I was reading Gadamer, reading, reading, reading, when the opening of one of his paragraphs near the end of the first chapter made me kind of chuckle, then do a double take, and then flip back through the chapter to see if there were other instances of this amusing mode of expression – a style I didn’t expect in a chapter on hermeneutics and language. The line that caught me is where Gadamer begins, “If I have not misunderstood Johannes Lohmann’s exposition…”(14), and while I first thought it was funny and displayed an intriguing humility, though perhaps a bit facetiously, I was intrigued by the fact that he used a qualifier at all, rather than making the assumption, as most writers do, that they have understood, going on from there to either appropriate and utilize the argument, or decimate it line by line.

Further down in the same paragraph, making me laugh again, he tags on “…as the beautiful German word says” (14). This, at first, seemed so out of place in a formal argument about hermeneutics, but it led me to realize that it was just that type of language that was making this essay an enjoyable read rather than a tortuous experience in uncovering the limits of my own ignorance.

I was also intrigued when Gadamer said,”…we are familiar with the strange, uncomfortable, and tortuous feeling we have when we do not have the right word. When we have found the right expression (it need not always be one word), when we are certain that we have it, then it ‘stands,’ then something has come to a ‘stand’ (15). But I found the idea incredibly ironic when I considered that language, the word, is ultimately only symbol; therefore, articulated or unarticulated, we hypothetically still have the feeling, the possession of the experience. Is it only in the translation making it available for mass appropriate that we feel relief? Or is it only in the naming or articulation that we feel we have fully possessed, appropriated, or translated? He follows this later with the statement that “Understanding is language-bound” (15), not, as he said, to create any kind of linguistic relativism, but rather to underscore his idea that we can only understand through language. Later on, Gadamer also says, “Precisely through our finitude, the particularity of our being, which is evident even in the variety of languages, the infinite dialogue is opened in the direction of the truth that we are” (16). But DOES this knowing or discovery of oneself require language; can we only know ourselves through the removal and translation, the symbolic system, of language? Or can we know without? I found it additionally ironic when Gadamer talks about the lovers communicating with language that sounds like advertising labels or technical terms, and goes on to critique the devolution of language, as the modern industrial world brings about “an approximation of language to a technical sign-system” (16). But really, isn’t all language just a sign-system anyway, technical to some degree or another?

~ Cassie