Wagering on an Ironic God

"Philosophers startle ordinary people. Christians astonish the philosophers."
—Pascal, Pensées
 
In Wagering on an Ironic God Thomas S. Hibbs both startles and astonishes. He does so by offering a new interpretation of Pascal’s Pensées and by showing the importance of Pascal in and for a philosophy of religion.
 
Hibbs resists the temptation to focus exclusively on Pascal’s famous "wager" or to be beguiled by the fragmentary and presumably incomplete nature of Pensées. Instead he discovers in Pensées a coherent and comprehensive project, one in which Pascal contributed to the ancient debate over the best way of life—a life of true happiness and true virtue.
 
Hibbs situates Pascal in relation to early modern French philosophers, particularly Montaigne and Descartes. These three French thinkers offer distinctly modern accounts of the good life. Montaigne advocates the private life of authentic self-expression, while Descartes favors the public goods of progressive enlightenment science and its promise of the mastery of nature. Pascal, by contrast, renders an account of the Christian religion that engages modern subjectivity and science on its own terms and seeks to vindicate the wisdom of the Christian vision by showing that it, better than any of its rivals, truly understands human nature.
 
Though all three philosophers share a preoccupation with Socrates, each finds in that figure a distinct account of philosophy and its aims. Pascal finds in Socrates a philosophy rich in irony: philosophy is marked by a deep yearning for wisdom that is never wholly achieved. Philosophy is a quest without attainment, a love never obtained. Absent Cartesian certainty or the ambivalence of Montaigne, Pascal’s practice of Socratic irony acknowledges the disorder of humanity without discouraging its quest. Instead, the quest for wisdom alerts the seeker to the presence of a hidden God.
 
God, according to Pascal, both conceals and reveals, fulfilling the philosophical aspiration for happiness and the good life only by subverting philosophy’s very self-understanding. Pascal thus wagers all on the irony of a God who both startles and astonishes wisdom’s true lovers.

Part One. Irony, Philosophy, and the Christian Faith
Section 1. Pascal and the Ancient Quarrel over the Best Way of Life
Section 2. Irony Rehabilitated
Section 3. The Figure of Socrates in Early Modern Philosophy: Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal
Section 4. Divine Irony as an Alternative to Deism and Voluntarism

Part Two. Socratic Immanence: Montaigne’s Recovery of Philosophy as a Way of Life
Section 1. Socratic Self-Knowledge
and the Art of Living
Section 2. Against Speculative Philosophy
Section 3. Montaigne’s Confessions
Section 4. Death, Diversion, and the Supernatural

Part Three. The Virtue of Science and the Science of Virtue: Descartes’ Overcoming of Socrates
Section 1. The Arts of Writing and the Science of Living
Section 2. Recovering and Overcoming Socrates
Section 3. Descartes’ New Science of Virtue
Section 4. Theology, Philosophical Irony, and the Arts of (Re-)Writing

Part Four. The Quest for Wisdom: Pascal and Philosophy
Section 1. Socrates and the Quest for the Good Life
Section 2. Ironic Reversal: The Reduction of Cartesian Certitude to Socratic Amazement
Section 3. Philosophy Deconstructed? Pascal Deconstructed?
Section 4. The Restless Heart: Pascal’s Residual Teleology
Section 5. Pascal’s Methods and the Quest for a Synoptic Vision

Part Five. Wagering on an Ironic God
Section 1. Rereading the Wager
Section 2. Wagering as Self-Emptying
Section 3. The Problem of Hope
Section 4. Neither Deism nor Voluntarism
Section 5. Christ as Eucharistic Cipher