The Flower of the Infinite: Conceiving the Knowing and Social Subject after Blaise Pascal

“Thinking reed. It is not in space that I must look for my dignity, but from the organization of my thoughts. I shall have no advantage in owning estates. Through space the universe grasps and engulfs me like a pinpoint; through thought I can grasp it.”

Blaise Pascal

I. Thought in being

Blaise Pascal, in emphasizing the fruitfulness of the organization of our thoughts, points out one of the central paradoxes of the relation between the thinking subject and the world, which has curious implications not only for epistemology, but also for ethics, aesthetics and social ontology, which I will thematize in this essay. The subject, from its spatially determinate point of perception seems engulfed by the corporeal universe, and yet in its thought it seems to be able to veritably “engulf” the universe. One can interpret this merely dualistically, in that the body which some abstract subjectivity uses as a vehicle is one body among others in the universe; but there seems to be more to this insight. Phenomenologically, as humans, we are constantly encountering the apparent historicity of our subjectivity. We always encounter our self-consciousness as a dynamism of becoming in relationality to objects and other subjects in being as a whole. We have a sense that our very subjectivity came into being out of the world. Even when one tries to, as Plato did, think of a soul preexisting its body, one is always faced with the contingency and becoming of one’s thought. And one is in fact faced with this precisely in the striving (and therefore becoming) to grasp being as a whole and not despite it.

II. The being of thought

Simply put, thought itself is grounded in being. Friedrich Schelling sought to explain the possibility of this paradoxical relation: the question of how thought emerges in being, or of how nature produces thinking subjects. To this end, Schelling seeks to think nature not merely as a sum of objects of our sense-perception and understanding (as Kant did), but also as subject. Not in the sense of an empirical psychological ego, but rather as having being-in-itself which is active, productive and expresses the laws of thought in its own intelligible substantiality. This is to say that Schelling thinks of nature as a whole which relates to itself as the object of its own activity of production, or in other words, as subject and object which are one. This unity of subject and object in nature develops processually, in that nature actively recapitulates its productivity in new natural products in various stages, until it finally produces spirit, that is, humanity qua incarnate thinking subjects. In humanity nature is not only a being in-itself but also a being for-itself. And the subjectivity of humans is already latent in nature, which enables both the historicity of subjects and the grasping of nature by finite subjects due to nature’s inherent intelligibility.

To further detail this process, a triad of principles which Schelling calls “potencies” can be developed: the ideal, the real and the identity of the ideal and the real. The emergence of human subjectivity can be understood as the actualization of ever-greater ideality in nature without the loss of reality, such that a higher unity of the ideal and the real is realized. The ultimate structure of both being as a whole and human subjectivity is then a constellation of the three potencies of which human subjectivity is also the onset of the third. As moments in the structure of human subjectivity, the potencies correspond to:

1. the private, pre-reflexive internality of the subject, the subject qua subject, which is its determinability, the possibilities of one’s self-expression, 2. the intelligible predicate, which is its determination, the actual self-expression at once for oneself and for another, 3. the unity of these two which enables the former to be truly revealed in the latter without reducing either one to the other.

As the unity of both determinability (being-able) and determination (purely-being), the third moment is our freedom or self-determination; as that which enables us to relate to ourselves as we are, i.e., as ourselves, it is our self-consciousness. In this sense, both our subjectivity and the Being of being as a whole is always an interplay of the both the hidden and the manifest, an activity of self-communication.

However, if our freedom (including our moral freedom), our ability to know truth and our self-expression (including our self-expression in art) are enabled by one and the same structure, how then should we understand the need for the organization of our thoughts which Pascal calls for? Can we still affirm a Kantian segregation of the spheres of ethics, epistemology and aesthetics, treating them as spheres which are only held together by a bare proportional analogy? Of course, that would not be possible. What this amounts to, is that the horizon of our ethical strivings in moral freedom – the Good; the horizon of our epistemic strivings in knowledge and self-knowledge – the True; and the horizon of our aesthetic strivings in self-expression – the Beautiful are all simply convertible aspects of the act of Being itself or transcendentals, as St. Thomas Aquinas called them. And the more intensely we truly strive towards one, the more intensely we truly strive towards the others.

III. Sociality and the self-realization of thought

Furthermore, Pascal curiously opposes one’s epistemic self-realization to one’s achievements in material possession. Saying that one cannot find his dignity in space, but rather in the organization of one’s own thoughts, and even explicitly that one shall have no advantage in owning estates. This should by no means return us to a dualistic way of thinking. St. Basil’s social ontology, which likewise emphasizes the relationality of subjects understood as hypostases, can help us understand the truth of this claim by Pascal. When the potencies are applied to the Absolute, they must be considered unconditionally, and thus all three potencies must be contained in one another, such that the whole structure of subjectivity is contained in all its three moments. The trinitarian theology of the Cappadocian fathers (including St. Basil) seems to anticipate this by insisting that all three Hypostases in the Trinity are co-eternal and co-equal, that they are neither parts of God or the Absolute nor modes, but that each Hypostasis possesses the fullness of the one act of Divine Being, Being which is the very relationality of the Hypostases. And therefore the Father is the whole God, the Son is the whole God and the Holy Spirit is the whole God. As finite beings, our being and the being of whatever material goods we may possess are distributed among us rather than possessed by all of us unconditionally. But if our being is also our self-communication and relationality with other subjects and with the Absolute, and the Absolute is to be understood as our final cause, then the horizon of all of our strivings: ethical, epistemic and aesthetic alike must be this state of unconditional co-possession prefigured in the Trinity.

According to St. Basil this can only be approximated in our current state, but it ought to be approximated. He holds that food, clothes, estates etc. which are superfluously possessed by the wealthy properly belong to the poor, and that their possession of these material goods renders them thieves, thereby compromising their ethical self-realization. And consequently, for us that is also their epistemic self-realization. In this sense, they shall have no advantage in owning estates, as Pascal says. St. Basil instead proposes that, both for the ethical self-realization of all subjects and for the satiation of bodily and psychological needs, all people in our communities ought to take what they need and give what they can and even cultivate an aesthetic pleasure in this ethical good. This is not to say that all people renounce what is good, true and beautiful in art or the communication of knowledge through reading and writing or spending time with friends. For St. Basil, these are not luxuries, they in fact they further our ethical self-realization. What luxury constitutes is possession of material goods in a manner which objectifies other subjects, whether directly (through an institution like slavery) or indirectly (through superfluous wealth) by not acknowledging their freedom, needs and strivings. This objectification of the other is also harmful to us, because it contradicts our being as self-communication, self-giving, relationality.

Conclusion

Philosophy, then, is the realization that we are all co-heirs apparent of the whole world in thought. We as subjects are grounded in being as a whole but all have the potential to begin to grasp it and grasp ever new things about it in organizing our thoughts. In striving to grasp the world while remaining “grasped” by the world, in appreciating beauty and creating beautiful works, in loving the other, loving their love for us and acting on that love, we realize the True, the Beautiful and the Good precisely as convertible aspects of the act of Being. Such that knowledge, aesthetic pleasure, art and morality are aspects of our ontological self-realization. Whereby, doing these things, we look for our true dignity, drawing our being ever nearer to Divine Being, to an eschatological state where we too shall become unconditioned, knowing together as we are known and grasping together as we are grasped.