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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:

  1. (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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