Stirrings (Still) of an Unlikely Metaphysical Reading of Hermeneutics

Abstract

This essay argues for an unlikely metaphysical reading of hermeneutics that draws on Gadamer’s understanding of Heidegger as a thinker who wanted to overcome the nominalist and nihilistic dead-end of modernity. It argues that Gadamer not only had a far more sympathetic and dialogical understanding of metaphysics than his teacher Heidegger but that he himself also relied heavily on the Platonic metaphysics of the Beautiful and the Medieval metaphysics of the transcendentals to establish his main thesis on the original belonging together of Being and Language expressed in his famous dictum “Being that can be understood is language.” While acknowledging his debt towards metaphysics, Gadamer also recoiled from the metaphysics of the transcendentals he relied on. One has to ask if he was consistent in doing so.^[1]

Keywords: Gadamer, metaphysics, Being, Language

“Would the word that had been spoken by the great metaphysical tradition of the West and that was still audible through the ‘historical century,’ the nineteenth, in the end fall on deaf ears? My hermeneutical attempt conjured (beschwor) this tradition and at the same time sought to go beyond the bourgeoisie’s religion of culture, where this tradition survived, and to bring it back to its original sources. But [I was well aware that] it might as well have seemed strange to the way of thinking of the youth driven as it was by a critical will of emancipation.”
Hans-Georg Gadamer^[2]

A metaphysical reading of hermeneutics will sound unlikely for many readers of hermeneutics who will assume as a matter of course that hermeneutics is post-metaphysical, since metaphysics is for them as passé as astrology or alchemy. Such a reading would probably be unusual for Gadamer himself. Even if he did show a refreshing openness towards metaphysical questioning and its open-ended nature, he did not develop a metaphysics himself. The conformity of my modest reading to Gadamer’s intentions is thus not an issue. I readily admit that I go beyond his intentions (while also picking up on some, indeed many of his hints) when developing such a reading, as I did in a recent book in English.^[3]

So why read hermeneutics metaphysically? Besides the arguments I will put forward in the present text, it is not outlandish to claim that metaphysics has always belonged to philosophy itself, as its foundation. Most major philosophers since Plato, who coined the term philosophia, have had important things to say about Being as a whole and the principles of reality, the classical themes of metaphysics. Hermeneutics claims itself to be philosophical and must therefore have something to say about metaphysical issues. If hermeneutics only offers guidelines for the correct interpretation of texts, it can perhaps steer away from metaphysical concerns. But once hermeneutics asserts philosophical relevance, it must engage with metaphysics, as the work of hermeneuts such as Augustine, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricœur or Vattimo confirms, who all had much to say about metaphysics and its issues.

But what is metaphysics? The question is susceptible of many answers (as nearly all philosophical issues), so it must be addressed from the outset. As I see it, metaphysics is the effort, the vigilant and self-critical effort on the part of our human reason to understand something about Being (or reality) as a whole and its reasons. As one sees, understanding is at the heart of the metaphysical effort, a fact underscored by the very first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “all humans seek by nature to understand” (eidenai is often translated by “to know,” but I follow here Oliver Scholz’s suggestion that one can speak here of understanding).^[4]

There are many ways to understand reality as a whole. The best confirmation of this can be found in Raphael’s famous fresco on the School of Athens in the Vatican, depicting Plato and Aristotle discussing the order of things in the presence of many other thinkers, artists, and scientists such as Pythagoras and Euclid. The most famous contrast (or complementarity^[5]) in the fresco is that of Plato who points vertically towards the superior region with his index finger, whereas his pupil Aristotle draws attention with his open hand to the world around us, a hand that also seems to reach out to those who contemplate the fresco and are thus drawn into it. The basic opposition is here that between the striving toward transcendence to explain the world (Plato’s gesture) and the demands of immanence and of the complexity of this-worldly Being (Aristotle’s counterproposal). To buttress this opposition, Plato holds (vertically of course) a volume of his Timaeus, which explains the architecture of the world through ideas, geometrical forms, and the hypothesis of a forethinking and divine world-architect (a demiurge), while Aristotle holds (horizontally!) a copy of one of his ethics (Etica in Raphael’s depiction). There are many aspects of this fresco that one could single out, but for my present purposes the most striking one is that of the dialogue between Plato and his pupil Aristotle, since metaphysics has basically been this dialogue or conversation on the meaning of things.^[6] One could say it is a hermeneutical reading of metaphysics, as an ongoing conversation, with the back and forth of argument, ideas, images, and directions of the gaze.

Indeed, there are many different metaphysical positions (say, those of Plato and Aristotle and many others, needless to say), but there is basically the metaphysical dialogue which forms the bulk of our metaphysical and philosophical tradition. This dialogue is about the fundamental order or sense of things and how it can give orientation and purpose to our lives. This idea of a basic order of things, which we can try to decipher or interpret, is common to all metaphysicians, indeed to the very idea of science insofar as it seeks to understand this order in its complexity as well as its unity. Heraclitus spoke of the One or the Logos that holds things together, Plato of the eidos, by which he meant the order or beauty of things that shows itself through instances of orderly permanence in our world, which our mind––our thinking––can contemplate. This is literally the case, since eidos refers to an act of seeing, eidō, by the mind. This is a most fundamental insight, of which metaphysics will present many variations: with our minds, we are able to understand the basic order of things (or at least something about it), which appears to display some beauty, some finality and even some intelligence. This is all summed up in the (literally) brilliant idea of the eidos, which we can see and admire, especially in the occurrence of the Beautiful, which radiates through all things and which is even that which shines the most in the world, according to the Phaedrus (250d: to ekphanestatōn, a passage that is often quoted by Gadamer). This Beauty goes beyond its individual occurrences (this or that beautiful thing, action, virtue, or science) since its features reappear in many other occurrences and species. It can therefore be thought of independently of them as a constant trait of Being––as Plato discovered––since it is the mind which recognizes here Beauty, which shows itself through the order and the finality of the world. This Beauty and arrangement of the world is exemplified by the carefully ordained cosmos (a Greek word that already entails this notion of harmony) in the Timaeus.

Aristotle sees this Beauty, this eidos, too, and he also knows that it is the mind that does the seeing, but he stresses more readily––and somewhat polemically––that this Beauty and this order is to be found in the world around us, to which he gestures with his open hand in Raphael’s fresco. As Gadamer argued, this immanent nature of Beauty and of every eidos was already obvious to Plato (Philebus 16d2 speaks pointedly of an eidos that is within or immanent, enousa). The fact that Beauty was his more recurrent example for the ideal dimension we can grasp and admire with our minds testified to this. Aristotle feared, however, that Plato’s focus on the ideal dimension would lead to some ontological separation (chorismos) between “two worlds,” the ideal and the sensible, which incited him to insist on the immanent eidos which shines in the world. Gadamer always felt that this notion of a chorismos was nothing but a polemical caricature of Plato.^[7] One doesn’t have to agree with Gadamer’s reading of an underlying agreement between the two philosophers to state that there was indeed a captivating debate between Plato and Aristotle about the nature of the idea which goes on to this day.

It is hard, however, to question that metaphysics––understood as the vigilant effort to understand something about the order of the world and its reasons––began with thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle,^[8] who, through their conversation or even confrontation, gathered into the School of Athens, in Raphael’s depiction, a host of predecessors (Parmenides, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, etc.) and successors (from Epicurus and Ptolemaeus to Averroes and Raphael himself, who depicts himself in his fresco). All are gathered into a contemporaneity of exchange and debate, reading and writing (books are everywhere in the painting), and learning from one another. As the fresco eloquently shows, this conversation dominated the philosophical schools of Antiquity up to Plotinus, Augustine, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, which was also, one can argue, a renaissance of this metaphysical view of the world and its sense for Beauty.

At the beginning of Modernity, this conversation takes an important turn toward the thinking ego, as evidenced, if not brought about by Descartes’ Metaphysical Meditations, which promoted the primacy of the understanding cogito. This was, as is well-known, a new beginning, but one in which metaphysics remained fundamental for philosophy. This is illustrated by the famous passage in the foreword Descartes wrote to one of his last works, the Principles of Philosophy, when he said that “philosophy is like a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches that come out of this trunk are all the other sciences, whose main ones are medicine, mechanics and morals.”^[9] This is another powerful depiction of metaphysics––as the root(s) of philosophy––an idea that, one could argue, Descartes had defended in his Metaphysical Meditations of 1641. When I speak of metaphysics, I always have this image of Descartes in mind which expresses a basic notion, namely that all science and knowledge rest on some basic understanding of reality as a whole and its guiding principles (or lack thereof, which is also a kind of metaphysics, one of chaos, disorder and contingency).

One could trace the posterity of this idea in Modernity, in the work of Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Whitehead, and many others who kept the Raphaelite conversation going to this day. But I want to come to the relevance of this tradition and conversation for hermeneutics. My conviction is that if hermeneutics claims to be philosophical, it also stands in this tradition for which metaphysical reflection forms the root of philosophy as such. Hermeneutics also understands––better than most, I would contend––that one cannot do away with this tradition without jettisoning philosophy itself in the process. It is not only pretentious but also suicidal to claim to get rid of metaphysics altogether. All those who tried––and many did, from Marx to Auguste Comte, Carnap, Ayer, and many others––were shown to be themselves derivatives of the metaphysical tradition itself and could not but presuppose a fundamental view of reality.

But how, to put the question in Kantian terms, is a hermeneutical metaphysics possible (or thinkable, if one prefers to put it in Heideggerian terms)? To answer this question, I believe one can start with the situation of metaphysics when hermeneutics emerged as a form of philosophy in the twentieth century.

I will mostly focus here on Gadamer, but to understand his contribution in this regard, Heidegger constitutes a natural starting point. It is well-documented that Heidegger himself received a classical metaphysical upbringing with a rather Thomistic and Aristotelian background. He wanted to raise anew the question of Being, which he claimed (in Being and Time at least) had remained dormant since Plato and Aristotle. He would later include Plato and even Aristotle in this forgetfulness of Being, but it is not far-fetched to claim that the question of Being was the main question of metaphysics to begin with, as documented if need be by the already quoted opening sentence of Book 4 of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “there is some science which considers Being as Being.”^[10]

The Heidegger of Being of Time clearly saw himself in this tradition of a metaphysics and attempted to develop some metaphysics (of Dasein) immediately after Being and Time and on the basis of the (unfinished) fundamental ontology he had put forward in 1927. Its basic idea, if one can sum it up in a nutshell, was that Being had always been understood through the prism of time, owing to the radical temporal nature of our own mortal being but that this evidence had remained largely hidden or forgotten throughout history. Heidegger claimed to be the first to open our eyes to this. In this process, he argued that the temporal understanding of Being that had dominated the philosophical tradition privileged an infinite understanding of time (and Being) as constant presence. This, he suggested, was a way for Dasein of reassuring itself and fleeing its own mortality. Heidegger’s Promethean hope was then, it seems, to finally develop a more authentic understanding of time, and thus of Being itself on the basis of Dasein’s radical temporality and being-toward-death. Hence, his work towards a new metaphysics of Dasein from 1927 to 1930, which we can glimpse in his lecture courses of this period and publications like What is Metaphysics?, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (where the preoccupation with metaphysics is obvious enough), and On the Essence of Ground and On the Essence of Truth. The metaphysical impulse was clearly strong in this period, which was also unusually productive as far as publications go, especially if one includes Being and Time. Yet, at the same time, Heidegger struggled with the metaphysical tradition since he increasingly thought that he could not really find in it what he was seeking. It would be too complex to recall these epic struggles here.^[11] Heidegger soon convinced himself that metaphysics had somehow to be left behind if one wanted to raise a new awareness for the question of Being. (To be “overcome,” as Carnap put it, would be hazardous and pretentious, even if Heidegger at times had this pretention).^[12] If one wanted to raise a new awareness for the question of being. According to Heidegger, metaphysics––with its alleged exclusive focus on Seiendes (entities), its genesis and its production––had made it impossible (!) to evoke Being and the new, temporal happening of Being as Ereignis that Heidegger was now seeking to express. To avoid any confusion with metaphysics, he even tried writing Being or Sein with an antiquated “y,” promoted the notion of Ereignis and in its vein developed a new and sometimes disconcerting terminology to reach, i.e., to say and unsay this “Seyn.” It was a heroic and somewhat pathetic effort, but Heidegger claimed it was the price to pay if one wanted to leave metaphysics behind. Not only am I not convinced that he ever left metaphysics behind, but I have also always argued that his endeavor continued to be metaphysical to the core––even according to Heidegger’s own, onto-theo-logical understanding of metaphysics. His later thinking indeed displayed all the hallmarks of metaphysical thinking as onto-theo-logy:

1. It remained itself ontological (“onto”) in that its main focus was on Being and its possible occurrence or happening in the clearing (Lichtung) of Being (which one can perhaps distinguish from the concrete entities, but this occurrence is itself an ontic phenomenon).
2. Heidegger’s later thinking was also theological—silently, and actually not so silently––in that this new thinking of Being hoped to open the way for a new happening of the “Divine” or for a new preparedness for such an occurrence––something metaphysics, with its emphasis on mere reasons (which Heidegger readily dismissed as idols, as if he had no reasons of his own), would have made unthinkable and impossible.
3. It also had a strong logical dimension in that Heidegger was desperately seeking for a new logos, a new language, for this overwhelming happening of Being, for which he created a powerful poetic vocabulary—one that could not, however, hide his enormous debt towards poetic thinkers of the metaphysical tradition such as Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius, Schelling, and a certain Hölderlin.

Heidegger was thus a secret metaphysician who in effect claimed that metaphysics had never been up to its promise, of thinking Being and its temporality, and for that reason needed to be left behind. In the end––literally, in one of his last lectures of 1964, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,”^[13] which was read by one of his pupils at a Kierkegaard conference in Paris––Heidegger spoke of the “end of philosophy” itself, since for him, philosophy and metaphysics had been one and the same (in this he was not entirely wrong, as Descartes reminded us). Gadamer was however always stunned by this pretention that philosophy had ended.^[14] And if Heidegger said, at the end of his essay on “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is dead,’” that “the reason that has been glorified for centuries was the most stubborn adversary of thinking,” Gadamer did not hesitate to use the notion of reason, which has indeed been celebrated in the metaphysical tradition, in the title of one of his books, and elsewhere of course, when he pleaded instead for Reason in the Age of Science (1976).

To be sure, Gadamer followed closely and with some empathy Heidegger’s life-long struggle with metaphysics. He always revered Heidegger as a teacher and even, as his recently published correspondence with him confirms, a father figure. What fascinated him most, was Heidegger’s mesmerizing re-reading of classics such as Plato and Aristotle who were re-actualized as contemporary “phenomenologists” who had things to teach and show us (and not only as antiquated figures with bizarre, outdated doctrines). There was here a fusion of horizons, between the Greeks, Heidegger, and our time, which Gadamer found compelling, discovering here a “hermeneutical truth” that he would later strive to justify in Truth and Method. ^[15] In this process, Gadamer was also entranced by Heidegger’s way with language, his rhetorically impactful handling of concepts and metaphors that made things immediately present and graspable. There was thus no gap between Being and language, since language made Being immediately present and Being was one with its linguistical and even poetical expression (we shall return to this unity of Being and language, which is at the heart of Gadamer’s ontology). In all this, in his reading of the Greeks and his way with language, Heidegger was quite the teacher and the mentor for Gadamer.

He was also something of a model in that Gadamer strove to develop a hermeneutics, a philosophical hermeneutics, which drew on the original account of understanding provided in Being and Time, where Heidegger had convincingly argued that there are always preconditions to understanding that involve the entirety of our Being. It would, thus, be counter-productive to wish to eliminate all forms of pre-understanding in the name of objectivity. This insight, Gadamer argued, could help pave the way for an adequate hermeneutics of the human sciences in which historically rooted prejudices often play such a guiding and productive role. Gadamer’s philosophical inspiration was to a large extent Heideggerian, but his project of an adequate hermeneutics of the humanities was not or––was rather an application of Heidegger’s insights to a more “epistemological” issue: the logic of the human sciences, which was not that central to his teacher.

How did metaphysics come into play in this hermeneutical project? At first sight, it didn’t appear that prominent, but upon closer examination it reveals its importance for Gadamer’s project and his relation to Heidegger. It is on these metaphysical elements that my project of a metaphysical hermeneutics wishes to build (in addition to the metaphysical tradition itself, of course) and that I would like to recall in the present discussion.

First of all, it is obvious that one does not find in Gadamer the very modern impetus to overcome metaphysics or its tradition. Quite the contrary, we find in his work a rehabilitation of tradition and its claim to truth, which was quite unique in the philosophical landscape of his time. Regarding metaphysics, it is also obvious that Gadamer does not share Heidegger’s impatience with metaphysics and constantly draws inspiration from its foundational figures—mostly Plato and Aristotle–– but also Plotinus, Augustine, Cusanus, Hegel, etc. Gadamer worked extensively on these main figures of metaphysics (including Heidegger) and never gives the impression that their thought needs to be superseded, quite the contrary. Besides his numerous studies on Plato and Aristotle, it is also noteworthy that Gadamer edited and translated what he saw as Plato’s foundational texts on his theory of ideas and Book 12 of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, two texts that can be viewed as the pinnacle of metaphysics.^[16]

More importantly perhaps, we also encounter in Gadamer a resistance to Heidegger’s contention that metaphysics needs to be overcome or even that there is such a thing as a closed and constraining language of metaphysics. This resistance is all the more remarkable given Gadamer’s usual deference towards his revered teacher and his reading of philosophy. This resistance emerged, discreetly at first perhaps, in many pieces Gadamer wrote on Heidegger after 1960. As Gadamer himself often pointed out, he only began writing on Heidegger after he had finally published his magnum opus, Truth and Method, in 1960. And he first did so at his master’s urging, when Heidegger asked him to publish an afterword to the separate publication of “The Origin of the Artwork” in 1960. After this invitation and the liberation perhaps that the publication of his main book signified in 1960, the floodgates, as it were, broke open: from the 60s to the 90s Gadamer wrote extensively on Heidegger, publishing some 30 different pieces on his master during his lifetime, not counting the many interviews in which he spoke extensively about Heidegger. They can now be found for the most part in volumes 3 and 10 of his Assembled Writings.

In many of these pieces, he remains very deferential toward Heidegger––some of these were also tributes for Heidegger’s significant anniversaries in 1964, 1969, and 1974 (which Heidegger also read and appreciated, as we know from their correspondence)––but in them Gadamer also gives voice to his different take on metaphysics, language, and the main figures of metaphysics. One piece is especially emblematic of his relation to Heidegger and metaphysics, namely the essay, “Heidegger and the Language of Metaphysics,” which he first published in 1967 in the Löwith Festschrift (Löwith, a friend and a colleague of Gadamer, had been an early student of Heidegger, whose later relation to Heidegger was strained).^[17]

It contains an important criticism of Heidegger and his view that there would be a constraining language of metaphysics that would limit the possibilities of thinking. Heidegger had argued, in his Letter on Humanism of 1946 and elsewhere, that it was the language of metaphysics that had made it impossible for him to carry out the project of Being and Time and had led to his philosophical turn. Gadamer asks if there really is such a constraining language of metaphysics because it is his conviction that one can, on the contrary, always find words to express what one wants to say. This is the quintessence of his conception of the universality of hermeneutics as a thesis on the possibility of finding a linguistic expression for what one wants to think.^[18] “Language knows no limits or restrictions,” Gadamer argued, “because it holds infinite possibilities of utterance in readiness.”^[19]

It was surely a different view of language that Gadamer promoted in this essay, indeed in his entire hermeneutics. But it was also another version of metaphysics that was put forward, one that refuses to pin down the legitimate, indeed inescapable metaphysical quest to one particular language or set of concepts.^[20] Gadamer voices his skepticism towards Heidegger’s view that metaphysics––focused as it would be on beings and their production––and its alleged language can be reduced to an objectifying understanding of Being which would have prepared the way for the technological conception of Being and entities in modernity. This is not the “language” that Gadamer finds in Plato or Aristotle. This different reading of Plato and Aristotle goes hand in hand with a different view of metaphysics itself as an open-ended dialogue, or conversation, on the meaning of things. It is evidenced for instance when Gadamer writes in 1983 at the end of his lecture on “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics,” that “phenomenology, hermeneutics and metaphysics are not three different philosophical points of views, but philosophy itself.”^[21]

This resistance to Heidegger’s reading of metaphysics emerges starkly in Gadamer’s different understanding of Plato. In Heidegger’s view, Plato would have prepared the way for our technological predicament with his understanding of reality by way of the eidos, on the grounds that this idea would always be grasped by our supervising and controlling eye, thereby establishing the primacy of our oversight or control over Being itself. This is not the meaning of Plato’s eidos, Gadamer argued: eidos is rather that which radiates through all beings and that illuminates us, but that remains something that we never fully grasp for itself. This is why we can only strive to express it through many words and concepts, none of which can ever claim to be the last and final word on what is. This is why, as Gadamer reads Plato, the way of the eidos is that of dialogue: it is only through common dialogue (one can again think of the Raphaelite conversation) that we can come to understand something about the world, well knowing that we do not have any final knowledge, which is the prerogative of the gods. Heidegger overlooks, Gadamer thus subtly suggests, this distinction between mortals and gods when he credits Plato with a god-like understanding of the world. Wisdom is something we can only seek, in philosophia, but never attain once and for all.

One can perceive this different take on philosophy and indeed metaphysics in Gadamer’s strong metaphysical, even theological reading of Heidegger’s entire philosophy. For Gadamer, Heidegger was a life-long God-seeker who sought in his entire path of thinking to overcome the “Nominalism” of modernity.^[22] This is important for my purposes, even if it is a little-noticed element of Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s philosophical endeavor. One must therefore recall in very basic terms what Nominalism is all about and why it was so important, in Gadamer’s view, for Heidegger. Nominalism is basically an understanding of Being that claims that there are no essences because the only real entities would be individual physical objects in space and time, those we can see out there and measure through an objectifying gaze. Everything else that our language can talk about––such as beauty, ideas, universal notions, etc.––are merely names (nomina), which have no real existence in and of themselves. This is how Nominalism received its name.

This privilege of individual and material existence is an understanding of Being that was developed in the late Middle Ages by thinkers such as William Ockham, but it traced its origin back to Aristotle’s insistence on the individual this or that (tode ti) as the seat of reality or substantiality (ousia). It is noteworthy that in the late Middle Ages, the fundamental motivation of the Nominalists was theological: an all-powerful God could not be limited by a pre-existing set of (eternal) essences and regularities. Surely, experience teaches us that there are such relative regularities in the world, but for the Nominalists, God could change them at random. For this reason, all reality, besides God, consists of contingent individual entities without any fixed or preexisting “essence,” which would only be a view of the mind or a mere word. This view became paramount for modernity in two of its most striking and well-known features: in the development of a science of nature geared toward the domination and transformation of objects, and in the emancipation of the individual itself, the ego, who can become a master of its own destiny, since it does not have to bow to any preordained order of Being or essences. Gadamer rightly saw, with many other historians, that this Nominalist view of the world, according to which there is no essence or finality to the world, was one of the main premises of modernity.^[23] All spiritual meaning would only be a creation of our language and understanding.

Most acutely, Gadamer recognized that this Nominalist and nihilistic predicament was what Heidegger was struggling with when he wanted to raise anew the question of Being in Being and Time and in all his work. Heidegger’s motivation was also theological, Gadamer argued, albeit a very different one from that which guided the Nominalists, i.e., the need to defend God’s omnipotence. Heidegger recognized and feared that there was no space left for religious faith or any form of the Divine in such a Nominalist universe. Another, perhaps simpler way of putting this would be to recognize the enormous challenge modern science poses today to religious belief: science seems to leave no room for spiritual realities. According to Gadamer, Heidegger, in all his work, sought to overcome this Nominalist, secretly technological and nihilistic, understanding of Being.

It is Gadamer’s contention that Heidegger projected this Nominalism back into Plato’s theory of ideas. Plato’s understanding of the world through the prism of ideas would amount, according to Heidegger, to a reduction of Being to our way of seeing them (eidos, as we recall, is indeed closely related to a verb that means to see and thus to know in Greek: eidō or idein) and hence to our potential control and planning. In Gadamer’s eyes, Heidegger would have confused Plato with Modern Nominalism. Gadamer, in many ways, strove to correct this. Regarding Plato, arguably, if not the founding figure of metaphysics, Gadamer tried to show that his conception of reality, and subsequent knowledge thereof, was very different from that of Modern Nominalism. Reality is understood by way of the eidos, because the eidetic or beautiful (eidos can also mean beauty in Greek!)^[24] is that which shines the most in the world: it illuminates everything and is the source of every light, even if we have a lot of difficulty grasping it. Everything partakes in the eidos, as the One that shines on and through the many, but our knowledge of this eidos is also akin to a form of participation in its reality, since we never comprehend or conceive it once and for all.

Gadamer argued that it was actually Modern Nominalism that was Heidegger’s adversary in his crusade against metaphysics and its objectifying language of “Vorhandenheit” (subsistence, occurrentness, or presence-at-hand). It identifies Being with factual, observable presence. Being and Time famously challenged the primacy of this common understanding of Being by claiming that another, more original understanding of Being was, for example, that of Zuhandenheit, i.e., that which is handy, available, and ready to hand, but hardly noticed for itself. Heidegger’s prime example of this was the hammer in the workshop of a carpenter. It does not call attention to itself unless it somehow becomes unhandy. It is only then that we come to examine it for itself in its sheer Vorhandenheit or factual subsistence and try to figure out what is wrong with it. In the same manner, in a room, the door, the ceiling, the light, a table, the chair we sit on, and the pen we write with are certainly “beings,” yet ones we never notice for themselves––unless they break down. Then we ask: What is wrong with this chair? Why is it shaky, or why does it make this quirky noise? The Being that is unassumingly handy (zuhanden) suddenly becomes vorhanden, subsistent, and calls attention to itself as a “subsisting object,” which we then consider in itself, like a subject staring at an object in front of it. One cannot fail to notice the somewhat mischievous irony with which Heidegger considers Vorhandenheit: what we assume to be, from the objectifying perspective of modern science, the most elementary form of Being––factual presence–– is only there when the relation to a given being is not functioning properly and it thus becomes vorhanden. Vorhandenheit is so derivative that it presupposes a breakdown of the normal, flowing relation with Being.

For Gadamer, this analysis was related to Heidegger quest for a proper vocabulary for that which does not exist as a factual, observable, and measurable being in space and time. This mode of being is, however, the only mode of being that Nominalism recognizes: that of the factual, observable presence of an individual thing. This Nominalist understanding of Being leaves no room to anything beyond physical space and time. According to Gadamer, all Being and Time would be an attempt to overcome these confines of Nominalism, which are so stifling for the Christian-inspired outlook Heidegger wanted to defend (to be sure, with his particular Paulinian and Lutheran insistence on the uncontrollability of time). By raising anew the question of Being and the meaning of Being, Heidegger would have been on the lookout for another understanding of Being than the Nominalist conception of Being as subsistence or Vorhandenheit, which remains almost inescapable to our modern mindset.

However, one has to see that this overcoming of Nominalism is also an important impetus for Gadamer himself, beyond the limited matter of his interpretation of Heidegger and for different reasons than Heidegger’s theological ones. This shows itself in Gadamer’s strong reliance on the metaphysics of the transcendentals at the end of Truth and Method and other works such as “The Relevance of the Beautiful” (1977).

The final chapter of Truth and Method is certainly the most metaphysical chapter of Gadamer’s entire philosophy and one that has seldom been very well understood. This is unfortunate because it is a decisive aspect of his thinking. It also forms the actual conclusion of Truth and Method and the backdrop for Gadamer’s famous dictum “Being that can be understood is language.” Much could be said about this dictum, so I will only focus in the present context, and rapidly at that, on the metaphysics of the transcendentals it presupposes, carries further, and transforms.

Gadamer’s saying “Being that can be understood is language” seeks, by its own account, to recall the “original belonging together” of Being and language, or the unity (ursprüngliche Zusammengehörigkeit or Mitte, as Gadamer calls it in German)^[25] that binds them to one another. This togetherness or solidarity is in a way obvious and at the same time strange, at least to our (modern, thoroughly Nominalist) ears. On the one hand, it is obvious since to speak about Being is to use words, language (like “Being”). Being is also accessible, perhaps even only accessible through a word or concept of our understanding (an element that is also present in the dictum itself: “that can be understood”). On the other hand, it is also strange, since we can also intuitively recognize a distinction between the two: Being and language are different “things.” Certainly, language is also a thing, say, one that can be studied by linguistics, phonetics, and the like, but reality is another: it is made of hardcore physical and material entities that are studied by the natural sciences. To use a simple example, one can distinguish a glass of water, here in front of us, from the expression “glass of water” that one uses when referring to it. We also have many other colloquial ways of referring to this basic distinction, when we claim for instance that something is easy to say, but that reality is more complex, and so on. So, while one can understand the obvious proximity of Being and language, one can also account for their difference or different nature.

Now, what does Gadamer mean when he speaks of the “original belonging together” (ursprüngliche Zusammengehörigkeit) of Being and language, and why does he rely (to a large extent) on the Platonic and Medieval metaphysics of the transcendentals to understand it? In this last section of Truth and Method, indeed in the entire work, Gadamer argues against a mere instrumental (i.e., Nominalist) understanding of language (and of understanding itself). Such an understanding claims that language (or understanding) is a kind of “tool” (or frame) we use in order to grasp reality, to communicate our thoughts, and to fashion the world to our purposes, as if reality were nothing but an amorphous mass without meaning (one can think of Descartes’ res extensae). Language, words, would be nothing but instruments at the disposal of the subject (or a community of speakers) that allow it to impose its will and imprint upon everything. Language and Being would thus stand in front of one another, just as the subject and the object, mind and reality.

Gadamer defends an entirely different view of language, which does not juxtapose language and Being as two realities that would stand opposite to one another. No, they would originally (ursprüngliche) belong together (Zusammengehörigkeit) (one will not fail to notice the metaphysical significance of an adjective like ursprünglich, original, in this context!). This view draws heavily on the ancient metaphysics of the transcendentals, which goes back to Plato and the Middle Ages. Its basic idea is that the main features or characteristics of Being––that are true of all Being and all species (and are for that reason called transcendentals)––such as Beauty, Unity, Being, Truth, Oneness, Intelligibility, are not only features of our language, but, more originally, of reality itself. They would belong to Being itself as a matter of course. Gadamer resuscitates this view, albeit with a hermeneutical twist. He wants to unsettle the conception according to which language would be nothing but an instrument in the hands of a sovereign subject, a subject whose importance Gadamer, most un-modernly, seeks to downplay throughout his hermeneutics (while at the same time insisting on the crucial role of the subject in hermeneutical understanding and application––but that is another issue!).

No, Gadamer argues, the “subject”––if one can call it that––or knowledge is “inserted,” incorporated into Being:

As was to be expected, this involves us in a number of questions with which philosophy has long been familiar. In metaphysics belonging (Zugehörigkeit) means the transcendental relationship between being and truth, and it conceives knowledge as an element of being itself and not primarily as an activity of the subject. That knowledge is incorporated in Being (solche Einbezogenheit der Erkenntnis in das Sein) is the presupposition of all classical and medieval thought.^[26]

This justifies Gadamer’s claim that his thesis on the original togetherness of Being and language leads us back into the dimension of problems of classical metaphysics.^[27] Gadamer even takes up in this context the Neoplatonic (and metaphysical) vocabulary of emanation to claim that language emanates from Being and presents it in its truth.

So, does Gadamer turn metaphysical all of a sudden? One could think so, since this reference to classical metaphysics is so affirmative and strategically important at the conclusion of the whole book. Yet, Gadamer also takes a distance toward this metaphysics because his intentions are different than those of classical metaphysics. As he later states,^[28] and despite some appearances, Gadamer does not want to renew or rehabilitate this metaphysics of the transcendentals as such and for itself. He uses it in order to polemicize against a conception of language (and understanding) that sees in it an instrument at the disposal of the autonomous and all-powerful subject. No, Gadamer contends, the speaking and understanding subject is inserted (einbezogen), incorporated into a larger “event”^[29] of Being that precedes it. Gadamer’s focus thus remains here on language (which is, perhaps, a modern emphasis!).

Gadamer thereby recoils from the “full” metaphysics of the transcendentals that supports his argument. According to this metaphysics, this togetherness was part of the structure of Being itself. And for the Middle Ages, this structure obtained because God had created the world in such a way that our language (and mind) can grasp the true structure of Being. This metaphysics of creation plays no role whatsoever for Gadamer, even if he is naturally aware of its importance for the Middle Ages.

The issue one can raise here is whether Gadamer can defend his thesis (on language) while at the same time relinquishing the full metaphysics of the transcendentals that supports the traditional doctrine he is building upon. Does he want to have his cake and eat it too? This raises the issue of consistency. How can he resist the postmodern conclusion, reached by some of his most consequent followers such as Rorty and Vattimo, that our historical languages are nothing but constructions of and projections on Being, not the emanation of Being, which would be unattainable for any hermeneutical perspective? I, for one, believe that Gadamer cannot defend his argument without the metaphysics that supports it.

Nonetheless, I wholeheartedly salute Gadamer’s breakthrough in that he broke the spell of Nominalism on our understanding of language and reality. Even if this was perhaps not his primary intention, he recalled that Nominalism was but one understanding of Being (in the Raphaelite conversation on the meaning of things), one that permeates and at the same time stifles Modernity, yet one that does not preclude the possibility of another understanding of Being—one which sees in Being not only a contingent individual physical occurrence (as Vorhandenheit), but the manifestation of a universal essence (an idea in Plato’s vocabulary), whose presence we can catch sight of in the experience of Beauty and express through our language. It recalls that the features our language and understanding discovered in the world are not created by them, but already in Being itself. There is already sense and meaning to the world, and our language unfolds it when it seeks to understand and explain what is. My modest attempt at a Metaphysical Hermeneutics hopes to give an idea of the understanding of Being, and philosophy, that such a breakthrough makes possible.

Bibliography

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Blumenberg, Hans. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit. Suhrkamp, 1966.

Blumenberg, Hans. “Die Vorbereitung der Neuzeit.” Philosophische Rundschau 9 (1961) 81–133.

Descartes, René. Lettre-préface de l’édition française des Principes de la philosophie. In Descartes. Oeuvres philosophiques, vol. III. 1643–1650, textes établis par Ferdinand Alquié, 769–785. Classiques Garnier, 1973.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. On Education, Poetry, and History. Applied Hermeneutics. Edited by Dieter Misgeld and Donald Graeme Nicholson. SUNY Press, 1992.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg and Martin Heidegger. Briefwechsel 1922–1976. Edited by Jean Grondin and Mark Michalski. Vittorio Klostermann, 2024.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Gesammelte Werke. 10 vols. Mohr Siebeck. 1985–95 [GW].

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Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Mohr Siebeck, 2000.

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Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Apprenticeships. Translated by Robert R. Sullivan. MIT Press, 1985 [PA].

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophische Lehrjahre. Vittorio Klostermann, 1977.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated and revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013 [TM].

Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Metaphysics: From Parmenides to Levinas. Columbia University Press, 2012.

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Grondin, Jean. Metaphysical Hermeneutics. Bloomsbury, 2024.

Habermas, Jürgen. Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie. Bd. 1. Suhrkamp, 2019.

Heidegger, Martin and Hannah Arendt. Briefe 1925 bis 1975. Vittorio Klostermann, 1998.

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. Harper & Row, 1977.

Heidegger, Martin. Was ist Metaphysik? 11. Aufl. Klostermann, 1969, 1975.

Heidegger, Martin. Pathmarks. Translated by William McNeill. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Lammi, Walter. Gadamer and the Question of the Divine. Continuum, 2008

Scholz, Oliver R. Verstehen und Rationalität. 2. Aufl. Vittorio Klostermann, 2001.

1. Keynote Lecture delivered at the 20^th anniversary meeting of the NASPH, in Washington, DC, on September 19, 2025. ↑

2. Philosophical Apprenticeships 147, slightly modified translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophische Lehrjahre, 181: “Würde das Wort, das die große metaphysische Tradition des Abendlandes gesprochen hatte und das durch das historische Jahrhundert’, das 19., hindurch noch immer vernehmbar blieb, am Ende taube Ohren finden? Mein hermeneutischer Versuch, der diese Tradition beschwor und zugleich über die bürgerliche Bildungsreligion, in der sie nachlebte, hinauszukommen und zu ihren ursprünglichen Kräften zurückzuführen suchte, mochte einer von kritischem Emanzipationswillen getriebenen jüngeren Denkgesinnung fremd vorkommen.” ↑

3. Jean Grondin, Metaphysical Hermeneutics (Bloomsbury, 2024). ↑

4. Oliver R. Scholz, Verstehen und Rationalität. 2. Aufl. (Vittorio Klostermann, 2001), 1. See Aristotle, Metaphysics 980a21 (Loeb Classical Library, 3). ↑

5. Another one is the complementarity of philosophy and theology, represented by Raphael’s depiction of “The Disputation of the Holy Sacrament,” which stands on the opposite wall to the “School of Athens” in the Stanza della Segnatura. Yet another one would be that of the tutelary statues of Apollo, representing the arts, and of Athena, which personifies justice and wisdom, which stand respectively above the groupings of Plato and Aristotle. ↑

6. Compare Gadamer’s characterization of philosophy as “the infinite conversation on the human destiny” (das unendliche Gespräch über die menschliche Bestimmung) at the end of his study of 1961 on “The Philosophy and Religion of Judaism” (GW 4, 77; EHP, 164). Walter Lammi, Gadamer and the Question of the Divine (Continuum, 2008), viii, rightly called attention to this passage. ↑

7. Gadamer even turned the tables on Aristotle by claiming that it was his First Mover, who thinks only of itself and is thus removed from the world, that was the true embodiment of the chorismos (see GW 7, 281 and my Introduction to Metaphysics, Columbia University Press, 2012, 272), not Plato’s ideas that shine everywhere. ↑

8. One should not be taken aback by the trivial fact that neither Plato or Aristotle used the term “metaphysics,” which was in all likelihood coined by Alexander of Aphrodisias to classify manuscripts of Aristotle that he ranked “after” those on physics. What we call metaphysics is what Plato simply called epistēmē, science or knowledge, at the end of Book 6 of the Republic for instance, or dialektikē in Book 7, and what Aristotle called prōtē philosophia or first philosophy. It is the science Aristotle evokes, without however naming it in this context, when he says at the beginning of Book 4 of his Metaphysics that there “is a science which considers Being as Being” (Metaphysics IV, 1003a20; Loeb Classical Library, 146). ↑

9. René Descartes, “Lettre-préface de l’édition française des Principes,“ in Descartes. Œuvres philosophiques. III 1643–1650. Textes établis par Ferdinand Alquié (Classiques Garnier, 1973), 779–80. ↑

10. Metaphysics IV, 1003a20; Loeb Classical Library, 146. ↑

11. See the Heidegger Chapter in my Introduction to Metaphysics, 201-224. ↑

12. See for instance what is probably his first public assurance of this in the first lines of his Postscript of 1943 to “What is metaphysics?”: “The question ‘What is metaphysics?’ questions beyond metaphysics. It springs from a thinking that has already entered into the overcoming of metaphysics” (Was ist Metaphysik?, 43; Pathmarks, 231). This obviously marked a departure from the 1929 inaugural lecture itself, which identified itself with metaphysics by explicitly unfolding a “metaphysical question” and by answering its question in claiming—in what has to be seen as a renewal of metaphysical thinking—that “metaphysics is a questioning that goes beyond or over beings (Hinausfragen über das Seiende) in order to recover them as such and as a whole for a conceptual grasp” (Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? 38; Basic Writings, 109, modified translation), even going as far as to say that “metaphysics was the fundamental event (das Grundgeschehen) in Dasein” and even “Dasein itself.” (Was ist Metaphysik? 41; Basic Writings, 112, modified translation). ↑

13. The English translation of this essay is found in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Harper & Row, 1977), 369–92. ↑

14. See for instance Gadamer, “Europa und die Oikoumene,” in GW 10 (Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 268: “Heidegger ist ja am Ende seines Lebens so weit gegangen, das Wort ‘Philosophie’ überhaupt nicht mehr zu gebrauchen, weil es ihm eine unlösbare Aufgabe schien, die von den Griechen begründete Metaphysik, die durch Plato und Aristoteles begründete Form des begrifflichen Denkens, auf neue Zukunfsthorizonte hin fortzuführen.” Translation: “At the end of his life, Heidegger went so far as to stop using the term ‘philosophy,’ because it seemed to him to be an unsolvable task to carry on into any future horizons the metaphysics founded by the Greeks, i.e., the form of conceptual thought founded by Plato and Aristotle.” One will note Gadamer’s illuminating equation of the “metaphysics founded by the Greeks” with “the form of conceptual thought founded by Plato and Aristotle,” which Gadamer does not want to relinquish. As the motto to this essay confirms, which is borrowed from his Philosophical Apprenticeships, Gadamer claimed that his entire hermeneutical attempt (Versuch) conjured up (beschwor) the great metaphysical tradition of the West and only feared, not without reason, it might have become inaudible in our time (PA, 147). ↑

15. See HW, 115–16: “In Heidegger’s lectures we were confronted with the things themselves in such a way that we no longer knew if the things he was speaking of were his or Aristotle’s. It was a grand hermeneutical truth that we began to experience then and that I was later to defend and justify theoretically” (slightly modified translation). ↑

16. See the volumes edited by Gadamer: Aristoteles, Metaphysik XII (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1948) and Plato. Texte zur Ideenlehre (Vittorio Klostermann, 1981). ↑

17. It was itself often republished and under slightly different titles. When it first appeared in the Löwith Festschrift, it was modestly titled “Remarks on the Theme ‘Hegel and Heidegger’,” but when it was republished in the 3^rd volume of Gadamer’s Kleine Schriften in 1972, it became “Heidegger and the Language of Metaphysics,” and when it was taken up in Heideggers Wege (HW) in 1983, and in the GW edition, it became “The Language of Metaphysics.” ↑

18. See also GW 10, 270: “Man kann in jeder Sprache alles sagen, wenn auch nicht immer in einem einzigen Satz oder einem einzigen Wort; aber man kann für das, was man denken will, die Worte suchen––und finden.” Translation: “One can say everything in any language, even if it not always in a single proposition or a single word; but for that which we want to think, one can search for the words––and find them.” ↑

19. HW, 78; GW 3, 236. Infinite! Gadamer had also alluded to this infinity when he presented the universality of language in Truth and method (TM, 420; GW 1, 405): “If all understanding stands in a necessary relation of equivalence to its possible interpretation [i.e., its possible linguistic expression], and if there are basically no bounds set to understanding, then the linguistic form which this understanding receives in its interpretation must contain within it an infinity that transcends all bounds.” Slightly modified translation because the printed translation speaks here, timidly, of an “infinite dimension,” whereas the German original speaks of an infinity (Unendlichkeit) that overcomes all limitations. ↑

20. HW, 77; GW 3,235. Gadamer had already expressed this criticism in his public tribute to Heidegger of 1964 (“Martin Heidegger––75 years”) which had appeared in one of Germany’s most respected newspapers, the Frankfurter allgemeine Zeitung and of which we know for sure that Heidegger read it since he mentions it, positively at that, in a letter to Gadamer of October 14, 1964 (Hans-Georg Gadamer/Martin Heidegger Briefwechsel 1922–1976. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2024, 165): “Does not the natural language in its universal malleability always offer a way to express what one has to say? And is it not the case that whatever does not allow itself to be said has been insufficiently thought?” (HW, 27; GW 3, 196) This is perhaps unrelated, but this tribute was reprinted in the 3^rd volume of Gadamer’s Kleine Schriften, a book Heidegger strongly recommended to Hannah Arendt in a letter he wrote to her on February 15, 1972: “You have to read Gadamer’s Hegel Studies [i.e., Hegel’s Dialectic] and the 3^rd volume of his Kleine Schriften” (Martin Heidegger/Hannah Arendt, Briefe 1925 bis 1975, [Vittorio Klostermann, 1998], 226). ↑

21. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 25 (1994), 110, literally: “Phenomenology, hermeneutics and metaphysics are not three different philosophical points of view, they are philosophizing itself [Philosophieren selber].” ↑

22. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, GW 3, 238; HW, 81 (modified translation): “If Heidegger understood his own endeavor as a preparation for posing the question of Being anew, then this assumed that traditional metaphysics, since its beginning with Aristotle, had lost all explicit awareness of the questionableness of the sense of Being. This was a challenge to the self-understanding of a metaphysics which would not recognize itself in its own consequences: in the radical Nominalism of the modern age, and in the transformation of the modern concept of science into an all-embracing technology. It was the main purpose [das Hauptanliegen) of Sein und Zeit to urge just such a recognition by metaphysics and its later formations.” On this point, see my chapter, “Thinking beyond the Confines of Nominalism: Gadamer’s Important Metaphysical Reading of Heidegger,” in Metaphysical Hermeneutics 103–17. ↑

23. On this point, see the essays by Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966); “Die Vorbereitung der Neuzeit”, Philosophische Rundschau 9 (1961), 81–133. Jürgen Habermas also sees in Nominalism the basic presupposition of Modernity. See his Chapter on “Wilhelm von Ockham: Das doppelte Gesicht der nominalistischen Revolution.”in Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, Bd. 1, Berlin 2019, 805–51. In one of the earliest footnotes of Truth and Method (TM, 92, a note to TM, 5; GW 1, 11), while discussing the decisive topic of the emergence of methodical science in early Modernity, Gadamer alluded to the work of the famous science historian Pierre Duhem on “the Paris Occamist school,” a Nominalist powerhouse, and its decisive influence on the birth of the new science in the seventeenth century. Duhem’s studies on the Nominalist sources of modern science must thus have been one of Gadamer’s primary sources. In an addition of 1986 to this footnote (TM, 92; GW 1, 11), Gadamer further alluded to the work of the science historians “Anneliese Maier and A. Koyré, among others.” The more precise references to the work of Anneliese Maier and others, such as André de Muralt, who have influenced Gadamer (and also Hans Blumenberg) in this regard, are given in Metaphysical Hermeneutics, 165. ↑

24. See my La beauté de la métaphysique (Cerf, 2019), 57 f. ↑

25. GW 1, 478; TM, 490. Zusammengehörigkeit is a word Husserl often used in his foundational works such as his Ideen (Hua 3, 187, 230), the Krisis (Hua 6, 221, 460) or his Cartesian Meditations (Hua 1, 16, 17, 56, 77, 146, 190). ↑

26. GW 1, 462; TM, 474. ↑

27. “The hermeneutics of the human sciences [. . . ] leads us back into the problems of classical metaphysics” (GW I, 464; TM, 476). See also Gadamer‘s Hermeneutische Entwürfe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 23, where Gadamer sums up the Greek conception of the rationality of the cosmos as logos in the following terms: “Dem entspricht, dass die Vernünftigkeit des Seins, diese große Hypothese griechischer Philosophie, nicht primär eine Auszeichnung des menschlichen Selbstbewusstseins ist, sondern eine des Seins selber, das so das Ganze ist und so als das Ganze erscheint, dass die menschliche Vernunft weit eher als ein Teil dieser Vernünftigkeit zu denken ist und nicht als das Selbstbewusstsein, das sich dem Ganzen gegenüber weiß.” Translation: “To this corresponds the fact that the rationality of Being, this great hypothesis of Greek philosophy, is not primarily a distinction of human self-consciousness, but one of Being itself, which so is a totality and so appears as a totality that human reason is much more to be thought of as a part of this rationality and not as the self-consciousness that knows itself to be standing in front of the totality.” ↑

28. WM, GW I, 480; TM, 492. See Metaphysical Hermeneutics, 99f. ↑

29. See on the very last page of TM (GW 1, 494; TM, 506): “wer versteht, ist immer schon einbezogen in ein Geschehen,” “when one understands, one is always already drawn into an event.”One will notice the very same verb, einbezogen (drawn, inserted, incorporated), that was used to describe the doctrine of the transcendentals in the already quoted passage of GW 1, 462; TM, 474 with its insistence on the Einbezogenheit, the incorporation of knowledge into Being. ↑