Pascal, Hunting over Poetry I

One hundred and forty years before Jeremy Bentham declared that “push-pin is as good as poetry,” Blaise Pascal was intrigued by those who preferred hunting to poetry (324). For both, the question concerned “what will make us happy?” Tetris and Halo have supplanted push-pin. But hunting and poetry still survive to pledge and promise.

When Pascal writes of hunting, he refers to boars and hares as the game with dogs and horses included among the means and royalty playing the part of the hunters. Hunting, as with Plato, is a group activity chasing quick, elusive game; the location, the means, and the actors have all changed.

Pascal claims that hunting and philosophy (and perhaps poetry too) share the same goal – happiness – but they differ radically in the means employed.

Hunting pursues happiness through diversion. Humans suffer from boredom and from the fright of facing into their own condition. “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber” (139). Of course, the inability also arises from the unhappiness. So, the hunter leaves his room and goes out to hunt. It gets him out of his room, and it will make him happy.

But what, exactly about the hunt makes the hunter happy? Here, Pascal believes, both the hunters and anti-hunters make a mistake. The hunter thinks that getting possession of a hare will make him happy. The anti-hunter (“those who philosophize on the matter”) cannot see why the scrawny, mangy hare, which the hunter “would not take as a gift” could possibly be worth spending a day hunting. Neither know that “it is the chase, and not the quarry, which they seek.” The chase has the capacity to distract us from ourselves.

“Whence comes it that this man, who lost his only son a few months ago, or who this morning was in such trouble through being distressed by lawsuits and quarrels, now no longer thinks of them? Do not wonder; he is quite taken up in looking out for the boar which his dogs have been hunting so hotly for the last six hours. He requires nothing more…. Without amusement there is no joy; with amusement there is no sadness.”