2. The Enlightenment Paradigm: The General Statement

It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions. The same events follow from the same causes.^[9]

This statement by David Hume is characteristic of the Enlightenment and of Enlightened natural-law philosophy. It must be emphasized that state-

[8] R. G. Collingwood. The Idea of History , London, 1970, 251. For a comprehensive discussion of Collingwood's relevant views, see W. J. Van der Dussen, History as a Science: The Philosophy of Collingwood , The Hague, 1981, chap. 7.

[9] D. Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals , Oxford, 1972, 83.

ments like these, contrary to appearances, always imply two things instead of only one. For suppose that we accept Hume's statement as it stands, next we try to formulate these general rules governing human action, but then discover that each individual natural-law philosopher or social scientist comes up with a different set of general rules, while all these sets appear to be mutually incompatible. In that case, the only possible conclusion is that no general rules have been found. For the discovery of general rules, the statements describing them are required to be intersubjectively acceptable, that is to say not only for me but also for you and anybody else. To put it differently, the general statement requires a general, or interchangeable knowing subject. The general statement and the general, interchangeable knowing subject are two sides of the same coin.

This world governed by general rules that can be discovered by the general, interchangeable knowing subject is, in principle at least, a world without impenetrable secrets. Even the most obvious limit of human knowledge, the transcendental human knowing subject himself, can be transgressed here, for the generality of the knowing subject guarantees the possibility of general knowledge. It may be that the social sciences will fail us and that we shall have to have recourse to philosophy. Probably philosophy has a chance of success here. For the fact that we do not believe that the problems that inspired Descartes, Kant, or Wittgenstein were meaningless problems proves that this is how we think. The knowing subject is, so to speak, "at home" here, in the world investigated by him; no part of the world investigated by him exceeds the bounds of what he could possibly know. This is the paradigm cherished by Hume, by the natural-law philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their modern heirs, the social scientists. Knowledge is knowledge of general rules that is in the possession of a generalized knowing subject.

This parallelism between the general states of affairs on the one hand, that are known by a general and interchangeable knowing subject on the other, implies the transparency of language. Clasped between the general states of affairs described by the general statement on the one hand and the general knowing subject on the other, the general meanings of the words of language remain fixed, and language does not have a chance to be creative or imaginative. Like the paperweight through which we see the text underneath, language here is a neutral medium through which the knowing subject perceives a sociohistorical reality that is built of the same "material" as himself. And how could knowledge of sociohistorical reality be possible if language stood in the way of our perception of reality? Social reality and the knowing subject being "coextensive," so to speak, language is derivative and cannot claim an independent status of its own. The relation between language and reality is fundamentally unproblematic—that is, a problem that can in principle be solved. Epistemology is

the department of philosophy that is supposed to solve the problem and we have no reason to doubt that it will be equal to its task.

In summary: as did so many others, Kant asked the question of how knowledge is possible and he assigned to epistemology the task of answering this question. We took a step backward here and asked, instead, how epistemology is possible, and we concluded that the shared generality of the general statement and the generalized knowing subject answered this "pre-Kantian" question. And the choice either for or against epistemology is ultimately a political one, since it depends on how the relation between the individual, the other, and the social order is conceived of.