This paper concerns the rupture between man or humankind and nature, and eventually between man and fellowman, brought about by modernization and industrialization. The complexity of the problem does not suggest clear-cut instant solutions, but it does demand a clarification at a theoretical level of the meaning of nature, value, and ideology. Hopefully, once the tree is identified, the forest can be traversed.
The problem is focused specifically upon oriental societies where the traditional values face a transformation or even disintegration. Elsewhere I singled out some of these values (integration and cohesion, natural and organic, communitarian self-realization, and family), and pointed out that their encounter with Western rationalism has resulted in something pathological--in Habermas's term, "ideological."1 What then can nature, value, ideology mean for orientals today?
NATURE
We speak of nature in many diverse ways: as the non-human which surrounds and permeates man, as the "natural" in contrast to the artificial, as the "nature" of such and such a thing, or "human nature." The meaning varies in the intentionality of the subject or even of the culture. Nature means something different for the farmer who tills, plants, waits and harvests; for the city dweller who seeks a respite from the work, noise and the pollution of city-life; and for the scientist probing into a phenomenon such as AIDS. As one cannot talk of nature independently of its relationship with man, it is more proper to speak of the relationship between man and nature.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty likens this relationship to that between the lived-body and the environment.2 Utilizing Gestalt psychology, he sees man and nature as forming a dialectical relationship of figure and background; the field, however, is never fixed. Like the lived-body and the environment, a tenuous equilibrium exists between man and nature: nature is sometimes benevolent, but at other times overwhelms man.3 Edmund Husserl describes three stages of the attitudes of man towards nature.4
1. The first attitude is mythico-religious. At the level of the life-world, nature is ambiguous. It is overwhelming, threatening and engulfing, inescapable or ineluctable; but it is also sustaining, surrounding, pervading and supporting. Nature is "both that to which man belongs and that which constantly jeopardizes man's plans and even his very life."5 Here man's orientation is practical in the sense of maintaining an equilibrium with this ambiguous mysterious force. Social institutions are mediations or lines of communication between man and nature. They are the pathways of the concrete life of a particular society and therefore cannot be universalized.
The traditional oriental religions may well fit into the above description of Husserl. Confucianism, Taoism and Hinduism always have conceived man as part of nature. Nature is that totality in which man finds a space, a home wherein he is born, grows and rests. Yet it is also beyond man's control; it is that with which man must harmonize himself. Taoism, for instance, describes tranquility as the original state of man before feelings are aroused, and equilibrium as the end after the aroused feelings. Confucianism at times identifies T'ien or Heaven not only as the physical sky, but also as nature in its totality. Mencius speaks of "nature" as "that endowed by Heaven." As the totality overwhelming and sustaining man, nature is then sacred and inviolable.
2. The second or theoretical attitude is a transformation of the mythico-religious attitude. Nature is now conceived objectively as the intentional correlate of science, as ideal objectivities, it is a field of objects-in-themselves to be revealed through episteme or theory (versus doxa or opinion).6 For the theoretical attitude nature is no longer sustaining, overwhelming and ineluctable, but physical (versus metaphysical). "Physical nature is experienced as a reflection of, or an approximation to, or a striving toward, or a degeneration from, the dimension of that which ineluctably sustains and overwhelms man."7 Here, physical nature becomes the mediator between man and the metaphysical--now the sustaining, overwhelming and ineluctable. Social institutions mediate no longer between man and nature, but between man and the metaphysical. Thus, nature becomes the sedimentation of man's freedom, while, unlike the mythico-religious attitude, this theoretical attitude can be universalized.
I am not sure if a corresponding attitude exists in oriental philosophies. However, I suspect that the attempts of Neo-Confucianists like Chu Hsi and Wang Yang-ming to seek principles in things or in the mind, or the Hindu concept of dharma, may be similar to the theoretical attitude described by Husserl.
3. The third or technological attitude attempts to master rather than to objectify nature, to grasp its inner workings so as to control and utilize it for man's ends. "Science and technology become the means of establishing man's dominion over nature."8 Nature now loses its definitive relationship to the sustaining, overwhelming, and ineluctable, and becomes the field of the development and exercise of technology. The metaphysical is now a hollow idol. Nature no longer being the sustaining, overwhelming, and ineluctable, nor the mediator between man and the metaphysical, man is delivered to anguish, alienation, nihilism. "Today, technology is the dimension of the sustaining, overwhelming, and ineluctable,"9 and nature appears no longer as sacred but brute and subject to being apprehended and tamed by man.
From these different attitudes towards nature, we can distinguish the following meanings of nature:
First, nature is the totality of man's situatedness, that into which he is born. What is inborn can be said to be "natural." What is not man's freedom to choose is given to him; it is a gift, and therefore sacred.
Second, nature is physical nature for, insofar as man is subjectivity, nature is the object or the non-subject.
Third, as the object of man's inquiry, nature is the essence of the thing objectified by man. Human nature in this sense is distinct from the sub-human because as self-becoming man's essence escapes conceptualization. (In Sartre's dictum, his existence precedes his essence.)
Fourth, nature is the non-human, the anti-thesis of man that is yet to be subjected to man's technologizing. Nature is the primitive to be tamed and harnessed for the goals of human civilization.
VALUES
Underlying one's attitudes toward nature is the reality of values or, more precisely, one's act of valuation. Values are to be distinguished first of all from goods, or things that carry a value ("carriers" or "bearers" of value). Values are qualities which transcend the goods that bear them. These qualities, however, are not perceivable by the senses or able to be grasped in psychic states. Instead, they are "intended" by the spiritual acts of feeling, those acts of loving and hating, or preferring and placing after.10 It is the heart that sees values; these are not thought but felt. They are immediately distinguished from an horizon of value. Our feelings are our spontaneous response to the world, and more immediate than thinking.
Are values subjective or objective? Max Scheler holds to the objectivity of values, but without discounting their relation to man. Values are objective insofar as they are qualities independent of man's situation, feeling-states and striving. Justice as justice will remain a value, regardless of the changes of man's history and of whether man values it or not. When man disregards a value, it is not the value that is destroyed but man himself. Values are not subjective for Scheler insofar as their quality as value does not depend on man. Just as the color green is green and will always be green and not black even if the green blackboard is now painted black, so justice will be a value regardless of whether a man is just or not. If subjective" is to mean "related to man," however, then clearly values are subjective in the sense of being objects of man's intentional feelings.
Whence do values come? It was not difficult for pre-modern philosophy to conceive values as derivative of being, for the cosmos or God was the center of philosophical attention. But the focus of modern and present-day thinkers upon man has placed values at the forefront rather than as derivations of being or God. Perhaps then the answer to the question of the origin of values can be found in man's actuation. Even prior to the answer, the question makes sense only when placed in the context of man's interest in himself: Why does man do what he does? Hence, the more pressing question has become not "Why is there Being rather than nothing," but "Why do we do what we do?"
The key to the connection between action and value is the phenomenon of privation. Values generate an ought-to-be and an ought-to-do, but unless my being is wanting I am not moved to act, to will beyond my privation. Through privation and in privation something like value first appears.11
Value, however, is not a property of privation, but rather an horizon in which something valuable appears to me as such. As origin of specific values it is never immediately given, but mediated in concrete values.12 Values are not abstract, but inherent in a situation, in the life world of man, against a background of value. Privation entails distinguishing values from this background, which mediates itself continually in man's willing and wishing, in that which is valuable. This is one reason why we often confuse values with norms and goods.
Do values change? It would be more accurate to say that they do not, but that man's perception or value-ception (to use Scheler's terminology) does. In the life-world, the ability and act of distinguishing in privation is a kind of understanding of values, which enables man to act responsibly. To gain understanding, however, requires a reflective analysis of the situation, an inquiry into the rationality of the acceptance of particular values, a rigorous science.13
Though necessary, understanding is not a sufficient condition for change. Praxis is a common activity in the life-world, and hence the understanding necessary to effect change is a shared understanding.14 "Value-change" requires the mediation of culture and its "rationality of action" or ideology.
IDEOLOGY
Paul Ricoeur contends that basically the term "ideology" should not have the pejorative Marxist sense of a distortion of reality under the influence of covert class interests.15 What follows is a summary of positive and negative meanings of ideology based upon Ricoeur's attempt to develop a phenomenology of ideology.
1. The first concept of ideology is based on the conditions of social integration. Because of the distance that separates the "founding event" and the social memory of that event, any social group needs to give itself an image, to "represent" itself, in order to preserve and diffuse the initial conviction of the Founding Fathers. Thus ideology here is an interpretation, a practical hermeneutics, a "meaningful action" in Weber's terms, to serve the integrative function of a society.
From this integrative function of ideology, certain negative meanings may come in:
1.a Ideology may then serve as a justification, an argumentative device to prove to the members of the group that they are right to be what they are.
1.b As justification or apology, ideology appears as simplifying and schematic; it becomes a code, giving rise to all sorts of isms.
1.c As a code of interpretation, ideology is something out of which we think, rather than something that we think--thus putting us under a spell.
1.d With this non-transparency of ideology, it is not so difficult for ideology to become an inertia that leads to intolerance.
2. The second concept of ideology takes place in the context of domination, though not yet in the Marxist sense, when there is a differentiation between the governing entity and the rest of the group. Such an authority raises a claim to legitimacy, and ideology serves as a code of interpretation which secures societal integration by justifying the existing system of authority.
Here again negative qualifications may enter into the concept of ideology:
2.a As justification of authority, ideology may claim more than what the citizenry believes. Ideology works as a justification of a political over-value.
2.b With ideology serving as a justification of a political over-value, ideology can easily become a distortion.
3. The third concept of ideology is the Marxist concept of ideology; ideology as a function of domination by a ruling class in a situation of conflict. Ideology for the young Marx is distortion as reversal, and works as an inverted image of reality. Religion is the paradigm of this reversal because "it puts everything upside down and formulates in heavenly terms what is primarily earthly."16 When the paradigm is extended to the realm of ideas, idealism as
the doctrine according to which ideas precede and generate things . . . becomes the model of ideology. Then the concept of ideology gets its purely negative connotation to the extent that it describes a general device, thanks to which the process of real life is obscured and replaced by what human beings say, imagine, conceive. Ideology becomes the name given to this mistaken substitution of image for reality.17
Since this sense of ideology is generated by real life itself, only a revolution of its material basis can put an end to this illusion. For Marx, no critique of ideas can by itself destroy the illusion; this can be done only by praxis.
This third concept of ideology when placed with the previous two concepts narrows down the general function of ideology as integrating and justifying. The Marxist concept defines ideology in terms of a specific content--religion--and not in terms of its function.18 If we separate the ideological function from the ideological content the same thing can happen to science and technology, to any ethical system, and even to Marxism itself, as when it is used, for instance, to justify the Party's claim to be the avante-garde of the working class.19
The foregoing phenomenology of ideology illustrates a basic thesis for Ricoeur, namely, "that ideology is an unavoidable phenomenon of social existence, since social reality has always been systematically constituted, social relations themselves experiencing their interpretation in pictures and presentations."20
TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY
What has the above explicitation of nature, values, and ideology brought us? Simply stated, it is this: that man and nature cannot be divorced--just as man can never be without his body; that man's relationship with nature is value-ridden; that this valuation is mediated in the shared understanding of culture; and that culture needs to symbolize, represent, and justify itself in ideology.
Perhaps, what may be added to this relationship of man with nature is the fact that the movement of man's interaction with nature always involves the aspects of labor, language, and power. Under these aspects, ideologies can be seen in their negative qualifications as "deviations from the genuine course of things," while still keeping in mind the need of any social group for an ideology, because a society without ideology would be a society without a general project.21 As deviations, ideologies must be criticized.
The critique of ideology is explained well by Jurgen Habermas who grounds it in his notion of three basic human interests--the technical, the practical, and the emancipatory.22
The technical interest refers to man's drive for instrumental action to master and control nature. Instrumental action here is purposive-rational, a means-end rationality whose aim is the exploitation of the world. The empirical-analytical sciences correspond to this interest.
The practical interest refers to man's symbolic interaction in a cultural tradition(s), to man's need for interpersonal communication. The "historical-hermeneutic sciences" correspond to this interest. Here, assertions no longer refer to possible mediation and technical exploitation as with technical interests, but to the understanding of sense and signification. Understanding takes place in ordinary-language communication, in the interpretation of traditional texts, and in the internalization of norms which institutionalize social roles.
The emancipatory interest criticizes the ideological tendencies of the first two interests. As such the sciences which correspond to this sphere are the critical sciences, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Ideology-critique enters here. The action is one of unmasking the forces of domination, dogmatism, and repression lying behind the reproduction of labor and the institutionally secured forms of general and public communication.
Both technical and practical interests achieve the power of self-reflection. Emancipatory interest seeks to break the barriers to open communication by social groups and persons, raising their self-consciousness "to the point where it attains the level of critique and frees itself from all ideological delusions."23 The technical interest of self-preservation cannot be segregated from the cultural conditions of human life, for society must first interpret what it considers as life. But hermeneutic understanding is not enough. Symbolic interpretations must likewise be submitted for evaluation to the ideas of the good life, "to the criterion of what a society intends for itself as the good life."24 This entails open communication, for the notion of the ideal is not a fixed essence, pure convention or unconditioned; it depends on symbolic interaction and material exchange with nature.25
Both technical and practical interests can have ideological tendencies "to submit reality to dreams," to develop an escapist isolationism which is virtually schizophrenic, an inverted image, and "a systematic domination,"26 because labor, language, and power constitute a triad which cannot be separated from each other.
For Habermas, the dominant ideology of our time is the ideology of science and technology. Technology, as the "scientifically rationalized control of objectified processes,"27 has indeed satisfied the material needs of society, but it has also given rise to what Gabriel Marcel calls "technocracy." In highly technologically advanced countries, the person is reduced to an efficient mechanical tool, if not to a number or stage of production. Relationships of man and fellowman cease to be interpersonal and become functional: one is identified and objectified by what he functions for. Instead of bringing human fulfillment, work becomes monotonous and depersonalizes. Means become ends in themselves, for the industrial system must become and remain functional and be further enhanced. This subjects the individual person to the enormous apparatus of production and distribution. The sub-system of instrumental action has now become a system itself, entering and dominating the sphere of communicative action. This repression of the person can disappear from the consciousness of the populace by a kind of legitimation of the domination--the "constantly increasing production of nature which keeps individuals . . . living in increasing comfort."28 In this way the domination of nature by technology can lead to the domination of man by man.
The ideological tendency in the practical sphere can take various forms. It can be the result of the domination of technology in all spheres of culture where the state legitimizes itself on the basis of its management of material reproduction, resorting to a diffused mass loyalty by keeping the citizens oriented to career, leisure, and consumption. It can also take the form of neo-colonialism with the dominant culture maintaining its influence on a former colony on the basis of its own technical (economic) interest. Ultra-nationalism can also be ideological in the attempt of a social group to defend itself from any outside influence on its traditional culture. Within a nation, ideology may function to bridge the disparity between the authority and the citizenry, or between the intellectual elite and the masses.
The need for a critique of ideology cannot be understated, for the vital link of labor and language with power opens the possibility of violence in forms that are explicit (murder, war), and implicit (manipulative persuasion, flattery, blackmail, monology of information and discussion, apathy). "Distortion is always traced back to the repressive action of an authority, i.e., to violence."29
Culture plays a decisive role in the critique of ideology, for culture includes every human expression, every product of humanity. The authentic role of culture is to be, not passive or evasive, but "an instrument of radical autonomous analysis in respect to any attempt of coercion and instrumentalization . . . to place man in a condition to exercise his own possibilities, to discover and develop the possibilities of the world."30 This entails "examining the concrete situation on the basis of universal theoretical criteria of `value' so as to establish what is positive or negative for humanity."31 The critique of ideology is more than interpretation of tradition from an historical standpoint. It is also a critique of the values of one's culture in the light of what can make mankind more human, more free and autonomous in the horizon of universalizable values. In this sense, the critique of ideology in terms of emancipatory interests is of the order of anticipation, of hope, and of eschatology.32
Where then would a critique of ideology bring us: return to primitive nature, return to traditional culture? Perhaps a synthesis is possible, namely, institutions which mediate man and technology, and which render nature more humanized and man more "naturalized" or at home with his world. Ideology in its original sense of integration may then become a utopia, and man co-creator with the One.
Ataneo de Manila University
Manila, Philippines
1. Manuel B. Dy, Jr., "Rationalism and Oriental Value Systems," in Raul J. Bonoan, S.J., ed., Higher Education for National Reconstruction (Manila: National, l987), pp. 129-145.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 299-345.
3. Francis F. Seeburger, "The Conversion of Nature and Technology," in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ed., The Crisis of Culture (Boston: D. Riedel Publishing Co., 1976), pp. 281-282.
4. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. by David Cars (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 283 ff., and expounded by Francis F. Seeburger, op. cit., pp. 282 ff.
5. Francis F. Seeburger, op. cit., p. 283.
6. Ibid., p. 283.
7. Ibid., p. 285.
8. Ibid., p. 287.
9. Ibid., p. 288.
10. Cf. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
11. Henning L. Meyn, "Values and the Life-World in the Problem of Crisis" in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ed., The Crisis of Culture, p. 140.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., p. 139ff.
14. Ibid., p. 146.
15. Paul Ricoeur, "Can There Be A Scientific Concept of Ideology?" in Joseph Bien, ed., Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, A Dialogue (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 44-52. Also, Paul Ricoeur, "Ideology and Ideology Critique," in Bernard Waldenfels, et al. Phenomenology and Marxism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 134ff.
16. Paul Ricoeur, "Can There Be A Scientific Concept of Ideology?" p. 50.
17. Ibid., p. 50.
18. Paul Ricoeur, "Ideology and Ideology Critique," p. 140.
19. Ibid., p. 141. Also, "Can There Be A Scientific Concept of Ideology?" pp. 51-52.
20. Paul Ricoeur, "Ideology and Ideology Critique," p. 141.
21. Ibid., p. 151.
22. Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
23. Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1978), p. 88.
24. Jurgen Habermas, op. cit., p. 313.
25. Thomas McCarthy, op. cit., pp. 90-91.
26. Robert Sweeney, "Values and Ideology," in A.T. Tymieniecka and C.O. Schrag, eds., Analecta Husserliana (D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1983), XV, 395-396.
27. Jurgen Habermas, Towards a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 57.
28. Ibid., p. 83.
29. Paul Ricoeur, "Ideology and Ideology Critique," p. 155.
30. Angela Ales Bello, "Culture and Utopia in Phenomenology" in A.T. Tymineiecka, ed., Crisis of Culture, p. 330.
31. Ibid., p. 330.
32. Paul Ricoeur, "Ethics and Culture," Political and Social Essays (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974), p. 257.