DESTRUKTION, ÜBERLIEFERUNG, AND THE “ORIGINARY”: HERMENEUTICS BETWEEN

HEIDEGGER AND GADAMER (II)

James Risser

Without doubt, there are significant challenges in any attempt to describe the character of
hermeneutics in the work of Heidegger and Gadamer as it pertains to what is common to
both and to a difference in their respective positions. If we attempt to establish this character
from the inside, that is to say, from the perspective of Gadamer's own account of the con-
nection of his work to that of Heidegger, we are faced with translating what is on the sur-
face a one-sided account. What Gadamer tells us about Heidegger's hermeneutics and his
own hermeneutics in relation to that of Heidegger is in fact colored by the direction of
Gadamer's own thinking. If, on the other hand, we attempt to establish this character from
a more neutral position outside the perspective given by Gadamer, precision would demand
an extensive review of the work of those third parties, such as Aristotle and Hegel, whose
philosophies frame the deeper problematic of their common association. And perhaps yet
a still greater challenge, we would have to take into account the dramatic development
within Heidegger's own work of the very notion of the hermeneutic as it moves from her-
meneutic phenomenology to thought, that is to say, from a conception of hermeneutics as
Auslegung to that of Andenken. Or, expressed differently: if we were to attempt to describe
hermeneutics between Heidegger and Gadamer as a hermeneutics that unfolds from the
common source of hermeneutic phenomenology, which is initially taken hold of by Heid-
egger in his hermeneutics of facticity, we would have to first explain the later Heidegger's
dismissal of “hermeneutics” and then explain how Gadamer can still link his concerns with
those of the later Heidegger.
With these challenges in view, but without the intention of attending to them directly,
I want to propose, at least initially, that we consider the key notions of Destruktion and
Überlieferung as a framework for establishing the character of hermeneutics between
Heidegger and Gadamer. These two notions are not only immediately identifiable with the
basic position of each -- Heidegger's hermeneutics from its earliest formulation is an her-
meneutics concerned with a certain kind of destruction (Destruktion), and Gadamer's herme-
neutics, as announced at the outset of Truth and Method, is concerned with understanding
tradition (Überlieferung) -- but also through their common association appear to immediately
present the element that unites the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer. What is com-
mon to both notions is the historical element. Heidegger's hermeneutics carries out a De-
struktion of historical concepts, and Gadamer's hermeneutics situates itself in the historical
understanding of Überlieferung. Thus it would appear that we have before us the identity
and difference sought. The description of the character of hermeneutics in Heidegger and
Gadamer would be a matter of showing how this hermeneutics that is rooted in the historical
for both comes to be understood from Heidegger's perspective in terms of Destruktion, but
from Gadamer's perspective in terms of Überlieferung.
However, this framework for interpreting contemporary hermeneutics is not as straight-
forward as it might appear to be, for it is possible to see a difficulty in both the mark of
identity and the mark of difference. Upon closer inspection of Gadamer's position, one
could argue, of course only with some exaggeration, that Gadamer does not consider his
version of hermeneutics to be linked in an essential manner with the problem of history.
It is certainly the case that when Gadamer takes up the problem of the (historical) Geistes-
wissenschaften in Truth and Method, he shows how hermeneutic understanding coincides
with historical understanding. However, in the subsequent development of his position in
Truth and Method, Gadamer shows that hermeneutic understanding actually coincides in
an essential way with the experience of experience, and ultimately with language as

1
dialogical event. As such, hermeneutic understanding is not to be equated with historical
understanding and its related notion of an unfolding of history. This point is made most
dramatically by Gadamer himself in his “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” where
he tells us that, in relation to Heidegger's reading of the history of metaphysics, his own
goal is to read Plato and Aristotle differently, and adds, “my intention would not be to
supplement the Heideggerian history of the increasing forgetfulness of being with a history
of the remembering of being. . . . [Certainly] everywhere that philosophizing is attempted,
one finds in this attempt a recollection of being takes place. In spite of this fact, however, it
seems to me there is no history of the recollection of being. Recollection has no history.”1
With his remarks on temporal distance, in the same text, we have further evidence for this
point. Gadamer notes that the argument for temporal distance “was a poor preparation for
discussing the fundamental significance of the otherness of the other and the fundamental
role played by language as conversation. It would have been more in tune with the subject
matter, I think, to speak of distance and its hermeneutic function in a more general way.
After all, interpretive distance does not always have to be historical distance.”2 Thus the
assumed identity between Heidegger and Gadamer requires a more careful consideration,
such that, if left unattended, it may not in fact hide from us something fundamental about
the difference in the character of hermeneutics between Heidegger and Gadamer.
The difficulty in the mark of difference between Heidegger and Gadamer is easier to
see. We cannot fail to notice that, strictly speaking, Destruktion and Überlieferung are not
parallel terms in their opposition. For Heidegger, as he explicitly states in his 1923 lecture
course on the hermeneutics of facticity, hermeneutics is coextensive with Destruktion, and
Destruktion is always a Destruktion of tradition.3 It would be most awkward, however,
to say that for Gadamer Überlieferung is an Überlieferung of tradition. To say the least,
for Heidegger Destruktion refers to the specific character of hermeneutic Wiederholung
(repetition), whereas for Gadamer Überlieferung refers to the thrownness, i.e., the having-
been, of hermeneutic experience. This is not to suggest that we cannot quickly translate
the two terms into a parallel for taking hold of their difference: Destruktion pertains to a
de-structuring in the manner of an Abbau, an un-building, whereas Überlieferung, set
within the context of the historical Geisteswissenschaften and the humanist tradition, per-
tains to an ongoing reacquisition, a transformational building in the manner of Bildung.
In this context it would then appear that Heidegger understands hermeneutics to be carry-
ing out a destruction of history, while Gadamer on the other hand wants to bring history
into its construction.4 But such a quick translation obscures the fact that Gadamer has

1
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” in Lewis Hahn, ed., The
Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 35. The point that Gadamer makes
here, which is a point to which we will return, is stated less cryptically in his essay “The Language of
Metaphysics”: “In [recollection] history has its reality, not that history is simply remembered through it.”
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Sprache der Metaphysik,” in Gesammelte Werke III (hereafter GW), Neuere
Philosophie I (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1987), 235; English translation by John Stanley, “The Language
of Metaphysics,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidegger's Ways (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994), 77.
2
Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 45.
3
In the Appendix to this lecture course, which follows Heidegger's own notes, Heidegger writes:
“For the concrete investigations, each in its place and at a particular time [jeweils]: historical investigations
-- Aristotle, Augustine, Parmenides. (Hermeneutics is destruction!) Only in such a manner demonstrating
the primordiality of this hermeneutical destructive research.” Martin Heidegger, Ontologie (Hermeneutik
der Faktizität), Gesamtausgabe 63 (hereafter GA) (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1988), 105; English
translation by John van Buren, Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press, 1999), 81.
4
This distinction is in effect what we find in Robert Bernasconi's “Bridging the Abyss: Heidegger
and Gadamer,” in idem, Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities

2
always been sympathetic to Destruktion as “a process of criticism directed at concepts that
no longer speak to us.”5 The hermeneutic task, Gadamer tells us, is Destruktion in that it is
a task of letting “the concept speak again in its interwovenness in living language.”6 Thus
the assumed difference between Heidegger and Gadamer requires a more careful con-
sideration such that if left unattended may in fact hide from us something fundamental
about the identity in the character of hermeneutics between Heidegger and Gadamer.

*****

In light of these difficulties, let us consider more precisely what constitutes the identity
and difference in the hermeneutics between Heidegger and Gadamer. As a natural first
step we need to locate the actual point of intersection of these two hermeneutics, from
which we can then name the actual mark of identity. It is well known that Gadamer's
initial contact with Heidegger in the early 1920s came at a time when Heidegger was first
formulating his project as a hermeneutics of facticity. This initial contact was decisive for
Gadamer's own understanding of the character of hermeneutics, and without doubt the
hermeneutics of facticity forms a point, if not the essential point, of intersection between
Heidegger and Gadamer.7 In particular, we know that Gadamer had been inspired by
Heidegger's manuscript of 1922, his “Aristotle Introduction,” in which Heidegger in effect
summarizes his work of the previous three years through a reading of selected passages
from Aristotle.8 In this manuscript Heidegger indicates quite explicitly that philosophical
research cannot extricate itself from the hermeneutic situation as the situation of the living
present. Since understanding this situation (the hermeneutics of the hermeneutic situation)
cannot be accomplished by merely accepting established knowledge, proper understanding
will require a primordial repetition of that which is to be understood. This repetition en-
tails a destruction of historical knowing, and thus from the outset Heidegger will link her-
meneutics to Destruktion.9 The specific character of this destruction becomes immediately
apparent in Heidegger's description of it. Heidegger notes that the philosophy of today's
situation (which we assume refers to Neo-Kantianism with its particular theoretical orien-
tation) moves inauthentically within Greek conceptuality. If philosophy is to make the con-
crete interpretation of factical life transparent, it must “loosen up the handed-down and
dominating interpretatedness in its hidden motives . . . and to push forward by way of a dis-
mantling return [im abbauenden Rückgang] towards the primordial motive sources of

Press, 1993). Bernasconi claims that, in contrast to Heidegger, Gadamer's overcoming of the Enlightenment
project amounts to a restoration of tradition.
5
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik,” Hermeneutik im Rückblick, GW10
(Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1995), 145; English translation by Richard Palmer and Diane Michelfelder,
“Letter to Dallmayr,” in Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer, ed., Dialogue and Deconstruction: The
Gadamer-Derrida Encounter (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1989), 99.
6
Gadamer, “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik,” 146; idem, “Letter to Dallmayr,” 100.
7
In “Text and Interpretation” Gadamer tells us that his own efforts “were directed toward not
forgetting the limit that is implicit in every hermeneutical experience of meaning” and, with respect to
these efforts, he retained the expression, the “hermeneutics of facticity.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Text und
Interpretation,” Hermeneutic II, GW2 (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1993), 334; English translation by Dennis
J. Schmidt and Richard Palmer, “Text and Interpretation,” in Michelfelder and Palmer, ed., Dialogue and
Deconstruction, 25.
8
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, ed. and trans.
Richard Palmer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 104.
9
See note 3 above.

3
explication.”10 Heidegger intends this destruction to be more than a simple alternative
approach to the philosophy of Neo-Kantianism. Carrying out this destruction becomes an
attack on the theoretical as such (the dominating interpretatedness in its hidden motives),
whereby philosophy itself becomes transformed. Philosophy becomes for Heidegger a
“philosophical hermeneutics,” and this is to say that it becomes “'historical' knowing in
the radical sense of the term.” What is at stake in this “philosophical hermeneutics” is not
a more accurate account of the history of philosophy, but “the authentic path upon which
the present must encounter itself in its own basic movements.” Without this primordial
interpretation -- an interpretation that Heidegger describes as a tendency towards “a radical
logic of origins” -- factical life “renounces the possibility of receiving its own self in
rooted possession.”11
Although Heidegger will abandon the language of factical life for the sake of the
primordial question of Being, he does not abandon this movement with respect to a radical
logic of origins. In Being and Time Heidegger writes: “If the question of Being is to achieve
clarity regarding its own history, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and
the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved. We understand this task
as one in which, by taking the question of Being as our clue, we are to destructure the
traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at this primordial experience in
which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being.”12 And even after
Being and Time, after the so called Kehre, Heidegger never abandons this movement. In
the Introduction to Metaphysics, he writes: “To ask how does it stand with Being?—this
means nothing less than to repeat and re-trieve [wieder-holen] the inception [Anfang] of
our historical-spiritual Dasein, in order to transform it into the other inception . . . . But
an inception is not repeated when one shrinks back to it as something that once was . . . but
rather when the inception is begun again more originally and with all the strangeness,
darkness, insecurity that a genuine inception brings with it.”13 And still later, in his 1953
essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger tells us that “in the realm of
thinking, a painstaking effort to think through still more primally what was primally
thought is not the absurd wish to revive what is past, but rather the sober readiness to be
astounded before the coming of what is early [des Kommenden der Frühe].”14
These passages, especially from the earlier writings, are filled with astonishing phrases:
“a dismantling return,” “a radical logic of origins,” “the coming of what is early.” More
importantly, these passages, in which we can see the shifting emphases in Heidegger's
thinking, clearly indicate that the interpretative movement involves a “step back” that is
not to be confused with the recovery of a lost ground. In the initial project of a herme-
neutics of facticity, which culminates in a certain sense with the publication of Being and

10
Martin Heidegger, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Anzeige der hermeneu-
tischen Situation,” ed. Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Dilthey-Jahrbuch 6 (1989): 249; English translation by
Michael Baur, “Phenomenological Interpretation with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical
Situation,” Man and World 25 (1992): 371.
11
Ibid.
12
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1972), 22; English translation
by Joan Stambaugh, Being and Time (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996), 20.
13
Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1987), 29-30;
English translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press), 41.
14
Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in idem, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen:
Neske, 1954), 30; English translation by William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 22. The notion of the “earlier” was already discussed by
Heidegger in his 1924 lecture course “The Basic Problems of Phenomenology.” See Martin Heidegger,
Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA24 (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1975), 461.

4
Time, this step back is decidedly historical in character and the hermeneutic aspect of it
is never in question. Heidegger ties the Destruktion of the historical tradition to the self-
interpretation of Dasein as an ecstatically-temporal-happening, which is to say that history
is to be interpreted in terms of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit). This point is well known to
readers of Being and Time. Briefly stated, Heidegger uses the term historicity to indicate
the distinctive way in which Dasein enacts its stretching along between birth and death.
Dasein enacts this historical living through a retrieval or repetition of its existence that
goes beyond a simple “ongoing reacquisition.” The retrieval is essentially negative: Dasein
returns to its having-been (Gewesenheit) in the form of a rejoinder (Erwiderung) and a
disavowal (Widerruf). The rejoinder is something like a critical reply to the continuity of
the past, and in this reply “it is at the same time a disavowal of that which in the 'today'
is working itself out as the past.”15 The disavowal is accordingly the countering of the
past in the present, such that the retrieval is not an actualization in which what was once
known now becomes explicitly known again. The retrieval, in other words, is not a remem-
bering as the retrieval of the forgotten, but, by virtue of the disavowal -- literally, a counter-
claim (Wider-ruf) -- a kind of dialogue with the past. The character of this dialogue is not
itself thematized by Heidegger, but the character of the retrieval is clear nonetheless. In
its critical reply it has the character of a quasi-logic of questioning such that the retrieval
of historicity can be said to be something like what is the interrogative opening of life to
itself (the self-interpretation of Dasein).16
When Heidegger then explicitly shifts his emphasis after Being and Time to an analysis
that takes shape under the rubric of the question of the truth of the history of Being, the
Destruktion is still carried out with respect to historicity, only now, what is at issue is the
historicity of truth. The truth of Being, i.e., the truth of the movement of Being in its dif-
ferentiated modes of openings, is experienced as a history. Since such differentiated modes
of openings encompass the errancy of traditional metaphysics, the history of Being is
tantamount to the history of metaphysics, and the destructive interpretation takes the form
of an overcoming (Überwindung) -- or better, a getting over (Verwindung) -- this history.
This “Verwindung,” which now constitutes Heidegger's renewal of the question of Being,
becomes a matter of a difficult conceptual labor that he identifies, in explicit contrast to
the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung, as a “step back.”17 Such a “step” is meant to highlight the
radicality of Heidegger's thinking: it is an attempt to point to what has been skipped over
in the history of metaphysics, namely, the thinking of the space of aletheia, the clearing
of Being.18
But what then becomes of hermeneutics in this later phase of Heidegger's thinking?19
Although the word itself is no longer used by Heidegger, the thinking with respect to the

15
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 385.
16
In his 1921 lecture course, Heidegger tells us that “it is precisely in questioning that factical life
attains its genuinely developed self-givenness.” Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen
zu Aristoteles, GA61 (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1985), 153; English translation by Richard Rojcewicz,
Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001), 113.
17
“For Hegel, the conversation with the earlier history of philosophy has the character of Aufhebung
. . . . For us, the character of the conversation with the history of thinking is no longer Aufhebung, but
the step back.” Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 39; English translation
by Joan Stambaugh, Identity and Difference (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 49.
18
This explanation is given by Gadamer in his essay “The History of Philosophy.” See Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Die Geschichte der Philosophie. Neuere Philosophie I, GW3, 305; English translation “The
History of Metaphysics,” in Gadamer, Heidegger's Ways, 163.
19
This phase is not Heidegger's last phase. In a still later phase, Heidegger does not want to speak
of the history of Being, since history is not the actual site of origin. The truth of Being is to be thought
from the place of Being and not in terms of historicity.

5
movement of the historicity of truth remains hermeneutical. In relation to this movement
that takes the form of a growing forgetfulness -- a history of loss, so to speak -- thinking is
still a matter of retrieval, but now in a different sense. One could say, following Heidegger's
own subsequent remarks on his use of the word “hermeneutic,” that it is a thinking that
for the first time attends to the “original experience of the hermeneutic relation.” Such
thinking, he tells us, is “a responding dialogue” that would remain “originally appropriated”
to a site of origin.20 The retrieval then can be described best as a preparatory thinking
(Vorausdenken) that is a thinking back (Zurückdenken) to the inception (Anfang) as in-
ception.21 As a thinking back, the name for this hermeneutic thinking is, quite simply,
recollection. This word is said in different ways by Heidegger: Erinnerung, Andenken,
Gedächtnis, but the meaning of the word is basically the same in each case. Recollection
loses its ordinary meaning as calling back to mind and becomes for Heidegger the gather-
ing of thinking back into what must be thought; and if we let this thinking back resonate
with the character of interpretation as a “dialogue with saying,” we can say, more to the
point, that recollection is a questioning thinking that in its fetching again is a thinking of
what is yet to come.22 And this word, I would argue, is the essential word for the identity
in the hermeneutics between Heidegger and Gadamer.
For Gadamer, philosophical hermeneutics has always been a matter of recollection
(Erinnerung), even though the word is not explicitly thematized in Truth and Method. It
has always been a matter of recollection insofar as the knowing appropriate to herme-
neutic experience is that of (again) bringing to presence -- a certain kind of “calling back
to mind” relative to the falling away intrinsic to finite existence. But this word is in fact
explicitly used by Gadamer, as we have already seen in the passage from his “Reflections
on My Philosophical Journey” quoted earlier. Returning to this passage, we can begin to
see precisely how hermeneutic recollection is to be understood. “Everywhere that philo-
sophizing is attempted,” Gadamer tells us, “one finds in this attempt a recollection of
being takes place. . . . Recollection is always what comes to one, and comes over one, so
that something that is again made present to us, offers, for the space of a moment, a halt
to all passing and forgetting.”23 Recollection is the mode of philosophizing, because
philosophical understanding takes place in relation to that which has come before. But
again, as Heidegger likewise insists, this is not to say that recollection is a return to the
previously known. Gadamer's further remark here is illuminating, not only for its
insistence that recollection is not a return to a previously known, but for identifying the
context in which all recollection takes place. “Recollection,” he tells us, is a “recollection
of something previously asked, the reclaiming of a lost question.”24 Gadamer then in-
dicates that the recovered question, which can no longer be the original question, is a
questioning again that mirrors the historicity of our thinking. For Gadamer, this means that

20
For a further discussion of this point, see my “After the Hermeneutic Turn,” Research in Pheno-
menology 30 (2000): 71-88.
21
See Gadamer, “Sein Geist Gott,” Neuere Philosophie I, GW3, 331; English translation, “Being
Spirit God,” in Gadamer, Heidegger's Ways, 194.
22
This is Heidegger's description of Andenken in his reading of Hölderlin's poem of the same name.
See Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlin's Dichtung (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1971), 84.
For his remarks on Gedächtnis, see idem, Was heißt Denken? (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971), 91-95.
For his remarks on Erinnerung, see idem, “Die Erinnerung in die Metaphysik,” in idem, Nietzsche II
(Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 481-490.
23
Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 35.
24
Ibid.

6
recollection also stands in relation to life's opening up and closing off; that is to say, for
Gadamer, too, recollection pertains to the interrogative opening of life to itself.25
Interestingly, Gadamer will also make this link between recollection and questioning
in “Destruktion and Deconstruction,” an essay in which Gadamer attempts to distinguish
his position from that of Derrida through their common roots in Heidegger. In particular,
Gadamer identifies his position in general with Heidegger's “step back,” which poses for
the first time the question of Being in a non-metaphysical sense. With its clear association
to the philosophy of Hegel, Gadamer claims that in his own way he is also taking a step
back from dialectics. The hermeneutic turn toward conversation as question and response,
that is the hallmark of his position, is an attempt to step back from both the dialectic of
German Idealism and Platonic dialectic. It aims to go back to the very presupposition in the
Socratic-dialogical: the anamnesis sought for and awakened in the logoi. Thus Gadamer
writes: “The 'recollection' that I have in mind is derived from myth and yet is in the highest
degree rational. It is not only that of the individual soul but always that of 'the spirit that
would like to unite us'—we who are a conversation.”26 Accordingly, for Gadamer, recol-
lection is the way of philosophizing itself, and this means, in relation to the possibilities
for the opening of life “to think further and speak further the language we speak.”
But in order to speak further, a philosophical hermeneutics, following Heidegger, will
have to carry out a form of Destruktion. To speak further the language we speak means
“that the presently alienated language of philosophy must recover its original saying power
and be led back to the saying of what is meant.”27 And thus for Gadamer recollection is, in
a way similar to Heidegger, a recovery with respect to origin.
Certainly, there are passages in Gadamer's texts where there is evidence for this further
claim. The most illuminating passages occur in the texts surrounding his exchange with
Derrida, in which his relation to Heidegger is a central concern. To take but one passage,
in “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik,” Gadamer poses the following question that he be-
lieves must be answered in the negative: “Have I really gone astray even though I intended
to follow Heidegger when he spoke about the overcoming of or recovery from meta-
physics?”28 What is behind this question is the charge that philosophical hermeneutics
remains configured by a metaphysics of presence. Gadamer quickly translates this con-
figuration into the issue of the continuity of meaning that in his own work he sees as the
issue of coming to agreement in understanding. Gadamer believes the question is raised
only because the notion of coming to agreement in understanding is misunderstood. Gadamer
tells us that it is of course true that, with respect to his own work, he continues to speak
the language of metaphysics, but he asks, “What is the 'language of metaphysics' really sup-
posed to mean?”29 He begins his reply by recounting what he learned from Heidegger:
“after years of naive uncritical use of the conceptual tradition of neo-Kantianism . . . I
learned from Heidegger what 'Begrifflichkeit' is and what it means for thinking. Above all
I learned to see how much self-alienation lurked in the conceptual tradition of modern
thought. So, as I encountered Heidegger, I immediately felt pursued by the pathos of De-

25
Here one should recall Gadamer's reformulation of the “hermeneutic circle,” in Truth and Method,
as interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. See Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Wahrheit und Methode, GW1 (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1990), 298; English translation by Joel Weins-
heimer and Donald Marshall, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1989), 293.
26
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Destruktion und Dekonstruktion,” in idem, Hermeneutik II, 369; English
translation by Geoff Waite and Richard Palmer, “Destruktion and Deconstruction,” Dialogue and
Deconstruction, 110.
27
Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 30.
28
Gadamer, “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik,” 139; idem, “Letter to Dallmayr,” 94.
29
Gadamer, “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik,” 144; idem, “Letter to Dallmayr,” 98.

7
struktion.”30 Gadamer then qualifies his adherence to this position of Heidegger. “How-
ever, I have not been able to follow Heidegger, or anybody else, when they speak of the
'language of metaphysics' . . . . Language, for me, is always simply that which we speak
with others and to others.”31 But to reject the language of metaphysics is not to reject the
task of Destruktion as letting “the concept speak in its interwovenness in living language.”32
For Gadamer, letting concepts speak is not a matter of Aufhebung but of bringing about
something new, that, as he sees enacted in Plato, involves a Destruktion of rigidified
words in which thinking is set free.
And here we should also point out that Gadamer's Destruktion appears not only as a
result of his contact with deconstruction. It is already at work in his analysis of tradition
in Truth and Method. To speak for tradition as the transmission (Über-lieferung) of having-
been will require a dismantling of a certain epistemological project within the tradition
(Tradition). Tradition's own hardened conceptuality, that he finds in the Enlightenment
project, is freed up by taking a step back to an original sense of the Geisteswissenschaften
and to an original sense of language. To state the same point somewhat differently,
Gadamer's hermeneutics has always been compatible with a dismantling, because he is not
really arguing for an unbroken continuity of tradition (Tradition), but only for the con-
tinuousness of transmission (Überlieferung), in which there is a freeing up of tradition it-
self.33 That is to say, in relation to the structure of belonging in which tradition (Über-
lieferung) is continuous with itself, there is an inherent Destruktion constantly at work;
and this is ultimately to say that historicity, the principle by which history and tradition
come to have their distinctive voice, is tantamount to an undergoing of history's freedom.
If, for Gadamer, tradition has authority over us, the actual governance with respect to that
authority is precisely what hermeneutic recollection executes. Moreover, we cannot fail
to note here that the execution of that governance -- the execution of the transmission of
tradition whereby the past has its future -- occurs in the interrogative. All transmission is
generated from the question that reflexively brings the questioner into question, and at the
same time brings the past into a relationship with a future where it is constantly becoming
different from itself. What Gadamer calls the fusion of horizons, then, is not so much a
unification of perspectives as it is history being released into the power of the possible
through the question.
Thus we can say, with respect to the mark of identity in the hermeneutics between
Heidegger and Gadamer, that it pertains fundamentally to recollection, which is to be under-
stood as that interrogation of (anterior) life that issues in the opening of that life.

*****

30
Gadamer, “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik,” 139.
31
Ibid.
32
Gadamer, “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik,” 146; idem, “Letter to Dallmayr,” 100.
33
I develop this point elsewhere. See my “Interpreting Tradition,” The Journal for the British Society
for Phenomenology 34, no. 3 (October 2003): 297-308. Note also Gadamer's remark in “The Relevance
of the Beautiful”: “For, of course, tradition means transmission [Übertragung] rather than conservation.
This transmission does not imply that we simply leave things unchanged and merely conserve them. It
means learning how to grasp and exercise the past anew. It is in this sense that we can say that trans-
mission is equivalent to translation.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Äktualität des Schönen,” in idem,
Ästhetik und Poetik I, GW8 (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1993), 138-39; English translation, Nicholas
Walker, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
48-49.

8
Let us now take our second step and consider the difference in hermeneutics between
Heidegger and Gadamer. In light of the named identity, the presumed difference in the
hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer cannot in fact rest on attributing the notion of
Destruktion to one, and the notion of Überlieferung to the other. Nevertheless, these two
notions remain a factor, if, as one possibility, we consider the difference in terms of the
issue of Heidegger's radicality. One could argue that, even if one grants that Gadamer's
hermeneutics is a retrieval of the original saying power of words, it is still not as radical
as Heidegger's hermeneutics, since this retrieval is carried out with respect to an “ongoing
reacquisition.”34 In contrast to this, Heidegger's hermeneutics, still in accord with the
character of retrieval, is constantly engaging in a “preparatory thinking” in which a dis-
mantling retrieve would interrupt ongoing reacquisition. But stated in this way, namely,
through the issue of interruption and a fortiori the issue of a new beginning, we can easily
overlook the essential difference between Heidegger and Gadamer. Certainly it is true that
Heidegger carries out his hermeneutic retrieval by engaging in an explicit overcoming of
the metaphysical tradition, while Gadamer does not. This difference, of course, cannot be
ignored, but it must at the same time be placed in relation to Gadamer's insistence that he too
is engaging in a Destruktion. In Gadamer's eyes, he sees himself departing from Heidegger
when he takes hold of the experience of language in a broader, if not more “urbanized” way,
such that there is no need to be concerned with the language of metaphysics. Gadamer
maintains that, when Heidegger concerns himself with the overcoming of metaphysics, he
“skips over the continued resistance and persistence of certain flexible unities in life we
all share, unities which perdure in the large and small forms of our fellow-human being-
with-each-other.”35 But to skip over “certain flexible unities in life” does not mean that
Heidegger will skip over the hermeneutics of transmission. Hermeneutics cannot get over
transmission! What is different about this transmission for Heidegger, especially with respect
to his later writings -- where he is concerned with the overcoming of metaphysics -- is
that it occurs in relation to an origin. It is with respect to this hermeneutics of origin, I
would argue, that we find the essential difference in the hermeneutics between Heidegger
and Gadamer.
This claim is immediately complicated by Gadamer's remark in “Dekonstruktion und
Hermeneutik” that the hermeneutic task of Destruktion, “has nothing to do with obscure
talk of origins and of the original.”36 With Heidegger obviously in mind, Gadamer sees
Destruktion, for himself as well as for Heidegger, to be concerned primarily, if not ex-
clusively, with freeing up hardened conceptuality. Given the full context of Gadamer's
remark, it appears that Gadamer wants to save Heidegger's Destruktion from the charge
of mysticism, for in point of fact Heidegger, especially the later Heidegger, does talk of
origins and original. Let us then state the matter more precisely: for Heidegger, herme-
neutic recollection is not a turning back to a mystical beginning, just as Aristotle's search
for first principles is not a turning back to a mystical beginning. This comparison with
Aristotle is not incidental. Heidegger's Destruktion is indeed carried out with a view to
something like “first principles,” and this means for Heidegger that hermeneutics is some-
thing like a hermeneutics of origins.
It is, of course, beyond the scope of my remarks here to establish the intricate distinctions
and movements of thought that the later Heidegger undergoes in his attempt to think the

34
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1981), 60.
35
Gadamer, “Destruktion und Dekonstruktion,” 368; idem, “Destruktion and Deconstruction,” 109.
36
Gadamer, “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik,” 146; idem, “Letter to Dallmayr,” 100.

9
enigma of movement that is tied to origin.37 With respect to our purposes here, we know
that when Heidegger attends to this matter, beginning in the 1930s, he distinguishes origin
(Ursprung) and inception (Anfang) from a starting-point (Beginn). A starting-point is
futureless and can be left behind, whereas an origin cannot.38 That is to say, an origin
is unsurpassable and ultimately unforgettable. The Greek word for origin -- the word that
draws the distinction between origin and starting-point into relief -- is arche. When
Aristotle defines arche in the Metaphysics, he is careful to point out the multiple meanings
of this word in ordinary use. Common to most of these meanings is the notion of “first.”39
As it pertains to the movement of Being, “first” is understood as that out of which Being
becomes and that which rules in the becoming. Thus arche has the sense of a ruling
beginning. When Heidegger then thinks arche as Ursprung and Anfang, he will, of course,
disengage it from its connection in Aristotle with cause (aitia),40 and also, in some sense,
from its connection with end.41 And equally so, Heidegger wants to disengage the
historical connection between arche and principium that in Western metaphysical thinking
will cover over the relation between origin and the condition of coming to presence. In
this disengagement, Heidegger will come to think the ontological condition of the
initiating of appearances as the event of appropriation (Ereignis) out of which the onto-
logical difference issues as a variation of the classical problem of the one and the many.
For Heidegger, this initiating gives rise to order, to what Heidegger calls, for example in
“The Origin of the Work of Art,” “setting-into-work.” A work, of which life in community
is an example, opens up a world and as such is original. Naturally so, there can be many
original modes of appearing; art, for Heidegger, is of course one such mode. These
original modes of appearing, though, are different from the initiating itself, that is to say,
from the originary as such -- the originary event of presencing that has no history.42 In
drawing this distinction between the originary origin (Ursprung) and the original mode
of historical origination, Heidegger now wants to claim that the event of presencing cannot
be accounted for in terms of historicity. Accordingly, in his attempt to think the movement
with respect to origin, Heidegger must supplement the project that goes under the name
“recollection in metaphysics.”43

37
The best account of this issue in the later Heidegger can be found in Reiner Schürmann's Heidegger
on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press, 1987).
38
See Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen »Germanien« und »Der Rhein«, GA39 (Frankfurt a.M.:
Klostermann, 1980), 3.
39
See Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1012b34-1013a23.
40
For Aristotle all causes are principles. See Metaphysics, 1013a17.
41
Aristotle will identify the arche with the telos, since without the end in the beginning there can
be no becoming. Heidegger, of course, does not regard Being teleologically, and yet the relation stands
for Heidegger. See Heidegger's remark in “The Origin of the Work of Art”: “A genuine inception [Anfang],
as a leap, is always a head start, in which everything to come is already leaped over, even if as something
disguised. The inception already contains the end latent within itself.” Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung
des Kunstwerkes,” in idem, Holzwege (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1972), 63; English translation by
Albert Hofstadter, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in idem, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971), 76.
42
Schürmann claims that Heidegger fails to keep this distinction clear in “The Origin of the Work
of Art.” Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, note 174, p. 349.
43
In the essay of this name Heidegger tells us that “recollection in the history of Being thinks history
as the arrival, always remote, of the perdurance [des Austrags] of truth's essence. . . . Being and truth
belong to each other just as they belong intertwining to a still concealed rootedness in the origin [Anfang]
who origination [Anfängnis] opening up remains that which comes. That which is original [das Anfängliche]
occurs in advance of all that comes.” Heidegger, “Die Erinnerung in die Metaphysik,” 481; English trans-
lation by Joan Stambaugh, “Recollection in Metaphysics,” in Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy

10
 Now, on one account, Heidegger wants to say that this further step back from historical
origins to the site of origin, which we see, most dramatically, Heidegger attempting to
work out in The Contributions to Philosophy,44 amounts to an Aufheben of the forgetfulness
that characterizes the history of metaphysics.45 But this further step back does not cancel
the lethe that lies at the heart of origin. At the end of metaphysics, thinking must be on
guard against taking this site of origin as a classical arche, that is to say, as the ruling of
the rule. And yet it is something like an arche. What is different for Heidegger is that this
“first principle” undercuts the very idea of first philosophy, that is to say, of a philosophy
that secures and commands the order of Being. As a hermeneutics -- if one can still speak
here of hermeneutics -- this hermeneutics of a displaced first philosophy becomes an
engagement with a first one that cannot be one with itself -- originally withdrawn -- and
this would mean, to say the least, that it is a hermeneutics that remains in the transmission
of what is to come.46
And for Gadamer? How are we to understand hermeneutics as a recollection with
respect to origin? Certainly the analysis at this point defies parallel construction, since
Gadamer refuses to take up the question of the history of Being that opens onto the issue
of origin. In order to answer this question, let us note again what Gadamer says about his
own step back from Hegelian dialectic. He tells us that this step back is the basic
experience from which the turn to philosophy is made, and within this, it is a step back
that remains true to the experience of finitude in which the beginning and the end remain
in darkness. This means, contra Hegel, that the beginning and the end cannot be joined
in their circularity, and, as a consequence, the course of life remains perfect in its im-
perfection and not imperfect in its perfection. That is to say, hermeneutic experience and
the life of dialogue are not conditioned by an end that is simply out of reach or postponed
(imperfect in its perfection), but takes place in relation to finitude proper (perfect in its
imperfection). That is why Gadamer will say that what is recollected in hermeneutic
experience is a lost question and not the site of historical origination, and certainly not the
site of origination as such.
But if the site of origination cannot be recollected, if it is given over to memory in the
manner of what Schelling calls “the immemorial” (das Unvordenkliche), it still enters the
life of speech as a resistance to unity. To explain this idea fully would require a separate
investigation into the relationship of Gadamer's hermeneutics, not so much to the philo-
sophy of Schelling, but to that of Plato. It is in Plato's philosophy that the issue of origin
becomes explicitly the problem of the one and the many, and Gadamer takes the “solution”
to this problem into his hermeneutics in this idea of a resistance to unity. To make this
point as concisely as possible here, let us consider just what Gadamer means by the notion
of ongoing reacquisition of tradition. To say the least, it means that there is the trans-
mission of meaning, there is the accomplishing of tradition (Überlieferung). This “there
is” -- the very idea of transmissibility -- is what can only be presupposed by transmission
as what is first, but as first, it is immemorial in memory.47 When Gadamer tells us that
language is tradition, we begin to see more clearly the sense of this operation. The

(New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 75.

44
See Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis), GA65 (Frankfurt a.M.: Kloster-
mann, 1989).
45
See Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row,
1972), 41.
46
This also means that the “new beginning” must be thought in relation to this configuration of
origin. One could perhaps say that the “new beginning” is a recollection of the origin that remains.
47
See Giorgio Agamben, “Tradition of the Immemorial,” in idem, Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 104-05.

11
origination of language is given in language, in what Gadamer calls the “Mitte der
Sprache.” The middle of language is language's own infinite self-transcendence, where
every word breaks forth as if from a center and is related to a whole; but the word, as the
event of the moment, is finite and stands in relation to the whole by “responding and sum-
moning.”48 The middle of language is an operation where the first principle of language
is displaced from being at the outset to being in the middle. Here we should recall
Gadamer's frequent references to Aristotle's image of the fleeing army as an image of how
knowledge can lead to all firsts, to beginnings, and to the command.49 For Gadamer, this
image serves to indicate how the arche with respect to knowing appears not at the
beginning, but displaced into the middle, so to speak; and this is to say that hermeneutic
recollection adheres to the riddle of language. Following once again Plato, Gadamer tells
us that “Platonic anamnesis is really quite similar to the riddle of language. They both
have no principium, no beginning, and their terms cannot be derived from a principium
as if there were an ortho-language.”50
Can we not say, then, that the middle of language is that operation where meaning is
never one with itself; or, to state the matter differently, at the root of language is a “two” --
a dia-logue -- that shelters the loss of presence. Accordingly, when Gadamer tells us that
“Being that can be understood is language,” we should now take this to mean that, in
relation to Heidegger but differently so, Being is encountered in a resistance to unity as
originally both one and two. This site of origination, where the origin cannot be one with
itself, becomes for Gadamer an arriving origin as the experience of homecoming. This
idea of homecoming in Gadamer's hermeneutics is not to be taken as the arrival at that
point where life has become domesticated. Rather, in accord with the character of an
arriving origin, it is an experience of Being “released again into the really astonishing
character of finite Being,” an experience that is undoubtedly extraordinary.51
Thus we can say, with respect to the mark of difference in the hermeneutics between
Heidegger and Gadamer, that Heidegger's hermeneutics is oriented to the self-movement
of Being at its inception, for the sake of original thinking, while Gadamer's hermeneutics

48
Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 462; idem, Truth and Method, 458.
49
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Zur Phänomenologie von Ritual und Sprache,” in idem, Ästhetik und
Poetik I, GW8, 405; English translation by Lawrence Schmidt and Monika Reuss, “Towards a Pheno-
menology of Ritual and Language,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer's
Hermeneutics, ed. Lawrence Schmidt (Landham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2000), 23.
50
Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Beginning of Philosophy, trans. Rod Coltman (New York: Continuum,
1998), 29.
51
See Gadamer, “The Language of Metaphysics,” 78. Gadamer continues his remarks on this idea
with a passing reference to Schelling's das Unvordenkliche. More directly, Gadamer links Schelling's das
Unvordenkliche to Heimat in “Hermeneutik und ontologische Differenz.” In this essay Gadamer finds
himself commenting on the fact that, with respect to a hermeneutics of facticity, understanding always
comes up against something that is not understandable. In his description of this limit to all openness, he
writes: “Als Philosoph hat Schelling solche Grenze mit dem Ausdruck »das Unvordenkliche« bezeichnet.
Das ist ein sehr schönes deutsches Wort. Sein Zauber beruht darauf, daß in ihm ein wirklicher Hauch von
dieser Vorausbewegung spürbar ist, die immer vordenken und vorausdenken will und doch immer wieder
an etwas kommt, wo man nicht mehr durch Vorstellen order Vorausdenken dahinterkommen kann. Das
ist das Unvordenkliche. Jeder Mensch kennt etwas davon. . . . Ich erinnere hier nur etwa an die Unvordenk-
lichkeit der Heimat. Das ist etwas, was man niemandem vermitteln kann, was sie für einen ist. Besitz?
Verlust? Wiedersehen? Gedächtnis und Rückkehr zur Erinnerung? All das sind Unvordenklichkeiten,
welche sich im menschlichen Leben versammeln.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutik und ontologische
Differenz,” in idem, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, GW10 (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1995), 64. This con-
nection with Schelling has recently been pointed out by Jean Grondin. See his “Die späte Entdeckung
Schellings in der Hermeneutik,” in István M. Fehér and Wilhelm G. Jacobs, ed., Zeit und Freiheit:
Schelling – Schopenhauer – Kierkegaard – Heidegger (Budapest: Éthos Könyvek, 1999), 65-72.

12
is oriented to the effort of speaking “originally” within the movement of originating life.

13