Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 10:29:28 +0200
From: Carsten Sestoft <sestoft-AT-coco.ihi.ku.dk>
Subject: Re: New book by Bourdieu


>Anton Monshouwer wrote yesterday:


>*Meditations pascaliennes* is Bourdieu's most philosophical book!

Certainly--and in a sense also his most directly anti-philosophical book.
"Real philosophy has only contempt for philosophy", he says with Pascal.
And in the introduction he begins by stating: "If I have decided to raise
some questions which I would have preferred to leave to philosophy, it is
because it appeared to me that philosophy--although so questioning--didn't
raise them" (p. 9); and on the same page he calls his work a "research
which hopes to gain access to truths that philosophy continues to make
difficult to attain".

(Sorry for the quality of translations)

Which are these questions then? It is mainly the effects of the "scholastic
point of view" and its illusions, i.e. the social distance between the
"impartial spectator" and his objects, and the distorsions in the knowledge
about the object that follow from that:
chap. 2: the scholastic illusions concerning truth, moral, and art;
chap. 3: the illusion af a secure foundation of thinking (where Bourdieu
shows the historicity of reason)
chap. 4: the illusions of the subject
chap. 5 (which I haven't read yet): probably the illusions of
intellectual's politics--it is called "Symbolic violence and political
struggle"
chap. 6: the scholastic illusions about time

Much of what is in this book resembles The Logic of Practice/Le Sens
pratique, but the questions are much larger, and Bourdieu sometimes writes
something like a "sociology of history" (in the sense of a "philosophy of
history") which seems very interesting to me, e.g. his account of the
historical differenciation of the fields of symbolic productions and the
economic field (pp. 29-36); and he also goes into more explicit discussion
with e.g. Habermas. All in all very interesting and stimulating; hope
you'll soon get it in English.

Carsten Sestoft


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