[Milton-L] historicism, formalism, etc. (Skulsky)

[Harold Skulsky]

I concluded my last reply to Professor Fleming by warning that my
failure to reply to his reply should not be construed as agreement. By
the same token, my current reply to his reply should not be construed as
disagreement . 

The happy fact is that , if I understand him, he has all along been in
agreement with me on the core of my point . In his words: “We can in
fact legitimately claim to be able to understand historical texts. . . .
The business of doing so is not qualitatively different from that of
understanding any utterance.” (I don’t understand the point of
“qualitatively” – but let that pass; as will appear later,
there are many things I don’t understand.)

To be sure, there seems to be a position Professor Fleming disagrees
with. The disallowed position, in his words, is this: “It makes sense
to think we achieve our understanding [of an utterance or text] by
rigorous methodical alienation of interpreter from interpretandum.” 

And here I am at a loss – though I’m happy to say that I don’t
endorse this apparently perverse view. Not yet at any rate.
 
The intellectual misdemeanor of “alienating the interpreter from the
interpretandum” sounds at least unsociable. Perhaps Professor Fleming
is right to dismiss it as incoherent as well. In short, if I were clear
on what it is to “alienate” a reader from a text, it would be a
pleasure to extend the range of our newfound agreement by joining in
Professor Fleming’s condemnation. 

It is not much help to be told, a bit further on, that the
practitioners of this piece of misbehavior are the ones who account for
how we come to understand what texts mean by invoking “binaries --
subject against object, interpretation against understanding, history
against present.” These ”binaries,” he tells us, are “tired,”
and they should be “dispensed” with. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear
precisely why fatigue earns rejection, or precisely which dichotomous
views about subject and object and the rest Professor Fleming has in
mind. 

I am happy to report that I for one would never identify a present
historical account of a past event with the past event itself, and hence
“alienate” the account from the time of its composition. Nor would I
distinguish my interpretation of (say) Professor Fleming’s latest
remarks from my understanding of those remarks; though both my
interpretation and my understanding are no doubt wide of the mark –
which is not surprising, because in my dialect the terms are
functionally equivalent. 

My assurance falters, I confess, when it comes to “subject” and
“object”; if it is a misdemeanor to distinguish my belief about
the meaning of Professor Fleming’s remarks from what my beliefs are
about, then I plead guilty. 

Here I am assuming that, in the context of discussion (say my reading
of utterances), “subject” (in the usual philosophical jargon)
includes my beliefs and claims about meaning and “object” includes
the meanings themselves. Unfortunately, I haven’t the faintest idea
what it would be to abandon this distinction, or why it is so much to
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s credit to have done so.

At the same time, if there is credit to be had here, I think he should
have it. In his conversation with me (see my last postiing), Gadamer
recommended the “merging of the horizons” of reader and author, and
hence (presumably) “subject” and “object.” This merging sounds
agreeably sociable. But it does not help unless we are very clear about
what it is to “merge,” and what “horizons” are, and how these
terms combine to describe a specific way of forming beliefs about the
meaning of a text. 

It is clear to me that Gadamer had no sympathy with Derrida precisely
because the latter offered no such reassuring strategy as “merging,”
etc. It is also clear to me that Gadamer can be aligned with a
constructive rather than deconstructive tradition 
of talk about the
meaning of the text – Professor Fleming helpfully calls it pragmatism,
and mentions Putnam as another member of this anti-deconstructionist
bloc. (I don’t find in Putnam’s notorious set theoretical argument a
particularly obvious quarrel with the Derridean view of the
“hors-texte”; and in fact the Putnam of recent years is a
realist, and even an objectivist, who has put that argument beyond him
– but let that pass.) The trouble is that the Hermeneutic strategy,
not to put too fine a point on it, is a little puzzling for want of a
hard and circumstantial spelling out in terms of examples set out
analytically.

Not that I am inviting this; I need to get back to proofreading a
forthcoming book and am not currently in a position to do the analysis
the justice it would surely deserve.

With respect, it has occurred to me that there is no finely articulated
philosophy of reading that separates a hater of “tired binaries”
from someone who tries hard to be objective in evaluating evidence for a
reading. The difference is simply the animus against “binaries.” 

The difference, in short, seems to be a dogma in search of an
argument.