Le Dieu caché : Étude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de Pascal et dans le théâtre de Racine

by Lucien Goldmann

L'idée centrale de l'ouvrage est que les faits humains constituent toujours des structures significatives globales, à caractère à la fois pratique, théorique et affectif, et que ces structures ne peuvent être étudiées de manière positive, c'est-à-dire à la fois expliquées et comprises, que dans une perspective pratique fondée sur l'acceptation d'un certain ensemble de valeurs.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Religion, Christianity

462 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Lucien Goldmann was a French philosopher and sociologist of Jewish-Romanian origin. A professor at the EHESS in Paris, he was a Marxist theorist.

Goldmann was born in Bucharest, Romania, but grew up in Botoşani.

He studied law at the University of Bucharest and the University of Vienna under the Austromarxist jurist Max Adler.[1] In 1934, he went to the University of Paris to study political economy, literature, and philosophy.[1] He moved to Switzerland in November 1942, where he was placed in a refugee camp until 1943.[1] Through Jean Piaget's intervention, he was subsequently given a scholarship to the University of Zurich,[1] where he completed his PhD in philosophy in 1945 with a thesis entitled Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants (Man, Community and world in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant).

Reviews

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just having finished this book, it strikes me that this is a particularly odd way to learn about God; that is, through a Pascalian interpretation of Racine's plays. Was Goldman a Jew who, like Pascal, only saw the greatness of tragedy via the mythos of Christianity ? Would he agree with Pascal that we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ and, would he extend this to the concluding proposition, which Spinoza suggested in his philosophy, that if this is true then it is also true that we are all akin to God in the true state of our Being ?

However, I have some criticisms: Goldmann appears not to be able to decide whether his book is a work of philosophy that provides insights into psychology or a work that prescribes specific political action; he tries to do both but, in fact, I think he succeeds at doing neither. I regret having to make this statement, as I typically have a great deal of sympathy with this type of interdisciplinary, or meta-philosophical, approach. I can only assume that Goldmann's reason for writing this religious-bearing text from the perspective of an atheist is to make room for faith in God, an attribute he imputes to Pascal's writings and, it appears, to the texts of Marx, Hegel and Lukacs as well.

At one point the authors explicitly says that the disappearance of the state coincides with the appearance of God, and it appears that he does so in order to re-affirm Marx's plea for men to join the struggle of the working-class in a movement of history that will, eventually, bring about a Socialist world-order. This project is essentially a structuralist project in that Goldmann analyzes the works of Pascal and Racine as languages, and this allows him to make judgments about their works which the authors did not necessarily intend or develop explicitly in their texts, which is essentially a post-structural element in his structuralist approach.

What becomes clear to me through Goldmann's writing is that the desire to eliminate God from the world is actually the desire to overthrow the king through a fantasy-consciousness originally created in childhood, to free the self from the political bonds which restrict psychological and sexual freedom. The artist is the figure who encourages the loosening of these bonds, the enlightened one who calls on us to return to the womb of freedom where the template of existence was one of multifarious possibilities and, as he indicates, the artist's goal is to establish a literary consciousness that, as in the eschatological dramas of Racine, will develop promiscuously until the coming of the Messiah. Three stars.

[Lutz Barz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. And I'm not into theatre. But the era was and it told. How rulers reacted, the public theatre goers and the Zeitgeist of the era. A laudable contribution to the understanding of culture.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

However unsure I am of Goldmann's 'tragic vision' as a historical category:

The fact remains that the tragedy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and, for the rest of this book, the words 'tragedy' and 'tragic', except when otherwise stated, will indicate the tragedy of refusal characteristic of these two centuries—does, like other forms of tragic creation and awareness, express a crisis in human relationship between certain groups of men and the cosmic and social world.

I have already said that the central problem of this tragedy is that of discovering whether a man can still live when the eye of God has lighted upon him. This is a real problem, since to live means necessarily to live in this world—a fundamental and universal truth of which phenomenology and existentialism have merely made us more conscious.

I do nevertheless find his 'world vision' methodology fairly helpful:

For me, literature, art, philosophy and, to a great extent, the practice of a religion are essentially languages, means whereby man communicates with other beings, and who may be either his contemporaries, his future readers, God, or purely imaginary readers. However, these languages constitute only a small and limited group chosen from among the many other forms of communication and expression open to man. One of the first questions that we must therefore ask is this: what is the characteristic peculiar to such languages? Although this is obviously to be found first and foremost in their actual form, it must be added that one cannot express just anything at all in the language of art, literature or philosophy.

These 'languages' are reserved for the expression and communication of certain particular contents. My initial hypothesis, which can be justified only by examples of concrete analysis, is that these contents are in fact world visions.

I am however very taken with his dialectical study of Pascal:

The second method goes from the abstract to the concrete, and this means from the parts to the whole and from the whole back to the parts again. For abstract knowledge of particular facts is made concrete by the study of their relationship with the whole, and the abstract knowledge of relative wholes is made concrete by the study of their internal structure, of the functions of the different parts and of their relationship with one another.

And Pascal cast as a characteristically pre-dialectical thinker:

Secondly, that the essence of man lies in the very fact that he can neither choose one of these antagonistic elements nor accept tension and antagonism. His very nature impels him to strive after a synthesis—pure goodness, absolute truth, real justice, immortality of the body as well as of the mind on all and every plane. But this ideal synthesis can never be achieved on earth, and can come only from a transcendent being, from God.

Under a different, reified form, these are the fundamental concepts of any dialectical thought: the antagonistic quality of all human reality, and the aspiration to synthesis and totality are what characterise other thinkers who came centuries after Pascal. All that needs to be added is that this antagonism is much more intense in tragic than in dialectical thought, since while in Hegel and Marx the very possibility of a future throws its light back on to the conflict between thesis and antithesis, the situation with which Pascal is confronted is entirely different. The complete absence of any possibility of a historical perspective renders the antagonism correspondingly more acute.

That absolutely made this book for me.