Dasein - Monoskop

246 PART III
Gadamer argues that different worldviews are not relative with
respect to the world an sich. Rather, "in every worldview the world
an sich is meant" 49 , and the world an sich is nothing but the sum
of the different world-views. To explicate this idea Gadamer draws
on phenomenological insights concerning perception. Husserl had
argued that the Ding an sich cannot be conceived of as the inaccessible
cause of our perceptions and presentations. Rather, it is the sum
of the different ways in which the thing appears to differently situated
perceivers. In other words, the Ding an sich is the continuum
of different perspectival adumbrations, Gadamer suggests that we
should conceive of the relation between different languages and their
worldviews along similar lines. Thus he speaks of different linguistic
worldviews as of different "linguistic adumbrations" and suggests
that the world an sich is nothing but the sum of these linguistic
adumbrations.
With this suggestion, though, Gadamer has not yet exorcized
linguistic relativism but merely defended himself against the possible
charge of semantical Kantianism. It might even seem that linguistic
relativism follows from the application of the notion of adumbration
to language, since in Husserl different (perceptual) adumbrations
exclude each other. Gadamer overcomes this difficulty by modifying
Husserl's notion of adumbration: every linguistic adumbration is
universal in that it can enlarge itself to include all other possible
adumbrations:
But it remains a characteristic difference that every "adumbration"
of the object of perception is exclusively different from
every other one ... whereas, with the adumbrations of the linguistic
worldviews, each one potentially contains within it every
other one, i.e., every one is able to extend itself into every other
one. It is able to understand, from within itself, the "view" of
the world that is presented in another language. 50
Despite the crucial significance of the Husserlian notion of adumbration
for Gadamer, however, and despite the possibility that
Gadamer's conception of language as infinite might derive from
Husserl, Gadamer does not return to Husserl's language as calculus
conception. Earlier we already saw Gadamer reject the project of a