[Milton-L] historicism, formalism, etc.

[jfleming at sfu.ca]

I'm afraid I don't really see how the distinction you are offering moves the
issue forward. Understanding, presumably, is _of_ something (eg a text). Yet
understanding is, in Gadamer's view, best theorized as an experience that we
undergo. Thus your "type 1" depends on "type 2." That is Gadamer's view. You
are asking a question he is trying to answer.

Of course what is understood, eg the text, is not the experience of
understanding. But insofar as understanding fulfills or actuates the text,
that fulfillment is the experience of understanding.

Analogously, a performance of a symphony is not its score. But the
performance fulfills the score; and the score is nothing other than the
opportunity, indeed the imperative, for this fulfillment. 

It may helpful to recall, as already stated, that Gadamer is not trying to
offer an epistemology (a theory of knowledge), but an hermeneutics (a theory
of interpretation and understanding). Within the latter, moreover, he _is
not offering a method_	-- rules or techniques to make us better
understanders. He is, rather, trying to offer a philosophical account, with
certain conclusions and implications, of just what kind of phenomenon
understanding is. His account certainly starts from the idea that it is a
kind of experience; but he is interested (at least as I read him) in trying
to show what kind of experience, what account of experience, can be
considered a way to the understanding _of subject-matters_ (things). 

Thus in the case of an historical text, for example, Gadamer's whole
interest must be in what it means. He takes the view, however, that
hierarchizing this "what the text means" (your type 1) over "what the text
means to me" (your type 2) is a misrepresentation of the interpretative
situation. It is a misrepresentation, that is, of the _challenging
experience that understanding is_. Furthermore, the hierarchization in
question _is nothing other than the dogma of objectivism_ (the dogma of
cognitive adequation to pre-interpretative fact). Yet you assert that nobody
maintains the latter.

As for the lecture you mention, it wasn't by me! I wish. Thanks for your
productive comments. JDF


On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:47:02 -0500 milton-l at lists.richmond.edu wrote:
> 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


James Dougal Fleming
Associate Professor
Department of English
Simon Fraser University
778-782-4713
cell: 604-290-1637

"Not always, nor of necessity, nor for the most part."