Ideology is essential to all thought. To be a thinking thing is to - TopicsExpress



          

Ideology is essential to all thought. To be a thinking thing is to settle on some assumptions to get any work done whatsoever. That is why truth primarily must be considered functional, and never absolute. Assumptions like “I am me, therefore, I am not you” and the law of non-contradiction are useful; but an existing structure of thought is not the only possible, the necessary, structure. European colonization of the globe and of the mind has done its best to eradicate difference in being and in thinking. One cannot ever be “outside” of ideology, one may only switch ideologies or, more likely, try to be aware of one’s own ideological biases and modify one’s view. My basic assumption is, in formal terms of valuation, that to try is better than not. The truths of reality cannot be absolute but we nonetheless strive towards our ideals of knowledge, truth, and justice because it is better than not trying. Historically, it should make sense that a thing declared as true should be immediately suspect, scrutinized. "…It is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied… Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is… vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most… be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. " -John Stuart Mill We must continue to be ceaselessly critical in our endeavors of knowledge; thought must be primary to action. I will side with Slavoj Zizek here in that, politically, what the world needs now is less action and more deliberation; I would also go so far as to say that perhaps this is what is needed on a more individual level, too, for it is we individuals who constitute the political body. Relieving a belief from the status of absolute truth does not devalue the belief. It is our attachments to egoism and totalitarianism which incline us to deem meaningless subjective truth. However, all truth is subjective; objectivity in truth is, in essence, an agreement. [nerd warning] In Kantian, the noumena is unknowable, and phenomenologically we are dissimilar, save for the a priori structure of thought, the form whose content is filled by ideology. (As an aside, consider this, if I take the sentence “all truth is subjective” and phrase it differently- that “no truth is objective”- I’ve created a paradox: for if no truth is objective, then the sentence itself cannot be objectively true. But it is also a tautology, if there is no objective truth then there is no way to disprove the sentence, either. For these reasons, phrases like these send up analytic red-flags, it is the consideration of this essay that these flags do not signal sloppy thinking; rather, that it signals how we are bound by our structures of language and ideology. The law of non-contradiction is a convention, and that something and its opposite can both be true is the first tenet of dialectical analysis). Buzzing through the air all around us, right now, are choruses of sound waves, radio waves, an entire world of imperceptible events happening in this place that is so seemingly quiet. The spectrum of light visible to our eyes is a mere sliver of the vast spectra we’ve discovered with more sensitive instruments. Our minds must set up parameters, limits, rules for thought; for without this finiteness, this delineation, thought itself becomes a tautology: all thoughts valued equally is equivalent to no thought at all. Existence is contingent upon difference. For thought to exist whatsoever, it must be in the business of distinguishing, delineating, and creating difference. That is the a priori structure of thought: the equation between difference and existence; but where we draw these distinctions, how we delineate, and what differences we create are not universal, and let us never assume that they are.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Jul 2013 07:29:22 +0000

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