Pascalian Meditations E-Book

Pierre Bourdieu

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 556

Beschreibung

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

Das E-Book Pascalian Meditations wird angeboten von John Wiley & Sons und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
Anthropologie, Anthropology, Sociology, Soziologie

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

Introduction

1 Critique of Scholastic Reason

Implication and the implicit

The ambiguity of the scholastic disposition

The genesis of the scholastic disposition

The great repression

The scholastic point of honour

Radical doubt radicalized

POSTSCRIPT 1: Impersonal Confessions

POSTSCRIPT 2: Forgetting History

2 The Three Forms of Scholastic Fallacy

Scholastic epistemocentrism

Practical logics

The scholastic barrier

Digression: A critique of my critics

Moralism as egoistic universalism

The impure conditions of a pure pleasure

The ambiguity of reason

Digression: A ‘habitual’ limit to ‘pure’ thought

The supreme form of symbolic violence

POSTSCRIPT How to Read an Author

3 The Historicity of Reason

Violence and law

Nomos

and

illusio

Digression: Common sense

Instituted points of view

Digression: Differentiation of powers and circuits of legitimation

A rationalist historicism

The dual face of scientific reason

Censorship of the field and scientific sublimation

The anamnesis of origin

Reflexivity and twofold historicization

The universality of strategies of universalization

4 Bodily Knowledge

Analysis situs

The social space

Comprehension

Digression on scholastic blindness

Habitus and incorporation

A logic in action

Coincidence

The encounter of two histories

The dialectic of positions and dispositions

Mismatches, discordance and misfirings

5 Symbolic Violence and Political Struggles

Libido and

illusio

Bodily constraint

Symbolic power

Twofold naturalization and its effects

Practical sense and political labour

The twofold truth

6 Social Being, Time and the Sense of Existence

The presence of the forth-coming

‘The order of successions’

The relationship between expectations and chances

Digression: Still more scholastic abstractions

A social experiment on time and power

The plurality of times

Time and power

Back to the relationship between expectations and chances

A margin of freedom

The question of justification

Symbolic capital

Subject Index

Name Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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e1

Pascalian Meditations

PIERRE BOURDIEU

Translated by Richard Nice

Copyright © this translation Polity Press 2000.

First published in France as Méditations pascaliennes

© Éditions du Seuil, 1997.

Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture.

First published in 2000 by Polity Pressin association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Editorial office:

Polity Press

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0-7456-2054-X

ISBN 0-7456-2055-8 (pbk)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Introduction

If I have resolved to ask some questions that I would rather have left to philosophy, it is because it seemed to me that philosophy, for all its questioning, did not ask them; and because, especially with respect to the social sciences, it never ceased to raise questions that did not seem to me to be essential – while avoiding asking itself about the reasons and above all the (often not very philosophical) causes of its questioning. I wanted to push the critique (in the Kantian sense) of scholarly reason to a point that questionings usually leave untouched and to try to make explicit the presuppositions entailed by the situation of skholè, the free time, freed from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to those urgencies and to the world. And it has been philosophers who, not content with engaging these presuppositions in their practice, like other professional thinkers, have brought them into the order of discourse, not so much to analyse them as to legitimate them.

In order to justify an inquiry that hopes to open the way to truths that philosophy helps to make it hard to reach, I could have invoked thinkers who are close to being seen by philosophers as enemies of philosophy, because, like Wittgenstein, they make its prime task the dispelling of illusions, especially those that the philosophical tradition produces and reproduces. But, as will become clear, I had various reasons for placing these reflections under the aegis of Pascal. For a long time I had adopted the habit, when asked the (generally ill-intentioned) question of my relations with Marx, of replying that, all in all, if I really had to affiliate myself, I would say I was more of a Pascalian. I was thinking in particular of everything that concerns symbolic power, the aspect through which the affinity appears most clearly, and other, less often observed, facets of his work, such as the refusal of the ambition of foundation. But, above all, I had always been grateful to Pascal, as I understood him, for his concern, devoid of all populist naivety, for ‘ordinary people’ and the ‘sound opinions of the people’; and also for his determination, inseparable from that concern, always to seek the ‘reason of effects’, the raison d’être of the seemingly most illogical or derisory human behaviours – such as ‘spending a whole day in chasing a hare’ – rather than condemning or mocking them, like the ‘half-learned’ who are always ready to ‘play the philosopher’ and to seek to astonish with their uncommon astonishments at the futility of common-sense opinions.

Being convinced that Pascal was right to say that ‘true philosophy makes light of philosophy’, I have often regretted that academic proprieties prevented me from taking this invitation literally: more than once I have wanted to fight the symbolic violence that is often exercised, firstly on philosophers themselves, in the name of philosophy, with the weapons most commonly used to counteract the effects of that violence – irony, pastiche or parody. I envied the freedom of writers (Thomas Bernhard on Heideggerian kitsch, or Elfriede Jelinek on the fuliginous clouds of the German idealists), or of the artists who, from Duchamp to Devautour, have, in their own artistic practice, constantly subverted the belief in art and artists.

The vanity of attributing immense and immediate effects to philosophy, and to the utterances of intellectuals, seems to me to be the example par excellence of what Schopenhauer called ‘pedantic comedy’, by which he meant the ridicule one incurs when performing an action that is not included in one’s concept, like a stage horse that defecates on stage. Now, if there is one thing that our ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ philosophers have in common, beyond the conflicts that divide them, it is this excessive confidence in the powers of language. It is the typical illusion of the lector, who can regard an academic commentary as a political act or the critique of texts as a feat of resistance, and experience revolutions in the order of words as radical revolutions in the order of things.

How can one avoid succumbing to this dream of omnipotence, which tends to arouse fits of bedazzled identification with great heroic roles? I think it is important above all to reflect not only on the limits of thought and of the powers of thought, but also on the conditions in which it is exercised, which lead so many thinkers to overstep the limits of a social experience that is necessarily partial and local, both geographically and socially, and restricted to a small region, always the same, of the social universe, as is shown by the limited scope of the references invoked, often restricted to one discipline and one national tradition. Attentive observation of the course of the world should, however, incline them to more humility, because it is so clear that intellectual powers are most efficacious when they are exercised in the same direction as the immanent tendencies of the social world, at which time they indubitably redouble, through omission or compromise, the effects of the forces of the world, which are also expressed through them.

I am well aware that what I have to say here, which for a long time I wanted to leave at least partly in the implicit state of a practical sense of theoretical things, is rooted in the singular, and singularly limited, experiences of a particular existence; and that the events of the world, or the minor dramas of university life, can have a very profound effect on consciousnesses and unconsciouses. Does that imply that what I say is thereby particularized or relativized? The unceasing interest that the ‘gentlemen of Port-Royal’ showed in authority and obedience, and their determination to reveal its principles, has been related to the fact that, although very privileged, especially in cultural terms, they almost all belonged to the bourgeois aristocracy of the robins (noblesse de robe), a social category still very distinct, in the eyes of others and in itself, from the noblesse d’épee under whose insolence they chafed. Their special lucidity as regards aristocratic values and the symbolic foundations of authority, especially that of title, may well have owed something to the marginal position that inclined them to critical dispositions towards the temporal powers of Church or State, but this in no way invalidates the truths it reveals.

The vestiges of religious or political moralism that lurk behind a number of apparently epistemological questionings have to be repudiated. In the order of thought, there is, as Nietzsche pointed out, no immaculate conception; but nor is there any original sin – and the discovery that someone who has discovered the truth had an interest in doing so in no way diminishes his discovery. Those who like to believe in the miracle of ‘pure’ thought must bring themselves to accept that the love of truth or virtue, like any other kind of disposition, necessarily owes something to the conditions in which it was formed, in other words a social position and trajectory. I am even fairly convinced that, in thinking about the things of the intellectual life, where so many of our investments are placed, and where, as a consequence, the ‘refusal to know’ or even the ‘hatred of truth’ that Pascal refers to are particularly intense (if only in the inverted form of the perverse false lucidity of resentment), a degree of personal interest in unveiling (which may well be denounced as denunciation) is no bad thing.

But the extreme vulnerability of the historical sciences, which are in the front line of the danger of relativization that they introduce, does have some advantages. And I could invoke the particular vigilance towards the injunctions or seductions of intellectual trends and fashions that results from constantly taking them as one’s object; and above all, the work of critique, verification and elaboration – in a word, sublimation – that I have brought to bear on the impulses, revolt or indignation that lie behind a given intuition or anticipation. When I uncompromisingly examined the world to which I belonged, I could not but be aware that I necessarily fell under the scrutiny of my own analyses, and that I was providing instruments that could be turned against me. The image of the ‘biter bit’ simply designates one very effective form of reflexivity as I understand it – as a collective enterprise.

Being aware that the privilege given to those who are in a position to ‘play seriously’, in Plato’s phrase, because their estate (or, nowadays, the State) gives them the means to do so, could slant or limit my thinking, I have always asked of the most radically objectifying instruments of knowledge that I could use that they also serve as instruments of self-knowledge, and not least knowledge of myself as a ‘knowing subject’. In this way I learned a lot from two research projects, carried out in very different social milieux – the village of my childhood and the Paris universities – which enabled me to explore some of the most obscure areas of my subjectivity as an objectivist observer.1 In fact I am convinced that only an enterprise of objectification, divested of the particular indulgence and complacency normally asked for and granted to evocations of the intellectual adventure, makes it possible to discover, with a view to going beyond them, some limits of thought and especially those that arise from privilege.

I have always felt some impatience with ‘puffed-up words’ [les mots d’enflure], as Pascal puts it, and the grand affirmation of peremptory theses that often accompany major intellectual ambitions; and, partly no doubt in reaction against the taste for epistemological and theoretical preliminaries or the endless exegesis of canonical authors, I have never shunned what are regarded as the humblest tasks of the craft of ethnology or sociology – direct observation, interviews, coding or statistical analysis. Without succumbing to the initiatory cult of ‘fieldwork’ or the positivistic fetishism of ‘data’, I felt that, by virtue of their more modest and practical content, and because they took me out into the world, these activities, which are in any case no less intelligent than others, were one of the chances I had to escape from the scholastic confinement of the habitués of ministerial offices, libraries, lectures and speeches that I encountered in my professional life. So I could have attached to almost every line the references to empirical investigations, some of them going back thirty years before the moment at which I now write, which made me feel I was authorized to put forward the general propositions that they presupposed or that they had enabled me to establish, without providing all the supporting evidence at each point and in a tone that may sometimes appear too abrupt.2

The sociologist has the peculiarity, in no way a privilege, of being the person whose task is to tell about the things of the social world, and, as far as possible, to tell them the way they are. In itself, that is normal, even trivial. What makes his (or her) situation paradoxical, sometimes impossible, is that he is surrounded by people who either actively ignore the social world and do not talk about it – and I would be the last to criticize artists, writers or scientists for being totally absorbed in their work – or worry about it and talk about it, sometimes a lot, but without knowing much about it (there are some of these even among recognized sociologists). It is indeed not uncommon that, when associated with ignorance, indifference or contempt, the obligation to speak that derives from suddenly acquired notoriety or the modes and models of the intellectual game inclines people to talk everywhere about the social world, but as if they were not talking about it, or as if one were talking of it to help to forget it and have it forgotten – in a word, while denying it.

So, when he simply does what he has to do, the sociologist breaks the enchanted circle of collective denial. By working towards the ‘return of the repressed’, by trying to know and make known what the world of knowledge does not want to know, especially about itself, he takes the risk of appearing as the one who ‘gives the game away’ – but to whom, except to those with whom, in so doing, he breaks ranks, and from whom he cannot expect recognition for his discoveries, his revelations or his confessions (which are necessarily a little perverse, it has to be said, because they are also valid, by proxy, for all his kind)?

I know fairly well what one can expect from working to combat the repression, so strong in the pure and perfect world of thought, of everything that touches on social reality. I know that I shall have to confront the virtuous indignation of those who reject the very principle of the effort to objectify – either because, in the name of the irreducibility of the ‘subject’ and its immersion in time, which condemns it to endless change and singularity, they identify every attempt to convert it into an object of science with a kind of usurpation of a divine attribute (Kierkegaard, more lucid on this point than a number of his acolytes, talks, in his Journal, of ‘blasphemy’); or because, being convinced of their own exceptionality, they only see there a form of ‘denunciation’, inspired by ‘hatred’ of the object (philosophy, art or literature) to which it is applied.

It is tempting (and ‘profitable’) to proceed as if a simple reminder of the social conditions of ‘creation’ were the expression of a desire to reduce the unique to the generic, the singular to the class; as if the observation that the social world imposes constraints and limits on the ‘purest’ thought, that of scientists, artists and writers, were the effect of a bias towards denigration; as if determinism, for which sociologists are so much reproached, were, like liberalism or socialism, or some aesthetic or political preference, a matter of belief or even a sort of cause on which one took up a position, either for or against; as if the commitment to science were, in the case of sociology, a prejudice, inspired by resentment, against all intellectual ‘good causes’, singularity and freedom, transgression and subversion, difference and dissidence, the open and the plural, etc.

Faced with the pharisaical denunciations of my ‘denunciations’, I have often regretted not having followed the example of Mallarmé, who, refusing to ‘perform, in public, the impious dismantling of the fiction and consequently of the literary mechanism, to display the principal part or nothing’,3 chose to save the fiction, and the collective belief in the game, by enunciating this seminal nothingness only in the mode of denegation. But I could not be satisfied with the answer he provided to the question whether one should utter publicly the constitutive mechanisms of social games that are as shrouded in prestige and mystery as those of art, literature, science, law or philosophy and charged with the values commonly held to be the most universal and the most sacred. To opt to keep the secret, or to unveil it only in a strictly veiled form, as Mallarmé does, is to prejudge that only a few great initiates are capable of the heroic lucidity and willed generosity that are necessary in order to confront the enigma of fiction and fetishism.

Conscious of all the expectations that I was forced to frustrate, all the unexamined dogmas of ‘humanist’ conviction and ‘artistic’ faith that I was obliged to defy, I have often cursed the fate (or the logic) that required me consciously to take up such a difficult cause, to engage, armed only with the weapons of rational discourse, in a struggle that was perhaps lost in advance against enormous social forces, such as the weight of habits of thought, cognitive interests and cultural beliefs bequeathed by several centuries of literary, artistic or philosophical worship.

This feeling was all the more paralysing because as I wrote on skholè and all these other things, I could not fail to feel the ricochet of my own words. I had never before felt with such intensity the strangeness of my project, a kind of negative philosophy that was liable to appear self-destructive. On other occasions, to try to still anxiety or worry, I have been able, sometimes explicitly, to assign myself the role of public scribe and try to convince myself – and also those I carried with me – of the certainty of being useful in saying things which are not said but deserve to be. But once these (so to speak) ‘public service’ functions were set aside, what remains by way of justifications?

I have never really felt justified in existing as an intellectual; and I have always tried – as I have tried again here – to exorcise everything in my thinking that might be linked to that status, such as philosophical intellectualism. I do not like the intellectual in myself, and what may sound, in my writing, like anti-intellectualism is chiefly directed against the intellectualism or intellectuality that remains in me, despite all my efforts, such as the difficulty, so typical of intellectuals, I have in accepting that my freedom has its limits.

To conclude these preliminary considerations, I would like to ask my readers, even the most well disposed of them, to suspend the preconceived or precautionary ideas they may have of my work and, more generally, of the social sciences, ideas which sometimes oblige me to return to questions that I believe I settled a long time ago, as I shall do again here, in clarifications which should not be confused with the doubling back and the revivals required by the sometimes imperceptible progress of research. I do indeed have the sense of having been rather ill-understood, partly, no doubt, because of the idea people often have of sociology, based on vague school memories or unfortunate encounters with the most salient members of the corporation, which can, alas, only reinforce the politico-journalistic image of the discipline. The diminished status of this pariah science inclines the poorly sighted to think that they surpass what surpasses them and the ill-intentioned to produce a deliberately reductive image without incurring the sanctions normally attached to excessively flagrant transgressions of the ‘principle of charity’. These prejudices seem to me all the more unjust or inappropriate because part of my work has consisted in reversing a good number of modes of thought current in the analysis of the social world (starting with the vestiges of a Marxist vulgate which, beyond political affiliations, clouded the brains of more than one generation). The analyses and models that I put forward were thus often perceived through categories of thought which, like the obligatory alternatives of dualistic thought (mechanism/finalism, objectivism/subjectivism, holism/individualism), were precisely rejected.

But I do not forget all that was due to myself, to my difficulty in explaining or my reluctance to explain; nor the fact that the obstacles to comprehension, perhaps especially when social things are in question, have less, as Wittgenstein observed, to do with the understanding than with the will. I am often surprised at the time it has taken me – and this is probably not over – really to understand some of the things I had been saying for a long time with the sense of knowing exactly what I was saying. And if I rework the same themes and return several times to the same objects and the same analyses, it is always, I think, in a spiralling movement which makes it possible to attain each time a higher level of explicitness and comprehension, and to discover unnoticed relationships and hidden properties. ‘I cannot judge of my work, while doing it. I must do as the artists, stand at a distance; but not too far.’4 I too have wanted to find the point from which the whole of my work might be seen in a single gaze, relieved of the confusions and obscurities that I could see there ‘while doing it’ and which one lingers on when looking from too close. Being inclined rather to leave things in the practical state, I had to convince myself that I would not be wasting my time and trouble in trying to make explicit the principles of the modus operandi that I have implemented in my work and also the idea of ‘the human being’ that, inevitably, I have engaged in my scientific choices. I do not know if I have succeeded, but I have in any case acquired the conviction that the social world would be better known, and scientific discourse about it would be better understood, if one were able to convince oneself that there are not many objects more difficult to understand, especially because it haunts the brains of those who try to analyse it, and because it conceals under the most trivial appearances, those of daily banality for daily newspapers, available to any researcher, the most unexpected revelations about what we least want to know about what we are.

1

P. Bourdieu, ‘Célibat et condition paysanne’,

Études Rurales

, 5–6 (Apr.–Sept. 1962), pp. 32–136;

Homo Academicus

, tr. P. Collier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).

2

As regards both my own works and works by others which have been useful to me, I have limited myself here to the references that seemed indispensable to those who might themselves wish to extend the research; and I am well aware that the middle way I have chosen, after much hesitation, between a total absence of references and the long enumerations of the names of philosophers, ethnologists, sociologists, historians, economists, psychologists, etc. whom I could and perhaps should have invoked at each moment, is simply the least bad solution.

3

S. Mallarmé, ‘La musique et les lettres’, in

Œuvres complètes

, ed. H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1970), p. 647. I have offered an analysis of this text, likely to provoke shudders in the pious celebrants of the seraphic poet of absence, who have turned a blind eye to it, in

The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field

, tr. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 274–7.

4

Pascal,

Pensées

, 114. (The translations from the

Pensées

are those of W. F. Trotter, see

Pascal’s Pensées

(London and Toronto: Dent, 1931).

Trans

.)

1Critique 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 the occasion for acquiring, in addition to all they explicitly aim to transmit, something essential, namely the scholastic disposition and the set of presuppositions contained in the social conditions that make them possible. These conditions of possibility, which are conditions of existence, act, as it were, negatively, by default, in particular because they are themselves essentially negative, such as the neutralization of practical urgencies and ends and, more precisely, the fact of being detached for a more or less long time from work and the world of work, from serious activity, sanctioned by monetary compensation, or, more generally, of being more or less completely exempted from all the negative experiences associated with privation or uncertainty about the morrow. (A quasi-experimental confirmation: for many children of working-class origin, more or less prolonged access to secondary education and to the suspended time between the ludic activities of childhood and adult work, which was previously reserved for bourgeois adolescents, leads to a breaking of the cycle of reproduction of the dispositions which would have prepared them to accept factory work.)9 The scholastic disposition which is acquired mainly in experience of education can be perpetuated even when the conditions of its exercise have more or less completely disappeared (with entry into the world of work). But it is truly fulfilled only by inclusion in a scholarly field and especially in one of the fields which, being almost totally limited to the scholastic universe, like the philosophical field and a number of scientific fields, offer the conditions favouring its full development.

The presuppositions contained in this disposition – the entry requirement demanded by all scholastic universes and the indispensable condition for excelling in one of them – constitute what I shall call, in an oxymoron likely to awaken philosophers from their scholastic slumber, the epistemic doxa. Nothing, paradoxically, is more dogmatic than a doxa, a set of fundamental beliefs which does not even need to be asserted in the form of an explicit, self-conscious dogma. The ‘free’ and ‘pure’ disposition favoured by skholè implies (active or passive) ignorance not only of what happens in the world of practice (brought to light by the anecdote of Thales and the Thracian servant girl10), and, more precisely, in the order of the polis and politics, but also of what it is to exist, quite simply, in the world. It also and especially implies more or less triumphant ignorance of that ignorance and of the economic and social conditions that make it possible.

There is a downside to the autonomy of the scholastic fields, a cost entailed in the social break that is favoured by economic separation. Although it is experienced as free and elective, independence from all determinations is only acquired and exercised in and through an effective distance from economic and social necessity (through which it is closely linked to occupation of privileged positions in the sexual and social hierarchy). The fundamental ambiguity of the scholastic universes and of all their productions – universal acquisitions made accessible by an exclusive privilege – lies in the fact that their apartness from the world of production is both a liberatory break and a disconnection, a potentially crippling separation. While the suspension of economic or social necessity is what allows the emergence of autonomous fields, ‘orders’ (in Pascal’s sense) which know and recognize only their specific law, it is also what, in the absence of special vigilance, threatens to confine scholastic thought within the limits of ignored or repressed presuppositions, implied in the withdrawal from the world.

Thus it has to be acknowledged that, though they do not have a monopoly on the scholastic posture, only those who gain entry to the scholastic universes are in a position to realize fully this universal anthropological possibility. Awareness of this privilege forbids one to consign to inhumanity or ‘barbarism’ those who, because they do not have this advantage, are not able to fulfil all their human potentialities. It also forbids one to forget the limits that scholastic thought owes to the very special conditions of its emergence, which one must methodically explore in order to try to free it from them.

The genesis of the scholastic disposition

Ethnology and history bear witness that the various dispositions towards the natural world and the social world, and the various anthropologically possible ways of constructing the world – magical or technical, emotional or rational, practical or theoretical, instrumental or aesthetic, serious or ludic, etc. – have very unequal probability, because they are encouraged and rewarded to very unequal degrees in different societies, depending on the degree of freedom with respect to necessity and immediate urgencies that is provided there by the state of the available technologies and economic and cultural resources; and, within a given society, depending on the position occupied within the social space. Although there is no reason to suppose that it is not randomly distributed among different societies and among the different strata of differentiated societies, the anthropological possibility of entering into the detached, gratuitous, ludic relationship with the world that is presupposed by most of the practices considered the most noble encounters very different opportunities for self-realization within those different societies and strata. The same is true of the inclination to adopt a magical attitude towards the world, which was much more improbable for a French philosopher of the 1950s like Jean-Paul Sartre, who evokes such an experience in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, than for a Trobriand islander in the 1930s as described by Malinowski. Whereas in the former case this way of seeing the world only arises exceptionally, as an accident provoked by a critical situation, in the latter case it is constantly encouraged and favoured both by the extreme uncertainty and unpredictability of the conditions of existence and by the socially approved responses to those conditions, foremost among which is what is called magic, a practical relation to the world which is instituted in collective rites and thereby constituted as a normal element of normal human behaviour in that society.

Thus the different kinds of ‘world-making’ have to be related to the economic and social conditions that make them possible. This means that one has to move beyond the ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’ in Cassirer’s sense to a differential anthropology of symbolic forms, or, to put it another way, to extend Durkheim’s analysis of the social genesis of ‘forms of thought’ by means of an analysis of the variations in the cognitive dispositions towards the world according to social positions and historical situations. As one moves away from the lower regions of the social space, characterized by the extreme brutality of the economic constraints, the uncertainties diminish and the pressures of economic and social necessity relax. As a consequence, less strictly defined positions, which leave more scope for manoeuvre, offer the possibility of acquiring dispositions that are freer in respect of practical urgencies – problems to solve, opportunities to exploit – and seemingly preadjusted to the tacit demands of the scholastic universes. One of the least visible of the advantages attached to birth lies in the detached, distant disposition – shown, inter alia, in what Erving Goffman calls ‘role distance’ – that is acquired in early experience relatively free from necessity. This disposition, together with the inherited cultural capital with which it is associated, makes an essential contribution towards favouring access to schooling and success in scholastic exercises – especially the most formal ones, which demand the capacity to participate simultaneously or successively in various ‘mental spaces’, as Gilles Fauconnier puts it – and so towards enabling the final entry into the scholastic universes.

While all learning, even among animals, makes room for play (increasingly so at higher levels of evolution), only the educational system sets up the very special set of conditions that are required in order for the conducts that are to be taught to be able to be performed, outside of the situations in which they are pertinent, in the form of ‘serious games’ and ‘gratuitous’ exercises, abstract actions without reference to any useful effect and without dangerous consequences.11 Learning in school, which, because it is freed from the direct sanction of reality, can offer challenges, tests and problems, similar to real situations but leaving the possibility of seeking and trying out solutions in conditions of minimum risk, is the occasion to acquire, in addition, through habituation, the permanent disposition to set up the distance from directly perceived reality which is the precondition for most symbolic constructions.

The great repression

But the scholastic disposition derives its most significant features from the process of differentiation through which the various fields of symbolic production gained autonomy and constituted themselves as such, thus distinguishing themselves from the economic universe which was being constituted at the same time. This process is inseparable from the full-scale symbolic revolution through which European societies gradually managed to overcome the denial of the economic on which precapitalist societies were founded and, in a kind of confession made to themselves, to acknowledge explicitly that economic actions really had the economic ends to which they had always been oriented.

(The philosophical field is undoubtedly the first scholastic field to have constituted itself by achieving autonomy with respect to the developing political field and the religious field, in Greece in the fifth century bc; and the history of this process of autonomization and the creation of a universe of argument governed by its own rules is inseparable from the history of the process which led from analogical reason (that of myth or rite) to logical reason (that of philosophy). Reflection on the logic of argumentation, first mythical (with, in particular, consideration of analogy), then rhetorical and logical, accompanied the constitution of a field of competition, freed from the prescriptions of religious wisdom without being dominated by the constraints of an academic monopoly. In this field, everyone acted as an audience for everyone else, was constantly attentive to the others and determined by what they said, in a permanent confrontation which progressively took itself as its object and was fulfilled in a search for rules of logic inseparable from a search for rules of communication and intersubjective agreement.

This prototype of the scholastic world presented in an ideal-typical form all the features of the scholastic break. For example, myths and rites ceased to be practical acts of belief obeying a practical logic – which was ceasing to be understood – and became instead matter for theoretical astonishment and questioning, or objects of hermeneutic rivalry, particularly through the introduction of more or less subtle shifts in the interpretation of the consecrated culture or the distinctive reintroduction of neglected myths such as those of Hecate or Prometheus. Typically scholastic problems also arose, such as the question of whether excellence can be taught. The third generation of sophists and the institutionalization of the school saw the emergence of the gratuitous intellectual game, eristic (the ‘art of disputation’), and interest in discourse for its own sake, in its logical or aesthetic form. But the consequences of the institutionalization of skholè in an academic order (the very ones which are recorded in the ordinary, pejorative, usage of the adjective ‘scholastic’) appeared with total clarity in the Middle Ages, when, for example, philosophy, ceasing to be a way of life, became a purely theoretical and abstract activity, increasingly reduced to a discourse, articulated in a technical language reserved for specialists.

When, in Renaissance Italy, after a long eclipse, there reappeared a scholastic field in which the process of differentiation of religion and science, analogical reason and logical reason, alchemy and chemistry, astrology and astronomy, politics and sociology, etc. started up again,12 the first cracks were already opening up. They were steadily enlarged, leading to the complete secession of the scientific, literary and artistic fields, and beginning a process of autonomization with respect to the philosophical field, which, having lost most of its traditional objects, was forced into constant redefinition, especially of its relationship with the other fields and the knowledge they have of their objects.)

Only at the end of a slow evolution tending to strip away the specifically symbolic aspect of the acts and relations of production was the economy able to constitute itself as such, in the objectivity of a separate universe, governed by its own rules, those of self-interested calculation, competition and exploitation; and also, much later, in ‘pure’ economic theory which records the social separation and the practical abstraction of which the economic cosmos is the product, while tacitly writing it into the principle of its object construction. But, conversely, it was only by means of a break tending to repress the economic aspect of the specifically symbolic acts and relations of production into the lower world of the economy that the various universes of symbolic production were able to constitute themselves as closed, separate microcosms in which thoroughly symbolic, pure and (from the point of view of the economic economy) disinterested actions were performed, based on the refusal or repression of the element of productive labour that they implied. (The process of autonomization and ‘purification’ of the various universes is moreover far from complete, both on the side of the economy, which still leaves considerable room for symbolic facts and effects, and on the side of symbolic activities, which always have a denied economic dimension.)

To understand this double break, it is not sufficient to take account of one or another of the various social transformations which have accompanied the development of the economic economy, whether the emergence of ‘specialists in practical knowledge’ – engineers, technicians, accountants, jurists, doctors – who, as Sartre suggests in his Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels, are somehow predisposed, by a mysterious expressive correspondence, to fulfil the role of ‘organic intellectuals of the bourgeoisie’; or the rise of a ‘corporation’ of men of letters, inclined to extend to politics the principle of critical public debate which they have set up in the republic of letters, as Habermas indicates in his analysis of the ‘structural transformations of the public space’.13 In fact, all the new agents, who, it is not untrue to say, have contributed to the invention of the universal and even, through the ‘Enlightenment philosophers’, made themselves its spokesmen, were able to perform this function only because they were caught up in relatively autonomous fields whose necessity, which they helped to bring about, imposed itself on them.

Having freed itself by stages from immediate material preoccupations, in particular with the aid of the profits secured by direct or indirect sale of practical knowledge to commercial undertakings or the State, and having accumulated, through and for their work, competences (initially acquired through education) that could function as cultural capital, they were increasingly inclined and also able to assert their individual and collective autonomy vis-à-vis the economic and political powers who needed their services (and also vis-à-vis the aristocracies based on birth, against which they asserted the justifications of merit and, increasingly, of the ‘gift’). But, in return, the logic of the emerging scholarly fields and of the internal competition made possible by the social break with the universe of the economy and the world of practice, forcing them to mobilize the specific resources accumulated through previous struggles, at every moment, in their present struggles, led them to create the specific rules and regulations of microcosms governed by a social logic favouring systematization and rationalization and so to advance the various forms (legal, scientific, artistic, etc.) of rationality and universality.

The repression of the material determinations of symbolic practices is particularly visible in the early moments of the autonomization of the artistic field. Through the permanent confrontation between artists and patrons, painterly activity progressively asserted itself as a specific activity, irreducible to a simple labour of material production that could be evaluated purely in terms of the value of the time spent and the paint consumed, and consequently claiming the status accorded to the noblest intellectual activities.14 The slow, painful process of sublimation through which pictorial practice asserted itself as a purely symbolic activity denying its material conditions of possibility has a clear affinity with the process of differentiation of productive labour and symbolic labour that proceeded at the same time. The emergence of universes which, like the scholastic worlds, offer positions in which one can feel entitled to perceive the world as a representation, a spectacle, to survey it from above and from afar and organize it as a whole designed for knowledge alone, no doubt favoured the development of a new disposition or, one might say, world view, in the literal sense, which found expression as much in the first ‘scientific’ maps as in the Galilean representation of the world or in pictorial perspective.

(Recently rereading Durkheim’s The Evolution of Educational Thought, I was again struck by his splendid evocation of how the educated men of the sixteenth century discovered the world-view that I call scholastic: ‘It seems then, in a general way, that in the sixteenth century, at least throughout that part of cultivated society whose ideas and sentiments have come down to us through literature ... a style of life was thought to be realizable and to be in the process of being realized which would be liberated from all preoccupation, unencumbered by any constraint and servitude, a kind of life in which activity would not be forced to submit itself to narrowly utilitarian ends, to canalize itself, to regulate itself so that it could adapt to reality; but it would rather be expended for the sheer pleasure of the expenditure, for the glory and the beauty of the spectacle which it performs to itself when it can be employed in complete freedom, without having to take into account reality and its exigencies.’ Durkheim does indeed relate ‘the sense of power, of autonomy, of independence, of leisurely, unfettered activity’ which was felt by the people of the Renaissance and expressed, in particular, in educational theories in which ‘the immediate necessities of life, as well as the urgent need to prepare the child in advance to confront them, seem to have been lost sight of’, to the appearance of a new lifestyle, itself linked to new conditions of existence; and he sees very clearly that, beyond their differences, the various educational systems, humanist or erudite, arising from these conditions, were all ‘aimed at the sons of a privileged aristocracy for whom the difficulties of serious living did not exist’.)15

Perspective, in its historical definition, is no doubt the most accomplished realization of the scholastic vision. It presupposes a single, fixed point of view – and therefore the adoption of the posture of a motionless spectator installed at a point (of view) – and also the use of a frame that cuts out, encloses and abstracts the spectacle with a rigorous, immobile boundary. (It is significant that, to construct a model of vision, Descartes – who, as is well known, gave a privileged place to intuition understood as vision – uses, in his Dioptrics, the image of an eye placed ‘in the expressly made aperture of a window’, on the back of which the observer, situated within the camera obscura, will see ‘perhaps not without admiration and pleasure, a painting that will represent most naturally in perspective all the objects that are outside’.)16 This singular viewpoint can also be regarded as universal, since all the ‘subjects’ who find themselves placed there – bodies reduced to a pure gaze, and therefore indifferent and interchangeable – are, like the Kantian subject, assured of having the same objective view, the one of which perspectival representation, as a ‘symbolic form of an objectification of the subjective’,17 in Panofsky’s phrase, performs the objectification.

Thus perspective presupposes a point of view on which no point of view can be taken; one which, like the frame of the Albertian painter, is that through which one sees (per-spicere