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Knowing When to Submit
Blaise Pascal
Pensees

Pascal argues that true reason requires a balance between doubting, certainty, and submission, and that failing to recognize when each is appropriate leads to intellectual error.

...-O presumptuous man!--The compounds are composed of elements, and the elements not.--O presumptuous man! Here is a fine reflection.--We must not say that there is anything which we do not see.--We must then talk like others, but not think like them. 267 The last proceeding of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. It is but feeble if it does not see so far as to know this. But if natural things are beyond it, what will be said of supernatural? 268
Submission.--We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason. There are some who offend against these three rules, either by affirming everything as demonstrative, from want of knowing what demonstration is; or by doubting everything, from want of knowing where to submit; or by submitting in everything, from want of knowing where they must judge.
269 Submission is the use of reason in which consists true Christianity. 270 St. Augustine.[104]--Reason would never submit, if it did not judge that there are some occasions on which it ought to submit. It is then right for it to submit, when it judges that it ought to submit. 271 Wisdom sends us to childhood. Nisi efficiamini sicut parvuli.[105] 272 There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason. 273 If we submit everything to reason, our religion wil...
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David Hume

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Philosophy's Humble Scope

Hume explains that due to the force of Pyrrhonian doubt and the imperfection of our faculties, we must confine our judgments to common life and experience, leaving sublime topics aside. This provides a grounding principle for Pascal's rule: we should doubt where our faculties are inadequate and submit to natural instinct in practical matters.

...ed_ scepticism which may be of advantage to mankind, and which may be the natural result of the Pyrrhonian doubts and scruples, is the limitation of our enquiries to such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding. The imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote and extraordinary, and running, without control, into the most distant parts of space and time in order to avoid the objects, which custom has rendered too familiar to it.
A correct Judgement observes a contrary method, and avoiding all distant and high enquiries, confines itself to common life, and to such subjects as fall under daily practice and experience; leaving the more sublime topics to the embellishment of poets and orators, or to the arts of priests and politicians. To bring us to so salutary a determination, nothing can be more serviceable, than to be once thoroughly convinced of the force of the Pyrrhonian doubt, and of the impossibility, that anything, but the strong power of natural instinct, could free us from it. Those who have a propensity to...
While we cannot give a satisfactory reason, why we believe, after a thousand experiments, that a stone will fall, or fire burn; can we ever satisfy ourselves concerning any determination, which we may form, with regard to the origin of worlds, and the situation of nature, from, and to eternity? This narrow limitation, indeed, of our enquiries, is, in every respect, so reasonable, that it suffices to make the slightest examination into the natural powers of the human mind and to compare them wi...

David Hume

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Proportion Belief to Evidence

Hume provides the concrete method of proportioning belief to the evidence. This enacts Pascal's prescription by offering a measurable criterion for when to doubt (low evidence), when to feel certain (high evidence), and implicitly when to submit (when evidence is balanced or inaccessible).

...this kind, which must at least silence the most arrogant bigotry and superstition, and free us from their impertinent solicitations. I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument of a like nature, which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures. For so long, I presume, will the accounts of miracles and prodigies be found in all history, sacred and profane. 87.
Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors. One, who in our climate, should expect better weather in any week of June than in one of December, would reason justly, and conformably to experience; but it is certain, that he may happen, in the event, to find himself mistaken. However, we may observe, that, in such a case, he would have no cause to complain of experience; because it commonly informs us beforehand of the uncertainty, by that contra...
In such conclusions as are founded on an infallible experience, he expects the event with the last degree of assurance, and regards his past experience as a full proof of the future existence of that event. In other cases, he proceeds with more caution: He weighs the opposite experiments: He considers which side is supported by the greater number of experiments: to that side he inclines, with doubt and hesitation; and when at last he fixes his judgement, the evidence exceeds not what we prope...

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil

The Myth of Certainty

Nietzsche deconstructs the notion of 'immediate certainty,' arguing that even basic propositions like 'I think' involve a chain of unproven assumptions. This challenges the possibility of attaining the kind of certainty Pascal's rule relies upon, suggesting that the boundaries between doubt, certainty, and submission may be inherently unstable.

...therefore, at least as regulative hypothesis, if not as heuristic principle. What? And others say even that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be the work of our organs! It seems to me that this is a complete REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM, if the conception CAUSA SUI is something fundamentally absurd. Consequently, the external world is NOT the work of our organs--? 16.
There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are "immediate certainties"; for instance, "I think," or as the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, "I will"; as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as "the thing in itself," without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object. I would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involve a CONTRADICTIO IN ADJECTO; we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words! T...
--In place of the "immediate certainty" in which the people may believe in the special case, the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, veritable conscience questions of the intellect, to wit: "Whence did I get the notion of 'thinking'? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an 'ego,' and even of an 'ego' as cause, and finally of an 'ego' as cause of thought?" He who ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by...

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil

Skepticism as Soporific

Nietzsche portrays skepticism not as a temporary phase but as a cultivated attitude of aloofness and refusal to commit, using figures like Montaigne and Socrates to illustrate a stance of perpetual inquiry and distrust. This offers an alternative to Pascal's call for discerning judgment, advocating instead a consistent suspension of judgment.

...they would like to ask so many, many questions... indeed among timid hearers, of whom there are now so many, he is henceforth said to be dangerous. With his repudiation of skepticism, it seems to them as if they heard some evil-threatening sound in the distance, as if a new kind of explosive were being tried somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered Russian NIHILINE, a pessimism BONAE VOLUNTATIS, that not only denies, means denial, but--dreadful thought! PRACTISES denial.
Against this kind of "good-will"--a will to the veritable, actual negation of life--there is, as is generally acknowledged nowadays, no better soporific and sedative than skepticism, the mild, pleasing, lulling poppy of skepticism; and Hamlet himself is now prescribed by the doctors of the day as an antidote to the "spirit," and its underground noises. "Are not our ears already full of bad sounds?" say the skeptics, as lovers of repose, and almost as a kind of safety police; "this subterranean Nay is terrible! Be still, ye pessimistic moles!" The skeptic, in effect, that delicate creature, is...
Or: "What is the use of any hasty hypotheses? It might quite well be in good taste to make no hypotheses at all. Are you absolutely obliged to straighten at once what is crooked? to stuff every hole with some kind of oakum? Is there not time enough for that? Has not the time leisure? Oh, ye demons, can ye not at all WAIT? The uncertain also has its charms, the Sphinx, too, is a Circe, and Circe, too, was a philosopher."--Thus does a skeptic console himself; and in truth he needs some consolatio...