Ok, so I literally just woke up from a nap, and I'm still groggy so cut me a little slack please.
Pascal's writing is at least fairly easy to understand. When reading this, my thoughts drifted towards Aristotle's Golden Mean. In the second paragraph of page 438, Pascal uses a lot of examples concerning extremes, examples such as: "Too much sound deafens us, and too much light dazzles us," and "extreme youth and extreme age hinder the mind." In my opinion, it has some pretty close similarities. Aristotle's Golden Mean is also about extremes, or rather, about finding the middle ground between them: too much confidence and you're arrogant, too little and you're a coward. If you can find the sweet-spot in the middle, a balance between the two extremes, you're golden (that's a joke you see). I think Pascal's getting at the fact that we live somewhere in that middle ground, with the extremes being imperceptible to us. He even goes so far as to say that the extremes escape us, or that we escape them. Because of this, we are somewhat limited in our knowledge, especially when it comes to religion and theology in general.
Edit: Commented on Rachael Gregson's and Mackenzie Jackson's posts
Pascal's writing is at least fairly easy to understand. When reading this, my thoughts drifted towards Aristotle's Golden Mean. In the second paragraph of page 438, Pascal uses a lot of examples concerning extremes, examples such as: "Too much sound deafens us, and too much light dazzles us," and "extreme youth and extreme age hinder the mind." In my opinion, it has some pretty close similarities. Aristotle's Golden Mean is also about extremes, or rather, about finding the middle ground between them: too much confidence and you're arrogant, too little and you're a coward. If you can find the sweet-spot in the middle, a balance between the two extremes, you're golden (that's a joke you see). I think Pascal's getting at the fact that we live somewhere in that middle ground, with the extremes being imperceptible to us. He even goes so far as to say that the extremes escape us, or that we escape them. Because of this, we are somewhat limited in our knowledge, especially when it comes to religion and theology in general.
Edit: Commented on Rachael Gregson's and Mackenzie Jackson's posts
Comments