Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623 – August 19, 1662) was born in Clermont-Ferrand, France to a bourgeois family. He displayed signs of ill health from his infancy, and thereby was educated at home solely by his father Etienne, a tax collector and mathematician. This education was highly unusual considering the time and his social status, and centered almost entirely on mathematics and classical languages, with little formal study of literature or philosophy: his writings were thus primarily grounded in his own thoughts and experiences.
Pascal’s first writings focused on geometry and the scientific world. He composed the Essay on Conics and started work on a calculating machine to aid his father, after the family had relocated to Rouen. He also contributed to the modern theory of probability with Pascal’s triangle, an array of binomial coefficients that arise in probability as well as calculus, though Pascal’s works did not extend so far. He also studied Galileo and Torricelli’s theories on air pressure and contributed a foundational experiment with mercury towers: enlisting his brother-in-law as he could not place the barometric tubes there himself, he positioned one at the top of a mountain and the other at the foot, and noted the changes in height of the mercury. While his interpretation was mistaken (the air was not, in fact, heavier in certain places), his work paved the way for other air pressure theorists and the unit for pressure bears his name.
France was undergoing a period of political unrest and the Pascal household relocated frequently for both financial and political regions. La Fronde, a series of revolts led by the nobility between 1648 and 1653, marked the early stages of Pascal’s life and led to increasing severity of the monarchical rule and the enforcement of religious conformity. Pascal’s poor health left few possibilities for him outside of the familial home, and he remained dependent on his relations for the whole of his life. The highly introspective nature of many of his philosophical texts undoubtedly reflects the extent of his daily occupations and limited opportunities.
On November 23, 1654, Pascal experienced a “night of fire” and swiftly began an intense religious conversion from his family’s relaxed Catholicism to the rigor of the Jansenists, a religious order that accepted predestination and taught that divine grace was the key to salvation, rather than the good-faith efforts perched by the Jesuits. Pascal entered the jansenist stronghold of Port-Royal and wrote the Provincial Letters, a series of prose letters to an imaginary friend decrying the relaxed morality of the Jesuits, who were the crown’s favored order and the established leading spiritual guides. According to literary critic Nicholas Boileau, these letters mark the beginning of modern French prose and they achieved massive success.
The majority of Pascal’s works were never published during his life; after entering Port-Royal, he only published under his own name at the request of the convent’s leaders. His final unfinished work, the Pensées, was intended as an apology of Christian life. He explores many inquiries into the nature of man, a nature which he believes imperfect and wretched, which can only be healed with the grace of salvation. Several topics of interest include Man’s reason and his senses, his inability to determine an accurate sense of self, and the subsequent impossibility to know other people as one cannot even know himself. Such affirmations have been linked to later theories of existentialism, but it may be useful to consider Pascal’s infirmity and the wretchedness of his own existence in affirming such a desolate state of the world. Pascal was also a rare proponent of the importance of the senses and of sentiment in the art of reasoning, in comparison to the staunch rationalists of the time.
He passed away in Paris at the age of 39, leaving considerable contributions to the fields of mathematics, theology, physics and philosophy. The otter in Animal Crossing is named for him.