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Note that this follows immediately on the observation about feeding off the morality of previous ages. Continguity need not mean anything – but OTOH, it may.

The first thing that strikes me about this passage is that Pascal is disappointed that he is not a disembodied intellect, and Nietzsche insists on re-grounding man in experience. So this is an existentialist passage.

But I’m also interested in the technique: it’s so very Nietzschean, it seems to me: if irritated by an external, consume it whole, turn it inside out and make it the very substance of the self.

What Nietsche called “the theory of milieu” was to become very popular to Victorian materialists with their positivist bent and is the very essence of Behaviorism as a psychological doctrine. Mark Twain’s dialogue-essay “What Is Man?” makes thorough use of it.

i dont know much about this, but i would say that pascal is more concerned with his irrational response to the weather. theres no actual difference in your day if the sky is blue or gray, but you still act as though it dramatically changed for the worse if a little moisture floats a few thousand feet above.

the fact that we are influenced by experience seems pretty irrefutable.

Funnily enough, I had just finished reading for the third time Heidegger’s characterisation of the They.

Future Man

The fact that Pascal considers the suggestion of being influenced by the weather to be offensive, is itself indicative of something. The attitude implies an expectation.

It is tempting, for someone like me who has also not read Pascal, to read this in terms of the usual dialogue on Cartersian metaphysics.

Perhaps this only facilitates the kind of discussion which is forever running from its own supposed point.

Bill Paterson

Did Pascal capture the realisation that he is not such an intellect - in order to facilitate disappointment? Also, is it his attitude (disappointment, offense), or the system which spawns it (i.e. subject/object dualism), so to speak, which is of primary interest? Or is it the relation?

The essence of Behaviourism, I think, is in it’s use of the concepts of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, bequeathed in their sense by Descartes - which it marries to a kind of bastard existential realism. Have you read any Merleau-Ponty, by any chance?

Nietzsche was simply disappointed in the lack of ‘amor fati’ exhibited by Pascal’s offence…

-Imp