Faith, Knowledge and Ideology

This was written as a note in my Blackberry phone in a lonely and long travel inside the New York subway; they are only sketchy ideas based on reflections caused by a recent argument I had with a professor in class. As such not much can be demanded from them.

The problem of ideology is urgent in social sciences. What we take to be ideological will set the limits and boundaries for the possibility of truthful knowledge. We assume that "ideological knowledge" is contrary to our idea of what knowledge is. Knowledge aims at truth while ideology is the mask of falsehood. But, is this true? Hasn't recent philosophy challenged the assumption that links knowledge with truth? I think us to be deceived if we don't agree with Nietzsche in his rejection of modern rationalist philosophy's pretensions. This leads us straight the dead end of yielding to the pessimist conclusion that any kind of knowledge must be ideological. But hasn't modern sciences proved many facts of the natural and social worlds to be true? So, there must be a connection between scientific knowledge and facts known to be true. These facts cannot vanish as fantastic representations just because we become skeptics of man's rational capacities.

What I conclude from this (which is, by no means, a novel conclusion at all) is that scientific knowledge only deals with truthful facts; that can only be its object. This calls for a statement of humility, because it implies that knowledge cannot grasp the Truth in its universal significance. Such thing as the Truth cannot be fully rationally apprehended. Because a thing like the Truth demands full knowledge of the totality of the object, and this cannot be reached, then we have to adjust to concrete and limited truthful facts. Ideology becomes the boundary of knowledge when we recognize that any rational knowledge that aims or pretends in reaching a final and absolute truth must be ideological and must be betraying the initial quest for truthful knowledge. This have been the pervasive spirit of many modern theories, particularly in social sciences; however not infrequently natural scientist fall in the same error.

Here faith comes into our problem. The object of faith is the Truth in its whole meaning. Whatever aims at reaching a discourse that deals with the totality of the whole truth must be an act of faith. Here we must attempt the next set of boundaries: the difference between faith and ideology, or if there is no difference at all.

The problem with faith is that it cannot be rationally explained without losing the inherent meaning of what it is, i.e. rational knowledge cannot know faith. One of the problems of many intelligent men that lack any sense of faith is that they cannot understand it without attaching to it an ideological origin. This was the problems men like Voltaire, Feuerbach, Marx, Einstein, Russell (however not Nietzsche) were condemn to have. Because the object and content of faith is the absolute Truth, whatever it might be, and because knowledge cannot reach that level of understanding under any circumstance, they use different rational explanations to give content and reason to what really is an abyss of in-comprehension and ignorance on their part. The knowledgeable atheist man doesn't have the experience of faith (I will later explain how I think they do but under ideological forms); ergo for them it is as hard and insufferable to give it credit just as it is hard and insufferable for the brutish and ignorant man to understand knowledge and coherent reason, or for the born blind the concept of color.

The relation between faith and knowledge is analogous to the relation between knowledge and ideology. Faith sets boundaries for knowledge, as knowledge sets boundaries for faith. In this sense it is naïve, or awkward to have a faith that challenges well known truthful facts, just as it is naïve and arrogant to deny the human experience of faith in a universal Truth using limited, concrete and short-sided truthful facts. This division was already exposed by St. Paul in theology and explored by Kant in philosophy. In this sense faith and knowledge can be both allies, or at least respectful opponents in man's heart and mind. By understanding that factual knowledge is limited, however truthful, and that faith does not have to disclaim factual knowledge but give meaning and sense to human life, a man can both have faith and respect reason's discoveries, as the 17th century European scientists and philosophers seem to have done.

However we cannot be over optimistic; faith, just as knowledge, has a relation to ideology, and in the past it has been the source for a lot of ideology. But the boundaries between these two cannot be clearly seen. To what extend faith in an omnipotent God does not derive in submission to an absolute monarch, or in a vicious devotion to a priestly caste? The problem is not easy to solve, because at first sight it appears to give knowledge the upper hand in claiming that faith is ideological by necessity. A first good approximation to such a complex subject might be through St. Paul in Hebrews 11. There, a radical schism is posed between things of God and things of this world, because everything that pertains to God is not seen (that is, never perceived through the body senses); hence it can never fit as a truthful fact, nor subject to knowledge. But the many examples of prophets given by St. Paul show one thing: trust. Man's capacity to trust, to accept something without proofs of it (as when a man accepts a promise from a friend) lies in the heart of the matter. If we take our relation to God to be a friendly relation (even more, the ultimate friendly relation), then we trust in his promise, and because of this we have faith, i.e. without knowledge. We take this promise to be the supreme Truth, without which the truthful facts would seem like ghosts and shades in a world without purpose. In this particular sense faith gives food for knowledge, as it makes the absolute Truth the spring of all other factual truths. So that when Pilate asked Jesus "What is truth?" (John 18:38), Jesus silence makes sense out of the impossibility of proving with rational speech what can only be grasped by faith. Jesus had already given the answer before Pilate asked him: "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice" (John 18:37); Jesus is the truthful fact of the universal Truth, and only faith can grasp that apparently incoherent notion. This explains Jesus' silence. Pilate's business was administering justice according to the Roman law; that is, according to the most rationally codified legal system of the times in the Mediterranean. Precisely because Jesus truth was a universal statement, it did not deal with the truthful facts that a judge like Pilate can accept in a court; the reason of why he says to the Jews "I find no guilt in him" (John 18:38).

But the answer of the Jews headed by the priests is also enlightening; their religion did not allow them to crucify or execute Jesus, but they found a loop in their beliefs by pressing the Roman law to kill him. Jesus had been preaching against some prominent "interests groups" in Judea, and they wanted to eliminate him from the scene, however unjust. The Jews were being subject to ideology. So what can be the difference between ideology and faith if the Jews' actions were moved by religious devotion? The truth is that religious devotion can turn into ideology when it is used to back particular worldly interests of powerful groups. Faith is the authentic and deeply personal experience of a metaphysical connection with God. This escapes reason, but it cannot be considered ideology because it also escapes ideological worldly purposes.

Just as faith can become the base for ideology, so the same with knowledge. Philosophical and scientific systems that aim at explaining the totality of the human condition are very well used for repressive reasons when it is taken to be the Truth, of which the Marxist ideology seems the most prominent recent case (but also the European divine right of the kings), as well as when it tries to erase man's inclination for faith. The boundaries between the three are never well fixed, because knowledge is always unstable and fallible, faith cannot be apprehended by the pure mind, and ideology hides in its most obscure and mendacious forms.

But what also seems to be true is that men, as long as they live in this world, cannot depart from any of them, because on ideology social and political stability is built, from knowledge every technique and technology is constructed, and only through faith men can have the hope they need to bear the miseries of worldly existence.