James Risser
The issue of language and alterity is a central concern in the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. According to Gadamer, the hermeneutic experience of the world is at bottom thoroughly linguistic. This means that reaching an understanding—whether in relation to texts, historical events, art works, or even events in our orientation to meaning in everyday living—occurs in the medium of language. In Truth and Method, Gadamer famously writes “being that can be understood is language” (Gadamer 1989c, 474). This statement does not mean that language is the only reality. It means quite simply that the intelligibility in an act of understanding has a linguistic element—what Gadamer calls Sprachlichkeit. It could be argued that this claim was drawn from Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics, where we find the aphorism: “That which is to be presupposed in hermeneutics is language alone, and everything that is to be found to which the other objective and subject of presuppositions belong must also be discovered from language” (Schleiermacher 1977, 50). Although it is likely that the context for this remark is simply Schleiermacher's provocation against every theology of inspiration, it serves to identify for Gadamer a central concern to account for the way in which language exists such that the act of understanding can be attained from it alone (Gadamer 1970).
The key to the issue of language and alterity then is to see exactly how language exists. In his discussion of language in Truth and Method and elsewhere, Gadamer is quick to point out that an instrumental view of language in which meaning functions in relation to a system of signs does not capture the way in which language actually exists. This view has a rich philosophical history beginning with Plato where, as we learn from the Cratylus, the name is nothing more than a conventional sign. So regarded, language functions only to designate and to point away from itself. What the linguistic sign points to is a reality beyond itself that presumably is already known, and in its detachment from reality—in effect placing itself midway between thinking and being—“the word is reduced to a wholly secondary relation to the thing” (Gadamer 1989c, 414). In this way, language becomes capable of artificiality and a construction into a system of signs. Considered in this way, language can have only an instrumental character. Language exists only in its “use” with the implication that the use of language is at the whim of the user of language, as if it is something in front of the speaker at his or her disposal (Gadamer 2007c, 105). This instrumental view of language raises the problem of how linguistic instruments can express nonlinguistic material. This is the epistemological problem that Nietzsche sees with language—a problem he solves by turning the artificial connection between word and thing into a radical theory of interpretation. In an attempt to convey the reality of a specific sensual being in words, which are generalizations, there can only be a dissimulating transference.
How can language be understood otherwise? Gadamer's claim, which follows the path of the later Heidegger in this regard, is that there is actually a deeper accord between word and thing in relation to which language has the character of making manifest. Gadamer expresses this accord in the language of experience (Erfahrung): Language is encompassing of experience, so much so that through the medium of language “our whole experience of the world and especially hermeneutic experience unfolds” (Gadamer 1989c, 457). More simply, Gadamer's contention is that “experience of itself seeks and finds words that express it” Gadamer 1989c, 417). In this context, experience means more than empirical experience; it refers to the general encounter with the world such that, through language, understanding and experience go hand in hand. To establish this view, Gadamer regards the word not just as a sign, but more like an image (Gadamer 1989c, 416). This means that, unlike the arbitrariness of a sign, the word bears a deeper connection to the appearance of what is named in the word. It is not to be regarded as a second-order level of presentation: first, the reality, then its representation in language. According to Gadamer, when we think something, which is in effect to say it to ourselves, we mean by it the thing that we think, so that “the starting point for the formation of the word is the substantive content that fills the mind” (Gadamer 1989c, 426). What comes to word, what is in our speaking words where there is no real consciousness of our speaking when we speak, is the intended thing, at least in principle. What lies within this claim for a more substantial notion of language is not only that deeper accord between word and thing in which there can be what Heidegger calls “world-disclosure,” but also a deeper accord between thinking and speaking. We are always thinking in language, and we are already in language when we begin to speak. Gadamer does not think that in our thinking and speaking we must find a way to cross a bridge between a wordless world on one side, and a worldless word on the other. Our words are worlded from the start; the reality of language is that a world is presented in it.
Gadamer finds the general frame for this more substantial notion of language in the historical Christian idea of the inner word (verbum interius), where the very idea of the word as image first emerges. What intrigues Gadamer about this idea is the way in which human speaking is conceived in relation to the divine inner word as the source of intelligibility. When Augustine speaks of the inner word of God in order to approach the idea of incarnation, he is following the Stoic distinction between logos endiathetos and the logos prophorikos. This is the distinction between an indwelling reason and the external word in which the thought dwelling within finds expression. Since the external logos is a secondary process to the internal reflection of thought, the external logos is but an imperfect manifestation of the reality. But the peculiar character of the Christian “speaking of the Word” does not allow it to be understood exactly this way, for in such speaking there is a becoming within this dynamic of language that does not lessen itself by its emergence into exteriority; nor is the Word made flesh—the speaking of the Word—to be regarded as a mere appearance of something more essential behind it.
According to Gadamer, here the “miracle of language lies not in the fact that the Word becomes flesh and emerges into external being, but that which emerges and externalizes itself in utterance is always already a word” (Gadamer 1989c, 420). In this idea of the inner word, the human word is formed in relation to the perfection of thought, but not as a reflective act. In reflection, words are formed in a secondary process by turning back to the mind where they take hold of a completed thought that comes first. In the idea of the inner word, language has already entered thought, and the spoken word is caught up in saying the thought; it is being formed in relation to the matter of thought. As it applies to hermeneutics, Gadamer thinks that this formation of the word in which the word is related to the manifestation of being captures the way in which the formation of meaning in general emerges in language. It is a formation that occurs in the very “movement” (Bewegtheit) of language. Just as the Christian idea holds that the human word fulfills itself in relation to the inner word, the hermeneutic word fulfills itself in relation to the initial speaking word that in principle would carry the subject matter in thought through to the end. But with respect to the general experience of hermeneutic understanding, the perfection of thought—that which is thought through to its end—escapes us. This experience of finitude in the thought that seeks to express itself means that in every human speaking we are never able to say all that we want to say. In fact, in speaking we may not always be able to say exactly what we want to say to avoid misunderstanding. In all this, the movement of language is faced with the task of a constant return to what is not said.
Gadamer is quite explicit about this movement when he brings together his historical reflections on language in the third part of Truth and Method in order to relate them to his own position. He notes that it is first with the logos tradition of the Greeks that “the articulation of the logos brings the structure of being into language” (Gadamer 1989c, 457). But with the idea of the inner word, this tradition needs to be modified to account for the way in which language involves a dynamic movement within itself of accomplishment and enactment. He states this movement in a decisive way:
Every word breaks forth as if from a center and is related to a whole, through which alone it is a word. Every word causes the whole of language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole world view that underlies it to appear. Thus every word, as the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and summoning. … All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is laid up within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid out.
(Gadamer 1989c, 458)
Gadamer will further describe this movement in which a word is related to the whole of language with the Hegelian term “speculative.” Hegel uses this term, which he correlates with dialectics, to describe the way in which thought goes into itself (speculum, to mirror) in such a way that the truth of a philosophical proposition or statement is not tied to the fixed base of the subject, but passes into the predicate to be superseded. Gadamer thinks that language has a similar structure of mediation. In its speculative structure, “finite possibilities of the word are oriented to the sense intended as toward the infinite” (Gadamer 1989c, 469). To say what one means “means to hold what is said together with an infinity of what is not said in one unified meaning and to ensure that it is understood in this way” (Gadamer 1989c, 469). In this dynamic, which raises into intelligibility our experience of the world, what comes to be understood is not something that has already been understood and which has now been put into words, but is the very working out of the moment of understanding. Gadamer thus uses the word “speculative” to underscore the presentational, rather than the representational character of the linguisticality of experience.
For Gadamer, then, language exists in its movement in what he calls “the self-presentation of the word,” that is to say, in its living accomplishment, which is nothing other than what we ordinarily call speaking. Language, for Gadamer, “is always simply that which we speak with others and to others” (Gadamer 1989a, 98). Accordingly, in this manner in which language exists for the experience of understanding (and for the understanding of experience), Gadamer will attribute a communicative function to the act of understanding and ultimately sees conversation or dialogue (Gespräch) as the model for that act of understanding. To understand amounts to bringing the word to speak again, or, more appropriately, to being able to hear what the other has to say. With this emphasis on dialogue as the process of coming to an understanding and the place where language has its true being, Gadamer separates himself from the later Heidegger's work on language. While both adopt the posture of the need for listening to the saying power of language, it is Gadamer who endorses the idea of dialogue in its basic sense. A genuine dialogue aimed at understanding is a real encounter with an other. There is in every dialogue a back-and-forth movement of listening and response that occurs in relation to a dialectic of question and answer. More important, this movement presupposes a common language, joining one to the other in a common space that is often first worked out in dialogue.
With this emphasis on living dialogue, Gadamer does not intend to establish the priority of speech over writing. The written word, in its element of being fixed—and as such a kind of alienated speech—is for the sake of understanding a word that “needs to be transformed back into speech and meaning” (Gadamer 1989c, 293). What is peculiar to the written word is its “ideality,” where the content has been separated from the concrete speech act and as such can be reproduced. In the transformation back into speech, there is no direct intention to get at the voice of the author, which would embrace the classical idea of the priority of speech over writing. A written text is not in principle to be understood as a living expression of the subjectivity of the writer, but simply as something that has something to say as an address to a reader. The act of reading becomes that act of interpretation in which the voice of the text enters a dialogue with the reader. Obviously, a dialogue between a text and a reader is more difficult than an actual one between two speakers; nevertheless, as a process of interpretation, the act of reading mediates with what is other in the manner of a dialogue.
It is at this point that we begin to see the relation between language and alterity. Reading a text for understanding is one aspect of the general hermeneutic concern for making what is foreign or strange familiar. Insofar as the text presents something to be understood, the text consists in an alterity, but so too there is an alterity in everything said that is not understood. Understanding is always situated between strangeness and familiarity. This element of alterity or otherness pervades the linguisticality of understanding in a double sense. In one sense, otherness lies within language as the very limit situation for understanding. In another sense, the element of otherness appears as a structural component of dialogue.
Regarding the first sense, when Gadamer writes regarding the movement of language that “finite possibilities of the word are oriented towards the sense intended as toward the infinite,” he is not suggesting that language always accomplishes the fulfillment of meaning, as if there are no limits to language. There is always a limit with respect to the “unsaid and the inexpressible” (Gadamer 2000a, 15). This limit, which we experience in an ordinary way in translation of poetic texts, is a limit within language itself. It is
the awareness that every speaker has in each moment when he or she seeks the correct word … the awareness that he or she never completely attains it. What reaches the other through language, what has been said in words, is always less than what has been meant or intended. An unstilled desire for the appropriate word—that is what constitutes the true life and essence of language.
(Gadamer 2000a, 17)
In his ongoing critical reflections on the relation between hermeneutics and deconstruction, Gadamer describes this limit in an interesting way. He first notes that with his coined word “linguisticality,” he believes he is capturing the Christian notion of the verbum interius. He insists that with this notion we are “dealing with a kind of quasi-transcendental condition of possibility, that is more a condition of impossibility,” and suggests that this movement is what conversation, with its dialectic of question and answer, enacts—a movement in which there is an alterity of the true (die Alterität des Wahren) through a constant transgression (Überschritt). “In the question as well as in the answer there may be something unsaid that speaks along with what is said and which may be deconstructively uncoverable; but [this unsaid] does not contribute to the conversation only by being uncovered. Indeed, perhaps it will then cease to speak altogether” (Gadamer 2007b, 384). What he means is that “thinking further” in language enacts a certain displacement in every attempt to completely understand. But it is precisely this displacement in the orientation to intelligibility that becomes the impetus for thinking further.
In the language of deconstruction, Gadamer will say that in all our attempts to understand in language we are following a trace which points in a certain direction. We follow a trace because we are always standing in the middle of language, so to speak, not at the beginning and without a view of the whole. A trace is what is simply left behind, and in the trace one knows that something has existed before. In asking oneself where the trace leads, “only then by picking up that trace does one mark his or her beginning” (Gadamer 2007b, 391). For Gadamer and for hermeneutics, the trace is something like a vestige that announces the absence of the origin and at the same time withholds the intelligibility from its completeness—an experience of alterity within living language.
The second sense of alterity requires a more extensive treatment. Dialogical conversation is the actual way in which one comes to understanding. In several places Gadamer will say that the achievement of understanding through dialogue means to come to agreement about what is said. This agreement is not so much the agreement between the two partners in dialogue, as if they have simply “hashed things out with each other,” as it is the agreement over what the subject matter is saying. That agreement is possible is a function of the rationality that is carried by language itself. In speaking with one another, language is able to build up an aspect held in common. “The true reality of human communication is such that a conversation does not simply carry one person's opinion through against another's in argument, or simply add one opinion to another. Genuine conversation transforms the viewpoint of both” (Gadamer 2007c, 96). Because of this transformation, Gadamer is able to say that when we understand we understand differently if we understand at all. And because of the commonality reached in a successful conversation, Gadamer is also able to say that the point is not that “I think this and you think that” but that there is an act of sharing of meaning. Ultimately, the linguisticality of understanding that issues in communication means for Gadamer that through language there is the opening of shared life in which one is able to hear the voice of the other.
But it is precisely this formulation of Gadamer's project that is often misunderstood or subject to a misplaced criticism. Since understanding (Verstehen) is a coming to agreement in understanding (Verständigung) where what is foreign becomes in some sense one's own understanding, the shared life in understanding necessarily erases the alterity and difference in the voice of the other. So considered, hermeneutic sharing amounts to a kind of ownership that turns the sharing in upon itself. All coming to agreement in understanding, in other words, is an assimilation into one's own understanding such that the voice of the other becomes in effect one's own voice. Although Gadamer at times makes use of the language of assimilation (Aneignung) to indicate the character of mediation in dialogical conversation, the claim that this entails a reduction of the other to the same is by no means self-evident. As a case in point, in his exchange with Derrida in 1981, Gadamer asserts his claim that the ability to understand sustains communal life with others while at the same time he insists that understanding is an understanding differently and that the otherness of the other is not overcome in understanding (Gadamer 1989b). Shared life is best understood then as a form of encounter where the threads of meaning can be drawn in all directions, beyond the limited horizon of the individual, so that what is to be understood can speak again.
Gadamer's concern for the alterity of the other in dialogue emerges early on in his work. In relation to the work of Karl Löwith, who wrote his second dissertation on the sociality of existence while Gadamer himself was working on his second dissertation on Plato, Gadamer maintained that Löwith did not have a sufficient regard for the other as other and for the conditions for shared life with the other through dialogue. Writing from the perspective of his own work on Plato, Gadamer first notes how the matter to be understood in Socratic conversation often fails because the conversation amounts to nothing more than mutual self-expression. In such cases, there is no genuine being-with-one-another but only a situation in which “the participants themselves [are able] to become manifest to each other in speaking about it” (Gadamer 1991, 37). What is behind his remark is the concern that the attempt to understand something through self-expression depends too much on self-reflection. In this early text, Gadamer is framing what he will later call in Truth and Method the second of the three forms of experiencing and encountering otherness. All three forms are forms of an I–thou (you) relation. In the second form, which mirrors Hegel's master–slave dialectic, a person reflects himself or herself out of the actual mutuality of the relation, thus destroying the bond between one and the other in the process. Any self-reflection preserves a contrast and opposition in the relation so that the ability of the other to speak on his or her own terms cannot be recognized. A real conversation between two people, on the other hand, attends only to the substantive intention of what is being said and as such is not strictly speaking concerned merely with the element of expression. In a real conversation with an other, it is this self-expression that breaks down. Gadamer's minor criticism of Löwith rests on this distinction. Gadamer maintained that Löwith understood thinking to be dealing with fixed cognitive assumptions—in effect, holding to self-expression—and in doing so he loses sight of a more encompassing thinking that can take place in a genuine conversation.
This is not to suggest that Gadamer is opposed to reflection, since it is undoubtedly an essential dimension of thinking and the ability to make something manifest in thinking. Gadamer wants to let the critical function achieved by reflection be carried out by the dynamics of question and response that takes place in conversation. What then constitutes a real conversation?
The difference here pertains to the enlarged sense that Gadamer gives to being with-one-another and to the way in which the thou in the relation of one to another has priority. Being-with-one-another has an enlarged sense for Gadamer because he thinks that it comprises the entirety of intentional life. It is the basic idea of shared life that Gadamer finds first in Aristotle. As outlined in the Rhetoric, Aristotle thinks that humans achieve a sense of community among themselves because they are capable of mutual understanding through speech (Aristotle 1967, 1253a15–18). Gadamer will translate this basic idea into the linguisticality of understanding as a participatory act of encounter and event. And here language is understood broadly as the very bond that makes possible the relation between understanding and experiential life in general. With a very intentional phrasing, Gadamer writes: “Who thinks language already moves beyond subjectivity” (Gadamer 2000c, 286). And if language is the condition for communicating, communication is to be understood not as information exchange between two subjects but a sharing: “‘Communication’ [Mitteilung]—what a beautiful word! It involves the idea that we share [teilen] something with one another [miteinander], that does not become less in the sharing but perhaps even grows” (Gadamer 1998, 6). In sharing, there is an opening, presumably between one and another that amounts to an act of participation with an other in which the world becomes larger, not smaller.
But the exact sense of the encounter with the other in shared life is yet to be seen. When Gadamer speaks of this encounter in the language of I and thou, it is of critical importance for Gadamer that this relation should not be taken as one of intersubjectivity. In a 1993 interview with Gadamer, Carsten Dutt quotes Gadamer's own text on the nature of conversation in order to solicit a response from him. The text reads: “Conversation with another person, whatever the objections or disagreements, whatever the understandings or misunderstandings, means a kind of expansion of our individuality and a probing of the possible commonality we have to which reason encourages us” (Gadamer 2001, 59). Dutt then poses the question whether his philosophy thematizes conversation as our capacity for rational intersubjectivity, and Gadamer responds: “Oh, please spare me that completely misleading concept of intersubjectivity, of a subjectivism doubled! In the passage you quoted I did not make any clever theoretical constructions at all: I said a conversation is something one gets caught up in, in which one gets involved” (Gadamer 2001, 59). What Gadamer objects to is framing conversation in terms of the priority of a “subject,” a doubling of the subject no less. In different words—and this is the key—through such framing, the very commonality that subtends subjectivity, namely, the shared common world of language to which we first belong as the condition for sharing, is lost.
While Gadamer refuses to characterize dialogical conversation in terms of intersubjectivity, he does employ a rich account of the interplay in dialogue in the language of an I–thou relation. That account emerges in Truth and Method in connection with Gadamer's analysis of the concept of experience, which is introduced as a way of articulating how an interpreter who is always effected by history—and thus stands in some relation of belonging to a historical tradition—actually interprets that historical tradition. As he explains it, experience is something that we are always involved in, and the character of knowing within experience is one in which our expectations regarding that experiencing are not always confirmed. This natural element in experiencing is the element of negativity in the sense that something otherwise is encountered in experiencing. In the language of Hegel, experiencing involves a reversal in the experiencing consciousness constituting what we ordinarily call learning. This learning is, effectively, an experience of limitation, and broadly considered amounts to the experience of finitude. The truly experienced person recognizes this, so that the one who takes experience seriously is one who is ready for experience, that is to say, is open to new experience. Applying this configuration to hermeneutic experience and the interpretation of historical tradition, Gadamer claims that this interpretation can take shape as one of three versions of the I–thou relation. The first version has little to do with a thou and relationality as such, since it is described as the mastery of historical tradition by method. The second version, as previously noted, corresponds to an I–thou that approximates a bad form of intersubjectivity, for it is described along the lines of Hegel's dialectic of recognition, where one does not want to cede to the other. It is a form of self-relatedness: one claims to know the other from one's own point of view, and thus, according to Gadamer, the “thou loses the immediacy with which it makes its claim.” In being understood, the thou is “preempted reflectively from the standpoint of the other person” (Gadamer 1989c, 359). The third form of the I–thou is the only one that captures the full import of the relation. Gadamer writes:
In human relations the important thing is, as we have seen, to experience the thou truly as a thou—i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us. Here is where openness belongs. … Without such openness to one another there is no genuine human bond. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another. When two people understand each other, this does not mean that one person ‘understands’ the other. Openness to the other, then, involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to do so.
(Gadamer 1989c, 361)
It is precisely this openness to the other that constitutes the unfolding of hermeneutic experience, which is to say both the idea of sharing and the idea of a genuine dialogue. Shared life in dialogue cannot occur by merely doubling the subject. It is this priority of the subject that will destroy the very possibility of sharing as a genuine participation with the other.
This priority of the other and participating with the other in dialogue constitutes the way in which world-disclosure occurs for hermeneutic experience. As Gadamer sees it, it actually has the virtue of a corrective for a deficiency that is often overlooked when one starts from the priority of the subject. The problem in shared life is not that we do not understand the other person, “but that we don't understand ourselves.” In all our efforts at understanding, “we must break down resistance in ourselves if we wish to hear the other as other” (Gadamer 2007a, 371). This is why Gadamer gives priority to the thou in every relating, for strengthening the other against oneself one not only allows one “to recognize in principle the limitation of one's own framework,” but also “allows one to go beyond one's own possibilities” (Gadamer 2000b, 284). For Gadamer, this priority of the other against that of the subject is so strong that ultimately he would rather use the word “other” in place of the “thou.” Gadamer thinks that the very idea of the I–thou relation, which has a long history beginning with the publication of Buber's I and Thou in 1923, “hides a mystifying substantiation” that blocks us from getting at the real problems in the relating of one to another. To say “the other” in place of “the thou” changes the perspective, for “every other is at the same time the other of the other” (Gadamer 2000b, 282).
In his writings on contemporary social life, Gadamer emphasizes this priority of the other as well. He argues for a notion of solidarity that would allow “for the common establishment of decisions which each considers to be correct in the areas of moral, social, and political life” (Gadamer 1992, 218). Such solidarity is not to be construed as one that would erase differences in an effort to secure a common identity. Rather, it would simply be a life together with respect to the need “to live with an other, to live as the other of the other” (Gadamer 1992, 234).
For the issue of language and alterity, it is language itself, Gadamer insists, that “intends the other” (Gadamer 2000c, 33). Such a claim makes little sense if we confine language to merely making statements in which the directions of meaning in language that arise in speaking to another are removed. So it is that Gadamer insists that being-with-one-another “develops in the true life of language,” which is found in dialogical conversation. Conversation, in turn, is the word seeking an answer in which the initial meanings from the participants unfold accordingly. In dialogical conversation “the one-another of word and answer has its own entitlement” (Gadamer 2000c, 32). This entitlement is what Gadamer describes as the self-presentation of the word. And this is to say that the with-one-another that develops in the true life of language is a sharing in its fundamental sense of participation. The word is not just seeking an answer, it is seeking the right word that enables one to hear the other.