Polar Opposites on a Cartesian Circle
Blaise Pascal1 felt that “Man is obviously made for thinking.
Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty
is to think as he ought.” A contemporary of René Descartes,2
Pascal is however best remembered for resisting rationalism,
which he thought could not determine major truths: “The
heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” Blaise
Pascal and René Descartes are reference points for two major
attitudes to conscious representation of the world: although
both saw reason as the primary source of knowledge, they
disagreed profoundly over the competence of Man—the
truth, as always, lies between faith and radical doubt.