Gurevich P.S. Abundance of the weighty thoughts (Critical commentary to Professor E. Y. Solovyev’s essay “Philosophy as Criticism of Ideologies” at the first session of the seminar of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, June 7 of 2016)

Abstract: This article is dedicated to the role of philosophy as an opposing instance with regards to ideology. This topic has a long history behind it, during the course of which the various outlooks upon this issue have been establishing. The discourse “criticism of ideologies”, having become relevant during the Enlightenment era, reflected the most popular commentary on this subject. The theory of interest, according to which reasoning of a person is defined by its instinctive or conscious interests, was developing within the theory of intentional deception. Over two centuries have passed since that time. A powerful intellectual movement aimed at criticism of ideology, irrevocably assigned to it a status of “false consciousness”.  Basing himself on the fundamental ideas of Solovyev, who presented an extensive program for debunking the ideology at a methodological seminar in the Institute of Philosophy, the author attempts to expand the frameworks of discussion on this topic.  For the first time in Russian philosophy, the author suggests a thought that the “criticism of ideology” as a certain research paradigm aimed at its exposure, outlived itself. A purely cognitive rejection of this phenomenon is not being accompanied by the versatile examination of the social phenomenon itself – ideology. As a result, the perception of ideology as an illusion became just the first level of thoughts on the matter.

Keywords: