Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Blaise Pascal

3 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal — mathematician, physicist, and philosopher — captured the paradox of the human being in unforgettable images in his Pensées. In the book, his thought serves to deepen the question of personhood existentially: the human being is at once the most fragile and the greatest being in nature.

Key Contribution

Pascal coins the image of the “thinking reed” (roseau pensant): the human being is the weakest being in nature — a breath of wind, a drop of water suffices to kill him. And yet he is greater than the whole universe that crushes him, for he knows that he dies, and the universe knows nothing of it. The greatness of the human being lies not in his physical strength but in his thinking, his cognition, his spiritual dignity.

Central Ideas in the Book

Fragility and Greatness

Pascal’s paradox illuminates a central insight of the book: the dignity of the person cannot depend on empirically measurable capacities, for the human being is fragile in everything empirical. It is precisely his fragility — his capacity to suffer, to fail, to die — that reveals his greatness: only a someone, not a mere something, can be conscious of its own finitude.

Against Reductionism

Pascal resists every reduction of the human being to a single dimension: the human being is neither body alone nor spirit alone, neither only great nor only wretched. He is both at once, and this tension is an expression of his personal constitution of being. Whoever understands the human being from one side only — only biologically (like functionalism) or only spiritually (like Descartes) — misses him.

Thinking and Personhood

Pascal’s emphasis on thinking differs fundamentally from Locke’s position: for Pascal, thinking does not first make the human being a person — it reveals his greatness, which already belongs to him. Thinking is person-behavior, not the condition of personhood. Even the human being who cannot — or can no longer — think remains the thinking reed, by his nature.

Place in the Book

Pascal is drawn upon in the Chapter 1: Introduction (German) and in the chapter Chapter 4: What Is Human Personhood? (German) to clarify the existential dimension of the question of personhood. His thought complements the systematic analysis with the power of image and paradox.

Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 29–35 (Pascal’s paradox of the fragility and greatness of the human being as an existential deepening of the question of the person).

Further sources:

  • Pensées (1670), trans. A. J. Krailsheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1966 (the thinking reed; the paradox of the fragility and greatness of the human being)

See also

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