The Inner Word Prior to Language

Hans-Georg Gadamer wants to uphold the inseparability of and language, and so does John Arthos in his new book, The Inner Word in Gadamer's Hermeneutics? Arthos focuses on the Augustinian and Thomistic concept of inner word, verbum interius, only because it looks to be a crucial nodal point linking and the inner workings of the mind, but also because Gadamer himself indicated that his hermeneutical thinking has grown from it as a crucial point of departure (IW 98; cf. 1 ). The importance of this concept and its history is enough to justify a whole book devoted to the interpretation of a single ten page section of Wahrheit und Methode, containing Gadamer's discussion of the inner word (III, 3, B).2 turns out to be a strikingly ambivalent section. includes a paragraph of sharply critical rhetorical questions aimed at Augustine (cf. IW 265f.; TM 381), who gave the West the concept of verbum interius together with the insistence that it does in fact have anything to do with language. It is Greek nor Latin nor of any other tongue, Augustine insists (On the Trinity 15:19), but a word of the intellect alone - precisely without speech! Gadamer quite rightly identifies this as a consequence of Augustine's thoroughly Platonist devaluation of sensible phenomena (IW 249; TM 380), and Arthos comments, part of Augustine's theory is anathema to (IW 250). Arthos's condemnation of Augustine at this point is strikingly, though no doubt inadvertently, ecclesiastical, employing the word anathema, which is the solemn term used for cursing a heretic who preaches a false gospel.3 If philosophical hermeneutics is meant to be good news - in that sense a kind of evangelion or gospel - then it apparently originated with a concept that turned out to be heretical. is all the more interesting that this heresy is represented by the great church father Augustine, who is the fountainhead of Christian orthodoxy in the West as well as the source of the concept of verbum interius. Something interesting and complex is going on here, in Gadamer's text as well as Arthos's. As a first approximation, I'd say what's happening is that Augustine is quite what any of us want him to be. This has been a repeated theme of my own scholarship for years: I'm an Augustine scholar who brings to both Catholic and Protestant theologians the bad news that Augustine isn't quite what they want him to be. Above all, he is more Platonist than anyone really wants him to be, and in that regard Gadamer is in the same boat with the theologians. Distinguishing Sensible and Intelligible Well, what's wrong with Platonism, after all? As Gadamer notes (IW 279; TM 382), describes thinking as an inner conversation of the soul with itself, and the point of this description is precisely to support Plato's contention that thought dianoia and speech logos are the same.4 This sounds pretty close to the desired unity, even though Gadamer thinks that Plato undoubtedly did consider that the process of thought, if conceived as a dialogue of the soul, itself involves a connection with language (TM 368; cf. IW 280). Nonetheless, you would think that this is closer to the unity of and speech Gadamer is after than the concept of the inner word, which Augustine explicitly denies is the kind of thinking we do when we silently use the words of a particular language. Again, Gadamer is well aware of this, and alludes to the passage where Augustine insists that the inner word is neither uttered prolativum in sound nor of in the likeness of sound cogitativum in similitudine soni.5 The inner word is precisely what seems to have been thinking of, a speaking silently to ourselves in a particular language. has no such connection with sensible sound, even imagined sound. To grasp it, says Augustine, we must understand a word not only before it sounds, but even before the images of its sounds are considered in thought, for this is something that pertains to no language. …