Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason by Mary Ann Caws

Abstract

 Reviews ture. e book’s deep excavation of J. M. Coetzee’s interests in central Europe at the point of difficult transition from the Austro-Hungarian empire and its handling of the subversive intertextual allusion of Zoë Wicomb’s fiction demonstrates, among other things, that such writing is by its very nature global. Modelling a method of interpretation that is ultimately hopeful, this book has much to say about the fates of literary reading in uncertain times, and the potential expansiveness of scholarly interest against the segmentation and marketization of academic labour. U  B A R Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason. By M A C. London: Reaktion. . xx+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. ere is a paradox in writing the biography of a writer who declared the self detestable , derided the notion of person, and excoriated Montaigne for attempting to paint a portrait of himself. Why risk reducing Pascal’s thoroughly anti-subjective project, grounded on extraordinary scientific, philosophical, and theological reflections , to the personal and the psychopathological? In this masterful short biography Mary Ann Caws avoids such pitfalls by focusing not on character but on Pascal’s style of life, and in so doing manages to introduce readers to the crux of his thought. Her Pascal is a ‘tense thinker’, who rarely spends time on ideas beyond his first brilliant intuitions and experiments, always afforded by circumstances and chance encounters. For Pascal, it is sufficient that these ideas contradict the obvious: there is void in nature, an object is an infinity of views, a machine can think, the fools are precisely those who think themselves smart, especially in politics, etc. A thinker of tensions who finds the Cartesian method naive, Pascal constantly stages contradictory perspectives on a complex universe. Each chapter links Pascal’s inventions to the pressure of circumstances. e theory of conical sections follows his move to Paris and his induction into Mersenne’s Académie. Pascal invents the calculator aer his father’s move to Rouen as a tax collector. e chance discovery of Jansenism leads to the first conversion and deepens Pascal’s relationship with his sister Jacqueline, a significant writer and actress. He invents probability theory during his ‘worldly’ period of active friendship with gamblers. is leads to the Wager argument (Caws manages to show its significance without repeating the accumulated scholarship). e second conversion follows the night of the Mémorial, a text Pascal wore sewn in the lining of his coat and which Caws reads as a poetic expression of the experience of the ineffable, leading to the first project of an Apology for Christianity presented to M. de Sacy. e war staged by Les Provinciales (a politicaltheological assault against the Jesuits as well as a phenomenology of bad faith) is linked to the miracle of his niece’s cure in Port-Royal. At the end of a trajectory linking peaks of thought to major events, Caws reads the Pensées not just as an anthropological and theological reformulation of all the strands of Pascal’s thought but also as a reflection on thinking and style which, to the modern reader, is a school of writing. MLR, .,   In places Caws could have gone further. In the Entretien with Sacy, Pascal did not just juxtapose Montaigne and Descartes, but built a philosophical ‘machine infernale’ where Stoicism and scepticism would reveal each other’s vanity, both for life and for salvation. As for the Pensées, Caws’s equation of fragment with aphorism is debatable. e Entretien, L’Esprit de la géométrie, several fragments marked as preface, chapter sections, and conclusion, and public readings given by Pascal of some of the Pensées assembled into bundles indicate a coherent apologetical project . Had he not died prematurely, he would surely have merged the fragments into chapters, while maintaining the aphoristic nature of many existential paradoxes pointing only to a solution beyond existence. More could be said in that regard on miracles and prophecies as irrational but indubitable proofs in history. Nietzsche and perhaps Char and Foucault could have been more explicitly discussed in the chapter on posterity, and the satirical Rondeau against the Jesuits needs...