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i
 The Inner Voice in
Gadamer’s Hermeneutics
 The Inner Voice in
Gadamer’s Hermeneutics
Mediating Between Modes
of Cognition in the Humanities
and Sciences

Andrew Fuyarchuk

LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

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Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fuyarchuk, Andrew, author.

Title: The inner voice in Gadamer’s hermeneutics : mediating between modes of
cognition in the humanities and sciences / Andrew Fuyarchuk.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017019011 (print) | LCCN 2017016307 (ebook) | ISBN
9781498547062 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498547055 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1900-2002. | Hermeneutics. | Science and the
humanities. | Humanities.
Classification: LCC B3248.G34 (print) | LCC B3248.G34 F89 2017 (ebook) | DDC
193—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019011

∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

 Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii
Prefaceix
PART I: FROM THE INNER WORD TO THE INNER VOICE 1
1 Gadamer the Post-Modern 3
2 Folk Intuitions about the Embodied Word 17
3 The Inner Voice and the Divine 45
4 Event of Language 69
5 Gadamer and the Pythagorean-Plato 99
PART II: HERMENEUTICS AND SCIENCE:
DIALOGICAL INTEGRATION 115
6 Gadamer and Helmholtz 119
7 The Problem Renewed 167
8 Gadamer, Mithen, Donald 199
9 The Inner Voice and Non-Manipulative Hmmmm 209
Bibliography241
Index 257
About the Author 265

v
 Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without a quiet and reliable place to
do research and write. Thanks to the staff and community at Angus Glen and
Cornell Public Libraries in Markham. I am also grateful to my employers and
in particular Heather Garland for accommodating my requests for a teach-
ing schedule that would give me the time to study and complete this work.
Scholars from whose works I learned a great deal and that assisted in the
development of the arguments are mentioned throughout the book. Thanks to
the anonymous reviewer and to everyone at Lexington and in particular Jana
Hodges-Kluck, Anita Singh and Rachel Weydert. This book is dedicated to
my family, friends, and Beijia Lin.

vii
 Preface

The inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics refers to the meaning that exceeds
anything explicitly said. This explanation has been subsumed within meta-
physical and theological parameters of interpretation with little regard for the
implication of Gadamer’s turn to the living language for understanding the
inner word. An examination of his phenomenology of the inner word reveals
its musical (rhythmic and tonal) dimensions and how they function to harmo-
nize disparate orientations in the middle voice; above all for Gadamer, those
that underlie modes of cognition in both the humanities and the sciences—a
visual and auditory ethos. However, understood as constituting the music of
language discernible in the middle voice, the inner word is also suppressed/
forgotten by the technological extension of sight, that is, print and thus
requires a turn of the inner ear or auditory disposition. Theories of language
in evolutionary and cognitive science are both assessed in light of Gadamer’s
insights into the nature of thought and employed to account for a dimension
of language that is inscribed in the lingual minds of our species, which when
recalled by the inner ear enables us to think of such opposites together as
we find in the humanities and sciences together. This thinking together is
expressed in a double account of an object of inquiry, such as the one I put
forward about the inner word in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.

ix
 Part I

FROM THE INNER WORD

TO THE INNER VOICE
 Chapter 1

Gadamer the Post-Modern

Edward Slingerland speaks from the side of science in What Science Offers
the Humanities. He acknowledges that both Heidegger and Gadamer resisted
the Platonic metaphysical tradition with Aristotle’s embodied practical wis-
dom, but that they did not stay the course.1 Rather than investigate how ideas
arise from sense experience, they retreat into the private realm of experience,
culture, and language. Although working with a different concept of science
than Slingerland,2 Ernest Gellner concurs with this assessment of herme-
neutics. In Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, he writes, “Everything is
meaning, and meaning is everything, and hermeneutics is its prophet. What-
ever is, is made by the meaning conferred on it.”3 For Gellner, the “meaning”
to which Gadamer refers is subjective and formed in cultural packages that
are impossible to translate between cultures let alone from one individual to
another in the same culture. He calls this “narcissism-hermeneuticism.” The
influence it has had at the academy is evident in Slingerland’s assessment of
post-modernism. For both Slingerland and Gellner, on account of holding that
there is no knowledge of facts independent of a linguistic-historical context,
hermeneutics is a proto-post-modernism and thus ultimately responsible for
the institutional and cultural divide between the humanities and sciences.
Given the extent to which post-modernism thus understood via hermeneu-
tics has fostered a climate of self-involvement, it is difficult to understand
how the post-modern fiction is intelligible to even readers of post-modernism.
Slingerland finds a reply in Gadamer’s fusion of horizons. He explains:
“According to certain understandings of the process of interpretation, evi-
dence plays little or no role: interpretation is the result of the free apprehen-
sion of spirit by spirit, unfettered by the sort of appeal to concrete evidence
or proof that we require in our more mundane interactions with the physical
world.”4 According to Slingerland, overcoming the conflation of truth with
3
4 Chapter 1

human caprice and fancy in hermeneutics consists of a mystical meeting of

minds divorced from a public forum of discussion. E. O. Wilson concurs
and explains that post-modernism’s notion of reality is “a state constructed
by the mind, not perceived by it” and thus without any objective truth, “only
prevailing notions of truth disseminated by ruling social groups.”5 For him,
hermeneutics undermines the Enlightenment ideal of a unity of knowledge.
Andreas Graeser, Stanley Rosen, and Richard Wolin have raised the alarm
in this regard from the side of the humanities. According to Graeser, because
history influences understanding there is no way to think rationally. Against
all reason, it is possible for Gadamer to understand that “p” but impossible to
disapprove of it.6 The upshot is that hermeneutics is a philosophy of ambigu-
ity, ambivalence, and non-commitment. Because hermeneutics has not the
wherewithal to develop a defensible position, it is “open” and “tolerant” to
the point of embracing positions that undermine it. Stanley Rosen’s assess-
ment concurs with Graeser. He argues that by denying that eternity is acces-
sible hermeneutics transforms history itself into eternity and essence with
the result that “Each finite historical epoch is an appearance of the essence
of being.”7 In other words, once historicism obliterates the transhistorical
standards for gauging truth and goodness, people mistake the latter with
whatever happens to be happening. Rosen echoes Gellner on the narcissism
of hermeneutics: “When, however, man becomes detached from things, or
lost in speech, he comes to think of himself as a radically or exclusively
historical being, a being that is nothing but self-inquiry or, more accurately,
self-interpretation.”8
Richard Wolin’s criticism of hermeneutics is on the surface more aggres-
sive than Graeser’s, but in the course of making his argument sides with him
and Rosen. Wolin argues that Gadamer was complicit in the rise of National
Socialism, and states, “what is striking about the recent scholarly findings is
the remarkable ease with which more traditional German nationalists such as
Gadamer embraced Nazi policies.”9 Yet, at the end of his essay Wolin wres-
tles with whether Gadamer securing of a professorial chair was motivated by
opportunism or a sincere support for the political ideology. Yes, Gadamer
voluntarily attended a political rehabilitation camp or Dozentendbund in
1936 that may have facilitated his promotion at the university, but Wolin also
reports that he referred to it as paramilitary nonsense.10 Yes, it is possible to
construe his philosophy as defending authority and tradition,11 but Wolin also
quotes Gadamer stating of Hitler, “He impressed me as being simple, indeed
awkward like a boy playing at being a soldier.”12 Yes, Gadamer’s1934 essay
“Plato and the Poets” might place him “in line with the political Platonists
and their glorification of the Republic as a contemporary political model,”13
but Wolin also states, “One should be clear that ‘Plato and the Poets’ is hardly
a Nazi text.”14 With these sorts of equivocations on his initial assessment of
 Gadamer the Post-Modern 5

Gadamer being a Nazi sympathizer, Wilson discloses the gist of Gadamer’s

position detected by Graeser. Hermeneutics is a philosophy of ambiguity and
non-commitment.
The aforementioned arguments against Gadamer support the contention
that hermeneutics removes grounds for judgment and criticism. Yet, Sling-
erland, Gellner, Graeser, and Rosen might also be subsuming Gadamer to a
presupposition about thought and language with which he would disagree.
His critics presuppose the identity of thought with being independent of lan-
guage. In contrast to them, as Gadamer says, “Being that can be understood
is language.”15 His words could be construed as an allusion to Heidegger’s
pronouncement in The Letter on Humanism, “Language is the house of
Being. In it man dwells” in which case, Gadamer might well yield to the very
conflation of Being with speech that has been used to explain Heidegger’s
errors in judgment. However, as Donatella Di Cesare reports of Gadamer,
“In a retrospective interview conducted in 1996 he clearly warns: ‘But no, I
have never meant and never said that everything is language.’”16 According to
her, Gadamer’s oft-quoted phrase in Truth and Method means that language
is “the house of mankind” which she says refers to the familiar and uncan-
niness of our mother tongue. Does this not lead to cultural relativism? DiC-
esare’s interpretation of Gadamer on language plays into the criticism of his
detractors. In order to circumvent them, it is apt to think of how Gadamer’s
belief that “language is the home of mankind” stands apart from Heidegger’s
“language is the house of Being.” Heidegger thinks of Being in terms of
the house and hold or the Greek oikos—a private space in which matters of
personal concern are cared for.17 This is in marked contrast to Gadamer who
expands the house to include the public space with which he identifies the
home of humankind. For Gadamer, the home of humankind transcends par-
ticular dialects. Rod Coltman is thus correct when he states that “Language
for Gadamer, as for Heidegger is indeed ‘the house of Being,’”18 provided
that a distinction is made between a private household and a public space of
intersubjective testability whose epistemic value Gadamer’s detractors would
surely approve of.

METHOD

This book has set for itself the task of opening up new possibilities for
research in the humanities that interface with contemporary science. This is
also the aim of Daniel Dennett in Freedom Evolves;19 however, in contrast to
his naturalism that tends to insist upon the veracity of the scientific method
alone, the method employed here respects the assumptions of both depart-
ments of learning. The validity of the scientific method is deemed to depend
6 Chapter 1

upon a spectator position; that of the humanities on the position of being a

participant to an inquiry about something that is not self-involving because it
demands a de-centering of subject’s subjectivity. The sciences and humani-
ties are not mutually exclusive of one another when understood in terms of
their respective modes of perception—the visual and the auditory. This way
of thinking about thinking in the humanities and sciences meets the expecta-
tions of an embodied cognitive science and phenomenology. Both reject the
conviction that objectivity is possible without examining the ways in which
perception mediates our understanding of beings/entities. The fact that argu-
ments by scientists discussed in part 2—for example, cognitive psychologist
Merlin Donald, and theorists about the evolution of language Ray Jackendoff
and Steven Brown—exemplify movement between the two aforementioned
stances, which suggests that the mode of cognition characteristic of the
humanities has already been bridged into the sciences.20 However, most sci-
entists have not acknowledged this crossover. In the rare instances of Shaun
Gallagher whose “interaction theory” interfaces with what will be argued
for here in relation to the living language,21 and Donald who cites Marshall
McLuhan and Northrop Frye as influences,22 the implications for the scientific
method as well as for conducting research in the humanities has not been
addressed. In order to bring about a rapprochement between them, dialogue
must include cross-fertilization. This has not been acknowledged by the dis-
torted and one-sided portrayal of hermeneutics presented by Slingerland, et
al. possibly on account of his decision about the history of philosophy that
does not pass the universal acid test; those who do not learn from history are
bound to repeat its mistakes. Gadamer takes this adage to heart. His study of
Plato and the Greeks brought to his attention the interplay of standpoints in
the middle voice that is a precondition for developing a double account of
an object of knowledge. This is clear in Gadamer’s commentary on Plato’s
Lysis. I consult that dialogue in order to explain concepts and themes that
surface throughout the book including the visual and auditory dispositions,
modes of cognition and their interplay. In order to circumvent the criticism
that a return to Plato restricts the relevance of this project to him, I corrobo-
rate Gadamer’s insights with research in other fields.
In Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628) René Descartes argues for
truth being a simple, immediate, certain, and indubitable apprehension by
the mind. He is not referring to a flash of intuition, but to a clear and self-
evident arithmetic or geometrical demonstration/deduction. This criterion
for knowledge also stands behind Edward deBono’s “White hat thinking.”23
It is impersonal, value neutral, and universal. There is, however, evidence
of it arising from a particular way of perceiving the world. Steven Crowell
writes succinctly of Patrick Heelan in this regard: “Heelan argues that such
a mode of perception is historically specific and learned. What he calls
 Gadamer the Post-Modern 7

‘Euclidean vision’ is made possible by the codes embedded in the specific

artificial environment that became predominant in the ‘early fourteen hun-
dreds.’”24 Crowell is referring to an environment that conditions people to
perceive things according to a spatial frame of reference defined by units of
length, width, and depth.
The other kind of thinking is what deBono calls “water logic” or “Green hat
thinking.” It does not move by certain steps from the self-evident to the obvi-
ous or by calculating outcomes by managing the means of production with
hypothetical imperatives, but instead moves by leaps of insight and intuition.
Shoji Nagataki contrasts these two forms of thinking with reference to the
game of chess between the computer named Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov
in 1997. Whereas computers “just calculate as many moves as possible up
to the limit of physical resources,” says Nagataki, “For a great player like
Kasparov there can be a move, made without knowing what makes him/her
choose it, which nevertheless proves to be extremely insightful. It can only be
described as a stroke of genius that prompted him/her to do so.”25 The human
mind therefore differs from a computer because humans have a capacity for
non-logical thinking that computers lack. He calls it “a stroke of genius.” The
problem with associating “water logic” or the alternative to logical thinking
with an inexplicable talent is that, as Gadamer argues at the outset of Truth
and Method, it indicates that one is interpreting tact from a narrowly con-
ceived scientific point of view. Gadamer resists this tendency. He argues that
an education in aesthetics fosters this “stroke of genius” (which I discuss later
in reference to Kant). If perception mediates knowledge, then challenging
one’s dominant mode of perception and understanding is necessary in order
to achieve a degree of objectivity about a given subject matter. The implica-
tion for the debate about distinguishing Artificial Intelligence from human
intelligence is that the basis for distinguishing them from one another shifts
from disputes about whether or not the manipulation of design networks by
a computer can be called a “stroke of genius” to bio-physiological processes
and sensory perception, which computers self-evidently lack. At this point, I
might consult the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He introduced the impor-
tance of the body and perception to understanding human cognition. His argu-
ment is dealt with in the context of its revival by Evan Thompson in part 2 and
is thus put aside here. Given the overall goal to negotiate the barriers between
the humanities and sciences with a method that combines contraries, it is
apt to consult a scientist who stands opposed to both Nagataki’s position on
insight and Gadamer’s contention that embodied cognition is lingual.
In contrast to Nagataki who distinguishes the human mind from a com-
puter because of insight, Daniel Dennett argues that the human brain func-
tions according to the same algorithmic procedures as that of a computer
and that Deep Blue was better than Kasparov at applying good design
8 Chapter 1

principles.26 In a sense, Dennett is correct. Contra what Nagataki suggests,

insight is not simply a gift, but rather a skill acquired by training in how to
extract principles from prior learning or programming of rules. In support
of these rules and design principles being mental mechanisms and processes
operating at a “sub-personal level” that is not accessible to the “personal
level” of consciousness, especially self-consciousness,27 Dennett however
argues in a way that might undermine that very claim. He quotes Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart and the painter Philip Guston admitting that they them-
selves disappear into the creative process and as a result cannot explain how
they create. Dennett includes himself among them and names twenty-two co-
authors of his essay “In Darwin’s wake, where am I?”28 However, by listing
the names of his co-authors, has he not brought to consciousness the design
networks that have shaped his thinking? Has he not lost himself in other’s
ideas and then gained himself back again? He does not deny being the author
of “In Darwin’s wake, where am I?” When treated as performative rather
than propositional, he disappears into linguistically constituted worlds of
meaning other than his own in order to refine the boundaries of his thinking
in language. Listing the names of artists, poets, and writers at the end of his
essay is thus not evidence of cognitive processes being operative about which
he is not aware and instead, the opposite. The list is evidence of his ability to
bring to consciousness design networks about which he had not been aware
while immersed in thought about where he had been in the midst of thinking
about a topic.
This argument against Dennett’s attempt to separate thought from language
is not without precedent. Assuming for now that he could not claim to be
an author without having a sense of self, Giorgio Agamben’s arguments are
pertinent to recall. He explains that philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and
Edmund Husserl, who tend like Descartes to model knowledge on mathemat-
ics, cannot avoid slipping into reasoning that a linguistically constituted self
is a condition of objectivity. Agamben demonstrates, as I have attempted here
with respect to Dennett, that their words attest to the fact that “the subject
has its site and origin” in language “and that only in and through language
is it possible to shape transcendental apperception as an ‘I think.’”29 The
capacity to view experience from the outside of experience and from there
separate thought from language, that is, Dennett’s position, is itself a feat
of language. To deny Gadamer’s position that all understanding happens in
language cannot but lead to the negation of the self. Indeed, this is effectively
Dennett’s starting point for thinking about thought. Since thinking consists
of algorithmic processes about which we can never be conscious, a conscious
self is “just impossible.” Or rather, it is “impossible” until we examine his use
of language and test his words against what he does. This does not however
mean that the claim to objectively valid knowledge is impossible.
 Gadamer the Post-Modern 9

For Gadamer, the value-neutral standard for knowledge, that is, mathemat-
ics, as well as the concept of the self or non-self it presupposes, is justified
for the very reasons tabled by Descartes. The “spectator standpoint” yields
distance from the distorting influence of personal experience. However, in
contrast to Descartes and Dennett, Gadamer does not treat that standpoint as
the only standard, but instead as a way toward knowing that prepares the self
for a return to the cave in a frame of mind capable of recognizing forms again
in the medium of language as various articulations of the same idea in differ-
ent contexts. These contexts are opened up by the resurfacing of social-being
or what Gadamer calls openness or listening and commensurate with it a dis-
tinctly different manner of thinking than deduction from agreed upon prem-
ises. The manner of thinking is lateral or asymmetrical and is characterized
as follows: it extracts content from an idea, relates that content to opposing
ideas, changes concepts and perceptions, reorganizes a system of beliefs,30
and performs these operations without knowing where it is going in advance,
that is, while striving toward “something absent.”31 The sort of thinking that
incorporates these skills tends to recognize patterns in works whose operating
assumptions allegedly diverge from one another. Asymmetrical thinking thus
combines mutually exclusive positions while retaining their independence
from one another, which is how Gadamer characterizes cognition, insight,
and knowing.32
The dialogue that Gadamer focuses upon in order to expose the limits
of thinking that is overly determined by the sight of sense impressions and
demands a resolution to the contradictions it generates, which in turn brings
a distinctly different ontological dimension for thinking to the fore is Plato’s
Lysis. In the Lysis (205b–206d) Socrates demonstrates that defining friend-
ship on the basis of its aspects or characteristics generates a contradiction.
Friendship is neither like to like nor unlike to unlike and thus cannot be
defined.33 In fact, the aporia compels the speakers to reflect upon the limits
of how they understand things and thereby instigates a change in their way
of thinking. This is clear in Socrates’ discussion with Hippothales. Gadamer
writes, “In a typically Socratic fashion, Socrates makes the boy admit that
only he will be esteemed who knows how to do something.”34 Knowing how
in this case is not a techne in the sense of craftsmanship and instead, tact. Tact
does not follow ready-made rules or formulas by applying them indiscrimi-
nately to a problem in order to force a calculated outcome that advances what
one already believes. Rather, tact entails relinquishing one’s predetermined
habits of mind for the sake of understanding the thing itself. This relinquish-
ing of a prior understanding from a standpoint that is not subjective demands
a change in ethos. Hippothales’ lack of ethos is stifling. Rather challenge his
wishes and confront the object of his desire, he stands at a distance from Lysis
and preserves them. When Socrates inquired into the nature of Hippothales’
10 Chapter 1

desire, Ctesippus spoke on his behalf. Socrates takes leave of them and
brings the importance of experience in the acquisition of knowledge to the
fore. He does this by demonstrating the limits of reaching conclusions about
something based on sense impressions alone. When each of the definitions of
friendship based on fixed properties put forward by Lysis is refuted, the result
is the famous aporia of the Platonic dialogues. The aporia or “neither/nor”
realization unlocks a sense of not knowing and therefore a sense of lacking
that has two consequences: (1) it turns a passive neutral spectator into a lover
of knowledge and (2) it turns acquisitive desire into care for the good of the
thing discussed. Both (1) and (2) require a change in how we relate to others,
that is, the distinctly different ontological dimension, for which not all math-
ematicians have an ear. This is evident in Socrates’ criticism of Theaetetus.
He persists in thinking that the senses are passive in the process of seeking
knowledge (like Descartes) and therefore never realizes how the body’s way
of relating to and interacting with beings plays a role in determining what
we think they are. Like many a mathematician, he separates aesthesis from
noeisis. This separation, represented in Plato’s “ladder of love” in the Sym-
posium, is necessary in order to reason in precisely the way celebrated by
Descartes, but is also one side of the equation and is not without ramifications
that determine a change in stance.
Gadamer explains the positional epistemologies at play in the argument in
the Lysis when after referring to conditional friendships based on pleasure in
which the reasons for being friends always changes he writes:

On the contrary, where friendship and love exist, there is something primary
and fundamental: an unconditional being dear of something which is dear in
itself and which lies outside the whole chain of things which are held dear as
means to an end . . . Here the cause as the “because of” (dia ti) and the purpose
as the “for the sake of” (heneka tau) are clearly distinguished. But Socrates
can nevertheless still interchange dia ti and heneka tau just as in German one
interchanges wegen and umwillen . . . Means do present themselves as purposes;
they are encountered in a context of getting to a goal. Thus we are not dealing
here with a logical mistake, i.e., the confusion of a causal determination with a
final determination, but with the intertwining of both determinations in human
experience.35

Dia or “on account of ” pertains to causal explanations of the idea of friend-

ship; heneka tau or “that for the sake of which” to the thing itself or the state
of being friends in reality (toi onti). In the Lysis they are in a “tension-laden
relationship” to one another yet are also intertwined in human experience.
The tension resides in the causal explanations proceeding from an orienta-
tion toward beings that is opposite to that of “for the sake of which.” The
former way of thinking consists of defining friendship, for example, like to
 Gadamer the Post-Modern 11

like and unlike to unlike, in terms of fixed properties or observable physical

characteristics.36 This is a viable starting point, but as mentioned insufficient
as well. Gadamer specifies that causal reasoning includes a lack or “presence
of something bad” and that it treats the object of inquiry as a means to its own
good (utility). He adds that this “destroys the communal basis of the relation-
ship”;37 that very basis is however opened up by the other signification for
reasoning about the topic—“that for the sake of which.” “That for the sake
of which” refers to another mode of cognition and consists of “another mode
of being altogether” in which one “transcends everything conditional and
rises to what is truly real, to ontos on.”38 In contrast to causal explanations
whose regressive analyses reduce the object to being the effect of a preced-
ing cause (exemplified in “the ladder of love”), thinking in terms of the thing
itself preserves the good of the thing. This is achieved with another mode of
cognition, which is typical of friendship that “has its basis in a ‘neither/nor’
which longs for the positive, longs for the good.”39 In other words, there is a
way of relating to objects of knowledge that is analogous to how we relate to
friends. Just as friends want what is best for the other for their own sake so
too does one want what is best for the object of inquiry—that its potential and
possibilities be fully developed for its sake.40
According to Gadamer, a double account about an object of inquiry
captures the two modes of cognition.41 More than a few philosophers have
argued for this approach to relating understanding and knowledge to one
another.42 I deal with their arguments in due course. The overall gist of
things is, however exemplified by Peter Fristedt. In “On the Integration
of Scientific Knowledge into Self-Understanding,” he comes close to my
position. Reminiscent of F. Schleiermacher, he asserts that it is only in the
dialogue form of natural language in which one has “an orientation toward
the whole.”43 This follows from language mediating between the mind and
experience. However, he assumes that science does not recognize the said
mediation. However, it is not clear that his position holds for the likes of
Paul Feyerabend or, embodied cognitive science. Fristedt’s angle on the sci-
ences not being amenable to self-criticism is for the same reason suspect.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has argued extensively in support
of the influence of the affects. Scientists are often their own best critics
and these days they are successfully questioning on empirical grounds the
excesses of the imagination operative in philosophical theories. Neverthe-
less, Fristedt’s work rings true on there being a false dichotomy between the
sciences and humanities that is clarified primarily from “the linguistically
mediated world of our experience,”44 provided that he disengage the latter
from a first-person perspective and align it with “a new kind of objectivity”
in the middle voice. This sort of objectivity, in which the topic announces
itself to the speakers, follows from tracking modes of cognition back to
12 Chapter 1

dispositions or attunements that strive for balance, which is for Gadamer the
norm in all organic processes.
Locating the mind in the body and from there constructing different dis-
positional understandings is crucial to the task of removing contradictions in
everyday hermeneutical practices. This is what distinguishes Gadamer from
other endeavors to mediate between opposite sides of a question. P. Christopher
Smith alludes to this merging of orientations. After pointing out that, for
Gadamer, “dialectic” refers to the back-and-forth of reply and address, and, to
the collection and division according to essence, he points out that Gadamer
intentionally allows “them to merge with one another.”45 Smith has found in
Gadamer’s thought exactly what Gadamer finds in Plato’s Lysis. Both need
and fulfillment co-exist together for Socrates in his quest for knowledge as
they do among friends. That is to say, from the standpoint of a non-lover need
is instrumental and has no bearing upon goodness. Consequently, language
is little more than a tool for jockeying around for advantage. With respect to
a lover of learning, and the kind of goodness that belongs to them, Gadamer
highlights the term oikeon. It refers to that which belongs to the self or one’s
own good about which one is needy. He then remarks that das Angehörige
includes overtones of das Zugehörige, “of that which is proper to the house-
hold.”46 However, as mentioned earlier, Gadamer expands this “household”
to the public space. He marks this out by recounting the meaning of Being in
a dialogue about friendship rather than in a monological treatise. As indicated
by the figure of Socrates, the process of preserving what one has and being
at home or dwelling with what is most one’s own (belonging) transpires in a
dialogue with friends similarly disposed to wanting to understand what they
also have, but do not possess except when they are together. The Pythago-
rean proverb “Friends hold everything in common” is a refrain in Plato’s
dialogues.47 Attending to assumptions, prior understandings, and motivations
is the beginning of friendship because it entails understanding how another
person reasons about something not for the sake of one’s own advantage, but
for the sake of understanding the topic itself. Gadamer grasps this teaching
from the Lysis in Truth and Method.48 He contrasts two ways of thinking.
One way aims to free itself from “the power of language.” This is a dialec-
tic of concepts that is without passion or love and characteristic of “White
Hat” or logical thinking mentioned by deBono. The hermeneutic experience,
however, is just the opposite—the lover of things themselves experiences the
“back love” of the topic when it acts upon them. The lover becomes a beloved
in Love.49 The entire arrangement is harmonia that Heidegger explains
is the distinctive feature of philein, “loving” in the Heraclitean sense (or
friendship).50 Gadamer purifies the hermeneutical experience of these erotic
dimensions. Nevertheless, they are implicit to what he says above about the
activity of the thing itself being an action that is unlike the methodology of
 Gadamer the Post-Modern 13

science. In contrast to the latter, an event happens to the knower.51 The event
of understanding the thing itself in a hermeneutical experience is in the non–
self-involving, and instead self-transcending middle voice wherein a speaker
is both active and passive, lover and beloved in Love with a topic or idea
that acts on them. Participating in this hermeneutical experience requires,
as Gadamer suggests hearing (hören) or an auditory rather than visual
mode of cognition. However, he is not always explicit about the dialectic
consisting of a movement between modes of perception in a self-regulating
harmony of voices.

NOTES

1. Edward Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body

and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 88 and 91.
2. Slingerland holds that knowledge is mediated by perception, Gellner is an
objective realist.
3. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (New York: Routledge,
1992), 24.
4. Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, 226.
5. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf Inc., 1998), 40.
6. Andreas Graeser, Issues in the Philosophy of Language Past and Present:
Selected Papers (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 175.
7. Stanley Rosen, “Post-Modernism and the End of Philosophy,” in Canadian
Journal of Political and Social Theory 9, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 93.
8. Stanley Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1969), 214.
9. Richard Wolin, “Fascism and Hermeneutics: Gadamer and the Ambiguities of
‘Inner Emigration’” in Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach ed., Nazi Germany and
the Humanities (Oxford: One World Publications, 2007), 102.
10. Ibid., 109–110.
11. Ibid., 113.
12. Ibid., 110.
13. Ibid., 119.
14. Ibid., 120.
15. TM, 470.
16. Donatella DiCesare, Gadamer: a Philosophical Portrait, trans. Niall Keane
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 155.
17. A household includes property, possession, and holdings (Haben); things that
Heidegger says are the original meaning of ousia. See Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis
of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 231.
18. Rod Coltman, “Gadamer, Hegel, and the Middle of Language,” Philosophy
Today 40, no. 1 (1996): 153.
14 Chapter 1

19. Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (Penguin Books, 2003), 14–15.

20. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: the Stages in the Evolution of
Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991; Steven Brown.
“Contagious Heterophony: A New Theory about the Origins of Music.” Musicae Sci-
entiae 21, no. 1 (2007): 3–26; Ray Jackendoff. “Parallels and Non-Parallels between
Language and Music,” Music Perception 26, no. 3 (2009): 3–19.
21. He argues for the cognitive sciences taking from hermeneutics concepts of
empathy and shared understanding both of which I explain in terms of auditory
disposition and attunement to the voice. He is also explicit about the problem being
addressed here, namely the relation of hermeneutics to science. See Shaun Gallagher,
“Hermeneutics and the Cognitive Sciences.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11, no.
10–11 (2004): 162–174.
22. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 170.
23. Edward deBono, New Thinking for the New Millennium (Beverly Hills: New
Millennium Press, 2000), 43.
24. Steven Crowell, “Patrick Heelan’s Innocent Eye,” in Hermeneutic Philosophy
of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J.,
ed. Babette E. Babich (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 247.
25. Shoji Nagataki and Satoru Hirose, “Phenomenology and the Third Generation
of Cognitive Science: Towards a Cognitive Phenomenology of the Body,” in Human
Studies 30, no. 3 (September 2007): 222.
26. Daniel Dennett, “In Darwin’s wake, where am I?” in Cambridge Companion to
Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 367.
27. I am consulting Varela’s discussion of Dennett and cognitivist theories of the
mind in Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied
Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991),
48–51.
28. Dennett, “In Darwin’s wake, where am I?” 373.
29. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience,
trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007), 51. In contrast to knowledge modeled on
mathematics that separates the thinking self from language and biological processes,
Agamben argues for positioning the self between biology and culture, ibid., 65.
30. Edward deBono, Six Thinking Hats (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 141;
144 and 154.
31. I am in debt to a “You-tube” interview by Tom Palmer with Terrence W. Dea-
con for this idea assumed by Gadamer to be implicit in the dialogue form. The notion
of the mind striving toward something absent is typical of Gadamer’s characteriza-
tion of being led by a question in a dialogue. Deacon explains this so-called absence
with constellations of teleodynamic forces beyond our conscious minds. “Incomplete
Nature, How Mind Emerged from Matter—Sane Society,” accessed Dec. 15, 2015,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvFE1Au3S8U.
32. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic” in Dialogue and Dialec-
tic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies of Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1980), 135.
 Gadamer the Post-Modern 15

33. The definition of friendship being like to like is refuted because people who
are like each other cannot be useful to one another, which offends the very idea of
friendship (214d–215a). The definition of friendship being unlike to unlike such as
between a poor and a rich man is a problem since it entails that enemies are friends
(215d–216b). Both definitions based on similarity and difference of characteristics are
self-cancelling.
34. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Logos and Ergon in Plato’s Lysis,” in Dialogue and
Dialectic, 9. See also Pausanias’ speech where he argues that no action is either good
or bad in itself because it depends on how it is performed. Plato, Symposium, 181.
35. Gadamer, “Logos and Ergon in Plato’s Lysis,” 16–17.
36. Plato, Lysis, 214a–216b.
37. Gadamer, “Logos and Ergon in Plato’s Lysis,” 15.
38. Ibid., 17.
39. Ibid., 15.
40. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.v.
41. For Plato on this double account see Phaedrus, 229d (mytholegein). The
double account resurfaces later in the dialogue in the parable of the charioteer that is
“like” the proof for the immortality of the soul (ibid., 245c–246b). In the Phaedo, the
change from natural scientific explanations for change to mathematical ones involv-
ing unity is hardly noticeable (96e–97a). Gadamer explains that when Socrates found
a solution to causation, he had also (“along with this”), found how two comes to be
from out of one. Accordingly, every scientific explanation partakes in the explanation
of numbers, that is, the principle of unity. Gadamer, “The Soul between Nature and
Spirit,” in The Beginning of Philosophy, 51.
42. See note 27 on Heelan. For a summative view of Heidegger on this question
see Miguel de Beistegui, Thinking with Heidegger: Displacements (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2003), 105. Other discussions of the topic are undertaken
by the following: Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities, trans. Clarence Smith
Howe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 63; David E. Storey, Naturalizing
Heidegger, His Confrontation with Nietzsche, His Contributions to Environmen-
tal Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 71; Michael
Wheeler, “Naturalizing Dasein and Other (Alleged) Heresies,” in Heidegger and
Cognitive Science, ed. Julian Kiverstein and Michael Wheeler (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), 180. The arguments of Edward Slingerland, Edward Wilson, and
Evan Thompson are discussed in chapter 7.
43. Peter Fristedt, “On the Integration of Scientific Knowledge into Self-Under-
standing,” in Inheriting Gadamer: New Directions in Philosophical Hermeneutics,
ed. Georgia Warnke (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2016), 194.
44. Ibid., 196.
45. Gadamer, “Logos and Ergon in Plato’s Lysis,” 1 Note 1.
46. Ibid., 18–19.
47. Plato, Lysis, 207c; Phaedrus, 279c.
48. TM, 460.
49. Plato, Phaedrus, 255e. Capitalized in order to represent the event of under-
standing in which the thing itself is announced in the middle voice.
16 Chapter 1

50. Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy? trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Klu-
back (New Haven: College and University Press, 1955), 47.
51. And Heidegger brings this out when he states that phainesthai is the middle
voice construction of phaino or light. I take this to be Heidegger’s formulation of
seeing with the ears. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1962), 51; SZ, 29. Hence-
forth “BT.”
 Chapter 2

Folk Intuitions about the

Embodied Word

Although by no means exhaustive of the available literature, this chapter

intends to show a pattern in commentaries on the inner word in Gadamer’s
thought. The pattern consists of moving toward a medial location in which to
think about the phenomenon of the inner word, that being a living dialogue,
and a recoiling from it toward concepts and ideas of the mind. In other words,
hermeneuts derail the phenomenological trajectory of their own inquiries and
sort information from a shared intersubjectively verifiable public world into
mutually exclusive categories of the mind and the body. Singerland calls
this tendency toward dualism a “folk intuition.” The scholars of the inner
word examined here that exemplify the problem include Jean Grondin, John
Arthos, James Risser, Philippe Eberhard, and Walter Lammi.

JEAN GRONDIN

In his essay “Gadamer and Augustine” Grondin reaches a point where a

phenomenology of the inner word is about to break open, and then aborts the
momentum by retreating into a notion of the inner word that is metaphysi-
cally encased in the sense of being of an intellectual nature. This is evident in
the way in which his treatment of Gadamer’s philosophy is at first wedded to
the phenomenological-existential character of Augustine’s and Heidegger’s
(early) thought, and then becomes divorced from it. He starts on the first foot-
ing when he explains Augustine’s existential struggle in De Doctrina Chris-
tiana impressed Heidegger.1 Augustine guided him to realize that there is a
difference between a neutral observer’s reading and understanding of a text
and that of a person wrapped up in it for the sake of a “living truth.” Gadamer
reports that Heidegger appeared to him as an Aristotle redivivus. If his

17
18 Chapter 2

testimony is any indication, in the early to mid-1920’s Heidegger was able to

bring Aristotle’s arid treatises into “life” presumably with a mimetic playful-
ness. Aristotle’s phenomenology and criticism of Plato spoke to Heidegger’s
hermeneutic of facticity in which interpretation is a way of gaining access to
the movement of meaning in existing historical life. It is not just Heidegger’s
own subjective quest for meaning that was activated by Aristotle’s writing,
but rather a “living truth” of historical life; repeatable and original. Some of
the most renowned philosophers of the twentieth century were captivated by
his dramatic manner of teaching; Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas,
Gerhard Krüger, Karl Löwith, and of course, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Grondin
notes that it was this early Heidegger, he specifies “even ‘oral’ Heidegger”
to whom Gadamer returned when he developed his hermeneutics.2 Not the
architect of language in Being and Time, the animated Heidegger inspired by
Augustine’s restless pursuit of self-understanding was the basis of Gadamer’s
thinking according to Grondin. Insofar as Gadamer thematizes dialogue or
a living conversation with a text, he hearkens to the oral Heidegger who
internalized, embodied, and translated Aristotle’s philosophy into a form that
resonated with his students.
Further to the point after emphasizing that the derivative character of the
proposition in Augustine caught Heidegger’s attention, Grondin explains that
in “The Universality of the Hermeneutic Problem” Gadamer agreed with the
way Heidegger used the word “hermeneutics” to mean a way of speaking.3
In the 1966 essay to which Grondin refers, Gadamer explains the infinity of
language on analogy with the struggle to speak a foreign language. When
speaking a foreign language one is never quite at home and always hears in
one’s mind one’s native language even if there is no deliberate effort under-
taken to translate. Gadamer suggests that this might account for stammering.
Stammering is an obstruction, yet also, he specifies, an “opening to the infi-
nite realm of possible expressions.” So too, Gadamer reasons is any language
infinite.4 The analogy between translating between languages and stammering
depends on wanting to say something that they are unable to utter. Grondin
lands upon this “in-between” when he writes: “The universal dimension of
hermeneutics is not so much one of language itself (which would amount say,
to a linguisticism of sorts), save for openness or quest for understanding, a
mode which is less actual language itself than a striving for words for what
urges to be said and heard.”5 The space between the subject (speaker) and act
of uttering something is taken up according to Grondin’s words above, by an
opening, a quest for understanding, a “striving for what urges to be said and
heard.” Being open consists of striving to hear, or active listening. Hence, it
is not unusual for people who stammer to cease stammering when they sing.
Adjusting the mind to acoustic space enables their speech to become fluid
 Folk Intuitions about the Embodied Word 19

and their thoughts coherent. Granted, Gadamer does not go into these ques-
tions. He lays down the framework for them by drawing attention to an actual
struggle, one that we can imagine ourselves in, in order to convey what he
means by the inner word (or infinity of language).
However, even though Grondin has referred the reader to this “oral” tradi-
tion in Gadamer’s explication of the inner word in “The Universality of the
Hermeneutical Problem,” he tends not to follow it through when he asserts
that, “the hermeneutical aims at that . . . which alone makes understanding
possible.” By shifting to this question, Grondin has imported the logic of
transcendental conditions into his interpretation and thus, propositional rea-
soning about the nature of reason. Rather than investigate the physiological
processes that make listening, acoustic space, and the affections of the body
possible during a dialogue, Grondin inclines toward Slingerland’s hypothesis
and withdraws into a disembodied concept of the inner word. Granted, he
does not exclude physiological processes of a certain kind of hearing from
his assertions. It is not clear however that they are well defined. He states that
the inner word is that which “is presupposed in all signs into which it can be
translated,” as if it were identical to its formal role in a system of signs. He
continues and writes of the inner word, “that which is indicated by this sign,
the intended, the thought, or ultimately, the word of reason itself in its uni-
versality,”6 as if the inner word were of a purely Stoic variety detached from
external impressions.7 He also narrows Augustine’s search for himself in God
to striving to express “our ‘mind’” and equates the motivation of a proposition
with unasserted presuppositions.8 Yet motivation is not a presupposition. It
pertains to memory, association of ideas, impulse and act, and not the order of
logical inference as Grondin suggests. Consider his words, “The Augustinian
theory turns out, in fact, to be very plastic, in that the words we use cannot,
just because they occur to us, exhaust what we have ‘in mind,’ that is, the
dialogue that we are.”9 What is it that we have in mind to which Grondin is
referring? An answer comes by way of the following as he writes, “From this
it stands out clearly that the universality of language cannot be one of spoken
language, but rather of the inner word, as it may be expressed with Augustine,
however awkwardly.”10 He reasons that in order to be universal, language
cannot be spoken. This suggests that for Grondin, there is no middle ground
between the sound of the spoken word and thought. Their attributes are mutu-
ally exclusive. Hence, although he quotes the Father of the Church stating
“original speech is a language of the heart” he bypasses the connotations of
these words when he explains of them, “This inner speech has no sensuous or
material form.”11 He supposes that if the verbum is not sensuous in the sense
of a physical sound, then it must be intellectual. He ignores what “language
of the heart implies,” that is, a non-intellectual grasp of the inner word.
20 Chapter 2

In a final instance of moving toward an interpretation centered on embodi-

ment and then recoiling from it, consider Grondin’s interpretation of the fol-
lowing passage from Augustine’s On the Trinity XV.X.19:

What one strives to reach is the verbum, which proffers itself in no sound, but
nevertheless indwells every speech and is presupposed in all signs into which it
can be ‘translated.’ When this intimate word of the soul or the heart takes on the
sensuous form of a concrete language it will not be expressed as it is, but rather
precisely as it can be seen through our bodies.12

According to Augustine, the verbum of the heart proffers itself without sound.
Yet it expresses itself through our bodies and is visible. Augustine is merg-
ing the auditory and visual perceptions. He is indicating to the reader that
the inner word is sensual. Although without sound, it indwells in speech, is
presupposed by signs, and is expressed, albeit not as it actually is, in the body.
The inner word is thus in some sense both audible and visible. Augustine does
not seem to explain how, which is why the question of their relation to one
another asserts itself. This is not however Grondin’s interest. He reasons that
if the inner word is not the word of any language it must be of the mind. He
does not consider that there may be aspects of language that are universal yet
also sonorous. Arthos is right. Grondin burdens his version of the inner word
with a subjective idiom that leaves the quintessential dialogical character of
Gadamer’s hermeneutics behind.13 Not unlike Plato in the Cratylus (accord-
ing to Gadamer in Truth and Method Part III), he separates thought/reason
from language.

JOHN ARTHOS

John Arthos does not recognize that the binary logic of Grondin’s thought is
inconsistent with the embodied phenomenon he is interpreting. However, this
is understandable. Arthos focusses on the theological sources for Gadamer’s
thoughts about the inner word that spill over into secular humanism. Accord-
ingly, he argues that Gadamer’s claim that dialogue is the fabric of our com-
munal ethos is a result of his having drawn the Judeo-Christian achievement
“back into the humanist tradition.”14 Arthos finds this “achievement” mir-
rored in a passage from TM III, 3, B:

Only now can the great dialectical puzzle of the one and the many which fasci-
nated Plato as the negation of the logos and which received a mysterious affir-
mation in medieval speculation on the Trinity, be given its true and fundamental
ground. When Plato realized that the word of language is both one and many,
 Folk Intuitions about the Embodied Word 21

he took only the first step. It is always one word that we say to one another and
that is said to us (theologically, ‘the’ Word of God)—but the unity of this word,
as we saw, always unfolds step by step in articulated discourse.15

There are two levels of Gadamer’s discursivity in this passage that Arthos
argues are brought together through a re-appropriation of the Word Incarnate.
On the one hand, is the speculative dimension of Gadamer’s discursivity. It
is expressed as the problem of the one and the many. On the other hand, is
the dialogical or practical layer of Gadamer’s discursivity. It arises when
Gadamer shifts to the first-person plural voice and thereby enters into a com-
munal dialogue. Gadamer enacts the very shift from the speculative to the
dialogical and thus social context that Arthos takes to be the twin layers of his
discursivity. According to him, the point of contact between the speculative
(universal) and the social (particular) is the Word of God, which Christians
enact historically.16 Whereas Plato, in order to protect aristocratic virtues
from distortion by the rhetoric of sophists, separated thought from language
and thus turned the one and the many into a speculative-intellectual problem,
Arthos holds that the Incarnation prevented this forgetfulness of language in
Western thought.17 Hence, Plato’s negation of the logos, as Gadamer says
above, received a mysterious affirmation in Trinitarian theology. This is the
support I can muster for Arthos’ argument and seems to follow from Gadam-
er’s interpolation about “the Word of God” while speaking in a communal
(us, we) voice mentioned by Arthos above.
Arthos effectively demonstrates that Gadamer’s philosophical herme-
neutics derives from and depends upon a prior theology of the Word. He
contends, perhaps with Grondin in mind that “If Gadamer’s point was only
to turn our attention to the surplus of meaning beyond what is spoken he
need hardly have gone beyond the language theory of Seneca.”18 In contrast
to Grondin, who claimed that the universality of Gadamer’s hermeneutics
requires Augustine in order to understand, and then puts forward a secular
account of the inner word, Arthos purports to have given Augustine’s theol-
ogy its fair due. If read this way his insights into the procession of the word
can be used to explain what Grondin aimed for, but which his binary logic
also foiled. For example, Grondin claims that the dialogical view of language
in Gadamer is an echo of the Augustinian theory of the verbum cordis medi-
ated by Gadamer’s intent to overcome the West’s forgetfulness of language
(fixation on propositions as final).19 Similarly, he argues, “The true univer-
sality of language lies in this dialectic of question and answer from which a
thoughtful hermeneutics nourishes itself,”20 and that the dialectic consists of
participation in meaning.21 As he comments on Gadamer’s 1966 essay, “Gen-
uine speaking in actual dialogue is what truly opens up a world. Language is
integral to the universality of the hermeneutical experience.”22 In all of these
22 Chapter 2

examples, Grondin is either suggesting or asserting that the universality of

Gadamer’s hermeneutics lies in the dialogical view of language. Yet, because
he identifies the inner word with something thought in contradistinction to the
spoken language, he cannot explain how Augustine’s notion of the verbum
cordis is, as he says, dialogical. Grondin’s manner of thinking, as argued, is
an impediment to his wanting to explain what he is trying to understand (and
asserts). Arthos completes this missing piece of the puzzle for Grondin.
Rather than separate thought from language and thereby place him in a
position of being unable to explain how participation in meaning during a
dialogue is possible, Arthos uses the Incarnation to explain the phenomenon
of language. Just as God (inner word) is conceptualized as being in the Son
(word made flesh) without any change of state, for example, from potency
to act, so too does thought come to language without any change of state.
Accordingly, there is no distinction between thought and language. If there
is no thought outside of language, then the inner word must be lingual, as
Andrzej Wierciński argues.23 If the inner word is lingual, then it is inherent to
language (rather than being an idea of the mind) and above all for Gadamer
inherent to a dialogue. Arthos and Wierciński’s arguments correct Grondin.
However, at the same time, it is not clear that Arthos does not yield to the
same tendency as Grondin. Not unlike Grondin who employs a method of
analysis that abstracts from the facticity of historical life modeled by Augus-
tine, by the early Heidegger, and by Gadamer’s turn from Hegel’s technical
dialectic to a living conversation, Arthos’ position is framed in terms that are
inconsistent with the event of language he seeks to explain. This is evident
in both his criticism of Grondin, and argument for the lingual character of
the inner word. With respect to criticism, Gadamer has the following advice:
“One does not go about identifying the weaknesses of what another person
says in order to prove that one is always right, but one seeks instead as far
as possible to strengthen the other’s viewpoint so that what the other person
has to say becomes illuminating [Einleuchtendes].”24 Strengthening another’s
point of view is understandable on analogy to play. During play, the speak-
ers’ subjectivity is de-centered. This happens while participating in the
self-presentation of the subject matter.25 This self-presentation of the subject
matter is facilitated by the players—interpreters who contribute to its coming
to fruition. Like a player in a game, a good-willed interpreter participates in
the other’s point of view in order to let the truth of the matter (Sache) bubble
to the surface independently of what either of them might believe about it.
However, Arthos does not abide by this principle of interpretation that
presupposed by both criticism and judgment. On the contrary, he sunders
his criticism of Grondin from an understanding of the Grondin’s work and
thereby overlooks the possibilities that prefigure his own position. In “The
Fullness of Understanding,” Arthos abandons the participatory role of the
 Folk Intuitions about the Embodied Word 23

listener and criticizes Grondin by listing seven statements out of context that
implicate him in a “subjective idiom.”26 A patchwork of quotations in support
of an argument invariably falls to the shortcoming of any de-contextualized
method of analysis. In fact, Grondin’s objections to propositional reasoning
could be directed against Arthos who claims, “The preferential position of the
proposition is a consequence of the fact that one can free it from its dialogical
context. Such isolation however does violence to language.”27 Accordingly,
there are nuances in Grondin’s manner of reasoning that Arthos does not
address. As noted, Grondin intends to think of the inner word in a dialogical
context, a living conversation, but Arthos does not mention this, and thus
forfeits his chance to be a good-willed interpreter and strengthen Grondin’s
position if not his own as well by explaining that thought, being lingual, is
inherent to dialogue.
With respect to his argument about the inner word, Arthos’ metaphysical
intuitions take hold. There are roughly three arguments from the introduc-
tion to his book The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics based upon
elevating an idea above the warp and woof of historical existence. He argues
that since “Augustine’s analogy of the verbum interius feeds on the epochal
achievement of the Church” by re-appropriating the link between incarnation
and Sprache, Gadamer is feeding on the same link; he is deriving his own
vision of human solidarity from the Church.28 Arthos is arguing that Gadam-
er’s vision of human solidarity is Catholic because he “re-appropriates” the
theology of the word in his own explication of thought coming to language.
However, this might not be the case. Gadamer’s re-appropriation is not a
repetition. Whatever epochal achievement of the Church Augustine feeds
on cannot be considered “the same” as Gadamer’s position unless Gadamer
is thinking within the same context and with the same question in mind as
Augustine.
Second, Arthos argues that the Incarnation was a pivotal moment in both
history and Gadamer’s hermeneutics. He writes, “That the word of God
unfolds in human history as the nexus between the transcendent and imma-
nent procession will be a kind of touchstone for the idea of discursivity
Gadamer develops throughout his career.”29 The touchstone is significant,
or rather unique and unparalleled since Arthos then asserts that “the idea
that the Church of Christ is the historical community of faith . . . heightens
Gadamer’s ideal of ancient dialogue when he finally comes back to it” (at the
end of Truth and Method).30 If this is the case, then there must be something
invariable about the Incarnation Gadamer affirms centuries later. But this
does not agree with the principle of his historically affected consciousness or
the re-appropriation of the past in a way that responds to our own questions
and hermeneutical situation. Nor is it clear that the incarnation is a singular
event without precedent. It could be that the mysterious affirmation of the
24 Chapter 2

logos in Trinitarian theology makes explicit what Plato really thought and to
which he had an inclining. According to Gadamer, in the “second voyage” in
the Phaedo (99d),31 Socrates turned away from inquiring into ideas directly
(they bedazzled his eyes) toward studying them indirectly or from how they
are spoken about in everyday language. Thus, Plato did not entirely forget
language. What Plato retained in the figure of Socrates, the Word Incarnate
saved from metaphysics, but still in terms prefigured by Plato for instance,
in the 7th Letter that he mentions alongside the Cratylus in “Language and
Verbum.” If Plato does the most to separate thought from language, this is
because separation is a form of forgetfulness that makes recollection possible
or intensifies the demand for it. Treating the incarnation as an event that
prevents the complete forgetting of the revelatory power of language builds
upon the idea of a community of philosophers at Plato’s Academy. This is the
approach to the history of ideas underlying Gadamer’s assertion that Aristotle
(and later Plotinus) clarified ideas bundled together in Plato’s philosophy.32
Accordingly, the incarnation is not a singular and unsurpassed event in his-
tory. In terms of their conceptual significance, both it and the Resurrection
were for Gadamer prefigured by Heraclitus’ view of generation (revived by
Christian Platonists such as Noetus and Hippolytus, says Gadamer).33 The
Christian doctrines are an articulation of a previous notion in the ongoing
process of concept formation continued by Hegel and Gadamer. To suggest
that Gadamer’s thoughts are those of the theologians discussed in “Language
and Verbum” depends upon abstracting from this process in the same way
Gadamer believed Schleiermacher did in his interpretation of Plato, that is,
tapping into the intentions of the author.
Finally, with respect to the second layer of discursivity, the dialogical and
practical (rather than the speculative), Arthos claims that Gadamer thinks
about the dialogue form after having journeyed through theology in Truth
and Method Part III, and thus carries theology into his interpretation of Plato.
He writes: “Whatever direction Gadamer goes in, it is always tracking with a
sympathetic resonance that picks up the harmonics of the tradition, in the same
way that the notes of a stringed instrument in its lowest registers contain all of
the overtones.” Consequently, for Arthos the idea that the Church of Christ is
the historical community of faith and the body of Christ is His Word unfold-
ing in the life of individual Christians, as he continues, “heightens Gadamer’s
ideal of ancient dialogue.”34 Theology is, he says, the “special value added” to
the notion of Platonic dialogue at the end of Truth and Method.
But it is not clear that the scholars with whose thoughts Gadamer interacts
constitutes a cumulative order of intentionality that carries forward, like strings
strummed on a guitar, to culminate in a resounding chord at the end of Truth
and Method about Plato’s dialogue form. Gadamer converses with philoso-
phers, theologians, atheists, or whomever not because of their personal beliefs,
 Folk Intuitions about the Embodied Word 25

but because of the ideas they express about a subject matter that concerns
him. In “Hermeneutics and the Ontological Difference” Gadamer explains
that he entered into a conversation with Plato and Plotinus, Augustine and
Thomas Aquinas, “or whoever, in order to at least partially gain ground in my
attempt to find the right language for what I myself was seeking.”35 Interest-
ingly, Arthos attests to this dimension of Gadamer’s thought when he writes,
“Because Gadamer sees the various contributions to his idea of Sprachlichkeit
from so many different sides, the distinctions between the various perspec-
tives tend to lose their edges. Such a compositing of ideas is characteristic
of Gadamer’s mode of reasoning.”36 There are different sides to an idea for
Gadamer because like Heidegger he understands that how a unitary phenom-
enon appears depends on the perspective taken toward it. According to Arthos
then, thinking is not, in fact, an accumulation of ideas into a single melodious
conclusion. On the contrary, Gadamer fills his mind with a plurality of many
voices that converge around a question. However, rather than abide by this
implication of his own argument, in the footnote to that same passage quoted
above from The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, Arthos exempts
Gadamer from a blurring of edges in his thinking about Augustine.37 It is only
possible to argue for Gadamer’s having exempted Augustine from the “the
process of picking up the harmonics of the tradition” if Arthos believes that
Gadamer and Augustine have the same intentional will.38
Neither Grondin’s nor Arthos’s method of inquiry is adequate to the phe-
nomenon of the inner word. They both rely upon a mode of reasoning that
militates against an account of the word in contexts and terms they acknowl-
edge is fundamental. Grondin’s “subjective-cognitive idiom” does not square
with the intersubjectivity of a dialogue that, he affirms constitutes the univer-
sality of hermeneutics. Arthos’ justification for the universal Church as the
substratum of Gadamer’s humanism depends upon a psychological method
that detaches the idea of the Incarnation from historically effected conscious-
ness. This is inconsistent with the lingual nature of the inner word that would
account for the formation of relations of solidarity in language in different
ways at different times and places. Arthos thus does not so much correct
Grondin’s “folk intuitions” as repeat it in a different form evinced as much
by what Arthos says as by what he does not say. For example, he reasons
that Gadamer’s Forward to Grondin’s The Philosophy of Gadamer is indirect
criticism. Arthos quotes from Gadamer’s introduction:

Hermeneutics encourages not objectification but listening to one another—for

example, the listening and belonging with (Zuhören) someone who knows how
to tell a story. Here we begin to glimpse the je ne sais quoi that we mean when
we refer to people’s understanding one another. It is Grondin’s special merit to
have worked out this ‘inner’ conversation as the real foundation of hermeneutics
26 Chapter 2

which (as I indicated in Truth and Method) plays an important role in Augustine
and in other contexts such as process theology.39

According to Arthos, Gadamer is pointing out that the inner word is not
precisely, as Grondin emphasizes, a silent dialogue of the mind with itself,
but rather belongs to a conversation. It is to Arthos’ credit to have explained
how the procession of the word in Augustine’s Trinitarian theology accounts
for dialogue being the locus for the formation of community. But at the
same time, just as Grondin had overlooked reflecting upon the significance
of the word of the heart and the body while translating Augustine in On the
Trinity, so too does Arthos not reflect precisely on the words by Gadamer
that he quotes above. He does not investigate what Gadamer might mean by
“listening to one another” and “belonging with (Zuhören),” which are surely
crucial to a dialogue. To sort out what might be at stake I defer to Philippe
Eberhard. He parses Zughörigkeit into its component hören (to hear, to listen)
and explains of the latter:

[they] imply, more than do seeing and looking, a medial relation to one’s sur-
roundings. If it is possible to look the other way if one does not want to see some-
thing, one cannot listen the other way if one does not want to hear something.
Sound travels through walls and around corners. Although “volume” designated
originally rolled up sheets of text, it now refers to the size of something and the
amount of space it contains, and it also refers to sound. Sound fills volume and it
is volume. It has an encompassing character that we cannot circumvent.40

To belong, then, when understood in terms of the etymology and connota-

tions of zuhören, is best understood as a relational listening that involves
sound, its volume, and physical spaces rather than contemplating the mind
of God. This is a context for thinking about the inner word laid down by
Augustine in The Confessions; a phenomenological-existential situation in
which Heidegger and later Gadamer came to frame their hermeneutics. How-
ever, neither Grondin nor Arthos abide by it entirely and instead, fall into a
folk-intuition or premodern mentality that Slingerland argues is characteristic
of hermeneutics. The juxtaposition between secular humanist (Grondin) and
theological (Arthos) accounts of the inner word is false.

JAMES RISSER

If, as Grondin believes, the inner word refers to meaning that exceeds any-
thing said by us finite beings, and it is not the voice of disembodied reason,
but rather, as Wierciński (and Arthos) argue, lingual, then an understanding
of the inner word must also be possible from the side of the language we
 Folk Intuitions about the Embodied Word 27

experience. Risser takes this step when he thinks about the question within
the context of the motility of language. He writes in what may be an indirect
criticism of Wierciński, “It is not enough to say that for philosophical herme-
neutics the experience of meaning is linguistic; one must immediately add to
this the more specific claim that this experience of meaning takes shape in
the language of speech, in living language, and as such hermeneutics is of
the voice.”41 Risser aims for a description of the inner word that preserves its
event character and movement (kinesis). In support of this position, he refers
to Gadamer’s description of philosophical hermeneutics in his essay “Practi-
cal Philosophy as a Model of the Human Sciences” (1979).42 Gadamer starts
to think about the purpose of hermeneutics from the problem of the alienating
character of the written word. The character of the written as opposed to the
spoken word has attracted the research of Eric Havelock (Preface to Plato),
Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy), and Marshall McLuhan (Gutenberg Gal-
axy). They delve into the kind of thinking patterns and cultural characteristics
of an oral in contrast to a literate civilization, and into the historical condi-
tions that brought about the change from one culture to the other. Gadamer
does not devote the same amount of attention as them to the way in which
writing stabilizes sounds in vowels, habituates the mind to a linear and con-
sequentialist mode of reasoning, and fosters independent and critical thought.
The latter are implicated in his recognition that writing alienates or creates
distance from the word that the art of interpretation bridges. His primary
concern however, according to Risser, is the absence of the other’s voice.
Hence, hermeneutics consists of bringing what is far (the other), near in order
to let it speak in a new and clearer voice. Risser re-iterates this “voiced”
view of Gadamer’s hermeneutics in The Life of Understanding.43 Therein, he
explains that reading properly entails enacting what we do when we speak
to one another. Taken from this point of view, what Gadamer means by a
“fusion of horizons,” for instance, would have to be re-interpreted. Is a fusion
of horizons a process of having one’s prejudices put at risk by the other in
order to find common ground with them in thought and about a subject mat-
ter? This is what Slingerland has led us to believe about the fusion. Eberhard
denies it. Quoting Bjorn T. Ramberg, he explains that the fusion of horizons
is not “a matter of drawing the product itself, as a manifestation of the mind
of another, into active question-and-answer dialogue with one’s own under-
standing.”44 Contrary to what Slingerland argues, the fusion of horizons does
not involve a transhistorical merging of consciousness. If not, then what?
From the perspective of the middle voice (which is the grammatical correlate
of an auditory disposition in a dialogue), in the fusion of horizons there is no
standpoint outside of the fusion from which to think about it. The fusion is
intelligible solely within the activity of a dialogue in which the mind-body
composite is implicated. This suggests that something else besides what
28 Chapter 2

another person states is at play. Risser does not explore these possibilities
from the side of factical life grounded in a living conversation. Nevertheless,
his overall shift toward a hermeneutics of the voice according to which he
conceives the inner word implies them.
In Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other, Risser differentiates his posi-
tion on the inner word from theologians and philosophers. He writes:

What appeals to Gadamer in this notion of the inner word is that this word,
which is not expressing the mind but the thing intended, “still has the character
of an event,” and “remains related to its possible utterance [Äußerung]” (TM
422/GW1 426). This is the word of spirit that occurs in writing when the word
is read. This is the word of breath that is heard by the inner ear.45

In the footnote to this passage he distances himself from a theology of the

inner word by pointing out that Gadamer does not speak of the inner ear in
relation to the inner word (and instead in relation to the spirit of the letter).46
The inner word, theologically understood is “metaphysically encased,” is
inaudible.47 This seems to be borne out by Augustine’s account of the verbum
in On the Trinity where he retreats into a Stoic notion of the logos.48 If the
inner word is a word of the mind, and without sound, then it is irrelevant to
the phenomenon of language. Accordingly, Risser concludes that Gadamer is
not interested in the theological model of the inner word except “as an ana-
logue for the hermeneutical event of language.”49 He thus ignores theology
and turns to the phenomenon of language. In the passage above, Risser says
that the hermeneutical event of the inner word does not express “the mind but
the thing intended.” This statement represents a shift from thinking about the
inner word in relation to metaphysics (mind, God) to thinking about it within
the motility of language. He goes further toward the physicality of the inner
word. He explains how to relate the thing intended to its possible utterance
and this is, he says, the word of breath. For Risser, the inner word is the breath
in the voice that expresses the thought intended.
Yet this cannot be the last word on the topic either because, for Risser, the
context for a study of the inner word is dialogical. Risser feels justified in
consulting Plato as a guide with which to refine what Gadamer means by the
inner word being “breath in the voice that expresses the thought intended.”
Using the Phaedrus in particular, he reasons that the inner word has the fol-
lowing features: (1) between sound and meaning, (2) without edges or con-
tinuous, (3) songful and, (4) renewed in recollection.50 According to Risser,
the interplay of breathed voices forms a space, the voices and words lose their
edges—they blend into one another to form one continuous and undifferenti-
ated breathed voice that he likens to a song, tale, or epic poetry. The unity of
song that emerges within an assembly of people signals, for Risser, the inner
 Folk Intuitions about the Embodied Word 29

word. He states, “When Gadamer says that the word ‘always already refers
to a greater and more multiple unity,’ a notion one finds in the concept of
verbus interius, one can readily relate this to the Greek epos.”51 Stated other-
wise, Risser is parsing out the dimensions of a dialogue in which intentions,
voices, and thoughts converge and cohere to form a song. The inner word is,
therefore, not of any one person’s voice. It is more like a meeting of minds in
the assembly. Risser considers Socrates in the market place the paradigmatic
situation on with which to model his interpretation of the inner word. He
indicates that the inner word is breath in the voice of many people convers-
ing with one another as they did in the assembly of Athens about matters of
public interest, for example, justice.
In The Life of Understanding, Risser returns to the question of the inner
word referring to it as vouloire-dire but does not, as he had in his earlier
book translated it as “intended meaning,” but instead as “wanting to say,”
which is the more accurate translation of the two. “Intending” connotes an
act of the mind, “wanting to say” of the embodied mind and passions with
an emphasis on lack rather than on foresight or planning. But wanting to say
what precisely? What is it that is lacking? Risser has already answered—the
inner word made public in the unity of voices or song. The “wanting to say,”
is a wanting to form a community of human solidarity in language.
The problem with Risser’s thesis is that nowhere in his writing does
Gadamer mention “breathed voice” in relation to either the inner word or
inner ear. I propose to use the same logic to assess Risser’s argument. He
eschews the theological version of the inner word because Gadamer does
not mention the inner ear in “Language and Logos.” This sets a precedent
for Risser’s own work. What then could justify his interpretive liberties?
As mentioned, he consults Plato as an authority on the inner word. This is
justifiable. Plato considers dialogue the medium for understanding, which
is Gadamer’s position as well. However, this is not, in fact, the only reason
why Risser defers to the ancient Greek. Although he calls Plato a “provisional
guide,”52 two of his three reasons for consulting the Phaedrus are indicative
of a “folk intuitionist” view of the Athenian. They are as follows: (1) Plato
has as close an affinity with Gadamer’s thought as Heidegger.53 (2) Plato
awakens contemporary consciousness to an understanding of the everyday
phenomenon of the voice we have forgotten. (3) Plato’s Phaedrus and the
discussion of the invention of writing is a means with which to challenge
Jacques Derrida’s criticism that Gadamer’s hermeneutics betrays the primacy
of the spoken word.54 Invoking the Phaedrus in order to refute Derrida’s
criticism of Gadamer is strategically effective, and probably the best reason
for turning back to Plato’s work. The other two justifications are slightly
more dubious. Risser does not explain in what way Gadamer has as close an
affinity with Plato as he does with Heidegger. How could he? They speak
30 Chapter 2

different languages and are from different cultures. Of course, it could be that
Risser presupposes that what he infers about Plato and the voice is true for
Gadamer because, like Arthos on Augustine, he supposes that they share the
same “mind.” Hence, his second reason stated above indicates that he thinks
Plato knows something about language that we have forgotten. In a move
reminiscent of Heidegger’s stepping back into Aristotle’s primordial notion
of phusis in order to save the world from technology, Risser steps back to the
pure, unadulterated origins of the voice in Plato’s thought. No less than Aris-
totle for Heidegger, for Risser, Plato’s language is unique because it has not
been distorted by Latin Christendom (which forced a rupture between thought
and language). But then, has Risser not assumed a transhistorical, essential-
ist understanding of the Greeks? If so, more evidence is required than an
inference about his view of Gadamer’s relation to Plato being analogous to
Heidegger’s to Aristotle and the pre-Socratics.
Risser reports that the word “breath” used to mean intelligence, spirit,
mind, soul, and life by the ancient Greeks.55 There is no point in trying to
distinguish these words from one another. The Greeks did not because they
were prescientific; submerged in experience. This suggests that “breath”
must have been, for the ancients, an “embodied” notion: mind-breath or soul-
breath of someone’s voice. However, at the same time, did not Plato trans-
form the ordinary meaning of such notions as soul and reason?56 Possibly, in
recognition of this, Risser drops “spirit,” “mind,” and “intelligence” from his
view of the inner word in The Life of Understanding. Therein he associates
the inner word with life, movement, and breath.57 This might be evidence of
him having recognized the “metaphysical” connotations of “breath” in Plato’s
philosophy, that is, immortal soul. However, conjecture does not count as
evidence. There are yet other indications of Risser’s folk intuition. He refers
to “the word of spirit that occurs in writing when the word is read. This is the
word of breath that is heard by the inner ear.”58 In this case, the word of breath
is not literally the breathing voice, otherwise it would not require, as Risser
says it does, an inner ear to hear. However, he also states:

A poem is not heard when the mere sound of the words are received by the ear,
just as a text is not read when our eyes read the letters that make up the words.
What is at stake is the voice, in other words, is the taking place of language as
such. The flatus vocis, literally, the breathing voice.59

In this case, the reader can feel the breathing voice (of the other). In contrast
to the former characterization of the breathed voice that required an inner ear,
the event of language about which he speaks in the second passage brings
the breath in the spirit of the word completely to life—the breath is right
there in front of the reader (presumably they breath it too). Striking is that in
 Folk Intuitions about the Embodied Word 31

this moment of breathing voice, Risser denies that any sound is heard. With
that qualification, he effectively undermines the experience he is aiming to
explain and pushes his view of the inner word back into a metaphysically
encased idea that is inaudible to anyone’s ear. Stated otherwise, he supposes
that since sound is of a physical nature it cannot at the same time be universal.
Breathe not making a sound, yet still being a property of voice, and therefore
related to meaning in the spoken language, qualifies for universality. Like
the light of day, it is everywhere and nowhere; mid-way between a physical
and metaphysical standard for what counts as reality. Nevertheless, the word
is still a product of conceptual thinking, which is the only kind of reasoning
that makes any sense of his choice: there is no such thing as a breathed voice
that does not make a sound unless nothing is said (which would disengage his
position from anything spoken).
In conclusion, Risser’s repositioning of the way in which to think about the
inner word from theology and philosophy to phenomenology is methodologi-
cally sound. His approach follows from the arguments by Grondin, Arthos,
and Wierciński, who claim that the inner word is dialogical and/or lingual;
yet do not take a phenomenological perspective on it. They do not conceive
of the inner word in experiential and historical terms; terms consistent with
the motility of language, they presuppose. However, Risser does, when
he associates the inner word with the voice, breath in the voice and song.
However, and in keeping with Slingerland’s view of hermeneutics, he also
blunts the significance of this move by resorting to sources and hypotheses
about Gadamer that are not hermeneutically sound except as a strategic move
against Derrida. Being thus distracted by the Greeks, he does not reflect
adequately upon the phenomenon of language itself to which he claims to be
returning, and indeed, bypasses it when he consigns the sound of language to
insignificance in matters of the inner word because, he thinks it is inconsistent
with the universality, that is, idea, of language.

PHILIPPE EBERHARD

The reasoning of the scholars studied thus far has metaphysical entangle-
ments. Although Grondin mentions an embodied notion of the inner word
while quoting Augustine, he identifies it with the infinite mind. Although
Arthos brings the verbum into the realm of a dialogue, he justifies his argu-
ment with a theory of consciousness. Although Risser argues for the inner
word being breath in the voice manifest in a medley of voices or song, he
denies it any acoustic properties and is distracted from a phenomenology of
the voice by what he thinks the ancient Greeks said. The movement toward
and away from a phenomenological and embodied account of the inner word
32 Chapter 2

suggests that while they have a good sense for what the inner word is, they
lack the capacity to form explanations for it in any other than metaphysical
terms. They do not develop explanations for the inner word that befit its
embodied nature, and instead, derail the latter by resorting to amodal con-
cepts and abstract ideas.
Eberhard’s reasoning does not straddle metaphysical and phenomeno-
logical commitments. In The Middle Voice in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, he
is aware of precisely what his colleagues do not reflect upon; namely, the
manner of reasoning that drives them toward certain conclusions and not oth-
ers. Hence, in chapter 2 of his book, he explains how scholars of Gadamer’s
work reach the point where a central idea is about to break open, and then
abort their motion or redirect it.60 By thus attending to how scholars think,
Eberhard sets a precedent for what has been undertaken here. In so doing, he
is also a source with which to understand why the thinking of the scholars
studied herein derails.
The title of Eberhard’s book fits the thesis that the middle voice is the
locale from which to interpret key themes in Gadamer’s work such as play,
fusion of horizons, speculativity, and the inner word. However, in the course
of developing his argument he distinguishes the auditory middle voice from
a visual standpoint toward beings that points toward two modes of reason-
ing about beings that other scholars have made the object of their research.
Eberhard explains, “What counts is not the origin and history of the Judeo-
Christian traditions way of listening to the spoken word but Christology’s
counterbalancing the visual imagery characteristic of a rationality manipulat-
ing and employing words instead of following them and listening to them.”61
This remark unsubstantiated; nevertheless, it includes important characteris-
tics of listening and seeing. He says that in contrast to seeing, which entails
the rational manipulation of words, listening follows them. These character-
izations are a first step toward differentiating two kinds of understanding.
For knowledge acquired by the sense of sight, it is typically best to be at a
distance from the object, thereby inoculating oneself from its influence and
taking in the widest field of view. Sight privileges the spectator’s perspective
that is indifferent to acoustic space and therefore, to the appearing/happen-
ing/emergent “how-being” in time. Hence, Hans Jonas points out that in
contrast to other senses sight is not time-bound. Whereas other senses are
limited to succession in time (one sensation at a time), sight is capable of
taking in a manifold or complete field of content co-temporaneously, or at
the same time.62 It is not simply the feeling for the rigidity of a pen that sight
detects; it takes in, for Jonas, the entire room in a glance and for this reason
tends toward the comprehension of areas that transcend the temporal dura-
tion of the surfaces touched. Whereas touch might convey some semblance
of a table by feeling every millimetre of it piecemeal, sight sees the entire
 Folk Intuitions about the Embodied Word 33

form simultaneously. No less than touch, hearing is limited to the temporal

duration of what is heard. Just as it is not a table that is felt, only a sense of
resistance, it is not a dog that is heard, merely the bark. Since sight has the
capacity to see the whole (form) of what can be touched Jonas believes it to
be superior to the other senses.
When thus taking up a visual relation to the inner word, how does it appear
to the knower? As “being-as-a-whole,” infinite mind, inexhaustible idea(s),
totality of all true propositions, the mind of God meeting the mind of human
beings. The visual-objective perspective is what derails the thinking of schol-
ars about the phenomenological nature of the inner word. This perspective
tends to abstract from the phenomenon by stabilizing an appearing appear-
ance into an idea or concept. Eberhard’s observation that visual imagery is
characteristic of rational manipulation of words is an inadvertent allusion to
these aspects of sight. Yet Eberhard also contrasts this visual way of acquir-
ing knowledge with listening that does not manipulate words but rather, he
says, follows them. In contrast to sight, hearing closes down the distance
between the subject and object as much as touch does. Indeed, hearkening has
primacy among the sensory modalities comparable only to touch and being
touched;63 hearing is a channel to the emotions and not away from them.64
In general, in the words of Walter Ong, “vision objectifies, speech personal-
izes.”65 Granted, Eberhard does not say as much as this, but it is entailed by
his aligning hearing with the middle voice, which in turn opens up a more
concrete and existential way of thinking about the inner word than does
objectifying sight.
The middle voice is distinct from the passive and active voices (receiving
the action and performing the action respectively) in that the subject is neither
acted upon nor the agent, but instead is both in relation to the verb.66 Eberhard
explains, “the middle voice brings the subject in his or her relation to the
process the verb expresses. In the middle voice, as opposed to the active, the
subject is within the action which happens to him or her and of which he or
she is subject.”67 As examples of middle voiced thinking, he cites the follow-
ing words by Gadamer: “history does not belong to us as we belong to it,” “in
conversation we are more led than leading,” “language speaks us rather than
we speak it.” From an objectifying-visual standpoint, these statements are,
of course, incoherent. How can one belong to history? Is history a despot?
Is a person a dog to conversation the leash? Gadamer must be personifying
nouns. From the medial location of the middle voice, however, the statements
Eberhard highlights make sense. Gadamer is urging the reader to think of
himself or herself as being both active and acted upon, which is what experi-
ence surely is (praxis-pathos). For Gadamer, it bears a striking similarity to
aesthetic experience that “says something to someone.” As David Vessey
points out, during an experience we are “‘in it’ in the existential sense, much
34 Chapter 2

as we are ‘in love,’ ‘in need,’ or ‘in a mood.’”68 In hindsight what emerges,
he points out, is up to us, but not in the midst of a game or in an experience
of truth in art. Eberhard uses the middle voice to interpret key themes in
Gadamer’s work, as mentioned.
Eberhard argues that Gadamer makes a crucial shift in how he thinks about
speculativity. Stated concisely, speculativity means, “that everything that
language says speaks because it is carried by that which it does not say.”69
Although Eberhard does not address the question of the inner word in this
context, it is implied. He reports that speculation comes to the fore as Vol-
lzug in Gadamer’s essay, “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Ideology.” Accord-
ing to Grondin, Vollzug is the unsaid in excess of anything said, that is,
inner word. The wealth of meaning in the unsaid is what one “wants to say”
(vouloire-dire) according to Risser,70 or as he puts it, the breath in the voice
of the intended thought. What Gadamer says about speculativity, therefore, is
consistent with what Gadamer scholars have determined is the nature of the
inner word. But consider Gadamer’s words about making oneself understood
in everyday language in which one who thus speaks:

May use only the most common and ordinary words and yet is able just through
them to bring to language what is unsaid, the unsaid that needs to be said and
here is said. He who speaks is proceeding speculatively in that his words are
not copying anything “real” but are actually expressing a relation to the whole
of being and letting it come to expression.71

Speculation is to “express” a relation to the whole of being. This relation,

Eberhard will maintain is auditory. Audition has a privileged access to the
whole of being. He explains that Gadamer “trespasses the visual character of
speculation” as a mirroring of what is not said and “describes speculation in
relation to the infinity of the unsaid as a resonating, atonen.”72 In the course
of explaining how the term speculative mirrors a relation in that the observer
is the medium that connects the image in the mirror with the actual sight of
the thing, Gadamer specifies that the mirror image is “like an ‘appearance.’”
He refers the reader to the Summa Theologica “Reply to Objection 2” where
the speculative relation is conveyed with image and mirror and is beholden.
But Gadamer also refers to its counterpart in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von
Schelling’s Bruno and quotes him in support of this interpretation of the
speculative relation.73 It is indeed, as he says parallel to Aquinas’ interpreta-
tion. However, Gadamer frequently holds out regard for the romantics, for
example, Hegel and Schleiermacher,74 for being the first among the mod-
erns to return to the pre-Socratics. Is it not likely that Gadamer would have
been aware of Johann Jacob Wagner’s words, “Bruno is really the authentic
philosophy of modern Platonism”?75 The translator and editor of the said
Another random document with
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plumes envolées, perdues, pour explorer les cimetières de la lenteur, la
seule luxure.

* * * * *
La bouteille que nous entourons des linges de nos blessures ne
résiste à aucune envie. Prenons les cœurs, les cerveaux, les muscles
de la rage, prenons les fleurs invisibles des blêmes jeunes filles et des
enfants noués, prenons la main de la mémoire, fermons les yeux du
souvenir, une théorie d'arbres délivrés par les voleurs nous frappe et
nous divise, tous les morceaux sont bons. Qui les rassemblera: la
terreur, la souffrance ou le dégoût?

* * * * *
Dormons, mes frères. Le chapitre inexplicable est devenu
incompréhensible. Des géants passent en exhalant des plaintes
terribles, des plaintes de géant, des plaintes comme l'aube veut en
pousser, l'aube qui ne peut ne plus se plaindre, depuis le temps, mes
frères, depuis le temps.

SANS RANCUNE
Larmes des yeux, les malheurs des malheureux.
Malheurs sans intérêt et larmes sans couleurs.
Il ne demande rien, il n'est pas insensible,
Il est triste en prison et triste s'il est libre.

Il fait un triste temps, il fait une nuit noire

À ne pas mettre un aveugle dehors. Les forts
Sont assis, les faibles tiennent le pouvoir
Et le roi est debout près de la reine assise.

Sourires et soupirs, des injures pourrissent

Dans la bouche des muets et dans les yeux des
lâches.
Ne prenez rien: ceci brûle, cela flambe!
Vos mains sont faites pour vos poches et vos
fronts.
* * * * *
Une ombre...
Toute l'infortune du monde
Et mon amour dessus
Comme une bête nue.

CELLE QUI N'A PAS LA PAROLE

Les feuilles de couleur dans les arbres nocturnes
Et la liane verte et bleue qui joint le ciel aux arbres,
Le vent à la grande figure
Les épargne. Avalanche, à travers sa tête
transparente
La lumière, nuée d'insectes, vibre et meurt.

Miracle dévêtu, émiettement, rupture

Pour un seul être.

La plus belle inconnue

Agonise éternellement.

Étoiles de son cœur aux yeux de tout le monde.

NUDITÉ DE LA VÉRITÉ

«Je le sais bien»

Le désespoir n'a pas d'ailes,

L'amour non plus,
Pas de visage,
Ne parlent pas,
Je ne bouge pas,
Je ne les regarde pas,
Je ne leur parle pas
Mais Je suis bien aussi vivant que mon amour et
que mon désespoir.
 PERSPECTIVE

Un millier de sauvages
S'apprêtent à combattre.
Ils ont des armes,
Ils ont leur cœur, grand cœur,
Et s'alignent avec lenteur
Devant un millier d'arbres verts
Qui, sans en avoir l'air,
Tiennent encore à leur feuillage.

TA FOI

Suis-je autre chose que ta force?

Ta force dans tes bras,
Ta tête dans tes bras,
Ta force dans le ciel décomposé,
Ta tête lamentable,
Ta tête que je porte.
Tu ne joueras plus avec moi,
Héroïne perdue,
Ma force bouge dans tes bras.

MASCHA RIAIT AUX ANGES

L'heure qui tremble au front du temps tout
embrouillé

Un bel oiseau léger plus vif qu'une poussière

Traîne sur un miroir un cadavre sans tête
Des boules de soleil adoucissent ses ailes
Et le vent de son vol affole la lumière

Le meilleur a été découvert loin d'ici.

LES PETITS JUSTES

SUR LA MAISON DU RIRE

Sur la maison du rire

Un oiseau rit dans ses ailes.
Le monde est si léger
Qu'il n'est plus à sa place
Et si gai
Qu'il ne lui manque rien.

POURQUOI SUIS-JE SI BELLE?

 Pourquoi suis-je si belle?
Parce que mon maître me lave.

AVEC TES YEUX

Avec tes yeux je change comme avec les lunes

Et je suis tour à tour et de plomb et de plume,
Une eau mystérieuse et noire qui t'enserre
Ou bien dans tes cheveux ta légère victoire.

UNE COULEUR MADAME

Une couleur madame, une couleur monsieur,

Une aux seins, une aux cheveux,
La bouche des passions
Et si vous voyez rouge
La plus belle est à vos genoux.

À FAIRE RIRE LA CERTAINE

 À faire rire la certaine,
Était-elle en pierre?
Elle s'effondra.

LE MONSTRE DE LA FUITE

Le monstre de la fuite hume même les plumes

De cet oiseau roussi par le feu du fusil.
Sa plainte vibre tout le long d'un mur de larmes
Et les ciseaux des yeux coupent la mélodie
Qui bourgeonnait déjà dans le cœur du chasseur.

LA NATURE S'EST PRISE

La nature s'est prise aux filets de ta vie.

L'arbre, ton ombre, montre sa chair nue: le ciel.
Il a la voix du sable et les gestes du vent
Et tout ce que tu dis bouge derrière toi.

ELLE SE REFUSE TOUJOURS

Elle se refuse toujours à comprendre, à entendre,
Elle rit pour cacher sa terreur d'elle-même.
Elle a toujours marché sous les arches des nuits
Et partout où elle a passé
Elle a laissé
L'empreinte des choses brisées.

SUR CE CIEL DÉLABRÉ

Sur ce ciel délabré, sur ces vitres d'eau douce,

Quel visage viendra, coquillage sonore,
Annoncer que la nuit de l'amour touche au jour,
Bouche ouverte liée à la bouche fermée.

INCONNUE

Inconnue, elle était ma forme préférée,

Celle qui m'enlevait le souci d'être un homme,
Et je la vois et je la perds et je subis
Ma douleur, comme un peu de soleil dans l'eau
froide.
 LES HOMMES QUI CHANGENT

Les hommes qui changent et se ressemblent

Ont, au cours de leurs jours, toujours fermé les
yeux
Pour dissiper la brume de dérision
Etc...

NOUVEAUX POÈMES

à G.

NE PLUS PARTAGER
Au soir de la folie, nu et clair,
L'espace entre les choses a la forme de mes
paroles
La forme des paroles d'un inconnu,
D'un vagabond qui dénoue la ceinture de sa gorge
Et qui prend les échos au lasso.

Entre des arbres et des barrières,

Entre des murs et des mâchoires,
Entre ce grand oiseau tremblant
Et la colline qui l'accable,
L'espace a la forme de mes regards.

Mes yeux sont inutiles,

Le règne de la poussière est fini,
La chevelure de la route a mis son manteau rigide,
Elle ne fuit plus, je ne bouge plus,
Tous les ponts sont coupés, le ciel n'y passera plus
Je peux bien n'y plus voir.
Le monde se détache de mon univers
Et, tout au sommet des batailles,
Quand la saison du sang se fane dans mon
cerveau,
Je distingue le jour de cette clarté d'homme
Qui est la mienne,
Je distingue le vertige de la liberté,
La mort de l'ivresse,
Le sommeil du rêve,

Ô reflets sur moi-même! ô mes reflets sanglants!

ABSENCES
 I

La plate volupté et le pauvre mystère

Que de n'être pas vu.

Je vous connais, couleur des arbres et des villes,

Entre nous est la transparence de coutume
Entre les regards éclatants.
Elle roule sur pierres
Comme l'eau se dandine.
D'un côté de mon cœur des vierges
s'obscurcissent,
De l'autre la main douce est au flanc des collines.
La courbe de peu d'eau provoque cette chute,
Ce mélange de miroirs.
Lumières de précision, je ne cligne pas des yeux,
Je ne bouge pas,
Je parle
Et quand je dors
Ma gorge est une bague à l'enseigne de tulle.

ABSENCES

II
Je sors au bras des ombres,
Je suis au bas des ombres,
Seul.

La pitié est plus haut et peut bien y rester,

La vertu se fait l'aumône de ses seins
Et la grâce s'est prise dans les filets de ses
paupières.
Elle est plus belle que les figures des gradins,
Elle est plus dure,
Elle est en bas avec les pierres et les ombres.
Je l'ai rejointe.

C'est ici que la clarté livre sa dernière bataille.

Si je m'endors, c'est pour ne plus rêver.
Quelles seront alors les armes de mon triomphe?
Dans mes yeux grands ouverts le soleil fait les
joints,
Ô jardin de mes yeux!
Tous les fruits sont ici pour figurer des fleurs,
Des fleurs dans la nuit,
Une fenêtre de feuillage
S'ouvre soudain dans son visage.
Où poserai-je mes lèvres, nature sans rivage?

Une femme est plus belle que le monde où je vis

Et je ferme les yeux.
Je sors au bras des ombres,
Je suis au bas des ombres.
Et des ombres m'attendent.

FIN DES CIRCONSTANCES

 Un bouquet tout défait brûle les coqs des vagues
Et le plumage entier de la perdition
Rayonne dans la nuit et dans la mer du ciel.
Plus d'horizon, plus de ceinture,
Les naufragés, pour la première fois, font des
gestes
qui ne les soutiennent pas. Tout se diffuse, rien ne
s'imagine plus.

BAIGNEUSE DU CLAIR AU SOMBRE

L'après-midi du même jour. Légère, tu bouges et, légers, le sable et

la mer bougent.
Nous admirons l'ordre des choses, l'ordre des pierres, l'ordre des
clartés, l'ordre des heures. Mais cette ombre qui disparaît et cet
élément douloureux, qui disparaît.
Le soir, la noblesse est partie de ce ciel. Ici, tout se blottit dans un
feu qui s'éteint.
Le soir. La mer n'a plus de lumière et, comme aux temps anciens, tu
pourrais dormir dans la mer.

PABLO PICASSO
Les armes du sommeil ont creusé dans la nuit
Les sillons merveilleux qui séparent nos têtes.
À travers le diamant, toute médaille est fausse,
Sous le ciel éclatant, la terre est invisible.

Le visage du cœur a perdu ses couleurs

Et le soleil nous cherche et la neige est aveugle.
Si nous l'abandonnons, l'horizon a des ailes
Et nos regards au loin dissipent les erreurs.

PREMIÈRE DU MONDE

À Pablo Picasso.
 Captive de la plaine, agonisante folle,
La lumière sur toi se cache, vois le ciel:
Il a fermé les yeux pour s'en prendre à ton rêve,
Il a fermé ta robe pour briser tes chaînes.

Devant les roues toutes nouées

Un éventail rit aux éclats.
Dans les traîtres filets de l'herbe
Les routes perdent leur reflet.

Ne peux-tu donc prendre les vagues

Dont les barques sont les amandes
Dans ta paume chaude et câline
Ou dans les boucles de ta tête?

Ne peux-tu prendre les étoiles?

Écartelée, tu leur ressembles,
Dans leur nid de feu tu demeures
Et ton éclat s'en multiplie.

De l'aube baillonnée un seul cri veut jaillir,

Un soleil tournoyant ruisselle sous l'écorce.
Il ira se fixer sur tes paupières closes.
Ô douce, quand tu dors, la nuit se mêle au jour.

SOUS LA MENACE ROUGE

Sous la menace rouge d'une épée, défaisant sa chevelure qui guide

des baisers, qui montre à quel endroit le baiser se repose, elle rit.
L'ennui, sur son épaule, s'est endormi. L'ennui ne s'ennuie qu'avec elle
qui rit, la téméraire, et d'un rire insensé, d'un rire de fin du jour semant
sous tous les ponts des soleils rouges, des lunes bleues, fleurs fanées
d'un bouquet désenchanté. Elle est comme une grande voiture de blé
et ses mains germent et nous tirent la langue. Les routes qu'elle traîne
derrière elle sont ses animaux domestiques et ses pas majestueux leur
ferment les yeux.

CACHÉE

Le jardinage est la passion, belle bête de jardinier. Sous les

branches, sa tête semblait couverte de pattes légères d'oiseaux. À un
fils qui voit dans les arbres.

L'AS DE TRÈFLE

Elle joue comme nul ne joue et je suis seul à la regarder. Ce sont

ses yeux qui la ramènent dans mes songes. Presque immobile, à
l'aventure.
Et cet autre qu'elle prend par les ailes de ses oreilles a gardé la
forme de ses auréoles. Dans l'accolade de ses mains, une hirondelle
aux cheveux plats se débat sans espoir. Elle est aveugle.

À LA FLAMME DES FOUETS

Ces beaux murs blancs d'apothéose
Me sont d'une grande utilité.
Tout au sérieux, celui qui ne paie pas les dégâts
Jongle avec ton trousseau, reine des lavandes.

Est-il libre? Sa gorge montre d'un doigt impérieux

Des corridors où glissent les sifflets de ses
chevilles.
Son teint, de l'aube au soir, démode ses tatouages
Et l'asile de ses yeux a des portes sans nuages.

Ô régicide! ton corset appartient aux mignons

Et aux mignonnes de toutes sortes. Ta chair simple
s'y développe,
Tu t'y pourlèches dans la pourpre, ô nouveau
médiateur!
Par les fentes de ton sourire s'envole un animal
hurleur

Qui ne jouit que dans les hauteurs.

À LA FLAMME DES FOUETS

Métal qui nuit, métal de jour, étoile au nid,
Pointe à frayeur, fruit en guenilles, amour rapace,
Porte-couteau, souillure vaine, lampe inondée,
Souhaits d'amour, fruits de dégoût, glaces
prostituées.

Bien sûr, bonjour à mon visage!

La lumière y sonne plus clair un grand désir qu'un
paysage.
Bien sûr, bonjour à vos harpons,
À vos cris, à vos bonds, à votre ventre qui se
cache!

J'ai perdu, j'ai gagné, voyez sur quoi je suis monté.

BOIRE

Les bouches ont suivi le chemin sinueux

Du verre ardent, du verre d'astre
Et dans le puits d'une étincelle
Ont mangé le cœur du silence.

Plus un mélange n'est absurde—

C'est ici que l'on voit le créateur de mots,
Celui qui se détruit dans les fils qu'il engendre
Et qui nomme l'oubli de tous les noms du monde.

Quand le fond du verre est désert,

Quand le fond du verre est fané
Les bouches frappent sur le verre
Comme sur un mort.
 ANDRÉ MASSON

La cruauté se noue et la douceur agile se dénoue. L'amant des ailes

prend des visages bien clos, les flammes de la terre s'évadent par les
seins et le jasmin des mains s'ouvre sur une étoile.
Le ciel tout engourdi, le ciel qui se dévoue n'est plus sur nous.
L'oubli, mieux que le soir, l'efface. Privée de sang et de reflets, la
cadence des tempes et des colonnes subsiste.
Les lignes de la main, autant de branches dans le vent
tourbillonnant. Rampe des mois d'hiver, jour pâle d'insomnie, mais
aussi, dans les chambres les plus secrètes de l'ombre, la guirlande
d'un corps autour de sa splendeur.

PAUL KLEE

Sur la pente fatale, le voyageur profite

De la faveur du jour, verglas et sans cailloux,
Et les yeux bleus d'amour, découvre sa saison
Qui porte à tous les doigts de grands astres en
bague.

Sur la plage la mer a laissé ses oreilles

Et le sable creusé la place d'un beau crime.
Le supplice est plus dur aux bourreaux qu'aux
victimes
Les couteaux sont des signes et les balles des
larmes.
 LES GERTRUDE HOFFMANN GIRLS

Gertrude, Dorothy, Mary, Claire, Alberta,

Charlotte, Dorothy, Ruth, Catherine, Emma,
Louise, Margaret, Ferrai, Harriet, Sara,
Florence toute nue, Margaret, Toots, Thelma,

Belles-de-nuit, belles-de-feu, belles-de-pluie,

Le cœur tremblant, les mains cachées, les yeux au
vent
Vous me montrez les mouvements de la lumière,
Vous échangez un regard clair pour un printemps,

Le tour de votre taille pour un tour de fleur,

L'audace et le danger pour votre chair sans ombre,
Vous échangez l'amour pour des frissons d'épées
Et le rire inconscient pour des promesses d'aube.

Vos danses sont le gouffre effrayant de mes

songes
Et je tombe et ma chute éternise ma vie,
L'espace sous vos pieds est de plus en plus vaste,
Merveilles, vous dansez sur les sources du ciel.

PARIS PENDANT LA GUERRE

«Amoureux d'une statue.»