What makes us philosophical creators? Am I not “thrown” into projects of understanding before becoming their author? Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) emphasized the importance of “thrownness” in his masterpiece Truth and Method (1960).

Strongly influenced by Heidegger, but more orthodox and modest. Gadamer’s work has four main areas:

• Development and elaboration of a philosophical hermeneutics;

• Dialog within philosophy, and within the history of philosophy, with respect to Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Heidegger.

• Engagement with literature, particularly poetry, and with art.

• Practical philosophy: contemporary political and ethical issues.

These new possibilities belong to a philosophy Gadamer called hermeneutics. Hermeneutics once designated the art of textual interpretation, the ars interpretandi. In Being and Time, Heidegger had taken up the term, which he had first encountered when studying biblical exegesis, and applied it to Dasein itself: prior to any textual interpretation, humans already interpret their world, interpret themselves and always already live within certain interpretations inherited from tradition. To put it briefly and to summarize hermeneutics and its pretension to universality: There is no Being without hermeneutics. Ontology is therefore necessarily hermeneutical.

Gadamer’s hermeneutics draws a completely different conclusion from Heidegger’s analysis: I am not the one that projects onto the world as much as I am projected into horizons of meaning that precede me.

Quote: In fact history does not belong to us, we belong to history … The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering light in the closed circuit of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than its judgments, constitute the historical reality of its Being.

What it “is” depends less on its consciousness than on its historical determination. It is easy to see how some have associated him with what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion” found in the works of Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Structuralism, which also believed that consciousness was a “distorting mirror.” However, Gadamer’s hermeneutics, unlike the “hermeneutics of suspicion, does not claim to better understand and master consciousness’ underlying mechanism by reducing it to a series of incorporated drives or forces and socioeconomic factors.

Gadamer liked to say that understanding is an event. His masterpiece was supposed to be called “understanding and event.” The title means that understanding is less of a subjective operation than an event that takes hold of us and surprises us, like a work of art that grabs hold of us and carries us along.

We are always too late, says Gadamer at the end of Truth and Method, when we try to explain what happens to us when we understand. And yet, it is nevertheless a truth experience.

Gadamer saw the hermeneutics of suspicion’s desire for transparency and emancipation from tradition as a symptom of the modern will toward domination that Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics had unmasked.

In order to limit consciousness’ pretensions to supremacy, Gadamer argued that understanding is less a subjective act than the “encounter of traditions.”

Whereas for Heidegger, the forgetting of Being characterizes Western philosophy, for Gadamer it is rather forgetting language, or forgetting that language is thought’s condition of possibility and its locus. Tradition always neglected language by subordinating it to thought as though thought in some way preexisted language. But, asks Gadamer, are thought and understanding even possible without language?

Hence his fundamental thesis: Language determines (the German says bestimmt: “gives a voice to”) both the process (Vollzug) and the object (Gegenstand) of understanding. It determines the process inasmuch as all understanding strives to express itself with language and seeks the words to a given meaning. Classical philosophy would have spoken here of “conceptualization.” But can any concept be produced without language? The object of understanding depends on language since what is understood can only be seen in the light of language.

But it is difficult, even impossible, to maintain the distinction between the process and the object of understanding. After all, can I really separate the object of my understanding from its wording?

One may thus speak of a fusion of understanding with what it understands since the object can only be distinguished from its understanding by another act of understanding. The fusion between understanding and its object is founded by a more original foundation, namely, that of Being and the word.

Gadamer’s universal ontology can be summarized in the following simple, yet difficult, apothegm: “Being that can be understood is language.”

Because of the original fusion of Being and word, it is impossible to distinguish Being from its presence in language.

Thus Being that I perceive or experience, even “silently,” remains centered on language insofar as it is always experienced as such and such. Being is always already meaningful. Language even orients what cannot be said, or what supposedly transcends all discourse. To say (!) I do not have the necessary words to express something implicitly acknowledges that my words are unable to expresses what must be said.

metaphysics was once (unless it has always been) a science of the transcendentals or of the universal predicates of Being.

When one dealt with the Beautiful, the Good or the One, the concepts employed never pertained to thought, but rather to Being itself.

Language expresses first and foremost the presence of Being in the mind in light of language’s precedence over thought.

The medieval doctrine preserved the original fusion and unity of thought and Being which modern thought had disrupted by asserting the opposition of subject and object that positioned thought in such a way that it came to objectivize and dominate Being.

Despite its claims to the contrary, thought is not autonomous in relation to Being, or to itself.

This metaphysics of our belonging to language and Being is, in its own way, mindful of the limits of the “metaphysics of subjectivity” buttressed by thought’s project of dominating beings. Rather ironically, the inversion of modern “transcendental” philosophy, founded on the subject’s supremacy, is carried out with the aid of medieval “transcendental” metaphysics. This metaphysics, which was devoted to Being and knew practically nothing of the “human subject,” still believed that knowledge was not a matter of domination, but rather one of participation in Being and truth.