I am precisely the target audience for this small book on the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. Although I work on 17th-century ph

A Summer with Pascal by Antoine Compagnon (Translated from French by Catherine Porter) - review by Jonathan Egid

submited by

Style Pass

2024-07-09 05:00:06

I am precisely the target audience for this small book on the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. Although I work on 17th-century philosophy (in a quite different part of the world, in my defence), I knew next to nothing about Pascal save for those things named after him – the unit of pressure, the triangle of binomial coefficients, the famous wager – before starting Compagnon’s elegant, unconventional ‘beach read’.

Years ago, I bought a copy of Pascal’s Pensées in one of those beautiful old Penguin Classics editions, but the image of his stark white plaster death mask set against an all-black background rather scared me off opening it up. A similarly foreboding impression was provided by the one sentence of his that I remembered, from an epigraph in A W Moore’s The Infinite: ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.’

What a phrase. Victor Cousin called it ‘a lugubrious cry surging up all of a sudden from the depths of the soul, in the desert of a world without God!’ This desert was one of inert matter, or pure and infinite mathematical extension. Such a conception of the world was inconceivable before the revolution in thought initiated by Galileo and Descartes and the concomitant growth of atheist, ‘libertine’ thought across Europe. A world without God was an empty world, inanimate, bare and silent. And it is the silence of infinite spaces that seems their most crucial characteristic, contrasting with the music of the heavenly spheres.