[PEN-L:33514] Re: extra/ideology.

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 12/30/02 12:46:43 AM Pacific Standard Time, cburford@xxxxxxxxxx writes:

> I have a different concept of ideology to that summed up in your description. See the discussion in the encyclopedia of the Marxists Internt Archive
>
> http://www.marxists.org/glossary/frame.htm





"Here economy creates nothing absolutely new (a novo), but it determines the way in which the existing material of thought is altered and further developed, and that too for the most part indirectly, for it is the political, legal and moral reflexes which exercise the greatest direct influence upon philosophy."

Engels Letter to C. Schmidt, October 27, 1890

Below is reproduced the rather lengthy paragraph from which the sentence above is taken. Underline has been added for emphasis. 


"As to the realms of ideology which soar still higher in the air, religion, philosophy, etc., these have a prehistoric stock, found already in existence and taken over in the historic period, of what we should today call bunk. These various false conceptions of nature, of man's own being, of spirits, magic forces, etc., have for the most part only a negative economic basis; but the low economic development of the prehistoric period is supplemented and also partially conditioned and even caused by the false conceptions of nature. And even though economic necessity was the main driving force of the progressive knowledge of nature and becomes ever more so, it would surely be pedantic to try and find economic causes for all this primitive nonsense. The history of science is the history of the gradual clearing away of this nonsense or of its replacement by fresh but already less absurd nonsense. The people who deal with this belong in their turn to special spheres i!
n the division of labour and appear to themselves to be working in an independent field. And in so far as they form an independent group within the social division of labour, in so far do their productions, including their errors, react back as an influence upon the whole development of society, even on its economic development. But all the same they themselves remain under the dominating influence of economic development. In philosophy, for instance, this can be most readily proved in the bourgeois period. Hobbes was the first modern materialist (in the eighteenth century sense) but he was an absolutist in a period when absolute monarchy was at its height throughout the whole of Europe and when the fight of absolute monarchy versus the people was beginning in England. Locke, both in religion and politics, was the child of the class compromise of 1688. The English deists and their more consistent successors, the French materialists, were the true philosophers of the bourgeoi!
sie, the French even of the bourgeois revolution. The German petty bourgeois runs through German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. But the philosophy of every epoch, since it is a definite sphere in the division of labour, has as its presupposition certain definite intellectual material handed down to it by its predecessors, from which it takes its start. And that is why economically backward countries can still play first fiddle in philosophy: France in the eighteenth century compared with England, on whose philosophy the French based themselves, and later Germany in comparison with both. But the philosophy both of France and Germany and the general blossoming of literature at that time were also the result of a rising economic development. I consider the ultimate supremacy of economic development established in these spheres too, but it comes to pass within conditions imposed by the particular sphere itself: !
in philosophy, for instance, through the operation of economic influences (which again generally only act under political, etc., disguises) upon the existing philosophic material handed down by predecessors. Here economy creates nothing absolutely new (a novo), but it determines the way in which the existing material of thought is altered and further developed, and that too for the most part indirectly, for it is the political, legal and moral reflexes which exercise the greatest direct influence upon philosophy.

About religion I have said the most necessary things in the last section on Feuerbach." 
(End of Quote)

I wrote the following: 

>That is to say that ideology predates the emergence of productive forces and the mode of production in material life. In fact this preexisting ideology - what Engels call "Ancient bunk," is actually reshaped from the absurd to the less absurd on the basis of developed in man's material conditions of production. 

This is to say that man possesses the power of observation before his transition to modern man no matter what the primary catalytic agent. This power of observation is inseparable from cognitive functioning. The power of observation and the symbolic form that characterize the manner in which people think things out is the meaning of the word ideology.

The Encyclopedia of Marxism lists Ideology as follows: 

"Ideology is a system of concepts and views which serves to make sense of the world while obscuring the social interests that are expressed therein, and by its completeness and relative internal consistency tends to form a closed system and maintain itself in the face of contradictory on inconsistent experience. (End of Quote)

"Ideology is a system of concepts and views which serves to make sense of the world," is not that far from saying - what is basically the same thing, "how people think things out," or

"The power of observation and the symbolic form that characterize the manner in which people think things out is the meaning of the word ideology."

The explanation of ideology continues with the below. 

"The word is used with a wide variety of connotations, even among Marxists; Terry Eagleton, in his Ideologies, lists a range of meanings:

* the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life; 
* a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class; 
* ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; 
* false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; 
* systematically distorted communication; 
* that which offers a position for a subject; 
* forms of thought motivated by social interest; 
* identity thinking; 
* socially necessary illusion; the conjecture of discourse and power; 
* the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world; 
* action-oriented sets of beliefs; 
* the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality; 
* semiotic closure; 
* the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure; 
* the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality; 


Melvin P.