Interesting discussion in Sustone

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http://www.sunstoneonline.com/magazine/searchable/Issue94.asp

THE LARGER ISSUE
By David Bohn
DAVID BOHN is professor of political science at BrighamYoungUniversity.
IN THE SPRING OF 1992, MALCOLM THORP, A respected professor of English history at BrighamYoungUniversity, published an article in defense of the "new Mormon history." I knew he had been working on it for some time. In the nearly seventeen years of our friendship, we had argued-occasionally heatedly-over the philosophical issues that frame the writing of Mormon history. He disagreed with the position that I had advanced in a number of published articles, a position that defended as legitimate and appropriate the way in which Latter-day Saints understand their common past within the context of faith and that opposed as unfounded the claims of revisionist historians that seemed to call for a wholesale reinterpretation of the Mormon past in secular terms.


....

He does a fascinating job.

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This section mirrors much of what I believe.

In the original outline to Truth and Method, Gadamer clarifies candidly the central thesis of his work: a frontal assault against the superstitions of "enlightenment rationalism" and the "naturalism" it authorizes. He demonstrates why the many explanatory registers of naturalistic discourse, including positivism, objectivism, historicism, and environmentalism with their often interrelated vocabularies, cannot be used to establish the claim of secular histories to be "higher," "better," that is, "truer," than other histories.36 In its place, he argues to justify an independent kind of understanding appropriate for the humanities, whose reduction to the ideal of natural scientific knowledge is impossible, and where the idea of the greatest possible approximation to the methods and certainty of natural sciences is even recognized as absurd . . . it does not concern another, unique method, but rather a completely different idea of knowledge and truth.37
In order to show that framing human history in the language of the natural sciences is inappropriate for the understanding of human activity, and has led to unjustified claims to objective knowledge, Gadamer authored one of the great philosophical works of our century, Truth and Method. He begins by arguing that, philosophically speaking, the historical understanding of the modern world moves within a language of "scientific rationalism" whose "schema is the conquest of mythos by logos. What gives this schema its apparent validity is the presupposition of the progressive retreat of magic in the world."38 Here the thought of the enlightenment, and the science that it authorized, understood itself by means of a false dichotomy. Scientific reasoning (logos) would progressively expose and correct superstition and error (mythos) through naturalistic explanation. The methodology of science aspired not only to discover and master physical nature but "human nature"-and thus historical nature-as well. Its final abition was nothing less than an objective knowledge of the principles that govern the world.
Central to this methodology is R‚nŠ Descartes's procedure of systematically doubting all "received opinion." Doubt, it is asserted, allows a clearing-a neutral perspective-to open up where "reality" is experienced directly, and reason, finally liberated from layers of accumulated falsehood, is said to gaze unencumbered upon the natural forces that drive history. In this way, moving from doubt to certainty, the "natural order" is identified by specifying the "natural causes" that are understood to impel human experience and structure human events. The totality of these relationships and the overarching principles that govern them are said to form a natural unity that can be known and manipulated.
With regard to history, enlightenment rationality not only seeks more than a mere understanding of historical texts, it seeks to understand them better than they were understood when they were written, better than their authors understood them. This is supposedly because empirical rationality, beginning with systematic doubt, allows the historian to escape historical prejudice-the authority of traditional historical understanding-and occupy a position exterior to the past, from which the past can be encountered and "explained" in rational, that is, natural terms. From here, a higher kind of knowledge is presumably achieved, because through scientific explanation the historian claims to be able to identify the underlying natural causes that actually motivated the writing of historical texts and thus account for their full content.


It will be continued on to another segment.

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We should not be surprised that the reduction of human history and the humanities in general to a kind of calculus operating within an the arena of natural law said to govern human relations elicited criticism of important writers from early on. Gadamer reviews this critique from Vico and Shaftsbury, through Hegel, Schleiermacher, Ranke, and Droysen, to Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Collingwood. In the process, he shows how each critique of enlightenment reason becomes subverted in one way or another by the object of its criticism and thus fails in the end to fully supersede the enlightenment heritage. A good example is Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), a German philosopher and historian. On the one hand, he sought to escape from the speculative philosophy of Hegel, only to find himself increasingly in its grasp. On the other hand, he sought to detach the human sciences from the natural sciences, only to end up harmonizing them.39
Gadamer recounts how Dilthey had sought to defend the human and cultural sciences against the encroachments of enlightenment science. He benefitted in his critique of naturalism and causality from the exhaustive analysis and scrutiny of enlightenment rationalism found in the first edition of Husserl's Logical Investigations, published in 1900-01. Husserl had "bracketed" (isolated and interrogated) all the terms used in "naturalistic explanation" in order to follow them carefully to their basic assumptions. Even Cartesian doubt would be bracketed, for it was not at all clear that doubt could be construed as a method capable of opening up a neutral and objective perspective in which reason could gaze upon the "undoubtable," i.e., the self-evidence of pure experience and the forces that are said to move it. Not only this, it was not hard to show that Cartesian doubt concealed an unjustified objective standard that always went "undoubted," an objective standard that both authorized doubt as a method and identfied that which was an appropriate object of doubt. But why indeed should not the Cartesian method, with its standards and rational processes, also be subject to doubt? Obviously, following this line of reasoning would involve us in an endless regress. Moreover, since doubt is supposed to take us to certainty by dissolving the residue of error that keeps the truth from being seen, Cartesian doubt must implicitly assert that the truth is essentially self-evident and thus beyond doubt. As will become clear later on, none of these assumptions can resist Husserl's phenomenological analysis. For clearly, what seems worthy of doubt is always historically conditioned and in the case of Descartes, the very truth that seems beyond doubt and indeed does not get doubted is enlightenment science's own idealized version of the world, of science, and of scientific rationality.
But Gadamer shows how Husserl's analysis goes further. Not only does Cartesian doubt fail to provide the historian with an objective point of departure, but naturalistic explanation itself cannot claim to provide a justifiable methodology capable of objectively accounting for human activity. Consequently, it is an inadequate foundation for historical scholarship. Gadamer follows Husserl in his painstaking investigation of the assumptions inherent in naturalism and shows why they cause problems not only for Dilthey, but also for revisionist historians.
To demonstrate this inadequacy, Gadamer relates how Husserl disputes the argument that naturalistic understanding can ever be based upon brute or raw perception. This, of course, is the claim made when historians say that the truth was clear from just looking at the facts, just reading the historical texts. And, despite Thorp's qualifiers, this is what he and other revisionist historians claim to do.40 Actually, naturalistic explanation never gets to nature or the brute facts. In a certain sense, Kant had already demonstrated that experience is not something external or exterior to consciousness that comes in from the outside to inform consciousness. Rather, as Kant points out, all understanding is cooperative. In the absence of a "mind" or a state of "consciousness" capable of organizing the inflow of sense data into discernable patterns, we could not have understandable experiences at all. Imagine, for example, a hose running water out into a street.41 Of course nothing builds up because there is nothng to contain the water. But were one to put the hose into a round pool, the sides of the pool would contain the water and form it into a circle. So it is with sense data or perception. Without concepts provided by the "mind" to contain and form (organize) incoming perception, there could be no experiences and thus no understanding. Perception could never be more than an undifferentiated flow of sensations with no meaning at all.
This, in part, is what Husserl is getting at when he argues that all claims to empirical knowledge must presuppose the prior existence of the unifying activity of consciousness. This state of consciousness (or mind) is already structured by an integrated set of ideas (by a worldview) capable of intelligibly organizing the inflow of sense data into some kind of understanding. Otherwise there could only be a diffuse and inchoate influx of sensation. Another example might help. When we see a book, what we really understand as a book is not how book atoms feel. Rather, it is how in consciousness a stream of perceptions are apprehended, processed, and organized under an ideal meaning (or concept) called a book. Gadamer emphasizes Husserl's surprising conclusion that the "real world," the "natural world," is never found in, but rather precedes, our apprehension of "raw experience," or the "brute facts." Indeed, it is always within the categories of this ideal world or preconceived reality-categories already pesent and underway in the unifying activity of consciousness-that the influx of sense data gets connected together and grasped.