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초록
This article tries to accounts for the way in which two Weimar intellectuals, Lev Shestov and Carl Schmitt, have appropriated the political and religious thoughts of Blaise Pascal who had lived in the Baroque culture. Shestov’s reading of Pascal amounts to the gist of the philosophical struggle he took up against phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. The challenge that as a deeply pious man Pascal had mounted to the geometric certainty proclaimed by René Descartes as beyond doubt is varied by Shestov who found in the Husserlian notion of epoché an intensified and renewed version of the Cartesian methodic doubt. By attempting to disqualify Husserl’s philosophical project on the basis of Pascal’s paradoxical faith, Shestov seems to have surreptitiously aimed at surpassing the Baroque thinker he revered. Schmitt, on the other hand, takes note of Pascal’s thought on the basis of his own political theology. As political theologians, indeed, Pascal and Schmitt have in common a strong antipathy towards civil war. Yet the latter rejects the former’s personal mysticism that Schmitt thinks is ignorant of, or indifferent to, the concrete reality of politics. In doing so, Schmitt follows in footstep of Thomas Hobbes who had argued that it is not a transcendent God but a worldly sovereign who can decide whether there happened a miracle or not. The fact that Schmitt has measured Pascal against Hobbes enables us to locate the origin and end of his political theology. Through Shestov’s and Schmitt’s readings of Pascal, one might well come to realize that the Baroque and the Weimar constitute a sort of parallel world.