Nobody could be more kosher than Jaakko Hintikka in the bracing climate of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In the festschrift recently offered to him, nevertheless, Dagfinn Follesdal evidently thought nothing of writing as follows: “Heidegger’s main contribution to philosophy, it seems to me, is to focus attention on the idea that all human activity, all our ways of relating to the world, to one another and to ourselves, contribute to constituting the world”. A few pages further on he writes: “Heidegger’s analyses of the many ways in which we may relate to the world . . . anticipate in many respects some of Wittgenstein’s later analyses of forms of life”. That last statement, of course, implies a somewhat controversial reading of Wittgenstein’s later work. The only point here, however, is that, for an analytic philosopher, such statements as those just quoted represent an unprecedentedly positive assessment of Heidegger’s work. This is of particular interest to students of recent theology, both Protestant and Catholic, where, for better or for worse, Heidegger’s influence has been considerable.

Scandinavian philosophers have always been well placed, culturally and linguistically, to mediate between the analytic and the phenomenological camps into which philosophers are still largely divided. Roughly speaking, the genealogy of the analytic line begins with Frege (1848 - 1925) and runs through Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Carnap to such philosophers as Quine, Donald Davidson, Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Dummett. The alternative line descends from Hegel (1770 - 1831), deviates by reaction into Kierkegaard and Marx, and is disseminated diversely through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, to such contemporaries as Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer and Habermas.

Quilmes is a large, predominantly working class suburb on the eastern side of Buenos Aires. With a population of some 800,000 it was constituted as a separate diocese five years ago and Bishop Jorge Novak was named its first bishop. To mark their five years as a diocese Quilmes held a synod last September whose aim was, as Sr Justa Tello told me at the synod office, “to help the people commit themselves”. The two-week synod last year was however just the beginning of a process of getting to know the socio-political and religious realities of the diocese; further sessions planned for 1982/83 hope to evolve pastoral responses to these realities. It is, as Sr Justa Tello explained, based on the ‘See-Judge-Act’ methodology and the September session of the synod had limited itself to the first of these.

Fr Orlando Yorio, who himself ‘disappeared’ for five months in 1976 just after the military coup in March of that year, is secretary of the synod. He pointed out to me that in the early years of the Spanish conquest of Latin America “evangelisation took place through synods”. Among the ample documentation prepared by various commissions for the synod is one which gives an historical background in the early councils of the church, various diocesan synods held in Europe at different times and especially the 51 diocesan synods held in many different regions of Latin America from 1539-1638. To my great surprise Fr Yorio pointed out to me that canon law insists that each diocese hold a synod every ten years. This major event in the life of the Quilmes diocese then was, in the words of Fr Yorio, “to put us in touch with a renovating tradition of the Latin American Church”.

Since the term ‘Ideology’ and ‘Ideological’ are used in a variety of ways, I shall start by saying something about how I intend to use these terms in this paper and indicate what I understand to be the nature of my remarks about them.

For the purposes of this paper I shall take Marxism, Conservatism, Liberalism and Nationalism to be examples of political ideologies. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list; I could, for example, have included Fascism or National Socialism. It is merely intended to provide me with enough material to make the main points of this paper without becoming too involved in matters of exegesis. It should also be noted that in calling Marxism, Liberalism and the rest ideologies I am not using the term in a pejorative manner. That is, I wish to distinguish at the outset between my thesis and that of those who would argue that in calling a belief, doctrine or argument ideological, we are also condemning it as unreasonable or irrational. My aim is simply to discuss how we can best characterise ideological arguments, by comparing and contrasting them with other kinds of arguments. That said, it ought to be clear that my remarks will be philosophical rather than historical in nature. Though I shall be referring to disputes between ideologists that took place in the past, my interest in them will not be that of the historian. I shall be concerned with their conceptual structure rather than their chronological development.