Pensées

Pensées (French 'thoughts') is a form of philosophical writing in which the author sets out a subject as a series of short, numbered reflections rather than as a continuous argument. The paradigm is Blaise Pascal's Pensées, published posthumously in 1670 — the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, which Pascal was arranging into numbered dossiers at the time of his death.

The form has attractive features and awkward ones. Its virtue is compression: a thought that would fill a chapter is stated in three lines and left to work in the reader's mind. Its risk is that the reader, missing the connecting tissue the author would have supplied, must partly assemble the argument themselves. Pascal's editors have argued for three and a half centuries about which arrangement of the fragments best reflects his intention.

The French moralist tradition kept the form alive after Pascal — La Rochefoucauld's Maximes, Vauvenargues's Réflexions, Chamfort's Maximes et pensées, and, into the twentieth century, Cioran's aphoristic books all belong to the same broad family. In each case the author has chosen the fragment because the subject — self-knowledge, virtue, disillusion — resists systematic treatment.

Common mistake: quoting a pensée as if it were a self-contained aphorism. Pascal's numbered fragments are often stages in an argument he never finished; a fragment cited in isolation may sound like a conclusion when in the manuscript it is a premise or a foil. Serious use of Pascal cites the fragment number and, where possible, indicates which edition's numbering is being used.