QuestionsAre humans good by nature?Neither angel nor brute: the greatness and wretchedness of man
Are humans good by nature?Both at once

Neither angel nor brute: the greatness and wretchedness of man

"Man is neither angel nor brute"; greatness and wretchedness; the chimera

Blaise Pascal 1623 · 1662The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
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What it claims

Man is at once great and wretched, capable of the best and of the worst: his nature is double, and both must be held together.

Why

Man knows his wretchedness, and that is what makes him great: he bears marks of both greatness and wretchedness.

The same idea through history
Blaise Pascal1660Pascal (1623-1662) writes these notes for a defence of Christianity, published after his death as the Pensées. He belongs to the Augustinian current of Port-Royal: human nature is great by its creation, wretched by its fall.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau1762In the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, Rousseau, himself a defender of natural goodness elsewhere, describes two distinct principles in man: one lifts him toward the true and the just, the other brings him back to his senses and passions.
Immanuel Kant1793Kant also describes a two-sided human nature, but in another way: an original disposition to good and a propensity to evil (see his argument on the crooked wood).
In short

"Neither angel nor brute: the greatness and wretchedness of man" is an argument by Blaise Pascal (Pensées, fragments B358, B397, B416, B418, B434, 1660) on the question "Are humans good by nature?" (answer: both at once). Its claim: Man is at once great and wretched, capable of the best and of the worst: his nature is double, and both must be held together. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Pensées, fragments B358, B397, B416, B418, B434
Valid with an implicit premise

Some say that man is an angel in the making, others that he is a beast who does not know it. Pascal refuses both: "Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute." He observes in man a greatness (he thinks, he knows he is wretched) and a wretchedness (he cannot reach the happiness he has an idea of), and holds that both are equally true. To show only one is dangerous, he says; both must be shown. Pascal explains this double nature by the fall: man was great, he has fallen. This religious explanation can be separated from the description. The text is not set out as premises: the P1 to P5 form is our reconstruction from several fragments. Pascal's "greatness" and "wretchedness" are not only moral: they cover thought, knowledge and happiness.

P1Man is neither angel nor brute. When he would act the angel, he acts the brute.
P2Man has an idea of happiness and of truth, and cannot reach them. If he had never been corrupt, he would enjoy truth and happiness; if he had always been corrupt, he would have no idea of either. This idea without possession implies a lost greatness.
P3Man's greatness and his wretchedness are each concluded from the other: he knows that he is wretched, so he is wretched, but he is really great, since he knows it.
P4It is dangerous to show man only what brings him close to the brutes, or only his greatness, and still more dangerous to leave him ignorant of both. It is very advantageous to show him both.
P5 · implicit premiseIf man is neither angel nor brute, if he bears the mark of a lost greatness and a present wretchedness, and if both must be held, then his nature is double: at once capable of the best and exposed to the worst.
Therefore man is at once great and wretched, capable of the best and of the worst: his nature is double, and both must be held together.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where man is neither angel nor brute, bears marks of greatness and wretchedness, and both must be shown, but where his nature is single, varying in degree from person to person: the conclusion "double nature" no longer follows.
With its five premises, the conclusion follows. Two points call for attention. First P5, which Pascal does not state: from the double observation (greatness, wretchedness) he moves to a "double" nature. Another reading would be that there is only one nature, showing degrees or mixtures in different people (Voltaire). Second, P2 contains the explanation by the fall: without it, we keep the description (marks of greatness and of wretchedness), but lose the explanation of their origin. Moreover, Pascal's "double nature" is wider than morality: it concerns thought, knowledge and happiness.
Analogy. An abandoned house in which one sees at once fine proportions and collapsing walls. One says it is a ruin, another a palace. Pascal says it is a palace in ruin, and that those who look at only one of the two do not understand what they see.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Voltaire 1734 · attacks premise 3

Voltaire writes that the spirit in which Pascal wrote his Pensées was to show man in an odious light. Pascal writes against human nature about as he wrote against the Jesuits: he imputes to the essence of nature what belongs only to some men, and eloquently hurls insults at mankind.

Pascal replies
Pascal Pascal's anticipated reply (fragment B416)
Summary: Pascal replies in advance by describing those who see only one side. Wretchedness being deduced from greatness, and greatness from wretchedness, some infer wretchedness all the more because they took greatness as proof of it, and others greatness all the more because they inferred it from wretchedness. All that the one party says in proof of greatness serves the others as an argument for wretchedness. Both must be held, not chosen between.
Voltaire 1734 · Voltaire, in the same letter (remark IV)
Summary: Voltaire answers that our various wills are not contradictions of nature. Man is not a simple subject: he is made up of a countless number of organs, and if one of them is slightly altered, all the impressions of the brain change, and the animal has new thoughts and new wills. We are sometimes cast down with sadness, sometimes swollen with presumption, according to our situations. These differences are so little contradictory that it would be contradictory if they did not exist.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Voltaire and Pascal describe the same facts: man is sometimes weak and sometimes proud. Pascal sees in this a sign of a double nature, explained by the fall. Voltaire sees the ordinary effects of a complex machine, with no mystery. The basic disagreement is about whether a religious account is needed to understand these contrasts.
Kant 1793 · attacks the conclusion

Summary: Kant notes that one can maintain that man is both, in some respects good, in others bad, and that experience even seems to confirm this middle. But he holds that it matters to morals not to admit any moral middle, either in actions or in characters, because in this ambiguity all maxims risk losing their precision and firmness. He calls "syncretists" those who make moral character a mixture.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1793, after the author's death (1662).
The debate goes on (our summary) Kant speaks of the deep disposition that fixes a person's maxims, not of acts or qualities. Pascal does not speak of maxims: he describes a being who thinks and suffers, great by thought, wretched by condition. The two do not use the word "double" in the same sense. Kant himself, further on, describes an original disposition to good and a propensity to evil in the same man (see his argument).
Where the debate stands (our summary)The disagreement is partly verbal: Pascal speaks of the condition, Kant of the orientation of the will. On the substance, both admit that man carries the best and the worst. They differ on whether an intermediate moral state is possible.
Rousseau 1755 · attacks premise 2

Summary: Rousseau grants that people are wicked, a sad and continual experience spares the need for proof. But he holds that man is naturally good, and that what depraved him is the changes in his constitution, the progress he made and the knowledge he acquired. Man's wretchedness therefore comes not from a fall, but from life in society.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1755, after the author's death (1662).
The debate goes on (our summary) Pascal writes a century before Rousseau. Both describe a man fallen from a better state, but they place the cause of the decline in different places: an original fault transmitted to all (Pascal) or a social evolution (Rousseau). Pascal judges, moreover, that this transmission is what most shocks our reason, and yet is necessary to understand ourselves (B434).
Where the debate stands (our summary)A basic point of disagreement: the origin of the double nature, its cause. Both camps accept the finding of a man capable of the worst and the best; they differ on the story that explains it.