• ideology – a system of ideas that appears rational only because the rationality of the system itself is never put in question or supported by the thought of something non-rational such as faith
  • These capacities are really just particularly effective revisions of an ancient design. **Rather than brain as the seat of the soul or command center, we might think of it instead as a as an interface between the mind and the body — the most powerful to be sure, but not the exclusive organ of the mind (the science fiction ‘brain in a vat’ notwithstanding)**20.
  • Perhaps this defect is as natural as the ideologies by which we attempt to outthink it, the techniques with which we try to erase it and the technology through which we pretend to forget it.
  • Does not every quantification require some form of qualification or acknowledgement of what is left out? In the realm of art things are often called invaluable or priceless.
  • Here it seems just as ideological to say that every human is singular and irreplaceable as it does to say the opposite. Even though the economy functions alarmingly well in its relentless quantification of qualitative value and near total disregard for the invaluable singularity of each human life, we’d really have to be almost inhuman to conclude that this is the only rational outcome simply because that’s how it played out for us. Regardless of whether we lean more toward the sentimental humanist or the sociopathic economist, it’s the failure of either side to account for the invaluable that reveals the ideology at work in both perspectives.
  • Could the same be said of economics, especially the critique of the political economy that many materialists regard as the cure for ideologies and the evils of capitalism. Like ethics, …1
  • Let us leave off instead with a musing from one of Heidegger’s late lectures in which he speaks of the reifying power of dialectics itself even in its early greek nativity , long before this age of hypercapital, in these lectures he is returning to the ancient greek texts and of Parmenides and Thales in which he claims the question of being is put most forcefully and developing what he calls a phenomenology of the inapparent. Here we might think of the inapparent as that qualitiative remainder that cannot be quantified or rationalized as a logical, dialectical proposition.2

Footnotes

  1. Re: political economy : was originally going to segue into the series on Ideality (Module)elaborate1

  2. Heidegger on Thales, and Parmenides and the Parmenides: “Phenomenology of the Inapparentelaborate vis-a-vis de Man and relevant sections from Text Machines (dissertation)