Vauvenargues ou le séditieux. Entre Pascal et Spinoza, une philosophie pour la seconde nature, and: Créature sans créateur. Pour une anthropologie baroque dans les Pensées de Pascal (review)

Vauvenargues is one of those authors we think we know without having read. Sidelined among the minor moralists, the texts he published are rarely considered rigorous and powerful. Hence we are endebted to Laurent Bove for having taken this thought seriously, and for having systematically brought into relief its most striking intellectual aspects. Vauvenargues himself asked his readers to “read slowly” (“lire doucement”)—a reading ethic that has finally been followed to the letter. Pascal also sought the right rhythm of reading, but not without a certain anxiety over an exaggerated slowness: “when one reads too fast or too slowly, one understands nothing.” In a brief and dense work, Bjornstad Hall finds a rhythm in closely analyzing the immanent condition of the human being before the stakes of Christianity attempt to propel it onto the mysterious pathways of grace, thus resisting jumping too quickly into Pascal the apologist in order to keep him closer to his attentive description of man in his day-to-day actions. The “anthropology” contained in Les Pensées has long been a subject of study, but Bjornstad proposes to remain within the descriptive logic of man’s condition as creature/created—his condition before being carried away with thoughts about the Creator. Thus these two studies share the same exploration of the human condition (what Christian theology calls “second nature”) at the beginning of modernity, but also, from a methodological point of view, they share the same scrupulous concern with the text and the same conceptual richness that allows them to combine, with exemplary rigor, philology and philosophy.

Laurent Bove’s remarkable work situates Vavenargues’s oeuvre in his regrettably brief life, in the problems posed by the publication of his texts, and in the history of philosophy. But what Bove shows us so eloquently in Vauvenargues is not only the heritage of radical Enlightenment thinking and free thought, but above all a well-organized reflection which, sometimes under a very unassuming guise, maintains positions as strong as those of a Pascal or a Spinoza.

In fact, by linking virtue and the power of action, body and desire, Vauvenargues aligns himself with Locke’s empiricism, and, even more so, with Spinoza’s philosophy. This enables him to reflect upon the social implications of imagination and self-love, as well as those of ambition and the thirst for glory. Thus Vauvenargues affirms an original political philosophy--taking up, responding to and sometimes challenging those of Boulainvilliers and Pascal. The fundamental anthropological notions in Les Pensées--force, custom and imagination--serve in Vauvenargues to elaborate the forms of communal living, based on assumptions of the immanence of second nature. Likewise, he takes up from Boulainvilliers and Pascal the relationships of force--even of war--that originate in the social and obviate the need to propose any illusory “social contract.” However, Vauvenargues does not succumb to the charms of special interest, and attempts, rather, to stress the infinite productivity of men living in society, linked to an ontological opening onto the time of action. Thus force and interest can be the effective principles of politics (in the style of Machiavelli), but are also the source of aspirations toward liberty and virtue. Hence it is less a matter of oppression by a transcendent principle that would subsume all differences, than it is a matter of an immanent affirmation of a liberating unity, appropriate for the productivity of the real as it exists.

The power of Vauvenargues’s thought lies in the fact that it does not underrate sentiment. Far from dismissing feelings as illusory, he affirms that they are part of the economy of politics and the production of knowledge. For...