Our geometric mind proceeds from a small number of principles to cut up the world, deduce with logic, and conclude with clarity; by contrast, intellectual acuteness feeds on a multitude of implicit principles ensconced in experience and riding on local intuition and felt analogy. The former is abstract and artificial, born of the specialized training of the mind; the latter is concrete and natural, springing synthetically from the flow of life and, we now know from cognitive science, rooted in sensorimotor moves. Pascal likens the geometric spirit to the gaze and the spirit of acuteness to the palpation of the hand. This opposition can help us discern the particular quandary of social science that the study of the implicit exacerbates: normal science runs on the spirit of geometry while social life runs on the spirit of acuteness. The task of an incarnate social science, then, must be to reconcile these two diverging forms of reason. “We are automatons as much as minds,” Pascal points out, and for this reason we must strive to avoid “two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit only reason.” Not a bad starting axiom for a sociology of flesh and blood.
Loïc Wacquant
