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

[jfleming at sfu.ca]

On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 10:02:16 -0500 milton-l at lists.richmond.edu wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

I really don't think I arranged the points you mention into the syllogism
you are keen to refute. 

> 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. 

Actually, I wouldn't assume, or hold, that. Objectivity is not objectivism.

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.*)

Thanks for this bit of learning.

> 
> 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? 

If we agree, on the subject-matter: the thing on the table.

> 
> 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.  
> 

Yes and no. Gadamer takes the view that we have to correct our
misapprehensions, to be sure. But he also takes the view that these are
where we have to start.

> 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. 

But that's simply an objectivist paralogism resting on the posit of
"undefeated evidence." That's what in question. Now you say: as long as we
don't question what's in question, Fleming deserves abuse, etc. Not very
compelling on either side of the conjunction, in my opinion.

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. 

Ditto. But then, it is not my view that the point of conversation is to
produce pleasure. That is what I would call an aesthetic-hedonist conception
of dialogue, which suits extremely well with an objectivist-authoritarian
conception of interpretation and understanding. Gadamer says, to the
contrary, that we begin to learn when our interlocutor -- be it a person, a
text, or whatever -- _offends_ our expectations. In that regard, Professor
Skulsky, I come out of this exchange really delighted to have served you as
a faithful exponent of philosophical hermeneutics.

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.”
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 


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."