The Inner Word in Gadamer's Hermeneutics

Gadamer and the Verbum Interius

chap ter 12  Gadamer and the Verbum Interius nor can I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself: so where could that be which cannot contain itself? Is it without itself and not within? —Augustine, Confessions, 10.8 Twice explicitly Gadamer spells out the limitations of the doctrine of the word for hermeneutics in the later sections of Truth and Method.1 Hermeneutics itself as an idea and practice emerging in the wake of Reformation and Enlightenment grew out of innovative studies in philology, jurisprudence, theology, and history to cope with a world that had grown increasingly distant from the perspective of the medieval mind. The scholastic worldview was predicated on an order of perfection ,coordinated and harmonized by a moral telos.Philosophical hermeneutics struggles to salvage the ideal under a different principle. The concluding sections of Truth and Method after III,2,B are a sustained attempt to describe the dimensions of a world shaped by the limits and possibilities of its own Sprachlichkeit. From a Gadamerian perspective, the translation of dynamis and energeia suffered a reduction in the Latin translation to potentia and forma, because the practical wisdom of the Greeks did not depend on its metaphysics. Platonic-Aristotelian actualization is not so much without an end as open-ended. The two ends of its middle, the concrete particular and the abstract universal, are conveniences of thought. Hope is built on a sense of direction that comes from a precedent rather than an origin. As Socrates taught, the world bodies forth under the sign of abstractions that disappear at the touch. They flow, as 351 352 Conclusion we have seen, from the thinking of language that never ceases to discover and invent itself. Gadamer’s first hermeneutic critique of a teleological order is in reference to the linguistic perspective of the German philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt.Whereas the word in scholasticism is“only a prismatic refraction in which there shines the one truth,” Humboldt believes in a “relative perfection”that emerges in each language and culture (TM, 440, 438/ WM, 443, 442): “A word is not simply the perfection of the ‘species,’ as medieval thought held.When a being is represented in the thinking mind, this is not the reflection of a pregiven order of being” (457/461). Gadamer ’s own hermeneutics is nourished by this model of thought, one“that is no longer guided by the knowledge of salvation” (461/465). Despite this distancing, Gadamer also asserts that insight into the puzzle of the one and the many“received a mysterious affirmation in medieval speculation on the Trinity”(TM, 457/WM, 461).We have seen that, for him, the teleology of the divine order and the model of trinitarian procession are not inextricably dependent on one another.He is grounded first in the rhetoricality of the social order: “The language that things have—whatever kind of things they may be—is not the logos ousias, and it is not fulfilled in the self-contemplation of an infinite intellect. It is the language that our finite, historical nature apprehends when we learn to speak” (476/480). The modesty of Gadamer’s humanism precludes a strong tie to a teleological perspective. What then is the bequest of trinitarianism for philosophical hermeneutics ? I will attempt in this conclusion to indicate how Gadamer’s appropriation of the theological concept of the verbum interius informs his conception of hermeneutic experience. Jean Grondin has transcribed a conversation he had with Gadamer late in the philosopher’s life, a kind of retrospective and summary discussion, in which the importance of the verbum interius comes up. In response to a question about his interest in the Trinity, Gadamer engages in a long disquisition on what he regards as the critical alternative to Cartesianism: “The entire destiny of Western civilization announces itself here in this nominalist turning toward the universalist argument, insofar as one no longer strives to lead a conversation,but rather wants to demonstrate compelling proofs.”2 Somehow in his mind there remains an indissoluble bond between speculative theology and classical rhetorical praxis. The kind of thinking that approaches the unknowability of the Trinity is intimately connected to the legacy of rhetoric, and in his extended response to Grondin he catalogues its affinities. Socrates’famous“Wissen des Nicht-Wissens”(knowing that he does not know), Plato’s poetic philosophy,Aristotle...