Blaise Pascal

Pascal is invoked as a philosophical interpreter of human activity: his account of diversion shows how apparently self-contained pursuits can point beyond themselves to a person’s condition. In Sartre’s argument, this example helps distinguish a genuinely concrete interpretation of conduct from explanations that merely sort particular desires beneath abstract categories.

Pascal and Diversion

Pascal’s example begins with familiar occupations—hunting, tennis, and many others—that might seem absurd if each were reduced to its immediate activity. He identifies in them a need for diversion: what matters is not only what a person does, but the way the activity answers a more encompassing concern. The pursuit thus carries a meaning that exceeds its own practical or recreational description.

This interpretation does not make hunting or tennis mere disguises for an abstract principle. Rather, the activity becomes legible as an expression of human reality and condition. Pascal’s account matters because it connects the particular occupation to a larger significance without treating the concrete act as disposable.

Role in Sartre’s Argument

Sartre places Pascal alongside Stendhal and Proust as evidence that desire cannot always be explained by isolating its apparent object. Just as love and jealousy may reach toward the world as a whole through a particular woman, diversion reveals a broader human concern through a particular pursuit. The specific activity is a point of access to a more extensive relation between the person, the world, and the self.

The comparison also marks a limit in classificatory psychology. A desire to row, for example, cannot be adequately explained by placing it under successively broader headings such as outdoor sports, sport, love of chance, and play. Such a hierarchy may classify an inclination, but it does not explain how the concrete desire acquires its distinctive meaning. Pascal’s interpretation instead directs attention to what the activity signifies within the individual’s wider orientation.

Significance

Pascal’s example supports Sartre’s search for an interpretation that neither reduces a person to general drives nor separates an act from the life that gives it meaning. Diversion is not simply an instance of an abstract need; the need becomes concrete in the chosen activity, while that activity points beyond itself. The example therefore helps frame conduct as meaningful within a person’s relation to the world, rather than as a self-sufficient act or a token in a classification.