Conclusion

Summary

The truth of the word

Tis but thy name that is my enemy; – Thou art thyself, though, not a Montague

What's Montague? It is nor hand nor foot,

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

What's in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

In the hope of approaching its uncanny nearness, Gadamer first spoke of an anteriority of language to thought. To think is to try to explain yourself in words. We are awoken by language to thought, but still earlier, to the presence of things. Gadamer eventually speaks of a contemporaneity of language to thought, rather than of an anteriority. The anteriority of language is not reduced to a vision or a schematization of reality by the mind, since the world is present through language, and we are present to the world. The past anterior of the language is really a present indicative.

Guillaume de Humboldt was right in saying that language represents a vision of the world. But for Gadamer, that is not enough: it is the world itself which is language speaking for us, to the extent that we cannot distinguish the world itself, the linguistic sense from an “en soi” which would be more world than what is articulated in words. In seeing the world's setting in language as a mental capacity (Geistekraft) and a process of formalization, Humboldt remained the prisoner of a subjectivist metaphysics on the powers of understanding.