Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Rationalism vs. Empiricism and Objectivism vs. Subjectivism

The standard grouping together of Descartes and Spinoza as 'Rationalist' obscures how they are radically opposed in another respect.  While Descartes derives God and World from private sensory experience, Spinoza derives private sensory experience from God and World.  In other words, Descartes is a Subjectivist, and Spinoza is an Objectivist.  Leibniz, too, is an Objectivist, i. e. the concept of a Windowless Monad could not be derived from private experience.  Locke, Berkeley, and Hume are all Subjectivists, though, unlike the latter two, Locke does not deny any Objective existence.  Now, Kant's credit to Hume of wakening him from "dogmatic slumber" seems to imply that Objectivism is dogmatic.  However, he misses how Hume's Subjectivism is also dogmatic--the acceptance of the irreducibility of Sense-Data suppresses the sequence of abstractions that isolate them from ordinary immediate experience.  Now, Kant does eventually posit himself in an Objectivist vs. Subjectivist opposition to Hume, but on the basis of redefining it in terms of Form vs. Matter within the Subjectivist context. So, he never comes to consider that his waking from a dogmatic slumber might be a dream within another dogmatic slumber.  Regardless, the usual classification of the era in terms of Rationalist vs. Empiricist obscures the dynamic of the Objectivist vs. Subjectivist opposition.

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