The Hidden God

A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine

By Lucien Goldmann

1955

First Published

4.08

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13H55M

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The concept of world visions, first elaborated in the early work of Georg Lukacs, is used here as a tool whereby the similarities between Pascal's "Pensees" and Kant's critical philosophy are contrasted with the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume. For Lucien Goldmann, a leading exponent of the most fruitful method of applying Marxist ideas to literary and philosophical problems, the tragic vision marked an important phase in the development of European thought from rationalism and empiricism to the dialectical philosophy of Hegel, Marx and Lukacs. The book is not a collection of isolated essays on Kant, Pascal, Racine, the status of the legal nobility in seventeenth-century France and the exact nature of the religious movement known as Jansenism, but an attempt to formulate, by an examination of these different topics, a general approach to the problems of philosophy, of literary criticism, and of the relationship between thought and action in human society.

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Author

Lucien Goldmann

Author · 8 books

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).