Stirrings (Still) of an Unlikely Metaphysical Reading of Hermeneutics

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.