A potential tool (or concept if you will (that is emerging in my present immersion in Rawls involves how we approach ideologies. And what I’m mainly thinking about here is the issue of Capitalism –that is even though it can be (and probably has been (applied to a lot of other ones as well. I would go back to a point made in (I believe (Joe Hughes’ secondary text on Delueze’s Difference and Repetition. In it, he describes three means by which we can confirm our beliefs:
1: the syntactic which focuses on how one assertion follows the other. For instance: because of A, B; because of B, C; therefore, because of A, C.
2: the semantic which focuses on the meaning of what we say and attempts to streamline it. This is the domain of the analytic.
And 3: the existential which tends to deal with reality as it presents itself with all its inconsistencies and deviations from the models provided by the semantic: what is thought of by many thinkers as the ironic.
And what I’m noting in Rawl’s book is a subtle shift (vacillation (between the semantic and the existential, that is while his primary focus seems to be on the semantic in that he seems to be putting a lot of emphasis on clearly defining his terms –for instance: the distinction he’s trying to make between a Law of Peoples and the state. Still, he finds himself always having to bring in the existential, such as the histories he describes, in order to confirm the abstract/semantic models he is presenting. There are even points where he utilizes the existential to put his abstract/semantic models into question.
But I could better make my point by working in my own comfort zone: the ideology of Capitalism. A lot of the time I am talking about and critiquing it, I am working in the semantic/abstract realm of its very logic. This is why, for instance, I can’t help but feel that the present income gap is unsustainable by the very logic of Capitalism since the real buying power created by it can no longer meet (Capitalism being about the flow of money (the general exchange value it produces. For instance, the true believers tend to work from the equation that exchange value=buying power. But if this was true, money would just sweep through the population and everyone would get what they needed. But from an existential perspective, we find that as buying power works towards the top, it doesn’t defuse as much as contract. Rich people, for instance (and while having the same basic needs as everyone else, don’t shop at Walmart which creates a lot of buying power through the people it employs. They rather buy their goods from elite providers who, while getting way more money for their goods than any Walmart employee or any third world slave that made the product sold, employ far less people.
So we have to ask: is the semantic approach as isolated from the existential as it claims to be –as the analytics claim it to be? We (or I (can claim that the semantic is pure in that it strictly works in the terms that define a given term or ideology –in my case: Capitalism. But is there any way of truly full proofing it from the existential?