Thoughts and Prayers
When famous mathematician Blaise Pascal died, he was in the process of writing a book of philosophy / apologetics. It remains unfinished, but his notes were collected and published under the title Pensées, which in French means ‘Thoughts’. In keeping with the title, it’s really just a collection of Pascal’s musings of various lengths. It’s as if Blaise Pascal had a blog where he talked about lay theology.
When I read Pensées last year, it pushed me fully out of Rationalism (as in Eliezer Yudkowsky, not as in Descartes) and into Postrationalism. I’ve wanted to write a kind of Postrationalist manifesto for a while, but I’ve struggled to organize my thoughts into full-length essays. Maybe it would be best to take after Pascal and just write down my thoughts.
Here’s my second-favourite passage from Pensées:
“Unity joined to infinity adds nothing to it, no more than one foot to an infinite measure. The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice. There is not so great a disproportion between our justice and that of God, as between unity and infinity.” (Pensées 233)
