Introducing Belay's Pascal, anti-modern. The subtitle of this piece is, if we're going to battle against modernity, we need to recognize our champions. Pascal might have been the first. Alright, Renee Descartes was kind of a dick.
His famous saying, quote, I think, therefore I am, unquote, is nothing less than a whole sale of all authority, even objective truth as authority, in favor of what Russell Kirk would have called a defecated rationality, and fear of subjectivism that belittles anything outside of one's own mind. You see, the modern attitude created by Descartes does two things. One, it enshrines one's own beliefs or preferences as exclusive source of truth. That's the fear of subjectivism, hard.
Two, it elevates logic that flows from that fear of subjectivism, the defecated rationality, into a truth, my truth, your truth, his or her truth, etc. I mean, if you draw a thick cocaine line from Descartes to today's transwords, you'd be drawing coke lines better than 100 Thompson. Now, accused of being atheist, Descartes claimed to be a quote about Catholic, unquote, that's from our Yale story, he used that phrase about Catholic, kind of funny, a lot of our current presidents, protestations of the contrary to his questionable Catholics, but anyway, Descartes claimed to be a devout Catholic, but he left his Catholic France to live him on the Calvinist and Jews in the Netherlands. His spouse, Ad, and bizarre theories about the soul, he spent his final days as a court philosopher for the Lutheran Queen, Cristina of Sweden, and died without last rights.
I was told not to guide you to seem particularly concerned about Catholicism. In fact, one academic thinks that Descartes was such a poor Catholic that a priest thought his example would prevent Queen Cristina of Sweden from converting to Catholicism, so the priest poisoned the father of modernity by a late-senate host with arsenic. Now, in my opinion, that story doesn't ring true. I mean, a priest who cares enough about Catholicism wouldn't descart the host like that, but hey, the queen did convert it from Descartes's death, so maybe.
The Pope also thought Descartes was kind of a dick, urban the aid to put his writings on the index of forbidden books about dozen years after Descartes died, but most people thought Descartes was brilliant. He was the toast of Europe, but Descartes wasn't the smartest guy in Europe. Heck, he wasn't even the smartest guy in France. A young upstart was his intellectual superior, Descartes knew it and resented it.
Did I mention Descartes was kind of a dick? When the 16-year-old Blaze Pascal published a mathematical paper on conic or conic sections, when Descartes was 43, Descartes knew he'd been eclipsed. When he was at lies at the height of his intellectual power and interpretation, at first Descartes refused to believe someone his youngest Pascal could have written something like that, but when he learned it was true, Descartes turned a bit little in him. When Descartes later invented the syringe and the hydraulic press, Descartes mocked him and said Pascal had, quote, too much of a vacuum in his head, unquote.
Pascal, in turn, returned. Pascal returned Descartes' disdain, but not out of petty jealousy. I mean, the better does not envy the other, but rather because Pascal saw Descartes' method dispense with God. Pascal, I suspect, saw where Descartes' method of pure subjectivism would lead, and even if Pascal couldn't have imagined men with lipstick and counterfeit vaginas, he no doubt saw if only vaguely the ugly road modernity and its subjective rationality would lead.
I'm intrigued that Pascal came along when he did and was thrown into Descartes' path. I mean, here was Descartes, the greatest mind in Europe, asserting one's ideas and rationality as the basis of everything and launching the era that we call modernity. Descartes, by the way, is considered one of the two fathers of modernity Descartes in idealism and bacon and science. That'll all be flushed out in later episodes.
And then there was, after Descartes launches modernity, and then almost immediately, there was this clear intellectual superior coming along less than ten years later, making the name for himself and sending himself as a far better alternative to Descartes. Pascal is the proto-antimodern, and he was anti-modern before modern was. And what did this tighten of anti-modernity, anti-cartesian idealism say? His most famous saying, quote, the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart, unquote. Don't, Pascal was saying trust your own reason as exclusive arbiter of truth. My dirty, as Jacques Derrida would show, was a series of little religions. The modern thought process goes like this, one, reject God, two, unwittingly embrace a new God, or what Jacques Derrida would call a little centric idea, three, rationalize truths from that new God.
That's it. Reject God. Embrace a new God. That's the recipe followed by every modern thinker that was, is, and ever shall be.
In fact, it's not just the recipe followed by every modern thinker. Every modern person, thinker, and adult follows that recipe. The moron of the honky-tonk bar with a flag bandana, Ronna said, and a skull on his face, the woke idiot with a Ukraine flag bandana, skeet-boarding people on the head, both moderns, the law of limited intellectual gifts. The Bryant, if disturbed David Foster Wallace, said, quote, everybody worships, the only choice we get is what to worship, unquote.
And if you go to the show notes, you'll, the fiffle quotes there in the end notes. So a person can claim to reject God, but some of the God will take his place in the heart. From that God, new ideas and conclusions will follow, no matter how boneheaded. Because here's the thing, every person needs a starting point that can't be reasoned too.
That starting point is his or her God, only an arrogant oaf thinks it's above worship. For Descartes, that little God was one's own mind. Once the elevated ones thoughts to the divine, people could start trusting their thoughts, ideas, and passions as little slices of dogma from cut from the little God of their mind. Pascal wasn't having it.
Now, the younger Pascal might not have much cared. He wasn't particularly religious. By his late 20s, his father died. His beloved sister was internet convent against his wishes.
He had small inheritance that was enough to sustain him, and that was about it. He only seemed to care about his scientific work. But then in November, 1654 at H31, he had an intense and direct encounter with the divine. He didn't talk about it, but he did write it down, a description of it, he sold it in the line of his coat.
They found after he died, by the way, because no one knew he had this little thing called the momento, the memoir, whatever, that he kept on at all times, presumably to remind himself of this divine experience. But anyway, at that point, he shifted his attention to this experience and started working on a thorough defense of the divine. He wrote passages as it came to him. Then after he had assembled a large collection, he started classifying them by cutting up each sheet into his component, Pensei's.
By the way, Pensei, Pensei's, Pensei's, I've heard a pronounce of the joint different ways, so when they're right wrong, I don't care, I'm gonna say Pensei's. Anyway, they arranged them under 28 headings, and they fastened the fragments within each bundle by threading string through them. Unfortunately, illness cut short is life and is great work. Only fragments one through three hundred and eighty two are classified, three eighty three through eight twenty nine weren't.
Though their content is occasionally full enough to allow classification by scholars, who also found about eighty more fragments resulted in nine hundred and twelve total Pensei's, which has since become a standard in the Western canon. If you go to volume 33 of the encyclopedia's great books in the Western world, that's Pascal most of which is the Pensei's. And the Pensei's, Pascal frequently refers to the quote, hidden god unquote. The phrase is in the subject of a lot of scholarly commentary, but my hunch is, he was referring to the Tao.
After reason, the logic of another course, something always remains. Paradox simultaneously points to that, points to that something, while at the same time mocking reason and logic, but paradox doesn't show us what that something is. That something is the Tao. That something is, I think, what Pascal was referring to when he referred to that quote, hidden god.
After all, if it wasn't hidden, we could articulate what he is, but he's behind articulation. That's why he's hidden, which is by the same of the Tao throughout all these podcast episodes in the past year or so. But Pascal knew god exists, so it is reasonable to believe, even if irrational. The Pensei's, as a whole, show how it's reasonable to embrace an irrational Christianity, for that matter the Pensei's defend the reason the irrational in general.
It's a paradox, yes, but reality is laced with paradox. As I've explored previously, full reality can't be reasoned to. We know all sorts of things that escape logic. We know that my intuition, or what Hugh Kenner refers to as the quote, insting for being unquote, which is in his forgotten classic paradox in Chesterton, get a copy, it's a hard slob, but short, lovely, great book.
When he reached the limits of our logic, but still see, feel, sense, and to it, that there's something else there, we've reached the Tao, paradox, absurdity, the tragedy of existence, the Grund, as my shakar might call it, whatever. That's what we're referring to. Pascal, the rationalist genius who devoted most of his life to unlocking the secrets of the material world, said he held the story in Carlos' era back in 2016, wrote the Pensei's, to quote, convince his fellow die-hard rationalists that human beings could never be ultimately satisfied by earthly life, or by reason alone, unquote. Pascal makes that point politically, in Pensei 199, I'm going to read it here.
We float on a vast ocean, ever uncertain and adrift, blown this way or that, whenever we think we have some point to which we can cling and fasten ourselves, it shakes free and leaves us behind. And if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slides away and escapes forever, nothing stays still for us. This is our natural condition, and yet the one farthest from our inclination, we bear with a desire to find firm ground and also a secure base, I wish to build a tower, reaching up to the infinite, but our whole foundation cracks and it opens up into the abyss. Reality, Pascal said, is full of astonishing contradictions, as is phrase of astonishing contradictions, and each person experiences them.
Reality is a paradox machine, each person is a little paradox machine. It's all absurd, and Pascal knew it, prefiguring the existentialist Albert Camus and his mythicist by about 300 years. It's so absurd we need to be crazy, in other words beyond reasonable and logical to appreciate it. Does that mean madness is the norm?
It could be. As Pascal said, men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness. Thanks for listening.