| Popis: |
The essay offers a comparative discussion of Wittgenstein and Pierre Bourdieu on the themes of ‘second nature’ and habitus. It seeks to distinguish something commendable in Bourdieu, namely the project of using sociological enquiry to facilitate social critique, from certain hyperbolical views about the bodily as distinct from mental nature of some of his key theoretical categories. An insight common to both Wittgenstein and Bourdieu—and deployed also in recent neo-Aristotelian ethics—is that of the grounding of rule-governed, socially informed activity in our ‘natural history’ or in the life of the body. This essay, however, warns against encumbering a valuable emancipatory project—here, the empirical study of damaging processes of social determination—with the questionable idea of a ‘logic of practice’, meaning a kind of normativity ‘below the level’ of intentional action and of our ordinary deployment of concepts. |
