8 The Horizon of Dialogue
1. The Forgetting of Language in the Western Tradition: Plato, Augustine, Humboldt
When Gadamer wrote the last part of Truth and Method, language had not yet reached the leading role on the philosophical stage that it would later come to have. The “linguistic turn” of the twentieth century, the point at which the most varied of philosophical currents run together, had not yet occurred. These currents go from logical positivism to Wittgenstein, from American pragmatism to structuralism and psychoanalysis, from Heidegger to the transcendental pragmatism of Apel and Habermas, from Merleau-Ponty to Derrida’s deconstruction. Philosophical hermeneutics contributes as well. But at that time even Gadamer could not imagine that his “turn”—the “ontological turn of hermeneutics guided by language”—would have corresponded to the “linguistic turn.” In a note to the last edition of Truth and Method he wrote: “I am not unaware that the ‘linguistic turn,’ of which I knew nothing in the early 50s, recognized the same thing” (TM 487/GW2 421; RPJ 41/GW2 4).
How did the reflection on language manifest itself in Germany during the early sixties? Wittgenstein was virtually unknown. Analytic philosophy, which had gradually gained the upper hand in North America, was associated with the positivism of the Vienna Circle and had been ostracized in Germany. In Husserl’s phenomenology the role of language was secondary, and this perspective radically changed only with Heidegger. Gadamer knew, for the most part, the essays linking language and poetry that Heidegger had written since 1935, and certainly he found inspiration in them. Nevertheless it should not be forgotten that On the Way to Language did not appear until 1959, when Truth and Method was already in print. Just as he did not mention Heidegger in the sections on aesthetics in the book, the section on language does not mention him either.1 Still there are moments in the book when Heidegger’s formulations can be heard unmistakably, beginning with the Kehre or “turn,” which Gadamer instead refers to as the Wendung, or “turning.” Clearly he wants to distance himself from Heidegger, who left hermeneutics behind in order to turn to the mystery of language. Heidegger’s turn, for Gadamer, is a return to the early hermeneutics of Geworfenheit, or “thrownness.” Gadamer’s turning, by contrast, takes place on the terrain of philosophical hermeneutics.2
In German philosophy, language is, however, anything but an unexplored field. For the present context it suffices to mention Ernst Cassirer, Hans Lipps, Johannes Lohmann, Julius Stenzel, and above all Richard Hönigswald. These are names that Gadamer often mentions.3 They all point to the great tradition of the philosophy of language in Germany that is linked to Hamann, Herder, and, especially, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Gadamer belongs to this tradition. Nevertheless, the somewhat forced synthesis in part 3 of Truth and Method contains many elements that seem questionable and unsatisfactory. Many of the theoretical arguments have a rudimentary character. It is therefore no coincidence that this third part, in contrast to the other two, has received comparatively little response. And it is also no coincidence that Gadamer, in subsequent decades, frequently returned to this part of the book, turning language into the guiding theme of the last phase of his philosophy.
In Truth and Method a long discussion of language in the Western tradition occupies nearly half of part 3 (TM 405–438/GW1 409–460). Gadamer proceeds from the question: what happened to language in the history of philosophy? His firm answer is that language has been completely forgotten and repressed, so that one must speak of a “forgetting of language” (TM 418/GW1 422). If, for Heidegger, the Western tradition is characterized by a forgetting of Being, then for Gadamer it stands under the sign of a forgetting of language. For both, Plato is the one primarily responsible.
What does the “forgetting of language” mean? It means that the innermost link between language and thought has been severed. As a result, thinking appears independent of language, and language gets demoted to the status of a mere tool of thought. This instrumental grasp of language, according to which words are nothing but signs for things and ideas that exist autonomously, is the implicit presupposition of the whole of Western philosophical reflection. According to Gadamer, ancient Greek philosophy refuses to recognize the constitutive role of language in the enactment of thought, and thus aspires to disclose to thought a realm beyond language (TM 417/GW1 421–422). Since Plato, the essence of language has been hidden here.
Gadamer’s reading of Plato concentrates on only the Cratylus, which for Gadamer is the paradigmatic, “fundamental statement of Greek thought on language” (TM 405/ GW1 409). In this dialogue two theories of language are set against each other: the first by Cratylus, for whom a natural similarity exists between a name and a thing, and the second by Hermogenes, for whom words are only conventional labels. Although Plato claims that both views are unsustainable, he does not move beyond them. Plato’s error, according to Gadamer, is that he tries to prove that the supposed “correctness” of words is no guarantee of their “truth”; hence it becomes important to know things without words (TM 407/GW1 411). As dim reflections of the light of the ideas, words block our ability to press forward to the truth of beings. Gadamer also criticizes the Platonic theory of ideas, which had been developed in order to counter the Sophists’ misuse of language. He comes to the somewhat surprising view “that Plato’s discovery of the ideas conceals the true nature of language even more than the theories of the Sophists” (TM 408/GW1 412). Plato on this account even interprets dialectics as the liberation of thought from language. What the essence of language really obscures, however, is the metaphysical model of the “similarity” between the original and the copy. Plato measures the word by the idea. However much the word can resemble the idea, it will never actually be the idea. The question becomes one of mímesis: the word is not a more or less correct imitation—if this were so, the world of names would be a doubling of the real world. Considered more closely, the word is a representation of what is taken to be worth revealing about a thing; as such, the word will always be right. In fact, it will not only be “right,” it will also be “true.” Regarding this truth of the word, it is legitimate to speak of “an absolute perfection of the word” (TM 410/GW1 415).
The critique of Plato, and especially his noetic concealment of language, gives Gadamer the opportunity to develop his thesis about the truth of the word and to distance his own position from any notion that the name is a sign.4 Starting from the Cratylus, the name for Plato loses all power of presentation, and becomes reduced to a “mere sign” or even a “number” (TM 412/GW1 416). With this move the premises of that fateful decision were put in place that would lead to a view of language as an ideal system of signs (TM 414/GW1 422). Yet if we remember all that Gadamer owes to Platonic dialectics, we must wonder about his somewhat questionable critique. It makes Plato appear, as if according to a Heideggerian yardstick, as the representative of a metaphysics of domination, aimed at constructing an ideal language with which Being, “as absolutely available objectivity,” can be calculated and controlled (TM 414/GW1 418).
As we have seen, Gadamer elsewhere offers a completely different image of Plato,5 and for this reason he later abandons the critique of the Cratylus. In one of his last essays he writes: “If Plato has no concept of ‘language’ that corresponds exactly to ours, it does not prevent his entire thinking from being grounded in language, specifically on the logoi” (LL 49/GW8 435). The so-called flight into the logoi, reported in the Phaedo, is viewed as an “epochal turn” in philosophy, even as the “beginning of philosophy” (GR 311/GW7 335).6
For Gadamer, Augustine’s verbum interior marks the only exception to the forgetting of language in the Western tradition. This interpretation contradicts the standard image of a conventionalist Augustine, which one encounters for example at the beginning of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Gadamer does not refer to Augustine’s De magistro in his argument, but rather to De trinitate (TM 422/GW1 424).7 A closer look shows, however, that it is not Augustine but Aquinas who is the most frequently cited author in this section, which Gadamer significantly entitles “Language and Verbum” (TM 418–428/GW1 422–431).
In Gadamer’s interpretation, the Christian notion of incarnation plays a central role. Christian theology opens up a new perspective with its referral to the prologue to the Gospel of St. John. Creation happens through the word of God. In contrast to the Greek logos, the Christian logos achieves its spirituality when it becomes “flesh” (TM 418/GW1 423). Far from a diminution or depreciation, incarnation is a full and essential realization of God, but its consequences are not only theological. According to Gadamer, incarnation sheds light on the miracle of language. In order to understand this we must follow Augustine, who moves in the opposite direction: he calls on language in order to penetrate the mystery of incarnation. For this reason he takes up the distinction from the Stoics between lógos endiáthetos and lógos prophorikós, inner and outer logos. The former is the inner space of thinking, while the latter is pure externality. Augustine sees an “analogy” between the inner and the outer word, though he does not reverse the relationship between inner and outer (TM 422/GW1 424). Fundamental theological reasons prevent him from making this reversal: the verbum as such is not to be confused with the Verbum chosen by God for his revelation. The same holds true for the inner human word that precedes the outer one. The “true” and original word—the mirror of God’s word—is the inner word that “lies in the heart” (verbum in corde).8 The intimate, purely intellectual and universal word is independent from any outer form. Augustine’s contribution, according to Gadamer, was to “situate the problem of language, too, entirely within inner thought” (TM 420/GW1 424). Through incarnation, one comes to the discovery of the inner word of thinking. But Gadamer asks, not without reason, “whether we are not here using the unintelligible to explain the unintelligible” (TM 421/GW1 425). For what is this “inner word” that seems to lie before and beyond language?
In order to find a way out of this impasse Gadamer turns to Thomas Aquinas, who designated the inner word as a forma excogitata, which means “the subject matter thought through to the end” (TM 422/GW1 426). The processual character of the inner word emerges in this “thinking to the end,” and indicates that discursivity to which finite human understanding is condemned. Here an opposition seems to form between noûs and diánoia, between intuition and discursivity. What would the processual character of the human word have in common with the procession of the divine word? Even in the process of human thought there is no change, no “transition from potentiality into action, but an emergence ut actus ex actu” from act to act (TM 424/GW1 428). The word comes to light in the same moment in which the knowledge of the thing occurs—not later. For Aquinas “the word is like a mirror in which the thing is seen” (TM 425/GW1 429). Yet the distinction remains between the divine and the human word: whereas the former springs from a single act of intuition, the latter is the result of a movement of thought that searches for the word as it thinks the matter through to the end (TM 425/GW1 429). Thus the human word is dispersed and incomplete, for the “word of human thought is directed toward the thing, but it cannot contain it as a whole within itself” (TM 425/GW1 429).
The first result of this discussion with Scholastic theology is the discovery that the word “is not formed by a reflective act” (TM 426/GW1 430). Gadamer will later say that speaking is a self-forgetting action. The second result is the discovery of the “event character” of language (TM 427/GW1 430–431). As the divine word promulgates itself ever anew in the kérygma, it can be said that the meaning of the human word belongs to the event character itself (TM 427/GW1 430).
The dialogue with Aquinas leads Gadamer to recognize that the unreflected formation of the word is one and the same as the formation of the thing in the concept. Much less clear is the role of Augustine’s verbum interior. For what is this inner word supposed to be? Since it is audible neither to the other nor to oneself, it runs the risk of disappearing in the indefinite realm of inwardness. It is reasonable to ask if it is really a word at all. Even the weaker formulation of an “inner conversation”—which follows from an Augustinian reading of Plato—does not resolve the problem.
The attempt to locate the universality of hermeneutics in the verbum interior can have grave consequences.9 In particular, it allows the specter of the subject to reappear, one that does not need to speak to itself and is therefore not self-conscious. This inner dialogue would be inarticulate and inaudible, and would be reduced in the end to a monologue, or better: to the immediacy of a self-presence that dispenses with all linguistic mediation. It would bring about a relapse into an instrumental conception of language in which the outer, expressed word is only secondary, derivative, and incomplete. The priority accorded to the verbum interior is really a way of returning the word, even if only the inner word, to reason, and thereby elevating reason, pure and cleansed, above language. Nothing could be further from hermeneutics. It is precisely this problematic return to Augustine that reveals one of the limits of Gadamer’s reflections on language.10 This is also chosen in the difficulty of resolving the tension between the doctrine of the verbum interior and other aspects of philosophical hermeneutics, above all the centrality of dialogue. The question of the limits of language is rather different. The verbum interior should not be confused with the unsaid. The limit is the limit of what is said, the spoken or expressed word that points toward the unsaid, and it is such only because it can always be said again and again differently. Hermeneutics begins where the said word arises and the voice of the other becomes audible.
Gadamer’s analysis of Humboldt in the section entitled “Language as Experience of the World,” also occurs in the shadow of Heidegger (TM 438–456/GW1 442–460). Since phenomenology had neglected the role played by language in the world, it falls to hermeneutics to reveal this role. But what should actually be explored is not so much language in the world as, in a radical reversal, the world in language.
Humboldt had already accomplished this reversal. The diversity of language, in other words the self-articulation of language in the forms of human discourse, is a phenomenon that Humboldt investigated more intensively than anyone else. He was able to grasp individuality without losing sight of universality: the poles between which the circle of language unfolds. According to Gadamer, however, Humboldt’s contribution was above all that he had seen in each language “a particular view of the world” (TM 440/GW1 444). As he follows Humboldt’s lead, Gadamer will be able to uncover the fundamental and originary linguisticality of the human experience of the world.
In Gadamer’s reception he also raises objections against Humboldt that take up Heidegger’s critique and can be summarized in three main points. The first rests on the old prejudice against philosophy of language and linguistics. Humboldt’s limitation, even though he is recognized as the creator of modern philosophy of language and linguistics, supposedly lay in his approach. He came to language as a philologist and not as a speaker, and thus he treated language as an object of research (TM 439/GW1 443). A similar charge could of course be made against Gadamer and even against Heidegger—moreover, Humboldt knew very well about the dangers of objectifying language. The second objection is that Humboldt’s notion of “mental power” diminishes the connection between language and thinking to the formalism of a competency, specifically to the ability to form the world in language’s enérgeia (TM 439/GW1 444). The third objection is connected to the second: Humboldt proceeds from the “metaphysics of individuality” initially developed by Leibniz. As a result he thinks of a subject that structures the world in front of him through language. This world, in turn, becomes the “object of language” (TM 439/GW1 444).11
If we look more closely, however, we can see that without language no world would exist for the subject to act upon. The conventional relationship between language and world should be reversed, since language is the primordial foundation for the subject’s activity. To be sure, with this reversal Gadamer has simply paraphrased what Humboldt had already said. The world is the world only through language, and on the other hand there is language only insofar as the world articulates itself in language. With this in mind we can understand what Gadamer means when he writes: “man’s being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic” (TM 443/GW1 447). To clarify this further, Gadamer distinguishes between world (Welt) and environment (Umwelt) (TM 443/GW1 447). The world is linguistically constituted only through our “freedom from environment” (TM 444/GW1 448). Here the question of the world in itself disappears (TM 447/GW1 451). This is because there can be no standpoint outside the human world of language, from which the world in itself can be grasped. And the “world” is nothing other than the totality of linguistic human experience as it is structured by different languages. The world lies in these linguistic perspectives, or better: the world is their open totality. The linguistic experience of the world transcends all relativism in such a view, because it encompasses every in-itself and so reveals itself to be “absolute” (TM 450/GW1 454). The fundamental relationship between language and world therefore does not mean that the world becomes the object of language, but rather that the horizon of language always already embraces everything that is and everything that we are.
2. Writing and the Voice of the Other: Listening to Derrida
Gadamer’s Truth and Method carries out the turn to language using the model of writing rather than orality. Though he claims otherwise, Gadamer begins with textual interpretation in order to return to dialogue and from there to reach the universality of language (TM 383–389/GW1 387–393). This path is necessary because history is transmitted in the “medium” of language; in other words, language is the happening of history. Here is where the linguistic character of understanding emerges, which is “the concretion of historically effected consciousness” (TM 389/GW1 393). It is true of course that there are “fragments of the past”; but what tradition hands down to us as spoken, or better, as written, is quite another matter (GW8 260). Inasmuch as writing transcends all finite determination, anyone can participate in the transmission of the past, provided he can read. Historically effective consciousness is a consciousness that reads (TM 389–395/GW1 393–399).
Yet what is the relationship between orality and writing? What is the place of the voice? And what role does the text play? Gadamer’s complex position on these questions changed over the years, especially as a result of his debate with Derrida, which also led to Gadamer’s distancing himself from Plato. The position can be summarized in the thesis of an inseparable connection between the oral and the written: “In truth there is no real opposition. What is written must be read and therefore all that is written is ‘subordinated to the voice.’”12
Gadamer does not share Plato’s “one-sided” condemnation of writing in the Phaedrus and in the excursus of the Seventh Letter.13 He takes Plato’s argument about the peculiar “weakness” of all written language to be an “ironic exaggeration.” Nor does he accept the thought, expressed in the Protagoras, that written language is resistant to dialogue (TM 393/GW1 396).14 For Gadamer the text speaks in responding to the questions a reader puts to it. He does not give up the idea that the text is a partner in a dialogue. Hermeneutics itself is just this “coming into conversation with the text” (TM 368/GW1 374). Cognizant of the asymmetry between a written and an oral dialogue, when an embodied other is present, Gadamer nevertheless emphasizes the continuity between the oral and the written. The boundaries are fluid: writing is voicelike and can be made oral again at any time; the oral, to the extent that it is language, can always potentially be written, or is always “destined for writing,” as Gadamer put it in his 1983 essay “Unterwegs zur Schrift?” (GW7 258–269). Put otherwise: the oral is potentially always already in the written, and the written is always already potentially in the oral.
The transition from the oral to the written occurs through reading. Here the distance from Derrida becomes apparent. Lécture, reading, becomes a paradigm that is implicitly opposed to écriture, writing. And it is no coincidence that the paradigm of reading, which is described as letting-speak or giving-voice-to, is ultimately expanded so far that it coincides with hermeneutics.15 “What is writing, if it is not read?” (DD 97/GW10 141) Gadamer posed this question to Derrida. “Writing is a phenomenon of language only insofar as it is read” (GW8 264). Writing is just as voicelike (stimmlich) as speech is potentially writing (schriftfähig). How can one avoid vocalizing writing while reading, or articulating it with the voice?
In 1981 Gadamer published an essay with the programmatic and significant title “Voice and Language” (GW8 258–270). Here he answers Derrida’s objections and develops his own conception of the voice, which comes to play a key role in the debate between hermeneutics and deconstruction.16 The voice is, to a certain extent, an attempt to build a bridge to écriture. If writing is not an “image of the voice,” then the voice is not an image of writing (GR 388/GW10 159). But what do articulated voice and the writing have in common?
Plato had already asked this question in the Philebus, which becomes decisive for dialectics because it concerns the relation between the one and the many (Philebus 14c–18d). Both the sounds articulated by the voice and the letters of the alphabet are given as examples. In the end it becomes clear that both, far from being mere examples, are precisely what reveal the unity of the many and the multiplicity of the one in the lógos. The voice reveals our incompleteness and finitude, because we cannot master it. One is thrown back on the méson, the “midpoint” of language, its middle or center, particularly in relation to those “elements,” articulated sounds and written signs, that mark the limits of an otherwise unlimited continuum and so enable both speaking and writing. Both are constants that open up a “field of play” (Spielraum). Despite its expansiveness, it is bound to the articuli, the boundaries carved into the boundlessness of phonic and graphic material (GW8 259). Articulation is therefore the reciprocal relation of voice and writing, a relation that sheds light on the transition that occurs in reading. In contrast to every natural form of expression, speaking and writing amount to a coming to agreement in what is held in common, beginning with the communal space of play of the letters and the articulated sounds in any language.
Nevertheless the voice for Gadamer has “both the first and the last word,” and this is where his distance from Derrida becomes visible (LL 34/GW8 419). But this position should not be confused with giving priority to the voice. The voice for hermeneutics is the continuous unity of speaking, whereas writing is characterized by the difference of interruption. It is “a phase in the event of understanding,” which is fixed in the text (DD 21–51, 30/GW2 330–360, 341). Yet this fixity is not permanent, and the text becomes that “between” which interrupts the continuity of the voice.17 This relates to the figure of the interpreter, who as inter-pres is the interlocutor. The “eminent text” of literature is no exception (DD 40/GW2 351). It demands to have its word heard; no less than other texts it demands to be given a voice. In the circular continuity of the voice the text stands for discontinuity. To the extent that philosophical hermeneutics emphasizes unity over difference, continuity over discontinuity, it favors the voice.
If in Derrida’s wake we have no choice but to rethink writing, the voice also becomes problematic. Next to Ousia and gramm
it is above all the book Speech and Phenomena from the 1960s that powerfully impressed Gadamer, as he himself pointed out (GR 377/GW10 149). Derrida had “rightfully criticized Husserl in this book,” by putting into question the self-conscious cogito that assumes it can think without signs (LL 33/GW8 418). Though he partially agrees with Derrida, Gadamer also expresses his skepticism. He accepts Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics for its “logocentricity,” though it might better be called its “monologocentricity.” Yet Gadamer rejects Derrida’s condemnation of the voice and, more precisely, the link that Derrida sees between the voice and the self-presence of consciousness (DD 112/GW2 371).18 Even though Gadamer never mounts a full-scale critique, his view is easy to summarize. The voice, so readily denounced for its presumed metaphysics of presence, is the phenomenological voice, the “spiritual flesh” that continues to be present to itself but hears itself in the absence of world.19 It is not clear why this should be so, for the voice both in its empirical embodiment and in its relation to articulation, that is, to writing. Just as much as writing, the voice would have to be a form of exile for the self-presence of consciousness. For hermeneutics, in other words, difference is carved into voice. The possibility that what is evoked may regain a voice in no way eliminates the reference to its absence (DD 112–113/GW2 371–372). This reference is the space of difference in the voice. The hermeneutic voice is in the first place the voice of the other, the voice I hear before I hear my own. This voice carries the otherness of the you into what would otherwise be only the identity of self-presence.20 Nor should it be forgotten that presence is also simultaneously an absence, for hermeneutics as for deconstruction; it is never a pure, full, and completed presence that is immediately given without past or future. Presence is the presence of an absence, regardless of whether it is spoken by the voice or manifested in writing.
It remains an open question whether the hermeneutic voice can be accused of relying on the metaphysics of presence, or whether, by contrast, deconstruction, with its critique of phenomenology, itself succumbs to an objectivistic conception of presence understood mainly as permanence. Certainly Gadamer, as Derrida argued, was guided by the intention to let the voice emerge from its relative obscurity. At the same time, Gadamer’s overall aim was not to assign a central position to the voice, but to emphasize the co-belonging of voice and writing through articulation.
Considering the importance of the voice, it is no wonder that hermeneutics proves to be a philosophy of listening or hearing.21 The power of sight, which has been privileged throughout the entire philosophical tradition, is now contrasted to the power of hearing. To be sure, Herder had already reversed the hierarchy of the senses in the eighteenth century. But Gadamer takes his cue directly from Aristotle, who had already clearly prioritized the sense of hearing.22 While the other senses offer access to only their own specific domains, hearing is “an avenue to the whole” as it participates in the linguistic experience of the world (TM 462/GW1 466). The claim of universality for hermeneutics finds its legitimacy here (RPJ 28/GW2 497). As the sense of language, hearing is the hermeneutic sense par excellence. “The art of understanding is certainly above all else the art of listening” (GW10 274). Already in Truth and Method the motif of hearing—hören—resonates audibly in the German word for belonging: Zugehörigkeit. The interpreter belongs to what is interpreted: he who is addressed belongs, is zugehörig, to what has been spoken to him. He cannot refuse to hear. Gadamer frequently returned to this theme, even in his last years, as in the untranslated essay from 1998 entitled “On Hearing” (“Über das Hören”). He links the inseparable connection between hearing and understanding to the moment of opening freely to the dimension of the other. This opening lies at the basis of every human relationship.23
3. In the Beginning Was the Question: Against the Analytic
In this way the openness of hermeneutic consciousness takes on more defined contours. Openness can be attributed to the one who listens to the voice of the other. The situation of every speaker, inasmuch as he or she speaks, is from the beginning the situation of being spoken to. One might say: in the beginning is the question. This condition further determines the primordial linguisticality of our being-in-the-world. But hermeneutics, which follows Plato’s dialectics, rejects every inception and every beginning. Hence even this beginning should not be turned into an abstract absolute. If there is a beginning for hermeneutics it always lies in the middle of dialogical praxis, where every question is a response and every response is a question—and so on to infinity.
Nevertheless, within the circularity of this dialectical movement we should speak in a Socratic sense of the “hermeneutic priority of the question” (TM 362/GW1 368).24 It is the knowledge of not-knowing that justifies this priority. He who believes he knows does not need to question. Conversely, he who is capable of questioning knows that he does not know—and as the Platonic dialogues show, asking questions is much more difficult than giving answers. “Actually, the secret of the question contains the miracle of thinking” (GR 392/GW10 162). The question reveals the openness of possibility, an aporetic hovering between “this way or that way.” At this stage a distinction is required, a distinction (Unterscheidung) that is always a decision (Entscheidung). Accordingly, “questioning . . . is more a passion than an action,” something that happens to us rather than something actively undertaken (TM 366/GW1 372). One does not pose questions. Instead, questions occur to us, they present themselves; they arise and force themselves on us. There is no method that can compel questioning to come forward. The only one who knows how to question is the one who lets himself or herself be called into question by being pulled up short by the other’s question, which breaks and disorients. The priority of the question is the priority of the otherness of the you.
The priority of the question is also legitimized by everyday practice, as for example in the logic of question and answer. What happens when one tries to understand what is being said in everyday language? One refers back to the horizon from which the question has emerged. Here lies one of the most important principles of hermeneutics: the utterance is always understood as an answer to a question (TM 370/GW1 375; RAS 98–99/VZW 102–103). Understanding takes place in the move from the answer back to the question it answers—or so says Gadamer, invoking the work of R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943).25 “Questioning” is another way of saying “understanding” (TM 370/GW1 379–380). Referring back to the horizon of the question, the motivational context of the dia-logue from which speech emerges has a theoretical scope that should not be overlooked.26 Here the contrast between hermeneutic and analytic philosophy comes into focus more sharply.
When hermeneutics returns to the motivating questions behind assertions, it is not following an artificial procedure but simply making available for reflection a process already embedded in everyday practice. If a person does not understand a question that has been put to them, then they are forced to ask. The process is not at all artificial. On the contrary: “It is very artificial to imagine that assertions fall from the sky and that they can be submitted to analysis without considering why they were said and in what way they are answers to something” (RAS 99/VZW 103). It is artificial to take assertions to be autonomous and to detach them from their motivational context, as analytic philosophy does. Hermeneutics challenges the presumed autonomy of assertions. The assertion is just one among the infinite multiplicity of speech forms, and moreover it is both a derivative and a secondary form. Aristotle was already well aware of this, when he distinguished between lógos semantikós and lógos apophantikós.27 All utterances are semantic, that is, they mean something; by contrast not all are apophantic; that is, the alternative between truth and falsity does hold for all. For example, a prayer is not an apophantic utterance. In our everyday communication utterances are simply semantic—and it would be truly strange if everything that is said were examined as if it could be verified. The apophantic logos is derived by logical abstraction from the semantic. That is why it is considered secondary, as Heidegger remarked (BT 144–150/SZ 2090. In contrast to Heidegger, Gadamer accepts the legitimacy of apophantic logic, even in its final analytic version, and thus he overcomes the dichotomy between the authentic and the inauthentic. On the other hand, analytic philosophy, where “the different dimensions of speech are only covered from a particular aspect,” should recognize that it is a logical curtailment of language (EH 166/UVG 204), and, without severing its semantic roots, it should grant both space and right of the plurality of human logoi.
In this way the question of the autonomy of the assertion takes on broader contours; it reveals itself to be an ethical and a political question as well. One should uncover the motives that have led to the dominance of the assertion: supported by the ideal of method, it is the supremacy of modern science that underwrites this dominance. At least since Galileo, method has proceeded by abstraction, isolation, and experiment, in order to dominate and control (GW2 186). The assertion is the formalized object that can be fully controlled. Although science can govern assertions, it cannot govern its own ends, beginning with the practical application of technology. Technology does not allow itself to be dominated, and science does not limit itself—their limits are ultimately left to our political abilities (GW2 192–193). Here it should be asked whether the unlimited use of knowledge in the form of assertions does not come at too high a price.
4. The Speculative Dialectics of the Word
“It is hermeneutics to know how much remains unsaid whenever something is said” (GR 417/GL 286). To move from what is said back to the unsaid is called speculation. Gadamer takes up the speculative movement of language in the penultimate chapter of Truth and Method, which introduces the universality of the hermeneutic experience. What does “speculative” mean? (TM 456–474/GW1 460–478) The etymology of the word points to speculum, a mirror that can reflect an image. Besides the mystery of the mirror, a “speculative” writer in eighteenth-century German philosophy was someone who reflects without surrendering to the concrete immediacy of appearances. The more recent meaning of the word stems from Hegel’s “speculative proposition,” which, as has been shown, is introduced in the Phenomenology of Spirit.28
Gadamer returns to this meaning from Hegel, but alters it somewhat and expands it to encompass language altogether. The movement of language for him is always speculative, because whatever is said mirrors in its finitude the infinitude of the unsaid and, from within its limits, points toward the horizon of the infinite. This movement, however, does not occur in the case of an assertion that is supposedly independent and detached from its horizon, which asserts its identity through the erasure of every difference that might call forth the reference to another. The assertion is the sliding back into what is merely finite. In our everyday use of language: “what is said combines with the infinity of what is unsaid in one unified meaning and ensures that it is understood in this way . . . Someone who speaks is behaving speculatively when his words do not reflect beings, but express a relation to the whole of being” (TM 469/GW1 473). Every word bursts forth, as if from the middle of a totality, in virtue of which is it a word at all. One could refer to Humboldt here, for according to him every word “resonates with and presupposes the entire language.”29 Here Gadamer sees the “dialectic of the word,” which is ultimately the dialectic of the finite and the infinite. The word in its finitude evokes the infinitude of what is unsaid, but without being able to say it. Thus the word is no “casual imperfection,” but an irrevocable witness to our finitude (TM 458/GW1 462).
At this point Gadamer distances himself from Hegel, for whom the speculative movement of the proposition should be expressed in the dialectical presentation, which is the way speculative movement shows itself, or better, demonstrates itself. Hegel introduces here a distinction between the speculative and the dialectical. By abstracting the reflexive relations of conceptual determinations from language, he brings this relation, by way of dialectical mediation, to absolute knowledge. For Gadamer, by contrast, the speculative is always dialectical. As a result, we can speak of a speculative dialectic of language. It is this dialectic that unfolds from the “middle” (Mitte) where all hermeneutic experience occurs. Gadamer takes the beginning away from Hegel. Since every word bursts forth from the “medium” of language, which is also the medium of historically effected consciousness, hermeneutics does not have the problem of the beginning. It recognizes the radical finitude provoked by this middle or medium (TM 472/GW1 476).30 Since it proceeds in its speculative truth from the event of the word, hermeneutic dialectics differs from metaphysical dialectics in its awareness of the constitutive and never-ending openness of this event.
5. Being, Understanding, Language
In the last subsection of Truth and Method, which concerns the universal aspect of hermeneutics, Gadamer addresses the meaning of “the turn” from Being to language with one of his most famous and widely quoted sentences: “Being that can be understood is language” (TM 474/GW1 478). This is also, however, among Gadamer’s most misunderstood statements, and has by now a reception history of its own. The interpretation by Gianni Vattimo, the translator of Truth and Method into Italian, has been influential. He reads this line as an identification of Being with language and his reading makes it possible to turn hermeneutics into a “weak ontology.”31 In this way, the decisive and far-reaching question arises about hermeneutics as philosophy.
It is significant that Vattimo interprets this sentence as a “translation” of a passage from Being and Time (BT 270–271/SZ 301–302). Gadamer’s discourse is measured against Heidegger’s discourse on the authenticity of being, while also invoking the well-known metaphor of language as the “house of Being.”32 But this metaphor never occurs in Gadamer’s work. Not so much the house of Being, language is, for Gadamer, the home of mankind that is often far too cramped (EE 172–173) The mother tongue, for Gadamer, is the most familiar place of being-with-oneself, but starting from an even more fundamental uncanniness.33 For language appears so “uncannily near” (unheimlich nahe) that it belongs among the “most mysterious questions that man ponders” (TM 378/GW1 383). To be sure, the most well known version of hermeneutics is the most urbanized one, which emphasizes the familiar. But to this should be added the more unsettling version, the one that emphasizes uncanniness, where we are not so much at home. The fleeting and ephemeral home that language offers us is not easily separated from the more substantial homelessness that defines our finitude in language, one that exists even prior to our finitude in the world. On this point Gadamer’s later hermeneutics appears almost to overlap with Derrida’s deconstruction.
Yet what is this more primordial uncanniness, if not the resistance of Being to language? Indeed, Gadamer does not at all identify Being and language. In a retrospective interview conducted in 1996 he clearly warns: “But no, I have never meant and never said that everything is language” (GR 417/GL 286). This “is” marks both identity and difference here; it differentiates this sentence from a tautology, and turns it into a speculative sentence in which Being unfolds in the predicate language, where it is understood but not exhausted. For the way in which something is shown in language belongs to its Being but does not exhaust it. So it is, on the one hand, that “the word is a word only because of what comes to language in it,” and on the other hand, “that which comes into language is not something that is pre-given before language; rather, the word gives it its own determinateness” (TM 475/GW1 479).
In Gadamer’s self-interpretation the relative clause between the two commas—“that can be understood”—should not be read as a supplement but rather as a “delimitation” (GR 417/GL 286). It does not say that Being is language and that it can also, in addition, be understood. The middle term is decisive, namely, understanding (PH 103/GW8 1–8,7). Thus the sentence could be rewritten in this way: “Being, insofar as it . . .” or “Being, within the limits in which it can be understood, is language.” Being that gives itself to be understood is language. For Gadamer, “understanding itself has a fundamental connection with language” (TM 395–396/GW1 399). Being that makes itself understandable for us is that way because it exists in language, and precisely this “understandability” is what concerns hermeneutics. If we proceed from understanding, the question of language for hermeneutics becomes unavoidable: “language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs” (TM 389/GW1 399).
6. The Limits of Language
The relationship between Being and language already points to the limits of language. The hermeneutic experience of language that follows the speculative movement turns out to be an experience of the limits of language. This theme was already mentioned in Truth and Method (TM 402/GW1 406). Furthermore, in the 1980s it became truly central to Gadamer, especially in the essay “The Boundaries of Language” (1985), which marks a turning point in Gadamer’s self-critical reflections (LL 9–17/GW8 350–361).
The “boundaries” should not be seen as imperfections of language, measured in relation to the perfection of reason. Then what are these “boundaries?” They can be experienced phenomenologically in what is prior to language, alongside language, and beyond language. Needless to say, it is clear that these border regions are defined by their striving to become language. The striving is for linguisticality, for the virtuality of what is not yet said but what awaits fulfillment in the linguistic event, and yet will likely run up against these limits of the latter.34 If on the one hand the primacy of verbal language is asserted here, into which all other “languages” could be translated, on the other hand the constitutive limits are also emphasized.
Gadamer summarizes the hermeneutic experience of the boundaries of language as the search for the right word. The “right word” is by definition never right—that would mean it is the appropriate, fitting word for a pre-given object. On the contrary, our experience of its boundaries demonstrates that language is anything but an instrument of domination and calculation. In all speech, however forgetful of itself it may be, we experience the boundary of the spoken and, specularly, the understood word. This is how Gadamer describes the experience of the boundary:
The experience of the boundaries of language is thus the experience of the boundaries of our existence and our finitude. The search for the right word appears to be an endless task. On the other hand, it is the word that always carries us above and beyond ourselves. In order to elucidate this, Gadamer recalls Rilke’s angel, that is, the possibility surrounded by a limit and evoked as an angel: “Above, beyond us, / the angel plays.”35 The word that we bring forth has always already caught up with us, is always already beyond us.
An important essay from 1971 also explores this theme. The essay, entitled “On the Truth of the Word,” was rewritten several times and did not appear in print until 1993 with its publication in volume eight of Gadamer’s collected works (SR 135–155/ GW8 37–57). Hermeneutic truth is bound to language because the world is there for us, and we for the world, only in language. When Gadamer takes up the question of the “truth of the word,” he means the word—as a singular word and not plural words—in the multiplicity of its forms: it can be a simple “yes,” or what you might say in making a promise—“You have my word on it!”—or it can be “the Word” in the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John (SR 135/GW8 37). Before it can be understood in the sense of an objective genitive, “the truth of the word” points to a more subjective genitive. It is the word that reveals the truth as it “comes out” before we can reflect and confirm it to be the true or “right” word. Just as he had spoken of the “ontological valence” of the image, now Gadamer speaks of the “ontological valence” of the word.36 The world attains Being for us only in the universal “Da,” or “there,” of the word that constitutes the wonder of language (SR 152/GW8 54). Whereas Being (Sein) comes to exist in the word, or Dasein in the word, we too are called by the word to this “Da,” we come alive to Being, we are awakened to it. In the “Da” of the word we are anamnetically drawn out of the forgetting of language and awakened to Being. Here lies the wonder. Yet what lies ready in this “Da” points at the same time to what escapes its grasp. The presence of the universal “Da” in the word is therefore also an absence. The word always already rises beyond the “Da,” always already transcends itself. Hermeneutics cannot overlook the play of presence and absence in the existence or Dasein of the word; by colliding with the boundaries of the “Da,” it reveals itself to be a hermeneutics of language and its boundaries. Such a hermeneutics constantly points to that which is not yet there in the “Da,”—and what always remains beyond it. The transcendence of language determines the movement of hermeneutics as always having to go beyond itself. Habermas is justified in his observation that hermeneutics promotes “the tendency to self-transcendence immanent in the praxis of language.”37 However, this point in no way puts into question the non-transcendental nature of the “dialogue, that we are,” within which everything can be said differently.
7. The Dialogue That We Are
“Language [Sprache] is dialogue [Gespräch]” (GW8 369). Gadamer formulates this thesis as early as Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, returning to it in Truth and Method, and taking it up again in his late works (PDE 35–65/GW5 27–48; TM 446/GW1 449; GW2 207; GW8 360). The hermeneutics of language unfolds as a hermeneutics of dialogue. If language arises from the openness of a historical language and realizes itself as individual speech, which for its part is always a speaking for or with the other, then the existence of language lies in dialogue. In its simplicity, this is the secret core of Gadamer’s philosophy, which, both in its theoretical reach and its practical intention, is a philosophy of dialogue.
At the basis of this thesis there lies, however, a philosophical motivation that should not be overlooked. Gadamer offers here a radical interpretation of this verse from Hölderlin: “Since we have been a conversation.”38 This line does not mean only that we simply participate in dialogue. We are always already in dialogue and speak out of its flow, or out of its unending flow. Even more so: we are dialogue. Each of us is not only in a dialogue, but according to our most intimate nature we are ourselves dialogue. For dialogue is our ubi consistam, it is the hermeneutic universe in which we breathe, in which we live.
But what does it mean that dialogue is an unending flow? Every word opens up to an endless number of possible further words, of response that it calls for and requires (GW8 38). Since it speculatively reflects the unspoken, no spoken word can be the last word. On the basis of this virtuality, every word points toward the openness in which we speak further. Thus it can be said that “speaking takes place in the element of the ‘dialogue’” (GW2 198). The endlessness opened up by the virtuality of the word is the endlessness of our speaking with each other. It follows that the dialogue has “an inner endlessness and no end” (GW2 152).
To be sure, the dialogue can be interrupted for many reasons: one might have nothing more to say, become irritated, or not want to continue speaking. But for hermeneutics the interruption is only a pause that implies a continuation. Arising from the primordial, inner endlessness of the dialogue, an interruption from outside might occur, but it in no way disturbs the endless openness. According to Gadamer, even the limit case of the soul’s inner dialogue with itself is endless (TM 547–548/ GW2 200–201). Here one comes across one of the most significant points of dissonance between hermeneutics and deconstruction: whereas Derrida accentuates the creativity of the interruption, Gadamer focuses—beyond all interruption—on the endless, or better, the uninterrupted dialogue.39 This adjective, actually suggested by Derrida, seems more appropriate for describing Gadamer’s dialogue.40 But even if the dialogue continues endlessly, it is discontinuous, that is, ending and endless at the same time. Rather than endless, we might say from the perspective of interruption that dialogue is un-interrupted.
Here arises the unlimited readiness for dialogue that distinguishes hermeneutics. Such readiness is philosophically justified by a trust in language and its ability to communalize. This does not mean that dialogue will always succeed. On the contrary: agreement is never certain, and understanding is never perfect. The dialogue cannot succeed if by success we mean closure, or self-enclosure within a wordless, ultimate consensus. The dialogue never closes. Of course this is not to say that we never reach a successful accord within dialogue’s potential endlessness. But when can we say that a dialogue has succeeded? A dialogue is certainly not successful only when we have learned something new. Success is reached, rather, when we come across something in the other that we have not met before in our experience of the world. Something changes, and changes us. The dialogue possesses a “transformative power.”41 This power is not a matter of more information. What counts in dialogue is the encounter with the other. Dialogue succeeds when the other has changed because of the self, and the self has changed because of the other. “Dialogue transforms both.”42 After the dialogue one is no longer the same person as before. Paradoxically, a dialogue succeeds all the more, the less it comes to a close: the more the disagreements come to light, the more misunderstandings and nonunderstandings appear anew. Hence, the dialogue does not conclude if the word, which the I addresses to the you and the you to the I, leads to a new openness, from which, through new questions and answers, the dialogue can go further (GR 393/GW10 162).
On the other hand, dialogue for Gadamer also responds to the fundamental disposition of life, fundamental insofar as it is abyssal, namely, anxiety. Driven out of one’s own narrowness and into the always alien expanse—as Schelling had already said—the I takes a distance from itself. In this centrifugal movement, the I runs up against the boundary of the other, the you, and loses its center. Yet it is precisely the you who makes it possible for the I to find its center again. Only when the center has been given away to the other, when it turns to the you, can the I recuperate its focus and restore its balance. This paradoxical event occurs in dialogue, where the center of the I is restored each and every time in the collision with the you. And each time, obviously, the center is never the same but always different: it differs through time, through language, in dialogue. In the encounter with the you, the I always understands itself differently.
To recuperate here means to heal. To be concerned with oneself does not mean to withdraw into oneself, but to care for the other. And conversely, one can heal especially—as Gadamer often emphasized—through the word of dialogue.43 The word heals better than any kind of medication—above all, the word of a friend. Here appears the immediate proximity of dialogue and friendship, the guiding thread that Gadamer followed from the beginning to the end of his path of thought. In the philía, where one’s own limits are recognized, one recognizes in the other, in the friend, “an increase of being, self-esteem and the richness of life.”44
All of this, however, is underappreciated in a time that seems to be characterized by the “incapacity for a conversation.”45 Today all forms of everyday dialogue are impoverished. Gadamer reviews the phenomenology of these forms, from pedagogical discussions to business negotiations to therapeutic dialogue.46 In psychoanalytic therapy, the inability to dialogue that manifests itself is a “disturbance” to be healed. But in everyday dialogue, this inability, which is not transparent to itself, takes on the “normal” form of blaming the other. In this way, for example, we say: “There is no talking to you.” This inability is then traced back to both the inability to listen and the inability to speak. People forget how to speak when the shared language has been exhausted and reduced to terminology, a frequent experience in the monological condition of today’s society.47 But in every dialogue, even the least successful, the I is elevated beyond its limitations by the encounter with the word from the you. The you is the lever that the I needs, even for a dialogue with itself.48 The I experiences its own limits in the strangeness of the you, who is also always familiar, just as the I, in the transcending movement of language, is always already beyond itself, thanks to the you, and with the you in the shared word. The “right” word proves here to be the word that reaches the you, that is heard and then answered by the you as if it were his or her own. In the word that has become communal, that resonates when it is uttered by the you, the I finds a home—a home that, however, because of the irrevocable homelessness of language, always remains fleeting. Gadamer takes up a Hegelian expression again when he says that speaking with one another is to make oneself at home with the other.
8. Understanding, Interpreting, Translating: Where Hermeneutics Is Misunderstood
If we consider the four decades of its reception history, it is surprising to note that philosophical hermeneutics has so often been misunderstood in its attempt within philosophy to give voice to the question of understanding. There are two misunderstandings above all that need to be addressed.
The first is contained in the charge that understanding, according to hermeneutics, would be an appropriation of the other. The charge is aimed at the furor, “the fury of understanding” that supposedly animates hermeneutics, as well as the conciliatory intention that would presumably guide its movements.49 Philosophical hermeneutics seems to claim that it could and should understand in a complete way, that it could and should reconcile and harmonize. Understanding in hermeneutics would, from this view, be self-evident and taken for granted. If this were so, however, hermeneutics would have no reason to exist, since it exists in order to raise the philosophical question of understanding.
In following the Heideggerian view that understanding is the fundamental enactment of human existence,50 Gadamer maintains that “agreement . . . is more primordial than misunderstanding.”51 This “agreement” is a matter neither of glib optimism nor of simply adopting an ethical task. On the contrary, with this thesis Gadamer describes in phenomenological terms the practice of speaking and understanding. A more originary understanding involves nothing other than bringing into harmony the common language that communalizes. One who speaks in a historical language—and in doing so speaks for the other and with the other—assents (Zustimmung) even before any accord has been reached, by being ready to attune one’s voice to the voice (Stimme) of the other, articulating oneself in the meaningful sounds of the common language. In short, whoever speaks has already agreed to share what is common and communicable with the speakers of that language, binding them to past, present, and future speakers. Even before any agreement with oneself, one is already in agreement with the other: speaking is thus a “mutual agreement.” Gadamer interprets the synthéke of Aristotle in this sense:52 “The concept of ‘synthéke,’ of mutual agreement, suggests in the first place the view that language forms itself in the being with one another” (LL 12/GW8 354). This agreement is the prelude of language, and sets in motion the further play of agreement and disagreement. Such a prelude cannot be avoided: every speaker must enter into the play of language, accepting the preexisting communality that language offers us. To speak means, then, to articulate further the commonalities of the world articulated in language. The spoken is further shared in speaking, and this communication can be communicated further. This is the reality of human communication, that is, of dialogue.53
Yet the flow of dialogue can be interrupted and agreement can also turn into disagreement. In this context Gadamer speaks of a “stumbling block” (TM 270/GW1 272). Almost completely overlooked by the reception, the “stumbling block” is a key concept for hermeneutics, because it clarifies the movement of understanding (GR 93/GW2 184). Without it, one might assume that understanding is self-generated. In order to delineate the concept of a stumbling block more precisely, Gadamer returns to Greek philosophy: “The Greeks had a very beautiful word for what brings our understanding to a standstill, they called it the atopon. That actually means: the unplaceable, whatever cannot be brought into the schematism of our horizon of understanding and therefore causes us to halt” (GR 93/GW2 185). The átopon is whatever provokes uneasiness and irritation, what seems strange to us, uncanny and alien. In the Platonic dialogues it is Socrates who is átopos, the philosopher who, being out of place, puts into question the order of the pólis and points to the externality of an ou-tópos, a beyond place to come.54 For hermeneutics, the átopon is the incomprehensible that breaks in on what once understood, and almost entirely forgotten, was taken for granted as self-evident. The átopon strikes what is seemingly familiar and suddenly puts into question the commonality of our words.55 The incomprehensible, which is still placeless, makes way for both nonunderstanding and misunderstanding. This does not, however, prevent attempts to continue to interpret in order to reestablish agreement—without excluding disagreement.
The second misunderstanding in the reception concerns the connection between understanding and interpretation. There is a widespread belief that understanding and interpretation are the same in hermeneutics, and the idea has actually provoked numerous criticisms. Can one really say, however, that “understanding” and “interpretation” are synonymous for hermeneutics? Certainly not, and the proof of this would be to read the texts in light of Gadamer’s complex reflections on understanding. To this end a third term needs to be considered: translation. Gadamer follows Schleiermacher, who tries to show that nonunderstanding and misunderstanding are not limited to the interpretation of texts, but jeopardize understanding in all discourse.56 It is precisely on this issue that hermeneutics becomes a universal question. Gadamer’s intention is to rediscover the hidden connection between interpretation and understanding. But connection does not mean identification. With his emphasis on understanding, through which he underlines our fundamental linguisticality, Gadamer in no way claims that all understanding is an interpretation, as if we—and this would indeed be a strange and untenable thesis—would actively interpret each moment of our everyday understanding. On the contrary, although he insists on the continuity of understanding, interpretation, and translation—a continuity that is constituted by the thread of nonunderstanding and misunderstanding that runs through them—he does not neglect their differences, which prove to be quantitative, not qualitative: different degrees of intensity (TM 389–390/GW1 391). Where understanding occurs, there is not translation or interpretation but speech (TM 386/GW1 388), and understanding a language means to live in it. To understand a language “does not involve an interpretive process; it is an accomplishment of life” (TM 385/GW1 388). There can be an understanding without interpretation—indeed, this happens normally in every dialogue. However, since nonunderstanding and misunderstanding are always lurking in every dialogue, understanding can always be interrupted and requires the between, or inter-, of an interpretation, an explicative interpretation. This interpretation is not separate from understanding, but rather the development of the understanding, its “conditions of fulfillment”—as Heidegger had already suggested in Being and Time (BT 143/SZ153). Interpretation unfolds in the medium of language and should be understood as a further linguistic articulation of understanding, one that is possible at any time:
An interpretation, which like any performance is a concretion of sense, can be called a success when “it too disappears again as an interpretation and preserves its truth in the immediacy of understanding” (TM 400/GW1 404). The extreme case of “translation” is marked by its greater degree of strangeness, which of course also exists in understanding and in interpretation but is unavoidable in translation. Gadamer gives the example of a dialogue in two different languages. In this case the recourse to translation is the self-incapacitation (Selbstentmündigung) of the speakers, who admit to their own incapacitation and are forced to make use of the artificiality of a translation (TM 384/GW1 388). Pushed toward interpretation, of which it is a “fulfillment,” the translation can be described as “highlighting” (TM 386/GW1 389). If the interpretation is, however, an explicit development of the understanding, the translation is an explicit, albeit “artificial,” development. The “despair of translation,” which might capture the “letter but not the spirit” of an utterance, would thus stem from the requirement that the translator must convey the “unity of viewpoint that a sentence possesses,” without however being able to get it right (GR 106/GW2 197). In this very traditional and not very hermeneutic sense, translation understood in a strictly interlinguistic way is not so much an extreme case, but rather a peculiar case and a deviation from the norm of intralinguistic dialogue. Even in his much later works, Gadamer will retain this negative view of translation and treat it as merely an artificial mediation of meaning that can be brought back to life only in dialogue. Translation, and even more the work of simultaneous translation, “is merely a vestige of living conversation, even if mediated, split, broken” (GW8 348).
9. Play and Dialogue: The Encounter with Wittgenstein
The paradigm of play is taken up again on the penultimate page of Truth and Method, only this time with respect not to art but to language: “Language games exist where we, as learners—and when do we cease to be that?—rise to the understanding of the world” (TM 490/GW1 493). It seems as if Wittgenstein could have written these words. Gadamer himself addresses this surprising convergence in the introduction to the second edition of Truth and Method from 1965 (TM xxxvi/GW2 446).57 We should therefore assume that Gadamer read Wittgenstein’s principal works, including the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, sometime between 1960 and 1965, perhaps as early as the last months of 1959. At any rate his 1963 essay on “The Phenomenological Movement” contains what are probably Gadamer’s most significant comments on Wittgenstein. Above all, in the final part of that essay, the “language game” is recognized as the common denominator of all the more recent philosophies, especially those that do without an “ultimate foundation,” after which for example Husserl sought (PH 172–177/ GW3 142–146). This convergence, which reveals itself to be an important encounter up until his last writings, is surprising because Wittgenstein was almost completely unknown in Germany at the beginning of the 1960s. Gadamer appears to have been one of the first to read him productively there. Thirty years later, in 1990, he declared: “The name of Wittgenstein is today one of the great names in the philosophy of our century” (GW8 343).
But what unites and what divides these two philosophers? For Gadamer, the importance of the encounter was evident. He had worked for some time on a phenomenology of play, which had clarified more and more for him the post-metaphysical implications of this concept. The encounter with Wittgenstein strengthened Gadamer in his belief that it is “play” which puts metaphysics into question. Wittgenstein’s position encouraged him to take this paradigm, which he had already applied to art, and extend it to language as a whole, seeing the reciprocity of play especially in the universality of language, or better, in dialogue (RPJ 41–42/GW2 5–6). It was, in other words, Wittgenstein who showed Gadamer a path toward overcoming metaphysics that differed from Heidegger’s. The language of metaphysics is, as has been shown, still language.58 Even petrified concepts reveal—as soon as they are integrated into living speech, into the web of language games and continue to “work” there—the lines of their own overcoming.59 Gadamer does not find the convergence between himself and Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, which refers all sentences to a “propositional logic.” Rather, he finds confirmation in the Philosophical Investigations, especially in Wittgenstein’s “pragmatics of language,” the new vision of language as public practice and shared action, and in the argument against private language.60 Precisely because language is always “public,” it is always communal and necessarily dialogical. The argument against private language is another way of emphasizing the priority of the dialogue (GW8 369; LL 45/GW8 432). For Gadamer, as for Wittgenstein, speaking involves mutual agreement at the middle point of the word, which is what “grounds” commonality, but this should not be confused with what is universally valid: “Even children’s games are of such a nature that we cannot go behind their established rules with any kind of superior knowing” (PH 175/GW3 144). This has an explosive impact on the concept of the “concept,” which, lost in the families of language games, loses its sharp contours, but gains the productivity of indeterminacy (PH 175/GW3 144; GR 385/GW10 156).
Yet despite their proximity the distance between Wittgenstein and Gadamer should not be overlooked, especially in their different views on the relationship between language and philosophy. For Wittgenstein, philosophy is a critique of language, a form of therapy that would lead to the dissolution of philosophical problems.61 For Gadamer, by contrast, hermeneutics is a listening to language, which in no way leads to a cathartic release from philosophy. The differences between them extend to their reflections on language. Gadamer expresses his doubts about the term “use,” which points to a much too instrumental view of language for him, and he also writes against the term “rule,” which seems too reductive in view of the complexity of speaking.62
Gadamer in his later work sees play more and more clearly as the binding element between nonverbal and verbal communication: from the language of animals to the language we use with animals to learning language, when children and adults “join together in play” (LL 14/GW8 356). Play is already the prelinguistic dialogue from which the linguistic dialogue proceeds. As the structural relation between play and the dialogue comes into view, the “medial” character of play (Spielen) emerges, which, since it is always a playing-with (Mit-Spielen), reveals an activity that borders on passivity. As a consequence, the rigid dichotomy between the subject and the object disappears. The speaker moves beyond his subjectivity by submitting to the interactive play of language, which always already points to the “beyond” of the other. And he opens himself up to the other’s wanting-to-say, by declining and conjugating himself with the other’s word, which thereby becomes communal.63
Here Gadamer distances himself not only from Wittgenstein, but also from Heidegger. For Wittgenstein, the perspectives of the speakers dominate. On the basis of their competence, that is, their operational skills with rules, they can move within the grammar of the game. Speakers play the game, and speaking is “part of an activity” in which a remnant of subjectivity emerges.64 In Gadamer’s view, the speaker’s perspective is overcome by the common perspective of the language game. However, this does not result in the hypostasis of language. In this way, Gadamer’s position should also be distinguished from Heidegger’s, since, for Gadamer, it is not language that speaks; it is rather the speakers. Whereas for Wittgenstein the subject retains mastery, for Heidegger it is language. Gadamer’s position between the two reflects the “medial” character of play, which casts light on the active process, which is nonetheless undergone, of dialogue.
10. The Diversity of Languages and the Future of Europe
For Gadamer, dialogue takes on even broader contours. The dialogue is not only between the I and the you, but also involves a dialogue between languages. The topic of diversity, which is already discussed in Truth and Method in the confrontation with Humboldt, becomes increasingly important for both philosophical and political reflection in Gadamer’s later works, where his attention turns more and more to the future of the European oikoumene. The most important text for this issue is the 1990 essay on “The Diversity of Languages and the Understanding of the World” (GW8 339–349).
If the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:4–9) disturbs us even today, it is because we are still seduced by the idea of constructing a unique language in which human hubris could takes shape: “The Tower of Babel repeats, in a form distorted until it is upside down, the problem of unity and multiplicity. Here, unity is the danger, and multiplicity is its overcoming” (GW8 340). But what does this tower represent in our contemporary world? Gadamer has no doubts about the answer given by the history of the West: the tower is science. As the product of logic’s power of abstraction, it rises up and is strengthened, too, by the language of mathematics, so that it rejects any foundation in common language. Yet a common language does not cease to differentiate itself into a multiplicity of historical, individual languages. Neither rationalization nor bureaucracy—in the sense articulated by Max Weber—will solve this problem by constructing some empty, mechanical unity. Thus the chimera of an artificial language should give way to the dialogue of languages, which is the only way to discover the value of every individual language—because “in each language everything can be said” (GW10 270). This insight helps us to resist the temptation to force onto others the world sedimented in our own particular language, as if it were purely and simply the world.
Dialogue is the way to preserve diversity in a culturally richer unity. The languages of Europe speak against monological unity and bear witness to the model of a unity articulated in differences. Because of the destinal eccentricity that, from the beginning, has inhabited Europe and pointed it toward dialogue, Europe’s oikoumene has been forced to experience, throughout its history, such a unity as always different, differentiated, and decentered.
Precisely at this point Gadamer sees Europe as a “true training ground” for coexistence, in a confined space, of different peoples, cultures, religions, and denominations (EPH 234/EE 31). As a result of the upheavals and traumas that have characterized it for centuries, Europe has the privilege and the task of learning how to respect the other in its otherness (EPH 234/EE 30). In “The Diversity of Europe: Inheritance and Future,” Gadamer writes not only of other people, but also of the other: it is the you who demands to be respected, but it is also the other “whom we meet at first as the other,” that is, in that otherness which nature, for instance, has for us (EPH 232–233/ EE 28–29). What today makes Europe significant, promising and momentous, is the privilege of respecting others or the other. This frequently disregarded task is imposed upon us now more urgently than ever in its universality. From this Gadamer draws his conviction that the European question is linked to the “future of humanity as a whole” (EPH 234/EE 31).65 “To live with an other, to live as the other of the other”: for a long time, this has been Europe’s task (EPH 234/EE 31). It is a matter of both an “ethical” and a “political” task, which has been posed to the individual, peoples, and states. In this sense, Europe anticipates the future of the globalized world. And the “new Babel,” in its productivity, requires that the free spaces of human cohabitation are not only respected but also lived—all the more so where foreignness is most present (GW8 343).
Gadamer’s emphasis on the other, the foreign, and the different does not at all weaken his demand that we build on what we share in common. Even if it is true that we encounter ourselves in the other, and above all in what distinguishes the other from us, nevertheless we should still recognize in and with the other what we have in common (EPH 219/EE 124–125). Above all, Gadamer calls on us to strengthen the web of community and to care for a shared future (EE 135). The question of Europe and its future is tied closely to the question of community, or rather, to the urgency of a new community. This latter point is very complex, because European identity is today more nonidentical with itself than ever. But precisely the creative experience of foreignness, which constitutes the heart of Europe’s eccentric identity, constitutes one final opportunity. We should begin from Europe’s peripheries and margins, which are at the same time places of failure as well as borders where horizons might be opened. The new community that arises against the backdrop of Europe will not be able to invoke an empty, abstract universality—even for Hegel the Europeans had “concrete universality” as their principle and character. Instead, Europe will have to repostulate the difference that is part of the European heritage, that difference that denies self-identity and forces it to shape itself again and again in difference. The heritage of Europe promises, from this new perspective, a future in which the culture of the self, in the plurality of differences, will also become a culture of the other.
Yet how does Gadamer understand the European heritage? For him, the European heritage is like a work of art, a “successful attempt to unite what is falling apart,” a work of art hovering between the dangers of the “character of the past” and the opening toward utopia. It is the impossible possibility of rebuilding a world in harmony through being-with-one-another, of recreating it in poetry and in art, even among the ruins of the prosaic (EE 65, 74/GW8 208, 213). The reconstruction must occur among these ruins—the ruins of Europe, but especially of Germany—yet this reconstruction is specifically entrusted to philosophy: Europe’s future, according to Gadamer, is intimately bound up with the future of philosophy. Still, the teachers Gadamer recommends are not contemporary philosophers, but instead Plato and Hegel: the poet-philosopher and the Swabian professor who took up the word of philosophy from its European past and gave it a universal resonance (EE 163–165).
11. Paul Celan: Between Poem and Dialogue
For philosophical hermeneutics there is already a place where one can live with the other as the other of the other. That place is poetry. But how would dialogue harmonize with the singularity of poetry? After his encounter with Paul Celan, perhaps the most important poet on his path of thinking, Gadamer came to the idea of the dialogue of the poem.
In the slender book from 1967, Who Am I and Who Are You? Gadamer explores Celan’s cycle of poems Breath-Crystal. Beyond this book, which Heidegger valued even more than Truth and Method, Gadamer also wrote a number of essays and collected them in 1990 under the title Poem and Dialogue.66 But Who Am I and Who Are You? is at the same time the most widely criticized of Gadamer’s works. And the criticisms are certainly justified, for the most part, since Gadamer fails to read Celan as part of the Jewish tradition, and he fails to take him for what he was and wanted to be: the poet of the Shoah. Here we should also note that this book, one of the first on Celan, was published in a time when, despite having won the Büchner Prize in 1960 in Germany, Celan was not well known. It is further true that Gadamer chose Celan as his chief witness for hermeneutical dialogue and thus universalized the question asked by Celan’s poetry: “Who am I and who are you?”
Gadamer frequently refers to Celan, also in autobiographical contexts. In particular he recalls Celan in order to juxtapose his poetic language with the philosophical language of Hegel, and in this way to examine the relationship between poetry and philosophy (GR 37–38/GW2 493. He deals with this topic in the 1977 essay on “Poetry and Philosophy” (RB 131–139/GW8 232–239). According to Gadamer, in their distance from ordinary language one finds the proximity of poetry and philosophy, but such a proximity divides itself into two extremes: the extreme of a word that sublates itself into a concept, in contrast to a word that stands for itself. In ordinary language, which tends to forget itself, the word passes into what is said, or fades away into the unsayable. In poetic language, however, the word stands “there in itself,” and does not withdraw from the said (RB 107/GW8 72). With an etymological figure borrowed from Heidegger, Gadamer frequently accentuates the dictation (Diktat) of poetry (Dichtung).67 The poetic word is “all word” and, as language in a “preeminent sense,” must be taken “at its word.”68 In order to explain this further, Gadamer introduces a simile from Valery: ordinary language is like small change, whereas poetic language is like a gold coin, whose value corresponds to its imprint.69
This significance is especially true for lyric poetry, which Gadamer—like Hegel—prefers above other art forms (GW8 58–69). Gadamer sees in Celan’s hermetic poetry an extreme and paradigmatic case in the context of contemporary literature. Celan’s poetry is a “message in a bottle,” a kind of cryptogram.70 Deciphering, reading, and listening mark the rhythm of the hermeneutic work that aims to give voice to those almost illegible signs. In order to reach its destination, the poetic message must be read, just as a piece of music must be performed—reading means allowing the text to speak, and so it is also always an interpretive act.71
For Gadamer, the close proximity between writing poetry (dichten) and interpreting (deuten) now comes to light (GW8 18–24). To interpret means to put oneself in the service of the poetic text, in order to draw out what the text itself already shows. An interpretation is successful when it retreats and disappears into a new experience of the poem (GC 147/WBI 156). The interpretive word interprets only what the poetic word points to. Thus interpretation is always a pointing- to something: here the interpretive word demonstrates its poetic vocation. Yet the poetic word, to the extent that it points- to something, is itself an interpretative word. Writing poetry and interpreting are equally primordial. They are joined in the pointing (deuten) beyond themselves and toward what is other than themselves: “Neither the interpreter nor the poet possesses artistic legitimacy—both are always already exceeded by that which actually is where a poem is. They both pursue a point that points into the open” (GW8 23–24). Celan’s poetry is an interpretive act, which is a way of pointing to something and an interpretation of it, because it is a reflection on poetry that is at work within poetry itself. For Celan, poetry is a “turn of breath” (Atemwende). For Gadamer, it suggests “the breath-like transition and reversal between inhalation and exhalation . . . where the poem’s breath-crystal falls like a single snowflake into its pure form” (GC 143/WBI 152). The crystal stands still in the breath, which as the life-breath belongs to all. It is from here that, in its uniqueness, it is raised to universality. It is not “my poem” but “your incontrovertible witness,” because it comes from the language of the you, that dialogical place which, despite its uniqueness, is universal because it is itself the place where language occurs (GC 113/WBI 124).
The universality of such witnessing emerges all the more plainly from the dialogue that the poem opens. Gadamer sees the poem as the place where the fundamental question arises: “Who am I and who are you?” The simplest answer is that the “I” is that of the poet and the “you” is that of the reader. But for Gadamer this is not at all the case. Although the “I” is often taken to be the poet, this “I” is the “I-form,” which encompasses both the “I” of the poet and anyone’s “I.”72 The “you” for its part is the “you-form,” that listens to the word of the I, the privileged dialogue partner of the poetic message, the you of the I, regardless of whether it is directed to the you as absolute other, as lover, or as one’s own soul (GC 109/WBI 120). In this way the question “who am I and who are you?” gains a completely new meaning. To begin with, “I” and “you” are neither fundamentally different nor defined once and for all: “I” and “you” are interdependent, and are even in a certain sense interchangeable. Your “I” can enter into my “I,” and your “you” can enter into my “you.” “To enter into” means here to take on the forms of the I or the you and to recognize oneself in these forms. The poles of the I and the you remain open, and this openness is the invitation that the poem offers to the reader: to join in the dialogue. This invitation is confirmed in the possibility that is offered to the reader to take up, from his or her perspective, the role of the I as well as the role of the you. The I and the you from the dialogue opened by the poem are absolute. The you is the you of the absolute dialogue partner and the I is the absolute I of the poet. The you and I, in their absoluteness, translate the humanity of the I and the you into a universal language. This is how the poet gives voice to the destiny of all. It allows the reader to be the I that the poet is, because the poet is the I who we all are (EPH 81/GW9 366).
Both question and answer, of the I to the you and the you to the I, the poetic word is the right word that, sought after desperately, offers protection and dwelling to both.73 Our basic experience as temporal beings is that everything slips away from us. By contrast, the poetic word in its “da,” or “there-ness,” brings the transitory quality of time to a standstill. In the poetic word the nearness, the intimate familiarity is “da,” “there,” where we can dwell, where the situation becomes homely: “The poetic word, by being there, bears witness to our being.”74
Gadamer addresses in this way the distinction between the poem and the dialogue. Since it does not pass away, the poetic word is, in contrast to the dialogical word, not processual (GW9 335–346). Our entire Being extends and unfolds between these two poles of language: the flow of dialogue and the crystal of poetry (GW9 338–339). The poetic word, because it prescribes the poetic dictation to the text, is in its crystalline form more fully “text” than any other word. On the other hand, every spoken word—and this constitutes the priority of writing over speech—is always only an attempt to allow the text of the poetic dictation to speak. Poem and dialogue reveal themselves in this way as extreme opposites: “The poem gains existence as ‘literature,’ the dialogue lives on the pleasure of the moment” (GW9 339).
Thanks to the inexhaustibility of their meanings, both are endless, though in different ways. The dialogue is infinite in the word that, in the horizontal endlessness of speaking-with-one-another, asks for further possible answers; the poem is infinite in the assertive word whose meaning is vertically inexhaustible.75 Even prior to any dialogical process, the poetic word founds community in its universality. The poem is the “refrain of the soul,” the refrain in which I and you discover that they are the “same soul,” reaching an agreement, that is, being attuned to the whole song to which the poem is an invitation.76
The poem proves to be dialogical in its very nature. In response to the question, “Who am I and who are you?” it answers by holding the question open, which allows no final answer. Rather, the question—as question—constitutes its own answer (GC 26/WBI 39). To ask, “who am I and who are you?” is a way of being the other of the other.
12. Ritual and the Reciprocity of Language
To linger in art means to contemplate or to participate, which indicates the close connections between art, festival, and language. In this context the paradigm of play becomes more and more important in the last phase of Gadamer’s philosophy. Play not only illuminates art, festival, and language, but also sheds light on ritual, that phenomenon of human existence which is just as immemorial as it is difficult to grasp. Its multiplicity of forms and relevance, for Gadamer, go far beyond what has previously been recognized. The important essay of 1992, “Towards a Phenomenology of Ritual and Language,” is dedicated to the discussion of this topic.77
In this essay Gadamer corrects himself. He admits that his focus to date had been too much on language and too little on the “lifeworld,” where one encounters action no less than language. This change of direction brings him to the limit of the “prelinguistic,” the site where the frequently reiterated comparison between animal language and human language takes place. It is difficult to speak of “ritual” with regard to the behavior of animals and their ways of understanding each other, because nature prescribes animal behavior. As a result these forms of behavior are natural and specific: they vary according to species. With human beings, by contrast, socially transformed rites vary within the species itself; rites take different forms in different cultures. Where, then, lies the specific difference? Where is the border between the animal and the human? One could easily offer an answer by accepting again the Kantian distinction between natural conditioning and freedom, or the old dualism of nature and mind. Contrary to the conventional view, Aristotle was not responsible for this; rather, it is with Aristotle that we should begin anew and with his definition of the soul as the enteléchia of the body.
For this reason Gadamer introduces the distinction between being together-with (Mitsamt) and with-one-another (Miteinander), which is only a logical distinction; considered ontologically, one is interwoven with the other (LL 24–34/GW8 407–419). Despite the connection of the preposition with, the distinction lies between these two expressions: between the mere together-with and the with-one-another, which involves reciprocity, mutuality. Nevertheless, this border is fluid and the together-with bears the with-one-another on the basis of its natural determinacy. Human behavior is never free of natural drives, and it is perhaps in the interweaving of the together-with and the with-one-another that one should locate the specificity of humanity. Rituality occurs in the life forms that the together-with opens, and only in that sense do they participate in the with-one-another of language. To put it another way, the ritual belongs to speaking, yet it is not really speaking, but acting. Where speaking crosses into ritual, it becomes action. From this perspective the particular feature of human language can be better grasped. It comes to light in the shared trait of showing and naming, in the distance of any speaker from what is here and now, and also from oneself, pointing in the direction of a meaning that, if it cannot be proved, is already the opening of a new space for the self and the other. This space is where the community of the world articulates itself.
Nonetheless, speaking has a ritualistic character, and thus it participates in rituals. This is shown in polite forms of speech, but also in religious ceremonies or the celebration of a festival where rituality dominates and language more or less defers to ritual. The play-space of one’s role is limited here, and everyone plays their respective roles. It is thus a matter of play, but one that is different from the play of dialogue. Ritual play, which is always already linguistic, nevertheless takes place in the together-with of collectivity, whereas linguistic play, which is always already ritual, occurs by contrast in the with-one-another of community. The difference is this: together-with is the becoming part of a collectivity, and with-one-another is the invitation to become a speaker in the reciprocal community of dialogue.
In regard to this reciprocity Gadamer turns to Plato’s concept of methéxis, in order to show what is not only a sharing, but also a participation and co-participation. The reciprocity of language, in which there is neither a first nor a last word, unfolds from a single “presuppositionless” element. Gadamer calls it, following Plato, the hikanón, that is, the communal word on which and in which the speakers agree in order to renew the dialogue (LL 23/GW8 405).78 The participation plays itself out not only in the infinite play of question and answer, but also in the binding community of language that communalizes and, furthermore, in the universal linguistic constitution of human life.
Notes
1. See chapter 3, part 3, of the present volume.
2. See chapter 4, part 5, of the present volume.
3. The importance of Hönigswald and his groundbreaking 1937 work on the philosophy of language has yet to be appropriately recognized (see TM 404/GW1 408). See Richard Hönigswald, Philos ophie und Sprache. Problemkritik und System (1937) (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970).
4. See chapter 5 in this volume.
5. See chapter 7, parts 5 and 6, in the present volume.
6. GR 311; GW7 335. See also Gadamer, Der Anfang der Philosophie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), 72.
7. Augustine, De Trinitate, XV, 10–15.
8. Augustine, De Trinitate, XV, X, 19.
9. See esp. Jean Grondin, “Gadamer und Augustinus: Zum Ursprung des hermeneutischen Universalitätsanspruchs,” in his Der Sinn für Hermeneutik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), 24–39.
10. After Truth and Method Gadamer seldom returns to Augustine, and when he does so it is only to repeat the position he had already taken there.
11. Similarly, Heidegger writes that Humboldt’s ideas speak the language of a metaphysics that belongs to his era, a language whose basis was established by Leibniz. He writes that Humboldt’s ideas “speak the language of the metaphysics of his time, a language in which Leibniz’ philosophy plays a decisive role.” Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 119/Unterwegs zur Sprache (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2007), 238.
12. Gadamer, “Reply to James Risser,” in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1997), 403–404, 403.
13. Gadamer, “Unterwegs zur Schrift?” GW7 228–269; Phaedrus 274b–278e/Plato 525–555; Seventh Letter 341c, 344c/Plato 1659, 1661.
14. Protagoras 329a/Plato 762.
15. See in this volume chapter 3, part 11, and chapter 14, part 2.
16. See Donatella Di Cesare, “Die Verborgenheit der Stimme: Gadamer zwischen Platon und Derrida,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik 5 (2006): 325–345.
17. See James Risser, “Reading the Text,” in Hugh J. Silverman, ed., Gadamer and Hermeneutics (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 93–105, 102–105.
18. See Rudolf Bernet, “Differenz und Anwesenheit: Derridas und Husserls Phänomenologie der Sprache, der Zeit, der Geschichte,” in Ernst Wolfgang Orth, ed., Phänomenologische Forschungen: Studien zur neueren französischen Philosophie (Freiburg: Alber, 1986), 88–98.
19. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, ed. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 59.
20. As Brice R. Wachterhauser observes: “there is no ‘pure’ alinguistic intuition of the self, but, according to Gadamer, all self-knowledge is linguistically mediated.. . . Gadamer would argue that even the philosophical attempts to locate and describe the essential core of selfhood, the transcendental ego, failed to come up with an ahistorical metalanguage of the self.” Brice R. Wachterhauser, “Must We Be What We Say? Gadamer on Truth in the Human Sciences,” in Wachterhauser, ed., Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 219–240, 230. See also chapter 5, part 2, of the present volume.
21. Riedel wrote of an “acroamatic” dimension of hermeneutics, referring to the Greek word for listening, akroâsthai: Manfred Riedel, Hören auf die Sprache: Die akroamatische Dimension der Hermeneutik (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1990), 163–176.
22. Aristotle, Of the Senses, 473a 3; Metaphysics, 980b 23–25.
23. “Über das Hören,” in Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Vorträge und Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 48–55, 51.
24. See Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, “Das Diskrimen der Frage,” in Hermeneutische Wege: Hans-Georg Gadamer zum Hundertsten, ed. Günter Figal, Jean Grondin, and Dennis J. Schmidt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 219–240.
25. Terry J. Diffey, “Some Thoughts on the Relationship between Gadamer and Collingwood,” Philosophical Inquiry 20 (1988): 1–12.
26. In this context Gadamer discusses the theme of “occasionality,” which he dealt with in the section on aesthetics. See chapter 2, part 7, in the present volume. “Occasional expressions” are those whose meaning is fulfilled only by the occasion, the occasion in which they are used. But “occasional” does not mean “accidental.” All that is spoken appears occasionally, because it refers back to the context of its origin. Gadamer’s position, which is a development of Lipps’s position, comes close here to Austin’s pragmatism. Hans Lipps, Untersuchungen zur hermeneutischen Logik (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1976); John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).
27. See On Interpretation, 17, 1–4.
28. See chapter 7, part 6, in this volume.
29. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. A. Leitzmann (Berlin: Behr [reprint, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968]), 4:1–35.
30. For Gadamer, observes Wright, “language is a center (Mitte), not an end (telos). It is a medium (Mitte), not a ground (arche).” Kathleen Wright, “Gadamer: The Speculative Structure of Language,” in Wachterhauser, Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, 193–218, 204; Rod Coltman, “Gadamer, Hegel, and the Middle of Language,” Philosophy Today 40 (1996): 151–159.
31. See in this volume chapter 10, part 6.
32. See Heidegger, from “The Letter on ‘Humanism,’” 217, and “The Way to Language,” in On the Way to Language, 135; Brief über den “Humanismus,” in Wegmarken, 313–364, 333; “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache,” in Unterwegs zur Sprache, 112.
33. See Gadamer, “Heimat und Sprache” (1992), GW8 366–372. See also Gadamer, “Leben ist Einkehr in die Sprache. Gedanken über Sprache und Literatur,” Universitas 10 (1993): 922–926.
34. See Deborah Cook, “Reflections on Gadamer’s Notion of Sprachlichkeit,” Philosophy and Literature 10 (1986): 84–92.
35. Gadamer, “Intendimento e rischio,” Archivio di Filosophia 1–2, ed. Enrico Pastelli (1961): 75–82, 82. In a somewhat revised form this essay appeared as “Zur Problematik des Selbstverständnisses: Ein hermeneutischer Beitrag zur Frage der Entmythologisierung,” GW2 121–132. For Gadamer’s thoughts on Rilke, see “Mythopoetische Umkehrung in Rilkes Duineser Elegien,” and “Rilkes Deutung des Daseins: Zu dem Buch von Romano Guardini,” GW9 289–305 and 271–281. On the connection between language and freedom, see Dennis J. Schmidt, “What We Cannot Say: On Language and Freedom,” in Schmidt, Lyrical and Ethical Subjects, 77–90. See Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982), 170.
36. See chapter 3, part 2, of the present volume.
37. Jürgen Habermas, Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, 5th ed. (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1986), 273.
38. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Friedensfeier,” in Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt/M: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 1, 341.
39. See chapter 10, part 4, of the present volume.
40. Jacques Derrida, “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue—Between Two Infinities, the Poem,” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham University Press 2005), 135–163; “Der ununterbrochene Dialog: Zwischen zwei Unendlichkeiten, das Gedicht,” in Jacques Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Der ununterbrochene Dialog, ed. and intro. Martin Gessmann (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2004), 7–50.
41. Gadamer, “The Incapacity for Conversation,” Continental Philosophy Review 39, no. 4 (2006): 351–359, 355; “Die Unfähigkeit zum Gespräch,” GW2 211.
42. “Sprache und Verstehen,” GW2 188. See Claude Thérien, “Gadamer et la phénoménologie du dialogue,” Laval théologique et philosophique 53 (1997): 167–180.
43. See chapter 6, part 4, and chapter 9, part 5, of the present volume.
44. “Freundschaft und Selbsterkenntnis: Zur Rolle der Freundschaft in der griechischen Ethik,” GW7 403. The original version of this still untranslated essay on friendship and self-knowledge in Greek ethics was written in 1928. However, it did not appear in print until 1985 (GW7 396–406). In 1999 Gadamer published “Freundschaft und Solidarität,” in Hermeneutische Entwürfe, 56–65. See also an essay from 1970: “Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation,” PT 103–113.
45. “The Incapacity for Conversation,” Continental Philosophy Review 39, no. 4 (2006): 351–359; GW2 207–215.
46. “The Incapacity for Conversation,” 356; GW2 213.
47. “The Incapacity for Conversation,” 357–358; GW2 214–215.
48. “Schreiben und Reden” (1983), GW10 354.
49. Jochen Hörisch, Die Wut des Verstehens: Zur Kritik der Hermeneutik (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1988).
50. See chapter 5, part 1, of the present volume.
51. This thesis, which also appears in Truth and Method, is subsequently developed in GR 96; GW2 187; LL 12/GW8 354.
52. Aristotle, “On Interpretation,” 16 a 19.
53. Wittgenstein offers a similar thought: human beings “agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in forms of life.” Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), #241, 88.
54. See chapter 6, part 5, of the present volume.
55. Donatella Di Cesare, “Átopos: Die Hermeneutik und der Ausser-Ort des Verstehens,” in Das Erbe Gadamers, ed. Andrzej Przylebski (Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, 2006), 85–94.
56. See chapter 4, part 2, of the present volume.
57. From this point on, Gadamer often returned to his encounter with Wittgenstein. See, for example, GW2 507; GW8 149; GW10 107 and 347.
58. Living language is thus always recuperated in its fundamental metaphoricity. See Gadamer, TM 432/GW1 436–437. See also Joel Weinsheimer, “Gadamer’s Metaphorical Hermeneutics,” in Gadamer and Hermeneutics, ed. Hugh J. Silverman, Continental Philosophy 4 (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 181–201; James Risser, “Die Metaphorik des Sprechens,” in Figal, Grondin, and Schmidt, Hermeneutische Wege, 177–190.
59. See Gadamer, GW2 248 and GW2 507; GW10 156 and 349. See also chapter 7, part 2, of the present volume. See Ulrich Arnswald, “On the Certainty of Uncertainty: Language Games and Forms of Life in Gadamer and Wittgenstein,” in Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher, eds., Gadamer’s Century. Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2002), 25–44. A new approach to this issue can be found in Chris Lawn, Wittgenstein and Gadamer: Towards a Post-Analytic Philosophy of Language (London: Continuum, 2004).
60. See PH 175/GW3 144; GW8 343.
61. GW2 429 and PH 177/GW3 146.
62. GR 384/GW10 157, 275.
63. See chapter 9, part 7, in the present volume.
64. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, #23, 11.
65. See “Europa und die Oikoumene,” GW10 271.
66. See also “Im Schatten des Nihilismus: Was muss der Leser wissen?” GW9 367–382. This essay is not included in Gadamer on Celan.
67. “From Word to Concept: The Task of Hermeneutics as Philosophy,” GR 115; GW9 337; GW8 251; GW10 140. [Trans. note: The German word for poetry, Dichtung, is etymologically related to the Latin dictum.]
68. “On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth,” RB 105–115, 106/GW8 72; “Philosophy and Poetry,” RB 139/GW8, 239.
69. “Philosophy and Poetry,” 132–133; GW8 233; GW8 19; GW8 59; GW9 62. See also Christopher Lawn, “Gadamer on Poetic and Everyday Language,” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 113–126.
70. Paul Celan, “Ansprache anlässlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen,” in Ansprachen bei der Verleihung des Bremer Literaturpreises an Paul Celan (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1958), 10–11; trans. Robert Kelly as “Address on Acceptance of the Prize for Literature of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” Origin, 3rd series, no. 15 (1969): 16–17.
71. “Lesen ist wie Übersetzen,” GW8 279–285; “Der ‘eminente Text’ und seine Wahrheit” (1986), GW8 286–295, 287–288.
72. See Gadamer, “Hilde Domin, Lied der Ermutigung II,” GW9 320–322, 321.
73. GC 104/WBI 115; “Hilde Domin, Dichterin der Rückkehr,” GW9 323–328; “Heimat und Sprache,” GW8 366–372. See James Risser, “Poetic Dwelling in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics,” Philosophy Today 38 (1994): 369–379; Bruce Krajewski, “Gadamer’s Aesthetics in Practice in Wer bin ich und wer bist du?” in Maps and Mirrors: Topologies of Art and Politics, ed. Steve Martinot (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 16–27.
74. “On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth,” RB 115/GW8 79. Alejandro A. Vallega, “On the Tactility of Words: Gadamer’s Reading of Paul Celan’s Atemkristall,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik 2 (2004): 99–121.
75. See Gadamer, “On the Truth of the Word,” in The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. Lawrence K. Schmidt (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 135–155, 135–136; “To What Extent Does Language Perform Thought?” TM 552–553; “Von der Wahrheit des Wortes,” GW8 37–38; “Wie weit schreibt Sprache das Denken vor?” GW2 206.
76. “Hölderlin and George,” EPH 93–109, 104–105; GW9 229–244, 241; also “Gedicht und Gespräch,” GW9 337–338, 344.
77. “Towards a Phenomenology of Ritual and Language,” trans. Lawrence K. Schmidt and Monika Reuss, in Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, ed. Lawrence K. Schmidt (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2000), 19–50; GW8 400–440. See Richard Palmer, “Gadamer’s Recent Work on Language and Philosophy: On ‘Zur Phänomenologie von Ritual und Sprache,’” Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2000): 381–393; Palmer, “Ritual, Rightness and Truth in Two Late Works of Hans-Georg Gadamer,” in Hahn, The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 529–547.
78. See Phaedo 101e 1.