The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

John Arthos

Description

This intellectual history and textual analysis of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s famous and obscure theme of the verbum interius, or “inner word,” serves as an indispensable guide to and reference for hermeneutic theory. John Arthos here gives a full exposition and interpretation of the medieval doctrine of the inner word, long one of the most challenging ideas in Gadamer’s Truth and Method. The scholastic idea of a word that is thought but not yet spoken served Augustine as an analogy for the procession of the Trinity, served Aquinas as the medium between divine ideas and human expression, and serves Gadamer as an expression of the embodied nature of human language. Arthos offers a history of the idea of the inner word in ancient and medieval thought, its place in German philosophy, and its significance for probing the deepest implications of hermeneutic understanding.

Arthos also provides a close reading of Gadamer’s exegesis of the source texts of the doctrine of the inner word. He cross-references Gadamer’s analyses with the original texts and draws out their Heideggerian and Hegelian overtones. Through this close reading, Arthos deepens our understanding of the radical nature of Gadamer’s thought, which not only calls upon the authority of tradition but also develops some of the profoundest insights of classical and Judaeo-Christian teaching about language.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie du langage
• Philosophie antique
• Biblical Studies
• Surveys
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Colegio Mayor Universitario Santo Tomás de Aquino
• Thomas Aquinas
• Truth and Method
• German philosophy
• Hermeneutics
• Ethics
• Augustine of Hippo
• Classical
• Ancient
• Augustine
• History

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 juillet 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268074647
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Inner Word in Gadamer’s HermeneuticsThe Inner Word
in Gadamer’s
Hermeneutics
John Arthos
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana0
2
5
7
8
1
0
7
3
7
9
6
5
0
6
5
Copyright © 2009 by University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 465
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Arthos, John, 19 –
The inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics / John Arthos.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
isbn 8-0-268-0204-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 190 –20. Wahrheit und Methode.
2. Hermeneutics—Religious aspects— Catholic Church.
3. De differentia verbi divini et humani. 4. De natura verbi
intellectus. 5. Word (Theology) I. Title.
bx179.p4a7 2009
12 '.686092 —dc22
20090125
This book is printed on recycled paper.To my parentsAre not our lives too short for that full utterance which
through all our stammerings is of course our only and
abiding intention?
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim2
4
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
List of Abbreviations xix
Introduction: From Logos to Verbum to Sprache 1
Part I. The Verbum in the History of Ideas
Chapter 1 The Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian Word
Chapter 2 Immanence and Transcendence in the Trinity
Chapter 3 Hermeneutic Anticipations: The Circular Ontology
of the Word in Augustine
Chapter 4 “The Word Is Not Reflexive”: Mind and World
in Aquinas and Gadamer
Chapter 5 The Pattern of Hegel’s Trinity: The Legacy of
Christian Immanence in German Thought
Chapter 6 Heidegger: On the Way to the Verbum
19
16
135
98
70
311
3
2
1
5
5
9
viii Contents
Part II. Exegesis, Truth and Method, Part III,2,B
Chapter 7 The Verbum and Augustine’s Inner Word 21
Chapter 8 The Aquinas Section
Chapter 9 The Neoplatonist Section 28
Chapter The Three Differences
Chapter Gadamer’s Summation and Prospectus (pars. 21 )‒‒
Part III. Conclusion
Chapter Gadamer and the Verbum Interius
Appendix: Source Texts
De natura verbi intellectus
De differentia verbi divini et humani 38
Notes
Bibliography 44
Index
458
390
364
36
35 12
33 22 11
311 10
260 Preface
There is, however, an idea that is not Greek which does more justice to the
being of language, and so prevented the forgetfulness of language in Western
thought from being complete. This is the Christian idea of incarnation.
—Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, III, 2,B
It is still a commonplace, at least in the popular culture of the
West, that language and thought, expression and meaning, are separate.
The instrumentalism of a scientific culture has encouraged us to think
that language is the container of meaning, a tool for communication. To
be sure, the idea that such a separation of language and thought is
problematic has remained alongside it all the while, but often as an almost
subterranean theme. In one of Cicero’s fictional dialogues, Scaevola locates
the moment in history when the study of philosophy and oratory were
separated:
The subjects that we are now investigating were designated by a single
title, the whole study and practice of the liberal sciences being entitled
philosophy. Socrates robbed them of this general designation, and in
his discussions separated the science of wise thinking from that of
elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together. This
ixx Preface
is the source from which has sprung the undoubtedly absurd and
unprofitable and reprehensible severance between the tongue and the
brain, leading to our having one set of professors to teach us to think
1and another to teach us to speak.
In arguing prodigiously against the separation of thought and language,
the twentieth-century German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer
appealed for support to an ancient theological conception, the verbum
interius or “inner word.” The phrase was coined when Augustine of Hippo
used the analogy of human language to help explain the mystery of the
Trinity. Just as that which our words newly conceive is always already
linguistic, so the Son, conceived from the Father, is not a different being.
The Father begets an offspring who is eternal with him, and nothing new
is created in that birth. But the verbum is no mere analogy, since the
divine procession itself is conceived in terms of language, as the prologue
2to the Gospel of John affirms: “and the Word was God” (1:1). Such an
ontological relation is as if the pupation of the chrysalis was a being
al3ready in flight, its metamorphosis indistinct from its origin and end. In
thinking through this enigma, Gadamer considers the verbum from the
reverse direction—How does the human word resemble divine
procession? By turning to Christian authority on the question of language,
Gadamer does a great deal more than reinforce Cicero’s insistence on the
unity of word and thought. To conceive of the word in the terms of
Christian revelation takes us back along the path of metaphysics where
language theory is no longer at home, and asks us to consider whether there
is not something we may have missed.
The proper domain of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is the meaning that
lies beyond the boundary of the statement, the logical proposition, and
the code, those tools of information which have become “the destiny of
4Western civilization.” But rather than move towards a poetics of the
ineffable, Gadamer draws on the traditional studies of rhetoric, practical
reason, hermeneutics, and process theology to develop a model of culture
5and history as an unending conversation. The idea of the word (logos or
verbum) that passes through and between Greek philosophy and
JudaeoChristian theology is a rich tradition of thought that serves as a central
impetus for the hermeneutic theory of language, part of a long
countertradition that unites strains of humanist rhetorical culture with a
theology of kerygma:8
Preface xi
[W]hen the Greek idea of logic is penetrated by Christian theology,
something new is born: the medium of language, in which the mediation of the
incarnation event achieves its full truth. Christology prepares the way
for a new philosophy of man, which mediates in a new way between
the mind of man in its finitude and the divine infinity. Here what we
have called the hermeneutical experience finds its own, special ground.
(Truth and Method, )
If the rhetorical tradition returns logos to the wholeness of the person
and the particularity of the situation so that the word is now irreducibly
an existential fact, the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the word makes this
relationship identical with history. Logos is now transposable with
person, culture, and world. The Judaeo-Christian Word takes language the
furthest distance possible from instrumentality.
The Christian concept of the word is an historical turning point in the
narrative of a humanist paideia obscured by the grand march of
rationalist empiricism. If Cicero locates a definitive moment of division that
had fateful consequences for Western culture, Gadamer finds another
moment that salvages a better possibility for that culture. It represents a
path not taken, buried under the terrible momentum of the more
efficient path, but like the scribes who preserved a textual heritage through
dark times, the idea of the word as it developed in theology provided a
safe haven for a way of thinking that would come vibrantly alive again
with hermeneutics. The confluence of the Greek propensity for
abstraction, Hebrew covenant identity, and Christian trinitarianism produced
an idea powerful enough to stubbornly shadow the implacable progress
of technical reason, lying in wait to point another way when that other
had spent itself.
The verbum interius represents a high point of theological rigor in
approaching the meaning of the “incarnate word.” Aquinas’s
commentary on the Gospel of John took the evangelist quite literally, asking
what “vocal sounds” have to do with the Logos of the prologue. Thomas
followed Augustine in analogizing the relation of “the conception in our
mind” and “the vocal utterance” with the Father’s will and its worldly
6expression. The “inner word” is a kind of lekton that straddles the
interiority of the mind and the embodied world, one foot in each. It was a
concept formed at a crossing point of cultures, not only in the tensive
amalgam of Platonist, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonist influences, but in
42xii Preface
the conflicting upsurge of mystical and conceptual impulses of dogmatic
theology. Pulled in one direction by the urge to cultivate the division
7of an inner and outer life, and in another by the logic of incarnation;
drawn towards the clarity of analytic logic (as ratio, definitio, and
adaequatio), but in the opposite direction by the trinitarian logic of
procession, dialectic, and paradox, the verbum interius marks a nexus of
con8tending cultural tendencies. For Gadamer it represented the possibility
of a different way of thinking about our own tradition, a discarded
narrative thread that we might pick up and weave into a framework for the
linguistic basis of knowledge.
Gadamer’s principal statement on the verbum interius occurs in a short
section of his magnum opus, Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method),
9originally published in 1960. The verbum section is undoubtedly one
of the most difficult to understand, so my effort here is in part to make
it more accessible. Alasdair MacIntyre wrote of Truth and Method:“To
accord a text the status of a classic is to say that it is a text with which it
is necessary to come to terms, that failure to reckon with it will seriously
harm our inquiries. Yet there are sometimes obstacles to be overcome,
10before we can learn what such a text has to teach us.” But more
importantly, “Verbum and logos” is an effort to grasp the significance of the
inner word as a critical moment in a narrative that Gadamer wishes now
to place back on track.
Argument and Structure
What is the relationship between human beings and language? The
hermeneutic structure of that relation is a