Regarding Ideology

Note: much written within is simplified, sometimes to the extreme…

We begin by drawing a distinction between philosophy – which presupposes an objective intelligent order – and ideology which systematically characterizes existence rendering reality a contingency of the subjective mind.

Note that philosophy1 defers (i.e., is dependant upon) to reality arguing – as Saint Thomas Aquinas – that ‘truth is the mind’s conformity to the object.” The object is intelligently measured/ordered – by God – and the human mind’s character/nature/essence (i.e., measure) is such that it apprehends the measures of the Creator… When the mind grasps that which is, as it is, the apprehension is true.

1 Classical philosophy i.e., the “love of wisdom” is deferential; modern philosophy is prescriptive i.e., it is actually ideology…

Contrast the ideologue; he/she imposes upon reality a subjective view, forcing reality into a Procrustean-bed. Procrustes – a Titan i.e., Greek demi-god, required all traveling through his domain to lie in his bed. If the traveler was too small to fit the bed, he/she was stretched – as on a rack – to fit; if to large, the excesses were cut off; such is what ideologues do to reality.

Note philosophers humbly defer to reality, but ideologues arrogantly impose upon reality their tortured view; a view which accords with the ideologue’s interest…

Western Culture’s ascendancy was a product of the worldview known as Christendom (the worldview which dominated the University through the 18th Century; it began to be lose dominance throughout the 19th & 20th Centuries); Christendom resulted from a “wedding of theology and philosophy” producing a rational faith and worldview, and was a synthesis of the Hebrew, Greek and Roman cultures stitched together – and made consonant – with the thread of Christianity; Saint Thomas Aquinas was the tailor… Aquinas died in 1274 and the unraveling began shortly thereafter (beginning most dramatically with the nominalist, William of Ockham, 1299-1350), although a sufficient remnant animated the Founders to give birth to the United States of America…

With Ockham and subsequent philosophical-theologians2 – the seamless garment of Christendom began to unravel; this unraveling was ongoing and along the way a divorce was brokered – most forcefully by Martin Luther (thus, Luther’s dictum: Sola-Scriptura) between philosophy and theology; leaving theology open to fideism, and philosophy vulnerable to irrationalism…

2 Note the “3” general groups: 1.) Philosophers, 2.) Theologians and, 3.) Philosophical-theologians; the latter group utilized philosophical reasoning to posit and defend what may be circumscribed and inferred from the tenets of a theology attendant to a particular faith…

As thinkers organically react to ideas new ideas follow as corollaries, these ideas each have their circumscriptions and thus, thinkers and thoughts have intellectual progeny. The thinkers which followed Aquinas – beginning with Ockham – seem to have lacked an appreciation for the subtlety and perfection of Saint Thomas’s metaphysics3 and thus they added, subtracted, rejected and/or contradicted the doctrines proposed in Aquinas’s treatise On Being and Essence, and elsewhere (e.g., Summa Contra-Gentiles, and Summa Theologica)…

3 Metaphysics – the branch of philosophy which treats existence qua existence; the metaphysician is concerned with the overriding conditions of Being, e.g., God, Truth, relation, limitation and causes…

The actions of Ockham – and subsequent thinkers – represent a distortion, decay and gradual supplanting and repudiation of Aquinas’s metaphysics; Descartes sets aside the confusion scholasticism had become; he’s the 1st thinker to systematically characterize reality (Descartes 1596-1650 – father of scientific-method, analytic-geometry and modern philosophy), and this further renders tenuous Christendom tenable worldview.

Immanuel Kant attempts to rescue Western Metaphysics (Christendom; Aquinas’s metaphysics) from the accretions and incoherencies which he receives from his intellectual progenitors, but gives the enterprise up as fruitless. Kant instead reduces metaphysics to an apriori4 system of thought; his 1st critique, viz: The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) renders metaphysics a contingency of the Kantian epistemology i.e., theory of knowledge, thus placing reality into a Procrustean-bed…

4 A priori – limitations imposed upon reality prior to – or before – any reference to reality; this reduces an objective reality to the subject, and renders the subjective consciousness “creator” of their world.

The Kantian critique is the beginning of philosophy becoming ideology; Kant referred to his systematic-“philosophy” as the Copernican Revolution5. The University gradually exchanged the rational objective worldview –

Christendom – for irrational Kantian derivatives i.e., material-pragmatism (grounded in an a priori nihilism); these views gained dominance throughout the 20th Century and evolve in accordance with the changing needs of the changing impetuses of the dominant-übermensch6and are then assimilated – to varying degrees – by most…

5 Prior Philosophers – Kant argues – predicated their thought on noumena i.e., objective-reality, which he claimed to be unknowable; Kant argues from the phenomena – how things appear to the subjective consciousness – and he supplies via the critique a systematic understanding of how to evaluate/understand the manifold-of-intuitions which are presented to consciousness’s judging faculties…

The Copernican Revolution reverses the dependent relation of cognitive beings have to an objective reality, instead cognitive beings reduce reality to their subjective minds; thus truth becomes subjective and reality becomes realities…

6 The movers-and-shakers of society, those that have the power (via manipulation or overt force) influence others to accept their view of the world…

Much more could be written on this topic, but in the remaining words we list a number of ideologies and make a few observations… An incomplete list of ideologies: atheism (yes, a religion, but also ideology); communism; empiricism; emotivism; existentialism (both the Christian variety of Kierkegaard, and the atheistic of Camus, Sartre and others); humanism; idealism; logical-positivism; Marxism; materialism; nihilism; objectivism (Yes, Ayn Rand was an ideologue); phenomenalism; rationalism; secular-humanism; scientism et al.

Observations:
1.) Humans which assimilate a view-of-the-world are unconsciously coerced to accept the attendant circumscriptions of “good” and “evil” and choices so delimited.
2.) Altering the dominant worldview produces a commensurate alteration of human choices, and activities.
3.) Once the subject consciousness is untethered from objective-reality dystopia is an almost unavoidable organic consequence…
4.) Conservatism presupposes an objective-intelligent-order, God, natural-law etc. and is thus not an ideology, but rather the social-political concomitant of the Perennial Philosophy…
5.) Concern for the disenfranchised is not “liberalism,” it is a moral obligation of rational beings…