Pascal by Michael Moriarty

Author:Michael Moriarty [Moriarty, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192588999
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2020-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

1 See Moriarty, DV, pp. 359–82.

2 Maxim 358 speaks, however, of humility as the true proof of Christian virtue.

3 Compare L 220/S 243/LG 196: ‘Tous les hommes se haïssent naturellement l’un l’autre’ (‘All human beings naturally hate one another’). See Christian Lazzeri, Force et justice dans la politique de Pascal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), pp. 23–55, for a good account of this.

4 On the emergence of the use of the pronoun moi (‘me’) as a noun (‘the self’), see Terence Cave, ‘Fragments of a Future Self: from Pascal to Montaigne’, in Retrospectives: Essays in Literature, Poetics, and Cultural History, ed. Neil Kenny and Wes Williams (Oxford: Legenda, Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2009), pp. 130–45.

5 See Mitton, ‘Pensées sur l’honnêteté’, in Moralistes du XVIIe siècle de Pibrac à Dufresny, ed. Jean Lafond (Paris: Bouquins, Laffont, 1992), pp. 85–90; Jean Mesnard, Les ‘Pensées’ de Pascal, 2nd edn (Paris: SEDES, 1993), pp. 105–37, and on the concept of honnêteté in general, Emmanuel Bury, Littérature et politesse: L’Invention de l’honnête homme 1580–1750 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), and Moriarty, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

6 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Millar with a foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §§ 178–96, pp. 111–19. Compare Pascal’s observation about the precedence of honour over life (L 806/S 653/LG 662).

7 It is hardly necessary to point to the gendered framework of this conception of subjectivity. One could in any case develop a very different conception if one began with, say, the experience of desire for another person or that of caring for a child.

8 A character in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time remarks that ‘self-love is so often unrequited’.

9 There is an analogy here with the workings of the social order, insofar as it generates, by appealing to imagination, the consent of the dominated to the rule of the dominant.

10 For a wide-ranging treatment of the ‘destruction of egology’, see Vincent Carraud, Pascal et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), pp. 287–345; and also Jean-Luc Marion, Sur le prisme métaphysique de Descartes; constitution et limites de l’onto-théologie dans la pensée cartésienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), pp. 343–55.

11 It is a commonplace to make the connection with the passage in Descartes’s Second Meditation when the Meditator examines the nature of his own perceptions of the passers-by. For references see the note in EMFT, p. 145, n. 84.

12 This, of course, is not always the case: sometimes when our eyes casually rove over a group of people, we become aware of one or some of them as subjects of a certain experience (as looking anxious or vexed, for instance); this can then be a subject of embarrassment, as if our observing them were indecent.

13 But the assumption that, in an age when smallpox was a common affliction, most men would feel like this is not perhaps unfounded. When Esther Summerson catches

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