Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Faithful Gadamer

The question posed by Gadamer is whether thought preforms language. The danger in such a conception is that if such is the case we have no choice in where language leads us globally and are doomed to destruction caused by industrialization and planetary abuses. Gadamer says that "... because this dialogue is infinite, because this orientation to things, given in the pre-formed schemas of discourse, enters into our spontaneous process of coming to an understanding both with one andother and with ourselves, there is opened to us the infinity of what we understand in general and what we can intellectually appropriate"(493).

What I'm having a hard time understanding is how are we capable of infinite dialogue? Obviously, Gadamer can't be speaking individually. Is this a kind of Hegelian interpretation of dialogues in the form of Geist? That's the interpretation that I'm taking to the right one, but I want to insure I'm not mistaken. The other interpretation that I can conceive of is that the possibilities of dialogue are infinite. My problem with either of these is that I don't see or I missed the foundation for the claim.

For me the only reasonable way to assert and justify this presumption would be to develop a certain concept that was unexpressable (how you would express it would be difficult, though) and show that language could not get there naturally. Now, in Gadamer's case, if Gadamer is referring to the capacity for us to reconceptualize, again, this would be Hegelian, I think, and find new possibilities for all possible concepts in that, I think he has a better argument. This kind of argument seems to be illustrated in "... the mediation of an experience pre-formed by language that we grow up in our world, does not remove the possibilities of critique"(495). This is the famous Hegelian thesis, antithesis, synthesis notion. However, even this seems to have a predetermined destination. While the argument can be said to have more leniency in formulation of new conceptions, I don't see that all possibilities are possible through it.

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