Blaise Pascal

A Biography on Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was born in France in the region of Auvergne in the town of Clermont-Ferrand in 1623. He came from a Catholic family, not surprising since France was known in the Middle Ages as the Eldest Daughter of the Church (Coulumbe, 2012). Religion, like science and math, was very important to Pascal and his family. Indeed, his father had expressed many of the same interests that motivated Blaise—so the apple did not fall far from the tree with respect to the scholarly direction that Blaise’s life took as he grew up. However, his health was never very robust, and Blaise Pascal only lived to be 39. Nonetheless, by the time of his death, he had made important contributions in all three areas of interest—religion, science and math. His most famous works include Pensees and Provincial Letters. Pensees was a philosophical-theological work that examined the disputes between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, a Catholic sect that had emerged in France during the Protestant Reformation and that Pascal identified with to some extent.
Pascal’s mother died when he was very young and his father moved the family to Paris shortly thereafter (Devlin, 2008). Pascal’s father took up the responsibility of educating his children, which is most likely the reason Blaise took after his father’s love of math and science. By the age of 16, Blaise Pascal was already writing proofs—his first being an “Essay on Conics” in line with an argument made by another French thinker Desargues. The essay became known as Pascal’s theorem, and the crux of it is that if a hexagon is inscribed in a conic, the three points of intersection on opposite sides will occur on a line which is known today as the Pascal line. It was a remarkable work by a young 16 year old and bode well for the young French scholar (Devlin, 2008). In fact, the work was full of so much erudition that the philosopher Descartes was certain that it had been the work of Blaise’s father.
While the head of the household had seemingly made a wise decision by investing in government bonds, the decision ultimately proved unwise when Richelieu defaulted on the bonds in order to scrape together enough money for France to fight in the Thirty Years’ War. Blaise’s father had to leave France—not only because they now had no money but also because Blaise’s father was vocally critical of Richelieu. Eventually, the father won back a position with the government and became a prominent official in Rouen. Pascal tried to help his father in his work as tax commissioner in Rouen and at the age of 19 he developed a mechanical calculating device that could assist in performing addition and subtraction, which today is called the Pascaline or Pascal’s calculator.
Not content to while away his time as an inventor, Pascal went on to apply himself to the study of mathematics and created what is today known as Pascal’s triangle, a tabular representation of binomial coefficients. He became interested in experiments in barometric pressure and wrote “New Experiments with the Vacuum” in order to refute the concept that “nature abhors a vacuum”—as Pascal demonstrated, vacuums could and did exist and the example of this was the fact that different liquids could be held up by air pressure alone.
Pascal also took a great interest in religious, philosophical and theological discussions, as was customary of many men at the time. He was introduced to Jansenism by way of his father’s friends. Jansenists were a strict sect within Catholicism and took up the subject with earnest in his writings though he also pursued other lines of inquiry as well. In 1656, however, Pascal began writing his Provincial Letters, which mainly attacked the idea of casuistry, i.e., the notion that rules could be extended in moral philosophy and applied to a variety of instances. Pascal had previously objected to the idea of first principles to some extent in his earlier mathematical writings arguing that proofs could only to a certain point be accepted or assumed because every proof relied upon a previous assumption and that assumption upon a prior one until one was all the way back at the first cause, which could never be verified empirically (Devlin, 2008). So Pascal was simply applying this same idea to his theological speculations at this time. The king was not pleased by Pascal’s Letters and ordered the book burned. Nonetheless, the Letters were popular among the French populace because of the literary skill involved in their composition: they were funny, biting, thoughtful and readable.
Pascal’s major work in theology was Pensees or Thoughts, which was published after his death. It was meant to be a defense of Christianity. While the Jansenist sect began to be purged and condemned throughout France, Pascal voiced his support for the sect, especially as his sister was a member of the cult—but when his sister died so too did Blaise’s public vociferations on the matter. His own health did not last much longer and was already in decline, particularly because of his ascetic lifestyle and his refusal to allows doctors to treat him. In 1662 while in Paris he died, but not before receiving the sacrament of extreme unction aka the sacrament of the sick or dying that the Church had always reserved for those of its members in poor health. Pascal prayed before dying that God might not abandon him, and these were said to be his last words (Muir, 1996).
Pascal is especially remembered today for the theory of probability which is especially used in the field of economics as well as in other sciences where risk management is a top concern. Pascal helped to get the theory rolling but others like Huygens did more extensive work on pushing the theory forward (Devlin, 2008). Pascal’s body, after an autopsy was performed, showed that he had been dealing with serious stomach issues and that his brain had even been impacted by his poor health, as he had terrible headaches later in life. It is likely that he suffered from cancer of the stomach or from tuberculosis (Muir, 1996).
What I remember Pascal mostly for are his literary works, his Thoughts and his Provincial Letters which are still read today by philosophy and theology students and even by literature students who appreciate the wit, rhetoric and style of Pascal the writer. Pascal opposed Descartes on the matter of rationalism but Pascal also opposed the idea stemming from the United Kingdom at the time that empiricism was the only mode of inquiry that could be trusted. Pascal was comfortable with neither and did not view either approach as wholly supportable and as enough to be reliable in and of themselves. At root, Pascal was a religionist and his view of reality depended more or less on faith, which he tried to explain in his Pensees.
Pascal’s mathematical contributions were significant but they were not earth-shattering and his main expression or voice could be found in his approach to the popular ideas of philosophy and religion which greatly influenced society at the time. French society in the 17th century was a place where Enlightenment philosophy was in vogue and so, in order to be read, one had to explore the ideas that were popular—and that is precisely what Pascal did. A precocious learner from his earliest age under his father’s tutelage, Pascal went on to be a fervent thinker, an experimenter, an inventor, but most of all a beloved writer.
References
Coulumbe, C. (2012). Oldest daughter of the church. Retrieved from
http://catholicism.org/oldest-daughter-of-the-church.html
Devlin, K. (2008). The unfinished game: Pascal, Fermat and the seventeenth-century
letter that made the modern world. NY: Basic Books.
Muir, J. (1996). Of men and numbers. NY: Dover.