The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics by John Arthos (review)

In 1988, one of those scenes at which a student of philosophy would yearn to be present took place in a Heidelberg pub. Hans-Georg Gadamer met with Jean Grondin, who was already at work on his brilliant biography of the philosopher, for some conversation and, one trusts, a glass or two of that Rhenish Gadamer greatly loved. The encounter may put us in mind of those brilliant anecdotes that introduce and frame many of the dialogues of Gadamer’s beloved Plato. But there is also a touch of the way James Boswell so artfully provoked Samuel Johnson into some of his most telling and memorable utterances. Many philosophers have difficulty appreciating such moments. They prefer clear ideas articulated in coherent arguments. But for a literary critic or anyone with a feel for drama, such moments not only express ideas but situate them in their human context in a way that bare argument can rarely do.

The scene itself—dialogue embedded in social conviviality (in vino veritas)—incarnates Gadamer’s philosophy perfectly. Grondin reports that he asked Gadamer a question—not “small talk,” but a very philosophic question indeed, as deep as those questions that arise in the most everyday circumstances among Socrates and his young friends. It may not be going too far to suggest that for Gadamer, real thinking is only possible between friends—those “friends for truth’s sake” that Plato speaks of. Gadamer himself refers to Aristotle’s syngnome and remarks that “only friends can advise each other” (1989, 323). Grondin’s question was, on what does the universality of hermeneutics rest? Gadamer did not reply immediately. Instead, he paused to think for a moment. Gadamer was not simply answering but answering for his philosophy, and the pause for thought shows that a real dialectic was taking place, a mutual opening to a truth that never shows itself as merely received or repeated.

In contrast to a politician who sticks to his talking points, Gadamer did not, as we might have expected, respond by referring to one of the key concepts from his writings—speaking, say, of dialogue or question and answer or “consciousness effected by history” (“wirkungeschichtliches Bewusstsein”), or tradition. Rather, he responded by saying that the universality of hermeneutics lay in “the interior word.” In his biography, Grondin registers his own surprise at this answer. He certainly knew that Gadamer had spoken of this concept in a few dense and important pages toward the end of Truth and Method and not infrequently in later essays, but presumably he had not realized that it was so central in Gadamer’s thinking. And indeed every really good answer to a question is at once familiar and surprising and at the same time “right” in a very precise way (Johnson famously defined “wit” as saying something no one had quite thought before but in so clear and striking a way that its correctness seems self-evident). This is an answer’s power to provoke fresh thinking and put things in a new light.

Having put the clue into our hands, Gadamer did not elaborate but left it to his interlocutor (and through him us) to take up this provocative remark. All the more welcome, therefore, is John Arthos’s important book The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics. Arthos provides as comprehensive and detailed an account as one might hope for. After setting the stage with a brief introduction, Arthos examines the texts and thinkers Gadamer draws on in his discussion of language: chapters on Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman reflections on language and the key doctrines of immanence and transcendence in the Trinity are followed by chapters on Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Hegel, and Heidegger. Arthos is not simply documenting Gadamer’s sources. Certainly, he is guided by the specific issue Gadamer centers on. But provoked by Gadamer, he reopens the very dialogue with tradition that constitutes Gadamer’s path to his own insights. This is methodologically...