Book chapter
Ad memoriam: к вопросу о базовой фрагментарности паскалевских мыслей
The article is devoted to the phenomenon of incompleteness of the book "Thoughts" by B. Pascal
This article attempts to compare philosophy of Blaise Pascal and the works of Lewis Carroll. Pascalean critique of culture is contrasted with Carroll’s absurd and joyful human world. In Pascal’s “Pensées” as well as in Carroll’s fairytales the culture appears to be a number of nonsenses, pretentious and comic, based on pure arbitrariness. Habit and groundless fantasy rule this world. The culture needs unconditional value guidelines, eternal ideals, the Ideas to gain the reasonable sense but the eternal ideals are disproportionate to a finite human. And the human is torn between an absurd given and the inaccessible ideals, between nothing and the endlessness. In this regard Pascal and Carroll are remarkably similar and one could trace this similarity in details.
The New time philosophy, the philosophy of culture, tries to slay the Pascal’s arguments but in fact it rather avoids a direct fight with him. While in Carroll’s books Pascal is opposed not by the Idea of the culture but by the image of Alice, of a loving and trusting child who can make even the most absurd world the warm and home one. Fragile love of a little child is stronger, more significant than eternal nonsense of the enormous world – the Pascal’s arguments find an equal rival in this love.
Theatrical imagery reveals itself as a flexible means of presentation, that is, not the final point of the aesthetic process, but one of its means, a language to describe reality, which is more important than the imagery; in that sense, any discursive practice offering elements from the theatrical lexicon or theatrical method becomes productive. Our analysis shall use as its textual material the tradition of French anecdotes from the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, a time when the genre of the anecdote actually received this name and when its poetics were conceptualized.It may seem paradoxical to a modern reader that the psychological perspective claimed by the author leads to a reduction of a historical person to just one passion. This feature is highly reminiscent of the logic of creating characters for comedy, and it dates back to the character studies by a disciple of Aristotle, the philosopher Theophrastus, whose work became immensely popular in seventeenth-century France. Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher who lived in the fourth century BC and was the teacher of Menander, identified 30 types (the liar, the slanderer, the grumbler, the arrogant one, etc.); and thus the New (Attic) Comedy became in many aspects a result of the assimilation of peripatetic psychology. The reductionist strategy of the anecdote goes back to the same conceptual and formal methods.
The article deals with the architectonic of Blaise Pascal's "Pensees". "Pensees" is the text combined with fragments. Its plot may be found in poetics of "order". The thematical and compositional center is the genre of apology.
The training manual introduces the reader to the original texts of French literature. The training manual excerpts from the works of contemporary French authors of the 20th century.
The main objectives of the manual are to develop and improve reading skills, oral and written skills.
The manual is addressed to students of philological and linguistic specialties, students senior classes of gymnasiums, lyceums, schools as well as all those who study French and are interested in modern French literature.