Latin American and Latinx Philosophy by Robert Eli Sanchez Jr.;

Latin American and Latinx Philosophy by Robert Eli Sanchez Jr.;

Author:Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00


Ideologization and the Social Function of Philosophy

Philosophers of liberation have the tendency of appreciating concepts that convey fluidity and motion. The tradition as a whole seeks to improve human life and not maintain oppressive states of affairs. Essential to the philosophy of liberation, then, is the attempt to call into question those systems of belief, forms of ignorance, and instances of intellectual disengagement that result in what Ignacio Ellacuría, the Jesuit philosopher of liberation, referred to as “ideologization,” a process through which a prevailing socioeconomic or political order makes itself into the definitive and permanent mode of social organization.5 Ellacuría refers to this as philosophy’s liberating function.

According to Ellacuría, philosophy has always been “about” freedom. He describes this relationship the following way:

We can say that philosophy has always had to do with freedom, though in different ways. It has been assumed that philosophy is the task of free individuals and free peoples, free at least of the basic needs that can suppress the kind of thinking we call philosophy. We also acknowledge that it has a liberating function for those who philosophize and that as the supreme exercise of reason, it has liberated people from obscurantism, ignorance, and falsehood. Throughout the centuries, from the pre-Socratics to the Enlightenment, through all methods of critical thinking, we have ascribed a great superiority to reason, and to philosophical reason in particular, as a result of its liberating function.

[…]

[T]his matter of philosophy and freedom gets to the fundamental purpose of philosophical knowledge, which even if it is understood as a search for truth, cannot be reduced to being a search for truth for its own sake. Such classical ideas as the relationship between truth and freedom (John 8:32), or between interpretation and the transformation of reality (Marx, Thesis 11 on Feuerbach), are an eloquent refutation of that reductionism. (LFP, 94)

Ellacuría depicts the interconnectedness of philosophy and freedom in two ways. First, in terms of the material conditions that make possible philosophical inquiry, and second, in terms of the instrumental value of reason and the social function of philosophy. Both are necessary if philosophy is to realize its full liberatory potential. With regard to the first, Ellacuría believes that although any person can ask philosophical questions, professional philosophy demands “freedom from the basic needs that can suppress the kind of thinking we call philosophy.” Philosophy, Ellacuría explains, requires the type of freedom that provides philosophers the time to hone the theoretical tools necessary to identify and critique problematic forms of ideology.

“Ideology” refers to a set of beliefs or ideas that are held for reasons other than the satisfaction of pure intellectual curiosity. Ideologies are typically politicized systems of thought that strive to justify a social order or political arrangement even if they pass themselves off as politically neutral. Though ideology is not necessarily bad in itself, Ellacuría focuses on the oppressive function of ideology, specifically the process through which an unjust social structure makes itself out to be the definitive mode of human organization (again, “ideologization”).



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