Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Exhileration

I am excited to hear from Gadamer how free we really are. He describes the problem at hand of the chance of a primordial falsity to our experience of the world. This is possible because of the extent to which we are bound by language. Our thought is shaped by the words we know. Simultaneously, our existence is an ongoing self-dialogue which is a "constant going beyond oneself and [returning] to oneself" (492). Some theories propose that we are truly imprisoned within the particular schematization formed by the conversation we learn from birth. Yet Gadamer says boldly that "there are no limits to the interior dialogue of the soul with itself" (493). He says we have the ability and the potential to say everything in words and there can be a universality to what we say.
At first thought, I am amazed to think of the freedom we have to express what we may not even understand in our language. This links to Heidegger's idea that we are able to be authentic at any time. It would seem we posses the power to go further than we would expect given our language capabilities into who we really are. How is this possible? What is happening when the dialogue between our soul and itself reaches beyond the limits of what language affords? Is this possible because it is afforded by experience, and we simply don't have words to describe our experience? To what extent does our experience preceed our words and our understanding of ourselves?

No comments:

Post a Comment