Pascalian Meditations

by Pierre Bourdieu

. 2000, bright clean copy, occasional neat margin notation on a couple of pages, Professional booksellers since 1981

Genres: Philosophy, Sociology, Nonfiction, Theory, Social Science, Cultural, France

1000 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.

Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is sort of a ‘why I’m not a Marxist’ explanation from Bourdieu. He warns you right at the start that this is what this is going to be. I’m going to quote that now – from pages one and two:

“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.”

Now, I guess most of us are aware of Blaise Pascal’s meditations from the modern atheists. And mostly that amounts to Pascal’s wager – the idea that we can’t know with any certainty whether god exists or not, and since the consequences to us of our believing in god and him not existing are so slight, and the consequence of not-believing and him existing are so terrible (an infinity of endless torment and torture) then that should mean we should just believe.

I’ve generally thought this was a pretty silly idea – I’m no more able to ‘just believe’ in the absurdity that I take religions to be than I would be able to ‘just believe’ I could fly, even if I can recognise the remarkable benefits that would be mine if I could ‘just believe’ such a thing. But Pascal’s advice is a bit more subtle than this, and it is this subtlety that Bourdieu is most interested in. A lot of atheists criticise Pascal’s wager on the basis that surely god would know we don't really believe, so, what is it that you think you are achieving with this bet? But Pascal knows something the atheists didn’t seem to see. That is, that ‘pretending’ to be something is very often the first step to actually becoming that thing. That he didn’t just expect you to make this wager and say, “okay, I will pretend to believe”, but rather, to say instead “I will act as if I believe”. And Pascal knew that acting as if you believe will very soon mean you actually will believe.

As I said at the start, in many ways this book is a response to Marxism. But what might be called the idealist side of Marxism. That is, how Marxists answer the question about just why there has been such a delay in the revolution. If capitalism is so bad, and it is clear that it is so bad to so many people (inequality is rising, we produce crap no one needs at remarkable costs to the planet - and even our possible survival on this planet) then why do people go out of their way to support a system that is so decidedly opposed to both their immediate and long term interests?

The standard Marxist response has been to rely some notion of ‘false consciousness’. The media in particular is so heavily dominated by the interests of the capitalist class that it spends virtually all of its time both distracting people from their own true interests and in making the interests of the ruling class seem completely normal. Really, there is very little question that there is something to this – it is hard to watch television and not be struck by how much all aspects of it reinforce the existing order. My current favourite example is police dramas. There is a murder, it is messy and confusing, it provides us a glimpse of a world that isn’t organised as ours currently is – that is, a world of chaos and disorder – and then the powers of our current social order step in and bring, by the end of the show, order and stability once again. That these messages are deeply ideological is hardly obscure – it isn’t even clear that these messages are meant to be ‘hidden’ in any sense. They are presented as simple ‘common sense’. And this ‘common sense’ stresses the importance of maintaining the existing social order.

Bourdieu stresses that the mistake the Marxists made was to assume that this was a problem with ‘consciousness’. You see, if it is just ‘false consciousness’ then the solution is to ‘correct’ this consciousness. The revolutionary task, then, is to try to explain to people why their interests are not the same as those of the ruling class. This ‘consciousness raising’ ought to be enough to help to provoke some sort of revolution – as when people realise they have effectively been lied to, and lied to in a way that allowed them to be exploited and to even be complicit in their own exploitation, well, surely then they will turn the world inside out.

Bourdieu makes it clear (through his notion of ‘symbolic violence’ in part) that this is rarely the case and that it is tackling the problem from the wrong end. The problem isn’t so much that people ‘don’t know’ they are being hard done by the system – people are more than willing to say this is the case. The problem is that, on some level, they also believe that they deserve the treatment they receive. The point being that the system doesn’t just spin ideological lies, but it also creates habits, dispositions and tastes that are matched for and suited to certain social positions within society. These tastes and dispositions aren’t just ‘ideas’ we acquire over our lifetimes, rather they become literally embodied in us. They are told in the ways we walk, or stand, or ‘hold ourselves’. We only become aware of these habitual ways of being when we try to become someone we were not ‘born to be’ as it were. The ‘first in family’ student to finish a university degree and get a job in a middle class occupation, for example. Here there are ‘ways of being’ that are fundamentally different from how their previous family life prepared them. They will be engaging, in this new life, with people to whom such ‘ways of being’ are not only automatic, but also assumed as ‘natural’ – that is, the only ways in which such things should (or even can) be done. What is natural to everyone around this person only comes at the cost of constant self-surveillance and the risk of ‘false steps’ that will give the game away to the person adopting these habits. What one has ‘lived’ all one’s life, naturally, comes easier than something one has only just learnt and so still needs to ‘perform’.

This is, in fact, something Pascal discusses quite extensively – and hence why Bourdieu aligns himself with Pascal. For Pascal a large part of being human isn’t about being ‘rational’. If we were to be ‘rational’ all of the time we would never really be able to function in society. Weighing all of the alternatives is impossible if we are to get on with living. We need to act, for a large part of the time, as if we were automatons. This sounds terrible, but it is also relatively obvious too. Perhaps the best example is in driving – we only need to ‘think’ about driving when we can’t do it properly or we are in a situation were we feel uncomfortable. The rest of the time we respond on remote control – and that is a good thing. There is an amusing test where they ask people who drive to sit in front of a camera and, as realistically as possible, to hold their hands up as if there was a steering wheel in front of them and to indicate, and then to change lanes. What the researchers did was to use how much these subjects moved their hands on the pretend steering wheel - they then showed what would happen if they had been driving a car. It wasn’t pretty. Basically, people massively ‘over-drive’ when they are not actually driving. And yet, if you do drive, you would have changed lanes endless times. The problem is in thinking about what is actually ‘automatic’, thinking about what you never think about.

For Bourdieu this is why ‘consciousness raising’ is never enough. People from lower social classes have been habituated to ‘know’ they lack the merit of the ruling classes – and the ruling classes have been habituated to know the same thing. No one just plays at this game – they have lived it, they have stakes in the game, there is no ‘disinterested’ position where we can see the game as just a game. All that there is that makes any sense at all is the game and our position in that game. The seemingly arbitrary rules that go with the game – like the difficulties of English spelling – are designed to be hard to learn, because then ‘knowing’ those rules shows distinction and social rank. Not knowing them is a constant potential source of shame, and a perfect means to ‘put someone back in their place’.

It is, I think, for this reason that so many of Bourdieu’s works discuss ‘theories of practice’. Here practice is the key term. If you want to change society you need to understand what it is that people do as automatons, what they do as reflex and unthinkingly. It is only when you are armed with this knowledge that you might have a hope of being able to disrupt those automatic practices in such a way that might allow new habits to form. It isn’t that ‘consciousness raising’ isn’t important or should be ignored, but rather that this could never be enough on its own. People need to live these new habits for them to become part of their lived experience and to have any hope of overturning the ready-made habits of a lifetime – habits structured by how they have lived their lives and therefore so much more difficult to brush aside or to change.

I think this is part of the reason why Bourdieu is often criticised for being fatalistic or an extreme determinist. But I think his point is to stress just how difficult social change, fundamental social change, that is, really is. It is also why explaining to someone from the deep South of the US that Obama care is actually in their interests – that having health insurance is very much in their interests if they are to get sick – doesn’t seem to wash with them. The problem is that the distaste for socialism has become so much a part of their cultural way of being, that triggering that response doesn’t allow them to consider whose interests a proposal is in – rather it triggers their disgust response – something emotional, rather than rational.

There is much more to this book that there is to this review – but I really do find this stuff (the idea that people have dispositions they rarely even know about, and yet that structure how they will respond to life’s situations) utterly fascinating. I’ve even started reading Pascal’s ‘Pensées’.

[nat · Rating 5 out of 5]

My bible.

[beyza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bourdieu's late work is quite difficult to read due to its elitist academic language, but we can witness almost all of his concepts and critiques within it (and on the one hand, have a feminist perspective). In this respect, I consider it an incredible piece of work.
We see that he criticizes the phenomenon of highly capable individuals confining themselves to institutions or libraries, thereby adding another one to the capitalist wheel. He believes that a scientist should also have enough intellectual background to make original statements about philosophy. However, such an acquisition also requires thinking—and consequently, leisure time. Yet, the subject is so preoccupied with writing reports, meeting article deadlines, and immersing in readings that leisure time, unfortunately, becomes somewhat enigmatic.
At this point, we can mention the necessity of a "sabbatical leave" (or something like that) for everyone in academia.

[Adam84 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Je tomu už nějaký ten pátek, co mi naposledy kniha od Bourdieua prošla rukama. "Ale číst Bourdieua je jako jízda na kole, to se přece nezapomíná", jsem si pomyslel... no není tomu úplně tak , s takovou bych se na tom kole do provozu raději nepouštěl.
A protože jsem již delší dobu nějaký ten obtížnější sociologický/filozofický text nečetl, byl jsem nucen pro mnohý odborný termín sáhnout hodně hluboko do paměti a to trochu "bolelo" .

Ve výsledku tedy byla tahle kniha pro mne kritikou hned dvojí. Kritikou rozumu scholastického, kterou Bourdieu zvládl s intelektuálním odstupem sociologa/filozofa sobě vlastním, a kritikou rozumu mého, který jsem já sám, ze svého scholé, byl nucen uznat za podmíněný spíše nedostatkem odbornosti, než přehnaným intelektualismem.

[Jan D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interessant, wenn auch etwas unorganisiert. Hätte großartige Zitate wenn sie nicht von mehrfach geschachtelten Einschüben unterbrochen wären; das Verb hängt natürlich ganz hinten. Daher nicht so angenehm zu lesen, es braucht oft einen Stift und/oder lautes Lesen um herauszufinden wie alles zusammenhängt.