This is probably forcing my own curiosity into the subject in a way that might not appease the way you've thought of the matter.
In line with what mike has said about feeling and internalizing reality, I think this is a good heuristic in regards to what conclusions we're prone to, though not necessarily destined to. I often make the simplistic comparison that our sense of reality is felt in much the same way one comes to understand inertia physically. There are things that are felt to be real and this seem's relevant when considering the direction that our reasoning takes us.
I often wonder if this is what is what is expressed by Ficthe
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positi.htmOf course, the thinking of people is formed first of all not by teachers and philosophers, but by the real conditions of their lives.
As Fichte said, the kind of philosophy you choose depends upon the type of person you are. Everyone is attracted to a philosophy which corresponds to the already formed image of his own thinking. He finds in it a mirror which fully presents everything that earlier existed in the form of a vague tendency, an indistinctly expressed allusion. A philosophical system arms the thinking (consciousness) of the individual with self-consciousness, i.e. with a critical look at oneself as if it were from the side, or from the point of view of the experience common to all mankind, of the experience of the history of thinking.
http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/fichte.htmFichte insisted that it was necessary to found science on a single principle, but held that such a first principle cannot be derived by philosophical means. Whether you choose a given principle to be the founding principle of your theory of knowledge or not “depends on what sort of person you are” he said. The choice of a theory of knowledge is therefore also an ethical act.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/johann-fichte/#3It must be granted that the truth of the Wissenschaftslehre's starting point cannot be established by any philosophical means, including its utility as a philosophical first principle. On the contrary—and this is one of Fichte's most characteristic and controversial claims—one already has to be convinced, on wholly extra-philosophical grounds, of the reality of one's own freedom before one can enter into the chain of deductions and arguments that constitute the Wissenschaftslehre. This is the meaning of Fichte's oft-cited assertion that “the kind of philosophy one chooses depends upon the kind of person one is.”
Though it doesn't seem reducible to some sort of simplified social determinism.
To me, the curiosity I have to try and understand this is based partially in our relation to the
material world mirred in social relations and an ideological layer of meaning imbued in it through the experience of those relations.
Because the material foundation is pivotal but we don't experience reality as it is, we necessarily inject our subjectivity that gives it's essence. That it's necessary that our sense of the world entails much subjectivity which complicates our
epistemological views.
https://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/existent_s_-_hegel_s_critique_of_kant12.pdfMore intriguingly yet, Hegel Hegel’s account of essence rejects all transcendence in favor of appearances. For Hegel there is not one thing, essence, and another thing, appearance such that essences are transcendent to beings like Plato’s forms, or are unchanging and invariant like Aristotle’s essences. Rather, it is appearance all the way down and there is no further fact “beyond” the appearances that is hidden and that must be discovered or uncovered. Hegel will say, “Essence must appear.”4 The real surprise is that the mediation of essence is a reference to another appreance, not a distinct ontological entity to be contrasted with existence. Indeed, in the Science of Logic, Hegel argues that essence is relation. Thus, as Hyppolite recounts, “The great joke, Hegel wrote in a personal note, is that things are what they are. There is no reason to go beyond them.”5
This is a striking claim that immediately brings Lacan’s discussion of objet a in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis to mind. There Lacan recounts the story of two artists named Zeuxis and Pharrhosios, locked in competition with each other to see who is the better artist. Lacan remarks that,
"In the classical tale of Zeuxis and Parrhosios, Zeuxis has the advantage of having made grapes that attracted the birds. The stress is placed not in the fact that the grapes were in any way perfect grapes, but on the fact that even the eye of the birds was taken in by them. This is proved by the fact that his friend Parrhosios triumphs over him for having painted on the wall a veil, a veil so lifelike that Zeuxis, turning towards him said, Well, and now show us what you have painted behind it. By this he showed that what was at issue was certainly deceiving the eye (tromper l’oeil). A triumph of the gaze over the eye.6"
The lesson to be drawn from this little parable is that the cause of desire-- not the object desired - -is precisely this enigma of what is behind the veil or curtain. As Lacan will recount elsewhere in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, we can be naked precisely because we wear clothing. “Doesn’t she know she’s naked under those clothes!” What we have here is the logic of the secret or crypt. Analysis comes to an end when objet a falls away and the analys and no longer attributes a secret knowledge to the analyst. Similarly, it can be said that metaphysics too needs to undergo analysis insofar as all too often it posits a true reality behind appearances in precisely the same way that Zeuxis believes there is something behind the veil painted on the wall.
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The point here is that the very idea of the thing-in-itself contains an internal contradiction insofar as it calls us to think a thing without determination, yet the very nature of a thing is to contain determinations. In the Phenomenology, Hegel shows that the distinction between the unknowable thing-in-itself as conceived by Kant and appearance is itself a distinction of the understanding, and therefore a product of thought.8 It is nothing but the ego’s reflection of itself into an other. That is, the thing-in-itself is identical to the ego, as a substrate divested of all concrete properties or qualities, a pure void as Hegel puts it, and therefore a phantasm of thought much like Zeuxis asking what is behind the veil.
The classic example being that the workers relation to production is fundamentally different from that of a capitalist and so upon looking at the same reality they necessarily see things of different meaning based on their relation to it. Which is why its a fair heuristic to point out the classist bias that typically originates from being raised in a well do to family.
Again I emphasize that this would be inadequate in better understanding the nuances of the many things interacting to the point that you have a certain ideological outlook. But the overall point in all of this, is that your felt being of reality strongly shapes what sort of reasoning you'll find appeal in. This I assume is the basis on which there can be assertions of classist tendencies, things that a probable on the basis of what class one belongs to. Many people don't need to read Marx or undergo a thorough education to see through some of the apologetic bullshit that runs counter to their interests through their lived reality. Though the matter is often complicated that our sense of reality isn't direct but has an
imagined quality to it.
"Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence" -
Louis AlthusserWhilst we can try and become uber rationalists who use a healthy degree of skepticism and logical analysis in trying to consider our views (who the hell has the time to be perfect of mind). At the bottom of it all, one inevitably has to make certain assumptions that can't be based on reason, but leaps of faith.
And I think it is here that might find the significant influence of the felt reality upon what sort of reasoning and points we find persuasive beyond being logical.
I think ideas would appear not only as they exist as perceptions of reality but also of relations between people and their circumstances. That what underpins the struggle of ideas is a struggle within real world conditions itself.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/foucaul1.htmFirstly, how does the subject form the object? Who is this subject? Of course, the subject cannot exist outside of individual human beings, but that means nothing - one also needs hydrocarbons, but so what? The subject which forms concepts is the social and historical practice of human beings. Concepts are social products. They are passed on to generations through social vehicles and products such as languages, media, institutions, wars and industries, etc. They are not primarily the creation of individuals, who 99% inherit concepts and work with them together with others within definite social relations, and to the extent of no more than 1% do individuals create concepts.
So when, for example, my male chauvinism confronts your feminism, it is not true that both are equally true, nor that the truth of each are incommensurable, or that the truth of each is in my life and your life, or yours is true for middle-class Western women and mine for backward males, nor surely that "truth" is meaningless, or something trivial that interests only dogmatists!? Nor that I make a better, more convincing, politically-correct defence of my position which is published in a reputable journal, or vice versa, or that I get more votes than you. But nor can I make the claim that my idea reflects what objectively exists, independently of human experience and yours not - what an absurdity! Perhaps we can say that yours is liberatory and mine repressive, and although neither is true, one is good and the other is bad, and that is all that matters? Perhaps we could settle the matter by arm-wrestling?
We must not get this question confused with the right of an individual to hold a view. This is of course a basic bourgeois right. But that is not the point; I do not thank you for allowing me the right to walk across a mine-field. I am interested in whether my idea of the best way home is objectively correct or not.
The structuralists were right when they identified the location of truth in the social practice of a culture, but limited by the conception of culture in anthropological static isolation (dynamic, static or partial "equilibrium"). The truth and error of my view and your view (continuing the metaphor from above) is a really-existing patriarchal society of which we are both a living part and which is undergoing transformation under the impact of the socialisation of women's labour and your struggle for the value of your labour. That is the source of the concepts (of "feminism", "male-chauvinism", "sexist language", etc.), that is the criterion of truth and that is what is changed by the material struggle of our ideas, that is the meaning.
So I would emphasize that whilst there is an ideological struggle, it is also based in the material world to.
Which as noted about the subjectivity involved in the view of the objective world is necessarily partisan. Which might be clearer if one thinks about how a worker and capitalist might view the same reality based on their different experience and relation to it.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htmThe key question thus concerns the exact STATUS of this externality: is it simply the externality of an impartial “objective” scientist who, after studying history and establishing that, in the long run, the working class has a great future ahead, decides to join the winning side? So when Lenin says “The theory of Marx is all-powerful, because it is true,” everything depends on how we understand “truth” here: is it a neutral “objective knowledge,” or the truth of an engaged subject? Lenin’s wager — today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever — is that universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: in a concrete situation, its UNIVERSAL truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly PARTISAN position — truth is by definition one-sided. (This, of course, goes against the predominant doxa of compromise, of finding a middle path among the multitude of conflicting interests.) Why not, then, shamelessly and courageously ENDORSE the boring standard reproach according to which, Marxism is a “secularized religion,” with Lenin as the Messiah, etc.? Yes, assuming the proletarian standpoint IS EXACTLY like making a leap of faith and assuming a full subjective engagement for its Cause; yes, the “truth” of Marxism is perceptible only to those who accomplish this leap, NOT to any neutral observers. What the EXTERNALITY means here is that this truth is nonetheless UNIVERSAL, not just the “point-of-view” of a particular historical subject: “external” intellectuals are needed because the working class cannot immediately perceive ITS OWN PLACE within the social totality which enables it to accomplish its “mission” — this insight has to be mediated through an external element.
And why not link these two externalities (that of the traumatic experience of the divine Real, and that of the Party) to the third one, that of the ANALYST in the psychoanalytic cure? In all three cases, we are dealing with the same impossibility which bears witness to a materialist obstacle: it is not possible for the believer to “discover God in himself,” through self-immersion, by spontaneously realizing its own Self — God must intervene from outside, disturbing our balance; it is not possible for the working class to actualize spontaneously its historical mission — the Party must intervene from outside, shaking it out of its self-indulgent spontaneity; it is not possible for the patient/analyst to analyze himself — in contrast to the Gnostic self-immersion, in psychoanalysis, there is no self-analysis proper, analysis is only possible if a foreign kernel which gives body to the object-cause of the subject’s desire. Why, then, this impossibility? Precisely because neither of the three subjects (believer, proletarian, analyst) is a self-centered agent of self-mediation, but a decentered agent struggling with a foreign kernel. God, Analyst, Party — the three forms of the “subject supposed to know,” of the transferential object, which is why, in all three cases, one hears the claim “God/Analyst/ the Party is always right”; and, as it was clear already to Kierkegaard, the truth of this statement is always its negative — MAN is always wrong. This external element does not stand for objective knowledge, i.e. its externality is strictly INTERNAL: the need for the Party stems from the fact that the working class is never “fully itself.”
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This formalization is strictly correlative to focusing on the Real of an antagonism: “class struggle” is not the last horizon of meaning, the last signified of all social phenomena, but the formal generative matrix of the different ideological horizons of understanding. That is to say, one should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of “narratives” — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his story. The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the IMPOSSIBILITY of this liberal notion of Form: Form has nothing to do with “formalism,” with the idea of a neutral Form, independent of its contingent particular content; it rather stands for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism, which “colors” the entire field in question. In this precise sense, class struggle is the Form of the Social: every social phenomenon is overdetermined by it, which means that it is not possible to remain neutral towards it.
But in regards to agreeing with most of what some prominent figure espouses whilst disagreeing with some of it, I suppose I don't make too much of a fuss of it depending on how significant that point is.
If it's pivotal to the thinkers overall views, then I might wish to examine further. Have to understand something to see its limitations and then attempt to move beyond them, as if expanding it rather than simply ignoring it. But other things someone thinks seem irrelevant, like if someone was a great thinker but they held some prejudice that I thought was based on crappy points, wouldn't really get me to focused on it necessarily. I probably hold a bias in the emotional impact I experience of finding my thoughts already fleshed out by someone, which is exciting. Which is expected as i'm no where near the frontier of knowledge to be an original thinker and so naturally I play catch up in the history of human thought.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics