Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method ,. p. 255 ) spells out the ontological import of Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy: “Things make themselves understood in their interpretation - that is, in language that speaks to us here and now . . . . Being makes itself accessible by presenting itself in beings that can be understood, and they are its self-presentations, its language . . . . If so, being exhibits the speculative structure of language. It multiplies itself in the infinity of its historical reflections and yet is nonetheless one.” The infinity here is the infinity of language; we can always say something new about something. “Reflection” reflects Gadamer’s use of the mirror metaphor of language - all language is speculative in the etymological sense, in that it is mirrored in language.

Weinsheimer goes on:

Being “retains its unity because what is expressed in language does not acquire a second existence; but rather its expression in language, as in a mirror, is the appearance of the thing itself. ‘What something presents itself as, belongs indeed to its own being.’” Weinsheimer understands that comment this way: “That this as belongs to its being means that (rather than being self-identical) it differs from itself: it is/not itself, and this is the case of everything that exists historically. It has a mirror relation to itself, a rift in its identity, which means that existing historically, as always something different, is its way of being.”

For Gadamer, though, this doesn’t degenerate into sheer plurality or alterity because “this is a mirror relation.” As Gadamer puts it, “Everything that is language has a speculative unity, a difference in itself between its being and its self-presentation, a difference however that is in fact no difference.” This split is built into language; language is inherently metaphorical (as Walker Percy says somewhere). Weinsheimer says it this way: “What a word means is not what it is; and yet if we divorce the meaning from the word in order to determine what the word is in itself, when it no longer means anything, then it is simply no longer a word. Language does not exist by itself but only in relation. A word is most a word when it is understood, when it means something other than itself and when what it is disappears into what it means, its interpretation.”

I repeat my earlier post: Gadamer’s entire project is an (unwitting) exposition of vestigia Trinitatis . His exposition, though, is far more orthodox than Derrida’s, whose work is also always bumping into Trinitarian categories. Gadamer is better because he knows that not all sons are prodigals. Gadamer is better because he is not, like Derrida, a consistent Arian. He knows that Sons can proceed from Fathers without being diminished by that procession, that Fathers can beget sons without leaking some of himself out, that Fathers are fulfilled as Fathers precisely in the begetting of Sons.