The concept of ideology in the German ideology

• Grant number: 19/17617-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2019
• End date: June 30, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Epistemology
• Principal Investigator: Luiz Sérgio Repa
• Grantee: Gisele Zanola Carvalho
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The project seeks to understand the constitution of the concept of ideology in general and its relation to reality according to Marx and Engels in their work The German Ideology. The project intends to circumscribe two important movements of the text: the presentation of ideology as the inversion of reality in consciousness and the comparison of this inversion with the functioning of a camera obscura. It is about addressing two central problems that relate to ideology: first, what is the correspondence between material contradictions arising from the productive activity of men and the contradictions of consciousness, often interpreted and criticized as mechanistic; and secondly, if, from the comparison with the camera obscura, ideology reverses reality in its capture, since reality is already inverted by the division of labor, that is, what is the relationship between the inversion of consciousness and the inversion of the real. The project considers that the approach to these problems must take place within a materialist epistemology, whose main features are developed in the first part of The German Ideology. (AU)