Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Ordinary Language Philosophy

GADAMER'S HERMENEUTICS AND ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY* H -G. GADAMER begins the third and final part of • his Wahrheit und M ethode with these words from Schleiermacher: "Alles Vorauszusetzende in der Hermeneutik ist nur Sprache," or in English, " Language is everything and the only thing which is to be presupposed in hermeneutics." 1 The use of this quotation and the fact that the conclusion of Gadamer's major work on hermeneutics is devoted to an investigation of language gives a clear indication, I think, that, at least as Gadamer conceives of it, hermeneutics has its basis in a philosophy of language and, to be more precise , in a philosophy of language as it is ordinarily spoken. For the Riickverwandlung in Sprache, the transformation back into language which he says is the task of hermeneutics, is meant specifically as a transformation of written texts back into spoken dialogue or conversation, i.e., Gespriich. Accordingly, at the heart of the theory of hermeneutics lies a philosophical account of Gespriich. That offers us, who have grown up and dwell within the Anglo-American tradition of language analysis, a unique possibility for what Gadamer calls a Horizontverschmelzung, a merging of a foreign frame of thinking with our own. I find that fortunate, for heretofore, however much we may have tried to appropriate this or that kind of thought coming to us from the Continent, e.g., existentialism, phenomenology, Marxism, and so forth, we have run up against the ineluctable fact that *Editor's note: the author of the present article, P. Christopher Smith, is the translator of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Hegd's Dialectic; cf. the Review Article in this present issue of The Thomi:Jt by Moltke S. Gram on pp. 822-880. 1 H.-G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und M ethode (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1965), p. 861. Henceforth, WM. 296 GADAMER'S HERMENEUTICS 297 the French and Germans who do these things are more at home in them than we are. Oftentimes, therefore, we seem reduced to reporters of the newest fashions in European philosophy. But with hermeneutics, I think, our chances for a true assimilation are much better and that precisely because the concern of thought for both hermeneutical inquiry and our own philosophical analysis is the same, namely language, and in part at least, language as it is .spoken, ordinary language. In the course of this paper I would like to give a preliminary indication of the overlap of ordinary language philosophy with hermeneutics, the overlap on which, I suggest, a valid merging of horizons might be established. And I would like to suggest as well what profit there could be if such a merging were accomplished. Let me proceed directly to an example which should give my idea of combining hermeneutics and language analysis some credibility . Perhaps the most elegant application of Gadamer's hermeneutical theory is to be found in his essay on Hegel's verkehrte Welt.2 Those who have tried their hand at Hegel at some time or other-and I number my.self among them-will admit that the section of Hegel's Phenornenology of Mind which deals with the verkehrte Welt is one of the most inscrutable texts in a book no part of which can easily be made sense of. The verkehrte Welt, then, would test the mettle of any interpretative technique. How does Gadamer approach the matter? By attempting to clarify the ordinary use of verkehrt and the other words near it in the semantic field over which it ranges. Gadamer'.s approach to the text relies upon the double use of the word in German. On the one hand, it is used in a value-free sense which relates to the position of something and thus functions as does umgekehr,t or inverted, i. 'e., reversed, backwards, inside out, etc. On the other hand, it has a range of uses relating to perverted, which imply at least some degree of evaluation . The example Gadamer cites is the German expression, 2 H.-G. Gadamer, Hegel's Dialectic, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 35-53. Henceforth, HD. 298 P. CHRISTOPHER SMITH "Das ist eine verkehrte Welt," meaning roughly, "That...