Part Two. Writing and Perception
4. Path of Lesen (Gadamer)
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4. Path of Lesen (Gadamer)
How are issues handed over with the Western philosophical history regarding the word meditation reflected in philosophical hermeneutics? Coincidently or not, by pursuing this question, we come across many of the rationales Gadamer uses when embarking on the philosophical path of Lesen. Let us begin by evoking how Gadamer understands Augustine's nondualist initiative of language in the meditations of The Trinity.
a. Verbum Cordis Revisited. The Ahistorical More of Sprache
To understand Gadamer's reading of Augustine, it is fruitful to begin with the philosophical‐hermeneutical motivation elaborated in Wahrheit und Methode. Gadamer's recourse to Augustine is explicitly integrated into a larger historical narrative starting with Plato (and continuing through Gadamer's contemporaries).
As noted in Section 2a, Gadamer holds that the Attics in general – and Plato is no exception here but rather
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an important contributor – suffered from a forgetfulness of language – a Sprachvergessenheit.353 Language as a lived and dynamic order of material and expressive being was not properly seen as such. The concrete, material reality of the logoi and the process‐element implied in linguistic understanding was either non‐
existent or considered insignificant compared to omnipresent and ahistorical cosmological order preceding the human inquiry in logos. Overall, the concrete and historical emergence of the human word means little.
In Gadamer's reading, Plato's tractate on language, Cratylos, expresses such a view on language. In this dialogue, writes Gadamer, the status of the verbal and written logoi are outlined by the model of numbers more than actual language.354 This paradigm corresponds with the fact that the material and concrete emergence of words becomes secondary to what is expressed in the words.355 On a more general level, as Gadamer demonstrates, Plato's conception of language is based on an idealist schema of linguistic life. The ideal order of the logoi belongs to a cosmic potentiality, without itself contributing to a process of knowledge as words. By the same token, the soul is believed to accomplish itself in a drastically nonlinguistic thought.356 On the way to logos, the soul is assumed to transgress the human language.357 According to Gadamer, Plato's conception of language corresponds to the Platonic‐Pythagorean religious idea of the migration of the soul, based on an essential difference between the soul and the body. The soul retains its independent nature throughout all its embodiment, writes Gadamer, and the separation of the soul from the body was regarded as a purification of the soul.358 The Greek religious idea of the gods appearing as human reflects the same schema. The gods do not become human in this religious conception but show themselves to humans by wholly retaining their superhuman nature.359
According to Gadamer, one historical impact of Augustine, together with Thomas Aquinas, is that language is brought properly into view for the first time in the Western tradition (without these writers, the Sprachvergessenheit would have been almost total, in Gadamer's narrative360). The impact of Christian theology in general and the verbum‐teaching of these so‐called Church‐Fathers361 in particular, alters both the conception of language and the correlated conception of embodiment. Christianity furnished new models of mind and body, distinct from the Greek religious ideas and models, writes Gadamer.362 The
353 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. 422.
354 Ibid. 417.
355 Ibid. 418.
356 Ibid. 416.
357 For a comment on the move from Plato to Augustine in Wahrheit und Methode, see Grondin, "Unterwegs zur Rhethorik. Gadamers Schritt von Platon zu Augustin in 'Wahrheit und Methode'."
358 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. 422.
359 Ibid. 422.
360 Also after Augustine and Thomas, the Sprachvergessenheit in Western philosophy continued, according to Gadamer.
Thus, the way language becomes visible in the Verbum‐teaching is interchangeable neither with the Greek Logos nor with ideals later brought in with the Enlightenment. Ibid. 425.
361 Gadamer frequently refers to Augustine and Thomas only as "die Kirchenväter". Our reading will mainly focus on Augustine, but as we follow Gadamer's reading, we also need to see the two Church‐fathers in combination. For a completer and far more detailed discussion of the verbum‐teaching in philosophical hermeneutics, see Oliva, Das innere Verbum in Gadamers Hermeneutik.
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Trinitarian idea of the Son of God becoming a vulnerable and final man of flesh and blood is a radical idea of embodiment or incarnation [Einkörperung]. The nondualism of incarnation furnished for an altered view on language. Instead of being submerged in a cosmic potentiality, which is a static and idealist order, the word now emerges as intrinsic to the process of understanding. "[I]m Unterschied zum griechischen Logos gilt: das Wort ist reines Geschehen,"363 writes Gadamer. Certainly, he adds, the language emerges only indirectly, as a human counterpart of the divine word. The important point is nevertheless that the mystery of the divine unity becomes reflected in the phenomenon of human language.364
We can approach Gadamer's reading of Augustine using the figure of unity and diversity. In the Greek context of many gods, philosophy (Plato) strives to gather a unity of the thinking mind within the diverse, nongathered ontological situation. In the Christian context with one God, by contrast, thinking strives to find the proper conception of diversity and plurality. From what we saw in The Trinity, Augustine's theology faces an apparent paradox in the singular status of the divine Word, the apparently nongathered organization of the Bible in enigmas and parables, the multitude of interpretations of the Bible, and in the diverse status the multiple historically conditioned, national tongues of humans. How can divine unity be reflected in these pluralities, without reducing either the originality of the divine unity or the originality of the diversity? Augustine's solution to the paradoxical situation, we can say, is to invert the problem. The plurality of human languages is itself what mirrors the divine Trinitarian unity. The pluralistic modes expressing the Word of God are themselves an accomplishment of the unity of God. In many ways, Gadamer's Augustine‐reading follows the framework of this figure. The manifest human counterpart of the Trinitarian unity emerges nowhere else but in the diverse ways the human tongue interprets the Bible, and in the diverse ways the human understands the enigma of his or her situation.
With the pluralism of human tongues expressing the singular Word, the relationship between the inner language of thinking and the language of the tongue gains a new and altered paradigmatic status, as we read in Wahrheit und Methode. Whereas Plato's inner dialogue with itself (Theaetetus) had the status of the emergence of a static ideal order, the Christian conceptions of creation and the Son of God becoming man now conceptualize the concrete and dynamic event of linguistic emergence. "Einmal geschieht ja die Schöpfung durch das Wort Gottes,"365 Gadamer explains, drawing attention to how the singularity of creating becomes reflected in language. For the Church fathers, creation is mirrored again and again in the process wherein thought breaches into spoken language, he demonstrates. The speaking of the word becomes just as miraculous as the incarnation of God. Man is always already in the word of God, as he opens his mouth and speaks.366 "Das große Wunder der Sprache liegt nicht darin, daß das Wort Fleisch wird und im äußeren Sein heraustritt, sondern daß das, was heraustritt und sich in der Äußerung äußert, immer
363 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. 423. Gadamer speaks here at the outset of Thomas Aquinas.
364 Ibid. 423.
365 Ibid. 423.
366 Ibid. 423.
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schon Wort ist."367 This model was unthinkable in the context of Plato, writes Gadamer. It is un‐Greek in the sense that the conception of emergence implies no secondary copy of a preexisting ideal order.368 The emergence is itself the original. Analogous to how nothing about God was lost when he once created the world, nothing is lost when the Word emerges in the earthly life of man. "Das Werden, um das es sich […]
handelt, ist kein Werden, aus dem etwas anderes wird,"369 Gadamer comments. The unity is not used up by emergence, as it were. "Weder handelt es sich um eine Abscheidung des einen vom anderen [kat' apokopen], noch um eine Minderung des inneren Wortes durch sein Hervorgehen in die Äußerlichkeit, noch überhaupt um ein Anderswerden, so daß das innere Wort verbraucht würde."370 In the pluralist and historically determined realities of human kind, the ahistorical and unitary truth of God emerges. Or in expanding our reading of Augustine: the heartfelt reading performed by the individual subject is for Augustine a concretized moment wherein the Word of God reveals itself – originally and uniquely at the moment of reading.
With this moment of originality, the figure of unity and pluralism turns into a question of potentiality and actuality. Gadamer's reading accentuates what we saw in the verbum cordis. The crux of the Augustinian verbum teaching, we read in Wahrheit und Methode, is that inner verbum is no real word as such. No human tongue can fulfill the inner word. The truth of verbum cordis is for Augustine independent of any linguistic emergence.371 The unity of God and His Son, and the enigmatic unity of man and God, we can say, is an order which qua itself is nonaccomplishable. Verbum cordis/verbum interius372 is an order which runs prior to the concrete linguistic utterance but as such is not uttered as such.
The genius of the verbum‐teaching, according to Gadamer, evolves in how it preserves a linguistic potentiality while avoiding idealist schemata analogous to Plato's Cratylos for instance. The unity of God's Word is not conceived as a nonhistorical ideality presumptively accomplishing itself in an ideal nonlinguistic being, but rather in historical language. In other words, the ahistorical Word of God is not beyond history but in history – and it is linguistic through and through. Qua potentiality, the Word is the principally nonaccomplishable unity. It is a unity that the human never can understand all the way – the human mind will always fall short. Precisely qua limited, however, the Word accomplishes itself as the enigmatic relationship between man and God. Phrased another way, the inner verbum – qua a mirror of God in a human – accomplishes itself by being essentially nonaccomplishable. As a final counterpart to the divine infinite Word, the human word is the limited expression.
367 Ibid. 424.
368 ibid. 423.
369 Ibid. 424.
370 Ibid. 424.
371 According to Gadamer, Augustine dismissed the difficulty of the plurality of languages in his suggestion. (Hans‐Georg
Gadamer, Hermeneutik II: Wahrheit und Methode; Ergänzungen; Register, Gesammelte Werke 2 (Tübingen:
Mohr/Siebeck, 1993). 424.) . In our context, we leave these critical perspectives out of the picture.
372 The terms verbum cordis and verbum interius will we be used more or less as synonyms. For a closer discussion of the
two words, see Oliva, Das innere Verbum in Gadamers Hermeneutik. 18 ff.
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Wahrheit und Methode follows the development of Augustine's verbum‐teaching further than we will do here. Gadamer moves to Thomas Aquinas and explicates in some detail how this philosopher accomplishes the initiatives launched by Augustine, for instance by pursuing the philosophical consequences of the relationship between thought and expression.373 In our context, pursuing Gadamer's reading in full would take us too far away from the path we are about to take, namely the juxtaposed co‐
reading of Gadamer and Merleau‐Ponty. For now, let us examine Gadamer's philosophical concept of language in light of what we have seen with Augustine. Though unquestionably important, the inner verbum of philosophical hermeneutics can hardly be said to be explicit in much of the commentary literature on Gadamer. In a certain sense, the emphasis is often placed on the "outer" accomplishment of language, for example, the way language instantiates and fulfills ethical commitments in dialogue. What, then, is the role of an inner language in a contemporary philosophy striving to overcome a dualism of inner/outer in the Cartesian sense?
For us, one way to conceive of Gadamer's philosophy in light of Augustine's Verbum Interius is to read Sprache as a philosophical (and secularized) analogy to Augustine's divine Word.374 Sprache, for Gadamer, is the omnipotent order of human life – the ultimate bond between the individual and limited self, and the infinite order of the world. Sprache is the bond of an agreeableness running prior to any verbalized expressions in or of the world. Thus, where the order of Augustine's God is the omnipresent order both running through the discourses and springing out of the heart of the individual, Sprache is for Gadamer an all‐encompassing and existential order. From the inside of a human, to the outside of the world, language permeates understanding. Sprache is always already [immer schon] there: "Die sprachlice Welterfahrung ist 'absolut',"375 writes Gadamer, "Die Sprachlichkeit unserer Welterfahrung ist vorgängig gegenüber allem, das als seiend erkannt und angesprochen wird."376 All our doings, investments, practices, and issues take place within language. "Wir sind […] in allem Wissen von uns selbst und allem Wissen von der Welt immer schon von Sprache umgriffen, die unsere eigene ist."377 Language is both personal and intimate to ontogenetic self‐understanding and a communal, transpersonal and phylogenetic order.
To avoid misunderstanding, we can note the following. Gadamer's contemporary version of Augustine's verbum implies no recourse to, for instance, an underlying logic or abstract system beneath or beyond the accidental expressions of everyday language. Language is what pre‐forms any conceptions of an object whatsoever, but it is not itself an object [Gegenstand]. Nor is language a tool for thought, i.e. an instrument that can be used and put aside at will. Also, the idea that language consists of individual signs
373 One interesting track to follow here could be the elaborated nuances pertaining to how the linguistic mind thinks in
the Sache. For Thomas and Gadamer, thought unfolds in and through the temporal singularity of the historical event, without thereby being reducible to terms of temporal succession (Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. 427. Cf. Oliva, Das innere Verbum in Gadamers Hermeneutik. 61.)
374 Gadamer, "Die Natur der Sache und die Sprache der Dinge (1960)." 75.
375 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. 453.
376 Ibid. 454.
377 Gadamer, "Mensch und Sprache (1966)." 149.
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communicated from a linguistically unattached point of view is rejected.378 Just as there is no outside of language, there is no behind. Language permeates the perspectives taken of oneself, of others and of the world in general. Everything which happens to the human is in the order of language. Saying does not meant that every percept, feeling or rudimentary thought of whatever kind is or must be expressed in language.379 Gadamer's figure goes the other way: the rudimentary, almost raw human existence wherein no actual word fits in, is, if it makes sense to say so, qualitatively more language than the verbalized expressions of thoughts and conversation. The beginning of dialogue – what Gadamer calls on the way to language – is wherein language reveals itself its most potent ways. Linguistic idealism is also thus rejected, i.e. the idea of an all‐encompassing totality wherein language is predestined within a higher order given on some abstract or ontological level.380
Hence, expanding on Augustine, the inner word of philosophical hermeneutics evolves in the limited perspective of a human, which is to say, in the factual nature of the human self. A human can never express him or herself fully. There is always more to say about the relationship to oneself, the relationship to others, and to the world in general. "Kein menschliches Wort kann in vollkommener Weise unseren Geist ausdrücken,"381 we read in Wahrheit und Methode. The human mind is always dispersed, or nongathered – "von diesem oder jenem zerstreut".382 The apparent paradox is that in the limited and never fully gathered perspectives of humans, the openness and nondogmatic nature of the linguistic mind emerges. Hence, no word can express the human mind completely.383 An openness to the unsaid belongs essentially to the nature of the linguistic mind. The human self is doomed, so to speak, to always seek new articulations of his or her situation. Furthermore, the human is incapable – even in principle – of saying everything. The human being needs to transgress the concrete boundaries of his or her situation through ever new articulations. Otherwise, there is for Gadamer strictly speaking no human world [Welt].384 In other words, there is a nonreducible more intrinsic to the human situation. This more, we could say, is the inner verbum of Wahrheit und Methode.
378 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. 421.
379 This way of reading Gadamer can be said implicitly to guide for example the reading of Erika Fischer‐Lichte, one of the
more prominent theoreticians within the so‐called Performative turn of contemporary aesthetics. According to Fischer‐
Lichte's reading, Gadamer's hermeneutics pertains to a notion of experience wherein understanding and interpretation are on par with a full‐fledged semantic articulation of what is experienced (cf. Erika Fischer‐Lichte, The Transformative Power of Aesthetics (Routledge 2008). cf. Chapter 5 The Emergence of Meaning). By defining language as the medium in which all understanding occurs, Gadamer forwards an intellectualist notion of interpretation, Fischer‐Lichte's reading indicates. Thus, Gadamer's hermeneutics captures only a small part of the complex situation of what an experience is, in particular what is being executed in the performative arts. By our account, the premise of this understanding is problematic. Verstehen does not equal intellectual, verbalized understanding. (If one takes into account Gadamer’s concept of Vollzug, which, in many ways, is a performative concept, the critical remarks of Fischer‐Lichte become even more difficult to accept.)
380 Cf. Gadamer, "Die Natur der Sache und die Sprache der Dinge (1960)." 75.
381 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. 429.
382 Ibid. 429.
383 Ibid. 429.
384 Cf. Ibid. 457.
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In the following, we will uncover more sides of Gadamer's linguistic philosophy and investigate the implications thereof. For now, however, we conclude by briefly rephrasing the important points established on behalf of the hermeneutist. Another way to say that language encompasses and conditions the human life form is to say that practices and moral values are accumulated in the shared medium of language. Practices and moral values are taken up in language, so to speak, not necessarily in a direct sense, but as potential ways of expressing oneself as a human being. Taken as a historical whole, language accumulates a vast horizon of possible ways of doing and expressing the human life form. The historical accumulation of language will always and by necessity overthrow the understanding of the individual self.
Language always harbors more than possibly can be expressed by the individual. Always pre‐forming cognition and perception, language is what conditions human expressivity in the first place.
Simultaneously, as the verbum cordis was in Augustine, the more of Gadamer's Sprache is not external to the individual but permeates his or her gaze from inner to outer. The hermeneutical self is this inexpressible more, we can say. The subject is the relational and ambiguous transition between individuality and community, familiarity and foreignness, historicity and a‐historicity. Language is the unity
Simultaneously, as the verbum cordis was in Augustine, the more of Gadamer's Sprache is not external to the individual but permeates his or her gaze from inner to outer. The hermeneutical self is this inexpressible more, we can say. The subject is the relational and ambiguous transition between individuality and community, familiarity and foreignness, historicity and a‐historicity. Language is the unity