"We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike"
About this Quote
Pascal captures how disagreement is not only a matter of seeing from different vantage points but of perceiving with different faculties altogether. Experience, temperament, training, and desire furnish us with distinct lenses. More unsettling is the confession that we often prefer difference. We do not merely fail to agree; we resist likeness, because likeness threatens our pride, our party, or the identity we have built around a position.
That last clause exposes the will at work inside cognition. For Pascal, the human mind is steered by amour-propre, self-love that bends judgment toward what flatters us. He spoke elsewhere of the tyranny of the imagination and of how the heart decides before reason justifies. To say we have no wish to find things alike is to say that perception is not neutral. We seek contrast to maintain distinction, and we exaggerate it to feel superior or safe.
The line grows out of the world Pascal inhabited: seventeenth-century France riven by theological and political quarrels. The Jansenist controversies, which he addressed in the Provincial Letters and the fragments of the Pensees, showed him how parties cherish the differences that mark their boundaries. He also distinguished between esprit de geometrie and esprit de finesse, two kinds of insight. Different eyes can mean different modes of understanding, each illuminating and distorting in its own way, and each tempted to dismiss the other.
Modern life confirms his diagnosis. Polarization thrives not only on divergent facts but on the desire to keep them divergent. Algorithms and echo chambers gratify the wish to avoid resemblance. The remedy implied by Pascal is intellectual humility: to notice how wanting colors seeing, to concede that our eyes are partial, and to cultivate the courage to recognize common ground. Such humility does not erase real differences, but it restrains the will to accentuate them, making space for truth to appear where pride once demanded contrast.
That last clause exposes the will at work inside cognition. For Pascal, the human mind is steered by amour-propre, self-love that bends judgment toward what flatters us. He spoke elsewhere of the tyranny of the imagination and of how the heart decides before reason justifies. To say we have no wish to find things alike is to say that perception is not neutral. We seek contrast to maintain distinction, and we exaggerate it to feel superior or safe.
The line grows out of the world Pascal inhabited: seventeenth-century France riven by theological and political quarrels. The Jansenist controversies, which he addressed in the Provincial Letters and the fragments of the Pensees, showed him how parties cherish the differences that mark their boundaries. He also distinguished between esprit de geometrie and esprit de finesse, two kinds of insight. Different eyes can mean different modes of understanding, each illuminating and distorting in its own way, and each tempted to dismiss the other.
Modern life confirms his diagnosis. Polarization thrives not only on divergent facts but on the desire to keep them divergent. Algorithms and echo chambers gratify the wish to avoid resemblance. The remedy implied by Pascal is intellectual humility: to notice how wanting colors seeing, to concede that our eyes are partial, and to cultivate the courage to recognize common ground. Such humility does not erase real differences, but it restrains the will to accentuate them, making space for truth to appear where pride once demanded contrast.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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