By HOMERO SANTIAGO*
Considerations on the book by Luís César Guimarães Oliva
“All of men's unhappiness comes from one thing: not knowing how to stay still in a room.”
(Blaise Pascal, Laf. 136/Br. 139)
This acute observation by Blaise Pascal, collected among the materials that tradition has conventionally called Thoughts, although made in the 17th century, was a rare, perhaps unique, case in the history of thought. The pandemic and the hardships of social isolation that we have experienced so recently have demonstrated, hundreds of years later, as if in an incredible planetary experiment, the truth of this aspect of the human condition detected by Blaise Pascal: people neither want nor are able to rest, they are naturally restless; we prefer the risk of a deadly disease to retreating and having to face ourselves.
Isolation blocks our incessant search for “entertainment,” that is, everything that has the power to distract us and make us forget about life, the world, and, above all, about ourselves, about who we are, and about our condition: from Blaise Pascal’s point of view, beings of the “in-between.” As long as we reflect a little on ourselves, each person recognizes that they touch on greatness (who has never done a good deed? Who has never dreamed of something better?) and at the same time perpetrate baseness (let he who has never done it cast the first stone). In each and every individual, there is something lofty and something lowly, and we find ourselves inevitably between these poles.
If it were just one thing or the other, everything would be resolved; but this is inconceivable because we are human. We are and live, with disturbing necessity, between the finite and the infinite, the low and the high, misery and greatness, treading the dust of the earth and simultaneously astonished by the sky – always able to follow one direction or the other, for our joy or for our sadness.
What are the reasons for this extravagant condition? In search of explanations, Pascal adopts the perspective of a demanding Christian and relies on a severe theology that identifies in our being a fundamental ambiguity resulting from the sin committed by the first man, Adam: the outrage inflicted by the finite creature on his infinite creator, an injustice therefore immeasurable whose effects have since indelibly marked our nature, producing a second one, and spreading throughout human history.
That is why we are condemned to the middle and, as soon as we realize this, to boredom. Neither in hell nor in heaven, we are left to live in this world taking all the risks at every moment, working for the uncertain, as if on a tightrope. This is what makes us restless, and it is to escape this condition, or at least to lighten the burden, that we are always looking for distractions and entertainment that serve as protection and palliative: engaging games, endless food and drink, an intense social life, and so on. Conversely, remaining quiet and without entertainment makes us sad, because it forces us to think about our condition, thus producing the unbearable exposure of the root of our unhappiness, namely, ourselves.
From a Pascalian point of view, as expressed in the note initially cited, this is why isolation – being locked up and having time to ourselves – is so terrifying. Roughly speaking, it has the effect of that anxiety, that irritation and that horror expressed by someone who “wastes” a minute or two at a traffic light, waiting to cross a street; always in a hurry to do nothing, unable to rest for a moment, as if the world were going to end because of it. This is the peculiar and paradoxical malaise discovered by Blaise Pascal: the restlessness caused by the imperative of stillness.
Now, what to do with what we are?
A rich exploration of this huge, intriguing Pascalian problem is what Luís César Guimarães Oliva proposes to us in his Nature and Grace in Blaise Pascal. For the reader interested in these problems, the work serves as an Ariadne's thread to traverse the scattered, incomplete and posthumous texts of Pascal, who (it is worth remembering) died very young and barely had time to organize the notes he kept to compose an apology for the Christian religion. The focus of the study falls on the two crucial concepts of the problem that we have just outlined: the endangered human nature, which since the fall of Adam has been a damnation for us, and the mystery of a grace that, although redemptive, only comes to us through divine intervention.
Readers who love Blaise Pascal can be sure to enjoy a lucid and rigorous portrait of the philosopher in Luís César Guimarães Oliva's book. Those who turn up their noses when they hear the name of the Jansenist should know that they will only lose out by turning a deaf ear to the real problems that he discovered and sought, in his own way, to confront; I would even say that reading the book in question is especially recommended for the latter.
Let's face it, it is not necessary to embrace the theology conveyed by Blaise Pascal to recognize the subtlety of his observations and his understanding of the human condition, invariably intermediate between disparate natures, sin and redemption. Between one thing and another, the dilemma of discovering, given the circumstances, how to deal with what we are and who knows, with a little luck, learning to stay quiet in a room, when that is strictly necessary, is insinuated.
* Homer Santiago He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at USP.
Reference
Louis Cesar Guimarães Oliva. Nature and Grace in Blaise Pascal. São Paulo, Paulus, 2023, 536 pages. [https://amzn.to/3ZCjAb5]
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