2nd Essay Assignment: Beautiful Minds

                               A Comparison between Ideas of Descartes and Pascal:

                                                                Beautiful Minds

Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal share similar starting point in their thought. Inspired by Montaigne, their skepticism and language are the important commonality which can be noticed easily. However, Descartes’ fight was against Scholastic philosophy whereas Pascal held strong arguments against the Jesuits. Descartes expressed his philosophy in a systematical way with a certain structure. On the other hand, nature of Pascal’s philosophy was never systematical or methodical.

In this essay, I will show Descartes’ and Pascal’s differences and points of contact. First off, I will focus on philosophers’ relation with skepticism to explore how skepticism differed in terms of its functions and motivations for each of the philosophers. Secondly, as they both put Reason at the core of their thought, I’ll go through thinkers’ engagement with reason to show what mainly separates them from each other. Thirdly, I will concentrate on thinkers’ attitude toward God’s existence and how and by what means they attempted to prove its existence. This aspect shows us how Doubt in these thinkers hints a major connection between them.

Descartes focused on skepticismbecause of epistemological reasons. He considered it as a useful tool to challenge beliefs since it permits doubt. He used doubt in order to destroy old philosophical structures and beliefs which are Aristotelian philosophy and Scholastic tradition. In Meditation One the Mediator thinks that all the things he knows come from his senses and they might lead him toward wrong conclusions. Therefore, he decides to undo his thinking and starts again from foundations to build his knowledge on more certain grounds. The Mediator also accepts that he might not be able to differentiate his present senses from dream images.  Thus, he concludes that he cannot doubt universal and simple things such as mathematics and geometry whereas composite things can always be doubted. Despite his skeptical attitude, doubt is not an end itself but a step for Descartes. On the other hand, Pascal is engaged with doubt in a very different way. To him, doubt is useful only when it helps man have the best possible orientation toward the religious experience. Because rational principals are vulnerable to the skeptical challenge, and therefore faith is the only real certainty. As it is seen clearly, there is a major difference the way thinkers relate with skepticism: Descartes uses skepticism as a ground for his thought and a way of endorsing reason, Pascal believes that skepticism proves the weakness of reason.

Regarding their attitudes toward reason, these thinkers place themselves at the opposite extremes. To Descartes, human’s existence does not require any place or material thing, because essence of a human being is simply to think. He methodically doubts everything and gives up his knowledge and beliefs. On the other hand, Pascal raises strong objections to Descartes’s speculative rationalism and cannot forgive that Descartes puts the reason at the very core of his thought with an isolation in hopes of reaching “its own self” and makes God irrelevant eventually. Pascal believed that it is not possible to answer every question through the use of reason, especially the ones which are outside the realm of reason. He suggested Descartes to enter from the heart to the mind, not from the mind into the heart. To him, totality created by God is essential to existence of humans, and one who follows reason exclusively cannot experience this fundamental totality.

            To Descartes, one can understand that God exists through her use of own reason. Since he proves existence of God by reasoning, his position on faith is ambiguous. In Meditation Three, he makes a deductive reasoning and proves that God is inherent. By Meditation Five the meditator’s empowered mind does not need any logical process because he finds the idea of God within himself just as surely as any shape or number. The idea of God can only come from a superior being since it belongs to nature of God. He states that his understanding belongs to nature of God is that God exists that is no less clear and distinct than is the case when he proves any number or shapes through mathematics and that God exists. Pascal believes that “it is the heart that senses God not reason”. And he defines faith as “the heart sensitive to God”.  This is where thinkers actually became separated on matters of reason and God as boundless. And, yet there are similarities between them. First thing which brings them together is axioms. To Pascal, axioms are anything perfectly self-evident and intuition helps us perceive them, which include “clear and distinct” perceptions of Descartes and mathematical axioms. Secondly, Pascal agrees with Descartes on the matter of Cogito: “I think, therefore I am”.

       In conclusion, each philosophers valued doubt in their own way. Descartes used doubt methodically to shatter old-order and initiate modern thought. Pascal protested against this by pointing out dangers of reason and put faith against doubt. Although they are just at opposite poles on very important matters, they, together, reflect the tension in modern man.