The Inner Word in Gadamer's Hermeneutics

The Verbum and Augustine's Inner Word

chap ter 7  The Verbum and Augustine’s Inner Word Truth and Method is famously divided into three major sections which treat, respectively, the themes of art, history, and language. The unity of the book and the relation of these parts have been the subject of much discussion, but the basic theme, providing an alternative vision to the modern,essentialist model of knowledge production,is consistently developed in different ways over the three sections. Against the picture of a determining subject observing and controlling a determinate object-world, Truth and Method depicts an emergent world arising out of the ceaseless play of culture, language, history. Agency is a shared or dispersed power, subjectivity is a secondary, co-dependent phenomenon , and both world and reflective consciousness grow out of their manifold interactions.The first part of Truth and Method focuses on the theme of play, the playing of a game or the performance of a play, which exhibits the interactive structure (Gebilde) of a world not captive to the fixed binary of subject and object. The second part of Truth and Method shows this structure at work on the scale of history, that is, the contact of consciousness with its own history exhibiting the same emergent, reciprocating structure developed in part one. The third part of Truth and Method reveals how Sprachlichkeit, linguality or living speech, is the fundamental idiom of this interaction. Clearly this is a Heideggerian theme, repeated now in a new key. The reciprocal relation of player and played, of history and consciousness, is anchored in the ontological unity of thought and speech. The word is the bodying forth of history and thought together, a unity that the Western tradition has forgotten. Indeed, Western intellectual tradition may 219 220 Exegesis, Truth and Method, Part III, 2, B be read as the history of the separation of thought and word, and consequently as the instrumentalization of culture. How did this forgetfulness happen? Gadamer offers a brief intellectual history in section 2 of the third part, the middle chapter of which contains the verbum section . His history begins with the fatal mistake of Plato in the Cratylus where language is attributed the bare function of signing. This is right because Plato was always for Gadamer the ambiguous pivot of Western thought, holding the seeds of its fateful detour and the keys to its hidden return. Instead of detailing the long career of the West’s historical mistake, Gadamer develops the counter- or shadow-history that lives along or underneath that dominant narrative, the history of the word that begins with the Greek logos and culminates with Heidegger’s Sprachlichkeit. Although the medieval concept of the verbum does not yet in every respect fully achieve the structure of hermeneutic understanding, elements that are developed in the final parts of Truth and Method, it served as a constant source of inspiration for Gadamer to get at the mystery of human Sprachlichkeit. He remarked in 1974 that“the deepest mystery of Christian doctrine, the mystery of the Trinity . . . constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding .”1 Gadamer looks at the verbum in this way. Just as the Trinity defies the categorical boundaries of person and word, process and end, spirit and body, singular and multiple, so the verbum never resolves language into a phenomenon that human understanding comprehends. The eighty-page prospectus of Truth and Method that Gadamer penned in 1956 devotes roughly three long sheets to the theme of the inner word, covering all the major themes that will be developed in greater detail in the finished work, including the later development of complicatio in Cusanus .2 It is not the case that Aquinas is left out of this draft, as Grondin states, although this is not obvious. Both the De differentia verbi divini et humani (“per modum egredientis”) and the De natura verbi intellectus (“verbum proprie dicitur personaliter tantum”) are quoted directly, although without citing authorship. The De natura quotation actually introduces the theme of verbum in the manuscript.3 Gadamer also discusses Aquinas’s division of verbum into definitio and ennuntiatio, and the complex structure of the Thomist species. Gadamer used the left-facing page in the manuscript to make notes to himself, and two other Thomist texts are referenced in this fashion on manuscript...