Gods and Monsters: The Scientific Method Applied to the Human Condition - Book II Page 24
Chapter 20:
Essence of ideologies
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in France, with the term of ideology you wanted to mean the science of ideas, namely the study of thought, conducted according to the methods of Locke and Condillac, namely applying the reasoning to the facts observed, avoiding the deductions regardless. Usually, however, for ideology is meant a system doctrinaire based on dogmas, and that establish the basis of the faith of a people (1). The irrational knowledge, represented by ideologies, shall be accepted for the good of the same ideology, proposal, and for those it proposed the ideology. On the contrary: the rational knowledge or science is accepted, voluntarily, and therefore, solely in the interests of those who accept it. This would be the demonstration, more evident, of its universal value. The fact, of easy ascertainment, according to which the ideologies and religions do not achieve ever the ideals that they propose and they support, pertains to their very essence, for which the achievement of ideal would entail the disappearance of the social organism that has promoted the ideology or religion. This does not happen in the scientific field, where the agent that aims to realize an any scientific purpose is qualified as “scientist” only if fully realizes, or it performs verification, of the hypothesis that proposes and, therefore, instead of being canceled by the achievement of the objective, it is legitimazed by this. In the case of the assumptions made by a researcher, the presence of the gap between reality and theoretical hypothesis, simply demonstrates the absence of scientific of the hypothesis itself. In the field of ideologies, the gap between real and ideal is inevitable and legitimised by the same structure of the ideology and the social organization that promotes the same. For this reason ideologies and religions have placed the attainment of the ideal the further away in time, as much as is possible, in an indeterminate time or indefinitely distant, as for example: the “end of times”.
Bonaventure of Bagnoregio he had put in opposition, clearly, the science and faith, recognizing that the first regards the intellect and the second “the affection” (2).
There is expectation, very widespread among the “scientists”, of to be able to reduce the various sciences: the physics, the chemistry, (and also) psychology, sociology (namely all the social and human sciences together with those physical-mathematical), to a single science. In such a conception there is an ideological concept, namely the so-called “physicalism” (3). However, there is something realistic in this conception, since in all sciences there is a common substrate, as demonstrated by the concept of “emergency” or emergence of a field of facts (for example of the type psychological) from other fields (for example: the physics and the biology) (4). In ideological knowledge there are many elements of invention fantastic irrational. However, fantasy is, for science, a precious instrument for the advancement of scientific knowledge itself. The fantasy, then, starting from being cause of irrationality, may become an instrument of the rationality, namely a knowledge that is truly reliable and consistent with human nature.
Marx had distinguished clearly between: “the way to make the search” and “the way of exposing the its contents based on the category of the same” (5). This, shows how Marx had distinguished between the understanding of the structural reality and the presentation of the same, according to its ideological interest (6). This shows the measure of the cajolery inherent in the “Marxism”.
The Marxist conception was articulated in the analysis of the “class struggle”, as a result direct of the “contradiction” between the “forces production materials” (or that which he identified with the degree of development of technical-scientific) and the “relationships of production”, which he identified in those that we define social relationships, namely the relationships between the various social layers (7). This contradiction he stood within of that he defined the “economic structure”.
Marx had used the conception of the first sociologists of the XIX century, on the alienation in respect of structural reality historic, which is manifested above all in the capitalist systems (for the greater freedom that occurs in these social systems), for theorising the alienation of individuals which, according to him, would be created by the capitalist system competitive, using this alienation presumed, a phony purposes and inclined to feudalism (8).
Marx, in the “Critical to the Gotha Program” (namely in the criticism at the program of the “social democracy” German of the nineteenth century), had criticized the concept according to which you considers the useful work as the possible, only, “in and through the society” and, then, “the useful belongs to the society and at the individual worker it belongs it so much as it is not necessary for maintain the condition of the work, the society”. He observed that “this phrase was always relied upon by samples of the social regime of every time” (9). However he, although he had evoked an reality post-structural, which defined “communism”, he characterized it as a new feudal phase, and consequently had thwarted every potential content of a new social reality, divorced from reality historical structural.
Part V:
The sciences of structural reality historical and their relationship with the ideologies