CHANGING PARADIGMS IN HISTORICAL

AND SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY

General Editors
Sarah Coakley Richard Cross

This series sets out to reconsider the modern distinction between “historical”
and “systematic” theology. The scholarship represented in the series is
marked by attention to the way in which historiographic and theological
presumptions (“paradigms”) necessarily inform the work of historians of
Christian thought, and thus affect their application to contemporary
concerns. At certain key junctures such paradigms are recast, causing a
reconsideration of the methods, hermeneutics, geographical boundaries, or
chronological caesuras which have previously guided the theological
narrative. The beginning of the twenty-first century marks a period of such
notable reassessment of the Christian doctrinal heritage, and involves a
questioning of the paradigms that have sustained the classic “history-of-
ideas” textbook accounts of the modern era. Each of the volumes in this
series brings such contemporary methodological and historiographical
concerns to conscious consideration. Each tackles a period or key figure
whose significance is ripe for reconsideration, and each analyses the implicit
historiography that has sustained existing scholarship on the topic. A variety
of fresh methodological concerns are considered, without reducing the
theological to other categories. The emphasis is on an awareness of the
history of “reception”: the possibilities for contemporary theology are
bound up with a careful rewriting of the historical narrative. In this sense,
“historical” and “systematic” theology are necessarily conjoined, yet also
closely connected to a discerning interdisciplinary engagement.

This monograph series accompanies the project of The Oxford Handbook of

the Reception of Christian Theology (OUP, in progress), also edited by Sarah
Coakley and Richard Cross.
 CHANGING PARADIGMS IN HISTORICAL AND
SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY
General Editors: Sarah Coakley (Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity,
University of Cambridge) and Richard Cross (John A. O’Brien Professor of
Philosophy, University of Notre Dame)

recent series titles

Calvin, Participation, and the Gift
The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ
J. Todd Billings
Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers
Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England
Benjamin J. King
Orthodox Readings of Aquinas
Marcus Plested
Kant and the Creation of Freedom
A Theological Problem
Christopher J. Insole
 Blaise Pascal on
Duplicity, Sin, and
the Fall
The Secret Instinct

WILLIAM WOOD

1
 3
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 Acknowledgments

In one form or another, I have been working through the ideas in this
book for well over a decade, and along the way I have accumulated a
great many debts, both intellectual and (alas) financial. Straightaway
I want to thank my parents, Horace and Sandra Wood, for supporting
me, in all senses of that word, for my entire life, even when they
probably shouldn’t have. I am profoundly grateful to them.
My first encounter with Pascal was in a class called “Luther, Calvin,
and Pascal on the Hidden God,” taught by Susan Schreiner and David
Tracy at the University of Chicago Divinity School in the Winter of
1999. I was required to hand in a ten-page paper on Pascal. Months
later (as is the custom at Chicago), when I finally got around to
writing it, I found that once I started, I couldn’t stop. I wrote draft
after draft, never quite satisfied that I had come to grips with Pascal,
but also far too absorbed to stop. Eventually, I decided to stop
stopping, and that modest seminar paper grew into my doctoral
exam paper, then my dissertation, and now this book. So thanks to
Susan Schreiner and David Tracy for offering the class.
I next wish to thank my dissertation advisor, Chris Gamwell, and
the members of my dissertation committee, Kathryn Tanner and Paul
Griffiths. They were the perfect committee: they frequently disagreed
with each other, and with me, and between the three of them, they
know just about everything, but they were all incredibly generous and
kind. I learned so much from them.
Sarah Coakley invited me to give a paper on Pascal to the D Society
in Cambridge, and when I survived the experience (barely!), she
suggested that I submit a manuscript to this series. She has been an
invaluable interlocutor and all-around source of wisdom during my
time in Oxford, and I am pleased and grateful to find myself suddenly
in her orbit.
I would also like to thank my colleagues, students, and friends in
Oxford. I presented a version of Chapter 3 to the University of Oxford
Modern Theology Seminar, and received very useful feedback, espe-
cially from Johannes Zachhuber, Joel Rassmussen, Tim Mawson, and
Philip Endean. I presented a version of Chapter 2 to the Cardinal
Allen Society of Oriel College. I thank all those in attendance for their
vi Acknowledgments
challenging questions. Many thanks as well—and for so much—to
Madhavi Nevader. I also thank Brian Leftow for advice, support, and
conversations about NFL football.
I hope that Karin Meyers will always be one of the first readers of
anything that I write. I value her insights and friendship enormously.
Ed Upton and Lea Schweitz also offered valuable suggestions, and
Marsaura Shukla and Claire Bowen commented on dissertation-stage
drafts. I thank them all.
Finally, special thanks to Gillian Hamnett, who read the entire
manuscript at short notice. The book is much better as a result of
her suggestions.
I have been supported by a William Rainey Harper Dissertation
Fellowship and a Martin E. Marty Center Dissertation Fellowship,
both from the University of Chicago, as well as a postdoctoral fellow-
ship from the Center for Philosophy of Religion, University of Notre
Dame. I thank both institutions. Some of the material in this book has
appeared in two published essays: “What is the Self? Imitation and
Subjectivity in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées,” Modern Theology, 26 (2010),
417–36; and “Axiology, Self-Deception and Moral Wrongdoing in
Blaise Pascal’s Pensées,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 37 (2009), 107–36.
I am grateful for permission to reuse that material here.
 Contents

Introduction 1
The Secret Instinct 2
The Fall, Self-Knowledge, and the Aversion for the Truth 5
Sin and Self-Deception 9
Sin, Paradox, and Self-Estrangement 12
Outline of the Argument 14
Interpreting Pascal on the Fall into Duplicity 15
1. The Evaluative Fall: Disordered Love and the
Aversion to Truth 19
Pascal’s Augustinian Anthropology: Amour-Propre
and Pride 20
From Pride to Disordered Love 25
The Evaluative Fall 30
The Evaluative Fall and the Cycle of Desire 34
Rapport, Truth, and Attractiveness 38
Ennui and Diversion as Signs of the Fall into Duplicity 42
Objection: Am I Really So Unhappy? 46
2. The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 51
Imagination, Illusion, and Political Order 52
That “Proud Power”: Pascal’s Critique of the Imagination 57
The Political Imagination and the Duplicitous Social Order 68
The Pretenses of Power 70
Politics as a Diversion from Truth 76
Blaise Pascal, Critical Theorist 79
Political Progress, True Justice, and the Church 87
3. The Imaginary Self in a World of Illusion: Pascal on the
Fallen Human Subject 92
What is the Self? 94
The Moi: The False Self 97
The Moi and Self-Interpretation 105
What is it like to be a False Self? An Example from
George Eliot’s Middlemarch 107
viii Contents
Nicholas Bulstrode as a Pascalian Moi 111
Parodying God by Performing the False Self 117
4. Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 121
Sinful Self-Deception as Culpable Self-Persuasion 121
Pascal on Moral Wrongdoing: The Wider Context 123
Self-Deceptive Moral Judgments are Interpretive 125
Pascal on Moral Judgment: The Heart, Sentiment,
and Finesse 129
The Imagination Bestows Value 137
How Moral Reasoning Goes Wrong: Self-Deception 140
Conclusion: What is Self-Deception? 144
5. On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on
Self-Deception 146
From “Lying To Oneself ” to “Irrational Belief-Formation” 149
Paradox! 163
Paradoxes of Attention and Awareness 169
“Perpetually Holistic Self-Transparency” 172
Conclusion: Pascal Contra Self-Transparency 176
6. A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception: Morally
Culpable Self-Persuasion 179
Lying to Oneself as a Form of Culpable Self-Persuasion 180
Persuasion, Reason, Rationalization 182
The Steps of Self-Persuasion 184
Self-Persuasion, Self-Deception, and Human Agency 195
Paradox Dispelled 198
How to Construct a False Self 204
Conclusion: Self-Deception, the Fall, and the Hiddenness
of God 209
7. The Way Back: On Loving the Truth 212
Grace as Pleasure and Delight in the Good 212
Loving the Truth as a Religious Stance 215
Subjectivity without Duplicity: The True Self Imitates Christ 217
The Final Word 225

Bibliography 227
Index 237
 Introduction

Blaise Pascal on Duplicity, Sin, and the Fall presents Pascal’s account
of the cognitive consequences of the Fall. The central claim is that for
Pascal, the Fall is a fall into duplicity. He holds that, as fallen selves in
a fallen world, human beings have an innate aversion to the truth that
is also, at the same time, an aversion to God. According to Pascal, we
are born into a duplicitous world that shapes us into duplicitous
subjects, and so we find it easy to reject God continually and deceive
ourselves about our own sinfulness.
Contemporary theologians who turn to Pascal will find an account
of the noetic effects of sin that is both traditional and innovative.1 It is
traditional in that it is robustly Augustinian, with a strong emphasis
on the fallen will, the darkened intellect, and the fundamental sin of
pride. Yet it is innovative in that it presents the noetic effects of sin as
both personal and social, and thereby embraces a view of subjectivity
and human agency that seems strikingly contemporary. For Pascal,
the self is itself a fiction, constructed from without by an already
duplicitous world. It follows that even some of the seemingly “inter-
ior” and cognitive consequences of the Fall must also be understood
as broadly social and external; similarly, some apparently social
consequences of the Fall (like the fallen political order, for example)
must be understood as broadly cognitive, since they reproduce and
reinforce the duplicity that we find at the heart of the human subject.
For Pascal, both the fallen self and the fallen world display the noetic
effects of sin.

1
I use the expressions “noetic effects of sin” and “cognitive consequences of the
Fall” interchangeably.
2 Introduction

THE SECRET INSTINCT

The book’s subtitle—The Secret Instinct—comes from fragment L136/

S168 of Pascal’s Pensées.2 In a long but unpolished fragment, Pascal
marvels at the fact that people obsessively pursue diversions like
gambling, hunting, and game-playing as if they desired those things
intrinsically, for their own sakes, when it is so plain (to Pascal, at any
rate) that what they really desire is simply to be diverted from
thinking about the human condition. What troubles Pascal is not
that people enjoy diverting activities, but that they persistently mis-
understand their own desires. They do not understand why they feel a
ceaseless desire for diversion.
As Pascal recognizes, there is a sense in which we must misunder-
stand what we want from diverting activities if we are to be diverted
successfully. He points out that a man cannot enjoy gambling if he
has nothing of value at stake. In such situations, he must engage in a
simple form of self-deception:
It might be argued that what he wants is the entertainment of gaming
and not the winnings. Make him play for nothing; his interest will not
be fired and he will become bored, so it is not just entertainment he
wants. A half-hearted entertainment without excitement will bore him.
He must have excitement, he must delude himself (se pipe lui-même)
into imagining that he would be happy to win what he would not want
as a gift if it meant giving up gambling . . . (L136/S168)
Pascal’s description of this simple form of self-deception quickly
broadens into a deeper theological critique. In the same fragment,
he says that we misunderstand the real character of our desire for
diversion because of an ever-present tension between our pre-fallen
and fallen human nature. This tension manifests as a conflict between
what we take (falsely) to be a desire for rest, but which is really an
aversion toward rest: whereas we think we desire rest, we really desire
its opposite, ceaseless activity. Because hunters—and by extension,

2
Unless otherwise noted, I cite the Pensées by fragment number from
A. J. Krailsheimer’s translation (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), which uses the
Lafuma numbering scheme. In addition to the Lafuma number (“L”), I also cite each
fragment by Sellier number (“S”), which is used in both Roger Ariew’s translation
(Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2005) and in Honor Levi’s abridged edn, Pensées and
Other Writings (New York: OUP, 1995).
 Introduction 3
everyone—do not really know themselves, they believe that they seek
the kill, the object of the hunt, but what they really seek is the
diversion provided by the hunt itself.
When men are reproached for pursuing so eagerly something that could
never satisfy them, their proper answer, if they really thought about it,
ought to be that they simply want a violent and vigorous occupation to
take their minds off themselves, and that is why they choose some
attractive object to entice them in their ardent pursuit . . . but they do
not answer like that because they don’t know themselves . . . They think
they genuinely want rest when all they really want is activity. They have
a secret instinct driving them to seek external diversion and occupation,
and this is the result of their constant sense of wretchedness. They have
another secret instinct, left over from the greatness of our original [i.e.
prefallen] nature, telling them that the only true happiness lies in rest
and not in excitement. These two contrary instincts give rise to a
confused plan buried out of sight in the depths of their soul, which
leads them to seek rest by way of activity and always to imagine that the
satisfaction they miss will come to them once they overcome certain
obvious difficulties and can open the door to welcome rest. All our life
passes this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and
once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom
it produces . . . (L136/S168)
Terminology like “a secret instinct” and “a confused plan buried out
of sight in the depths of their soul” (un projet confus, qui se cache à
leur vue dan le fond de leur âme) suggests a kind of ubiquitous self-
deception, but determining the precise contours of this confused plan
requires interpretive work. At first blush, the claim that we have two
competing “instincts” connotes something like conflicting, animalis-
tic impulses. But in the Pensées, Pascal clearly uses the term “instinct”
to describe a kind of implicit knowledge. As Buford Norman writes,
instinct is “a less abstract, perhaps less intellectual awareness of
something that we have always known but never verbalized.”3
Pascal generalizes from his critique of gamblers and hunters, and
claims that the human condition as such is characterized by an
incoherent aversion to rest. The people in this fragment “think they
genuinely want rest when all they really want is activity . . . they do
not know themselves.” It is clear that they do not know themselves,

3
Buford Norman, Portraits of Thought: Knowledge, Methods, and Styles in Pascal
(Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1988), 29.
4 Introduction
because the rest that they ostensibly desire is displaced by the very
means by which they seek it. The ostensible purpose of their frenzied
activity is to arrive at a point of rest, where activity is no longer
necessary. Yet the real purpose of their activity is the reverse: pre-
venting themselves from arriving at a point of rest. Their “confused
plan,” to pursue rest by means of frenzied activity, is incoherent and,
by definition, it cannot succeed. Indeed, the only way they can
attempt such a plan at all is by deceiving themselves about what
they really desire.
Throughout the Pensées, Pascal launches the same critique against
even bigger quarry: the universal human desire for happiness, which
he holds to be nothing other than a universal desire for God (see
especially L148/S181). The person who “finds delight in diversion”
only imagines that he is happy; he can sustain this illusion only
because he refuses to attend to his deeper unhappiness.4 According
to Pascal, true happiness and true rest are coextensive: “Telling a man
to rest is the same as telling him to live happily. It means advising
him to enjoy a completely happy state, in which he can contemplate
at leisure without cause for distress. It means not understanding
[human] nature” (L136/S168). Furthermore, if we were to attend to
our unhappiness, we would see that we cannot be truly happy as long
as we are estranged from God: “It is quite certain that there is no good
without the knowledge of God; that the closer one comes, the happier
one is, and that ultimate happiness is to know him with certainty; that
the further away one goes, the more unhappy one is” (L432/S684, see
also L399/S18, L407/S26).
Because we all have a deep desire for happiness, we also have a deep
desire for God; moreover, these desires are one and the same. Yet
instead of nurturing our deep desire for God, we systematically try to
extinguish it. “When we wish to think of God is there not something
which distracts and tempts us to think of something else?” (L395/S14,
see also L399/S18). Yet when we divert our attention from God, we
also divert our attention from the remedy for our own unhappiness,
since Pascal identifies happiness with rest in God. Insofar as the
apologetic project of the Pensées is an effort to lead its readers to

4
See also fragment L44/S78, where Pascal ties our false conceptions of happiness
to the faculty of the imagination: “Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes
them happy, as against reason, which only makes its friends wretched . . . ”
 Introduction 5
attend to this natural desire, a desire that all feel and few recognize, the
entire project of the Pensées is also an effort to awaken us from self-
deception.

THE FALL, SELF-KNOWLEDGE, AND THE

AVERSION FOR THE TRUTH

To the extent that there is anything like a dominant scholarly con-

sensus about Pascal’s account of the Fall, it does not emphasize
duplicity and self-deception.5 On the dominant consensus, Pascal
tells—albeit in striking fashion—a fairly conventional Augustinian
story about the fallen will, which tends toward prideful self-love, and
fallen reason, which can no longer grasp the saving truths of faith. On this
telling, the fallen human being retains only a formal capacity for happi-
ness and truth. This formal capacity is experienced as a kind of restless
desire. We long for stable happiness, and so we implicitly long for God,
the sole source of happiness. Similarly, our restless desire to know is also
an implicit longing for God, the source of all truth. Even though we retain
the capacity for happiness and truth after the Fall, this capacity is just
that: a bare capacity, a formal possibility that remains substantively
unfilled (L75/S110, L131/S164, L401/S20, L406/S25, L599/S496).
The fact that we have a capacity for happiness and truth and yet are
doomed to be unhappy and ignorant (apart from grace) explains a wide

5
For examples of the dominant scholarly consensus on the Pensées as a whole see
A. J. Krailsheimer, Pascal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), chs 4–6; Hugh
Davidson, Blaise Pascal (Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1983), ch. 4; Jean Mesnard, Les
Pensées de Pascal, 3rd edn (Paris: Société d’édition d’énseignement supérieur, 1993); and
esp. Philippe Sellier’s authoritative introduction to his own edited edn of the Pensées
(Paris: Bordas, 1991), 5–92. Sara Melzer’s Discourses of the Fall: A Study of Pascal’s
Pensées (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986) is one of the few book-
length treatments of Pascal’s understanding of the Fall. It offers a post-structuralist
account of the Fall as a fall from truth into language. Another is David Wetsel, L’Écriture
Et Le Reste: The Pensées of Pascal in the Exegetical Tradition of Port-Royal (Columbus,
Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1981), which argues that Pascal hopes in the Pensées
to demonstrate the Fall’s historicity. See also Jan Miel, Pascal and Theology (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 66–74; Philipe Sellier, Pascal et Saint
Augustin (Paris: A. Colin, 1970), chs. 1–2. Michael Moriarty’s Early Modern French
Thought: The Age of Suspicion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Fallen
Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006), are especially valuable, and both discuss the theme of self-deception.
6 Introduction
range of human behavior, according to Pascal. It explains our desire
for diversion, our natural passion for inquiry, and even our politics.
Pascal thus treats the doctrine of the Fall as an empirical hypothesis
that functions as an indirect proof of the truth of Christianity.6 We
can infer that Christianity is true because only Christianity explains
the data that we do in fact observe: human beings are both great and
wretched, with a capacity for truth and happiness that nevertheless
remains empty. We are great because we are created in the image
of God, but wretched because we are no longer in the pristine state of
our creation. Only Christianity understands why human beings are
both great and wretched, and never either one or the other alone. Our
wretchedness testifies to our greatness, which in turn points to our
wretchedness, in an endless dialectic (L122/S155). This seeming para-
dox impels us towards Christianity, the sole philosophy that can
comprehend our dual nature and, through grace, resolve it.
Pascal insists that we must come to know God in order to be happy,
but we must first know ourselves in order to know God. He thereby
embraces the Augustinian imperative of self-knowledge that Etienne
Gilson calls “Christian Socratism.”7 According to Pascal: “Man’s true
nature, his true good and true virtue, and true religion are things that
cannot be known separately” (L393/S12). Yet for the Christian, unlike
for the ancient Greek, to know one’s “true nature” is to know oneself
as fallen.
For a religion to be true, it must have known our nature; it must have
known its greatness and smallness, and the reason for both. What other
religion but Christianity has known this? (L215/S248)
There are in faith two equally constant truths. One is that man in the
state of his creation, or in the state of grace, is exalted above the whole of
nature, made like unto God and sharing in his divinity. The other is that
in the state of corruption and sin he has fallen from that first state and
has become like the beasts. (L131/164)
To recognize that we are fallen is also to recognize that we must turn
to Christ, our redeemer. The doctrine of the Fall unlocks the myster-
ies of the human condition, but the doctrine of the Fall is revealed

6
For a discussion of the way Pascal treats the Fall as an explanatory hypothesis, see
Daniel C. Fouke, “Argument in Pascal’s Pensées,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 6
(1989), 57–68.
7
Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 209.
 Introduction 7
only with the coming of Christ. Christ is the real key to self-know-
ledge: “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we
only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life
and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we cannot
know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves”
(L417/36).

The Aversion for Truth

In summary, the apologetic strategy of the Pensées depends on first
showing that Christianity offers the best account of human nature
and the only remedy for the human condition, and then persuading
its readers to “wager” on the value of the Christian way of life.8 This
is the conventional interpretation of Pascal. In my view, this inter-
pretation ignores some of Pascal’s most striking insights about the
cognitive consequences of the Fall, and especially the insight that the
Fall is a fall into duplicity. Pascal presents humankind not merely as
ignorant of our own fallenness, but as willfully ignorant. We hate the
truth about ourselves and so we reject it. “Ordinary people have
the ability not to think about things they don’t want to think
about,” he writes (L815/S659). Above all they do not want to think
about their own sinfulness, and so “Men despise religion. They hate it
and are afraid it may be true” (L12/S46). Accordingly, the proofs of
the Christian religion “lie before their eyes, but they refuse to look”
(L428/S682). The doctrine of the Fall unlocks the mystery of human
nature, but it is so repugnant that reason “draws away” when pre-
sented with it:
Without doubt nothing is more shocking to our reason than to say that
the sin of the first man has implicated in its guilt men so far from the
original sin that they seem incapable of sharing it . . . Certainly nothing

8
In the 1970s and 1980s, under the influence of post-structuralist literary theory,
several prominent interpreters argued that Pascal did not intend to write an apology at
all, and others argued that he intended to produce a fragmentary work. In addition to
Melzer, Discourses of the Fall, see also Louis Marin, La Critique du discourse (Paris:
Minuit, 1975), Emmanuel Martineau, Discours sur la religion et sur quelques autres
sujects de Blaise Pascal (Paris: Fayard/Armand Colin, 1992). These interpretations are
usefully provocative, but I side with the dominant scholarly consensus discussed in
n. 5. For a persuasive discussion of the interpretive controversy, see David Wetsel,
Pascal and Disbelief: Catechesis and Conversion in the Pensées (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 1–18.
8 Introduction
jolts us more rudely than this doctrine, and yet, but for this mystery,
the most incomprehensible of all, we remain incomprehensible to
ourselves. (L131/S164)
Original sin is folly in the eyes of men, but it is put forward as such.
You should therefore not reproach me for the unreasonable nature of
this doctrine, because I put it forward as being unreasonable. But this
folly is wiser than all men’s wisdom . . . For without it what are we to say
man is? His whole state depends on this imperceptible point. How could
he have become aware of it through his reason, seeing that it is some-
thing contrary to reason and that his reason, far from discovering it by
its own methods, draws away when presented with it? (L695/S574)
In short, far from seeking saving knowledge about God and self—and
thereby genuinely seeking our own happiness—we are infected with
an incoherent “aversion for the truth” (L978/S743).
This aversion for the truth is incoherent because we need to know
the truth about ourselves, God, and Christ in order to be happy.
Indeed, the universal desire for happiness is also a universal desire
for truth. After all, our “ultimate happiness” comes from knowing
God “with certainty” (L432/S684). Moreover, just as Pascal is pre-
pared to identify God with goodness as such, he is also prepared to
identify God with truth as such (L99/S132).9 Thus, in order to be
genuinely happy, we must first know that happiness and truth are
found in God, and we must know what prevents us from attaining
God. Our desire for happiness is therefore also a desire for truth.
We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty
We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death.
We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable
of either certainty or happiness.
We have been left with this desire as much as a punishment as to
make us feel how far we have fallen. (L401/S20)
Ecclesiastes shows that man without God is totally ignorant and in-
escapably unhappy, for anyone is unhappy who wills but cannot do.
Now he wants to be happy and assured of some truth, and yet he is
equally incapable of knowing and desiring not to know. He cannot even
doubt. (L75/S110)

9
The claim that, in some sense, God is identical with the truth as such is found in a
wide variety of Christian intellectual settings. It is biblical, of course (John 14: 6, 16:
13). It is also defended in the metaphysical systems of classical theism, and in the
Reformed Church’s Westminster Confession (see ch. 1, }4). For a study of this claim
in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, see William Wood, “Thomas Aquinas on the
Claim that God is Truth,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 51 (2013): 21–47.
 Introduction 9
This, then, is the real condition of the fallen human being, according
to Pascal. We desire both happiness and truth and yet we continually
reject God, the only stable source of happiness and truth. The fallen
human subject is internally divided, torn apart by desires that are ever
felt and never satisfied. Because no worldly good can satisfy our
innate desire for happiness and truth, we face a stark choice. We
can recognize our own limitations, accept our fallen nature, and turn
to God through Christ for redemption. Or we can lie to ourselves, and
to others, and pretend to be happy even though we know deep down
that we are not. This path is the one most people take, according to
Pascal. As fallen selves in a fallen world, human beings have an innate
aversion to the truth that is also, at the same time, an aversion to God.
The Fall is a fall into duplicity.

SIN AND SELF-DECEPTION

Christian theologians distinguish between “original sin,” which de-

scribes a systemic corruption that pervades all the structures of
human life, and personal “sins,” which are the voluntarily acts of
individual agents. Original sin is inherited, in a broad sense of that
term: humans are always born into a world already shaped by sin, and
we are warped by its malign effects deep within our own subjectivity.
Not surprisingly, theological proposals differ about the nature and
effects of original sin. Some emphasize its social character, and focus,
for example, on the ways in which supra-personal cultural, political,
and economic forces shape people into sinful subjects who then
reproduce those same sinful structures. Others emphasize the interior
dimension of original sin, and locate it first of all in the fallen will,
which cannot love God above all things, and the darkened intellect,
which cannot perceive God clearly.10 Pascal’s account is valuable
because it captures both the social and personal dimensions of sin.

10
With few exceptions, contemporary systematic theologians have largely neg-
lected the cognitive consequences of the Fall. The only extended treatment remains
Stephen K. Moroney, The Noetic Effects of Sin: An Historical and Contemporary
Exploration of How Sin Affects our Thinking (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books,
1999), which focuses almost entirely on the Reformed tradition. Several important
recent books on sin also do not discuss the noetic effects of sin in any detail, though
they may discuss the fallen will: Paula Fredrikson, Sin: The Early History of an Idea
10 Introduction
But what is sin? Sin is at root a kind of turning, an incoherent turn
away from God and toward some worldly object of delight that is,
necessarily, less than God. Instead of loving God as the highest good,
the center and source of all value, sinners raise up something else
alongside God, treat it as a rival source of value, and love it improp-
erly. As Pascal writes, “If God exists, we must love him alone, and not
transitory creatures . . . Thus, everything which drives us to become
attached to creatures is bad, since it prevents us from serving God, if
we know him, or seeking him if we do not” (L618/S511). We ought to
love God above all things, but as a result of our sinful condition, we
are constantly tempted to turn away from God (L395/S14).
The best theologies of sin establish a dialectic between original sin
and personal sin, such that the condition of original sin makes
personal sin easier and more tempting.11 If I am born into a world
that teaches me to hate my neighbor, the concrete actions that
manifest this hatred will come easily to me. Similarly, if my will is
warped and my mind is dark, I will hate those whom I should love.
In both cases, original sin supports personal sin. At the same time, in
both cases, personal sin reinforces and builds up the broader struc-
tures of original sin. A person who sins repeatedly acquires sinful
dispositions and habits, and begins to lose whatever virtuous dispos-
itions and habits he may have. By sinning, he becomes a sinner, the
sort of person who helps make the world a sinful place.
Pascal’s insight is that the dialectic of sin is also a dialectic of self-
deception. The Augustinian tradition holds that pride is the arche-
typal sin. The prideful sinner loves himself with an immoderate love

(Princeton: PUP, 2012); Ian MacFarland, In Adam’s Fall: A Meditation on the

Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Gary
A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Matt Jenson,
The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther, and Barth on Homo Incurvatus in Se (New
York: Continuum, 2006); Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the
Christian Doctrine of Sin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The topic of
the noetic effects of sin is more likely to be discussed by philosophers of religion who
take themselves to be in dialogue with “reformed epistemology.” I note esp. Alvin
Plantinga, “Sin and its Cognitive Consequences,” ch. 7 of Warranted Christian Belief
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Michael Sudduth, The Reformed
Objection to Natural Theology (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), esp. chs 6–7. See also
Paul K. Moser’s The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008) which may be read as a sustained argument that
philosophers of religion should take the noetic effects of sin more seriously.
11
E.g. MacFarland, In Adam’s Fall, 10, 18–22. With this usage of “original sin,”
I do not mean to describe the first sin, but the inherited condition of sinfulness.
 Introduction 11
that ought to be directed to God. Yet pride may also be understood as
a form of self-deception. The prideful person often exhibits the
peculiar double-consciousness, the knowing ignorance, of the self-
deceiver. He seems both to know and not to know that his excessive
self-devotion is undeserved.12 This point generalizes to sin as such. By
its very nature, sin hides in the shadows of consciousness because it
cannot survive if it is exposed for what it is. Self-deception is one of its
major tools, and so an adequate account of sin will also be an account
of self-deception, and of how the sinner deceives himself about his
own value and the value of his projects. From one direction, because
projects of self-deception feature an aversion to the truth, they are
sinful, since an aversion to truth is also an aversion to God. From the
other direction every sinful act is also an act of self-deception. This is
a trickier case to make. Certainly, it is possible for someone to act
immorally (or sin) knowingly and in full awareness. At a relatively
superficial level of analysis, a thief will usually recognize that he steals,
for example. But at a deeper level, every sinner does deceive himself.
He deceives himself about the fact that he implicitly recognizes that
God is the highest good and the true source of value. He also deceives
himself about whether he is deeply and fundamentally satisfied even
though he is estranged from God.
The moral incoherence of sin has the same structure as the epi-
stemic incoherence of self-deception. The characteristic aversion of
sin, the turn away from God, is isomorphic with the characteristic
aversion of self-deception, the turn away from truth. In the relevant
forms of self-deception, one deceives oneself precisely because one
knows and rejects the truth. The self-deceiver recognizes the truth
and recoils from it, and intentionally tries to replace it with a lie. As
Pascal writes, he “would like to do away with the truth, and not being
able to destroy it as such, he destroys it, as best he can, in the
consciousness of himself and others” (L978/S743; slightly emended).
Like the turn away from God that constitutes sin, the turn
away from truth that constitutes self-deception is motivated by our
fallen, disordered love. In mundane, day-to-day matters, we have a

12
Reinhold Niebuhr also makes a similar point. He writes: “Man loves himself
inordinately. Since his determinate existence does not deserve the devotion lavished
upon it, it is obviously necessary to practice some deception in order to justify such
excessive devotion.” It is clear that by “deception” Niebuhr means, above all, self-
deception. See The Nature and Destiny of Man, i (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1941), 203–4, esp. 204 n. 2.
12 Introduction
utilitarian motivation to seek the truth, since knowing the truth helps
us to carry out our projects. But when the truth is unwelcome, as it
often is in moral or spiritual matters, and when it opposes our desires
and our projects, then we have a motive to reject it, and to embrace
beliefs that are more welcome, even though they are false. In other
words, when we love some private good more than we love the truth
as such, we have a motive for self-deception. This isomorphism
between sin and self-deception is just what one would expect if God
is truth itself, as the Christian tradition maintains.
If God is truth, it follows that to turn away from the truth is to turn
away from God, which is the very paradigm of a sinful action. It is
therefore not surprising that the structure of self-deception should
mirror the structure of sin. Yet the isomorphism between sin and self-
deception extends beyond the characteristic aversion at the heart of
both. The relationship between original sin and personal sins may
also be understood as a relationship between the social conditions
of self-deception, on the one hand, and personal projects of self-
deception, on the other. Because we are born into a duplicitous
world that shapes us into duplicitous subjects, and because our loves
are disordered, we find it easy to deceive ourselves. Any would-be self-
deceiver will already have acquired the skills of self-deception, because
one must acquire exactly these skills in order to become a functioning
member of society. Having been habituated into patterns of deception,
he will persistently be able to refuse to attend to his own beliefs and
intentions, and therefore he will be able to deceive himself. Moreover,
insofar as he deceives himself, it is highly likely that he also deceives
other people, and contributes to their self-deception, thereby repro-
ducing and reinforcing the reign of duplicity into which we are all
born. Again, Pascal: “we are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction,
and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves” (L655/S539). In
short, “this is not the home of truth; it wanders unrecognized among
men” (L840/S428).

SIN, PARADOX, AND SELF-ESTRANGEMENT

Throughout the Pensées, Pascal argues that the Christian doctrine of

original sin empirically explains a wide range of human behaviors
that would otherwise be inexplicable. Yet he does not offer anything
 Introduction 13
like a rational explanation of sin. Frankly, I suspect that he would
regard the quest for a rational explanation of sin as itself quite
sinful—an all too common instance of the pride of the philosophers.
In any case, many Christian thinkers have agreed with Pascal and
asserted that sin is deeply paradoxical. One thinks, for example, of
Reinhold Niebuhr’s oracular claims that sin is “inevitable but not
necessary,” that “sin posits itself,” and that “man could not be
tempted if he had not already sinned.”13 Similarly, in The Concept
of Sin, Josef Pieper asks, “How can a human being with full deliberate-
ness undertake an act of resistance to the very meaning of his own
existence?” He goes on to answer that “We seem to have reached the
furthest border beyond which not only language but also thought
itself begins to encounter the impassible . . . All we can do is admit
that we are faced with, so to speak, a reductio ad mysterium.”14
Although I do not regard sin as utterly inexplicable, I do agree that
it is deeply puzzling. A sin is always a performative self-contradiction
and, as such, it can never be treated as a fully rational action. The
sinner, by definition, undermines his own happiness even while he
believes, falsely, that he seeks it. He also cultivates an understanding
of himself and his own value that is self-contradictory. This residue of
inexplicability also colors the phenomenology of sin and ensures that
the sinner himself will remain puzzled by his own sins. We can
imagine interrogating a sinner by recursively asking him to account
for his actions. Eventually we will reach a bedrock level and find
ourselves asking: Why did you choose that lesser good in favor of
God, the highest good? Whether at this bedrock level or before, even
the most philosophically sophisticated and self-aware sinner will
eventually reach a point where has nothing to say for himself other
than: I don’t know why I did that. I just did. The phenomenology of
sin mirrors the phenomenology of self-deception. When we say that a
person is self-deceived, we mean to say that some of his behavior is
initially puzzling, even inexplicable, in light of his own avowals, the
rest of what we know about him, and what we assume about his
beliefs and desires. Likewise, from the first-person point of view,
when the sinner looks at his own past, he expresses the same kind
of puzzlement about himself. He asks himself: How could I have done

13
See Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, i, chs 7–9.
14
Josef Pieper, The Concept of Sin (South Bend, Ind.: St Augustine’s Press, 2001),
33, 81–2.
14 Introduction
that, when I knew that it was wrong? Both as a self-deceiver and as a
sinner, he is opaque to himself, estranged from his own deepest
beliefs and desires.

OUTLINE OF THE ARGUMENT

The book begins with a focused study of Pascal’s account of the way
the Fall has affected our various cognitive and affective faculties by
warping our capacity to love and to evaluate competing goods. I argue
that Pascal understands the Fall fundamentally as an evaluative fall,
rather than a fall of the reason or the will, narrowly construed. Next,
I discuss Pascal’s often-overlooked contribution to the tradition of
Augustinian reflection on the fallen nature of state power. Pascal
developed an account of the concrete mechanisms by which citizens
are socialized into accepting state rule that predates the work of
critical theorists like Althusser, Foucault, and Bourdieu by some 300
years. In Chapter 3, I move from the duplicitous political order to the
duplicitous social order and, finally, to the duplicitous subject.
According to Pascal, each individual person’s disordered self-love is
changed into something different, the desire to deceive and be de-
ceived, as a result of his interactions with other members of society.
As a result, even our very selfhood is false and imaginary, a social
figment rooted in duplicity. To help make Pascal’s ideas clearer,
I offer an extended example of a false self drawn from George Eliot’s
Middlemarch. Eliot is not a contemporary of Pascal, and did not take
herself to be illustrating his thought. Nevertheless, her concrete
narrative depiction of the self-deceptive banker Nicholas Bulstrode
helps us understand Pascal’s very abstract account of the false self.
Cumulatively, across the first three chapters, I build up a Pascalian
picture of the human subject as one who is habituated to deception
because it is the essential glue that holds his world together. In
Chapter 4, I narrow the focus still further, and discuss the ways in
which the Fall has affected our capacity for moral reasoning and
moral judgment. Not surprisingly, Pascal argues that the chief threat
to the moral life is self-deception. His central claim is that, in a moral
dilemma, an agent usually perceives a sinful choice as more attractive
than a moral choice precisely because the sinful choice is rooted in
 Introduction 15
self-serving imaginative fantasy. He then convinces himself that the
sinful choice is, in fact, morally licit.
On my reading, the Pascalian sinner deceives himself, but what
exactly is self-deception and how is it possible? Whereas Chapters 1
through 4 are more exegetical, Chapters 5 through 7 are more
constructive. In pursuit of this question, Chapter 5 departs somewhat
from Pascal to discuss various criticisms, drawn from contemporary
analytic philosophy, of the very possibility of self-deception. Against
the analytic consensus, I argue that lying to oneself—the form of self-
deception that Pascal makes central—is possible. Chapter 6 presents
my own Pascalian model of sin as self-deception, understood as
morally culpable self-persuasion. Whereas previous chapters argued
that Pascal can serve as a constructive theological resource, Chapter 6
shows this by example. Chapter 7 concludes with Pascal’s account of
what it is to be a non-duplicitous self, one that loves God above all
things and, in so doing, loves the truth as such.

INTERPRETING PASCAL ON THE FALL

INTO DUPLICITY

Presenting and exploring Pascal’s insight that the Fall is a fall

into duplicity is the task of the book as a whole, and especially of
Chapters 1 through 4. The argument depends less on proof-texting
from specific fragments and passages of Pascal’s work than on de-
veloping an overall, holistic interpretation of his thought. There are
only a few straightforward references to duplicity and self-deception
in the Pensées. Fragment L978/S743 speaks of the evil of “deliberate
self-delusion.” That fragment also argues that routine social inter-
actions depend on the subtle interplay of deceit, pretense—including
self-pretense—and hypocrisy. It is a major fragment to which I return
many times. Elsewhere we read that human beings both see and do
not see their own fallen condition:
He must not see nothing at all, nor must he see enough to think that he
possesses God, but he must see enough to know that he has lost him.
For, to know that one has lost something, one must see and not see:
such precisely is the state of nature. (L449/690)
16 Introduction
The language in this fragment indirectly suggests self-deception.
Similarly, Pascal frequently asserts that we perceive an “image” or
“idea” of the truth, even though we also “possess nothing but false-
hood” (L131/S164; see also L20/S54, L25/S59, L208/S240). This juxta-
position also evokes the peculiar knowing ignorance that we associate
with self-deception. He also says that reason and the senses “deceive”
each other (L45/S78) and that everyone is the victim of an illusion
(L92/S126). Moreover, he points out that people behave as if they are
ignorant of crucially important truths—above all the truth that they
will die—that are obvious and easily grasped. Again, we tend to
associate this kind of willful ignorance with self-deception. Finally,
Pascal does say that we have an “aversion to the truth” (L978/S743)
and arguably one cannot be averse to the truth as such without first
knowing it as truth, which implies something stronger than simple
ignorance. So there can be no doubt that Pascal holds that fallen
human beings live under the spell of a variety of self-spun illusions.
But these scattered references on their own are not enough to warrant
the grander claim that Pascal regards the Fall as a fall into duplicity.
The interpretive challenge of defending that claim is further com-
plicated by the philosophical challenge of understanding exactly what
counts as a genuine case of deception or self-deception. Does the fall
into “duplicity” mean that most people consciously, explicitly lie to
each other most of the time? Does it mean that they lie to themselves
most of the time? Is lying to oneself even possible? (It is difficult to
understand how a single subject can intentionally deceive himself,
since presumably he must both know the truth as deceiver, and yet
also cause himself to believe its opposite, as deceived.) These ques-
tions are important, and at various points—especially in Chapters 5
and 6—I do address them. Yet I do not offer any set of putatively
necessary and sufficient conditions for, for example, “duplicity” or
“self-deception.” Instead, I allow the contours of those concepts to
emerge on their own, from my engagement with Pascal’s texts.
I develop an account of lying to oneself as culpable self-persuasion,
because I believe—with Pascal—that this form of self-deception is the
most virulent threat to the moral life.
One might also object that it is not useful to discuss the kind of self-
deception that infects the moral life without first saying what moral
judgments are and what moral responsibility entails. I recognize that
these are important, foundational questions. I do give a brief account
of moral reasoning, drawn from Pascal, in Chapter 4. But I also do not
 Introduction 17
intend to give any account of moral responsibility, other than to say
that I assume a basic moral realism which holds that moral values and
moral responsibility are not illusory or socially constructed. Granting
that assumption, my treatment of sin and self-deception can super-
vene on any plausible account of moral responsibility.
By now it should be clear that my project is not purely historical or
exegetical. The claim that Pascal regards the Fall as a fall into dupli-
city is solidly grounded in a reading of the Pensées. But I intend the
argument of the book as an example of constructive theology and not
just historical exegesis: it is my “Pascalian” analysis of the cognitive
consequences of the Fall, as much as it is Pascal’s own analysis. The
Pensées are a fragmentary, unfinished text, filled with rhetorical feints,
intellectual experiments, and blind alleys. Strictly speaking, on purely
historical and exegetical grounds, I am not convinced that we can
really say that Pascal had an “account” of anything whatsoever,
including the Fall. To a greater degree than with other texts, any
interpretation of the Pensées must be partial and tentative, an
example of thinking with Pascal rather than just reporting what he
thought.
When we try to think with Pascal, however, we encounter the
Pensées as a text that opens up a world to us, a world that presents
a certain vision of the nature of sin and the Fall.15 As a constructive
theologian, I aim to take that vision seriously, respond to it, and
develop its implications. I therefore hope to do more than simply
offer a new interpretation of Pascal. Rather, my deeper purpose is to
demonstrate, first, that Pascal offers a viable and long-neglected
constructive resource for contemporary theology and, second, that
theologians should change the way they understand the noetic effects
of sin in light of his thought. There can be little doubt that construct-
ive theologians have largely ignored Pascal. The interpretive problems
posed by the Pensées are at least partly to blame for the dearth of
Pascalian theology. Furthermore, the secondary literature on Pascal is
spread across disciplines that include history, postmodern literary

15
Hugh Davidson best articulates the spirit with which to approach the Pensées:
we should watch Pascal at work, describe his practice, and see to what extent his
practices can be related to a more general topic of inquiry. When we proceed in this
way, we see “not only recurrent problems, but also reappearing lines of attack on
them, tendencies that bespeak something conscious and deliberate.” Hugh
M. Davidson, Pascal and the Arts of the Mind (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), p. xiii.
18 Introduction
criticism, analytic and continental philosophy, and critical theory.
Much of that literature is in French. In part because few theologians
are even aware of it, they rarely regard Pascal as a constructive
resource for their own work. Finally, English-language scholarship
on Pascal has tended to focus heavily on the wager argument, Pascal’s
supposed fideism, or his religious epistemology.16 All of these topics
are important, but they do not exhaust the resources Pascal offers.
Contemporary theologians frequently describe their work as, for
example, “Augustinian,” “Thomistic,” or “Barthian.” Such labels sig-
nify something more than exegetical fidelity to a great figure from the
past. They also signify the creative innovations of a living tradition.
I similarly seek to show, by exegetical argument and constructive
example, that “Pascalian” theology is both possible and fruitful.17

16
E.g. James R. Peters, The Logic of the Heart: Augustine, Pascal and the Rational-
ity of Faith (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2009).
17
It also bears saying that “Pascalian” theology need not slavishly follow Pascal.
Accordingly, I have little to say about some of the theological controversies that most
preoccupied Pascal himself—e.g. disputes between Jesuits and Jansenists about nature
and grace or how to reconcile human freedom with divine predestination.
 1

The Evaluative Fall: Disordered Love

and the Aversion to Truth

Pascal firmly believes that the human condition as we now experi-

ence it is founded on the sin of our first parents. He reads the
Genesis narrative as factual history and he completely accepts a
literal picture of the Fall. According to Pascal, we must accept that
Adam’s mind was “very strong, very just, very enlightened,” that his
will desired “what he knew to be best for his happiness,” and that,
with divine aid, he could attain his true beatitude. Despite all this,
we must also accept that Adam disobeyed God, presumably in full
awareness of the consequences of his disobedience, because he
“wanted to be independent of God and be his equal,” something
that he must have known was impossible. The sheer irrationality of
Adam’s sin is bequeathed to us as punishment: our minds are
“dulled and deadened,” and our wills “voluntarily, and quite freely
and joyfully” embrace evil as if it were good. In short, we are born
into darkness, concupiscence, and death, aptly likened to “a fruit
bred from rotten seed.”1

1
The above quotations are from Pascal’s unpublished and unfinished treatise,
Writings on Grace, 221–2. An excerpt in English (from which they are taken) may
be found in Levi (ed.), Pensées and Other Writings, 205–26. The French may be found
in the second volume of Michael Le Guern’s edn of Pascal’s complete works: Œuvres
complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2000), 288–9 (hereafter abbreviated as OC). For a
study of the way Pascal reads Genesis 3, see Wetsel, L’Écriture et le reste. For studies of
the Writings on Grace, see Hervé Pasqua, Blaise Pascal: Penseur de la grâce (Paris:
P. Téqui, 2000); Hélène Bouchilloux, Pascal (Paris: Vrin, 2004), 183–96; Michael
Moriarty, “Grace and Religious Belief in Pascal,” in Nicholas Hammond (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Pascal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
144–61. See also Le Guern’s introduction to his edn in OC ii. 1210–16.
20 The Evaluative Fall
There is no need to accept the historicity of the Genesis narrative
to find real insight in Pascal’s account of the cognitive consequences
of the Fall. The most important such consequence, which preoccu-
pies Pascal throughout his writings, pertains to our capacity to love.
Pascal believes that our capacity to love has been deformed and
disordered by the Fall and that, as a result, we can no longer love
coherently. Pascal identifies the capacity to love with the capacity to
evaluate competing goods, and so he holds that that every aspect of
human life is affected by its deformation. As a result of the Fall, our
capacity to love and evaluate goods is warped. It follows that we are
warped—we desire, believe, and act incoherently. The Fall is a
fall into duplicity because we no longer love God, or truth, as we
should but instead love lesser worldly goods, and especially our own
fallen selves.

PASCAL’S AUGUSTINIAN ANTHROPOLOGY:

AMOUR-PROPRE AND PRIDE

Pascal pursues his indictment of disordered love by using a closely-

linked set of terms like concupiscence, self-love (amour-propre), and
pride (orgueil). He also speaks of the divided will or our divided
human nature. All these terms are drawn from the Augustinian
Christianity that furnishes his master narrative.2 Regardless of his
terminology, however, throughout his writings Pascal claims that we
love ourselves with an unrestricted love that is properly directed
towards God alone. One of the richest passages about disordered
love in the entire Pascalian corpus is found in a letter to his sister
Jacqueline, dated October 17, 1651. Their father had recently died,
and Pascal comforted Jacqueline with a meditation on how a Chris-
tian should understand death, providence, and consolation. The fact
that we recoil at death, writes Pascal, is a clear sign that human nature
has fallen. This insight leads him to discuss the origin of sin:

2
Valuable treatments of Pascal’s anthropology include Christian Lazzeri, Force et
justice dans la politique de Pascal (Paris: PUF, 1993), 3–55, and Sellier, Pascal et Saint
Augustin, chs. 1–2.
 The Evaluative Fall 21
I am obliged to tell you in general about the origin of all vices and all
sins . . .
The truth that opens up this mystery is that God has created man
with two loves, the one for God and the other for himself, but with this
law: that the love for God would be infinite, that is to say, without any
other end than God himself, and that the love of self would be finite and
referred to God . . . Since, with the arrival of sin, man has lost the first of
these loves, the love of self alone remained in this great soul that is
capable of an infinite love, and this self-love has spread out and over-
flowed into the vacuum that the love for God has left. And so, he has
loved himself alone, and all things for himself, that is to say, infinitely.
Behold the origin of amour-propre. It was natural to Adam and just in
his innocence, but it has become both criminal and immoderate, as a
result of his sin.3
In this passage, Pascal posits an original self-love (l’amour pour soi-
même) that is good, because it is derived from an infinite love for God.
After the Fall, this wholesome self-love is corrupted into amour-
propre, an infinite love directed at the self instead of God. When we
lost the love for God, it left behind a “vacuum” or “void” (vide). The
imagery is clear: before the Fall, the love for God restrained our innate
self-love, but when that love was lost in the Fall, it left behind a
vacuum that self-love expanded into and filled, thereby becoming
immoderate and unrestrained.4
The specific concept of amour-propre plays an important role in
seventeenth-century French thought, and pinning down its exact
meaning in any given context is not always easy. Significantly, Pascal
here describes amour-propre not merely as immoderate self-regard
but as the condition of human nature after the Fall: it is both the
consequence of Adam’s original sin and the origin of all our subse-
quent sins. By tying it to the first and prototypical human, Pascal
suggests that amour-propre is ubiquitous because it flows from the
disordered human nature bequeathed to us by Adam. Furthermore,
this disorder manifests as a disorder of our loves: whereas God

3
My tr. from OC ii. 20.
4
The image of the vacuum is deliberately chosen, since Pascal had spent several
years proving experimentally, against the a priori Aristotelian and Cartesisan physics
of his day, that it was possible for a vacuum to exist. See Préface sur le Traité du Vide in
OC ii. 452–8. In contrast to Descartes’s “retrograde” project of “grounding physics in
apriori principles and deductive metaphysics,” Pascal’s own experiments are “still
admired for their rigour and held up as models of empirical investigation.” Daniel
C. Fouke, “Pascal’s Physics,” in Hammond, Cambridge Companion to Pascal, 75–6.
22 The Evaluative Fall
created us with two loves, only one love remains; whereas we should
love God without reservation, we instead love ourselves without
reservation.
The broader currents of seventeenth-century French Augustinian-
ism are also on display in this passage. The master narrative of
Augustinian Christianity tells the story of the disordered human
self, which perpetually renders itself incoherent by loving inco-
herently. Pascal’s description of our two fundamental loves evokes
Augustine’s account of the two cities in The City of God. In that work,
Augustine opposes the earthly city, characterized by amor sui (love
for self) to the heavenly city, characterized by amor dei (love for God).
The former is marked by the lust for power (libido dominandi) and
the latter by mutual self-giving love.5 Elsewhere, like his follower
Pascal, Augustine claims that disordered self-love is the origin of
all sin:
The first ruin of man was amor sui. For if man had not loved himself,
and had instead put God before himself, he would always have been
willing to be subordinate to God, and he would not have redirected
himself toward neglecting God’s will and doing his own. For that is
what it means to love oneself: one wills to do one’s own will. Put the will
of God before all that—learn to love yourself by not loving yourself, so
that you will know that to love oneself is a crime, as the Apostle says:
“for men will be lovers of themselves.” (2 Tim. 3: 2)6
Augustine more often describes the act of putting oneself before God
as the sin of pride (superbia). Whether he calls it amor sui or superbia,
however, Augustine says that pride is at the root of every sin because
it is the origin of human sinfulness and the beginning of Adam’s
fallen will.7 As such, pride is closely linked with the disordered love
that Augustine calls concupiscence. In Augustine’s thought, concu-
piscence is a many-headed monster. It is, first, an “anti-divine

5
See Augustine, De civitate dei 14.28.
6
Sermon 96.2. My tr.: ‘prima hominis perditio, fuit amor sui. si enim se non
amaret, et deum sibi praeponeret, deo esse semper subditus uellet: non autem con-
uerteretur ad negligendam uoluntatem illius, et faciendam uoluntatem suam. hoc est
enim amare se, uelle facere uoluntatem suam. praepone his uoluntatem dei: disce
amare te, non amando te. nam ut sciatis uitium esse se amare, sic apostolus dicit: erunt
enim homines se ipsos amantes.’
7
De civitate dei 12.1, 12.6, 14.13; De trinitate 12.14, 13.23. See also “Pride” in Allan
Fitzgerald and John C. Cavadini, Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1999).
 The Evaluative Fall 23
disposition” or an inclination toward sin; but it is also a description of
our divided will and, in general, the state of fallen humanity.8 Concu-
piscence is thus both sin and penalty, associated with disordered desire
and inevitable death: as a result of Adam’s illicit presumption, says
Augustine, “the human nature in him was vitiated and mutated, so
that in his members, he suffered a rebellious, disobedient desiring and
was put under the necessity of death . . . ”9 Throughout his works,
Augustine describes this “rebellious, disobedient desiring” as the inco-
herent love of lower, earthly goods in place of higher, spiritual goods.
And in his Confessions, he offers a poignant description of the conse-
quence of his own disordered love: “I slid away from you, my God, and
in my adolescence, I wandered, straying from your stability. I made
myself an empty wasteland of want.”10 This, then, is the master
narrative of Augustinian Christianity. (More precisely, this is that
narrative’s description of human beings under the reign of sin, apart
from grace.) Disordered love, paradigmatically manifested as the sin of
pride, is all-pervasive. It is the natural condition of the fallen human
being, and part of the psychological motivation of all human actions.
When the moralists of seventeenth-century France looked to this
Augustinian narrative, they found more than a theological diagnosis
of human sinfulness; they found a worldview that seemed perfectly
suited to their own times. They thus took all the negative theological
valences that Augustine had given to excessive self-love and concu-
piscence and bestowed them on the term amour-propre. To be sure,
the French moralists also used this term with a more psychological
sense, to mean something like the desire for esteem and self-esteem,
but the theological valences remained beneath the surface.11 In the

8
The phrase “anti-divine disposition” comes from “Concupiscence,” in Fitzgerald
and Cavadini, Augustine through the Ages.
9
De civitate dei 13.3. My tr.: ‘sed hactenus in eo natura humana uitiata atque
mutata est, ut repugnantem pateretur in membris inoboedientiam concupiscendi et
obstringeretur necessitate moriendi.’
10
Confessions 2.18. My tr.: ‘defluxi abs te ergo et erravi, deus meus, nimis devius ab
stabilitate tua in adulescentia, et factus sum mihi regio egestatis.’
11
On amour-propre as the desire for esteem and self-esteem, see John Elster,
Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 85ff. David Westgate and Anthony Levi present a useful corrective to
Elster’s purely psychological account of the nature of amour-propre. They emphasize
its theological roots and argue that much of the time the French Moralists treated
amour-propre as equivalent to the sin of pride. David Westgate, “The Augustinian
Concept of Amour-Propre and Pascal’s Pensées,” Nottingham French Studies, 10
(1971), 10–20; Levi, French Moralists, 225–34.
24 The Evaluative Fall
latter part of the seventeenth century, well after Pascal, the term
amour-propre began to lose its original, Augustinian associations
and came to mean bare self-interest or vanity. By the middle of the
eighteenth century, Rousseau could claim that amour-propre is a
result of improper socialization; he then opposes it not to the love
of God, but to another, innate and beneficial self-love, amour de soi.12
But a hundred years earlier, Pascal and his contemporaries treated
amour-propre as a theological concept equivalent to the sin of pride
and associated with concupiscence.
Even a cursory reading of Pascal shows that he faithfully thinks and
writes from within this Augustinian narrative. His terminology varies,
which is not surprising, given the fragmentary character of his
writings, but his underlying message does not. For Pascal as for
Augustine, pride and concupiscence destroy the human soul and
cut it off from God, its only true source of happiness:
The Christian God is a God who makes the soul aware that he is its sole
good: that in him alone can it find peace; that only in loving him can it
find joy: and who at the same time fills it with loathing for the obstacles
which hold it back and prevent it from loving God with all its might.
Amour-propre and concupiscence, which hold it back, are intolerable.
This God makes the soul aware of his underlying amour-propre (ce fond
d’amour propre) which is destroying it, and which he alone can cure.
(L460/S699)
Anyone who does not hate the amour-propre within him and the
instinct which leads him to make himself into a God must be really
blind. Who can fail to see that there is nothing so contrary to justice and
truth? For it is false that we deserve this position and unjust and
impossible to attain it, because everyone demands the same thing. We
are thus born into an obviously unjust situation from which we cannot
escape, but from which we must escape . . . (L617/S510)
Pascal therefore thoroughly embraces the Augustinian claim that the
human condition is constituted by disordered love, which paradig-
matically manifests as immoderate self-love. Indeed, some of Pascal’s
most uncompromising fragments present the self as relentlessly tyr-
annical, always trying to usurp God’s place as the center of value.

12
See his “Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Men
[1755],” in Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella (eds), Rousseau’s Political
Writings, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), 3–57,
esp. 27–8.
 The Evaluative Fall 25
According to Pascal, each person thinks that he is the center of the
universe per se because he is the center of his own universe, which
comes to an end when he dies (L668/547). As a result, each egoistic
self relentlessly tries to dominate others: “The self is hateful . . . In a
word, the self has two characteristics, it is unjust in itself for making
itself the centre of everything: it is a nuisance to others in that it tries
to subjugate them, for each self is the enemy of all the others and
would like to tyrannize them” (L597/S494).
In other words, Pascal seems to hold that the most fundamental
fact of human nature is that each person is guilty of the sin of pride. In
the Pensées, Pascal uses the word for pride (orgueil) more often than
the term amour-propre, but they both play essentially the same roles
in his thought. Both can name Augustinian superbia, as well as
ordinary vanity. The terms amour-propre and orgueil are polyvalent
in the Pensées; that is, they always carry both their fully theological
and ordinary psychological meanings at the same time. Pascal wants
his readers to see their own routine actions as instances of petty self-
regard and, at the same time, as manifestations of the sin of pride.
He therefore implicitly grounds his indictment of the selfishness,
hypocrisy, and bias that people display in ordinary life in his fully
theological vocabulary.13 It is clear that “pride” is equivalent to amour-
propre, since both are linked to concupiscence (e.g. L149/S182, L216/
S249) and pride, like amour-propre, is a fundamental source of sin
(L208/S240, L774/S638). “Pride” is the more important term in the
Pensées, since it plays a role in the work’s central dialectic. That is,
Pascal usually juxtaposes pride not with its corollary, concupiscence,
but rather with various dialectical opposites: “wretchedness” (e.g.
L192/S225, L352/S384, L358/S390, L477/S712, L931/S759), “despair”
(L192/S225, L212/S245, L352/S384, L354/S386), or “sloth” (L208/
S240, L774/638).

FROM PRIDE TO DISORDERED LOVE

At the risk of undercutting Pascal’s impeccable Augustinian creden-

tials, there is a problem with the above account, which equates

13
See Nicholas Hammond, Playing with Truth: Language and the Human Condi-
tion in Pascal’s Pensées (New York: Clarendon Press, 1994).
26 The Evaluative Fall
disordered love with excessive self-love, or pride. Discussing this
problem requires a brief detour into contemporary work in theo-
logical anthropology. It seems descriptively inadequate—untrue to
the human condition—to say that all people are guilty of excessive
self-love. This objection simply reiterates the charges made by femi-
nist theologians and their allies, who argue that many Augustinian
accounts of sin overlook the particular form of sinfulness exhibited by
those who love themselves too little. Some people are tempted less by
self-assertion than by self-abasement, and so some people engage less
in the sin of pride than in the sin of self-dispersal or self-evacuation.
By “self-dispersal” and “self-evacuation,” I have in mind, for example,
Valerie Saiving’s list of characteristic temptations that are not easily
traced back to pride: “triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness; lack of
an organizing center or focus; dependence on others for one’s own
self-definition, tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence . . .
in short, underdevelopment or negation of the self.”14 Even with no
elaboration at all, it is clear that many of these descriptions would not
typically be associated with prideful self-assertion. In short, as Gene
Outka writes, “indolent inertia and arrogant soaring remain distinct
temptations. We miss too much on each side that deserves attention
in its own right when we try to reduce one to the other.”15 This is an
important point for my own constructive project. I base my account
of sinful self-deception on Pascal’s account of disordered love, and it
seems descriptively inadequate to say that all sin is motivated by
excessive self-love.
In fact, Pascal himself may have anticipated this point. As he
develops his overall dialectic of greatness and wretchedness, Pascal
sometimes says that sin has two roots. In a minor chord that never-
theless sounds throughout his treatment of human nature, pride is
only one of those roots. The other is paresse, a French word that

14
Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion,
40 (1960), 109. Similarly, in a review of feminist theologies of sin, Alistair McFadyen
presents the following list of verbs as characteristically associated with the diminution
of selfhood: failing, hiding, abdicating, abnegating, denying, fleeing, participating,
being complicit, acquiescing in, accepting, consenting to, complying, and cooperating
with. See Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian
Doctrine of Sin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 142–3.
15
Gene H. Outka, Edmund N. Santurri, and William Werpehowski, The Love
Commandments: Essays in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 1992), 54.
 The Evaluative Fall 27
translates the Latin acedia—spiritual apathy, otherwise known as the
sin of sloth. In two fragments, Pascal describes paresse (usually
rendered as “sloth” in English translations) as one of the twin sources
of sin, alongside pride.
Against those who, trusting in the mercy of God, remain indifferent,
without performing good works.
Since the twin sources of our sins are pride and paresse, God has
revealed to us two of his attributes to cure them: his mercy and his
justice. The proper function of justice is to bring pride low, however
holy the works (‘enter not into judgment’ [Psalm 143: 2]); the proper
function of mercy is to combat paresse by encouraging good works . . .
(L774/S638)
Without this divine knowledge, how could men help feeling either
exalted at the persistent inward sense of their past greatness or dejected
at the sight of their present weakness? For unable to see the whole truth,
they could not attain perfect virtue. With some regarding nature as
incorrupt, others as irremediable, they have been unable to avoid either
pride or paresse, the twin sources of all vice, since the only alternative is
to give in through cowardice (lâcheté) or escape through pride. For
if they realized man’s excellence they did not know his corruption, with
the result that they certainly avoided sloth but sank into pride, and if
they recognized the infirmity of nature, they did not know its dignity,
with the result that they were certainly able to avoid vanity, only to fall
headlong into despair . . . (L208/S240)
Although Pascal’s treatment of paresse is cursory compared to his
treatment of pride, it is nevertheless historically significant. Both
fragments suggest that the sin of paresse maps nicely onto the medi-
eval sin of acedia (sloth), since paresse, like acedia, causes us to
become indifferent to God and unconcerned with good works. More-
over, the textual connection between paresse and acedia is straight-
forward in the Pascalian corpus. In the ninth provincial letter, Pascal
himself uses the word paresse to translate acedia, in a context that
provides a further clue about its meaning. Pascal mocks his Jesuit
interlocutor’s suggestion that acedia means only “being dejected at
the fact that spiritual things are spiritual, for instance being distressed
because the sacraments are the source of grace.”16 Interestingly,
Pascal’s Jesuit parodies Thomas Aquinas, who writes that acedia is

16
Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, tr. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin,
1982), 139.
28 The Evaluative Fall
“sorrow for the spiritual good,” an “oppressive sorrow which so
oppresses a man’s mind that he wants to do nothing,” “a certain
weariness of work,” and the “paralysis of the mind which neglects to
begin good things.”17 By mocking the Jesuit’s degenerate treatment of
acedia, Pascal implicitly endorses the more robust scholastic defin-
ition from which it departs, which he renders with the French word
paresse. His implicit endorsement is significant because it means that
he uses the word paresse in a fully theological way, to name the sin of
acedia. That is, for Pascal, paresse is more than a psychological feeling
of laziness or cowardice, in exactly the same way that the sin of pride
is more than mere egoism. Rather, paresse, like acedia, describes a
deep-seated weariness that manifests as an indifference or aversion to
spiritual goods. Pascal also links paresse with despair, suggesting that
paresse results from despair over the fallen human condition.
The pride–sloth dialectic reinforces the overarching dialectic
between human greatness and wretchedness at the heart of the
Pensées: we fall into sin when pride causes us to ignore our wretch-
edness, but also when paresse causes us to ignore our greatness. The
dialectic between pride and sloth also plays a major role in Pascal’s
“Discussion with Monsieur de Sacy,” which discusses the religious
value of the philosophers Epictetus and Montaigne.18 According to
Pascal, whereas Epictetus recognizes that there is a God and that true
happiness is found only in God, Montaigne recognizes that human
nature is weak and human reason is uncertain. Yet both Epictetus
and Montaigne, without the virtues of the other, can see only one
side of human nature. As a result, each falls into pride or sloth,
respectively.
Although the term paresse is used only a handful of times in the
Pensées, the condition that it describes plays a central role in Pascal’s
thought. Nevertheless, many scholars miss its importance. For
example, Philippe Sellier claims that Pascal’s distinction between
paresse and pride is only superficial and that the former simply
reduces to the latter. According to Sellier, paresse is not really
a separate source of sin but only “the worn-out face of pride,”

17
My trs, respectively, of: ‘tristitia spiritualis boni; ita deprimit animum hominis ut
nihil ei agere libeat; quoddam taedium operandi,’ and ‘torpor mentis bona negligentis
inchoare.’ All are from Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 35, art. 1.
18
“Entretien de Pascal avec Monsieur de Sacy sur Épictète et Montaigne,” in OC
ii. 82–98.
 The Evaluative Fall 29
a concept that captures the idea that “we will ourselves to be excep-
tional until we are in despair.”19 Sellier’s interpretation ignores both
Pascal’s own statement that paresse is a separate source of sin
alongside pride, and the implications of the textual link between
paresse and acedia.
Pascal’s own thought on the sources of sin is therefore surpris-
ingly contemporary, since he allows that self-abnegation and des-
pair are sources of sin that are distinct from the sin of pride. For my
part, I will go still further and adopt “disordered love” as the key
analytical category that describes our fallen capacity to love. This
move allows me to say that our sinful projects can be motivated by a
disordered love for finite goods in general—whether those goods
include the self, other people, or even relative abstractions like race
and nation. As an exegetical matter, however, I will not stop to
qualify Pascal each time he equates disordered love with excessive
self-love.
Theologians who do finally reduce all forms of disordered love to
the sin of pride might claim that I confuse pride with its typical
manifestations, which are usually, but not necessarily, acts of self-
assertion.20 They would say that pride—Augustine’s superbia—is
simply any act of willing that is contrary to the will of God. On this
view, even to will one’s own self-abasement is to will something that
God does not will, which, by definition, is superbia. It seems to me,
however, that the more one pushes pride/superbia in this direction,
the more it loses its own distinctive characteristics and begins to take
on the purely formal sense of disordered love: excessive love of
something other than God, with no particular object of love neces-
sarily implied. So I shall instead say that disordered love per se is at
the root of all sin and that pride is one way—but not the only way—
that disordered love manifests.21

19
See Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin, 185–6.
20
See e.g. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd-
mans, 1991), ii. 243 n. 33.
21
Though subsequent thinkers who have been influenced by Augustine do expli-
citly claim that every sin is rooted in pride, Augustine and Pascal might be amenable
to the above interpretation. For all their condemnations of pride, both of them also
attend carefully to the “triple concupiscence” presented in 1 John 2: 16 (“For all that is
in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of
the Father but is of the world”), of which pride is only one species of sin. In Pascal, see
esp. fragments L933/S761 and L545/S460.
30 The Evaluative Fall

THE EVALUATIVE FALL

The cognitive consequences of the Fall result from disordered love.

Since we are fallen, we are not able to love and evaluate goods
properly. We resist the truth about ourselves and God because we
do not love them as we should. Thus, the Fall has cognitive conse-
quences because it is first and foremost an evaluative fall. Most studies
treat Pascal’s account of the Fall in straightforwardly conventional
terms as a fall of the reason or the will.22 In my view, we may arrive at
a better understanding of Pascal’s account of the Fall by looking
beyond the Fall of the reason and the will—understood narrowly as
the faculties of calculating and choosing—to an even deeper fall, a fall
in our ability to perceive and respond to value.
Certainly, Pascal does launch a variety of attacks on our rational
and volitional faculties in the Pensées. He calls reason “corrupted”
(L60/S94, L600/S497) and “impotent” (L131/S164), suggests that
reason is not reasonable (L76/S111), and says that reason and the
senses are engaged in mutual deception (L45/S78). In fragment L199/
S230, surely one of the most important in the Pensées, he presents the
human being as suspended between the twin infinities of the micro-
scopic and the super-terrestrial, and cut off from the knowledge of
either. Yet Pascal often uses the word raison with a technical mean-
ing, to name that faculty concerned with deducing conclusions from
premises, i.e. with syllogistic reasoning (L298/S329).23 Many of
Pascal’s attacks on reason simply point out how few areas of human
life lend themselves to this kind of inquiry. Furthermore, the many
fragments in which Pascal straightforwardly praises human reasoning
frustrate any attempt to tie him to anti-rationalism as such. For

22
For some standard treatments of Pascal on the Fall, see the Introduction, n. 5.
23
The most detailed treatment of Pascal’s use of the technical sense of raison is
found in Norman, Portraits of Thought, 45–60. See also Hugh M. Davidson’s two
works, The Origins of Certainty: Means and Meanings in Pascal’s Pensées (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1979), 44, and Pascal and the Arts of the Mind, 13; An
excellent discussion of the various meanings given to the word raison by 17th-cent.
writers, including Pascal, may be found in Jeanne Haight, The Concept of Reason in
French Classical Literature 1635–1690 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).
In French, see Jean Laporte, Le Cur et la raison selon Pascal (Paris: Elzévir, 1950),
13–26, 101; Dominique Descotes, L’Argumentation chez Pascal (Paris: PUF, 1993),
151–89. See also Hélène Bouchilloux, Pascal: La Force de la raison (Paris: Vrin, 2004)
and Apologétique et raison dans les Pensées de Pascal (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995).
 The Evaluative Fall 31
example, he writes that reason “constitutes [our] being” (L491/S736),
that “all our dignity consists in thought” (L200/S232), and that we
should form beliefs on the basis of our “own inner assent and the
consistent voice of [our] reason” instead of on the basis of authority
(L505/S672). If Pascal condemns the reason as fallen, his condemna-
tion is also more qualified than many scholars are willing to admit.
In addition, the condition of disordered love that characterizes
fallen human willing is more than merely an inability to choose the
good. To be sure, like Augustine, Pascal says that the human will is
fallen and divided, unable to will its own genuine good. In fragment
L502/S738, he is especially straightforward: “the will of man is divided
between two principles: cupidity and charity . . . cupidity makes use of
God and delights in the world, while charity does the opposite.”
Sometimes the two wills are presented as two natures: “Concupis-
cence has become natural for us and has become second nature. Thus
there are two natures in us, one good, the other bad” (L616/S509).
And Pascal also makes the same point using the terminology of the
“heart”: “I say that the heart loves the universal being naturally and
itself naturally, according to its devotion. And it hardens itself against
one or the other as it chooses . . . ” (L423/S680).24 In any case, regard-
less of his terminology, Pascal’s central claim about the divided will is
that we incoherently seek private, particular goods to the exclusion
of the more general goods (and ultimately, God, the universal good)
of which they are a part: “For everything tends towards itself: this
is contrary to all order. The tendency should be toward the general,
and the bias toward self is the beginning of all disorder in war,
politics, economics, and in man’s individual body. The will is there-
fore depraved” (L421/S680).
At the same time, however, Pascal also holds that appeals to the
will have little explanatory power. To talk of “willing” some goal—
even willing a goal out of concupiscence—is merely to assert that we
want what we want, without specifying why we want what we want.
In the Writings on Grace, Pascal discusses what it means to be a “slave
of delight,” and writes: “For what is more clear than this proposition,
that one does always what delights one the most? Since this is nothing
other than saying that one always does what pleases one most, that is,
one always wants what pleases one, that is, one always wants what one

24
My tr. I discuss the heart as a cognitive faculty in Ch. 4.
32 The Evaluative Fall
wants.”25 If Pascal treats the operation of the will as a tautology, then
it is difficult to affirm that he believes the Fall has most fundamentally
damaged the will’s faculty of choice. That would have to mean that,
after the Fall, the will no longer wants what it wants—an absurdity.
Rather, when Pascal says that the will is “depraved,” he means that
it is fundamentally oriented toward some false conception of the
good, and that this basic orientation affects every concrete instance
of willing. The fundamental love that Pascal names “love of self ” or
“love of God” is not just one particular emotion, attitude or desire
among others. It is more like a comprehensive orientation or stance.
As such, it shapes all of one’s emotions, attitudes, and desires. When
Pascal says that concupiscence automatically makes all our decisions
for us because it has become our second nature, he makes this very
point (L119/S151, L616/S509). A person doesn’t wake up in the
morning and decide: Today, I want to do three things—get a haircut,
clean my apartment, and idolatrously love myself instead of God.
Rather, the fact that he loves himself instead of God disposes him to
value certain things and reject others, to pursue certain projects and
not others, and so on. It disposes him to engage with the world
selfishly, no matter what he does, and so it shapes his life as a
whole.26 In fact, to extend Pascal’s reflections a bit, every instance
of love is the adoption of a stance. Love is always a stance because it
always comes packaged, as it were, with a principle of interpretation.
It orders the lover’s values and engagements by deriving them from
the needs and interests of the beloved. As such, love always shapes
one’s attitudes and dispositions, more or less comprehensively,
depending on the nature of the beloved object.27 As Pascal succinctly
writes, “the heart calls good that which it loves” (L255/287).

25
My tr. of OC ii. 272. (Car qu’y a-t-il de plus clair que cette proposition, que l’on
fait toujours ce qui delecte le plus? Puisque ce n’est autre chose que de dire que l’on fait
toujours ce qui plaît le mieux, c’est-à-dire que l’on veut toujours ce qui plaît, c’est-a-dire
qu’on veut toujours ce que l’on veut.) In this analysis of Pascal’s understanding of the
will as a tautology, I follow Miel, Pascal and Theology, 153–7.
26
Conversely, the desire to turn away from himself and back toward God is also
not one desire among others. It results from conversion. He must adopt (be given) an
entirely new vantage point from which everything looks different.
27
Harry G. Frankfurt puts it nicely (and sounds properly Pascalian) when he says:
“Loving something has less to do with what a person believes, or with how he feels,
than with a configuration of the will . . . This volitional configuration shapes the
dispositions and conduct of the lover with respect to what he loves, by guiding him
 The Evaluative Fall 33
Pascal amplifies the traditional Augustinian account of love by
emphasizing that our inability to love God above all things concretely
manifests as an inability to perceive the true value of spiritual goods.
Throughout his writings, Pascal pursues this point by metaphorically
linking love and visibility.28 In one of his most important fragments,
Pascal presents a developed picture of the relationship between love,
value, and perception. In fragment L308/S339, he sets up three
hierarchically arrayed orders of reality—body, mind, and charity—
and characterizes each with an appropriate kind of perfection,
roughly described as physical power, intellectual acumen, and saint-
liness, respectively. The three orders of being are also three orders of
value and, as such, three orders of visibility:
All the splendor of greatness lacks luster for those engaged in pursuits of
the mind.
The greatness of intellectual people is not visible to kings, rich men,
captains, who are all great in a carnal sense.
The greatness of wisdom, which is nothing if it does not come from
God, is not visible to carnal or intellectual people. They are three orders
differing in kind.
Great geniuses have their power, their splendor, their victory, their
luster, and they do not need carnal or intellectual greatness, which has
no relevance for them . . .
Saints have their power, their splendor, their victory, their luster, and
do not need either carnal or intellectual greatness, which has no rele-
vance for them . . . (L308/S339)29
Pascal claims that denizens of each order cannot properly evaluate
the goods of the other orders because they cannot see them. The
“splendor” and “luster” of intellectual greatness is not visible to
carnal people, he writes, because intellectual greatness has no “rele-
vance” (the French is rapport) for them. Similarly, the luster of

in the design and ordering of his relevant purposes and priorities.” Harry
G. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 43.
28
The best discussion of the motif of sight in the Pensées is found in Hans Urs von
Balthasar’s chapter on Pascal in his The Glory of the Lord, iii. Studies in Theological
Style: Lay Styles, tr. Andrew Louth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), 179–88.
29
There are important exegetical questions that I must pass over about whether
the three orders should be understood as incommensurable or interpenetrating. For a
study of the importance of the three orders to Pascal’s thought, see Jean Mesnard, “Le
Thème des trois orders dans l’organisation des Pensées,” in Lane M. Heller and Ian
M. Richmond (eds), Pascal: Thématique des Pensées (Paris: Vrin, 1988).
34 The Evaluative Fall
saints cannot be recognized by inhabitants of lower orders. Objects
from outside of one’s own order seem alien and unattractive, and
because one does not see them as valuable, one does not really see
them at all. This is, of course, literally false, but it does point toward
an important idea. To return to the language of love (for the three
orders can be seen as three different stances of love), Pascal claims
that I necessarily experience the world—my world—as the world
that I love.30
Yet Pascal is certainly no subjectivist. The three orders are best seen
as an objective hierarchy that presupposes a robust axiological and
moral realism. Even if we are not always able to recognize and
properly evaluate the real worth of some perceived good, the objective
standard of value remains in place. It is simply a feature of the world,
on Pascal’s account, that it exists within a framework of objective,
hierarchically ordered values. With the three orders, Pascal highlights
the difference between love as a response to the inherent, pre-existing
value of an object, on the one hand, and love as what invests a beloved
object with value, on the other. It is natural to say that one ought to
love things that are worth loving and, further, that one ought to love
them in the right way.31 This insight returns us to the distinction
between ordered and disordered love: sometimes we invest beloved
objects with a value they cannot objectively bear.

THE EVALUATIVE FALL AND THE CYCLE OF DESIRE

One sure sign that the will is depraved, according to Pascal, is that we
have lost the ability to evaluate goods properly. Since we do not affirm
that God, the universal good, is the standard of value, anything can
seem like the highest good. Accordingly, Pascal delights in pointing
out the bewildering array of things that philosophers—certain that
their opinions are grounded in reason—have identified as the

30
See Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of
Freudian Psychoanalysis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 132–42,
for an interesting version of this idea from a psychoanalytic perspective.
31
Susan Wolf pursues this point at some length in her critique of Harry Frankfurt
in “The True, the Good, and the Lovable: Frankfurt’s Avoidance of Objectivity,” in
Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry
Frankfurt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 236 ff.
 The Evaluative Fall 35
supreme good: virtue, pleasure, truth, peaceful ignorance, idleness,
indifference, and more (L76/S111). Ordinary people fare no better:
Pascal grants that all people naturally seek happiness, but points out
that no one agrees about what happiness consists in. Since human-
kind abandoned God:
It is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to take his place:
stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves,
serpents, fever, plague, war, famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his
true good, man is capable of seeing it in anything, even his own destruc-
tion, although it is so contrary at once to God, to reason, and to nature.
(L148/S181)
This is a bizarre list, to be sure, but according to Michael Moriarty,
each element on it has either been the explicit object of worship
by some human community, or has been sought as a form of “tran-
scendence through transgression,” which is an implicit form of
self-worship.32 Of course, it is even easier to imagine more typical
substitutes for the highest good: wealth, power, and national identity
come readily to mind. In any event, the salient fact about the human
will, according to Pascal, is that it tries (and fails) to invest finite
goods with an infinite value that they cannot bear.
Because it has no genuine standard of value, the will cannot
evaluate goods properly and is buffeted by an unceasing stream of
desire. Pascal’s account of the will also yields an important psycho-
logical fact. According to Pascal, human desire is multi-tiered and is
not exhausted by the day-to-day felt desires that one occurrently
experiences and avows. These desires cannot be explanatorily basic,
because they are not the psychological bedrock of the human person.
Rather, a person’s felt desires, goals, and actions are shaped by
whatever he affirms (implicitly or explicitly) as a comprehensive
good: a lover of money will have a different set of desires than, say,
a lover of justice. (This is not to say that each person explicitly affirms

32
Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought, 132. Moriarty doesn’t say any more
about just who it is who worshipped all these things. But further research shows that—
who knew?—it was apparently a commonplace of early modern thought that the
ancient Egyptians worshipped vegetables, especially leeks and onions. Rampant
Egyptian vegetable worship is mentioned by for example Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan,
4.44), David Hume, Natural History of Religion (ch. 12), and Nicholas Malebranche
(The Search After Truth, 6.2.6).
36 The Evaluative Fall
some good as “comprehensive,” or affirms exactly one false, compre-
hensive good.33)
Furthermore, any false conception of the ultimate good is doubly
incoherent, according to Pascal: incoherent in itself and incoherent
as a basis for action. Anything other than God is logically excluded
from being the highest good: a finite good cannot be possessed
by everyone without diminishing it, as the universal good must be
(L148/S181). And when we pursue a finite good as if it were infinite,
we act incoherently. We always retain some love for God and
so, no matter how furiously we pursue some finite good, we remain
hardwired to pursue God, the ultimate good (L423/S680, L564/
S471, L148/S181).34 We are thus at cross-purposes with ourselves,
pulled in different directions by the intra-psychic conflicts that our
incoherent loves create, trying—and failing—to love God above all
things.
Because it is trapped by this doomed project, the will produces a
ceaseless stream of desires. That is, each person constantly experi-
ences his own psychic life as an endless series of plastic, unstable
desires that, when satisfied, immediately produce further desires. This
is because our occurrent (i.e. felt) desires are instrumentally related to
the incoherent project of treating finite goods as the ultimate good.
Regardless of their explicit target, occurrent desires also implicitly
aim at a target they cannot reach, restful happiness. Even when our
desires are satisfied at the explicit level, they still fail to attain this
ultimate goal. Thus, in the fullest sense, no desire is ever finally
satisfied, and so humans are trapped in a state of restless longing.
This constant longing is what engenders further desires:
Since nature makes us unhappy whatever our state, our desires depict
for us a happy state, because they link the state in which we are with the
pleasures of that in which we are not. Even if we did attain these
pleasures, that would not make us happy, because we would have new
desires appropriate to this new state. (L639/S529)
In order to stop the cycle of desire, people must be oriented toward
the truly ultimate good. But instead of reorienting our fundamental

33
In other words, someone who e.g. treats money as the highest good would not
necessarily assent to the claim “Money is the highest good” and may not experience anything
like a constant, explicit, avowable, “desire for money”.
34
Pascal follows Augustine here, of course. See Charles T. Mathewes, “Augustinian
Anthropology: Interior Intimo Meo,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 27 (1999), 195–221.
 The Evaluative Fall 37
idea of the good, we continue to pursue limited goods as if they were
ultimate. Speaking about the universal quest for happiness, Pascal
writes:
A test which has gone on for so long, without pause or change, really
ought to convince us that we are incapable of attaining the good by our
own efforts. But example teaches us very little. No two examples are so
exactly alike that there is not some subtle difference, and that is what
makes us expect that our expectations will not be disappointed this time
as they were last time. So, while the present never satisfies us, experience
deceives us, and leads us on from one misfortune to another . . . (L148/
S181)
People do not understand why they remain deeply unsatisfied even
when their immediate desires are gratified. They fail to see that the
problem lies in the fact that their desires are oriented toward com-
prehensive goods that are false.
In sum, our felt desires and day-to-day wants are instrumentally
ordered toward the satisfaction of deeper desires for more compre-
hensive goods. This fact complicates standard models of rational
agency and motivation, since it ensures that any causal story about
the impact of desire on belief and action cannot stop with an account
of occurrent desire, for occurrent desires themselves have causal
stories. Moreover, because our desires (occurrent or deep) shape
our beliefs and actions, it follows that, if our desires are conflicting
and incoherent, then they are likely to shape our beliefs and actions
incoherently. Our beliefs must be split along the same fault line as our
wills—incoherent selves with incoherent wills could only have inco-
herent beliefs. The theory of the divided will therefore sets up a whole
range of intra-psychic conflicts wherein a single human subject is
wracked by belief divided against belief, action against action, and
action against belief. We miss the full force of this anthropology if we
succumb to the temptation of thinking that Pascal posits two autono-
mous wills or two subjectivities. He does not, and to do so would be to
adopt the Manichean heresy. In fragment L629/S522, Pascal denies
the suggestion that we have two “souls,” but the context is such that it
is clear that he means to deny two centers of subjectivity. In a more
modern parlance, we do not, strictly speaking, “have” wills in the way
that we have some tool, for example, or even in the way that we have
hands. The claim that our wills are incoherent is better understood as
the claim that we are incoherent precisely to the extent that we cannot
38 The Evaluative Fall
make sense of our own volitions, for when we cannot make sense of
our volitions we cannot make sense of ourselves.
Suppose I believe that a successful career will bring me lasting
happiness. I succeed at one job after another, all of which fail to
make me happy. Pascal’s point is that I don’t treat these specific
experiences as falsifications of the general claim that a successful
career brings lasting happiness. Instead, I focus on the situational
particularities of each and imagine that the general claim remains
valid. (I wasn’t happy at this job because of the boss, I wasn’t happy at
that job because of the salary, etc.) I exploit the fact that each situation
is slightly different in order to preserve an interpretation of happiness
that does nothing more than constantly engender a new set of soon-
to-be frustrated desires. As Pascal succinctly puts it: “What causes
inconstancy is the realization that present pleasures are false, together
with the failure to realize that absent pleasures are vain” (L73/S107).
As a result of the Fall, we have lost the ability to love God above all
things. Although we retain a capacity for infinite love, we can find no
infinite object in the world that answers to that capacity. We therefore
strive to satisfy our infinite love with finite goods, an inevitable
project inevitably doomed to failure.
Moreover, the point of the theory of the divided will is not just the
truism that we must choose among incompatible goods and that we
often choose poorly. The theory of the divided will also captures the
feeling of seeming alien to oneself and the concomitant sense of
puzzlement that such self-estrangement is even possible. To say that
we are estranged from ourselves is just to say that our actions and our
beliefs are often in fundamental conflict. Our loves and desires help
shape our beliefs (L539/S458). It follows that if we have incoherent
desires—as we do, according to Pascal—then those incoherent desires
can only shape our beliefs incoherently. It is no surprise, therefore,
that human life is rife with self-deception.

RAPPORT, TRUTH, AND ATTRACTIVENESS

Truth is among the goods that we are unable to value properly.

Because we do not love the truth, we reject it in favor of self-serving
falsehoods. Put otherwise, we are unable to value the truth properly
because we do not find it attractive. This, too, is a consequence of the
 The Evaluative Fall 39
Fall: the Fall has left us with a fissure between beauty and truth.
Pascal’s scattered thoughts on attraction and persuasion make this
very point. In his most direct fragment on beauty, he writes that
“there is a certain model of attractiveness and beauty consisting in a
certain relation (rapport) between our nature, weak or strong as it
may be, and the thing which pleases us” (L585/S486). It is instructive
that Pascal locates the source of attractiveness in the rapport between
our nature and the particular attractive thing and not in the thing
itself. This often-overlooked fragment, and the concept of rapport,
helps explain why the Fall is a fall into duplicity, and produces an
aversion to truth.35
Pascal’s reference in L585/S486 to “our nature” is obviously a
reference to our fallen nature, “weak or strong as it may be,” and
therefore implies that the way we perceive beauty is determined by
how far we have fallen. Because the integrity of our nature is one of
the terms of the relation that establishes attractiveness, it follows that
our aesthetic judgments also express our moral character. Pascal
describes the relation itself as a relation of rapport.36 English editions
of the Pensées usually translate rapport as “relationship” and rappor-
ter as “to relate,” and, indeed, these are the ordinary renderings of
these words. The French word rapport, however, has valences not
quite captured by the English word “relationship”. Whereas “rela-
tionship” is a neutral term, rapport connotes value. This was also true
in Pascal’s time: the relevant subsection of one seventeenth-century
French dictionary begins its definition of rapport with convenance
(fitness/propriety/seemliness) and continues with ressemblance and
conformite (resemblance and conformity).37 To say, for example, that
there is “a rapport between man and all he knows” (L199/S230) is to
say more than that some relationship obtains between the two. It is
to say that the relationship that obtains is appropriate and that a
man’s knowledge befits his state as a finite human being. Similarly, it
is not the case that there is no “relationship” between God and the
human being (L418/S680). There is, Pascal would certainly affirm, at

35
The discussion below borrows from William Wood, “Reason’s Rapport: Pasca-
lian Reflections on the Persuasiveness of Natural Theology,” Faith and Philosophy, 21
(2004), 519–32.
36
The word rapport and it variants appear in some of the key fragments of the
Pensées (L199/S230, L298/S329, L308/S339, L418/S680, L733/S614, L826/S667, L919/
S750).
37
Academie Francaise. Le Dictionnaire de l’Academie francoise (Paris, 1694), 281.
40 The Evaluative Fall
the minimum the relationship of creator to creature. But, despite this
relationship, the fallen human being is not conformed to God, does
not resemble God, and is not fitted to matters divine. The fallen
human being has no rapport with God.
According to Pascal, our evaluative judgments are driven by per-
ceptions of rapport between ourselves as knowing subjects and the
objects or situations we encounter. In other words, we are likely to be
attracted to goods that fit in with, resemble, and conform to our
already existing interpretations of ourselves and the world. Because
we are fallen, however, our already existing interpretations of our-
selves and the world are likely to be false and self-serving. It follows
that evaluative judgment is frequently a self-referential process and
that we often engage with reality by determining the degree to which
it conforms with what we already believe. Thus, we are highly vulner-
able to self-deceptive reasoning, and especially self-deceptive moral
reasoning.
It is no surprise that Pascal argues that we are more easily per-
suaded by attractiveness than by truth and that, as a result, our
reasoning is often rationalization. Like any keen observer of the
human condition, Pascal recognizes that, under the influence of
desire, people often depart from the strict canons of rationality and
believe just what they want to be true. In the Pensées, he makes this
point using the faculty psychology of his day:
The will is one of the chief organs of belief, not because it creates belief,
but because things are [i.e. seem] true or false according to the aspect by
which we judge them. When the will likes one aspect more than
another, it deflects the mind from considering the qualities of the one
it does not care to see. Thus the mind, keeping in step with the will,
remains looking at the aspect preferred by the will and so judges by
what it sees there. (L539/S458)
Even when the mind, the locus of belief, is in a position to form
correct judgments, it often does not do so because it is led astray
by its own desires. The image of the mind brought up short,
captivated by the charms of one aspect (face in the French) of the
matter it is judging and unable to turn away, evokes nothing so
much as the rapt gaze of a lover caught in the fog of love. And like
a lover so caught, the mind, believing that the object of its gaze is
eminently worthy of attention, realigns its judgments of truth and
falsity accordingly. Metaphorically, Pascal is making the point—now
 The Evaluative Fall 41
common in philosophical psychology—that desire can influence
belief-formation.38
In a short treatise called “The Art of Persuasion” he makes the
same point in less metaphorical terms. Although we should be con-
vinced only by rationally demonstrated truths, according to Pascal,
“every man is almost always led to believe not through proof but
through that which is attractive . . . we believe almost only in the
things we like.”39 It follows that the best way to persuade someone
of something—the way with the greatest chance of success—is to
show how the matter under consideration is connected to a state of
affairs that he or she desires:
whatever it is one wants to persuade people of, we must take into
consideration the person with whom we are concerned, of whom we
know the mind and heart, the principles admitted, and the things loved;
and then we must take note, in the matter concerned, the relation it has
with admitted truths or of the objects of delight through the charms we
attribute to them.
So the art of persuasion consists as much in pleasing as it does in
convincing, humanity being so much more governed by whim (caprice)
than by reason.40
We are highly likely to believe claims that are tied to what we already
love or that otherwise reinforce what we already believe. Although the
particular things that charm and delight us vary, they can be traced
back to the “principles” and “prime movers” of each person’s will.41
Pascal’s account of disordered love shows how to understand this
claim: a person is most charmed and delighted by those things that
relate back to the comprehensive good that he affirms. Belief-forma-
tion therefore depends on a particular person’s disordered loves. In a
way, this is common sense: a lover of money will have a different set

38
For a way into the empirical psychology literature on this topic, see Jonathan
Haidt, “Morality,” in S. Fiske, D. Gilbert, and G. Lindzey (eds), Handbook of Social
Psychology, 5th edn Hobeken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), 805–6. See also the discussion in
Alfred R. Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), 11–31.
39
“The Art of Persuasion” may be found in Levi (ed.), Pensées and Other Writings,
193–204. The French may be found in OC ii. 171–82.
40
“The Art of Persuasion,” in Levi (ed.), Pensées and Other Writings, 195.
41
“The Art of Persuasion,” in Levi (ed.), Pensées and Other Writings, 194: “These
powers [the mind and the will] each have their principles and prime movers of their
actions . . . Those of the will arise from certain natural desires, common to everyone,
such as the desire for happiness, which no one is without . . . ”
42 The Evaluative Fall
of desires than a lover of justice, and it will be easier to for him to
believe something that advances his financial interests.
Thus, on Pascal’s account, the Fall is a fall into duplicity because it
is an evaluative fall. Because we no longer love or desire truth, we turn
away from truth and embrace self-serving fantasies. At the level of our
cognitive faculties, our disordered capacity to love affects the will, and
through the will, belief-formation. This means that the Fall affects our
capacity to reason, and that reason itself may be warped by disordered
love.
Once we understand its cognitive consequences, the Fall becomes
both tragic and terrifying. Even if we accept as a general claim that our
reason is fallen, we cannot accept it “from inside,” in the first person. If
we are indeed more often persuaded by desire than by truth, then it is
also the case that, in the moment, we cannot recognize this fact about
ourselves. We cannot admit that we believe something just because we
wish it were true. From our own point of view, we seem to rely wholly
on our reason, and we take ourselves to be reasoning toward the truth
even though we are not. The desirable seems like the true. Rational-
ization seems like reasoning. It may be correct that, as Pascal writes,
that “It is your own inner assent and the consistent voice of your
reason that should make you believe” (L505/S672), but it is also correct
that, unbeknownst to us, the “voice” of our reason is more often the
voice of the sophist than of Socrates.

ENNUI AND DIVERSION AS SIGNS OF THE

FALL INTO DUPLICITY

Thus, according to Pascal, we reason poorly under the all-pervasive

influence of warped desire. Our reasoning often leads us away from
the truth, and we frequently think in biased and self-deceptive ways
without realizing it. Since we do not value truth and goodness prop-
erly after the Fall, and since the desires of our wills have the power to
bias our reasoning, we are able to reject the truth about ourselves and
God. At first blush, the claim that ordinary people routinely “reject
the truth about themselves and God” may seem too extreme. Yet
Pascal persuasively makes the case that some of the most routine and
ubiquitous human activities manifest exactly this aversion. Consider
 The Evaluative Fall 43
again, for example, his critique of boredom (ennui) and diversion
(divertissement).
The heart of that critique is the claim that people try to convince
themselves that they are happy, when in fact they suffer from pro-
found existential boredom (ennui). They relentlessly pursue diverting
activities (divertissement) in order to avoid confronting their own
nullity and emptiness. Like concupiscence and vanity, ennui and
divertissement are signs of the Fall, and they are ubiquitous because
the consequences of the Fall are ubiquitous. In his critique of diver-
sion and ennui, Pascal presents the fallen human subject as an inco-
herent self-deceiver, one who continually lies to himself about his
own happiness.
Although the French ennui is often translated by the English word
“boredom,” and there is considerable semantic overlap between the
two terms, Pascal’s ennui is more like a kind of existential despair.
According to Pascal, ennui is the felt response to the “nullity” and
“emptiness” that characterizes the fallen human condition as such.
Ennui. Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete
rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without
effort. Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence,
helplessness, emptiness. And at once there wells up from the depths of
his soul ennui, gloom, depression, chagrin, resentment, despair. (L622/
S515)42
Elsewhere, Pascal argues that, even when we do not explicitly attend
to our own existential emptiness, we nevertheless feel it. We feel the
Fall, and this feeling of our own fallenness drives us toward self-
deceptive diversions.
Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So
who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise,
diversions, and thoughts for the future?
But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinc-
tion. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could

42
Nicholas Hammond makes the point that the first series of terms (néant,
abandon, insuffisance, dépendance, impuissance, vide) describes an objective state,
while the second set (ennui, noirceur, tristesse, chagrin, dépit, désespoir) describes the
subjective response to that state. Playing with Truth: Language and the Human
Condition in Pascal’s Pensées (New York: Clarendon Press, 1994), 107. In theological
terms, the first series describes the human condition after the Fall, while the second
series describes what it feels like to be fallen.
44 The Evaluative Fall
be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is
reduced to introspection with no means of diversion. (L36/S70; my
emphasis)
As soon as they are deprived of diverting activities, people feel their
nullity even though they do not recognize its source. The Fall is
therefore the cause both of ennui and of its seeming opposite, the
ceaseless pursuit of diversion. By pursuing diversion, people try to
prevent feelings of ennui, and thereby avoid confronting their fallen-
ness, which is the cause of both.
Thus men who are naturally conscious of what they are shun nothing so
much as rest; they would do anything to be disturbed (L136/S168).
Man is so unhappy that he would be bored even if he had no cause for
boredom (ennui), by the very nature of his temperament, and he is so
vain that, although he has a thousand and one basic reasons for being
bored, the slightest thing, like pushing a ball with a billiard cue, will be
enough to divert him . . . (L136/S168)
Divertissement and ennui are correlative concepts. They each express
in opposite ways the “nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence,
helplessness, [and] emptiness” of the human condition after the Fall
(L622/S515).
Of the two, divertissement is by far the more dangerous. Ennui,
though painful, is an authentic reaction to the fallen human condi-
tion. Diversion is superficially pleasant and therefore a more insidious
sign of the Fall. Diversion, unlike ennui, is a form of bad faith.43 Were
we to allow ourselves to feel ennui, we might inquire about its true
cause, come to recognize that we are fallen, and then seek redemp-
tion. We pursue diversions in order to avoid feeling ennui and to
eschew self-knowledge.
The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion. And yet it
is the greatest of our miseries. For it is that above all which prevents us
thinking about ourselves and leads us imperceptibly to destruction. But
for that we should be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek some
more solid means of escape, but diversion passes our time and brings us
imperceptibly to our death. (L414/S33)

43
Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin, 166. According to Sellier, Pascal’s divertissement
is similar to Augustine’s aversio, a culpable turn away from God.
 The Evaluative Fall 45
We distract ourselves from our unhappiness and then pretend that we
are happy. This project is incoherent, according to Pascal, because
diversion leads away from genuine happiness: properly understood,
the pursuit of diversion is really the pursuit of unhappiness.
. . . is a man not happy who can find delight in diversion?
No: because it comes from somewhere else, from outside; so he is
dependent, and always liable to be disturbed by a thousand and one
accidents, which inevitably cause distress. (L132/S165)
[I]f our condition were truly happy, we should not need to divert
ourselves from thinking about it. (L70/S104)
The pursuit of diversion therefore manifests the performative inco-
herence of sin: we seek happiness by means of the very activity that
makes true happiness impossible to find. Elsewhere, Pascal makes it
clear that diversion is a kind of willful ignorance. We actively avoid
learning the truth about ourselves and so we implicitly reject God, the
only source of genuine happiness.
Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have
decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things. (L133/
S166)
When we wish to think of God, is there not something which distracts
us and tempts us to think of something else? All this is evil and innate in
us. (L395/S14)
The turn away from God is a turn away from happiness and a turn
away from truth. People persistently refuse to notice their own ennui
and so they mistake the unstable happiness of diversion for the stable
happiness that only comes from rest in God. They “do not know
themselves” because “they think they genuinely want rest when all
they really want is activity” (L136/S168). These displays of willful
ignorance are experiential proofs of the Fall, according to Pascal
(L131/S164). Yet these proofs “lie before our eyes, but we refuse to
look” (L428/S682; slightly emended).
Pascal’s critique of ennui and divertissement presents one of the
most important, admired, and fruitful themes of the Pensées. It
connects Pascal backward, to medieval treatments of acedia, and
forward, toward contemporary critiques of the ubiquitous boredom
produced by modernity itself. Pascal’s theological anthropology
therefore plays a central role not only in the history of the concept
of boredom, but in the history of the modern subject as such. After all,
46 The Evaluative Fall
some scholars have argued that boredom and ennui are the defining
experiences of modernity.
In a time when the drives to novelty and innovation, speed and progress
that have always defined modernity become the foundation of a process of
continuously accelerating transformation, boredom haunts the western
world . . . Boredom epitomizes the dilemma of the autonomous modern
subject, for whom enlightenment has also meant fragmentation . . . If
rationality is the sustaining myth of modernity, boredom, as an everyday
experience of universalized skepticism, constitutes its existential reality.44
At the very start of modernity, Pascal makes a version of the same
criticism, and there can be no doubt that his thoughts about ennui are
central to the way the concept developed in Western thought.45
Yet Pascal’s own critique of ennui is irreducibly theological. It is a
critique of the human condition after the Fall. Pascal shows us that
the Christian doctrine of the Fall is the secret center of the experience
of modernity itself. Indeed, if Christianity is true, then a full critique
of the ills of modern society—and especially any critique of modern
boredom—must be theological. We should look beyond the Enlight-
enment, industrialization, or capitalism, for example, and seek the
ultimate source of boredom in the fact that we are fallen. Pascal offers
us a set of lenses that allow us to explain common human behavior in
theological terms. Boredom and diversion are revealed as correlative
expressions of the nullity of the human condition after the Fall.
Furthermore, on this analysis, diversion becomes incoherent and
self-deceptive. People who pursue happiness by means of diverting
activities contradict themselves. They pursue happiness by running
frantically away from it. Pascal’s account of the Fall helps us to
understand this otherwise puzzling behavior.

OBJECTION: AM I REALLY SO UNHAPPY?

According to Pascal, and according to the Augustinian tradition from

which he draws, human beings can only be truly happy when they

44
Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 1–4.
45
Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1976), ch. 4; Goodstein, Experience without Qualities, 36–7.
 The Evaluative Fall 47
orient their lives around God as the comprehensive good. Because we
retain some basic love for God even after the Fall, the choice to orient
our lives around some good other than God is not only futile but self-
deceptive and incoherent. As a descriptive generality about the
human condition, Pascal’s critique certainly has some bite, even for
the non-Christian. Many of us really are restless in just the way Pascal
describes: seeking always a new object of delight, finding always that it
fails to satisfy, once attained. Surely just as many also feel the dark
weariness of ennui. Nevertheless, Pascal does not intend his critique
merely as a widely applicable descriptive generality. He wants us to
treat his observations as something like empirical confirmation of the
theological axioms that ground them. His observations are meant to
apply without restriction to every human being, and he treats them as
evidence that we all retain the desire for an unlimited good, which is
to say that he treats them as evidence that we are all fallen. We are
indeed restless—or at least some of us are—but does our restlessness
really demonstrate that we are fallen?
Put most forcefully: Pascal’s claims about happiness and boredom
seem like empirical claims that are easily falsified. Consider, for
example, the case of John, who wants above all to be a great concert
pianist. Certainly, if he never practices the piano and spends all his
time in the pub, we would say that his desires are incoherent and that
his stated goal is objectively unattainable for him. But suppose instead
that he is diligent and talented; suppose further that John actually
does achieve his goal and becomes a great concert pianist. On this
telling, there appears to be no incoherence between his actions and
his ultimate goal. Nor does the goal itself seems internally inconsist-
ent, or even especially unworthy. Even this little story therefore
appears to refute Pascal’s claim that it is incoherent to orient one’s
life around any good other than God.
The story so far misses the real force of Pascal’s critique, however.
He would not deny that people often pursue their explicit projects
and goals coherently, nor that they sometimes satisfy their desires and
experience feelings of pleasure as a result. Rather, Pascal would insist
that even if John attains his stated goal and becomes a great concert
pianist, he will find that he still remains deeply restless and unhappy.
It is this tension, the tension that arises when all our avowed desires
are satisfied but we still find ourselves inexplicably dissatisfied, that
Pascal takes to be a sign of the Fall. In John’s case, the supposed
incoherence lies in a conflict between his avowed goal (becoming a
48 The Evaluative Fall
great concert pianist) and another goal, one that he himself does not
avow, but one that, according to Pascal, John necessarily pursues in
spite of himself: the goal of finding true happiness in God. Pascal
must insist that John can never be satisfied as long as he pursues an
explicit goal that is in conflict with that other, unrecognized, goal.
Moreover if John were to attend to his own true feelings, he would
realize that his stated goal, and the life he builds around attaining it, is
not fulfilling. He will know this because he will see that he is not
fulfilled. The fact that he believes that he is fulfilled is a result of his
self-deception. His apparent happiness is just another sign of the Fall.
In short, Pascal is committed to the view that, even after he is a great
concert pianist, John will remain existentially unhappy and can come
to realize this fact about himself, his own protestations to the con-
trary. Pascal thereby sets himself up as a better judge of John’s psychic
economy than John himself.
Pascal is surely correct that it is often the case that the very act of
fulfilling a desire reveals that desire retrospectively to have been
unstable or unsatisfying. The psychic tension that Pascal identifies
is a real phenomenon. We see it with desires both trivial (I want cake!)
and profound (I want to be a concert pianist). The trope of the
seemingly successful person who gains everything only to realize
that he remains unhappy is ubiquitous. Still, an appeal to lingering
existential dissatisfaction only pushes the site of our criticism of
Pascal back one level, from his views on happiness to his views on
ennui. The tension to which Pascal points may be a widely recognized
phenomenon, but it is only a sign of the Fall if it really is the case that
all human beings have a persistent feeling of ennui that can only be
dispelled by orienting our lives around God as the comprehensive
good. The twin claims that we can find happiness only in God and
that we remain mired in ennui without God both seem quite prob-
lematic. We can grant that many people remain existentially unhappy
even when their desires are satisfied. It does not follow that this
generalization applies universally. The counterfactual claim—that
everyone who orients their life around God finds restful happi-
ness—does not follow either.
In my view, we should applaud Pascal for recognizing that the
tradition of Christian reflection on happiness has this empirical core.
Surely the human condition must be roughly as Pascal presents it if
the basic Christian story is true and God really is the sole source of
goodness. On the other hand, if it is possible to be fully satisfied when
 The Evaluative Fall 49
one attains some limited good, then Pascal’s empirical claims are
false, and their falsity counts as evidence (though not necessarily
as decisive evidence) against the basic Christian narrative that they
support. It is salutary for Christians to confront this dilemma. Never-
theless, the dilemma does suggest that further argument is called
for.46 In order to show that everyone implicitly desires restful happi-
ness in God, we need an argument that the desire for any good
whatsoever presupposes some desire for the comprehensive good,
and that only the Christian God can serve as a comprehensive
good in the relevant sense.47
Such an argument may be called for, but Pascal does not offer one.
One line of defense would be to say that Pascal simply stipulates that
God is the comprehensive good, that humans are happy only when
they are properly related to God, and so forth. After all, in any line of
inquiry, there is nothing methodologically suspect about treating
some claims as undefended axioms, and Pascal’s claims about happi-
ness form the bedrock of the Christian tradition from which he
argues. Perhaps he has no obligation to defend them.
It is more instructive, however, to pay closer attention to what
Pascal offers instead of linear arguments. Instead of arguments, he
presents suggestive portraits of people mired in the cycle of ennui and
frustrated desire. In the long fragment on diversion, for example,
he describes an array of people who are unable to quell their deep
sense of ennui and find restful happiness: the wealthy, soldiers,
kings, gamblers, hunters, billiard players, and holders of high office
(L136/S168). He implicitly invites his readers to identify themselves
imaginatively with these portraits and thereby accept that they, too,
seek diversion not for its own sake but as a way of distracting
themselves from the ennui that is a sign of their own deep desire
for God. In other words, Pascal makes his case not with direct
arguments aimed at the faculty of reason, but with indirect portraits
that seek to shift the way his readers understand themselves. The fact

46
Obviously a great deal also hangs on what it means to be “fully satisfied.” This is
an interesting question that I cannot pursue here.
47
The cumulative argument that Thomas Aquinas presents in the first five ques-
tions of Summa Theologiae I–II could help Pascal here. There Aquinas discusses the
purpose of human life, what happiness is, and how to attain it. For a very different, but
no less rigorous, treatment of the same question from a process theology perspective,
see Franklin I. Gamwell, The Divine Good (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco,
1990).
50 The Evaluative Fall
that he “argues” in this way is a methodological choice that is entirely
consonant with the way he understands both the fallen human
subject and his own intellectual task.
Pascal’s own account of the cognitive consequences of the Fall
requires him to argue obliquely. He takes himself to be addressing
fallen rational agents who are sure to be hostile to the conclusions he
wishes to establish. Their hostility exists at the level of reason: the
claim that they are fallen strikes most people as rationally repugnant
(L695/S574). Even when the truth about the human condition is
rationally available to us, we turn away from it because we are unable
to value it properly. We eschew painful truth in favor of easy false-
hood; we implicitly grasp the truth but explicitly refuse to recognize it.
At the same time, our deep desire for God remains. Pascal’s challenge
is to draw our attention to this deep desire in a way that bypasses our
rational objections. Given his views about the evaluative fall, it makes
sense that he would offer portraits and narratives instead of rational
arguments. By his own reckoning, arguments about our fallen nature
will not command assent even when they are sound. Because we find
the claim that we are fallen so deeply unattractive, we also find it easy
to reject. Given that this is our state, arguments meant to establish the
rational truth of Christianity will not succeed. Instead, the adroit
apologist must mount an appeal that is more affective and aesthetic.
This is why Pascal gives us imaginative portraits and brief vignettes
instead of straightforward argument.
None of this is meant to solve the philosophical problems and
objections raised above. Pascal is committed to the view that most
people deceive themselves about their own happiness and about what
they really want. After all, “if our condition were truly happy, we
would not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it” (S104/
L70); thus people like John “feel their nothingness without recogniz-
ing it” (L36/S70). Yet John’s story is only a tragic story about lifelong
self-deception—and not, say, a triumphant story about the value of
hard work—if we already agree that John (and everyone else) retains a
deep desire for God that manifests as a persistent feeling of ennui.
Pascal’s appeal to self-deception already presupposes that claim.
Contra Pascal, the claim may well stand in need of rational argument.
But to reject it altogether is to cease thinking as a Christian at all.
 2

The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s

Political Theology

Pascal is primarily known as a mathematician, scientist, and religious

apologist, but he is also a provocative political theorist with an
interestingly Augustinian account of the relationship between state
power and state duplicity. According to Pascal, a stable society can
exist only when its members systematically misapprehend the true
character of power and treat force as worth. Any functioning state
must induce its citizens to believe that the social order is held together
by bonds of justice and mutual respect. In so doing, the state must
induce them to believe a falsehood, according to Pascal, since the
social order is actually held together not by justice, but by the will-to-
power born of concupiscence. Pascal’s political theory grows out of
his famous critique of the deceptive faculty of the imagination. The
supposition that the social order rests on justice rather than force is a
fantasy, an act of the imagination.
By joining his critique of politics to his critique of the imagination,
Pascal makes a signal contribution to the tradition of Augustinian
political theology. He presents a sophisticated account of the concrete
mechanisms by which citizens are socialized into accepting state rule.
According to Pascal, each person’s selfish desire to dominate others
must be transmuted into “admirable rules of polity, ethics and justice”
(L211/S244) by a socially produced and reinforced system of illusion.
A functioning society can neither come into being nor long remain
stable without some such system of illusion, and so widespread
duplicity is a necessary condition of political order.
52 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology

IMAGINATION, ILLUSION, AND

POLITICAL ORDER

It is not surprising that Pascal’s remarks on politics grow out of his

broader critique of disordered love. Concupiscence has become our
“second nature” (L616/S509), and its effects on human life are ubi-
quitous. Moreover, prior to all socialization, fallen human beings are
already born with biased wills that incline toward the private good of
the self instead of the common good of all. When people enter into
society, they bring their disordered love with them. In order for a
stable society to emerge out of this egoistic miasma, each person’s
individual will must somehow be tempered and bent toward the
pursuit of a (relatively) common good. Yet even though the political
order may appear just, its apparent justice only masks its true foun-
dations—the will-to-power which comes from concupiscence:
All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best
we could to make it serve the public good, but this is only to feign a false
image of charity, for at root it is only hate. (L210/S243)1
We have established and developed out of concupiscence admirable
rules of polity, ethics and justice, but at root, the evil root of man, this
figmentum malum is only concealed; it is not pulled up. (211/S244)
Pascal’s ideas about political order are well-captured by the claim that
when we attempt to serve the public good we merely “feign a false
image of charity.” According to Pascal, the “admirable rules of polity,
ethics, and justice” that characterize a well-functioning society are
deceptive, and only conceal the fact that fallen human beings “natur-
ally hate each other.”
We might well wonder how such “admirable rules” developed in
the first place. Like his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, Pascal tries to
uncover the true nature of society with a thought experiment that
narrates the origin and development of social bonds. And, like
Hobbes, Pascal supposes that a functioning social order emerges out
of a state of war, which must cease before order can prevail:

1
My tr.: Tous les hommes se haïssent naturellement l’un l’autre. On s’est servi
comme on a pu de la concupiscence pour la faire servir au bien public; mais ce n’est que
feindre, et une fausse image de la charité; car au fond ce n’est que haine. The key word
is feindre. The 1694 Dictionnaire de l’Academie francoise defines it as: Simuler, Se
servir d’une fausse apparence pour tromper, Faire semblant (442).
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 53
The bonds securing men’s mutual respect are generally bonds of neces-
sity, for there must be differences of degree, since all men want to be on
top and all cannot be, but some can.
Imagine, then, that we can see them beginning to take shape. It is
quite certain that men will fight until the stronger oppresses the weaker,
and there is finally one party on top. But once this has been settled, then
the masters, who do not want the war to go on, ordain that the power
which is in their hands shall pass down by whatever means they like;
some entrust it to popular suffrage, others to hereditary succession, etc.
And that is where imagination begins to play its part. Until then pure
power did it, now it is power, maintained by imagination in a certain
faction, in France the nobles, in Switzerland commoners, etc.
So these bonds securing respect for a particular person are bonds of
imagination. (L828/S668)
This fragment presents a genealogy of social order, understood as the
“bonds securing men’s mutual respect.” A functioning society must
have such bonds—they are “bonds of necessity”—since the desire to
dominate one’s neighbors is universal but cannot (logically cannot)
be universally satisfied. Pascal thus inquires about the condition of
the possibility of creating successful social bonds out of the universal
desire to dominate.2
In contrast with the better-known scenario of Hobbes, it is striking
that Pascal’s version of the war-of-all-against-all makes no mention
of individuals. It is assumed that groups have already coalesced and
that the victor is not a person, but a party. Presumably, the conquered
form a similar collective. One might wonder how these collectives
came to be, if Pascal intends this thought experiment as an account of
the birth of all forms of social cooperation.3 The fragment itself does
not address this issue explicitly, but it does invite grounded specula-
tion. Note that Pascal does not say, with Hobbes, that people flee into
society because they fear violent death. Instead, he seems to suggest
that people band together out of a positive desire to dominate others:

2
Lazzeri, Force et justice, 56–64.
3
It is possible that Pascal did not intend the fragment as a conceptual account of
an utterly pre-social state of nature, but as an empirical description of how social
order coalesces in societies (like his own) wracked by civil war. I myself am partial to
the idea that this fragment implies that, for Pascal, society goes “all the way down,”
that no human individual can exist completely apart from society. Even without this
supposition, however, I see no reason why the dynamics in this fragment cannot be
recursively applied to smaller and smaller groups, including the interactions of two
individuals.
54 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
“all men want to be on top and all cannot be, but some can.” Thus, the
initial logic of society is not exactly Hobbesian, in which isolated
individuals are more vulnerable to attack and so join together to ward
off potential threats. Pascal’s logic seems even darker: a single indi-
vidual can only dominate other people to a limited degree, but wide-
scale domination is possible for a group. By identifying oneself with a
group, one maximizes one’s own opportunities for domination.4
Pascal next points out that, once a group attains dominance, it will
want hostilities to cease immediately. This is a matter of straightfor-
ward self-interest. From the point of view of the dominant, continued
war can only have two effects, equally undesirable: more war will
either erode the group’s already-dominant position or needlessly
diminish the resources (real and psychic) it can extract from the
conquered. Yet even if peace is in the interest of the dominant
group, it is not clear how a stable peace can emerge. A social order
cannot be founded exclusively on the power of the dominant group.
Members of the subordinate group must also believe that they have
something to gain by laying down their arms, after all.
It is here that the fear of violence enters the picture. Despite their
collective dominance, individual members of the victorious group still
lack personal security. After all, any given member of the subordinate
group could still harm any given member of the dominant group. For
hostilities to cease, the dominant group’s fear of violent reprisal must
be assuaged. And so members of the subordinate group must some-
how be induced to signal consistently to the dominant group that
they accept their own subordination. As Michael Moriarty puts it, “It
is not enough for the individual to be recognized as a member of a
group: his or her membership must be recognized as necessitating a
consistent pattern of behavior toward him on the part of members of
the opposite group. Submission to violence must be made perman-
ent.”5 The key is that submission to violence must be made perman-
ent, if violence is to be made temporary. There can be no stable
monopoly on coercive force unless both sides jointly legitimate it.
Pascal’s insights about the foundation of the social order anticipate
those of Michel Foucault, and a quotation from Foucault makes

4
See Eric Méchoulan, “On Power: Theology and Sovereignty in Pascal’s Pensées,”
Romance Quarterly, 50 (2003), 87–8.
5
Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought, 113. My argument in this chapter
depends heavily on Moriarty. See also Lazzeri, Force et justice, 229–62.
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 55
Pascal’s own point succinctly. Foucault inverts the famous dictum of
Carl von Clausewitz and argues that “politics is the continuation of
war by other means”:
And while it is true that political power puts an end to war and
establishes or attempts to establish the reign of peace in a civil society,
it certainly does not do so in order to suspend the effects of power or to
neutralize the disequilibrium revealed by the last battle of the war.
According to this hypothesis, the role of political power is perpetually
to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force, and to
reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even
the bodies of individuals . . . Politics, in other words, sanctions and
reproduces the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war.6
Politics is the continuation of war by other means because, on
Foucault’s account, the dominant group founds a regime and estab-
lishes a political order precisely in order to preserve the balance of
power that obtained at the end of the general war. The dominant
group tries to naturalize, and thereby make permanent, the submis-
sion of rival groups. This is exactly Pascal’s point.
In order to prevent further hostilities, and to secure its own
dominance, the victorious group needs to found a regime and estab-
lish procedures for the orderly transfer of power. But in order to do
this, it needs a way of transmuting the fear of violence into the social
bonds of mutual respect. Ideally, from the point of view of the
dominant group, the subordinate group’s members should come to
interpret themselves as essentially subordinate, not just contingently
weak. In this light, fragment L828/S668 concludes with an interesting
turn:
And that is where imagination begins to play its part. Until then pure
power did it, now it is power, maintained by imagination in a certain
faction, in France the nobles, in Switzerland commoners, etc.
So these bonds securing respect for a particular person are bonds of
imagination. (L828/S668)
Pascal now answers the question with which he opened the frag-
ment—what are the bonds of mutual respect that constitute the social
order? His answer: they are bonds of the imagination. Sheer force can
bring a recalcitrant group to heel. Perhaps it can even eradicate that

6
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France,
1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003), 15–16.
56 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
group altogether. But sheer force alone cannot found a functioning
social order. A stable social order can only emerge when most
members of society believe that the social order is founded on justice
instead of force. This false belief is the product of habit and the
imagination, according to Pascal.
Pascal’s claim in L828/S668 that “the bonds securing respect for a
particular person are bonds of imagination” is another way of saying
that society functions best when the socially subordinate construe the
socially dominant as deserving of their power. This construal is an act
of the imagination: because of their outward trappings, the dominant
are imaginatively invested with a patina of respectability, virtue, and
worth that is, strictly speaking, unearned:
The fact that kings are habitually seen in the company of guards, drums,
officers, and all the things which prompt automatic responses of respect
and fear has the result that, when they are sometimes alone and
unaccompanied, their features are enough to strike respect and fear
into their subjects, because we make no mental distinction between
their person and the retinue with which they are normally seen to be
associated. And the world, which does not know that this is the effect of
habit, believes it to derive from some natural force, hence such sayings
as: “The character of divinity is stamped on his features.” (L25/S59)
Our magistrates have shown themselves well aware of this mystery.
Their red robes, the ermine in which they swaddle themselves like furry
cats, the law-courts where they sit in judgment, the fleurs de lys, all this
august panoply was very necessary . . . We only have to see a lawyer in
cap and gown to form a favorable opinion of his competence. (L44/
S78)7
Elsewhere, Pascal makes the same point even more succinctly: “Can-
nibals laugh at an infant king” (L101/S134). This is drawn from
Montaigne, who reports that when some native Brazilians visited
France, they were surprised at the deference shown to the young
Charles IX. Because they had not been socialized into the cultural
and political habits of European monarchies, “they thought it very
strange that so many grown men, bearded, strong, and armed, who
were around the king . . . should submit to obey a child, and that one

7
As I go on to discuss, Pascal’s work on the imaginary foundations of social order
is regarded as a precursor of 20th-cent. ideological criticism, and several prominent
critical theorists, including Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and Slavoj Žižek expli-
citly acknowledge their debt to Pascal.
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 57
of them was not chosen to command instead.”8 Their question is
eminently reasonable: why does a child king command respect?
Pascal’s answer is that the bonds of imagination, reinforced and
reproduced across the society, shape the way the king is perceived
by his subjects, making him seem inherently fit to rule. In order to
understand this point fully, it is necessary to discuss Pascal’s account
of the imagination, custom, and habit.

THAT “PROUD POWER”: PASCAL’S CRITIQUE

OF THE IMAGINATION

Early on in the Pensées, Pascal launches what is arguably the sharpest

attack on the imagination in Western intellectual history. He calls it
the “dominant faculty in man,” and even goes so far as to say that it
has established a second human nature in each person (L44/S78). He
opposes the power of the imagination to the weakness of reason. The
imagination “checks and dominates its enemy, reason, for the pleas-
ure of showing the power it has in every sphere.” In its war with
reason, the imagination is the “master of error and falsehood” be-
cause its products are not always false and so are even more insidi-
ously duplicitous: the imagination sets “the same mark on true and
false alike” (L44/S78). Moreover, Pascal notes that, far from being
immune to its seductions, intellectual sophisticates are the most
vulnerable to them: “I am not speaking of fools, but of the wisest
men, among whom imagination is best entitled to persuade. Reason
may object in vain, it cannot fix the price of things” (L44/S78).
To say that the imagination can, and reason cannot, “fix the price
of things” is to give the imagination the power to bestow value.9
Because it has this power, the imagination instantiates and reinforces
the duplicitous reign of disordered love. The imagination can satisfy
desires for domination, knowledge, and pleasure (i.e. the “triple

8
“Of Cannibals,” Essays, 1.31. In Michel de Montaigne, Complete Essays, tr.
Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), 159.
9
See Matthew W. Maguire, The Conversion of Imagination: From Pascal through
Rousseau to Tocqueville (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 17–21.
58 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
concupiscence” of 1 John 2:16, discussed in L545/S460 and L933/
S761). In each of these spheres, the imagination asserts its power to
create objects of value:
Imagination has its happy and unhappy men, its sick and its well, its
rich and poor; it makes us believe, doubt, deny reason; it deadens the
sense, it arouses them; it has its fools and sages, and nothing annoys us
more than to see it satisfy its guests more fully and completely than
reason ever could. Those who are clever in imagination are far more
pleased with themselves than prudent men could reasonably be. They
look down on people with a lofty air; they are bold and confident in
argument, where others are timid and unsure . . . Imagination cannot
make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason which only
makes its friends wretched: one covers them with glory, the other with
shame . . .
Imagination decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness
which is the world’s supreme good. (L44/S78)
The imagination can satisfy the desire for power and domination (the
clever in imagination “look down on people with a lofty air”), know-
ledge (the imagination “makes us believe, doubt, deny reason”), and
bodily pleasure (it deadens and arouses sense, and it creates beauty
and happiness). Pascal seems to imply that, from a subjective point of
view, imaginary satisfaction is no different from real satisfaction.
It doesn’t really matter whether I am superior to someone else—
imagining that I am feels just as good. The imagination makes fools
happy because it allows them to desire objects that aren’t real, con-
jures up groundless pleasures, and invests real objects with more
value than they can bear. There is a direct relation between the way
we value beloved objects and the way we see them, which affects the
beliefs we form about them. Because love is always a more-or-less
comprehensive stance toward the world, it influences the way we
perceive things and thereby influences our beliefs about them.
When we love something, we not only respond to its value, we also
invest it with value. One way we do this is by imagining it in its ideal
form—as bigger than life, wonderful, and perfect. We thereby im-
aginatively invest beloved objects with a psychic sheen that reinforces
our loving attachment to them.
One such object is the self. Pascal calls the imagination a “proud
power” (superbe puissance), and regards it as the handmaiden of pride
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 59
(L44/S78).10 How else could the self “make itself the center of every-
thing” (L597/S494) except by imagining that it is? A real person faces
indefeasible limits; only an imaginary person can be like a god.11 Not
only do we privately imagine that we are perfect, according to Pascal,
we also try to “lead an imaginary life in the minds of others” by
pretending to be better than we are (L806/S653). The desire for the
esteem of others is “the most indelible quality in the human heart”
(L470/S707), and only the imagination finally satisfies this desire:
“Who dispenses reputation? Who makes us respect and revere per-
sons, works, laws, the great? Who but the faculty of imagination? All
the riches of the earth are inadequate without its approval” (L44/S78).

The Imagination and the Habituated Body

So far, Pascal’s indictment of the imagination is severe, but it remains
squarely within our own thought-world. That is, we can map Pascal’s
critique onto our own contemporary understanding of the imagin-
ation and see why he criticizes its power. As his main fragment on the
imagination continues, however, close reading shows that Pascal soon
takes a puzzling turn away from our own understanding.12 Consider
his well-known example of a wise and dignified magistrate who reacts
badly to an odd-seeming preacher:
Would you not say that this magistrate, whose venerable age commands
universal respect, is ruled by pure, sublime reason, and judges things as
they really are, without paying heed to the trivial circumstances which
offend only the imagination of weaker men? See him go hear a sermon
in a spirit of pious zeal, the soundness of his judgment strengthened by
the ardor of his charity, ready to listen with exemplary respect. If, when
the preacher appears, it turns out that nature has given him a hoarse
voice and an odd sort of face, that his barber has shaved him badly and
he happens not to be too clean either, then, whatever great truths he
must announce, I wager that our senator will not be able to keep a
straight face. (L44/S78)

10
“Arrogant force” is Krailsheimer’s translation of superbe puissance. “Proud
power” is a better translation, because it captures Pascal’s associative link between
the imagination and the sin of pride (superbia).
11
I return to Pascal’s treatment of the false, imaginary, self in Ch. 3.
12
The following discussion of the magistrate in fragment 44 is drawn from
Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought, 102–21.
60 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
Pascal’s phrase at the end of this passage ( je parie la perte de la gravité
de notre sénateur) suggests that the magistrate is so struck by the
preacher’s lack of decorum that he loses control of his own body and
laughs involuntarily. This is certainly an amusing scene, but it is
somewhat curious that Pascal blames the magistrate’s behavior on
his imagination. After all, the magistrate does not dream up a vivid
but false scenario to distract himself from the preacher’s message.
There is no suggestion that, in truth, the indecorous preacher does
not have an odd face, a hoarse voice, and so forth. Thus, it would
seem to make more sense for Pascal to blame the magistrate’s behav-
ior on his faculty of sensation, or his will. For example, he might say
that vividly concrete sensations impede the magistrate’s grasp of
abstract truth, or that his will errs in failing to assent to the truth
because it is distracted by considerations that are rationally irrelevant.
Instead, Pascal criticizes the imagination.
In order to understand more precisely what Pascal means in
passages like this, it is important to recognize that early modern
conceptions of the imagination differ from typical present-day con-
ceptions.13 Early modern thinkers did not strongly associate the
imagination with artistic creativity or speculative genius, for example.
Rather, their point of departure was scholastic thought, in which the
imagination was closely linked to the body and to ordinary sensation.
Aristotle regarded the imagination chiefly as a faculty that mediates
between the external senses and the intellect. To Aristotle and his
scholastic followers, it is one of the four “interior senses,” along with
the common sense, the estimative power, and the memory. The
imagination allows us to represent inwardly, with mental images,
the things that we perceive outwardly, with our senses. On this
conception, the imagination could err (unlike the senses) because it
is partly under our own control, since we can voluntarily produce
mental images that do not correspond to present-at-hand objects, and
it is especially vulnerable to the passions, but it should not be
regarded as highly deceptive.14

13
Here I draw from Gérard Ferreyrolles, “Compendium sur l’imagination dans les
Pensées,” Littératures classiques, 45 (2002), 139–45. This article is a précis of his
longer work, Les Reines du monde: L’Imagination et la coutume chez Pascal (Paris:
Champion, 1995).
14
See e.g. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 78, on the powers of the soul,
and q. 84, art. 7, and q. 85 art. 1, on the intellect’s need for “phantasms.” See also
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 61
By the time of Pascal, different conceptions of the imagination had
evolved, but they still preserved the fundamental link with the body,
material objects, and sensation. For example, Montaigne treats the
imagination as a bridge between the external world and the power of
judgment: it allows us to alter the way we perceive physical things and
it can even cause physical changes in the body.15 And Descartes
denies that the imagination is an essential part of the mind—and
therefore of the self—by associating it even more closely with the
body.16 But for Descartes, too, the imagination is “a special way of
thinking about material things.”17
The fact that early modern thinkers tended to associate the im-
agination with the body and the senses helps explain why Pascal
blames the imagination in the scenarios he constructs in fragment
L44/S78. For Pascal, the imagination is the faculty that controls
the salience of our sense perceptions. He writes within a tradition
that views the imagination as an essential part of ordinary judgment,
but he radicalizes this tradition by emphasizing the imagination’s
deceptiveness. The imagination is usually (though, again, not inher-
ently) deceptive, according to Pascal, and it exerts its power prior to
the act of judgment by biasing our perceptions. Thus, when the
dignified magistrate loses his composure while listening to the
preacher, he does not “imagine” anything at all, in our contemporary
sense of the term: he perceives the preacher directly and accurately.
But some aspects of what the magistrate perceives (the preacher’s
appearance and tone of voice) are so salient that they dominate his

Aristotle’s discussion in De anima. 3.3: “Thinking is different from perceiving and is

held to be in part imagination, in part judgment” (427b28).
15
He mentions coughing, fevers, and even death. See John D. Lyons, Before
Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford, Calif.: Stan-
ford University Press, 2005), 47. According to Lyons, Montaigne also says that the
imagination is what distinguishes us from animals.
16
In the sixth meditation Descartes makes a rather startling claim: “I consider that
this power of imagining, which is in me, differing as it does from the power of the
understanding, is not a necessary constituent of my own essence, that is, of the essence
of the mind. For if I lacked it, I should undoubtedly remain the same individual that
I now am.” The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ii, tr. John Cottingham, Robert
Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 51
(at 7.73). Ultimately, Descartes disperses the traditional powers of the imagination
among the body (esp. the pineal gland), the intellect, and the will. See Dennis
L. Sepper, “Descartes and the Eclipse of the Imagination, 1618–1630,” Journal of the
History of Ideas, 27 (1989), 379–403.
17
Discourse on Method, part 4, in Philosophical Writings, i. 129 (at 6.37).
62 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
attention and prevent him from focusing on the substantive content
of the preacher’s message.
According to Pascal, the imagination structures the way we inter-
pret our experiences and thereby allows us to make judgments that
are not necessitated by brute sense data. At the level of uninterpreted
sense data, there is no such thing as a “hoarse voice and an odd sort of
face” (L44/S78). It is the faculty of imagination—always operative and
usually deceptive—that allows the preacher to be described with these
terms. Again, the magistrate’s imagination isn’t deceptive in one
sense: the preacher really does have a certain tone of voice and certain
facial features. Pascal does not have Descartes’s skeptical worry that
sense impressions can be thoroughly and systematically deceptive.
The imagination is deceptive in a more subtle sense, since it leads us
to focus on the superfluous at the expense of the pertinent.18
The tight link that Pascal establishes between the imagination and
the salience of our sense perceptions is one reason why his portrait of
the magistrate and the preacher belongs in his general critique of the
imagination. We can delve even deeper into Pascal’s conception of
the imagination, however, by paying close attention to just what it is
about the preacher that so shakes the magistrate’s composure. The
magistrate is struck by the preacher’s shabby, indecorous, and un-
seemly demeanor. Pascal writes: “If, when the preacher appears, it
turns out that nature has given him a hoarse voice and an odd sort of
face, that his barber has shaved him badly and he happens not to be
too clean either, then, whatever great truths he must announce,
I wager that our senator will not be able to keep a straight face”
(L44/S78). Note that, in the relevant context, there is nothing inher-
ently humorous about a hoarse voice or an unkempt appearance.
Indeed, these qualities might be thought to inspire reverent awe
instead of laughter. They might be taken as proof that the preacher
is a genuinely holy man who is properly contemptuous of the world’s
secular values, for example. But this is not the magistrate’s reaction at
all. The passage therefore presents another interpretive puzzle: why
does the magistrate have this particular reaction—laughing at the

18
“The problem is not, as for Descartes, that sensation might be deceptive (how do
we know that the preacher is not really a baboon or a hallucination?), but that it is
always excessive: that we cannot receive any sensory information without the possi-
bility of receiving too much—too much, that is, from the viewpoint of our needs and
purposes, as assessed by reason.” Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought, 104–5.
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 63
preacher’s demeanor—and why does Pascal blame this reaction on
his imagination?

Custom and the Social Imagination

By tying the magistrate’s behavior to his imagination, Pascal suggests
that the imagination does more than allow us to dream up wishful
fantasies or impart salience to our sense perceptions. The imagination
also shapes our spontaneous experience by functioning as a socially
constructed repository for our dispositions and tacitly held values. As
a result, it is internally related to the body, custom, and habit.19 As
John D. Lyons puts it, the Pascalian notion of custom “is so closely
linked to the imagination that the two forces are two facets of the
human condition. One appears to be more concerned with action
(custom) and the other with perception (imagination), but they act
together, strengthening each other. What we have the habit of doing
shapes what we see, and vice-versa.”
With this link in mind, it is reasonable to assume that that the
magistrate laughs at the preacher because he has internalized the
customary values of his wider social world. Consider two related
fragments:
Custom makes masons, soldiers, roofers. “He is an excellent roofer,”
they say, and, speaking of soldiers: “They are quite mad,” while others
on the contrary say: “There is nothing as great as war, everything else is
worthless.” From hearing people praise these trades in our childhood
and running down all the others we make our choice. For we naturally
love virtue and hate folly; the very words will decide, we only go wrong
in applying them.
So great is the force of custom that where nature has merely created
men, we create every kind and condition of men.
For some regions are full of masons, some of soldiers, etc. There is no
doubt that nature is not so uniform: it is custom then which does this,
for it coerces nature, but sometimes nature overcomes it and keeps man
to his instincts despite all customs, good or bad. (L634/S527)

19
Although “habit” connotes personal practices and “custom” connotes social
mores, I use the two terms interchangeably here. According to Hugh Davidson,
there is no strong distinction between them in 17th-cent. French (Origins of Certainty,
77–8).
64 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
“How well-made that is! What a skillful workman! What a brave
soldier!” That is where our inclinations come from and our choice of
careers. “What a lot that man drinks! How little that man drinks!” That
is what makes people temperate or drunkards, soldiers, cowards, etc.
(L35/S69)
Both of these fragments make the point that what we often take to be
innate, natural inclinations are really the product of habituation (see
also L125–6/S158–9). Nature creates human beings, but custom
creates each specific “kind and condition” of human being. Further-
more, in these fragments, the vehicle of habituation is language. Each
person internalizes an evaluative vocabulary that tells him what to
praise and blame. A person brought up to love war will have been
habituated into a particular set of dispositions and values—about
courage, patriotism, and so on—that shapes the way he spontan-
eously acts. When he encounters both a soldier and a roofer, for
example, he might admire the soldier more than is strictly warranted
and ignore the virtues of the roofer.
Returning to the magistrate of fragment L44/S78, to say that his
concern for decorum shows that he has internalized the values of his
society is simply to say that his unreflective reaction to the preacher is
a product of a lifetime of habituation and training. When he looks at
the preacher, he sees what he has been trained to see. Myriad social
pressures—his family life, his concern for his self-image, his political
and economic interests, etc.—have collectively shaped his character
and turned him into someone who laughs at a preacher with “a
hoarse voice and an odd sort of face.”
Presumably, however, the magistrate does not explicitly regard
himself as the kind of person who mocks and ignores the unsophisti-
cated. He does go to hear the preacher “in a spirit of pious zeal . . .
ready to listen with exemplary respect,” after all. Yet his behavior
shows us what he really values: not truth, but decorum. He is so
struck by the preacher’s lack of decorum that he cannot keep a
straight face. Moreover, the fact that his reaction is spontaneous
and bodily suggests that he holds these values tacitly. The magistrate’s
body expresses the underlying beliefs and values that he would never
explicitly avow. We can assume that, if asked, the magistrate would
not explicitly assent to a claim like: one should not pay attention to
people who appear disheveled. But his behavior shows that he does
believe it, nevertheless. The imagination, custom, and the body are all
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 65
tightly connected. The magistrate’s dispositions and values are those
of the society in which he is embedded. The fact that he manifests
them physically and not reflectively shows that they subsist at a level
beneath his explicit awareness. He has internalized them so thor-
oughly that, in Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, they are “inscribed on his
body.”20
Pascal has his own terminology to describe the mechanism by
which belief is inscribed on the body. He calls it “the automaton” or
“the machine” (L7/S41, L11/S45, L821/S661). This mechanism is
most prominently featured in the wager fragment, which urges an
unbeliever who nevertheless wants to become a Christian to “act as if ”
he already believes, by “taking holy water, having masses said, and so
on” (L418/S680). Pascal claims that his behavior will soon produce
explicit belief. The theoretical underpinning of this program of ha-
bituation is found in fragment L821/S661:
For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automa-
ton as mind. As a result, demonstration is not the only instrument for
convincing us. How few things can be demonstrated! Proofs only
convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that
are most believed. It inclines the automaton, which leads the mind
unconsciously along with it. Whoever proved that it will dawn tomor-
row, and that we shall die? And what is more widely believed? It is, then,
habit which convinces us and makes so many Christians. It is habit that
makes Turks, heathen, tradesmen, soldiers, etc. . . . With no violence, art
or argument, it makes us believe things, and so inclines all our faculties
to this belief that our soul falls naturally into it. When we believe only by
the strength of our conviction and the automaton is inclined to believe
the opposite, that is not enough . . . (L821/S661)
Scholars sometimes understand the automaton simply as the body.21
It is true that Pascal establishes close links between habituation and
the body. In the wager scenario, for example, the unbeliever is
promised explicit belief only after he performs certain bodily rituals.
And in the dossier titled “Causes and Effects” Pascal argues that
commoners are habituated into believing that noblemen are superior

20
Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 2000), 171. As I discuss below, Bourdieu explicitly regards Pascal as a major
influence on his work.
21
See e.g. Ferreyrolles’s comments on fragment L7/S41 in his edn of the Pensées.
Gérard Ferreyrolles (ed.), Pensées (Paris: Librairie générale de France, 2000), 55.
66 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
because they are compelled to bow down and genuflect before them
(L80/S115, L89/S123). This argument captures the basic insight
behind the automaton: repetitive actions can cause belief. These
actions are paradigmatically, though not exclusively, physical ges-
tures. (Recall that in L634/S527 (above), Pascal also says that repeti-
tive speech—in the form of praise and blame—can contribute to
habituation.) Hugh Davidson gives a good account of the automaton
when he argues that it is not just a part of a person (i.e. the body), but
the whole person, with all his powers of thought, feeling, and action
“insofar as they are capable of habituation, of being bent in new
directions and . . . insofar as they do their work in the absence of . . .
explicit or deliberate thought or desire.”22
This understanding of the automaton leaves out something im-
portant, however. It leaves out the idea that the automaton is a
mechanism of belief because the body is a bearer of meaning.23 In
this sense, it might be even better to say that the automaton is the
whole person, insofar as that person habitually participates in the
intersubjective realm of meaningful behavior. This point is easily
overlooked and, in fact, it is possible that Pascal himself did not
recognize it. In the wager, he tells the unbeliever to “stupefy himself ”
(he uses the word abêtira) by acting unthinkingly, as a machine or an
animal would. But note also that he doesn’t urge the unbeliever to
perform just any empty, irrelevant action—he doesn’t say, for
example: hop on one leg until you believe in God. Nor, for that
matter, does he tell the unbeliever that he will be converted if he
kneels down while gardening or sprinkles his forehead with ordinary
drinking water. The unbeliever must kneel down in a context of
worship and he must cross himself with holy water. These gestures
are thick with meaning; indeed, they are intrinsically meaningful, in
the sense that the unbeliever’s private attitude toward them is not
what invests them with meaning. Rather, their meaning is intersub-
jective, public, and already fixed, regardless of the unbeliever’s own
attitude toward them.
This insight suggests a way of understanding the logic of the
automaton, and why a certain kind of habitual action produces belief.
It is not only the unbeliever’s mechanical behavior that converts him.
It is the fact that his behavior, though mechanical, is also meaningful.

22
Davidson, Origins of Certainty, 76.
23
The automaton is a “mechanism of belief ” in the sense that it can cause belief.
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 67
He wants to believe in God, although he does not, and so he “acts as
if ” he already believes in God. But in so acting, he shows that he
recognizes that his behavior is intersubjectively meaningful and, in
fact, he shows that he already knows its meaning. The very decision to
perform this particular set of ritual actions habitually and not some
other set, or none at all, reveals that he knows the meaning of his
actions. His actions cause him to believe in God because they are
themselves objective expressions of belief in God. In some obscure
but real sense, he already believes in God when he decides to habit-
ually cross himself, kneel, and pray. What happens to the unbeliever
slowly over time is not just the process of coming to belief, but also
the process of recognizing that he already believes. Over time, his
mind makes explicit what his body has already learnt.24
In summary, the Pascalian imagination, closely tied to the body,
and habituated by custom, is the point of intersection between the
individual person and the intersubjective realm of meaning that
comprises his social milieu. The imagination shapes the way one
spontaneously perceives, judges, and acts. Through a dynamic inter-
play between the imagination, the body, and custom, one internalizes
a set of dispositions and conceptual schemes about what is normal
and abnormal, taken-for-granted and deviant. The will, the imagin-
ation, and habit play a role in all our experiences and, collectively,
they manifest the effects of disordered love. Habits themselves may be
understood as patterns of love and desire that flow from the funda-
mental orientation of the will. Augustine describes love as a weight,
and it is clear that, for him, the weight of his love is his habitual
pattern of loving and desiring.25 Pascal weds his own critique of the

24
As Slavoj Žižek aptly puts it: “What distinguishes Pascalian ‘custom’ from
insipid behaviorist wisdom . . . is the paradoxical status of a belief before belief: by
following a custom, the subject believes without knowing it, so that the final conver-
sion is merely a formal act by means of which we recognize what we have already
believed.” Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 40.
The above reading of the automaton borrows from Žižek’s Lacanian reading of the
wager, but is (I hope) somewhat less outré. Instead of focusing on the intersubjective
realm of meaning, as I do, Žižek focuses on the Lacanian unconscious (33–43).
25
Confessions 8.21, 13.10. Discussing Augustine’s view of habit in de libero arbi-
trio, James Wetzel writes, “The history of how we have desired and acted on desire,
registered in our present experience as the cumulative force of habit, will have an
obstructive influence on our ability to allow new kinds of desires, for example, ones
framed by beatific knowledge, to determine our willing.” James Wetzel, Augustine and
the Limits of Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 94.
68 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
imagination to the Augustinian account of habit. For Pascal, habits—
both personal habits and social customs—give content to the imagin-
ation. Our habits thereby shape the very possibilities we are able to
consider. No fantasy, no possibility, is so novel that it is utterly free
from the influence of established patterns of thought and action. In
John Dewey’s vivid phrase, “Thinking is secreted in the interstices of
habits.”26 Furthermore, the habituated imagination governs what we
are able to see, because it spontaneously leads us to focus on some
aspects of a situation and ignore others. Because the imagination
shapes what we see, it shapes how we act, and as we act, we also
strengthen our existing habits and acquire new ones, in a perpetual
cycle. The fact that the imagination is shaped by a duplicitous world
means that we are habituated into duplicitous patterns of thought and
action.

THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION AND THE

DUPLICITOUS SOCIAL ORDER

Pascal’s account of the imagination, custom, and habit provides the

key to his political theology. In particular, that account grounds his
claim that a stable political order can only emerge when citizens are
socialized into misunderstanding the true nature of state power.
According to Pascal, most of our political beliefs, values, and associ-
ations are a product of the imagination. A subject who believes that
“the character of divinity” is stamped on the features of his king has
been led by his imagination to associate the mere sight of the king
with the august panoply of his retinue (L25/S59). His judgment is
rooted in an act of the imagination: the king possess no essential
“character of divinity,” visible or otherwise. Moreover, when stripped
of his imaginary divinity, the king can make no claim that he is
inherently—by virtue of lineage alone—fit to rule. That fitness is
also imaginary.
The cords of respect that bind rulers and ruled may be imaginary,
but they are not ephemeral mental constructs, according to Pascal,

26
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (Chicago:
Gateway Books, 1946), 160.
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 69
and they are not formed by happenstance. On the contrary, they are
inscribed on the body, as people are physically habituated into con-
struing force as worth.
Respect means: inconvenience yourself. This is seemingly empty but
quite right, for it says: “I would truly inconvenience myself if you
needed it, since I do it even when it is of no use to you.” Further, respect
serves to distinguish the great. Now if respect was shown by sitting in an
armchair, we would be showing respect to everybody, and so no dis-
tinction would be made; but by inconveniencing ourselves, a distinction
is very well made. (L80/S115; tr. Ariew)
Cause of the Effects. This is remarkable: they do not want me to honor a
man clothed in brocade and followed by seven or eight lackeys. Why, he
will have me thrashed, if I do not salute him. His costume is his power
. . . (L89/S123; tr. Ariew)
The first of these fragments points to the relationship between the
imagination and the body, custom, and habit. The bonds of respect
that unite rulers and ruled are bonds of the imagination, and here
Pascal says that the point of respect is to distinguish the rulers—i.e.
the great. Furthermore, the best way to show respect to the great is by
accepting a measure of physical discomfort (standing, bowing, etc.)
when one finds oneself in their presence. This transaction, though
physical, shows how the imaginations of the commoners have been
habituated: standing and bowing do not intrinsically manifest respect
to one’s superiors any more than the magistrate’s robes intrinsically
manifest his wisdom (L44/S78). Moreover, it is only partly true to say
that the commoner bows because he imagines that the nobleman is
superior. Properly understood, the causality also works the other way:
the nobleman is superior because the commoner bows.
The second fragment reveals the deeper origin of these imaginary-
yet-physical bonds of respect. Would-be savants (the fragment’s
nameless “they”) object that a powerful man is not worthy of respect
simply because he wears elaborate clothes and is accompanied by an
entourage. According to Pascal, these savants miss the point: such
outward displays of status really signify the ability to deploy coercive
force (“He will have me thrashed . . . his costume is his power”).27 The
nobleman has the power to thrash the commoner who refuses to
salute him. Originally, fear makes the commoner bow. Yet his

27
See Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981), 12.
70 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
physical behavior, when constantly repeated, leads the commoner to
associate the nobleman with divinity, and so he comes to believe that
the nobleman’s superior status is well-deserved, even essential. Taken
together, the two fragments show a concrete instance of Pascal’s
general claim that the dispositions of the imagination are produced
and reinforced by habituation and the constant training of the body—
what Pascal elsewhere calls “the machine,” the most effective way of
persuading the mind and fixing belief (L821/S661).
This, then, is Pascal’s answer to the question of how bonds of
violence and fear are transmuted into bonds of respect. The imagin-
ation, habituated by the body, effaces the real meaning of social
transactions that manifest status. When the commoner bows to the
nobleman, the transaction really shows that the nobleman has the
power to harm. But over time, as the results of this pattern of
habituation permeate society, the deeper message of such transactions
is forgotten. We do not need to suppose that either the nobleman or
the commoner grasps it explicitly. Instead, each party believes that
when the commoner bows, he simply recognizes the nobleman’s
essential superiority. And they are not wrong about that—both
parties do believe in the nobleman’s essential superiority—but they
are wrong to suppose that the nobleman really is essentially superior.
This belief is false, a fantasy of the imagination. Pascal claims that,
writ large, this mechanism explains how we come to believe that
people generally deserve their positions in the social hierarchy. Social
order ultimately rests on the desire to dominate and the fear of force,
but it functions best when it seems to rest on respect for merit. The
victors need to convince the vanquished that the social order rests on
justice instead of force. But even if they succeed, the truth remains the
same: “being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what
is strong just” (L103/S135).

THE PRETENSES OF POWER

Political stability rests on power disguised by the “wonders of human

imagination” and so systematic illusion is a prerequisite of political
order, according to Pascal (L60/S94). In the dossiers titled “Wretch-
edness” and “Cause of the Effects,” Pascal develops this claim further.
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 71
Ordinary people, he says, falsely believe that the political order is just
and so they respect their leaders, but for the wrong reasons.
Cause of the effects. It is true, therefore, to say that everyone is under an
illusion; for, although the opinions of the people are sound, they are not
so as conceived by them, since they think the truth to be where it is not.
Truth is indeed in their opinions, but not where they imagine it to be. It
is true that we must honor gentlemen, but not because birth is an
effective privilege, etc. (L58/S92; tr. Ariew)
In other fragments, Pascal even goes so far as to suggest that it is
prudent that people are deceived about the true basis of political
power:
It is dangerous to tell people that the laws are not just, for they obey
them only because they believe them to be just. That is why they must
be told at the same time that laws are to be obeyed because they are laws,
just as superiors are to be obeyed because they are superiors, not
because they are just. (S100/L66; tr. Ariew)
That is why the wisest of legislators used to say that men must often be
deceived for their own good . . . The truth about the usurpation [of
justice by force] must not be made apparent; it came about originally
without reason and has been made reasonable. We must see that it is
regarded as authentic and eternal, and its origins must be hidden if we
do not want it soon to end. (L60/S94)
Ordinary people are “under an illusion” about the fact that political
order rests on force instead of justice, but unbeknownst to them, that
illusion serves a social good. People must be induced to obey their
rulers, since a functioning society depends on preserving political
order. After all, “it is dangerous to tell the people that the laws are
not just,” and so “the wisest of legislators” say that “men must be
deceived for their own good.” Fragments like these seem to suggest
that Pascal does not really mean to criticize the deceptive nature of
state power. Rather, he seems to affirm the tradition of the “noble lie”
and claim that, for their own good, ordinary people must be deceived
by their leaders about the real nature of politics (L91/S125).28 On this

28
Plato’s Republic 414b–415d is the source of this tradition in Western thought.
Socrates proposes to deceive the citizens of his ideal city into believing that the city’s
social classes are of divine origin. A stable social order depends upon duplicity. “The
good city is not possible then without a fundamental falsehood; it cannot exist in the
element of truth, of nature,” writes Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1978), 102.
72 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
reading, Pascal becomes an advocate, rather than a critic, of state-
sponsored deceit—an apologist for the Fall into duplicity.

Sinful Illusion or Noble Lie?

In any case, we should recoil from this cynical vision of politics,
whether or not it is Pascal’s. A wider view of the Pensées shows us
that this cynicism is only superficial, however. First, it is significant
that the fragments in which Pascal most clearly seems to endorse
political deception are found in the dossier “Wretchedness” (L60/S94,
L66/S100). The fact that he placed them there implies that they do not
present his own final, considered views on politics. The claim that the
people must be deceived for their own good is thus a rhetorical half-
truth, only one side of the overall Wretchedness/Greatness dialectic
that governs the logic of the Pensées. The cynical views expressed in
that dossier must therefore be set against his more positive vision of
politics, found elsewhere in the Pensées. Moreover, the fact that these
fragments obviously borrow from Montaigne (especially from his
“Apology for Raymond Sebond”) is further evidence that they do
not present Pascal’s own unqualified views, since Pascal treats Mon-
taigne as a paradigm case of someone who is only half-correct.29
Given this evidence, and given the dialectical character of his thought,
we would expect Pascal to resolve these opposing views of politics
with some further appeal to the higher truth of Christianity.
Second, it seems unlikely that Pascal would endorse anything so
crude as explicit deception from the ruling party. After all, as we have
seen, he gives a very sophisticated account of the way that custom and
the habituated imagination function as implicit, transpersonal mech-
anisms of socialization. These mechanisms operate apart from the
explicit, conscious intentions of the ruling party and can successfully
socialize citizens into believing that the political order is just. Surely
the members of the ruling party are also under the spell of these
transpersonal mechanisms, and have also been socialized to see
themselves as just. There is therefore no need to suppose that they
recognize their own injustice but cravenly deceive the people.30 Of

29
For a list of Pascal’s allusions to Montaigne in this dossier, see the commentary
on the relevant fragments in the Ferreyrolles and Sellier edns of the Pensées.
30
Compare Althusser’s rejection of the antiquated view that “Priests and Despots”
have forged “Beautiful Lies” and cynically foisted them on the masses in order to
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 73
course, some individual elites might be explicitly deceitful (L60/S94),
but as a general account of the way that the power relations of a
society come to be systematically obscured, deliberate deceit from the
ruling party is not the best explanation. It is far more likely that the
ruling elite believe their own falsehoods and regard themselves as
truly just.
Finally, suppose that the ruling elites do consciously recognize
their own injustice and set out deliberately to deceive the populace.
On such an assumption, the ruling elites would have to be fully lucid
about their own injustice and therefore—paradoxically—immune
from the cognitive consequences of the Fall, since amour-propre
and disordered love of self are among the chief effects of the Fall.
Such an assumption would render the ruling elites almost unintelli-
gibly demonic, on the one hand, even while denying the real force and
ubiquity of the cognitive consequences of the Fall, on the other.

The Fallen Political Order as a Sign of God’s Wrath

In fact, it is clear that on Pascal’s considered view, even though the
political order is unjust in one respect, there is another, higher respect
in which it is just after all. So, strictly speaking, when the people come
to believe that laws are just, they are not completely wrong, but partly
right for the wrong reasons. The political order is unjust insofar as the
laws and political arrangements in a given society really do depend on
force and the bonds of imagination. Yet in a higher sense, even
though the political order depends on force, it remains just: the
political order figures God’s wrath toward sinners and so exemplifies
God’s just punishment on a fallen world.
True Christians are, however, obedient to [political] follies; not that
they respect follies, but rather the divine order which has subjected men
to follies as a punishment. (L14/S48)
God . . . has allowed societies to make their own laws to divide [worldly
goods]. Once these laws are established it is unjust to violate them.31

exploit and enslave them: Lenin and Philosophy, tr. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1971), 110.
31
Pascal, “Premier discours sur la condition des grands,” in OC ii. 195.
74 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
But because God in his providence has been pleased to preserve human
society, and punish the wicked who disrupt it, he has himself established
laws for taking the life of criminals . . . It is therefore certain, Fathers,
that God alone has the power to take life, and yet, in establishing laws
for the execution of criminals, he has entrusted this power to kings and
states.32
So even though the people are wrong to believe that the political order
depends on (worldly) justice rather than force, they are not wrong
that the political order is just in a higher sense. They are right for the
wrong reasons, because God has ordained that people should be
subject to their rulers, as a punishment for sin. God therefore uses
the pervasive illusions of the fallen political order and bends them
toward something good. We see again the basic Augustinian point
that, even as people sin, they somehow continue to serve God un-
knowingly and work out his mysterious will.

Political Self-Deception
This is a less cynical vision of politics, but it is certainly no less dark.
Pascal does not claim or commend the view that the dominant
members of society knowingly deceive their subordinates about its
true foundations. On Pascal’s account, the system of illusion that
transmutes fear of violence into mutual respect is a social mechanism,
not a personal-agential one. Yet outside the text and in between the
lines, we can go a bit further: the mechanisms of political order
should also be understood as mechanisms of self-deception. Custom,
habit, and the imagination each enable ruler and ruled alike to deceive
themselves about the real basis of political authority.
This claim is not obviously correct, even if we allow that it goes
beyond the letter of Pascal’s own text. The social transactions that
Pascal discusses are certainly sinful, since they are not oriented
around charitable love of God and neighbor. They are also duplici-
tous, because they only work to the extent that they induce people to
believe something false. A political gesture like the commoner’s bow
to the nobleman only succeeds to the degree that its real meaning is
effaced. (Both the commoner and the nobleman believe that the bow

32
14th Provincial Letter, tr. Krailsheimer, 208.
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 75
expresses the deference due to natural superiority; it really expresses
the fear-born deference due to raw power.)
Still, it is not obviously the case that members of society really
deceive themselves about the nature of political order. Put another
way: why are the mechanisms of social illusion also self-deceptive
mechanisms? After all, when Pascal’s commoner bows to the noble-
man, both the nobleman and the commoner sincerely believe that
their actions express their inherent respective worth. Perhaps we
should say instead that they are simply in error—they embrace a
false account of themselves and their actions, but nevertheless do not
deceive themselves.
Yet it is clear that both the nobleman and the commoner have a
strong motive to embrace the founding illusion that force is worth,
and Pascal would certainly agree that both sides want to believe in the
inherent fitness of the established social order. Their disordered self-
love—their amour-propre—gives them an incentive so to believe. This
is obvious with respect to the nobleman. Members of the ruling party
would naturally want to believe that a social order that strongly
promotes their own interests is actually rooted in justice. But
members of the subordinate group also wish to embrace a flattering
self-image. The nobleman needs the commoner to submit, but he also
wants to believe that he is genuinely worthy of the commoner’s
esteem. Similarly, the commoner needs to submit (lest the nobleman
respond violently) but he also wants to believe that he himself is not
simply weak. He wants his submission to be valued as a natural and
appropriate response to an innate superior.33 Both sides have a
personal incentive to transmute an uncomfortable truth into a com-
forting falsehood. In this sense, they are all-too-willing victims of this
social mechanism of illusion.
Moreover, even in Pascal’s own text, it is clear that the truth about
the illusory foundations of social order is easily grasped, only barely out
of our sight, and only then because we conveniently fail to look in the
right direction. Citizens must actively avoid the truth about state power
because that truth is so readily available to them. After all, Pascal holds
that even the “half-clever” are able to see through the illusion that
noble birth and merit are coextensive (L90/S124). Moreover, his obvi-
ous worry that “ordinary people” can be incited all-too-easily into civil

33
Lazzeri calls this submission a “voluntary servitude” (Force et justice, 251).
76 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
war suggests that ordinary people are also very quick to recognize that
state power really rests on force instead of justice:
The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs
by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack
authority and justice . . . There is no surer way to lose everything;
nothing will be just if weighed in these scales. Yet the people readily
listen to such arguments, they throw off the yoke as soon as they
recognize it . . . (L60/S94)
The people “throw off the yoke” of unjust rule as soon as they
recognize it, and they recognize it very easily. Yet this fact alone
suggests self-deception, since it implies that the people have always
known the truth about the real foundations of society, but kept that
truth hidden from themselves. After all, if it is even so much as
possible for members of society to unmask the pretenses of power,
then they must retain some sense of true justice, against which the
failures of their own society can be measured. If their only concept of
justice were derived from the ideological interests of their own rulers,
then the people could never (even in principle) repudiate those rulers
as unjust. Nor is it the case that people require some special act of
divine illumination before they can recognize that the political order
is based on force. While it is true that only “perfect Christians” can
grasp that the political order actually dispenses God’s just punish-
ment on sinners, one need not be a Christian at all to recognize that,
on a human level, it is grounded in force (L90/S124, L93/S127). The
sheer possibility of political insurrection therefore implies that the
people have always had some grasp of true justice, on the one hand,
even as they also believed (falsely) in the justice of their own fallen
political order, on the other. The cognitive conflict exhibited by such
conflicting beliefs is surely a form of self-deception.

POLITICS AS A DIVERSI ON FROM TRUTH

The value of Pascal’s political theology is best seen when we apply it

to the duplicity and concupiscence of our own society.34 It should be

34
A few caveats. First, I should say that by “our” society I mean the late-capitalist
democracies of the Western world, and paradigmatically the United States. Second,
when I criticize “politics” I do not mean to criticize professional politicians
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 77
obvious that much of our own politics falls directly under Pascal’s
critique. A Pascalian critique of politics will be irreducibly theological,
but it should also allow us to see things that are hidden to secular
critics, or to see more familiar things in a new way. In my view, we
should join Pascal’s critique of diversion to his critique of politics.
Then we can see the full theological implications of Pascal’s claim that
the mechanisms of imagination and custom reproduce the power
relations that really ground the political order. In a fallen world—in
our fallen world—political practices themselves are often imaginary.
Our common political practices turn citizens away from the truth,
prevent them from thinking about what a good and just society really
looks like, and distract them from thinking about what their own
society looks like in comparison.35 Our politics is a diversion that
turns us away from the truth.
At the textual level, the links between politics, the imagination, and
diversion are clear in the Pensées. The imagination’s ability to bestow
value on otherwise trivial activities is what allows us to divert our-
selves successfully, and Pascal’s typical examples of people who are
owed deference because they are imaginatively invested with respect
are all political figures: noblemen, magistrates, and royalty (L44/S78).
Moreover, his paradigmatic example of someone who diverts himself
from realizing his own unhappiness is a king. He also frequently
describes political behaviors like war or court intrigue as diversions
(L136/S168, L137/S169). To be sure, Pascal’s own critique of diver-
sion is aimed at the individual subject, and argues that we pursue
diversions as a way of individually confronting our own sense of
nullity and despair. Yet it is natural to extend this critique to the
intersubjective political realm, and argue that, because our politics
takes the form of diversion, we are similarly diverted from truths
about our fallen societies.

exclusively. The relevant political class includes those at every level of political
engagement: politicians, media, citizens, and so forth. Finally, it is not the case that
a Pascalian critique applies without exception to every political actor in a given
society. Nevertheless, it surely applies widely enough to be an insightful critique.
35
Note that it is possible for two people agree with the claim that politics are a
diversion even if they do not agree about the substantive question about what the just
society should look like. For example, a Marxist and a libertarian could both agree that
contemporary politics serves mainly to divert our attention away from the problems
of society. They would just disagree on what the real problems of society are.
78 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
The first step in a Pascalian critique of politics is empirical: one
must make the case that political activity typically looks like other
diverting activities and seems to serve the same function. Yet it is
easy—almost trivial—in our media-saturated, sound-bite culture to
show that the line between entertainment and politics has nearly
vanished. Anyone who pays attention to a contemporary election
campaign, or watches political talk shows on television, or reads the
way political disagreements are covered in contemporary newspapers
should readily agree that political discourse functions often like a
game or, at best, a semi-scripted reality television show. Someone
who disagrees, and believes that contemporary political debates typ-
ically present reasoned, substantive arguments about the pressing
issues of the day, may abandon my Pascalian critique here, at the
first step. It seems obviously true to me that the first step is beyond
secure.
The second step requires us to look deeper. Granting that politics
has become a form of diversion, we must ask about the “cause of the
effects”—the real point of the diversion. For Pascal, the real point of
diversion is to prevent ourselves from thinking about our own exist-
ential unhappiness. If we were to think about our own unhappiness,
we would realize that we are fallen, and turn to God and Christ for
help. Our aversion to self-knowledge, which causes us to pursue
constant diversion, is also an aversion to God. We can and should
treat politics in the same way. On this account, members of the
political establishment and ordinary citizens alike frequently use
politics as a distraction from their own existential despair. In this
sense, politics can be like gambling, hunting, or any other kind of
diverting activity: a way of avoiding boredom and rejecting God.
Deeper still, we can say that when politics becomes a diversion, our
political activity itself becomes the means by which we avoid thinking
uncomfortable truths about our society. Fallen politics turn us away
from our society’s defects and hide them from our view. This claim
takes Pascal’s point about the imaginary nature of political transac-
tions and extends it. When a commoner elaborately bows to a
nobleman, as in Pascal’s day, or when political debates take the
form of ritualized, game-like performances, as in our own day,
these imaginary transactions divert our attention from the fact that
the political order rests on force instead of worth. In both cases,
political transactions serve the interests of the ruling elite. Indeed,
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 79
that is their purpose. We focus on the game but not on the real reason
that it is played.
If political action has indeed become a form of diversion, then on
Pascal’s analysis we will also find in our politics the performative
incoherence of sin. It is incoherent and self-defeating—a form of
collective self-harm—to use politics as a way of systematically
avoiding the project of building a better society. And yet a Pascalian
analysis suggests that this is the real meaning of much political
behavior. We may mean well, and enter the political arena because
we want to bring about social justice. Yet the rules and norms of that
very arena are structured to make it difficult to bring about social
justice. The arena itself is fallen, and serves other, darker purposes
altogether.
Finally, Pascal’s analysis of boredom and diversion explicitly de-
scribes diversion as a kind of self-deception (L136/S168). The truth
about the real meaning of diversion is easily grasped, and the fact that
so few grasp it is a sign of the Fall. When we apply this insight to
politics, it implies that the truth that politics has become diversion is
also easily grasped: something that we all already know, even while we
resist attending to it. We feel the nullity of contemporary politics even
when we do not explicitly recognize it (S70/L36).

BLAISE PASCAL, CRITICAL THEORIST

Just by virtue of being members of society, we are already burdened

with habits of mind that point us away from truth. Pascal’s political
theology argues that society can exist only when its members system-
atically misapprehend the true character of power and treat force as
worth. As a result, everyone has been socially constructed to see as
necessary certain connections that are not necessary—to believe that
certain outward signs (e.g. the magistrate’s robes) necessarily signify
inward worth. On Pascal’s account, we have been conditioned to
accept relatively superficial explanations of social phenomenon be-
cause deeper explanations come with real costs, both psychic (lost
self-esteem) and physical (the threat of violence). Thus the conun-
drum: although we do retain some concept of genuine justice, all
actually existing societies are grounded not in justice but in force. The
best explanation for this state of affairs, according to Pascal, is that
80 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
most people want to preserve the illusion that state power rests on
justice instead of force and so they learn to ignore the truth that it
does not. He appeals to custom, habit, and the imagination in order to
explain how people are socialized into a political order that makes it
easy for them to avoid the truth. In a similar way, contemporary
critical theorists appeal to the mechanisms of ideology. In both cases,
members of society learn, through uncountably many small lessons,
that it is easy and natural to serve the state, and that probing its real
foundations has considerable psychic and physical consequences,
even when the threat of genuine violence is absent.
Pascal’s work on the imaginary foundations of political order
should seem strangely familiar to students of modern ideological
criticism. Ideological criticism examines the way certain false, broadly
harmful assumptions diffuse through society until they become neu-
tral, natural, and taken-for-granted. It also concerns the way people
are shaped into ideological subjects. Pascal’s thought anticipates
modern ideological criticism, and some of the most important twen-
tieth-century critical theorists explicitly acknowledge their debt to
him. Yet even though critical theorists like Louis Althusser and Pierre
Bourdieu affirm the influence of Pascal on their work, they also
divorce his account of state power from his theological account of
the Fall. We should resist this divorce. The full value of Pascal’s
political theology is more easily seen by comparing it to contemporary
critics who would strip Pascal of his theological moorings and re-
deploy his thought for purely secular purposes.

Althusser and Bourdieu’s Debt to Pascal

According to Althusser “the whole theory of ideology, of misrecogni-
tion and recognition, is to be found in Pascal.”36 In Althusser’s own
famous example, when a police officer yells “Hey, you there!” to
someone in a crowded street, the person addressed by the officer
turns around, somehow recognizing that he is the one being hailed.
Yet how does he know that he is the one addressed and not someone
else? And, stipulating that he isn’t doing anything wrong, why is his
automatic response to turn around rather than to ignore the officer’s

36
Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87, ed.
François Matheron and Oliver Corpet (New York: Verso, 2006), 269.
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 81
call? His spontaneous deference shows that he has already been
formed as a subject—in a process that Althusser calls “interpella-
tion”—by the reigning ideology of the state. He automatically and
implicitly recognizes the authority the officer has over him because he
has been taught from birth to defer to agents of the state. To respond
as he does is obvious and natural.37
Althusser’s policeman is merely Pascal’s nobleman (L89/S123) in
modern dress: the underlying mechanisms of call and response are
exactly the same. Like Pascal, Althusser insists that the underlying
mechanisms of ideological interpellation are physical and bodily,
rooted in the routine, ritualized performance of daily activities.38
Moreover, perhaps because Althusser follows Pascal, he is able to
advance beyond an earlier and cruder theory of ideology according
to which the ruling classes consciously use ideology as a weapon to
mystify the ruled and render them docile. Following Pascal, Althusser
recognizes that the ruling class has also been formed by ideology and
therefore sees its superior social position as natural and virtuous.39
Althusser also argues—again like Pascal—that the entire system of
ideology is an illusion that masks the truth about the relations of
power and domination that really constitute society. Ideology is “an
imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of
existence.”40 Our recognition (reconnaissance) is always a misrecog-
nition (méconnaissance). The natural, seemingly innate categories by
which we recognize ourselves and navigate our world are really the
product of ideology. The ideological illusion serves the need, felt by
both rulers and ruled alike, to regard the social relationships that
structure their world as rooted in something grand, something other
than sheer force. Althusser is correct that this theory of ideology is
already found in Pascal.
Bourdieu’s debt to Pascal is even more explicit. In the opening pages
of his fittingly titled Pascalian Meditations, he writes that his own
work on symbolic power owes more to Pascal than to Marx. On the
submission to “symbolic violence”—Bourdieu’s version of ideology—
he adds: “This submission . . . is itself the effect of a power, which is

37
Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 118–19.
38
Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 113–14. He explicitly mentions Pascal and the
argument of the wager fragment on 114.
39
Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 110.
40
Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 109.
82 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
durably inscribed on the bodies of the dominated, in the form of
schemes of perception and dispositions (to respect, admire, love, etc.)
. . . It is these dispositions, in other words, more or less what Pascal puts
under the heading of ‘imagination’ which dispense ‘reputation’ and
‘glory’, give ‘respect and veneration to persons, works, laws, the
great.’”41 Bourdieu’s reference to “schemes of perception and dispos-
itions” recalls one of his own central analytical concepts, habitus,
which in turn suggests a further debt to Pascal on custom, habit,
and the imagination. Habitus refers to the culturally inculcated,
durable dispositions that give rise to particular practices.42 Bourdieu
appeals to the concept of habitus to explain how people unconsciously
internalize and follow social rules. Pascal deploys the concepts of
custom, imagination, and habit to do exactly the same conceptual
work.

Sin and Ideology

It is possible to find similar conceptual debts to Pascal in other
contemporary critical theorists.43 More interesting, however, is to
ask what it means that modern critical theorists find Pascal’s thought
so fruitful. After all, Pascal’s own social theory is avowedly Christian
and Augustinian. It seems more likely that he would be a target rather
than a source of ideological criticism. Critical theorists like Althusser
and Bourdieu need to explain how dominant classes can maintain
their dominance and why subordinate classes participate in their own
subordination. They therefore posit impersonal—or rather, transper-
sonal—mechanisms by which the ideology of the dominant classes
continually reproduces itself throughout society. These mechanisms
are transpersonal because they are seldom the explicit product of
conscious intentional agency. Rather, agents make explicit intentional
decisions by choosing from a field of potential actions that has already
been shaped by ideological mechanisms. Althusser’s man in the street
may never have been explicitly taught to defer to agents of the state,

41
Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 1–2, 171 (my emphasis).
42
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1977), 72; Logic of Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 53.
43
Slavoj Žižek also depends on Pascal in several places (see e.g. Sublime Object of
Ideology, 36–43). See also Michael Moriary, “Zizek, Religion and Ideology,” Para-
graph, 24/2 (July 2001), 125–39.
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 83
but he nevertheless turns around because he somehow knows that it is
he who is being hailed by the policeman. It does not occur to him not
to turn around. A lifetime’s worth of small, unremarkable lessons
about his own place in the social hierarchy has taught him to defer to
state power automatically.
Critical theorists argue that transpersonal mechanisms and social
forces shape human beings into particular kinds of subjects. Yet they
also need to explain why the real character of these mechanisms is
obscured, with the result that the ideology of the dominant classes
seems obvious and natural to all levels of society. Pascal has a similar
theoretical need. Like contemporary critical theorists, Pascal wants to
explain why human beings persistently misunderstand their real
interests and reject evident truths about themselves, their own happi-
ness, and God. Whereas critical theorists appeal to the mechanisms of
ideology, Pascal appeals to the mechanisms of original sin and the
Fall.
According to the Christian tradition, original sin—like ideology—
is a transpersonal force that shapes personal agency. The condition of
original sin is a transpersonal force, but individual sinful acts are
expressions of personal agency. Feminist theologian Serene Jones
usefully describes original sin as a “false performative script” into
which we are born. Like the mechanisms of ideology, these scripts
do not wait for us to act but . . . , more often than not, “perform us”—as
part of the nexus of oppressive relations within which . . . subjectivity
comes into being. As original sin, they are scripts that we inherit (they
are inborn), and yet, as performances, they cannot be said to be intrinsic
to our humanity (they are not inherent). Likewise, they are not scripts
we could choose to avoid (they are inescapable), and yet, because we are
given a counter role to inhabit in faith, they are performances that can
be contested (they are not irredeemable).44
Pascal’s account of sin and the Fall presents an early version of the
idea that sin is a performative script, and thereby anticipates both
contemporary ideological criticism and contemporary feminist the-
ologies of sin. He understands that sin is always personal, in that it is a
product of intentional agency, but also structural, in that it is also a

44
Serene Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology, 119. I elided the word
“women” in this quotation because I believe that this programmatic statement about
sin applies equally to both women and men. (I should also say that I expect Jones
herself would agree.)
84 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
product of broader social mechanisms that are prior to individual
human decisions. In more concrete terms, he locates the source of sin
in disordered love, but he also recognizes that custom, habit, and the
socially constructed imagination shape human agents into sinful
subjects. The Pascalian sinner makes sinful choices and is justly
condemned, but he also inherits a fallen world that elicits and re-
inforces those choices. Someone who is born into a society that
inordinately values wealth, for example, will be taught in thousands
of near-imperceptible ways to love wealth and to pursue it at the
expense of higher goods. Even if such a person becomes, say, a teacher
instead of a banker, the love of wealth will continue to infect his
choices and distort his relationships. He will therefore find it more
difficult, well-nigh impossible, to love God as the highest good. Of
course, no actually existing society is completely oriented around
exactly one false good. Rather, societies valorize wealth, power,
fame, race, nation, self-esteem, and so forth—a near infinity of false
goods that individually and collectively serve to obscure the fact that
God is the genuine source of value and the sole ground of stable
happiness.

Theology Beyond Ideology

However interesting these resonances with contemporary critical
theory may be, Pascal’s own project is irreducibly theological. Need-
less to say, modern critical theorists have very different agendas, and
so they sever Pascal’s early insights into ideology from their theo-
logical source. It is reasonable to ask whether we should follow them.
It is certainly of historical interest that one of the earliest theories of
ideology and interpellation was developed in the service of a Christian
apologetic, but is it also of constructive interest? Put another way:
what is the value of tying the genealogy of state power to a specifically
Christian account of the Fall?
Because I share (roughly) Pascal’s Christian commitments, my
bedrock answer to this question must be: because that Christian
account is true. To the extent that the basic narrative of Augustinian
Christianity is true, it provides us with deeper levels of explanation
that help us to understand the mechanisms of state power better than
we otherwise could. Pascal can go beyond the typical explanations of
secular political theory, whether liberal or Marxist. Because he is
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 85
committed to a theological narrative, Pascal can offer a deeper
account of why the ruling classes have the interests that they do,
why existing economic and political arrangements are likely to be
unjust, and why power so rarely serves justice. On his account,
human beings enter society bearing their disordered love and their
aversion to truth. The cognitive consequences of the Fall are logically
prior to the formation of disordered political arrangements, even as
those disordered political arrangements ramify the effects of the Fall.
Pascal can appeal to a more fundamental explanation that is not
available to secular political theorists.
In addition, because his account of state power rests on an account
of the Fall, and because he understands the Fall as a fall into duplicity,
he is able to show how the mechanisms of ideology are, at the same
time, both cognitive and epistemic, on the one hand, and embodied
and social, on the other. This is one of Pascal’s most important
insights. Unlike other theologies of sin, Pascal’s account shows that
the cognitive consequences of the Fall imply a critique of politics. For
Pascal, the cognitive consequences of the Fall go beyond the interior
faculties of the darkened intellect and the disordered will. The cogni-
tive consequences of the Fall are also political and social. Pascal
therefore sees more clearly than secular political theorists that the
mechanisms by which state power reproduces itself are deceptive and
self-deceptive.
The notion that ideology should be understood in epistemological
terms as something like “false consciousness” is no longer widely
defended, for example. According to Terry Eagleton, truth and falsity
are “irrelevant” to Althusser’s theory of ideology because “ideology is
less a matter of representations of reality than of lived relations.”45
Pascal shows how it can be both. The fallen subject is shaped not
only by the real relations in which he actually stands, but also by
the relations in which he takes himself to stand. Thus, on the one
hand, subjects are necessarily shaped by the fact that they stand in
certain real, objective relations with God, other citizens, the state,
and the means of production. On the other hand, however, they also
stand in a series of imaginary relationships that render those real
relationships obscure. Pascal’s insight is that because people stand
in doubled, conflicting relationships with the wider world, they are

45
See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991), 10–31,
esp. 18, 20.
86 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
shaped into doubled, conflicting subjects that are cognitively at war
with themselves. With this insight, we can explain both why ideology
functions—we want to believe the foundational illusions of our
society—and also why it can be unmasked: we remain fundamentally
oriented toward the truth, even as we attempt to steep ourselves in
illusion. In Pascal’s terminology, we are both great and wretched at
the same time. His account of the conflicting subjectivity of the fallen
human being implies both an epistemological theory of false con-
sciousness and the physical, embodied relations by which ideology
reproduces itself.46
Because Pascal’s account of state power grows out of his account of
the Fall, his political theology is also anti-utopian and properly
critical.47 He therefore offers a necessary corrective to the temptation
toward utopian thought. A Pascalian political theorist will never
make the mistake of identifying any existing political order with
true justice, for example. We might be tempted to imagine that a
society founded under exactly the right conditions—by upright, just
people acting justly—would inaugurate an ideal political order that
reproduces those pristine original conditions. (Indeed, this fantasy
more-or-less describes both the founding myth of the American
republic, as well as the founding myth of a proletarian revolution
leading to a utopian classless society.) Pascal blocks this temptation.

46
There is a certain circularity to Pascal’s account, but it need not be vicious.
People are formed into duplicitous subjects by already-existing duplicitous social
mechanisms, but surely the social mechanisms themselves could only have been
produced by already-existing duplicitous subjects. Pascal’s Augustinian commitments
lead him to resolve this circularity in the direction of individual agency. (Though he
may well ultimately resolve it with an appeal to the very first sin, itself inexplicable.
For the moment, however, I can sidestep this worry because I am not trying to answer
the vexing question of how sin entered the world at all.) The final “unit of analysis”—
so to speak—of Pascal’s account of sin is indeed the fallen will and its disordered loves.
The duplicitous political order is the collective result of the individual choices of fallen
human beings. This is not to say that the sinful social mechanisms that he identifies
are the simple aggregation of those choices. Along with contemporary critical theor-
ists, Pascal recognizes that social mechanisms can acquire a kind of quasi-agency that
supervenes on individual choices. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, social mechan-
isms do depend on the actions of fallen human agents.
47
Here Pascal follows Augustine. For an analysis of the anti-utopian character of
Augustine’s political theology see R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in
the Theology of St Augustine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For a
defense of the claim that modern utopian thought is “gnostic” because it perverts the
eschatological vision of genuine Christianity, see Eric Voeglin, The New Science of
Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 87
For Pascal, the political order is fallen, and so every actually-existing
society will reproduce the duplicity and concupiscence that are the
results of the Fall.

POLITICAL PROGRESS, TRUE J USTICE,

AND THE CHURCH

In short, Pascal sees politics as tragedy because the unavoidable

incoherence of sin always brings with it an element of tragedy.48
His vision is bleak, and even if we embrace the idea that a properly
Christian political theology must remain essentially critical, we would
do well to ask whether Pascal’s vision of politics is nevertheless too
bleak. For example, as an exegetical matter, it is not clear that Pascal
would ever admit that citizens should rebel against an unjust regime,
or whether he simply counsels them to accept their lot and turn their
eyes heavenward.49
Regardless of his own intentions, however, we can find in Pascal
the building blocks of an account of politics that does value the
pursuit of social justice. Contrary to Hobbes and Montaigne, Pascal

48
This statement evokes the thesis of Lucien Goldmann’s Marxist classic The
Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of
Racine (New York: Humanities Press, 1964). According to Goldmann, the apparent
contradictions, aporias, and paradoxes of the Pensées are not signs of an unfinished
fragmentary text, but express the fact that Pascal, at one and the same time, com-
pletely embraces a world that he can only regard as meaningless, and yet also
completely rejects that world in the service of a God who never appears. The
contradictions of Pascal’s text express the contradictions of Pascal’s worldview and
make him a forerunner of Marxist dialectics. Goldmann’s reading of Pascal is often
strikingly insightful, but ultimately too partial and theologically illiterate to convince.
“So much of what seems to be paradoxical in the Pensées arises . . . not, as Goldmann
would have it, [from] a refusal of the world from within the world: it is rather a total
acceptance of the world in the knowledge that all our aspirations are other worldly; it
is the application to our intellectual life of the mystery of the Incarnation” (Miel,
Pascal and Theology, 192). See also Wetsel, Catechesis and Disbelief, 295–7.
49
Hélène Bouchilloux writes that Pascal’s “entire oeuvre” argues that “we should
revolt and declare our revolt against tyranny” (“Pascal and the Social World,” in
Hammond, Cambridge Companion to Pascal, 211). A. J. Beitzinger is more restrained:
Although Pascal takes “a firm stand for active defense of truth” in the sphere of
politics, “Resistance beyond the means of nonviolent remonstrance, argument and
non-compliance is not specified” (“Pascal on Justice, Force, Law,” Review of Politics,
46/2 (1984), 233.
88 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
does affirm that true justice exists and that people retain some dim
but real cognitive grasp of it.50 We should certainly agree with Pascal
that no fallen human community can perfectly instantiate true justice,
but when we renounce utopia, we do not thereby renounce the
possibility of making political advances at all. Given that we do
have some grasp of true justice, surely we can judge actual commu-
nities according to how well they approximate it. And given the
possibility of such judgments, surely it is also possible to explicitly
try to make our own communities more just.
To be sure, we remain fallen and so our grasp of true justice
remains dim. A Pascalian theologian must admit that enduring
political communities have been founded upon nearly every depravity
imaginable, from slavery to infanticide (L29/S63, L148/S181, L60/
S94). One must also admit that these communities surely seemed
just to their contemporary defenders. A certain epistemic humility
about our own sense of justice is therefore in order. The lesson Pascal
teaches is that we can easily be wrong about whether our projects
really do serve social justice, or whether they are instead sinful,
idolatrous, or utopian.51 Even so, it is not tenable to deny the bare
possibility of political progress. Although we remain fallen, we can
now recognize, for example, that slave-based societies are unjust. We
can grasp this truth, while some of our forebears could not. The fact
that we disagree with our forebears about the justice of slavery is not
evidence that fallen human beings can never grasp true justice. It is a
sign that moral progress is indeed possible in the political sphere,
even for fallen human beings.

50
See Hélène Bouchilloux, “La Politique Pascalienne: Contre Montaigne et
Hobbes,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, 183/4 (1993), 661–82;
Gérard Ferreyrolles, Pascal et la raison du politique (Paris: PUF, 1984), 147–202;
Virgil Martin Nemoianu, “The Order of Pascal’s Politics,” British Journal for the
History of Philosophy, 20 (2012), 1–23.
51
For a brief, powerful statement of Pascal’s anti-utopian politics, see his 1657
letter to his brother-in-law, Florin Périer. Pascal writes: “We act as if we have a
mission to make truth triumph, instead of a mission to fight for it. The desire to
conquer is so natural that when it covers the desire of making the truth triumph, we
often take the one for the other, and believe that we are seeking the glory of God
instead of our own.” OC ii. 40. Paul J. Griffiths uses Pascal’s 1657 letter to advocate
political quietism, and the view that “Christian advocacy of a political proposal
assumes that justice in the political sphere is not attainable but must nonetheless be
sought.” “The Quietus of Political Interest,” Common Knowledge, 15 (2009), 18.
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 89
Still, moral progress is always hard won. Pascal’s central insight
about politics is that disordered political systems reproduce them-
selves through mechanisms of physical and psychological habitu-
ation. These mechanisms inculcate in us dispositions that are
causally prior to our explicit acts of conscious reflection and deliber-
ation. On a Pascalian analysis, it follows that social justice and
political progress can only result from an equally effective program
of counter-habituation. In the words of Bourdieu, “It is quite illusory
to think that symbolic violence can be overcome solely with the
weapons of consciousness and will.”52 The broadly social mechan-
isms that support duplicitous state power can only be opposed by a
rival set of similarly broad mechanisms. True justice can be little more
than a barely graspable abstraction unless it is made concrete in the
bodies, practices, and habits of human subjects living together in
society. Only counter-institutions oriented around truth can resist
the duplicitous institutions of state power, and shape subjects into
just political agents. Where shall we find such a community of truth?
It is natural for a Christian to look first to the church. Pascal—no
mean critic of the church of his own day—writes that “The history of
the church must properly be called the history of truth” (L776/S641),
and calls the church the only place where we find “true justice without
violence” (L85/S120; see also L974/S771). Indeed, there is at least a
formal sense in which the true church must be identified with the
community of the just. From an eschatological perspective, the true
church is the transhistorical community of saints who stand in the
right relationship with God, who love God above all things, and who
derive all value from the divine good. Such a community simply is the
community of the just, by definition.
We live on this side of the eschaton, however, where it is not
obvious that any actually-existing ecclesial community functions as
a community of truth, standing against the ideologies of state power.
The pilgrim church on earth should not be too easily identified with
the triumphant church of the saints in heaven, and all too often the
church has been a servant of state power instead of a critic. There is a
real danger, then, of valorizing the church uncritically by identifying
it with the community of the just. Here too Pascal is a valuable
corrective. Although he remained a faithful Catholic, he spent most
of the last decade of his life in opposition—sometimes private,

52
Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 180.
90 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology
sometimes open—to the institutional church of his day. Any follower
of Pascal should be appropriately wary of overidentifying any actually
existing ecclesial community or authority structure with divine justice
per se.53 And it is surely noteworthy that the same Pascal who urges
citizens to submit docilely to political authorities that manifest God’s
wrath toward sinners did not himself submit docilely to ecclesial
authorities when called upon to do so.
Perhaps we can have a truly just politics only when the church
militant has become the church triumphant; if so, that day has not yet
arrived. As with the just society in general, however, we need not view
this state of affairs in binary terms. Just because the church on earth is
not perfect, it does not follow that it cannot improve, and that
Christians should not work to improve it. At its best, the Christian
tradition embraces self-critique. A Pascalian political theology would
expect to find in the church the same tension or dialectic that exists
with respect to the state. On the one hand, its members do have some
grasp (maybe even a greater grasp) of genuine justice and goodness;
on the other hand, the same tendency toward duplicity and self-deceit
that we find in society at large exists in the church as well. How could
it be otherwise, given that the church is comprised of fallen human
beings? The church is at one and the same time both the community
of the fallen and the community of the redeemed. When we accept this
fact, we can take a realistic yet hopeful attitude toward its potential to
be an engine of social justice. History also shows that the church can
be an agent of justice in opposition to the state. Yet we should not
forget—and we should not forget on properly theological grounds—
that the church remains vulnerable to duplicity and self-deceit.

CONCLUSION

For Pascal, then, the political order is duplicitous because it is fallen,

and no political order can be free from the effects of the Fall. Political

53
Pascal would agree that the true teachings of the Church are formally identical
with divine justice. On the other hand, he is certainly no unthinking servant of
ecclesial authority: “when we no longer listen to tradition; when the Pope alone is
proposed to us; when he has been manipulated, and thus the true source of truth,
which is tradition, has been excluded; and the Pope, who is its guardian, has become
biased; the truth is no longer free to appear” (L865/S439; tr. Ariew).
 The Reign of Duplicity: Pascal’s Political Theology 91
agents with fallen minds and wills can only set up duplicitous soci-
eties. Since people inevitably acquire their particular dispositions and
habits from the societies into which they are born, it follows that a
political order rooted in duplicity will inevitably shape people into
duplicitous subjects who have every incentive to immerse themselves
in illusion.
 3

The Imaginary Self in a World of Illusion:

Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject

It is a truism of contemporary theological anthropology that the

Enlightenment has bequeathed to us an impoverished conception of
the self. Fairly or not, this conception is often traced back to Rene
Descartes. The so-called Cartesian self is a fully autonomous, disem-
bodied, and self-transparent thinker. It is not essentially related to
other persons, whether human or divine. Indeed, this self is not even
essentially related to its own body.1 Yet even as theologians hurry to
distance themselves from the Cartesian subject, they often overlook
Pascal, one of its first and greatest critics. This oversight is unfortu-
nate, since Pascal presents a robust account of subjectivity that is not
only anti-Cartesian but theologically rich.
To be sure, it is widely recognized that Pascal wrestles with the
deep paradoxes of human subjectivity in his Pensées. He famously
declares that the human being is “a thinking reed,” a creature that is
simultaneously great and wretched. Our wretchedness testifies to
our greatness, which in turn reinforces our wretchedness, in an
endless dialectic (L122/S155). The most plausible explanation for
this paradoxical dialectic, according to Pascal, is that we have fallen
from some previously ideal state, exactly as Christianity teaches.
The dialectic of greatness and wretchedness is a relatively transpar-
ent theme in an otherwise opaque text and so it has been much
discussed.2 Pascal’s theological account of subjectivity stretches

1
This picture is certainly a stereotype. Specialists do not find it in the work of
Descartes himself. Nevertheless, even if Descartes is no Cartesian, there is no doubt
that the “Cartesian subject” has had a life of its own in modern thought and has been
an object of virulent theological criticism.
2
See e.g. Mesnard, Les Pensées de Pascal, 178–210; Davidson, Blaise Pascal, 78–9.
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 93
considerably beyond the dialectic of greatness and wretchedness,
however.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Jean-Luc Marion and Vincent Carraud,
brilliantly analyzed the anti-metaphysical—and therefore anti-Car-
tesian—character of Pascal’s account of subjectivity.3 Both scholars
recognize that Pascal is frequently motivated by theological con-
cerns. Still, without wishing to denigrate their work, it is also the
case that neither Marion nor Carraud gives Pascal his full due as
a theological thinker. Their account of human sin is thinner and
less nuanced than Pascal’s own. For Pascal, as for Augustine, sin is
duplicity and so duplicitous subjectivity is sinful subjectivity.
Once we recognize this point, we can read the Pensées as a theo-
logical text from beginning to end. By contrast, Carraud insists
that Pascal’s only properly theological account of the self is found
in the dialectic of greatness and wretchedness; he thereby misses the
fact that the rest of Pascal’s thoughts about duplicitous subjectivity
also concern fallen subjectivity and are therefore equally theo-
logical.4 Marion, for his part, correctly argues that Pascal’s August-
inian account of the self equates subjectivity with love, but he does
not fully explore Pascal’s own insight that excessive, tyrannical self-
love is also socially expressed and duplicitous and therefore can

3
See Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, tr. Jeffrey L. Kosky
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 277–345. According to Marion, Pascal
identifies Cartesian thought with the second of his well-known “three orders” (body,
mind, and charity, from fragment L308/S339) and tries, in various ways, to show that
the third order (the order of love and grace) transcends the second. See also Vincent
Carraud, Pascal et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1992), esp. 217–345. In general, the
current scholarly consensus holds that Pascal was not only well-acquainted with, but
even somewhat sympathetic to Descartes’s philosophy. At the same time, the consen-
sus also holds that, in the Pensées, Pascal tried to undermine elements of that
philosophy by showing its limitations. See e.g. Henri Gouhier, Blaise Pascal: Conver-
sion et apologétique (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 108–93; Michel Le Guern, Pascal et Descartes
(Paris: Nizet, 1971).
4
See Carraud’s “Remarks on the Second Pascalian Anthropology: Thought as
Alienation,” Journal of Religion, 85 (2005), 539–54. Carraud distinguishes between a
theological anthropology found in the fragments on greatness and wretchedness and a
phenomenological and philosophical anthropology that concerns “the discourse of
human existence” and is found in the fragments on glory, the imagination, justice, and
diversion (545). According to Carraud, this second anthropology “is not ruled by any
theological principle” (546). Carraud’s readings of particular fragments are often quite
insightful but the strict separation he finds between the philosophical/existential, on
the one hand, and the theological, on the other, is his own. It is not Pascal’s.
94 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
manifest, paradoxically, as a kind of dependence.5 More work there-
fore remains to be done.
In this chapter I aim to develop a fully theological, yet still Pasca-
lian, account of human subjectivity. Pascal presents a portrait of fallen
subjectivity, selfhood under the reign of sin. On this account, Pascal
argues that the self is imaginary, in a special sense. It is one’s own
imaginative construal of oneself. What I call my “self ” is just the story
that I tell to myself about myself, my subjective narrative identity.
This subjective self is an imaginary construct that typically does not
correspond to the way I really am. In fact, the self is doubly imaginary,
according to Pascal. One always sees oneself through the (imagined)
eyes of other people. My subjective narrative identity is therefore the
story that I imagine that other people would tell about me: my fantasy
about your fantasy about me. I want to loom large in the thoughts of
other people, and so I tell myself that I do. Pascal calls this doubly
imaginary self the moi. I first present Pascal’s account of the moi, the
false self, and then, as a way of making Pascal’s thought clearer,
I present an extended example of a false self drawn from George
Eliot’s Middlemarch. Finally, I use Pascal’s account constructively to
argue that at the deepest core of our subjectivity we cannot help but
imitate God. Even after the Fall, to be a self is to imitate God. As
sinners, our duplicitous subjectivity is a dreadful parody of God’s
loving act of creation.

WHAT IS THE SELF?

Before I present Pascal’s account of subjectivity, it is helpful to see

how Pascal himself frames the question that account is meant to
answer. In fragment L688/S567, Pascal straightforwardly asks: What
is the self? (Qu’est-ce le moi?). Pascal asks but does not answer this
question—the fragment ends in aporia. As he dismisses various
solutions to his question, it becomes apparent that to be a self is to
be a proper object of love but we are not told what kind of self, if any,
could be such an object.

5
Furthermore, as I discuss in Ch. 7, neither Marion nor Carraud grasp the full
weight of Pascal’s brief account of non-duplicitous, Trinitarian subjectivity.
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 95
What is the self? (Qu’est-ce le moi?)
A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I pass by,
can I say he went there to see me? No, for he is not thinking of me in
particular. But what about a person who loves someone for the sake of
her beauty; does he love her? No, for smallpox, which will destroy
beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her.
And if someone loves me for my judgment or my memory, do they
love me? Me, myself? No, for I could lose these qualities without losing
myself. Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul?
And how can one love the body or the soul except for the sake of such
qualities, which are not what make up the self, since they are perishable?
Would we love the substance of a person’s soul, in the abstract, what-
ever qualities might be in it? That is not possible, and it would be wrong.
Therefore, we never love anyone, but only qualities.
Let us then stop scoffing at those who win honor through their
appointments and offices, for we never love anyone except through
borrowed qualities. (L688/S567)
Rather than giving a direct answer to the fragment’s opening ques-
tion, Pascal presents three scenarios: a pedestrian casually spotted
from a window, a woman loved for the sake of her beauty, and
someone else loved for the sake of his mental attributes. It is immedi-
ately striking that in all three scenarios, the “self ” in question is
presented not as an agent, but as the passive recipient of the attention
of others. Furthermore, the nature of that attention is also specified.
In this fragment, at least, to be a self is to be the object of love.6 Even
in the first situation, the wish that the man in the window should be
“thinking of me in particular” connotes a desire for love.
This fragment bears close scrutiny. It is significant that Pascal
investigates the nature of the self by asking “what is the moi?” rather
than “what am I?” as Descartes asks in his Meditations.7 The French
word moi has no exact English equivalent. It corresponds to the
regular pronoun “me,” of course, but it can also mean “the self ,”

6
Here I straightforwardly follow Marion: “To become a self, I need to be neither
seen, nor thought, nor known, but nothing less than loved” (On Descartes’ Metaphys-
ical Prism, 324).
7
“What then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts
understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory
perceptions.” Meditation II, in Descartes, Philosophical Writings, ii. 19 (at 7.28). For
commentary, see Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, 322–33; Carraud, Pascal
et la philosophie, 315–26; Paulette Carrive, “Lecture d’une Pensée de Pascal: ‘Qu’est-ce
que le moi?,’ ” Les Études philosophiques, 3 (1983), 353–6.
96 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
“myself ,” “the I,” or personal identity generally. As I discuss below,
Pascal also uses the ordinary term le moi in a theoretical way, to name
the doubly imaginary, socially constructed persona. In this fragment,
Pascal’s emphasis on the accusative case instead of the nominative
(Qu’est-ce le moi?) is clearly a methodological choice that anticipates
the major themes of the fragment.
The picture of the self on display here is seen most clearly when
contrasted to that of Descartes. Indeed, many scholars believe that
this fragment is a direct reaction to the Meditations, and that Pascal
deliberately borrows and subverts key Cartesian images in it. At the
broadest level, this fragment rejects Cartesian claims of autonomy
and self-transparency. Pascal implies that introspection cannot reveal
the nature of the self because the self is partly constituted from
without. Whereas the Cartesian subject is separate from the world,
separate even from the body that it inhabits, Pascal takes it for
granted that to be a self is to be embedded in a network of relations,
a world. Indeed, the “self ” considered as moi is dependent upon
others for its very existence. Alone, I am “I” but I need others to be
“me.” Consequently, if it is “me” that I am investigating (or, better, if
I am not really an “I” at all, but a “me”) then I cannot properly study
myself in isolation.
Recall that toward the end of his second meditation, as Descartes
seeks to understand the nature of the self, he speaks of looking out his
window at the men on the street below. He judges that they are indeed
men even though, strictly speaking, all he really sees are coats and
hats. He concludes from this experiment that it is his mind, and not
his bodily senses, that grasps the men, just as it is his mind that grasps
the underlying essence of a piece of wax that is melted and reshaped
until all its contingent qualities are stripped away. He then concludes
that he himself is fundamentally mind, not body, and that he can
perceive his own mind more clearly than anything else.8
Pascal presents a similar scene, but he inverts it. In Descartes, the
self is the watcher at the window, the one who melts the wax, the one
who voluntarily performs the philosophical therapy of meditation in
order to establish its own certain existence and (only after so doing)
the existence of others. In Pascal, the self is watched from the window,
and its qualities are progressively stripped away as if it were the wax.

8
Philosophical Works, ii. 21–3 (at 7.33–4).
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 97
When its qualities are stripped away, Pascal seems to suggest, nothing
at all remains of the self and so nothing remains to be known or loved.
In the fragment’s first scenario, the self as such is not really
encountered at all, because it not made the object of loving attention.
The second scenario declines to identify the self with the transient
physical attributes that often elicit love. The third rejects the equation
of the self with one’s subjective mental life (one’s judgment or
memory) for the same reason. Pascal also specifically declines to
identify the self with the substance of the soul. He thereby departs
from the Aristotelian and scholastic traditions, since in classical
metaphysics, a substance, by definition, is what underlies change.9
In those traditions, the substance of my soul could indeed be con-
strued as that which I most truly am because the substance of my soul
would preserve my identity through all temporal and physical
changes. Pascal refuses to identify the self with the substance of the
soul, because an abstract “soul-self ” cannot be a proper object of love.
In this fragment, Pascal thus presents what might be called a
negative ontology of the self. We are told that the self is not isolated
from the world, not fully autonomous, not exclusively an agent, and
not a unitary, imperishable substance. As is frequently the case with
viae negativae, however, the fragment seems to end in aporia: it does
not tell us anything about what the self actually is. Pascal suggests that
we need to be seen, thought about, and, ultimately, loved in order to
be; but what others see, know, and love is not us, but only “borrowed
qualities.” At the fragment’s end, we have been given no answer to its
opening question, nor have we learnt what kind of self can be an
object of love.

THE MOI: THE FALSE SELF

We learn Pascal’s first answer to this question elsewhere in the

Pensées. If our subjectivity is called into being by love, it follows
that the kind of self we are is determined by the kind of love that
calls us into being. Thus, in the fallen world, under the reign of sin,
our idolatrous, disordered love can only call into being a false,

9
See Edouard Morot-Sir, La Metaphysique dePascal (Paris: PUF, 1973), 56–8.
98 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
imaginary self. The story of the birth of the false self is also Pascal’s
account of fallen human subjectivity. According to Pascal, only an
imaginary self can seem worthy of love and so each person pretends
to possess desirable qualities that he does not really have:
We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own
being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we
try to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and
preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one. And if we are
calm, or generous, or loyal, we are anxious to have it known so that we
can attach these virtues to our other existence; we prefer to detach them
from our real self so as to unite them with the other. We would
cheerfully be cowards if that would acquire for us a reputation of
bravery. How clear a sign of the nullity of our own being that we are
not satisfied with one without the other and often exchange the one for
the other! For anyone who would not die to save his honor would be
infamous. (L806/S653)
Pascal here posits a duality in the self, a separation between our
“imaginary being” that exists only in the minds of others and our
own, “real” being, the precise nature of which is not specified. It seems
fairly straightforward to map the imaginary being of L806/S653 onto
the moi of L688/S567 (discussed above) and conclude that the im-
aginary being, the self as it exists “in the eyes of others,” is the moi that
is constructed by the world.10
In contrast with the motif of passivity in the earlier fragment,
however, now it appears that each person actively welcomes and
constructs this separation. Pascal uses an array of first-person-plural
action verbs to paint a picture of a self that is not only an agent but a
whirlwind of activity. It thus corrects the rather one-sided picture of
the self offered by L688/S567. We are not merely constructed by the
world with no agency of our own; rather, we are co-authors of our
imaginary selves. But we must also note the kind of activity to which
fragment L806/S653 refers. The verbs Pascal deploys are, without
exception, verbs of desiring, and collectively they paint a picture of
the self as an agent whose only activity is craving: “we are not
satisfied . . . we want . . . we try . . . we strive constantly . . . we are anx-
ious . . . we prefer . . . ” And what we crave, without exception, is the

10
I return in due course to the point that an imaginary self with imaginary being
seems to presuppose a real self with real being.
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 99
esteem of others. Note, however, that our desire for esteem is mark-
edly not the desire actually to be worthy of esteem, but rather a desire
for esteem as such, regardless of whether we deserve it.
Greatness of man. Our idea of man’s soul is so lofty that we cannot bear
to be despised and not enjoy the esteem of a given soul. All the
happiness of men lies in this esteem. (L411/S30)
For whatever possession he may own on earth, whatever health or
essential amenity he may enjoy, he is dissatisfied unless he also enjoys
the good opinion of his fellows. He so highly values human reason that,
however privileged he may be on earth, if he does not also enjoy a
privileged position in human reason, he is not happy. This is the finest
position on earth; nothing can deflect him from this desire, and this is
the most indelible quality in the human heart. (L470/S707)
The “most indelible quality in the human heart” is the desire to “enjoy
the good opinion of his fellows.” Yet this desire does not call forth
virtuous projects of self-improvement, in which we seek to become
ever more worthy of the esteem of others. Far from it. The desire for
esteem is essentially duplicitous. In a slogan: the desire for esteem
creates the desire to seem.
It is easy to miss the full force of Pascal’s critique. He does not
claim merely that the desire for esteem is one activity among others,
activities performed by an otherwise substantial self. Rather, the
relentless activity by which we pursue the esteem of others just is
the moi, the false self identified by the fragments discussed above
(L688/S567, L806/S653), and, furthermore, the moi just is the self—or
at least the only self to which we have any epistemic access. Thus, for
Pascal, the self is essentially duplicitous. Better—it is essentially an act
of duplicity, duplicity in act.
Elsewhere in the Pensées, Pascal presents and develops this claim.
In a long and polished fragment entitled “self-love” (amour-propre),
he argues that our subjectivity depends on social relationships, which
themselves depend on joint projects of deception, pretense, and
hypocrisy (L978/S743). The dialectic is complex. A person’s amour-
propre causes him to deceive both himself and others, but it also
causes him to pretend to believe those trying to deceive him. Pascal
intends this complex dialectic as an account of subjectivity as such.
Indeed, the fragment’s opening line asserts an equivalence between
selfhood and self-love: “The nature of amour-propre and of this
human self is to love only self and consider only self ” (La nature de
100 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
l’amour-propre et de ce moi humain est de n’aimer que soi et de ne
considerer que soi. L978/S743).
The nature of amour-propre and of this human moi is to love only self
and consider only self. But what is it to do? It cannot prevent the object
of its love from being full of faults and wretchedness: it wants to be great
and sees that it is small; it wants to be happy and sees that it is wretched;
it wants to be perfect and sees that it is full of imperfections; it wants to
be the object of men’s love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve
only their dislike and contempt. The predicament in which it thus finds
itself arouses in it the most unjust and criminal passion that could
possibly be imagined, for it conceives a deadly hatred for the truth
which rebukes it and convinces it of its faults. It would like to do away
with this truth, and not being able to destroy it as such, it destroys it, as
best it can, in the consciousness of itself and others and it cannot bear to
have them pointed out or noticed.
It is no doubt an evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil to be
full of them and unwilling to recognize them since this entails the
further evil of deliberate self-delusion (illusion volontaire). We do not
want others to deceive us; we do not think it is right for them to want us
to esteem them more than they deserve; it is therefore not right either
that we should deceive them and want them to esteem us more than we
deserve . . . (L978/S743)11
The link between selfhood and self-love asserted in the fragment’s
opening line follows from Pascal’s claim that love calls the self into
being (L688/S653). It quickly becomes apparent that any self called
into being by self-love must be essentially duplicitous. Accordingly, in

11
The term that Krailsheimer translates as “deliberate self-delusion” is illusion
volontaire. In context, this term clearly refers to self-deception. Indeed, in 17th-cent.
French, the term illusion by itself connotes delusion, possibly of demonic origin. The
1694 Dictionnaire de l’Academie francoise (p. 588) defines it as “an appearance or
artifice by which one deceives a man . . . It is said more usually of the deceits that
demons make, by making things appear otherwise than they are to the interior or
exterior senses . . . It also signifies a thought, a chimerical imagination: This man has
some illusions, is subject to illusions, feeds on illusions.” Furthermore, Pascal’s
contemporary Pierre Nicole clearly uses illusion volontaire to mean self-deception.
In his essay “On Self-Knowledge,” he writes: “Finally, if they do not disguise the laws
of God, they disguise themselves to themselves. They attribute to themselves reasons
and intentions which they do not have; and do not want to see those which they have.
Thus while making a false assessment of their actions, they justify themselves to
themselves throughout their whole life by the means of this illusion volontaire. Behold
the sleep from which one must demand to be preserved . . . ” Pierre Nicole, Essais de
Morale (1675), iii. 28–9.
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 101
the fragment’s opening salvo, Pascal opposes self-lucidity to the desire
for the love and esteem of other people. In the French, Pascal’s
alliterative repetition of the verbs vouloir (to want) and se voir (to
see oneself) draws attention to the gulf between what the self desires
and what it knows to be true: il veut etre grand, il se voit petit; il veut
etre heureux, et il se voit miserable . . . 12 The self doesn’t just notice
the gulf between what it wants and what it is, however; it also actively
tries to hide this gulf from itself and others. It “conceives a deadly
hatred for the truth which rebukes it” and it “would like to do away
with this truth” but it cannot. Instead, it destroys the truth “in the
consciousness of itself and others”—not completely, however, but
only “as best it can.” I think that there can be no doubt that this
fragment describes a recognizable project of self-deception.
The self not only wants esteem of others, it also wants to deserve it.
But it also sees that it is wretched, small, and imperfect. Pascal writes
that the self “wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem and sees
that its faults deserve only their dislike and contempt.” Since it cannot
(we may suppose) successfully attack its own imperfections, it attacks
the awareness of its imperfections, both in its own consciousness and
in the consciousness of others. It is clear that Pascal is describing a
complex process of outwardly directed pretense and inwardly
directed self-deception. Yet, recalling the fragment’s first line, we
must understand this process as an account of the self as such:
selfhood as duplicity in act, once again.
As the fragment proceeds, Pascal complicates his claim that we
deceive others to earn their esteem. Although we do act deceivingly
toward others, it turns out that they are not innocent victims and, in
this fragment at least, they are not really even deceived. Rather, they
see through our deceptions and deceive us in turn. What Pascal first
calls deception is actually more like collusion in hypocrisy, since both
sides pretend to accept the false appearances presented by the other.
This aversion for the truth exists in differing degrees, but it is in
everyone to some degree because it is inseparable from self-love. It is
this false delicacy which makes those who have to correct others choose
so many devious ways and qualifications of giving offense. They must
minimize our faults, pretend to excuse them, and combine this with

12
Nicholas Hammond makes this point in “Pascal’s Pensées and the Art of
Persuasion,” in Hammond (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Pascal (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 244.
102 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
praise and marks of affection and esteem. Even then such medicine still
tastes bitter to amour-propre . . .
The result is that anyone who has an interest in winning our affection
avoids rendering us a service which he knows to be unwelcome; we are
treated as we want to be treated; we hate the truth and it is kept from us;
we desire to be flattered and we are flattered; we like being deceived and
we are deceived . . .
Thus, human life is nothing but a perpetual illusion; there is nothing
but mutual deception and flattery. No one talks about us in our presence
as he would in our absence. Human relations are only based on this
mutual deception; and few friendships would survive if everyone knew
what his friend said about him behind his back, even though he spoke
sincerely and dispassionately . . . ( L978/S743; see also L792/S646)
There is a shift in perspective in this passage. It is no longer just we
who deceive others; those same others also deceive us. They “pretend”
to excuse our faults, and pursue “many devious ways and qualifica-
tions” to avoid offending us. Of course, we are meant to understand
that each person continually plays both the role of flatterer and
flattered in this scenario, since “human relations are only based on
this mutual deception.”
Pascal’s claim that everyone deceptively flatters other people is
actually somewhat unexpected. After all, the “aversion for the truth”
and the “false delicacy” that Pascal criticizes are qualities that spring
from disordered love of self, and yet they cause us to flatter the self-
image of others. We might expect him to say the opposite, since he
holds that everyone wants to dominate everyone else (L597/S494).
After all, if a person wishes to seem great, it would make sense for him
to denigrate others, not flatter them, so that he himself would seem
greater by comparison. Pascal’s insight to the contrary exposes the
real dynamics of self-love. Universal self-love has the unintended
consequence of creating universal flattery. My own purely selfish
goal gives me a motive to advance your equally selfish goal.
In his examination of self-love in the Pensées, Christian Lazzeri
argues that, for Pascal, this system of deceptive flattery is actually a
structural requirement of the disordered self-love that is a product of
the Fall.13 Pascal holds that the human self is finite, but is the object of
its own infinite love. Only an infinite entity can serve as the proper
object of an infinite love, however, and so the self faces two choices. It

13
Lazzeri, Force et justice, 9–10, 40–52.
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 103
can either redirect its infinite love toward a properly infinite object, or
it can try to modify its own dimensions until it seems like an infinite
object. The first option, conversion, is at the heart of Pascal’s apolo-
getic project. The second option is the one that most people pursue.
On the second option, the self tries to become everything, to arrogate
to itself all possible reality (L149/S182, L421/S680, L617/510).
It is not at all clear how the self could attain this goal, however.
Certainly, it cannot really become everything. Infinity necessarily
remains out of reach, but another option seems promising. If the
self cannot modify its actual dimensions, it can at least modify its
apparent dimensions. More precisely, it can modify its own know-
ledge of its true dimensions so that it seems infinite to itself, and
therefore seems like a proper object of its own infinite love. Yet reality
constantly intrudes—the self is always embedded in a society of other
selves and each of these others, by their very existence, contradicts the
self ’s own claims to infinity. So in order to achieve its goal, the self
needs a way of drawing these other selves into its own project of self-
deification. The self therefore adopts an external point of view on
itself and its activities. It tries to expand its own dimensions by
expanding the space that it takes up in the thought of others. When
the self is esteemed by others to the greatest possible degree, it will
have arrogated to itself the greatest possible being, and thereby
achieved a cheap version of its corrupt goal.14
As fragment L978/S743 draws to a close, Pascal returns to the idea
that the source of this mutual deception lies in the human subject as
such:
Man is nothing therefore but disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in
himself and with regard to others. He does not want to be told the truth.
He avoids telling it to others, and all these tendencies, so remote from
justice and reason, are naturally rooted in his heart. (L978/S743)
This final move is significant because it emphasizes that, according to
Pascal, the mutual deception that characterizes all social relationships
is not just a culturally contingent feature of his own (admittedly
duplicitous) society. Mutual deception is a precondition of any

14
Lazzeri’s analysis is correct as an exegesis of Pascal, but as discussed in Ch. 1, it
seems descriptively inadequate to say that every person always wishes to dominate all
others. Fortunately, the dialectic at work here can easily be modified to accommodate
the claim that sometimes people identify themselves with some other object—another
person, an ideology, a nation, etc.—and try to lend all possible being to it.
104 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
human relationship because it is “naturally rooted” in the heart,
the seat of love and subjectivity. The human being as such just is
“disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard
to others” (L’homme n’est donc que déguisement, que mensonge et
hypocrisie, et en soi-même et à l’égard des autres).
By reading the fragments on the desire for esteem alongside the
fragments on the moi and on self-love, it is clear that, for Pascal, the
self just is the moi, the imaginary, socially constructed self formed by
dynamic interaction with other people. This imaginary self is the only
proper object of a most improper self-love. Pascal’s logic is brutal: to
be a self is to be an object of love (L688/S567), but the self, considered
in itself, is “full of faults and wretchedness,” and possesses no qualities
that can compel real love (L978/S743). It follows that to be a self at all
is to be an imaginary self that compels only duplicitous love (L806/
S653). In all of these fragments, the self is de-centered: it is not found
in Cartesian self-presence but in the imaginations of other people. It
is true that Pascal writes elsewhere that “my self [significantly, le moi]
consists in my thought” (L135/S167), but fragment L806/S653 shows
us how to interpret this statement. My self may consist in my thought,
but my thought consists in thinking about myself in the thoughts of
another.15 My self is thus doubly imaginary. It is my own imaginary
projection of how I exist in the thoughts and imaginations of other
people.16
Although he himself doesn’t quite put it this way, according to
Pascal, our selfhood is a fantasy. The moi is the only self to which we
have access, and it is inherently false and duplicitous. According to
Pascal, the selves that we manifest to the world are only polite fictions
that conceal our libido dominandi. To be a self at all is to be a false,
imaginary self that exists for the sake of imagined esteem. The
tendency toward duplicity that infects our interpersonal relationships
also infects our very subjectivity. We are multiply oriented away from

15
Here I follow Carraud, “Remarks on the Second Pascalian Anthropology,” 552–3.
Contra Carraud, however, I read this fragment as a key instance of Pascal’s fully
theological anthropology. To think oneself in the thought of another is itself a form of
sinful pride, in which the self tries to become everything, if not in reality, then in
the imaginations of other people.
16
It might be more accurate to say one’s subjective narrative identity is a single
imaginary story, doubly told, because it is the identity that one imaginatively con-
structs for oneself, as filtered through one’s imaginative reconstructions of the
thoughts of others (which are sometimes based on actual interactions, of course).
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 105
the truth. We eschew self-knowledge about who we are and what we
do, as we lovingly attend to our imaginary selves and manifest them
to the world.
Pascal’s claim that to be a self is to be a false, duplicitous, self
requires qualification. As a formal matter, the distinction between
true and false selves inevitably collapses if there are no true selves at
all. And it is obviously not the case, as he would have it, that no one
ever has any qualities that genuinely deserve love or that no one ever
loves others because of their genuinely lovable qualities. These claims
are best read as the work of a moralist and not a metaphysician, one
who exaggerates for effect in order to reveal deep truths about human
nature and human relationships. Pascal’s exaggerated language ad-
vances the robustly theological claim that only God is worthy of
unrestricted love. On this understanding, the true self is the self that
ceases to be a moi precisely insofar as it imitates Christ by loving God
above all things. I return to this point in Chapter 7.
For now, I would like to separate Pascal’s claim that all selves are
false selves into distinct ontological and epistemological claims. The
ontological claim is simply that the false, socially constructed, im-
aginary self (the moi) does not correspond to the way one really is—
that is, to an objectively accurate account of one’s dispositions,
engagements, and so forth. The epistemological claim is that it is
very difficult—I do not quite want to say impossible—to distinguish
the moi from an accurate depiction of oneself. We are never finally
“alone” with ourselves, because we are always imagining ourselves as
we exist in the minds of others, even if this means reflexively becom-
ing an other to ourselves. Thus, we are never completely separate
from the moi, or from the patterns of deception that call it into being.

THE MOI AND SELF-INTERPRETATION

If every self is a false self, a moi, it is equally clear that this condition
is no accident, according to Pascal. We do not just find ourselves
trapped by the patterns of deception and self-deception that create
the moi. Instead, as fallen subjects we actively construct our im-
aginary selves in a joint performance of tacit cooperation with other
duplicitous subjects. The duplicitous subject, like a player on the
stage, enacts his own false self-understanding and in so doing,
106 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
reinforces it and maintains it in being. We actively construct our
imaginary selves, we want to become them, and we try to manifest
them in the world. We want to inhabit these false selves utterly and
so we try to divert our own attention from the fact that they are
false.
Consider again fragment L978/S743, the long fragment on self-love
and self-deception. That fragment is about the immoderate love that
people have for themselves, and their concomitant demand that
others ratify that love. For Pascal, the moi results from an axiological
blunder about the value of the self. The relevant notion of value is a
thick conjunction of moral worth, beauty, and fulfillment. What the
self desires, and knows it does not possess, is a sheen of greatness and
perfection that compels the love of others. Yet the qualities the self
does possess are, in the classical Greek sense, shameful: wretchedness,
faults, and flaws that deserve only the contempt of others. The self ’s
axiological blunder is not an isolated mistake, but a form of moral
perversity that infects its every engagement and facilitates its tyran-
nical behavior toward the world at large. How can we so thoroughly
misapprehend our own value? Pascal’s answer begins with claim that
the will is disordered, bent away from the true source of value and
lovingly oriented toward false goods. As we attempt to satisfy our
disordered desires, we develop habitual patterns of thought and
action that shape us into moral agents who are prone to deception
and self-deception. Furthermore, these habitual patterns are repro-
duced and reinforced by the duplicitous social world in which we are
embedded.
In a more contemporary idiom, we can say that the sinner per-
forms the moi when he falsely interprets himself and his projects.
Insofar as he is a moi, the sinner lacks self-knowledge, because if he
were truly to know himself, he would know himself as sinful and
fallen. His self-knowledge would result in moral change. It follows
that the sinner, as sinner, cannot really know himself. As Charles
Taylor puts it:
There is such a thing as self-lucidity . . . but the achievement of such
lucidity means moral change, that is, it changes the object known. At the
same time, error about oneself is not just an absence of correspondence
[to the facts about oneself]; it is also in some form inauthenticity, bad
faith, self-delusion, repression of one’s human feelings, or something of
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 107
the kind; it is a matter of the quality of what is felt just as much as what is
known about this . . . 17
Elsewhere in the same work, Taylor argues that one’s beliefs about
one’s own mental life partly constitute that mental life. Regardless of
whether that further thesis is true, it is certainly the case that one does
not come to know oneself in exactly the same way as one comes to
know some external state of affairs. The project of attaining genuine
self-knowledge is also a project of moral development. Conversely,
being wrong about the value of oneself and one’s projects is less a
matter of being mistaken than of being duplicitous. This is what it
means to say that we enact the false self: we deceive ourselves and
others about our own moral worth.
When we join Pascal’s analysis of the moi to his analysis of attract-
iveness and rapport, we can see again why the fallen self so often hates
the truth. As discussed in Chapter 1, Pascal writes that “there is a
certain model of attractiveness and beauty consisting in a certain
relation (rapport) between our nature, weak or strong as it may be,
and the thing which pleases us” (L585/S486). If we are attracted to
things that fit in with, resemble, and conform to our natures, and if we
also have a false understanding of our natures, then we are likely to be
attracted to false beliefs, beliefs that reinforce that false understanding.
Conversely, we are likely to reject beliefs—like the belief in God, or
the belief that we are fallen—that threaten to destabilize our false
self-understandings. According to Pascal, such is our situation. Our
attraction to the beautiful but empty forms of the imagination has led
each of us to construct a moi, a “self ” that is a mere fantasy.

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A FALSE SELF? AN EXAMPLE

FROM GEORGE ELIOT’S MIDDLEMARCH

Pascal’s account of fallen subjectivity is provocative, but opaque.

According to Pascal, every self is a false self, a moi. However striking,
it is not entirely clear what this claim amounts to in practice. Nor is

17
Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Philosophy and the
Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1985), 26.
108 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
entirely clear what it means to say that, on Pascal’s account, our
subjectivity is performative, that we enact the false self and thereby
hold it in being. Yet the moi is a key concept for understanding
Pascal’s views about the cognitive consequences of the Fall. Moreover,
my own account of self-deceptive moral reasoning presupposes it.18 It
is therefore worthwhile to present a fuller and more concrete picture
of the false self. I have chosen a literary example of a false self, drawn
from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The example that I have in mind
comes near the end of the novel, in chapter 70, when the ostensibly
pious Nicholas Bulstrode hastens the death of his sick enemy, John
Raffles, even though Raffles had been entrusted to his care. Of course
Eliot did not take herself to be depicting the Pascalian moi as such,
but her portrait of the self-deceptive Bulstrode nevertheless reveals
very well what it is like to perform the false self.
The facts of the case are these: Nicholas Bulstrode is a pious,
wealthy banker who has always presented himself to the people of
Middlemarch as a pillar of social respectability. Unbeknownst to the
community, however, in his younger days, he was an active member
of an illegal fencing operation that trafficked in stolen goods. Worse,
he lied to his first wife about her missing daughter and grandson just
so that he himself could inherit her estate. John Raffles, an itinerant
ne’er-do-well, knows Bulstrode’s secrets and threatens blackmail.
When Raffles falls ill and begins raving, Bulstrode needs to know
whether Raffles has revealed his secrets, or whether they remain safe,
so he summons Dr Lydgate to treat him. Although Raffles is very sick,
Lydgate concludes that he will likely recover, as long as he is watched
carefully and given no alcohol whatsoever, under any circumstances.
At Bulstrode’s insistence, he alone hears Dr Lydgate’s instructions
and he promises to watch over Raffles.
Naturally, it would be quite convenient for Bulstrode if Raffles were
to die. Over the course of the next day and night, Bulstrode wrestles
with his conscience about his desire to be rid of his blackmailer
forever. He repeatedly fantasizes about Raffles’s death, and hopes
that divine providence will deliver it.
Whatever prayers he [Bulstrode] might lift up, whatever statements he
might inwardly make of this man’s wretched spiritual condition, and
the duty he himself was under to submit to the punishment divinely

18
I develop this account across Chs 4 through 6.
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 109
appointed for him rather than to wish evil for another—through all this
effort to condense words into a solid mental state, there pierced and
spread with irresistible vividness the images of the events he desired.
And in the train of these images came their apology. He could not but
see the death of Raffles, and see in it his own deliverance . . . Should
Providence in this case award death, there was no sin in contemplating
death as the desirable issue—if he kept his hand from hastening it—if he
scrupulously did what was prescribed . . . intention was everything in
the question of right and wrong.19
Because he holds that “intention is everything in the question of right
and wrong,” he tries to put aside his desire to harm Raffles and so he
resolves to obey Lydgate’s orders: “Why should he have got into any
argument [with himself] about the validity of these orders? It was
only the common trick of desire—which avails itself of any irrelevant
skepticism, finding larger room for itself in all uncertainty about
effects, in every obscurity that looks like the absence of law” (673).
Later in the day, Bulstrode reverses a previous decision and agrees
to lend money to Dr Lydgate. Eliot writes that he does not examine
the purity of the intentions that led to this reversal: “He did not
measure the quantity of diseased motive which had made him wish
for Lydgate’s goodwill, but the quantity was none the less actively
there, like an irritating agent in his blood” (675). Bulstrode’s “diseased
motive” is, of course, the desire to co-opt Lydgate and keep him from
asking uncomfortable questions, should Raffles happen to die during
the night. In the hidden recesses of his heart, Bulstrode’s desires are
getting the better of him:
A man vows, and yet will not cast away the means of breaking his vow.
Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which
tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his
imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is
telling himself over again the reasons for his vow. (676)
Eventually, he tires of staying with Raffles and summons his servant,
Mrs Abel, to keep watch in his place. Though she explicitly asks about
the details of Raffles’s care, Bulstrode does not forbid her to give him
alcohol, and later, when she asks for permission to give him some
brandy, he even gives her the key to the wine cellar. Eliot tells us that

19
George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 672. Further
citations of this edn will be given in the text.
110 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
Mrs Abel’s request prompted a “struggle” within Bulstrode and
emphasizes the “husky” quality of his voice when he agrees to give
Mrs Abel the key. But she doesn’t tell us what, if anything, he thought
at the time, only that by the next morning, his conscience was
untroubled:
Early in the morning—about six—Mr. Bulstrode rose and spent some
time in prayer. Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily
candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action! Private prayer is inaud-
ible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just
as he is, even in his own reflections? Bulstrode had not yet unraveled
in his thought the confused promptings of the last four-and-twenty
hours. (678)
Raffles soon falls into a sleep from which he will never awake. As
Bulstrode watches him die, his conscience is still clear:
As he sat there and beheld the enemy of his peace going irrevocably into
silence, he felt more at rest than he had done for many months. His
conscience was soothed by the enfolding wing of secrecy, which seemed
just then like an angel sent down for his relief. (678)
Note that Bulstrode’s first reaction is relief that “the enfolding wing of
secrecy” will protect him from any accusation of wrongdoing. This
suggests that he is aware of his misdeed. On the other hand, Eliot also
emphasizes that Bulstrode does not acknowledge his complicity in
Raffles’s death, not even to himself. He dismisses his own responsi-
bility with rationalizations. He asks himself overly narrow questions
that imply his innocence: “And who could say that the death of
Raffles had been hastened? Who knew what would have saved
him?” (679). He persuades himself that the real cause of Raffles’s
death is unknowable, since he might have died anyway, even if
Lydgate’s orders had been followed exactly. Similarly, he preserves
his own sense of innocence by focusing on the (morally irrelevant)
fact that his guilt cannot be proven publicly. Even five days later, “He
had not confessed to himself yet that he had done anything in the way
of contrivance to this end [Raffles’s death]; he had accepted what
seemed to have been offered. It was impossible to prove that he had
done anything which hastened the departure of that man’s soul”
(685). Henceforth when he prays, he represents his sins toward
Raffles as hypothetical and prays for forgiveness “if I have herein
transgressed” (692). Needless to say, despite his too easy conscience,
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 111
Bulstrode does not ever tell Dr Lydgate about the brandy and—
interestingly—Lydgate doesn’t ever ask whether his instructions
were properly carried out, although he is suspicious.

NICHOLAS BULSTRODE AS A PASCALIAN MOI

According to Pascal, after the Fall our very subjectivity is duplicitous

and false. Moreover, we jointly construct our false selves in complicity
with the wider world. The claim that we performatively enact our
false selves is just the claim that every sinner engages in a mutually
reinforcing play of deception and self-deception.
Thus human life is nothing but a perpetual illusion; there is nothing but
mutual deception and flattery . . . Human relations are only based on
this mutual deception . . . Man is therefore nothing but disguise, false-
hood, and hypocrisy; both in himself and with regard to others. He does
not want to be told the truth. He avoids telling it to others, and all these
tendencies, so remote from justice and reason are naturally rooted in his
heart. (L978/S743)
Eliot’s Bulstrode is an apt example of the fallen, false self—“this
human moi”—because he exposes the “mutual deception and flattery”
and aversion to the truth that characterizes both the fallen world and
the fallen human subject.
In that light, Eliot’s portrayal suggests four descriptive theses about
the moi. These theses are not necessary or sufficient conditions. They
are more like thick descriptions about this particular case that plaus-
ibly generalize to other cases. They allow us to get a better grip on
what it means to say that after the Fall, every self is a false self. Of
course, I hope that even Pascal would not say that every human being
is a moral monster on the level of Nicholas Bulstrode. Still, the
Bulstrode case reveals some of the general contours of the false self
very well.

(i) Performing the False Self is an Ongoing, Habitual Project

The first thesis concerns the way the false self is enacted. Performing
the moi is an ongoing “project” and not just the result of a single
112 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
discreet duplicitous act. Moreover, it is a habitual project, which
means that it is rarely the result of explicit, consciously avowed,
deception at all. Rather, over time, our deceptive dispositions and
behaviors tend to harden into habits, which allows us to continue
pursuing them without explicit self-monitoring. To be sure, as an
analytical tool, we can say that Bulstrode falsely believes a series of
individual propositions like: “I did not hasten the death of Raffles” or
“I am not morally responsible for Raffles’s death.” But this way of
describing his case obscures as much as it clarifies. For Bulstrode
could plausibly be said to deceive himself about countless additional
connected propositions, e.g. that he does not wish to buy Lydgate’s
silence, that his desire for Raffles’s death played no role in his decision
to allow him to receive alcohol, that Raffles’s death could not have
been prevented, that he is morally exonerated by the absence of
empirical proof of his guilt, that he is not the kind of person who
would hasten the death of an enemy, that he is a good Christian who
only does the will of God, that he deserves all his wealth, that he
deserves the esteem of his fellow townsmen, etc. These can be multi-
plied almost ad infinitum. There is no conceptual barrier to treating
each one in isolation, but this seems quite artificial. Instead, all of
these beliefs are ingredients in a single project of duplicity. This
ongoing project is what it means to say that Bulstrode enacts his
false self.

(ii) The False Self is Socially Expressed and,

Therefore, Interpersonal
As Eliot describes him, Bulstrode is not only a self-deceiver but also a
hypocrite and a deceiver of others who is very concerned about his
public identity. Eliot’s portrait thereby serves as a clear example of the
value of Pascal’s analysis of the moi as a social fiction, as well as the
socially expressed nature of amour-propre. Bulstrode is a hypocrite
because he lords his supposed virtue over the rest of the town, and
does not admit that he himself conspicuously fails to live up to his
own ideals. He is also a deceiver, by commission and omission,
because he hides his true past from other townsfolk, including his
own wife. In a deeper sense, Bulstrode’s hypocrisy goes beyond his
specific actions and assertions. It is woven into his way of life. This
paragon of country respectability made his money by trafficking in
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 113
stolen goods and hoarding a fortune that properly belonged to a
penniless widow and her son, after all. He will do almost anything
to protect his carefully crafted public persona, and he fears exposure
above all because it would mean that “he must quail before the glance
of those towards whom he had habitually assumed the attitude of a
reprover” (694).
Though he is a deceiver and a hypocrite, it must also be noted that
Bulstrode’s project of duplicity succeeds only through the tacit co-
operation of other people. Although the town eventually turns against
him, Bulstrode’s self-deceit is enabled by some of his fellow citizens,
in particular Dr Lydgate and Mrs Abel. While it cannot be said that
either of them intentionally conspired with Bulstrode, Eliot does say
that they both had suspicions about him that they did not voice. Their
silence allows Bulstrode to continue to divert his attention from his
deeds and so furthers his project of self-deception. Eliot’s point is an
important one. The actions and, especially, the omissions of our
colleagues—the unasked question, the unpressed argument—these
are mechanisms of self-deception no less than our own secret desires
and intentions.

(iii) The False Self is a False Interpretation of the Self

As Pascal insists, and as the Bulstrode episode shows, sinful self-
deception is essentially a first-person affair. Bulstrode deceives him-
self about his own moral responsibility, his own motives, and his
own engagements. In a broader sense, he deceives himself about
his own moral character and, what amounts to the same thing,
about his identity. It is clear that Bulstrode’s belief that he is morally
virtuous is constitutive of his sense of identity. Eliot says that imagin-
ing that other people know the truth about how he made his fortune
is like imagining his own death.20 Not all beliefs about the self are
similarly constitutive of one’s identity. For example, suppose that,
late in life, Bulstrode learnt that he had actually been born in Man-
chester instead of in London. He might be shocked, but he would still
be recognizably the same person, to himself and others. Learning that

20
“ . . . his fears were such as belong to a man who cares to maintain his recognized
supremacy: the loss of high consideration from his wife as from every one else who did
not clearly hate him out of enmity to the truth, would be as the beginning of death to
him” (585).
114 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
he is not, finally, a good person would not be at all like learning
that he is from Manchester. Learning that he is not a good person
would entail fundamentally re-evaluating himself and crafting a
new identity, a new picture of himself. He engages in his project of
sinful self-deception precisely in order to avoid confronting the
truth about himself, and to protect his prideful self-image.
It is also worth attending carefully to the matters about which
Bulstrode does and does not deceive himself. As a heuristic device, we
can group some of the above propositions together and say, summarily,
that Bulstrode deceives himself about whether he is morally responsible
for Raffles’s death. By contrast, note that he does not deceive himself
about the empirical fact that Lydgate issued certain instructions or even
about whether he gave the wine cellar key to Mrs Abel. Indeed, if he
were to sincerely deny that he gave the wine cellar key to Mrs Abel at all,
we might be forced to say that he was more than self-deceived. We
might even have to say that he was mentally unbalanced.
Similarly, the sinner does not just deceive himself about whether
some specific action or project is good. The sinner also deceives
himself about the self—about what a self fundamentally is, and
about what kind of autonomy it can have. The Pascalian sinner is
moi because he is both a deceiver and a self-deceiver who constructs a
false, godlike self and tries to convince himself and the world that this
false self is real and beautiful.21
Thus to be a sinful moi is to interpret oneself and one’s moral
engagements falsely. Sinful self-deception takes place at the level of
evaluation and interpretation, and not only at the level of observation
or bare factual description, and so when Bulstrode deceives himself,
he does not just make false empirical judgments. For example, he
does not come to believe the false proposition “I, Bulstrode, am not
responsible for Raffles’s death” solely because he misapprehends
empirical evidence. He also must misinterpret a range of different
considerations about what moral responsibility entails, whether there

21
Bearing in mind that not all sinners are guilty of the sin of pride, we can also
imagine a sinner who has steeped himself not in prideful self-assertion but in sloth,
apathy, and despair. Here the sinner’s disordered love would take the form of treating
some created good other than the self as the center and source of value, or of simply
failing to recognize the self ’s genuine worth. Such a case could still be one of sinful
self-deception. The sinner would still acquiesce to an order of value derived from the
world, rather than God, and accept instead an imagined portrait of himself as unduly
weak or powerless, but still no less false.
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 115
are mitigating factors, what God wills, and so forth. Bulstrode de-
ceives himself about his moral responsibility because of the way he
misinterprets these considerations.

(iv) The Sinner Sustains the False Self by Lying to Himself

The foregoing theses all suggest that the duplicitous performance that
constitutes the moi is directed at the self as much as at the world.
Moreover, that performance is not merely an act of self-deception
(a phenomenon that can take many forms) but something even
darker. The false self can only be sustained by the strongest form of
self-deception, lying to oneself. As I discuss in the next two chapters,
even the idea of lying to oneself smacks of paradox, because it seems
to require that a single agent believes the truth (as liar) and yet also
believes its contradiction (as the victim of the lie). It also seems to
require that a single agent intentionally puts himself into this con-
flicting mental state. Yet this paradoxical mental state is exactly the
state that nourishes the Pascalian moi.
On a plausible reading, Eliot presents Bulstrode as someone who
lies to himself because he intentionally cultivates contradictory beliefs
in order persuade himself that he is morally blameless. On the one
hand, Bulstrode seems to recognize that he is morally responsible for
Raffles’s death even though never attends to this belief in explicit
consciousness. He certainly knows that he failed to relay Lydgate’s
direct orders and that he gave Mrs Abel the key to the wine cellar. His
relief that “the enfolding wing of secrecy” would hide the true cir-
cumstances of Raffles’s death also suggests that he knows that he is at
fault. On the other hand, Eliot does not present Bulstrode simply as
an opportunistic liar, since she says that he does not admit his
immoral acts even to himself. And in an earlier episode of self-
deception, in which Bulstrode deceives himself about the morality
of lying to his wife about the location of her daughter and grandson,
Eliot strongly suggests that he successfully cultivated a false belief in
his innocence even though he also knew the truth of his guilt.22 In the

22
“ . . . his soul had become saturated with the belief that he did everything for God’s
sake, being indifferent to it for his own” (588). See also: “There may be coarse hypocrites,
who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but
Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger
than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires
116 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
episode presently under discussion, Eliot also repeatedly says that
Bulstrode attributes Raffles’s death to divine providence, which im-
plies that he believes that he himself is not responsible for it.23 Finally,
note that when he is directly confronted with his crimes at a town
meeting, Bulstrode’s conscience “turned venomously on him with the
full-grown fang of a discovered lie” (694). It seems reasonable to say
that his conscience strikes back with such surprising venom only
because he both did and did not believe that he was not morally
responsible for Raffles’s death. So it seems likely that Bulstrode
believes that he is responsible for Raffles’s death and yet also believes
that he is not.24
Eliot also presents Bulstrode as someone who intentionally culti-
vates his conflicting beliefs. To be fair, she does write that Bulstrode
does not “distinctly mean” to let Raffles die, and says instead that
homicidal desires are “at work in him dimly, and make their way into
his imagination, and relax his muscles” even as he tries to resist them
(676). This could suggest a diagnosis of unintentional self-deception,
in which Bulstrode’s evil desires directly cause his beliefs and actions,
without the mediation of any intentional agency. On the other hand,
Bulstrode’s relevant behavior unfolds over the course of days, adapts
to changing circumstances, and is complex and goal-directed. At least
five days separate his initial decision to loan money to Lydgate from
his exposure at the town meeting, and Bulstrode does not admit his
guilt to himself during this entire time. Given the duration of this
episode of self-deception, it seems more plausible to say that he
intentionally deceives himself.
Indeed, according to Eliot, Bulstrode deceives himself with a per-
suasive inner dialogue that sometimes takes the form of prayer. He

into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs” (590). The story of this episode of self-
deception, which lasts for many years, is told in Eliot’s ch. 61.
23
See Eliot, Middlemarch, 676 and 685, and also the foreshadowing on p. 585:
Bulstrode “felt a cold certainty at his heart that Raffles—unless providence sent death
to hinder him—would come back to Middlemarch before long. And that certainty was
a terror.”
24
I admit that these passages are more suggestive than decisive. In each of these
examples, it is also possible that Bulstrode simply diverts his attention from his know-
ledge that he is responsible. He could do this without also forming the contradictory
belief that he is not responsible. Close reading alone allows but does not entail the further
claim that Bulstrode actually believes the contradictory proposition that he is not
responsible for Raffles’s death. I take this ambiguity as a sign that Eliot’s example is
psychologically realistic. A real-world example would be equally hard to parse.
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 117
uses inward prayer to chip away at his own conscience both before
and after his misdeed:
Raffles dead was the image that brought release, and indirectly he
prayed for that way of release, beseeching that, if it were possible, the
rest of his days here below might be freed from the threat of an
ignominy which would break him utterly as an instrument of God’s
service. (676; see also 678)
Eliot also says that, throughout the course of his life, Bulstrode has
used self-talk and prayer as a form of rationalization. For instance, in
his youth, he had to rationalize away his worries about joining the
illegal fencing operation:
He remembered his first moments of shrinking. They were private, and
were filled with arguments; some of these taking the form of prayer . . .
And it was true that Bulstrode found himself carrying on two distinct
lives; his religious activity could not be incompatible with his business
as soon as he had argued himself into not feeling it incompatible . . . his
soul had become more saturated with the belief that he did everything
for God’s sake, being indifferent to it for his own. (587)
It seems clear that Bulstrode knows that he is guilty of moral wrong-
doing, but soothes his conscience with interior speech. In other
words, Bulstrode persuades himself to believe something that he
knows is false.
In short, Bulstrode lies to himself about his own moral responsi-
bility. He intentionally cultivates the false belief that he is not respon-
sible for Raffles’s death, even while he also recognizes that he is
responsible. On Pascal’s analysis this behavior is exactly what we
should expect. Bulstrode is a clear example of the Pascalian moi,
who lies to himself and to the world in order to win the esteem of a
fallen world.

PARODYING GOD BY PERFORMING THE FALSE SELF

As presented so far, Pascal’s account of the false self, however striking,

could easily be construed as moralistic, existential, and wholly secular,
without reference to the divine. Yet the performance of the false
self is at root a sinful performance. The patterns of deception and
118 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
self-deception that call the false self into being are nothing other than
a perverse imitation of God’s own good activity of creating and
sustaining the world. The false self is best understood as a parodic
imitation of God.
The project of enacting the false self certainly displays the per-
formative incoherence of sin. Pride and the desire for esteem often
walk hand-in-hand and so it is easy to overlook the fact that they are
not natural partners at all. Whereas pride seems like a kind of self-
assertion, the desire for esteem seems more like a form of self-
dispersal, a kind of dependence on others. Although the desire for
esteem is spawned by an idolatrous love of self, and although it may
be “the most indelible quality of the human heart” (L470/S707),
it surely cannot be the desire of someone who genuinely believes
himself to be an autonomous god-man, secure in the knowledge
that he is a self-contained law unto himself. Rather, the desire for
esteem is more like a kind of dependence. If “all the happiness of
men” lies in the approval of others (L470/S707), then surely we each
depend on that approval in a very basic way. Everyone pursues
an incoherent project of self-glorification through obsequious, self-
abnegating dependence.
This incoherent project is, again, nothing other than the project of
publicly performing the false self. Yet now it seems that this perform-
ance has two moments. Interestingly, each moment corresponds to a
traditional kind of sin, pride (self-assertion), on the one hand, and
sloth (self-dispersal), on the other. In the moment of self-assertion,
the duplicitous subject rejects the world as it is and cognitively tries to
remake it in some favored image. In more conventional terms: be-
cause he finds the truth about himself and his projects threatening, he
rejects it in favor of a falsehood. This can be understood as a kind of
prideful self-assertion, willfully imposing one’s own desired interpret-
ation on the world. In the moment of self-dispersal, on the other
hand, the duplicitous subject consents to the deceptive order of the
world by agreeing to play a character in a social drama that aims at
hiding the truth about himself and others. He conspires with other
people to construct and inhabit an imaginary world that is designed
to enable everyone to preserve their false self-understandings.
I choose the words, “consent,” “conspire,” and “enable” with care,
in order to signal that the agency involved in constructing the false
self is peculiar. It is both active and passive at the same time. Self-
assertion describes the way the duplicitous subject constructs his false
 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject 119
interpretations in the first place. In the moment of self-assertion, the
duplicitous subject recognizes and rejects the truth about himself, and
so he is not merely ignorant, mistaken, or a victim of the deception of
others. Yet the duplicitous subject can successfully construct and
inhabit an imaginary self only because his fellow human beings are
themselves also deceivers and self-deceivers. All sides work together
to facilitate mutual duplicity. The social mechanisms of self-dispersal
therefore enable the duplicitous subject to preserve his false self-
understanding. Without them, he could not divert his attention
from unwelcome truths about himself; nor could he continue believ-
ing the more welcome falsehoods. This dual structure reveals the
deepest, most incoherent structure of sinful subjectivity. Whereas
we should passively accept the truth wherever we encounter it, we
instead actively impose our own false interpretations on the world
(self-assertion). And whereas we should actively resist the world’s
corrupt blandishments and try to develop a coherent and virtuous
self, we instead passively consent to the duplicitous, imaginary self
suggested by the world (self-dispersal).
Because Pascal treats the moi theologically, and because he holds
that the fall into duplicity is an evaluative fall, he also enables us to see
the aesthetic and evaluative dimensions of the sinner’s self-deceit. The
Pascalian sinner does not simply fail to recognize the true order of
value. He does not just make a mistake about the good. Rather, when
he tries to impose his own order of value on the world, he makes a
willful mistake: he lies to himself about the good. He tries to imbue
created goods with a moral value derived from some source other
than God. In so doing, he seeks to usurp God’s role as the ultimate
source of goodness.
The sinner may strive to usurp God’s role, but he necessarily fails to
succeed, and thereby displays the incoherence of sin, the inversion of
activity and passivity. In the Raffles affair, for example, Bulstrode is
active where he should be passive: instead of passively accepting the
objective moral order and realizing that a human life is more valuable
than his own reputation, he actively tries to remake the moral order in
his own image by reversing its real values. Similarly, he is passive
where he should be active. The townspeople want to see him as an
upright country banker; instead of actively repudiating this portrait
as false, he passively accepts their portrayal of him and thereby
sustains his belief in his own innocence. He passively takes refuge
in the mutual interplay of vanity, hypocrisy, and deception that
120 Pascal on the Fallen Human Subject
characterizes Middlemarch social life and lets it support his false
sense of self. Bulstrode rejects God instead of rejecting the fallen
world. With his analysis of the moi, Pascal allows us to see the full
dimensions of his sinful project.
Thus, in the full light of a robust theology of sin, the false self
appears as not just logically incoherent but morally dreadful. The
false self is nothing but the product of an attempt, ever frustrated, to
imitate the Creator. When the duplicitous subject turns away from
God in his duplicity, he mocks and parodies God’s own good activity.
God loves and creates the world—that which is not God—and
thereby holds it in being; creation is good because God makes it so.
The duplicitous subject loves not God, nor the world as it is, nor even
himself as he is. Instead, he loves a constructed, imaginary self, which
can flourish only in an imaginary world of his own devising. That is
what he lovingly creates and holds in being; he tries to make it good
but he cannot.
With this incoherent activity, he inverts the dialectic of presence
and absence that characterizes God’s agency in the world. On Pascal’s
understanding, God’s kenotic absence from the world allows the
world to exist, and is therefore more real than the presence of any-
thing that is not God (see fragment L449/S690). On the other hand,
the duplicitous subject’s mode of being in the world is thoroughly
false: insofar as he is a moi, a false self, he is present in the world at all
only to the degree that he is not real, only to the degree that he
withdraws from the real world and into an imaginary world of his
own contrivance.25 Whereas Pascal’s God hides from the world be-
cause the world cannot bear God’s goodness, the duplicitous subject
hides from the world because the world cannot bear his own sinful-
ness. It may seem strange to say that a thoroughly fallen world cannot
bear the presence of sin. Yet even in a fallen world, we are not like
Milton’s Satan. “Evil be thou my good” is not the cry of an intelligible
human agent. Even in a fallen world, sin must appear in the guise of
the good, which is why duplicity is its ever-present henchman. This,
then, is Pascal’s account of fallen human subjectivity.

25
With this talk of withdrawal, I mean to echo Augustine’s privative account of
evil.
 4

Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s

Moral Theology

It is in the moral life that we most dramatically experience the dark

effects of the Fall. Even when we try to be good, we fail. More often,
we do not try at all. Worse, we convince ourselves that we are good
when we plainly are not. Pascal’s account of the moral life presup-
poses his indictment of the selfish moi. The Pascalian moi is a false,
imaginary self, and it is inherently duplicitous. Indeed, the moi is itself
a fiction, constructed jointly by self and world, purposefully—and
lovingly—created to allow us to pursue immoral goals under the cloak
of apparent virtue. It is not surprising that this division and duplicity
at the core of the self produces division and duplicity in our moral
judgments, nor that the moral life is rife with self-deception.

SINFUL SELF-DECEPTION AS CULPABLE

SELF-PERSUASION

There are various phenomena that we call “self-deception” in ordin-

ary language. Some are harmless. Some are monstrous. Across the
next three chapters, I aim to give a Pascalian account of sinful self-
deception. The sinner deceives himself about his own moral charac-
ter, and the morality of his actions, desires. and emotions. He may
also deceive himself about such morally fraught issues as whether his
life has meaning or whether he is really happy. Many of the great
characters of literature are sinful self-deceivers. In addition to Nich-
olas Bulstrode (Chapter 3), I think of Emma Bovary, who systematic-
ally evades mundane reality and immerses herself in an imaginary
122 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology
world of glamour and romance; or of Tolstoy’s Ivan Illyich, who
cannot admit that he soon will die. On a more sinister front, the
annals of history are also filled with sinful self-deceivers. Here I think
above all of moral monsters, like the collaborators in Hitler’s final
solution, who managed to rationalize away any admission of their
own guilt. On the other hand, as I understand it, sinful self-deception
is not confined to extreme cases like these. One might deceive oneself
about whether one is a true friend or a loving spouse, for example.
Indeed, self-deception is important and interesting precisely because
it is such a ubiquitous feature of the moral life. Ilham Dilman puts the
point nicely: self-deception in the moral life is “the kind of self-
deception, for instance, into which people fall in their struggles to
live a decent life, to make something of their lives, to find some sense
or significance in life, or alternatively the deception they fall into in
growing indifferent to moral considerations, in taking no notice of
them.”1 According to Pascal, virtually everyone is guilty of self-
deception in this sense.
From this point forward, I propose to focus on the strongest form
of self-deception, lying to oneself. From a theological perspective,
self-deception is sinful because it features a rejection of the truth.
The sinful self-deceiver recognizes the truth about himself and his
moral engagements, but then persuades himself to believe a falsehood
about them. We can therefore understand this form of self-deception
as morally culpable self-persuasion. Self-persuasion is morally culp-
able when it is aimed at cultivating false beliefs about one’s moral
engagements. Sinful self-deception is culpable because it is a lie to
oneself and a lie to the world.
Lying to oneself plays a special role in moral wrongdoing. It is
relatively easy to charge a subject with contradictory believing about
moral matters. Certainly this is the case if one affirms that people
have innate moral knowledge. But one need not hold that the moral
law is hidden away in the heart to imagine cases where acting
immorally entails believing something that is also believed to be
false. Let us say that I believe that stealing is always wrong. So, if
I steal something, it is reasonable to say that I believe that my own
case is an exception to the general prohibition on stealing, and also
that I believe that it is not, because I know that there are no such

1
Ilham Dilman and D. Z. Phillips, Sense and Delusion (New York: Humanities
Press, 1971), 63.
 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 123
exceptions. It would seem odd, for instance, to say that I just happen
to forget, at just the right time, my earlier belief that stealing is wrong.
In short, many cases of sinful self-deception seem to be cases in which
the sinner lies to himself. Furthermore, if we deny that the sinful self-
deceiver holds contradictory beliefs about his moral engagements, we
also have to explain away phenomena like the pangs of conscience
and flashes of insight that often accompany moral wrongdoing. But if
we accept that sinful self-deceivers hold contradictory beliefs, it is
easy to account for these persistent feelings of guilt: they arise when a
person knows, but self-deceptively denies, his own immoral acts.

PASCAL ON MORAL WRONGDOING:

THE WIDER CONTEXT

How can a person persuade himself that he is good (or that he acts
morally) when he knows otherwise? Pascal’s answer to this question
would not begin with particular acts of believing, but with a broader
account of fallen human nature and our warped cognitive, volitional,
and affective faculties. I provided the key elements of such an account
in Chapter 1. The answer properly continues with a discussion of the
political and social forces that shape us into sinful, duplicitous sub-
jects. Presenting that discussion was the burden of Chapter 2 and 3.
On Pascal’s account, disordered love creates an aversion toward
truth. Each individual person’s self-love is changed into something
different, the desire to deceive and be deceived, as a result of his
interactions with other members of society.2 According to Pascal,
pervasive duplicity is a necessary condition of political order, success-
ful social relationships, and even of the formation of the self. Cumu-
latively, in discussing these three domains, Pascal builds up a picture
of the human subject as one who is habituated to deception because it
is the essential glue that holds his world together.
With this broad background in place, I turn to Pascal’s account of
moral wrongdoing. My discussion has four parts. First, I argue that

2
For a similar argument, see Elster, Alchemies of the Mind, ch. 5, and in particular
the social mechanisms that he calls “transmutation” (unconscious transformation of
an undesirable motivation or belief into a desirable one) and “misrepresentation”
(conscious pretense about one’s motivations or beliefs).
124 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology
moral judgment is holistic and interpretive, as opposed to narrowly
evidence-based and empirical. Second, I present Pascal’s account of
interpretive moral judgments. He posits a special cognitive faculty,
which he calls “the heart,” that intuitively perceives moral value. The
heart responds to moral value by producing a sentiment, a spontan-
eous moral judgment that is both cognitive and affective. A sentiment
is inherently compelling: our sentiments seem true and so we natur-
ally want to believe them. Pascal also gives a unique account of moral
reasoning. That account centers around finesse, an interpretive form
of reasoning that is prominent in the moral life. Third, I present
Pascal’s account of how agents invest moral goods with subjective
value. If it is the heart that perceives value, it is the faculty of
imagination that bestows value. According to Pascal, the imagination
determines the subjective value of objects and situations by shaping
the way we construe and interpret them. The imagination is often, but
not always, a deceptive, self-serving faculty. Thus, fourth, because
Pascal holds that belief-formation is largely determined by our sub-
jective perceptions of value (via the imagination), he emphasizes that
our moral reasoning is often self-serving and deceptive. In the ab-
sence of God’s grace, every moral agent is also a duplicitous, sinful
moi. It is not surprising, then, that Pascal holds that the central threat
to the moral life is neither ignorance of the moral law nor moral
weakness. Rather, the central threat to the moral life is self-deception.
According to Pascal, moral wrongdoing is usually a product of self-
deceptive moral reasoning: a sinful moral agent spontaneously recog-
nizes that some course of action is immoral but persuades herself that
it is moral after all.
The primary aim of this chapter is to understand better Pascal’s
account of moral wrongdoing and develop his claim that the central
threat to the moral life is self-deception. In so doing, however, I also
make the case that Pascal has been unfairly ignored as an ethical
theorist. Few would deny that Pascal is a keen observer of the human
condition, one who dissects the vanity and hypocrisy of his targets
with wit and flair. But although his reputation as a moraliste is secure,
his reputation as a moral theorist is virtually nonexistent. There can
be no question that contemporary ethicists—both theologians and
philosophers—have largely neglected Pascal as a constructive re-
source. In addition, there is a striking dearth of scholarly work in
English about Pascal’s ethics. In fact, A. W. S. Baird’s Studies in
Pascal’s Ethics, published in 1975, remains the only full-length
 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 125
treatment of its topic in any language.3 Of course, it could be that
Pascal’s ethical theories have not received much scholarly attention
because Pascal does not have much of interest to say about ethics.
However, even a cursory reading of the Pensées suggests that Pascal
has a great deal to say about many topics that are central to contem-
porary ethical theory.4 Scattered among its fragments, we find
Pascal’s thoughts about the nature of the good, for example, as well
as an account of moral motivation and a fairly well-developed theory
of moral judgment. Pascal is much more than a religious moralist
with a fine prose style. He is also an important moral theorist, one
who deserves a place alongside the other, more systematic, ethicists of
the early modern pantheon.

SELF-DECEPTIVE MORAL JUDGMENTS

ARE INTERPRETIVE

On my Pascalian account of self-deception, the sinner falsely inter-

prets the moral worth of his own actions or character. In so doing, he

3
Baird’s work remains useful. Baird does emphasize, rightly, that Pascal’s ethics
are teleological and axiological. Baird also recognizes that Pascal classifies moral goods
on a hierarchical scale, “with the different orders representing at once categories of
moral value and orders of being.” A. W. S. Baird, Studies in Pascal’s Ethics (The
Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1975), p. vii. Moreover, Baird is not wrong when he claims that the
fragment which outlines that scale’s three major categories—body, mind, and charity
(L308/S339)—is of signal importance to Pascal’s ethics. At times, however, Baird
focuses too heavily on supposed tensions and inconsistencies in Pascal’s thought, such
as whether his “natural ethics” lose their value from the perspective of the supernat-
ural order of charity. This focus prevents him from devoting sustained attention to
other important aspects of Pascal’s ethics.
4
Of course, there are many publications in French—and some in English—that
discuss aspects of Pascal’s ethics in the course of treating other matters. See Sellier,
Pascal et Saint Augustin, ch. 2; Lazzeri, Force et justice, chs 1–3; Pierre Magnard,
Pascal: La Clé du chiffre (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1991); Pierre Cariou, Pascal
et la casuistique (Paris: PUF, 1993); Beitzinger, “Pascal on Justice, Force, and Law.”
Many discussions of Pascal’s ethics of belief may be found in English-language
philosophy, but their concern is largely epistemological. See, for instance, Thomas
Hibbs, “Habits of the Heart: Pascal and the Ethics of Thought,” International Philo-
sophical Quarterly, 45/2 (2005), 203–20. Similarly, despite its title, Ann T. Delehanty’s
“Morality and Method in Pascal’s Pensées,” Philosophy and Literature, 28 (2004),
74–88, mainly seeks to show that Pascal’s religious epistemology responds to proto-
deconstructionist worries about the perspectival character of moral language and
moral truth.
126 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology
comes to hold various false beliefs about himself and the world.
Before continuing, it is worth asking about the nature of the believing
and judging that characterizes self-deception. In my view, the sinful
self-deceiver falsely interprets himself and his moral engagements but
he does not become a self-deceiver primarily by drawing false con-
clusions from empirical evidence. All beliefs are not formed in the
same way. Not all beliefs are formed by drawing conclusions from
empirical evidence. That is, not all believing is empirical believing. In
my view, morally self-deceptive believing is not empirical believing.5
Whatever their differences, many contemporary philosophical
models of self-deception assume that any self-deceiver comes to
believe (falsely) that p because his desire, fear, anxiety, or whatnot
causes him to misconstrue external, empirical evidence that bears on
the truth value of p. In other words, these models assimilate all forms
of self-deception to self-deception about empirical states of affairs.
I self-deceptively believe that my wife is not having an affair, for
example, or that I do not have a terminal illness, and I believe these
things because I misapprehend or ignore evidence to the contrary. In
such cases there is a plain fact of the matter, and anyone who is not
self-deceived, and who has access to the same evidence that I do,
would believe differently.6 Whether or not this paradigm suffices for
other forms of self-deception, it does not capture self-deception in the
moral life very well.
Accordingly, I would like to draw a distinction between beliefs
formed as a result of empirical judgments and those formed as a
result of interpretive judgments and argue that lying to oneself is best
treated as a case of the latter. On my account, the self-deceiver falsely
interprets the moral worth of his own actions or character. He might
also make false empirical judgments in the course of his interpretive
activity, but they are not the primary element of his project of self-
deception.
In a short space, it probably isn’t possible to distinguish between
empirical and interpretive judgments in a way that is not at least
slightly tendentious. But my theoretical needs are quite modest.

5
Note that my argument is untroubled by those who would object that all
believing is interpretive believing. My concern is only with those who would restrict
the believing that characterizes moral self-deception to hypothesis-driven, evidence-
based, empirical believing.
6
E.g. see Mele’s discussion of the “impartial observer test,” in Mele, Self-Deception
Unmasked, 106–10.
 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 127
Although the line between empirical and interpretive judgments may
not be exactly where I say it is, there is surely some relevant line to be
drawn. In my view, moral self-deception lies on the interpretive
side of that line, wherever it is drawn. I certainly do not want to
draw the line by denying that interpretive judgments can be true or
false. The picture I have in mind looks something like this: empirical
judgments are like hypotheses in that they are, in principle, subject to
decisive, intersubjective, disconfirmation on the basis of objective,
publicly available evidence. All of these elements work together:
empirical disconfirmation of p can be decisive because intersubjective
agreement can be reached about whether the evidence supports or
disconfirms p, which implies that the relevant evidence is publicly
available and that it objectively points only one way.7 By contrast,
interpretive judgments do not depend primarily on publicly available
evidence that objectively points only one way and so intersubjective
agreement about their truth cannot always be rationally compelled,
as it can with empirical judgments. Instead, agreement usually must
be sought, elicited, by means of persuasion.8 Put another way, an
interpretive judgment is holistic and evaluative.
Consider a simple analogy from literature. Two people can still
disagree about whether Achilles or Hector is the main character of the
Iliad even though they both agree about all the relevant empirical
evidence (e.g. that the poem itself claims to be about the rage of
Achilles, or that it ends with the funeral of Hector). Neither can
decisively vindicate his own interpretation with a simple appeal to
evidence, and so each also must bring different kinds of consider-
ations to bear and make different kinds of appeals. In short, each
person must engage in a project of persuasion.
When I say that sinful self-deception is not really a matter of
empirical judgment, I mean that it is not primarily driven by a failure
to grasp the force of objective, empirical evidence. In part this is
because the self-deceiver, by definition, deceives himself about a
moral matter, and so his self-deceptive judgments are also moral
judgments. Moral judgment cannot be straightforwardly assimilated

7
In this conception of evidence, I am relying on W. V. O. Quine’s discussion of
observation sentences in Pursuit of Truth, rev. edn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1992), 1–22.
8
Again, I do not mean to deny e.g. that a great deal of scientific inquiry also
depends on interpretive, and not empirical, judgments. Nor do I wish to deny that it is
impossible to reach intersubjective agreement regarding interpretive judgments.
128 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology
to empirical judgment. Even moral judgments that do seem straight-
forwardly empirical are better treated as cases of false interpretation.
A straightforwardly empirical claim ultimately rests on a relatively
uninterpreted level of factual evidence. Yet with a moral judgment, a
great deal of interpretation is usually built in: the way we describe a
moral situation is what makes it the kind of situation it is for us.
Consider Pascal’s own critique of dueling in the Provincial Letters. In
the seventh letter, he notes that people can self-servingly manipulate
their own evaluative vocabulary and repeatedly mocks the way the
“Jesuits” sanitize immoral acts by redescribing them as innocent. For
example, his Jesuit interlocutor helpfully points out that while dueling
is immoral, defending oneself against attack is permitted. And so (the
Jesuit innocently inquires): how could it be wrong merely to stand at
an appointed spot at an appointed time? And if someone else should
happen by at that time and try to shoot you, well then . . . what choice
do you have, really, but to defend yourself? As Pascal ironically notes,
“That is not really permitting the duel. On the contrary, he avoids
saying that it is one, in order to make it lawful, so sure is he that it is
forbidden.”9 Under the description, “fighting a duel,” I am culpable,
but under the description, “defending myself,” I am blameless, even
though I agree that “dueling” is immoral. Similarly, Nicholas Bul-
strode might well agree about the factual chain of events that culmin-
ates in the death of Raffles, but he describes those events to himself as
an act of Providence instead of his own act of homicidal neglect. In
making this point, I anticipate the argument of Chapter 6, since a
theory of self-deception needs to explain how we are able to adopt
such biased descriptions. I advance the claim here only to emphasize
that beliefs about one’s moral engagements, even those that seem
straightforwardly empirical, are still interpretive in the relevant sense.
A statement like “I am a good person” can be treated like any other
proposition—it can be formalized with the sentence letter “p”—but
when I deceive myself about whether I am a good person, there is
much more going on than the fact that a single wayward proposition
managed to sneak into my otherwise well-regulated epistemic house.
Rather, since my very identity is at stake, the falsehood goes further
down. Instead of speaking of believing a false proposition, it seems
more apt to speak of living an inauthentic life. One does not

9
Provincial Letters, tr. Krailsheimer, 106.
 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 129
misconstrue the authenticity of one’s life solely because one fails to
gather evidence properly. It therefore seems clear that we cannot
account for all the dimensions of sinful self-deception by treating it
as the result of a series of false empirical judgments. On the other
hand, it is natural to say that when I misconstrue my moral character,
I misinterpret myself.
This claim has important implications for the task of understand-
ing self-deception. As I noted above, intersubjective agreement about
the truth of interpretive judgments cannot be compelled by an appeal
to empirical evidence alone, and must be sought by means of persua-
sion. If self-deceptive judgments really are false interpretative judg-
ments, in the sense I have outlined, then persuasion must play a
similar role in fixing the beliefs of the individual self-deceiver. Lying
to oneself would then be a type of culpable self-persuasion.

PASCAL ON MORAL JUDGMENT: THE HEART,

SENTIMENT, AND FINESSE

Pascal understands the difference between interpretive and empirical

believing very well. He furnishes us with a language with which to
describe the self-deceiver’s interpretive judgments and conflicting
beliefs. Pascal’s account of moral judgment depends on a unique
faculty, the heart. The heart has a characteristic operation, feeling
or intuiting (sentiment), and a characteristic form of reasoning,
finesse. On Pascal’s account, moral judgments are judgments of
finesse.

Le Cœur
The Pascalian heart is a cognitive faculty that unifies key operations of
the will and the intellect. It is a faculty of tacit, intuitive knowledge,
including moral knowledge—it might be glossed as, among other
things, the seat of conscience. According to some commentators,
Pascal posits the heart in order to free his philosophical anthropology
from the rigid faculty psychology of his day. Late medieval and early
modern thinkers sharply distinguished the intellect, a speculative and
ratiocinative faculty, from the will, an appetitive and executive
130 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology
faculty. This separation presented special problems in the moral
sphere because it inevitably raised questions about which faculty
has priority in moral action. If the intellect has priority, then the
moral life seems at its root to become a desiccated matter of rational
calculation, which threatens to undercut the traditional Christian
emphasis on love. Alternatively, if the will has priority, then love
itself seems to become non-rational. Other thinkers of the era
appealed to “the heart”—a suitably biblical and Augustinian term—
as a way out of this dilemma, but still ended up collapsing the heart
into the will. The Pascalian heart, on the other hand, does successfully
reconcile various aspects of the intellect and the will without finally
collapsing into either.10
Scholarship on Pascal’s cur is voluminous and does not tend
toward mutual agreement.11 Exegetical debates and distinctions
abound. Matters are complicated by the fact that Pascal uses the
term “heart” both as a technical term in his new faculty psychology
and as a biblical, metaphorical term that means something like
“subjectivity.” For example, “How hollow and foul is the heart of
man!” (L139/S171).12 It isn’t always easy to see which sense is in play
in a given passage. Furthermore, Pascal sometimes uses “heart” and
“will” interchangeably, and in places where a sensitive reader expects
the one term, Pascal sometimes supplies the other.
In any case, it is clear that the Pascalian heart does unite various
cognitive, affective, and volitional operations of the person. The
cognitive dimensions of the heart are most clearly outlined in frag-
ment L110/S142. It is the heart that furnishes us with the knowledge
of first principles that cannot be demonstrated. It operates by means
of its own kind of perception, characterized by the verb sentir and its
derivations (usually translated as “to feel,” but used by Pascal to
signify any immediate apprehension).

10
See Martin Warner, Philosophical Finesse: Studies in the Art of Rational Persua-
sion (New York: OUP, 1989), 161; Levi, French Moralists, 326–8. Philipe Sellier says
that the heart includes the will but exceeds the will, because it also includes the
memory and various other intellectual operations (Pascal et Saint Augustin, 128).
11
See esp. Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin, 117–39. See also Norman, Portraits of
Thought, 3–18, 38–44; Warner, Philosophical Finesse, 152–82; Davidson, Origins of
Certainty, 106–11.
12
Sellier, waxing rhapsodic, says: “The heart therefore represents depth and
inwardness, our true being” (Pascal et Saint Augustin, 135).
 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 131
We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our
heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason,
which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. . . . For
knowledge of first principles like space, time, motion, and number is as
solid as any derived through reason, and it is on such knowledge,
coming from heart and instinct, that reason has to depend and base
all its argument. The heart feels (sent) that there are three spatial
dimensions and that there is an infinite series of numbers. . . . Principles
are felt (se sentent), propositions proved, and both by certainty though
with different means . . . (L110/S142)
The heart is also the faculty that allows us to perceive God and the
truths of faith: “As if reason were the only way we could learn! Would
to God that we never needed it and knew everything by instinct and
feeling (sentiment)! . . . That is why those to whom God has given
religious faith by moving their hearts are very fortunate” (L110/S142).
Pascal never repudiates his claim that the heart has an immediate,
intuitive grasp of the first principles of reasoning, but it is the heart’s
grasp of moral and religious principles that interests him the most: “It
is the heart which perceives God, and not the reason. That is what
faith is, God perceived by the heart, not by the reason” (L424/S680).
Although this fragment suggests a sharp disjunction between the
heart and the reason, in another important fragment, Pascal says
that the operations of the heart unite aspects of love and reason:
The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We know this in
a thousand things.
I say that the heart loves the universal being naturally and itself
naturally, according to its devotion. And it hardens itself against one
or the other as it chooses . . . (L423/S680)13
The first line of this fragment, arguably the most famous line in the
Pensées, is often misunderstood as a plea for rank emotivism. In fact,
Pascal emphasizes that the heart is a rational faculty—the heart has its
reasons—even though it is not a deductive, ratiocinative faculty.

13
My tr. Krailsheimer translates Pascal’s et with “or” in L423, which changes the
meaning of the passage by suggesting a complete disjunction. Krailsheimer writes: “it
is natural for the heart to love the universal being or itself, according to its allegiance,
and it hardens itself against the other as it chooses.” But Pascal writes: Je dis que le
cur aime l’être universal naturellement, et soi-même naturellement, selon qu’il s’y
adonne. Et il durcit contre l’un ou l’autre, à son choix.
132 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology
To say that the heart is both a cognitive and a volitional faculty is
just to say that it is first of all an evaluative faculty.14 By positing the
faculty of the heart, which unites key operations of the intellect and
the will, Pascal shows how the propositions of faith and morality can
be simultaneously true and attractive. The heart can grasp that a
proposition is true, but its judgment of truth is also an aesthetic
judgment of beauty. In this regard, I want to emphasize that the
cognitive dimension of the heart aims at truth, full-stop, and not at
something less than or different from truth. To speak somewhat
awkwardly, nothing could be more solidly true than the first prin-
ciples of time, space, and number. The truths of faith and morality,
which the heart also intuits, are just as true as these first principles,
according to Pascal. At the same time, because the heart is also a
volitional and affective faculty, it is by means of the heart that we find
ourselves attracted to moral truth and goodness. Consider the richly
aesthetic language with which Pascal describes the heart’s perception
of Jesus: “Jesus without wealth or any outward show of knowledge has
his own order of holiness . . . With what great pomp and marvelously
magnificent array he came in the eyes of the heart, which perceive
wisdom” (L308/339). The true form of Jesus, which is visible only to
the eyes of the heart, is presented as possessing a kind of moral beauty
that also has a cognitive value, since the beauty of Jesus is tied to his
wisdom.
Here, as elsewhere, Pascal regards ethics and aesthetics as closely
linked. Many contemporary thinkers, especially those working in the
“continental” tradition, agree.15 Accordingly, Pascal provides a con-
crete resource from which they may draw. For example, he argues that
divine grace operates on the soul by overwhelming it with aesthetic
delight, which causes it to love spiritual goods over carnal goods.16
This view may resonate in interesting ways with contemporary

14
Warner, Philosophical Finesse, 201–2; Norman, Portraits of Thought, 40.
15
For important foundational statements of this idea, see Hans Georg Gadamer,
Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 480–91, and Jean
François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s Critique of Judgment,
Sections 23–9 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 23–9. See also the
work of Richard Kearney, esp. Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagin-
ation (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995). The move to rejoin ethics and
aesthetics is not confined to continental philosophy, however. See Roberts M. Adams,
Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: OUP, 1999).
16
See Ch. 7.
 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 133
discussions about the ethics of receptivity to the Other, or the over-
whelming power of the ethical sublime.

Sentiment
Pascal’s account of the heart may be understood as an attempt to
provide a psychological and rational basis for the traditional medieval
slogan “love itself is a form of knowledge.”17 Love itself may be a form
of knowledge, but just what does love’s knowledge look like? To find
Pascal’s answer to this question, one must turn to the heart’s charac-
teristic operation: sentiment (feeling or intuiting). One can get a sense
of the full meaning of sentiment from the various ways Krailsheimer
translates it: realization, feeling, intuition, persistent inward sense,
perception, instinct, opinion, heartfelt.18 Another appropriate term
would be “insight.” A sentiment is a spontaneous insight that does not
result from a chain of progressive reasoning. It may or may not be
explicitly formulated in words. The word sentiment names both an
operation of the heart (feeling) and the product of that operation
(a feeling). A spectrum of quotations confirms this initial picture:
Those who are accustomed to judge by sentiment have no understanding
of matters involving reasoning. For they want to go right to the bottom of
things at a glance, and are not accustomed to look for principles. The
others, on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason from principles,
have no understanding of matters involving sentiment, because they look
for principles and are unable to see things at a glance. (L751/S622)
Reason works slowly, looking so often at so many principles, which
must always be present, that it is constantly nodding or straying because
all its principles are not present. Sentiment does not work like that, but
works instantly, and is always ready. We must then put our faith in
sentiment, or it will always be vacillating. (L821/661)
Memory, joy are sentiments and even geometrical propositions become
sentiments, because reason makes natural sentiments and natural senti-
ments are erased by reason. (L646/531; my tr.)
The last fragment is especially interesting because it suggests that,
over time, even propositional knowledge can become a tacit, innately

17
amor ipse notitia est. See Gregory the Great, Homelia in Evangelium 27.4.
18
Noted in Norman, Portraits of Thought, 4–5.
134 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology
known sentiment.19 Conversely, by reasoning about one’s sentiments,
one can alter or overturn them. Even though the reason and its
operations are distinct from the heart and its operations, both sides
can still affect one another. In sum, a sentiment is a judgment of value
that imposes its truth immediately on the reason.20

Moral Judgment as Intuitive Reasoning: Finesse

The heart and sentiment furnish the building blocks for a Pascalian
account of moral judgment. When the heart perceives a moral good,
it responds by producing a sentiment, a spontaneous insight that
seems true, and therefore seems compelling by its very nature. One
may think of a moral sentiment as something like a spontaneous
deliverance of the conscience. It is an immediate moral judgment
that one should (or should not) do something or that some course of
action is morally good. A sentiment of the heart is innately compelling
because it has the felt sense of truth.
It is possible to collect Pascal’s scattered thoughts about the heart
and sentiment into a unified picture of moral judgment. Pascal
himself offers the key concept around which such an account centers:
finesse. He famously distinguishes between the “geometrical mind”
and “the mind with finesse” (l’esprit de géométrie and l’esprit de
finesse) in fragments L512–13/S670–1. The geometrical mind is
linear, analytical, and deductive: its preferred principles, like the
propositions of geometry,

19
Pascal’s point in L646/S531 is that, through repetitive reasoning, we can develop
an intuitive grasp of even the most abstract principles. As Pierre Force writes, “In
other words, habitual reasoning can turn some propositions into principles that have
the same status as the first principles we know by the light of nature. Conversely,
critical reasoning can demote some first principles and make them appear conven-
tional and artificial, instead of obvious and natural.” Pierre Force, “Pascal and
Philosophical Method,” in Hammond, Cambridge Companion to Pascal, 226. This
fragment also makes it clear that Pascal does not think that the knowledge born of
sentiment must always be non-discursive. One’s knowledge of a mathematical prop-
osition could become so innate that it becomes a sentiment, but presumably one
would still be able to express it in language. The fact that sentiment plays a role in
Pascal’s scientific writings also weighs against the view that knowledge born of
sentiment is non-discursive. Matthew L. Jones, “Writing and Sentiment: Blaise Pascal,
the Vacuum, and the Pensées,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 32 (2001),
139–81.
20
Gouhier, Conversion et apologétique, 72.
 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 135
are obvious, but remote from ordinary usage, so that from want of
practice, we have difficulty turning our heads that way, but once we do
turn our heads, the principles can be fully seen; and it would take a
thoroughly unsound mind to draw false conclusions from principles so
patent that they can hardly be missed. (L512/S670)
By contrast, the mind with finesse is holistic and hermeneutical, and
characteristically focused on everyday life. It grasps both the whole
picture of a given situation as well as the texture and details of its
parts. The mind with finesse treats principles that are “in ordinary
usage and there for all to see” and so:
There is no need to turn our heads, or strain ourselves: it is only a
question of good sight, but it must be good; for the principles are so
intricate and numerous that it is almost impossible not to miss some . . .
These things are so delicate and numerous that it takes a sense of great
delicacy and precision to perceive them and judge correctly and accur-
ately from this perception: most often it is not possible to set it out
logically as in mathematics . . . The thing must be seen all at once, in a
glance, and not as a result of progressive reasoning, at least up to a point.
(L512/S670)
Pascal goes on to say that the intuitive mind makes judgments
“tacitly, naturally, and artlessly” (L512/S670) and in the next frag-
ment he connects judgment, finesse, and sentiment: “For judgment
pertains to sentiment, just as the sciences pertain to mind. Finesse is
the part of judgment, geometry the part of mind” (L513/S671; my tr.).
Pascalian finesse, then, is a kind of informal, intuition-based
reasoning. Just as proof is the proper goal of the demonstrative
mathematical mind, persuasion is the proper goal of finesse. The
spontaneous insight of sentiment is the foundation of this form of
reasoning, which grasps things “all at once, in a glance.” Still, unlike
sentiment, finesse is a form of reasoning, so it cannot really be
instantaneous. Thus, even though Pascal is obviously much taken
with the contrast between spontaneous, synoptic finesse and plod-
ding, analytical ratiocination, he is right to qualify this contrast at the
conclusion of the above fragment. In sum, we might say that finesse is
the kind of reasoning that is appropriate for the heart’s evaluative
domain.21 Ordinary moral reasoning typically takes the form of

21
Other scholars have made similar claims about finesse and evaluation. Martin
Warner relates Pascal’s finesse to the evaluative and hermeneutical elements of literary
136 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology
finesse. By “ordinary” moral reasoning, I mean everyday deliberation
about moral matters, as opposed to, say, theoretical reflection about
the nature of moral goods. Everyday moral judgments are usually
spontaneous and intuitive and everyday moral reasoning is usually
digressive and associative, rather than progressive and deductive
(L298/S329).
In contemporary terms, Pascal’s account of finesse-based moral
judgment may be understood as a version of ethical intuitionism.22
Ethical intuitionism claims that when people grasp moral truths,
“they do so not by a process of ratiocination and reflection but rather
by a process more akin to perception, in which one just sees without
argument that they are and must be true.”23 In Pascal’s terminology, a
sentiment of the heart is an immediate perception that some situation
or course of action is morally desirable (or morally forbidden). To say
that a sentiment has the felt sense of truth is just to say that when the
moral agent forms a sentiment that some state of affairs is licit or
illicit, she judges automatically, without deliberation. It is simply self-
evident to her that some course of action or situation is morally good
(or bad). For example, if I see someone robbing a bank, I do not
initially respond to that state of affairs by deliberating about whether
theft is morally justified. Rather, I immediately judge that this in-
stance of theft is wrong. Subsequent deliberation may overturn my
initial view, but the spontaneous moral judgment still precedes, and
does not follow, any deliberation.
Ethical intuitionism is very much in vogue at the moment, in both
philosophical ethics and contemporary moral psychology, in part
because a wealth of empirical data suggests that it offers a descrip-
tively correct account of moral judgment.24 The fact that Pascal is an
important early-modern proponent of ethical intuitionism has not

criticism, and John D. Lyons says that Pascalian finesse is what allows us to under-
stand other people by imaginatively identifying with them. See Warner, Philosophical
Finesse, 202; Lyons, Before Imagination, 94–121.
22
For important recent discussions of ethical intuitionism, see Robert Audi, The
Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (Princeton: PUP, 2004),
and Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist
Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review, 108 (2001), 814–34. The classic
statement is W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930).
23
Haidt, “Emotional Dog,” 814. See also Haidt, “Morality,” 802.
24
See Jennifer Nado, Daniel Kelly, and Stephen Stich, “Moral Judgments,” in John
Symons and Paco Calvo (eds), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology
(New York: Routledge, 2009), 621–33.
 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 137
been recognized in this literature. Pascal’s status as an overlooked
forebear of ethical intuitionism should not exhaust contemporary
interest in his ethical thought, however. His most important contri-
bution to ethical theory lies in his account of how and why we fail to
live up to our ethical intuitions.

THE IMAGINATION BESTOWS VALUE

The preceding analysis raises an important question. If the heart

produces immediate moral sentiments, and if those sentiments are
both true and compelling, then why does anyone ever act immorally?
Why do we not always act in accordance with our sentiments? Pascal’s
response to this question leads back to his famous critique of the
imagination. Even though our moral sentiments have the felt sense of
truth, according to Pascal, we are also strongly motivated to believe
that our imaginative fantasies are true. If it is the heart that responds
to the perceived value of moral goods, it is the imagination that
bestows value on them in the first place. As a result, even though
we do respond immediately to moral goods, we typically perceive
those goods only after they have already been filtered through a haze
of imaginative fantasy. Without repeating the discussion of the im-
agination in Chapter 2, recall that, according to Pascal, the imagin-
ation can “fix the price of things” and so invest moral goods with
value. Moreover, “Imagination decides everything: it creates beauty,
justice and happiness which is the world’s supreme good” (L44/S78).
Pascal’s account of the socially constructed imagination reveals
that he is not just an ethical intuitionist but a social intuitionist.
A social intuitionist recognizes that people are “intensely social crea-
tures whose moral judgments are strongly shaped by the judgments of
those around them.”25 While some moral intuitions may be innate to
everyone, social intuitionists claim that people acquire most of their
particular moral intuitions through custom and habituation—that is,
through their participation in thick cultural webs of moral practice.
Once again, although social intuitionism currently enjoys pride of
place among empirically oriented moral psychologists, there has been

25
Haidt, “Emotional Dog,” 828; “Morality,” 808–21.
138 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology
no recognition that Pascal is an early advocate of its key claims. Social
intuitionists often look for inspiration from David Hume, or even
Aristotle, without ever recognizing that Pascal is an even closer cousin
to their own work. Moreover, Pascal is able to wed a social-intuition-
ist ethics to a full-blooded account of moral and axiological realism,
something that contemporary social intuitionists often find them-
selves unwilling or unable to do.26
Both the imagination and the heart are cognitive and affective
faculties. The heart intuitively grasps moral and spiritual goods, and
perceives moral beauty (L308/S339). Yet it is also an affective faculty
associated with loving and desiring. Like the heart, the imagination
also unites various cognitive andsh affective functions into a single
faculty. In its cognitive aspect, the imagination allows us to form
mental representations. These representations include the everyday
images by which we inwardly grasp the things that we perceive with
our external senses. In its affective dimension, the imagination
bestows value on goods. Although Pascal does not directly speculate
about how the heart and the imagination would work if human
beings had not fallen, it seems clear that the heart should perceive
moral goods accurately, leading us to love and desire them according
to their true value. Similarly, the imagination should also correspond
to the world as it is, and supply us with accurate mental representa-
tions. In both cases, there should be no conflict between what is true
and what we find beautiful. A moral agent that is not fallen would
accurately perceive the beauty of spiritual goods and would love them
as a result.
Instead, after the Fall, the imagination has become a “proud power”
that oversteps its bounds and creates moral value independently,

26
See e.g. Jonathan Haidt’s interview with Tamler Sommers in The Believer, in
which—at least, in my judgment—he finds himself a bit flummoxed at his inability to
dismiss questions about what grounds moral truths (“Jonathan Haidt,” The Believer,
3/6 (Aug. 2005), 71–85. According to Haidt, moral truths are “anthropocentric
truths”: “When people make moral claims they are pointing to moral facts outside
of themselves—they intend to say that an act is in fact wrong, not just that they
disapprove of it . . . On our account, moral facts exist, but not as objective facts which
would be true for any rational creature anywhere in the universe. Moral facts are facts
only with respect to a community of human beings that have created them.” Jonathan
Haidt and Fredrik Bjorklund, “Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions about Moral
Psychology,” in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, ii. The Cognitive
Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008),
213–14.
 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 139
setting “the same mark on true and false alike” (L44/S78), and the
heart has become “hollow and foul” (L139/S171). The sinner rejects
the sentiments of the heart—the seat of conscience—and instead acts
on the basis of the false, self-serving fantaisies of the imagination.
Although Pascal usually focuses on the way we excessively magnify
the value of our own selves, any object may be imaginatively invested
with more value than it can bear: one may build up a fantasy about a
commodity (a new car, for example), a specific self-understanding (of
oneself as being just the kind of dashing person who would drive such
a car), or some other pursued goal (making enough money to buy the
car). The possibilities are endless. In each case, however, the perceived
value of the object sought is a function of how it is imaginatively
construed.
Although Pascal recognizes that the imagination is central to the
moral life, his thought challenges the sometimes facile claims of
contemporary narrative ethicists and those who would look first to
the “narrative imagination” for moral renewal.27 Pascal reminds us
that the imagination is not just the locus of individual creative genius
and speculative possibility. It is also a socially constructed repository
for the (often immoral) dispositions and values of the wider world.
Far from being the initial launching pad for moral critique, the
imagination is often itself the faculty most in need of such critique.
Furthermore, Pascal would remind us that reorienting the moral
imagination is no simple matter. Certainly it is not just a matter of
reading the right novels or passages from scripture, imaginatively
identifying with the right moral exemplars, or trying to dream up
new possibilities for moral community. Because the imagination is
socially constructed, reorienting the imagination requires something
like a massive program of counter-habituation, comparable to be-
coming a native member of a wholly new society. In short, reorienting
the imagination would require something that looks quite a lot like an
ongoing program of religious conversion. Pascal therefore sounds
an important note of caution about the moral possibilities of the
imagination.

27
Without a detailed engagement with the writings of others, this assertion barely
rises to the level of an accusation, let alone an argument. Since I lack the space to
support it, I judge it best to pass over its specific targets in silence.
140 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology

HOW MORAL REASONING GOES WRONG:

SELF-DECEPTION

According to Pascal, moral judgments are spontaneous responses to

perceived moral values, and the deceptive faculty of imagination
bestows value on moral goods. It is no surprise, therefore, that Pascal
also thinks that our moral reasoning is highly vulnerable to self-
induced error. By “moral reasoning,” again, I mean the ex post
facto deliberation that often follows spontaneous moral judgments
of the heart and that Pascal calls finesse. Pascal claims that, even when
our moral sentiments are veridical, we often reject those sentiments as
a result of self-deceptive moral reasoning.
Accurate moral reasoning requires that our spontaneous moral
sentiments be veridical. There is no guarantee that our sentiments
are veridical, however. Worse, they can seem veridical even when they
are not. As a result, we can easily mistake false fantasies for truthful
sentiments.
All our reasoning comes down to surrendering to sentiment.
But fantaisie is like and also unlike sentiment, so that we cannot
distinguish between these two opposites. One person says that my
sentiment is mere fantaisie, another that his fantaisie is sentiment. We
should have a rule. Reason is available but can be bent in any direction.
And so there is no rule. (L530/S455)
Whereas a sentiment comes from the heart, a fantaisie comes from
the imagination. But from the subjective point of view, it can be
difficult to distinguish between the two. A veridical sentiment and a
false fantaisie both come with the same self-certifying warrant of
felt truth. As a result, we often treat false, self-serving fantaisies as if
they were veridical sentiments. It is dangerous to turn to reason for
help, since reason can “be bent in any direction” by desire and
disordered love.
Furthermore, this error—treating false fantaisies as veridical senti-
ments—is often far from innocent, according to Pascal. Indeed, it is
most often a willful mistake, which means that the central threat to
the moral life is not just error but self-deception. In fragment L975/
S739, Pascal succinctly outlines his account of how the imagination
affects moral reasoning: “Men often take their imagination for their
heart, and often believe they are converted as soon as they start
 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 141
thinking of becoming converted.”28 To take the imagination for the
heart is to self-deceptively believe that one’s own self-serving fantasies
reveal the felt sense of conscience. The unbeliever who falsely believes
that he is converted takes his imagination for his heart when he
willfully fails to discern the difference between what he merely
wants to be true (an imaginative fantasy) and what he really knows
to be true (a deliverance of the heart). Thus, according to Pascal,
moral reasoning typically goes wrong when a moral agent persuades
herself that her immoral beliefs and actions are, in fact, moral after all.
Very often, when one is faced with a morally fraught situation,
what one perceives as the moral choice is relatively unattractive, but
the immoral choice is highly alluring. Pascal gives us a technical
vocabulary in which to describe this state of affairs, a vocabulary
that is grounded in an interesting and plausible philosophical psych-
ology. However, Pascal’s contribution to moral theory is more than
just another technical description of moral wrongdoing. Pascal’s chief
contribution is the insight that the conflict between sentiment and
fantaisie is an evaluative conflict, driven by the moral agent’s re-
sponse to the perceived attractiveness of competing goods. Pascal’s
central claim is that, in a moral dilemma, an agent usually perceives
an immoral choice as more attractive than a moral choice precisely
because the immoral choice is rooted in self-serving imaginative
fantasy. The typical sinner does not act immorally as a result of a
clear-eyed decision for evil (he is not a moral monster). Nor does he
explicitly choose to do wrong all the while desiring to do right (he is
not morally weak). Nor does he fail to understand what the moral law
requires (he is not morally ignorant). Rather, his immoral choice is
attractive to him because he is able to call up imaginative fantasies
that allow him to quash his pangs of conscience and spontaneously
reinterpret his actions as morally licit.
Pascal probably would not assert that moral wrongdoing must
always proceed in exactly this way. That is, I doubt that he would
deny that reflective, fully self-aware moral wrongdoing is possible.
Even in such cases, however, we still might want to say that moral

28
Of course, the explicit topic of the fragment is religious conversion and not
moral reasoning, but the obstacles that impede conversion are also the obstacles that
impede successful moral reasoning. Moreover, even though Pascal would take care to
leave room for the operation of divine grace in conversion, it is also the case that the
trajectory of Pascal’s apology in the Pensées depends on his ability to present the
choice to become a Christian as both a rational and a moral choice.
142 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology
wrongdoing includes an element of self-deception. Suppose, then,
that Nicholas Bulstrode knows perfectly well that his immoral actions
are wrong, and suppose that he justifies them only by saying to
himself: Ha! All this “right and wrong” stuff is for losers! Granting
that Bulstrode initially forms a veridical sentiment that stealing is
morally wrong, when he later embraces the imaginative fantasy that
he is somehow beyond good and evil (so to speak), he has persuaded
himself of something that, as a result of his sentiment, he already
knows to be false: that he is not bound by the relevant moral standard.
Thus, this justification still seems like a form of self-deception.
So, Pascal argues that we are highly vulnerable to self-deception as
a result of the way we respond to value—in this case, to the value of
different moral goods. The will has no choice but to desire those
goods that seem most attractive, and it also has the power to make
attractive goods seem more salient to the mind. As a result, the will
has the power to shape our beliefs according to our desires.
The will is one of the chief organs of belief, not because it creates belief,
but because things are [i.e. seem] true or false according to the aspect by
which we judge them. When the will likes one aspect more than
another, it deflects the mind from considering the qualities of the one
it does not care to see. Thus the mind, keeping in step with the will,
remains looking at the aspect preferred by the will and so judges by
what it sees there. (L539/S458)
It is easy to see why we are highly likely to come to believe that our
self-serving but enticing imaginative fantasies are true. Our imagina-
tive fantasies are so enticing because we ourselves voluntarily con-
struct them as maximally alluring. The faculty of the imagination is
partly under our control, after all. Of course, sometimes we seem to be
passive recipients of fantasies that wash over us unbidden, but it is
equally clear that sometimes we actively, explicitly construct attract-
ive fantasies. Moreover, even in the former case, we can usually
exercise enough control to interrupt unwelcome fantasies or dismiss
them from our minds, so it is still accurate to say that the imagination
is under our voluntary control, in the relevant sense.
Our imaginative fantasies give us a way to preserve an image of
ourselves as morally upright and blameless, even when we are not.
Because fantaisies are inherently compelling, the very activity of
imagining our own moral innocence comes with built-in persuasive
power that can shape our beliefs self-deceptively. Bulstrode may
 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 143
initially realize that he let Raffles die, but as he continues to turn the
fantasy of his innocence over in his mind, reinforcing it with loving
attention and psychic energy, he soon comes to believe in it whole-
heartedly. Moreover, because this imaginative activity is something
over which Bulstrode has voluntary control, it seems apt to say that,
by steeping himself in his imaginative fantasies, he deceives himself.
To return to the terminology above, in the moral arena, taking the
imagination for the heart—mistaking fantaisie for sentiment—is usu-
ally a willful misconstrual.
Pascal explicitly makes this claim in the fragment on self-love and
the formation of the self. In that fragment, Pascal presents the sinful
self (the moi) as fully aware of its own “faults and wretchedness”:
The nature of self-love and of this human moi is to love only self and
consider only self. But what is it to do? It cannot prevent the object of its
love from being full of faults and wretchedness: It wants to be great and
sees that it is small; it wants to be happy and sees that it is wretched; it
wants to be perfect and sees that it is full of imperfections; it wants to be
the object of men’s love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only
their dislike and contempt. (L978/S743)
Precisely because the self is aware of its imperfections, it forms a
“deadly hatred of the truth” about its own sinfulness:
The predicament in which it thus finds itself arouses in it the most
unjust and criminal passion that could possibly be imagined, for it
conceives a deadly hatred for the truth which rebukes it and convinces
it of its faults. (L978/S743)
It therefore tries to destroy that truth altogether, in a project of
duplicity that is directed both at the self and at the wider world.
It would like to do away with this truth, and not being able to destroy it
as such, it destroys it, as best it can, in the consciousness of itself and
others and it cannot bear to have them pointed out or noticed.
It is no doubt an evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil to be
full of them and unwilling to recognize them since this entails the
further evil of deliberate self-delusion . . . (L978/S743)
We are vulnerable to self-deception because we are fallen subjects in a
fallen world. We must appeal to the specifically Christian terminology
of the Fall in order to understand the specific form of moral weakness
that human beings typically exhibit. Our moral judgment is not just
error-prone. It is fallen, and this is a determination that makes a
144 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology
difference. Pascal’s theological account explains why our moral
reasoning takes the particular form that it does, and why it so
frequently goes wrong.

CONCLUSION: WHAT IS SELF-DECEPTION?

Because the Fall is a fall into duplicity, we have an innate aversion to

moral truth. According to Pascal, we find deep truths about ourselves
and God hateful, and so we reject them, and try to persuade ourselves
that we do not feel their pull. Furthermore, the Fall is an evaluative
fall, and so its noetic effects are also evaluative. We have lost the
ability to value moral goods properly and so we find them unattract-
ive and are able to persuade ourselves to turn away from them. When
we sin, we turn away from evident truths about God and self, and
instead steep ourselves in imaginative fantasy. We pretend that we are
happy when we know that we are not. We pretend to be good citizens
of just societies. We pretend to be moral. We pretend to be real.
Pascal gives us a vocabulary with which to express these claims, and
tools to help us understand them. After the Fall, to be a self is to be a
doubly imaginary moi. As such, we experience the moral life as an
endless series of conflicts between the imagination and the heart.
When we “take the imagination for the heart” we treat the fantaisies
of the imagination as veridical sentiments.
Whether expressed in Pascal’s own vocabulary or in a more modern
idiom, all of these claims assert the same central truth. To be a sinner is
to be a self-deceiver. The Pascalian sinner prevents himself from
attending to truths that he finds threatening. (After all, “Ordinary
people have the ability not to think about things they do not want to
think about”: L815/S659.) The sinner lies to himself and persuades
himself to believe something that he also recognizes as false. These
claims are puzzling, even paradoxical, but they are entailed by Pascal’s
account of the duplicitous moi as well as his account of moral wrong-
doing. Whether or not we accept Pascal’s particular theological claims,
most of us accept that self-deception is a real and pervasive phenom-
enon. Any adequate moral psychology or philosophy of mind—
indeed, any effort to understand what it means to be a human
being—surely must address it. But the very idea of self-deception,
and especially of lying to oneself, smacks of paradox. Perhaps we
 Sin and Self-Deception in Pascal’s Moral Theology 145
should rest content with that paradox. Alternatively, perhaps we should
seek to dispel it. In any case, Pascal’s account of sin and the Fall seems
to entail that a very paradoxical form self-deception is widespread, even
ubiquitous. It therefore makes sense to try to understand the vexing
phenomenon of self-deception better.
 5

On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy

on Self-Deception

Across the first four chapters, I have argued that Pascal construes the
Fall as a fall into duplicity, and that as a result, deception and self-
deception warp the political order, the social order, and even the way
we are formed as subjects. Above all, deception and self-deception are
ubiquitous in the moral life. In Chapter 6, I offer my own Pascalian
account of sin as self-deception. Before I can offer that account,
however, I must raise and address some pressing philosophical objec-
tions about the puzzling phenomenon of self-deception. If the Fall is a
fall into duplicity and the moral life is rife with self-deception, then in
order to understand the cognitive consequences of the Fall, we need
to understand self-deception better. Accordingly, in this chapter,
I depart somewhat from Pascal, and focus instead on philosophical
debates about self-deception drawn from contemporary analytic phil-
osophy. Self-deception has been an object of study in a variety of
intellectual traditions, but—perhaps unsurprisingly—it is in the trad-
ition of analytic philosophy that we find the most vigorous arguments
that lying to oneself is not even so much as possible.
Pascal does not offer anything like a philosophical analysis of self-
deception, of course, nor does he directly defend its conceptual
possibility. In fact, he might even argue that any such defense presents
yet another sinful example of the pride of the philosophers. He
certainly would not be bothered by the fact that lying to oneself
seems “paradoxical.” After all, his entire apologetic strategy depends
on showing that human life is rife with paradox. Analytic philoso-
phers may flee from paradox, but Pascal embraces it, and he would
likely assert that the paradoxical nature of self-deception is just a
further sign of the Fall: mired as we are in the paradox of greatness
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 147
and wretchedness, fallen human beings inevitably engage in paradox-
ical behavior like lying to themselves. This behavior is exactly what we
should expect to see, on Pascal’s account of human nature.
I therefore intend the argument of this chapter as a Pascalian
critique of contemporary analytic philosophy on self-deception. It is
Pascalian because it imitates Pascal’s own attitude toward the leading
philosophical schools of his day: I refuse the terms in which the
analytic inquiry poses the question of self-deception. As a follower
of Pascal, I engage with analytic philosophy as a way of showing its
limitations and revealing exactly what it leaves out. This attitude
toward philosophy is demonstrably Pascalian.
Throughout the Pensées Pascal criticizes the vanity of philosophers.
“To make light of philosophy is to philosophize truly,” he writes
(L513/S671). Yet Pascal also offers much more than mocking aphor-
isms. Despite his own protests to the contrary, he does engage with
philosophy—in order to overcome it and subvert it from within. As
we have seen, he transforms the foundational Cartesian ego into the
fallen, sinful moi in order to show that Descartes, for all his philo-
sophical acumen, remains “pointless, uncertain, and arduous” (L84/
S118; L887/S445). Yet he can only assume this stance toward
Descartes’ philosophy to the degree that he thoroughly grasps its
inner logic:
Pascal can revoke Descartes, for the sake of eventually overcoming what
is metaphysical in him, only insofar as he reaches an authentic under-
standing of him . . . In short, the sought after debate [between Pascal
and Descartes] will take place only if one demonstrates that Pascal read
Descartes before he criticized him and precisely in order to do so—in a
word, it will happen only if Pascal is confirmed as a Cartesian.1
Similarly, even though I rarely quote Pascal in this chapter, I do my
best to imitate him. I take analytic philosophy on self-deception
seriously because I wish to undermine and go beyond it.
Nevertheless, analytic philosophy on self-deception poses a genu-
ine challenge to Pascal’s account of the cognitive consequences of the
Fall, and that challenge must be answered. I am more sympathetic to
analytic philosophy than Pascal was to Descartes. For example, I do
not believe that analytic philosophy as such is “pointless, uncertain,
and arduous,” and I certainly do not claim to be subverting it

1
Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, 280.
148 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
wholesale. Still, analytic philosophy on self-deception richly deserves
a Pascalian critique. At the heart of the analytic inquiry on self-
deception, at its very foundation, there is a gaping hole—just where
we expect to find a knock-down argument that lying to oneself is
impossible, we find nothing at all. If the philosophers working on self-
deception agree about anything, they agree that insurmountable
paradoxes arise when we try to model self-deception on lying to
oneself.2 Yet, somewhat shockingly, across almost half a century of
analytic debate, very few philosophers have actually made any explicit
arguments that this is so. Furthermore, the arguments they have
made are not cogent, because they depend on overly strict analogies
with interpersonal deception, easily avoidable errors about the logic
of believing, or implausibly strong claims about mental self-transpar-
ency. The typical self-deceiver in analytic philosophy looks suspi-
ciously like the stereotype of the disembodied Cartesian ego. By
contrast, as we have seen, the Pascalian sinner is a fallen self embed-
ded in a fallen world. His very selfhood is a lie, a hateful moi
pretending to be a charitable, autonomous agent. It is therefore not
surprising that the Pascalian sinner can lie to himself.
Thus, this chapter presents both a narrative and an argument. The
narrative is about disciplinarity and how a trajectory of inquiry
develops in an intellectual tradition. It is the story of how one
question (“How can a person successfully lie to himself?”) is quickly
transformed into another, more congenial, question (“How can a
person form a false belief against the clear weight of contrary evi-
dence?”) even though the original question was never shown to be
incoherent or intellectually sterile. The argument is that the original
question is not incoherent or intellectually sterile. Lying to oneself
remains a viable way to understand some forms of self-deception,
including the sinful self-deception that infects the moral life.3 Pascal’s
account of the cognitive consequences of the Fall remains on solid
ground.

2
Dion Scott-Kakures makes one of the few indisputable claims about self-
deception when he says that “few, these days, would aim to understand self-deception
as lying to oneself.” Dion Scott-Kakures, “At ‘Permanent Risk’: Reasoning and Self-
Knowledge in Self-Deception,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 65 (2002),
577.
3
Just to be clear: I do not hold that all forms of self-deception must be analyzed as
cases of lying to oneself. But I do argue that lying to oneself is possible, and that it is a
good way to understand self-deception in the moral life.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 149

FROM “LYING TO ONESELF” TO “IRRATIONAL

BELIEF-FORMATION”

In 1960, Raphael Demos of Harvard University published a

modest article in the Journal of Philosophy titled, “Lying to One-
self .” This article provoked a series of sharply critical responses,
which provoked more responses, and so on, and soon a lively
conversation on self-deception developed among analytic philoso-
phers. It is a conversation that continues still, as diverse philoso-
phers endeavor to construct an account of self-deception that
avoids the taint of paradox but remains true to the way we use
the concept in ordinary language. No single model has com-
manded assent, and every aspect of the problem of self-decep-
tion—even its very existence—has been the source of vehement
debate. There is, of course, no reason to expect that philosophers
would reach fundamental agreement on every question provoked
by the complex phenomenon of self-deception but, nevertheless, it
is striking how fractious the analytic conversation has been. Not
for nothing does the relevant Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
entry begin: “Virtually every aspect of the current philosophical
discussion of self-deception is a matter of controversy, including
its definition and paradigmatic cases.”4
Fatefully, given the trajectory of responses that his article would
soon provoke, Demos sets the philosophical problem of self-deception
in motion by modeling self-deception on intentional interpersonal
deception and, furthermore, by equating deception with lying. Thus,
according to Demos, a self-deceiver is someone who lies to himself:
I will say that “B lies to (deceives) C” means: B intends to induce a
mistaken belief in C, B succeeds in carrying out this intention, and
finally B knows (and believes) that what he tells C is false. All three:
intention, results, and knowledge, are included. From this meaning of
lying and deceiving, I will proceed to a discussion of “lying to oneself ”
or “deceiving oneself ” . . .
Self-deception exists, I will say, when a person lies to himself, that is
to say, persuades himself to believe what he knows is not so. In short,
self-deception entails that B believes both p and not-p at the same time.

4
Ian Deweese-Boyd, “Self-Deception,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Winter 2006), <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2006/entries/self-deception>.
150 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
Thus, self-deception involves an inner conflict, perhaps the existence of
a contradiction. But this would seem to be an impossibility . . . 5
There is plenty to quibble with here. There are other forms of
deception besides lying—among other things, a lie is a speech act,
but not all acts of deception are speech acts—and, arguably, there are
other forms of interpersonal deception besides intentional interper-
sonal deception—one may deceive someone else by inadvertently
misleading him, for example.6 But still, from a methodologically
innocent, pretheoretical point of view, Demos’s rough-and-ready
analysis of self-deception seems perfectly reasonable: when a person
deceives himself, he persuades himself to believe what he knows is not
so, and he is in a state of “inner conflict,” because he believes both p
and not-p at the same time. This is almost precisely the mental state
that I ascribed to Nicholas Bulstrode in Chapter 3, and discussed in
Chapter 4.
As a quick contrast with Demos, and as a revealing indictor that
shows how the analytic conversation on self-deception developed,
consider one of the currently reigning models of self-deception.
According to the influential model of Alfred R. Mele, S enters the
state of self-deception in acquiring the belief that p if:7
(a) The belief that p which S acquires is false.
(b) S treats data relevant, or at least seemingly relevant, to the
truth value of p in a motivationally biased way.
(c) The biased treatment is the cause of S’s acquiring the belief
that p.
(d) The body of data possessed by S at the time provides greater
warrant for not-p than for p.8

5
Raphael Demos, “Lying to Oneself,” Journal of Philosophy, 57 (1960), 588.
6
On the distinction between deception, intentional deception, and lying, see
Roderick M. Chisholm and Thomas D. Feehan, “The Intent to Deceive,” Journal of
Philosophy, 74 (1977), 143–59; Thomas L. Carson, “Lying, Deception and Related
Concepts,” in Clancy Martin (ed.), The Philosophy of Deception (New York: OUP,
2009).
7
Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked, 50–1. Since 2001, Mele has some minor conces-
sions in response to critics, but no major changes. See his “Have I Unmasked Self-
Deception or am I Self-Deceived?,” in Martin, Philosophy of Deception, 260–76.
8
Mele means to say that S does not recognize that the data warrant not-p.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 151
Mele’s model is a fine example of what is now the mainstream
analytic view about self-deception.9 Note just what has gone missing
in the forty-one years that intervene between Demos and Mele. The
self-deceiver no longer believes contradictory propositions, or be-
lieves the truth at all. He no longer recognizes the force of the
evidence, at any time, or on any level. And he no longer intends to
deceive himself, let alone lie to himself. (Mele intends his causal
language in (c) to mean efficient, non-personal causation.) There is
not even any suggestion that the self-deceiver is aware that he desires
p or that he reasons under the influence of that desire. As he gathers
evidence, trying to decide whether p, he simply makes a mistake: a
motivated mistake, to be sure, but a mistake nevertheless. That,
according to Mele, is all that self-deception amounts to. There is
not even the faintest gesture toward Pascal’s claim that self-deception
is morally dreadful. After all, it is far from obvious that I am morally
responsible for the fact that I inadvertently draw a biased inference
from a body of evidence.
No one can believe both sides of a contradiction in full awareness
of the contradiction. Therefore, in order to defend his analysis,
Demos needs to explain how the self-deceiver can put himself into
such a state. Here one might naively expect an appeal to Freudian
ideas like repression or a censoring superego, ideas that were well-
entrenched in the common parlance of the 1960s. No such appeals
are forthcoming from Demos, however, and with notable exceptions,
Freudian concepts do not figure prominently in future analytic dis-
cussions about self-deception either.10 Demos very quickly dismisses
any suggestion that the self-deceiver’s true belief is “repressed into the
unconscious.”11

9
Mele intends these conditions as empirical hypotheses about what real-world
self-deceivers do. That way of construing the philosophical task would have been
utterly alien to the philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s. See e.g. H. O. Mounce’s
rebuke of D. W. Hamlyn on just this point in their exchange of 1971 (H. O. Mounce,
“Self-Deception,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 45 (1971), 61).
10
I mention Freud not to make any substantive point, but only because, when
I discuss the analytic debates on self-deception with colleagues who are not well-
versed in analytic philosophy, they are struck by its minimal engagement with extra-
analytic traditions like psychoanalysis and phenomenology, both of which have
devoted sustained attention to the problems of understanding conscious awareness
and unconscious mental activity.
11
Demos, “Lying to Oneself,” 591.
152 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
Instead, he makes the seemingly innocuous claim that the person
who believes both p and not-p “is capable of doing so because he is
distracted from the former.”12 Though Demos is not especially clear
about how this works, the thrust of his argument is plain: he means to
say that a person distracts himself from his own unwelcome beliefs.
Because both the true belief and its contradiction exist “in the con-
sciousness of the person,” Demos appeals to our ability to manage our
awareness in order to explain how someone can simultaneously
believe them both:
There are two levels of awareness possible; one is simple awareness, the
other awareness together with attending, or noticing. It follows that
I may be aware of something without, at the same time, noticing it or
focusing my attention on it. This comes about because I may be
distracted by something else, or because I may deliberately ignore it,
or because I may not wish to think about it. This not-noticing need not
be something that just happens to me . . . 13
Such an analysis “saves” the phenomenon while at the same time
conforming to the requirements of the law of contradiction. For, indeed,
we are saying that the person who lies to himself believes both p and
not-p at the same time, and is capable of doing so because he is
distracted from the former. Finally, this account is not far different
from the way in which people express the facts in ordinary language.
Thus they would say of the mother who has come to believe that her son
is a fine fellow, that she knows all along in some corner of her mind that
he is not much good.14
Like his analysis of self-deception, Demos’s account of awareness
invites some obvious questions. One wants to know how the self-
deceiver can successfully intend a project of “not noticing” his own
contradictory beliefs, for example. Surely he must already have no-
ticed the contradiction in order to intentionally divert his attention
from it, which should suffice for dispelling it, on the assumption that
no one can believe an explicit contradiction in full awareness.15 This
is a puzzle that Demos does not fully solve. Again, however, like his
analysis of self-deception as lying to oneself, Demos’s claim that we
can deceive ourselves by managing our own attention and awareness

12
Demos, “Lying to Oneself,” 194. 13
Demos, “Lying to Oneself,” 593.
14
Demos, “Lying to Oneself,” 594–6.
15
For a criticism along these lines, see Herbert Fingarette, Self-Deception (London:
Routledge, 1969; repr. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000), 16.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 153
seems quite promising.16 It could easily have elicited a productive
series of sympathetic amplifications from the philosophical commu-
nity. That is not what happened.
Before continuing, let me introduce some largely self-evident ter-
minology. I will call the claim that a self-deceiver believes contradict-
ory propositions the dual-belief condition. (Granting that knowledge
implies belief, the dual-belief condition can also capture the claim
that the self-deceiver knows not-p and believes p.) I will call the
claim that the self-deceiver intentionally executes a plan to deceive
himself the agency condition.17 A case of self-deception in which the
self-deceiver satisfies both the dual-belief and agency conditions will
be called strong self-deception, and a case in which the self-deceiver
satisfies neither the dual-belief nor the agency condition will be called
deflationary self-deception. Demos, for example, offers a model of
strong self-deception because he affirms the dual-belief and agency
conditions, whereas Mele offers a deflationary model because he does
not. By definition, a philosophical account of strong self-deception
models self-deception on intentional interpersonal deception, and
therefore treats self-deception as a lie to oneself.
What happened in the forty-one years that intervene between
Demos and Mele? How did the philosophical debate on self-decep-
tion develop in such a way that Mele’s account seems like a viable
model of self-deception, even though it is in no way an answer to
Demos’s original question? Instead of trying to answer Demos’s

16
Demos also makes an interesting comparison between his own account of
awareness and Aristotle’s account of akrasia. Like the Aristotelian akrates, perhaps
the self-deceiver can believe contradictory propositions because she construes each
side of the contradiction in a way that diverts her attention from their contradictory
character. E.g. although a self-deceiving mother may not be able to believe, in full
awareness, two propositions that directly contradict (“My son is good” and “My son is
not good”), she may be able to represent those propositions to herself in a way that
masks their contradictory character: “My son is not much good” and “My son is a fine
fellow.” Whether this solution finally satisfies or not, it is intriguing, and deserves
further thought. See “Lying to Oneself,” 593–4.
17
Note that the dual belief and agency conditions do not necessarily hang together.
There are philosophers, like William Talbott, who affirm the agency condition but not
the dual belief condition, and there are philosophers, like Brian McLaughlin, who affirm
the opposite. W. J. Talbott, “Intentional Self-Deception in a Single Coherent Self,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 55 (1995), 27–74; Brian P. McLaughlin,
“Exploring the Possibility of Self-Deception in Belief,” in Brian P. McLaughlin and
A. O. Rorty (eds), Perspectives on Self-Deception (Berkeley, Calif.: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1988), 29–62.
154 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
question (“how can one lie to oneself ?”), philosophers took a different
course, both in the initial wave of responses to his paper, and in
the trajectory that followed. They emphasized the fact that modeling
self-deception on interpersonal deception, as Demos does, seems to
generate vexing paradoxes. The ubiquitous theme of paradox is what
intervenes between Demos and Mele and what causes the analytic
debate to develop as it does.18
Ironically, the very first response to Demos’s paper, John Canfield
and Patrick McNally’s “Paradoxes of Self-Deception,” points out that
there is no formal, logical contradiction involved in saying that the
same person believes p and believes not-p at the same time. They
write: “Because p and not-p are not truth-functional components of
[Jones believes p and Jones believes not-p], it is not self-contradictory
and in fact will often be true.”19 I will say much more about this claim
in the next section. For now, the important point is that from the very
beginning of the analytic debate, it was frankly conceded that De-
mos’s own analysis of self-deception is not logically contradictory. So
whatever it might mean to say that believing p and not-p is “paradox-
ical,” it is clear from the outset that “paradoxical” cannot mean
formally incoherent.
Notwithstanding this concession, the immediately following paper,
Canfield and Don Gustavson’s “Self-Deception” (1961), established
the pattern of argument that would prevail for the next half-century.
First, they note that modeling self-deception on intentional interper-
sonal deception requires us to say things that are “extremely odd-
sounding, if not contradictory.”20 The phrase “if not contradictory”
must be read as “although not contradictory,” given that Canfield is a
co-author of the earlier paper making this very point. In effect, then,
Canfield and Gustavson reject the possibility of lying to oneself not on
any formal, logical basis, but simply because it seems “suspect.”21

18
See Mele’s 1987 review article (Alfred R. Mele, “Recent Work on Self-Deception,”
American Philosophical Quarterly, 24 (1987), 1–17), and the first chapter of Fingarette,
Self-Deception.
19
John Canfield and Patrick McNally, “Paradoxes of Self-Deception,” Analysis, 21
(1961), 142. Canfield and McNally also raise objections to Demos that (in hindsight)
seem frankly irrelevant: he does not account for contradictory dispositional beliefs,
nor for “disbelieving,” which they apparently take to be an intentional act that is
distinct from both “believing that not” and “not believing.”
20
John Canfield and Don Gustavson, “Self-Deception,” Analysis, 23 (1962), 32.
21
Canfield and Gustavson, “Self-Deception,” 33.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 155
They argue that, even in cases where “in some sense, the person
‘knows’ what he believes and asserts to be false,” the word “knows”
takes on an unusual meaning.22 I take it that their point is that if
“knows” has an unusual meaning in cases of self-deception, it does
not make sense to say that a self-deceiver really knows the truth, from
which it follows that he does not really deceive himself at all, in the
usual meaning of “deceive” (presumably on the assumption that if
A deceives B about p, then A knows p). But even granting these
(rather implausible) general claims about the univocal meaning of
“knows” and “deceives,” this argument shows only that self-deception
cannot be exactly like interpersonal deception in every respect—a
claim that is trivially true. It is correct that a single person cannot
be explicitly, occurrently aware (as deceiver) that he knows not-p
even while he deceives himself (as victim) into explicitly, occurrently
believing that p. But it does not follow that there is no way to model
self-deception on interpersonal deception. Canfield and Gustavson
seem to assume that it does.
The argument pattern originally exhibited by Canfield and Gus-
tavson in 1961 continues unabated through the present day. Despite
the rhetoric of paradox, few philosophers expressly argue that the
belief-state that Demos associates with self-deception—believing that
p and believing that not-p—is impossible. At virtually every point, the
basic move is the same: a philosopher first introduces the threat
of paradox, then he uses that threat as a warrant that allows him to
turn directly to his own “less paradoxical” model, even though he
never argues that the relevant sense of “paradoxical” is equivalent to
“incoherent,” or “impossible,” or to anything stronger than Canfield
and Gustavson’s original “extremely odd-sounding, if not contradict-
ory.” Merely raising the specter of “paradox” suffices to show that
certain conceptions of self-deception should be avoided at all costs.
The relevant argument form is a version of what David Lewis calls the
“refutation by incredulous stare,” and it appears again and again (the
emphasis is mine throughout):
Terrence Penelhum, 1964: The concept of self-deception has seemed to
some to generate paradoxes, to make us claim, for example, that a man
both does and does not believe the same proposition. Such difficulties
come, as has recently been shown, from trying to understand the idea of

22
Canfield and Gustavson, “Self-Deception,” 35.
156 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
deceiving oneself on the model of that of deceiving others. If we resist
this temptation, a non-paradoxical rendering seems less difficult.23
Frederick Siegler, 1968: . . . But if A and B are the same person, this
would imply that A believed that p was not true and that p was true,
which is if not impossible, at least paradoxical. We need some analysis of
the notion of self-deception that avoids this apparent paradox.24
Richard Reilly, 1976: Since this suggests that the self-deceiver inten-
tionally, and hence knowingly, believes what he does not believe, self-
deception has been thought at least paradoxical, if not impossible. What
I shall argue is that Demos’ . . . formulation is fundamentally mistaken.25
Robert Audi, 1982: Self-deception has widely been regarded as para-
doxical. Perhaps . . . deceiving oneself would typically require getting
oneself to believe something one knows is not true. It is not clear how
this is possible, if indeed it is; and most philosophers writing on self-
deception have tried to avoid conceiving it in this way.26
Alfred R. Mele, 1987: What I shall call the paradox of belief may be
formulated as follows for the purposes of introduction . . . “A must
simultaneously believe that not-p and believe that p. But how is this
possible?” The purpose of the present chapter is to show that this
paradox can be resolved [by denying that the self-deceiver holds con-
tradictory beliefs].27
David Hales, 1994: A prominent view about self-deception, probably
the predominant one, is that self-deceivers both believe p and believe
not-p. . . . Many have thought that these seeming facts are a contradic-
tion in the making, or some kind of paradox . . . The central project of
this paper is to undercut this entire approach.28
Kent Bach, 1998: Much of the mystery of self-deception is lifted once
we abandon the assumption that the self-deceiver must be acting
intentionally if he is to be acting purposefully . . . If there is an orthodox
view of what [self-deception] involves, it is that [the self-deceiver] gets
himself to form a contrary belief . . . No wonder paradox looms, for the

23
Terrence Penelhum, “Symposium: Pleasure and Falsity,” American Philosoph-
ical Quarterly, 1 (1964), 87–8.
24
Frederick A. Siegler, “An Analysis of Self-Deception,” Noûs, 2 (1968), 147.
25
Richard Reilly, “Self-Deception: Resolving the Epistemological Paradox,” Per-
sonalist, 57 (1976), 391. Later in the paper, he glosses “believes what he does not
believe” as “believes p and not-p” (393).
26
Robert Audi, “Self-Deception, Action, and Will,” Erkenntnis, 18 (1982), 133.
27
Alfred R. Mele, Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self-Deception, and Self-
Control (New York: OUP, 1987), 121.
28
Steven D. Hales, “Self-Deception and Belief Attribution,” Synthese, 101 (1994),
273.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 157
orthodox view has it that the self-deceiver incoherently intends to form
a belief that conflicts with another belief that he does not abandon.29
Neil Levy, 2004: Both requirements [that the self-deceiver holds
contradictory beliefs and intends to deceive himself] still have their
defenders. But both seem to give rise to paradoxes . . . In the face of
these paradoxes, defenders of the traditional conception of self-decep-
tion are forced to resort to some rather untraditional hypotheses . . .
Given the paradoxes threatened by each requirement, however, if we can
account for self-deception without invoking them we ought to do so.30
D. S. N. Van Leeuwen, 2007: More formally, [the supposed self-
deceiver] believes that p and believes that ~p. But this seems
psychologically absurd. So we have arrived at the well-known paradox
of self-deception: start with an ordinary description of everyday mental
life . . . and on quite straightforward analysis of the terms involved in the
description see that it entails absurdity.31
These (wholly representative) quotations illustrate two key argumen-
tative moves that are prevalent in the analytic debate on self-deception.
First, as noted above, philosophers simply assert that lying to oneself is
“paradoxical,” and then repudiate that conception of self-deception
immediately, without further argument. In most cases, these quota-
tions provide the full extent of any actual arguments offered about why
lying to oneself is so paradoxical. Merely introducing the charge of
paradox is enough to dismiss this conception of self-deception.
Second, philosophers rarely use their own, active voice to assert that
self-deception is paradoxical. This is somewhat surprising, given that
the charge of paradox is so important, and I do not think it is a mere
stylistic peccadillo. In the quotations above, note that the assertion of
paradox is attributed to an impersonal “some” (Penelhum), and also to
“many” (Hales), as well as to a passively voiced, “widely held” view
(Siegler, Reilly, Audi). The prevalence of the passive voice expresses a
certain argumentative unease born of the fact that these philosophers
all regard lying to oneself as “paradoxical” even though they have not

29
Kent Bach, “(Apparent) Paradoxes of Self-Deception and Decision,” in Jean
Pierre Dupuy (ed.), Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality (Stanford, Calif.:
CSLI, 1998), 166.
30
Neil Levy, “Self-Deception and Moral Responsibility,” Ratio, 17 (2004), 296.
31
D. S. N. Van Leeuwen, “The Product of Self-Deception,” Erkenntnis, 67 (2007),
420.
158 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
shown that the relevant sense of “paradoxical” amounts to anything
stronger than “difficult to understand.”32
In any case, by the late 1980s, the theme of paradox had been so
well established that the paradoxes of self-deception were even given
distinct names and canonical formulations. The first, which I will call
the “doxastic paradox,” concerns what the self-deceiver believes. Here
is a tidy formulation of the doxastic paradox, from William Talbott:
It seems that a person who is self-deceived in believing a proposition p
must, as the deceiver, believe that p is false, and as the deceived, believe
that p is true. But how is one to make coherent sense of the supposition
that a single self could believe both parts of an explicit contradiction?33
The doxastic paradox has received the most attention in the literature
overall, but there is also a second paradox of self-deception, which
I will call the “strategic paradox,” and it is more prominent in
contemporary discussions.34 It concerns what the self-deceiver does
in order to deceive himself. In central cases of interpersonal decep-
tion, the deceiver knowingly and intentionally causes his deceived
victim to believe a falsehood. When deceiver and deceived are the
same person, however, the strategic paradox ensues. Here is a formu-
lation of the strategic paradox, from Mele:
In general, A cannot successfully employ a deceptive strategy against
B if B knows A’s intention and plan.35
This is the idea behind the strategic paradox: if a person (as deceiver)
believes that some proposition is false or unwarranted, it seems

32
Interestingly, several of the most recent wave of articles on self-deception barely
mention the paradoxes. Their authors have so thoroughly assimilated the claim that
we cannot model self-deception on lying to oneself that this possibility is not raised at
all, not even to be immediately dismissed. See e.g. Kevin Lynch, “On the ‘Tension’
Inherent in Self-Deception,” Philosophical Psychology, 25 (2012), 433–50, and Eric
Funkhouser, “Self-Deception and the Limits of Folk Psychology,” Social Theory and
Practice, 35(2009), 1–13. Tamar Szabó Gendler’s “Self-Deception as Pretense,” Noûs
Supplement: Philosophical Perspectives, 21 (2007), 231–58, does raise (and then
dismiss) the possibility that we should model self-deception on interpersonal decep-
tion, though she does concede that the interpersonal model gets some things right.
33
Talbott, “Intentional Self-Deception in a Single Coherent Self ,” 28.
34
The terms “doxastic paradox” and “strategic paradox” come from Annette Barnes,
Seeing through Self-Deception (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4–17.
Mele uses the terms “static” and “dynamic” paradoxes in “Recent Work on Self-Decep-
tion,” 1. He also uses “paradox of belief ” and “strategy paradox” in Irrationality, 121, 38.
35
Mele, Irrationality, 138.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 159
impossible that he could also make himself (as deceived) believe that
the proposition is true. We do not appear to have the kind of active,
decisional control over our beliefs that a successful plan of self-
deception requires.
I am now in a position to make some general observations about
why the trajectory of analytic thought developed as it did after
Demos. The initial barrage of papers on self-deception, from 1960
to about 1970, shows that the philosophical problem of self-deception
came to be posed very minimally. With any philosophical inquiry,
there is a natural “fit” between question and answer, problem and
solution: the range of solutions to a philosophical problem that are
considered viable is constrained by the way the problem is posed. Yet
the reverse also holds. If the answer to a given question seems
impossible, the question itself can only seem incoherent. Questions
that only seem to elicit impossible answers soon cease to be asked
altogether. They are replaced by different, more answerable, ques-
tions.
Under the threat of paradox, philosophers abandoned the dual-
belief condition right away. They began to treat self-deception as a
special kind of false, but not contradictory, belief: belief against the
obvious weight of the evidence. After Demos, analytic philosophy on
self-deception may be seen as a series of attempts to resolve or avoid
the doxastic and strategic paradoxes while answering the question
“what must be added to false belief to yield a condition of self-
deception?”36 That was not Demos’s original question at all, but it
is the question that analytic philosophers have been trying to answer
for almost fifty years. Once the problem is posed this way, the
challenge then becomes one of specifying just what it is about self-
deceptive false believing that distinguishes it from other kinds of false
believing, such as error, prejudice, wishful thinking, stubbornness,
etc.
For example, against Demos’s claim that the self-deceiver believes p
and not-p, Canfield and Gustavson argue that the self-deceiver need
only believe p in “belief-adverse circumstances,” i.e. circumstances in
which the evidence points overwhelmingly to not-p. In response,
Terrence Penelhum points out that this analysis of self-deception is
not sufficiently restrictive, since people who are merely mistaken,

36
Mele, Irrationality, 128.
160 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
ignorant, or stupid also believe p against the weight of evidence that
objectively favors not-p. What we need, according to Penelhum, is a
further condition that the self-deceiver recognizes the force of the
evidence, even though he does not believe the true proposition to
which it points and, in fact, believes its opposite.37 Against this claim,
however, Patrick Gardiner argues that, if the self-deceiver recognizes
the force of the evidence for p, then by that very fact, he must also
believe p. (On many analyses of the relationship between evidence
and belief, to recognize that the weight of one’s evidence favors p just
is to believe p.) Since the self-deceiver also believes the counter-
evidential proposition, not-p, Penelhum’s analysis simply reinstates
the doxastic paradox, according to Gardiner.38
Gardiner’s paper is an ancestor of the most prominent current
models of self-deception—deflationary models that deny both the
dual-belief and the agency conditions—because Gardiner wonders
whether, after all is said and done, “self-deception really comes down
to no more than being mistaken with a motive.” He speculates that
perhaps “a self-deceiver is simply a man who wrongfully believes
something to be true which he would not have believed to be true
in the absence of the particular interest in the matter concerned that
he has.”39 Gardiner himself ultimately demurs, but it is just this view
that Mele, for example, now defends.
The crucial conceptual shift in this early analytic debate occurred
almost immediately and had far-reaching consequences for the way
subsequent debate developed. Again, Demos’s original question was:
how can one successfully lie to oneself? His question assumes that the
self-deceiver knows the truth, for it is precisely because he knows the
truth that a puzzle arises about how he can come to believe his own
lie. This assumption was quickly left by the wayside. Driven by
aversion to the paradoxes, the philosophical problem of self-decep-
tion was transformed from a problem about the self-deceiver’s con-
flicting beliefs into a problem about the nature of his relationship to a
body of evidence. The relevant question becomes: how can the self-
deceiver believe p and fail to believe not-p, given the overwhelming
evidence for not-p? This question, more-or-less implicit in the early

37
Penelhum, “Symposium: Pleasure and Falsity,” 88.
38
Patrick L. Gardiner, “Error, Faith, and Self-Deception,” Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, 50 (1970), 234 ff. See also Fingarette, Self-Deception, 25–8.
39
Gardiner, “Error Faith and Self-Deception,” 242.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 161
discussion from Canfield and Gustavson to Gardiner, is the question
that is passed on to subsequent philosophers.
Soon the puzzle of self-deception explicitly becomes a puzzle about
how to explain cases “when someone presents himself as believing
that something is so in the face of what the accuser himself sees as
amply obvious evidence that it is not so.”40 Phrased differently, the
question at hand becomes, “how does a subject who is competent to
detect the irrationality of a belief that p form her belief against
weighty or even conclusive evidence to the contrary?”41 It can even
be glossed as merely “the puzzle of how irrational belief is formed.”42
Construed so minimally, the problem of self-deception becomes
simply a problem about how a person can draw a false, biased
inference from a straightforward body of evidence.
There are at least three unintended consequences of this concep-
tion that deserve brief mention. First, the emphasis on empirical
evidence tends to sever the traditional connection between self-de-
ception and self-knowledge, and also tends to sever strong connec-
tions between self-deception, moral responsibility, and moral agency.
There are many alternative ways in which the philosophical problem
of self-deception could have entered into the mainstream of analytic
philosophy. Even Demos’s own paper could have been viewed
through the prism of philosophical ethics. It could have provoked a
series of questions about moral responsibility, moral psychology, and
the moral consequences (for good and ill) of reasoning under the
influence of emotion and desire. To be sure, at many points in the
analytic conversation, a great deal of interesting work does address
these questions. For the most part, however, the philosophical prob-
lem of self-deception has always been treated as a problem in episte-
mology and the philosophy of mind:
The question “What is self-deception?” is similar, in an interesting
respect, to the question “What is knowledge?” The latter question has
often been formulated as follows: “What must be added to true belief to
yield knowledge?” A parallel formulation of the former question, as

40
David Kipp, “On Self-Deception,” Philosophical Quarterly, 30 (1980), 306.
41
Ariela Lazar, “Deceiving Oneself or Self-Deceived? On the Formation of Beliefs
under the Influence,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Philosophy, 108 (1999), 265.
42
Ariela Lazar, “Division and Deception: Davidson on Being Self-Deceived,” in
Dupuy, Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Irrationality, 26.
162 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
least as it has often been understood, is natural—namely, “What must
be added to false belief to yield a condition of self-deception?”43
. . . to me, the real interest of self-deception is whether certain tough
cases are possible, and how they are if they are, and why they are not, if
they are not . . . Investigating those may reveal something of importance
about mental architecture.44
When the chief philosophical interest of self-deception lies in its
implications for “mental architecture,” it is clear that moral consider-
ations have been left far behind.45 Indeed, the flight toward deflation-
ary models of self-deception runs exactly parallel with a concomitant
flight away from treating self-deception as the sort of thing for which
one is morally responsible.46
Second, to someone who is not steeped in the assumptions of
analytic philosophy, “the puzzle of how irrational belief is formed”
may not seem very puzzling. As Jon Elster points out, more than three
hundred years ago, French moralists like La Rochefoucauld (and
Pascal) offered very sophisticated discussions of the causal effects of
emotion and desire on mental life.47 From the long perspective of
history, it is quite strange to see twentieth-century analytic philoso-
phers argue about whether desire can unintentionally cause biased
reasoning. Of course it can. The interesting question is whether that is
all there is to self-deception.
Finally, even within the analytic tradition, once the problem of self-
deception gets posed so minimally, the pressure to deny the dual
belief and agency conditions and adopt a deflationary model of self-
deception becomes almost overwhelming, because anything else
really does look like massive theoretical overkill. Anti-intentionalists
like Mele argue that self-deception can be fully explained as the
unintentional byproduct of, for example, selective evidence gathering

43
Mele, Irrationality, 128.
44
Brian P. McLaughlin, “On the Very Possibility of Self-Deception,” in Roger
T. Ames and Wimal Dissanayake (eds), Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philo-
sophical Enquiry (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 46.
45
Moral questions, of course, are primary in ancient and early-modern discussions
of self-deception. Given his interest in classical philosophy, it is not surprising that
they are present in Demos, as well. See Demos, “Lying to Oneself ,” 589–90.
46
The logical conclusion of this trajectory is Levy, “Self-Deception and Moral
Responsibility,” 294–311.
47
Elster, Alchemies of the Mind, 76 ff. One might add that La Rochefoucauld and
Pascal are themselves nourished by a millennium and half of Christian reflection on
the same topic.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 163
and selective attention. These behaviors are broadly purposive, but
they are not intentionally aimed at acquiring some favored false
belief. If both sides are only trying to answer the question of how
can someone form a false belief that p in the face of evidence that
strongly favors not-p, then the very parameters of the debate favor the
anti-intentionalist. Unintentionally biased reasoning is straightfor-
wardly possible, whereas intentionally biased reasoning is much
more problematic. Famous experiments in empirical psychology
show that people often reason poorly when they are influenced by
desire and emotion. It is highly unlikely that the subjects of these
experiments intend to reason badly. Anti-intentionalists like Mele can
appeal to these data, but intentionalists have no comparable body of
empirical evidence to which they can appeal.
This is what I mean when I say that Mele’s theoretically minimal
model of self-deception is the logical conclusion of the initial re-
sponse to Demos. It is the logical conclusion of any trajectory of
inquiry that aims to answer the very minimal question, “how can
someone form a false belief that p in the face of evidence that strongly
favors not-p?” Mele can answer this question with admirable parsi-
mony, asserting that there is nothing more to self-deception than
biased belief, thereby rendering entirely superfluous the contradictory
beliefs and hidden intentions posited by his opponents. It is surely
correct that contradictory beliefs and hidden intentions are not
needed to explain “the puzzle of how irrational belief is formed.”
But they might still be needed to explain how someone can lie to
himself successfully—which is, after all, the problem that Demos
originally set out to solve.

PARADOX!

Of course, the doxastic and strategic paradoxes are supposed to rule

out lying to oneself. If they really do rule it out, then the move toward
deflationary models of self-deception is not only warranted, but
required. As discussed above, worries about the doxastic and strategic
paradoxes have driven the analytic debate on self-deception by con-
straining the field of possible solutions to its central problems. Yet
surprisingly few philosophers have explicitly argued that the para-
doxes are insurmountable. As far as anyone has actually shown, the
164 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
paradoxes of self-deception are really puzzles that can be solved,
instead of paradoxes that must be avoided.
All sides agree that modeling self-deception too closely on inter-
personal deception generates paradoxes. But how closely is “too
closely?” It is possible to generate different versions of the doxastic
and strategic paradoxes, depending on how the underlying relation-
ship between self-deception and interpersonal deception is construed.
At one extreme, the paradoxes do present logically insurmountable
barriers. But on more plausible construals, they do not.
For example, consider this formulation of the relationship between
interpersonal deception and self-deception, which does describe a
logically impossible state of affairs:
In typical cases of deception: at time t, B (the deceived) does not believe
that p. A (the deceiver) believes that not-p and does not believe that p.
Then, at t + 1 (a suitably short interval), A knowingly and intentionally
causes B to believe p. At t + 1, A still believes that not-p and it is still not
the case that A believes p, nor is it the case that B believes not-p.
In typical cases of self-deception, A = B.
This formulation generates a doxastic paradox that is logically
insurmountable, because it entails that a formal contradiction is
true: “A believes that p” and “It is not the case that A believes that
p.” It also generates a strategic paradox that is psychologically insur-
mountable, because it asserts that A instantly, knowingly, and inten-
tionally causes himself to believe that p is true when he already believes
that p false. This may or may not be logically impossible, but it is surely
psychologically impossible—human beings just aren’t wired that
way.48 But there is no reason to assume that self-deception must be
modeled on this particular construal of interpersonal deception.
Moreover, this is not even the construal that most advocates of strong
self-deception embrace. Consider instead a softer formulation, like:
In typical cases of deception, A believes not-p, and B believes p, because
A intentionally causes B to believe p.
I do not claim that this is a satisfactory analysis of deception, but it is
the rough conception of interpersonal deception that generates the

48
This disjunction between logical impossibility and psychologically impossibility
is not meant to be theory-laden, and my argument does not really depend on it. The
point is simply that believing at will does seem impossible, but it isn’t clear that it is
impossible in the way that collecting a bouquet of colorless red roses is impossible.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 165
most common formulations of the doxastic and strategic paradoxes,
like those of Talbott and Mele, above. Roughly:
Doxastic Paradox: S believes that not-p and S believes that p.
Strategic Paradox: S intentionally causes himself to believe p, when he
also believes that p is false.
These formulations of the paradoxes do not describe impossible states
of affairs, and they are the only formulations that must be addressed
by someone who wants to show that the dual-belief and agency
conditions can be satisfied. To show that these formulations do not
describe impossible states of affairs, I will consider each in turn.

The Doxastic Paradox: Puzzling, Not Paradoxical

Given all the attention devoted to the doxastic paradox—“often
regarded at the paradox of self-deception”49—it is quite remarkable
that there is nothing formally incoherent about the claim that a
single subject believes contradictory propositions. That is, it is not
logically impossible for a single subject to believe p and believe not-p
at the same time. Everyone agrees that it seems impossible to believe
explicitly contradictory propositions in full awareness of both sides
of the contradiction, and, conversely, everyone agrees that believing
inconsistent—as opposed to directly contradictory—propositions is
common enough. But even beyond these points of near-complete
accord, there is also widespread agreement that there is nothing
formally incoherent about the mere fact of holding contradictory
beliefs. Indeed, I think it is safe to say that nearly all philosophers
who have carefully considered the matter agree that “S believes p and
S believes not-p” is not a logically incoherent proposition—not a
formal contradiction.50

49
Mele, Irrationality, 121.
50
In other words, I do not take myself to be saying anything new or controversial
in the discussion which follows. In the self-deception literature e.g. see Donald
Davidson, “Deception and Division [1986],” in Problems of Rationality (New York:
OUP, 2004), 199–200; Canfield and McNally, “Paradoxes of Self-Deception,” 142;
Ronald B. de Sousa, “Self-Deception,” Inquiry, 13 (1970), 308; Mike W. Martin, Self-
Deception and Morality (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 18–24;
José Luis Bermúdez, “Self-Deception, Intentions, and Contradictory Beliefs,” Analysis,
60 (2000), 309–19.
166 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
One quick and dirty way to see that “S believes p and S believes not-p”
cannot be a formal contradiction is to note that, if it were, then it
could never be true, and if it could never be true, then it could
never be legitimate to assert it. But then it could never be legitim-
ate to accuse someone else of directly contradicting himself, a
practice that most philosophers would surely be reluctant to aban-
don. Somewhat more formally, consider these four statements:
(1) Marge believes that Bart is good.
(2) Marge believes that Bart is not good.
(3) Marge believes that (Bart is good and Bart is not good).
(4) Marge does not believe that Bart is good.
Applied to Marge, the dual-belief condition asserts that the conjunc-
tion of (1) and (2) is true. And there simply is not any way in classical
logic (propositional logic and first-order predicate logic with identity)
to schematize the conjunction of (1) and (2) in a way that produces a
formal contradiction.51 There are formal systems of doxastic logic
that aim to capture the logic of belief, but they are normative systems
that capture the logic of ideally rational belief—what perfectly ra-
tional, logically omniscient believers would believe—and are not
descriptive systems that capture the way people actually do believe.52
They are not relevant to disputes about the doxastic paradox.

51
In propositional logic, these two statements can only be paraphrased as e.g. “q”
and “r,” which do not contradict. They cannot be paraphrased as “q” and “–q,”
because the statements do not have the same content: “S believes that p” and “S
believes that not-p” are not semantically equivalent, obviously, and so they cannot
both be paraphrased by a single sentence-letter and its negation. In predicate logic, it
is possible to define a two-place “belief ” relation, “Bxy,” that takes a person as its first
argument and a proposition as its second argument, so that “S believes that p” would
be paraphrased “Bsp.” But then “S believes that not-p” would have to be paraphrased as
“Bs p” which also does not directly contradict “Bsp.” Of course, it is possible to
introduce premises and axioms that ensure the two will contradict, but that is always
possible for any two propositions, and doesn’t mean that there is something inherent
in the belief-relation entailing that one person cannot believe a contradiction.
52
Compare the statement from the formal linguist and philosopher Barbara
Partee, who writes: “a formal system which disallows inconsistent beliefs, no matter
how elegant it may be, is of dubious value as an explanation of the meaning of belief
sentences in ordinary language unless it can be argued that all purported attributions
of inconsistent beliefs to a person are necessarily in error.” Barbara Partee, “The
Semantics of Belief-Sentences,” in Jaakko Hintikka et al. (eds), Approaches to Natural
Language: Proceedings of the 1970 Stanford Workshop on Grammar and Semantics
(Boston, Mass.: Reidel, 1973), 317. The same point holds for directly contradictory
beliefs.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 167
Note also that even (3), which asserts that Marge believes a single
proposition with contradictory content, does not itself express a
formal contradiction, though I cannot really imagine a case in which
it is true. It might be thought that (1) and (2) jointly entail (3), but this
is false: it is certainly possible to believe several individual propositions
without also believing their conjunction.53 (For example, I do not
now believe one proposition, p, that is the conjunction of all the
indefinitely many true-but-trivial mathematical propositions that
I believe singly.)
The conjunction of (1) and (4) is indeed a formal contradiction, and
must be avoided at all costs.54 It might be thought that (2) entails (4),
since we usually assume that someone disbelieves p when we attribute
to him the belief that not-p. If this is indeed a logical entailment, then
the dual-belief condition (the conjunction of (1) and (2)) would, after
all, express a hidden contradiction. But it is not a logical entailment.
Ordinarily, when we take a proposition like (2) to be true, we are
justified in assuming that (4) is true as well. But the connection does
not hold as a matter of logic. In sum: only the conjunction of (1) and
(4) produces a formal contradiction, but the dual-belief condition
requires merely the conjunction of (1) and (2). Therefore, however
puzzling or logically odd the dual-belief condition may be, it cannot be
ruled out as impossible.

The Strategic Paradox: A Matter of Degree

Although the strategic paradox does not even purport to raise a
formal contradiction, it still has more bite than the doxastic paradox.
At first blush, it really does seem impossible to cause oneself to believe
something that one also believes to be false or groundless. Bernard
Williams provides a canonical defense of this claim (although not in
the context of disputes about self-deception):
If I could acquire a belief at will, I could acquire it whether it was true or
not; moreover I would know that I could acquire it whether it was true

53
Mele agrees: see his Self-Deception Unmasked, 131 n. 1.
54
In ordinary language, the meaning of statements like (4) is sometimes ambigu-
ous. Sometimes (4) can express no more than (2), but more often it expresses
something stronger, “S disbelieves p,” where this means, “It is not the case that S
believes that p.” That is the way I read it here.
168 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
or not. If in full consciousness I could will to acquire a ‘belief ’ irrespective
of its truth, it is unclear that before the event I could seriously think of it
as a belief, i.e. as something purporting to represent reality.55
According to Williams, there are conceptual connections between
“believing that p” and “believing that p is true”: if one does not believe
that p is true, one cannot believe p. As Mele puts it, “any project
describable as ‘getting myself to believe what I know [or believe] to be
false,’ is bound to be self-defeating.”56 If a self-deceiver is to satisfy the
agency condition, it seems that he must engage in just such a project.
Yet it is clear that Mele does not really think that intentional
projects of belief cultivation are always self-defeating. For example,
he agrees that an unbeliever who wants to believe in God and submits
to Pascal’s post-wager program of habituation really will come to
believe in God.57 Moreover, in the self-deception literature, at least, it
is regarded as unproblematic that these kinds of indirect, longer term
projects of belief cultivation are possible. Yet, on their own terms,
these are precisely projects in which a person intentionally employs a
deceptive strategy against himself in order to cultivate a belief that he
does not regard as true.58
Philosophers who consider the issue invariably accept that wager-
type projects are possible, but deny that they are really projects of self-
deception. Rather, such projects are assimilated to highly irregular
projects of “self-caused” deception, in which a “present self” deceives
a “future self.” Consider a man who falsifies his own diary, confident
that at some future date he will have forgotten that he did so; when he
later reads the diary, his “future self ” will have been deceived by his “past
self .” Philosophers typically accept that projects like this are possible, but
deny that they are really projects of self-deception, properly so-called.59

55
Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1973), 148. Though Williams is often cited as a decisive refutation of doxastic
voluntarism, there is a growing body of literature criticizing his argument and
defending various forms of doxastic voluntarism. See e.g. the symposium on doxastic
voluntarism in The Monist, 85/3 (2002), 343–478.
56
Mele, “Recent Work on Self-Deception,” 1.
57
Mele, Irrationality, 132–4.
58
I emphasize “on their terms” because I do not believe that the convert in Pascal’s
wager engages in “deceptive” strategies.
59
See Mele, Irrationality, 132–4; Barnes, Seeing through Self-Deception, 112–14;
Mark Johnston, “Self-Deception and the Nature of Mind,” in McLaughlin and Rorty,
Perspectives on Self-Deception, 77–8; McLaughlin, “Exploring the Possibility of Self-
Deception in Belief ,” 41.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 169
So as far as I can see, then, this is philosophical state of play
regarding the strategic paradox: everyone accepts that immediate,
decisional control over belief-formation is impossible, but everyone
also accepts that indirect, long-term control over belief-formation is
straightforwardly possible. There is plenty of conceptual space in
between those two extremes, however—between immediate decisio-
nal control (which might count as self-deception but is impossible)
and long-term, indirect control (which is clearly possible but does not
count as self-deception). Somewhere in that conceptual space, per-
haps there is a project that is just decisional enough to count as a
successful project of intentional self-deception and just long-term
enough to succeed.60 I see no reason to rule out that possibility in
advance, at any rate. The claim that one cannot coherently execute a
plan to deceive oneself simply ignores a vast middle ground in which
self-directed control over the process of belief-formation is possible.
I conclude that neither the doxastic paradox nor the strategic
paradox presents an insurmountable barrier to strong self-deception.
Analytic philosophy on self-deception might have developed very
differently. The seemingly paradoxical character of self-deception
might have served as a philosophical goad instead of a philosophical
barrier. Demos’s original paper might have provoked a half-century
of attempts to show that the dual-belief and agency conditions can be
satisfied after all, despite the threat of paradox. Instead, with notable
exceptions, Demos provoked a half-century of attempts to show that
genuine self-deception does not require those conditions to be satis-
fied, because of the threat of paradox.

PARADOXES OF ATTENTION AND AWARENESS

The paradoxes of self-deception have bite because people cannot

knowingly believe both sides of a contradiction or intend to deceive
themselves if they explicitly focus on what they intend. The real issue
is awareness: no one can believe both sides of a contradiction in full
awareness and no one can successfully employ a deceptive strategy
against himself in full awareness. Given the near-universal rejection

60
For a suggestion along these lines, see Roy A. Sorensen, “Self-Deception and
Scattered Events,” Mind, 94 (1985), 64–9.
170 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
of strong self-deception, it appears that philosophers on all sides of
the analytic debate assume that our immediate, spontaneous aware-
ness of our own beliefs and intentions renders strong self-deception
impossible. This assumption is false.
If the paradoxes may really be understood as puzzles about atten-
tion and awareness, then they present insurmountable barriers to
strong self-deception only on the assumption that two highly im-
plausible claims about believing and acting are true:
(BFA) If S believes that p and forms the belief that not p, then S also
focuses on (p and not-p), in full awareness.
(AFA) For any action, X, X-ing intentionally entails X-ing in full-
awareness that one is X-ing.61
Both claims assume that awareness is a binary state: one is either
wholly, completely aware of one’s beliefs and intentions, or else one
has not really formed those beliefs or acted intentionally at all. The
dual-belief condition is blocked by (BFA) because (BFA) asserts that
we would always notice that we are about to believe a contradiction,
which would prevent us from forming the contradictory belief. The
agency condition is blocked by (AFA) because (AFA) assumes that we
would explicitly focus on any intention to deceive ourselves, which
would prevent us from executing that intention successfully.
If (AFA) were true, however, one of two things would have to
follow: we would either have to admit that virtually none of our
actions are intentional, or we would have to suppose that everyone
fully, explicitly attends to what they do almost all the time. I take it
that neither is plausible. Consider the utterly common phenomenon
of rote actions performed by habit—for instance driving along a
customary route. A driver typically performs scores of intentional
actions—unlocking the car, starting it, minutely adjusting to road
conditions while driving, etc.—and he is aware of performing these
actions (after all, he isn’t literally unconscious) but he does not
explicitly attend to them.
Contra (BFA), consider a related claim that is clearly false: “If S
believes that p and forms the belief that q, then S also focuses on
(p and q), in full awareness.” It is obvious that this more general claim
about awareness and belief-formation does not hold. If it did, then
each time we form a new belief, we would also, explicitly, occurrently

61
“(BFA)” and “(AFA)” for, respectively, Belief/Action in Full-Awareness.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 171
focus on its conjunction with all our existing beliefs. Furthermore,
even diehard non-contradictionists admit that people routinely fail to
notice that they hold inconsistent beliefs, so it is also clear that we are
not generally aware of all the logical implications of what we believe.
When we already believe p, for example, it is clear that we frequently
form the belief q without ever noticing that “if q then not-p.”
So someone who affirms (BFA) must assume that our spontaneous
awareness of our own beliefs is such that we guard against any
contradiction, even though we recklessly tolerate inconsistency, and
even though we do not, in general, monitor the conjunctions of what
we believe. This is narrow ground, indeed. Perhaps some philoso-
phers would respond that human beings really do exemplify just this
peculiar mixture of rationality and irrationality. It seems to me,
however, that defending just-and-only this position is a form of
special pleading, a maneuver that would only be adopted by someone
who wanted to guarantee that people never held contradictory beliefs,
even though contradictory believing is not logically impossible.
I don’t find (BFA) or (AFA) even remotely plausible, and one doesn’t
exactly have to be a doctrinaire Freudian to believe they are badly
mistaken. If I am not entitled simply to dismiss these claims, then at a
minimum, I can at least lay down a marker noting that this is the
price that someone who denies the possibility of strong self-deception
must pay: he or she is committed to this very picture of unrestricted
mental self-transparency.
For it is a fact that claims about awareness that are even slightly
weaker than (BFA) and (AFA) will not generate the insurmountable
paradoxes needed to rule out the dual belief and agency conditions. In
particular, the paradoxes are not insurmountable if we soften (BFA)
and (AFA) into the following modal variants:
(BFA-P) If S believes that p and forms the belief that not-p, then S can
focus on (p and not-p), in full awareness.
(AFA-P) For any action, X, X-ing intentionally entails that one can
become fully aware that one is X-ing or has X-ed.62
I doubt that even these revised claims are true, but they are at least
defensible. They also allow that strong self-deception is possible, even
without positing any new theoretical entities like subagents, mental
partitions, or unconscious beliefs. On these two modal claims, a

62
In “BFA-P” and “AFA-P,” the “P” is for “possibility.”
172 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
successful account of strong self-deception would merely be an
account of how a self-deceiver manages his awareness so that he
does not attend to his beliefs and intentions while he is deceiving
himself, even though he can attend to them.
I therefore suggest the following rough-and-ready picture of strong
self-deception: While the self-deceiver remains in the state of self-
deception—while he continues to deceive himself—he does not ever
attend to the fact that he believes not-p, and he does not ever attend to
the fact that he is intentionally deceiving himself into believing p. But
he is still able—he still has the capacity—to notice these facts about
himself. Presumably, if he were to notice them, he would thereby
cease deceiving himself, by definition. While it is impossible for him
to notice his beliefs and intentions and still continue deceiving him-
self, it is perfectly possible that he does not notice them at any
particular point during his self-deception. Obviously, I don’t claim
that this bare description is an analysis of self-deception or a full
explanation of how someone can deceive himself. But it does suggest
that, on any remotely plausible construal of self-awareness, the very
possibility of strong self-deception cannot be ruled out.

“PERPETUALLY HOLISTIC SELF-TRANSPARENCY ”

The claims about awareness captured by (BFA) and (AFA) are at the
very root of the nearly universal analytic assumption that self-decep-
tion is highly paradoxical. The early opponents of strong self-deception
explicitly relied on (BFA). Indeed, without (BFA), it is possible that
self-deception would never have been regarded as paradoxical in the
first place.63 On the other hand, I doubt that most contemporary
philosophers working on self-deception would assent to (BFA) and
(AFA), were they presented with these claims as general claims about
human awareness. But they still advance arguments that implicitly
depend on them.

63
See F. A. Siegler, “Self-Deception,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 41
(1963), 30; Siegler, “Demos on Lying to Oneself ,” Journal of Philosophy, 59 (1962),
472; Stanley Paluch, “Self-Deception,” Inquiry, 10 (1967), 269–70; Béla Szabados,
“Self-Deception,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 4 (1974), 54.
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 173
When pressed, most contemporary philosophers would probably
insist that they rely only on the plausible (BFA-P) and (AFA-P) and
not on their more implausible cousins. But their own arguments belie
this assertion. For example, (AFA) is prevalent in Mele’s work. He
writes:
[Self-deceivers] rarely act with the intention of deceiving themselves.
Unless there are unconscious intentions, this would involve consciously
aiming at getting oneself to believe (or think, sincerely avow, etc.)
something that one consciously knows or believes to be false. And
although this is possible (e.g., I might hire a hypnotist to induce in me
a false belief that my business is prospering), it also seems to be rather
distant from common cases of self-deception generally treated in the
literature on this topic.64
When Mele says that intending to deceive oneself “would involve
consciously aiming at getting oneself to believe . . . something that one
consciously knows or believes to be false,” he appears to treat con-
sciously intending as synonymous with explicitly intending—i.e. with
intending in full self-awareness. That is, he appears to be relying on a
principle like (AFA). With all his talk about hypnotists and so forth, it
is clear that he assumes that someone who intends to deceive himself
must formulate an explicit plan, represent it to himself in full aware-
ness as “an intention to deceive” and then carry it out. He does not
seem willing to accept that anything else could count as intentionally
deceiving oneself. Yet as a general claim about what intentional action
requires, this is surely an overly restrictive view, for all the reasons
I have already presented.65
A bit of detective work shows that the same implausible assump-
tions about self-awareness also lurk behind many other contemporary

64
Mele, Irrationality, 123.
65
Against this restrictive view, Bermúdez cites Mele’s own work on the philosophy
of action. “It is highly implausible that doing something intentionally entails doing it
knowingly (cf. Mele 1992a, 112), and nothing less than this will generate the dynamic
paradox. Even the view (which entails the falsity of all Freudian accounts of repression)
that when one is acting intentionally, what one is trying to do is accessible to introspec-
tion, will not generate the paradox because an intention can be accessible to introspec-
tion (in the sense that it could be brought to consciousness) without actually being
conscious, and unless the intention is actually rather than potentially conscious, there is
no reason for it to undermine the strategy of self-deception.” José Luis Bermúdez,
“Defending Intentionalist Accounts of Self-Deception,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
20 (1997), 108. The internal citation is to: Alfred R. Mele, Springs of Action: Under-
standing Intentional Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
174 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
dismissals of strong self-deception, even when those assumptions are
not immediately apparent. Consider, for example, Eric Funkhouser’s,
“Do the Self-Deceived Get What They Want?” (2005).66 Understand-
ably enough at this point in the analytic conversation, Funkhouser
feels entitled to dismiss the possibility of strong self-deception in
a single sentence: “Well-known paradoxes arise when self-deception
is viewed on the model of interpersonal deception, and theorists
must deny a parallel at some point.”67 In the footnote to that sentence,
he refers his readers to the first chapter of Mele’s Self-Deception
Unmasked (2001). In that chapter, Mele does describe the doxastic
and strategic paradoxes at considerable length, but the two statements
below are the closest he comes to arguing directly that they should be
regarded as prima-facie barriers to strong models of self-deception:
Some theorists take this to entail that, at some time, self-deceivers both
believe that p and believe that not-p (e.g., Kipp, 1980, p. 309). And, it is
claimed, this is not a possible state of mind: the very nature of belief
precludes one’s simultaneously believing that p is true and believing that
p is false. Thus, we have a static puzzle about self-deception: self-
deception, according to the view at issue, requires being in an impossible
state of mind.
. . . it is hard to imagine how one person can deceive another into
believing that p if the latter person knows exactly what the former is up
to, and it is difficult to see how the trick can be any easier when the
intending deceiver and the intended victim are the same person.68
The second cited passage merely makes the weak claim that “it is hard
to imagine” how the agency condition could be satisfied. As it stands,
this is not quite an argument—lots of things that are hard to imagine
turn out to be true.

66
Eric Funkhouser, “Do the Self-Deceived Get What they Want?,” Pacific Philo-
sophical Quarterly, 86/3 (2005), 295–312. The answer to his title question is “no,”
incidentally. According to Funkhouser, self-deceivers believe that not-p, want to
believe that p, and so form two false, second-order beliefs: that they do not believe
not-p and that they do believe p. But they don’t get what they want, because they don’t
actually form a false, first-order belief that p.
67
Funkhouser, “Do the Self-Deceived Get What they Want?,” 298.
68
Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked, 6–7, 8. It is correct, though somewhat unfair, to
say that these statements are the closest Mele comes to arguing directly against strong
self-deception. Mele believes that his own model is superior to strong models because
his model is a more parsimonious explanation of self-deception, and so as an
inference to the best explanation, his simpler model is better. Thus, he sees little
need to argue against strong self-deception directly (17).
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 175
On the other hand, the first passage does make an argument, but
not in Mele’s own voice. It alleges that “it is claimed” by “some
theorists” that the dual-belief condition describes an impossible
state of mind.69 Accordingly, someone who does not immediately
agree that contradictory believing is paradoxical, and who innocently
traces Funkhouser’s citation back to its source, might still be per-
plexed.
If he were particularly curious, he might notice that Mele himself
cites David Kipp (1980) as one of the theorists who holds this view,
and so turn to Kipp for further explanation. Here his search would
end, for Kipp offers as clear a statement as anyone could ever want
about why strong self-deception is paradoxical. On the page cited by
Mele, Kipp writes:
The literalist view thus seems to require that the self-deceiver should be
simultaneously deceiver and deceived. This, in turn, seems to require
that two mutually opaque, autonomously thinking and willing con-
sciousnesses should exist within the soul of the self-deceiver, yet that
these consciousnesses should also exist within a unified consciousness
that grounds the self-deceiver’s identity as a self.70
What a leap! According to Kipp, if a self-deceiver believes both p and
not-p, he must be the bearer of “two mutually opaque, autonomously
thinking and willing consciousnesses.” That is indeed a very high
theoretical price to pay for affirming the dual belief-condition. But
why does Kipp think that such an exorbitant price must be paid? He
continues directly:
What all of this requires, of course, is that consciousness should not be
exactly what, in my view, it most inexorably shows itself to be, namely,
something whose “parts” are by nature consubstantially unified in a
state of perpetually holistic self-transparency.71

69
Interestingly, throughout his many publications on self-deception, Mele is very
careful not to make this claim in his own voice. In fact, he occasionally makes the
opposite claim: “Again, I have not claimed that simultaneously believing that p and
believing that not-p is conceptually or psychologically impossible” (Self-Deception
Unmasked, 132 n. 3); “I have no wish to claim that it is impossible for an agent to
believe that p while also believing that not-p. My claim, to be substantiated further, is
that there is no explanatory need to postulate such beliefs” (Alfred R. Mele, “Real Self-
Deception,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20 (1997), 98).
70
Kipp, “On Self-Deception,” 309.
71
My emphasis. Naturally, Kipp’s very next sentence begins “There is no possibil-
ity of arguing this complex issue here” (309).
176 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
Kipp thinks that a self-deceiver can satisfy the dual-belief condition
only if he has two separate, autonomous centers of consciousness. He
holds this view because he also thinks that any single center of
consciousness is perfectly self-transparent.
This is the argument that grounds Kipp’s own denial of the dual-
belief condition, and therefore—whether Mele would explicitly assent
to it or not—it is also the argument that objectively grounds Mele’s
own allegation, citing Kipp, that strong self-deception is not a pos-
sible state of mind. And, finally, this argument also grounds Fun-
khouser’s breezy assertion, citing Mele, that “well-known paradoxes
arise when self-deception is viewed on the model of interpersonal
deception.” The “well-known paradoxes” of self-deception turn out to
be paradoxical only on the assumption that consciousness is “by
nature consubstantially unified in a state of perpetually holistic self-
transparency.” If this assumption is rejected—as it surely must be—
then the claim that strong self-deception is highly paradoxical has
been given no basis in argument, despite a chain of citations that
stretches back for twenty-five years.

CONCLUSION: PASCAL CONTRA

SELF-TRANSPARENCY

If my study of analytic philosophy on self-deception is correct, then the

argument that lying to oneself is “paradoxical” depends on some very
implausible claims about human awareness. By contrast, the argument
of Chapters 1 through 4—indeed, even the briefest resume of Pascal’s
thought—suffices to show that he thoroughly rejects the assumption
that we are transparent to ourselves. Pascal indicts the “nullity of our
own being” (L806/S653) and calls the seat of our subjectivity “hollow
and foul” (L139/S171). Far from being transparent to ourselves, we
cannot even be sure whether we are asleep or awake (L131/S164). We
are “always torn by inner divisions and contradictions” (L621/S514).
To the extent that Pascal’s description of the human subject is apt, it
refutes analytic assumptions about mental self-transparency.
Instead, in the Pensées, self-knowledge is not simply a matter of
introspection, or directing one’s conscious awareness towards one’s
own mental life. Self-knowledge is always a theological project. To
 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception 177
know ourselves is to know ourselves as fallen and in need of redemp-
tion. “Man’s true nature, his true good, true virtue, and true religion
are things that cannot be known separately” (L393/S12). “Not only do
we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves
through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus
Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of
our life or our death, of God or of ourselves” (L417/S36). The only
self-knowledge worth having is that “we are wretched, corrupt, sep-
arated from God, but redeemed by Christ” (L431/S683). Until we are
redeemed by Christ, we remain fallen and corrupt, internally and
externally wracked by the consequences of the Fall. Internally, our
wills are divided against themselves and caught up in the perpetual
cycle of unsatisfied desire. Our rational faculties are also fallen. We
are still able to reason deductively, but calculative reason must start
from true premises in order to succeed, and both sides of a contra-
diction often seem true to us (L177/S208). The faculty of the imagin-
ation, which is not oriented toward truth, is so powerful that it has set
up a “second nature” in us (L44/S78). Externally, we are all members
of a social world that systematically conditions us to eschew truth.
The political order is founded on mechanisms of deception that
reproduce themselves by becoming customary and natural. Human
social interactions are often little more than mutual collusions in
pretense, hypocrisy, and self-deception. Even my subjective sense of
self is doubly imaginary, my fantasy about the way other people think
about me. In short, according to Pascal, we are not isolated, self-
transparent, maximally-rational minds. We are duplicitous subjects
thrown into a duplicitous world. It is therefore not surprising that
we can lie to ourselves. It would be surprising if we could not. “We
are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and
disguise ourselves from ourselves” (L655/S539). Or again: “this is not
the home of truth; it wanders unrecognized among men” (L840/S428).
Pascal’s theological anthropology therefore provides a necessary
corrective to contemporary analytic philosophy on self-deception. He
teaches us that a properly robust account of self-deception should not
merely be a story about what happens in the isolated mind of the
individual self-deceiver. Rather, it must also be a story about moral
subjectivity and the myriad influences that shape people into moral
agents capable of deceiving themselves. Moreover, that story must
also be about the wider world. Everyone will already have acquired
the skills of deception and self-deception, because one must acquire
178 On Lying to Oneself: Analytic Philosophy on Self-Deception
exactly these skills in order to become a functioning member of
society. Having been habituated into patterns of deception, he will
have acquired the skill of persistently refusing to attend to his own
beliefs and intentions, and therefore he will be able to lie to himself.
Moreover, insofar as he does lie to himself, it is highly likely that
he also lies to other people, and contributes to their self-deception,
thereby reproducing and reinforcing the reign of duplicity into which
we are all born.
 6

A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception:

Morally Culpable Self-Persuasion

In this chapter I present my own Pascalian model of sin as self-decep-

tion by developing an account of morally culpable self-persuasion.
Morally culpable self-persuasion is a form of strong self-deception,
of lying to oneself. (I use the terms “self-deception,” “immoral self-
deception,” and “sinful self-deception” more-or-less interchangeably, to
mean lying to oneself.) Compared to other accounts, my Pascalian
model treats self-deception more like an ongoing activity than a mental
state. Narrowly, I explain how a person can intentionally cultivate false
beliefs. More broadly, I argue that, because the immoral self-deceiver
interprets himself and his moral situation falsely, he intentionally crafts
a false self, as discussed in Chapter 3. The narrow and broad aspects of
immoral self-deception reinforce one another. A person falsely inter-
prets himself when he embraces a relatively comprehensive story about
himself and his activities as a moral agent. Yet embracing such a story
also implies embracing various false beliefs about his moral situation,
because an interpretation of oneself is always also an interpretation of
the world in which one acts. So, for example, when a self-deceptive thief
falsely interprets his moral situation, he falsely interprets his own
specific acts of thievery, but he may also falsely interpret the chain of
events leading up to them and following from them. I show that an
immoral self-deceiver can first believe a true interpretation of his
situation, then persuade himself to believe a false interpretation, and
yet still continue to believe the true interpretation.
My argument is Pascalian throughout. The basic claim is that the
self-deceiver can avow his self-deceptive activity, but he habitually
does not, not even to himself. The picture of human agency described
180 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
by Pascal’s wager shows how this is possible. Sinful self-deception
begins in the imagination, as the self-deceiver is spontaneously pre-
sented with an array of different interpretations of his moral situ-
ation. In the terminology that I develop below, he then accepts a false
interpretation, and persuades himself that it is true with rhetorical
and behavioral techniques. He engages in a persuasive program of
internal rhetoric, and he acts as if his favored interpretation is true.
This project of self-persuasion mechanically causes him to believe his
favored, false interpretation. This project of sinful self-deception is
also the project of constructing the false self, the Pascalian moi. The
self-deceiver creates a false self and projects it into the world.

LYING TO ONESELF AS A FORM OF CULPABLE

SELF-PERSUASION

I emphasize that sinful self-deception is “culpable” self-persuasion. It

is an open question whether we are generally culpable for our (un-
avoidable) participation in the “inherited” duplicity that characterizes
a fallen world. Yet we are certainly culpable for our personal projects
of self-deception. Sinful self-deceivers pursue their projects in order
to persist in, or avoid taking responsibility for, their immoral activ-
ities, and throughout their projects, they continue to deceive them-
selves and so remain complicit in those activities. Although I do not
equate self-persuasion per se with self-deception, I argue that the
techniques and habits that make self-persuasion possible also make
lying to oneself possible.
There are other forms of self-deception besides lying to oneself,
and many of those forms are surely also sinful. Suppose a sinner first
recognizes the truth about his moral culpability (he believes that p),
but then persuades himself to believe that he is blameless (and so
comes to believe that not-p), but does not continue believing that he is
culpable (and so loses his belief that p). He would not have contra-
dictory beliefs at any point, but his self-deception would still be sinful
because he has still rejected the truth about himself and his projects.
His turn away from truth is itself sinful—indeed, it is the essence of
sin. Similarly, suppose the sinner does not ever form the false belief
that not-p, but merely persistently diverts his attention from his true
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 181
belief that p so that he can act on the basis of not-p. This still-weaker
project of self-deception remains sinful—and for the same reason: it
features an intentional rejection of the truth.
My Pascalian account of self-deception as self-persuasion can also
explain these weaker forms. I focus on lying to oneself, the strongest
form of self-deception, because, following Pascal, I believe that it is a
common phenomenon, especially in the moral life. I hold that lying to
oneself is common precisely because—in contrast with many con-
temporary philosophers—I do not regard it as especially paradoxical.
On the other hand, a philosopher who regards lying to oneself as
extremely paradoxical is more likely to hold that it is also very
uncommon. Such a philosopher has an incentive to seek an account
of self-deception that does not require the self-deceiver to lie to
himself. I have no such incentive. Moreover, someone who holds
that lying to oneself is very uncommon also faces certain theoretical
demands. She must explain away the signs of psychic tension and
conflicting behavior that we associate with self-deceivers: pangs of
conscience, vacillation, avoidance, and so on. She must attribute these
behaviors to something other than the self-deceiver’s contradictory
beliefs and intentions. I face no similar theoretical demands, because
I hold that lying to oneself is common.
I treat lying to oneself as a form of self-persuasion. Self-persuasion
itself need not be regarded as inherently exotic or paradoxical.
Indeed, in a weak sense, it can even be equated with the activity of
interpreting. To say that I persuade myself that Hector is the main
character of the Iliad is just to say that as a result of interpreting the
poem—whatever that involves—I come to believe that Hector is its
main character. This is conceptually possible even if, at the outset,
I firmly believe that Achilles holds this honor. In this sense, self-
persuasion is simply the project of thinking about a problem and
deliberating about it with the goal of reaching a state of subjective
satisfaction with a possible solution. Of course, the self-persuasion
that characterizes self-deception cannot be exactly like this, since
one cannot concurrently avow a project of self-deception, and the
interpreter in the Iliad example can concurrently avow his interpretive
activity. This difference raises the specter of the doxastic and strategic
paradoxes (as discussed in the previous chapter). To avoid them,
I must also explain how a self-deceiver can engage in goal-directed
behavior (e.g. intentionally cultivating false beliefs) without ever
attending to his operative goal. I do address this issue, but only after
182 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
presenting the account of self-persuasion. As a result, it may initially
seem that my account renders self-persuasion too explicit and con-
scious to capture the distinctive phenomenon of self-deception.

PERSUASION, REASON, RATIONALIZATION

Before discussing self-persuasion in detail, I would like to say a bit

more about persuasion as such, and how Pascal understands it.
According to his contemporary, Antoine Arnauld, Pascal “knew as
much about true rhetoric as anyone has ever known.”1 It is certainly
the case that his two most famous works, the Provincial Letters and the
Pensées, are properly regarded as masterpieces of persuasive writing.2
He even wrote a short—though unfinished and unpublished—treatise
called “The Art of Persuasion.” It therefore makes sense to look at
what Pascal has to say about persuasion and belief-formation. As
discussed previously, he argues that we are more easily persuaded by
attractiveness than by truth. As a result, our reasoning is often ration-
alization: “every man is almost always led to believe not through proof
but through that which is attractive . . . we believe almost only in the
things we like.”3
Because each person has a different set of desires, and because
successful persuasion depends on the manipulation of those desires,
successful persuasion is relative to the person to be persuaded. We are
more likely to believe claims that reinforce what we already believe,
because our beliefs have already been shaped by our disordered
desires and loves.
[When we wish to persuade someone,] we must take into consideration
the person with whom we are concerned, of whom we know the mind
and heart, the principles admitted, and the things loved; and then we
must take note, in the matter concerned, the rapport it has with

1
Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking (1662–83), tr. Jill
Vance Buroker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 208 (3.20.6).
2
There are two book-length works in English that discuss Pascal’s use of rhetorical
techniques: Erec Koch, Pascal and Rhetoric: Figural and Persuasive Language in the
Scientific Treatises, the Provinciales and the Pensées (Charlottesville, Va.: Rockwood
Press, 1997); Patricia Topliss, The Rhetoric of Pascal: A Study of his Art of Persuasion
in the ‘Provinciales’ and the ‘Pensées’ (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1966).
3
“The Art of Persuasion,” ed. Levi, 193.
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 183
admitted truths or of the objects of delight through the charms we
attribute to them.4
Self-persuasion is not excepted from the general logic of persuasion.
An account of self-deception as self-persuasion should not begin
with the assumption that a person is a perfectly rational agent and
then treat any departure from perfect rationality as something excep-
tional that must be explained. When we reason with ourselves, our
reasoning is still influenced by desire and disordered love. A long
philosophical tradition claims otherwise, however, and treats private
deliberation as a paradigm case of logical reasoning. On this picture, a
person deliberating alone would not need to engage in any special
pleading to advance a particular point of view, and would consider all
relevant arguments solely on their merits. He would treat himself as
an ideal-typical representative of the universal audience of human
minds and address himself only with objectively rational arguments.5
Put another way, the “secrecy of self-deliberation seems to guarantee
its value and sincerity.”6 Pascal shows why this picture is mistaken.
In fact, a person does not hold himself to especially elevated standards
of argumentation—quite the opposite, it seems. When a person delib-
erates, he may indeed imagine that he is an ideal representative of
the universal audience, and he may equate his own feelings of subject-
ive certainty with objective validity. But this imaginary projection is
just that—imaginary. Far from being a genuine exemplar of universal
rationality, the “self” that one addresses in private deliberation is
simply another false self, spun out of disordered love and constructed
precisely because it is ideally persuadable. In more mundane termin-
ology: on Pascal’s understanding, putatively rational arguments
directed at oneself are usually rationalizations intended to satisfy
one’s own desires.7

4
“The Art of Persuasion,” ed. Levi, 195.
5
Charles M. Natoli, Fire in the Dark: Essays on Pascal’s Pensées and Provinciales
(Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 81. I should be clear that Natoli
is not endorsing this tradition.
6
Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on
Argumentation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971), 41. Again,
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are critical of this tradition, and are not defending it.
They cite Arthur Schopenhauer and J. S. Mill as clear proponents of the view they
attack.
7
Indeed, Pascal would say that, apart from faith, a person cannot really constitute
himself as an ideal exemplar of universal rationality because this is precisely to adopt
184 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
None of this entails that there is no such thing as objective validity,
nor that it is impossible to follow the proper canons of rationality.
Pascal simply makes the empirical observation that people believe
that they follow the canons of rationality even when they do not, and
so their subjective certainty seems like objective validity even when it
is not. To be sure, these observations raise interesting meta-epistemo-
logical questions about how we can know that we know, but it is not
necessary to address such questions in this inquiry.

THE STEPS OF SELF-PERSUASION

This excursus into Pascal’s ideas about persuasion sets the stage for
the discussion of self-deception that follows. In the rest of this
chapter, I advance the claim that the self-deceiver knows the truth
but persuades himself that a false interpretation of his moral situation
is true.8 Even when the specific techniques of persuasion that he uses
on himself are not exactly the same as those he would use on other
people, the underlying dynamics are the same. Like everyone else, a
self-deceiver is a fallible person who often reasons poorly and is
always vulnerable to a variety of non-rational pressures and emo-
tional appeals. These pressures and appeals work on him mechanic-
ally, as it were, even when it is he himself who brings them to bear.

Taking the Imagination for the Heart

Immoral self-deception begins as a conflict between the imagination
and the heart, the seat of conscience. According to Pascal, “Men often
take their imagination for their heart” (L975/S739). Using the termin-
ology I discussed in Chapter 4, this means that we often mistake the
fantaisies of the imagination for the veridical sentiments of the heart.
Accurate moral reasoning requires that our spontaneous insights are
truthful, but they can seem truthful even when they are not.9 From

God’s own point of view. Only when we are joined to God in faith is true objectivity
possible, according to Pascal.
8
I will address the specter of the doxastic and strategic paradoxes in due course.
9
“All our reasoning comes down to surrendering to sentiment. But fantaisie is like
and also unlike sentiment, so that we cannot distinguish between these two opposites.
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 185
the subjective point of view, it can be difficult to distinguish between
the two, since a truthful sentiment and a false fantaisie both seem
veridical. When one tries to distinguish between them, one has
recourse only to reasoning, which itself depends on initial principles
produced by sentiment, and so remains vulnerable to the persuasive
power of imaginative fantasy.
A more concrete example of what I mean might be helpful. Con-
sider the case of Tom, a businessman who is out to defraud his
clients:10
Tom is an employee for a large corporation involved in a systematic and
illegal price-fixing scheme. He knows about the scheme and has himself
participated in illegal activity, but he deceives himself about his own
moral culpability, and comes to believe that he has done nothing wrong.
Spurred in part by greed and in part by a vague fear of taking a stand
against his colleagues, he struggles to believe that his actions are per-
missible. He tells himself that consumers actually benefit from the
price-fixing scheme because it helps stabilize the market and protects
it from vacillations caused by cut-throat competition. He makes every
effort to talk, think, and act confidently as he carries out his part at
secret meetings; he even reassures a colleague who expresses qualms
about the activities. He does much the same with his own qualms, which
occasionally bring with them a deflating awareness that his self-pretense
is a charade. He often boosts his confidence by imagining how good
things will be for him when the scheme yields its expected financial
windfall. Over time, Tom actually succeeds in convincing himself that his
actions, while “technically illegal,” are not wrong or unethical. Yes, a law
was being broken, but it was a bad law and it hurt business. Participants
in the price-fixing scheme were not criminals out to gain personal
advantage, they were serving the interests of the shareholders. Tom
would not have said this about other white-collar criminals, and his
evaluation of his involvement in the conspiracy is surprisingly at odds
with his general sensitivity in moral and religious matters. His self-
deception arose as an effort to silence an otherwise anguished conscience.

One person says that my sentiment is mere fantaisie, another that his fantaisie
is sentiment. We should have a rule. Reason is available but can be bent in any
direction . . . . And so there is no rule” (L530/S455).
10
This example is lightly adapted from Michael W. Martin. Most of the specific
words and phrases in this description come directly from his Self-Deception and
Morality, 6–9. I combined several of Martin’s examples into a single case. I use this
example instead of Nicholas Bulstrode (as in Ch. 3) because I want to be able to
illustrate my central claims by making up further details as needed.
186 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
On my Pascalian account, when Tom is initially presented with the
opportunity to participate in the scheme, he spontaneously forms a
veridical sentiment—he might experience it as a “pang of conscience”—
that his participation would be wrong because the scheme is illegal and
immoral. He believes this spontaneous insight, because sentiments
are subjectively self-certifying. At the same time, his deceptive and
socially formed imagination produces a range of false, exculpatory,
and self-serving fantasies. These imaginative fantasies suggest ways in
which his participation in the scheme would be licit after all, and
function as temptations that incite him spontaneously to reinterpret
his own engagements. This is the first stage of his project of immoral
self-deception.

Accepting a False Interpretation

The next stage of immoral self-deception is acceptance. When a
person embraces or otherwise identifies himself with a particular
interpretation of his moral situation he accepts that interpretation.
The idea that acceptance is an epistemic category distinct from belief
has a fine philosophical pedigree. As I discuss below, it plays an
important part in Pascal’s famous wager argument. But, for the sake
of economy, rather than exegetically teasing out the material that
I need from Pascal, I turn to two contemporary analytic philosophers,
L. Jonathan Cohen and Robert Stalnaker.
Cohen and Stalnaker do not draw the distinction between belief
and acceptance in exactly the same way, but for my own modest
purposes, their accounts are complementary. On both, acceptance is
voluntary but belief is involuntary. Any account of the nature of belief
is philosophically controversial, and I want to proceed with a min-
imum of controversial commitments. So, for the present purposes,
I fully endorse only their claim that acceptance is different from
belief—however belief is finally understood—and that acceptance is
voluntary.
According to Cohen, to accept that p is “to have or adopt a policy of
deeming, positing, or postulating that p—that is, of going along with
that proposition . . . as a premise in some or all contexts for one’s own
and others’ proofs, argumentations, inferences, deliberations, etc.” By
contrast, belief that p is “a disposition to feel it true that p, whether or
not one goes along with the proposition as a premise.” Acceptance
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 187
executes a choice, and so one answers the question whether one
accepts that p by reporting a decision. On the other hand, one
answers the question whether one believes that p by introspecting
and reporting what one is “disposed to feel about the matter.”11 For
his part, Stalnaker allows that the act of acceptance can be less than
fully explicit: “To accept a proposition is to treat it as a true propos-
ition in one way or another—to ignore, for the moment at least, the
possibility that it is false. One may do this . . . more or less tentatively,
more or less self-consciously, with more or less justification, and with
more or less feeling of commitment.”12 He also allows that acceptance
can have a social dimension, can be momentary, and can be “com-
partmentalized.”13 Belief and acceptance typically go together, but
need not. A lawyer can accept that his client is innocent, for instance,
and organize a defense around this assumption, while believing all
along that he is guilty.
I said earlier that the self-deceiver spontaneously seizes on a false
interpretation. This can be understood as equivalent to the claim that
the self-deceiver begins by accepting a false interpretation, which he
then uses as the basis for his reasoning and acting. On this under-
standing, in which accepting an interpretation means more than
merely entertaining it, even the bare act of acceptance is already
sinful, since it features an intentional rejection of the truth. A self-
deceiver would be culpable solely for accepting the false interpret-
ation, since he also knows the true interpretation of his moral

11
These quotations are all from L. Jonathan Cohen, “Belief and Acceptance,”
Mind, 98 (1989), 368. In a book based on this article, Cohen presents an analysis of
self-deception in which the self-deceiver believes p and accepts, but does not believe,
not-p. See L. Jonathan Cohen, An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (New York: OUP,
1992), 133–60. In contrast to Cohen, I argue that the self-deceiver does fully believe
not-p (or p, as the case may be) because, over time, the act of accepting a proposition is
highly likely to cause him to believe it. This, I take it, is one of the lessons of Pascal’s
account of habituation.
12
Robert Stalnaker, Inquiry (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), 79.
13
On the first point: “In a cooperative inquiry, a dialogue or a debate, what we
accept may be more important than what I accept. It is our common beliefs and
assumptions, or what we take to be our common beliefs and assumptions.” On the
second and third points: a person “may accept a proposition for a moment without
the expectation that he will continue to accept it for very long” and may “accept
something in one context while rejecting it or suspending judgment in another. There
need be no conflict that must be resolved when the difference is noticed, and he need
not change his mind when he moves from one context to the other.” Stalnaker,
Inquiry, 80–1.
188 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
situation. Accepting the false interpretation, even without fully be-
lieving it, would already imply that the self-deceiver had made a
decision to avoid his moral responsibility.
Unlike non self-deceptive forms of acceptance, however, the im-
moral self-deceiver accepts the false interpretation because the true
interpretation is unwelcome and because he wants to believe the false
interpretation. It follows that his act of accepting is not an isolated
mental act. When Tom the white-collar criminal accepts that his
activity is licit, he also “makes every effort to talk, think, and act
confidently as he carries out his part at secret meetings.” In other
words, when he accepts the false interpretation, he also adopts the
patterns of thought and action of a person who genuinely believes in
it. I discuss these patterns below, under the headings of “internal
rhetoric” and “acting-as-if, ” respectively.

Internal Rhetoric
It is unproblematic to assert that there is such a phenomenon as self-
directed interior speech. It is somewhat more problematic to treat
self-talk as a genuine instrument of self-persuasion, yet we do easily
use expressions like “I talked myself into it.” This is a figure of speech,
to be sure, but it is nonetheless true that sometimes we do talk
ourselves into things, and that “I talked myself into it” is more than
just an oblique way of saying, “I made up my mind.”14 It is reasonable
to ask how this process works. I focus on self-talk because it is the
paradigm case of the broader phenomenon of internal rhetoric. By
self-talk, I mean explicit, inwardly directed speech acts. Internal
rhetoric does not always take this form. People do not always think
in words. They also call up images, feelings, vague impressions, and so
forth. All of these can have persuasive force.15 When a person thinks

14
See Jean Nienkamp, Internal Rhetorics: Toward a History and Theory of Self
Persuasion (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001).
15
According to Nienkamp mental activity is by nature rhetorical because thought
itself has “persuasive, hortatory, or sermonic” functions (Internal Rhetorics, p. ix).
Similarly, according to Kenneth Burke, insofar as thought is semiotic, it is rhetorical.
Rhetoric “is rooted in an essential function of language itself . . . the use of language as
a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to
symbols.” Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1969), 43. Burke’s claim that human beings respond to symbols
“by nature” ties in nicely with Pascal’s suggestion that speech is inherently persuasive
(see fragments L99/S132 and L814/S658).
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 189
about some matter with the goal (implicit or explicit) of persuading
himself, he engages in internal rhetoric. In a fairly literal sense, the
self-deceiver talks himself into believing a false interpretation.
An interesting fragment from the Pensées presents the important
features of self-talk and hints at how it can persuade:
Why does a lame person not annoy us, but a lame mind does? Because a
lame person recognizes that we are walking straight, whereas a lame
mind says that it is we who are limping . . .
So, being certain only to the extent that we see with all our vision, it
puts us into suspense and surprises us when another sees the opposite
despite his vision, and still more so when a thousand others deride our
choice. For we must prefer our own lights to those of so many others,
and this is daring and difficult . . .
Man is so made that, by virtue of telling him he is a fool, he believes it.
And by virtue of telling it to ourselves, we make ourselves believe it. For
man alone holds an internal conversation with himself, which it is
important to keep well in check. Evil communications corrupt good
manners [1 Cor. 15: 33]. We must maintain silence as much as possible
and talk with ourselves only of God, whom we know to be the truth, and
in this way convince ourselves of it (L98–9/S132; tr. Ariew)
Pascal asserts that, as a matter of fact, self-talk can end in self-
persuasion (“by virtue of telling it to ourselves, we make ourselves
believe it”). It is also interesting that Pascal calls this an interior
“conversation,” which implies multiple partners, and not an interior
monologue, which implies a single speaker.
On my reading, the fragment also makes three important points
about how the process of self-persuasion works. First, it includes an
exhortation from Pascal implying that we can control our self-talk to
some extent (“We must maintain silence as much as possible and talk
with ourselves only of God, whom we know to be the truth, and in
this way convince ourselves of it”). Second, it recognizes that we talk
to ourselves in the face of normative pressure exerted by external
speech from other people. Finally, it assumes that self-talk presents
itself as a “conversation” among multiple interior voices. I will discuss
each of these and how they bear on immoral self-deception.
First, because we can control our self-talk to some extent, we can
use it to intervene in the process of belief-formation. One way we can
do this is by directing our attention: we can use inner speech to
distract ourselves from unpleasant thoughts and direct our focus
toward pleasant ones. As Pascal recognizes, “Ordinary people have
190 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
the ability not to think about things they do not want to think about”
(L815/S659; see also L70/S104, L133/S166, L889/S445).16 Many con-
temporary philosophers note that selective attention to external evi-
dence plays a role in self-deception. My point here is that self-talk is
itself a form of attention that has its own persuasive power. If a person
frequently cultivates thoughts and imaginative fantasies that he is an
especially honest person, he will soon believe that he is such a person,
even if he genuinely is not. This will happen naturally, almost auto-
matically.
It also seems possible to use self-talk to persuade oneself of some-
thing that one knows to be false. Take the case of Tom, the white-
collar criminal. Suppose that he knowingly does something illegal and
unethical. To avoid this knowledge, he focuses intensely on a highly
tendentious interpretation of his actions under which the law itself is
“illegal” because it violates the spirit of some obscure regulation; on
this interpretation he is a moral hero for exposing its injustice.
Whenever he can, he rehearses this interpretation to himself sotto
voce. Over time, he comes to believe it. If this seems like a plausible
scenario, then we have a case where Tom talks himself into believing
something that he initially knew to be false.17
Second, this fragment shows that it is a mistake to isolate internal
rhetoric from the wider project of persuading others and being
persuaded by them. We always talk to ourselves in the face of
normative pressure exerted on us by other people. Pascal rightly
notes that it is difficult to “prefer our own lights” when “a thousand
others deride our choice.” Indeed, one might say that it is so difficult
that it rarely happens at all. Surely it is far more common to internal-
ize the voices of one’s peers and so begin to think as they think. It is
easy to see how this process can yield a system of mutual complicity
in deception and self-deception, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. It is
even easy to see how such a project could be intentional. For example,
Tom wishes to avoid confronting his immoral behavior, and so he
initially pretends to his co-workers that all is well and that their firm
is on the level; they pretend likewise to him and in the end, they all

16
Of course, he also recognizes the opposite, that sometimes unwelcome thoughts
seem to wash over us (L542/S459, L656/S540, L395/S14).
17
Talking oneself into something that one knows is false is not necessarily a case of
self-deception, on my definition, because it could simply be a case of changing one’s
mind and believing differently.
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 191
believe each other. They tacitly work together to replace their internal
voices of criticism with voices of collaboration. In a way, such a
project is merely another form of selective attention. Of course, it
is not the case that all of Tom’s colleagues always ratify his false
interpretations. So he sometimes seeks out just those colleagues who
will. It is impossible to specify general rules about how an immoral
self-deceiver enlists other people in his project of self-deception. This
is just to say again that self-deception must be studied in its particu-
lars, and in its context.
Third, the claim that we internalize the voices of our peers presents
a way of understanding the claim that we hold an interior “conversa-
tion” with ourselves. The speakers, and the audience, in this conver-
sation are the social voices that we have internalized. These voices
comprise what rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke calls a “parliament,
with conflicting interests.”18 If the self is a parliament of conflicting
interests, then self-persuasion is also a form of persuading others,
even if those “others” are only the social voices one has internalized.
This picture of the self offers a way of understanding the goal of the
immoral self-deceiver. Some of the self-deceiver’s inner critics will
support his self-deceptive project and some will impede it. To per-
suade himself that a false interpretation is true, he must vindicate the
former and silence the latter.
Here it is important to note again that persuasion, including self-
persuasion, is always particular. The self-deceiver does not have to
meet universal, objectively valid standards of rational proof in order
to persuade himself. He only has to satisfy his inner critics. And, of
course, those critics are not real people at all but internalized voices
filtered through his own self-serving imagination. In other words, the
burden of proof may be quite low. Nevertheless, the self-deceiver
allows himself to think that, because he has defeated his inner critics,
he has reached the truth of the matter. Thus, in the end, the project of
self-persuasion works just like any project of persuasion: a person
addresses himself with a mix of argument, rationalization, emotional
appeals, and so forth. It is a truism that rigorous argument is not the
only means of persuading others—and, in fact, rarely persuades at all.
There is little reason to think internal rhetoric differs from external
rhetoric in this regard.

18
Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 38.
192 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
I should say that by “voices,” and “inner critics,” I mean to describe
a perfectly ordinary phenomenon. Among the store of human cap-
acities is the capacity to imagine alternative points of view and talk to
ourselves from those imagined perspectives.19 This can be an auto-
matic process, but it can also be consciously directed. The self-
deceiver is one person, a unified agent who (like all of us) has
internalized a multiplicity of voices, roles, and identities which
make competing claims on him. He has the further capacity (as we
all do) to accept some elements of this multiplicity and reject others.
When he deceives himself, he accepts and acts on false interpret-
ations, and over the course of time persuades himself that they are
true.
This picture of internal rhetoric is not especially mysterious. To be
sure, it is natural to ask: among the cacophony of one’s internalized
voices, which voice may be regarded as “one’s own” voice? Although
the question is natural, I do not believe that it requires a detailed
answer. Again, the relevant picture is that of a single person deliber-
ating. My voice—my self—is simply the voice that governs the delib-
eration, chooses among competing interpretations, and decides what
to do. My voice is simply my capacity to do these things. I take it that
this is an easily recognizable phenomenon. If pressed to say more,
I would say that a person’s own-most voice is the putative voice of
universal reason—“putative” because subjectively internalized in the
sense discussed above. But I hope that I am not so pressed, and that
the picture as it stands is sufficiently clear.
Another objection is not so easily dismissed. Self-persuasion seems
ordinary and unproblematic only when a person is genuinely unsure
of the truth or of what to do. It is hard to see how immoral self-
deception can be assimilated to self-persuasion without reinstating
the doxastic and strategic paradoxes in an especially virulent form.
How can the self-deceiver succeed in persuading his inner critics
when he knows that they speak the truth? And how can he do this
intentionally without being undermined by his own knowledge?
I would like to defer these questions for a bit longer. Before answering
them, I will add the final component to the model of immoral self-
deception as self-persuasion by turning to Pascal’s wager, and his
claim that “acting as if” one believes (in God, for Pascal) can induce

19
Here I mean to recall Pascal’s ideas about the false self, which is constructed, in
part, by imagining oneself from the point of view of another (L806/S653).
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 193
belief mechanically. I wish to connect this account to my treatment of
acceptance and internal rhetoric. Accepting a false interpretation,
engaging in internal rhetoric about it, and “acting as if ” it is true,
while conceptually distinct behaviors, are fused together in a single
process that can easily lead to self-deception.

Acting-As-If (The Wager)

My treatment of acceptance and internal rhetoric recalls Pascal’s
famous wager fragment (L418/S680). On typical readings of the
wager, Pascal uses a probabilistic argument to advance the claim
that belief in God is rational, even if one cannot settle the question
whether God exists. The target of this argument is convinced that
belief in God is practically rational, but he remains unable to believe
by fiat. In response, the fragment’s Christian interlocutor tells the
unbeliever that he should adopt a policy of acting as if he believed,
because eventually this will make him truly believe.
I turn to the wager because it clearly reveals the important dynam-
ics of self-persuasion. Since, on my account, immoral self-deception is
a form of self-persuasion, the wager therefore also reveals the import-
ant dynamics of immoral self-deception. Not all self-persuasion is
self-deception, however, and I do not claim that the unbeliever in the
wager fragment deceives himself into believing in God. To be sure,
many philosophers do treat the wager as a paradigm case of a certain
form of self-deception. From Pascal’s own point of view, it certainly is
not—one can only regard the wager as a case of self-deception if one
assumes that God does not exist. (In any event, it is clear that the
unbeliever in the wager does not meet my own criteria of immoral
self-deception because he does not meet the dual-belief condition.)
The bulk of the philosophical attention paid to the wager fragment
focuses not on self-deception but on its probabilistic arguments.
However philosophically fruitful these arguments are, however,
I have argued elsewhere that fragment L418/S680 also tries to over-
turn the unbeliever’s false self-interpretation and replace it with a
new, Christian, self-interpretation.20 I won’t rehearse that argument

20
“The unbeliever is so attached to ‘noxious pleasure, glory, and good living’
(L418/S680) that he identifies his true self with the body and then falsely concludes
that his bodily existence makes God unintelligible to him.” Wood, “Reason’s Rap-
port,” 530.
194 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
here, except to note that insofar as the wager aims at conversion, by
that very fact, it aims at replacing a false self-interpretation with a
true one. Whatever else it may be, conversion is at least an ongoing
process of inhabiting a new, wholly comprehensive stance, from which
everything, and especially oneself, must be interpreted differently.21
Leaving aside questions about the role of grace in conversion, then, it
makes sense to treat the wager’s account of the ongoing process of
conversion as an ongoing process of self-persuasion.
The wager fragment reveals another important dimension of self-
persuasion, in addition to acceptance and internal rhetoric. As dis-
cussed above, when the self-deceiver accepts a false interpretation of
his moral situation, he must reinforce that interpretation to himself
with internal rhetoric. Yet because a person is never cut off from the
wider world, he must also act as if that false interpretation were true.
In the wager fragment, Pascal establishes a close connection between
accepting a claim and acting as if it is true. It is natural to say that the
unbeliever initially accepts that God exists, even though he does not
yet so believe. This initial moment of acceptance is purely cognitive.
But Pascal then tells the unbeliever to “behave just as if he did believe,
taking holy water, having masses said, and so on.” This program of
habituation is not cognitive. As Pascal notes elsewhere, “habit pro-
vides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed” (L821/
S661).22 Pascal recognizes that, over time, a policy of acting-as-if can
induce belief mechanically, even in the absence of any explicit
thought or deliberation on the part of the agent himself.
If a program of behavioral habituation (acting-as-if) can produce
explicit belief, then belief should follow even more readily when that
program is reinforced by persuasive internal rhetoric. There is no
question that Pascal establishes a close connection between accept-
ance and acting-as-if. He does not explicitly mention self-talk or

21
As Pascal writes in fragment L378/S410: “True conversion consists in self-
annihilation before the universal being.” For a study of Pascal’s understanding of
conversion, see Wetsel, Pascal and Disbelief, 327ff.
22
As Jean Mesnard writes in his commentary on this fragment, “The analysis of
belief and the practice of persuasion could not be unaware of the role of custom, this
automatism of the body. The apologist has to consider it. The opinions of the libertine
have been made habitual, and the weight of these habits impedes him from hearing
the reasons for converting. It is necessary, then, at one stage of the apologetic project,
to cause a change in habit in order to reform the automaton.” Mesnard, Les Pensées de
Pascal, 87.
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 195
internal rhetoric in the wager fragment, but it is likely that self-talk
would play a role in any successful program of auto-conversion. This
is implied by other fragments of the Pensées, especially L99/S132: “We
must maintain silence as much as possible and talk with ourselves
only of God, whom we know to be the truth, and in this way convince
ourselves of it.” In any case, it is hard to see how any program of
acting-as-if could produce its desired effects were it constantly under-
mined by skeptical self-talk.
Accordingly, it makes sense to posit an organic connection
between the elements of self-persuasion: accepting a proposition
entails interpreting one’s experience in light of that proposition,
which entails adopting characteristic behaviors that in turn further
shape one’s dispositions, habits, and beliefs. All three go together:
to accept a proposition just is to interpret relevant situations around
that proposition and so to act as if it were true. Since wager-style
projects of belief cultivation do in fact succeed, it seems to be empiri-
cally true that, in appropriate circumstances, a person can cultivate
a particular belief. It is just a feature of our psychic makeup that we
are persuadable in this way.23

SELF-PERSUASION, SELF-DECEPTION,
AND HUMAN AGENCY

Still, the most important feature of the wager fragment is not its
empirical claim that self-persuasion is possible, but the philosophical
account of human agency that it assumes. Pascal’s program of habitu-
ation can succeed because it exploits the temporal character of self-
hood, persuasion, and intentional agency. Throughout the Pensées,
Pascal makes the important point that the self exists in time and is
always subject to change. Over time, people change fundamentally:
“Time heals pain and quarrels because we change. We are no longer
the same persons; neither the offender nor the offended are themselves
anymore. It is as if one angered a nation and came back to see them
after two generations. They are still Frenchmen, but not the same

23
Of course, citing Pascal does not suffice to establish the empirical claim that a
wager-style project of self-persuasion is possible. But I am not aware of any philoso-
pher or psychologist who disputes this claim.
196 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
ones” (L802/S653). Thought is doubly temporal, according to Pascal.
It occurs in temporal sequence, and is usually about the past or the
future:
We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the
future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it
up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise
that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not
think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are
not and blindly flee the only one that is . . . (L47/S80)
Because internal rhetoric is a form of thought, it too is temporal, and so
it follows that self-persuasion is a temporal process. Once a person
accepts a particular interpretation and then begins to use it as a premise
in his reasoning and a guide for his actions, he will likely come to
believe it. Accepting, reasoning, and acting-as-if all work together to
cause self-persuasion. A process of self-persuasion can succeed because
the self is temporal, and all its actions are temporal. This claim,
however obvious, has important consequences for any account of
self-deception. On most occasions, the immoral self-deceiver does
not instantaneously enter the full-blown state of self-deception, as if
some mental switch were flipped. Rather, he rationalizes his way into
self-deception, actively working to shape his own beliefs over time.24
Because a person changes over time, he can act upon himself to bring
about particular changes, including changes in belief.
In the most important philosophical contribution of the wager frag-
ment, Pascal shows that it is possible to intend a temporally extended
process of self-persuasion. Simply put, executing an intention need not
be a single, instantaneous act. Intentional agency extends through time.
To borrow an example from José Luis Bermúdez, suppose I have a long-
term intention to advance my career. It is natural to suppose that this
long-term intention influences everything I do in my professional life,
and it would be correct to say of any particular such action that
I perform it in order to advance my career.25 Similarly, in the wager,
the unbeliever carries out a long-term intention to believe in God.

24
I do not want to make any conceptual or empirical claims about the typical
duration of such a process, however. For a related claim, that self-deceivers in general
must engage in “reflective reasoning” as a necessary condition of entering the state of
self-deception, see Scott-Kakures, “At ‘Permanent Risk,’ ” 576–603.
25
Bermúdez, “Self-Deception, Intentions, and Contradictory Beliefs,” 314.
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 197
Understanding the temporal character of agency enables us to see
one way that a project of immoral self-deception can be intentional.
Some intentional activities can cause a person to forget, reinterpret, or
otherwise fail to notice the long-term intentions that launched them.
Immoral self-deception is like this. Again, Bermúdez: “As Pascal
pointed out, acquiring a belief is a long-term process . . . It seems
likely that the further on one is in the process, and the more successful
one has been in the process of internalizing the belief, the more likely
one will be to have lost touch with the original motivation.”26 Bearing
in mind that I do not regard the wager scenario as a case of self-
deception, it is still instructive on this point. Presumably, the newly
converted believer doesn’t say: “Yep. I tried to trick myself into
believing in God and it worked. Good for me!” He says something
like: “I thought I was trying to trick myself into believing in God, but
now I see that God really was calling me to conversion all along . . . ”
By virtue of engaging in religious activities and cultivating religious
habits of mind, the convert spontaneously reinterprets the intentions
that guided him. The activity itself—the mechanical behavior of
“acting as if ”—causes these effects. As a natural result of carrying
out his intentions, the believer reaches a point at which he reinter-
prets them. Similarly, we may suppose that by the very fact of
engaging in his project of self-deception, the self-deceiver spontan-
eously reinterprets his own intentions.
Philosophers recognize that this kind of temporally extended self-
deception is possible, but they tend to treat it as something exotic that
is remote from ordinary self-deception. It is often assimilated to the
“self-deception” that results when, for example, a man falsifies his
own diary, confident that at some future date he will have forgotten
that he did so; when he later reads the diary, his “future self ” will have
been deceived by his “present self.” It is true that such cases do not
seem like typical cases of self-deception. But the phenomenon they
trade on—the tendency to ignore, forget, or reinterpret one’s own
intentions as a result of carrying them out—is far from exotic. Here is
a more pedestrian example: John is trying to decide whether to quit
his high-paying job and pursue a career in music. He knows that his
brother, Chris, is highly likely to encourage him to quit, since Chris is
a musician who hates the corporate lifestyle. He also knows that his

26
Bermúdez, “Self-Deception, Intentions, and Contradictory Beliefs,” 314.
198 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
father would give the opposite advice. John chooses to talk to Chris,
aware of the fact he is stacking the deck in favor of quitting. He even
jokes to a friend: “It’s probably true that I want to be talked into
quitting. Otherwise, I’d go to my father instead.” After a long conver-
sation with Chris, John emerges confident that he should quit his job.
He does not attend to the fact that he intentionally sought biased
advice from Chris. When his friend reminds John of his earlier
statement, John sincerely replies: “I may have said that, but I really
went to Chris because he understands what it takes to make it in the
music business. Anyway, he gave me good advice, and that’s what
matters.” In my view, scenarios like this one are plausible and quite
common because people regularly forget or reinterpret their own
intentions.27
In brief, then, this is my account of immoral self-deception as self-
persuasion: having spontaneously imagined a false, but alluring,
interpretation of his moral situation, the self-deceiver accepts that
interpretation, and reinforces it both internally, with self-talk, and
externally, by acting as if it were true. He does all this intentionally, by
forming long-term intentions that guide his behavior even when he
does not explicitly attend to them. As he continues to divert his
attention from his knowledge and his reasons for acting, his attention
policies become habitual, which further enables him to persist in his
project of self-deception.

PARADOX DISPELLED

Still, one might object that, however ordinary, the account of self-
persuasion described above is still too explicit to reflect the distinctive
phenomenon of self-deception. In the wager, for example, a person
explicitly decides to cultivate a specific belief. It seems unlikely that
the self-deceiver ever explicitly decides to cultivate a belief, even if—
like the convert in the wager—he subsequently reinterprets this deci-
sion. We must therefore suppose that at no point in time does the
typical self-deceiver explicitly intend to deceive himself. How, then, is

27
As it stands, this is not a case of self-deception (on my understanding of self-
deception), though it could easily be turned into one. Rather, it is a case in which a
person retroactively reinterprets his own intentions.
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 199
his self-deception intentional? To raise this question is to raise at last
the problem of the doxastic and strategic paradoxes. How can a self-
deceiver intentionally persuade himself to believe something false,
especially if the true and false beliefs continue to coexist in his mind?
This question vexes regardless of whether we construe self-deception
along narrow lines, as a matter of false believing, or broader lines, as a
matter of cultivating a false interpretation of oneself.
The doxastic and strategic paradoxes have bite because they
rest on a plausible assumption about self-awareness: in appropriate
circumstances, people can avow their own intentions and beliefs.
(I use “avow” and “avowal” to capture the idea of explicit self-
acknowledgement, with or without explicit verbal assent.) Many
philosophers hold that for a given act, A, a person must be able to
avow his intention to A, if he can be said to A intentionally.28 A similar
condition holds for believing. A person who believes that p can, in
appropriate circumstances, avow that p. Note that these are modal
claims that are meant to capture the logical grammar of intending and
believing. It is clearly false that, empirically, only a person who expli-
citly attends to his reasons for acting acts intentionally. When I walk
into a dark room and turn on a light, I may not explicitly reflect on the
darkness of the room, the desirability of light, and so forth. Likewise,
I often drive along an accustomed route without ever noticing all the
decisions I make along the way. In both of these examples I do not
attend to my reasons for acting, but I could avow them, or at least some
of them, if asked. Presumably, the self-deceiver cannot and therefore
(so the objection runs), he cannot intend to deceive himself in any
ordinary sense of “intend.” A similar story can be told about believing.
On most accounts of believing, a person has a nearly infinite store-
house of beliefs that he does not attend to at a given moment, but that
he could avow, if pressed to do so.
There are many ways to respond to the doxastic and strategic
paradoxes by positing unconscious beliefs and intentions of one
stripe or another. I myself do not regard unconscious mental activity
as philosophically dubious. Indeed, there are several philosophical
accounts of the unconscious that I find persuasive, and to which

28
See e.g. Barnes, Seeing through Self-Deception, 92ff. Barnes does not make this
argument in terms of “avowal,” but she says that an intentional action is an action
performed for a reason the agent can acknowledge, and of which he can become non-
inferentially aware. This seems equivalent to the claim at issue.
200 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
I could appeal.29 I do not want to defend some particular account of
unconscious mental activity, however. I also do not want to import
one without argument, since that would be to sidestep most of the
key battles about how self-deception works. I prefer to draw on my
discussion of awareness in Chapter 5, and shift the battleground
altogether.
For the sake of argument, I will grant “the avowal condition,” that
an agent must be able to avow his intention to A and his belief that p if
he can be said to A intentionally or believe that p. Yet because this is a
modal claim, from the fact that the self-deceiver does not avow his
intentions and beliefs in appropriate circumstances it does not follow
that he cannot avow them. It is possible—there is conceptual space to
say—that he can avow them but that he does not, habitually, not even
to himself. What he cannot do is avow them and still remain in the
state of self-deception. The following analogy shows the point I wish to
make. Even if a virtuoso conductor can critique his own interpret-
ation of a piece of music, he cannot do so while conducting. The two
activities are mutually exclusive: engaging in one rules out engaging
in the other. Yet it would be misleading to say that the conductor
cannot critique his interpretation at all, just because he cannot not do
so while conducting. It is similarly misleading to say that the self-
deceiver cannot avow his self-deceptive intentions and beliefs just
because he cannot do so while continuing to deceive himself.
Thus, on my account, what needs explaining is not why the self-
deceiver cannot avow but why he does not avow. And to answer
this question, we should consider how avowal functions rhetorically
in the thick, social context of a project of self-deception. I address
the strategic paradox first, and then the doxastic paradox. An ad-
equate solution to the latter depends on a solution to the former, since
the doxastic paradox results from the intentional activity of cultivat-
ing false and contradictory beliefs. In my view, the right question to
ask is: what happens when the demand for avowal arises? I argue
that the demand for avowal is as likely to reinforce a project of
self-deception as dispel it. Sometimes the demand for avowal is
what rules avowal out.

29
I am especially partial to David H. Finkelstein, “On the Distinction between
Conscious and Unconscious States of Mind,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 36/2
(1999), 79–100.
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 201
Of course it is possible—even likely—that amid an ongoing project
of self-deception, the demand for avowal does not arise at all because
the self-deceiver never attends to his own intentions. Tom the white-
collar criminal doesn’t explicitly decide to deceive himself about the
morality of his behavior. He just starts rationalizing away competing
interpretations and acting in such a way that self-deception naturally
follows. Tom’s actions are nevertheless intentional. Granting (a) that
one doesn’t have to attend to one’s intentions to act intentionally, and
(b) that one has already been habituated into patterns of deception,
self-exculpation, and rationalization (from Chapters 1 through 3), it
seems straightforward to say that Tom intentionally but spontan-
eously seizes on a false interpretation of his situation, acts as if it is
true, and comes to believe it. It doesn’t matter whether he could avow
that he intends to deceive himself. He does not so avow. It never
comes up.
Suppose that the demand for avowal does arise. One possibility is
that it arises from within the self-deceiver himself. For whatever
reason, he takes a reflexive stance toward his actions and asks himself
what he is doing, or what he really believes. But we should not assume
that this self-critical attitude is some sort of confrontation with a
relentless inner Javert. It is a psychic event with its own history and its
own effects. It arises amid his project of self-deception, and the fact
that it arises does not mean that it will bring that project to an end. It
might instead reinforce him in his self-deception by leading him to
defend himself more vehemently against his inner critic. He might
then feel more confident about his actions, since he has virtuously
“examined” his own conscience and found it clean.
Yet another possibility is that someone else confronts the self-
deceiver and asks him to give an account of himself. This scenario
is just an intensified version of the previous one. Why suppose
that such a confrontation will provoke honest self-scrutiny? An
accusation of moral wrongdoing seems more likely to cause the
accused to dig in and mount a hot defense of his rectitude. Anger,
shame, or amour-propre take over and drive the accused further away
from self-lucidity, not closer to it. Once again, the point is not that the
self-deceiver cannot avow his intentions; the fact is that he does not,
and this is why he persists as a self-deceiver. This, then, is my solution
to the strategic paradox: the self-deceiver can avow his intentions, but
he does not, because the demand for avowal itself makes it likely that
he will not.
202 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
Since my account of immoral self-deception embraces the dual-
belief condition, I need to solve not only the strategic paradox but also
the doxastic paradox. How can a person believe that p and persuade
himself to believe that not-p, especially when he continues to hold the
former belief ? My solution to the doxastic paradox follows the same
lines as my solution to the strategic paradox. I reframe the problem as
a rhetorical dilemma rather than a conceptual or psychological one
and argue that it can be solved by setting it in its appropriate
rhetorical context.
The doxastic paradox, when unpacked, poses three different prob-
lems. The first is the logical problem of whether it is possible for a
single person to believe contradictory propositions. As discussed in
Chapter 5, this problem is easily solved: as all parties admit, there is
no formal, logical, contradiction at all in the claim that a subject, S,
believes that p and believes that not-p. Since it poses no formal
contradiction, the state of affairs captured by the doxastic paradox
cannot be ruled out as logically impossible. Second, however, even if it
does not describe a logically impossible state of affairs, the doxastic
paradox does seem to describe a psychological impossibility. It seems
psychologically impossible for a single subject to believe contradict-
ory propositions at the same time. If it were possible (so the objection
runs) a person would be able to avow explicitly the joint proposition
“p and not-p.” But no one can do this. The problem of psychological
impossibility is more difficult, but it can also be solved.
Granting that it is possible to believe contradictory propositions
but impossible to believe them explicitly, it follows that the self-
deceiver must only keep himself from attending to (a) both propos-
itions at the same time and (b) the fact that he believes both. The
objective fact that the two beliefs are contradictory does not dispel
the contradiction unless he attends to both at the same time. His
habitual practices of self-persuasion—acceptance, internal rhetoric,
and acting-as-if—all allow him to manage his attention and ensure
that he does not explicitly focus on the contradiction. He attends
to his contradictory beliefs only when these strategies are thwarted,
when the world exerts some rational pressure on him to resolve the
contradiction.
To the extent that a self-deceiver is able to avoid encountering such
pressure, he can continue to hold both beliefs. Here I follow the same
line of reasoning that I did with the demand that the self-deceiver
avow his intentions. It may be that no such pressure arises. Even if it
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 203
does, it is a mistake to assume that any challenge, whether from
himself or another, will automatically bring to bear the pressure
needed to dispel the contradiction. After all, beliefs are not mental
items that one can just look at with an inner eye. The self-deceiver,
like anyone else who decides to examine what he really believes, faces
an arduous task: he must ask himself how he feels about certain
matters, why he acts in certain ways, and so on. He can easily fail to
ask himself the right questions, thus allowing his contradictory be-
lieving to continue.
On the other hand, suppose someone else confronts him about his
seemingly contradictory beliefs. In a real-world argumentative set-
ting, it is not always easy to recognize contradictory believing, let
alone confront it, let alone successfully overturn it. People do not
usually directly contradict themselves, in the sense that few people
baldly assert both p and not-p over a short period of time. It is far
more likely that the scenario is more convoluted: they assert (or
otherwise seem to believe) first q and then r, for example, and never
attend to the fact that q implies p and r implies not-p. In general, the
harder an interlocutor has to work to convince the self-deceiver that
he holds contradictory beliefs, the more room there is for the self-
deceiver to avoid confronting the charge. His beliefs may even harden
as the dynamics of the argument take over.
The third problem captured by the doxastic paradox concerns
belief-formation. Even if it is logically and psychologically possible
to be in the state of contradictory believing, how could the self-
deceiver come to believe that not-p when he already believes that
p (or vice versa)? Why would he be able to form the belief that not-p
at all, and, if he does, why wouldn’t the newly formed false belief
that not-p simply cancel out the already-held true belief that p? My
answer to these questions depends wholly on my answers to the
previous two dilemmas. If it is logically and psychologically possible
to hold contradictory beliefs, it is obviously the case that it is possible
to form them. So if the previous two answers are convincing, this
third problem is not especially troubling. Properly understood, it
simply asks an empirical question about how the process of self-
deceptive belief-formation works. And my answer to that question
is the whole of Chapters 1 through 4. Reduced to their essence: the
sinful self-deceiver believes that p. He wants to believe not-p, and with
the cooperation of the wider world he engages in a project of self-
persuasion. Eventually he does persuade himself that not-p is true.
204 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
For his activity of self-persuasion to succeed, however, he must cease
avowing or attending to his belief that p. Yet it is clear that he still
believes p because it continues to figure into some of his reasoning
and activity. (Tom the white-collar criminal doesn’t go home and
cheerfully tell his wife that he falsified 100 records during that day’s
work, as he might if he genuinely ceased believing that his actions
were illegal and immoral.)
Philosophers emphasize that a self-deceiver cannot avow his pro-
ject of self-deception because, as a conceptual matter, they wish to
distinguish self-deception from lying, pretense, and hypocrisy. In my
view, this emphasis is misplaced precisely because it makes the
boundaries between these activities too sharp and thereby obscures
the way self-deception really works. In a certain sense, it is correct—
indeed, it is a truism—that the self-deceiver cannot avow contradict-
ory beliefs, or an intention to deceive himself. Were he to do so, he
would no longer be deceiving himself. But he can still intend to
deceive himself. As all sides agree, a person can act intentionally
without avowing the reasons for which he acts. It is only one step
further to say that the self-deceiver acts intentionally without ever
avowing his self-deceptive intentions because the demand for
avowal—should it arise at all—is so easily dismissed.

HOW TO CONSTRUCT A FALSE SELF

We might expect that the immoral self-deceiver’s knowledge of the

truth about himself would exert a persuasive force that works against
the formation of inconsistent, self-deceptive beliefs. But he instead
pursues a coherence of identity that is deeper, for him, than mere
logical consistency. Accordingly, I now turn to the broader aspects of
immoral self-deception, which focus on the self-deceiver’s interpret-
ation of himself. I adapt Pascal’s account of the moi, the false self, and
argue that the immoral self-deceiver intentionally constructs a false
self so that he can avoid confronting his own immoral engagements.
In the Pensées, a moi is simply a person’s socially constructed (and
therefore partially duplicitous) persona. I extend Pascal’s treatment
by suggesting that an immoral self-deceiver can intentionally exploit
the mechanisms of self-formation for the specific purpose of
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 205
constructing a false self that will help him evade his own moral
responsibility.
The sinner deceives himself about his own identity, and he there-
fore leads an inauthentic life. Recall again the case of Tom, the
businessman engaged in an illegal price-fixing scheme. Pascal pro-
vides the resources that can allow us to understand the broader
dimensions of Tom’s project of self-deception. As a result of his
disordered loves, his socially constructed and duplicitous imagination
allows him to craft a false identity that he projects into the world. The
world, in turn, ratifies and reinforces that identity, which further
enables him to persist in his self-deception. He then reinforces and
projects his intentionally constructed false self by means of a process
of self-persuasion.
The mental and behavioral techniques of self-persuasion are the
very same techniques that allow him to construct and manifest the
false self. Tom accepts that he really is the blameless construct that
he imagines himself to be. As he imagines himself from the point of
view of others, he also imagines talking to them about himself and
convincing them of his innocence. In his interior dialogues, he re-
inforces the voices that exonerate him and rationalizes away his
lingering worries. He acts as if he is morally blameless, thereby
enlisting the reinforcement of other people and convincing himself
further. All of these activities are ways of cultivating particular beliefs
and attitudes, but, cumulatively, they also allow him to construct and
inhabit a false, self-deceptive identity.

Imaginatively Constructing the Self

Tom’s project of self-deception begins with the spontaneous activity
of his imagination, which is rooted in his disordered loves. More
precisely, and building on the previous chapters, let us say that Tom
was first approached by a superior who artfully suggested that he
falsify some records. Faced with this illegal and unethical demand,
Tom spontaneously redescribed the situation to himself as merely an
invitation to help out a colleague or to help the company become
more profitable, both virtuous activities in themselves. As Tom gets
pulled deeper into the scheme, he allays any feelings of guilt by
imagining his future wealth. He also focuses on the way he imagines
that others see him—as a sharp businessman, a family man, and a
206 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
respected citizen. Tom’s imagination is active on multiple levels. It
shapes the several ways in which he spontaneously interprets his
activities, suggests ways in which he should not be blamed for
them, and helps him divert his attention from the truth.
At a deeper level, Tom’s imagination is driven by his own funda-
mentally disordered loves—his greed, self-interest, and his excessive
identification with the corporation. He also loves himself improperly,
which is to say that he loves a particular version of himself, in which
he seems morally upright and blameless, both to himself and to the
world, even when he is not. On the Pascalian model, the self-deceiver
imagines his false self into being by imagining himself from the point
of view of other people. In a broader sense, then, the false self is also
built from the store of material furnished by his socially constructed
imagination.

Acceptance and Avowal

When he accepts a false self-interpretation, he avows a false identity, a
false conception of himself, and, at the same time, he disavows the
truth about himself and his engagements. When I say that Tom
cultivates, projects, and ultimately believes in a false self, I mean
that he centers his thoughts and interprets his actions around a
particular aspect of his identity, to the exclusion of other relevant
aspects. Tom will have imaginatively internalized a store of ready-
made social identities and roles that he can inhabit in order to persist
in his self-deception. Because he is already skilled at inhabiting these
roles, he can perform them with minimal attention to his deeper
motivations.30 Each of us has many such identities and roles ready-
to-hand, and they can all be a means of self-deception. Tom can easily
play the part of the loyal employee, the pillar of the community, or the
family man, for example. By accepting, avowing, and projecting these
identities, he is able to divert attention from the illegal and unethical
engagements that he disavows.

30
See Stanley Hauerwas and David B. Burrell, Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further
Investigations in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1977), 87; and Fingarette, Self-Deception.
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 207

Internal Rhetoric
As Tom imagines himself from the point of view of others, he also
imagines talking to them about himself and convincing them of his
innocence. In his interior dialogues, he reinforces the voices that
exonerate him and rationalizes away his lingering worries. In so
doing, he uses internal rhetoric to fashion a false, self-serving identity
in which he is morally blameless. Recall that Kenneth Burke calls the
self a “parliament, with conflicting interests.”31 Michael Walzer de-
scribes the self in a similar way, and sounds like a good Pascalian:
My inner world is thickly settled . . . I am in fact assaulted by different
critics making different claims on behalf of different and often incon-
sistent notions of a more perfect self . . . The critics that crowd around,
speaking for different roles and identities have not been chosen by me.
They are me, but this “me” is socially as well as personally constructed; it
is a complex, maximalist whole. I am urged to conduct myself, let’s say,
as a good citizen, doctor, or craftsman . . . Many external “causes” are
represented in my critical wars, and the representatives come from and
still have connections outside. They have been internalized, in the
common phrase, and, if I am lucky, naturalized—adapted to their new
environment, (my mind and heart) and to the requirements of com-
petitive co-existence.32
This picture of the self offers a way of understanding how the identity
of an immoral self-deceiver coalesces around his project of self-
deception. Suppose that Tom assumes the persona of the dutiful
family man who wants only to provide for his family. He does not
attend to the fact that his illegal activities actually endanger his
family’s welfare; rather, he uses interior speech in order to ensure
that his self-interpretation runs the other way. He says to himself, in
effect: “I could never engage in illegal activity, because I’m not that
kind of person. I’m a dutiful family man.” By cultivating this concep-
tion of his identity, he can avoid acknowledging his own unethical
behavior. Though Tom may, in fact, be a dutiful family man, this
constructed self-image is still a false identity, a false self, because it
does not capture the whole story about Tom and his engagements. He

31
Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 38.
32
Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre
Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 96.
208 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
uses interior speech to divert his attention away from a true self-
interpretation and toward a false self-interpretation that is internally
“consistent” with his avowed identity only because it does not incorp-
orate relevant facts about his engagements.

Acting-As-If
Just as Tom reinforces his false self-interpretation with interior
speech, he also publicly acts as if he is morally blameless, thereby
enlisting the reinforcement of other people and hardening his own
self-deceptive identity. Pascal’s analysis of the moi suggests that
Tom’s project of acting as if he is morally blameless will be reinforced
and supported by his wider social environment. Thus, an important
dimension of Tom’s self-deception does not derive from any desire
for financial success, but from a fear of social ostracism and estrange-
ment from his peers. We can imagine, for example, that Tom’s
colleagues at the firm, including his respected superiors, all tacitly
support the price-fixing scheme either by remaining silent about it, or
even by discussing it in morally neutral or positive terms. At the same
time, we can also imagine that his family and friends support his self-
deception in various ways. For example, perhaps they fail to respond
appropriately to his occasional tentative hints that something may be
awry, saying only that it would be foolish for Tom to do anything that
jeopardizes his “promising” career.

The False Self and the Aversion for Truth

The Pascalian moi is like an outlandish story that everyone tacitly
agrees to treat as true. Its plausibility depends on this general suspen-
sion of disbelief. Self-deception can arise when the important stories
that a person tells about himself no longer seem plausible but he is
unwilling to qualify them or give them up because he loves them—
and his role in them—too much. Thus, the link between immoral self-
deception and one’s identity rests on a deeper link between one’s
identity and one’s disordered loves.
The entire project of immoral self-deception is rooted in the self-
deceiver’s aversion for the truth. He hates the truth about himself and
his immoral projects, and instead loves an imaginary self that appears
good when it is not. Pascal’s account of the moi, the false self, is an
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 209
elucidation of what it means to love the self more than the truth, and
more than God, who is truth (L99/S132). A person loves himself
improperly when he does not derive his own value from God, the
true source of all value. The self that he fashions and projects into the
world is false because it is centered around a false, unstable source of
value. As a result, his thoughts, desires, and habits are shaped and
disfigured by his disordered self-love. Yet this claim just is the claim
that his very identity is disfigured by his disordered love, for one’s
identity is nothing but the sum of one’s thoughts, desires, and habits.

CONCLUSION: SELF-DECEPTION, THE FALL,

AND THE HIDDENNESS OF GOD

To say that we are fallen is to say that we have turned away from God.
Worse, the turn away from God is not some unrepeatable event that
can be safely confined to a barely remembered ancestral past—
whether we construe that past as historical or mythological. To say
that we are fallen is to say that every man is Adam, and every woman
Eve. We continually re-enact the Fall by repeatedly turning away
from God and toward created objects of delight that are by definition
less beautiful, less desirable, and less true. This drama is perverse, and
we can only continue acting in it by deceiving ourselves about the part
we play. The Fall is a fall into duplicity because pervasive duplicity is a
necessary condition of remaining fallen.
Pascal shows us what it is means to be fallen by showing us that the
cognitive consequences of the Fall are wider than we might assume.
We cannot understand the noetic effects of sin by focusing only on
the fallen will and the darkened intellect. We must also account for
the duplicitous imagination, which in turn directs us outward, first to
our own habituated bodies, and then still further outward to the
duplicitous customs of the wider world that shapes us into the fallen
subjects that we are. A proper account of the cognitive consequences
of the Fall must also explain how we are formed as subjects, and any
such account must be both personal and social. According to Pascal,
our very subjectivity is a social fiction that renders us unable to attend
to God. Only after we understand what we are can we profitably turn
toward the task of understanding why we think and act as we do.
210 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception
What we do, mainly, is sin—and then try to persuade ourselves
that we are innocent. Sin and self-deception go hand in hand pre-
cisely because we are fallen. That is, we are fallen, but we are not
demonic. While it is true in a way to say that the sinner rejects God, it
is not the whole truth. We do not—cannot—reject God explicitly, in
full awareness. We do not consciously hate goodness and truth as
such. Rather, we lie to ourselves about what really is good and true.
Only then can we preserve the fiction that we love truth and good-
ness, although we repeatedly turn away from them. Yet even our lies
witness to our love of truth. We care about the truth just enough to
pretend to love it, and no more.
Someone utterly unmoved by the truth cannot be bothered to
pretend. We pretend because we are fallen—and therefore both
great and wretched at the same time. The Fall has left us with a secret
instinct that draws us toward God and truth, in addition to the secret
instinct that drives us away (L136/S168).
Theologians appeal to the Fall and its cognitive consequences in
part to explain why God appears hidden to us. Scripture tells us that
“the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against . . . those who by
their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about
God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (Rom. 1:
18–19). God has revealed himself through his creation, and only our
own wickedness prevents us from seeing him there: “Ever since the
creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible
though they are, have been understood and seen through the things
he has made” (Rom. 1: 20). Indeed, our wicked rejection of God is
both crime and punishment. Because we reject God, we find it ever
easier to go on rejecting God, and our cognitive faculties pay the
price: “So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they
did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became
futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened”
(Rom. 1: 21). Because our minds have grown dark as a result of our
own wickedness, we find it difficult to see God in his creation.
The claim that God hides is hard to understand. Surely a perfectly
loving God would reveal himself to all those who seek him. At the
very least, surely a perfectly loving God would reveal himself to
everyone who is not culpably ignorant of God. On Pascal’s account
of divine hiddenness, there is no such thing as innocent ignorance of
God. The claim that God hides is equivalent to the claim that we are
culpable for our non-belief.
 A Pascalian Model of Sin as Self-Deception 211
If he had wished to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, he
could have done so by revealing himself to them so plainly that they
could not doubt the truth of his essence . . . This is not the way he
wished to appear when he came in mildness, because so many men
had shown themselves unworthy of his clemency, that he wished to
deprive them of a good they did not desire . . . Thus wishing to appear
openly to those who seek him with all their heart and hidden from those
who shun him with all their heart, he has qualified our knowledge by
giving signs which can be seen by those who seek him but not by those
who do not. There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and
enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition. (L149/S182)
We are deprived of God only because God is a good that we do not
really desire. On the other hand, when we do desire God, when we
sincerely seek God, we can see the signs that lead us to God. There
really are signs in nature that reveal God, for those who are disposed
to look for them:
It is true then that everything teaches man his condition, but there must
be no misunderstanding, for it is not true that everything reveals God,
and it is not true that everything conceals God. But it is true at once that
he hides from those who tempt him and that he reveals himself to those
who seek him, because men are at once unworthy and capable of God:
unworthy through their corruption, capable through their original
nature. (L444/S690)
God is partly concealed and partly revealed, and so we are culpable
for the fact that God appears hidden to us. According to Pascal, it
would be more accurate to say that we hide from God, instead of the
reverse.
The claim that God is partly concealed and partly revealed fits well
with the claim that sin is self-deception. Just as the self-deceiver both
knows and rejects the truth, so does the sinner both know and reject
God. Moreover, if every sinner is a self-deceiver, then it is easy to
understand why we are culpable for our non-belief. We are culpable
for our non-belief because we actively persuade ourselves to turn
away from God. Both sinner and self-deceiver grasp the truth just
enough to choose to turn away from it. Finally, according to the
doctrine of the Fall, every human being is fallen, and so every
human being is a sinner and self-deceiver. There can therefore be
no innocent unbelief. Such are the cognitive consequences of the Fall,
according to Pascal.
 7

The Way Back: On Loving the Truth

The fallen sinner turns away from the truth about his own sinful
condition, and away from God, who is truth itself. The Fall is a fall
into duplicity, and sin is a kind of self-deception. Yet if the turn away
from truth is a turn away from God, then a turn toward truth must be
a turn toward God. In order to love God above all things, we must
love the truth above all things. Furthermore, if sin is self-deception,
then self-lucidity must be its remedy. But to say only this is to say far
too little. It implies that the path to salvation may be found through
introspective self-knowledge alone. Pascal would never agree that we
can simply strive to know ourselves better and then stop sinning.
Loving the truth requires reorienting one’s loves around God or
Christ, and that is the work of grace, not something that we can just
choose to do on our own. Introspection is not grace.

GRACE AS PLEASURE AND DELIGHT IN THE GOOD

Pascal’s account of grace is not unconnected to his account of the Fall,

however. According to Pascal, the Fall is a fall into duplicity because it
is an evaluative fall, which has left us unable to judge the true value
of moral goods. It should not be surprising that he also describes
the remedy for the Fall in similarly aesthetic and affective terms. He
holds that God’s grace is received as a kind of pleasure: a delight in
goodness and truth.1 In his short work “On the Conversion of the

1
This is the delectatio victrix (victorious delight) of Jansenist Augustinianism. The
source of this idea in Augustine may be found in De peccatorum meritis et remissione
2.19.33 and De spiritu et littera 1.29.5. See also Moriarty, “Grace and Religious Belief ,”
 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth 213
Sinner,” Pascal presents a Neoplatonic itinerary that uses the lan-
guage of delight and pleasure to describe the soul’s turn from lower to
higher goods.2 The turn toward God is also a turn toward true
knowledge of the self that brings with it moral change. In the first
stage of conversion, God gives the soul a new form of self-knowledge
that also reorients its desires:
The first thing that God inspires in a soul that he truly deigns to touch is
an understanding and an extraordinary view through which the soul
considers material things and itself in a whole new way.
This new light causes the soul to fear and brings a disturbance that
thwarts the repose it found in the things that were its delights.
The soul can no longer taste with tranquility the things that charmed
it before. Continuous doubt assaults its enjoyment, and this inward-
looking view causes the soul no longer to find the accustomed sweetness
among the material things to which it was so effusively addicted.3
Grace is here presented as both cognitive and affective. It first produces
“an understanding and an extraordinary view” that causes the soul to
begin to reject “the things that were its delights.” The extraordinary
view is an “inward-looking” interior view, a turn toward self-knowledge,
and the first stage of the classic Neoplatonic and Augustinian ascent—
we turn inward, before we turn upward. As the soul continues its
ascent toward God, it comes to understand that worldly goods are
ephemeral, and this same understanding saps them of their capacity
to give pleasure:
The soul views perishable things as perishing and even as already
perished; and in view of the certain annihilation of everything that it
loves, the soul is frightened, seeing that each instant rips away the joys
of its goods, and that which is the most dear flows away at all moments,
and at last a day will come when the soul will find itself stripped of all
the things in which it had placed its hopes . . . In this way the soul
perfectly comprehends that its heart was only attached to things that
are fragile and vain, that it must find itself alone and abandoned at the

in Hammond, Cambridge Companion to Pascal, 148; Gouhier, Conversion et apologé-

tique, 71–81; and Magnard, La Clé du chiffre, 248.
2
The Écrit sur la Conversion du Pecheur may be found in OC ii. 99–102. Jean
Mesnard dates this work to 1657–8, a period contemporaneous with the early
fragments of the Pensées. Le Guern dates it to 1655, on the basis of comparisons
with the wager fragment (L418/S680). See Le Guern’s remarks at OC ii. 1166–7.
3
My tr. from OC ii. 99.
214 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth
end of this life, since it did not care to join itself to a true and self-
subsistent good that could sustain it during and after this life.4
A cognitive insight again yields an affective reorientation. Once the
soul recognizes the finitude of perishable goods, those goods no
longer retain their power to delight. Finally, when the soul turns to
God, who is the highest, universal, and most stable good, knowledge
unites with desire as the soul moves from an intellectual understand-
ing that God is the most lovable good to a felt desire for God. The soul
traverses all the creatures, and cannot stop its heart until it arrives at the
throne of God, where it begins to find repose and that goodness such
that there is nothing more lovable, a goodness that can only be taken
from the soul by its own consent.
For although the soul does not yet feel the charms with which God
rewards the habit of piety, it nevertheless understands that creatures
cannot be more lovable than the Creator, and its reason, assisted with
the light of grace, makes it understand that there is nothing more
lovable than God and that he can only be taken from those who reject
him, because to desire him is to possess him, and to reject him is to lose
him.
And so the soul rejoices that it has found a goodness that cannot be
taken away as long as it desires that goodness, a goodness of which there
is none higher.5
The continuing reception of grace is experienced as a growing aes-
thetic pleasure. The soul’s reason—“assisted by grace”—first recog-
nizes intellectually that God is the most lovable good. This
recognition gives way to a joyful desire for God, since to desire God
is to possess God. Divine grace operates on the soul by overwhelming
it with aesthetic delight, which causes it to love spiritual goods over
carnal goods. The “Writings on Grace” also express this view of grace-
as-pleasure:
To save his elect, God sent Jesus Christ to carry out his justice and to
merit with his mercy the grace of Redemption, medicinal grace, the
grace of Jesus Christ which is nothing other than complaisance and
delectation (suavité et délectation) in God’s law diffused into the heart
by the Holy Ghost, which, not only equaling but even surpassing the
concupiscence of the flesh, fills the will with a greater delight in good
than concupiscence offers in evil; and so free will, entertained by the

4 5
My tr. from OC ii. 99–100. My tr. from OC ii. 101.
 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth 215
sweetness and pleasures (charmé par les douceurs les plaisirs) which the
Holy Ghost inspires in it, more than the attractions of sin, infallibly
chooses God’s law for the simple reason that it finds greater satisfaction
there, and feels its [i.e. the law’s] beatitude and happiness.6
As with his essay “On the Conversion of the Sinner,” Pascal here
describes the reception of grace and the moral development that it
causes by appealing to the terminology of delight and pleasure. God’s
grace is experienced as pleasure. The recipient of grace unexpectedly
finds that he enjoys following God’s law more than he enjoys “the
concupiscence of the flesh.”
When the sinner receives grace, his fundamental stance, his orien-
tation toward the world, is changed. Although Pascal describes this
change mainly in volitional and affective terms, it also yields a
cognitive shift that alters what the sinner believes. Before receiving
grace, the sinner believes that worldly goods are intrinsically more
pleasurable than spiritual goods. He may find the moral life desirable
in an abstract, intellectual way but does not actually believe that it can
lead to his own happiness. More precisely, even if the sinner would
assent to the claim “Following God’s law is the moral course of
action,” he would also assent to the claim “Sinning is inherently
more pleasurable than following God’s law.” And, indeed, before he
receives grace, the sinner does find sinning more pleasurable than
following God’s law. Nevertheless, this second claim is false. When
the sinner receives God’s grace, he comes to know that it is false
because he begins to take greater pleasure in God’s law. His pleasure
allows him to see the world differently. He becomes more skillful at
evaluating competing goods, which in turn allows him to acquire
moral knowledge to which he previously had no cognitive access.
Before he received grace, his fallen incapacity to experience real
pleasure blocked him from truly understanding his own world.

LOVING THE TRUTH AS A RELIGIOUS STANCE

The connections between desire, pleasure, and truth structure both

Pascal’s account of the Fall and his account of grace. The Fall is a fall

6
“Writings on Grace,” ed. Levi, 223 (OC ii. 289–90).
216 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth
into duplicity precisely because it is an evaluative fall. Our beliefs are
highly influenced by our desires, and so when we lose the capacity to
appreciate and desire moral goods, we lose the capacity to form true
beliefs about our world, with its objective hierarchy of goods, and
ourselves, as moral creatures. Or rather, we seem to lose this capacity,
but we do not—not really. Even after the Fall, we retain an implicit
love for God, traced back to our original nature, and with it some
knowledge, however dim, that God is the highest good and our only
source of genuine happiness. Our implicit love and knowledge of God
battles with our explicit desire for worldly goods and our false belief
that we can be happy when orient our lives around them. Grace,
received as pleasure in the good, restores coherence to the self by
restoring coherence to its desires and the beliefs they shape.
Grace reorders our desires and reorients our intellects toward
truth. Apart from grace, the truth is often unwelcome, and so we
often have a motive to deceive ourselves. In order to avoid sinful self-
deception, we must love the truth more than we love ourselves and
our projects. It may seem strange to suggest that the “the truth” is an
object that can be loved. Yet the phrase “love of truth” does not
describe a particular attitude toward a particular object. Rather, it
describes a fundamental attitude toward reality as such. In Chapter 1,
I said that love is always an interpretive stance. The love of truth
describes an interpretive stance in which we want all our judgments
to be determined by objective reality instead of by our own desires.
I think that it can fairly be described as a religious stance. I have in
mind a well-known quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein:
It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a
passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it is
a belief, it is really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It is
passionately seizing hold of this interpretation. Instruction in a religious
faith, therefore, would have to take the form of a portrayal, a descrip-
tion, of that system of reference, while at the same time being an appeal
to conscience.7
Wittgenstein is often opaque to me, but I think that by a “system” of
reference he must mean a comprehensive set of concepts, a way of
describing and interpreting whatever one happens to encounter.

7
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1947), tr. Peter Winch (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 64e.
 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth 217
Furthermore, because it is a system of reference, it cannot be just one
particular belief among others. And perhaps most important of all, he
describes religious belief not as the system of reference itself, but as a
“passionate commitment” to it, which he glosses as “a way of living,
or a way of assessing life.”
It seems clear that a love of truth must also be a “passionate
commitment to a system of reference” in exactly the sense that
Wittgenstein intends. The relevant system of reference may be under-
stood as a comprehensive set of concepts—the exact set of concepts
that one must have if one is to engage with the world as it really is. In
order to get, keep, and appropriately deploy this special set of con-
cepts, one must be passionately committed to the truth. As Wittgen-
stein suggests, achieving the stance of passionate commitment is not
easy. To be sure, if one is passionately committed to the truth, one
must possess the habits and skills of rationality—the ability to weigh
evidence, draw conclusions, etc. But a person with this skill will not
automatically love the truth. We learn to love properly by exercising
moral virtues, and so the failure to love the truth is really a moral
failure. It is easy to see that this is the case by looking at the ways in
which people characteristically fail to love the truth. Someone filled
with pride effectively views himself as the center of the universe;
consequently, he treats external objects and other people either as
obstacles to his projects or as means of achieving them. He cannot see
the world as it truly is because of his self-love. Someone mired in
spiritual apathy might have an opposite reaction, and treat himself
and his goals as nothing more than hateful obstructions to the good of
another. The claim that disordered love is the fundamental motiv-
ation of self-deception suggests that the rational blindness of self-
deception is tied to the moral blindness of false self-love. We cannot
be formed as properly rational subjects without also being formed as
properly moral subjects, because in order to reason well about the
world, we must first keep our disordered love in check.

SUBJECTIVITY WITHOUT DUPLICITY: THE TRUE

SELF IMITATES CHRIST

Pascal would add that a passionate commitment to the truth must

refer back to God and Christ. To love the truth, to see the world as it
218 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth
really is, is to try to see the world from God’s point of view, which is to
imitate God. This is also what it means to become a true self, a self
that is free from self-deception because its loves are properly ordered
towards God. It is clear that we can never fully succeed at this task,
but it always remains a goal and a moral norm. And the only way to
imitate God without falling into further sin and self-deception is to
have one’s loves reordered in such a way that one loves God above all
things, and loves everything else through God. Otherwise, “we make
an idol of truth itself, for truth apart from charity is not God, but his
image and an idol that we must not love or worship” (L926/S755).8
Pascal would also say that finite human beings can genuinely imitate
God only by imitating Christ, the God-man and the paradigmatic
human being. Pascal’s Christocentrism is apparent throughout the
Pensées, but it is especially prominent in a series of fragments on “the
body of thinking members” (L360–74/S392–405). These fragments
use the metaphor of membership in the body of Christ to argue that
one can only know oneself, and be free from self-deception, when
one’s loves are properly ordered.9

8
The fragment continues, “Still less should we worship its opposite, which is
falsehood . . . ”
9
Scholars who have discussed the fragments on the body of thinking members
typically have not emphasized that they present Pascal’s positive account of authentic
human subjectivity. Miel treats the relevant fragments, first, as a metaphor for
predestination that shows what it means for the human will to be moved by the
divine will; and, second, as “a bridge between Pascal’s theology of grace and his
notions concerning the Christian in society” (Pascal and Theology, 178–9). Jacob
Meskin provides the best discussion in English in his “Secular Self-Confidence,
Postmodernism and Beyond: Recovering the Religious Dimension of Pascal’s Pen-
sées,” Journal of Religion, 75 (1995), 487–508. Meskin correctly sees that Pascal argues
in the relevant fragments that we must identify with Christ in order to transform our
subjectivity. Meskin does not set this insight in dialectical opposition to Pascal’s
thoughts on the false self (the moi) and sinful subjectivity, however, and he does
not remark on the Trinitarian theme of fragment L372/S404. Nor does Miel. Ferreyr-
olles reads the fragments on the body of thinking members in social-political terms
(Pascal et la raison du politique, 246). Michel Le Guern, in his book on “the image” in
Pascal, recognizes the prominence of the image of the body of thinking members in
Pascal’s thought, but draws no philosophical or theological conclusions about this fact
(L’Image dans l’uvre de Pascal (Paris: Colin, 1969), 146–50). Pierre Magnard
presents a fine, rich discussion but his treatment is also primarily historical and
exegetical (“Un corps plein de membres pensants,” in Dominique Descotes, Antony
McKenna, and Laurent Thirouin (eds), Le Rayonnement de Port-Royal: Mélanges en
l’honneur de Philippe Sellier (Paris: Champion, 2001), 333–40. I am not aware that
Marion discusses the relevant fragments at all, though he certainly recognizes that, for
Pascal, authentic subjectivity must be centered on Christ, as the universal object of
love (See On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, 329–31). Finally, Carraud does discuss
 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth 219
In fragment L417/S36 of the Pensées, Pascal famously claims: “Not
only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know
ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through
Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we cannot know the meaning of
our life or our death, of God or of ourselves.” The fragments on the
body of thinking members develop this claim. In these fragments, he
takes the idea that Christ is the object and center of all things and
applies it to the task of attaining genuine self-knowledge and authen-
tic subjectivity.
The basic insight that underpins Pascal’s account of the true self is
not surprising. Given that to be a self is to be an object of love, it
follows that a true self can only be called into being by a true, because
rightly ordered, love. To say that our loves are rightly ordered is to say
that we love God above all things, and love everything else, including
the self, through God and for God. This is a standard Christian claim,
of course, but Pascal develops it in an especially interesting way, in a
series of fragments on what it means to be a member of the body of
Christ. As with his account of sinful subjectivity, the theme of imita-
tion is central. Just as a false self, a moi, parodically imitates God, so
also a true self imitates Christ, who loves God above all things. By
imitating Christ, the true self virtuously imitates God.
In the fragments on the body of thinking members Pascal shows
that when the self attains genuine self-knowledge, it will not only love
itself differently but will in fact become a different kind of self
altogether. Pascal believes that sinful, duplicitous subjects inevitably
try to make themselves the center of everything and tyrannize every-
one else (L597/S494). As a way of resisting our innate self-love, he
therefore suggests a thought experiment. If we imagine that we are
each parts of a greater whole, a body of thinking members, we will
subordinate our own value to the value of the whole and thereby love
ourselves properly. “In order to control the love we owe to ourselves,
we must imagine a body full of thinking members (for we are
members of the whole), and see how each member ought to love
itself, etc.” (L368/S401).
To be a member is to have no life, no being, and no movement except
through the spirit of the body and for the body. The separated member,

the body of thinking members and even recognizes their Trinitarian character, but he
reads the fragments in question quite differently. See n. 11 below.
220 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth
no longer seeing the body to which it belongs, has only a wasted and
moribund being left. However, it believes itself to be whole, and, seeing
no body on which it depends, it believes itself to be dependent only on
itself and tries to make itself its own center and body. But not having in
itself any principle of life, it only wanders about and becomes bewil-
dered at the uncertainty of its existence, quite conscious that it is not the
body and yet not seeing that it is a member of a body. Eventually, when
it comes to know itself, it has returned home, as it were, and only loves
itself for the body’s sake . . . (L372/S404)
It is clear that the fragments on the body of thinking members are
inspired by Paul’s discussion of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians
12. There are also further allusions in this fragment to the biblical
story of the prodigal son: the separated member “wanders about and
becomes bewildered at the uncertainty of existence” until it “comes to
know itself ” and returns “home.” On my reading, these biblical tropes
also work to emphasize the conceptual relations that bind the self ’s
being, its self-knowledge, and its self-love.
Pascal begins with ontology. Separated from the body, the self has
only “wasted and moribund being left,” yet Pascal treats this onto-
logical separation as a failure of self-knowledge: the self ’s being is
moribund because it no longer sees the body to which it actually still
belongs and so falsely “believes itself to be whole.” Furthermore, when
the self overcomes this failure of self-knowledge, and comes to know
itself truly, its self-love is immediately transformed. Once the self no
longer falsely believes itself to be whole, it “comes to know itself,” and
then it “loves itself for the body’s sake.” To unpack Pascal’s metaphor,
when the self knows itself rightly, it also loves itself rightly, and—
circling back to ontology—it thereby becomes a different kind of self
altogether: whole but not alone, no longer isolated but a member of
the body.
To be sure, we recognize a sense of “self-knowledge” that is unre-
lated to the self ’s being or its love. That is, there is a sense of “self-
knowledge” in which we could say simply that a person knows certain
facts about himself. But this thin sense of “self-knowledge” is not the
sense that Pascal develops with his image of the body of thinking
members. Enlightenment modernity is accustomed to treating being,
love, and knowledge as sharply distinct, but for Pascal, it is not
possible to separate them when it comes to discussions of the self.
For example, in another fragment he writes:
 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth 221
If the foot had never known it belonged to the body, and that there was
a body on which it depended, if it had only known and loved itself, and
if it then came to know that it belonged to a body on which it depended,
what regret, what shame it would feel for its past life . . . How submis-
sively it would let itself be governed by the will in charge of the body
. . . (L373/S405)
Pascal seems to assume that the foot would automatically love itself
properly and submit its will to the will of the body when it comes to
know itself. He does not leave any room for a foot that knows that it
belongs to the body and yet refuses to love the body as the source of
its own being. The next fragment explains why there is no such room.
There is no such room because the very idea of rejecting the general
source of happiness in the name of private happiness is incoherent:
If the feet and hands had their own wills, they would never be properly
in order except when submitting this individual will to the primal will
governing the whole body. Otherwise they would be disorganized and
unhappy, but in desiring only the good of the body they achieve their
own good. (L374/406)
In the idiom of these fragments, it would be incoherent for the hands
and the feet to come to know that their happiness is a function of the
good of the body without thereby also loving the good of the body.
Because it would be incoherent, it seems natural to say that if they do
not, in fact, love the good of the body, then the hands and feet do not
really believe that their happiness is a function of the good of the
body. It is in this sense that genuine self-love and genuine self-
knowledge are inseparable. A change in self-knowledge entails a
change in self-love, and surely these two changes together entail a
change in the kind of self that one is. A self that loves itself above all
and regards itself as an isolated, wholly autonomous source of value is
simply not the same kind of thing as a self that subordinates its own
good to the universal good of all.
In Pascal’s terms, a self that subordinates its own private good to
the universal good has ceased to be a moi. Pascal himself gave the title
“Christian morality” to the bundle of fragments on the body of
thinking members. The lesson is clear: a genuine change in self-
knowledge and self-love could not be merely an internal, inwardly
directed affair. As selves in a world, we necessarily project our self-
understandings—both true and false—into the world. When we
attain real self-knowledge, we not only love ourselves with a rightly
222 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth
ordered love; we also engage differently with the world. Our tyran-
nical self-love is transformed (through the help of God’s grace) into
an impartial love that desires the good of all. And if the member truly
desires the good of all, then surely its actions must express this desire.
In other words, under sin or under grace, our self-knowledge and self-
love are always socially expressed and, again, performative. We per-
form our selves, according to Pascal, and so it follows that the project
of performing agapic love will necessarily shape one into a different
kind of self, something other than a selfish, tyrannical moi.
Another interpretative difficulty looms, however. Once the self has
ceased to be a moi what else is left for it to be? Recall that elsewhere in
the Pensées Pascal claims that a true self is a self that is worthy of love
(L688/S567). Perhaps unsurprisingly, he also claims that only God is
finally worthy of love.
The true and only virtue is therefore to hate ourselves . . . and to seek for
a being really worthy of love in order to love him. But as we cannot love
what is outside us, we must love a being who is within us but is not our
own self . . . Now only the universal being is of this kind: the kingdom of
God is within us, universal good is within us, and is both ourselves and
not ourselves. (L564/S471)
It appears that we are left with two alternatives: either there are no
true selves, because there are no selves worthy of love, or a true self
must, in some sense, be identified with God. Pascal chooses both
alternatives at once. To the extent that every self is an imaginary self, a
moi, there really are no true selves; but to the extent that one ceases to
be a moi, one thereby becomes something wholly different just insofar
as one’s self-knowledge and self-love have been transformed. At the
root of our subjectivity we find a self that is both a worthy and a
possible object of love. This self is “both ourselves and not ourselves.”
Elsewhere he says that “Happiness is neither outside nor inside us: it
is in God, both outside and inside us” (L407/S26).
We cannot truly love ourselves unless we know and love God, a
project which somehow entails that we are also identified with God.
Yet according to Pascal, we cannot come to know and love God
without first knowing and loving Christ: “Not only do we only
know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through
Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ”
(L417/S36). Surely Christ is also the self that is “both ourselves and
not ourselves” mentioned in L564/S471. The Pascalian true self is the
 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth 223
self that is utterly conformed to Christ, with properly ordered loves.
One becomes a true self when one is conformed to God through the
imitation of Christ; one becomes worthy of love by virtue of being so
conformed. Thus, on my reading, Pascal holds that the true self is the
self that knows and loves God by imitating Christ’s own virtuous love
for God. Christ is the only perfect human subject because his natural
human self-love is also fully identical to love for God. Only when we
imitate Christ can we love God above all things and thereby become
true selves.
In the fragments on the body of thinking members, Pascal takes the
idea that Christ is the object and center of all things and applies it to
the task of attaining true subjectivity. I argued above that the sinful,
false self is best understood as a parodic imitation of God. Yet the
converse also holds. To be free from duplicity, we must imitate God
rightly, by imitating Christ, who is the God-man and the paradig-
matic human being. This is what authentic subjectivity is for Pascal:
subjectivity without duplicity, selfhood that is called into being by a
love that is properly ordered towards God. For Pascal, true subjectiv-
ity is Christocentric subjectivity.
It could not by nature love anything else except for selfish reasons and
in order to enslave it, because each thing loves itself more than anything
else.
But in loving the body it loves itself, because it has no being except in
the body, through the body, and for the body. He who adheres to God is
one spirit [1 Cor. 6: 17]
The body loves the hand and if it had a will the hand ought to love
itself in the same way as the soul loves it; any love that goes beyond that
is wrong.
Adhering to God is one spirit, we love ourselves because we are
members of Christ. We love Christ because he is the body of which
we are members. All are one. One is in the other like the three persons
[of the Trinity]. (L372/S404)10
The body of thinking members is not just any human collective.
Pascal’s claim is not merely that selfish individuals should subordin-
ate their private desires to the good of the whole. The body of
thinking members is the body of Christ. To recognize that one is a

10
In the original, the internal quotations are in Latin, as Pascal cites from the
Vulgate Bible: Qui adhaeret Deo unus spiritus est and Adhaerens Deo unus spiritus est,
respectively.
224 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth
member of the body of Christ is to cease to be a false self, a moi, and to
become something altogether new. After all, it is constitutive of the
moi that it cannot recognize that it is a member of the body. Once it
does recognize that it is a member of the body, it immediately ceases
to be a moi. Having ceased to be a moi, the only thing left for it to be is
a member of the body of Christ, the one who loves God above all
things. And surely to be a member of the body of Christ is also to
imitate Christ and thereby become Christ-like.
Indeed, it is striking that the self ’s transformation is described in
explicitly Trinitarian terms. In the fragment above, Pascal’s model for
authentic self-love, and therefore authentic subjectivity, is nothing
other than perichoresis, the perfect, self-giving love of the Father, Son,
and Spirit: “we love ourselves because we are members of Christ. We
love Christ because he is the body of which we are members. All are
one. One is in the other like the three persons [of the Trinity]” (L372/
S404). Indeed, this fragment goes so far as to equate subjectivity with
theosis: by adhering to Christ in the mystical body we become one
spirit with God, and this is just what it means to be a genuine self.
Theosis is the goal of authentic selfhood. We are true selves—we are
truly selves—when we are a part of Christ, in the mystical body,
constitutively joined with God and neighbor by mutual, self-giving
love, just as Christ is constitutively joined with the Father and Spirit
in the perichoretic union of the holy Trinity.
Scholars rarely explore the theological depths of Pascal’s thoughts
about duplicitous subjectivity. They discuss the fragments on the
body of thinking members even more rarely.11 This omission is
especially regrettable, because these fragments are a necessary

11
See n. 9, above. Interestingly—though, I would say, unfortunately—Carraud
reads the fragments on the body of thinking members as anti-Augustinian. According
to Carraud, Pascal, unlike Augustine, does not say that all human beings find
themselves with two mutually opposing loves (self-love and the love for God). Nor,
according to Carraud, does Pascal call for a change in the object of one’s love (from the
self to God) but rather for a change in the nature of one’s love: to love oneself justly
one must love oneself as one is loved by God, which presumably means impartially
(“Pascal’s Anti-Augustinianism,” Perspectives on Science, 15 (2007), 461; see also his
Pascal et la philosophie, 341). This claim fits in with Carraud’s overall reading (which
I share in part) that, for Pascal, to be a self is to think about oneself in the thought of
another. It would follow that the right kind of self is a self that thinks about itself in the
thought of the right kind of Other—God. Carraud’s picture, then, is of a self that
changes the way it knows and loves itself, but does not change in its being, when it
comes to recognize that it is a member of the mystical body. E.g. Carraud says
explicitly that for Pascal, unlike for Augustine, self-love does not need to be
 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth 225
complement to Pascal’s account of sinful subjectivity. Moreover,
when one overlooks the fragments on the body of thinking members,
one can easily overlook Pascal’s role in the history of modern theo-
logical thought about the self. If my reading is correct, in these
fragments it is Pascal who launches—however inchoately—a trad-
ition of Trinitarian retrieval that is of the greatest contemporary
interest. This tradition holds that the modern individualistic subject
is a pernicious illusion and that true subjectivity is relational and
Trinitarian.12 This tradition of inquiry looks back to the premodern,
to be sure, but insofar as it is also explicitly counter-modern, it
necessarily occurs within and after modernity. Pascal, writing at the
very dawn of modernity, can fairly claim to be its originator.

THE FINAL WORD

Pascal’s account of sinful subjectivity presents selfhood as duplicity:

under the conditions of the Fall, we are false, imaginary selves called
into being by improper self-love, performing our subjectivity in a
dark parody of divine goodness. Conversely, we slough off the false
self and attain genuine subjectivity when (by grace, Pascal would
surely say) we truly imitate God and conform ourselves to Christ,
who loves God above all things. A person who loves God as the
highest good also loves all things according to their true value. In so
doing, he loves the truth and is passionately committed to it. Pascal
shows that this commitment to the truth may be understood as a fully
Christian commitment. Because Christians have a moral obligation to
love the truth, it follows that they cannot finally distinguish between

“converted” but only “controlled” (“Pascal’s Anti-Augustinianism,” 461). He thereby

implies that there is no fundamental change in the self as it exists before and after it
comes to see that it is a member of the body. On my reading, Carraud does not pay
enough attention to the Christological and Trinitarian elements of the relevant
fragments and so he does not appreciate the fact that the self is not only converted
but essentially transformed when it comes to regard itself as a member of the body.
12
For one example among many, see Catherine Mowry La Cugna, God for us: The
Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 243–317, ch. 8, “Persons in
Communion.” For adroit resistance to the claim that personhood is relational, see
Harriet A. Harris, “Should we Say that Personhood is Relational?,” Scottish Journal of
Theology, 51 (1998), 214–34.
226 The Way Back: On Loving the Truth
intellectual virtues and religious or moral virtues. A Christian can
legitimately say that every time she utters something true, no matter
how mundane, she worships God in the very act of speaking truly.
Christians may therefore understand their every word and gesture as
an opportunity to draw closer to God and to make themselves and
the world more hospitable to the truth. Indeed, this may be the only
way to be free from self-deception. It is also, I suggest, one way to
understand the biblical exhortation to “Pray without ceasing.”
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 Index

acceptance 186–8, 194, 206 in God 67, 106

acedia 27–8, 45 logic of 166
see also paresse; sloth system of reference 216–17
acting-as-if 193–5, 208 belief-formation 41–2, 124, 126, 142,
see also habituation 149–63, 167–70, 182, 203–4
Adam 19, 21–3 beliefs 37–8, 65–6
Adams, Roberts M. 132n15 conflicting 76, 115–16, 129,
agency condition 153, 160, 162, 165, 165, 171
168–71, 174 believing, empirical 126–9
akrasia 153n16 Bermúdez, José Luis 165n50, 173n65,
Althusser, Louis 72n30, 80–1, 82, 85 196–7
Ames, Roger T. 162n44 body of thinking members 218, 219–20,
amor dei 22 223, 224–5
amor sui 22 boredom 43–7
amour-propre 20–4, 73, 75, 99–100, 112 Bouchilloux, Hélène 19n1, 30n23,
see also pride; self-love 87n49, 88n50
Anderson, Gary A. 10n10 Bourdieu, Pierre 65, 80, 81–2, 89
Aquinas, Thomas 8n9, 27, 49n47, 60n14 Burke, Kenneth 188n15, 191, 207
Ariew, Roger 2n2 Burrell, David B. 206n30
Aristotle 60, 61n14, 153n16 Buss, Sarah 34n31
Arnauld, Antoine 182
attention 189–90 Calvo, Paco 136n24
paradox of 169–72 Canfield, John 154–5, 159, 165n50
attractiveness 38–42, 107 Cariou, Pierre 125n3
and truth 40–1, 182 Carraud, Vincent 93, 94n5, 95n7,
Audi, Robert 136n22, 156, 157 104n15, 218n9, 224n11, 225n11
Augustine 31, 36n34, 86n47, 93, Carrive, Paulette 95n7
120n25, 212n1, 224n9 Carson, Thomas L. 150n6
Confessions 23 Cartesian:
The City of God 22 ego 148
Augustinian doctrine 5, 6, 10, 14, 18, 20, subject 92, 96
22–6, 33, 46, 51, 68, 74, 82, 84, 93, Charles IX 56
114, 130, 213 Chisholm, Roderick M. 150n6
automaton 65–6 Christian Socratism 6
avowal 199–201, 204, 206 Christianity:
awareness 152, 169–72, 173 Augustinian 20, 84
truth of 6, 48–9
Bach, Kent 156–7 church, the 89–90
Baird, A. W. S. 124, 125n3 Clausewitz, Carl von 55
Barnes, Annette 158n34, 199n28 coeur, see heart
beauty 39 Cohen, L. Jonathan 186–7
Beitzinger, A. J. 87n49, 125n3 concupiscence 20, 22–4, 31–2, 51–2
belief: in our society 76–9
dual-belief 153, 160, 165–7, 169–70, triple 57–8
175–6, 193 1 Corinthians 12 220
238 Index
custom 63–8, 63n19, 77 Eagleton, Terry 85
see also habit Eliot, George, Middlemarch 14, 94,
107–17
Davidson, Donald 165n50 Elster, John 23n11, 123n2, 162
Davidson, Hugh M. 5n5, 17n15, 30n23, emotion 162, 163
63n19, 66 emptiness 43–4
de Sousa, Ronald B. 165n50 Enlightenment 92
deception: ennui 43–4, 45–6, 47–9
interpersonal 148–50, 153–5, 158, Epictetus 28
164, 174, 176 esteem 99, 101, 118
mutual 103 ethical intuitionism 136–7
Delehanty, Ann T. 125n3 ethics 124–5, 132–3, 161
Demos, Raphael 149–54, 155, 159–61,
163, 169 Fall, the 5, 83
Descartes, Rene 21n4, 61, 62, 92, Christian doctrine of 46
93n3, 147 cognitive consequences of 1n1, 7, 17,
Meditations 94, 96 30, 85, 108, 146, 209–10
Descotes, Dominique 30n23, 218n9 into duplicity 1, 7, 15–18, 20, 42–6
desire 182, 213 evaluative 14, 30–8
and belief-formation 41 noetic effects 144, 209
cycle of 34–8 false-self 97–105, 148, 180, 204,
for diversion 2 222, 224
effects of 162, 163 construction of 204–9
for esteem 99, 101, 118 definition 94, 95–6
for God 4 habitual project 111–12
for happiness 4, 8 imaginary 144
for love 95 interpersonal 112–13
for truth 8 in Middlemarch 107–17
unsatisfied 177 parodic imitation of God 117–20
warped by 42 performance of 108, 111, 118–19
Deweese-Boyd, Ian 149n4 as self-deception 113–17
Dewey, John 68 and self-interpretation 105–7
Dilman, Ilham 122 see also self
Dissanayake, Wimal 162n44 fantaisies 140–3, 144, 184–5
diversion 43–4 see also imagination
desire for 2 fear 54–5, 70
from truth 76–9 feminist theologians 26
portraits describing 49 Ferreyrolles, Gérard 60n13, 65n21,
pursuit of 45 72n29, 218n9
divertissement 43–4, 45 finesse 124, 134–7, 140
dueling 128 Fingarette, Herbert 152n15
duplicity 1, 14 Finkelstein, David H. 200n2
fall into 15–18, 20, 42 Fitzgerald, Allan 22n7, 23n8
mutual 119 force 59n30, 69–70, 79
in Pascal's political theology 51–91 Force, Pierre 134n19
in our society 76–9 Foucault, Michel 54–5
and state power 51 Fouke, Daniel C. 6n6, 21n4
see also lying to oneself; Frame, Donald M. 57n8
self-deception Frankfurt, Harry G. 32–3n27, 34n31
Dupuy, Jeam Pierre 157n29 Fredrik Bjorklund 138n26
 Index
Fredrikson, Paula 9n10
Freud, Sigmund 51n10
Funkhouser, Eric 158n32, 175
Gadamer, Hans Georg 132n15
gambling 2
Gamwell, Franklin I. 49n47
Gardiner, Patrick L. 160–1
Gendler, Tamar Szabó 158n32
Genesis 19
Gilbert, D. 41n38
Gilson, Etienne 6
God 105, 177
belief in 67, 106
desire for 4
hiddenness of 209–11
identification with 222–3
imitate 223
love for 216, 218
and objectivity 184n7
parodying 117–20
rational 193
rejected 1, 78, 144
source of goodness 48–9
truth 212
God's wrath 73–4
Goldmann, Lucien 87n48
goods, evaluation of 34–6
Goodstein, Elizabeth S. 46n44
Gouhier, Henri 93n3, 134n20
grace 212–15, 216
Gregory the Great 133n17
Griffiths, Paul, J. 87n51
Gustavson, Don 154–5, 159
habit 63n19
see also custom
habitual project 111–12
habituated body, and
imagination 59–63
habituation 64, 89, 194, 195, 197
see also acting-as-if
Haidt, Jonathan 41n38, 136n22,
137n25, 138n26
Haight, Jeanne 30n23
Hales, Steven D. 156, 157
Hamlyn, D. W. 51n19
Hammond, Nicholas 19n1, 25n13,
43n42, 101n12, 134n19, 213n1
happiness 4, 8, 48
Harris, Harriet A. 218n12
239
Hauerwas, Stanley 206n30
heart 124, 129–33, 137–9
Heller, Lane M. 33n29
Hibbs, Thomas 125n3
Hintikka, Jaakko 166n52
Hitler, Adolf 122
Hobbes, Thomas 35n32, 53, 87
human agency 195–8
human subject 92–120
Hume, David 35n32, 138
hunters 2–3
hypocrisy 101–4
ideology 80, 81
and sin 82–4
and theology 84–7
illusion 51, 52–7, 70–1, 72–3, 80, 81
illusion volontaire 100
imagination 52–7, 180
cognitive and affective 138–9
early concepts of 60–1
and the habituated body 59–63
Pascal's critique 51, 57–68
political 68–70, 77
and self 58–9, 92–120, 205–6
social 63–8, 177
and value 124, 137–9
intellect 129–30
interpellation 81
interpretation 179–80, 181, 186–8
Jesus Christ 7, 105, 177
imitation of 217–25
Johnston, Mark 168n59
Jones, Serene 83
justice 79, 87–8, 89
Kearney, Richard 132n15
Kelly, Daniel 136n24
Kipp, David 161n40, 174, 175, 176
knowledge 133
Koch, Erec 182n2
Kosky, Jeffrey L. 93n3
Krailsheimer, A. J. 2n2, 5n5, 59n10,
74n32, 100n11, 128n9, 131n13, 133
Kuhn, Reinhard 46n45
La Rochefoucauld 162
Lafuma number (L) 2n2
language 64
Laporte, Jean 30n23
240
Lazar, Ariela 161n41
Lazzeri, Christian 20n2, 53n2, 75n33,
102, 103n14, 125n3
Le Guern, Michel 19n1, 213n2, 218n9
Lear, Jonathan 34n30
Levi, Anthony 23n11, 130n10
Levi, Honor 2n2, 19n1, 41n39, 182n2,
215n6
Levy, Neil 157
Lewis, David 155
lie, noble 72–3
Lindzey, G. 41n38
logic 166
Louth, Andrew 33n28
love:
capacity to 20
desire for 95
disordered 20, 25–9, 52, 73, 84
and knowledge 133
rightly ordered 219
a stance 32–3
and visibility 33
see also self-love
Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca 183n6
lying to oneself:
analytic philosophy and 146–78
as culpable self-persuasion 122, 129,
179, 180–2
and the false-self 115–17
see also duplicity; self-deception
Lynch, Kevin 158n32
Lyons, John D. 61n15, 63, 136n21
Lyotard, Jean François 132n15
McFadyen, Alistair 26n14
MacFarland, Ian 10n10
machine 65, 70
McKenna, Antony 218n9
McLaughlin, Brian P. 153n17, 162n44,
168n50
McNally, Patrick 154, 165n50
Magnard, Pierre 125n3, 213n1, 218n9
Maguire, Matthew W. 57n9
Malebranche, Nicholas 35n32
Marin, Louis 69n27
Marion, Jean-Luc 93, 94n5, 95n6,
147n1, 218n9
Martin, Clancy 150n6
Martin, Michael, W. 165n50, 185n10
Martineau, Emmanuel 7n8
Marx, Karl 81
Matheron, Francois 80n36
Index
Mathewes, Charles T. 36n34
Méchoulan, Eric 54n4
Mele, Alfred R. 126n6, 150–1, 153–4,
156, 158, 159n36, 160, 163, 165,
167n53, 168, 173, 175–6
Melzer, Sara 5n5, 7n8
Meskin, Jacob 218n9
Mesnard, Jean 5n5, 33n29, 92n2,
194n22, 213n2
Miel, Jan 5n5, 218n9
moi, see false-self
Montaigne, Michel de 28, 56, 57n8, 61,
72, 87
moral agency 161
moral facts 138n26
moral judgements:
interpretive 124, 125–9
as intuitive reasoning 134–7
moral life 124, 125–9, 126, 130, 139,
141, 144
moral reasoning 124, 140–4
moral theology 121–45
moral wrongdoing 123–5
Moriarty, Michael 19n1, 35, 54, 59n12,
62n18, 82n43, 212n1
Moroney, Stephen K. 9n10
Morot-Sir, Edouard 97n9
Moser, Paul K. 10n10
Mounce, H. O. 51n9
Murdoch, Dugald 61n16
Nado, Jennifer 136n24
Natoli, Charles M. 183n5
Nicole, Pierre 100n11, 182n1
Niebuhr, Reinhold 11n12, 13
Nienkamp, Jean 188n14
Norman, Buford 3, 30n23, 133n18
normative pressure 190–2
nullity 43–4
orgueil 20, 25
see also pride
original sin 8, 9, 12, 83
Outka, Gene H. 26
Overton, Lee 34n31
Paluch, Stanley 172n63
Pannenberg, Wolfhart 29n20
paradox 12–14, 146, 154, 155–8,
163–9
of attention and awareness 169–72
dispelled 198–204
 Index 241
doxastic 158–9, 163–6, 169, 174, 181, as tragedy 87
192, 199, 200, 202–3 as war 55
strategic 158–9, 163–5, 167–9, 174, power 57–68
181, 192, 199, 200, 202 lust for 22
paresse 26–7, 28–9 pretenses of 70–6
see also acedia; sloth state 14, 51, 89
Partee, Barbara 166n52 see also will-to-power
Pascal, Blaise: pride 114n21, 118, 217
as critical theorist 79–87 Augustinian 10–11, 20, 22
"On the Conversion of the destroys the soul 24
Sinner" 212–13 and disordered love 25–9
"Discussion with Monsieur de and paresse 28–9
Sacy" 28 see also amour-propre; orgueil
Pensées 2–5, 7, 13, 15, 17, 19n1, 25, prodigal son 220
28, 30, 33n28, 39, 40, 45, 57, 72, 77,
87n48, 93, 97, 99, 103, 125, 131, raison 30
142n28, 147, 182, 184, 189, 195, rapport 39–40, 107
204, 213n2, 218–19, 222 rationalization 40, 42, 117, 182–4
"The Art of Persuasion" 41, 182 reality, orders of 33–4
Post-wager problem 168 reason 30–1, 40, 42, 50, 57, 177, 182–4
Provincial Letters 128, 182 reasoning:
three orders 93n3 critical and habitual 134n19
wager fragment 66–7, 180, 193, intuitive 134–7
196, 198 moral 124, 140–4
"Wretchedness" 72 unintentionally biased 163
"Writings on Grace" 19n1, 31, 214–15 Reilly, Richard 156, 157
Penelhum, Terrence 155–6, 157, 159–60 religious conversion 32n6, 67n24, 103,
Perelman, Chaïm 183n6 139, 141n28, 194–5, 197, 213
perichoresis 224 repetition 66
Périer, Paul J. 88n51 respect 55, 69–71, 77
persuasion 182–4 rest, aversion to 3–4
see also self-persuasion rhetoric, internal 188–93, 194–5, 207–8
Peters, James R. 18n16 Richmond, Ian M. 33n29
Phillips, D. Z. 122n1 Rorty, A. O. 153n17, 168n50
philosophers, vanity of 147 Ross, W. D. 136n22
philosophy of mind 161 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 22
Pieper, Josef 13
Plantinga, Alvin 10n10 Saiving, Valerie 26
Plato 71n28 Santurri, Edmund N. 26n15
pleasure, aesthetic 214 Scott-Kakures, Dion 148n2, 196n24
political discourse 78 secret instinct 2–5
political imagination 68–70 self:
political order 52–7, 73–4, 177 conflicting interests 191
political progress 87–90 as fiction 1
political self-deception 74–6 and imagination 58–9, 92–120
political system 76 negative ontology 97
political theology 51–91 what is it? 94–7
politics: see also false-self; moi
anti-utopian 88n51 self-assertion 119
as diversion 76–9 self-deception 2–6, 13, 101, 113–17
illusion or lie 72–3 analytic philosophy on 146–78
and self-deception 74–6 controversy 149–50
242
self-deception (cont.)
deflationary 153, 160, 162, 163
diversion as 79
mechanisms 75
moral judgements 124, 125–9
moral reasoning 140–4
political 74–6
as self-persuasion 183
sinful 9–12, 121–3, 144–5, 179–211
strong 153, 164, 169–72, 174–6
unintentional 116
see also duplicity; lying to oneself
self-dispersal 26, 119
self-estrangement 12–14
self-evacuation 26
self-interpretation 105–7, 113–17
self-knowledge 6, 78, 106–7, 161, 176–7
self-love 20–2, 93
see also amour–propre; love
self-persuasion:
morally culpable 122, 179–211
self-deception as 183
steps of 184–95
a temporal process 196
self-talk 188–93
self-transparency 172–8
Sellier number (S) 2n2
Sellier, Philippe 5n5, 20n2, 28–9, 44n43,
72n29, 125n3, 130n11
sentiment 124, 131, 133–4, 135, 137,
140, 142, 144, 184–5
Sepper, Dennis L. 61n16
Siegler, Frederick A. 156, 157, 172n63
sin 9–12, 210
explanation of 13
and ideology 82–4
incoherent 11–12, 79, 118
nature of 10
noetic effects of 1n1, 10n10, 17
origin of 20–1
original 8, 9, 12, 83
performative script 77, 83
of pride 25
and self-deception 9–12, 121–3,
144–5, 179–211
of sloth 27
two roots 26
Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter 138n26
sloth 27, 114n21
see also acedia; paresse
social imagination 63–8
social intuitionist ethics 137–8
Index
social justice 87–8
social order:
duplicitous 14, 68–70
emergence of 52–4
Socrates 42, 71n28
Sommers, Tamler 138n26
Sorensen, Roy A. 169n60
soul 97, 213–14
Stalnaker, Robert 186–7
state power 14, 51, 89
status 69–70
Stich, Stephen 136n24
Stoolhoff, Robert 61n16
subjectivity 92–120, 130
Sudduth, Michael 10n10
superbia 22, 25, 29
see also pride; orgueil
Symons, John 136n24
Szabados, Béla 172n63
Talbott, W. J. 153n17, 158, 165
Taylor, Charles 106–7
theological anthropology 177
theology, and ideology 84–7
thinking reed 92
Thirouin, Laurent 218n9
Thomas D. Feehan 150n6
Tolstoy, Leo 122
Tom, white-collar criminal 185–6, 188,
190, 201, 204–7, 208
Topliss, Patricia 182n2
transmutation 123n2
transpersonal mechanisms 82–3
Trinity, the 224, 225
truth 38–42
and attractiveness 40–1, 182
aversion for 1, 7–9, 208–9
and beauty 39
desire for 8
hatred of 143
loving the 212–26, 215–17
and politics 76–9
unattractive 38
unconscious mental activity 199–200
unhappiness 45, 46–50, 78
value 124, 137–9, 142
Van Leeuwen, D. S. N. 157
violence 54–5, 70, 81
Voeglin, Eric 86n47
von Balthasar, Hans Urs 33n28
 Index
Walzer, Michael 207
war 54–5
Warner, Martin 130n10, 132n14,
135–6n21
Werpehowski, Willam 26n15
Westgate, David 23n11
Wetsel, David 7n8, 194n21
will 5, 67, 129–30, 142, 177
divided 20, 31–2, 37–8
243
Williams, Bernard 167–8
Will-to-power 51, 52, 53–4
see also power
Winch, Peter 216n7
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 216–17
Wolf, Susan 34n31
Wood, William 8n9, 39n35,
193n20
Žižek, Slavoj 67n24, 82n43