Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology by Kenneth Minogue

Author:Kenneth Minogue [Minogue, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765803658
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-10-19T02:00:00+00:00

III. The Ground of Revelation

Revelations judge without being themselves judged. This is a superiority which presents few problems in a traditional society where no plurality of independent view-points has developed. The revelation constitutes the entire culture, and there is nothing outside it. The modern world, however, is an endless rough and tumble in which beliefs assail each other without end. How, then, can revelations perform the miracle of placing themselves, or seeming to place themselves, above the mêlée? Part of the answer lies in the way they are grounded.

The ground of a revelation must be distinguished from all the many ways in which revealed doctrines are supported in actual argument. In such situations, any available persuasive device to hand will be used: argument, evidence, abuse of competitors, irrelevance, appeals to conviction, authority, and so on. There remains, however, a fundamental ground by which revelations appeal to their supporters as being evidently true. In general, revelations are grounded either by way of some external authority, which is the most secure option; or by some form of internal self-evidence.

So far as the former possibility is concerned, the most popular grounding of a revelation is divinity. Ancient cities were generally founded by gods or demi-gods, and the religions which surround us in the West are grounded upon revelation by God himself; this is, of course, the root meaning of “revelation.” The use of science as an external source of grounding of revelations may also be counted here, as in social Darwinism or some forms of racialism, which purport to derive their authority from science. This latter grounding was more powerful in the last century, and, as we have seen, ideology itself originally looked to science.

It took some time for ideology to disentangle itself from this link which came in time to seem more of a liability than a benefit. This historical development, whose logic we have been tracing in earlier sections, simplifies our understanding, for it reveals clearly enough that ideology, properly understood, cannot rely upon any external grounding at all. It must thus rest upon what I have called self-evidence. I am, of course, using this term in a somewhat extended sense. A self-evident truth is ideally one whose very denial immediately lands the denier in self-contradiction.13 This means that the proposition itself supplies its own evidence, but in most cases of this kind, what is elicited is trivial. Nevertheless, there have been attempts to construct entire philosophies upon this very basis—Cartesianism being one example, and some versions of the doctrine of natural law another. This kind of self-evidence would obviously be a very strong card to play in support of any revelation, but a philosophical grounding lays a revelation open to philosophical criticism, which has not been kind to claims of self-evidence. If we extend the idea of self-evidence, we shall find that there are many kinds of experience which yield the sense of an indubitable truth, with the result that, in vulgar parlance, the expression “self-evident” often characterizes any proposition which the speaker finds undeniable.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.