In 1988, one of those scenes at which a student of philosophy would yearn to be present took place in a Heidelberg pub. Hans-Georg Gadamer met with Jean Grondin, who was already at work on his brilliant biography of the philosopher, for some conversation and, one trusts, a glass or two of that Rhenish Gadamer greatly loved. The encounter may put us in mind of those brilliant anecdotes that introduce and frame many of the dialogues of Gadamer's beloved Plato. But there is also a touch of the way James Boswell so artfully provoked Samuel Johnson into some of his most telling and memorable utterances. Many philosophers have difficulty appreciating such moments. They prefer clear ideas articulated in coherent arguments. But for a literary critic or anyone with a feel for drama, such moments not only express ideas but situate them in their human context in a way that bare argument can rarely do.The scene itself—dialogue embedded in social conviviality (in vino veritas)—incarnates Gadamer's philosophy perfectly. Grondin reports that he asked Gadamer a question—not “small talk,” but a very philosophic question indeed, as deep as those questions that arise in the most everyday circumstances among Socrates and his young friends. It may not be going too far to suggest that for Gadamer, real thinking is only possible between friends—those “friends for truth's sake” that Plato speaks of. Gadamer himself refers to Aristotle's syngnome and remarks that “only friends can advise each other” (1989, 323). Grondin's question was, on what does the universality of hermeneutics rest? Gadamer did not reply immediately. Instead, he paused to think for a moment. Gadamer was not simply answering but answering for his philosophy, and the pause for thought shows that a real dialectic was taking place, a mutual opening to a truth that never shows itself as merely received or repeated.In contrast to a politician who sticks to his talking points, Gadamer did not, as we might have expected, respond by referring to one of the key concepts from his writings—speaking, say, of dialogue or question and answer or “consciousness effected by history” (“wirkungeschichtliches Bewusstsein”), or tradition. Rather, he responded by saying that the universality of hermeneutics lay in “the interior word.” In his biography, Grondin registers his own surprise at this answer. He certainly knew that Gadamer had spoken of this concept in a few dense and important pages toward the end of Truth and Method and not infrequently in later essays, but presumably he had not realized that it was so central in Gadamer's thinking. And indeed every really good answer to a question is at once familiar and surprising and at the same time “right” in a very precise way (Johnson famously defined “wit” as saying something no one had quite thought before but in so clear and striking a way that its correctness seems self-evident). This is an answer's power to provoke fresh thinking and put things in a new light.Having put the clue into our hands, Gadamer did not elaborate but left it to his interlocutor (and through him us) to take up this provocative remark. All the more welcome, therefore, is John Arthos's important book The Inner Word in Gadamer's Hermeneutics. Arthos provides as comprehensive and detailed an account as one might hope for. After setting the stage with a brief introduction, Arthos examines the texts and thinkers Gadamer draws on in his discussion of language: chapters on Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman reflections on language and the key doctrines of immanence and transcendence in the Trinity are followed by chapters on Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Hegel, and Heidegger. Arthos is not simply documenting Gadamer's sources. Certainly, he is guided by the specific issue Gadamer centers on. But provoked by Gadamer, he reopens the very dialogue with tradition that constitutes Gadamer's path to his own insights. This is methodologically correct—profoundly so. It not only illuminates the thinking behind Gadamer's very condensed discussion but also opens our ears to whatever more tradition may say to us in this fruitfully circular interchange that now includes Arthos and through him ourselves.To my mind, the most productive of these rethinkings is the chapter on Aquinas, which turns out to be just as much about Augustine. An invaluable bonus is that Arthos includes as appendices the Latin text and his own English translation of Aquinas's two short treatises De natura verbi intellectus and De differentia, which Gadamer follows closely and which have previously been inaccessible to readers with little or no Latin. In these appendices, Arthos for his reader's convenience even underlines the words in the Latin text that Gadamer directly quotes. Scholars question whether these treatises are by Aquinas, though Gadamer thought them authentic. In any case, the conversation with Aquinas supports Gadamer's pursuit of his insight that “the formation of the word is not reflexive. For the word does not at all express the mind, but rather, the thing meant” (1989, 426). Thinking about language is thus liberated from the framework of the subject-object dichotomy that makes possible the achievements of modern philosophy but also persists as an insoluble problem. Language is not an instrument created by subjectivity to express its ideas in signifiers that have only an arbitrary relation to signifieds. I think there is a convergence here with Wittgenstein's critique of private language. The ontological status of the word and its relation both to mind and world need to be understood in a new way.Arthos goes beyond Gadamer's specific focus on Aquinas's thought by working out more fully and very subtly a special kind of reflexivity, which he terms “inherent reflexivity,” that keeps the word related to the self but not subordinated to it. He introduces Augustine's use of the mirror to suggest this peculiar reflexivity in which the human being is object (“image”), reflecting surface (“mirror”), and subject (“viewer”) in its own trinity. Even though the mind is not grasping itself in a self-conscious way, it “never does not understand itself, never does not love itself” (1991, 386). Aquinas goes further when he argues that human beings “reflect” God by being like him: according to Arthos, “This means that the image cannot be understood statically or as an object, but as an active imitation” (149). There is a “mutual transformation of being” in the relation of mind and object (150). St. Paul speaks of a mirror but of seeing in a mirror darkly. Thus, Arthos argues, “the Thomist reflexivity of intellect is not a perception or insight of a fixed and whole subject, but an active, transformative process” (153). Instead of a second-order activity of “looking at ourselves thinking,” this inherent reflexivity is “our very being in the world, the circuitous way that we understand” (155). Self and world achieve a correlative perfection through the word, but the word is never subsumed in a Hegelian absolute self-consciousness. Gadamer wants to do justice to the inwardness that Augustine brought into Western thought but also, as Arthos notes, to “thinking with the other, a membership in the civic community” (158). As Arthos puts it, “Being lives in the rich accretions of meaning out in the world, in the particular manifestations of culture and history which communities innovate” (158). Beyond “the inner life of the individual” stands “the shared world of community and history” (158). The word does not rebound “back upon itself or the speaker,” but emanates into the world and “works to constitute that world” (160). In its reflection, it returns with an addition, an increase from the response of another (another person and indeed the whole of tradition).At the same time, Arthos registers very well the difference between Thomas and Gadamer. For Thomas, intellect is ordered toward God, who is perfect intellect, perfect understanding. But for Gadamer, the self lacks “control of experience and the world” (160). Our relation to the world is not simply the path to God, but rather we are caught up in and serve “the unfolding of being in a co-implication that does not ultimately privilege our separated soul” (161). The process of knowing inaugurated in language culminates in “the priority of the question,” not the vision of being (161).I offer this overview as a good example of Arthos's approach. He begins with Gadamer and from there proceeds to engage afresh the texts and writers Gadamer has most directly in view in a particular section of his book. But Arthos is not simply expounding Gadamer or summarizing a previous text Gadamer's readers may not be familiar with. Still pursuing the point at issue, he opens out the earlier thinker's argument and goes well beyond Gadamer's account to find further resources for thinking about language and the relation of self, word, and world. The additional insights he gains in the end return to Gadamer with a wider perspective that connects with other parts of Gadamer's hermeneutics. And those added insights do not simply lie ready to hand in the earlier text but represent Arthos's own penetrating interpretation that claims its own autonomous philosophical interest. He is not just thinking about Gadamer but thinking about the subject (Sache) alongside Gadamer in a way Gadamer would heartily approve of.Each of Arthos's chapters on the tradition is thus worthy of close attention and extended reflection, but I do not try to summarize each here. I would only add that his well-informed examination of the intertwined doctrines of incarnation and the Trinity show how relevant the thinking of the church fathers and above all Augustine are to an understanding of language that escapes the limits and impasses of most modern philosophical accounts. Christianity is many things, but among them it is a serious intellectual tradition that was built up by some of the most acute minds in human history. These thinkers were not simply dogmatically juggling symbols and doctrines backed by scriptural or hierarchical authority. They were thinking through every aspect of human existence in ways that remain instructive. Without question, the thinking in that tradition that remains important for philosophy (in the Greek and modern sense) needs to be separated from the portion that belongs only to committed faith. No bright line divides these two, yet it would not be simply a mistake but also foolish for philosophers, even of the most rigorously secular convictions, to close their ears to this tradition out of a distaste for anything that has the aroma of piety for them or out of a misguided offense at what they take as proselytizing. The work of philosophers from Jacques Derrida's late books to Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben stands as an exemplary demonstration of a readiness to confront this tradition with no intent (or risk) of reclaiming for Christian faith a central, still less authoritative, position in contemporary culture.Following his rereading of the tradition Gadamer converses with, Arthos spends over 140 pages closely examining the 10-page section of Truth and Method entitled “Language and Verbum” (1989, 418–28). His commentary proceeds paragraph by paragraph, preserving the structure and sequence of Gadamer's argument. He usefully provides the German text with his own English translation in double columns side-by-side. He registers both what Gadamer is saying and what he is not saying or when he is saying something unexpected, thus revealing what is going on between the lines or behind the text (Gadamer remarked that every utterance is a union of the said and not-said in a specific way). Gadamer's hermeneutics is, of course, insistent that there can be no “exhaustive” commentary or “final word” on any significant text, and certainly not on a text that packs every page with the fruit of forty years of reading and thinking, as Gadamer's great book does. For all its intensive detail, Arthos's commentary does not silence his (and Gadamer's) readers by handing them the meaning of a difficult text on a silver platter, as it were, but rather invites them to engage with him in a close, mutual scrutiny aimed not at the verbal details of the text but ultimately at the subject matter (Sache) that comes to light through it, namely, the nature of language itself.It is worth repeating that Gadamer's indispensable achievement here is to liberate thinking about language from subjectivism, mentalism, instrumentalism, and linguistic structuralism (including the “communication model”). Those may make useful contributions within their sphere of legitimacy. But without rejecting the notion of consciousness or the theory of judgment, Gadamer makes clear that, as Arthos notes, language carries along with it “the community of persons that speak through that language, their achievements, discoveries, and failures” (359). As Arthos puts it, for Gadamer, “The passage of the word down through human history is … a procession, an increase of being arising out of the very finitude of our contingent being” (360). This new understanding of language has far-reaching implications that we have barely begun to explore. Indeed, I hope that the next book on this subject will survey dominant current views of language and present a critique from a Gadamerian perspective. Arthos's invaluable book sends us forth well equipped for exactly that exploration.