> Idealism and empiricism support each other, in the sense that where
> knowledge is denied, one relies on faith and/or the fetishization of the
> cosmic contingency of human experience (as conceived by empiricism), as Roy
Hmm, well, historically they were antipodes of 18th century social theory, and as such are not really religious in that sense. Kant's system is always claiming that it doesn't know what's going on, and then moving past these self-imposed limits anyway (the a priori and the categorical imperative, for example, rely on the self-conscious working out of the concept, not received faith). Hume's radical contingency is actually more like religious faith than Kant's amphiboly of logic, but in practice it works out to be an insurance policy on the mercantile object: he's speculating on the marketplace of speculation, and so his radical skepticism is already the cynical realism of a British bourgeoisie which has a world empire to extract surplus-rents from ("gunboat empiricism", if you will). Kant, representing the underdeveloped German merchants who barely existed as a coherent class, couldn't do this, but tried to give the speculation a juridical foundation (i.e. moral principles were supposed to ensure the extraction of surplus-value; there was no German Empire to make sure this happened). In the context of semi-feudal Central Europe, Kant was a revolutionary, crazy as this sounds.
-- Dennis