Frank Lentricchia argues that there is “no unmediated historical knowledge,” and adds: “That is reserved for God, or for theorists like Hirsch who believe that objective knowledge can be acquired in a massive act of dispossessing ourselves of the only route to knowledge that we have: the historicized self. What Hirsch’s readings of Heidegger and Gadamer may ultimately indicate is the traditional Anglo-American fear and manhandling of any sort of thought which does not work from Carestian premises.”
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