On Pascal’s abêtissez-vous
It is normal, Blaise Pascal says, to end up feeling discouraged and struggling to believe. Faced with this situation, one must continue to force oneself to act as if one’s faith remained intact: continue praying, even when you cannot believe you are being heard.
Keep going, pushing aside what ‘reason’ at that moment would have you believe. Plod on, make a brute of yourself, do not think.
But not in a hypocritical, posturing way: it was not said play stupid, but go stupid. It is all about discipline and a — paradoxical — faith that faith will return.
Do not neglect, for instance, brushing your teeth even if you think you will die soon or you are determined to end your life. Either prospect may lead you not to mind losing your teeth.
The advice sounds indeed paradoxical, to say the least, if not downright contradictory — impossible. Yet the truth is that often it is possible to put it into practice, and often it even works.
This should, however, be distinguished from the nihilistic attempt to become literally stupid and flat, like a beast, in order to make a life that seems to leave room only for flatness less torturous. I pursued that path myself, with tenacity and rigour, and it merely destroyed what remained of my morale and my nerves.
In a letter to his brother on 9 August 1838, Dostoevsky wrote:
‘I have a new plan: to go mad.’
Such a path is not alien to me either. It does not work.
Nigh nothing important depends on one’s own will.