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A synthesis of forty years’ work by France’s leading sociologist, this book pushes the critique of scholarly reason to a new level. It is a brilliant example of Bourdieu’s unique ability to link sociological theory, historical information, and philosophical thought.Pascalian Meditations makes explicit the presuppositions of a state of “scholasticism,” a certain leisure liberated from the urgencies of the world. Philosophers, unwilling to engage these presuppositions in their practice, have brought them into the order of discourse, not so much to analyze them as to legitimate them. This situation is the primary systematic, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic error that Bourdieu subjects to methodological critique.This critique of scholarly reason is carried out in the name of Pascal because he, too, pointed out the features of human existence that the scholastic outlook ignores: he was concerned with symbolic power; he refused the temptation of foundationalist thinking; he attended (without populist na?vet?) to “ordinary people”; and he was determined to seek the raison d’?tre of seemingly illogical behavior rather than condemning or mocking it.Through this critique, Bourdieu charts a negative philosophy that calls into question some of our most fundamental presuppositions, such as a “subject” who is free and self-aware. This philosophy, with its intellectual debt to such other “heretical” philosophers as Wittgenstein, Austin, Dewey, and Peirce, renews traditional questioning of the concepts of violence, power, time, history, the universal, and the purpose and direction of existence.
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Pascalian Meditations ~ PIERRE BOURDIEU Translated by Richard Nice Stanford University Press Stanford, California Contents ~ Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1997 Editions du Seuil This translation © 2000 Polity Press First published in France as Meditations pascaliennes Editions du Seuil Originating publisher of English edition: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. First published in the U.s.A. by Stanford University Press, 2000 Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture Printed in Great Britain Cloth ISBN 0-8047-3331-7 Paper ISBN 0-8047-3332-5 LC 99-71220 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Introduction 1 1 Critique of Scholastic Reason 9 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 2 I J 9 12 16 17 25 28 POSTSCRIPT I: Impersonal Confessions 33 POSTSCRIPT 2: Forgetting History 43 The Three Forms of Scholastic Fallacy 49 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 50 54 57 POSTSCRIPT: How to Read an Author 60 65 73 77 81 83 85 Contents Vi 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 anamnesis of orig