revdrron

How does it happen that [words] are ‘words,’ that is, that they have a general meaning? In his first apperception, a sensuously equipped being finds himself in a surging sea of stimuli, and finally he begins, as we say, to know something. Clearly we do not mean that he was previously blind. Rather, when we say ‘to know’ [erkennen] we mean ‘to recognize’ [wiedererkennen], that is, to pick something out [herauserkennen] of the stream of images flowing past as being identical. – Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 14