Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
These are posts on philosophy from the blog Base and Superstructure. My background is in academia, with a specific focus on feminism, philosophical issues in the social sciences, and social and political philosophy. I have also done work on historical figures such as J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These posts incorporate some or all of these issues. The influences may be more or less explicit, depending on the topic. Philosophy can be intimidating, and so these posts present issues in a way that’s open to many people. There is also discussion of specific philosophical issues, and specific issues from a philosophical perspective, such as feminist accounts of pornography, Marxist and socialist accounts of the state and political economy, and the search for the best explanations for social and material phenomena.
People often talk about money or class standing in a political argument. But I’m not referring in this post to liberal elitism. Nor am I talking about the even more brazen, ‘I have more money than you, therefore I’m better’ kind of thing.
Rather, I want to focus on more subtle ideas. And ones found primarily on the political left. Leftists will appeal to money or class status when discrediting certain kinds of views or people.
We’ve seen a flurry of activity on the left. Yes, this includes activism on a wide range of issues. But I’m not talking about that here. Here, I’m talking about a flurry of new ways to label or describe our actions. The left increasingly uses elevator words to do these things.
What does that mean? The left uses loftier words for its actions than those actions warrant. It inflates the language. During the early months of COVID-19, activists proposed modest, temporary rent subsidies. But they called those subsidies ‘cancel rent.’ Even though the subsidies would do no such thing. I’ll post plenty more examples below. For now, I’ll note that things like this happen a lot these days.
I want to ask why. And not only why, but is it a bad thing? If so, how bad is it?
It’s a bit trendy these days for leftists to dismiss talk of ‘human rights’ – or the ‘rights of man,’ as people once knew them. In truth, Marxists went even further. But it’s surging again in the last few years. In the older days, leftists dismissed all this as talk of ‘bourgeois rights’ or ‘freedom.’ Now they frame it more in terms of privilege or the ‘rights of man’ being only for white…well, men.
Where did all this come from? I’ll give an overview of Marx’s critique of human rights and the rights of man. This stuff comes from his early political philosophy. And I haven’t written a lot about that. I’ve focused in this blog mostly on Marx’s later work.
I’ve been interested in questions concerning artificial intelligence (AI) for a long time. Back in the days way before I left academia. In my undergrad days at Indiana University, I even began as a Cognitive Science major. But the more I thought about these issues, the more I realized I was really interested in more philosophical questions about mind, meaning, and human understanding. Less so the science of AI. Eventually this led me to the work of Hubert Dreyfus and Heideggerian AI, Dreyfus’s application of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to the field.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.
At some point in their careers – usually near the beginning – all philosophy professors teach students how to identify informal logical fallacies. Teaching informal fallacies is one of the most important parts of the job. But for most of them, it’s one of their least favorite parts of the job.
Why?
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