Nicholas Davey
As words, images, and concepts are the media through which hermeneutic understanding takes place, reflection on their nature will be central to any appreciation of how hermeneutics operates. Given the philosophical complexity of these terms, a grasp of the broad intellectual circumstance of their usage will establish our starting point. The consequences of Martin Heidegger’s radical transformation of hermeneutics are not to be underestimated: understanding is no longer conceived as the activity of a subject but as a mode of being which characterizes specifically the existence of the human subject (Dasein). An attribute of that existence is its “moved-ness” (Bewegtheit), and the transitions and transformations of understanding are its modes (“Classical and Philosophical Hermeneutics,” GR 56). The change to a processual and eventual notion of understanding alters how the function of words, images, and concepts in relationship to each other is conceived within hermeneutics. A new emphasis is given to the presentational function of words and images (the bringing-forth of a world) as opposed to their representational function (describing a world independent of human cognition). This initiates a further change in how the referential operation of words, images, and concepts is understood.
An implied consequence of Heidegger’s ontological transformation of hermeneutics is the emergence of meaning as fundamentally relational. The meaning of words and images is no longer anchored to the fixed objects, essences, or ideas they allegedly refer to but in their collective ability to establish and fill -out what they bring forth as a meaningful world. The objective meanings referenced by words are generated by language itself: “The living virtuality of speech … brings a totality of meaning into play, without being able to express it totally” (TM 458). Gadamer openly opposes the dogma of “meaning-in-itself” (TM 473); “meanings, too, are like a space in which things are related to one another” (TM 433, emphasis added). He comments poignantly that is only because of language that mankind has a world: “Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all … Not only is the world world only insofar as it comes into language, but language too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is presented in it” (TM 443). It is the nature of language that “it has its being in revealing” (TM 421). This raises a question: how do words, images, and concepts relate to one another? How do shifts in how a symbol is thought about influence how it is seen? As we shall shortly suggest, the answer to this question brings to light Gadamer’s transformation of Heidegger’s of hermeneutics.
Truth and Method establishes that understanding is thought of as processual: one “understands” not so much when one has grasped something technical but when one has undergone or passed through a significant change in one’s thinking about oneself and the world: understanding entails transformative movement. The question is how do words, images, and concepts inaugurate such movement. Gadamer is in no doubt that words, images, and concepts are intimately related: “A word has a mysterious connection with what it ‘images’; it belongs to its being” (TM 416). “Language (words) and thinking (concepts) about things are so bound up” (TM 417) that the “character of language as event” is inseparable from “the process of concept formation” in that “thought can turn for its own instruction to this stock (of meanings) that language has built up” (TM 429, insertion added). Transference from one sphere to another is not just the basis of metaphor (TM 431) but grounds the movement which constitutes hermeneutic understanding. How is this movement to be understood?
Intuiting the presentational character of language is tied to Heidegger’s insistence that language is not a subject’s instrument for mapping out objects in their experience. Heidegger contends that mankind’s being-in-the world is primordially linguistic; being-in-the world and having a language cannot be separated. Gadamer subsequently argues: “Our verbal experience of the world is prior to everything that is recognised and addressed as existing” (TM 450). What we call “world” and the statements we make about it are both already within the world horizon of language and are, logically speaking, consequent to it (TM 450). Gadamer readily admits that in the form of statements and assertions, language “objectifies” a world but insists that what is “linguistically objectified as a world” should not be confused with a world-in-itself existing independently of the objectification. Not only is there no such world but the “linguistically objectified world” is, ontologically speaking, secondary to the pre-existant world horizon of language (Sprachlichkeit). Heidegger and Gadamer distinguish, accordingly, between the primary aletheic (disclosive, presentational, or eventual) use of language and the secondary derivative aphophantic use of statements and assertions. This differentiation permits a further distinction between linguistic meaningfulness (the aletheic) and linguistic meaning (the apophantic).
In asserting the primacy of the disclosive character of language, Gadamer is not denying that words have a referential or even an instrumental function. It is plain that within academic, financial, or political discourse, the meaning of words must be regularized by grammar and syntax. The question is whether words function only in this way. To insist that language operates exclusively as an instrument of assertion limits meaningful communication to what can be conventionally “objectified” in language. However, Gadamer’s notable contribution to the twentieth-century philosophy of language lies in his insistence that language also functions speculatively. It is this speculative account of language that binds his account of words, images, and concepts together and offers an account of the movement between them.
“Words that bring something into language are themselves a speculative event. Their truth lies in what is said in them and not in an intention locked in the impotence of subjective particularity” (TM 489). “The word speculative … refers to the mirror relation. Being reflected involves a constant substitution of one thing for another” (TM 465). Underlying these comments is the view that the richness and profundity of the spoken word lies literally in what is not said, in the ability of the spoken word to summon the unspoken horizons of meaning upon which all meaningful utterance depends. “To say what one means … to make oneself understood … means to hold what is said together with an infinity of what is not said in one unified meaning” (TM 469). Gadamer famously remarks: “Every word breaks forth as if from a centre and is related to a whole, through which alone it is a word. Every word causes the whole of the language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole of the worldview 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” (TM 458). In Heidegger’s terms, the sayable “brings the unsayable into the world:” they are not opposites (“The Origin of the Artwork,” PL 74).1 The disclosed manifests the presence of the withheld, and without it the withheld would lack its promise of a coming-fullness of meaning. The speculative capacity of words therefore refers to their power to insinuate an infinite horizon of possible meaning. When operating speculatively, the word reveals our existence in the primordial horizons of linguisticality, horizons which transcend each and every one of us. “What comes (therefore) into language is something different from the spoken word itself. But (then) the word is a word only because of what comes into language in it” (TM 475). The word disappears into what is said, so that saying “allows the reality beyond every individual consciousness” to become visible (TM 449). “Who ever has language ‘has’ the world” (TM 453). Insofar as the speculative word discloses the linguistic horizon of existence, language is ontologically performative; it manifests the linguistic character of existence transcending individual existence.
The eventual nature of language demonstrates that its capacity to generate meaning cannot be controlled. Meanings may be conventionalized by dictionary and grammatical regulation, but a living language will not be so constrained. We are often subject to meaning: meanings are encountered in words and images independent of any willing and doing. It is, indeed, the speculative openness of linguistic meaning that enables such spontaneous productivity. Unlike many mathematical and scientific terms, the meanings of historical and literary concepts are rhetorically and logically indeterminate. Although a way-of-life may assume a certain stability of meaning for a set of defining terms, that stability is always open to challenge from other related or contiguous determinations of meaning. The speculative openness of language is such that new meanings are bound to arise. So long as a discourse exists within the primordial language horizon of human existence, it is susceptible to the serendipitous emergence of new meanings. An unusual expression, a novel metaphor, or an unexpected phrase can undermine a received understanding of a word, point to other ways of understanding it, and awaken a sense of the infinite extent of the language horizon sustaining human existence. What thought unravels as a new determination of meaning, preexists its being spoken in the language horizon of existence. As Gadamer puts it: “Thought can turn for its own instruction to the stock of possibilities that language has (itself) built up” (TM 429). This parallels Heidegger’s claim that “interpretation” fills out the possibilities already in understanding (BT 188-9). Hermeneutics, as Gadamer grasps it, keeps the movement of that understanding in play. Hermeneutics it is not about understanding what words mean but concerns setting received and contemporary meanings into play with one another so as to initiate the emergence of new ways of thinking with those meanings and thereby effect changes in the movement of our self-understanding. In conclusion, the speculative nature of language is at the root of the word’s capacity to disclose a world, while the indeterminate open nature of linguistic meaning implies that every understanding words bring us to is vulnerable to challenge and change. What makes such slippages of meaning productive? Memory and anticipation will prove significant.
The shift to a presentational mode of thought is also discernible in Gadamer’s consideration of the image: “I have, among other things, tried to refute the idea that the art image is a mere copy of something” (“The Artwork in Word and Image,” GR 196). The image as “presentation” is “far from being a mere imitation” and “necessarily revelatory” of something new (TM 115). This account of the image is subtle but contrary. Presentation suggests that the image is performative; it does not re-present a given state of being but “brings forth” a new one. Yet Gadamer persistently refers to the mimetic function of images. The tension is dissolved because mimesis, he argues, concerns presentation i.e. it is productive rather re-productive. The image is formative; a coming-into-appearance of a subject matter and not a re-production (copy) of it as if it existed independent of its image. In a phenomenological reversal of Plato, Gadamer argues that mimesis is forward looking and not the re-cognition of a past original. The joy of coming to recognition entails the knowing of something again that we already know as if for the first time (TM 114). In the image, what we already know (pre-reflectively) emerges “as if illuminated, from all the contingent and variable circumstances that condition it; it is grasped in its essence. It is known as something” (TM 114). The image gathers together previous experiences and memories of a person and, in the form of a portrait image, projects them in a unified form so we can perhaps come to see for the first time a unity in their disparity. In the image, “the ‘known’” enters into its true being and manifests itself as what it is only when it is recognised” (TM 114). Gadamer suggests notably that mimesis is a mode of thought orientated toward the future: “it brings forth intensified possibilities never seen before” (RB 64). “Mimesis always points in the direction of that which one approaches, or towards that which one is orientated, when one represents something” (“Plato as Portraitist,” GR 311). The speculative dimension of language elucidates the capacity of an image to be future orientated.
The poetic and artistic image are performative in that they bring something into being. What they realize in structured and articulate form are certain of the possibilities held in linguistic and cultural experience. Our existence within a language horizon confirms that we are as much acquainted with what words might or could mean (their speculative dimension) as we are with specific determinate examples of their meaning. Such acquaintance means we can anticipate different hermeneutical outcomes. However, our everyday mode of temporal being is one of dispersal. We are to a degree absent from ourselves, passing from task to task with much around us open and undecided. There are, of course, implicit patterns hidden in what we do but because of our immersion in the everyday, though we may sense and hope for a consummate point of arrival, rarely do we see ourselves or our concerns so coherently. The genius of the artistic and poetic image is to “transform into a coherent structure” what is at play speculatively in our linguistic and cultural horizons allowing us to see that coherence as if for the first time. The image effects a movement of understanding: by means of the transforming image we come to know (recognize) what we did not know that we already implicitly knew, that is, the unrealized possible meanings held in the speculative horizons of cultural and linguistic existence. The image offers a clear knowledge of what in everyday existence is only known darkly (“Classical and Philosophical Hermeneutics,” GR 65).
In relation to the speculative dimensions of cultural and linguistic existence, the image is both summative and formative. It is summative in that it explicitly articulates open possibilities within a cultural horizon, and it is formative in that it creates a discernible structure capable of standing alone and interrogating semantic possibilities within other frameworks of experience. In relation to human experience, the educative power of the image (what it is capable of bringing to light and making recognizable from within experience) is hardly to be underestimated. An image can also disclose the operative presence of our concepts.
Gadamer strikingly describes the process of thinking as watching the obscure reflections of concepts moving beyond the outer entrance to the cave of consciousness (“Autobiographical Reflections,” GR 33). Apart from a misleading Platonic reference, it re-emphasizes that “thinking something (is) a kind of motion” (“Hermeneutics and the Ontological Difference,” GR 367). Furthermore, philosophical concepts are not to be understood apart from the “living” conditions of their “emergence,” that is, their conceptual history (“Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy,” GR 229). Concepts are neither immutable nor timeless but evolve. They are historically generated and transmitted intellectual frameworks or imaginaries. Nor are concepts pre-linguistic. Gadamer speaks of an “intimate unity of speech and thought” (TM 433) in which the “logical productivity” of language, that is, “the spontaneous and inventive seeking out of similarities by means of which it is possible to order things” (TM 432) is itself part of the linguistic horizon of existence. As with words and meanings, new concepts emerge spontaneously from that horizon. The creation of new concepts is not instrumentally conceived but considered part of language’s presentational capacity.
Gadamer also speaks of Sachen (things-in-themselves), which are best understood as phenomenological actualities; “living concerns” which shape and orientate our being-in-the-world. Unlike abstract concepts, the Sachen of love, duty, and belonging are intensely felt; they denote fields of behavior, concern, and reflection. However, although within logic and mathematics one tends to operate solely with determinate concepts, the concepts and Sachen associated with the humanities are indeterminate and comparatively imprecise. The meaning of concepts attached to and carried by a tradition let alone the meaning of those deployed in cultural, political, and religious debate is “always more” than envisaged. Plato may have thought he had a clear grasp of his moral concepts, but the historical provenance of concepts never exhausts their potential for new and different meanings. No author can anticipate what their key concepts can come to mean. The indeterminate nature of historical and aesthetic concepts implies that they are always open to further development. Thus, like words and images, concepts too have their speculative dimension. Hermeneutical reflection becomes not explication but elaboration; a thinking with a position and a drawing out of what has yet to be said from within it. “Our thinking is never satisfied with what one means in saying this or that. Thinking points beyond itself” (“Autobiographical Reflections,” GR 31). As implied earlier, sustaining Bewegtheit is primary. We can now see it is the very openness of words, images, and concepts generate such movement. All three have speculative dimensions that point beyond any initial presentation of meaning. The relatedness of those dimensions is crucial.
Words, images, and concepts have actual and potential satellite meanings able not only to transfer across different poetic, literary, and philosophical media but also to upset and transform their core meanings. Indeterminacy of meaning is central. Heidegger’s distinction between what a verbal or visual presentation simultaneously discloses and withholds invokes the notion of a hermeneutic differential: it is always possible to differentiate between what a word says and what it means, between what a concept asserts and what it entails. The clarification of what a word or image may mean depends on this differential. Any elaboration of what they state or show necessitates opening the speculative horizons they themselves open on to. The drive to clarify the meaning of a word can create additional differences. Exploring the speculative entailments of an image may achieve a more extensive understanding but, at the same time, the quest for clarity can also trigger unforeseen determinations of meaning in related fields. The indeterminacy of meaning in the speculative horizons of words and images as well as the interrelatedness of those horizons guarantees that the drive “to understand more” will also promote “an understanding differently.” Movement is equally stimulated by the difference between concepts and images. No concept can capture the openness of meaning a symbolic image invokes: “Conceptual explication is never able to exhaust the content of a poetic image” (“Autobiographical Reflections,” GR 37). No word can grasp the totality of meaning a symbol calls forth. Here, the differences between word, image, and concept start to work off one another. That an image and its speculative horizon might not be captured by either word or concept does not imply that word and concept cannot be deployed in new ways to solicit from the image more of its “withheld” possibilities. It is not a question of how an interpreter can capture images in words but of how “to find a pointing word that … leads to a better seeing” of the image itself (“The Artwork in Word and Image: So True, So Full of Being!” GR 195). In Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, “the symbol gives rise to thought” (SE 347): the image grounded in its own speculative horizon invites the spectator to go beyond the visual and to contemplate a complexity of meaning that can only ever be contemplated. However, that contemplation can in turn alter the determination of the concepts associated with the image and change how it is subsequently seen. Because of their indeterminate and speculative nature, Gadamer contends that word, image, and concept are in constant transformative “dialectical” interplay. Hermeneutic practice keeps such transformations in play. The philosophical precondition that underwrites the movement that is hermeneutic understanding concerns the related and openly indeterminate speculative horizons of meaning from which word, image, and concept spring. Reading, writing, and attentive looking are ways of opening the unarticulated aspects of our cultural horizons and perhaps, more important, they are practices which because of the speculative dimensions of word, image, and concept disturb and disrupt what we think we know with certainty.