Re: nostalgie versus progress
Phil Agre (pagre who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Tue, 25 Jun 1996 14:55:29 -0700 (PDT)
I hope I didn't mean to suggest that German thought is relativist.
Herder believed that aesthetic judgement was thoroughly relative to
particular cultures, in that aesthetic judgements could only be made
against the background of the culture as a totality, but he also
believed that aesthetic judgements (I'm just taking aesthetics as
an example) are objective, in the sense that a thing's aesthetic
qualities are fully determined by the culture. That general notoin
notion of a culture as a totality is pretty much the backbone of
the counter-enlightenment tradition back to Vico and forward through
modern cultural anthropology. The whole debate about relativism
in these contexts has been pretty much a matter of distinguishing
fine degrees of difference about what an organic culture is. Perhaps
your point is that someone who doesn't believe in progress is a
relativist, inasmuch as any criterion of comparison at all generates
its own notion of progress. But that seems way too strict. It's
quite possible to find various kinds of progress conceivable without
believing that they are actual, inevitable, likely, or even possible.
And there's a real sense in which many Germans have been regressivists,
believers that cultures inevitably tend downhill. That's not relativism
by any means.
Phil