The Fragility of Language and the Encounter with God

On the Contingency and Legitimacy of Doctrine

Florian Klug

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506473680
• eBook ISBN: 9781506473697
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Drawing on recent philosophical developments in hermeneutics and poststructuralism, The Fragility of Language and the Encounter with God offers a theological account of the contingency of language and perception and of how acknowledging that contingency transforms the perennial theological question of the development of doctrine. Klug applies this account to humanity's encounter with God and its translation into language. Because there exists no neutral epistemological standpoint, Klug integrates contemporary insights on the theory of the subject (especially those of Žižek and Badiou) and presents humanity as a subject that transforms its experience of and with God into language and places it in a shared space for reception. But can the speaking subject have authority and legitimacy in making statements about the Absolute? What role do the Christian faithful play in evaluating that authority?

These questions are addressed both to biblical texts and doctrinal statements. Crucial is the Catholic perspective that legitimate statements of faith and insights are only possible through the Holy Spirit. However, humanity cannot command or control the Holy Spirit but can only show its influence indirectly through the receptive tradition of the universal church. The Fragility of Language and the Encounter with God argues that statements of faith cannot overcome contingency. Instead, the Catholic notion of receptive tradition attempts to cope rationally with the fragility of perception and language in humanity's orientation toward God.

1

Man and Language

Man as a Speaking Being

Since antiquity, those who have observed man, and seek to define the qualities that are unique to him and differentiate him from other living creatures—especially from other animals—have focused on the rational language of Logos that has been granted to man. This places him above all animals.1 For man, language is the means of communication par excellence; through language, man can enter into a mediating and a mediated relationship with a counterpart, with an Other. Just as a speaking being is in a relationship with a recipient, the relationship between a speaking being and language likewise consists of an irrevocable alterity. Language is acquired from the external world, through experience; in the communicative process, one’s focus shifts from one’s own position toward that of the interlocutor. Language always remains something external to man; it can’t be incorporated into one’s own self—that is, into one’s own horizon—in such a way that one would have real authority over it. The externality, the inaccessibility, and the alterity of language are essential elements of human speech.

If language lacked these characteristics, it would be in danger of losing its dynamism, its ability to develop, and its vitality; it would tend toward stasis. If that were to happen, there would no longer be understanding, but only direct knowledge. Therefore, according to Martin Heidegger, speaking and expressing are not the primary starting points for man’s ability to speak; man’s ability to listen is prior to even having words: “Listening to . . . is the existential being-open of Dasein as being-with for the other. Listening even constitutes the primary and authentic openness of Dasein for its ownmost possibility of being, as in hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it.”2

In addition, one should note a special characteristic of human speech that is closely associated with the etymological relationship between λόγος and logic: human speech and human thought can’t, and mustn’t, be strictly separated from one another. Moreover, according to Hans-Georg Gadamer, there is an essential connection between thought and speech that keeps them closely intertwined with each other: “Rather, language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs. Understanding occurs in interpreting. . . . All understanding is interpretation, and all interpretation takes place in the medium of a language that allows the object to come into words and yet is at the same time the interpreter’s own language.”3

It must be noted that human language is not an instrument,4 an object that man can use independent of thought; if that were the case, language would only emerge secondarily—that is, be an additional factor that helps man articulate his thoughts aloud and communicate them to fellow human beings. Man is a historical being embedded in historical structures that he can certainly recognize but can’t overcome. This temporary horizon has a special quality: the time-bound nature of linguistic access to the world is expressed anew in each spoken word. Following Gadamer, one can say that man, due to his own historicity, is always subject to a linguistic prejudgment that is open to being revised or corrected.5 An “a priori” prior to this prejudgment can’t exist because man is dependent on experiences that come to him from the outside. Through experience, man acquires language, knowledge, and a horizon as a structurally necessary prejudgment; it is precisely through this same experience of an intrusion from the external world that a prejudgment, if man is open to it, will be revised or corrected.6

Man can’t take an objective position toward language—that is, treat it as a concrete object or an instrument. Walter Kasper, following Heidegger and his student Gadamer, takes the view that man depends on language in order to even have access to hearing the truth. However, the same words can’t directly present the truth to man because they are independent of man; they are integrated in a dialectic movement that makes the truth accessible or inaccessible.7 Man is dependent on language in order to be able to think. He can’t violently reject this dependence and become his own master of language because this would place him outside the world and historicity. In other words, a human being who frees language from these conditions and then places himself in an absolute position over language is no longer a human being.8 Man’s world of understanding is a world of language; his horizon is located in this world and can be expanded. Man experiences the world through language, but language is not a direct reproduction of reality; it gives humans the possibility of having access to reality.9 Man gains perspective through language. It is finite and limited, just as Wittgenstein’s perspective toward the world through language claims, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”10

Limitations and Possibilities of Human Speech

Even though man’s authority over language is limited, and he can never really master it, language opens up possibilities for him that can only exist through language and can never exist beyond it. Language gives man the possibility of not only being able to act in a practical way; through speech itself, via so-called performative statements, man is able to produce objective facts about reality.11

As already mentioned, language is, first and foremost, an event between people in which a speaking being enters into a relationship with an Other. John R. Searle, in his work on the construction of human institutions through human speech acts, declares that language is primarily a functional instrument that is available to humans and makes it possible for them to live in a communicative community with one another.12 Because language is not a direct reproduction of external reality, and it can’t be (as a medium for communication, language has a mediating position and therefore occupies the middle between a thing and its meaning), it can lead to differences—that is, disagreements between signification (the sign—the signifier—and the signified).13 The relationship between the signifier and the signified is not natural and directly given: “The link between signal and signification is arbitrary. Since we are treating a sign as the combination in which a signal is associated with a signification, we can express this more simply as: the linguistic sign is arbitrary.”14

Language and its linguistic signs are not an identical reproduction of reality; to the contrary, they are separated by a chasm that humans can’t overcome through logical-rational means. Man can recognize this gap between the signifier and the signified and problematize it, as Jacques Derrida and others do with the neologism différance.15 One finds here the essential mystery of human language; due to the contingency of its function as a sign, it opens up possibilities of naming and signifying, but it also simultaneously, in turn, closes and even denies man the possibility of mastering it. Language can be understood as a wound or as something in a state of limbo.16 Even thematicizing and articulating this mystery doesn’t reveal it, nor does this lead it to an enlightened position; rather, it focuses one’s gaze onto the mystery so that man, despite all his difficulties and efforts to analyze language, has no choice but to accept his inability to master language and its state of limbo. Man can only respond to the question of the essence of language by a paradoxical nonresponse.17

The problem that a linguistic sign doesn’t directly reproduce the signified object phonetically but only references and names it in a declarative statement isn’t made any easier if one places various signs in relation to one another and if one connects them functionally through grammatical structures and forms a statement out of all of them. Nevertheless, as precarious as this starting point is for man’s attempts to solve this problem, this opens up the possibility for man, on a practical level, to not only take an individual position but enter into a communicative community with another person in which he is totally reliant on himself as a creature that is a speaking being. In speech, man puts himself at risk as an individual by marking his statements with an I and identifying them as his own individual perspective.18

A speaking being finds himself in a dialectical situation; he doesn’t have authority over language, but language—that is, a spoken statement—is determined by chance and fragility. The speaker simultaneously steps out of speechless anonymity, enters the public sphere, and makes himself and his personhood a topic for public scrutiny.19 His statement can turn into a lie, just as his oath can turn into perjury or his promise can become an untruth because man hasn’t been granted sovereignty over language. In a performative statement, as presented par excellence in an oath or a promise, an interpersonal reality can be created that closely connects the statement of the person, who is making a promise or swearing an oath, with his own personhood and exposes him to acknowledgment by the Other. In order for such a new reality, created through language, to have an effect on the world, the recipient (an individual or a collective, such as a nation or a community of fellow believers) has to accept ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Marcus Pound
• Preface to the English Edition
• Translator’s Note
• Introduction: The Primary Epistemological Question
• 1. Man and Language
• 2. God’s Initiative: God’s Intrusion into Man’s Horizon of Understanding
• 3. Human Speech about God
• 4. Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography