This piece is about a relatively new Epistemology and (eventually) the role of habitus in the day-to-day acquisition of knowledge and living life. It will be revised and corrected over the coming days and months. Therefore, you should check in when you have time to reread it and follow along.

We are all very comfortable with the idea that, if something is not an "objective" fact, then it is a "subjective" fact or, to use a more precise word, an opinion. Nevertheless, we are aware in our bones, so to speak, that "objective" facts can only be known to us as individuals through the frames and lenses of our individual minds, that is, "subjectively." So, what do we mean by objective and objectivity? After all we believe that certain things and ideas are objectively true.

What we mean by "subjectivity" is that any idea a person has exists in a human mind rather than in the external world, which, after all, we understand subjectively, which means through the extremely complex matrix of our own personal experiences, dreams, feelings, tastes, and opinions. Subjectivity means "alloyed" with and by the idiosyncracies of individual human minds.

So this line of thinking reminds us of Plato and Forms, by which he argued that he had solved the problem of subjectivity, especially since he could achieve unanimous agreement among all his students and friends that an ideal circle or sphere were truly what we think they are because we agree on the definition, but that, although real circles and spheres might very slightly oblate or have craters, etc., in practice, they nevertheless sufficiently approach the Ideal Form that we can use those words: "circle" and "sphere." In this way we wiggled our way over the millennia into the belief that perfect consensus is a good enough characteristic of "objective" ideas, especially since we mostly stopped imagining that God created these Forms, but rather that our very large consensuses accomplish that, consensuses which, by the way, can be completely fictional or mistaken, especially in theology and politics.

This essay is being written to suggest that the world or reality might be better understood without the two categories: objective and subjective. Or, at least as thinking citizens, who do not wish to overturn our own pragmatic epistemologies and worldviews, we should subscribe to a form of understanding the world with fewer inherently self-contradictory concepts! After all, we are quietly aware that formal logics fail to describe or explain so much of human behavior, and more importantly that humanity's historical behaviors, so far, reflect the fact that at different scales we disagree about nearly everything, and (perhaps) that Agreement is the lesser or rarer outcome of all. And that we go to bloody, destructive war over differences of opinion quite regularly.

What we are up to at this point is the introduction of a new, modern, (and unlikely to succeed very soon) philosophy, an epistemology, a study of how we know anything. There will be no pop-quizzes, midterms, or comprehensive examinations here, BUT since Iron Mountain is a public place, I have to give due credit, as the college of all us thinkers usually requests, for ideas that were unknown or alien to me, the essayist, and so I will begin in the most difficult piece of philosophy I have ever encountered, put into English without commas, "translated" from the French by Richard Nice [ 😏 ], the work Outline of a Theory of Practice by Pierre Bourdieu, Cambridge University Press, 1977-1990, original in 1972. The translator's Forward is only two pages long and ends with this paragraph to give you the gist and topography

The fact remains that a text which seeks to break out of a scheme of thought as deeply embedded as the opposition between subjectivism and objectivism is fated to be perceived through the [very] categories which it seeks to transcend, and to appear contradictory or eclectic (except when forcibly reduced to one or the other alternative). The provisional eclecticism which can juxtapose Wittgenstein^* with the young Marx^** finds its justification in the fact that all the resources of a tradition which from the beginning has [very unfortunately] made practice the negative obverse of theory are needed in order to think the unthinkable. [Emphases and italics added.]

^{* — Wittgenstein explained that “every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the world. It is the object for which the word stands.” In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein shifted his thinking, no longer believing that language had a fixed structure that mirrored the structure of reality. Whereas,}

^{** — What Bourdieu or his translator may mean about pre-1845 Marx is that he was thinking about alienation and social relations, taking precedence over individual "consciousness." In other words, both were becoming relativists, as Bourdieu was. NOTE: Lots of people reject Marx out of hand, but the history is that Marx's ideas have penetrated the thinking of many who ironically refer to themselves as "we Marxists," meaning that they have taken his ideas into respectful consideration and, believing in Aristotelian dialectics, arrive at their own at syntheses that contain the necessary critique of Marx's thinking and rejection of his politics.}

This all of this means is that you need to have a car, get into its driver's seat, and put your feet on the pedals in order to learn how to use a stick shift. You need to adopt Bourdieu's epistemology in order to understand it, because your language is tailored to the epistemology his replaces. It is a little like being a Episcopal Methodist and becoming a Buddhist. Not only the means, but the ends are different.

Yes. Well, we, at least I, am off on a ride likely to scramble brains now approaching the midpoint of their ninth decade. Yet, at last!, I am convinced by the former President of my country that, if he can and did fathom the heretofore illogic of ingratiating himself to Christian Fundamentalist Evangelists by saying "grab 'em by the [you know what]," then so can I [fathom it]!

Philosopher and Sociologist Bourdieu, well into his treatise on Practice, writes

Unlike scientific estimations, which are corrected after each experiment in accordance with rigorous rules of calculation, practical^* estimates give disproportionate weight to early experiences: the structures characteristic of a determinate type of conditions of existence, through the economic and social necessity which they bring to bear on the relatively autonomous universe of family relationships, or more precisely, through the mediation of the specifically familial manifestations of this external necessity (sexual divison of labour, domestic morality, cares, strife, tastes, etc.), produce the structures of the habitus which become in turn the basis of perception and appreciation of all experience. (p.75)

^* This is not the conventional "practical," meaning "useful" and "effective." It is Bourdieu's replacement term for both of the terms "objective" and "subjective." It means "arrived at or understood for having been acquired by action, practice, ... by which he means that everything we know happens that way.

I believe Bourdieu is saying that "early experiences" (of children) within the autonomous, if not exactly unique, environment of the family setting, which, by the way, are of several types, each with (or without) characteristic resources and other "conditions of existence," especially considering the economic and social consequences brought to bear on the whole situation, for example, "sexual divison of labour, domestic morality, cares, strife, tastes, etc.," produce the meaning-laden architecture of the HABITUS, and that these structures of HABITUS are the basis of frames for, lenses through which we perceive and appreciate or process all experience. OR, in many fewer words:

The habitus is created very early in life and consists of frames of reference, each related to fundamental personal (individual) understandings of how the principal and other economic and social relationships within families are practiced and realized. It evolves and soon includes understandings of public mores and, of course, politics.

Then Bourdieu says

The habitus, the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations, produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands ... in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus.

Which I believe is better said now as

The habitus, evolving under disproportionate influence of early experience, thus acquiring durability by rekindling of engrams, conditions, modulates, or inflects relevant cognition and behaviors (practices) according to the content of the habitus structural elements, and by that behavior slowly amends and reenforces itself, where relevance is established by re-cognition of the conditions in which the habitus structures were created and reenforced.

By now we have a concept, habitus, that establishes and explains default understandings of regularly occurring situations in the world, but at cognitive levels deeply connected to, but extending into the public beyond personality, affect, and worldviews, where emotions act to emphasize and promote associated practices and behaviors. Habitus are mostly shareable, where as personality is not. In Bourdieu, practice is where the truth is, where mental expectations are met or not or new perceptions are acquired. We live moment to moment, but certifying what we have already learned, making some notions less provisional and others more.

As a survival system practice and the habitus created is efficacious, because we live in the present and our brains are evolved for moment to moment experience, and fast enough to make some mid-course corrections ... most of the time. As an artifact of practice, habitus is what it is, a default instruction set for the next moment.

JB

Frames