L'Homme Machine in Pascal and Bourdieu

PUBLICATIONES UNIVERSITATIS MISKOLCINENSIS SECTIO PHILOSOPHICA, 2022

In 1918 towards the end of his life, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in a letter to Picasso: “What is there today that is newer, more modern, more denuded and more laden with riches than Pascal?” What was it about this seventeenth century physicist, mathematician, inventor, moralist and religious philosopher that elicited such soaring praise from a surrealist poet over 250 years after his death at the young age of thirty-nine? Although Pascal was without a doubt a scientist of formidable genius, it was not his scientific prowess which won him the greatest admiration among the creative minds of the early twentieth century, nor which continues to feed his buoyant reputation at the beginning of the twenty-first. It was rather his profound insights into the workings of the human consciousness, his understanding in an age of humanism emerging from the Renaissance, that humans are, “un milieu entre rien et tout”, a space between nothing and everything, capable of the highest highs and the lowest lows.

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2015

Blaise Pascal has been viewed as a major modern philosopher but today is being increasingly ignored. One of my passions is philosophy and I was shocked to discover that the famous Pascal was totally ignored in the popular “Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers” (2010) and “The Story of Philosophy” by Bryan Magee (1998) and “The Oxford Companion to Philosophy” (1995). However, he does merit a four page entry by RH Popkin (Emeritus Philosophy Professor, Washington University-St. Louis, MO) in “Great Thinkers of the Western World” (1992) and a substantial write-up in Wikipedia. Even a Google search on the word Pascal first lists the scientific unit of pressure named in his honour. This essay will examine this major omission of Pascal from the ranks of the principal philosophers of Western Europe. We shall show that he annoyed too many powerful people both then and later, so it was easier to omit him than confront his radical, independent philosophical/religious thinking, while acknowledging his major mathematical achievements and minor scientific research.

Any état présent of Blaise Pascal (1623-62) is bound to start with an acknowledgement of the insuperable editorial difficulties thrown up by the most important text in the Pascalian canon, known, albeit not to him, as the Pensées. The rights and wrongs of how these discontinuous posthumous sections of written material are presented in order to be, as far as possible, both readable and faithful to what we can ascertain of their compilation and purpose have dominated the story of their publication for more than three centuries. The problem might seem to arise uncomplicatedly from the simple fact of Pascal's early death, leaving as it did a vast corpus of preparatory notes for a projected apologia for the Christian religion in a state of disorder and fragmentation. If, then, we begin by turning innocently to their early publication history, we might hope, at least bibliographically, to find some initial points de repère; but these are already fraught with difficulty. The highly selective and theologically tendentious first version of what was to be known to posterity as the Pensées de Monsieur Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets (the 'É dition de Port-Royal') was published in 1670, but was marked by the intrusive editorial presence both of his sister Gilberte Périer, and of the Jansenist ethos that characterized the spiritual milieu of Pascal's family and associates. Pascal was linked to the neo-Augustinian theology of the convent of Port-Royal -so much is certain -and clear evidence of that affiliation is present in the editio princeps, which is available as a facsimile in a modern critical presentation. 1 It was also, selfevidently, to this truncated and partisan anthology that writers in the eighteenth century referred when they took issue with or (more rarely) drew inspiration from the arguments which are, or appear to be, the cornerstones of the whole project.

Renaissance Quarterly, 2020

Verbum, 2014

This essay argues that the main instrument Montaigne, 16th-century French thinker and writer, used for creating a "new ontology, " as Nicola Panichi calls it (2004, 278), was language and a special style of writing. He, first of all, created-or revived from the Antiquity-a new genre most suitable for a new discourse, and christened it essai. Then he applied a method known in humanist schools of the Renaissance as ultraquem partem to relativise all previous thought. Finally, he employed a thorough, frank examination of his own behaviour, habits and preferences, adorned with Latin sentences, to promote self-analysis as a path to personal contentment. This article applies the theory of Bakhtin, a 20th-century Russian philosopher and sociolinguist, especially his essay "Discourse in the Novel" ("Слово в романе"), in the analysis of the peculiarity of Montaigne's composition and its purposefulness in expressing at that time dangerous, but already prevalent worldview. Since battling medieval Christian thought was the paramount assignment of his endeavour, the quotes are mostly taken from Montaigne's only essay-and by far the longest in the three-volume collection-entirely dedicated to religion, "Apologie de Raimond Sebond. "

An apt title for a longer essay on Blaise Pascal-the French, seventeenth century scientist, mathematician, philosopher and theologist-developed along a chronological line, could be: from nothing to nothing. The first 'nothing' plays a pivotal role in one of his earliest contributions to the field of physics, and concerns the discussion about the possibility of a vacuum in nature. For more than two thousand years, first by the Aristotelian philosophy of nature, then subsequently supported by Christian theology and philosophy, the existence of nothing, a pure void within the plenitude of being was considered as an impossibility, an odd idea contradicting the widely shared conviction that nature abhors a vacuum. Of course, Pascal was not the first to perform experiments with tubes filled with mercury, water or wine to produce the remarkable creation of seemingly-as we know now thanks to those experiments, also really-empty spaces within those tubes. He may not have been the first to conduct these experiments (Torricelli and Galileo preceded him), reading the reports and discussions of the experiments, reveals Pascal's tenacity. 2 Therein he is not directly arguing in favour or against the philosophically problematic idea of empty space; relying on the impossible idea of a vacuum, he explains the phenomena observed. This eventually allows him to conclude that the lowering of liquids in a tube, turned upside down in a vessel containing the same liquid and producing the vacuum in the upper part of the tube, is entirely due to air pressure. Which is indeed, as Alexandre Koyré once put it, a remarkable way of explaining the real via the impossible 3 , that is via the counter-intuitive idea of a natural nothingness. Taking a leap from the scientific observations and calculations stemming from the early stages of Pascal's adult life, to the months preceding his premature death in 1662 at the 1 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer, London: Penguin 1966, 240. This English translation relies on Louis Lafuma's edition of the Pensées. Following a common practice in referring to Pensées, the number of the pensée will be added, according to the Lafuma, Léon Brunschvicg and Philippe Sellier editions, respectively. The motto above is taken from: Laf. 656 / Br. 368 / Sel. 743. 2 See Dominique Descotes, 'Pascal. Le calcul et la théologie', in: Pour la science, 16 (2003), 1-93. 3 Alexandre Koyré, Etudes d'histoire de la pensée scientifique. Paris: Gallimard, 1966, 185-186.