WORDS AND THINGS

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 481.

A final problem with concepts is what can be called the fetishism of concepts. This occurs when concepts are treated as though they have a concrete existence separate from and, in some senses, holding sway over, the human beings who use them. In short, words are treated as things, rather than as devices for understanding things. Max Weber (1864–1920) attempted to deal with this problem by classifying particular concepts as ‘ideal types'. An ideal type is a mental construct in which an attempt is made to draw out meaning from an otherwise almost infinitely complex reality through the presentation of a logical extreme. Ideal types are thus explanatory tools, not approximations of reality; they neither ‘exhaust reality' nor offer an ethical ideal. Concepts such as ‘democracy', ‘human rights' and capitalism' are thus more rounded and coherent than the unshapely realities they seek to describe. Weber himself treated ‘authority' and ‘bureaucracy' as ideal types. The importance of recognising particular concepts as ideal types is that it underlines the fact that concepts are only analytical tools. For this reason it is better to think of concepts or ideal types not as being ‘true' or ‘false', but merely as more or less ‘useful'.

Further attempts to emphasise the contingent nature of political concepts have been undertaken by so-called postmodern theorists. They have attacked the ‘traditional' search for universal values acceptable to everyone on the grounds that this assumes that there is a moral and rational high point from which all values and claims to knowledge can be judged. The fact that fundamental disagreement persists about the location of this high point suggests that there is a plurality of legitimate ethical and political positions, and that our language and political concepts are valid only in terms of the context in which they are generated and employed. However, perhaps the most radical critique of concepts is developed in the philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism. This distinguishes between ‘conventional' truth, which constitutes nothing more than a literary convention in that it is based upon a willingness amongst people to use concepts in a particular way, and ‘absolute' truth, which involves the penetration of reality through direct experience and so transcends conceptualisation. In this view, thinking of all kinds amounts to a projection imposed upon reality, and therefore constitutes a form of delusion. If we mistake words for things we are in danger, as the Zen saying puts it, of mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.