CoPhi: Pascal’s weakness

Thursday, February 9, 2023

Pascal’s weakness

Blaise Pascal is on the agenda today in CoPhi. I always point out that there's more to him than his problematic, ill-considered "wager".

Here's one of his stranger pensées:

"In writing down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my weakness, that I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness."

What can it mean to "know your nothingness"? Does he mean he wants to know there's more to life than eternal nullity before birth and after death? Isn't he really striving for knowledge of something Epicurus pointed out as inescapably elusive? Isn't it better to strive for something actually within reach?

Or does he just mean he wants to confront his finitude and fallibility, and to demonstrate humility as a condition of ultimate salvation? That does seem to have been his great preoccupation.

A little humility is good. But there's nothing wrong with striving to improve your memory too, and to know something more than your deficiencies and lacunae.

Paradoxically perhaps, the skeptic, Montaigne, did that better than Pascal. And he avoided trying to know more than he could, which I see as Descartes's greatest error.

1 comment:

Nick KlineFebruary 9, 2023 at 9:59 AM
(Section 6)

As a pilot, I have heard of the unit hectopascal as that is the standard measurement for pressure in many other parts of the world. In the United States, we use inches of mercury rather than the hectopascal, so I do not have much using the hectopascal. However, I do know that it was named after Blaise Pascal and that he made significant contributions to the science and mathematical fields, but I did not know that Pascal had such a diverse work portfolio including philosophy.
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I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion... "

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Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now... I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..."

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==

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The dumbing down of American life is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

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― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

==
On the other hand, eastern enlightenment...

“Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.”
― Bodhidharma, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma

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