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FRANCIS J. AMBROSIO
Georgetown University
Heidegger to which Gadamer calls our attention above is not the dif-
ference between day and night: the two share a c o m m o n concern for
the same question, the question of truth. Rather, Gadamer speaks of
dusk and dawn: two different ways of turning toward the one "sun"
which now lights up all that is, revealing its presence, now enfolds all
in darkness, drawing it into absence. The goal of what follows is to
comprehend the striking appropriateness of this metaphor as a way of
expressing the relation of Gadamer's thought to Heidegger's.
The position taken here is that this relationship, in both its similarity
and difference, must not be treated as a comparison of "philosophies,"
and therefore as an issue of intellectual curiosity about two "posi-
tions," but must be entered into in the way one joins a conversation,
by taking up for oneself the question which is its essential subject
matter, in this case, the question of the nature of truth. Only when the
c o m m o n ground which Gadamer and Heidegger share in their way of
asking this question has been displayed precisely in terms of the boun-
daries which the "crisis" of their different ways of attending to it first
establishes and brings into view can their relation on those grounds be
adequately expressed. To do this, we shall consider three proposals.
First, that the principal point of similarity between Gadamer and
Heidegger emerges in the central role which the notions of die Virtuali-
tdt des Sprechens, the virtuality of living language, and das Ereignis, the
event of Appropriation, play in the thought of each respectively regard-
ing the question of truth. Second, that the primary difference between
them shows itself as different ways of speaking, almost as distinct "ac-
cents" one might say, which they develop in attempting to respond to
the question of truth. Finally, that this relation of similarity and dif-
ference between Gadamer and Heidegger in their way of asking and
responding to the question truth reveals something essential about the
nature of truth itself: namely, its inner relation to the question of
freedom, a question which, itself unspoken and unthought, lies at the
center of the issue we propose to consider here. The conclusion we shall
reach is that Gadamer's relation to Heidegger is most worthy of con-
sideration for what it shows about how thinking, one of the works of
truth, lets us be free.
23
(i) Truth
Heidegger's early and later writings and gives a new direction to the
working out of the Kehre, just as it gave the direction which Heidegger
worked out in Sein und Zeit. Furthermore, this new direction is the
one Gadamer sees himself as following in Wahrheit und Methode.
Consequently, Gadamer follows Heidegger b e y o n d the transcendental
phenomenology of the existential analytic of Dasein through the
turning in his way of thinking toward the nature o f truth happening as
event. This leads to an ontological context appropriate to asking the
question of the truth of Being in its priority to beings, that is, with-
out reference to beings. We are looking, therefore, for a clue in Gada-
mer's Introduction not only to the direction of Heidegger's later
thought, but to the direction o f Gadamer's own leading question in
Wahrheit und Methode as well.
I take the "clue" referred to by Heidegger from Gadamer's Intro-
duction to Der Ursprung to be the following:
(ii) Language
(iii) Destination
(iv) Similarity
The first element of this parallel comes into view when we consider
the way in which Gadamer thinks of language as "centering" the hu-
man relation to the world (die Mitte der Sprache). This means that it
is language which "centers" the event in which man and world come-
to-be-together. The structure of this event is a "centering" because
language essentially constitutes: a "point of mediation" out of which
man and world emerge together; a " c o m m o n ground" upon which they
meet; the " m e d i u m " within which their relation unfolds.
Gadamer sees this conception of die Mitte der Spraehe prefigured,
although somewhat dimly, in Alexander von Humboldt's insight that
languages are "views of the world." Gadamer interprets von Humboldt
as meaning by this that as one grows into membership in a linguistic
community, one is introduced to a particular attitude and relationship
to the world. But Gadamer points out that the ontological ground of
this insight is really the recognition that language has no independent
life apart from the world that comes into view within it. "Not only is
the world 'world' only insofar as it comes into language, but language,
too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is represented
within it. Thus the original humanity of language means at the same
time the fundamental linguistic quality of man's being in the world.'21
Gadamer's critique of von Humboldt here follows a strictly Heideg-
gerian line. The work of language in mediating man's relation to the
world is a genuinely ontological "appropriation" of the sort Heidegger
spoke of in Identity and Difference, as opposed to a metaphysical
"connection" between "things" or an external subjective or dialectical
31
achievement - not only does die Welt weltet only insofar as it comes
into language, but die Sprache spricht only as the coming into language
of the world.
It is in terms of this conception of die Mitte der Sprache as the
coeval emerging together of man and world that Gadamer thinks of the
event of truth as the unhiddenness (aletheia) of beings. Truth, for Gada-
met, is the emergence into language of the human relationship to the
world as a virtual whole of meaning. The notion of die Mitte der
Sprache contributes to determining the meaning of virtuality by empha-
sizing the ontological priority of the "centering" which language is to
any of the beings which appear within it, that is, the priority of the "re-
lation" (Verhdltnis) to its "relational members" (Beziehungsgliedern).
The world is not simply the collection of beings that appear within it;
rather, it is the absolute condition of their appearing and standing forth
as the beings they are. In this sense it precedes them absolutely. It is
this quality of ontological priority and "absoluteness" which the hu-
man relation to the world, occurring as an event of truth in language,
involves that is the first essential determination of the meaning of
virtuality in Gadamer's thought insofar as it parallels Heidegger's notion
of das Ereignis:
the interplay of the movement toward the appearing of beings amid the
abiding concealment of Being which characterizes all truth as unhidden-
ness. In Heidegger's essay Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, he spoke of
truth setting itself to work as art. The "work of truth" happening in
the art work refers to the clearing of an open space, so to speak, within
which beings can reveal themselves as what they truly are, not just "in
themselves," whatever that may mean, but in terms of their place in a
human world (Van Gogh's peasant shoes, for example). This occurrence
of unhiddenness, however, does not happen as "steady presence"
(stete Anwesenheit) in which beings are laid bare, but is simultaneously
an event of concealment, a holding-themselves-back in which beings
stand within themselves, that is, in their Being. Because art is essentially
poetry, and "poeticizing" became for Heidegger the "opening-saying"
of Ereignis, the effective essence of which is silence and to which hu-
man speaking is a co-responding, we expect to find a fundamental con-
gruity between what Heidegger said about the structure of the event of
truth and what Gadamer wishes us to understand about the way truth
is bound up with the virtuality of language.
This is in fact the case. When Gadamer asks how truth happens in a
linguistic world, he finds that the unhiddenness of beings contains
within it this same opposition of revealing and concealing, and this
by the very nature of language:
extends out beyond itself into what necessarily remains unsaid. This
relation of "responding and indicating" and the limit of knowledge it
establishes does not imply that truth is falsity or even "partial" falsity,
nor is it merely the consequence of the finitude of human under-
standing. On the contrary, it speaks of the original superabundance of
meaning that comes into language, but never fully, in the event of
truth, and which itself accounts for the finitude of human under-
standing. The point here is one which is basic to both Heidegger and
Gadamer's thought, namely that the priority and initiative in lan-
guage, understanding, and the event of truth lies with Being rather
than with Dasein or with beings in general. This is the ultimate meaning
of human finitude in all its determinations, and thus Gadamer can say
with regard to language and truth:
Here we touch on the heart of the matter, but for the moment,
only in passing. How Gadamer and Heidegger attempt to think about
the "finitude of Being," which is always and only the Being of finite
beings, and yet which is at the same time the origin of the superabun-
dant "infinity of meaning" to be understood in human speaking, this
is, as we shall see, the critical point at which both similarity and dif-
ference flash between them. For the moment, however, we are still
stressing what is common to them. 26
The final element of the virtuality of living language which we will
consider here is its characteristic of "founding" truth, in a sense very
similar to the one in which Heidegger spoke of the work of art founding
truth. Specifically, we are concerned with the quality of "newness"
which the event of truth carries with it in its emergence into language.
This "'newness" of the event of truth considered from the center of
language is the third determination of what Gadamer means by virtuali-
ty as parallel to Heidegger's notion of das Ereignis.
We need to recall here the priority Gadamer attributed to the "rela-
tion" over against its "'relational members," the I who understands and
that which is understood. This, we have now seen, is but a specific
application of the notion of das Ereignis which Gadamer recognizes
as lying at the heart of Heidegger's later work. Truth is at work in the
34
(From the side of the subject matter) this event means the coming
into play, the working itself out, of the context of tradition in its
constantly new possibilities of meaning (Sinn) and resonance, new-
ly extended. In as m u c h as the tradition is newly expressed in
language, something comes into being that had not existed before
and exists from now on. 27
From the side of the interpreter, Gadamer emphasizes that the as-
similation o f the meaning of something handed down to us is not a
"mere repetition" of some meaning "in itself" that the text might be
thought to hold. Rather, the text finds voice and is allowed to speak
by encountering the interpreting word, i.e. the word of the interpreter.
Gadamer's model for this encounter-in-language which is the determina-
tion of meaning in understanding is conversation:
II
Obviously, a great deal could be said about his immensely rich and
personally felt statement. The issue, apart from criticisms and re-
joinders, is clearly the question of truth; specifically what Gadamer
calls here the "truth of remembrance." What he wishes to say turns on
a poignant, as well as ancient, metaphor for truth, the sun. In the face
of Heidegger's "radical" announcement of the "cosmic night" of the
forgetfulness of being, the nihilism which Nietzsche had foretold and
with which two generations of European thinkers, including Husserl,
Wittgenstein, Sartre, Marcel, Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, Bultmann, Tillich,
and of course Heidegger and Gadamer themselves, had been intimately
and passionately concerned, Gadamer responds with the image of two
possible reactions to the spreading darkness and a question, "Is one
permitted then to look back toward the last rays of dusk as the sun
sets in the evening sky instead of turning about to watch out for the
first shimmer of its return?" Is this finally the way Gadamer sees his
thought in relation to Heidegger's: an awe-inspired lingering with what
42
has shown forth, allowing its light to sink deeply into the place of re-
membrance and there be memorialized, as opposed to attentive antici-
pation, restless and ever projecting itself forward from the watching
place where it has been stationed, ready to announce the coming of
what will show itself?. What is the difference between the dusk and
the dawn, sunset and sunrise? Between the truth of remembrance of
the having-shown and the truth of attendance upon the not-yet-show-
ing? Are these not both "showing" and therefore the same? Yet they
happen differently because what is remembered and what is anticipated
attentively is not a "what," a being (the sun), but a lighting-showing, an
event which has no being apart from its occurring/happening. Remem-
brance and attendance are different appropriations of the one event of
showing-saying. Gadamer thinks of virtuality as the structure of truth
happening as remembrance. Remembrance memorializes truth, al-
lowing it to be the "same," by engaging in conversation one of the
"works" which comprise tradition, the having-already-shown of truth,
not as a formal re-enactment but as a new appropriation of meaning
which understands "what still and yet again is real." The sense of "the
doable," of what has already been done and needs to be done again,
not as repetition but as understanding anew for oneself, is the correc-
tive which hermeneutical consciousness offers not only to the utopian
or eschatological consciousness which willfully envisions some apo-
calyptic achievement, but also to the attentive anticipation which
awaits in thought an event of truth not-yet-showing.
For Heidegger the thinking of Ereignis is precisely such a thoughtful
attendance upon truth as not-yet-showing. To round out our illustra-
tion of the difference in Heidegger's way of speaking about the event
of truth from Gadamer's, we shall turn now to a text of Heidegger's in
which he too attempts to take one step beyond the apparently prob-
lematic common ground of difference-amid-similarity which we have
seen he shares with Gadamer. That tension-relation of difference and
similarity will not be dissolved by his taking the step, but perhaps by
following it we shall see more clearly how their paths diverge in moving
toward their shared destination.
The text we will consider is the lecture Zeit und Sein (1962). 36
Externally considered, the lecture represents an important way-marker
for Heidegger since it is an explicit attempt to find a way of saying
what he recognized he had not been prepared to say adequately in the
unpublished third part of Sein und Zeit, and for which the "later
writings" since the 1930's (including Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes)
had in some sense been preparing. So he comments at the outset that
43
the purpose of the lecture is "to say something about the attempt to
think Being without regard to its being grounded in terms of beings. ''37
Heidegger is remaining with the one question, different from Gadamer's,
which has guided him from the beginning, the question of the on-
tological difference. But already in Sein und Zeit Heidegger had real-
ized the need to move b e y o n d a phenomenological and transcendental
approach to this question, through which he had shown that Being is
Time in terms of the temporality of Dasein's existence. This approach
is not fully adequate to the task of thinking Being without regard to its
being grounded in terms of beings, even the ontologically privileged
being of Dasein, for which its own being is an issue. Consequently,
Heidegger says here that he can give a "little clue" as to how to listen
to this lecture: "The point is not to listen to a series of propositions,
but rather to follow the movement o f showing. ''3' As we shall see, this
already suggests what Heidegger hopes will show itself, namely the way
in which "occurrence" (Ereignis) happens, the "structure", if you will,
of occurrence. The only way to allow all this to appear is for thinking
to let occurrence happen as thought, i.e. to follow the movement by
which it shows itself.
This movement begins with the naming together of time and Being.
But immediately language (the language of metaphysics, of beings, in
which we are used to think) encounters a difficulty:
Time is not; there is, it gives time. The giving that gives time is
determined by denying and withholding nearness. It grants the
openness of time-space and preserves what remains denied in what
has been, what is withheld in approach. We call this giving which
45
But having thought the giving which gives Being as "destiny," and
the giving which gives time as extending, have we shed light on the It
which - gives Being and time? Has the problem of language we en-
countered at first been overcome? To this extent: that there has be-
come manifest the way that the two, Being and time, are delivered over
to one another in what is most their own. "What determines both,
Being and time, in their own, that is in their belonging-together, we call
Ereignis, the event of Appropriation. ''48 Ereignis names the matter-to-
be-thought, what brings Being and time into their own and holds and
maintains them in their belonging-together. Ereignis names the " I t "
which gives Being and time. At this point, however, Heidegger brings
us up short by telling us that this statement is correct, yet untrue - it
conceals the matter to be thought as Appropriation. 49 For now we
seem to understand the " I t " not as a being but as an event, rather than
thinking " I t " in terms of Appropriation as the extending and destining
which opens up and preserves. We think we k n o w what an event is, but
do we? Impasse? No, aporia; there is more.
In thinking Being and time as Appropriation we have learned some-
thing about what we thought we knew - the way in which occurrence
happens:
attempt to think the meaning of the "It" which gives Being and time
as Appropriation?
terms. Both tasks are "unceasing." Both listen to and say what is always
the Same in terms of the Same about the Same. Yet the manner of say-
ing is different: not in some trivial or idiosyncratic sense, but in a way
that itself pertains to the nature of the truth which happens in the
saying. Truth: saying the Same about the Same in terms of the Same,
differently. This is the subject matter which determines the relation of
Heidegger's thought to Gadamer's. What now, apart from this specific
relation, can we say about that matter itself. What do dusk and dawn
have to do with truth?
III
Gadamer has asked whether, faced with the coming-on of the "cosmic
night of the forgetfulness of being," one is permitted to look back
toward the last rays of dusk as the sun sets in the evening sky instead
of turning about to watch out for the first shimmer of its return. We
now have a clearer idea of what this question means concretely for the
relation of Gadamer to Heidegger in terms of the way each thinks and
speaks about truth. This relation is one of difference amid sameness,
and we find that this characteristic pertains not merely or even primari-
ly to a relation between persons or "philosophies" but has to do with
the nature of truth itself. What is it about the event of truth that al-
lows it to occur as the saying of the Same about the Same in terms of
the Same, differently? As Ereignis/Aletheia for Heidegger and as die
Virtualita't des Sprechens for Gadamer? As the truth of remembrance
memorialized in the lingering with the fading light of dusk, as opposed
to the watchful attention that awaits the overcoming of dark forgetful-
ness by the dawn of a new lighting? How do we say this inner charac-
teristic of truth that allows the Same to differ? Perhaps by allowing it
to give itself to us in our thinking in a different word - now not truth,
but freedom. Perhaps the relation of Gadamer's thought to Heidegger's
is best understood not in terms of the question of truth but rather of
freedom. Perhaps the question of whether "it is permitted" to linger
with the dusk rather than turn to watch out for the dawn of truth can
only be answered when we recognize that all human being-free-from
and being-free-for, and therefore free-to-differ within the Same of
truth, is given by a giving which is also a "freeing."
In the context of Heidegger's thought, the suggestion we are making
here could be viewed as follows. The question of freedom is to be
thought in terms of Ereignis/Aletheia, understood as giving Time (ex-
49
tending the Open) and Being (destiny) and thereby binding and guiding
thought to itself as the matter to-be-thought. This "giving" resolves it-
self then to the question of freedom as origin and destiny. Ereignis/
Aletheia is originative giving of Time and Being as the horizon of pos-
sibility for human being-in-the-world. It frees Time and Being by ap-
propriating them first to each other and then secondarily to Dasein, all
the while concealing itself as the freeing-giving. Freedom is the working
out of the issues of origin and destiny: an origin which is a giving more
original than the identification of any causal complex or agent; a desti-
ny which is the receiving of a giving more ultimate than any final deter-
mination or destination in the sense of an ending place. What is re-
quired in asking how truth can be a saying of the Same differently is
the working out of the structure of a giving and receiving, a revealing
and concealing, an originating and destining which is the most approp-
riate work and own-most play of Truth happening as an event.
For Gadamer, the question of truth in its inner relation to freedom,
can be put in terms of die Virtualitat des Sprechens. As we have seen,
virtuality names the inner character of die Mitre der Sprache, the on-
tological openness of language which allows conversation with the
tradition to point to and indicate the limitless possibilities for meaning
toward which understanding has its bearing, without being able to
bring into language these meanings in their "wholeness." This pos-
sibility resides, in Gadamer's view, in what he terms the "logical priori-
ty of the question." Every "answer" is experienced by hermeneutical
consciousness as an answer to a question, and therefore the "logic"
which governs every horizon of answering receives its determination
from the question which originates it. It is precisely in this sense that
it can be said that, for Gadamer, the question is "more true" than any
answer to it. The characteristic of first being "in question" frees Under-
standing for the pointing to and indicating of a virtual whole of mean-
ing wherein the truth of every answer is to be sought. The freeing of
understanding for truth by its entering upon the common ground of
language opened to it by the question which originates conversation
between interpreter and the work which stands in tradition, thereby
destining it for the possibility of answers which found its history,
means that die Virtualitdt des Spreehens names for Gadamer not
simply the happening of truth in understanding but also the belonging-
together in hermeneutical consciousness of truth and freedom in a way
that is perhaps best captured by a statement from neither Gadamer nor
Heidegger, but the poet Rilke:
50
NOTES
17. See, in general, Heidegger's Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959),
English translation, On the Way to Language, edited by Peter D. Hertz (New
York: Harper and Row, 1971). In particular, the reader is directed to the
essay, "The Way to Language," in that collection where Heidegger makes the
comment in a note on p. 260 (german; 129 english): "It may appear unbeliev-
able to many that the author has been using in his manuscripts the word
Ereignis...for more than 25 years. What it refers to, though in itself something
simple, continues for the time being something difficult to think. F o r thought
must first disaccustom itself from slipping back into the idea that here it is
"Being" that is conceived as Ereignis. The Ereignis is intrinsically different in
its richness from any conceivable metaphysical determination of Being. Being,
on the other hand, can be thought, as regards the derivation of its essence, in
terms of Ereignis."
18. Heidegger, "Origin," p. 87 ( " A d d e n d u m " ) .
19. Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 262 (131).
20. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, p. 465; translation my own.
21. Ibid., 419 (401).
22. Ibid., 426 (408).
23. Ibid., p. 434; translation m y own.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. The difference will be explicated in section II below in terms of the contrast
of "Virtualitiit" and "Ereignis"; the similarity resides principally in Gadamer
and Heidegger's shared insistence that human finitude can only be understood
in terms of the nature of the relation between the human and Being, and not
vice versa.
27. Gadamer, Wahrheit undMethode, p. 438 (419).
28. Ibid.
29. See Gadamer's explication of the structure of Socratic dialogue in Wahrheit
und Methocle, pp. 3 4 4 - 5 0 ( 3 2 5 - 3 3 ) .
30. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, p. 250 (235).
31. See Part III of Wahrheit und Methode, "The Ontological Shift of Hermeneu-
tics Guided by Language," where Gadamer's attempts to state his most basic
philosophical committments regarding the nature of the hermeneutical phe-
nomenon.
32. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, p. xxiii; translation and emphasis my own.
33. Although these elements of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics form the
horizon for the section of Wahrheit und Methode that carries this title (Part
III), they are not concisely presented there. The formulations that follow are
synopses of developments carried out throughout that work, and in certain
cases, in other works of his.
34. 1959 and 1960 respectively; Gadamer's Introduction to Der Ursprung was
also written at this time.
35. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, pp. x x v - x x v i ; translation my own.
36. Martin Heidegger, "Zeit und Sein", given as a lecture on January 31, 1962:
English translation by Joan Stambaugh in, On Time and Being, New York:
Harper and Row, 1972. S e e "References" to this volume for publication
history of the German text', all citations are from this translation.
53
37. Ibid., p. 2.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., pp. 3 - 4 .
40. Ibid., p. 5 ; emphasis added.
41. Ibid., p. 19.
42. Ibid., p. 8.
43. Ibid., pp. 8 - 1 0 .
44. Ibid., p. 12.
45. Ibid., p. 15.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., p. 16.
48. Ibid., p. 19.
49. Ibid., p. 20.
50. Ibid., p. 22.
51. Ibid., pp. 2 2 - 2 3 .
52. Ibid., p. 24.
53. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, translated by M.D. Herter Norton
(New York: Norton, 1934), pp, 3 3 - 3 4 .