Hans-Georg Gadamer: ‘Language as Determination of The Hermeneutic Object’

Abstract

Writing involves self-alienation. Its overcoming, the reading of the text, is thus the highest task of understanding. Even the pure signs of an inscription can be seen properly and articulated correctly only if the text can be transformed back into language. This transformation, however, always establishes … a relationship to what is meant, to the object that is being spoken about. Here the process of understanding moves entirely in the sphere of a meaning mediated by the linguistic tradition. Thus the hermeneutical task with an inscription starts only after it has been deciphered. Only in an extended sense do non-literary monuments present a hermeneutical task, for they cannot be understood of themselves. What they mean is a question of the interpretation, not of the deciphering and understanding of what they say.