Blaise Pascal: summary brief description of the life and thought of the French philosopher and mathematician.
Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont in 1623. He began his career as a scientist and at 18 he invented the first prototype of the calculator (the Pascaline). In 1654, “called by the God of Abraham, Jacob and Jesus Christ”, he converted following the Jansenist movement , which believed that only divine grace could save man (the Jansenists did not distance themselves from the Catholic Church, although they were inspired by the Counter-Reformation). His most important work is “Thoughts”, which was published after his death.He reproached Descartes for having created a God as a requirement of reason that does not touch the life of man, and is therefore not a god of the sacred scriptures. All of Pascal ‘s philosophy revolves around religion and the greatest enigma of man, that is, man himself, whose solution can only come from faith.
Human knowledge
According to Pascal , man tries to escape perpetually from a constitutive unhappiness, trying to distract himself (divertissement = perpetual escape), also seeking other truths. Man does not live in function of the present that continually escapes him, but his life is a projection towards the future, but this deprives him of the most important thing he has: reason.
Man acts with 2 ways of knowing :
- Spirit of geometry (reason) : it has as its object the physical realities and the abstract entities of mathematics and man uses a discursive and demonstrative procedure. The limit of scientific investigation, and therefore of science, is given by experience, because where there is experience there is no scientific knowledge, and by the indemonstrability of the first principles. The greatest limit, however, is the inability of science to face existential problems.
- Spirit of finesse (heart) : has as its object man and moral and religious realities and is based on the heart, feelings and intuition. For Pascal the spirit of finesse is fundamental to understanding scientific reasoning. “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”.
Problem of three-dimensionality: man perceives three-dimensionality even before knowing it mathematically.
According to Pascal, the limit of previous philosophers, including Descartes , was to have created a rational God, in fact he speaks of the “God of Abraham and Isaac” made of love and consolation and who fills the soul (God the creator).
Man is neither absolute ignorance, nor absolute wisdom, he is neither absolute power, nor absolute impotence; Pascal says that he is neither an angel nor a beast, but he is an incomprehensible beast. Man is characterized by a great intuition and a great aspiration, but only thought makes man great. In this regard, Pascal states that “even if the universe crushed man, he would still be more noble than those who kill him, because he is aware of having to die”.
Tragic Realism and the Doctrine of the Fall
Tragic Realism : Man’s salvation lies in the awareness that he is neither the first nor the last. The only thing that consoles us from misery (ontological meaning) is divertissement, without knowing that it is the greatest misery because it is an escape from ourselves. Man is kneaded with misery (“if he boasts, I will put him down”) and greatness (“if he humbles himself, I will boast”).
The last step of reason is to recognize that there are infinite things that surpass it, among these is God.
Doctrine of the Fall: Many things surpass human reason, but that truth that escapes reason is given by religion. Pascal considers Christianity the most reasonable and true religion because it speaks of man’s fall from a paradisiacal world following original sin. This is demonstrated by the fact that man feels unhappy in being a deposed king. If man did not know happiness, he would not feel sadness and pain and the desire to return there.
The bet on God
Before God we cannot provide proof of his existence, but we can only bet on his existence, like good poker players: if I bet on the existence of God and I discover that God does not exist, I will have lost transient pleasures, that is, temporary and worldly ones . If I bet that God does not exist and I discover that he exists, I will have lost eternal happiness and beatitude. This is why Pascal says that it is better to bet on the existence of God, because there is less to lose. Man, even when betting on the existence of God, can only save himself through divine grace, which can do nothing without human research. Reason is useful to man to understand the folly of a life made only of entertainment. God is sensitive to the heart and not to reason. Bernard of Caravalle: he wonders why God killed Jesus Christ to save the world, when he could have saved it without killing his son: finally he says that God wanted to understand what it meant to be a man and to suffer like him.
