Gadamer, Augustine, Aquinas, and Hermeneutic Universality

Abstract

Hans-Georg Gadamer's claim that hermeneutics is universal is both widely controversial and rarely understood. At the very least it is the claim that the relevance of hermeneutics goes beyond the traditional questions of interpreting authoritative texts, especially religious texts or legal texts. More likely Gadamer has in mind something along the lines that hermeneutics asks the most fundamental philosophical questions, or that hermeneutic insights are central to any philosophical system. Gadamer himself hasn't been particularly clear on what he means by hermeneutics' universality; sometimes he speaks universal problem, at other times universal process, at other times universal experience. What is clear is that the claim of hermeneutic universality is related to Gadamer's theory of language, as the claim first arises in the final section of Truth and Method, Language as the Horizon of Hermeneutic Ontology. In series of recent articles Jean Grondin has sought to shed light on the problem by focusing on Gadamer's discussions of specifically Augustine's analogy between the God as Verbum, as Word incarnate, and speech as thought incarnate.1 Grondin's view is that Hermeneutics' claim to universality can only be adequately understood via Augustine, and his interpretation has become standard fare among Gadamer interpreters. Against this reading, I think Gadamer's reliance on Augustine is overstated. Augustine's view violates central features of philosophical hermeneutics, so either Grondin - and perhaps Gadamer too - is misreading or Grondin is misreading Gadamer's use of Augustine. Commentators, including Grondin himself, have noted that in what is supposed to be discussion of Gadamer spends quite bit more time discussing Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa. I will argue that is rightly so; it is Aquinas's account of the inner word, the verbum mentis, that helps us to see what Gadamer means by the universality of hermeneutics, not Augustine's discussion of the interius Verbum.2 Such criticism is not just quibble about Gadamer scholarship. The issue of universality is important for three reasons: it is the linchpin of the debates between Gadamer and Habermas in the late 1960s;3 it is one of the ways Gadamer locates himself in the history of hermeneutics; and it is meant to legitimate questions of interpretation as central, if not fundamental, philosophical questions. But as important as the claim to universality is, Grondin's misreading of Gadamer means that he misses the real insights contained in Gadamer's discussion of the Verbum. So to understand why Grondin is mistaken is at the same time to better understand core claims of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. Grondin begins by citing two of Gadamer's references to Augustine: first Gadamer's discussion of Plato and Augustine in the last chapter of Truth and Method, and then Gadamer's reference to Augustine in his account of the history of the forgetfulness of language. The forgetfulness of language was the event of turning language into mere medium of the expression of ideas, rather than seeing language as having a being of it own.4 Gadamer traces the origin of this event all the way back to Plato's negligence of the intimate connection between words and things.5 In the Cratylus Socrates weighs two competing accounts of language, one where language is made of purely conventional signs used to refer to things, the other where words are by their nature connected to the things they signify. Neither is wholly satisfactory - if language were pure convention we could not use words wrongly; if words were naturally connected to things we could not explain linguistic differences - but both take for granted that however words work, they work as signs of reality, and have fundamentally different kind of existence from what are truly real, the forms. Gadamer considers the instrumentalization of language in the two choices as masking the true character of language. …