Jasmina Mojsieva-Guseva

Intellect and Interest

Summary

It is a common knowledge that human activities could be either instrumental or communicative, which is a new interpretation of the old Marxist division of the society in which the relations belong to the materialistic base or to ideological superstructure. Having that in mind we explicitly come to a conclusion that the relation between instrumental and communicative activities is parallel to the relation between materialistic gain and knowledge, i.e. interest and intellect, or colloquially put – money and mind.

We meet the third segment – words only in the sphere of uninhibited communication between people. That goes on through a symbolic interaction between social institutions that recognise each other. Its practical form is the rhetoric that politicians need to gain power and money.

My essay is about the interactive connection of those three segments and I raise the question about the establishment of a meaningful relation between scientific discoveries and the practice. That eventually connects with the intended reality on the grounds that intellect and interest are identical, which can be seen in the critical analyses of Habermas and the other members of the philosophical school – Frankfurt circle. They maintain that when the world would be structured according to intellectual principles, the intellect would be a mean of emancipation. We still have to answer these questions: to what degree is it possible to implement this theory in practice, how this process gets developed and what are the difficulties that this process faced being implemented in the social structure in the last decades.