"The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said"
About this Quote
Language, for Gadamer, is not a tool you pick up and put down; it is a medium that picks you up. The provocation in this line is the reversal of ownership. Modern life trains us to treat words like instruments: sharpen the message, control the narrative, optimize the tone. Gadamer insists that the "real being" of language is not the dictionary definition or the private intention behind speech, but the event that happens when hearing actually lands and takes hold. Meaning is not stored in language like data. It occurs in the act of being addressed.
The sly subtext is anti-sovereignty. When we hear "what is said", we are not simply decoding signals; we are being situated inside a shared world where assumptions, traditions, and histories are already at work. Hearing is porous. It brings us under language's jurisdiction, where we can be surprised, corrected, even changed. That is why Gadamer's emphasis falls on being "taken up": understanding is less conquest than participation.
Context matters. Writing in the wake of Heidegger and against the post-Enlightenment fantasy of pure method, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics argues that interpretation isn't a technical procedure that yields neutral results. It's dialogical, historically conditioned, and dependent on openness to the other. "What is said" is pointedly public: it resists the retreat into "what I meant". The line doubles as a warning and a promise: the more we try to dominate language, the less we grasp how it actually works - as a living, communal force that happens to us.
The sly subtext is anti-sovereignty. When we hear "what is said", we are not simply decoding signals; we are being situated inside a shared world where assumptions, traditions, and histories are already at work. Hearing is porous. It brings us under language's jurisdiction, where we can be surprised, corrected, even changed. That is why Gadamer's emphasis falls on being "taken up": understanding is less conquest than participation.
Context matters. Writing in the wake of Heidegger and against the post-Enlightenment fantasy of pure method, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics argues that interpretation isn't a technical procedure that yields neutral results. It's dialogical, historically conditioned, and dependent on openness to the other. "What is said" is pointedly public: it resists the retreat into "what I meant". The line doubles as a warning and a promise: the more we try to dominate language, the less we grasp how it actually works - as a living, communal force that happens to us.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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