Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> >The more I think about this, the more I wonder:
Doug, this seems misleading to me. The impression most of your posts over
time have given is that you made up your mind years ago on this as a
fundamental principle, from which no deviation was permissible. You seem
to think that if for one second you gave up your (dogmatic?) belief in
universal doubt you would fall into an abyss of universal doubt from
which there could be no recovery. You never expand on it, explore it,
consider variations on it, you merely reassert it in all its naked
abstraction.
> if we are basically
> >incapable of self-criticism, does that counsel extreme certainty or
> >extreme uncertainty?
We are basically incapable of flapping our wings and flying the Atlantic.
But still somehow we fly the Atlantic. Yoshie and Charles are making a
rather simple point -- there *is* a route to correction of one's errors,
but that route involves rejecting the incredibly arrogant assumption that
one can peer into one's own soul and see there what is correct and holy,
what is incorrect and must be torn out. There is, of course, an empirical
matter that no one has ever done this.
> Neither. It's just a fact of the matter.
>
> You don't take criticism from Christina Hoff Sommers as to the state
> of feminism (I don't know if you even read her, aside from Katha,
I've never gone through the work of determining that there are some 100+
elements instead of four. In fact, I have no way on my own of knowing
that water and fire are not elements. It is certainly true that some of
the things around me are lighter and more malleable, others lighter but
less malleable, etc., which seems pretty good evidence of the existence
of fire and water as fundamental elements. But despite this limitation of
my own knowledge I am actually utterly certain of the correctness of the
modern table of atomic weights and utterly certain that fire and water
are not two of the four (or five) fundamental elements. (In China ancient
physics held there to be five elements, the fifth of which was wood.)
Moreover, I am reasonably certain that anyone who does not admit to
certainty on this matter is either a liar or a fool. (The necessary
qualifying adverb here is grounded in the strong element of contingency
in reference to most non-trivial general descriptions meant to apply to
historically actual individuals.) As Yoshie remarks below, we can only
talk of uncertainty at all because of the extremely large number of
certainties which most of us share.
> Laura, and others' criticisms of her), but you are certain that you
> are right & she's wrong.
>
> We don't live in a world where everything is uncertain, and only in a
> world of many certainties can we speak of uncertainties.
Criticism, incidentally, *has* to be based on shared principles. This is
perhaps what makes self-criticism (in the abstract) a self-defensive
rather than "open-minded" procedure. Self-criticism in the abstract (that
is, other than in response to criticism launched by others) is
necessarily solipsistic, denying in advance any requirement that the
agent share with others any principles of collective or mutual judgment.
The individual (and self-criticism is a radically individualistic
process) announces in advance that he/she refuses to consider any other
principles of judgment than those unique to his/her own subjective
responses to the world. Self-criticism, as an isolated process, is an
absolute repudiation of the principle of solidarity. *I* KNOW the only
principles that apply to MY activity, and I owe no allegiance to any
collectivity that does not bow down before those (purely private)
principles.
Doug, for whatever reason, does seem to be more fearful than most of
being wrong -- and a dogmatic scepticism or sceptical dogmatism does more
or less guarantee that one is never wrong, the penalty being that one is
never right either. If Yoshie has been studying Trilling lately perhaps
she can find the passage in his works where he notes that this terror of
being wrong is especially strong among professors. He quotes or
paraphrases the cautious and mushy-mouthed way in which Professor A
"disagrees" with Professor B, the implication being that if he simply
said, Professor B is wrong, Professor B would melt into a pool of butter
on the spot.
Carrol
