Monday, February 20, 2006

On Pascal's Pensees

I am currently working on a piece on heaven which will trump this piece. Discuss with me if you desire to talk about it.

After reading the Pensées of Blaise Pascal, I was thoroughly disappointed. For such an immaculate genius it was disturbing how set in his sentiments of the superiority of Christianity, and how much he deemed skepticism asinine. It is also striking his self-contradictory nature towards the Jews.

I do not at this point wish to go back through the text and explain myself perfectly, but I feel that writing my ideas down is paramount at this time. I would like to state some ambiguities that I remember, but I vow that this is the first draft of this extended work, and citations will be included.

First for the ambiguities. At one point, Pascal seems sympathetic towards the Jews, almost looking at them as if they Muslims viewed Jews within fifty years of the Muhammad (محمد). He first sees them as pious people who rejected the latest message (Jesus). However, these are only in sparing quotations, and I may have misinterpreted them. Later he turns very hostile towards the Jews, and calls Solomon infinitely inferior to Plato.

The next issue I have with Pascal is his critique of skepticism. In every instance except “The Wager” he is almost condescending towards skeptics. This is ironic because it is in extreme collocation with the rest of his writings. I have hitherto written on the wager so I will not discuss that here. Yet Pascal later seems to be angry towards skepticism. It appears paradoxically ironic to me that the man who formulated possibly the foremost argument for believing in God to then turn around and be exceedingly hostile toward skepticism. The fact that Pascal a man so enamored in the sciences to accept God is not only in a different pattern with many of the men of the age is noteworthy. However, Kepler and Newton were also devout theists, so a case could be made that the best scientists were also the most devout theists. Einstein is of the same breed of Newton in this respect.

Pascal’s work appears to be very repetitive and can be predictable at times. This is no fault of his, but he Pensées can become somewhat tedious to read. What I can critique is his lack of talent as an aphorist. What I am saying is his style is not striking, and I believe that many are much more talented. Yet this argument fails because I read a translation of the Pensées, and not the Pensées themselves (I probably should have stated already that the title means the thoughts), although he has not been praised too greatly for his prose.

I am well aware that this is a poor study of The Pensées, but again I just wanted to put down some thoughts. My closing remarks are that the Pensées fell very well short of my expectations. I expected a man of such genius to be able to produce something greater than he already did. To ignore the rest of the Pensées outside of The Wager may be a keen idea, but Pascal’s other writings cannot be ignored. A theory may be proposed where that Pascal was such a genius prodigy that he may have never grown up and been religious out of some sort of fear or inferiority. However I claim not to be a psychologist of any serious skill, so it is not the time to give Blaise Pascal a psychological profile, but I am throwing the idea out there. The Pensées fell quite short of expectation and Pascal should be remembered for his genius in science, mathematics and The Wager.

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