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Chapter 4 - Pascal on the Ordering of Human Time
Christopher Goodey, The Open University, Milton Keynes
Book:

Development

Published online:

10 June 2021

Print publication:

10 June 2021, pp 85-104
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Summary

Blaise Pascal’s Pensées hint at a temporal description of soul and mind, and were deeply influential upon subsequent pioneers of the developmental idea. On the one hand, using spatial analogies drawn from geometry, Pascal considered the most important aspect of the individual’s interiority to be ‘Order’. On the other, Order was a temporal phenomenon because it had to manage the movements of interiority over time, which otherwise had a ‘lunatic’ unpredictability. The political theory of absolutism, which Pascal approved, arose in order to control this. Pascal believed it was possible even for the predestined elect to lapse or degenerate, and initiated the focus on time as a ‘counterweight’, a way of pushing back against this. His account of the power of the individual will in relation to God’s operation of that will marks the start of a resemblance to the account of ‘nature versus nurture’ in modern psychobiology.