Re: Hume & the Postmodern Grin without a Cat (was Re: pomois...

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

> In a message dated 9/10/00 2:59:24 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx writes:
>
> << That's why I mentioned in the post that Hume backed off -- sensibly
> so -- from the most radical implications of his own epistemology
> (which brings "everything solid melts into air" to its extreme).  One
> can have beliefs that one can't justify by reason, and without those
> (unjustified) beliefs one can't have society (a line of reasoning
> often adopted by conservatives), or so thought Hume, I think. >>
> * * *
>
> But a skeptical (or any other) epistemology has no necessary implications for
> political philosophy. Neither does Hume's naturalistic "solution" to the
> problem of induction imply a Oakeshottean appeal to the inarticulate wisdom
> of the ages. --jks

One can be a radical skeptic & anarchist, to be sure (e.g. Paul
Feyerabend), instead of a conservative, for instance.

My contention is, though, that abstract individualism, as an effect
of commodity fetishism, underwrites nearly the whole of Western
Philosophy (epistemologically, that is, individual philosophers'
various political preferences notwithstanding).  There is a common
ground between many dialectical twins of Western Philosophy (e.g.
Descartes & Hume, Kant & Bentham, logical positivism & postmodernism,
etc.).  Hegel & later (the very early) Marx sought to solve these
antinomies dialectically.  Marx, however, eventually came to think
that one couldn't "exorcise Descartes's evil demon" philosophically
(at least not from the philosophical point of departure of Cogito) &
besides to find the problem to be rather beside the point (of the
political project of communism) & "scholastic."  The second thesis on
Feuerbach: "The question whether objective truth can be attributed to
human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical
question.  Man must prove the truth -- i.e. the reality and power,
the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.  The dispute over the
reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is
a purely scholastic question."  I thought that's what you suggested
in "The Paradox of Ideology" _Canadian Journal of Philosophy_ 23.4
(December 1993):

*****   How we can tell whether we are responding correctly,
'mirroring' reality accurately?  If the question is whether we can
have some _guarantee_ that we are on the right track, on this view we
cannot.  The best we can do is to monitor our success or failure in
achieving our ends and extending our theories and note our tendency
to increase or reduce our theoretical and practical ambitions in
response to that success or failure.  At the end of the day, even at
the hypothetical end of inquiry, we might be wrong.  Marx has not
exorcised Descartes's evil demon.

This will not satisfy the skeptic, a worry Marx would dismiss as
'scholastic.'  Marx's worry is different: that his own theory, and
all scientific inquiry, undermines its own claim to objectivity and
justification by revealing itself as ideological.  The problem of
skepticism and the paradox of ideology are distinct.  Marx addresses
the second but not the first.  The Cartesian skepticism that
motivates the objection here asks whether one can establish the
objectivity of scientific knowledge a priori, without assuming any
such knowledge to begin with.  Like modern naturalizing
epistemologists, Marx helps himself to the scientific knowledge we
accept in practice.   (p. 556)   *****

Yoshie