'Where then is the self?' Pascal's Critique of the Ego

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.

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.

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2015

Modern Theology, 2011

I aim to develop a fully theological, yet still Pascalian account of human subjectivity. Exegetically, I argue that the Pensées themselves present two such accounts. The first account is a portrait of fallen subjectivity, selfhood under the reign of sin. The second account is a portrait of authentic subjectivity. This account is explicitly Christological and even Trinitarian. Constructively, I argue that Pascal’s two accounts show that our subjectivity is performative and imitative: whether under sin or under grace, to be a self is to imitate God.

In this paper I discuss the work of Blaise Pascal in mathematics, physics, engineering , and philosophy as well as his Christian faith.

Physico-theology. Religion and Science in Europe, 1650-1750 (edited by Ann Blair and Kaspar von Greyerz), Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020

Pascal's Rejection of Natu ral Theology The Case of the Port-Royal Edition of the Pensées I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy, he would like to do without God, but he could not help allowing him a chiquenaude to set the world in motion; after that he has no more to do with God. Pascal 1 Pascal's famous statement on Descartes, reported in Marguerite Périer's Mémoire sur Pascal et sa famille, is prime evidence for Pascal's opinion that Descartes's Principia philosophiae, while striving to ground physics in metaphysics, and thus to explain natu ral phenomena from a prior demonstration of God's existence, actually reduces God to a subaltern function. Pascal interprets Descartes's causal hierarchy of God and the laws of nature as detrimental to the role of God: beyond his initial chiquenaude, the Cartesian God is no longer required to explain natu ral phenomena; matter and motion are by themselves sufficient princi ples for all the complexities of nature. This criticism, despite its inadequacy-Descartes's natu ral philosophy does not dispense with God once a first impulsion is given to the whole system of matter and motion-highlights a significant point, the absence of any reference to God's design in Descartes's explication of physical phenomena. Pascal's statement, thus, seems to condemn the Principia philosophiae as dealing with a theologically blank world. From this, we might expect that Pascal, against Descartes's strictly mechanist explication of nature (which Pascal no doubt connects with the attribution to Descartes of an implicit atheism), intended to defend the opposite view that all natu ral phenomena display God's purposiveness. We might suppose, in other words, that Pascal's apol o getic proj ect integrated natu ral theology as an essential tool in the attack on atheism. This supposition would be false, however. Indeed, in an intellectual context featuring multiple proofs of the existence of God, including many arguments from the divine design of the world, Pascal's apol o getic proj ect is characterized M a r t i n e P é c h a r m a n

Scottish Journal of Theology, 1972

2018

Master's Thesis (2018). I argue that there is a tension in the Pensées between, on the one hand, Pascal’s attempt to authenticate Scripture with proofs based on miracles and Old Testament prophecies and, on the other hand, his use of 1 Cor 1–3 in his rejection of the principles of knowledge espoused by some of his contemporaries, like Descartes and Spinoza. I conclude by reflecting on the fragility of the human situation with respect to divine revelation, and the requirement that one must love and submit in order to grasp the truth.

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.