Ideology is not lies
Brian Leiter makes in passing a rather curious remark about materialism. He says materialism involves a scepticism about two claims:
> (1) that moral ideas and reasons make a causal difference to the course of events; or, (2) that certain normative
> ideas in the form of a theory make a causal difference to the course of events.
He then goes on to discuss in positive terms a version of egoism. But it seems to me what he describes precisely _isn’t_ materialism, but a version of dualism, albeit one which sees thought as epiphenomenal (that is, as perhaps being caused by the physical, but not in its turn causing anything physical). Materialism is, in a way, almost the opposite of this; it _insists_ on the causal efficacy of ideas, precisely because it is _not_ dualism, because it denies that ideas are anything other than material.
What materialism _does_ deny is that ideas are only caused by other ideas. This is what Marx attacks the young Hegelians for in The German Ideology, who, he says, think that the way to combat false ideas is to oppose to them true ideas. The key statement of materialism is Putnam’s, that ideas “ain’t in the head,” (Putnam was once a Maoist, don’t forget, and apparently regularly taught introductory philosophy of science courses by discussing Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism). Ideas are not simply caused by prevailing material and social relations: they _are_ (some of) these relations. To know something, or to hold a belief or attitude, is to be in a complex causal relationship with other people and objects, not to be in some special internal electro-chemical state.
From the point of view of ideology-critique, then, the correct materialist approach is not the realism or egoism that Leiter commends, the attempt to find hidden self-interest behind and in contradiction to public statements of ideas or ethics. A better example would be Quentin Skinner, who identifies the way in which political theory _as an intellectual discipline_ is constituted by succesive attempts to wield it in the service of particular interests.
(Next up: why I fancy Kimberly out of Girls Aloud)
3 comments
Leave a comment
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Surely is the far superior Girl Aloud than Walsh?
Comment by Marty @ 12/29/2004 1:57 pm
Hmmm.. doesn’t seem to like my html…
I meant to say:
Surely Tweedy is the far superior Girl Aloud than Walsh?
Comment by Marty @ 12/29/2004 1:59 pm
With Kimberly it’s the lips, and the breathy Manchester vocal….
Tweedy is the homosocial choice….
Nadine is the connoissuer’s pick…
:-)
Comment by kathy hacker @ 12/30/2004 4:11 pm