Webster says a prism is “a medium that distorts, slants, or colors whatever is viewed through it”.
It appears to me that Marx was the first great thinker to have coined the word “ideology”. Ideology is a distinctive form of reasoning about the individual and about the individual in society. Ideology is a systematically biased mode of thinking. Ideologies vary extensively in so far as the idioms used, the extent of bias, the degree of sophistication, the manner in which bias permeates various aspects of theory, and so on.
While ideologies vary widely in certain aspects all ideologies share some common characteristics. An identifiable logical structure is shared by all. This structure includes: 1) a moral dimension, 2) it is biased toward a specific group and is biased against those out side this group, 3) an ideology cannot not directly defend it self because it rests on assumptions that have never been critically examined or even formulated, and 4) Marx believes these assumptions to be “nothing more than the intellectual ‘transcripts’ of the conditions of existence of the social group whose point of view it reflects”.
Like viewing the world through a prism, the ideologue experiences the world in a distorted manner. “What a man does not transcend in reality, he cannot effectively transcend in thought either. The limits of his existence are the limits of his thoughts. His basic assumptions are therefore ultimately nothing but his conditions of existence ‘reproduced’ in thought.”
Quotes from Marx’s Theory of Ideology Bhikhu Parekh
Question: Is it possible (neuro-scientifically or otherwise) to see life without a filter? Can humans experience objective reality? (Assuming, of course, that an objective reality exists...)
Any passive means of data collection would seem to do that. A camera isn't looking for it's friends it's just looking and gives each particle of its view equal weight.
Experiencing something, in my opinion, requires putting something of ones self into what is perceived. So as far as I'm concerned truly experiencing objective reality is impossible.
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Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
the very pathways that information is sent through in our brains are formed based on previous experience with stimuli and prior information processing.
Much of what people believe is based upon those physical pathways, and at the very least, shows that a personal bias is actually a physical thing.
According to transcendent reality maps, objective reality is experienced when the illusion of the individual self is finally subsumed into Pure / Absolute / (pick your own adjective) Consciousness. This, so to speak, is the purpose of meditation: to transcend all "filters" associated with individual consciousness.
Whether or not this is what actually occurs is another story.
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Apr 3rd, 2009 05:55 PM
