The Philosophic Roots of Modern Ideology

The Philosophic Roots of Modern Ideology

Chapter 1

Part 1 the Cave: The Illusion and the Reality of Education Freedom and Force

In this part, the author uses Plato’s allegory of the cave as the beginning. In this story, the people who lived in the cave think the reality is just like what they see, the shadows and sounds of the puppeteers and their artifact. When the people struggling and going outside of the cave, and then adjusting the new surrounding fulling with sunshine, they can see the new and true world clearly. Adjusting the sunshine is a very painful processing, but once they adapt it, they will see a whole new world.  

This allegory was the story of domination and oppression, like education and liberation. Domination: (1) self-enslavement, the misperception that you are free, and have a misunderstanding of the real world. (2) Force dragging you from ignorance to awareness. Like all beliefs the philosophers believed, all of those may be an illusion-just the shadow on the wall. To break the shadowlike chains of conventional wisdom, education helps us to constitute the beginning of liberation. Liberation: becoming a human more fully conscious of the world one may inhabit.

For contemporary political ideologies, we have been taught by well-intentioned puppeteers, but the study of philosophic roots of these competing ideologies help us to get a border angle of vision and understand the real political life.

Part 2 what is ideology?

Ideologies are action orienting belief systems whose adherents take them to be true.  

Two other forms of political theory (1) traditional political philosophy: it try to construct comprehensive philosophic system that explain nearly every dimension of political reality.    (2)modern scientific theories: it attempt to produce very general theories about humanity as well, but to describe and predict human behavior based on the accumulation of “facts” gained from scientific observation of social and political behavior. It share with traditional political philosophy the goal of producing comprehensive accounts of reality based on the observation of real world, but it does not to create specify grand of existing of ideal political communities.

The distinguishing features of ideologies is its explicit action. Ideologies seek not only be convincing; they seek to motivate their audience to engage in action to bring that vision of the real world. And they do this by provide a goal culture-human beings may construct for themselves.

The functions of ideologies (1) simplify a view of the world into select categories shaped by a view of a goal culture. (2) Demand action either for or against change (3) Justify the course of action taken as well as the view of the world established.    

Part 3 why study ideology?

In political field, the relationship between ideas and actions is that ideas constitute the actions which called hermeneutics. Hermeneutics suggests that to understand political actions, we must understand the meanings of ideas, like motivations, intentions and concerns, which constitute the action. So studying ideologies is a hermeneutical processing: it pursues to understand the ideological ideas and purpose that constitute or make political activity what it is. And hermeneutical suggest that to understand the actions undertaken by ideological activists is to understand their purpose who carried them out. Ideologists try to change our understanding so that to shape the view and direction of us, to affect and change how we act.