Truth and Method: Part III

The ontological shift of hermeneutics guided by language

1 Language as the medium of hermeneutic experience

p 397

To try to escape from one's own concepts in interpretation is not only impossible but manifestly absurd. To interpret means precisely to bring one's own preconceptions into play so that the text's meaning can really be made to speak to us.

But no text and no book speaks if it does not speak a language that reaches the other person. [...] There cannot, therefore, be any single interpretation that is correct "in itself", precisely because every interpretation is concerned with the text itself.

2 The development of the concept of language in the history of Western thought.

In Greek the expression for "word", onoma, also means "name".

p 407

...without words being must be known purely from itself.

3 Language as horizon of a hermeneutic ontology

p 468

Hegel distinguishes between the speculative and the dialectal. The dialectal is the expression of the speculative, the presentation of what is actually contained in the speculative, and to this extend is the "truly" speculative.

p 484

Only when light is created, does God speak for the first time. Augustine interprets this speech, by means of which light is commanded and created, as the coming into being of mental light, by means of which the difference among created things is made possible.