Dominiek Hoens
Abstract:
In this paper the question of the object in
Freud’s metapsychology is sketched out from an economical point of view, that
is in terms of pleasure and displeasure. This allows for a reading of Pascal’s
wager that makes clear what interest Lacan had in discussing this one pensée at
length in his Seminar on the Object of Psychoanalysis. The central issue in
Lacan’s reading concerns the object a as a stake the subject has lost.
Keywords:
Jacques Lacan, Blaise Pascal, Wager, Pleasure,
Object a, Jouissance
‘Everything is done
to make man forget the Pascalian view of his
condition, in other words his incessant struggle
against himself’.[1]
Although Jacques Lacan frequently refers to Blaise Pascal, the relation
between the two thinkers is rarely commented on, and has still to be studied in
full detail.[2] An
in-depth discussion of Lacan’s use of various writings by Pascal at many, and often
crucial, moments of his teaching (the Seminar he taught from 1953 through 1980)
would be a task for a book. That this work is still to be done may be due to the
fact that of the two Seminars – The
Object of Psychoanalysis (1965-1966) and From an Other to the other (1968-1969) – where Lacan deals most extensively
with Pascal, only one has been published in French,[3]
and no official English translation is available of either.[4]
‘Obscure’ as these passages may (still) be, readers who have read through the
long sections devoted to Pascal, particularly Lacan’s extensive commentaries on
le pari (the notorious ‘wager’, i.e.
fragment 418 of the Louis Lafuma edition of Les
Pensées)[5], must
certainly have felt the urge to probe deeper and map out the intellectual
proximity between these two thinkers.
As the theme of this issue of Continental
Philosophy Review is "The Object of Psychoanalysis," this article
is limited to Lacan’s commentary on the wager included in the eponymous Seminar
13,[6]
and does not include the game theoretical reading of the wager conducted later,
in Seminar 16, From an Other to the other.[7]
I shall begin by (1) sketching out the problem of the object, and will proceed
from there to (2) a discussion of Pascal’s wager, and (3) a presentation of
Lacan’s reading of it.
1.
My goal in this section is to show the emergence of the object in
Freud’s genetic account of human subjectivity. My account is economical: it is
centered around the function of (dis)pleasure, and leaves aside the more
structural aspect of Freud’s work, i.e., the topographic division of the mental
apparatus into the unconscious, the preconscious, and consciousness, or the
later triad of id, ego and super-ego.
Freud’s starting point is fairly simple: the
organism is thrown into the world and is forced, both by external and internal
stimuli, to act or, more precisely, to re-act. The emphasis on reaction is
based on the idea that an organism does not act sui generis, but is prompted into action by stimuli. According to
Freud, these reactions obey the pleasure principle and so lead the organism to try
and get rid of the unpleasant part of any tension or excitement. In many cases,
no reaction means not only that the organism will continue to experience
displeasure, but also that the discomfort will increase (cf. hunger). At this
point, Freud introduces a distinction between external and internal stimuli;
the latter he names instinctual stimuli (Triebreize)
or, simply, drives. The first question one must ask is: how does an organism
that has not as yet established a division between inside and outside distinguish
between external and internal stimuli? Freud answers the question in Instincts and their Vicissitudes (1915) as
follows:
Let us imagine ourselves in the situation of an almost
entirely helpless living organism, as yet unorientated in the world, which is
receiving stimuli in its nervous substance. This organism will very soon be in
a position to make a first distinction and a first orientation. On the one
hand, it will be aware of stimuli which can be avoided by muscular action
(flight); these it ascribes to an external world. On the other hand, it will
also be aware of stimuli against which such action is of no avail and whose
character of constant pressure persists in spite of it; these stimuli are the
signs of an internal world, the evidence of instinctual needs [Triebbedürfnisse]. The perceptual
substance of the living organism will thus have found in the efficacy of its muscular
activity a basis for distinguishing between an ‘outside’ and an ‘inside’.[8]
This simple
opposition makes it clear that, initially, the organism has no interest in the
‘world’, or in distinguishing between an ego and external reality. This distinction
is merely an effect of the organism’s inability to get rid of an internal
tension. This unpleasant stimulus, experienced as something ‘constant’, the
perceptual substance first identifies itself with, which results in the formation
of a reality ego (Real-Ich). However,
this explanation in terms of a distinction between a constant internal reality
and an ever-changing exterior leaves us with another problem: doesn’t Freud
also refer to another original ego as a pleasure ego (Lust-Ich)? How does that ego relate to the reality ego, the first
identity derived from an organism experiencing a constant displeasure?
To solve this apparent contradiction we must
take a closer look at both egos, the Real-
and the Lust-Ich. It is characteristic
of the original reality ego to identify itself with an instinctual stimulus (Triebreiz) arising from inside the
organism. The reality ego identifies with an internal stimulus, and not with an external object, as the
pleasure ego does. But the externality of the object is by no means self-evident,
for Freud emphasizes that the pleasure ego introjects pleasurable objects, i.e.,
it considers them as parts of itself. Still, Freud only mentions objects when he
is discussing the pleasure ego, and he considers them internal to this ego only
insofar as the object can also not be
part of it; in other words, only insofar as it is possibly rejected in an
external reality. But, to make a long story short: for the reality ego, there
is only an internal experience of
displeasure; for the pleasure ego, there are internal objects to the extent that they belong, first and foremost, to the
external world.
The nature of the pleasure involved also changes
with the transition from reality ego to pleasure ego. In the first instance,
the ego is passively experiencing either displeasure, when the tension mounts,
or pleasure, when tension decreases. Later on, the ego will be actively looking
for pleasurable objects with which to identify. While pleasure in both cases is
the effect of a lowering of tension, the second case introduces time into the discussion,
since the ego is said to be able to anticipate the pleasure produced by certain
objects: the memory some objects leave prompt the ego to try and reproduce the
experience of pleasure via the
object.
The object, then, is both secondary and necessary for the constitution of
human subjectivity, a fact that becomes evident even from a cursory look at a
particular kind of drive: the sexual drive. According to Freud, sexual drives
are fundamentally auto-erotic. And this raises the question of how they ever
get interested in or intentionally directed towards an (external) object. The phantasm,
here, plays the role of condition of possibility. As Freud explains in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,
the function of the phantasm is to solder together a drive and an object.[9]
The phantasm makes it possible for one to substitute auto-erotic pleasure for
pleasure derived from an object. The verb, to solder (verlöten in German), is well-chosen, for it connotes the unnatural,
indeed artificial, character of the relation between drives and their objects. Still,
for our purposes, the important point to keep in mind is that pleasure is the
principle of any relation – whatever form it might take – between subject and
object. The reference to a mythical first, and autotelic, form of pleasure does
not mean, simply, that this pleasure has been lost, to the advantage of
another, object-oriented version of it; it means that the ultimate aim of the
second version is a pleasure that undoes the relation – i.e., the distance – between subject and object.
2.
This economical and rather abstract perspective
on pleasure and object-relatedness becomes more palpable when one is reminded
of another famous Freudian statement: ‘The finding of an object is in fact a
refinding of it’.[10]
One way to understand this is with reference to the fundamental nostalgia
characteristic of mental life: some mythical object was lost, taken away, or
disappeared somehow, and since that moment the psychical apparatus has been desperately
looking for it. Because the real object is lacking and thus cannot be
retrieved, one must satisfy oneself with surrogates, that is, with objects that
are only interesting to the degree that they remind us of the original. It is
certainly possible to argue for this reading from a Freudian perspective. A
slightly different reading, however, makes use of the paradox inherent to equating
the finding of an object with its refinding. The simultaneity of finding and
refinding indicates two possible directions. We have already discussed the first
one: finding is based on a prior loss. The second one, for its part, entails a
more complex operation: finding the object actively installs the loss on whose basis one can consider the object as
found again. In that sense, each and every refinding of the object actively
creates the separation between what is lost and what is found. What this means
for pleasure, in loss and gain terms, is that pleasure, to be pleasure, must entail
a loss, and that loss alone makes it possible to find pleasure in a certain
object. This concomitance of pleasure and loss is already present in the German
word Freud uses, Lust, which means both
pleasure and desire or craving.
That notion that pleasure is to be kept open, that it must be like a
quest in which the seeking is more important than what it leads to, is
succinctly articulated by Pascal in fragment 773: ‘We never go after things in
themselves, but the pursuit of things’.[11]
We must read this passage with an eye to the world his interlocutors inhabit,
the world of amusement through game-playing. Games were particularly popular
among seventeenth-century noblemen. They served as a necessary distraction from
boredom and, in Pascal’s diagnosis, from the miserable condition human beings were
in. What is essential to the game is not the outcome, the gain or loss, but the
playing of it, the expectations it thrives on, the tension between the
certainty, on the one hand, of the rules of the game and the stakes put on the
table, and the uncertainty, on the other hand, of chance (hasard).
In this respect, it is worth noting that Pascal first became interested
in games of chance when he was asked about the right way to end such a game prematurely. His friend
the Chevalier de Méré asked him how the stake could be divided fairly between
two players should they decide to interrupt their game before it reached the
end. By way of example, imagine two players, each of which have invested fifty
Euros in a coin toss game that, they stipulate, will end when one of the
players has won six tosses. However, they subsequently decide to end the game
when one player has won five tosses and the other four. How, then, to divide
the stake between the two players? Pascal’s quest for a rule of divisions [règle des parties] is detailed in the
(partially lost) correspondence with French jurist and mathematician Pierre de
Fermat.[12]
From what we have of the exchange,
however, it is clear that both men, although their approaches differ, arrive at
an equally sound solution to the problem. Fermat suggests calculating the
possible outcomes, and then to divide the stake in accordance with the quantity
of possible wins A and B can respectively count on. In our example, it is clear
that the quantity of possible wins for A is greater than for B, and that the
stake should be divided between the two using the same ratio. The disadvantage
of this solution is that it very quickly leads to rather complex tree graphs without
which it would be impossible to show all possible outcomes of the game.[13]
Pascal proposes a different method, one that, as mentioned just above, leads to
the same division of the stake between the two players.
Pascal starts from the observation that there are two possible outcomes
to each successive round: either A or B will win the toss. Returning to our example,
we can easily deduce that either player A wins the toss and the game, or that B wins the toss and equalizes the chances of winning
the game. In the latter case, with player B having tied the tosses at five
each, each player will again be fully in possession of his stake, so that A has
at least ‘won’ fifty Euros, even if he were to lose his round. Chances that the
former case will obtain, however, are split – he will either wins or lose – hence
the remaining fifty Euros should be divided in half. The conclusion is that if
both players decide to end the game prematurely, A is entitled to 75 (50+25) Euros,
and B to 25. If we now make a minor change to our example and imagine A to have
won five rounds and B only three, the reasoning is then as follows: A is sure
to have the right to 75 Euros – based on the future possibility of B winning four
rounds, as we just explained – and A can also lay claim to half of the
remaining 25 Euros, bringing his total to 87,5 Euros, if both players agree to end the game when A has won five and B three
rounds. The confines of this article
do not allow for engaging more deeply with Pascal’s ‘rule of divisions’, or
with the elegant application of Pascal’s triangle to it.
Our interest in this brief discussion of the problem of dividing the
stakes among two players who decide to end a game of chance prematurely resides
in the direct references to it in the pensée
devoted to the wager. This fragment, entitled ‘Infinity – nothing’, can be
divided into two parts.[14]
The first part is called the existential wager and argues that one has reason
to bet on the existence of God. We do not know if God exists, and the aim of
the argument is not to prove God’s existence. Rather, it says that, given the
fact that no one knows with certainty what to do does not take away the choice
everyone if confronted with: to suppose that God exists, or that He does not. According
to Pascal, one is always already in
the wager, and one has to make a choice. Simply not believing in God is
tantamount to making an active choice against God’s existence. Here, it is
obvious that Pascal defends Christian belief as a matter of reason because it
is based on a division between what one can be certain of and what depends on
chance. This implicit reference to the problem of the right division of stakes
– which is also based on a precise division of what is certain and what is
still open to chance – leads to the second part of the fragment, the
mathematical wager.
This opens with Pascal’s imaginary interlocutor objecting: ‘That is
wonderful. Yes, I must wager, but perhaps I am wagering too much’.[15]
Wagering on the existence of God entails giving up earthly pleasures, and what
if sacrificing one’s life’s pleasures is too high a stake compared to what one
may expect as the outcome of the game? Pascal replies by pointing out that if
the possible outcome is an infinity of happy lives after death, one is right is
to bet on the existence of God. What one can lose (if it turns out that God
does not exist), i.e., earthly pleasure, is nothing
compared to the infinite reward awaiting
us – if He exists. Here Pascal makes active use of his rule of the division of
the stakes: it is right to bet, that is, to start or continue the game, for if
one were not to enter (or to interrupt) the game, one is certain to lose more. We
should also add here that, while no one knows the outcome – my forsaking of earthly
pleasure can go unrewarded, either because God does not exist, or because He decides
not to save me from hell – everyone knows that the game will end: death is one
of the few certainties human beings can rely on. The uncertainty is treated
like a chance: either God exists or he does not. But, given the minimal chance that
He does exist, and the infinite reward that may entail, the only reasonable option
is to bet on His existence, as my stake is, compared to the infinity of the
possible, a nothing (rien). And
Pascal concludes: ‘That leaves no choice’. In French, it says: ‘Cela ôte tout parti’, which means,
literally, that the choice to choose for or against God was never actually a
choice at all. If one follows reason, according to Pascal, it becomes clear
that in this case the rule for the right division of the stakes does not apply.
In an ordinary game, the rule leaves the players with the choice either to continue
or to interrupt the game, and, moreover, it shows them how the stakes will be divided.
In the context of the wager, however, where infinity is part of the
calculation, the only thing one can do, if one wants to act reasonably, is to continue
the game and wager on the existence of God.
3.
In the last section of the fragment, ‘Infinity – nothing’, the
interlocutor admits that the argument to wager for God’s existence is
convincing, but he also adds: ‘I am so made that I cannot believe’.[16]
Reason forces him to opt for God’s existence, but that does not mean he actually believes it. Pascal’s notorious
answer advises him to act as if he believes, and that will gradually make the
aspiring believer ‘more docile’; ‘Cela
vous abêtira’, it says, which means, literally: it will turn you into a
beast. Lacan approvingly quotes this passage, stating that beasts lack the very
thing that, according to Pascal, prevents human beings from believing, namely:
an image of the self, which is the cause of self-love and narcissism.[17]
This is a rather surprising statement at first sight. After all, when
discussing the formative function of the image for the ego, doesn’t Lacan use many examples taken from animal ethology?[18]
The distinction here resides in the fact that an animal is open to imaginary
effects, such as copying a fellow animal’s color or emotional contagion, but it
does not form an ego with which it orients itself in life. In that respect,
Lacan and Pascal think along the same lines: narcissism is a deadlock and,
despite the intense passions it may produce (rivalry, aggressivity, vanity,
etc.), it keeps human beings in a state of ignorance concerning their own
existence. For Pascal, the real question is belief, which, as we have seen, can
be approached and argued for with
reason. For Lacan, the (narcissistic) ego veils the true dimension of subjectivity,
namely the lack-of-being (manque à être)
or desire (désir) the subject is qua
subject of the symbolic order. Despite the centuries that separate them, both
Pascal and Lacan agree that self-love, or narcissism, is an obstacle to
confront another dimension that more fundamentally determines our existence,
reason and the symbolic order, respectively. Still, both also point to what
only appears at the margins of the logic of calculating reason (Pascal) and the
signifier (Lacan’s term for the basic element with which the symbolic order
works). This, for Pascal, is belief, the ‘reasons of which reason knows nothing’.[19]
And, for Lacan, desire, that which articulates itself in the symbolic order,
but also indicates its non-closure as it emerges where a signifier is lacking.[20]
Here the question of the object comes into play. For Pascal the noblemen
forget their miserable condition by playing games of chance, more precisely,
they are not aware of it for they do not take in the Christian perspective on
their own existence. If they were to, they would both be able to despair and to
find the solution to it by converting themselves to Christianity. This would
allow them to move from being the subject of idle pastime in which one gambles
with what one has, to being the
subject of belief in which one bets with one’s own life, i.e. what one is. Of course, the nobleman will argue
that he considers life also as something he has, and as perhaps too high a
stake to gamble with. But as we have seen, however, Pascal argues that this is
a nothing. The obvious question here is: how can one stake nothing?
In order to answer this question Lacan quotes approvingly[21]
a passage from Pascal’s The Arithmetic
Triangle:
In order to understand the rules of the
divisions [règle des partis], the
first thing that it is necessary to consider is that the money that the players
have staked in the game no longer belongs to them, for they have given up the
property; but they have received in exchange the right to expect that which
chance is able to give to them of it, according to the conditions to which they
have agreed first.[22]
This means that whatever one stakes, one has to consider it as lost, as
reduced to a nothing. Thus by entering the game something (property) is turned
into nothing (the stake) and what one gets in return is ‘the right to expect
that which chance is able to give.’ In the case of the wager this means that
earthly pleasure is actually nothing when compared to the expectation of an
infinity of happiness awaiting the gambling believer. Lacan shows the
surprising analogy with the expectation people address to a psychoanalyst:
their hope is on another life, a happy life as the possible outcome of the
expensive and time-consuming labor of psychoanalysis.[23]
Within the non-christian frame of the analytical cure one does not aspire for
an infinity of happy lives but for a second life, a happy one. That is why
perhaps Lacan, more than Pascal, is able to question the stake: is it something
or nothing? What should one give up in order to make chance to lead a happy
life?
The promise of Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, is not a happy life,
but the entering into a culture of desire. This means that one has to give up
what one already has lost, a pleasure (jouissance)
still inherent to the symptom one complains about. The analysis will make the
analysant realize that this ‘stake’ is anyway lost and that he can only expect
to desire in a fruitful and/or bearable manner. The name for this stake is
object a which is qualified by Lacan
as a plus-de-jouir, a wordplay on plus that contains both dimensions we
already encountered in our discussion of Freud: a lost (plus) enjoyment (jouir)
turned into a surplus (plus) of
enjoyment. To be the subject of desire means to give up (being) the object of
it and to consider its satisfaction as an extended future.
References
Cléro, Jean-Pierre. 2008. Lacan and probability. Electronic Journ@l for
History of Probability and Statistics. http://www.jehps.net/Decembre2008/Clero.pdf. Accessed 30
September 2012.
Duras, Marguerite. 1993. Le Monde Extérieur:
Outside II. Paris: P.O.L.
Gallagher, Cormac. 2001. What does Lacan see in Blaise Pascal? http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Aut_2001-WHAT-DOES-JACQUES-LACAN-SEE-IN-BLAISE-PASCAL-Cormac-Gallagher.pdf. Accessed 30 September
2012.
Freud, Sigmund. 1942. Drei Abhandlungen zur
Sexualtheorie. In Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud, Edward Bibring, and Ernst
Kris, Vol. 5, 27-145. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag.
Freud, Sigmund. 1953. Three essays on the
theory of sexuality. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud (trans: James Strachey), Vol. 7, 123-245. London: The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Freud, Sigmund. 1957. Instincts and their
vicissitudes. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud (trans: James Strachey), Vol. 14, 109-140. London: The Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Freud, Sigmund. 1959. Hysterical fancies and
their relation to bisexuality. In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (trans: James Strachey), Vol. 9, 159-166.
London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Lacan, Jacques.
2006a. The mirror stage as formative of the I
function as revealed in psychoanalytic experience. In Ecrits, (trans: Bruce Fink), 489-542. New York-London: W.W. Norton
& Company.
Lacan, Jacques. 2006b. Le Séminaire. Livre XIII:
L’objet de la psychanalyse, Ed. Michel Roussan. Unpublished.
Lacan, Jacques. 2006c. Le Séminaire. Livre
XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre, Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil.
Le Célibataire: Revue de psychanalyse. 2006.
Lacan et Pascal. No. 13.
Pascal, Blaise. 1654. Fermat and Pascal on
probability. http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~bskyrms/bio/readings/pascal_fermat.pdf.
Accessed 30 September 2012.
Pascal, Blaise. 1966. Pensées. Trans. A. J.
Krailsheimer. London: Penguin.
Pascal, Blaise. 2009. The Arithmetic Triangle.
Trans. R. Pulskamp. http://www.cs.xu.edu/math/Sources/Pascal/Sources/arith_triangle.pdf.
Accessed 30 September 2012.
Thirouin, Laurent. 1991. Le hasard et les
règles. Paris: Vrin.
[1] Duras (1993, p. 140).
[2] Notable exceptions are Gallagher (2001), Cléro (2008) and a special
issue of Le Célibataire (2006).
[3] Lacan (2006c).
[4] An unofficial English translation by Cormac Gallagher is available
here: http://www.lacaninireland.com/
[5] Pascal (1966, pp. 149-153).
[6] Lacan (2006b).
[7] Lacan (2006c, pp. 105-183).
[8] Freud (1957, p. 124).
[9] Freud (1953, p. 137; see also 1959, p. 161).
[10] Freud (1953, p. 222).
[11] Pascal (1966, p. 262). The original French includes a word play on chercher (to search) and recherche (to re-search): ‘Nous ne
cherchons jamais les choses, mais la recherche des choses.’
[12] Pascal (1654).
[13] If A needs x rounds to win the game and B needs y rounds, then x+y-1
rounds is required to be sure to end up with a winner. The possible ways to
reach this result, however, amount to 2r+s-1.
[14] For the ensuing explanation I rely on Thirouin (1991, pp. 130-147).
[15] Pascal (1966, p. 151).
[16] Pascal (1966, p. 152).
[17] Lacan (2006, p. 137).
[18] See, among many other examples, the case of the female pigeon in Lacan
(2006a, p. 77).
[19] Pascal (1966, p. 154, fr. 423).
[20] That is also why Lacan defends Pascal’s choice for the God of Abraham,
of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of grace, instead of the God of the
philosophers (Descartes). See Lacan (2006b, p. 135; 2006c, pp. 102f, 147, 150).
[21] Lacan (2006c, p. 117 and p. 126).
[22] Pascal (2009, p. 15).
[23] Lacan (2006c, p. 146).
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