Pascal und die Krise der neuzeitlichen Metaphysik

This study marking the 400th birthday of the writer and scholar Blaise Pascal attempts to understand his often-described modernity against the backdrop of a crisis in modern metaphysics that to this day shadows science and whose most succinct expression is probably found in talk about the »loss of God«. This asserts itself by rendering the paradox – Pascal speaks of the unity of two opposing truths – as the key to interpreting his Pensées. In this, Pascal, according to this essay's thesis, proves himself to be the first consistently post-metaphysical thinker. Instead of the self-conscious subjectivity of thought (egocogito), he takes nature, in which the »I« perceives itself as an earthly body-bound subject in the world, as the decisive instance that leads us to the common locus of the first principles of knowledge and faith. Pascal thus proves to be the antipode of the Cartesian understanding of science and offers us the opportunity of reconciling science with religion.