Abdolkarim Soroush's Lecture Series: The Method of Critiquing Ideas (3)

I will begin by mentioning some other examples in the realm of fictive and instrumental ideas.

One of the most important of these is the issue of ownership; we want to see whether ownership is a construct (fictive) and instrumental matter, or an external and factual one? When an object is owned by someone and someone is the owner of an object, do these two have a natural relation and a real relationship, or is their relationship of another kind; and can one search for an attribute that would be their attribute of being-owned and ownership, and what errors in this matter will lead to what misguidances.

With the criteria we have given in the past, and upon which we still rely and which we employ, we believe that ownership is a construct, a fictive and instrumental idea, and for this reason it is something conventional and posited, like other conventions.

Here we analyze the issue of the right of ownership, and when I say someone has the right to own a good, or does not have the right, or that the right must be taken from him, we want to see what kind of right this is. Whether a reality can be found in the external world corresponding to it and as its equivalent, or cannot be found.

We will present this issue, in accordance with the past, to our own criteria; let us remember that the criteria consist of the non-applicability of truth and falsehood in construct-based propositions, the lack of an external equivalent in construct-based concepts and notions, and the revocability, non-universality, and need-derived nature of these concepts and their application in the realm of human relations.

One can easily see that when I say an object belongs to someone and is someone's property, this being-property and being-owned is never an attribute among the real attributes of that object.

For now, we are not concerned here with what belongs to whom according to different schools of thought, but we do know that, in any case, according to the thought of whichever school I speak, different schools have ultimately explained the relationship of ownership and being-owned in a way that suits their taste, and in any case, in all schools we have someone who is the owner and something that is owned. We all know (as I have said), regardless of whether we consider labor and the product of labor to belong to the worker, and the commodity to belong to the capitalist or to the worker, the land to belong to the landowner or to the cultivator, according to the various rules and different regulations that exist in different intellectual and ideological systems, whoever the owner of whatever may be, the purpose in any case is to explain this type of relation.

No attribute is ever added to the owned object when it is owned by someone, and no attribute is ever added to the owning person when they own something.

Thus, the ownership relation between the owner and the owned is not a real relation, like the relation between iron and a magnet, or the relation between this ceiling and this floor, where one is above the other and one is below the other.

It is not a real relation between the lover and the beloved, such that it does not depend on their decision (or does not depend on their inclination); it is not a relation like that between the earth's field and the earth's gravity and a stone. It is not that kind of external and real connection.

Rather, the owned object can belong to person A, and can be revoked and taken from him without any characteristic of that object changing. We cannot, by approving regulations, come and make a contract or convince people that the earth is not spherical, or from a certain time onward pass regulations through parliament that the earth is spherical.

We cannot do such a thing, but we can pass regulations through the parliament so that from a certain point onward, houses no longer belong to their previous owners, or houses come into the possession of other owners, and lands that previously had other owners are divested from them.

We can pass a law that some properties be confiscated, that is, taken out of the possession of some and placed at the disposal of others, at the disposal of the court and so on. Therefore, it is entirely revocable. And it is revocable in a way that we, by a law in our own midst and by our own acceptance, bring it into existence and revoke it.

The revocation of this law never requires the application of a natural law; merely by one law, by one convention in the past, something is considered to belong to someone, and by another convention, ownership is taken away from them. The ownedness of an object is never something like the color of that object, or its weight, or its magnetic property, or its combustibility, or its solubility in a liquid. These are real properties of an object.

When a lump of sugar is mine, this lump belonging to me is not like the property this sugar has of dissolving in water, or the property this sugar has of carbonizing upon burning. Such a property as ownedness does not exist in the sugar, and for this very reason, it is revocable; that is, this sugar can be given to someone else, or I can gift it, or, in accordance with the law, ownership is taken from me and belongs to another, or it is stolen from me and someone else takes possession of it. In any case, it can be annulled, it can be revoked, and it is not considered a property of objects, whether of the owner or the owned.

The non-universality of the matter of ownership is a completely settled issue. No system in the world, no ideology in this world can come into being that would seek to make people accept, merely through legislation, what the distance of the Earth from the sun should be!!!

Such a thing is impossible; but systems can come into being that say, henceforth, the factory does not belong to the factory owner; it belongs to the workers, it belongs to the workers' council, it belongs to the state, and so on.

Therefore, it is not universal. In one place, the factory is considered to belong to the factory owner, and according to other intellectual systems, the factory is not considered to belong to him. Inheritance belongs to certain people, and according to other systems, this same inheritance does not belong to them, it is divided in another way, and a different ownership is exercised over it.

Therefore, the matter of who owns what is by no means a universal matter. When a person has a specific weight, it is the same for the whole world; that is, under specific conditions, this weight is a specific amount. But that a specific object belongs to someone is not the same everywhere; in some places, they are not considered the owner, and in some places, they are considered the owner.

A point we must certainly mention here is that we are not speaking of someone's possession of a property. That is a real matter, not a conventional one. That I can possess this notebook and paper before me and write something is a real matter; it is not imaginary. And it is a reality that takes place and occurs. But our discussion is about whether I have the right to do this possessing, whether I have the right to consider myself its owner. Therefore, the right of ownership is different from the power of possession. The power of possession is not an instrumental and imaginary notion, but the right of ownership and the right of possession is a conventional matter.

Nor is it universal, as you have seen, and on the other hand it is a product of our needs. It is quite natural that human beings, as they live, need to create regulations concerning the division of property and who should appropriate what and what should be at whose disposal, and it is these regulations that create ownership. When the regulations change, the types of ownership will change; the things owned will be different, the owners will be different people, and in this way ownership is subject to regulations. Ownership is something that the law brings into existence.

Some have spoken of ownership being an innate matter. Again, we do not wish to discuss here whether ownership is innate or not; we are discussing ownership here in a specific sense: ownership as it is regulated within social relations is certainly a constructed (contingent) matter.

But whether human beings are innately and naturally inclined to own something or not is an entirely different matter. That is another point. Here we were saying that language is a conventional matter; we were saying that language is a conventional matter, but whether human beings are innately inclined to name objects or not is another matter.

Regardless of whether this is the case or not, it is entirely non-contingent, but the names themselves are certainly a conventional matter. That I am the owner of a certain object is a conventional matter, but that we innately desire to own something, as an inclination in our psyche, regardless of its truth or falsehood, is fundamentally beyond the scope of discussion and is certainly a non-contingent matter, and we are not seeking to discuss the validity of that issue, but we merely wish to separate these two matters from each other.

Even if it is proven that ownership is an innate matter, for example, it can never be proven who should own what. This second matter introduces a "should," making it subject to regulations, and once it is subject to regulations, in the sense we were discussing, it will be constructed. From this perspective, we wish to conclude again that, much like the error that occurred regarding rulership, where some, through a lack of prudence concerning the constructed nature of rulership, drew conclusions from it for politics, for social governance, for statecraft, a similar issue has arisen in the matter of property: what belongs to whom.

We have said before that one cannot determine what something is called by referring to its characteristics; one cannot determine who is the ruler by referring to a person's attributes.

Here too, we wish to say that one cannot determine who owns what, or what is owned by whom, by referring to the attributes and characteristics of the structure of a thing.

We wish to explain here that what has been presented under the name of the issue of ownership, and around which both sides speak—whether the product of labor belongs to the capitalist or to the worker—is absolutely not amenable to rational and logical examination.

We cannot provide proof for it, either to negate or affirm it. Because no one can ever prove a constructed attribute for an external object based on that object. We have said that constructed (contingent) matters are not external attributes of any object. It is not written on any object what its name is, nor is it written on any object whose property it is.

Whatever it may be, once it is established that ownership is constructed, this is an inevitable consequence. No object says by itself, "I belong to whom," and no person says by themselves, "I am the owner of what."

Therefore, all those proofs that are mentioned to show that profit belongs to the capitalist are erroneous, and all the proofs mentioned to show that profit belongs to the worker are also erroneous.

Both are equally erroneous; neither can logically lead anywhere. The dispute between these two schools—to whom does profit belong? To the worker or to the capitalist? To whom does the product of labor belong? To the worker or to the capitalist?—since it is based on the issue of the right of ownership and the right of possession, which is a constructed matter, is as fruitless as an English speaker and a Persian speaker arguing about what the name of the moon is.

One brings a reason that the name of the moon should be 'moon,' the other brings a reason that the name of the moon should be 'māh.' We know that both arguments are equally baseless and have missed the point entirely. In constructed matters, one cannot argue, either negatively or positively, for either side.

This statement of ours is, of course, neither in favor of capitalism nor in favor of the worker. We are, of course, not concerned with whose favor it ends up in. We are concerned with speaking the truth, but the truth is that a path has been taken in error from the very beginning here, and this clearly shows the danger, misleading nature, and importance of conflating these concepts and failing to distinguish them—the very thing we are aiming for, and all our discussions are organized to prevent such fallacies.

From this perspective, in our view, the issue of ownership is entirely among constructed and imaginary matters; it is merely a tool for the administration of social affairs.

If we could regulate our relations in another way so that we did not need to create the concept of ownership, we would not have ownership either, and there would be no need for the concept of ownership or for the regulations related to ownership—none of these.

It is simply our being human, our need for social life, and our need to possess external things that has brought these matters into existence.

Yes, of course, once ownership is a constructed (imaginary) matter, dispossession is also a constructed matter, theft is also a constructed matter, usurpation is also a constructed matter; all of these will be constructed matters, all of these will relate to issues of ownership.

When and what is considered theft—that is, something belonging to someone is taken from them—and when and what is not considered theft, is one hundred percent a constructed matter.

Then all the regulations for discovering what is theft and what is not, all the penal regulations established for the thief, and then you will see that all that is established under the name of criminal law and civil law, all of these will be a series of matters that are constructed.

No one has the right to prove to us, to line up logical reasons, and then demonstrate what belongs to whom. Today, we must unfortunately point out that there are those who, because they have been deceived by that logical conflation and have not made a sufficient distinction between imaginary and non-imaginary concepts, instrumental and non-instrumental concepts, have considered ownership as a real, external attribute of external objects, and having borrowed this from certain other schools, they insist greatly on imposing this view on Islam as well.

In our view, neither in Islam nor anywhere else can such a claim ever exist that an attribute called the attribute of being owned can be identified in objects.

Everything that exists is conventional; one must see what the conventions of a school of thought are. A school of thought can stipulate that all profit belongs to the capitalist, half the profit belongs to the capitalist, none of the profit belongs to the capitalist, all profit belongs to the worker, five times the profit belongs to the worker. All of these are possible; depending on the convention. Of course, what is important here, and we have pointed this out in previous sessions, is that the capability or incapability of these conventions must be tested in practice. This is where the critique lies, not in providing a logical proof of what inherently belongs to whom.

If something inherently belonged to someone, there would be no need for proof, nor would we need to establish regulations that it must go to them.

We never establish regulations for iron that it must go to the magnet; it goes.

Regulations are created where things are brought into being by our decision and abolished by our decision.

Therefore, if the product of labor inherently belonged to the one who has the right to it, we would not need to establish regulations. We have not established regulations for stones, nor have we established regulations for planets that they must follow this path and must not follow that path. Such a thing, such an inherent belonging, does not exist in the external world.

It is we who assign a property to an owner, and since it is we, since it is our regulations, this shows that the matter is instrumental and conceptual.

Ownership is an instrument that humans have created, a conceptual instrument, not an external one. All contingent matters and thoughts are instruments of the kind of concepts that we use to manage the affairs of our lives; ownership is of this kind.

So, who owns what is neither true nor false; what belongs to whom is neither true nor false; attempting to prove or negate these propositions is futile.

They must only be assessed in terms of their capability, evaluated, and by referring to the ideological basis, one must see what kind of convention has been made about them in each school of thought and each ideology.

A similar kind of error regarding contingent and non-contingent issues is seen in many terms today. We discussed this particularly in the first session: that which is commonly narrated as (Indeed, life is belief and struggle), life is belief and struggle in the path of belief. If we interpret it as a non-contingent matter, it will have one meaning, and if we interpret it as contingent, it will take on another meaning, and there is always this kind of ambiguity regarding many concepts.

There is a danger that we sometimes take a concept as contingent or not as contingent, and one of the fallacies that usually occurs in thinking is precisely this: that an idea is sometimes expressed in a way that is in a contingent context and in another context is non-contingent.

As an example, we have a term that is used in our society today, and that is the term "popular" (mardomi). We say that sports must be popular, the army must be popular, the government must be popular, education must be popular. One must see what this means.

We are not here to properly define what "popular" is or what its criteria are; we only want to say that one must be wary of using "popular" in two different senses.

Sometimes, "popular" is an external attribute of an object, in which case it is a non-contingent matter. If we enumerate certain characteristics for the army and say that when it has these, it is popular, and when it lacks them, it is not, then in this case it is not a contingent matter, much like saying the army has a certain number of soldiers—this is not a contingent matter—or if the education system possesses certain traits, it is popular, and so on.

But sometimes, this very word "popular" takes on a meaning almost equivalent to "good." Whatever we want to call good, we call popular, and whatever we call popular, our intention is that it is a good thing.

In this case, we are conflating two issues, one of which is contingent and the other non-contingent.

Because good and bad are contingent ideas, instrumental ideas—we will come to these—they belong to the category of evaluative contingencies. However, if "popular" is an external attribute of an object, it is no longer contingent; rather, it is a reality similar to other factual attributes that objects possess. The exact same issue applies to "reactionary" and "progressive."

These are two terms that have acquired an evaluative state in our society. These two terms can also have a non-evaluative state, be non-contingent, and be used as real, external attributes of objects. The meaning of "reactionary" would not be that something is bad, and the meaning of "progressive" would not be that something is good. Rather, if we simply consider two states, we could name one state "reaction" and the other "progress," just as we consider hot and cold. When water has a particular state, we say the water is hot; when it has another state, we say it is cold. In this case, these are non-contingent. But if our purpose in saying something is hot is that it is bad, and our purpose in saying something is cold is that it is good, then we have not used hot and cold in their non-contingent meaning; we have used them in a contingent meaning.

And then there are instances where we oscillate between these two. Sometimes we say hot meaning hot itself, sometimes we say hot meaning bad; sometimes we say cold meaning cold itself, sometimes we say cold meaning good. And then these become mixed together, and the conflation of concepts is always the origin of fallacies and the origin of endangering things.

We might take a particular state and name it "reaction," and another particular state and name it "progress," just as I said, like hot and cold, like light and heavy, like ugly and beautiful, and so on. There is no obstacle to this; naming is a convention and is permissible. But there is one thing we have no right to do, and that is to deceive.

It is deceptive; based on the shared use of words and on employing different meanings for the same words, if we label everything that seems bad to us as "reactionary," then this is where an error has occurred. That is, we are using "reactionary" in an evaluative sense, not in a non-contingent sense, and in that case, we will, of course, face a very significant problem.

When I say something is reactionary, it means it is bad. When I say something is bad, it means it is reactionary. Then the result is that when I say something is reactionary, it means it is reactionary.

That is, it deprives us of judgment. We must know that when I say reaction is bad, there is a difference between reaction and bad.

Reaction is one thing and bad is another; only then does our statement have meaning. If we say that bad is the same as reaction, then it means reaction is reaction, and we have essentially said nothing, uttered no word. Whereas our statement—when we say progress is good or reaction is bad—will be meaningful only if reaction has one meaning and bad has another meaning; reaction is a real matter, and bad is a conventional and evaluative matter. Then one relates these two, saying one has such-and-such a property.

But if we conflate them, using reaction in place of bad and bad in place of reaction, then when I say, "Reaction is bad," we have said nothing at all; in fact, we have said, "Reaction is reaction."

Because when I say, "Reaction is bad," if someone asks, "What is bad?" and I reply, "Bad is also reaction," meaning everything reactionary, then it means that when you say something is reactionary, you have made no judgment about it; you have neither said it is good nor said it is bad.

Because if you say everything reactionary is bad, and since bad also means reactionary, then it again becomes reactionary, it is reactionary.

These are words that are sometimes used in a conventional sense and sometimes in a non-conventional sense; positive and negative terms are of this kind in our society.

Like "positive work." "We saw no positive work" has two meanings: one is that we saw no effective work in the external world—this is a non-conventional matter; but if it means we saw no good work, no worthy work, then it is a conventional notion. These two must be distinguished from each other.

There are many words that are used in both these senses, and as we said, slipping from one to the other will cause many errors to arise.

Up to this point, we were speaking of matters that were conventional and credal; we had said that credal notions also have an evaluative type. Evaluative credal notions are those that are generally based on good and bad. Wherever we evaluate and call something good or bad, we have, in truth, presented an evaluative credal notion.

We must emphasize again that good and bad are not external attributes of any object; they are merely our judgment, our evaluation, and our valuation regarding external and outward objects.

When we say the cholera microbe is bad, firstly, we express this relatively, meaning it is bad relative to us humans. Otherwise, the cholera microbe is not bad relative to the cholera microbes themselves. Secondly, "the cholera microbe is bad"—the badness of this microbe is never an attribute within this microbe. No matter how much you examine a cholera microbe, looking at the structure of its body's shell, what the contents of the cells of this microbe's body membrane are, how it feeds, what enzymes it has, how it exerts its effect—study all these matters, and none of them is badness itself. Each of these is an attribute, an effect, a property of this being.

Where is it that, if you found it, you would say, "I have found badness"? Nowhere. In the cholera microbe, there are all kinds of attributes except badness, yet we deem it bad. We say the scent of a rose is good; where in this scent is the goodness?

When you analyze the scent of a flower, those chemical molecules that are released from the pores in the flower into the air and reach our noses, arousing a pleasant sensation in us, and we call it fragrance and deem that scent good—where is this goodness in that scent?

No matter how much you analyze the physical and chemical properties of this object, you will not see goodness itself anywhere; you will always report a property to us, about which we must again ask you whether this property is good or bad.

You will say that this flower's scent, its chemical composition, that which produces this scent, contains carbon, for example. The question remains: is containing carbon good or bad? You will say it has such-and-such a chemical structure. Is that chemical structure good or bad? Whatever you mention as a property among the properties of that object, this very question applies to that property: is this property itself good or bad? Therefore, no property can be shown in anything that is itself the goodness of that object; rather, that property itself will again be subject to this same question: is it itself good or bad?

It is in this sense that we say goodness and badness, and all sentences, thoughts, and propositions that contain good and bad, are all fictive and conventional thoughts.

Good and bad are tools that we have made, or that the convention-makers have made, varying according to different ideologies, which they attribute to things and beings, classifying and grading them, and they will differ according to different thoughts. Things are deemed good in some places and deemed bad in others.

We must avoid a mistake here. The mere fact that something is relative—that is, it has one ruling for some people and another ruling for others—this alone never makes a thought conventional. For example, regarding the great event that occurred in our country, whether it was a revolution or not? This may be a matter of dispute.

Some may wish to give it another name, attribute another quality to it. Suppose, regarding the effects of a particular drug on the body, there may be differences of opinion about the nature and mechanism of this drug's effect in treating a specific disease. Difference of opinion alone is not the criterion for whether we consider a thought conventional or not.

All these characteristics we have mentioned must all hold true together for a thought. We all know that relativity and difference of opinion in many cases are merely the result of ignorance. Some are ignorant of a matter, while others are more familiar and have greater knowledge, and therefore have more information. Thus, it is not unknown to them, and they hold a different view; for those to whom the matter is unknown, the issue appears otherwise.

The question of whether the earth moves or not? Around the 16th century, these were completely disputed matters. You would see societies in this world absolutely believing in the earth's stillness, societies believing in its motion, societies wavering and in transition through stages of decision-making, and all those anxieties, temptations, critiques, and criticisms, until finally today, we perhaps cannot find a society that believes in the earth's stillness. Scientific matters are like this; regarding them, as long as a consensus is not reached, disagreement persists. Discussion and criticism exist. The important criterion of the matter is not that there is disagreement about it, but whether truth and falsehood apply to it or not? That is, if we were to accept this statement, is this statement true or false? Can it have a correspondent in the external world or not? In our view, that which is bad, its badness is not a property in the external world; it is not that it exists and we have not yet discovered it.

Goodness is not a property of a thing. We said that any property we choose as good or bad, that property itself will be questioned as to whether it itself is good or bad.

If we suppose that the color white is good, if we suppose that doing good is good, if we suppose that oppression is bad—those things we usually consider bad and good; let us put these forward.

When I say oppression is bad; this statement of ours will have content when oppression is one thing and bad is another, and then we make bad a property of oppression; we make it a predicate of oppression.

If it were the case that oppression itself is badness, not that it is something which is bad, then, in that case, when we say oppression is bad, the result will be: oppression is oppression.

The result will be that bad is bad. Because one is the same as the other, oppression is oppression, it will lead to the same conclusions, and we find innately and conscientiously that the matter is not so.

When we say oppression is bad, we have given news about oppression, not that we have come and said that oppression is oppression. Oppression is nothing other than oppression. This is a very obvious matter. In this respect, whatever external matter it may be, any external matter about whose goodness or badness you judge, that thing itself and all the properties of that thing are other than the goodness or badness of that thing.

Therefore, bad and good are other than an external property, and in this respect, it is a fictive thought.

All those, all propositions that contain bad and good will be considered fictive thoughts. And here again we want to draw that conclusion: nothing can be proven to be bad or good; these will rely entirely on our ideological thoughts. If you could prove that something has an external property, and then, that bad and good are among the external properties of things, in that case, yes, the path to proving the goodness and badness of things is open. But when it is not an external property for a thing, in that case, one cannot prove the goodness or badness of any entity.

We return again to our past examples: one cannot prove what the name of the moon is; one cannot prove that such-and-such a person is the spouse of such-and-such a person. In no way are these matters provable, nor are they falsifiable; that is, one cannot negate this with any reason. One must only see what the convention is. Is this person their spouse according to conventions? Has the person themselves accepted the spousal relationship or not? Have they agreed in a certain language to give a certain name to a certain thing or not? Do people consider a certain thing good or not?

We should also mention another point here so as not to cause confusion. When we say something is conventional and revocable, we do not mean that conventional matters are flimsy. It is possible that the name for the moon in the Persian language may never be revoked until the end of time; it is possible that a husband and wife may never revoke their marriage contract for their entire lives; these things are entirely possible. It is possible that something that has been deemed good by all people may be deemed good forever, and all people may always consider themselves obliged to deem it good, to find it desirable, and to follow it; these things are entirely possible. It is possible that something we find and know to be desirable may also be entirely suited to our psychological makeup—and indeed, it is usually the case that we generally find things good that are in harmony with our innate nature or our psychological constitution. All of these things are entirely possible, reasonable, and existent, and therefore, because human beings have similar psychological constitutions, the good things may always be similar for all of them.

We do not deny these points. What we want to say is that when I say something is good, I am expressing a fictive thought. An instrumental thought; but what people's motives are in deeming something good is an entirely different point. These two matters must be carefully separated.

Our motive, our impetus, in what we count as bad and what we count as good, is a matter in its own right, but when, following the impetus of a motive, following being stirred by a motive, we have deemed something good and expressed that such-and-such a thing is good, that is another point. And deeming something good does not amount to discovering an external attribute of a thing; rather, it is a judgment and an evaluation that we make about external objects. When we say such-and-such an object is yellow, we have made a discovery of an external attribute of it, but when we say something is good, these two types of judgment differ; the former is non-fictive, but the latter is fictive.

But how we came to understand that such-and-such a thing is yellow, or how we came to say that such-and-such a thing is good, is another matter; which is not our current subject, and we certainly accept that there are a thousand points finer than a hair here. There are thousands of difficult questions in these areas: how human beings have found their way to good and bad, how they have understood it, why, and by what path they have arrived at this evaluation they have made up to today; whether it can be changed or not. What are the criteria in these changes? All of these are questions that must be answered in their proper place, and they are infinitely important questions as well.

Now we return again to the point we were making, that fictive thoughts play an immense role in our lives; we cannot live for a moment without the concept of good and bad. Everything we set aside or bring forward, doubt, condemn, or praise, deem necessary to follow or not worthy of following—all of these contain within themselves the concept and hue of good and bad. In other words, we say some things are bad and to be discarded, and some things are good and acceptable, and it is for this reason that our entire life revolves around these conventions, these conventionalities, these evaluations, upon the idea of good and bad. But the point we wish to highlight is that these thoughts, for all their importance, are instruments and are conventional, and the characteristics we mentioned hold true for them, and they must not be conflated with non-conventional thoughts.

Answers to Questions

Here, I will pose one or two questions that have been received and give a brief answer to them.

First Question

One of the questions was that there are some words, some names, that have a congruity with their referent. The question, as it was posed, was exactly this: that the word

and he will belong to another time, another world, and another atmosphere, but this statement can be true and it can also be false, meaning that news of a future with certain characteristics—some deny it, some believe in it, some say it is true, and some say it is false. The possibility of truth and falsehood makes a matter mentally posited. Even if it is not found in the external world, there are many issues and concepts; many thoughts, many conceptions and judgments for which we cannot find an external correspondent, and yet these thoughts are non-posited. Simply not being found in the external world does not make something fanciful; one must see whether it can be found or not, and therefore whether it can be true or not, and this is sufficient for it to be non-fanciful;

Third Question

It has been said (it has been asked) whether ideology is a mentally posited matter or not?

If we take ideology to mean the totality of oughts and ought-nots and the totality of valuations, then yes, ideology will be a set of mentally posited things; all that constitutes our aspirations, ideals, desiderata, our goods and bads, all that we praise or blame, all that determines our obligations, duties, and rights—if we give this entire set one name and call that name ideology, ideology will be a mentally posited matter. All that speaks of perfection and deficiency, a perfection and deficiency that is more or less equivalent to goodness and badness, all of these will be mentally posited thoughts, and if we include these within ideology, then yes, ideology is a mentally posited matter.

In our society today and in the view of some theorists, ideology is intended in two senses; these two senses must be separated. Sometimes ideology is spoken of, and what is meant by ideology is the totality of a school's worldview and ideals, that is, ideology means the entire school. In this case, no, ideology in this sense will not have entirely mentally posited content, because what constitutes a school's worldview is, of course, not mentally posited but rather non-posited, and we will later explain how those are non-posited.

But if we take ideology to mean that part of a school which comprises only its values—for example, what it has determined and prescribed regarding property, regarding leadership, regarding social relations, regarding the rights of men and women, regarding the recommendations it has made in the world, all ethical issues, regarding all that we count as bad traits and good traits, regarding virtues, regarding vices, regarding ideals, regarding what things people should consider desirable and what things they should reject.

On the whole, if we consider ideology to include only this part of the issues, then of course ideology is entirely mentally posited; it is all of the kind of these fanciful thoughts,

Fourth Question

We must also mention one small point at the end, and that is that it sometimes seems, just as we can escape from mentally posited laws, we can also escape from non-posited laws. It has been asked whether we can escape from the law of gravity; some spacecraft, for example, escape and go to places where there is either no gravity or less gravity; in any case, they escape from the Earth's gravitational field. Therefore, from this perspective, there is no difference between mentally posited and non-posited laws, that one can be annulled and the other cannot.

First, the fact that we can escape from a law is different from that law not existing in the external world. We said that if the earth exists, it is a mass, and this mass has gravity; you can be within the gravitational field of this mass, and you can leave it; for example, even in leaving this gravitational field, you must invoke another law of the same nature. That is, the law has not been abolished; it still exists, but the law of that same nature is that, alongside this field, if such-and-such a tool exists, you will obtain such-and-such a result. And in this way, another law is again at work, and you are subject to another law.

Secondly, when an object exists, and that object itself is subject to a law, as long as that object exists, that law also exists. You cannot extract light from its own laws; as long as light exists, the law of light also exists. As long as light passes from air into a liquid, the law of refraction of light also exists.

That is, that which the law governs, and that object which is the bearer of the law, as long as that object exists, that same behavior exists and that same law exists; and if new conditions arise, those new conditions bear a new law, and again the rule of a new law prevails. But if these same people—given that it is these same people who must be the bearers of this law of punishing the murderer—if these same people decide not to be the bearers of this law, then this law will no longer exist.

There is a difference between whether light can decide to possess the laws of light or not. Light cannot make such a decision; as long as light is light, and as long as it is in those specific conditions, it has that same law, and it will have that same law forever. But as long as a human is human, according to various decisions, they can break a law, escape it, abolish it, and while they themselves still exist, a law may not be in effect among them.

Abdolkarim Soroush's Lecture Series: The Method of Critiquing Ideas (3)

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Abdolkarim Soroush's Lecture Series: The Method of Critiquing Ideas (1)

Abdolkarim Soroush's Lecture Series: The Method of Critiquing Ideas (2)