Philosophers like to ask: What is thinking? But they never ask what are the necessary social conditions for that particular way of performing the activity of thinking which defines the thinker, he who thinks the nature of thinking (by asking, for example, What is thinking?) or, to put it more simply, the philosopher as he is conceived of in the university, in fashionable circles or in the press? Does what philosophers think, what they can and especially what they cannot think (starting with the social conditions of thinking, of their own thinking and of their social being as thinkers), owe anything to these conditions? Is there any possible way of thinking which would allow one to think the possibility of freedom in relation to these conditions? Perhaps , instead of denying, as if by magic, the limits that every form of thinking owes to its social conditions of production and of operation, one should instead work to deny them in practice on the basis of a critical knowledge of these limits. It is in this way, for example, that the critique of intellectualism and of intellectualocentrism, which prohibits the intellectual from thinking practice as practice, is not in itself the end of this critique: it aims only to provide an orientation for the work required to free the intellectual from those limits that derive from his position as intellectual and, in particular, from all those that have their source in the illusion of intellectual freedom with respect to social conditioning. More precisely, the incapacity of both philosophy and social science to comprehend practice - and more especially a practice as fully and entirely practical as ritual practice -lies in the fact that, just as in Kant reason locates the principle of its judgements not in itself but in the nature of its objects, so the scholarly thinking of practice includes within practice the scholarly relation to practice. This is to say that the critique of intellectualism which is at one and the same time epistemological and sociological, is not just one moment in a social polemic leading to the relativization of all intellectual production, but is rather the most radical form of a critique of theoretical reason, which aims at grasping, in order to transcend them, the limits inherent in all scholarly knowledge. --Pierre Bourdieu The philosophical institution
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 19:09:58 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015