Most of all, beware of the teaching of the scholars … They preach words, and do nothing. And the result is that they no more than say: ‘Do this and that.’ And there is no further result, because they do nothing good, but only talk. And they tell people to do the impossible, and they themselves do nothing.
(Leo Tolstoy. The Gospel in Brief)
0. INTRODUCTION
Virtually everyone gives some thought to how they can make the best out of their time here on Earth. Few, however, bother to consider the extent to which such thinking can actually hope to improve their circumstances; we are happy enough merely to assume that it can, and that the quality & quantity of our thinking will be sufficient to the task at hand.
Admittedly, some have given this matter the degree of consideration it undoubtedly deserves, and we are exceptionally fortunate that three of the most brilliant minds to have graced our planet are among those who have done so. They are, namely:
- Blaise Pascal, the 17th Century, French Polymath;
- Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th Century, German philologist and philosopher; and
- Plato, the Ancient Greek forefather of Western Philosophy.
By examining the fruits of their collective labour, we aspire to a heightened appreciation of the mutually dependent relationship shared between the character both of one’s life and one’s thinking. Such is the general aim of this undertaking.
The more specific, academic goal of this paper is to demonstrate that this general theme can be seen to underlie much of these great philosophers’ work. Such a demonstration is supposed meritorious insofar as it will endow us with a needle of coherence by which to thread the otherwise haphazard presentation of the original philosophies into a more clearly meaningful whole.
That such an undertaking should have the appearance of exposition alone should come as little surprise to those already familiar with these works, for, as will be appreciated, the various philosophies expounded herein do not appear in the original works in any sustained or cohesive way. The implicit ‘critical’ claim of this paper, then, is that these philosophies can be faithfully portrayed in narrative form.
To invoke the authority of Pascal himself: ‘Let no one say that I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the subject is new.’
1. PASCAL
Blaise Pascal was exceptionally talented at abstract reasoning. By the time he was a mere sixteen years of age, word of this precocious mind had already spread as far as the great René Descartes. And, by the time he was thirty, Pascal had universally established himself as a scientist, a mathematician, and a geometer of the highest calibre.
In November of his thirty-first year, however, young Pascal had a profound mystical vision that radically altered his estimation of the mind’s ability to penetrate the realm of truth, as Nietzsche would later put it. Henceforth abandoning his meticulous scientific studies and his exacting mathe-matical works, Pascal turned his mind to Theology and Philosophy, and gave his heart exclusively to Jesus Christ.
Eight short years later, Blaise Pascal died.
Following Pascal’s untimely death, two important discoveries were made.
The first was that, upon rummaging through his personal artefacts, Pascal’s family and friends retrieved numerous scraps of paper. Written on each were independent, though not isolated, ideas. Compiled and edited, these ‘scraps’ were to become Pascal’s most famous work: his aptly titled, Pensées (simply, ‘thoughts’). It is this masterpiece of prose and profundity that forms the principal focus of our present investigation.
The second discovery was made by a servant who chanced upon a note, meticulously sewn into the inside of his master’s coat. Presumably intended to serve as a constant reminder, the note dramatically described the vision that Monsieur Pascal had nearly a decade before. It read:
FIRE.
GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
Not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
…
He is only found by ways taught in the Gospel.
….
He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel:
Renunciation, total and sweet.
…
May I not forget your words. Amen.
It is with this second discovery, that we feel the pricking of the needle that will allow us to penetrate to the heart of the motivation and significance of the first.
***
Pascal’s vision shook his faith in Reason to the very core. Faced with the God of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob, Pascal immediately recognised his previous abstract theism to have been seriously lacking; not of the philosophers and the learned, as he says.
This is understandable insofar as the God of the Old Testament was the kind of entity that would manifest Himself in vision and speech to command that one sacrifice their most beloved (a tendency not without ironic significance for Pascal, the scientist). More importantly, He was not the type to be found in detached and convoluted metaphysical proofs, as if prone to magical invocation. Indeed, Pascal argued that rational arguments are only ever able to convince the mind, and so unavoidably neglect the body and soul. Therefore, as soon as the books that contain these proofs are shut, we begin to lose confidence in our newly found convictions, thereby rapidly drifting back to our old ways.
That said, it is fair to assume that Pascal was not so foolish as to expect that everyone would be graced with indelible visitations like the one he experienced. Divine revelation is considered by the faithful to be miraculous and, so, exceptional. Indeed, Pascal believed that normally, proof of God is found in the seemingly inexplicable phenomenon of charitable feeling, as was exemplified by the teachings and actions of his Saviour.
Pascal’s overarching concern, therefore, was how we can possibly foster such charity, both in ourselves and in others.
Christian or not, this question remains of the utmost importance even today. And yet, as Pascal undoubtedly appreciated, it is an especially problematic issue. For while it is obvious that we can potentially train the body and educate the mind, it is difficult to imagine how we could ever directly cause the feeling of an emotion like charity, either in oneself or another, if one weren’t already predisposed to have it.
Such impenetrability led Pascal to conclude that charitable feeling must be ‘supernatural’ in that it is revealed as ‘infinitely’ disconnected from mind and body. And, furthermore, that it can only be bestowed by the grace of God alone.
Nevertheless, Pascal believed that for any good Christian, there remained much to be done in order to win God’s blessing of charitable feeling. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he also argued that it was vital that such efforts pertained to the mind and body equally, for, as was appreciated by the character of his mystical vision, Reason had been revealed to him as insufficient for the task.
***
Pascal deeply lamented the fact that contemporary philosophers especially were ignorant of these shortcomings of Reason, ‘as though only [it] were capable of instructing us.’ But, as Pascal explains, it is in vain that philosophers seek purely rational proofs, not only for the existence of God, but for any truths whatsoever. For it is only vanity that drives them, and not a humble awareness of their own wretchedness, nor the divine feeling of charity, as it ought to be.
‘We make an idol out of truth itself,’ bewails Pascal; puffing ourselves up in self-congratulatory pride at how clever we are that not even God can escape the nets of our reasoning. But our goal should not be merely to prove that we can create truths; like becoming an astronomer merely to play with telescopes. Rather, we should be driven by a humble desire for knowledge of the things in themselves – God and the stars!
‘For truth apart from charity is not God’, Pascal continues, ‘but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.’ Or, as Epicurus put it centuries earlier:
We must not pretend to study philosophy, but study it in reality: for it is not the appearance of health that we need, but real health.
Here we are reminded of a strikingly similar sentiment expressed by Saint John of the Cross in his Ascent of Mount Carmel, where he writes that those with lively imaginations are liable to presume that their most ingenious thoughts must capture or touch-on the truth, and so eagerly rush to write them down and have them circulated widely. But, typically, as nothing more than perhaps a modicum of fame comes of the entire elaborate process, we can be sure that their thoughts were ‘truthful’ in only the most superficial sense. For as Saint John explains in agreement with Pascal, the inevitable concomitant compassion found in all God-given truths, necessarily compels one immediately to charitable action … so much so that the real truth is only able to be written down retrospectively.
To appreciate the force of these shared philosophies, we need only to contrast any Ethicist of standing with any Humanitarian, asking ourselves, ‘Who does the world and its people more good?’
That Pascal and Saint John of The Cross should share the same response is no great coincidence, for, as was hinted at by the opening abstract of this paper, their Messiah is recorded in the Gospel of Saint Matthew as similarly scorning the inaction of scholars. Indeed, Jesus goes so far as to suggest that, because of the demanding hypocrisy of scholars – proclaiming, ‘do as I say, not as I do’ – they inevitably end up calling for the impossible to be accomplished.
Pascal, too, felt this to be the case: without being constrained by the pragmatics of action and charitable feeling, Reason lacks anchorage, and so ‘can be made to serve any purpose whatsoever; hence there is no rule.’ Therefore, as ‘reason cannot set a true value on things’ , the situation is further exacerbated by the fame, fortune, and influence typically given to those with the most colourful and alluring imaginations – ‘that deceitful part in man.’
This particular attitude of Pascal, however, was perhaps not so much a product of divine revelation or scriptural espousal, as it was an empirical sociological evaluation. It can be clearly seen in his scathingly satirical, Provincial Letters, that Pascal was highly critical of what he regarded to be the ‘chicanery’ of Jesuit casuistry. Furthermore, if only from the frequency of mentions in Pensées, we can see that Pascal was deeply perturbed by what he regarded to be the prevalence of philosophical scepticism.
However, as Pascal did not want to deny the reasonableness of the Jesuits or the sceptics outright, he is thereby seen to present himself with a serious dilemma:
On all sides the language is similar. We must have a fixed point in order to judge. The harbour decides for those who are in a ship; but where shall we find a harbour…?
The answer that Pascal gave, of course, was in the teaching and example of Jesus Christ, and of those who similarly live through him, for, as we saw at the outset, ‘He is only found [and kept securely] by the ways taught in the Gospel.’ This response is in keeping with Pascal’s overall philosophy insofar as he believed that ‘Jesus Christ and Saint Paul employ the rule of love, not of intellect; for they would warm, not instruct.’
Indeed, such is the recommendation subsequent to Pascal’s famous ‘Wager’, and it is here that we can most clearly see all the various elements of Pascal’s philosophy coming together:
In itself, all that the Wager aspires to, is to convince the reader that even an erroneous belief in the existence of God is favourable to an unyielding atheism, regardless of whether the latter is justified. Once the reader is thus convinced, Pascal openly admits that faith does not seem to be the type of phenomenon that can be merely ‘decided-upon’, even with sufficient supporting evidence, for, as we saw earlier, Pascal believed that rational proofs are only ever weakly effective. Instead, Pascal implores the reader to:
…at least learn your inability to believe, since reason brings you to this, and yet you still cannot believe. Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. There are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as though they believed, taking holy water, having masses said, etc. This will naturally make you believe…
…you will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, and truthful.
2. NIETZSCHE
Unsurprisingly, Friedrich Nietzsche – author of such works as The Antichrist and Beyond Good and Evil – had seemingly distinct concerns to that of pious Pascal. And yet, as will be shown of Nietzsche’s 1870s notebooks, fundamentally the two shared very similar worries.
***
Nietzsche, it is fair to say, was a fairly egotistical individual, penning such chapters as ‘Why I am so clever’ and ‘Why I am Destiny’ only half tongue-in-cheek. It is clear from his writings more generally, that Nietzsche intensely wished that he could have been a grand heroic figure, like Napoleon Bonaparte or Marcus Aurelius. Instead, a fall from his horse relieved him of military service, and continuing poor health (incidentally, a trait that he shared with Pascal) prevented him from virtually anything but a life of secluded philosophising and mountain walking.
In Nietzsche: A Life of Literature, Alexander Nehamas argues that Nietzsche’s philosophy can be characterised as the literary personification of his ideal self. Ironically, as Nietzsche described philosophies other than his own:
It has become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its author, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography.
In this light, it is illuminating to view Nietzsche’s abandonment of his earlier philosophy, as a psychological response to a growing awareness of the likely outcome of his own fate. For instance, as Nietzsche had been popularly known as the ‘little saint’ in his youth, it seems only natural that he was initially happy to adopt for his own philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer’s triad of supreme human types: i.e. the artist, the philosopher, and the saint. However, we can readily suppose that as Nietzsche gradually became conscious of the limitations of his own mature character, the saint came to be not merely abandoned, but sourly denigrated, whilst the ideal categories of artist and philosopher (which Nietzsche now understood himself to be exclusively aspiring to) were ever highly praised.
It is telling, then, that in his 1870’s notebooks, Nietzsche expressed a profound vexation, if not outright shame, in noting that even the so-called ‘Great Philosophers’ (Schopenhauer and Kant being Nietzsche’s two exemplars) each lived lives in seemingly unthinking accordance with the norms of their time. Upon closer inspection, they could hardly be regarded as particularly ‘wise’ in most aspects of their lives, outside their work. On the one hand, because of a superstitious fear of contracting illness, Kant refused to breathe through his mouth while in the open air, even when friends or strangers would try to speak with him! On the other, Schopenhauer wouldn’t trust his neck to a barber’s razor, for fear of making himself vulnerable to assassination, even though he was almost entirely disregarded as a philosopher during the majority of his lifetime.
Such a situation was totally unacceptable by Nietzsche’s lights. According to him, the real ‘work’ of any true philosopher is to be found in the example set by the manner in which they lived. One’s writing is secondary; merely serving as a manual by which to guide others in following suit. Here it is interesting to note the similarity with the following passage from Pascal’s Pensées:
We can only think of Plato and Aristotle in grand academic robes. And yet, they were honest men, like others, laughing with their friends, and when they diverted themselves with writing their Laws and the Politics, they did it as an amusement. That part of their life was the least philosophic and the least serious; the most philosophic was to live simply and quietly. If they wrote on politics, it was as if laying down rules for a lunatic asylum; and if they presented the appearance of speaking of a great matter, is was because they knew that the madmen, to whom they spoke, thought they were kings and emperors. They entered into their principles on order to make their madness as little harmful as possible.
And yet, according to Nietzsche, in contemporary academia, the philosopher could hardly be said to live any differently from any other scholar. Why, then, would anybody trouble themselves with Philosophy in particular, when it seemed as though studying the ways any other academic would produce the same benefits in life?
Nietzsche claimed that such dire circumstances were in part being caused by the flippant manner in which his contemporaries approached Philosophy: beginning to write and teach nearly as soon as they had begun to learn. Indeed, here again we can espy something of the self-referential psychology behind Nietzsche’s philosophising, for ironically he himself had been appointed Professor of Classical Philology at The University of Basel at the incredibly young age of twenty-four. But while the fashionable vice of haste was, to Nietzsche mind, making matters worse, he nonetheless felt that the true source of the problem was to be found in the nature of knowledge itself.
***
Knowledge, Nietzsche argued, aspires to stagnancy; ‘The End of Inquiry’, as Charles Pierce would later put it. Even as far back as Plato, we find the character of Socrates explaining to poor, bewildered Meno, that it will do us little good having opinions that fly away at every opportunity. What we need are tethers! That is, Socrates explained, arguments by which to turn our indeterminate beliefs into resolute knowledge.
But, claimed Nietzsche, in order for there to be even the possibility of attaining knowledge, we are first obliged to create concepts.
According to Nietzsche, prior to the advent of concepts, all expression and non-linguistic communication was openly a matter of imitation and (sensory) impression, of authority and (phenomenal) metaphor. With the creation of concepts, however, ‘the impression is petrified…; it is captured and stamped by means of concepts. Then it is killed, skinned, mummified, and persevered as a concept.’ Such a process, Nietzsche argued at length, futilely seeks to deny the uniqueness and particularity of each and every aspect of reality, from the individual tree-leaf to a passing commendation of ‘honesty’. Hence, the world is shrouded in a Platonic supernaturalism or qualitas occulta, the ‘knowledge’ of which involves little more than the playing, arranging, and manipulation of one’s most familiar and, therefore, seemingly concrete concepts.
Science has been able to capitalise in the positive production of such knowledge, in part, because the scientist is obliged to maintain at least the pretence of empirical fidelity to the essentially dynamic reality that it seeks to negate via the creation of its laws, theories, findings, observations, etc.
Philosophy, on the other hand, has recourse only to the concepts themselves, and so, via endless generations of arrangements, categorisations and manipulations, any philosophical knowledge to be obtained from these petrified, conceptual artefacts, is liable to have little to no tangible connection to reality.
Here we are reminded of Immanuel Kant, in writing of the limitations of pure reason:
… once we are outside the circle of experience, we can be sure of not being contradicted by experience. The charm of extending our knowledge is so great that nothing short of encountering a direct contradiction can suffice to arrest us in our course; and this can be avoided, if we are careful in our fabrications – which none the less will still remain fabrications.
Or, in Nietzsche’s own words: ‘The deception of ideas appears in the vacuum.’
Unfortunately, in attempting to outrun the shadow cast by the Promethean rise of Science, Nietzsche’s contemporaries had, he thought, increasingly sought refuge in such vacuous mysticism. As he said, ‘where one can know nothing that is true, there the lie is permitted.’ This was especially true in contemporary Ethics, which without naming names, Nietzsche claimed was peddling such fanciful metaphysics of Humankind, so far removed from the realities of everyday life, as to be utterly useless pragmatically. Thus he concluded, with double-edged condescension, that ‘vegetarians, with their prescription to eat less and more simply, are of more use than all the new moral systems taken together.’ Unfortunately, however, it was precisely because these new moral systems demanded nothing of their proponents (except, perhaps, poetic self-glorification) that increasingly they were not only permitted, but extolled.
Nietzsche was predictably pessimistic about the likelihood of Philosophy successfully fleeing the scientific saturation of academia and the world at large. He thought that ultimately, if philosophers persisted with such futile metaphysical escapism, they would eventually be run down and reduced to a subsidiary science, charged only with ensuring that neither full-blown Science nor non-Science (art, religion, etc.) encroach upon one another’s legitimate territories. ‘Professional boarder patrolling’ (Grenzwächterschaft) Nietzsche called it, further suggesting that those who were rightly unwilling to indulge in metaphysical speculation, had already begun to submit thusly. Indeed, Nietzsche held that such philosophastering was also in part to blame for the growing irreverence to what he regarded to be the awesome burden of any true lover of wisdom – in contrast to the ‘scientific trainees’ that the academy were now appointing as so-called ‘teachers’.
***
Although Nietzsche didn’t explicitly suggest a remedy for the situation described above, at times he curiously contrasted ‘knowledge’ with ‘truthfulness’.
Truthfulness, Nietzsche suggested, is something more akin to honesty or authenticity, where one gives in to the perpetual ebb and flow of the world, letting go of the attempt to know and thereby control the world with grossly reductionist concepts, laws, and principles. Instead, Nietzsche recommended ‘actively sacrificing yourself to the culture which is developing’, for as he concludes of all philosophising:
The objective value of knowledge: it does not improve anything. It has no final, universal goals. It originates accidentally. The value of truthfulness: it, on the other hand, improves things!’
3. PLATO
In agreement with Alfred North Whitehead’s famous characterisation of Western Philosophy as little more than a footnote to Plato, in this final section I seek to demonstrate that Plato (through the character and mouthpiece of his teacher, Socrates) can be seen to presage the concerns of Pascal and Nietzsche by nearly two thousand years.
***
Ironically, it is only from the writings of Plato that we know that Socrates conscientiously wrote nothing himself. That is, while Socrates acknowledged that the written word could be used as an effective aide to memory, he ultimately felt that no real knowledge (or perhaps what Nietzsche would call ‘truthfulness’) could be captured by fixed, written words. Rather, it is an essential element of all Socratic philosophising that it arise directly out of elenchus. The truth for Socrates is always only ever arrived at via authentic dialogue, which, as Hans-Georg Gadamer emphasised, is essentially without predetermination. Indeed, we find the same sentiment expressed by the soon-to-be-executed Socrates when he encouraged his interlocutors to follow the conversation regarding his ultimate fate to wheresoever it may lead:
[This] is the spirit in which I am prepared to approach the discussion, … if you take my advice, you will think very little of Socrates, and much more of the truth. If you think that anything I say is true, you must agree with me; if not, oppose it with every argument that you have.
Thus we begin to see that Socrates’ unwavering commitment to this mode of truth is, in part, achieved via a diminished regard for the self. Think very little of Socrates. It is, however, tempting to conclude from this that Socrates has contradicted himself in the following proclamation of Plato’s Gorgias:
…it is a greater boon to be delivered from the worst of evils [(i.e. false opinion)] oneself than to deliver another.
To do so, however, would be misguided. Aside from the somewhat backhanded rhetoric of appealing to Gorgias’ sense of self-interest, Socrates believed that any meaningful advantage to ‘oneself’ (i.e. their ‘soul’) will in fact amount to a diminishing of one’s individual, worldly self; not a reinforcing of it.
We can see this to be the case no more clearly than in Plato’s Phaedo. Therein Socrates argues that philosophising amounts to the practise of dying. Everyday life – with its deception of the senses, and distractions of worldly desire and bodily-functions – prevents the philosopher from full, unadulterated knowledge of the truth. Given, then, that Socrates also believed in the immortality of the soul, he optimistically felt that when the philosopher actually comes to die, their soul, freed from bodily identity and worldly concerns, will naturally find atonement with this truth. However, until such time – as suicide is a sin by Socrates’ reckoning – the philosopher must merely practise dying, for it is only in philosophising that the world-bound soul is in any degree capable of transcending the self and, concomitantly, of espying the eternal truth of things. ‘This condition of the soul’, explains Socrates, ‘we call wisdom.’
***
In agreement with his successors, Socrates believed that an essential requirement of true thinking involves right living. In Socrates’ case, the life of the true philosopher is thought to require that one willing choose to live in relative, albeit sustaining, poverty. Those who seek payment for their so-called wisdom inevitably compromise their fidelity so as to win the continued favour of their patrons. Such philosophical corruption, thought Socrates, was most clearly manifested in the political power sought after by orators.
Oratory, by virtue of its instantiation, necessarily requires a knack for flattery, argued Socrates. This is because any individual who addresses the Assembly is obliged to pander to the lowest common denominator if they are to have any hope of winning the conviction of the majority. Socrates concludes that this unfortunately means that the orator ‘is a creator of convictions about right or wrong by persuasion, but not by instruction.’ Furthermore, this then precludes oratory as being a worthy vocation for those who seek after the truth, for without necessarily involving an element of instruction by which to anchor belief as knowledge, orators are not only unable to ensure true conviction in their audiences, but, moreover, even in themselves.
***
In one of the most remarkable passages of Western Literature, the character of young Polus asks Socrates whether he considers Archelaus, ruler of Machonia, to be a happy or wretched person; to which Socrates replies frankly that he couldn’t possibly know what to think regarding this matter, as he had ‘never met the man.’
For Socrates, everyday notions that happiness might somehow be guaranteed by wealth, power, fame, glory, etc., are all without weight. Even the label of ‘wisdom’ can, too often, fail; audiences are all too easily deceived, and philosophy may be uttered or written without real understanding on the part of the author.
Rather, according to Socrates, it is only via direct interpersonal, philosophical dialogue that we can attain knowledge, not only of the wellbeing of one’s interlocutor, but concomitantly of oneself and the truth. For Socrates to have gained knowledge either about Archelaus, his own self, or the truth of, say, the relation between power and happiness, Socrates felt he would have had to appropriately converse with Archelaus himself.
Here we are reminded somewhat of Nietzsche’s notion of truthfulness as being an authentic immersion into the dynamism of reality. Indeed, from the discussion of the origin of names in Plato’s Cratylus, we can see a striking similarity expressed by Socrates’ straddling of the two seemingly dichotomous positions advanced by Hermogenes and Cratylus respectively.
Hermogenes, on the one hand, held that the origin of names is a matter of convention and consensus. That is, someone with the proper authority christens the object in question with an essentially arbitrary name-sound that is subsequently to be used by all. On the other hand, the character of Cratylus argued that ‘things have names by nature.’ That is to say that the name-sound belonging to an object, in a sense belongs essentially; it must, at least in part, reflect the essential nature of the object itself.
While Socrates is careful to point out, contra Cratylus, that many names do not literally reflect the essence of the referent, insofar as people are nonetheless willing to call an object by incongruous names, the status and nature of the object must, nonetheless, be indirectly reflected, contra Heremogenes. For example, it is clear that applying the literally incongruous nickname of ‘Tiny’ to a person of large stature may nonetheless indirectly reveal that he, Tiny, had friends of a playful nature.
Similarly, while the nickname ‘Plato’ literally means broad-shouldered or broad-browed, it is easy to conjecture that at least part of the reason that we all now know the Ancient Greek Philosopher, Aristocles, by the name of ‘Plato’ is not only because he was of large stature, but moreover because he thought quite highly of himself and so was known less-literally, but more playfully, as ‘big-man’.
That said, Socrates would be quite right to point out that the only way to really know whether or not this was in fact the case, would involve meeting both the named and the namers themselves.
***
In Plato’s apology, Socrates states that the social goal of his philosophy is ‘to convince Athenians, young and old, to make their first and chief concern not for their bodies nor for their possessions, but for the highest welfare of their souls.’ The life of philosophy, argued Socrates, is the only way for the soul to regain its wings after death. But, while thinking of the more Platonic (in contrast to Socratic) theory of Forms, it is tempting to think of such immortality as being closer to Pascal’s heavenly supernaturalism, from the following call to philosophy, we find, perhaps, a closer affinity to Nietzsche’s truthfulness:
…far more excellent [than recording one’s ideas in writing], is the serious treatment of them, which employs the art of dialectic. The dialectician selects a soul of the right type, and in it he plants and sows his words founded on knowledge, words which can defend themselves and him who planted them, words which instead of remaining barren contain a seed whence new words grow up in new characters, whereby the seed is vouchsafed immortality, and its possessor the fullest measure of blessedness that man can attain unto.
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Primary Sources
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NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Philosophy and Truth
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AMOUR, Leslie. “Infini Rien”: Pascal’s Wager and the Human Paradox
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TOLSTOY, Leo. The Gospel in Brief
