Liberating Language

Language is a prison-house to much post-structuralist theory. Not to Gadamer. I suspect that this is related to the fact that he is comfortable with finitude. Language seems a prison-house only to those who still long for some way to escape creaturliness. Language is a prison-house only for frustrated Platonists.

For Gadamer ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , p. 444), language is the condition of human freedom: “wherever language and men exist, there is not only a freedom from the pressure of the world, but this freedom from the environment is also freedom in relation to the names that we give things, as stated in the profound account in Genesis, according to which God gave Adam the authority to name creatures.”

Unlike animals, who are bound to environment, humans are capable of being free from environment, and that is because of language. Human beings experience the world through the medium of language, and language is inherently variable and flexible, offering multiple ways of accessing the complexities of the world. Speech is thus the source of human freedom: “Man can always rise above the particular environment in which he happens to find himself, and because his speech brings the world into language, he is, from the beginning, free for variety in exercising his capacity for language.”