책으로, 말로, 돈으로 전수되는 從北
김수진(탈북자)


한국에 금방 왔을 때 대한민국 사람들이 거지꼴인 북한을 동경한다는 게 믿어지지 않았다. 처음에는 일시적인 정신질환인줄 알았다. 몇 년을 살고 보니 만성정신질환이라는 걸 이해했다. 한국 같은 호화스러운 나라에서 살면서 북한 같은 공산독재국가를 동경한다는 것은 인두겁을 썼다고 말하기에는 짜증이 나고 정신질환환자에 비기지 않을 수 없다. (발췌)
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해석학의 학계(學界) 침입

 

해석학의 사전적 정의는 오래된 성서의 해석학이라는 것이다.

하지만 현대 해석학은 창시자 하이데거와 후계자 가다마를 이어, 문학에서 “해체주의”로 이어졌다. 해체주의는 프랑스의 평론가 푸코, 리쾨르, 데리다 등에 의해 창도되었고, 서구에서는 예일대학에 의해 주도되었다. 해체주의와 해석학의 요점은 허무주의, 상대주의, 유아론(唯我論) 등인데, 한 마디로 객관적인 진실은 없고, 또 있어도 우리가 그것을 발견할 수 없다는 것이다. 각각의 개인이 주관적인 감정, 견해, 역사에 사로잡혀 있으므로, 객관적인 진리를 발견할 수가 없다는 주장이다.

만일 우리가 텍스트의 의미를 이해할 수 없다면, 우리는 왜 저자들의 작품이나 철학을 이해하거나 진지하게 고민하려는 것일까? 해석학에서 이해 불가능이란 자기 실현적 예언과도 같다.

막시즘은 진실도 과학도 아니다. 그래서 어쨌다는 것인가? 해석학에 따르면 어떤 것도 객관적으로 진실이 아니며, 따라서 모든 견해와 명제는 각 개인의 감정과 변덕에 따라 주관적이다.

해석학에 따르면 모든 사회적 문제는 사적이고 비합리적인 취향에 귀결된다. 따라서 사회주의가 아름답다 생각하는 사람이 있어도, 객관적인 진리가 없기 때문에 그들을 저지할 수 없다. 필연적으로 막스, 베블렌, 슈몰러, 하이데거, 가다머 등 거의 모든 해석학자들은 좌우를 막론하고 집합주의자이거나 그와 유사한 사상에 경도되었다.

해석학자들은 항상 자신의 견해를 회의적으로 바라보고, 대화에 열려 있다고 주장하지만, 그들은 몇몇 적대적 상대들에 대해서는 상대가 틀렸다는 확신을 갖고 있다.

만일 진실이 없고, 결론이 이를만한 준거가 없다면, 대화에서 결론은 어떻게 나올까? 어쩌면 강력한 권력의지를 지닌 사람에 의해 결론이 내려질 가능성이 크다. 사실 해석학자들은 스탈린이나 히틀러, 폴 포트 등의 권력자에 고분고분했다.

해석학자들은 그들에 대한 비난을 “비학자적”이라고 응수하는데, 여기서 말하는 학자적이란 몽매주의(蒙昧主義)적 단어를 관련 없는 책과 기사의 번잡한 인용으로 둘러싸는 사람이다.

1953년이 밀턴 프리드먼이 쓴 "실증 경제학의 방법 The Methodology of Positive Economics,"은 논리적 실증주의를 경제학에 도입한 결과가 되었다.

신고전주의 경제학에 대한 오스트리아 학파의 반격에 대해, 그들은 프리드먼의 논문을 근거로, 이론이 적절히 예측을 하는 한, 전제의 오류는 상관 없다고 주장했다.

이에 대해 미제스와 하이에크는 인간사는 실험실이 없어서 변수를 통제하고 실험할 수 없고, 인간의 의식, 의지의 자유, 가치, 목표를 선택할 자유 등이 있는 세상에서는 계량적 항수(恒數)가 없다고 반격했다.

어쩌면 해석학의 부상은 실증주의에 대한 복수이기도 해서, 해석학자들은 실증주의자들에게 “만일 과학이 계량적이고 실험 가능한 것만을 의미한다면, 우리는 너희들을 의미 없는 것들로 매장해버리겠다”고 응수하는 것이다.

 

The Hermeneutical Invasion

 

•Murray N. Rothbard

 

 

Introduction

 

In recent years, economists have invaded other intellectual disciplines and, in the dubious name of "science," have employed staggeringly oversimplified assumptions in order to make sweeping and provocative conclusions about fields they know very little about. This is a modern form of "economic imperialism" in the realm of the intellect. Almost always, the bias of this economic imperialism has been quantitative and implicitly Benthamite, in which poetry and pushpin are reduced to a single level, and which amply justifies the gibe of Oscar Wilde about cynics, that they (economists) know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The results of this economic imperialism have been particularly ludicrous in the fields of sex, the family, and education.

 

So why then does the present author, not a Benthamite, now have the temerity to tackle a field as arcane, abstruse, metaphysical, and seemingly unrelated to economics as hermeneutics? Here my plea is the always legitimate one of self-defense. Discipline after discipline, from literature to political theory to philosophy to history, have been invaded by an arrogant band of hermeneuticians, and now even economics is under assault. Hence, this article is in the nature of a counterattack.

 

To begin, the dictionary definition of hermeneutics is the age-old discipline of interpreting the Bible. Until the 1920s or 1930s, indeed, hermeneutics was confined to theologians and departments of religion. But things changed with the advent of the murky German doctrines of Martin Heidegger, the founder of modern hermeneutics. With the death of Heidegger, the apostolic succession of head of the hermeneutical movement fell upon his student, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who still wears this mantle.

 

The greatest success of the hermeneutical movement has been achieved in recent decades, beginning in the closely related movement of "deconstructionism" in literary criticism. Headed by the French theorists Michel Foucault, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida, deconstructionism in the Western Hemisphere is led by the formidable Department at Yale University, from which it has spread to conquer most of the English-literature departments in the United States and Canada. The essential message of deconstructionism and hermeneutics can be variously summed up as nihilism, relativism, and solipsism. That is, either there is no objective truth or, if there is, we can never discover it. With each person being bound to his own subjective views, feelings, history, and so on, there is no method of discovering objective truth. In literature, the most elemental procedure of literary criticism (that is, trying to figure out what a given author meant to say) becomes impossible. Communication between writer and reader similarly becomes hopeless; furthermore, not only can no reader ever figure out what an author meant to say, but even the author does not know or understand what he himself meant to say, so fragmented, confused, and driven is each particular individual. So, since it is impossible to figure out what Shakespeare, Conrad, Plato, Aristotle, or Machiavelli meant, what becomes the point of either reading or writing literary or philosophical criticism?

 

It is an interesting question, one that the deconstructionists and other hermeneuticians have of course not been able to answer. By their own avowed declaration, it is impossible for deconstructionists to understand literary texts or, for example, for Gadamer to understand Aristotle, upon whom he has nevertheless written on at enormous length. As the English philosopher Jonathan Barnes has pointed out in his brilliant and witty critique of hermeneutics, Gadamer, not having anything to say about Aristotle or his works, is reduced to reporting his own subjective musings — a sort of lengthy account of "what Aristotle means to me." Setting aside the hermeneutical problem of whether or not Gadamer can know even what Aristotle means to him, we push back the problem another notch. Namely, why in the world should anyone but Gadamer, except possibly his mother or wife, be in the least interested in the question of what Aristotle means to him? And even in the improbable event that we were interested in this earth-shattering question, we would in any case be prevented on hermeneutical principles from understanding Gadamer's answer.

 

Deconstruction and hermeneutics are clearly self-refuting on many levels. If we cannot understand the meaning of any texts, then why are we bothering with trying to understand or to take seriously the works or doctrines of authors who aggressively proclaim their own incomprehensibility?

 

Incomprehensibility

 

Indeed, a crucial point about the hermeneuticians is that, for them, incomprehensibility is a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a colleague of mine ruefully told me: "I have read everything on hermeneutics I can lay my hands on, and I understand no more about it than I did when I first started." Even in a profession — philosophy — not exactly famous for its sparkle or lucidity, one of the most remarkable qualities of the hermeneuticians is their horrendous and incomparably murky style. Stalactites and stalagmites of jargon words are piled upon each other in a veritable kitchen midden of stupefying and meaningless prose. Hermeneuticians seem to be incapable of writing a clear English, or indeed a clear German sentence. Critics of hermeneutics — such as Jonathan Barnes or David Gordon —are understandably moved to satire, to stating or quoting hermeneutical tracts and then "translating" them into simple English, where invariably they are revealed as either banal or idiotic.

 

 

At first, I thought that these German hermeneuticians were simply ill-served by their translators into English. But my German friends assure me that Heidegger, Gadamer, et al. are equally unintelligible in the original. Indeed, in a recently translated essay, Eric Voegelin, a philosopher not normally given to scintillating wit, was moved to ridicule Heidegger's language. Referring to Heidegger's master work, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), Voegelin refers to the meaningless but insistent repetition of a veritable philosophical dictionary of phrases as the Anwesen des Answesenden ("the presence of that which is present"), the Dingen des Dings ("the thinging of the thing"), the Nichten des Nichts ("the nothinging of the nothing"), and finally to the zeigenden Zeichen des Zeigzeugs ("the Pointing sign of the pointing implement"), all of which is designed, says Voegelin, to whip up the reader "into a reality-withdrawing state of linguistic delirium."

 

On Gadamer and the hermeneuticians, Jonathan Barnes writes:

 

 

What, then, are the characteristic features of hermeneutical philosophy? Its enemies will wade in with adjectives like empty, vapid, dreamy, woolly, rhetorical. Gadamer himself tells an uncharacteristic story. At the end of a seminar on Cajetan, Heidegger once startled his devoted audience by posing the question: "What is being?" "We sat there staring and shaking our heads over the absurdity of the question." Quite right too, say the enemies of hermeneutics: the question is perfectly absurd. But Gadamer has only a frail sense of the absurd, and his own readers ought to react as he once — but alas, only once — reacted to Heidegger.

 

Barnes goes on to say that Gadamer admits "that his thought has sometimes been less than pellucid." He further quotes Gadamer as saying:

 

 

Certainly I sometimes spoke over my pupils' heads and put too many complications into my train of thought. Even earlier my friends had invented a new scientific measure, the "Gad," which designated a settled measure of unnecessary complications.

 

Barnes adds that:

 

 

Some may prefer to this self-congratulatory little story a remark which Gadarner makes of his younger self: "Despite my title of doctor, I was still a 22-year old boy who thought rather murky thinking, and who still did not really know what was going on."

 

Barnes adds: "Did the boy ever grow up?"

 

At this point we may cite Sir Karl Popper on G.W.F. Hegel, who counts along with Friedrich Schleiermacher as at least a great-grandfather of hermeneutics. What Popper lacks in satiric gifts he makes up in the vehemence of the scorn that he heaps upon the legion of his philosophical enemies, real or imagined. After denouncing Hegel's "high-flown gibberish" and "imbecile fancies," Popper quotes with obvious relish the attack on Hegel by his contemporary Schopenhauer as:

 

 

a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before.

 

Why this enormous acclaim and influence exerted by mystifying nonsense? In addition to noting its establishment in the interests of the Prussian state, Popper offers the following explanation:

 

 

For some reason, philosophers have kept around themselves, even in our day, something of the atmosphere of the magician. Philosophy is considered a strange and abstruse kind of thing, dealing with those mysteries with which religion deals, but not in a way which can be "revealed unto babes" or to common people; it is considered to be too profound for that, and to be the religion and theology of the intellectuals, of the learned and wise.

 

For a final citation on the incomprehensibility of hermeneutics, let us turn to the witty and devastating demolition by H.L. Mencken of Thorstein Veblen, another early protohermeneutician and an institutionalist opponent of the idea of economic law. In the course of an essay featuring the "translation" into English of Veblen's indecipherable prose, Mencken wrote that what was truly remarkable about Veblen's ideas:

 

 

was the astoundingly grandiose and rococo manner of their statement, the almost unbelievable tediousness and flatulence of the gifted headmaster's prose, his unprecedented talent for saying nothing in an august and heroic manner.…

 

Marx, I daresay, had said a good deal of it long before him, and what Marx overlooked had been said over and over again by his heirs and assigns. But Marx, at this business, labored under a technical handicap; he wrote in German, a language he actually understood. Prof. Veblen submitted himself to no such disadvantage. Though born, I believe, in these States, and resident here all his life, he achieved the effect, perhaps without employing the means, of thinking in some unearthly foreign language — say Swahili, Sumerian or Old Bulgarian — and then painfully clawing his thoughts into a copious and uncertain but book-learned English. The result was a style that affected the higher cerebral centers like a constant roll of subway expresses. The second result was a sort of bewildered numbness of the senses, as before some fabulous and unearthly marvel. And the third result, if I make no mistake, was the celebrity of the professor as a Great Thinker.

 

Collectivism

 

Marx, in fact, has been hailed by the hermeneuticians as one of the grandfathers of the movement. In 1985, for example, at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association in Las Vegas, virtually every paper offered in political theory was a hermeneutical one. A paradigmatic title would be "Political Life as a Text: Hermeneutics and Interpretation in Marx, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Foucault." (Substitute freely such names as Ricoeur and Derrida, with an occasional bow to Habermas.)

 

 

I do not believe it an accident that Karl Marx is considered one of the great hermeneuticians. This century has seen a series of devastating setbacks to Marxism, to its pretensions to "scientific truth," and to its theoretical propositions as well as to its empirical assertions and predictions. If Marxism has been riddled both in theory and in practice, then what can Marxian cultists fall back on? It seems to me that hermeneutics fits very well into an era that we might, following a Marxian gambit about capitalism, call "late Marxism" or Marxism-in-decline. Marxism is not true and is not science, but so what? The hermeneuticians tell us that nothing is objectively true, and therefore that all views and propositions are subjective, relative to the whims and feelings of each individual.

 

So why should Marxian yearnings not be equally as valid as anyone else's? By the way of hermeneutics, these yearnings cannot be subject to refutation. And since there is no objective reality, and since reality is created by every man's subjective interpretations, then all social problems reduce to personal and nonrational tastes. If, then, hermeneutical Marxists find capitalism ugly and unlovely, and they find socialism beautiful, why should they not attempt to put their personal esthetic preferences into action? If they feel that socialism is beautiful, what can stop them, especially since there are no laws of economics or truths of political philosophy to place obstacles in their path?

 

It is no accident that, with the exception of a handful of contemporary economists — who will be treated further later — every single hermeneutician, past and present, has been an avowed collectivist, either of the left- or right-wing variety, and sometimes veering from one collectivism to another in accordance with the realities of power. Marx, Veblen, Schmoller, and the German Historical school are well known. As for the modern hermeneuticians, Heidegger found it all too easy to become an enthusiastic Nazi once the Nazi regime had been established. And Gadamer had no difficulty whatever adapting either to the Nazi regime (where he was known for having only a "loose sympathy" with the Third Reich) or to the Soviet occupation in East Germany (where, in his own words, he won "the special esteem of the Russian cultural authorities" for carrying out "their directives exactly, even against my own convictions").

 

"Openness" and Keeping the "Conversation" Going

 

Here we must note two variants of the common hermeneutical theme. On the one hand are the candid relativists and nihilists, who assert, with an inconsistently absolutist fervor, that there is no truth. These hold with the notorious dictum of the epistemological anarchist Paul Feyerabend that "anything goes." Anything, be it astronomy or astrology, is of equal validity or, rather, equal invalidity. The one possible virtue of the "anything goes" doctrine is that at least everyone can abandon the scientific or philosophic enterprise and go fishing or get drunk. This virtue, however, is rejected by the mainstream hermeneuticians, because it would put an end to their beloved and interminable "conversation."

 

In short, the mainstream hermeneuticians do not like the "anything goes" dictum because, instead of being epistemological anarchists, they are epistemological pests. They insist that even though it is impossible to arrive at objective truth or indeed even to understand other theorists or scientists, that we all still have a deep moral obligation to engage in an endless dialogue or, as they call it, "conversation" to try to arrive at some sort of fleeting quasi-truth. To the hermeneutician, truth is the shifting sands of subjective relativism, based on an ephemeral "consensus" of the subjective minds engaging in the endless conversation. But the worst thing is that the hermeneuticians assert that there is no objective way, whether by empirical observation or logical reasoning, to provide any criteria for such a consensus.

 

Since there are no rational criteria for agreement, any consensus is necessarily arbitrary, based on God-knows-what personal whim, charisma of one or more of the conversationalists, or perhaps sheer power and intimidation. Since there is no criterion, the consensus is subject to instant and rapid change, depending on the arbitrary mindset of the participants or, of course, a change in the people constituting the eternal conversation.

 

 

A new group of hermeneutical economists, eager to find some criteria for consensus, have latched onto a Gestalt-like phrase of the late economist Fritz Machlup, perhaps taking his name very much in vain. They call this criterion the "Aha! principle," meaning that the truth of a proposition is based on the exclamation of "Aha!" that the proposition may arouse in someone's breast. As Don Lavoie and Jack High put it: "We know a good explanation when we see one, and when it induces us to say aha." Somehow I do not find this criterion for truth, or even for consensus, very convincing. For example, many of us would find the prospect of being confronted with the option of engaging in endless and necessarily fruitless conversation with people unable to write a clear sentence or express a clear thought to be the moral equivalent of Sartre's No Exit.

 

Furthermore, I have a hunch that if someone came up with the proposition: "It would be a great thing to give these guys a dose of objective reality over the head" or at the very least to slam the door on their conversation, that this would elicit many more fervent "Ahas!" than the murky propositions of the hermeneuticians themselves.

 

The prime moral duty proclaimed by the hermeneuticians is that we must at all times keep the conversation going. Since this duty is implicit, it is never openly defended, and so we fail to be instructed why it is our moral obligation to sustain a process that yields such puny and ephemeral results. In keeping with this alleged virtue, the hermeneuticians are fervently and dogmatically opposed to "dogmatism" and they proclaim the supreme importance of remaining endlessly "open" to everyone in the dialogue. Gadamer has proclaimed that the highest principle of hermeneutic philosophy is "holding oneself open in a conversation," which means always recognizing "in advance, the possible correctness, even the superiority of the conversation partner's position." But, as Barnes points out, it is one thing to be modestly skeptical of one's own position; it is quite another to refuse to dismiss any other position as false or mischievous. Barnes points out that the modest skeptic:

 

 

recognizes that he himself may always be wrong. Gadamer's "open" philosopher allows that his opponent may always be right. A modest skeptic may … indeed, in his modest way, regard the history of philosophy as a ceaseless campaign, marked by frequent defeats and occasional triumphs, against the ever powerful forces of fallacy and falsehood.… [W]ith some opponents he will not be "open": he will be quite sure that they are wrong.

 

The most important hermeneutical philosopher in the United States is Richard Rorty, who, in his celebrated book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, devotes considerable space to the prime importance of "keeping the conversation going." In his sparkling critique of Rorty, Henry Veatch points out that, to the crucial question of how can we conversationalists ever know which ideals or "cultural posits" (in the Rortian language) are better than others, "Rorty could only answer that, of course, there can't be any such thing as knowledge in regard to matters such as these." So, if there is no knowledge and, hence, no objective criteria for arriving at positions, we must conclude, in the words of Veatch, that "although Aristotle may well have taught that 'philosophy begins in wonder,' … present-day philosophy can only end in a total conceptual or intellectual permissiveness." In short, we end with the Feyerabendian "anything goes" or, to use the admiring phrase of Arthur Danto in his summary of Nietzsche, that "everything is possible." Or, in a word, total "openness."

 

But if all things are open, and there are no criteria to guide conversationalists to any conclusions, how will such conclusions be made? It seems to me, following Veatch, that these decisions will be made by those with the superior Will-to-Power. And so it is not a coincidence that leading hermeneuticians have found themselves flexible and "open" in response to the stern demands of state power. After all, if Stalin, Hitler, or Pol Pot enters the "conversational" circle, they cannot be rejected out of hand, for they too may offer a superior way to consensus. If nothing is wrong and all things are open, what else can we expect? And who knows, even these rulers may decide, in a sardonic burst of Marcusean "repressive tolerance," to keep some sort of Orwellian "conversation" going in the midst of a universal gulag.

 

In all the blather about openness, I am reminded of a lecture delivered by Professor Marjorie Hope Nicholson at Columbia University in 1942. In a critique of the concept of the open mind, she warned: "Don't let your mind be so open that everything going into it falls through."

 

There is another self-serving aspect to the hermeneutical demands for universal openness. For if nothing — no position, no doctrine — can be dismissed outright as false or mischievous or as blithering nonsense, then they too, our hermeneuticians, must be spared such rude dismissal. Keeping the conversation going at all costs means that these people must eternally be included. And that is perhaps the unkindest cut of all.

 

If one reads the hermeneuticians, furthermore, it becomes all too clear that typically no one sentence follows from any other sentence. In other words, not only is the style abominable, but there is no reasoning in support of the conclusions. Since logic or reasoning are not considered valid by the hermeneuticians, this procedure is not surprising. Instead, for reasoning the hermeneuticians substitute dozens or scores of books, which are cited, very broadly, in virtually every paragraph. To support their statements, the hermeneuticians will list repeatedly every book that might possibly or remotely relate to the topic. In short, their only argument is from authority, an ancient philosophic fallacy which they seem to have triumphantly revived. For indeed, if there is no truth of reality, if for logic or experience, we must substitute a fleeting consensus of the subjective whims, feelings, or power plays of the various conversationalists, then what else is there but to muster as many conversationalists as possible as your supposed authorities?

 

Armed with their special method, the hermeneuticians are therefore able to dismiss all attacks upon themselves, no matter how perceptive or penetrating, as "unscholarly." This lofty rebuttal stems from their unique definition of scholarly, which for them means ponderous and obscurantist verbiage surrounded by a thicket of broad citations to largely irrelevant books and articles.

So why then have not the distinguished critics of hermeneutics played the game on their opponents' own turf and waded through the mountains and oceans of hogwash, patiently to cite and refute the hermeneuticians point by point and journal article by journal article? To ask that question is virtually to answer it.

 

In fact, we have asked some of the critics this question, and they immediately responded in a heartfelt manner that they do not propose to dedicate the rest of their lives to wading through this miasma of balderdash. Moreover, to do so, to play by the hermeneuticians' own rules, would be to grant them too much honor. It would wrongfully imply that they are indeed worthy participants in our conversation. What they deserve instead is scorn and dismissal. Unfortunately, they do not often receive such treatment in a world in which all too many intellectuals seem to have lost their built-in ability to detect pretentious claptrap.

 

Hermeneutical Economics

 

"The hermeneuticians are able to dismiss all attacks upon themselves, no matter how perceptive or penetrating, as 'unscholarly.'"

 

Economists like to think of their discipline as the "hardest" of the social sciences, and so it is no surprise that hermeneutics — though having conquered the field of literature and made severe inroads into philosophy, political thought, and history — has yet made very little dent in economics. But the economics discipline has been in a state of methodological confusion for over a decade, and in this crisis situation minority methodologies, now including hermeneutics, have begun to offer their wares in the economics profession; of course, the practitioners down in the trenches only loosely reflect, or indeed have scarcely any interest in, the small number of methodological reflections in the upper stories of the ivory tower.

 

But these seemingly remote philosophical musings do have an important long-run influence on the guiding theories and directions of the discipline. For approximately two decades, Lionel Robbins's justly famous The Nature and Significance of Economic Science was the guiding methodological work of the profession, presenting a watered-down version of the praxeological method of Ludwig von Mises. Robbins had studied at Mises's famous privatseminar at Vienna, and his first edition (1932) stressed economics as a deductive discipline based on the logical implications of the universal facts of human action (for example, that human beings try to achieve goals by using necessarily scarce means). In Robbins's more widely known second edition (1935), the Misesian influence was watered down a bit further, coupled with intimations no bigger than a man's hand of the neo-classical formalism that would hit the profession about the time of World War II. After the war, the older economics was inundated by an emerging formalistic and mathematical neoclassical synthesis, of Walrasian equations covering microeconomics and Keynesian geometry taking care of macro.

 

Aiding and abetting the conquest of economics by the new neo-classical synthesis was the celebrated article by Milton Friedman in 1953, "The Methodology of Positive Economics," which quickly swept the board, sending Robbins's Nature and Significance unceremoniously into the dustbin of history. For three decades, secure and unchallenged, the Friedman article remained virtually the only written portrayal of official methodology for modern economics.

 

It should be noted that, as in the triumph of the Keynesian revolution and many other conquests by various schools of economics, the Friedman article did not win the hearts and minds of economists in the pattern of what we might call the Whig theory of the history of science: by patient refutation of competing or prevailing doctrines. As in the case of the Mises-Hayek business-cycle theory dominant before Keynes's General Theory, the Robbins book was not refuted; it was simply passed over and forgotten. Here the Thomas Kuhn theory of successive paradigms is accurate on the sociology or process of economic thought, deplorable as it might be as a prescription for the development of a science. Too often in philosophy or the social sciences, schools of thought have succeeded each other as whim or fashion, much as one style of ladies' hemlines has succeeded another. Of course, in economics as in other sciences of human action, more sinister forces, such as politics and the drive for power, often deliberately skew the whims of fashion in their own behalf.

 

What Milton Friedman did was to import into economics the doctrine that had dominated philosophy for over a decade, namely logical positivism. Ironically, Friedman imported logical positivism at just about the time when its iron control over the philosophical profession in the United States had already passed its peak. For three decades, we have had to endure the smug insistence on the vital importance of empirical testing of deductions from hypotheses as a justification for the prevalence of econometric models and forecasting, as well as a universal excuse for theory being grounded on admittedly false and wildly unrealistic hypotheses. For neoclassical economic theory clearly rests on absurdly unrealistic assumptions, such as perfect knowledge, the continuing existence of a general equilibrium with no profits, no losses, and no uncertainty, and human action being encompassed by the use of calculus that assumes infinitesimally tiny changes in our perceptions and choices.

 

In short, this formidable apparatus of neoclassical mathematical economic theory and econometric models, all rests, from the Misesian point of view, upon the treacherous quicksand of false and even absurd assumptions. This Austrian charge of falsity and unreality, if noticed at all, was for decades loftily rebutted by pointing to Friedman's article and asserting that falsity of assumptions and premises do not matter, so long as the theory "predicts" properly. In its founding years in the early 1930s, the Econometric Society emblazoned on its escutcheon the motto, "Science is prediction," and this was the essence of the Friedman-derived defense of neoclassical theory. Austrians such as Mises and Hayek replied that the disciplines of human action are not like the physical sciences. In human affairs, there are no laboratories where variables can be controlled and theories tested, while (unlike the physical sciences) there are no quantitative constants in a world where there is consciousness, freedom of will, and freedom to adopt values and goals and then to change them. These Austrian contentions were dismissed by neoclassicals as simply posing a greater degree of difficulty in arriving at the human sciences, but not in offering a troublesome difference in kind.

 

The neoclassical synthesis, however, began, in the early 1970s, to lose its power either to understand or to predict what was going on in the economy. The inflationary recession that first appeared dramatically in the 1973 — 74 contraction put an end to a 35-year period of arrogant and unquestioned hegemony by the Keynesian wing of the neoclassical synthesis. For Keynesian theory and policy rested on the crucial assumption that inflationary recession simply cannot happen. At that point, Friedmanite monetarism came to the fore, but monetarism has now come a cropper after making a rapid series of disastrously wrong predictions from the beginning of the Reagan era until the present. But he who lives by prediction is destined to die by prediction.

 

In addition to these failures of Keynesianism and monetarism, the blunders and errors of econometric forecasting have become too notorious to ignore, and a wealthy and supremely arrogant profession, using ever higher-speed computer models, seems to enjoy less and less ability to forecast even the immediate future. Even governments, despite the assiduous attention and aid of top neoclassical economists and forecasters, seem to have great difficulties in forecasting their own spending, much less their own incomes, let alone the incomes or spending of anyone else.

 

Amid these failures, there has been a chipping away at the neoclassical formalism of Walrasian microeconomics, sometimes by disillusioned leaders operating from within this ruling paradigm.

 

As a result of these problems and failures, the last 10 or 15 years has seen the development of a classic Kuhnian "crisis situation" in the field of economics. As the positivist neoclassical orthodoxy begins to crumble, competing paradigms have emerged. Sparked also by Hayek's receipt of a Nobel Prize in 1974, Austrian or Misesian economics has enjoyed a revival since then, with numerous Austrians teaching in colleges in the United States and Britain. Recently there have even emerged five or six Austrian graduate programs or centers in the United States.

 

In a crisis situation, of course, the bad jostles the good in the new atmosphere of epistemological and substantive diversity. No one ever guaranteed that if a hundred flowers should bloom, that they would all be passing fair. On the left, the nontheory of institutionalism has made a bit of a comeback, jostled by "post-Keynesians" (inspired by Joan Robinson) and "humanistic" neo-Marxists who have substituted a vague adherence to "decentralization" and protection of all animal and vegetable life forms for the rigors of the labor theory of value. Which brings us back to hermeneutics.

 

For in this sort of atmosphere, even the underworld of hermeneutics will vie for its day in the sun. Probably the most prominent hermeneutical economist in the United States is Donald McCloskey, who calls his viewpoint "rhetoric" and whose attack on truth occurs in the name of rhetoric and of the eternal hermeneutical conversation. McCloskey, unfortunately, follows the modern path of rhetoric run hog-wild and divorced from a firm anchor in truth, overlooking the Aristotelian tradition of "noble rhetoric" as the most efficient way of persuading people of correct and true propositions. For Aristotelians, it is only "base" rhetoric that is divorced from true principles. McCloskey is now organizing a center for rhetorical studies at the University of Iowa, which will organize volumes on rhetoric in a number of diverse disciplines.

(위의  Donald McCloskey는 여자로 성전환 수술을 받은 후 Deirdre McCloskey로 개명했다.)

   

Much as I deplore hermeneutics, I have a certain amount of sympathy for McCloskey, an economic historian who endured years as a drill instructor and cadre leader in the Friedman-Stigler Chicago school's positivist ranks. McCloskey is reacting against decades of arrogant positivist hegemony, of an alleged "testing" of economic theory that never really takes place, and of lofty statements by positivists that "I do not understand what you mean," when they know darn well what you mean but disagree with it, and who use their narrow criteria of meaning to dismiss your argument. In this way, the positivists for a long while were able to read virtually all important philosophical questions out of court and consign them to the despised departments of religion and belles lettres. In a sense, the rise of hermeneutics is those departments' revenge, retorting to the positivists that if "science" is only the quantitative and the "testable," then we shall swamp you with stuff that is really meaningless.

 

"Our Market Process hermeneuticians should be warned that there may be worse things in this world than mathematics or even positivism."

 

It is more difficult to excuse the path traveled by the major group of hermeneuticians in economics, a cluster of renegade Austrians and ex-Misesians gathered in the Center for Market Processes at George Mason University. The spiritual head of this groupuscule, Don Lavoie, has reached the pinnacle of having his photograph printed in his magazine Market Process talking to the great Gadamer. Lavoie has organized a Society for Interpretive Economics (interpretation is a code word for hermeneutics) to spread the new gospel, and has had the effrontery to deliver a paper entitled "Mises and Gadamer on Theory and History," which, as a colleague of mine has suggested, is the moral equivalent of my writing a paper entitled "Lavoie and Hitler on the Nature of Freedom."

 

It must be noted that nihilism had seeped into current Austrian thought before Lavoie and his colleagues at the Center for Market Processes embraced it with such enthusiasm. It began when Ludwig M. Lachmann, who had been a disciple of Hayek in England in the 1930s and who had written a competent Austrian work entitled Capital and Its Structure in the 1950s, was suddenly converted by the methodology of the English economist George Shackle during the 1960s. Since the mid-1970s, Lachmann, teaching part of every year at New York University, has engaged in a crusade to bring the blessings of randomness and abandonment of theory to Austrian economics. When Lavoie and his colleagues discovered Heidegger and Gadamer, Lachmann embraced the new creed at the 1986 first annual (and, if luck is with us, the last annual) conference of the Society of Interpretive Economics at George Mason University. The genuine Misesian creed, however, still flourishes at the Ludwig von Mises Institute at Auburn University and in its publications: The Free Market, the Austrian Economics Newsletter, and the Review of Austrian Economics, which in its first issue included a critique of a quasi-hermeneutical book by two ex-Misesians who claim to have discovered the key to economics in the works of Henri Bergson.

 

One of the main motivations of the ex-Misesian hermeneuticians is that their horror of mathematics, to which they react as to the head of Medusa, leads them to embrace virtually any ally in their struggle against positivism and neoclassical formalism. And so they find that, lo and behold, institutionalists, Marxists, and hermeneuticians have very little use for mathematics either. But before they totally embrace the desperate creed that the enemy of my enemy is necessarily my friend, our Market Process hermeneuticians should be warned that there may be worse things in this world than mathematics or even positivism. And second, that in addition to Nazism or Marxism, one of these things may be hermeneutics.

 

And just as Professor McCloskey's history may serve as a partial mitigation of his embrace of hermeneutics, we may go further back and mitigate the sins of the logical positivists. For, after all, the positivists, much as they may be reluctant to admit it, also did not descend upon us from Mount Olympus. They grew up in old Vienna, and they found themselves in a Germanic world dominated by protohermeneutical creeds such as Hegelianism as well as by the young Heidegger, who was even then making his mark. After reading and listening to dialectics and protohermeneutics day in and day out, after being immersed for years in the gibberish that they were told constituted philosophy, is it any wonder that they — including for our purposes Popper as well as Carnap, Reichenbach, Schlick, et al. — should finally lash out and exclaim that the whole thing was meaningless or that they should cry out for precision and clarity in language? Is it also any wonder that the nascent positivists, like McCloskey a half-century later, should go too far and throw out the philosophic baby with the neo-Hegelian bathwater?

 

This article originally appeared in Review of Austrian Economics 3 (1989): 45 — 59 (available in PDF) and was adapted from a paper delivered at a Conference on Recent Trends in the Social Sciences held by the London Academic and Cultural Resources Fund and the Institute of Philosophy of the Jagellonian University of Krakow at Krakow, Poland, in April 1987.

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   MK Lee

30일자 트럼프 대통령 페이스북, 은혜도 모르는 남한 반미권력에 대해 노골적 경고.

"한국을 보라. 우리는 한국에 엄청난 군인들을 보내 국경을 지켜주고 있지만, 제대로 대가로 지불받지 못하고 있다.
그렇지 않은가?"

틀린 말 하나 없다.

남의 나라 금쪽 같은 젊은이들 수만, 수십만의 희생으로 지킨 게 한반도 남쪽 대한민국이다.
덕택에 우리는 자유와 번영을 누렸다.

그런데 이제는 이 체제수호의 최후 보루인 헌법과 자유민주주의, 한미동맹 근간까지 파괴하려 들며,
오직 인류 최악 전체주의 학살세습수령권력 양아치들과 '우리민족끼리' 만 중시하며
멋대로 우리 혈세로 대북 퍼주기나 재개하려 들고, 사회주의적 개헌 음모나 획책하는 금수만도 못한
배은망덕한 자들이 자신들을 진보와 인권, 민주의 대명사인양 포장하며 국가 권력을 사취했다.
가장 청렴한 애국자들은 온갖 오욕과 누명을 뒤집어 쓰고 부당하게 감옥에 갇혔다.

이런 불의가 계속되는 땅은 마땅히 그 대가를 치를 천벌을 부른다.
우리가 치러야 할 숙명이면 어쩔 수 없다.

타락한 언론, 무능한 기회주의 국회 및 사법부 같은 수명 다한 부패한 제도권과 결탁한
희대의 사기 탄핵, 부정선거 논란의 진실과 촛불혁명권력의 실체가 드러날 날, 상상을 초월할
간첩 명단이 발표될 날이 멀지 않았다.
누가 이기는지, 끝까지 가보자.

[양양가(襄陽歌)]
인생(人生)의 목숨은 초로(草露)와 같고
조국(祖國)의 앞날은 양양(襄陽)하도다
이 몸이 죽어서 나라가 산다면
아~! 아~! 이슬 같이 기꺼이 죽으리라~

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[격동의 한반도-전문가 진단⑪] 이지수 "北, 붕괴 직전 폭풍전야...대화가 상황 못바꿔"

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음식으로 그린 그림

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자서전 작가가 스페인 군인 시절 1920년대 초에 모로코의 사창가에 갔는데, 유태인이었던 포주가 쇠로 된 열쇠를 갖고 있었다고 한다. 그런데 그 열쇠는 1492년 유태인들이 스페인에서 추방될 때, 그녀의 조상이 살던 집의 열쇠였다고 한다. 무려 400년을 넘게 옛날 스페인에 있던 집의 열쇠를 보관하고 있었던 것이다!

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