Pascal and the lust for learning

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a promising scientist and mathematician, an outstanding precursor of infinitesimal calculus, projective geometry and probability, made contributions in hydrodynamics and was also a skilled experimenter, who built the first calculating machine – to help his father who was a tax assessor.

Born in Clermont-Ferrant, his family moved to Paris when Pascal was still a child. His family was Catholic, and inclined towards a new doctrine which at that time was beginning to take off in France; this was Jansenism, which, founded by Cornelius Jansen some years earlier, held that man could only be saved from hell by the intervention of divine grace, and that this intervention was predetermined and did not depend on good deeds. Pascal professed great admiration for this doctrine, and his reflections on it caused him to have more than one mystical outburst; it cannot be ruled out that Pascal’s poor health, which caused him serious digestive problems that eventually led to his death at the age of 39, had as much or more to do with his ecstasies than his Jansenist faith. In 1654 he had an accident while driving a horse-drawn carriage from which he escaped unhurt; this led to a mystical delirium that led him to enter the convent of Port Royal, which had become the main centre of Jansenist ideas. There he meditated on the greatness and misery of man and composed his main philosophical-religious works: The Provincials and Thoughts.

That mystical temper is reflected in his criticism of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, rather than as a tool to the greater glory of God. We thus have “greed or lust for learning, a dissolute appetite for knowledge. Such a study of science arises from a primary interest in oneself as the centre of things, instead of being concerned to seek outside, among all the natural phenomena around us, the presence of God and His glory”.

Probably his mystical outbursts meant that, in the end, he remained a promising scientist: “The greatest he could have been in the whole history of mathematics”, in E.T. Bell’s opinion. In fact, Nietzsche saw in Pascal the model of genius crippled by religion: “Christianity has sided with everything weak, with every inferior, with every failure,” he wrote in The Antichrist; “it has made an ideal of opposition to the instincts tending to preserve the strong life; it has spoiled even the reason of the intellectually strongest natures by leading them to regard the supreme values of intellectuality as something sinful, something that leads astray, a temptation. The most pitiful example is Pascal, who believed that his reason was corrupted by original sin, when it was corrupted precisely by his Christianity” – with which, to some extent, Bertrand Russell agreed: “Pascal sacrificed his magnificent mathematical talent to his God, thus attributing to him a barbarity which was a cosmic enlargement of his sickly mental tortures”.

References

Antonio J. Durán, Crónicas Matemáticas, Crítica, Barcelona, 2018.