- Cf. Hart, The Beauty of the Infi nite , 298: “truth inhabits words that in
themselves can never be adequate to the fullness of what they express.”
- Cf. Gerhard Ebeling, An Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language ,
trans. R.A. Wilson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), 57: “a statement can
often say much more than it makes explicit.”
- Cf. TM , 475: a word’s “own physical being exists only in order to disap-
pear into what is said.”
- This builds upon the principle established in his discussion of aesthetic
experience ( TM , 140). Representations of works of art (i.e., images) have
a relationship with the original, but this relationship is not “one-sided”;
that is, the original does not merely bequeath to the copy its ontological
infl uence and condition. Instead, the reproduction is now the place where
the original presents itself, where it comes into being; the copy emanates
as overfl ow of the original which undergoes “an increase in being” (cf.
Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer,
Strauss, Derrida [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 87: “If a
play exists as a play only in being presented, it continues to exist only in
re-presentation. Although each and every reproduction is different, there
is an enduring core that remains recognizably the same”).
- Nicholas Davey, Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer’s Philosophical
Hermeneutics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006),
139.
- Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language , trans. Peter D. Hertz (San
Francisco: HarperCollins, 1963), 124, italics original. See also Martin
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , trans. Albert Hofstadter (New
York: HarperCollins, 1971), 188. Similarly, Gadamer writes: “it is more
literally correct to say that language speaks us, rather than that we speak it”
( TM , 463). This is parallel to his earlier statement concerning play: “all
playing is a being- played” (106). Hence, all speaking is a being-spoken.
- Gary Madison, “Being and Speaking,” in Beyond the Symbol Model:
Refl ections on the Representational Nature of Language , ed. John Stewart
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 83, italics his.
- Cf. Heidegger, On the Way to Language , 63: “The being of anything that
is resides in the word. Therefore this statement holds true: Language is the
house of Being.”
- Cf. Ebeling, Theological Theory of Language , 56: “We could not speak and
understand language if language had not been uttered to us in advance,
drawing us into the continuum of language which existed before us and
independently of us.”
- According to Palmer, Gadamer’s notion of die Sache Selbst is non- personal:
“the ‘what’ that we understand is not a personal ‘what’ but an historical
‘what’ in which we participate; to refer to ‘personal experience’ is itself to
CONVERSATION, BEING, AND TRINITY: TOWARD A TRINITARIAN... 45
