I found reading the Gadamer passages an uncomfortable experience. On the one hand, I am attracted to the more mystical concepts—of being possessed by understanding (“we are possessed by something and precisely by means of it we are opened up for the new, the different, the true”) and of language as an entity with it’s own teleological ends (“For language is not only an object in our hands, it is the reservoir of tradition and the medium in and through which we exist and perceive our world”). Gadamer’s ideas seem to sanctify the obsession with language and texts with which we are engaged—I hear many theological echoes in the “ecstatic self-forgetting” he describes as the basis of self-knowledge, and in the notion of a “unity of understanding.” Interpretation here is a kind of Eucharist.
On the other hand, to define our being by our relationship to language, as Gadamer seems to do, I find potentially dangerous and limiting. Doesn’t such a definition deny the humanity of those without language, as well as squander the human wealth of immediate, unutterable, sensual experience?
--Ann