Pascalian Meditations - Tapa dura

In this major work, Bourdieu pushes the critique of scholastic reason to a point which most questionings leave untouched, making explicit the presuppositions entailed by the situation of skhole, the free time, liberated from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to the world. And it is philosophers who, not content with engaging these presuppositions in their practice, have brought them into the order of discourse, not so much to analyse them as to legitimate them. This critique of scholastic reason can be made in the name of Pascal because his thought expressed the features of human existence which the scholastic outlook ignores - his concern with symbolic power, his refusal of the ambition of foundation, his attention, devoid of all populist naivety, to 'ordinary people' and his determination to seek the raison d'etre of the seemingly most illogical behaviour rather than condemning or mocking it. Through this Pascalian critique, Bourdieu charts a negative philosophy which calls into question our most fundamental presuppositions and renews the traditional interrogation of violence, power, time, history, the universal and even the purpose and direction of existence, with a debt to the heretical philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Austin, Dewey and Peirce.

Pierre Bourdieu is Professor of Sociology at the College de France and Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.