ABSTRACT
The Paradiso’s speculative reflecting of the whole of being is effected by poetic language, particularly by dint of metaphor, and thus self-reflection in this sense also turns toward the Other, toward references other than those literally signified. Dante presents God specularly, through an indispensable imagery of mirroring, yet this approach to God becomes fully intelligible, not only by the light of images, but also through the speculative character of language. Taking the speculative dialectic of thought and the concept developed by G. W. F. Hegel into the realm of language, Hans-Georg Gadamer speaks of a speculative dimension belonging to language as such, according to which “the finite possibilities of the word are oriented toward the sense intended as toward the infinite”. The dialectical movement of the proposition expresses the speculative relation—the mirror-like relation—that is language’s speculative presentation of the thing itself.
