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

[Harold Skulsky]

James Fleming provides the following argument to support his
"hermeneutic" philosophy of reading. 

1. (PREMISE): Understanding is a "phenomenon that we experience."
(Paraphrases by Professor Fleming: Understanding is "an event." It is
"something that we undergo.")
2. (CONCLUSION): There is simply no problem with understanding. 
Q.E.D.

It pains me extremely to have to report that as it stands this argument
just doesn’t follow, unless we add the following auxiliary premise: 

1b. If something is a phenomenon we experience, or an event we undergo,
then there is no problem with it.

Unfortunately, 1b is false. There are countless “events” or
“phenomena” that pose problems for us, and do so precisely
because we “experience” or “undergo” them. Indeed, my experience
of reading this particular argument of Professor Fleming’s has posed
just such a problem for me. As it happens, it is precisely a problem of
understanding. The argument is so obviously fallacious that (in all
charity) I can only think that I have somehow managed to MISunderstand
it - possibly by having taken it literally. But let that pass.

Having proved to his own satisfaction (and to the satisfaction of one
reader who greets his performance with “Bravo!”) that there is
”simply” no problem with understanding,  Professor Fleming moves
on to what he takes to be the real problem in this domain: the delusion
that understanding needs objective justification. Objective
justification, he informs us, is “non-interpretative adequation of the
understanding.” 

This bizarre definition suggests that Professor Fleming is at war with
a straw man – certainly not with any approach to reading that I would
call objective. But more of this in a moment.

Well then, assume for the sake of argument that objectivitiy is not
even an intelligible goal. And assume that we have doubts and
disagreements about the meaning of a given text. How are these doubts
and disagreements to be resolved? Professor Fleming advises us to “let
[the text] address us in our given interpretative situation,” to let
our understanding emerge from applying the text to our own predicament.


(The advice about applying the text to our "given situation" has a
history that an objectivist would cheerfully embrace. Gadamer and his
fellow hermeneuts owe it to the Lutheran preacher Johann Albrecht
Bengel’s famous exhortation to “apply the whole meaning [of
Scripture] to yourself.” But according to Reverend Bengel this
exercise happens only after you “apply yourself wholly to the text.”
Applying the text is possible only if you understand it first.*)

Above all, Professor Fleming advises us to resolve our differences
cooperatively, by telling each other “the way things seem to us.” To
come to agreement is to get our "seemings," or (in Gadamer-speak) our
“horizons,” to “fuse.”

Anybody who thinks that this advice is responsive, much less helpful,
is welcome to it. To me it is a string of metaphorical evasions of the
question. What is it for a text to “address” us? What is it for our
seemings to “fuse”? What (to drop the decorative metaphors) do we
agree ON when we succeed in agreeing? 

The "wrong" answer, of course, is that the text “addresses” us by
being the central part of the evidence for a fact of the matter, namely,
what the text means in the system of communication (call it a language
for short) that its author is using. If our cooperative efforts succeed,
 it will be because our “seemings” -- that is, our beliefs about
what the text means in said language -- will converge on the meaning of
the text in (once again) the system of communication the author used.
And our standards for evaluating evidence for that fact of the matter
will include this familiar and (one would have thought) unexceptionable
rule: carefully filter out subjective biases, such as prejudices,
misinformation, and antecedent messages 
from the gut.  

This answer is "wrong," to repeat, because it somehow corresponds to
the objectivist pipe dream of “non-interpretative adequation of the
understanding” - a pipe dream that Professor Fleming urges us to
abandon “root and branch.” In a less furiously metaphorical mode,
the answer is “wrong” because it rests on evidence of the same kind
as the text itself – rests on other texts (or “contexts”) the
understanding of which will need to be justified by still other texts,
and so on ad infinitum. 

But this is where I came in.

I began this conversation by explaining that the reader who offers
undefeated evidence for his reading has already shouldered his burden of
proof. The burden on the skeptic is to provide counter-evidence --
evidence that discredits the reader’s evidence either by defeating it
or by refuting it. This aborts the regress; the only delusion here is
the arbitrary claim that the objectivist approach is doomed to a vicious
regress to infinity. There just is no such inevitable regress, except in
the cloud-cuckoo-land of a beginner’s course in epistemology. 

Actually there is another delusion. Professor Fleming's picture of the
objectivist is a man or woman of straw. An objectivist in the actual
world of critical scholarship is not a trafficker in self-evidence, or
clear and distinct ideas. The evidence that earns her belief is evidence
hitherto undefeated, not indefeasible. In this the resulting belief
doesn’t differ from any other belief that qualifies as knowledge.

But once again this is where I came in, with a point (among many
points) that Professor Fleming’s responses show no sign of engaging
with. 

My conversation with Professor Fleming has allowed me to get clear on
what I believe, and I thank him for that. But it has not been an unmixed
pleasure. The prospect of a “fusing” of our particular
“horizons” was always dim, since he and I do not share the
same ideal of how to argue one’s case.  It is all too clear to me that
his ideal prevails among a great many in our profession, though, I can
only hope, not in most.

*“Te totum applica ad textum; rem totam applica ad te.”