Last time I checked, Hume's price-specie flow model is still taught in
university economics classes to measure price and money supply dynamics
under a gold standard. Not a bad concoction for someone whose "universe"
implies that "identities in general are fiction, subject only to customs."
Do we really need to abstract economic implications from the /philosophy/
of one of the most influential political economists of the 18th century?
----Ben Day
On Sun, 10 Sep 2000, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >Hume is just saying that it's impossible to rationally demonstrate that,
> >because X has always followed Y in the past, it will do so in the future.
> >
> >This is a bit far afield of pen-l, though, I suppose.
> >
> >----Ben
>
> Not so afield of PEN-L, in that Hume's philosophy -- his view that
> there are no dependent entities, hence there is no absurdity in a
> grin without a cat (or a Robinson Crusoe, an abstract individual
> absolutely free from & autonomous of social relations) & the future
> is radically uncertain -- is a sign of the times: "Everything solid
> melts into air," the transition from feudalism (where dependence is
> universal & Aristotle's final causes assure the sense of order) to
> capitalism (where dependence is exceptional & products of human labor
> become divorced from human ends in the anarchy of capitalism, which
> Adam Smith covers up with the surreptitious reintroduction of
> Providence which transvalues private vices into public virtues).
>
> In the Humean universe, personal identities in particular &
> identities in general are fiction, subject only to customs, hence to
> radical self-fashioning & -re-fashioning. The age of (pre-modern)
> allegories with type names ends; the epoch of novel with proper names
> -- for instance, Robinson Crusoe & Moll Flanders, self-made man &
> woman -- begins. For elaboration of this theme, see, for example,
> Ian Watt, _The Rise of the Novel_:
>
> "Just as the modern study of society only began once individualism
> had focussed attention on man's apparent disjunction from his
> fellows, so the novel could only begin its study of personal
> relationships once _Robinson Crusoe_ had revealed a solitude that
> cried aloud for them....[I]t is appropriate that the tradition of the
> novel should begin with a work that annihilated the relationships of
> the traditional social order, and thus drew attention to the
> opportunity and the need of building up a network of personal
> relationships on a new and conscious patterns; the terms of the
> problem of the novel and of modern thought alike were established
> when the old order of moral and social relationships was shipwrecked,
> with Robinson Crusoe, by the rising tide of individualism" (92).
>
> Hume himself, however, backed off from the most radical implications
> of his own philosophy: "We can form no wish which has not a reference
> to society" (_Treatise of Human Nature_). And yet his pragmatic
> acceptance of what he thought of as dictates of nature & customs is
> at odds with the rest of his philosophy in which nothing is logically
> dependent for existence on anything else. He couldn't solve this
> aporia* (and didn't even try to), for it cannot be solved in
> philosophy -- abstract individualism is real & ideological at the
> same time, as Marx teaches us. In other words, Hume left us a
> problem that can be only solved in collective political practice.
> Deliberating with oneself wouldn't do.
>
>
> *a-po'-ri-a
> from Gk. aporos "without a passage"
> diaporesis
> addubitatio, dubitatio
> addubitation, doubht, the doubtfull
>
> Deliberating with oneself as though in doubt over some matter; asking
> oneself (or rhetorically asking one's hearers) what is the best or
> appropriate way to approach something.
> <http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/Figures/APORIA.HTM>
>
> Yoshie
>
>
