Pascalian Meditations

Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Rafalko

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509534029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this major new work, Bourdieu pushes the critique of scholastic reason to a point which most questionings leave untouched.

1
Critique of Scholastic Reason

It is because we are implicated in the world that there is implicit content in what we think and say about it. In order to free our thinking of the implicit, it is not sufficient to perform the return of thought onto itself that is commonly associated with the idea of reflexivity; and only the illusion of the omnipotence of thought could lead one to believe that the most radical doubt is capable of suspending the presuppositions, linked to our various affiliations, memberships, implications, that we engage in our thoughts. The unconscious is history – the collective history that has produced our categories of thought, and the individual history through which they have been inculcated in us. It is, for example, from the social history of educational institutions (a supremely banal one, absent from the history of philosophical or other ideas), and from the (forgotten or repressed) history of our singular relationship to these institutions, that we can expect some real revelations about the objective and subjective structures (classifications, hierarchies, problematics, etc.) that always, in spite of ourselves, orient our thought.

Implication and the implicit

Renouncing the illusion of the self-transparency of consciousness and the representation of reflexivity commonly accepted among philosophers (and even accepted by some sociologists, like Alvin Gouldner, who recommends under this name an intimist exploration of the contingencies of personal experience¹), one has to resign oneself to acknowledging, in the typically positivist tradition of the critique of introspection, that the most effective reflection is the one that consists in objectifying the subject of objectification. I mean by that the one that dispossesses the knowing subject of the privilege it normally grants itself and that deploys all the available instruments of objectification (statistical surveys, ethnographic observation, historical research, etc.) in order to bring to light the presuppositions it owes to its inclusion in the object of knowledge.²

These presuppositions are of three different orders. To start with the most superficial, there are those associated with occupation of a position in social space, and the particular trajectory that has led to it, and with gender (which can affect the relationship to the object in many ways, in as much as the sexual division of labour is inscribed in social structures and in cognitive structures, orienting for example the choice of object of study).³ Then there are those that are constitutive of the doxa specific to each of the different fields (religious, artistic, philosophical, sociological, etc.) and, more precisely, those that each particular thinker owes to his position in a field. Finally, there are the presuppositions constituting the doxa generically associated with the skholè, leisure, which is the condition of existence of all scholarly fields.

Contrary to what is commonly said, especially when people worry about ‘ethical neutrality’, it is not the first set, in particular religious or political prejudices, which are hardest to apprehend and control. Because they are attached to the particularity of persons or social categories, and are therefore different from one individual to another, from one category to another, they are unlikely to escape the self-interested criticism of those who are driven by other prejudices or convictions.

This is not true of the distortions linked to membership of a field and to adherence, which is unanimous within the limits of the field, to the doxa which distinctively defines it. The implicit in this case is what is implied in the fact of being caught up in the game, in the illusio understood as a fundamental belief in the interest of the game and the value of the stakes which is inherent in that membership. Entry into a scholastic universe presupposes a suspension of the presuppositions of common sense and a para-doxal commitment to a more or less radically new set of presuppositions, linked to the discovery of stakes and demands neither known nor understood by ordinary experience. Each field is characterized by the pursuit of a specific goal, tending to favour no less absolute investments by all (and only) those who possess the required dispositions (for example, libido sciendi). Taking part in the illusio – scientific, literary, philosophical or other – means taking seriously (sometimes to the point of making them questions of life and death) stakes which, arising from the logic of the game itself, establish its ‘seriousness’, even if they may escape or appear ‘disinterested’ or ‘gratuitous’ to those who are sometimes called ‘lay people’ or those who are engaged in other fields (since the independence of the different fields entails a form of non-communicability between them).

The specific logic of a field is established in the incorporated state in the form of a specific habitus, or, more precisely, a sense of the game, ordinarily described as a ‘spirit’ or ‘sense’ (‘philosophical’, ‘literary’, ‘artistic’, etc.), which is practically never set out or imposed in an explicit way. Because it takes place insensibly, in other words gradually, progressively and imperceptibly, the conversion of the original habitus, a more or less radical process (depending on the distance), which is required by entry into the game and acquisition of the specific habitus, passes for the most part unnoticed.

If the implications of inclusion in a field are destined to remain implicit, this is precisely because there is nothing of the conscious, deliberate commitment, or the voluntary contract, about it. The original investment has no origin, because it always precedes itself and, when we deliberate on entry into the game, the die is already more or less cast. ‘We are embarked,’ as Pascal puts it. To speak of a decision to ‘commit oneself’ to scientific or artistic life (as in any other of the fundamental investments of life – vocation, passion, devotion) is, as Pascal himself was well aware, almost as absurd as evoking a decision to believe, as he does, with few illusions, in the argument of the wager. To hope that the unbeliever can be persuaded to decide to believe because he has been shown by cogent reasons that he who gambles on the existence of God risks a finite investment to win infinite profit, one would have to believe him disposed to believe sufficiently in reason to be sensitive to the reasons of that demonstration. But, as Pascal himself very well puts it, ‘we are as much automatic as intellectual; and hence it comes that the instrument by which conviction is attained is not demonstration alone. How few things are demonstrated! Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It inclines the automaton, which persuades the mind without its thinking about the matter.’⁴ Pascal thus recalls the difference, which the scholastic existence leads one to forget, between what is logically implied and what is practically entailed through the paths of ‘habit which, without violence, without art, without argument, makes us believe things’.⁵ Belief, even the belief that is the basis of the universe of science, is of the order of the automaton, the body, which, as Pascal never ceases to remind us, ‘has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing’.

The ambiguity of the scholastic disposition

But there is no doubt nothing more difficult to apprehend, for those who are immersed in universes in which it goes without saying, than the scholastic disposition demanded by those universes. There is nothing that ‘pure’ thought finds it harder to think than skholè, the first and most determinant of all the social conditions of possibility of ‘pure’ thought, and also the scholastic disposition which inclines its possessors to suspend the demands of the situation, the constraints of economic and social necessity, and the urgencies it imposes or the ends it proposes. In Sense and Sensibilia J. L. Austin refers in passing to the ‘scholastic view’, giving as an example the fact of enumerating or examining all the possible senses of a word, without any reference to the immediate context, instead of simply observing or using the sense of the word which is directly compatible with the situation.⁶

Developing what is implied in Austin’s example, one could say that the ‘as if’ posture – very close to the ‘let’s pretend’ mode of play which enables children to open imaginary worlds – is, as Hans Vaihinger showed in The Philosophy of ‘As If’, what makes possible all intellectual speculations, scientific hypotheses, ‘thought experiments’, ‘possible worlds’ or ‘imaginary variations’.⁷ It is what incites people to enter into the play-world of theoretical conjecture and mental experimentation, to raise problems for the pleasure of solving them, and not because they arise in the world, under the pressure of urgency, or to treat language not as an instrument but as an object of contemplation, formal invention or analysis.

Failing to make the connection, suggested by etymology, between the ‘scholastic point of view’ and skholè, philosophically consecrated by Plato (through the now canonical opposition between those who, engaged in philosophy, ‘talk at their leisure in peace’ and those who, in the courts, ‘are always in a hurry – for the water flowing through the water-clock urges them on’⁸), Austin fails to address the question of the social conditions of possibility of this very particular standpoint on the world and, more precisely, on language, the body, time or any other object of thought. He therefore does not realize that what makes possible this view which is indifferent to context and practical ends, this distant and distinctive relation to words and things, is nothing other than skholè. This time liberated from practical occupations and preoccupations, of which the school (skholè again) organizes a privileged form, studious leisure, is the precondition for scholastic exercises and activities removed from immediate necessity, such as sport, play, the production and contemplation of works of art and all forms of gratuitous speculation with no other end than themselves. (Let it suffice to indicate here – I shall return to this – that, failing to bring out all the implications of his intuition of the ‘scholastic view’, Austin was unable to see in skholè and the scholastic ‘language game’ the source of a number of fallacies typical of the philosophical thought which, following Wittgenstein and along with other ‘ordinary language philosophers’, he endeavoured to analyse and exorcise.)

The scholastic situation (of which the academic world represents the institutionalized form) is a site and a moment of social weightlessness where, defying the common opposition between playing (paizein) and being serious (spoudazein), one can ‘play seriously’ (spoudaiôs paizein), in the phrase Plato uses to characterize philosophical activity, take the stakes in games seriously, deal seriously with questions that ‘serious’ people, occupied and preoccupied by the practical business of everyday life, ignore. And if the link between the scholastic mode of thought and the mode of existence which is the condition of its acquisition and implementation escapes attention, this is not only because those who might grasp it are like fish in water in the situation of which their dispositions are the product, but also because the essential part of what is transmitted in and by that situation is a hidden effect of the situation itself.

Learning situations, and especially scholastic exercises in the sense of ludic, gratuitous work, performed in the ‘let’s pretend’ mode, without any real (economic) stake, are th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Introduction
• 1 Critique of Scholastic Reason
• POSTSCRIPT 1 Impersonal Confessions
• POSTSCRIPT 2 Forgetting History
• 2 The Three Forms of Scholastic Fallacy
• POSTSCRIPT How to Read an Author
• 3 The Historicity of Reason
• 4 Bodily Knowledge
• 5 Symbolic Violence and Political Struggles
• 6 Social Being, Time and the Sense of Existence
• Subject Index
• Name Index
• End User License Agreement