beyond wishful thinking 59need to form an attitude, implicit and unelaborated if not explicit and
fully formed, to the most disturbing and perplexing aspects of our con-
dition. We will have an attitude, whether we want to or not and whether
or not we are fully conscious of the ideas informing it. In arriving at
such an attitude, however, we are condemned to cognitive overreach:
we must stake the course of our lives on suppositions whose grounds
fail to do justice to the gravity of their implications and to the scope of
their claims.
Th is paradoxical feature of our situation— our need to enlist the
most fragile ideas in support of the most important decisions— is the
half- truth in Pascal’s account of faith in God as a wager: a bet that pays
off fabulously if it succeeds and that leaves us no worse off than we oth-
erwise remain, death- bound in the darkness of a godless world, if it
fails. Th e truth in this account is that we must take a stand— a fateful
stand— without having such grounds as we might demand even for
decisions of much less consequence. Th e falsehood is the suggestion
that the spirit in which we take such a stand could or should mimic the
calculus of the gambler. It is not about a par tic u lar benefi t or cost (al-
though the Jansenist focus on salvation and damnation might make it
seem so); it is about the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives, as
viewed from the outside, from the perspective of their defi ning limits,
for what goes on inside our existence, for the way we live.
Th is inescapable cognitive overreach, imposed on us by our circum-
stance, is what the vocabulary of the Semitic mono the isms calls faith.
To suit the purpose at hand, a conception of faith must not depend on
the distinctive tenets of each religion. It must acknowledge the two
sides of faith: risking and trusting.
Th e risking side of faith is the consequence of the unavoidable over-
reach: the stand without grounds that could ever suffi ce to justify it by
the lights of the criteria that we apply to our decisions of more limited
scope. However, such overreach is also prophecy, and self- fulfi lling
prophecy at that. Th e vision that results in an imperative, on a basis
that is always dubious, prompts us to act, individually and collectively.
By our actions we change the world in the light of the vision; thus, the
self- fulfi lling aspect of the prophecy.
However, we do not change the world at will; we only bring it a lit-
tle closer to the prophetic message and to its imperative of world