SubStance

SubStance 29.3 (2000) 68-83

Habitus, Intentionality, and Social Rules:
A Controversy between Searle and Bourdieu

Gunter Gebauer

Bourdieu's sociology contains many concepts and terms that could play a significant role for philosophy. University philosophers are hardly inclined, of course, to accept suggestions from other disciplines, in particular when they carry the scent of empirical research in the everyday world. Their interest lies--apart from a few exceptions, such as Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and Charles Taylor--beyond the sensory world, directed instead toward the world of pure thought. The mind has no smell; it avoids contact with the corporeal. When philosophers describe society, it is transformed into a product of thought. The absence of sensuality lends intellectual rigor and consistency to their attempts, inasmuch as they trace social structures back to logical ones. In this way philosophy can achieve, at best, clarifications of concepts from which sociology can also benefit. However, this advantage is always obtained at a high price: intellectual construction ignores everything that constitutes society--social practice, power, actions of social agents, their habitus, their position, strategies, and the internal complexities of society itself.

The weaknesses and advantages inherent in a logical reconstruction of social processes can be studied in John R. Searle's The Construction of the Social World (1995). Through a critical confrontation of these strengths and weaknesses with Pierre Bourdieu's theory, it becomes clear how this theory actually contributes to a philosophy of society. Searle's publication is the logical continuation of his work on construction, which spans several decades. It leads from his theory of the speech act, via the concept of intentionality, to the "rediscovery of the mind," finally arriving at an "ontology of social facts." ¹ Bourdieu's starting points are his cultural-anthropological field research, and empirical sociological studies of traditional and modern societies. In these works, he develops a theory of social action and of a society characterized by power structures. ² Searle transfers an entire field out of the empiricism of sociology into the philosophy of mind, and submits it to an ontological model of hierarchical levels of reality. Bourdieu's aim has long been to dissociate the concept of the social agent from the philosophy of mind. Both Bourdieu and Searle invest a wealth of ideas in their attempt to reorder the respectively opposing discipline [End Page 68] through approaches, theories, and instruments they have developed. First I will briefly outline Searle's assumptions on the construction of social reality, which I will then confront with Bourdieu's model for the construction of the social agent and society from social practice.

Searle's Model for a Unified Material and Social Ontology

The basis of Searle's argument is his assumption of an external reality: there is a world of objects which, as "brute facts," are independent of humans. As a second category, Searle introduces "social facts," which are dependent on humans. In contrast to brute facts, social facts exist solely because we believe that they exist. Alternatively, he also characterizes them as "institutional" facts, which exist "only by virtue of collective agreement or acceptance" (Searle 1995, 39). Social reality is constructed on the foundation of pre-social facts, with the aid of belief. Searle assumes a continuous transition from "an ontology of biology to an ontology that includes cultural and institutional forms" (ibid., 227).

The conscious acts of believing, from which society originates, are known as "intentional acts" in Searle's terminology. Their intentional structure is produced with the aid of language and its ability to symbolize and represent social facts. Language is "the condition of possibility of the creation of all human institutions" (ibid., 75). It generates social facts through speech acts, in particular through declarations. In his earlier works, Searle had considered individual intentionality exclusively; for the creation of social facts, however, this is not sufficient. The linguistic act of creating institutions from brute facts is achieved through "collective intentionality," a "social self-consciousness." Searle understands this as a particular category that has no social origin itself; he considers...