Disproportion
disproportio (latin)
At Pascal’s, there is no common measure between man and the reality that envelops him. Situated *"between two abysses"*—the infinitely great and the infinitely small—man is but *"a middle ground between nothing and everything"*: his reason, shaped for middling magnitudes, grasps neither the principles nor the end of things. The disproportion, then, is not merely man’s smallness in space, but the lack of proportion between his faculties and what they claim to encompass. Hence Pascal’s dread: the discovery does not merely shrink man, it strips him of all footing and all claim to be the measure of things.
Un néant à l’égard de l’infini, un tout à l’égard du néant, un milieu entre rien et tout.
The word first denotes a missing relation. Proportion, from the Latin pro portione, “according to the share”: two magnitudes are in proportion when one can be measured by the other. Dis-proportion thus names not so much a difference in size as a rupture in common measure—there exists no unit that bridges human faculties and the extremes that border them. Between the finite and the two infinities, Pascal writes, “nothing can fix” a relation.
It is not smallness that wounds, but the absence of scale. Man could be tiny and yet in his place, like a note in a chord. Pascal strips him of the chord: “a middle between nothing and everything,” suspended between what he cannot reduce to nothingness and what he cannot expand to infinity. His reason, made for the middle ground, fails at both ends; his claim to know the principles and the end of things proves “as infinite as their object,” and thus futile.
Disproportion must be distinguished from its neighbors. It is not diversion, which veils the condition to avoid seeing it: disproportion is precisely what diversion conceals. Nor is it the serene smallness of the sage—the Taoist self-so, where man, one of the “four great things,” finds his rank by imitating what is greater than himself. Where the sage settles, Pascal recoils: the same absence of measure opens in one a repose, in the other an abyss.