Gadamer’s notion that things “come into language” can sound rather abstract and abstruse. I think it’s a powerful idea.

It’s powerful first because, as Gadamer is at pains to demonstrate, it means that language is not a screen that keeps us from access to the world (as Derrida and others tend to say). Because things can “come into language,” because every thing can come into language, we have access to everything. Language is potentially as big as the world; it can contain the earth and all that is in it, and heaven too. Because the world comes into language, it comes into knowledge; it becomes discussable and therefore knowable.

It’s powerful also because it shows us what language is for. Against Plato, modern science, and structuralism, Gadamer insists (with Heidegger) that language and world are inseparable (both would say that language in some ways constitutes the human world, as opposed to the mere “environment”). We cannot consider language “in itself” without considering the world that we use language to talk about. When we try, we end up with something that is not really language, because the world has always already “come into language.”

Gadamer’s idea is also not abstract but very concrete, though he rarely expounds on it in concrete ways. Consider:

A scientist discovers a new element. To make his discovery known, that bit of the world must come into language: He must name it before he can announce it. But naming the new element is not just a way of publicizing a discovery. It is not merely a matter of labeling something, like an artifact in a museum display. When the element comes into language, new possibilities are opened up for describing the element and its infinite set of relationships in the world.

The scientist describes the new element - let us call it stoichyzon - by reference to atomic weights, which puts stoichyzon into a pattern of relations with other elements. He describes its properties by comparison with other related elements. He describe how stoichyzon might combine with other elements, or how an isotope of stoichyzon might be put to practical uses. All of the properties and relations of the element to the world of which it is a part are explored in language, and language enables us to look at stoichyzon from an infinite variety of different angles.

Or, think of an undiscovered Amazon tribe, without any written language. It already has “come into language” in various ways. It has oral myths and the elders of the tribe recount the tribe’s history to the young men who are entering adulthood. Women pass on their lore to daughters while going about daily tasks. But if the tribe is finally discovered and, say, visited by a German anthropologist who writes a monograph on his field world, the tribe has “come into language” in a more expansive way. Perhaps the tribe has unusual or unique religious practices or beliefs; they will be analyzed and discussed by comparison with previously known tribal religions. Tribal rituals will come into the German language to be expounded on and compared.

This all is so obvious and natural that it’s almost impossible to imagine it happening any other way. How else would new discoveries become widely known except by “coming into language”? But the very naturalness and obviousness supports Gadamer’s point: To imagine an alternative is not only to imagine humanity having a different sort of culture; it requires us to imagine humanity as a different sort of species altogether. That the world must, and always already has , come into language points to a fundamental anthropology that has, as Gadamer recognizes, thoroughly theological roots.