Religious Hinge Commitments and Ideology

Abstract

In his final notebooks, published as On Certainty, Wittgenstein articulated a radical conception of the structure of rational evaluation, one that had arational hinge commitments at its heart. This proposal has recently been extended to the religious case, in the form of quasi-fideism, which treats basic religious commitments as being hinge commitments. My interest in this paper is how religious hinge commitments relate to one’s fundamental ideological commitments, such as the kinds of basic political or economic certainties that prevail in a predominantly capitalist society. While I argue that there are significant overlaps between fundamental religious and ideological commitments, there are also some significant divergences, which is why the former tend to be more plausible candidates to be genuine hinge commitments. In particular, I maintain that while allowing that there can be religious hinge commitments extends hinge epistemology beyond the paradigm, commonsense, cases that was Wittgenstein’s focus in On Certainty, it doesn’t thereby open the door to there being ideological hinge commitments, given the important ways in which religious and ideological hinge commitments diverge in their properties.

1. Introductory Remarks

In his final notebooks, published posthumously as On Certainty, Wittgenstein offered a radical new way of thinking about the structure of rational evaluation.1 As we will see, this was a conception of rational evaluation that put everyday commonsense conviction at the very centre. Moreover, this commonsense conviction, far from being grounded to a degree commensurate with the level of certainty associated with it, is instead essentially arational. Even more radically, Wittgenstein’s thought was that understanding how our system of rational evaluation could have arational commonsense certainties at its heart undermines, rather than leads to, radical scepticism.

Following a metaphor that Wittgenstein uses at one point, this everyday commonsense conviction has been cast as a hinge commitment.2 We will consider what is involved in a hinge commitment in a moment, as I will be putting forward my own proposal in this regard (there are now myriad accounts of this notion in the literature).3 What will be significant for our purposes is that hinge commitments, at least as I understand this notion, are plausibly applicable to basic religious commitments too. This leads to an account of the epistemology of religious belief that I have elsewhere called quasi-fideism.4 Such a proposal is certainly novel, in that it represents a position in the epistemology of religious belief debate that had hitherto not been defended.

My goal here is not to defend quasi-fideism, but rather to examine one potentially interesting consequence of allowing that there might be religious hinge commitments. This is that, on the face of it at least, there seem to be some important overlaps between basic religious commitments and ideology. Accordingly, if one’s basic religious convictions can qualify as hinge commitments, then why can’t one’s ideological commitments also count as hinge commitments?

While I can see the appeal of this line of argument, I will be aiming to convince the reader to reject it. Specifically, my claim will be that while one’s basic religious convictions can plausibly count as hinge commitments, one’s ideological commitments do not count as hinge commitments, even despite the overlaps just noted. This is because although there are features that are common to basic religious and ideological commitments, there are also some quite significant ways in which their properties diverge. I further maintain that noting this point casts light on how we should be understanding hinge commitments.

2. Hinge Commitments

The central idea behind Wittgenstein’s account of the structure of rational evaluation is the thought that it is built into the very idea of a system of rational evaluation that it presupposes an overarching certainty in the general veracity of one’s commitments as a whole (what I will refer to as one’s worldview, for short). As he puts it at one point early on in the notebooks that make up On Certainty:

“If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”

(OC, §115)

The crux is that in order to engage in a practice of offering reasons for or against specific propositions, of rationally grounding a claim or rationally doubting it, this overarching certainty must be in place. This is because it is this certainty that provides the necessary framework so that rational evaluations can occur.

I have elsewhere described this overarching certainty in one’s worldview as the über hinge commitment.5 Notice some interesting properties of the über hinge commitment. If the über hinge commitment provides the framework against which rational evaluations occur, then it follows that it cannot be itself rationally evaluated. This means that this overarching certainty is arational in nature. Relatedly, it further follows that all rational evaluation is essentially local—there can be no universal rational evaluations, whereby one rationally evaluates one’s commitments as a whole. Moreover, if Wittgenstein is right, then this is not an incidental fact about our system of rational evaluation but rather a necessary feature of what a system of rational evaluation could be.

Indeed, Wittgenstein doesn’t just describe this overarching certainty in one’s worldview as arational, but further claims that it is a ‘primitive’, ‘animal’ conviction, something that is manifest in our actions rather than grounded in reasons. (e.g., OC §395, §475) As he puts the point, quoting Goethe, “In the beginning was the deed.” (OC §396) This is a certainty that is not grounded in reasons but is rather the product of our practices—our social enculturation—which is why it is revealed in our actions rather than grounded in reasons. The idea that reasons ‘go all the way down’, as we might put it, is on the Wittgensteinian picture a philosophical fantasy.

This last point is especially significant to the debate about radical scepticism. The radical sceptic—think of Cartesian scepticism, for example—engages in universal rational evaluations with a view to drawing a negative conclusion. In contrast, the traditional anti-sceptic—think of G. E. Moore (1925, 1939), for example—engages in universal rational evaluations with a view to drawing a positive conclusion. If Wittgenstein is right, however, then both radical scepticism and traditional responses to radical scepticism have misunderstood what is involved in rational evaluation.

This is the sense in which Wittgenstein is offering what I have called an ‘undercutting’ response to radical scepticism, in that he is showing that what might at first seem paradoxical is in fact not paradoxical at all. That is, the problem of radical scepticism can be thought to be exposing deep tensions in our ordinary ways of thinking about epistemic matters, such that it exposes a genuine paradox. But Wittgenstein is arguing that this putative paradox in fact turns on a faulty philosophical picture that misdescribes our ordinary practices. After all, it is not part of our ordinary rational practices to undertake universal rational evaluations—this is something that the philosopher introduces into the discussion.6 This is presented as an innocuous extension of our ordinary localised practices of rational evaluation. If Wittgenstein is right, however, then there is nothing innocuous about this at all. Rather, it represents a faulty philosophical picture—one that we should thus reject—that is masquerading as commonsense but which is anything but.

The über hinge commitment manifests itself in a series of certainties that are concerned with more specific propositions. The idea is that any claim that is so basic to the worldview that doubt of this claim would effectively call the worldview into question thereby inherits the distinctive epistemic features of the über hinge commitment. This is how such apparently mundane propositions of a broadly empirical nature, such as that one’s name is such-and-such (e.g., OC, §425), that one is speaking English (e.g., OC, §158), or that (in normal circumstances) one has hands (e.g., OC, §1), can constitute hinge commitments. Like the über hinge commitment, these are propositions that we are optimally certain of and which are nonetheless, Wittgenstein argues, such that our conviction in them is arational and primitive. This is because a doubt here would endanger the worldview as a whole. As Wittgenstein puts it, doubt of these specific hinge commitments that manifest the overarching über hinge commitment would “drag everything with it and plunge it into chaos.” (OC §613) This is why one cannot doubt such hinge certainties and remain in the space of reasons.7

The specific hinge certainties that manifest the über hinge commitment inherit many of the latter’s epistemic properties. For example, they are essentially arational, and so not in the market for knowledge; they exhibit a primitive complete certainty that is disconnected from reasons and rooted instead in action; they are the kinds of claim that stand fast in rational evaluations rather than being the subject of rational evaluations themselves; and so on.

Note too the obviousness of these specific hinge certainties. It is not the kind of thing that would come as a surprise to be told that one has hands, that one’s language is English, that one’s name is such-and-such. While we might not ordinarily consider these specific hinge certainties—as Wittgenstein puts it, they “lie apart from the route travelled by enquiry” (OC, §88)—this does not mean that they are not regarded as being obviously true, once they are pointed out to us.8

Notice that on the reading of Wittgenstein that I am proposing, not everything about which we are certain is thereby a specific hinge commitment, since it has to stand in the relationship just noted to the über hinge commitment.9 In particular, they need to be the sort of proposition the doubt of which would amount to doubt of the über hinge commitment. I’ve argued elsewhere that it is important to OC exegesis to realise that throughout this work Wittgenstein is contrasting the hinge certainty (as we call it) with other kinds of certainty that lack the target philosophical properties. In particular, Wittgenstein discusses various widely-held scientific claims of which we are certain, such as that water boils when heated. Although we are certain of them, however, they are not hinge certainties, as doubt of them does not call the über hinge commitment into question (OC, §613).10

It’s also important to OC exegesis to understand that Wittgenstein is not treating philosophical claims like ‘There is an external world’ as hinge commitments (though this is a common misreading of his views). Indeed, following on from themes from his Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953), he regards such claims as simply nonsense. In any case, theoretical claims don’t have the right kind of relationship to the über hinge commitment anyway. It is only everyday mundane commonsense commitments that could exhibit the primitive, arational, complete certainty that we are after, a certainty that is primarily manifest in our actions rather than our thoughts. Theoretical claims, in contrast—and especially theoretical claims of a philosophical variety—always admit of a degree of intellectual distance, no matter how convinced of them we might be. Visceral certainty just doesn’t apply here.11

With the foregoing in mind, we can identify three core properties of our hinge commitments:

(i)

Fundamental. They express certainties that are fundamental to one’s worldview in the specific sense that to countenance error here would generate a wholesale doubt of one’s worldview (i.e., doubt of the über hinge commitment).

(ii)

Obvious. As certainties that manifest the über hinge commitment, they concern claims that one instinctively regards as obviously true.

(iii)

Visceral. Our certainty in specific hinge commitments, like the über hinge commitment that underlies them, is an arational visceral certainty that is rooted in action rather than reasons.

Moving forward, we will assess whether a particular certainty can qualify as a hinge certainty by appeal to these three core properties.

3. Religious Hinge Commitments

As I noted in the introduction, quasi-fideism is the name that I have given to the application of Wittgensteinian hinge epistemology to the epistemology of religious belief. The core idea is that the most basic religious certainties are to be understood as hinge commitments, and hence as arational certainties that manifest the subject’s über hinge commitment. That’s the fideistic aspect of the proposal. But notice too that on this account the arational nature of fundamental religious commitments does not set them apart from fundamental commitments more generally, as one’s fundamental non-religious commitments are also, qua hinge commitments, arational. This is why the fideism in play is quasi-fideism rather than straightforward fideism (whereby all religious commitments are arational). It is only the fundamental religious commitments that are arational, and this is no different from fundamental commitments more generally.

Wittgenstein himself didn’t offer this proposal, but since he died soon after the notebooks that make up OC were written, it is hardly surprising that he didn’t get around to applying the new ideas about the structure of rational evaluation to specific issues of relevance. Given Wittgenstein’s broadly religious mindset, it would be hard to imagine him not exploring such an application, had he lived longer.12

Notice how quasi-fideism offers a distinctive take on the epistemology of religious belief debate. It shares with traditional forms of fideism the idea that one’s fundamental religious commitments are arational. But it also radically departs from fideism by treating other religious beliefs that don’t function as hinge commitments as being subject to rational evaluation in the normal way. Contrary to the evidentialism proposal in the epistemology of religious belief, quasi-fideism doesn’t hold religious belief to more exacting epistemic standards than it holds ordinary beliefs, even though the religious case tends to involve convictions that are very strongly held.13

Relatedly, like reformed epistemology, quasi-fideism offers a parity-style argument.14 The arguments are very different, however. For reformed epistemology this argument is employed to show that one’s basic religious beliefs—similar to, say, one’s basic perceptual beliefs—can amount to knowledge even while lacking independent, non-circular support (on account of the reliability of the faculty that produced them). In contrast, the parity-style argument offered by quasi-fideism maintains that the arationality of one’s most basic religious commitments cannot be grounds for doubt that any religious belief is rationally held. After all, it is true of one’s beliefs more generally that they presuppose arational hinge commitments, so there is no relevant difference between ordinary belief and religious belief, specifically.15

But how plausible is the idea that hinge epistemology might apply to the religious case? Remember that the cases that Wittgenstein focusses upon in OC are commonsense empirical claims, such as that (in normal circumstances) one has hands. I would argue that fundamental religious commitments are not ordinary empirical claims, however, but rather have an important axiological component.16 That is, to live the religious life is to see the world in certain ways that will be very different to someone who rejects this kind of life. This is why I don’t think that a cold, dispassionate claim like ‘There exists a God’ would be a plausible candidate for a religious hinge commitment, as one could be committed to such a proposition even if one lacked religious conviction (perhaps, for example, one is sufficiently persuaded by evidential considerations, like the recent work on the fine-tuning argument, to think it more likely than not that God exists).17 It would have to be instead something that captures this axiological dimension to religious conviction, such as that ‘God loves me and wants what is best for me.’ Here we have a claim that represents a way of seeing the world such that it is imbued with meaning and purpose.18

With the foregoing in mind, we shouldn’t pretend that the application of hinge epistemology to the religious case is not a departure from the philosophical picture regarding the structure of rational evaluation that Wittgenstein offers in OC. Fundamental axiological claims, particularly ones over which we might disagree, are quite different from everyday, commonsense certainties that we all share.19 I think the way to think of this is that the ‘core’ set of hinge certainties are of the everyday, commonsense variety, which leaves open that there might be further hinge certainties that make up the worldview that are not of this kind. That would open up the possibility of axiological hinge commitments, like religious hinge commitments.

Even so, we still need to be told how a fundamental religious conviction could qualify as a religious hinge commitment. This would entail being able to offer credible cases of basic religious commitments that satisfy the three core conditions for hinge commitments noted above. Let’s take these conditions in turn.

The first condition, fundamental, looks fairly compelling. Certainly, a genuine and deep religious conviction—which is surely the kind that interests us—would exhibit this feature. Indeed, religious believers describe instances where they are led to doubt in precisely these terms, whereby they feel like their whole way of thinking about the world is being brought into question. This is not to deny that religious believers often experience doubt in the sense of anxieties about the truth of this aspect of their worldview.20 But the point is that, normally one’s faith constrains this doubt; that’s just what having faith means. Conversely, in the cases where someone with a genuine and deep religious conviction loses that conviction, then this has a transformative effect on their lives. Indeed, on the quasi-fideistic picture it is transformative precisely because it involves a change in one’s hinge commitments.

That said, we should register that there is an important difference between a commonsense hinge commitment, of the sort that was Wittgenstein’s focus in OC, and the application of this notion to the religious case. We’ve just noted that fundamental religious claims can be so woven into the very fabric of one’s worldview that they would satisfy a condition like fundamental, as doubt here would imply a wholesale doubt in one’s worldview. In the case of commonsense certainties, like ‘I have hands’, however, Wittgenstein is claiming that doubt here (in normal circumstances) would imply that one has exited the realm of reason altogether, and so we would seek causes for your professed doubt rather than reasons. Clearly, however, the situation is more complex if we grant that there are religious hinge commitments.

The contrast comes about because while there isn’t divergence in our commonsense hinge commitments—any sane person in normal conditions (who has hands) is certain of this fact (as their actions indicate), even if they never explicitly formulate this thought. That’s what makes such cases paradigm examples of hinge commitments. If one elects to take Wittgenstein’s account of hinge commitments and apply it to the religious case, however, then one is explicitly widening the scope of our hinge commitments to take in claims that are not immune to rational doubt in this radical sense. It may have been true for certain regions of human history that to doubt the existence of a God who cares for you would be to court insanity, but clearly this is not so today.

What is true even in today—at least if one lives in one of the many secularised societies in the world—is that if one is an ardent religious believer who comes to have serious doubts about the truth of one’s religious worldview, then this will have important, and transformative, consequences. People often describe a loss of faith in terms of grief, and it is easy to see why, once one understands the centrality of faith to one’s worldpicture, as the world can now seem a completely different, and alien, place compared with before. Moreover, there is also the alienation from the members of one’s religious community with whom one now lacks a shared conception of the world. This is the sense in which doubt of religious hinge commitments, while different from the (implausible) doubt of commonsense hinge commitments, is nonetheless in the vicinity of the latter in virtue of involving a wholesale disorientation and transformation of one’s worldview, just as the fundamental condition on hinge commitments demands.21

The second condition, obvious, should be straightforward, as clearly a religious believer regards the fundamental commitments of their religious system as obvious. Indeed, if anything, they might be too obvious. We noted earlier that as regards our commonsense hinge commitments we do not normally even think about them in an explicit sense, as they belong entirely to the background. Here, then, is another way in which the move away from paradigmatic cases of commonsense hinge commitments to include fundamental religious hinge commitments effectively extends the scope of the notion of a hinge commitment. For while commonsense hinge commitments are always in the background, religious hinge commitments have a tendency to be foregrounded, in the sense that they are explicitly cited, and often recited by the congregation, in religious ritual. Nonetheless, at least with this caveat in mind, I think we safely say that this condition is satisfied.

The third condition, visceral, is perhaps the one that is most clearly met by fundamental religious commitments. One’s faith is not a matter of reasons. Even if one can marshal reasons in its favour, the fact remains that a life of faith is not grounded in such considerations. Instead, it is a lived response to the world, a commitment that is revealed in our actions rather than grounded in reasons. This is why faith is so different from ordinary belief. For example, if apparent counterevidence comes your way regarding one of your ordinary beliefs, then, if you are rational anyway, you will at least lower your confidence in the truth of that belief, if not suspending your belief altogether. But faith is not like that. Indeed, if one simply suspended one’s fundamental religious convictions in the face of apparent counterevidence, then this would simply show that one never really had that faith in the first place. Like our commonsense hinge commitments, religious hinge commitments play a fulcrum role in one’s rational practices, such that one undertakes rational evaluations relative to the framework provided by these arational religious certainties, rather than this religious hinge certainty being itself subject to rational evaluation.

Let’s put these points together. Quasi-fideism certainly extends the scope of hinge epistemology beyond the paradigm cases of commonsense hinge commitments that Wittgenstein focusses upon in OC to take in religious hinge commitments that lack some features of the paradigm cases. And yet, with that qualification in mind, religious hinge commitments nonetheless satisfy the three core conditions on hinge commitments that we have set out. We thus have a prima facie basis for thinking that hinge epistemology could feasibly extend to the religious case, in the form of quasi-fideism.

4. Ideology

This brings us to our main concern, which is whether moving away from the paradigmatic cases of commonsense hinge commitments that Wittgenstein focusses upon in OC by allowing that fundamental religious commitments can be hinge commitments entails also allowing that ideological commitments are hinge commitments. This issue is rooted in the overlap between these two kinds of commitment. Although there are different conceptions of ideology in the literature, the overarching idea is that ideology involves largely implicit features of our worldview which structure how we think about important social, political and economic issues. In addition to this broad characterisation of ideology, I am going to add one further stipulation, which is that I will take ideology to always be something that distorts or misrepresents how things really are in some fundamental way. My usage of the term is thus not a value-neutral, but explicitly negatively valenced.22

For example, a Marxist critique of the contemporary capitalist worldview might argue that the ideology of this worldview makes it seem ‘fair’ that workers are exploited in low-wage jobs on account of the fact that the market promotes ‘freedom’ (it is, after all, a ‘free’ market). According to the Marxist analysis, this is an inverted way of understanding the actual situation, one that serves to promote the status quo. Whatever freedom is on display in this economic arrangement, it is primarily the freedom of large corporations to exploit workers. The ideology thus masks the true nature of one’s economic conditions in ways that are generally harmful (though beneficial for the small number of people who benefit from these economic conditions, and so have a motivation to propagate this ideology).

This talk of ideology ‘masking’ the true nature of reality implies a picture whereby ideology is metaphorically akin to a kind of optical device, one that distorts how you view reality but which you don’t know you are wearing. The trick is to remove the optical device—i.e., the ideological commitments that are distorting one’s perception—and one will be returned to one’s ‘natural’ way of perceiving the world, which is largely veridical.

The cultural theorist, Slavoj Žižek, has argued that the situation is in fact more complex than this. In particular, he maintains that ideological commitments take root, and thus perform their deceptive purpose, precisely because they offer a conception of how things are that we find psychologically pleasing. In this sense, it is the ideologically-informed conception of the world that we find ‘natural’. Similarly, we find the removal of this ideologically-informed conception of the world to be painful.

Žižek makes this point very vivid in the documentary film devoted to his ideas about ideology, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology.23 In this documentary he considers a number of movies and examines how they manifest ideological commitments. One of these movies is John Carpenter’s They Live (1988). In this film, the protagonist stumbles on a box of sunglasses that have a mysterious property. When one wears the glasses one can see the world as it really is and not merely as it is presented to one. In particular, one can see that there are zombie-like aliens that live among us but who we perceive as being fellow human beings. In addition, wearing the glasses enables one to see how these aliens are using subliminal messages to get people to consume and be obedient to the prevailing social order.

As Žižek points out, the purpose of They Live is to make vivid the nature of ideology. As we just noted, we might naturally suppose that ideology is, metaphorically speaking, akin to a kind of optical device that we put on which prevents us from seeing things as they really are. Žižek argues that the actual situation is more complex. Following the themes of They Live, it would be more accurate to say that ideology is our ‘natural’ way of seeing the world around us (recall that the protagonist naturally sees the world in a way that is informed by the ideology), albeit a fundamentally incorrect one. Rather than ideology being the ‘glasses’ that mask our natural ways of seeing the world, we instead need to put on special glasses to enable us to see the world as it really is, to break the spell of ideology.

Moreover, Žižek emphasises the uncomfortable nature of this realisation. He discusses in depth one scene in They Live where the protagonist has to literally fight his friend in order to get him to try on the glasses, as he is so opposed to seeing reality through them. Žižek’s point is that there is a kind of enjoyment that we get from the ideology, such that it is painful to us to reject it. For example, we may strongly desire it to be the case that the American Dream is true, and thus that anyone, regardless of their background, can be a success so long as they are smart and hard-working. There is something pleasing about this idea that the system is, at root, fair and well-ordered, and that can blind us to the reality, which would tell us something that is very uncomfortable to hear.

On the face of it, at least, this conception of ideology lends itself to a hinge-theoretic reading. Taking our three conditions in turn, it seems plausible that ideological commitments can appear to be ‘natural’ elements of our commonsense conception of the world (in line with fundamental); that they will, accordingly, seem obviously true (in line with obvious); and that we are disposed to be viscerally certain of them, in a way that is manifested in our actions rather than grounded in reasons (in line with visceral). If that’s right—and I will be arguing that it isn’t—then ideological commitments, at least so construed anyway, would be credible candidates to being hinge commitments. At the very least, even though (as we will note in due course), there are some obvious differences between the paradigm commonsense cases of hinge commitments that Wittgenstein focusses upon and the putative ideological hinge commitments, if one is willing to grant that there can be religious hinge commitments (which also diverge from the paradigm, commonsense cases in some respects, as noted above), then it is hard to see how a principled case can be offered for excluding ideological hinge commitments.

5. Ideological Commitments Are Not Hinge Commitments

To my knowledge, there is only one published work that explicitly develops the idea that ideological commitments should be construed as hinge commitments, offered by Chris Ranalli (2022).24 In this paper, Ranalli contends that two passages from article 17 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, devoted to property rights, might function as ideological hinge commitments. Here are the relevant passages:

(1)

Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

(2)

No-one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Ranalli’s idea is that claims about property, as exemplified by these passages from the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, can constitute background ideological commitments that prevent individuals from being able to recognize the true nature of their socio-economic situation, including the extent to which prevailing socio-economic conditions are contrary to their class interests.

I think the idea that these might be background ideological commitments is plausible. The issue that concerns us, however, is whether they should be thought of as hinge commitments. Here is Ranalli on this point:

“Just as [hinge commitments25] bring reasons for belief and doubt into view, they also resist reason-based justification or criticism. The employee has the resources within their liberal capitalist belief system to challenge their employer’s spying behavior, for example—which arguably would violate a human right—but not to the challenge the employer-employee relationship itself. This is because that relationship is conceived in their belief system as a fundamental expression of liberty, which would have framework status in that belief system.”

(Ranalli 2022, p. 141)

I agree with Ranalli that such ideological commitments are tacitly playing a framework role in our rational evaluations, such as in terms of how they might determine what counts as reasonable objections to existing socio-economic conditions, but I don’t think that this point by itself suffices to ensure that they are hinge commitments. At most, it shows that they satisfy the first condition on hinge commitments that we set out, fundamental. (Though as we will see below, it’s actually not clear on closer inspection that our ideological commitments even satisfy this condition).

The problem facing the idea that ideological claims like this are hinge commitments arises with the other two conditions. Let’s take them in turn, starting with obvious. Are ideological claims instinctively regarded as obviously true? While we might come to regard these claims as true, I don’t think we would naturally describe them as obvious, much less would we be instinctively inclined to describe them this way.

In order to understand why this is so, given how ideological commitments are meant to seamlessly structure our thinking about the world, we need to make an important distinction between two ways of talking about ideology. On the one hand, there is the ideology itself. This is not a set of propositions that we are explicitly committed to but rather more akin to a picture of how things work and are related to one another that structures our thoughts and actions. Call this way of thinking about ideology, the underlying ideological picture. On the other hand, there is the particular set of propositions which capture this ideology. Call this way of thinking about ideology, the ideological propositions. When a theorist of ideology like Žižek emphasises the apparent naturalness of ideology, he is referring to the underlying ideological picture rather than to specific ideological propositions. Ideology, so construed, is obvious to us in the sense that it naturally informs our thoughts and actions. But when we are asking the question of whether our ideological commitments are hinge commitments, it is the latter way of thinking about ideology that is in play, and here the obviousness of these ideological propositions is doubtful.

Clearly ideology can be obvious in the underlying ideological picture sense without it being obvious in the ideological propositions sense. That is, the general ideological picture that is operating in the background can feel natural to us, and thus in this sense at least be obvious, even though the specific ideological propositions that can be used to capture this picture are not obvious, much less instinctively obvious. Indeed, in the normal case, one doesn’t translate the background ideology into explicit propositions at all. In fact, the ideological picture that structures one’s thought is much more effective if one doesn’t attempt to do this, because once one starts to analyse this picture and break it down into specific propositions, then it suddenly starts to look a lot less obvious.

Ranalli’s examples of ideology are the result of an attempt to break down a diffuse ideological picture and extract specific propositional commitments that make up that picture. But what one is now facing are theoretical claims that use technical (e.g., legal) terminology rather than commonsense claims. There is thus quite a lot of distance between a commonsense certainty like ‘I have two hands’, and a legalistic formulation of one’s property rights. The primitive, arational certainty that attaches to the former has no place with regard to the latter. Even if one convinces oneself that the latter is true, one will do so in the usual way by offering rational support for it. Obvious is thus a problem for ideological commitments, at least so long as we focus our attention on the relevant propositional commitments that are consequences of the underlying ideological picture (which is what we should be doing, given that our concern is whether such commitments are hinge commitments).

This point carries over to the other condition on hinge commitments, visceral. While I would be willing to grant that we might have a visceral arational certainty in the ideology in the underlying ideological picture sense, I don’t think it is at all credible to think that this particular kind of certainty carries over to ideology in the ideological propositions sense. I noted just now that ideology is most effective if one doesn’t try to break it down into particular propositions which capture the underlying ideological picture. This is because this picture informs our thought and action at an implicit level, whereby we are unaware of the influence of the ideology but rather just instinctively treat it as natural. In contrast, the process of making the elements of the underlying ideological picture explicit in propositional form makes the ‘underlying’ ideological picture much less underlying, and hence brings its particular brand of obviousness into question. Put another way, ideology is most effective when it is operating implicitly at the level of action (as the underlying ideological picture tends to do) rather than being put into the spotlight of reason (as the attempt to formulate specific ideological propositions does).

The crux of the matter is that the very reasons why our ideological commitments fail to satisfy the obvious condition entail that it also fails the visceral condition. Even if we convince ourselves of the truth of the, rather theoretical, ideological propositions that make up the underlying ideological picture, this will be because we are persuaded by the supporting reasons for these claims. Rather than being a visceral, arational certainty that is rooted in actions rather than reason, it would instead be a more familiar kind of certainty that is grounded in reason. Again, then, we find that there is a great deal of distance between the commonsense certainties that Wittgenstein thought were paradigmatic hinge commitments and our ideological commitments.

This brings me back to the other condition on hinge commitments that we formulated, fundamental. We noted above that our ideological commitments at least seem to satisfy fundamental in the sense that they are central to one’s overarching worldview, and hence play a framework role in our rational practices, just like our commonsense hinge certainties do. I think that, nonetheless, there is a very important difference between our ideological commitments and our commonsense hinge commitments, one that calls into question whether the former really do satisfy the fundamental condition.

Recall that the guiding idea behind hinge epistemology is that the framework for our rational practices is provided via an arational visceral certainty in the general veracity of one’s worldview, the über hinge commitment. Although many Wittgenstein commentators fixate on the specific hinge commitments that he discusses, it is this overarching hinge commitment that is the most important one, as the specific hinge commitments flow from the über hinge commitment and not vice versa.

This point has an important consequence, which is that one’s specific hinge commitments cannot be in tension with one’s über hinge commitment, as they are simply manifestations of it. This is why, although becoming aware of the essential groundless of one’s specific hinge commitments—i.e., becoming aware of them qua hinge commitments—can be intellectually unsettling, it won’t by itself lead to doubt of them, given their relationship to the über hinge commitment.26 Discovering that one could have no rational basis for one’s complete certainty, in normal conditions, that one has hands might be intellectually unsettling, but one’s absolute certainty in this proposition will be unaffected by this discovery, as one’s subsequent actions will reveal.

Compare this with a discovery of how one’s underlying ideological picture has been operating in one’s thoughts and actions, in a manner cut-off from reasons but rather rooted in actions (via one’s socialization into this picture). When I recognize that my certainty in the existence of my hands is a hinge commitment, I become aware of its essential groundlessness. Nonetheless, it remains a hinge commitment on my part. In contrast, when I become aware that my thought and action has been guided by ideology—which, recall, we explicitly defined in terms of how it misrepresents reality—then what I become aware of is something very different, which is how I have been duped. Moreover, precisely the way to become aware of this fact is to try to make explicit the propositions that capture the underlying ideological picture.

What is radical about the Wittgensteinian account of the structure of rational evaluation is that our hinge commitments, which provide the framework for rational evaluation, can be arational. Nonetheless, they still need to be certainties that we regard as true, since it is only by being so that they can be manifestations of the über hinge commitment. If there were ideological hinge commitments, however, although they might appear to play the requisite framework role, they couldn’t possibly bear the right kind of relationship to the über hinge commitment. In particular, they cannot be manifestations of the über hinge commitment if they are not just groundless but also the kind of commitment that, when fully exposed, were revealed to be false (and so in tension with the über hinge commitment, which cannot be regarded as false). And yet this would be a consequence of them being ideological commitments.

This last point highlights a further core difference between genuine hinge commitment and one’s ideological commitments, which concerns what happens when we become aware of the role that they play in our practices. Discovering that one’s certainty that one has hands is a groundless hinge commitment does not lead to doubt of this claim. Indeed, if Wittgenstein is right, then it cannot lead to doubt, at least in the sense that one remains in the space of reasons. Genuine doubt here would be a sign that one has lost one’s marbles. Moreover, insofar as one understands why this certainty is groundless in this fashion, then one also understands that there is nothing problematic about its groundlessness. It is not as if one is ignorant of this proposition, as it is not something that is in the market for knowledge in the first place. (That one fails to know one’s hinge commitments no more indicates a cognitive failing on one’s part than the fact that one is unable to imagine a circle-square indicates an imaginative failing).27

Matters are completely different in the case of becoming aware of one’s fundamental ideological commitments. Now doubt would be an entirely appropriate—indeed, rational—response to this discovery. In fact, it would be very odd to become aware of one’s ideological commitments and yet carry on as before. Of course, it may be difficult to shake these commitments in practice. One has been habituated into tacitly accepting them, after all. But nonetheless one ought to now regard them with suspicion and one absolutely should no longer treat them as obvious certainties.

Notice how allowing that there can be religious hinge commitments does not lead one down the route that we just saw creating problems for putative ideological hinge commitments. If the religious person comes to realize (if quasi-fideism is correct, anyway), that their basic religious commitments are essentially groundless, then she doesn’t thereby come to realize that she has been duped. The groundlessness of these claims does not indicate that they should be regarded as false. Moreover, if she understands the quasi-fideist explanation of why these claims are groundless, then she also understands that this is inevitably the case. The crux of the matter is that extending hinge epistemology to the religious case does not open up the door to allowing there can ideological hinge commitments too, given the important differences between these two kinds of fundamental commitment.28