Introducing Blaise Pascal: The First Anti-Modern?

Rene Descartes was kind of a dick.His famous saying, “I think, therefore I am,” is nothing less than a wholesale rejection of all authority—even objective truth—in favor of a defecated rationality and fierce subjectivism that belittles anything outside one’s own mind.The modern attitude created by Descartes does two things:1. It enshrines one’s own beliefs or preferences as the exclusive source of truth (fierce subjectivism).2. It elevates the logic that flows from that fierce subjectivism (defecated rationality) into a truth (my truth, your truth, his/her/its truth, etc.).If you draw a thick cocaine line from Descartes to today’s Trans Wars, you’d be drawing coke lines better than Hunter Thompson.Accused of being an atheist, Descartes claimed to be a “devout Catholic,”[i]but he left his Catholic France to live among the Calvinists and Jews in the Netherlands. He espouses odd (and bizarre) theories about the soul. He spent his final days as the court philosopher for the Lutheran Queen Christina of Sweden and died without Last Rites.One academic thinks that Descartes was such a poor Catholic that a priest thought his example would prevent Queen Christina from converting to Catholicism, so the priest poisoned the father of modernity by lacing a host with arsenic. The story doesn’t ring true—a priest who cares enough about Catholicism wouldn’t desecrate the host like that—but hey, the Queen converted after Descartes’ death so maybe.The Pope thought Descartes was kind of a dick. Urban VIII put Descartes’ writings on the Index of Forbidden Books about a dozen years after Descartes died.Pascal Surpassed DescartesBut 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 Blaise Pascal published a mathematical paper on conic sections when Descartes was 43, Descartes knew he’d been eclipsed when he was at the height of his intellectual power and reputation. At first, he refused to believe someone as young as Pascal could’ve written something so impressive, but when he learned that it was true, Descartes turned to belittling him. When Pascal invented the syringe and the hydraulic press, Descartes mocked him and said Pascal had “too much vacuum in his head.”Show notes here