Man and World 19:21-53 (1986).

@1986, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands.

DAWN AND DUSK: GADAMER AND HEIDEGGER ON TRUTH

FRANCIS J. AMBROSIO
Georgetown University

Understanding certainly does not mean merely the taking over of

traditional opinion or the acknowledgment of what has been
enshrined by tradition. Heidegger, who had first identified the
concept of understanding as a universal determination of Dasein.
means thereby precisely the character of understanding as project,
which is really to say, Dasein in its orientation toward its own
future. At the same time, I do not wish to deny that I for my part
have emphasized within the universal matrix of the elements of
understanding its direction toward the appropriation of what is
past and has been handed-down. Heidegger, too, like many of my
critics, may here feel the absence of an ultimate radicality in
drawing out consequences. What does the end of metaphysics as a
science mean? What is the significance of its ending in science? If
science climaxes in a total technocracy and brings on with it the
"cosmic night" of the forgetfulness of being, the nihilism foretold
by Nietzsche, is one then permitted to look back toward the last
rays of dusk as the sun sets in the evening sky instead of turning
to watch out for the first shimmer of its return? 1

In light of the pervasive influence of Heidegger's thought on Gada-

mer's philosophical hermeneutics, it is quite common, especially in the
United States, to encounter the view that Gadamer is a "disciple" of
Heidegger, one whose achievement lies primarily in having mapped out
in detail one of those "regional ontologies" which Heidegger's more
original way of thinking first opened up. Whatever limited plausibility
this "discipleship" view might have, Gadamer's statement above forces
us to recognize that, whether accepted or rejected, such a view cannot
do justice to the issue of his relation to Heidegger because it tends to
operate too much on the level of "philosophies" and too little on the
level of the "subject matter" (Sache) for thought upon which their
relation is centered. The difference of interest and emphasis with
22

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

This section will make a preliminary survey of the common ground

which Gadamer and Heidegger share regarding (i) the nature of truth
as an event; (ii) the central role of language in the occurrence of this
event; (iii) their respective ways of characterizing the destination
toward which the question of truth occurring as language is directed;
(iv) the structural similarity of these two characterizations.

(i) Truth

Gadamer acknowledges that the reflective formulation of his herme-

neutical practice which Wahrheit und Methode represents "begins by
following Heidegger":

To put it in purely formal terms, the primacy that language and

understanding have in Heidegger's thought indicates the priority
of the "relation" (Verhdltnis) over against its relational members
(Beziehungsgliedern) - the I who understands and that which is
understood. Nevertheless, it seems possible to me to bring to ex-
pression within hermeneutical consciousness itself Heidegger's
statements concerning "Being" and the line of inquiry he devel-
oped out of the experience of the "Kehre". I have carried out this
attempt in Truth and Method. 2

It is clear that Gadamer's characterization of human understanding

in Wahrheit und Methode follows Heidegger's existential analytic of
Dasein in Being and Time. The ontological structure of temporality
(Zeitlichkeit) is the essence of Dasein's privileged (existential) way of
being. In-der-Welt-sein, in its radical finitude and historicality, reveals
understanding to be central to Dasein's way of coming-to-be-itself in
authentic resolve in relation to the possibilities for being with other
beings it has as a "thrown-project." What is less clear in Wahrheit und
Methode is the equally Heideggerian influence on the notion of truth
with which Gadamer correlates this view of understanding. For direct
testimony regarding the way of asking the question of truth which
Gadamer and Heidegger share we must look to other sources. In the
Preface to the 1960 Reclam edition of Der Ursprung des Kunstswerkes
Heidegger says, "The introduction (to this edition) composed by H.-G.
Gadamer contains a decisive hint for the reader of my later writings. ''3
Concern for the question of the "meaning (truth) of Being" unifies
24

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:

The fundamental significance of the essay on the work o f art, it

seems to me, is that it provides us with an indication o f the later
Heidegger's real concern. No one can ignore the fact that in the
work o f art, in which a world arises, not only is something mean-
ingful given to experience that was not known before, but also
something new comes into existence with the work of art itself.
It is not simply the manifestation of a truth, it is itself an event. 4

Gadamer is referring here to Heidegger's characterization of the way

truth sets-itself-to-work in art as the heightened striving of world and
earth which gives the art-work the shining luminosity that distin-
guishes it as unique among the ways in which truth occurs as an event.
The real significance of Heidegger's characterization is the insight it
gives us into the nature of truth as such. The striving of world and
earth is but an instance of the conflict of revealing and concealing,
presence and absence, that is the truth of every being. "As unhidden-
ness (aletheia) truth is always an opposition o f revealment and conceal-
ment. The two belong together. ''s Being contains something like a
hostility to its own presentations. Existing things do not simply offer
themselves to us as present: they also have an inner depth of self-
sufficiency that Heidegger calls "standing-in-itself. ''6 Consequently,
the opposition referred to is not the same as the conflict of knowledge
and error. If knowledge depends on our overcoming error, the truth
would be the pure lying-open of beings to reason. 7 But the "complete
unhiddenness of beings," their total objectification by means of correct
subjective acts of representation by which they are torn from the dark
 25

realm of hiddenness in error, leads to a conception of truth as presence-

to-mind that negates this standing-in-themselves by which things shelter
themselves in their being. It results in a leveling of beings to the flat
plane of the human will-to-control. On such a view, truth would repre-
sent nothing more than the human opportunity for using beings. 8 Con-
sequently, Gadamer says:

...the closedness and concealment of the work of art is the guaran-

tee of the universal thesis of Heidegger's philosophy, namely, that
beings hold themselves back by coming forward into the openness
of presence. The standing-in-itself (repose) of the work of art be-
tokens at the same time the standing-in-itself of beings in general. 9

The notion of truth as an event means "presencing," the way in

which beings in general come into presence. The structure of this event,
the way truth as unhiddenness happens, is the abiding opposition of
revealing and concealing. A being's truth is its Being, and the enduring
tension of standing-in-itself while coming forward into presence is the
truth of Being, the way it "occurs" as an event of the presencing of
beings. This way of asking the question of truth in terms of the pre-
sencing of beings indicates the direction in which Heidegger's later
thought will go, toward the structure of presencing as such.

(ii) Language

Heidegger concludes Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes with a striking

observation: truth, as the clearing and concealing of what is, happens
in being composed, as a poet composes a poem. All art, as the letting
happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially
poetry.l~ "Essential poetry," Heidegger tells us, is "projective saying."
In relation to the work of art, projective saying refers to the fixing in
place (composing) of the "figure" of the work, so that it comes to
stand in itself (repose) as a lighting up of the ordinary and familiar,
allowing truth to emerge in the newness of possibility, until then
unthought, open to Dasein as existence. Art does not consist in either
copying or transforming something already in being; rather, it is the
project by which something new comes forth as true. 11 Essential
poetry includes poesy, or what we ordinarily refer to as poetry, indeed
in a privileged way, but extends beyond it to all genuine forms of art
because all art is projective saying. But since language is the happening
26

in which beings first disclose themselves to man each time as beings,

language itself is poetry in the essential sense of projective saying.
Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the open for
the first time. By naming beings for the first time, language brings
them to word and appearance originally. "Only this naming nominates
beings to their being from o u t o f their being. ''12 Where there is no
language, there is no openness of what is, no world is set up nor is
the earth set forth, and the truth of beings does not occur.
Heidegger goes on to speak of the "work of language," understood
as projective saying, as "founding truth" in the triple sense of be-
stowing, grounding, and beginning. 13 The work of language is the
lighting of beings that allows them to appear and the clearing of an
open space that allows them to stand forth as what they are. But this
work has the character of a "foundational" event. It is a bestowing
because the truth that appears, for example in the work of art, can
never be derived or deduced from anything that went before. It is a
grounding because it fixes in place the beings that appear in our world
by setting them firmly back into the sheltering, supporting closedness
of earth. It is a beginning because it brings what is lighted and cleared
among men for the first time to become part of their destiny; as such it
constitutes a leap that may be prepared for, but nevertheless is new in
the sense that it is the source of history. The work of language is, then,
the way truth occurs as a foundational event, and as "founding leap"
(Ursprung, literally "primal leap") allows truth to originate. Language
is the way truth originates. The originating of truth in the newness
and uniqueness of its historical occurrence is what Heidegger means by
referring to truth as an event. Consequently, Gadamer observes that:

...the primacy of language is not simply a unique trait of the

poetic work of art; rather it seems to be characteristic of the
very thing-being of things themselves. The work of language is
the most primordial poetry of Being. The thinking which con-
ceives all art as poetry and which discloses that the work of art
is language, is itself still on the way to language. 14

Wahrheit und M e t h o d e begins with the recognition with which

Gadamer concludes his Introduction to Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.
It begins by "following Heidegger," specifically the mature Heidegger
who, in working out the Kehre in his thought, was "on the way"
to thinking language as the original place of understanding and as
allowing truth there to originate as an historical event. The temporali-
 27

ty-structure of human understanding which characterizes Dasein's way

of orienting itself as a thrown-projection toward its possibilities for
being, as well as the opposition of revealing and concealing which is the
structure of the event of truth, come to be expressed in Wahrheit und
Methode in terms of an ontology of language. From this ontological
perspective, Gadamer attempts to show how language allows truth to
originate in understanding, without thinking of language as an entity]
thing (being), either objectively or subjectively construed, which pro-
duces or causes truth's occurrence. The originative work of language,
the occurrence of truth as an event of unhiddenness, and the histori-
cal project of understanding as an episode of human existence, these
three, Gadamer wishes us to realize, these three are not three, but one.
The thinking which is "on the way to language" is already underway
along a direction of thought which has as its destination the saying of
the appropriateness of language, truth, and understanding in their
belonging-together.

(iii) Destination

In an " A d d e n d u m " to Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes written in 1956,

twenty years after the original composition, to "explain some of the
leading words," Heidegger reminds the reader that because truth as
the unhiddenness of beings means nothing else than the presence of
beings as such, that is, in their Being, talk in the essay about the found-
ing of truth touches on the problem of the ontological difference, a
sphere which the 1936 text cautions, "cannot be explicated here."
Regarding the possibility of such an explication, Heidegger says in the
"Addendum":

The whole essay, "The Origin of the Work of Art" deliberately

yet tacitly moves on the path of the question of the nature of
Being. Reflection on what art may be is completely and decidedly
determined only in regard to the question of Being. Art is con-
sidered neither an area of cultural achievement nor an appearance
of spirit; it belongs to the disclosure of Appropriation (das Ereig-
nis) by way of which the "meaning of Being" (cf. Being and Time)
can alone be defined. What art may be is one of the questions to
which no answers are given in the essay. What gives the impres-
sion of an answer are directions for questioning.iS
28

In touching upon the ontological difference from the perspective of

the art work (not the artist or appreciator), there opens up a path
which even at that time, and more clearly from the perspective of
twenty years later, Heidegger saw leading to clas Ereignis as the way in
which alone the "meaning of Being," his original question, could be
defined. The thinking of das Ereignis lies at the center of Heidegger's
later thought. Yet, although Gadamer certainly was aware of the 1956
Addendum when he prepared his Introduction to the new edition of
the essay in 1960, and Heidegger himself indicates that the Introduc-
tion gives a "decisive clue" to the reader of his later work, Gadamer
makes no reference to das Ereignis in his interpretation of the work,
Der Ursprung. Why? To understand fully the sense in which Wahrheit
und Methode represents Gadamer's attempt to follow out in terms of
hermeneutical consciousness the direction of the Kehre, it is necessary
to assess the significance of the apparent absence in Gadamer's thought
in general of any explicit development in the question of the ontologi-
cal difference such as occurs with Heidegger in the sustained elabora-
tion over the years of the notion of das Ereignis.
I wish to suggest that as a matter of fact there is a significant parallel
in Gadamer's thought to the notion of alasEreignis as Heidegger's way of
thinking the question of the ontological difference. This is Gadamer's
notion of the Virtualit(t't des Spreehens, the virtuality of living language.
The notions of das Ereignis and die Virtualit(~t des Sprechens represent
the destination toward which each thinker is being lead in following
his leading question - destination, not in the sense of terminus, but
rather of point of reference upon which expectation focuses.
One of the principal Heideggerian texts concerning das Ereignis is
Identitgl't und Differenz. 16 There Heidegger speaks of the "belonging-
together (identity) of man and Being." This belonging-together, how-
ever, is not the customary metaphysical understanding of identity,
which emphasizes the "together" as a nexus or connexio, a necessary
or essential connection between one thing and another, both having
substantial existence prior to and apart from their togetherness. Rather,
Heidegger here gives precedence to "belonging" as determining the
sense of the " h o w " of this "together." It is the "belonging t o " one
another of man and Being that gives its meaning to their unity of
relationship. The relationship of m a n and Being is fundamentally an
event in the sense that they emerge together and have no separate,
ontologically prior standing-apart-from-one-another. Ereignis as event
refers to the "letting happen" of this belonging-together.
It is out of the thinking of Ereignis that Heidegger's fullest account
 29

of the nature of language comes. 1~ Heidegger says at the conclusion

of the Addendum that the problematic context of discussion regarding
the relation of man and Being in Der Ursprung "comes together at the
proper place...where the nature of language and poetry is touched on.
all this again only in regard to the belonging-together of Being and
Saying. ''is Die Sage, "Saying," language in its essence, is stillness; the
"chime of stillness" Heidegger calls it. ~9 Yet this stillness is not stag-
nant immobility, the absence of vibrant motion. It is the harmony of
Identity, of mutuality and appropriation so perfectly attuned that it
rings out in a tone so mellow that it is no sound but a song, an im-
pulse, complete in itself, yet open in that it calls all things into their
being. Language is the "song of Ereignis." It is das Ereignis, the hap-
pening of Identity, the disclosure of Appropriation, which is the
movement toward opening-saying, toward language, that opens up a
path toward human speaking. Therefore Heidegger insists that language
is more than an activity of man or a naming/labeling of pre-existing
objects. On the contrary, man speaks only in co-responding to the
Saying of language. In fact it is language which "speaks" man, and
all human speech as co-responding always has the quality of being
first a listening to what language says. Furthermore, language does not
name what has already shown itself, but is itself the opening up of a
clear space and the lighting of that which appears in it. Because lan-
guage has its origin in the stirring of das Ereignis toward opening-
saying, language too has 'the character of an event, and the structure
of that event is the disclosure of Appropriation. The event of lan-
guage, thought now as the "song of Ereignis", is the primal poetry of
which Heidegger spoke in Der Ursprung while the thinking of the Kehre
was still "on the way to language." Now language is understood as the
opening-saying of das Ereignis, the letting happen of belonging-to-
gether, and consequently as the originating event which founds truth.
Now insofar as Wahrheit und Methode can be viewed as Gadamer's
attempt to work out in terms of hermeneutical consciousness the line
of thinking Heidegger followed from the experience of the Kehre,
that portrayal rests ultimately upon Gadamer's elaboration of an on-
tology of language. The ontology of language is at the center of Ga-
damer's specifically philosophical concerns in Wahrheit und Methode,
and at the heart of his ontology of language lies the notion of die
Virtualita't des Sprechens, the virtuality of living language. It is finally
only by recourse to the idea of virtuality that Gadamer is able to carry
out his "decentering" of m e t h o d as the appropriate path of access to
truth by clearing away the "ontological obstructions of the scientific
30

concept of objectivity," and identifying understanding as a "discipline

of questioning and investigation which provides a warrant for (ver-
biirgt) truth. ''2~ This discipline, which has the character of a dialogue
or conversation, takes its stand in the "center of language." Gadamer's
efforts to work out the inner dynamic structure of the way in which
truth happens as an event in language, and to show how this event is
"warranted" in its truth in contrast to the "guarantee" of systematic
certitude offered by the method which seeks scientific objectivity,
takes the form of an elaboration of the notion of virtuality. It seems
clear that in several important ways die Virtualit(it des Sprechens
parallels Heidegger's thinking of das Ereignis. That parallel can be
shown by way of the three following examples.

(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:

In language the world presents itself. The experience of the world

in language is "absolute." It transcends all of the relativities of the
positing of being, because it embraces being in itself, in whatever
relationship (relativities) it may appear. The linguistic quality of
our experience of the world is prior as contrasted with everything
that is recognized and addressed as being. The fundamental rela-
tion of language and world does not mean that the world becomes
the object of language. Rather, the object of knowledge and of
statements is already enclosed in the horizon of language .22

As the centering of the relationship of man and world in their

emerging into being and belonging together, the structure of the event
of truth happening in language is "virtual" in the sense that all beings
which appear within the world are already "embraced" and "enclosed"
within the world-horizon of language as their absolute condition. In
this way, Gadamer follows Heidegger toward a realm which is "beyond
Being," the realm of das Ereignis, in which alone the issue of the on-
tological difference can be explicated.
The second element of Gadamer's development of the meaning of
virtuality that parallels Heidegger's thinking of Ereignis has to do
specifically with the structure of the event of truth. This structure is
32

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:

Every word breaks forth as from a center and bears a relation to

the whole, through which alone it is a word. Every word allows
the whole of language to which it belongs to sound out, and the
world also allows what remains unsaid, to which it is connected
by responding and indicating, to be co-present in its momentary
occurrence. 23

Gadamer goes on to say that this characteristic of "momentariness,"

language's occasional nature as an historical event, is not an imperfec-
tion of its expressive power, but rather is a direct consequence of the
"living virtuality of speech," such that it brings a totality of meaning
into play, without being able to express it totally. 24 The virtuality of
language in this sense corresponds to the refusal of beings to yield
themselves totally to us in knowledge, withholding themselves, as it
were, in their Being and thereby establishing the outer limit and boun-
dary of knowledge. The "whole of language," the world-horizon within
which beings appear as what they are, itself never comes into language,
and as a consequence the meaning of everything said about them
 33

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:

All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is within

it an infinity of meaning to be elaborated and interpreted. This is
why the hermeneutical phenomenon can also be illuminated
only in the light of this fundamental finitude of Being, which is
wholly linguistic in nature? s

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

hermeneutical process in both interpreter and text, or rather, in their

unity which is mediated by language, the center ground upon which
they meet. It is the c o m m o n language-tradition which work and inter-
preter share that opens up and is itself the cleared space in which truth
occurs:

(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:

It is not Being in itself that is increasingly revealed when Homer's

Iliad or Alexander's Indian Campaign speaks to us in the new ap-
propriation of tradition but, as in genuine conversation, some-
thing emerges that is contained in neither of the parties individ-
ually. 28

Gadamer's use of the model of conversation to describe the way in

which truth occurs is ultimately Platonic in origin, 29 but for the present
our interest is focused on the "newness" and historical "uniqueness"
that attends every genuine event of truth, and the rootedness of this
newness in the nature of language. "Newness" here is not synonymous
with "novelty," the merely different. The happening of truth is not the
saying of what has not been said recently or ever quite i n this way, or
has been neglected or overlooked in the past, or even the "discovery"
and confirmation of a previously unknown fact or theory. Under-
standing always has to do with the possibilities for human existence
in the world, and truth always involves the unhiddenness of beings as
such, that is, in their Being. Now Gadamer's insight into the virtuality
of language as founding the event of truth in its newness is his recogni-
tion that language itself is the origin of both beings in their unhidden-
ness and of Dasein in its possibilities for being in the world. It is original
 35

newness in the sense that tradition as meaning handed-down and under-

standing as possibility for new meaning emerge from out of the center
of language and give birth to the historical "present" of human exis-
tence. Language is this emerging together of man and world, truth and
understanding in their original potentiality for being historical. The
center of language as the point of origin for the event of truth which
founds history is the final determination of virtuality at which Gada-
met arrives by thinking through the significance of Heidegger's notion
of das Ereignis for his ontology of language. Das Ereignis, thought
from the center of language, becomes die Virtualitdt des Sprechens.

II

We are now in a position to inquire about the limits of the similarity

we have observed between Gadamer and Heidegger in their way of
asking the question of truth. This difference shows itself most clearly
in their different ways of speaking, in the different "accents" they
develop as they attempt to respond to that question. We shall proceed
in two steps. First, we shall broadly characterize the difference by way
of an inventory of examples of terms which, while reflecting the
structural parallel in the question the two share, also indicate a deci-
sive divergence of interests and emphases arising out of an inversion
of priorities which Gadamer carries out in appropriating Heidegger's
thought regarding the nature of truth. Second, we shall consider the
significance of the difference more carefully by examining the primary
illustration of it, the way in which Gadamer and Heidegger respectively
put the notions of Virtualitiit and Ereignis to use to identify and com-
municate what each sees as most genuinely his own in his response to
the question of the meaning of truth.
Gadamer observes in Wahrheit und Methode that Heidegger exam-
ined the problems of hermeneutics and the historicality of under-
standing only for the purposes of ontology, that is, only in terms of
his attempt to recover from oblivion the "question of the meaning of
Being" in its difference from beings, while Gadamer's own interest is
precisely how hermeneutics, once freed from the ontological obstruc-
tions of scientific objectivity and methodologism, can do justice to the
historicality of understanding. 3~ This inversion of priorities between
the two, while not in itself constituting a direct conflict of viewpoint,
does point to a difference of interests and emphases which we can
hardly believe would be without considerable consequences. In fact,
36

there ig at least one basic regard in which exactly such a consequence is

immediately and impressively apparent - Gadamer and Heidegger
speak in entirely different ways. Gadamer's language is that of a work-
ing teacher and scholar concerned primarily with making himself clear
to his colleagues and students about the questions he views as "most
important to all of us," and, where possible, reaching agreement in
conversation with the philosophical tradition. It contains nothing
of the "poetic" or "mystical" use of language for which Heidegger has
been so widely criticized. Heidegger, for his part, takes poetry as the
model for his own thinking and speaking. His concern is not so much
making himself clear as it is to let the subject matter itself speak in the
idiom most appropriate to it, with the result that his language takes on
the mysterious, almost riddling character of oracular utterance. No
value-judgment is placed on this most obvious difference between the
two here. Obviously, none should be in itself; certainly, at least not
until the significance of that difference has been understood.
The point to be observed is rather that in attempting to do justice
to the hermeneutical nature of understanding in terms of an ontology
of language, 31 Gadamer has reinterpreted the essence of Heidegger's
later thought in terms of the former's own guiding questioning. In so
doing a fundamental transformation takes place, and while it may still
be possible to indicate points of similarity between the two on this
level, or even establish one to one correspondences between certain
leading ideas, ultimately the differences are equally telling. The essence
of this difference of interest and emphasis between the two thinkers is
contained in the dictum which states Gadamer's central ontological
thesis, "Being which can be understood is language." This provocative
assertion is the basis for the claim to universality which he makes on
behalf of hermeneutics, and in terms of which he defends his philo-
sophical hermeneutics against the charge of being a linguistic idealism,
similar to Hegel's idealism of Absolute Spirit, in the sense that it re-
duces the actual reality of events and history in their contingency and
absurdity to mere appearance. Commenting on the universal ontological
structure upon which philosophical hermeneutics is based, Gadamer
says:

The finitude of one's own understanding is the manner in which

reality, opposition, absurdity, and unintelligibility make them-
selves felt. Whoever takes this finitude seriously must also take
the reality of history seriously .... This is the sense in which the
statement, "Being which can be understood is language," must
be read. It does not refer to the absolute mastery of the one who
 37

understands over being. On the contrary, it means that being is

not experienced where something is at our disposition, and to that
degree is conceptualized (begriffen), but rather where what is
happening can only be understood? 2

Clearly, Gadamer is no idealist; equally clearly, the Heideggerian

Seinsfrage is here subordinated to the question of the nature of under-
standing. "Understanding" is the central term in Gadamer's dictum,
"Being which can be understood is language," and both the meaning
of "being" and the meaning of "language" are to be interpreted in
terms of it. Here we see clearly displayed the difference between the
two: while Gadamer draws on much of both the early and later Heideg-
ger's ontological thought, it is in order to explain the nature of histori-
cal understanding, as Gadamer himself practices it in his own herme-
neutical work of interpretation. Heidegger, on the other hand, has but
one purpose in his interest in understanding, finitude, history, truth
and language, namely to think the meaning of Being. For Gadamer,
this is finally a normative but secondary concern.
The question must be asked at this point: What are the consequences
of such a transposition of the context of questioning? Can Gadamer's
claim for the linguisticality of understanding as a universal ontological
structure support itself through its tacit appeal to Heidegger's thought
in the midst of such a transposition?
To attempt the beginnings of an answer to this question, we shall
list in summary form certain key elements of Gadamer's "ontological
shift of hermeneutics guided by language, ''33 together with aspects of
Heidegger's later thought to which in some sense they may be viewed
as corresponding. The juxtaposition will reveal the significance of
the difference which the transposed context of questioning makes.

1. Die Mitte der Sprache. This central thought in Gadamer's ontology

of language signifies that language is the "center," middle ground, or
point of mediation between man and world. "Center" in the sense of
their c o m m o n origin out of which they emerge in their original unity;
"middle ground" which they both occupy and which supports both;
"point of mediation" as the medium of converse in which their rela-
tionship attains to understanding. The parallel here with Heidegger's
concept of das Ereignis as the originating event of the belonging-
together of man and Being is unmistakable. The difference lies in the
fact that, for Gadamer, language itself is the originative source of
meaning; his questioning extends only to Being that can be understood.
38

For Heidegger, the originative is das Ereignis. Language is the "song" of

das Ereignis in its movement toward opening-saying; human speaking is
a listening and responding to that to which human thoughtful speaking
co-responds.

2. The essence of language. Gadamer is clear in stating that he takes the

dialogical movement of conversation to be the essence and original
form of language. For Heideggcr on the other hand, Dichten, poeti-
cizing, is the essence of language. These distinct models for the essence
of language reflect the unique concerns of the two: Gadamer as teacher
and scholar is concerned with understanding and reaching agreement
about the subject matter in dialogue; Heidegger seeks to re-awaken the
lost sense of the meaning of Being which metaphysics and the objective
language of science has encrusted with accretions of meaning foreign
to it.

3. Understanding. Understanding as it occurs in the hermeneutic

consciousness has the structure of event, an event which is "from the
ground u p " linguistic in nature, that is, it occurs in the medium of
language and has language in the form of tradition as its subject matter.
As such, understanding is always interpretation and Gadamer analyzes
it in terms of the structure of hermeneutic experience. With Heidegger,
understanding comes to be taken up into the more fundamental work
of thinking. Thinking is concerned with the meaning of Being and has
its home in the realm of das Ereignis. Thinking is not fundamentally
an experience, but the fate (Geschick) which "comes over" ((Tber-
kornrnnis) thinking.

4. Tradition and the interpreter. For Gadamer, language is always

living language, language at work in the tradition, and understanding
is an interpretive dialogue. This dialogue is only possible because both
parties to it share, to a greater or lesser degree, a common language,
that is, the language of the tradition to which the interpreter listens.
Conversely, belonging-together, appropriation (ZugehOrigkeit), for
Gadamer always refers principally to the belonging of the interpreter
to the tradition. Now for Heidegger, language refers primarily to die
Sage, the original Saying of Ereignis, which is wordless and still; hu-
man speech or discourse (Rede) is a listening and co-responding to
originative Sage. Since Saying has its source in das Ereignis, it dis-
closes and appropriates, and human speech shares in this event by
listening and responding. Being which can be understood refers to
 39

language living in the tradition for Gadamer. For Heidegger human

speech is a listening and co-responding to language as the song of
Ereignis.

5. Truth. Gadamer himself seldom mentions truth directly and nowhere

formulates a coherent characterization of it in his own terms. One
would suspect that if queried directly he would refer to truth as un-
hiddenness (aletheia). Going further, his work could consistently yield
the interpretation, formulated more in his own idiom, that truth is the
emergence into language of man's relationship to his world as a (virtual)
whole of meaning. Truth is clearly an event for Gadamer and it is an
event of unconcealedness and concealment that takes its original place
in language. For Heidegger truth is, simply, das Ereignis, the disclosure
of appropriation. We shall return to this point presently.

From the five examples cited here, a common pattern emerges. In

each case, a central aspect of Gadamer's thought parallels a dominant
theme in Heidegger's, but in each case there is a crucial difference:
the "shift" to a linguistically-founded hermeneutics on the basis of
an ontology of language is presented by Gadamer in terms of a Heideg-
gerian "pattern," which in the transposed context of Gadamer's leading
question has lost its home, so to speak, its original embeddedness in
the Seinsfrage.
There is one major exception to this pattern, however - the vir-
tuality of the word. Heidegger speaks of the essence of language,
Sage, as the "song of Ereignis" and the "chime of stillness," while for
Gadamer Virtualftdt is the penumbra of the unsaid which always sur-
rounds and shelters what is said, the center from which the word
"breaks forth in its inner dimension of multiplication." Virtuality of
the word for Gadamer is that which holds the essence of language,
conversation, constantly open to its new and inexhaustible potentiali-
ties for meaning. The truth to which understanding attains in language
has its proper "being" in the "whole of meaning," which can never be
brought into words but to which the word is related by "responding
and indicating." The virtuality of the word alone in Gadamer's shift of
hermeneutical understanding to the ontological plane in language re-
tains the traces of that movement that first stirs language and gives
to it its quality of inexhaustible richness, and its character as originative
of meaning. It alone in Gadamer's ontology of language recalls the
"chime of stillness," the primal nature of Saying, and its origin in
das Ereignis.
40

Is there an ambiguity lurking here in Gadamer's thinking about

language? In contrast to Heidegger, does not Gadamer's formula for the
"shift" in his thought to the ontological level, "Being which can be
understood is language," indicate the loss of that most original on-
tological dimension which the notion of Ereignis first opens up in
regard to both Being and language. Ereignis designates a realm "be-
y o n d " Being. The human relationship to the world emerges into lan-
guage in the conversation between the one who seeks understanding
and that which, standing in the tradition, is to be understood only in
so far this conversation has been taken up into the attentive dynamic
of listening and responding to the more original opening-saying of
Ereignis. In this formulation, it appears that Gadamer may have failed
to confront the radical meaning of human finitude by prematurely
closing off the ontological horizon of his thought, demarcating its
boundaries with the concept of the virtuality of language, its silence
about its own effective essence, and thereby limiting that thinking to the
horizon of the "world," which is "thoroughly and from the ground up
linguistic and therefore understandable. Is this not rather too sharp a
division between what is thoroughly understandable and that which is
genuinely "beyond words," but not beyond attentive listening and
responding which does not seek so much to understand through the
movement of question and answer as it does to think? Do we encounter
in Gadamer's notion of virtuality too comfortable a recognition of the
finitude of understanding which knows securely from the outset the
limits of its confinement and is content, in its desire to avoid the
"speechlessness" of the later Heidegger, to forget what might lie be-
yond understanding because it does not know how to put it as a ques-
tion, and because the words with which it might answer beggar imagina-
tion?
But here we should be cautious; it would be too easy at this point
to make "comparative judgments" about "philosophies," acting as if
we understood that in terms of which alone such judgments could be
made - the " t r u t h " of the subject matter to which our questions are
pointing. A better way presents itself if we allow ourselves to be guided
by Gadamer and Heidegger themselves. Chronologically, the stopping-
place we have reached in our following of the relationship of Gadamer's
thought to Heidegger's corresponds roughly to the publication of
Unterwegs zur Sprache and of Wahrheit und Methode. 34 To pick up
the trace of the direction which our inquiry should follow from here
regarding the difference between them, we must look to the steps,
admittedly tentative yet revealing, which each thinker himself took at
 41

this juncture, allowing ourselves to be reminded of the real issue be-

tween them, the question of truth. We begin with Gadamer.
In the Foreword to the second edition of Wahrheit und Methode,
1964, an invaluable text for the insight it gives into Gadamer's own
self-understanding, he specifically addresses the difference between
himself and Heidegger. Significantly he does this in terms of "truth."
The text begins with the citation about "dusk and dawn" quoted at
the outset of this study and picks up as follows:

It seems to me, however, that the onesidedness of hermeneutical

universalism possesses the truth of a corrective. It enlightens the
modern viewpoint of making, producing, and constructing con-
cerning the necessary conditions under which it itself stands...
What man needs is not only the unswerving posing of ultimate
questions, but just as much the sense of what is doable, what is
possible, what is appropriate here and now. Of all people, the
philosopher, I think, must himself be aware of the gap between
his claims and the reality in which he stands. Though he may
always be called upon to draw radical conclusions from every-
thing, the role of prophet, Cassandra, preacher, or even know-it-
all does not suit him.
Hermeneutic consciousness...seeks to counterpose to the will
of man, which more than ever is mounting in a utopian or eschat-
ological consciousness a critique of what has gone before, some-
thing o f the truth o f remembrance: what still yet and ever again
is real. 3s

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:

Being is not a thing, thus nothing temporal, and yet it is deter-

mined by time as presence.
Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains
constant in its passing away without being something temporal
like the beings in time.
Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such
a way that neither can the former - Being - be addressed as
something temporal nor can the latter - time - be addressed as a
being. As we give thought to all this, we find ourselves adrift in
contradictory statements? 9

Dialectic is no way out of these contradictions. This would require

saying, "Being is; time is." Rather we say, "there is Being; there is
time." We attempt to show how this "there is - it gives (es gibt)"
can be experienced and seen:

The appropriate way to get there is to explain what is given in the

"It gives," what "Being" means, which - It gives; what " t i m e "
means - It gives. Accordingly, we try to look ahead to the It
which - gives Being and time. 4~
44

Following this direction, Heidegger reaches a point where he can say

that the "It" which gives Being and time can be only thought in the
light of the kind of giving which belongs to it: giving as destiny; giving
as extending. 41 "Being" can be thought of as the gift of allowing
(beings) - to - presence, as unhiddenness, which is retained in the
giving (and therefore is different from beings). As gift retained in the
giving, Being as gift of allowing-to-presence is the gift of a kind of
giving which gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and
withdraws. Such a giving, Heidegger calls "sending. ''42 As such, the
gift of Being is remembered with regard to what comes into presence
(beings), and is forgotten with regard to the giving in which the gift is
retained. This sending initiates the epochal history of Being for thought
(Heidegger: to hold back is, in Greek, epoche) in the multiple transfor-
mations by which the gift is remembered and the giving forgotten. This
epochal history of Being for thought is the kind of giving Heidegger
calls "destiny.' ,43
"Time," for its part, must be thought in relation to Being as allow-
ing-to-presence. Presence, the present, already bears itself in relation to
past and future, but not in the conventional sense of serial duration,
successive "nows," but rather in the sense of lasting, abiding. What is
present concerns us human beings as what, lasting, comes toward us.
Presence means: the constant abiding that approaches man, reaches
him, is extended toward him. 44 But presencing is not confined to what
is present; in fact, the manner of presencing of past and future is pre-
cisely absence: being not-yet-present, being no-longer-present. Both
concern us by approaching us in a reciprocal relation which brings
about the present. The unity of time's three dimensions consists in
the interplay of each toward each, and this interplay is itself a fourth
dimension of time. It is the interplay of present, past, and future, of
presencing in absence which holds each of them apart and, thus opened,
holds them near to one another. Thus the giving which gives time is an
opening which nears, as extending. 4s It keeps open what has been by
denying its advent as present. What has not yet been is held open in
the approach coming from the future by withholding the present in
the approach. 4~ The giving of time has the character of denial and with-
holding:

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

gives true time an extending which opens and conceals. As ex-

tending it is itself a giving, the giving of a giving is concealed in
true time. 47

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:

...namely, that to giving as sending there belongs keeping back

- such that the denial o f the present and the withholding o f the
present, play within the giving of what has been and what will be.
What we mentioned just now - keeping back, withholding, denial
- shows something like a self-withdrawing, something we might
call for short: withdrawal. But in as much as the modes of giving
that are determined by withdrawal - sending and extending - lie
in Appropriation, withdrawal must belong to what is peculiar to
the Appropriation. s~

Succinctly, Appropriating expropriates itself of itself. It withdraws

what is most fully its own from boundless unconcealment. By this
expropriation, which belongs to Appropriation as such, it does not
abandon itself - rather, it preserves what is its own. sl
By looking through Being and time we have caught a glimpse of what
the event of Appropriation means. But is this meaning anything more
than a "thought-construct?" What can we say about the result of our
46

attempt to think the meaning of the "It" which gives Being and time
as Appropriation?

Only this: Appropriation appropriates. Saying this, we say the

Same in terms of the Same about the Same. To all appearances,
all this says nothing. It does indeed say nothing so long as we
hear a mere sentence in what was said, and expose that sentence
to the cross-examination of logic. But what if we take what was
said and adopt it unceasingly as the guide for our thinking, and
consider that this Same is not even anything new, but the oldest
of the old in Western thought: that ancient something which con-
ceals itself in a-letheia? That which is said before all else by this
first of all the leit-motifs of thinking gives voice to a bond that
binds all thinking, providing that thinking submits to the call of
what must be thought, s2

Ereignis, the event of Appropriation, thought as the "It" which

- gives Being and time, means the destiny of extending the Open
which allows beings to c0me-to-presence. Of the essence of this giving
which allows beings to presence is withdrawal. The unhiddenness of
beings is given only amid the concealing of the giving so that what is
most its own, the giving itself, is preserved. The giving which gives
Being and Time cannot give its own-most, and therefore is a finite
giving. This finitude which is itself of the essence of Ereignis is ex-
propriation, and belongs to it as much as the giving which allows beings
to presence. It is necessary, in a sense more ultimate than the necessity
of logic, which is always consequent to the relations which it governs.
Therefore, Ereignis as the giving which withdraws cannot be said in
statements according to the logic of metaphysics. The giving which
preserves its ownmost in giving by withdrawing is always only the
Same in its allowing (beings)-to-differ. As a result, when we say the
Same in terms of the Same about the Same, we say the oldest of the
old, we say the unhiddenness which preserves itself so as to retain the
giving which is its ownmost in favor of the destiny which extends the
Open and allows beings to differ, i.e. to come to presence as what they
are. We say Aletheia, the happening of Truth which guides and binds
all thinking to the event of giving/withdrawing. The thinking which
is responsive to the call of the matter-to-be-thought, Ereignis/Aletheia,
is guided by and bound to this matter in such a way that its task is to
cease all overcoming and leave metaphysics to itself, because in over-
coming metaphysics it remains guided by and bound to metaphysics
rather than to its own proper matter. In ceasing to overcome meta-
 47

physics thought is freed for its proper task, "unceasingly to overcome

the obstacles that tend to render such a saying (of It in terms of It
about It) inadequate," in the way that Heidegger sees the saying of
Appropriation in the form of the lecture remaining itself an obstacle
of this kind. The lecture itself has spoken merely in propositional state-
ments, and in this sense remains an obstacle to be overcome.
To cease all overcoming of metaphysics so as unceasingly to over-
come the obstacles to saying adequately the meaning of Appropriation
in terms of It about It, the Same which is the oldest of the old, Ereig-
nis/Aletheia, the event of truth which allows beings-to-differ in the
saying of the Same - a formidable task. Perhaps the sort of task, the
unswerving posing of ultimate questions, to which Gadamer wished to
counterpose the need, equally urgent, for a sense of what is doable,
what is possible here and now? Certainly both are necessary. Certainly
Ereignis/Aletheia and die Virtualiti~t des Sprechens are in some impor-
tant sense the "same" in that both attempt to say the way every event
of truth happens in language as unhiddenness, or the unconcealing of
beings occurring amid the perduring concealment of their coming into
presence. Yet it is equally certain that Heidegger and Gadamer speak of
truth quite differently, each in a way appropriate to the task dictated
by the question which opens before them the way to their destination.
For Heidegger, that task is to leave-off overcoming the language of
metaphysics, its Seinsvergessenheit, and leave metaphysics to itself so
as unceasingly to overcome the obstacles to saying adequately the
meaning of Ereignis/Aletheia in its own terms as he attempted to do
in Zeit und Sein and demands be done again. For Gadamer, the task is
to counterpose to the will of man, ever-mounting in utopian or eschato-
logical consciousness, a critique of what has been, the truth of remem-
brance: what still and yet again is real. Virtuality is the inexhaustible
possibilities of saying anew the meaning that is at work in what has
been said or made or done by conversation with the work, once the
"middle ground" which the work and the one who seeks to under-
stand share has been entered. This middle ground is language embody-
ing itself as tradition in its questionability. Virtuality is the possibility
of appropriating tradition in an event of truth which happens in lan-
guage as conversation. Gadamer's task demands unceasing conversa-
tion with tradition. For Heidegger, despite the massive evidence of the
fruitfulness of his own conversation with the tradition, this always re-
mains a secondary task; remembrance is only instrumental. Once at-
tention has been reawakened, it turns to listen, not to what remains
unsaid in what has been said, but to what is yet to be said in its own
48

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

...I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear friend, to be patient

toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the ques-
tions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written
in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek to have the answers,
which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to
live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions
now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live
along some distant way into the answer, s3

Is it possible that the naming together of truth and freedom points

us toward another way of naming "the oldest of the old," in the idiom
of a different voice and tradition? Can that which guides and binds
human existence to itself as its original destiny in the mystery of giving
and receiving, and which has sometimes been characterized as "eternal"
because it can as little be thought of "in time" as either truth or free-
dom, be given a different name which says the same, the mystery of
love? This is to suggest not that "love," as yet unthought and unspoken
here, is what Gadamer and Heidegger are "really" speaking of, but
rather that truth as the saying of the Same, differently, and freedom,
as the giving and receiving which allows this saying to happen, can be
thought in a superabundance of which the relation of Gadamer's
thought to Heidegger's is one unique yet humble epiphany. It would, I
think, come dangerously close to sentimentality to speak too easily
here of thinking and understanding as a work of love, but perhaps this
much can be said: the relation that exists between philosophers stands
on the ground first opened up by the human questions of truth and
freedom. To reduce the understanding of this relation to a comparison
of "philosophies" and to engage in debates about their "correctness"
or "errancy" is to betray the possibility for truth which such under-
standing offers. Such reductionism is born of the fear of a relativistic
permissiveness. It amounts only to intolerance of the human, and
constitutes a surrender of freedom to the shrinking effect of a mean-
spiritedness which is unwilling to pay the price of freedom's capacity.
This applies not only to the way we understand the relation of Gada-
mer's thought to Heidegger's, but also to the relation of hermeneutical
thought to that of Wittgenstein, for example, and the style of language-
analysis he practiced. The timely challenge for philosophy now is to
understand the difference between such ways of thinking amid their
similarities, without minimizing or obscuring either, in the service of
that genuine human freedom which seeks the integrity of truth.
 51

NOTES

1. H.-G, Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundztige einer philosophischen

Hermeneutik (Tiibingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1960) 2. Auflage, with author's Vorwort
to that edition, 1965. English translation, Truth and Method (New York:
Seabury Press, 1975) by Garrett Barden and John Cumming. For the sake of
convenient reference, I have generally followed this translation and given the
page number of the German text and then the English, except where philo-
sophical accuracy or clarity seemed to require otherwise, as in the case of this
citation from the Vorwort to 2. Auflage, p. xxv. I have indicated such depar-
tures as my own translation.
2. H.-G. Gadamer, "Zur Problematik des Selbstverst/indnisses," Kleine Schriften,I
(Ttibingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1967), pp. 74-75. English translation by David E.
Linge, "On the Problem of Self-understanding," in Philosophical Herrneneutics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 50.
3. Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960).
Translated by Albert Hofstadter as "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry,
Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 17-87. All
references are to this translation. The remark quoted here from Heidegger's
Preface is cited by Hofstadter, along with important bibliographical informa-
tion, in the References for this translation, pp. xxiii-xxiv. The "Introduction"
by H.-G. Gadamer mentioned is translated by David E. Linge as "Heidegger's
Later Philosophy," in Philosophical Hermeneutics, pp. 213-228. All references
are to this translation, hereafter cited simply as "Introduction."
4. Gadamer, Introduction, p. 224.
5. Ibid., p. 226,
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 225.
8. Ibid., p. 227.
9. Ibid.
I0. Heidegger, "Origin," p. 72.
11. Gadamer, Introduction, p. 228. What both Heidegger and Gadamer are re-
ferring to here, I would suggest, is the radical meaning of what has been tra-
ditionally recognized as the transforming power of metaphor, properly under-
stood. Poetic language is characterized primarily by its capacity to reveal new
possibilities for meaning in what unpoetic experience takes to be the ordinary
familiarity of the commonplace. "Metaphor" names the essence of this trans-
forming capacity not just in poetic language, but in all language in its origin.
Metaphor is the "original" way language "works,"
12. Heidegger, "Origin," p. 73.
13. Ibid., p. 75.
t4. Gadamer, Introduction, p. 228; emphasis added.
15. Heidegger, "Origin," p. 8 6
16, Martin I-Ieidegger, Identitiit und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), English
translation, Identity and Difference, by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper
and Row, 1969). For an enlightening etymological discussion of the meaning
of Ereignis in Heidegger's thought, see Hofstadter's Introduction to Poetry,
Language, Thought, pp. xix-xxii.
52

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 .