Lucien Goldmann > Quotes

“The greatness of tragic man lies in the fact that he sees and recognises these opposites and inimical elements in the clear light of absolute truth, and yet never accepts that this shall be so. For if he were to accept them, he would destroy the paradox, he would give up his greatness and make do with his poverty and wretchedness (misère). Fortunately, however, man remains to the very end both paradoxical and contradictory, ‘man goes infinitely beyond man’, and he confronts the radical and irredeemable ambiguity of the world with his own equal and opposite demand for clarity.”
― Lucien Goldmann

“In the infinite space of rational science God falls silent, because in elaborating this concept man has been obliged to give up any genuinely ethical norm. The central problem which tragic thought and the tragic mind had to face, a problem which only dialectical thought can solve on both the moral and the scientific plane, was that of discovering whether there still was some means and some hope of reintegrating supra-individual values into this rational concept of space, which had now replaced for ever the Aristotelian and Thomist universe. The problem was whether man could still rediscover God; or, to express the same idea in a less ideological but identical form, whether man could rediscover the community and the universe.”
― Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu caché : Étude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de Pascal et dans le théâtre de Racine