ABSTRACT
The tragic mind can neither conceive nor recognise the existence of such an experience. However detached a man may be from the world, he still remains just as infinitely distant as ever from any authentic awareness, until the moment suddenly arrives when, without passing through any intermediary stage, his inauthentic consciousness enters the realm of essences. The concept of 'world vision' is an extremely useful one in any attempt to discover this meaning, and to study the work of Pascal and Racine. Racine and Pascal will consist of three stages, but these will not necessarily be presented in chronological order. In the first the text the expression of a world vision; in the second this world vision will be more closely analysed as constituting a whole made up of the intellectual and social life of the group; third the thoughts and feelings of the members of the group will be seen as an expression of their economic and social life.
