haha, no, a meta-ideological person who is also in some ways dogmatic/ideologically blinded...
you're right, he does do that. his sweeping lambasting of "the bloody postmodernists" borders on conspiratorial at times
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How anyone would take a modern French philosopher of that vein seriously on anything and not think that they've led themselves astray is beyond me.
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yeah i think he's kind of misguided in this area, though i think his critique of relativism as a corroding influence on civilization is on point. for the record i love JBP --- think he's brilliant and doing valuable work, though has his flaws like anyone
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He's an extremely brilliant psychologist. He's a little bit smarter than me, but not so much so that I can't understand how brilliant he is.
Most of his political ideas are poorly cultivated. He reads a few books and thinks he's found the answers, as far as I can tell. Naive.
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people running around condemning ideology rarely understand what it is. It's not a curse word. Human rights is an ideology; democracy is an ideology. Should treat people well = ideology. People don't truly see their own most held beliefs as ideological.
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when most people use ideology as a curse word what they mean is that the person is dogmatic.
Everyone is ideological except for people who are very severely disordered. It is unavoidable.
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i think T McKenna's usage of the term permanently tainted my understanding of what it actually means : P ... at the same time, idk if i agree that "treat people well" is an ideology; seems like a single maxim; i think of an ideology as an elaborate web of ideas/justifications
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Yeah, I think Ian was stretching that explanation a bit past the point of credulity, but he's right in the broader sense - which is really what matters.
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absolute, dogmatic, and unquestionable support of any specific formulation of the ideologies of democracy and human rights will still confine thinking and could (i suspect) result in some bad scenarios tho
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first thing that comes to mind is you could end up closed off to even better formulations of those ideologies, or better alternatives -- retaining some openness to other possibilities still seems better than fundamentalism
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That's not what fundamentalism is, by the way.
It's true that fundamentalists are generally stubborn and intractable, but you're straining the definition a bit.