Exiled in the Mother Tongue: Gadamer’s Contribution to the Question of Heimat and Fremde

A notable significance of the phenomenon of exile for hermeneutics is most distinctively revealed by its paradoxical situation in which one’s life is interrupted with respect to place, time, and language. Exile characterises a moment of displacement whereby life is neither entirely forgetful of and disjoined from the Heimat nor wholly assimilated and fused into (verschmelzen zu) the Fremde. As Gadamer puts it, “Wer aber das Schicksal hat, im Exil zu leben, der führt ein Leben zwischen vergessen wollen und das Andenken wahren, zwischen Abschied und Andenken, Verlust und Neubeginn, wo immer es auch sei.” In this sense, exile marks the situation in which one’s life is identified neither with the Heimat nor with the Fremde, and yet is located at the same time by both. Instead of emphasising the pervasive power of the past with such expressions as tradition, belongingness, and preservation, as he does in Wahrheit und Methode, Gadamer, in the later works, becomes much more attentive to the disruptive moments that are effective in understanding as revealed by his interpretation of the moment of exile.

I wish to examine the notion of exile from a hermeneutic perspective, taking Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as its point of departure. This topic is inspired by a recent development in Gadamer scholarship, exemplified by Donatella Ester Di Cesare in her Utopia of Understanding and by James Risser in his The Life of Understanding, that brings the notion of exile to the fore. Their works on exile have helped pave the way for recognising the relevance of place and the relation of the Heimat and Fremde for Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, which has hitherto mostly been neglected. Indeed it is possible to locate in his later works aspects of his thought which pertain to the questions of exile, even though such a topic is not explicitly thematised in Wahrheit und Methode. The essay “Heimat und Sprache”, for instance, marks one of the very few places where Gadamer explicitly takes up such a problematic.

It is in the nature of language that we feel zu Hause and fremd at the same time. Thus Gadamer remarks that “Ich erinnere hier nur etwa an die Unvordenklichkeit der Heimat. Das ist etwas, was man niemandem vermitteln kann, was sie für einen ist.” In borrowing the expression ‘das Unvordenkliche’ from Schelling, Gadamer hopes to underline the the manner in which the living language, the only language we have, is always capable of renewing itself. Yet such a renewal is possible precisely because we are also displaced from it at the same time. As such, Gadamer’s conception of language forms a double movement whereby that to which we belong, the living language, also serves to displace us from our very place in the world. It is in this sense that the mother tongue is to be understood: “Die Muttersprache behält für jeden etwas von unvordenklicher Heimatlichkeit”. Hence, I wish to bring out the relation between place and language and demonstrate the significance which this relation acquires for hermeneutics insofar as our thinking is guided by it.

Tsutomu Ben Yagi  has been working since the beginning of 2013 as a doctoral student at the Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg under the supervision of Professor Günter Figal. His research topic consists of examining the significance of place (Ort) for Gadamer’s hermeneutics through the notions of home (Heimat) and foreign (Fremde). I have previously studied at Berkeley (U.S.A.), Dublin (Ireland), and Budapest (Hungary).