Introduction

This chapter identifies the difficulties in reading Pascal’s Pensées due to its fragmentary state. It shows the relation between this fragmentation and the substantive metaphysical problem of order treated by Pascal in the text. For Pascal, the ultimate principle of order, both metaphysical and textual, is found in the distinction—Infini rien—between the transcendent God and all else, which, without God, would be nothing. Pascal’s approach to the disclosure of this distinction moves from the latter term to the former, from the human being and nature generally to God. This book reverses Pascal’s approach: from God, to the nature of nature, and then to the nature of the human being. This reversal may be understood as a “recapitulation” of Pascal’s thought, intended to allow it to appear afresh in new circumstances, an understanding Pascal himself seems to endorse. The body of the book is outlined and the stakes of Pascal’s account are sketched: either a true cosmos, grounded in a transcendent God, in which the universal and the particular are harmoniously integrated, or else a tragically heterogeneous world of bad fragments.