A thought comes when "it" will and not when "I" will. Thus it is a falsification of the evidence to say that the subject "I" conditions the predicate "think."
One should not conceal and corrupt the facts of how our thoughts have come to us. The profoundest and least exhausted books will always have something of the aphoristic and unexpected character of Pascal’s Pensees. (Nietzsche).
A thought, for Nietzsche, ought to take us by surprise, ambush us and our tired preconceptions. The image of thought here is of lightning, in search of tinder, suddenly blazing into our heads. It disarms and discomforts.
At the same time we should attend, listen if you like, to where thought comes from – all the roughness and unevenness of thought that is erased by the final polish of the essay. Thought should display, without shame, its obscure and troubled origins.
Reading Pascal, we can see, as well as a series of luminous insights the underlying movements of the thought which has generated those insights. Pascal is thinker who never forgets thinking itself: he attends not only to the content of the thoughts but is preoccupied with their specific shape and realises that, finally, shape and content ought not to be separable:
Words arranged differently have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects. (23)
Pascal’s writing of course tends towards the aphoristic. Aphorisms trap thoughts, but the trap is set not by a grasping eagerness but by utter receptive openness to the event of thought. Pascal knew that, as Nietzsche later says, a thought comes when it wants rather than being consciously willedby an 'I'. It typically has its roots in shocks and transformations external to thought itself (travel would be an obvious example). Man is a ‘thinking reed’ blown by and answering a summons external to himself and forever already in place.
And indeed, despite Pascal being a lover of thought, its singular path, there is also a consistent stress on the non-intellectual non-cognitive nature of human behaviour, from which, as it were, thought must painfully rescue itself:
We are as much automatic as intellectual; and hence it comes that the instrument by which conviction is attained is not demonstrated alone. How few things are demonstrated? Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It bends the automaton, which persuades the mind without thinking about the matter.
The notion of ‘mind’, as something wholly separable from the body, troubles Pascal: “’My mind is disquieted.’ ‘I am disquieted'would be better."
Strikingly, Pascal has been a key reference for modern theorists, including Pierre Bourdieu and Slavoj Zizek. This is, superficially, surprising, considering Pascal’s religious ultra-orthodoxy. However, as Zizek has pointed out, Pascal reveals the paradoxical but eminently dialectical relation between the avant-garde and the archaic – the way in which the very resolute attempt to be faithful to the Old or ‘outmoded’ in new conditions produces the utterly innovative, the radically modern (more recently, much Modernism was itself this ‘archaic avant-garde’). The hungry seeker after newness, by contrast, produces only the same old thing over and over. The monotony of the merely new can be countered with the genuine difference of the past.