Re: Western rationality

[joanna bujes]

"Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point"

I think Pascal's assertion has more to do with the limitations of reason than with the  powers or nature of the more ambiguous "coeur." In other words, it's difficult to say whether by "heart" Pascal means heart/feeling or heart/love.

I see "raisons" used metaphorically with respect to the heart -- which is to say that reason is incapable of comprehending these reasons; therefore it can neither admit them or not admit them; they are outside of its domain.

Reason/thought operates in the realm of the past, thought never being able to reach out of the realm of memory, since it _is_ memory in combination with some operational rules: the equal, the more, the less. It is, as ravi argues, basically nothing more than a calculating state machine. Thus reason literally, by definition, cannot "know" (connaitre = to know) the reasons of the heart. Thought can only know the new in terms of the old and therefore can never know the new. The new (which love does comprehend) can only come into being, can only be apprehended when thought stops. What is then comprehended cannot be rendered either through reason or through language. Wittgenstein too admitted to this limitation.

"If you observe, what makes us stale in our relationships is thinking, thinking, thinking, calculating, judging, weighing, adjusting ourselves; and the one thing which frees us from that is love, which is not a process of thought. You cannot think about love. You can think about the person whom you love, but you cannot think about love... We do not know what love is: we know pleasure; we know the lust, the pleasure that is derived from that and the fleeting happiness which is shrouded off with thought, with sorrow. We do not know what "to love" means. Love is not a memory; love is not a word; love is not the continuity of a thing that has give you pleasure... We know only the love of the brain; thought has produced it, and a product of thought is still thought, it is not love."

Whether Pascal was awake to all this I cannot say; his silly wager and calculating way of getting to God would argue against his being awake to anything much.

Joanna