The themes of the chapters are varied, but all attempt to lay bare Pascal’s understanding of truth, each using a different approach. From the outset, Carraud emphasizes the importance of Descartes in the development of Pascal’s thought. He describes how from his Memorial onward, Pascal maintained “that the nature of truth conforms to the Cartesian concept of truth as certainty, and not correspondence, as Heidegger maintained in his Nietzsche.” This is a particularly important point, given that Pascal is a crucial node connecting the currents of modern thought, with Cartesianism as a major influence.
Carraud consistently strives to show how Pascal’s work is philosophical in nature, seeing his work as enriched by Descartes, and also by Montaigne. He analyzes the way in which Pascal engages with each of these thinkers, demonstrating that Pascal read Montaigne, but made a much closer study of Descartes. For Pascal, Descartes remained an almost untouchable exemplar, while he allowed himself to interpret Montaigne: “Pascal’s interpretation, even where we might disagree with it, still allows us to engage philosophically with Montaigne today.” Pascal used these thinkers as a basis on which to build his own thought, which he did with great tenacity. Carraud gives a deep, knowledgeable account of this process, as this dual influence sheds the greatest light on Pascal’s “philosophy.”
A good illustration of the author of the Pensées as philosopher is found in the chapter dedicated to Pascal’s attitude to ennui and its notorious counterpart, diversion. Carraud points out that these weighty concepts, typical of Pascal, are linked with death from the beginning, writing that “the connection between ennui and the representation of death also necessitates the examination of its suppression through diversion.” The “Mystery of Jesus” section of the Pensées gives a more intimate account of this issue, which was of great importance to Pascal. Jesus seems to speak to Pascal, Carraud argues, adding “this ennui intensifies, in Pascal’s thinking, coming to represent agony itself.”
Counterintuitively, Pascal dove deeper into religion not to emerge a mystic, or more straightforwardly, a theologian, but rather to take his philosophy further. His goal was to examine truth and certainty, even if, as Carraud reminds us, philosophy often confirms “the radical absence of connection between ourselves and God.” Pascal’s despair here prefigures that of Kierkegaard. Both, as philosophers oriented toward Christianity, tried to find a remedy for the “silence of these infinite spaces” (pensée 206), using a “revelation” that nonetheless appears highly problematic, or even sterile, to the modern understanding. Carraud’s work immerses us, via Pascal, into this moral question that remains, moreover, important for us today, although in a more exclusively ethical form, despite the immutable, constant background of the decline of metaphysics.