FOR THE Enlightenment, as we saw earlier, the enemy of ideology was, paradoxically, ideology. Ideology in the sense of a science of ideas would combat ideology in the sense of dogma, prejudice and mindless tradition-alism. Behind this belief lay a supreme confidence in reason typical of the middle class in its 'progressive' phase: nature, society and even the human mind itself were now raw materials in its hands, to be analysed, mastered and reconstructed.
As this confidence gradually wanes throughout the nineteenth century, with the emergence of a fully fledged industrial capitalist order about which there seemed little rational, a new current of thought comes to the fore. In a society where 'reason' has more to do with the calculation of self-interest than with some noble dream of emancipation, a scepticism about its lofty powers steadily gathers force. The harsh reality of this new social order would seem not reason, but appetite and interest; if reason has a role at all, it is the purely secondary op.e of estimating how the appetites can be most effectively gratified. Reason can help to promote our interests, but it is powerless to pass critical judgement .on them. If it can 'ventriloquize' the passions, it remains itself entirely mute.
Such a standpoint had already been part of the familiar stock-in-trade of English empiricist philosophy, from Thomas Hobbes to David Hume. For Hume, reason can only ever be the slave of passion; and for this trend of
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thought in general the task of reason is to ascertain the nature of things as exacdy as possible, so that we may the better realize our appetitive ends. But there is a latent tension between the two parts of this statement. For if'man' is essentially a self-interested animal. will not these interests tend to distort his rational judgement? How can he be at once an impartial analyst of the world, and a partisan creature who views objects only in relation to his own needs and desires? To know what is rationally the case, I must so to speak remove myself and my prejudices from the scene of inquiry, behave as though I were not there: but such a project can clearly never gee off the ground.
There is, in face, a distinction between passions and interests, which Albert Hirschman has usefully examined. I For seventeenth- and eigheeenth-century thought. to follow one's interests was on the whole positive, whereas to follow one's passions was not. 'Interests' suggested a degree of rational calculation, as opposed to being driven on by blind desire: it acts as a kind of intermediary category between the passions, which are generally base, and the reason, which is generally ineffectual. In the idea of 'interests', so Hirschman argues. the passions are upgraded by reason, while reason is lent force and direction by passion. Once the sordid passion of greed can be ttansmuted to the social interest of making money, it can suddenly be acclaimed as a noble goal. There was always of course the risk that this opposition could be deconsttllcted - that 'promoting one's interests' just meant counterposing one set of passions to another; but 'interest' had the sense of a rational self-love about it, and was seen as conveniendy predictable, whereas desire was not. ~ the physical world is ruled by the laws .of movement'. proclaimed Helvetius, 'so is the moral universe ruled by laws of interest':2 and we shall see that it is only a short step from this classic bourgeois doctrine to the assumptions of posttnodernism.
It is an easy seep from holding that reason is simply a neutral instrument of the passions, to claiming that it is a mere reflex of them. What if the supposed antithesis between reason and interests could be deconscructed, and reason be grasped simply as a modality of desire? What if this most elevated of the human faculties, which traditionally brings us within the orbit of divinity, were in reality just a disguised form of malice, longing, loathing. aggression? If this is so, then reason ceases to be the opposite of ideology, and becomes itself ideological through and through. Ie is ideological, moreover, in two senses of the word: first. because it is no more than an expression of interests; secondly. because it dissembles these interests behind a mask of impartiality.
A logical consequence of this view of things is that we can no longer speak of false consciousness. For now all consciousness is inherencl, false;
whoever says 'consciousness' says distortion, delusion, esttangement. It is not that our perception of the world is sometimes clouded by passing prejudices, false social interests, pragmatic constraints or the mystifying effects of an opaque social sttUcture. To be conscious just is to be deceived. The mind itself is chronically distorting: it is simply a fact about it that it travesties and disfigures reality, squints at the world sideways, grasps it from the falsifying perspective of some egoistic desire. The Fall is a faIl up into consciousness, not one down to the beasts. Consciousness is just an accidental by-produce of the evolutionary process. and its coming was never prepared for. The human animal is alienated from the world just because it can think, which puts it at a disabling distance from a mindless nature and opens up an unspannable abyss between subject and object Reality is inhospitable to the mind, and is ultimately opaque to it If we can speak any longer of'ideology' at all, it must be in the manner of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum, which argues that some of the 'idols' or false notions which mystify humanity have their roots deep in the mind icsel£
In the transition from Hegel to Arthur Schopenhauer, we can observe this dramatic shift of perspective taking place. Hegel's philosophy represents a last-ditch. eleventh-hour attempt to redeem the world for Reason, setting its face sternly against all mere intuitionism; but what in Hegel is the principle or Idea of Reason, unfurling its stately progress through history. has become in Schopenhauer the blind. voracious Will- the empty. insatiable hankering which lies at the core of all phenomena. The intellect for Schopenhauer is just a crude. blundering servant of this implacable force. twisted out of ttUe by it, an inherently misrepresenting faculty which believes itself pathetically
to present things as they really are. What for Marx and Engels is a specific social condition, in which ideas obscure the true nature of things. is in Schopenhauer generalized to the structure of the mind as such. And from a Marxist standpoint. nothing could be more ideological than this view that all thought is ideological. It is as though Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation (1819) does just what he describes the intellect as doing:
offering as an objective truth about reality what is in fact the partisan perspective of a society governed increasingly by interest and appetite. The greed, malice and aggressiveness of the bourgeois market place are now simply the way it is with humanity, mystified to a metaphysical Will
Schopenhauer stands at the fountainhead of a long tradition of irrationalist
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thought for which concepts are always ineffectual and approximate, incapable of capturing the ineffable quality of lived experience. The intellect carves up the complexity of that experience into arbitrary chunks, freezing its fluidity into static categories. Such speculations are rife in Romanticism, pass into the 'vitalist' thought of Henri Bergson and D.H Lawrence, and can even be glimpsed in the post-structuralist opposition between 'metaphysical closure' and the unthinkable play of difference. All thought is thus a form of alienation, distancing reality in the very act of trying to seize it. Concepts are just pale reflections of the real; but to see concepts as 'reflections' at all is surely very strange. To have a concept is simply to be able to use a word in a particular way; it is not to be regretted that the word 'coffee' lacks the grainy texture and rich aroma of the actual thing. There is no 'nameless gap' here between the mind and the world. Having a concept is no more like having an experience than throwing a tantrum is like throwing a party. It is only because we are tempted to think of concepts in empiricist style as 'images' or 'offprints' of the world that we begin to fret about the eternal rift between the two.
The W1l1 for Schopenhauer is quite futile and purposeless, but shields us from a knowledge of its own utter pointlessness by breeding in us a delusion known as the intellect. The intellect obtusely believes life to be meaningful, which is just a cunning ruse on the Will's part to keep on perpetuating itself.
It is as though the will takes pity on our hunger for significance and throws us just enough to be going on with. Like capitalism for Marx, or like the unconscious for Freud, the Schopenhauerian Will includes its own dissemblance within itself. known to a gullible humanity as reason Such reason is just a superficial rationalizing of our desires, but believes itself to be
su~limely disinterested. For Immanuel Kant, the world revealed to us by 'pure' (or theoretical) reason is just an assemblage of mechanistic causal processes, as opposed to the realm of , practical' reason, or morality, where we know ourselves to be free, purposive agents. But it is difficult for us to subsist comfortably in this duality, so Kant looks to aesthetic experience as a way of bridging it. In the act of aesthetic judgement, a piece of the external world momentarily appearS to have some kind of purposive point to it, thus assuaging our rage for meaning.3
The antithesis in Schopenhauer between intellect and will is a version of the later vexed opposition between theory and ideology. If theory informs us that reality lacks all immanent significance, then we can only act purpose-fully by suppressing this gloomy knowledge, which is one meaning of
'ideology'. All action, as we have seen with Nietzsche and Althusser, is thus a sort of fiction. If for Althusser we cannot act and theorize simultaneously, for Schopenhauer we have a problem even in walking and talking at the same tiine. Meaning depends on a certain oblivion of our true condition, and has its roots sunk deeply in non-meaning. To act is to lose the truth at the very point of trying to realize it. Theory and practice, intellect and will, can never harmoniously coincide; and Schopenhauer must therefore presumably hope that nobody who reads his philosophy will be in the least affected by it, since this would be exactly the kind of instance of theory transforming our interests which he is out to deny.
There is another paradox about Schopenhauer's writing, which it is worth touching upon briefly. Is that writing the product of the intellect or the will, of 'cheory' or 'ideology'? If it is a product of the Will, then it is just one more expression of that Will's eternal pointlessness, with no more truth or meaning than a rumbling of the gut. But it cannot be a work of the intellect either, for the intellect is hopelessly estranged from the true nature of things.
The question, in other words, is whether the claim that reason is inherently falsifying is not a species of performative contradiction, denying itself in the very act of assertion. And this is one of the many vexed issues which Schopenhauer will bequeath to his more celebrated successor, Friedrich Nietzsche.
The reality of things for Nietzsche is not Will but power; but this leaves reason in much the same situation as it was with Schopenhauer. Reason for Nietzsche is just the way we provisionally carve up the world so that our powers may best flourish; it is a tool or servant of those powers, a kind of specialized function of our biological drives. As such, it can no more submit those drives to critical scrutiny than can the Schopenhauerian intellect take the measure of the Will which propels it. Theory cannot reflect critically on the interests of which it is the expression. ~ critique of the faculty of knowledge', Nietzsche proclaims, 'is senseless: how should a tool be able to criticise itself when it can only use itself for the critique?'4 The fact that Nietzsche's own philosophy would appear to do just that is one of the several paradoxes he presents us with.
The mind, then, is just an editing and organizing of the world for certain pragmatic ends, and its ideas have no more objective validity than that. All reasoning is a form of false consciousness, and every proposition we utter is without exception untrue. (Untrue to wlutt, and in contrast with what, are
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tricky logical problems raised by Nietzsche's work.) Our thought moves within a largely unconscious framework of needs, interests and desires founded in the kind of material animals we are, and our truth claims are entirely relative to this context The whole of our knowledge, as the philosopher Marrin Heidegger will later argue, goes on within some practical, pre-reflective orientation to the world; we come to self-conscious-ness as beings already prejudiced, engaged, interested. Indeed the word 'interested' means literally 'existing in the midst o£'; and nobody can exist anywhere else. For Nietzsche and Heidegger as for Marx; we are practical beings before we are theoretical ones; and in Nietzsche's view the notion of intellectual disinterestedness is itself just a concealed form of interest, an expression of the rancorous malice of those too craven to live dangerously.
All thought is 'ideological' to the core, the outward mark of struggle, viol-ence, dominion, the clash of competing interests; and science and philos-ophy are no more than crafty devices by which thought covers over its own unsavoury sources. Like Marx, Nietzsche is out to bring down reason's cred-ulous trust in its own autonomy, scandalously unmasking the blood and toil in which all noble notions are born, the baseness and enmity at the root of our most edifying conceptions.
If reason is a kind of delusion, however, it is a necessary one - for without its deceptive reductions and simplifications we would never be able to survive. It is not true in Nietzsche's view that there is a cruck bearing down on me at sixty miles per hour. For one thing, discrete objects such as trucks are just convenient fictions, ephemeral spin-offs of the ubiquitous will to power of which all apparently solid, separate substances are secretly composed. For another thing, the words 'I' or 'me' are equally spurious, fashioning a deceptively ongoing identity out of a bundle of centteless powers, appetites and actions. 'Sixty miles per hour' is just an arbitrary way of chopping up space and time into manageable chunks, with no ontological solidity whatsoever. 'Bearing down' is a bit of linguistic interpretation, wholly relative to the way the human organism and its perceptions have historically evolved. Even so, Nietzsche would not be cruel or cavalier enough to suggest that I shouldn't bother leaping out of the way. Since it is unlikely that I shall be around much longer if I give too much thought to these abstruse matters while the truck is thundering up, the statement is true in the pragmatic sense that it serves my survival and well-being.
The concept of ideology, then, is everywhere at work in Nietzsche's writings, even if the word itself is not; and it is operative in two different
senSes. The first is the one we have just seen - the view that ideas are simply deceptive rationalizations of passions and interests. There are analogies to this, as we have noted. in the Marxist tradition. at least as far as particular ideas are concerned. Nietzsche universalizes to thought as such what for Marxism is true of specific forms of social consciousness. But the alternative meaning of ideology in Nietzsche also fmds some warrant in Marxist theory, and this is the conception of it as 'otherworldliness'. Ideology in this sense in Nietzsche's philosophy is that static, dehistoricized realm of metaphysical values ('soul', 'truth', 'essence', 'reality' and the rest) which offers a false consolation for those too abject and unmanly to embrace the will to power-to accept that struggle, disunity, contradiction, domination and ceaseless flux are really all there is. Ideology in this sense is equivalent to metaphysics - to the spuriously eternal verities of science. religion and philosophy, refuge of the 'nihilists' who spurn the joy and terror of endless becoming. The true world (of metaphysics)', Nietzsche comments, using the word 'true' sardon-.
ically, 'has been erected on a contradiction of the real world';5 and his thought is here strikingly dose to The German Ideolog)( In the teeth of such anodyne otherworldliness, Nietzsche speaks up instead for 'life': 'life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker;
suppression. hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation, and at least, at its mildest, exploitation. •.• '6 'Life', in other words, bears an uncanny resemblance to the capitalist market place, of which Nietzsche's own philosophy, among other things, is an ideological rationalization.
The belief that all thought is ideological, a mere rationalizing expression of interests and desires, springs from a social order in which a conflict between sectoral interests is uppermost. It is thus, one might claim, an ideology all of its own. If this is obvious enough in the case of Thomas Hobbes, it is rather less so in the apparently 'radical' version of this case promoted by much postmodernist theory, which is deeply in debt to the work of Nietzsche. That case, put in slightly parodic form, runs somewhat as follows. There is no such thing as truth; everything is a matter of rhetoric and power; all viewpoints are relative; talk of 'facts' or 'objectivity' is merely a specious front for the promotion of specific interests. The case is usually coupled with a vague opposition to the present political set-up,linked to an intense pessimism about the hope for any alternative. In its radical American form, it occasionally goes along with the belief that anything, including life in a Siberian salt-mine, is probably preferable to the current American way of
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life. Those who expound it will tend to be interested in feminism and 'ethnicity' but not in socialism, and to use terms like 'difference', 'plurality' and 'marginalization' but not 'class struggle' or 'exploitation'.
That there is something in this position is surely clear. We have seen too much of the shifty self-interestedness of the 'disinterested' to be much impressed by it; and we are generally right to suspect that appeals to see the
That there is something in this position is surely clear. We have seen too much of the shifty self-interestedness of the 'disinterested' to be much impressed by it; and we are generally right to suspect that appeals to see the