The Inner World in Gadamer's Hermeneutics (review)

Kenneth Burke would have loved this book, as will readers of his Rhetoric of Religion. Even as Burke argued in that book that whatever can be said of God can be said of words, hence the science of logology, Arthos's meticulous study of the primary sources pertinent to arguably the most central, but opaque, section of Gadamer's Truth and Method shows how Burke was right in spades. Although Arthos is not directly addressing Burke, he offers a timely, welcome, if daunting, resource for rhetoricians who on the one hand celebrate the news of philosophy's well advertised "linguistic turn" and on the other wonder if our checks will ever arrive. If we take seriously the form/substance dualism, so well explicated by Stanley Fish, that perpetually consigns rhetoric to reality's shadow, philosophically minded rhetoricians are almost defined by the hope that someday, somehow, this cloud will lift.

Arthos shows that the West has an alternative narrative: a nondualistic, nonreductive perspective for understanding the relation among language, thought, divinity, humanity, and history. Further, this alternative to dualism and subjectivism is rooted in classical antiquity, particularly civic rhetoric, Hebrew and Christian tradition, Renaissance humanism, Reformation Biblical studies, and post-Enlightenment philosophy.

The focal point of Arthos's study is the ten pages of section III, 2, B of Truth and Method (three in the 80 pages of the 1956 original prospectus [220]). In that section Gadamer suggestively, though cryptically, explains that, as secular as his hermeneutic is—with its view of human understanding as finite, linguistic, dialogic, and historical—the model for his perspective is the procession of persons in the Christian Trinity. What does this mean?

Arthos's book is arguably the definitive statement on how to read Gadamer's Trinitarian claim. The book is divided into three parts plus a preface, introduction, and an appendix containing translations of the two Latin texts Gadamer most relies on in III, 2, B: Aquinas's De differenti verbi et humani and De naturi verbi intellectus. The preface frames themes of enlightenment dualism and linguistic reductionism as motivating the study, and the introduction and part 1, respectively, present and address an ambitious agenda of issues from Heraclitus, the Stoics, Neo-Platonism, the Bible, and philosophy from Hegel to Heidegger. Part 2 identifies philosophic and historical tensions in Gadamer's statement and draws upon the background of part 1 to address them. The conclusion restates Gadamer's themes, rehearses responses to problems and objections, and argues for the coherence and cultural urgency of his vision.

In his preface Arthos sketches Gadamer's aim of returning "logos to the wholeness of the person and the particularity of his situation" and his view of "the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the word [as making] this relationship identical with history" (xi). In short, in Gadamer's project, rhetoric—in the sense of the deep humanistic tradition of teaching and practice celebrated and defended by Vico plus the Judaeo-Christian tradition rooted in the incarnate word—"takes language the furthest possible distance from instrumentality" (xi). The specific notion of the verbum interus was Augustine's way in De Trinitate of making clear, or at least humanly intelligible, the mystery of the Trinity. For Augustine, even as human beings coin new words without stepping outside of language, so the Father begets the Son without engendering anything new. Thomas Aquinas developed Augustine's thought; it is the interweaving of Augustine and Aquinas, laced with themes from Hegel and Heidegger, that is central to the crucial ten pages that, Arthos contends, we must better understand to appreciate the depth of Gadamer's claim and its implications.

In the Introduction, "From Logos to Verbum to Sprache," Arthos features the issue of the one and the many as a defining theme in both the Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian traditions. Related issues include the problem of identity and difference, the tension within the polyvalent term logos between insight and discourse, personal psychic...