Tuesday, 2 August 2016

According to Kant, as I have already mentioned, the mechanisms which will bring about social peace are independent of the will of individuals as well as of their merits: “The guarantee of perpetual peace is nothing less than that great artist, nature (natura daedala rerum). In her mechanical course we see that her aim is to produce a harmony among men, against their will and indeed through their discord.” And this is ideology at its purest. One can claim that the notion of ideology only became possible in the liberal universe, with its founding distinction between ordinary people immersed in their worlds of meaning - of (what appears from the properly modern perspective) the confusion between facts and values - and the cold, rational observers who are able to perceive the world the way it is, without moralistic prejudices, as a mechanism regulated by laws (of passions) like any other natural mechanism. It is only in this modern universe that society appears as an object of a possible experiment, as a chaotic field on which one can (and should) apply a value-free theory or science given in advance - a political “geometry of passions,” or economy, or racist science. Only this modern position of a value-free scientist approaching society in the same way as a natural scientist approaches nature, is ideology proper, not the spontaneous attitude of the meaningful experience of life dismissed by the scientist as a set of superstitious prejudices - it is ideology because it imitates the form of natural sciences without really being one.

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