A fixed point (thought 383)

How do we know if we’re right or if the other guy is right?

In the staging of this film, the text appears as a single piece. This may seem simplistic. It’s meant to symbolize that a way of thinking about the world must take into account all the different points of view in order to arrive at a truth. If the text appeared as it went along, it could be fragmented, weakened by bias.

Text of Blaise Pascal’s "Thought 383

Text located on page 431 of the original manuscript.

Those who are in derangement say to those who are in order that they are the ones who are moving away from nature, and they believe they are following it: as those who are in a ship believe that those who are on the edge are fleeing. Language is the same on all sides. You need a fixed point to judge it. The port judges those in a vessel; but where shall we take a port in morality?

The Covid-19, a philosophical textbook case

The Covid-19 period, for example, between 2020 and 2022, was a recent textbook case of the obfuscation of reason. The majority believed in a single reality. It’s like Blaise Pascal’s bateau (ship): a vision from a single point of view, stemming from a fear cultivated by univocal discourse, with the certainty of being right and that others are wrong, and even dangerous. This led to a terrible dehumanization and discrimination of those who remained in port, if we continue Pascal’s metaphor. The “unvaccinated” were excluded from social life and economic activity, via the “health pass”, even though medical research had not investigated whether “vaccines” protected against transmission of the virus; and it has now been proven that they did not. Now that the fear has dissipated, and the fog of consciousness has lifted, we are discovering the nuances of reality and the lies of the powers that be. I believe this is an invitation to think better, when we find ourselves in the midst of new situations of fear in the future.

What I think Pascal’s thought can teach us is that when we’re certain we’re right and others are wrong, what it proves above all is that we’re completely wrong.

The real tragedy is that those who are certain they are right lose respect for those who see the world differently. They lose their humanity, even when they are convinced they are defending the common good, such as public health. And if this affects the majority, then democracy tips over into a dictatorship, supported by the majority without any awareness of the problem, because the certainty of doing good is shared.

This opens up a political dimension in Blaise Pascal’s philosophical thinking, which is in line with the thinking of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, particularly her concept of the “banality of evil” in relation to Nazism. Hannah Arendt risked her freedom of thought in 1963, when she was excluded from the intellectual community because her vision was different from the dominant one (which was that of “absolute evil”), on a political subject of the highest order. Today, her thesis has proved to be the right angle for understanding Nazism.

During the Covid-19 period, (too) few philosophers took the risk of their freedom to think, which is the role of the intellectual (as opposed to the expert, who responds to a commission and is therefore not free), and represents a social risk. I’d like to mention Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher, and Barbara Stiegler, a French philosopher, who have shed light on this period with their philosophical thinking. In the present, they have helped us to continue thinking about the world, rather than allowing ourselves to be put in a situation of absence of thought, as Hanna Arendt explained so well. Like Hannah Arendt in her day, they were invisible on the media scene. It’s never too late for awareness.