Keywords

Introduction

All direct quotes in this article that do not specifically refer to English-language publications were translated by the authors themselves.

Dietrich Benner’s General Pedagogy, published in 2015 in its eighth revised edition, offers a systematic view of the relationships between pedagogical thinking and acting. The coherence and consistency of his argumentation are still evident more than 30 years after its first publication in 1987, and it represents a convincing attempt to articulate what could be considered the systematic core of pedagogy. Benner’s intention is both to determine the distinct logic of pedagogical practice without seeking it out in non-pedagogical settings and attributions and to consider and problematize the interplay between pedagogical practice and pedagogical theory. Benner thus fills an old desideratum of pedagogical or educational science (Erziehungswissenschaft) since Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and Herbart – something that current contributions in the field of general pedagogy are no longer able or willing to do in this way (cf. Rieger-Ladich, 2020; Thompson, 2020). By emphasizing the non-hierarchicality of social practices, he made a strong case for an inherently pedagogical and educational approach to human praxis. The fundamental questions and problems of general pedagogy raised by Benner are still highly relevant, as the thematically various and international contributions to this volume of essays show.

In our contribution, we aim to question Benner’s approach with regard to its presuppositions and foundational principles and to explore possibilities for expanding it from a phenomenological, practice-theoretical, and social-theoretical perspective. This expansion also means to problematize the underlying fundamental dualism between socialization, habit, and affirmation on the one hand, and Bildung, transformation, and cognitive reflection on the other, along with the model of a rational subject.

This problematization is carried out with the goal of rehabilitating life-world habitual and doxic experiences in their significance to the theory of Bildung. This is accomplished in two steps. First, with Egon Schütz, Edmund Husserl, and Eugen Fink, we provide a phenomenological perspective on the foundations and the modes of operation of the judgment. With Schütz, it is possible to detach judgment and thus Bildung and self-activity (Selbsttätigkeit) from the logocentric fixation on knowledge, truth, and generality. By including the pre-predicative and doxic dimensions of judgment, habits and opinions can be pointed out as the foundation and as the functional mode of judgment. Bildung thus becomes describable as a formation of opinions (Meinungsbildung) (cf. Schütz, 1975). The sociality of opinion as judgment is then extended in the second step with Pierre Bourdieu from a social-theoretical perspective. For this, we work out the habitualized doxa as the primary, judging approach to the world. We thus determine the pre-predicative judgment as a mode of the habitus and show that habitual dispositions transmitted through social practices are the basis of the experience of the world. In this way, habit, routine, and habitus can be taken out of the dual of mere affirmation and transformation that underlies Benner’s theory. The phenomenological and practice-theoretical considerations make it possible to bring into view both the life-world and bodily dimensions of pedagogical practice, as well as the dimensions of power, social inequality, distinction, and privilege, and capture them in their significance for the processes of Bildung.

Non-affirmative Education and Bildung in Dietrich Benner’s Work

We would first like to outline the basic ideas of Dietrich Benner’s non-affirmative theory of education (Erziehung)Footnote 1 and Bildung. In Benner’s understanding, these two theoretical approaches are closely related, insofar as non-affirmative education always implies a ‘way of acting pedagogically’ (Benner, 2015, p. 155) that is openly directed at a summoning to self-activity (Aufforderung zur Selbsttätigkeit) on the part of the educand. This summoning to self-activity is rooted in the idea of the fundamental Bildsamkeit or perfectibility (Rousseau) of the human being. In this sense, non-affirmative education intentionally aims at non-affirmative Bildung, understood as the ‘transformational work of the human being on his or her determinationFootnote 2‘(Benner, 2015, p. 167). It becomes clear that Benner is interested in grasping the basic structures of pedagogical thinking and acting in their systematic and problem-historical relation to one another, as is also stated in the subtitle of his General Pedagogy (Allgemeine Pädagogik).Footnote 3 Benner’s non-affirmative theory of education is complemented by a non-affirmative theory of educational institutions, which we will only mention here briefly.

The pair of concepts of affirmative and non-affirmative opens up a field of tension in Benner’s theory of pedagogical thinking and acting. Affirmative, understood as positive approval, can refer to different aspects in the context of theories and practices of education. Benner’s primary interest in this regard is the ‘basic questions underlying an idea of education that does not seek to educate future generations either to affirm an existing order or to recognize an order conceived of by educators’ (Benner, Chap. 2, this volume, p. 5). The goal of education, as Benner puts it is that the educand, i.e., the young people who are to be educated, ‘enter educational processes (Bildungsprozesse) that have not been directed by education (Erziehung)’ (ibid., p. 4). In other words, ‘young people were not to be educated to affirm existing conditions or to affirm pedagogical actors as representatives of anticipated conditions but must be enabled to participate in discourses on what is to be preserved and what is to be changed’ (ibid., p. 5). A central argument for affirmative education put forward by Benner is ‘that every rising generation is educated in a historically given social reality that first demands recognition and that has to be acknowledged before it can be examined with regard to the possibility of change and called into question on the basis of arguments’ (Benner, 2015, p. 146). Education in this sense, then, is meant to result in the conservative preservation of the status quo, that is, of established norms, traditional values, and existing social and political conditions. A second affirmative position is that of an education that is directed towards a future that is anticipated by the educating person in the form of a ‘vicariously anticipated positivity […] that is to serve […] as a normative guideline for pedagogical action’ (Benner, 2015, p. 147).

Benner attests to both positions that they start from an ‘instrumental understanding of pedagogical practice’ and consider education as a ‘means to transmit or change given positivities’ (ibid.). Accordingly, in both positions, education only represents the ‘executive’ that imposes ‘non-pedagogical demands on pedagogical practice’ (ibid.) and thus disregards the regulative principle of a ‘pedagogical transformation of societal influences and requirements’ (Benner, Chap. 2, this volume, p. 12), meaning the transfer of societal influences on pedagogical processes into pedagogically legitimate ones. Moreover, affirmative education disregards the constitutive principle of summoning to self-activity and thus makes transformation impossible.

A non-affirmative theory of education, on the other hand, strives to orient ‘the intentionality of pedagogical action on the principle of the summoning to self-activity and the functionality of social influences under the idea of their pedagogical transformation’ (Benner, 2015, p. 148). Pedagogical practice thus appears not as a mere executive of non-pedagogical demands, but in its ‘impact on learning processes’ (ibid.) of those to be educated. The core question of non-affirmative pedagogical interactions that Benner subsequently articulates is ‘how adolescents, without simply being assigned responsibility for the consequential effects of their socialization, can be encouraged to engage in self-activity in such a way that their future destiny does not emerge as a direct result of their socialization but is instead mediated through the reflection of such socialization’ (Benner, 2015, p. 149). An adequate theory of education, one may conclude here, is one ‘that understand[s] educative influences as the promotion of self-reflection, self-judgment, and self-action and link[s] them back to pedagogical transformations of external demands on education’ (Benner, Chap. 2, this volume, p. 15).

Benner understands Bildung as a ‘human-world-relationship’, understood as an ‘interplay between the self and the world […], in which the human being determines himself in engagement with the world’ (Benner, 2015, p. 162). In this way, he follows both Humboldt’s theory of Bildung as well as Rousseau’s ideas of perfectibility and the Bildsamkeit of the human being. Bildung is to be understood in two ways. It encompasses an ‘individual side of human Bildung and pedagogical interaction’ and ‘seeks to align it with the task of transforming indeterminate Bildsamkeit into experimental, self-chosen determinations in distinction from affirmative educational concepts that take the word of an unconditional recognition of subjectivity’ (Benner, 2015, pp. 170 f.). Furthermore, the ‘social side of Bildung’ determines it ‘in contrast to affirmative pedagogies of culture as that of a transformational activity of culture referring to all areas of human activity, for which, just as for individual Bildsamkeit, there is not and cannot be a well-founded, universally valid ideal of Bildung’ (ibid.). Thus, it can be summarized that a theory of Bildung aligns the tasks of educatively supported processes of Bildung ‘with regard to the concept of indeterminate Bildsamkeit and the nonhierarchical relationship between pedagogical practice and other forms of practice’ (Benner, Chap. 2, this volume, p. 15).

Bildung as the Formation of Opinions (Meinungsbildung)

In the following, we will problematize Benner’s theses and the presuppositions that underlie his approach. We ask under what conditions, presuppositions, and with which figures of legitimization and justification Benner operates. Transformative Bildung is defined by Benner, as outlined above, as thinking, judging, and acting for oneself.Footnote 4 Self-activity as a key principle of Bildsamkeit is thus linked to operations of judgment and critique that are founded on reason. Reasonable judgments, in turn, are based on the knowledge that can be derived and legitimized in a rational and cognitive way. In a certain way, it can be said that the subject of Bildung is first and foremost constituted through this. The subject of Bildung, and thus modern, non-affirmative Bildung itself, is founded and legitimized – historically and systematically – in a judging, reflexive-critical transition from socialization to Bildung. According to Benner, the duality of socialization and Bildung is the basis of both the Bildungs-theoretical core question of non-affirmative interactions and the principle of self-activity, as well as the development and legitimization of a modern, public educational system. The subjective and societal fundaments of modern Bildung and education are thus based on a fundamental dualism and on the model of a rational subject that establishes a humane ‘order of things’ (Foucault, 2009) through rational judgments that legitimize and universalize the knowledge therein.

With the aim of a foundational-theoretical clarification and a social-theoretical extension, we will ask about the basic principles and preconditions of this approach. The dualism between socialization on the one hand and Bildung, on the other hand, will be questioned by this social-theoretical extension to also rehabilitate habitual and doxic experiences in terms of a theory of Bildung.

Bildung as the formation of opinions is a central topic in Egon Schütz’s philosophical, existential-critical phenomenology and theory of Bildung. In his habilitation, ‘Freedom and Destiny. Reflections on the Problem of Bildung from the Perspective of a Theory of Meaning’ (Freiheit und Bestimmung. Sinntheoretische Reflexionen zum Bildungsproblem) (Schütz, 1975) and in many of his seminar and lecture writings,Footnote 5 Schütz pursues a critical archaeology and a deconstructive genealogy of the metaphysical presuppositions of pedagogy and of the theory of Bildung. His starting point is the life-world experience in relation to the world and to fellow human beings, which, in its existential significance and event character, asserts itself against scientific, theoretical, medial, and political ‘disguises’ (Heidegger) and distortions. The outline of an ‘existential-critical pedagogy’ (Schütz, 2017) understands Bildung as a praxis against the background of anthropology that draws on Heidegger and Fink, according to which the human being as an ‘existing relation of truth, world, and being’ (ibid.) has to act and fail in cultural praxes. Like Benner, Schütz uses Eugen Fink’s six dimensions of praxis as a systematic framework: love, work, play, and aesthetics, power and politics, as well as finitude and education (cf. Fink, 1995, 1970, 2018). Unlike Benner, however, he understands these not in a praxeological way, but with Fink and Heidegger as dimensions of being in which ontological experiences of crisis, failure, wonder, and transformation can occur.Footnote 6

Schütz begins his reflections on the formation of opinions with a metaphysic-critical deconstruction of the European presuppositions of judgment.Footnote 7 He shows that Bildung in the European tradition is committed to knowledge and knowledge-adequate truth, assuming an elementary dichotomy of knowledge and opinion (doxa). Opinion as holding-true (Für-wahr-halten) is thus not capable of truthness; Bildung as the formation of opinions would be an ‘impossibility’ (Schütz, 1990/1991, p. 3). This tradition-rich opposition of knowledge and opinion is reconstructed and deconstructed by Kant and Plato. In a close reading of Kant, Schütz demonstrates that, first, the significance of opinion is connected to the question of the validity and truth of a judgment, and, second, that in it the reasoning subject with its subsuming power of judgment accounts for the certitude of the judgment. Third, he shows that holding-true (Für-wahr-halten) means the explicit reference of a judgment back to a subject and, in the relationship of judgment, the validation of the judgment considered to be true. Kant distinguishes three hierarchically ascending forms of validity in judgment according to their level of reasonability and legitimacy: judgment of opinion, the judgment of belief, and judgment of knowledge. Schütz then states with Heidegger:

The guideline of the reconstruction [of opinion, belief, and knowledge, ed.], however, is [the modern model of, ed.] the certainty of knowledge, the ‘certitudo’, in which the moments of the ‘certain’, the ‘agreed’, the ‘undoubted’ resonates in a fundamental way. […] Here, holding true can (and must) put to test its general truthfulness and soundness. Within knowledge, the reason is general and sovereign – sovereign in the fact that it is general. And the sovereignty of the knowing reason consists not least in the fact that it not only knows what can be known, but that it also knows what cannot be known, but may reasonably be left to faith (Schütz, 1990/1991, p. 40).

Against the logocentric delegitimization of Meinen (i.e., of having an opinion) – and thus also of life-world habits and the habitualities based on them – Schütz brings Husserl’s primordial experiential mode of pre-predicative judgment into play. According to Husserl, judgments are already made in the perceptions of the lived body, but not in a logifying mode. Going beyond this, we would like to present this aspect in more detail hereafter (cf. Brinkmann, 2021, pp. 178 f.). Husserl illustrates the life-world, pre-predicative judgment (cf. Husserl, 1975) by the example of color perception: colors are always already ‘apprehended’ (ibid., p. 75) in this kind of perception – as color properties of a certain thing, as colors of a surface with a certain texture, simply as stains on the carpet (cf. ibid.). Objects given in sensory experience are assemblages that can themselves refer to a genesis before they appear in experience. Sensory perceptions are thus based on a pre-predicative judgment that is a basic part of perception and experience, ‘sensory awareness’ (ibid., p. 67). ‘Predicative judgments’ (ibid., p. 21) and logical judgments build on this genetic process of judgment. They are based on lived bodily reflexivity.Footnote 8 Predicative judgments, however, subordinate perception and experience under a different, linguistic, ‘grammatical’ order.

Judging as holding-true (Für-wahr-halten) presupposes, according to Schütz and Heidegger, a difference of things, human beings, and relations, which are responded to in the act of differentiation. Against this backdrop, predicative reasoning can only be considered a specific mode of general, inductive reasoning in perception and experience. It responds to a being-different that is prior to the act of differentiating. Differentiating in judgment is thus based on the being different of things, people, and relations. It is, in the truest sense of the word, an ‘Ur-Teil’, a division of an original whole that makes differentiation possible. Ontological being-different is the condition of the possibility of being able to differentiate as holding-for-true (cf. Schütz 1990/1991, 1996/1997). This ontological difference implies a pre-predicative structure in the self-relationship, an elementary being bent back to oneself of the human being, that already shows itself in the simplest forms of perception up to the experiences of failure, of not-being-able-to, of forgetting, but also in moods and emotions.

If we take judgment as a praxis of human self-relation and as a mode of ‘self-understanding’ (Fink) in the world, then two important conclusions can be drawn: Predicative judgment in the mode of subjectivity and objectivity, of logic and grammar, is, first, only one form of the praxis of differentiating, a praxis that performs and cultivates the cultural and symbolic forms of judgment. Secondly, the epistemological presuppositions of the logical forms of judgment are undermined. Judging no longer means representing the world in the mode of reason, reducing it to terms, or forcing it into a schematism. Instead, judging presupposes the non-representability of human beings and the world.Footnote 9

For Schütz, this results in two consequences: First, a radical doubt of the universality and legitimacy of rational knowledge and the sciences based on it. Schütz demands a radical epoché (bracketing) – phenomenologically speaking – which not only points out the limits of logifying knowledge but also deconstructs it. Only after this epistemic-critical operation can other forms of judgment – lived bodily, religious, and above all aesthetic – gain equal importance. The non-hierarchicality of these forms of judgment emerges – in contrast to Benner’s model – after and with the deconstruction of their metaphysical basic assumptions and can thus only emerge after the deconstruction of its underlying logocentrism and its forms of legitimation. Only through deconstruction can plural forms of judgment actually be thought non-hierarchically, i.e., also non-logocentrically. Secondly, if the opinion is no longer logocentrically placed under the suspicion of untruthfulness and provisionality, then - as Schütz makes clear with an image-theoretical interpretation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave based on Fink - doxic opinion and its different forms of judgment can be understood as ‘image windows’ (Schütz, 1990/1991, p. 79) to the world. After all, according to Schütz, it is in meaning that we make images of the world. With Fink, Schütz differentiates dream images, shadow images, allegorical images, artistic images, and so on. Images are seen as mediums of transcendence, of transcending the doxic, scientific, and representational relations to an embracing whole. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the ascent into the light, an existential relationship is already suggested. For Fink, the image is seen as a medium in which – highly relevant in terms of a theory of Bildung – a relation to oneself, to others, and to the world is expressed, in which this relation is simultaneously revealed on the one hand and concealed on the other. The perspective on the beyond-itself-ness of the image owes itself to an opening for the pre-predicative forms of judgment of opinion (cf. Fink, 2021 [1970]).

The rehabilitation of opinion (doxa) implies at the same time rehabilitation of habit and habitus. Both dimensions are highly relevant in terms of the theory of Bildung and education. They can and must be separated from the dual of Bildung versus socialization. A first indication of this social-theoretical turn is given by Günther Buck in his reconstruction of learning as experience. Buck also critically turns against Kant (cf. Buck, 2019, pp. 215 ff.): If in learning, Bildung, and education ‘everything depends on conscious self-determination’ (Buck, 2019, p. 215), then the socially and societally dimensionalized formation of habits can only be seen as heteronomy, i.e., as a foreign determination (Fremdbestimmung) (cf. ibid.). If one detaches habit formation and habitus from this normative bracket and expands their experience theoretically, it quickly becomes clear: habits and habitus, like all experiences, are based on a life-world horizon and bodily experience. Habit and habitus, as ‘the structures of behavior’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1963), are neither static-determining nor exclusively conservative-preserving structures. They are both structured and, at the same time, structuring structures (cf. Bourdieu, 2015, p. 98 f.). Habits are thus ‘poorly understood if they are not also seen as intelligent skills open to innovation’ (Buck, 2019, p. 217). Bildsamkeit from a phenomenological perspective is not an anthropological capacity of the subject that is directed towards perfectibility, nor is it a mere relational category between processes of Bildung and education (cf. Benner in this volume). Rather, Bildsamkeit can only be understood under the conditions of already experienced doxic, real-world experiences. These experiences are not based on the subject (as the hypokeimenon, the underlying), but rather originate in the social experiences and habits that precede the life-world, including the others in front of whom and with whom educational processes take place (cf. Ricken, 2012).Footnote 10

Doxa and Habitus: Habit and Transformation

We will now revisit the relationship between experience, habit, and habitus and elaborate on it from a social-theoretical point of view with Bourdieu. With Schütz, Fink, and Buck, we have so far tried to clarify the significance of doxic opinion and its underlying pre-predicative judgments in terms of a theory of Bildung. This involves bracketing the logocentric fixation on a reasonable, rational subject. With Bourdieu, it now becomes possible to determine pre-predicative judgments as a mode of the habitus and to interpret them with regard to their social constitution.

For Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the concept of doxa is of fundamental importance. He too distinguishes doxa as an opinion from rational, theoretical knowledge. He considers doxa to be an ensemble of opinions being assumed in a mode of pre-predicative belief.Footnote 11 They, therefore, ‘are accepted as self-evident’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 470) and evolve in ‘ordinary acceptance of the usual order that goes without saying and therefore usually goes unsaid’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 424).Footnote 12 For Bourdieu, the doxic experience as a mode of accessing and approaching the world is of such central importance that he determines it as ‘l’expérience première du monde sociale’ (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 549), that is, as the primary experience of the social world.Footnote 13 Similar to Schütz, Bourdieu also assumes that the doxa emerge through repeated and routinized experiences that result in the incorporation of the objective conditions. Bourdieu highlights the significance of the relation between habit and corporeality, pointing out, with recourse to Pascal, that ‘custom makes all authority’, in other words, that ‘the social order is merely the order of bodies’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 168). Unlike Schütz, Bourdieu does not examine existential self-relations and formative self-understandings, but social and societal relations. Bourdieu is also not interested in the Bildungs-theoretical relevance of formation and the opinion-based ‘image windows’ that we discussed with reference to Fink. He is not initially concerned with Bildung, but with the social dimension of being-in-the-world. This social dimension of judgment and opinion now becomes better understood when the doxa is analyzed in relation to the concept of habitus. This way, the implications of Bourdieu’s approach for a theory of Bildung can be brought to light.

Bourdieu describes the habitus as a system of ‘durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 53). It ‘is constituted in practice’ (ibid., p. 52), more specifically in and through life-world practices and in the experiences that people make within these social practices. The position in the social space, as well as the different circumstances associated with these positionsFootnote 14 have the consequence that people make different experiences under the respective specific social conditions of existence of their growing up and of their lives. The individual habitus is thus largely adapted to the objective conditions under which it developed. The habitualized dispositions that develop from this as a ‘system of schemes of perception, thought, and action’ (Bourdieu, 1974, p. 153) then function ‘as principles that generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor’ (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 53). Habitualized practices are thus specifically not the result of reasonable, rational decisions, as action-theoretical approaches would presuppose. Rather, the habitus represents the ‘principle of practical comprehension’ not through a ‘knowing consciousness’ but through ‘the practical sense of a habitus inhabited by the world it inhabits’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 142). For Bourdieu, the social praxis in which the habitus is established is ‘the site of the dialectic of the opus operatum and the modus operandi’ (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 52), that is, the place where performed practical actions as products or results, on the one hand, and the way they are performed and executed, on the other, come together in a meaningful way. Praxis takes place in the mode of habitualized routines, in which one’s own life circumstances, as well as the experiences that are made and that are potentially possible within them, are understood in their practical logic and meaning: ‘The homogeneity of habitus that is observed within the limits of a class of conditions of existence and social conditionings is what causes practices and works to be immediately intelligible and foreseeable, and hence taken for granted’ (ibid., p. 58).

The habitus can thus be understood as a ‘practical sense’ (‘sense pratique’, is also the original title of Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice), as a sense for the appropriateness and meaning of praxis and its practices. For the most part, this practical sense is not explicitly taught through teaching, instruction, or intentional education, but rather in the mode of an ‘implicit pedagogy’ (ibid., p. 69). Through this non-explicit, often pre-predicative mode, ‘schemes are able to pass directly from practice to practice without moving through discourse and consciousness’ (ibid., p. 74). Bourdieu thus describes an implicit mode of transmission by which the meaning of praxis and the ways of performing practices are practised, exercised, and incorporated in a process of ‘internalization of externality’ (ibid., p. 45). The social praxis in which these experiences are made must be understood as a bodily praxis. It is performed through repeated and repeatable practices that are carried out with the body and whose immanent ‘social sense’ is thereby incorporated and inscribed in the body. In this sense, the habitus is ‘embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history’ (ibid. p. 56); it is ‘the socially made body’ (Bourdieu & Warquant, 1992, p. 127).

The power of habitualized doxa, therefore, lies in the fact that they lead to an unquestioned acceptance of their conditions. Social practices understood in this way, always imply a pre-predicative judgment as well, in that the pre-found objective conditions of the praxis and the way in which the praxis itself is performed provide grounds for the possibility of social distinction, that is, the judgment of legitimate and illegitimate practices in their respective ‘subtle differences’.Footnote 15 The life-world and routinized praxis thus become palpable in its judging dimension. In addition to the dispositions of perceiving, thinking, and acting, Bourdieu also writes elsewhere of dispositions of ‘appréciation’ (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 204), that is, of evaluation or judgment. The ensemble of dispositions would thus have to be expanded, on the one hand, by the dimension of judgment. On the other hand, it becomes clear that in Bourdieu‘s perspective, comparable to Husserl’s primordial experiential mode of pre-predicative judgment, every perception, thought, and action already implies certain pre-predicative judgments. Social judgments are constantly made in the habitual mode: the habitus judges the appropriateness and legitimacy of people’s subjective perceptions, their own experiences, the expressions they make, the objective conditions to which they are exposed, as well as the practices of others. Framed in this way, following our discussion of Schütz, the habitus can also be understood as an implicit opinion that becomes explicit in social practices. These judgments are thus expressed not only, or even predominantly, in theoretical and explicit judgments, e.g., in a political opinion, but primarily in very practical terms in the subtle distinctions of life-world praxis, for example, of eating or dressing.Footnote 16 The habitus as a kind of practical opinion thus fundamentally implies a doxic, pre-predicative, implicit, and embodied mode of judgment. This way, Bourdieu criticizes a one-sided focus on logical forms of judgment and rational knowledge and, like Husserl and Schütz, rehabilitates lived-bodily and social modes of judgment as a way of accessing and relating to the world.

According to Benner’s understanding, the genesis of the habitus and its modes of functioning described up to this point fall into the realm of affirmative socialization. According to Benner, however, it is the responsibility and characteristic of pedagogical praxis to transcend the socializing influences on adolescents. Thus, for Benner, the habitualized doxa only become relevant in terms of a theory of Bildung when they are explicitly and cognitively responded to. Only then a transformation of the existing relationship between the self and the world can occur. This transformational moment is determined both as a normative goal of pedagogical processes and as a constitutive characteristic for practices to be recognized as pedagogical practices at all. In this way, Benner can define education as a summoning to self-activity, that is, as a call to critically and explicitly evaluate one’s own experiences of socialization and to relate to them reflexively in order to give oneself one’s own purpose in engagement with the world. A perspective on a theory of Bildung conceived in such a way would only allow us to think of Bildung as an interruption, a transgression, or a transformation of the habitus.Footnote 17 We would now like to conclude, however, by showing that routines, habits, doxa, change, transformation, and Bildung are not categorically mutually exclusive, and that, in fact, repetitions can also be characteristic of experiences and processes of Bildung (cf. Brinkmann, 2017).Footnote 18 Following Schütz and Bourdieu, we thus try to show that both perspectives are enclosed in the formation of opinions and in the habitus.

Bourdieu’s ‘emphasis on the stability of the social’ (Schäfer, 2016, p. 137) earned him strong criticism, which repeatedly focuses on the ‘assumed persistence of incorporated schemes of perception, thought, and action’ (Schäfer, 2016, p. 139) (cf. Liebau, 2009; Rieger-Ladich, 2004, 2005). Reading Bourdieu himself, it becomes clear that he does not understand and does not want habitus to be understood as deterministic. The most fundamental differentiation, that already makes this distinction apparent, is that he speaks of dispositions. Bourdieu writes that the habitus functions ‘not along the paths of a mechanical determinism, but within the constraints and limits initially set on its inventions’ (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 55). He notes that ‘habitus is difficult to understand only so long as one remains locked in the usual antinomies – which the concept of the habitus aims to transcend – of determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity, consciousness and the unconscious, or the individual and society’ (ibid., p. 55). Thus, habitus is not deterministic; rather, it is characterized by an “openness’ to failure, reinterpretation, and conflict’ (Reckwitz, 2003, p. 294). Closedness and openness thus do not describe mutually exclusive opposites, but ‘two sides of the ‘logic of praxis” (ibid.). Bourdieu, therefore, criticizes a dualistic perspective that categorically distinguishes between stability (describable as an affirmation in Benner’s sense) and change (corresponding to Bildung in Benner’s case). For him, habitus always implies both an active (structuring) and a passive (structuring) side. He highlights that the habitus changes ‘constantly in response to new experiences’, and that the habitualized dispositions are ‘subject to a kind of permanent revision’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 161).

The body, or rather the Leib, plays a central role in this, as it does for Husserl and Schütz. Speaking with Husserl, the lived body is both the ‘expressive body’ (Husserl, 1989, 259) and the ‘zero point’ (ibid., p. 166), i.e., the medium of perception of the world and the ‘pathic and passive sides of embodied experience’ (Brinkmann et al., 2019, p. 3). Bourdieu writes that with a ‘Heideggerian play on words, one might say that we are disposed because we are exposed’. He continues:

It is because the body is […] exposed and endangered in the world, faced with the risk of emotion, lesion, suffering, and sometimes death, and therefore obliged to take the world seriously […] that it is able to acquire dispositions that are themselves an openness to the world, that is, to the very structures of the social world of which they are the incorporated form (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 140f.).

Disposition and exposition, habits and change, routine and openness, or in pedagogical terms, habitus and Bildung, are thus not only not mutually exclusive but are rather inseparably related to each other.

We have already pointed out with Buck that customary and habitualized experiences must be understood as open to innovation. The habitus also implies a moment of creativity; it can relate to new or unknown practical situations and produce new patterns or varieties of social practices. For Bourdieu, however, this openness of the habitus must always be seen in relation to the constraints and limits initially set on its inventions (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 55). Bourdieu thus addresses the limits of the social constitution of human praxis. At this point, Bourdieu’s theory becomes graspable as a social-theory that makes it possible to include the social conditions and preconditions under which human praxis takes place. This allows us to follow up on the rehabilitation of habitual and doxic experiences elaborated by Schütz and extend it in a social-theoretical way with Bourdieu’s perspective. Social relations of power and domination, of social inequality, of distinction and social privilege, which are the preconditions of every doxic experience of the self and the world, can thus be included and reflected in their significance for the processes of Bildung. Referring back to Benner, we can thus show with Bourdieu that the non-affirmative processes of Bildung are not fully understood if we understand them exclusively as pedagogical actions initiated by non-affirmative education as a summoning to self-activity. Rather, it becomes clear that habit, doxa, and habitus also hold great and so far often overlooked potential for Bildung. This can be grasped by recourse to Schütz’s concept of the formation of opinions. From this point of view, Bildung as the formation of opinions would have to include and rehabilitate the doxic experience of the world and thus both the pre-predicative and image-related as well as the societal and social dimensions of judgment.

Conclusion

Taking Benner’s thoughts on the relationship between affirmative and non-affirmative pedagogical praxis as a starting point, we have questioned his approach in terms of its presuppositions and limitations. Drawing on Schütz, it became clear that Benner grounds Bildung on cognitive forms of judgment that are undermined by pre-predicative judgment and opinion. At the same time, this calls into question the underlying notion of the strong subject that is being constituted in cognitive judgment. Benner traces the processes of Bildung back to the practices of non-affirmative education in the form of a summoning to self-activity. This understanding of Bildung can be extended by considering life-worldly, pre-predicative, pre-linguistic, and embodied judgments in their significance for Bildung. To do so, the fundamental dual between Bildung and socialization, transformation and repetition, and the model of the rational subject that legitimates and universalizes a cognitive ‘order of things’ (Foucault, 2009) in rational judgments must be questioned. With a perspective on Bildung as the formation of opinions, doxic opinion and habitus can also be grasped in terms of their relevance for Bildung. Moreover, with Bourdieu, it becomes possible to include the social dimension of doxic opinion and thus also the conditions of power and dominance, e.g., in the form of social inequality or distinction, dimensions that are only hinted at in Benner’s theory.Footnote 19 We self-critically admit at this point that this extension is associated with a twofold difficulty, the solution to which is yet to be found. With the phenomenological and practice-theoretical extensions, we are at risk of losing the systematic sharpness of the terms used by Benner, a sharpness on which the great impact and reception of his General Pedagogy appear to be based. On the other hand, this extension also has consequences for the determination of normative aspects of theories of Bildung and education. Ultimately, especially in postmodern, post-democratic, or what have meanwhile become ‘post-factual’ times, we would like to admit that not all opinions might or should be valued equally and that there are degrees of rationality in the formation of opinions, which are currently being vehemently disputed.

We hope to have shown with Schütz and Bourdieu that processes of Bildung are not exclusively based on discontinuous, interrupting, and transformation-oriented summonings to self-activity but are first and foremost also made possible by repetitive, routinized, and habitualized dispositions and the pre-predicative formation of opinions. This constitutes a self-relation that is always already open in varying degrees – to the world, to others, and to oneself – and that is practically constituted and cultivated in opinions.