I would like to use this blog post to explore the ideas of pain, wholes, and individuals found in Pascal and Wittgenstein in connection to another French thinker, Simone Weil. For me, she seems to lie somewhere between the two on these issues and, as she had studied Pascal extensively, offers some interesting insights to the limitations of his theory.
Pascal’s analogy, in remark 372, of a human made up of thinking members to represent how individual men relate to humanity as a greater whole is only really made up of two parts: the separated member and the body to which is belongs. It is almost as if Pascal is imagining the type of absurdity Wittgenstein asks his readers to through his discussion of how pain relates to the body (286). In Pascal, it is not a question of pain but a question of faith, or more specifically Christian faith. The separated member, or bodily appendage, is a follower of Christ who, even if it believes itself to be whole and dependent eventually “comes to know itself […] and loves itself for the body’s sake.” The process is a discovery of faith or a truth that, for Pascal, is the only possibility: “but he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit”. We can only know ourselves if we know God. The two figures of Pascal’s analogy do not directly correlate to the human and the Lord; individual members of humanity can, in fact, think. Therefore if the analogy is to work it’s literal meaning must be ignored; the literal figure of the organic body must be posited and replaced with something more abstract.
Simone Weil, in her essay on “Human Personality”, approaches a similar topic to Pascal: how we relate to one another as individuals, and how we relate to a greater whole. For Weil, however, there are three parts to the equation: the Personal, the Collective, and the Impersonal. Her three roughly correlate to Pascal’s as follows; the Personal is like the separated member of the analogy, the Collective is similar to the whole body (Jesus Christ), and the Impersonal is something else. The best correlation I can imagine is to see it as either the separated member once if has found it’s home in the body, or the human once it has found the lord. However, neither of these is quite right. Weil describes the Impersonal as all that is sacred. “What is sacred in science is truth; what is sacred in art is beauty. Truth and beauty are impersonal.” (I believe there are similarities in style with Pascal here, the use of aphoristic phrases with no guarantee the reader is following.) She goes on, still sounding like she is in agreement with Pascal, to state “Perfection is impersonal. Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin”. However, it is her application of these three which marks her against Pascal and, at least for me, makes her more accessible. The personal is unimportant in both, selfish, foolish and unknowing of itself, however for Weil there is also a sense of selfishness in the collective; it too acts with itself as priority. Her collective is not Jesus Christ, it is perhaps more an institutional religion, or a nation. The impersonal then is what is missing from Pascal’s analogy, the gap that means the literal body must be posited. Similarly to Pascal she separates parts, yet not to join them together in Jesus Christ but as a way to find a different truth; Weil’s truth is Justice. The impersonal is the part which can ask “what are you going through” without relating to one’s own experience, or worrying about how it affects the collective whole.
Wittgenstein’s investigation of whether the body has pain or whether the consciousness does (although he never uses this word himself) is in a similar vein to Pascal’s analogy discussed above. However, Wittgenstein’s aim is different. He is looking at how we understand pain and how, then, we can understand the pain of others. This latter aim is what connects him to Simone Weil. Wittgenstein leads his readers through the idea that it is “absurd to say of a body that it has pain” to the question “How does it become clear that it is not the body?” (286) because for Wittgenstein, this is true. Wittgenstein moves his discussion to the larger concept of sensations to explore how they only exist in the signals and signs language, or we through the medium of language, have created in order to represent, but more importantly, to express pain and sensations to others. This focus fits into Wittgenstein’s overall investigation of language. Earlier he poses the question “what about language which describes my inner experiences [sensations] and which only I can myself can understand?”(256) Is it possible for sensations, whether pain or otherwise, to remain private and not understood when they must be expressed in a language which “is not a ‘private’ one”? Weil’s answer would be, I believe, that they should not be private; the focus should not be on your personal pain but on the pain of others. She would agree with Wittgenstein most when he demands that we do not comfort the body “but the sufferer: one looks into his eyes.”(286)
I have only read a little Weil and didn’t know (though I should have) that she, as you say, “studied Pascal extensively.” One question I would have regarding her distinction between “the collective” and “the impersonal,” is whether by “the collective” she does not mean the social collective – Pascal’s “body of thinking members” would encompass that, but would not be limited to it. On the other hand, he does, at least in his analogy, emphasize the affective relationship of the “member” to the whole of which it is a part, and that affectivity would seem to be something Weil wishes to deprecate (?) in her emphasis on “the impersonal.” In this connection it is true, I think, that justice remains a largely political concept for Pascal and is subordinate to “caritas” as a “value,” but I would need to look more closely at how he uses the word “just.”
Regarding Wittgenstein, I hope to pursue that discussion this evening – perhaps you’ll bring up Weil