I summed up Gadamer’s discussion of beauty and light a few days ago, but here is Gadamer himself speaking to the subject ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , pp. 482-7). Following Aristotle and Aquinas, he argues that “‘Radiance’ . . . is not only one of the qualities of the beautiful but constitutes its actual being. The distinguishing mark of the beautiful – namely that it immediately attracts the desire of the human soul to it – is founded... Read more
Language is a prison-house to much post-structuralist theory. Not to Gadamer. I suspect that this is related to the fact that he is comfortable with finitude. Language seems a prison-house only to those who still long for some way to escape creaturliness. Language is a prison-house only for frustrated Platonists. For Gadamer ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , p. 444), language is the condition of human freedom: “wherever language and men exist, there is not only a freedom from... Read more
One might characterize Gadamer’s project as one of recognizing the virtue of necessity. We cannot understand the past, he points out, without involving ourselves in it; even if we could slice ourselves from our understanding of the past then it would no longer be we who understand it. No matter how much we try to put ourselves into the shoes of an author or imagine a historical time period, it is we who are wearing the shoes and doing the... Read more
According to Gadamer ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , 405), philosophy essentially began with a nominalist move. The “earliest” view saw an “intimate unity of word and thing,” so intimate that the “true name was considered to be part of the bearer of the name.” Philosophy “more or less began with the insight that the word is only a name – i.e., that it does not represent true being. This is precisely the breakthrough of philosophical inquiry into the... Read more
Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method ,. p. 255 ) spells out the ontological import of Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy: “Things make themselves understood in their interpretation – that is, in language that speaks to us here and now . . . . Being makes itself accessible by presenting itself in beings that can be understood, and they are its self-presentations, its language . . . . If so, being exhibits the speculative structure of language. It... Read more
Weinsheimer (p. 241) on Gadamer on Nicholas of Cusa: “By allying the creativity of language to the divine creativity that speaks the world into being, Nicholas of Cusa is able to conceive of the multiplicity of human locutions and languages positively. He understands them not merely as mental words, as Aquinas did, but as actual spoken languages; and even these, he implies are – however many – still not a mere dispersiona nd enfeeblement of the one true Word. Whereas... Read more
Joel Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method , p. 238) offers this superb summary of Gadamer’s preference for the logic of metaphor over the logic of deduction or induction: “If thought is indivisible from language, then thought is more fundamentally metaphorical rather than logical. Metaphor is a specifically linguistic process of concept formation ( Bildung ), since a concept is altered and expanded when a word is transferred from one thing to another so that the... Read more
Genesis 49:12: He washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes. His eyes are darker than wine, and his teeth whiter than milk. As Pastor Sumpter has emphasized, we live in a world of deception, seduction, and lies, of hype and hypocrisy. Men have been liars since Adam’s fall, but our technologies pose fresh dangers. The serpent that deceives us is of our own making. Flash and flair are today more important than substance. Advertisements... Read more
Matthew 28:18-20: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything that I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always even to the end of the age. Baptism is a naming ceremony. Your daughter already has a name, and a meaningful one. Baptism adds another name because in baptism she becomes a member of a new... Read more
When Adam sinned, he abandoned his Father to become a child of the devil, the father of lies. Ever since, the history of humanity has been a history of lies. “All men are liars, the Psalmist says. Paul agrees: “Their throat is an open grave, with their tongues they keep deceiving. The poison of asps is under their lips.” Paul says two things about lying. First: Lying is universal. We may rarely tell an outright falsehood, but we spin and... Read more
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