The Responsibility to Understand

Abstract

In this chapter, I build on current post-Gadamerian scholarship in hermeneutics to argue that Gadamer’s attempt to advance Heidegger’s ontological turn in hermeneutics is oriented by the question of responsibility. In his major work Truth and Method, Gadamer suggests that his attempt to advance Heidegger’s ontological turn in hermeneutics concerns a further turn toward language. I argue that while Gadamer’s concern for this further turn toward language is unassailable, his attempt to advance Heidegger’s ontological turn is also crucially oriented by Heidegger’s call in his Letter on Humanism for an original ethics. In consequence, as I show, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics not only includes considerations in practical philosophy but must itself be understood as what Heidegger described as an original ethics.