4 Philosophy & The Trap of Membership

Jeremy Collins

Ideology and philosophy ace indelibly linked such that to properly understand our engagement with one, we must have some understanding of the other. Two especially interesting ways of dealing with this are proposed by those who approach the idea with a salesmanship like mindset, and those who claim a certain priority between the two. The former typically hold an ideology to be a starting point and that we ought to work backwards from there. The latter however often holds that, whether in general or particular, ideology stands in the way of a better philosophy or that ideologies ought to be informed only by rigorous philosophical processes. It’s this second way of viewing their interactions that interests me the most. Here we find that if we accept this position ideology, at least normatively, becomes a subset of philosophy. However, it occurs to me that attempts to make priority claims between the two is somewhat wrongheaded. The reason for this is that they are so bound up together that priority claims seem to miss the point. This is evidenced to me by the fact that philosophy itself is loosely ideological insofar as it holds that philosophy itself is worthwhile. This relation between the two seems to suggest that in order to fully understand our own engagements and methods within philosophy, we must return to and analyze our ideological roots.

Before our work begins, and before we can ever inquire into the world and our conceptions of it, we’ll inevitably find that placed between us and the world are things that mediate our experience of it. In terms of ordering and processing data, we have our senses which order and prioritize an immense amount of information to allow us to experience it. But in terms of knowledge, the only tool we have is reason. Reason can direct us towards certain ontological truths, like “there is more than the singular so there must be something of a plurality;” perhaps even first principles. But what can be understood in this way is limited in scope to those things we can be certain of, which provides us with an account which is hardly an exhaustive account of anything. Living with nothing besides these few, seemingly irreducible and irrevocable truths is untenable if we have any desire to pursue our own survival, or engage in any sort of productive ways. So to fill in the chasm, and to be able to operate as functional individuals and members of a society, we adopt certain preconceptions that, in a very Kantian sense, we can layer over the world and understand it through. Ideologies then seem to play a significant roll in formulating this understanding. In all spaces of life this is the case. Even where we find well informed, clear minded and rational professionals engaging in their fields, we find they use ideological perspective to better understand and direct their work. The whole fields of medicine and economics serve as prime examples.

Finding an ideology, or being handed one as a child is, is just one part. The ideology itself is just a bundle of propositions tied together with an extra, prescriptive element. It is a thing, and a thing that does not by its nature govern our understanding. Once we have it, however, there is then a choice of how we engage with it. When we engage with it as perspective or use it as a framework, we will have adopted a set of presumptions that will helps us to make sense of things outside of our own expertise and fills in blanks for what is impossible to know. A belief in God might help us to find meaning in what might otherwise seem an empty world, or allow us to make sense of good and evil. Ideological frameworks that deal with economies might help us to order and make sense of things that are otherwise so large as to be superliminal. Ideological perspectives then will help to mediate and organize our experience of the world in order to help us to understand it, past our previously mentioned certainties and simple inventories. It is once we can understand that philosophy can begin.

This framework that we create can have some side effects however. Firstly, there is often a category mistake made when an ideological precept, such as the existence of God, is taken to infer ontological truths. I have often see examples of this within religion; materializing as an ideological precept that doubt is sin which requires one to hold god’s existence as a fundamental truth rather than based in faith. Additionally, while some kind of framework is necessary to understand the world, it can also make other perspectives more difficult to understand, or encourage us to reject concepts that fall outside of our own ideological frameworks. This may be because the concepts are irreconcilable, like the existence of an almighty god and atheism, or because the logic is external to our own, like creation myths and evolution. Finally, all ideological perspectives offer us the opportunity of membership. And it is there, within membership, that I find ideology becomes its most problematic.

Even a cursory glance would reveal that the ideas of ideology overlaying the world and informing our heading aren’t new. Enlightenment era philosophers spent a great deal of time and effort criticizing the dominant religious ideologies and the stranglehold they had had on thought while they remained dominant. During this time, there was a concerted effort to show how religious doctrine was accepted as basic truths without question. Post Enlightenment philosophers in turn have pointed towards the enlightenment as having brought their own biases and falling into the same traps they had pointed towards before. During this time Kant establishes his conception of the progress of thought when he proposed that the process of acquiring knowledge progressed from “the senses” to “the understanding” and finally ended with reason; which looks back upon the previous two. Another modern philosopher, John Stewart Mill, attempted to demonstrate the importance of a plurality of ideas, establishing his conception of the marketplace of ideas. Most relevant to my specific considerations is Richard Rorty. Through the lens of linguistic analysis, he comes to the conclusion that when people come to conclusions about the world, what they’re doing is building a vocabulary. The idea here being that as we progress our understanding, we are building one of an infinite possible frameworks through which we understand the world. To Richard Rorty, because our vocabulary is just one of a great number of valid and “complete” vocabularies, we would do well not to reject these other conceptions, but to be understanding of them. The thing that stands out to me, however, how membership specifically informs the relationship between ideology and philosophy. Conceptions of cultural hegemony and dialectical materialism were created with something very similar in mind. However, recent inventions that have expanded our ability to interact on a global scale and through new mediums seems to have changed the landscape so significantly as to undermine such broad views.

What hasn’t changed is that membership, no matter what its form, has a powerful draw to it. Humans, as a social species, don’t only thrive in communities, they need them. Historically, the survival of the human race has been predicated on our ability to build strong social bonds and work together. Even today membership sometimes means having a place to sleep and food to eat. It can mean the difference between being praised when speaking out or targeted for violence. Another of its elements is that we have a tendency to identify ourselves through our memberships. Both in terms of what kinds of people, like socialites or intellectuals, and in terms of what kinds of ideas we accept, like membership in political ideologies. In our own internal worlds, specifically as it relates to identity, membership does not necessitate belonging or inclusion. One can imagine, as Dostoevsky does, that a person is so alienated from their fellow man that their membership is of a category of one, and is deflned by their non-membership in other things. In both of these aspects, being a member of the “right” things can bring us comfort, joy, and perhaps even material and social capital, while being a member of the “wrong” things can have the opposite effects. Membership, perhaps more than anything else, determines your standing in life.

The thing that has changed has been the advent of the internet, and the proliferation of subcultures that defy old, broad strokes conceptions of cultural interactions. Here we find that the more integrated we as people are, the more the authority of hierarchical structures becomes diluted by public opinion, popularity and pressure to perform ones identity. This has become so much the case that some people base their whole lives and personalities on the opinions of those around them, including those who seek to avoid “conformity” or to set themselves apart. Like many of my premises this is not new, but the phenomena have been exaggerated in the wake of the internet.

On its face, however, our membership doesn’t fundamentally change how we engage with our ideological frameworks. The same fallacies we can make holding a worldview without membership can be made while we’re members. All of the things that are problematic are also problematic before we accept membership in the ideology. What membership does do, however, is threaten us. If we choose to question, if we deviate too far, we may be risking our membership. So here the ideas that ideology impedes on our ability to do philosophy becomes the most real. Questioning and exploring will eventually push at the boundaries of what is comfortably within our membership category. Here we’re posed with a question, and it’s a question of restraint- ought we constrain and direct the scope of our enterprises, or do we have them constrained for us? Perhaps the most potent, and relevant example of this is the analytic-continental divide. In examinations the first thing we find is that the “analytic school” is a self defined philosophical tradition which seeks to bracket itself off from the rest of philosophy. At it’s core lies an ideology about what philosophy ought to be; what makes their way of doing it “better.” What emerges from this ideologically saturated soil is two things. The first is a series of excellent works, new methods, and insights that come from a new way of addressing problems that continues today. The second thing, however, is a social program within philosophy that uses method as a tool to police membership. Here, projects that bore similarity to each other, and perhaps could benefit from their comparison, would be kept separated by this divide. Famously in 1960 Gilbert Ryle responded to a “continental” philosopher’s question, “aren’t our projects the same” with something of a disdainful “I hope not.” ln the same vein Wittgenstein and Heidegger have incredible similarities between both of their philosophies. However, because they represent the different sides of the ideological divide, they’ve historically rarely been taken into consideration together, and we’re left with an empty space where there otherwise could have been an ongoing and productive dialogue.

There are many criticisms of the analytic project. Many writers have pointed out the same things as I have stated above. It’s regularly noted that the analytic project is largely left without a significant project. That, while the methods still prove fruitful, the analytic school has run aground in some way or another. My account of how this happened is one of membership. My account is one where the analytic school was less based on an actual pursuit and more so on ideological membership. This membership created a tradition so constrained by it’s own membership that it does make one wonder if the question the tradition now asks are somewhat devoid of useful insight.

It does seem as though there is an alternative to a philosophy based in membership. It is not hard to imagine an analytic program that tries to separate itself out to peruse its program, and tries to minimize ideological influences without basing its engagement in membership. This alternative as I see it would be a pragmatic employment of analytic philosophy- pragmatism here being used in the practical sense and not in reference to the tradition. Pragmatic considerations as a basis for engagement would help us to avoid the trap of membership, and constrain our inquiries based on what is practical instead. I believe this approach allows for more flexibility within a tradition and the application of its methodology to provide for a fuller philosophy.

So then, our brief examination of ideology has told us a great deal. For one, it seems to tell us that ideologically free philosophies are few and far between. That philosophy that comes from membership will be reduced in scope and size by that membership. That those at the center of the analytic continental divide fall prey to membership. That ultimately our methodologies can be inhibited by that same trap. And that, if we agree to those premises, it would serve us well to see pragmatism as something of a vaccine against the more problematic nature of membership.

Jeremy Collins is a Philosophy major at the University of Baltimore. With a particular interest in the human condition as it relates to itself, and as we relate to each other, philosophy becomes more than just an academic work for him.