James Risser

THE INCAPACITY OF LANGUAGE

In this essay I want to discuss Gadamer’s philosophy of language. Anyone already familiar with Gadamer’s position might think I had made an error in my title. Should it not be the capacity of language rather than the incapacity? After all, in the crucial passages in Truth and Method and in numerous other writings Gadamer affirms the capacity rather than the incapacity of language. To take but one example: “To say what one means”, he tells us, “means to hold what is said together with an infinity of what is not said in one unified meaning and to ensure that it is understood in this way”.1 The task of understanding, for Gadamer, is to find the word that can reach the other, and the fact that we do find such words signalling the success of understanding is not really put in question, at least as he presents his position in Truth and Method. This process of an unfolding linguistic meaning in which “finite possibilities of the word are oriented toward the sense intended as toward the infinite”2 presumes, of course, that meaning does not reside in the statement, but is held within the very motility (Bewegtheit) of language, which Gadamer describes simply as living language. So, why would one want to speak about the incapacity rather than the capacity of language in a treatment of Gadamer’s philosophy of language?3 The simple and uncomplicated answer to this question is that because Gadamer follows Heidegger in relation to the basic configuration of his hermeneutics, he will accordingly incorporate into his position Heidegger’s radicality regarding the finitude of being, whereby being has a self-concealing if not a self-refusing dimension. Presumably Gadamer displays this radicality in his understanding of language, which he in fact describes as the record of finitude. Despite the way in which Gadamer expresses this finitude in classical metaphysical language, there is still good reason to maintain that he does hold to this radicality, and one can assume thereby that for him language contains a certain inability within it. At first sight, we see how Gadamer attends to this inability when he tells us that in dialogical conversation, which is of course the model for living language, we can never say all that we want to say. But precisely what this means, i.e., to understand how a certain incompleteness equals an incapacity, is by no means clear. In order to understand the character of this finitude and its inability in a thorough-going manner, let me first draw an important distinction. In the form of a question: Is the incompleteness at issue here a function of the limits of language as this might ordinarily be understood, or is the incompleteness due to the performative dimension of language itself, such that an idea of

The Demand of Freedom in Kant's Critique of Judgment

Abstract This paper examines the issue of the unity of the critical philosophy in Kants Critique of Judgment through a careful consideration of the actual bridge that joins nature and freedom. Kant argues that this bridge is made under the demand for the furtherance of life, and is accordingly to be equated with the demand of freedom. This article specifically focuses on this demand that is, in effect, carried out by the principle of purposiveness. It is argued that this demand is somewhat artificial since it does not fully take into account the real struggle between nature and freedom.