yeah, she was here. Like, it's proof in that sense. It's proof in a sense for David that God exists, that the sky declares his glory. But it's only in a sense because, of course, he had to love God before he saw the sky or antecedently, at least, to seeing the sky before he perceived it as declaring God's glory. So it kind of gets the order back.
PJ Wehry (50:13.543)
Hmm.
Yuval Avnur (50:14.701)
And so this is a very interesting element of Pascal too, that you could sort of have experiences in a way that entails the existence of something, but they don't really constitute proof that that thing exists, because you had to have loved the thing first in order to have that experience. And this is actually, for those who really want to geek out, this is actually, I think, also from Augustine.
Augustine at one point, I think it's in De Trinitate, says something like, you know, rhetorically says, but who can love something that he does not know? And so again, I think it's Pascal kind of rehashing these Augustinian ideas and sometimes biblical ideas for a modern audience, sort of applying it to our lives.
PJ Wehry (51:06.522)
Yeah, thank you. I want to be respectful of your time. But so kind of as we draw to a close here and thank you for kind of drawing out the heart. I love getting all the context. I had to piecemeal. I read like the introduction to reading about Pascal and they're like, you should read it in this order. And they just they didn't talk about the the papers on the desk. And I had to piece together. like as I was reading the Ponce's, I was like, what is happening? Like
Yuval Avnur (51:11.297)
Hmm, yeah, sure.
Yuval Avnur (51:30.604)
huh.
PJ Wehry (51:36.135)
He's like, write this later. And I'm like, what do you mean write this later? Write it now. You know, so I appreciate that. I was like, oh, oh, he died. Not his fault. Yes, yes. And then beautifully written passages in between, which is a very odd experience. But besides buying and reading your book, because obviously there's so much more here to dig into.
Yuval Avnur (51:46.763)
bunch of notes, note to self do this. You'll work this out later. Yeah.
Yuval Avnur (51:56.855)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (52:06.311)
But besides buying and reading your excellent book for someone who's listened for about the last hour What would you tell them to do or think about over the next week in response to this?
Yuval Avnur (52:06.444)
Yeah.
Yuval Avnur (52:18.579)
what a beautiful question.
Yuval Avnur (52:31.713)
Think about why you, when you look out at the world, think about...
why you take it to be the way it looks to be. I know that's a bit of a...
whatever the mental version of a tongue twister is. why, you know, if you look out at the sky and it seems foreboding or it seems boring, or if you look out over wherever you live and you think it just looks like a heartless mechanism and it's not particularly nice, or maybe you live in Colorado and you look out when you're like, what an incredible
thing nature is, I would say really think about what is that? What is it that that what is it that leads you?
to perceive the world as whatever you perceive the world as. And I think that that's worthwhile doing because I think it helps us to experience rather than just read about or hear about the way in which the state of our heart affects the way things look. And I hope, you you mentioned some of your guests get political. I don't want to get political, but
PJ Wehry (53:39.121)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (53:59.28)
You
Yuval Avnur (53:59.372)
I think that there's a way in which this can inform the way we think about our current sort of moment. I think once you really experience and appreciate the way that, you know, what's in your heart affects how things look, you can start maybe understanding the other side, whatever the other side is in a more humane way. You can start thinking, well, they're in a different state. They're literally sometimes.
in different state in the Union, but also that they're in a different heart state, right? That they're, that they, that person who thinks I'm all wrong and has this complete sort of polar opposite view of things, I mean, you can start thinking, well, why does the world look the way it does to them? What must their heart be like? And what would it mean to engage with someone whose heart is there? And we can look to Pascal as a kind of a model, you know.
maybe I'll leave you with this, that he talked about trying to convince someone of something they don't believe. He talks about this and he says people aren't offended by the idea that they don't see everything. They get offended when they're told they're wrong.
It's such an important insight. know, if you can tell someone, I understand why you're seeing it, that you're right to see it the way that you are given what's going on, right? Tell them what they're right about, or at least consider what they're right about. You know, the world can look that way if your heart is in this place. That's correct. It's also that they, it's just that it can also look a different way if your heart is a different way. You're not seeing everything. And I'm not seeing everything.
PJ Wehry (55:28.71)
Yes.
Yuval Avnur (55:43.694)
So let's try to see things together and let's try to relate to these different places that our hearts are at. So a Pascalian way of thinking about why the world looks the way it does and therefore Pascalian way of understanding these deep disagreements is to engage with the heart because his theory predicts, that we are hearts with a belief mechanism tacked on as an afterthought and the world
is ambiguous enough, capable of being seen in so many different ways that it's more or less going to bend, it's more or less going to appear however the heart, know, in a way that matches however the heart is. that's what I would...
PJ Wehry (56:31.473)
Yeah.
Yuval Avnur (56:32.269)
That's what I would suggest.
PJ Wehry (56:34.897)
Beautiful answer. Dr. Avnor, wonderful to have you on today. Thank you.
Yuval Avnur (56:40.023)
Thank you for having me.