Specialized philosophical jargon widens the divide between high culture and the popular masses.

Evidence

The problem on the other hand, it seems to me, is this: how can one explain how such a conception, which is certainly not pure futility, even for a philosophy of praxis, should today, when exposed to the public, provoke only laughter and mockery? This seems to me the most typical cause of the distance that has grown up between science and life, between certain groups of intellectuals— who are however in “central” positions of command in high culture—on the one hand, and the great popular masses on the other; and a cause also of the way in which the language of philosophy has become a jargon which produces the same effect as that of Harlequin. But if common sense finds it funny, the philosopher of praxis should all the same look for an explanation both of the real meaning which the conception has and of the reason why it was born and became diffused among the intellectuals, and also of the reason why it is found laughable by common sense. Without doubt the subjectivist conception is proper to modern philosophy in its most achieved and advanced form, in that it gave birth to, and was superseded by, historical materialism, a philosophy which, in its theory of superstructures, poses in realistic and historicist terms what traditional philosophy expressed in a speculative form. … It is surprising that there has been no proper affirmation and development of the connection between the idealist assertion of the reality of the world as a creation of the human spirit and the affirmation made by the philosophy of praxis of the historicity and transience of ideologies on the grounds that ideologies are expressions of the structure and are modified by modifications of the structure . — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1570

Categorization

• XREF: The distance between ‘science and life’ and the laughter of common sense resonates with Gramsci’s broader hegemony/common-sense framework that the reader is assembling for the Islamophobia toolkit.
• DEFINE: Establishes that subjectivist philosophy was superseded by historical materialism, which translates its speculative claims into realistic, historicist terms about superstructures.