A Hermeneutics at the Limit: The Prelinguistic Testimony of Human Finitude

Abstract

This dissertation reexamines the experience of human finitude in the hermeneutical works of Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. In this, I claim that hermeneutic experience is an experience with human finitude, and that this experience of human finitude is a testimony. The structure of testimony I put forward in this dissertation contains two parts: Testimony is both the revelation or evidence of something true, and a demand to act in the face of this truth. The experience of human finitude is then an existential testimony, one which reveals our ontological limits as finite beings, and makes an ethical claim on us to nevertheless act responsibly in our finite condition. For Jaspers, we encounter this testimony in the boundary situations of death, suffering, struggle, and guilt, and in the ciphers of transcendence. In Heidegger, the attestation of Dasein is in the silent call of conscience, the fundamental mood of anxiety, and in the immanence of death as Dasein’s ownmost possibility. For Gadamer, hermeneutical experience is testimonial in our encounter with tradition.

Furthermore, I develop an account of this testimony as one that is silent or ‘prelinguistic.’ The testimony of human finitude is always an initial encounter with that which is not yet in language, but nevertheless urgently demands to be interpreted and understood. A hermeneutic disposition that is attentive to the grounding role of finitude in hermeneutic experience, what I am calling a ‘hermeneutics at the limit,’ is necessary for interpreting and understanding the prelinguistic testimony of human finitude. After the first three chapters on Jaspers, Heidegger, and Gadamer, chapters four and five then turn to the poetic works of Paul Celan and Herman Melville as existential testimonies that call for a hermeneutics at the limit in order to bring these prelinguistic testimonies into language for oneself and for others.