Language is itself a form of expression, or we can also call it an art giving the power to articulate the thought process and spread the message across. Nature has bestowed the animal kingdom and birds with the language for them to express themselves. Be it bees, ants, whales, apes, elephants from tiny birds to huge ones like eagles and vultures, all are naturally given the gift to make not only their presence felt but also express their inhibitions and interests to others in their own world. For animals, language is not required to be learned but they adopt it naturally in their own environment, but it is not so with men. Human beings developed their own language and learned it according to their needs and aspirations and in the environment of their dwellings. What made them different from the animal kingdom?
Language for men is not just the way of their expressing power but it is their way through which they could feel associated themselves with their own society, culture and religion. The language was formulated by the conscious efforts of our ancestors who had experimented with the symbols and figures of our cavemen. And the man to conceptualize the meaning of this language in the world of ours is no one else than
Hans-Georg Gadamer. He was the man to give the shape to the hermeneutics of the twentieth century. He had training in neo-Kantian scholarship and classical philology and was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He formulated a complete distinctive dialogical approach based on Plato, Aristotle and Heideggerian. He completely ignored subjectivism and relativism, renounced any interpretive methods, and based his understanding on the basis of the linguistic tradition. (Malpas, Online).
His relationship with the language and art has been associated with him throughout his life. He followed the process of philosophical hermeneutics of Heidegger but in a different form. Heidegger’s interest was basically based on the ontological perspective of hermeneutics but Gadamer went beyond that to explore and ponder on the historicity of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is an art of the interpretation of literature, in its various dimensions, especially biblical literature. Therefore, Gadamer had done the interpretation in a historical manner the structure of understanding that opens us to the world outside, but with certain essence of prejudices. The prejudices are the necessary precondition of understanding of our historical past, in other words, prejudices should not be understood negatively but for Gadamer, it plays the most important role as an understanding of the starting point of our understanding transmitted by our tradition. (Negru, 115).
Besides this philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer extensively worked on literature and art especially in the field of poetry. He especially claimed the fact that the distinctive feature of poetry is its autonomous power. In other words, it means that poetry for its composition does not require any additional information on the way it should be composed, or on its historical composition. He meant to say that, “poems interpret themselves insofar as one needs no additional information about the occasion and the historical circumstances of their composition.” (Gadamer, 86) Poetry like in any other type of language and art and goes beyond the content and on the basis of which it is being composed. Unlike the other prose, the poem stands as a unique concept in itself to the extent that if any other information is added to the author or context, it is treated as a tool for interpreting it while the poem bears the testimony of that interpretation. But, even more than that, any remaining information will add on to explain the overall context of the poem but does not involve the meaning of the poem itself.
Gadamer did not consider poetry as a part of the communication or as a passage for the author’s message. For Gadamer, the poem stands alone in itself, reflects its own meaning, its own message. As he said that, “poetry doesn’t report, it testifies; it stands on its words”. (Gadamer, Philosophy and Literature, 249).
To reflect the meaning of the poetry, Gadamer adopted what is known as Paul’s Valery’s currency metaphor. He says that prose of everyday usage is like paper money, and is a symbolic representation of the inner depths of our life. It gets its value from its capacity and ability powers to substitute themselves and exchange for objects. It is like a gold coin, which comes to use when it is put forward for the exchange. Poems are quite useful for exchange purposes but at the same time valuable too even if the images in the stanzas of the poem are worn off just like the coin is worn off in a due course of time.
Language is not something, which stands in its own unique way but language is an expression of something, which we have to face in our day to day lives in our scientific encounters and in our practical day to day life. In the same way, words cannot stand on their own account but are the expression of the powers that we intend to convey. Whether the words are written or spoken, they are used according to the way we live, we express and we associate ourselves with others and associate with our society or culture. Language or words do not have their own identity. There is a sharp difference between the poetry we express and the poetic world we use in our everyday lives. As Vallery suggests, “The language of poetry is not a mere pointer that refers to something else, but, like the gold coin, is what it represents” (Gadamer, Bernasconi, & Walker, 113).
Gadamer says that words in the poetry have their own value that cannot become invisible even it is placed in the context of the meaning of the poetry and the whole poetry too do not wither away its textual presence in the revelation of something it wants to reveal. In whatever way, we think about the poetry maintains its intrinsic power to make the revelation and also has the prospective to initiate further interpretations. While reading the poem we can feel their hidden meaning and sounds which are creating the effect and the importance of words in it, and it is also true that the poem gets its meaning only because of these words. He further states that poems are not easily translated, but the fact is that new poems are always written in a new language that tries to keep the meaning of the original context of the poem in contact. Therefore, we can say that the best translators of the poems are also poets themselves who have the capability and power to express.
Gadamer also says that art is “a continuation … of natural tendencies of natural events” and says, “the play that emphasizes on the truth in the presence of the work of art is an example of the play that models all interaction, especially dialogical interaction”. (Discussion Paper: Poetry as a Unique Art Form, Online).
Another function of language he suggests is a disclosure which according to the hermeneutic phenomenology, any phenomenon is not disclosed to the subject but is disclosed through the use of language, which in turn decorate the ideas that ultimately guides us towards our understanding of the world. It makes us closer to the world and familiar with it, to the extent that whenever we forge the exchange of words with one another, the world is shared. Language makes us feel closer to the world whereby it makes us have an experience of everything, which is going on around us, it makes us realize and encourage the religious waves that would make our salvation easier. It also enables us to make a judgment of what is right and what is wrong in our society. Especially the words in the poems bear the testimony to our belongingness to the world.
Gadamer also wrote dialogue when he says that dialogue is a means due to which phenomena become conscious. We modify all our actions and relations with the materialistic and immaterial things in the world and understand them in the due course of the process. Language is a disclosure of our thoughts as such it is considered as a shared disclosure. Language opens us towards reality in the same way it opens us to the real world outside. Just like things make the revelation to us in the way of our association to them and in the way of their usage for us, language also helps us in perceiving the words and is linguistically informed. We see something because we have words, which make us understand these things and these things are disclosed to us as something that we can understand, articulate and describe and naturally in the form of words that make the language.
We understand the things or objects that are produced before us and articulate them or describe them in the form of language. The linguistic experience of Gadamer suggests that language executes the thought process and the criteria for the use of language is based on criteria for successful thinking. Hereby he reveals the fact that poetry plays a distinctive role in developing the status of the language and in turn poetry adorns the language in its very character to disclose the depth of its functioning. Poetry refines the language and develops the process of disclosing. From this aspect, Gadamer suggests poetry, “the highest fulfilment of that revealing which is the achievement of speech” (Gadamer, Bernasconi, & Walker, 112).
Here in the disclosure and assessment of the process of language or art, Gadamer suggests that the “at-hand character of experience is ubiquitous, in which case hands are not just tools. They form an essential way the world is disclosed to us”. (Discussion Paper: Poetry as a Unique Art Form, Online) Things, which are within our reach, we feel like touching them and grasping them. Grasping something is similar to understanding something and hereby hands are very useful tools as a virtue of the fact that our hands, which are the most useful part of our body to discloses.
Gadamer’s association with the art form has been influenced by his own concept of dialogue and the history of philosophy, and he brought out the facts from Hegel as well as Plato. This association also made him comprehend and understand hermeneutics as well as helped him to develop this concept further. As opposed to others, Gadamer took beauty as his central point to understand the nature of art and he makes us understand his real intentions on the use of beauty in his final pages of “Truth and Method”.In the book, he emphasized the fact that beauty is presented to us in many forms and makes us feel a close relationship between the truth and beauty.
The particular interest in his writing is the conceptualization of the three ideas like art as play, art as a symbol and art as a festival. First is the importance of play which is a central theme of Gadamer’s hermeneutic thinking process bringing out the basics of the account of Gadamer’s experience of both his art and understanding. Art for Gadamer is not a simple representation, but within each art there lays a deeper meaning of life and is literally more than what is represented. In whatever medium artwork is displayed, it conveys the symbolism. As we experience art we are not given the vision of our new life but we are also able to make our dwelling along with this work of art, which takes us into the journey of our time. Therefore, art according to Gadamer is festive – a festive of not only our life but also our life beyond and to the life that we are not able to see and perceive but that is our truth and is very well a great exponent of our life. Gadamer suggests that in our understanding of the art there is an influence of history and situation so historical and it is also true that any kind of understanding is at some degree or the other is self-understanding and when we are able to understand the art, we would also learn what we are capable of?
Further, Gardner said about language that in order to understand the spoken or written language we must have the power to anticipate its meaning. But in several conditions preconceiving or prejudging of the language and the manner in which the language is interpreted in reality pose in front of us a hindrance and can mislead us in interpreting its true meaning. Therefore, if we are to understand the exact meaning of its language, we should be able to make which of our preconceptions or thoughts are making our understanding possible, or which our preconceived notions are misleading us. Historians make the point that it is very possible to make the interpretation of the meaning possible by the process of finding out its history but Gadamer criticize it. He said that while there is a historical consciousness on the observation of the past the understanding of the hermeneutic joins the concept of the past with the present. Therefore we can say that there is a consciousness about the hermeneutic changes and this very consciousness joins our present with the past.
Gadamer suggests that language is a medium through which we are able to experience the world and understand it and that through hermeneutics. The hermeneutics states that it is language is everything, which we are able to understand. It is not just a style of interpretation, but it also establishes the relationship between an interpreter and a language that needs to be interpreted.
Reference
“Discussion Paper: Poetry as a Unique Art Form”. Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 2007. Web.
Gadamer. Hans-Georg. “Philosophy and Literature”. Man and the world 18(2), 1985: 249.
Gadamer, Hans Georg, Bernasconi, Robert & Walker, Nicholas. “The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays”. Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Religious and Poetical Speech.” In Myth Speech and Reality edited by Alan Olson and Leroy Rouner. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1980.
Gadamer, Hans Georg, Weinsheimer, Joel & Marshall, Donald G. “Truth and Method” London / New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004.
Malpas, Jeff. “Hans-Georg Gadamer” Internet (2005). Web.
Negru, Teodor. Gadamer-Habermas Debate and Universality of Hermeneutics. International Journal of Axiology, 7(7) 113-119, 2007.