IGOR CÉSAR NOBRE MESSIAS

This work aims to investigate the radical otherness implicit in the conception of “God”, according to the perspective of the Blaise Pascal. In view of his Jansenist worldview, Pascal emphasizes the substantial human need to seek outside of himself what he lacks. According to the author, due to the horror that man has of his own reality, that is, of his nature split by sin, the movement made towards what is external to him is justified by the inherent lack that drives him to try to understand – in the other – what is the self. However, it is worth highlighting that, according to Pascal, from the fact that the self is unbearable for itself, it does not follow that it knows the cause of this fateful condition, which impels it to deviate from itself, either towards the fun or towards the appropriate option which is God, as the philosopher points out. For this reason, not the essence of God will be analyzed, but the inseparable need that the self has to establish interpersonal relationships, not only with its peers in a horizontal sense, but mainly in a vertical perspective, having in God the supreme reference of an otherness absolutely radical.