Abstract

In his book Truth and Method, Hans Georg Gadamer, criticizes the treatment that natural sciences give to the concept of experience. To achieve the ideal objectivity of knowledge, capable of guaranteeing the repetition of experiences to throw an identical result, science has to remove completely the "historicity of experience". The method of this model consists of successive generalization of data obtained in the cognitive process so that they can be used teleologically in predicting similar events composed of other individual data. Also the historical moment of the event is lost in the middle of the process of generalizing. But the gadamerian search about the essence of hermeneutic experience goes in another direction. Rather, it protects its own internal historicity, and has a direct relationship with tradition understood as language, i.e. "who speaks for itself as it does a ‘you’" and as "a true companion of communication", Gadamer said. Although hermeneutic experience has a linguistic nature, the gadamerian treatment of language is very different from the traditional philosophy of language. Indeed, Gadamer insists the unity of thought and language, but understood in the hermeneutic context as "understanding and interpretation" unit. It’s then imperative to discover the intrinsic nature of language, and in doing this, Gadamer discovers two medieval theology ideas, penetrated by Greek philosophy, which serve as the perfect basis for hermeneutic experience: the Logos incarnation as a metaphor for verbum mentis, or inner word, and its manifestation in language; and the mysterious union of the divine persons in the Trinity to illustrate the type of links that occur during the "processual moment of the word". Such analogies appear in chapter 13 of his book and he quotes from several medieval authors. This essay refers only to the second.