Positivist empiricism can be as anti-historical as speculative idealism

Evidence

If “speculative idealism” is the science of categories and of the a priori synthesis of the spirit, i.e. a form of anti-historicist abstraction, the philosophy implicit in the Popular Manual is idealism upside down, in the sense that the speculative categories are replaced by empirical concepts and classifications which are no less abstract and anti-historical. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1555

Categorization

• XREF: Gramsci’s reversal — empirical classification as another form of abstraction — parallels the Frankfurt School and later thinkers on how ‘value-free’ empiricism itself carries ideology, and how one polarity of an error can be sustained by attacking its opposite. — connects to: Historical materialism refutes empiricism’s compartmentalizing thought, not German idealism’s speculative totalizing — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 193; Ontology and positivism are complementary variants of an anti-subject objectivism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 540