fall into the fi ctions of the subjectivist fallacy” (Richard Palmer,
Hermeneutics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 191,
n44). He later acknowledges that hermeneutical experience obtains as
ontological disclosure (209). So, how is this non-personal? It seems self-
evident that as ontological and as disclosure , hermeneutical experience is
laden with personal qualities and characteristics. The “what” of our under-
standing is really a “who” communicating to us, in us, and through us in a
circulation of discourse that provides (for) life through a mysterious but
fruitful interplay of disequilibrium and stability. Cf. Hans-Herbert Kögler,
“Being as Dialogue, or The Ethical Consequences of Interpretation,” in
Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years After Gadamer’s Truth and
Method, ed. Jeff Malpas and Santiago Zabala (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2010), 343–367: “any interpretive approach to tradi-
tion—due to its inner dialogical constitution—is in essence ethically similar
to real intersubjective encounters” (352, italics original). Though many
are reluctant to identify Being as a personal “who,” a personal someone
addressing us, positing the “what” of understanding as a “who” makes
considerable sense within the parameters of Gadamer’s own project, even
if he did not make this explicit (but see quote cited in next note).- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics , trans. and ed. David
E. Linge (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 101, italics
original. - Kathleen Wright, “Gadamer: The Speculative Structure of Language,” in
Hermeneutics in Modern Philosophy , ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 202. - This is an application/extension of Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit
(thrownness). - Santiago Zabala, The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology after
Metaphysics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 25–52.
Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text using the follow-
ing format: ( RB , page #). - Metaphysics has not been obliterated (this chapter is evidence of that). The
form of the “destruction” Heidegger and Zabala announce is more trans-
formation than annihilation. Heidegger explains: “Destruction does not
mean destroying but dismantling, liquidating, putting to one side the
merely historical assertions about the history of philosophy. Destruction
means—to open our ears, to make ourselves free for what speaks to us in
tradition as the Being of beings” ( What is Philosophy? , trans. J. T. Wilde
and W. Kluback [New York: Rowman and Littlefi eld, 2003], 73; quoted in
RB , 4). Metaphysics continues, but in a new way, humbled and modifi ed
by the hermeneutical fi lter of post-Nietzschean thought.
46 C.C. EMERICK