andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
> The debate gets very sophisticated, and smart
> relativism is very hard to beat. Ultimately I do not
> think it can be beaten with the a priori equipment
> that the relativists tend to want to say delimits the
> discussion. You can't dig yourself out of Cartesian
> skepticism or Berkeleyean idealism with nothing but a
> philosophers' armchair. The real question is, why
> should we allow relativists and skeptics to thus
> defined the terms of the debate?
And one can follow up that real question with the historical question of explaining why Descartes, Berkeley & their followers should have dug those holes to begin with. That, I think, is a both a more interesting and important question _and_ one which, while not easy to answer, is in principle answerable, in that increased awareness of human activity (past, present, and future) emerges from even the attempt or from partial answers.
The starting point is, perhaps, Marx's observation on the "dot-like" isolation of the "free laborer" in capitalist society. There is no "intellectual" escape from that isolation.
I believe I have quoted the following below, but it is (I think) a wonderfu illustration of how that isolation comes to be taken for granted, thus making it seem somehow necessary to "refute" the varieties of skepticism. John Arthos, writing on _Paradise Lost_:
"Our imaginings are not so much concentrated as they are diffused. . . . One of the great advantages of Milton's manner is that it largely frees the Christian view from the limited contexts of contemporary society and draws us instead to think of Adam and Eve as ourselves at any moment in history and at any place entering upon an unknown life."
That is, "we" somehow exist _outside_ history, 'free' from any social relations, and by an act of will enter into social relations rather than (as is the case) always finding ourselves already implicated in such an ensemble of social relations. That isolation (and the philosophies that flow from it) is at least partly grounded in the experience of the abstract consumer as he/she stands before a (seemingly) infinite range of "choices," which (since they are separated from their motive) he/she must choose among "freely." (For the peasant family growing (for the most part) their own food, there is a direct and even 'visible' relationship of (say) the act of sowing and its motive (the consumption of the bread). But there is no visible link between the 'free' choice of this rather than that brand of green beans and consumption of the food. One could be buying the beans to use as missiles against an ornery neighbor!
Grant that isolation, and realist assumptions seem intolerably vulgar.
Carrol