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

[James Rovira]

This discussion seems to me to be plagued with equivocation.
"Understanding" in Prof. Fleming's post is being used in two different
senses:

1. As "understanding of" something -- understanding in terms of the object
of understanding: "The problem is with the idea that understanding needs
objective justification."
2. Understanding as a phenomenological event in itself -- what the mind is
doing when it understands: "a recognition that we only ever understanding
anything applicatively: by allowing it to address us in our given
interpretative situation," and, "We have to say the way things seem to us.
Insofar as others may disagree, they will tell us."

The conversation seems to me to reject type 1 readings by reducing them all
to type 2: in this view, a type 1 reading is a type 2 reading in a state of
bad faith.  But a type 1 reading understands that the text is never the
person reading it: understanding a literary text is always understanding of
something objective, external to and independent of the self.  So when we
-describe- our understanding of a text, we -can- support this description
using objective language.

Writing about one's experience of reading a text, explaining that experience
in terms of one's own historical situatedness, is a type 2 reading.

These two types of readings are very different.  It's sheer solipsism to
completely collapse type 1 readings into type 2: the ability to engage in a
type 2 reading means we have some knowledge of ourselves, our historical
situatedness, so by extension the ability to identify those facets of our
reading proceeding from our place in history and to -differentiate them from
readings proceeding from a different historical situation-.  Thus, type 2
readings -make possible the objectivity of type 1 readings-.

The claim that objective readings lead to infinite regress ignore
significant distinctions between inductive and deductive reasoning about
historical data, and between a view of history that places those living
today on a continuum with those living in the past (so that historical
difference is not absolute), and a view of history that assumes absolute
difference from those who lived in the past.  Note how an emphasis upon "our
given interpretive situation" assumes a significant, and perhaps
insurmountable, difference between our given interpretive situation and,
say, Milton's.  We work toward a "fusion of horizons" -- which I assume is
only possible among those living in the present.

There is an implicit demand for certainty in this description of the
objectivist camp that very few real historians I've read actually hold.

What really bothers me is that Prof. Fleming's argument seems to set up one
extreme position (positivist?) as a norm (when it is far from it) so that
the opposite extreme becomes the only reasonable solution.  A better
position is found, I think, in a third option.

I seem to recall a recent, fairly sophisticated lecture by Prof. Fleming
about a German painting that described in some detail the point of view of
the figure in the painting and how that point of view merged with the
viewer's.  Fusion of horizons indeed, but this time the horizons to me
spanned time as well as space.

Jim R
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