Carrol Cox wrote:
And no one has the slightest fucking idea of what "postmodernism" is
or
who 'believes' in it, or if it is something one believes in or like
the
rain something that falls on one.
Independent of what it's called, there is a doctrine, claiming
derivation from Heidegger's idea (elaborated in Being and Time) of the
"hermeneutic circle," that asserts that texts are necessarily
"constructed" by the reader in a way makes their meanings unknowable
things in themselves.
This differs from Husserl's "phenomenology" which is, in part, a
method for avoiding misinterpretation (of texts or any other aspect of
reality) by questioning hitherto unquestioned frameworks of
interpretation.
For instance, Keynes, who understood this point, claimed the Austrian
Hayek had falied to understand the argument of A Treatise on Money
because he had failed to read it phenomenologically in this sense (as
he put it, failed to read it with "good will" - combining a
philosoophical with a psychological point).
This is also true of all those, e.g. Paul Davidson, who insist on
interpreting Keynes on the assumption that he treats all agents as
fully "rational" (or, as Paul prefers, in order to distinguish an
understanding of "rationality" - in the sense conventional in
economics - that takes account of fundamental "uncertainty" from one
that doesn't, as fully "sensible"). This in spite of the fact that in
many texts, most obviously in the autobiographical essay "My Early
Beliefs," Keynes explicitly rejects this assumption. In "My Early
Beliefs," for instance, he claims the assumption that all individuals
are "reasonable" is "disastrously mistaken" and substitutes for it the
assumption that "there are insane and irrational springs of wickedness
in most men."
Ted
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