Wagering on Truth

An Introduction to Baroque Gambling

“We want truth and find only uncertainty in ourselves.” This statement comes early on in the collected thoughts of Blaise Pascal, in a book now known as Pensées. Reaching across the endless expanse of time, Pascal’s words resonate in a philosophical climate where truth has become the object of much criticism. Indeed, it becomes difficult to have much certainty in anything. The linguistic turn that took place towards the beginning of the 20th century within philosophy produced countless pages of reflection and argumentation over signifier and signified, speech and writing, language and truth, knowledge and uncertainty. Many refused to give up on a commitment to truth, to knowledge about what really is, going so far as to try and cause a metamorphosis in which philosophy would shift from mere speculation into a kind of science. Others from the post-Nietzschean philosophers in Europe to the pragmatists in the United States reveled in this new order of thought, declaring that the philosophical questions which had been raised since the time of Descartes had not only lost their usefulness but had even been shown to be unsolvable. A waste of time which should be abandoned. Taking a step further, some of these philosophers such as Richard Rorty proclaimed the death of philosophy, envisioning a post-philosophical culture that would arise from the understanding that “we can cease doing philosophy when we want to (Wittgenstein).” This essay is not in any sense meant to be a refutation of these philosophers who levied powerful and important criticisms against many of the fundamental assumptions of philosophy as it has been understood. Neither is it a defense of academia more broadly or the professionalization of philosophy, or any sort of philosophical Fach. The question I would rather pursue is this: what do we do when we know we can stop doing philosophy, but we want to keep doing it anyway? Or to rephrase: what do we do with this desire for truth when all we find is uncertainty? To answer this question we will take the time to explore one possible solution, that being Pascal’s (in)famous Wager. 

To begin to understand the Wager we must first understand the assumptions upon which Pascal bases his philosophy. Working within a fundamentally Augustinian framework, it is unsurprising that Pascal has a rather pessimistic view of humanity and the human condition. After all, it was none other than St. Augustine who first introduced the doctrine of Original Sin into Christian theology. To see the extent to which this idea of a state of falleness and sin had on Pascal’s thought, let us take a moment to examine in greater detail the passage from Pensées quoted above:

Man does not know which place he should occupy. He has obviously gone astray and fallen from his true place, lacking the power to find it again. He looks for it everywhere anxiously and unsuccessfully, in impenetrable darkness.

We want truth and find only uncertainty in ourselves.

We seek happiness and find only wretchedness.

We are incapable of not wanting truth or happiness and are incapable of certainty or happiness.

We have been left with this desire as much to punish us as to make us perceive from whence we have fallen.

As we can see rather clearly, Pascal takes the idea of the Fall to be of fundamental importance. For Pascal it not only explains the pursuit within philosophy to come to understanding over claims concerning what is true and how we should act, but also why as until then any such attempt had been (in his mind) unsuccessful. 

While Pascal’s overtly theological reasoning for these beliefs might not sit well with many today, it isn’t difficult to see the parallels between the results of his philosophy and the results of someone such as Richard Rorty. As Rorty writes in his piece “Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein”:

Theory starts, as Dewey remarked, when somebody has doubts about what everyone has always believed, and suggests that there is another way of looking at the matter. The possibility of alternative theories ends only when interest in the subject has lapsed so far that no one cares what anyone else might say about it.

This line of reasoning is what leads Rorty towards his dismissal of claims about the nature of truth, fundamental reality, etc. The arguments go round and round in a circle, never reaching any stable conclusions, always being challenged and rechallenged, never getting anywhere concrete. What Rorty would like us to do is to stop asking these kinds of questions because they can serve no pragmatic use. He wants the topic of the conversation to change, for philosophers to start doing something that has more of a pragmatic value. We can understand Rorty’s objection to philosophy as it exists then as a kind of ethical critique. We should stop asking the questions not only because we’re not getting anywhere with them, but also because they are distracting from asking much more important questions, such as how we should live with one another. Perhaps surprisingly, Pascal seems to share similar objections to certain questions within philosophy, such as the existence of G-d. Despairing at the ignorance of the philosophers, Pascal declares in his “Discourse on the Machine”:

If there is a God, he is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, he bears no relation to us. We are incapable therefore of either knowing what he is or whether he is. This being so, who will dare undertake to resolve the question? Not we, who bear no relation to him.

For Pascal, the question of G-d’s existence is not only unresolvable, but also nonsensical. No faculty of reason could ever possibly allow for us to understand what G-d is, whether or not G-d exists, etc. However, Pascal did not believe that the existence or non-existence of G-d had no bearing on our life, or that it wasn’t a problem worth pondering. Rather for Pascal the initial question, whether or not G-d exists, is misguided, and the question we should be asking ourselves is, as Deleuze puts it, “what is the best mode of existence, the mode of existence of someone who believes that God exists, or the mode of existence of someone who believes that God doesn't exist?” What Pascal does by shifting the subject of discussion towards this question as opposed to the question of G-d’s existence is provide an ethical perspective which we may explore even though the initial question was not in and of itself inherently ethical.

We might begin to wonder then how exactly Pascal presents us with anything different than what the post-Nietzschean or pragmatist philosophers have already formulated and without theological reasoning. It seems as though Pascal managed to reach similar conclusions in a less rigorous fashion. What purpose then is served in digging up a long dead thinker from the Baroque period? The answer to that question lies in the Wager (Machine) itself. For Pascal does not simply abandon the question of G-d’s existence. Rather, after he has provided us with the ethical perspective he proceeds to create a tool which we may use to pick a side. The classical formulation of the Wager is as follows: to live as though one believes that G-d exists is to risk finite loss in this life (through placing restrictions on ourselves, living a life of piety, etc.) for the chance at infinite reward in the next (salvation). To live as though one does not believe that G-d exists is to risk infinite loss in the next life (damnation) for finite gains in this life (lack of restrictions on what is pleasurable). Since the risk of denying the existence of G-d is greater than what is lost in affirming G-d’s existence, Pascal believes we should bet that G-d exists and live accordingly. Much ink has been spilled over the apparent issues with this formulation of the Wager. For instance, what if there is a G-d which is not the Christian G-d? That G-d, whether from a different, existing religion or entirely unknown to us may not care to punish or reward us at all, or even worse, such a G-d might have a far worse punishment devised for those who believe in the wrong G-d than for those who believe in no such G-d at all. The issue with these responses to the Wager is that they fail to grasp its instrumental character. The usefulness of the Wager lies not in its particular formulation, but rather in that it allows for us to come to reason based decisions on questions which seem to escape our faculty for reason. One may argue that Pascal’s Wager still fails even if we reduce it to a purely instrumental nature. After all, would not the most rational choice be to not choose? In anticipation of such an argument, Pascal writes, “Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are committed.” While this response seems to be no response at all, we can examine the implications of the statement by returning to the passages quoted above that appear in earlier sections of Pensées. For Pascal we have a desire for truth, even as we are led time and time again into nothing other than uncertainty. For Pascal the idea that one would simply not wager is almost unthinkable. Baked into our essence is a need to wager, a desire for truth with which we have been condemned. Once again, this argument relies on some dubious reasoning and commitments to a particular understanding of Christian theology. Pascal’s thought seems to run into a problem of being circular. He would like for us to wager, and he assumes that we must wager, but that assumption is based on his belief in G-d. In other words, the necessity of wagering relies on one already having decided to make the wager. Even more, it requires one to have bet on G-d’s existence. 

While these issues are apparent, perhaps the wager can be saved from Pascal’s arguments. Let us consider for a moment what it would look like for one to choose not to wager. Presumably, the person making the choice to not bet on either G-d’s existence or G-d's non-existence would continue to live their life in a certain way. It seems reasonable to assume that the way in which they would live is the same as the person who bets that G-d does not exist. Alternatively, they may end up living their life the same as the person who chooses to bet that G-d does exist. In each case, the decision to not choose manifests itself in the same way as if one did choose. Perhaps then for Pascal the reason one must wager is because the Wager is concerned with an ethic, how we choose to live, and because this is the object of reflection for the Wager, not choosing is still functionally the same as making a choice, because the person not choosing will still go on to live a particular way of life. And because the Wager concerns a way of life, and because this concern makes not choosing functionally equivalent to choosing one way or the other, the person in question has no reason to not choose. In fact, the act of choosing presents itself as helpful to the person in question by providing them with a sense of direction in how they may proceed.

We return then to the original question that acted as the starting point for our inquiry: what do we do when we know we can stop doing philosophy, but we want to keep doing it anyway? In the face of the arguments made against standard philosophical practice by the post-Nietzschean philosophers and the pragmatists, Pascal gives us a tool to help each of us decide what we would like to do in the face of uncertainty. In other words, Pascal tells us that we can wager on truth. In fact, we’ve been doing it this entire time. What the linguistic turn in 20th century philosophy revealed was not that truth was impossible, but rather that our access to truth is uncertain. When we attempt to philosophize and speculate about the nature of reality, we quickly run into a wall, beyond which our reason cannot take us. The solution to this dilemma presented by philosophers such as Rorty is to change the subject entirely. Because our reason cannot resolve these problems, we are better off leaving them alone and doing something else. This solution is as valid as any other, and if one finds themself sympathetic to Rorty or other philosophers like him, then they may find Rorty’s solution entirely adequate. In other words, they would like to wager on disbelief in truth. But as the reaction to pragmatist and post-Nietzschean philosophy reveals, this solution is not adequate for everyone. For those who would like there to be truth which we can access, for there to be a fundamental nature to reality which we can come to know, the Wager provides us with an ethical tool for choosing to wager on truth, despite our uncertainty. This kind of wagering, which I would like to call baroque gambling, tells us it's perfectly fine to cease doing philosophy when we want to, but also that it’s perfectly legitimate to keep doing it when we don’t want to let it go. While this kind of wager can never provide us with a metaphysical or epistemological ground to continue our philosophical inquiries, it does provide us with a new perspective, an ethical perspective centered on what we are willing to lose and what it is we hope we might gain. And so we can continue to speculate about reality, we can speak of universals and moral truths, even in the face of unresolvable uncertainty. To appropriate a phrase from Wittgenstein, we can choose to bet on truth when we want to.