Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years After Gadamer's Truth and Method

10. Being Is Conversation: Remains, Weak Thought, and Hermeneutics

161 10 Being Is Conversation: Remains, Weak Thought, and Hermeneutics Santiago Zabala The answer to the question, “What is philosophy?” consists in our corresponding to that toward which philosophy is on the way. And that is—the Being of being. In such a correspondence we listen from the very outset to that which philosophy has already said to us, philosophy, that is, “philosophia” understood in the Greek sense. That is why we attain correspondence, that is, an answer to our question, only when we remain in conversation with that to which the tradition of philosophy delivers us, that is, liberates us. We find the answer to the question, “What is philosophy ?” not through historical assertions about the definitions of philosophy but through conversing with that which has been handed down to us as the Being of being. —Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? Among the most important consequences of Heidegger’s destruction of Being as presence, in addition to the overcoming of metaphysics and the elevation of hermeneutics to the center of philosophical concern, is the weakening of Being to its own remains. While few Heideggerian scholars consider the German master’s philosophical destruction as a weakening of Being, most contemporary hermeneutic philosophers agree that he is the first to have given ontological import to hermeneutics. For such authors as Donald Davidson, Ronald Dworkin, and Nancy Holland, philosophical interpretation has become not only a philosophical problem in itself, but also the ground to start overcoming the division between 162 S A N T I A G O Z A B A L A analytic and continental philosophy. While most contemporary analytic philosophies (such as that of J. Searle) continue to restrict ontology to a scientific focus from the empiricist tradition, and continental philosophers (such as J.-L. Marion) firmly maintain the objectivist intentionality of their phenomenologist tradition, today, half a century after the publication of Hans-Georg Gadamer’sTruth and Method, hermeneutics has the opportunity to leave aside these traditional metaphysical aspirations for indubitable knowledge. Philosophical hermeneutics should no longer be presented as another variation of continental philosophy against analytical philosophy, but rather as the dissolution of such divisions among disciplines, where language is not used to represent reality but to help break “the crust of convention of the epistemology industry,” as John Dewey would say. While a new interchangeable framework already has begun to take shape in the fusing together of problems from both traditions by such authors as Karl-Otto Apel, Ernst Tugendhat, and John McDowell, this same framework will not become the thought of the twenty-first century until it overcomes metaphysics in a productive way. However, if hermeneutics can present itself as the post-metaphysical thought of the twenty-first century , it is not only because its best practitioners (Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Nietzsche) have broken ground for it while others from both traditions (Thomas Kuhn, Michael Theunissen, and Rüdiger Bubner) have developed it, but rather because it has become the most appropriate response to Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics. However, this has occurred only because hermeneutics has left its conservative focus on dialogue and become a progressive conversational philosophy where success, as Rorty pointed out, is measured by “horizons fused rather than problems solved, or even by problems dissolved.”1 More than a philosophical position in search of Being’s origins, hermeneutics, through Vattimo and Rorty, has become a system of thought that aims to discover Being’s effects. The goal of this essay is to demonstrate that Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics together with the ontological effects of hermeneutics will result in “conversation,” that is, in something “weak,” as Rorty explained, “in comparison to scientific inquiry.”2 But in order to demonstrate that Being is conversation, it is first necessary to outline the remains of Being that Heidegger’s destruction exposed and the ontological effects that interpretation implies. “Conversation” will become not only the most appropriate result of Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics but also, as Vattimo has emphasized, “what interpretation can generate ,” that is, “Being, new senses of experience, new ways for the world to announce itself.”3 163 B E I N G I S C O N V E R S A T I O N Before venturing into the remains of Being, it should be pointed out that Reiner Schürmann and Jacques Derrida are among the few philosophers who have granted destruction the central role it deserves in...