Just Curious

"The Economic Man," the "Rational Actor" and Hegelian sleight of hand

Prof. Hanson mentioned more than a few times in our torts class the fallacy of what he called "Dispositionism," and its corollary in Neoclassical Economics, the notion of the rational actor. Yesterday I read an essay by Professor Lucio Colletti on Marx's "Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State" and the issue of such pseudo-abstraction was discussed in length. It pretty much has to do with how "(un)transcendental" Hegel (and other "Dispositionists," to steal a Hansonian term) really was vis-a-vis true transcendentalists such as the Kant, Marx, Meister Eckhart and St. Denis. There are two solution to this. We could either go all the way through transcendentalism and finally come to the outer-boundary of human reason, the "cloud of unknowing," stop there, and claim that we've found the cornerstone of all human morals (as Kant did in his "Groundwork," which really provides the ethical fiber later materialist philosophies badly need); or, we could go back and become vulgar materialists like people who constituted the New Left.

Another book that I picked up yesterday was Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s 'The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.' I don't know why but suddenly I came to realize that the fallacy of both monoculturalists and multiculturalists lie precisely in their pseudo-abstractions, the former of "The American Man" or "the Free Citizen," whatever that means, and the latter of categories such as "race," "class" and "gender." They both commit the mortal error of taking "the system," not-so-abstractly-constructed-and-with-empiricist-biases-built-in, rather than the human individual, as their point of departure. In a sense, the monoculturalists are repeating the Hegelian sleight-of-hand, smuggling a posteri notions into their "transcendental" construction of the "American man" and claiming generality for the specific features/quirks a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class man may have; whereas the multiculturalists, being products of a reaction against
this sleight-of-hand, are just being plain-ole' vulgar materialists.

All these sound very abstract and incomprehensible at this moment. I will try to write up a short paragraph about it the next few days, when I spend my holidays in Philly, and post it online.

posted by James Chang @ 1:58 PM