ABSTRACT
Human history is in part a chain of objectively lived and reconstructed persons and events. Human experience and symbolization take place within social contexts. Acceptable knowledge is reduced from the totality of human experience—in its range from the concrete to the apperception of mystery—to the delimitations of methodology. With a dominance of empirical science, the past has often been reduced to little more than a source of information rather than the basis of self-understanding with a symbolism spanning facts and values enmeshed in an awareness of the transcendent mystery. Radical preservation is a call to recover, not just the roots of the preservation movement but the roots of human experience and that which has been forgotten in the modern world with its positivistic focus on the empirical. Radical preservation lays out an approach that spans Percy's San Andreas Fault of the modern mind.
