Another Beginning?

Heidegger, Gadamer, and Postmodernity

DAVID LIAKOS
Houston Community College

Abstract: Martin Heidegger’s critique of modernity, and his vision of what may come
after it, constitutes a sustained argument across the arc of his career. Does Hans-Georg
Gadamer follow Heidegger’s path of making possible “another beginning” after the
modern age? In this article, I show that, in contrast to Heidegger, Gadamer cultivates
modernity’s hidden resources. We can gain insight into Gadamer’s difference from
Heidegger on this fundamental point with reference to his ambivalence toward and
departure from two of Heidegger’s touchstones for postmodernity, namely, Fried-
rich Nietzsche and Friedrich Hölderlin. We can appreciate and motivate Gadamer’s
proposal to rehabilitate modernity by juxtaposing his rootedness in Wilhelm Dilthey
and Rainer Maria Rilke with Heidegger’s corresponding interest in Nietzsche and
Hölderlin. This difference in influences and conceptual starting points demonstrates
Heidegger and Gadamer’s competing approaches to the modern age, a contrast that
I concretize through a close reading of Gadamer’s choice of a poem by Rilke as the
epigraph to Truth and Method.

M artin Heidegger’s critique of modernity, and his vision of what forms of

life and thinking may come after it, constitutes a sustained argument
that stretches across the arc of his decades-long career and became increasingly
central to his philosophical project beginning in the 1930s.1 Does Hans-Georg
Gadamer, for his part, follow his teacher Heidegger’s path of making possible
“another beginning” after the modern age? Here in this article, I intend to show
that, in contrast to Heidegger’s proposal, Gadamer opts instead to cultivate
modernity’s hidden resources. We can gain insight into Gadamer’s difference
from Heidegger on this fundamental point in what Jürgen Habermas called, in
his landmark study of the title, the philosophical discourse of modernity with
reference to his ambivalence toward and departure from two of Heidegger’s

© 2019. Epoché, Volume 24, Issue 1 (Fall 2019). ISSN 1085-1968. 221–238
DOI: 10.5840/epoche20191118152
222 David Liakos

touchstones for his thinking of postmodernity, namely, Friedrich Nietzsche and

Friedrich Hölderlin.2 My suggestion shall be that we can more fully appreciate and
motivate Gadamer’s proposal to rehabilitate modernity—that is, to dwell with,
rather than abandon, our inheritances from modern thought and culture—by
juxtaposing his rootedness in Wilhelm Dilthey and Rainer Maria Rilke with
the later Heidegger’s persistent and corresponding interest in Nietzsche and
Hölderlin. This subtle but important difference in Heidegger and Gadamer’s
influences and historical and conceptual starting points will demonstrate their
competing approaches to the problem of the modern age. I will argue that
out of these contrasts emerges a substantive disagreement between Heidegger
and Gadamer concerning the possibility of another beginning after the end of
modernity that the later Heidegger was so concerned to investigate, explicate,
and defend—always, crucially, in dialogue with and taking provocation from
Nietzsche and Hölderlin. In avowedly departing from Heidegger’s central start-
ing points in these two writers, Gadamer, I will argue, correspondingly rejects
the possibility of the other beginning in which these two visionaries inspired
Heidegger to believe so fervently. Gadamer’s contestation of Heidegger sets the
stage for his own positive thinking on these issues, meaning that we should now
recognize how Gadamer substantively contributes to the philosophical discourse
of modernity.

§1. Nietzsche/Dilthey
I want to investigate the sources of Gadamer’s ambivalence first toward Nietzsche
and then toward Hölderlin. Leo Strauss interrogates Gadamer’s differences
from Heidegger in their 1961 correspondence, and insightfully observes in
this regard that in Truth and Method, “there is a chapter on Dilthey and none
on Nietzsche.”3 Gadamer replies, “You are entirely right when you speak of . . .
Dilthey instead of Nietzsche.”4 In an interview conducted in 1986, clearly still
impressed by the insight contained in the correspondence of twenty-five years
earlier, Gadamer admits, “I suppose that Leo Strauss was right when he said
that my concern was to respond critically to Dilthey, just as it was Heidegger’s
concern to respond critically to Nietzsche.”5 In both these comments, we see a
pronounced profession of agreement by Gadamer with Strauss concerning the
significance of the rootedness of Gadamer’s thinking in the concerns of Dilthey
rather than in those of Nietzsche. With regard to Heidegger’s relation to both
Nietzsche—and, as we will soon see, Hölderlin as well—Gadamer proclaims a
significant degree of ambivalence.
How should we understand this putative distinction between Nietzsche and
Dilthey? In the 1986 interview in which he recalls his correspondence with
Another Beginning? Heidegger, Gadamer, and Postmodernity 223

Strauss, Gadamer’s interviewers press him to clarify his attitude toward Nietzsche,
and he replies as follows:
In fact I have never understood the enthusiasm for Nietzsche, neither in
those days [the 1920s and 1930s] nor in our own. I have never understood
how one has come to see Nietzsche as an epochal figure, or perhaps now I
do understand it. Nietzsche is the one, I suppose, who has expressed what
it is about modernity that makes life impossible. But the productive use of
Nietzsche which so many of my friends and later my students undertook has
always been strange to me.6
This comment is, we must admit, a rather extraordinary thing for a Heideggerian
thinker to utter. Of course, in his later interpretations, Heidegger forcefully and
exhaustively articulated exactly the thesis that Gadamer professes here not to
understand, namely, that Nietzsche was “an epochal figure.” In Truth and Method,
Gadamer articulates more precisely the reason why Nietzsche was epochally
important from Heidegger’s perspective:
In raising the question of being and thus reversing the whole direction of
Western metaphysics, the true predecessor of Heidegger was neither Dilthey
nor Husserl, then, but rather Nietzsche. Heidegger may have realized this only
later; but in retrospect we can see that the aims already implicit in Being and
Time were to raise Nietzsche’s radical critique of “Platonism” to the level of
the tradition he criticizes, to confront Western metaphysics on its own level,
and to recognize that transcendental inquiry is a consequence of modern
[neuzeitlichen] subjectivism, and so overcome [überwinden] it.7
Gadamer insightfully suggests here that for Heidegger, the struggle with Nietzsche
meant the struggle with metaphysics. Indeed, Heidegger considered Nietzsche the
consummation of ontotheology, the metaphysical attempt to grasp the meaning
of entities as such and as a whole.8 At the same time that Nietzsche achieved the
late-modern culmination of the entire metaphysical tradition, he also pointed
positively toward how to twist free from that tradition and hence beyond the
modern age. As Heidegger exclaims of Nietzsche in the Black Notebooks, we
must “allow this endwork [Endwerk] to rest in itself as an impetus into the
other beginning.”9 In other words, when we dwell with Nietzsche’s metaphysics
of eternally recurring will to power, we see the nihilistic outcome or end of the
ontotheological tradition, but we also glimpse how the end of the history of being
consequently opens up for us another beginning after metaphysics. In pointing
to the way Heidegger saw Nietzsche as a positive model for freeing ourselves
from metaphysics, Gadamer signals his awareness of the motif in Heidegger of
the double-sided nature of Nietzsche’s significance: “I just want to remind you
what [the philosophical relevance of Nietzsche] is all about: ‘It is the question
of overcoming [Überwindung] metaphysics.’ This is indeed the question which
224 David Liakos

Nietzsche was asked by Heidegger to discuss.”10 As Gadamer recognizes, Hei-

degger thought that Nietzsche represented both the height of metaphysics as
well as the hint as to how positively to escape from it.
Though Gadamer here intimates his awareness of this theme in Heidegger,
he does not devote any significant discussion to Nietzsche in Truth and Method,
as Strauss insightfully noticed, and does so only in a few places elsewhere in his
corpus. Both in his occasionally explicit uneasiness and more frequent silence
about Nietzsche, Gadamer expresses hesitancy concerning the prospect of follow-
ing Heidegger’s path of meditating on the prospect of freeing ourselves from the
metaphysics of modernity and consequently opening up a new and postmodern
future.11 Gadamer’s skepticism about Nietzsche and his influence on European
intellectual culture more generally amounts, then, to a dramatic consequence
of his objection to Heidegger’s postmodern project that was motivated by Hei-
degger’s dramatic struggle against Nietzsche. We can see the outline of Gadamer’s
alternative to Heidegger here in the fact that he does not merely reject Nietzsche
in a one-sidedly negative gesture, but rather claims a starting point of his own
in Dilthey: “Dilthey instead of Nietzsche,” as he expresses this point in his letter
to Strauss. What, then, is the significance of Dilthey here?
As is well known, a considerable part of the argument of Truth and Method
enacts a struggle against Dilthey’s formative influence on the development of
modern hermeneutics, as signaled by the title of an important chapter of that
text: “Overcoming the Epistemological Problem Through Phenomenological
Investigation [Forschung].”12 Dilthey’s great ambition was to provide (as per the
title of one of his many unfinished works) a Critique of Historical Reason, that
is, to justify the cognitive achievements of the humanities and social sciences
on the model of Kant’s justification of the natural sciences in the First Critique.
Following Heidegger, Gadamer strongly rejects this epistemological starting
point: “Today’s task could be to free ourselves from the dominant influence of
Dilthey’s approach and from the prejudices of the discipline that he founded.”13
Nevertheless, Gadamer shares Dilthey’s distinctive and hermeneutical orientation
toward defending the Geisteswissenschaften. As he explains in the introduction
to Truth and Method, he admires and follows “the breadth of the historical ho-
rizon in which Dilthey has placed all philosophizing.”14 Significantly, the later
Heidegger expresses only muted respect for precisely this salient feature of Dil-
they’s philosophical project: “Dilthey: does not belong among the philosophers,
but still less among the historiologists [Historikern]; he is a historical thinker of
the type whose greatest form was realized in the nineteenth century by Jacob
Burckhardt.”15 We should understand Heidegger’s claim that Dilthey “does not
belong among the philosophers” as more than a merely petty swipe or insult.
Rather, Heidegger suggests Dilthey is not an epochal metaphysician who has
reoriented our entire culture’s sense of what it means for anything to be at all.
Another Beginning? Heidegger, Gadamer, and Postmodernity 225

Dilthey may certainly be an important thinker about history, which places him
alongside the likes of the historian Burckhardt, but Dilthey, according to Hei-
degger, does not count as a thinker who has formed history through his own
thought. Nietzsche, on the other hand, was for Heidegger just such a thinker. In
other words, Nietzsche occupies an exalted position in the history of being and
Dilthey does not. Indeed, in virtue of Heidegger’s later orientation toward the
development of a comprehensive history of being for the revolutionary purpose
of freeing ourselves from the totalizing and one-sided way of viewing reality
characteristic of metaphysics as ontotheology, Nietzsche became one of his most
important later interlocutors while Dilthey ultimately did not.
It is for that reason that Gadamer establishes a sharp contrast between his
connection to Dilthey and Heidegger’s to Nietzsche. Gadamer does not share
Heidegger’s persistent concern with the history of being for which Nietzsche
stands as an avatar. Instead, he wants to stay behind and bask in the setting sun
of the twilight of modernity. Gadamer’s avowed starting point in Dilthey is cru-
cially consonant with his dispute with Heidegger on this point. In his systematic
attempt throughout Truth and Method to dispute the variously epistemological,
historicist, and romantic models of modern hermeneutics, a struggle signaled
by his avowal in the 1986 interview “to respond critically to Dilthey,” Gadamer
remains focused on and dwells within a modern intellectual tradition—albeit
one he attempts to advance in a radical way very much rooted in Heidegger. But
where Heidegger wants to move on to the new beginning after the exhaustion
of modernity, past the distinctive intellectual movements and achievements
of the modern age, Gadamer finds that not everything in modernity is worth
abandoning.
According to Gadamer, the modern tradition of hermeneutics is one such
resource that still demands thoughtful attention, whereas Heidegger in his later
work increasingly ceases to identify his own thinking with hermeneutics. As he
provocatively and succinctly puts it in a 1973 letter to Otto Pöggeler, “Herme-
neutical philosophy? Oh, that is Gadamer’s thing [ist die Sache von Gadamer]!”16
The later Heidegger, in his persistent attempt to open up another beginning,
slyly twists free of any reductive or narrowing label for his thinking: “It is always
risky [verfänglich],” as he puts it in the Black Notebooks, “to give names to the
basic positions of philosophical thinking.”17 This dictum would seem to apply
especially to labels like “hermeneutics” or “hermeneutical philosophy” that
have their origins distinctively in the modern age, since such associations risk
obviating or imperiling Heidegger’s maverick attempt to think another begin-
ning free of any trace of the deficiencies and shortcomings distinctive of modern
philosophy. Indeed, when asked in 1953/1954 why he had “dropped both words
[‘phenomenology’ and ‘hermeneutics’]” to identify his own thinking, Heidegger
avers that he had “to abandon my own path of thinking to namelessness [um
226 David Liakos

meinem Denkweg im Namenlosen zu lassen].”18 Gadamer, who freely placed his

thinking under the banner of “philosophical hermeneutics”—meaning that he
wants to put the tradition of hermeneutical thinking, which traces its modern
origins to Friedrich Schleiermacher as well as Dilthey, on a new philosophical
basis—decidedly does not share this compunction about philosophical labels.
“Hermeneutics” requires avowed rehabilitation and new life, not abandonment
in favor of a radical mode of thinking without name or label. It is this differ-
ence that I read Gadamer as gesturing toward in the contrast he draws between
Dilthey, now understood as a symbol for the hermeneutical reinvigoration and
rehabilitation but not abandonment of modern thinking, and Nietzsche, who
represents the Heideggerian movement to another beginning.

§2. Hölderlin/Rilke
Seen from a certain angle, Gadamer’s attitude toward Hölderlin seems mark-
edly different from his predominantly negative characterization of and avowed
distance from Nietzsche. Like Heidegger—perhaps even more so, since he makes
it one of the central features of his entire hermeneutics—Gadamer derives enor-
mous inspiration from Hölderlin’s motto that “we are a conversation.”19 No such
central concept from Nietzsche makes its way into the very heart of Gadamer’s
hermeneutics. While Nietzsche only infrequently appears in Gadamer’s work, he
devotes many essays to interpreting Hölderlin’s poetry, several of which are col-
lected in the volume dedicated to the hermeneutics of poetry in his Gesammelte
Werke.20 Finally, one finds many approving and emotionally resonant allusions to
and quotations from Hölderlin’s poetry throughout Gadamer’s corpus, including
in a 2002 letter written less than two months before his death at the age of 102
containing the following distillation of the very essence of his hermeneutics: “In
the constantly changing structure of our essentially finite languages, we might
find, with Hölderlin, that we ‘still have access to much of the divine.’”21 It is dif-
ficult to imagine Gadamer appealing to Nietzsche in such a movingly positive
and appropriative gesture or under similar life circumstances.
It is thus perhaps surprising that we observe a similar dynamic to Gadamer’s
ambivalence toward Nietzsche in his avowal that he does not follow Heidegger
in the direction of Hölderlin’s poetry. When he proclaims, “I did not follow
him [Heidegger] on the path [Wege] of an inspiration from the poetic mythos
of Hölderlin,” Gadamer sounds the same note as in his avowed distance from
Heidegger’s obsession with Nietzsche.22 Like his reaction to Strauss’s insight
concerning his distance from Nietzsche, Gadamer gestures here toward a differ-
ence with Heidegger in terms of a rejection of one of the latter’s most important
starting points and conversation partners. As he also does when considering
the difference between Nietzsche and Dilthey, Gadamer significantly repeats
Another Beginning? Heidegger, Gadamer, and Postmodernity 227

this claim concerning Hölderlin multiple times, suggesting the importance of

the point: “I did not need to follow Heidegger, who based himself on Hölderlin
instead of Hegel [der Hölderlin gegen Hegel] . . . in order to recognize the hubris
[Hybris] that resides in concepts.”23 What significance should we attach to Ga-
damer explicitly taking leave from Heidegger’s turn to Hölderlin?
Heidegger’s relation to and interpretation of Hölderlin is, of course, a highly
complex topic.24 It will, for our purposes, suffice to say that Heidegger views
Hölderlin’s significance principally in terms of the way his poetry makes ac-
cessible to the present a new relation to being as such, as he makes clear in the
following programmatic statement: “A poetic turning toward his [Hölderlin’s]
poetry is possible only as a thoughtful altercation [Auseinandersetzung] with
the revelation of beyng [Offenbarung des Seyns] that is achieved in his poetry.”25
For Heidegger, Hölderlin envisions a radically new and non-modern (if not
“postmodern”) understanding of being. His poetry hence demands thoughtful
attention, and so Heidegger frankly dubs him “the poet of the other beginning.”26
Hölderlin points the way to a new relation between humanity and being that goes
beyond the impoverished, reductive, and ultimately nihilistic understanding of
being characteristic of late modernity and its technologically oriented way of
life. When the later Heidegger speaks of another beginning for Western culture
and our relation to being, he upholds Hölderlin’s poetry as the most profound
and inspiringly hopeful account of that possibility for our entire culture—if only
we were able to hear his poetry in the right way. For Heidegger, Hölderlin shows
us nothing less than the “‘transition’ [‘Übergang’]” to another beginning outside
or beyond the modern age.27
Just as Gadamer expresses reluctance to follow Heidegger in his altercation
with Nietzsche’s metaphysics and the other beginning such a confrontation opens
up, so too Gadamer’s ambivalence about Heidegger’s Hölderlinian turn should be
read as motivated by a disagreement with Heidegger concerning the very possi-
bility of another beginning after modernity. With regard to Nietzsche, I sketched
Gadamer’s alternative to Heidegger in terms of his preferred starting point in
Dilthey. A corresponding illustration of Gadamer’s thinking can be adduced in
the case of Hölderlin, this time with Rilke playing the role of counterweight to
Hölderlin just as Dilthey was the antagonist of Heidegger’s Nietzschean turn. I
will now reconstruct, with reference to Rilke, Gadamer’s ambivalence concern-
ing Heidegger’s Hölderlin.
Heidegger would no doubt have agreed with Gadamer’s insightful reading
of Hölderlin as the poet of “the pain of separation [Schmerz der Trennung].”28
That is, in Heideggerian terms, Hölderlin articulates our abandonment by being,
or the way our thinking has forgotten the inexhaustible source of our forms of
intelligibility, but Hölderlin also positively indicates how to regain contact with
the gods. When Gadamer signals his distrust of Heidegger’s turn to Hölderlin,
228 David Liakos

he must refer to these Hölderlinian themes of abandonment and a subsequent

new beginning that became so programmatic for the later Heidegger. To get a
glimpse of another perspective on Gadamer’s alternative to this Heideggerian
project, we should turn to one of his other poetic touchstones, namely, Rilke.29
In the recently published Black Notebooks circa 1938-1939, Heidegger explicitly
compares Rilke unfavorably to Hölderlin: “Stefan George and Rilke deserve es-
teem, but they should never be employed as aids to the interpretation [Auslegung]
of Hölderlin, for they are nowhere equal to or even close to his historical destiny
[Bestimmung] and cannot at all be compared to him.”30 On Heidegger’s read-
ing, Rilke fails to live up to the incredibly high poetic standard set by Hölderlin
because only the latter provides us with a picture of how to get out of modernity
and back into contact with the gods: “Rilke stands, although more essentially and
more poetically in his own proper course, as little as does Stefan George on the
path of the vocation [Berufung] of the ‘poet,’ a vocation grounded by Hölderlin
but nowhere taken up. Rilke has not—and even less has George—surmounted
[bewältig] Western humanity and its ‘world’ in a poetic-thoughtful way.”31 For
this devastating reason, Heidegger ascribes to Rilke—in explicit contrast to
Hölderlin—“the lack of essential decision [wesentlicher Entscheidungen],” which I
read as a description of Rilke’s unfortunate inability to be anything but modern.32
These unpublished comments from the Black Notebooks, of which Gadamer
would of course have been unaware, shed considerable light on Heidegger’s
difficult and well-known interpretation of Rilke’s poetry in “What Are Poets
For?” from 1946.33 In that essay, as in the Notebooks of several years earlier,
Heidegger contends that Hölderlin exceeds Rilke in importance: “Rilke’s poetry,
in its course within the history of being, remains behind Hölderlin in rank and
position.”34 What accounts for Rilke’s lesser status as a poet in the terms of the
history of being? For Heidegger, Rilke amounts to a poet of modern subjectiv-
ity who “remains moderately [abgemilderten] in the shadow of a Nietzschean
metaphysics.”35 Heidegger claims that Rilke’s poetry valorizes the inner space of
consciousness as a sanctuary to which we could turn as a desirable alternative to
the onslaught of modern technology and scientific objectification and alienation.
In this latter respect, Rilke admirably and perceptively identified many of the
deficiencies of the modern age, but Heidegger views his turn to interiority as a
deficient response to the problem of modernity. Rilke becomes, on Heidegger’s
reading, merely a poet of consciousness, albeit of “the reversal of consciousness
[die Umkehrung des Bewußtseins].”36 That is, Rilke correctly saw the damagingly
nihilistic effects of modern–Cartesian subjectivism, in which conscious subjects
become the only sites of meaning over against a world of inert and otherwise
meaningless objects. But Rilke’s alternative to this distinctively modern horror
is only to make the interior realm of consciousness a space to which we could
retreat in order to freely discover and create meaning outside of subject–object
Another Beginning? Heidegger, Gadamer, and Postmodernity 229

relations. This heroic turn to the inner heart performs, however, merely a reversal
of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity, not a genuine escape from its structure.
Because he still works “within the sphericality of modern metaphysics” in his
turn to the interior, Rilke’s poetry fails to truly get out of modern subjectivism.37
In appealing to the inner world of consciousness as the sovereign domain of
meaning opposite an exterior world marked by technological objectification,
Rilke remains entrapped by the logic of subjectivism.
Even worse than this subjectivistic character of his work, Rilke’s poetry ac-
cords with the most deleterious aspects of Nietzsche’s late-modern metaphysics
of eternally recurring will to power. Heidegger justifies this provocative claim
by arguing that Rilke’s turn to the interior world of consciousness involves a
strongly voluntaristic will to emphatically turn away from the outer world that
remains the center of attention for most modern people: “Memory, making
inward, inverts our essence that only wills assertively, and its objects, into the
innermost invisibility of the heart’s space.”38 Rilke, in other words, has merely
inverted the objectifying tendencies of modern technology in his own willful
turn to the subjective realm of the inner heart, and in doing so, he plays into the
Nietzschean metaphysics of will to power by insisting on a strongly voluntaristic
decision to turn inward. When Heidegger claims, at the end of his indictment
of Rilke’s Nietzschean and modern tendencies, that “no poet of this era can
overtake [überholen]” Hölderlin, he suggests that among poets, only Hölderlin
has produced a vision that goes beyond the limiting and dangerous dichotomy
of subject and object and its attendant metaphysics of the will to power.39 Rilke
remains entrapped within this late-modern metaphysical structure, while Hölder-
lin helps “blaze [spuren] a path [Weg] for [his] mortal relations, a path toward
the turning point [Wende]” beyond modernity.”40 Rilke does not live up to this
task and instead, as Heidegger suggested previously in the Notebooks, fails to
meaningfully contest or go beyond modern Western culture.
Gadamer does not share Heidegger’s dim view of Rilke’s modernist defi-
ciencies both in “What Are Poets For?” and in the Black Notebooks, and it is
precisely in his own implicit disagreement with Heidegger’s critique that we can
appreciate how Rilke functions for Gadamer as a balance to Hölderlin. As was
the case also with regard to Hölderlin, Gadamer wrote extensive commentaries
about Rilke, many of which are included in the volume on poetics in the Gesam-
melte Werke.41 But to appreciate how Rilke provides Gadamer with a compelling
and competing alternative vision to Heidegger’s Hölderlinian account of a post-
modern future, we need look no further than the epigraph to Truth and Method
Gadamer chose from Rilke:
Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is
mere skill and little gain;
but when you’re suddenly the catcher of a ball
230 David Liakos

thrown by an eternal partner

with accurate and measured swing
towards you, to your center, in an arch
from the great bridgebuilder of God:
why catching then becomes a power—
not yours, a world’s.42
Insofar as commentators even pay attention to Gadamer’s citation of Rilke,
they typically focus on the way it prefigures his theory of play, his defense of
humanism, and other prominent themes in Part One of Truth and Method.43
Rilke’s poetry is too important to Gadamer, however, to be treated in so limited
a fashion. The Rilke epigraph, I will suggest, poetically expresses insights at the
very heart of Gadamerian hermeneutics. Furthermore, Heidegger himself com-
ments on this poem in “What Are Poets For?” and suggests a reading at odds
with how Gadamer deploys the poem as the epigraph to his magnum opus. As
I will now argue, we should see the epigraph in the wider context of Gadamer’s
entire conception of our belonging to historical tradition in a way that invites
comparison with Heidegger’s Hölderlin. Gadamer’s choice of Rilke’s poem as the
epigraph to Truth and Method suggests an implicit but spirited confrontation
with Heidegger.
Rilke contrasts two ways of catching: You can catch either “only what you’ve
thrown yourself ” or “a ball / thrown by an eternal partner.” In the context of
Gadamer quoting this poem as the epigraph to Truth and Method, I read these
images as competing metaphors for human understanding.44 The first concep-
tion is strongly subjectivistic in character, suggesting that understanding is a
sovereign act of will in which we rely only on our own individual capacities for
reasoning. The line describing this conception (“Catch only what you’ve thrown
yourself ”) recalls Kant’s monumental claim that “reason has insight only into
what it itself produces according to its own design.”45 In other words, we can know
with certainty only by means of the necessary concepts and principles we use a
priori to organize experience. The resonance of Kant here also usefully highlights
Gadamer’s subsequent critique of the Enlightenment. Rilke, and following him
Gadamer, suggests that this model, according to which human reason sovereignly
organizes experience, is only a narrowly deficient and one-sidedly reductive way
of conceiving how, first of all and most of the time, we understand.
Rilke writes that when we realize we are playing catch not only by ourselves
but rather with “an eternal partner,” we see that the power to catch belongs not
only to ourselves, but to “a world.” I suggest that the “eternal partner” here names
tradition, which for Gadamer functions as the necessary background for all acts
of understanding and as a constant conversation partner for whoever wants to
authentically understand. How is tradition “eternal”? It stretches far back into
the past history of human consciousness and extends indefinitely into the future,
Another Beginning? Heidegger, Gadamer, and Postmodernity 231

insofar as whoever in the present engages with the past and what it has handed
down to us carries tradition forward and keeps it alive. Once we see that we
understand only thanks to tradition—that we play catch with an eternal partner
encompassing the history of human languages and texts, as well as the reality
those human artifacts try to capture and describe—then we will correctly see our
capacity for understanding as belonging necessarily to a wider, richer historical
context from which we can never wholly extricate ourselves, but which provides
us with all our capacities in the first place. Rilke evocatively calls this ineluctably
deep background “a world.”
If my reading is right, then Gadamer quotes Rilke at the outset of Truth and
Method in order to show that the voluntarist and subjectivist conception of
human understanding that Rilke compares to catching a ball you have thrown
yourself is at best only one stage or level of understanding. Like Rilke in his
turn in the poem toward seeing catching as a power belonging to a world, Ga-
damer will in the course of Truth and Method go beyond subjectivist theories
of understanding (such as Schleiermacher’s and Dilthey’s) toward a conception
of understanding as occurring only against the dynamic backdrop of tradition:
“Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in
a happening of tradition [Überlieferungsgeschehen], a process of transmission
in which past and present are constantly mediated.”46 Rilke’s poem dramatizes
precisely this distinction in conceptions of understanding. My reading also
suggests that Gadamer’s choice of the epigraph from Rilke implicitly disputes
Heidegger’s reading of Rilke as a Nietzschean poet of the will to power who never
transcended modern subjectivism. For Gadamer, Rilke is no voluntarist but is
rather attuned to this very happening of understanding to which Gadamer, fol-
lowing Heidegger in this respect, calls attention. Significantly for our purposes,
Heidegger refers in “What Are Poets For?” to the very poem Gadamer uses as
an epigraph when he elliptically suggests that the expression “eternal partner
[ewige Mitspielerin]” names Rilke’s distinctively modern and hence deleteriously
metaphysical understanding of “entities in their entirety [Seienden im Ganzen].”47
On Heidegger’s analysis, as we have seen, Rilke’s understanding of the being of
entities is in terms of modern subjectivism and will to power. Gadamer subtly
but convincingly contests Heidegger’s harsh critique by suggesting that Rilke
goes beyond subjectivism toward a dynamic and indeed phenomenological at-
tunement to the way understanding happens to us—not as something we merely
will as on a modern conception, but rather as a bequest dynamically handed
down to us by tradition.
How does Rilke’s poem, as I read it here, function also as a rebuke of Hei-
degger’s Hölderlin? Gadamer quotes these lines from Rilke because they evoke
his overall conception of our radical belongingness to historical tradition.48 Al-
though Rilke’s anti-Kantian picture of understanding suggests a radical critique
232 David Liakos

of modern thinking with which Gadamer undoubtedly has profound sympathy,

Rilke and Gadamer’s shared picture of the way we inextricably belong to history
implies that we also belong to the modern age, in particular, of which we are all
today a part. Heidegger was wrong to one-sidedly read Rilke as a Nietzschean poet
of subjectivism, but for Gadamer, Rilke does suggest that we do always already
belong to modernity as that tradition we have inherited and in which we live. I
would concede this latter point to Heidegger’s interpretation. On my reading,
Gadamer wants to argue that we do belong to the modern age—a fact we can
acknowledge without succumbing to modernity’s worst and most excessive and
damaging features, such as the will to power that Heidegger tendentiously reads
into Rilke. Heidegger’s Hölderlin, on the other hand, evokes a world in which we
have fallen away from the gods and from being, and so both the thinker and his
poet in turn creatively imagine a future in which we have completely left moder-
nity behind. Rilke and Gadamer reject this utopian hope. For them, we cannot
just move beyond an age that ineluctably claims us and that also always enables
and makes possible all our understanding.49 Instead, we must live with—and live
up to—what we have inherited from tradition.

§3. Conclusion
Earlier, I argued that the contrast between Dilthey and Nietzsche suggested that
Gadamer would rehabilitate modern thinking rather than leave it behind entirely.
Gadamer’s invocation of Rilke instead of Hölderlin, meanwhile, forms part of
his argument that we always dwell within an existing historical tradition—in-
cluding modernity—and can never simply abandon those traditions we inherit.
Not only does Rilke suggest an alternative to Heidegger; Gadamer also subtly
employs Rilke precisely against Heidegger’s infamous reading of him as a thinker
of modern subjectivity. In his appeals to Dilthey and Rilke, Gadamer carefully
but decidedly distances himself from Heidegger’s postmodern touchstones in
Nietzsche and Hölderlin—and the call to another beginning that they sound.
Gadamer’s reactions to this family of figures suggest a sketch, at least, of his own
distinctive way of thinking about modernity after Heidegger. Gadamer’s readings
of Nietzsche, Dilthey, Hölderlin, and Rilke indicate this subtle but important
contrast with Heidegger’s critique of modernity, and the specific nature of his
understanding of these figures, as I have shown, further substantiates my argu-
ment that he rejects the Heideggerian vision of another, postmodern beginning.
Following Dilthey and Rilke, I argue, Gadamer rehabilitates the central themes,
concepts, motifs, and images of the modern age in order to cultivate their hid-
den resources and motivate a form of hope that modernity still has something
to offer us. Validating this way of reading Gadamer’s relation to Heidegger and
of his philosophical project as a charitable rehabilitation of modern culture and
Another Beginning? Heidegger, Gadamer, and Postmodernity 233

thinking would require, however, additional interpretative work beyond the

scope of this article. I invite future Gadamer scholarship, then, to attend to these
hermeneutic possibilities for seeing Gadamer as a post-Heideggerian thinker of
the modern age that have perhaps not yet been fully explored. Such a project
requires attending not only to Gadamer’s relation to Heidegger, but also to the
possible connections between Gadamer’s thinking and that of other important
theorists of modernity.

Notes
1. As Hubert L. Dreyfus puts it, “Around 1930 . . . Heidegger began to investigate
the understanding of being peculiar to modern Western culture” (“Heidegger on
the Connection Between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics,” 290). Even as
pronounced a critic of Heidegger as Jürgen Habermas recognizes that “Heidegger
brought the discourse of modernity into a genuinely philosophical movement of
thought once again” (The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, 53).
2. On Heidegger’s appeals to Nietzsche, Hölderlin, as well as Van Gogh (whom I do
not discuss in this connection, since as a painter he has no immediately obvious
analogue in Gadamer’s thinking) as postmodern touchstones, see Iain Thomson,
“Nihilism as the Deepest Problem; Art as the Best Response.” See also Heidegger’s
fascinating list of “those who created and suffered” in their thinking of another
beginning: “Schiller, Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, Van Gogh, Nietzsche—[all] were torn
[entrissen wurden] too early from a lucid existence” (Martin Heidegger, Ponderings
II–VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938, 235/Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 94: Überlegungen II–VI
(Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), 324.
3. Hans-Georg Gadamer and Leo Strauss, “Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit und
Methode,” 5.
4. Ibid., 8.
5. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History:
Applied Hermeneutics, 145.
6. Ibid.
7. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 248/Gesammelte Werke 1: Hermeneutik I. Wahrheit
und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 262.
8. On Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, and on Heidegger’s definition of ontotheology,
I follow here Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, 7–39.
9. Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 273/Überlegungen II–VI, 374.
10. Gadamer, Hermeneutische Entwürfe, 137.
11. The first of the two volumes of Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke dedicated to Neuere
Philosophie bears the subtitle “Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger” (Gesammelte Werke 3:
Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger). The omission of Nietzsche from
this trio is striking. The second volume on Neure Philosophie, subtitled “Probleme,
Gestalten,” contains only one essay on Nietzsche, which is a largely literary analysis
234 David Liakos

of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Gesammelte Werke 4: Neuere Philosophie II. Probleme,

Gestalten, 448–62).
12. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 235/ Gesammelte Werke 1, 246. Translation modified.
13. Ibid., 158/ Gesammelte Werke 1, 170.
14. Ibid., xxiv/ Gesammelte Werke 1, 5.
15. Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 374/ Überlegungen II–VI, 514.
16. Quoted in Gadamer, The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, 412.
Jean Grondin cites this remark in a 1996 interview with Gadamer (ibid., 409–27).
The original source of the quotation, apparently from a letter dated January 5, 1973,
is Pöggeler’s major study Heidegger und die hermeneutische Philosophie, 395. Hei-
degger’s later relation to hermeneutics as a philosophical approach or tradition is a
complex topic to which I cannot give sufficient attention here but to which I would
like to return in future work.
17. Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 206/Überlegungen II–VI, 281.
18. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 29/Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 12: Unterwegs zur
Sprache, 114.
19. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 370/Gesammelte Werke 1, 383. On the effective history
of this idea in the Heideggerian and Gadamerian traditions, and a robust defense of
it against some criticisms, see Theodore George, “Are We a Conversation? Herme-
neutics, Exteriority, and Transmittability,” 331–50.
20. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke 9: Ästhetik und Poetik II. Hermeneutik im Vollzug.
21. Gadamer, “Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Letter of Support.” Dated January 14, 2002, to
Andrzej Wiercinski and the First International Congress on Hermeneutics.
22. Gadamer, The Gadamer Reader, 339/Gesammelte Werke 4, 477. Translation modified.
23. Gadamer, “Reflections on my Philosophical Journey,” 37/Gesammelte Werke 2:
Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode: Ergänzungen, Register, 506.
24. On the crucial political and ethical valences of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, see
Charles Bambach, Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice: Hölderlin—Heidegger—Celan.
25. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine,” 5/Gesamtausgabe, Vol.
39: Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” 6. Translation modified.
26. Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 182/Überlegungen II–VI, 248.
27. Ibid., 182/Überlegungen II–VI, 248.
28. Gadamer, Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, 98/Gesammelte
Werke 9 235.
29. J. M. Baker, Jr., also articulates (albeit in passing) a Gadamerian contrast between
Hölderlin and Rilke that anticipates mine here (“Lyric as Paradigm: Hegel and the
Speculative Instance of Poetry in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics,” 159). It should be
mentioned that there are important and considerable similarities and continuities
between Hölderlin and Rilke that my discussion obscures. For example, a good
exploration of the way these two poets can both be seen as expressing a theory
of community can be found in Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge, Lyric Orientations:
Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community.
Another Beginning? Heidegger, Gadamer, and Postmodernity 235

30. Heidegger, Ponderings VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938–1939, 219/Gesamtausgabe,

Vol. 95: Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938–1939), 281.
31. Ibid., 341/Überlegungen VII–XI, 438.
32. Ibid./Überlegungen VII–XI, 438.
33. For a view of Heidegger’s reading of Rilke as mostly positive, see Julian Young, Hei-
degger’s Philosophy of Art, 143–7. On my view, the Black Notebooks indicate, at least,
that Heidegger was quite negative toward Rilke. I will further substantiate this sug-
gestion above. Also, I prefer and hence retain the earlier translation of the title “Wozu
Dichter?” as “What Are Poets For?” from the collection Poetry, Language, Thought,
rather than “Why Poets?” from the more recent translation in Off the Beaten Track.
34. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 206/Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 5: Holzwege, 276.
35. Ibid., 214/Holzwege, 286.
36. Ibid., 230/Holzwege, 307.
37. Ibid./Holzwege, 307.
38. Ibid., 231/Holzwege 309.
39. Ibid., 240/Holzwege, 320.
40. Ibid., 202/Holzwege, 272.
41. Gesammelte Werke 9.
42. Quoted in Gadamer, Truth and Method, vi/Gesammelte Werke 1, xii. Gadamer quotes
from an uncollected poem of Rilke’s whose title has also been translated “As long as
you catch self-thrown things.” For the full poem, see Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected
Poems (Bilingual Edition), 138–9. Here is the passage Gadamer quotes in German:
“Solang du Selbstgeworfenes fängst, ist alles / Geschicklichkeit und läßlicher Gewinn—;
/ erst wenn du plötzlich Fänger wirst des Balles, / den eine ewige Mitspielerin / dir
zuwarf, deiner Mitte, in genau / gekonntem Schwung, in einem jener Bögen / aus
Gottes. großem Brückenbau: / erst dann ist Fangen-können ein Vermögen,—/ Nicht
deines, einer Welt.”
43. See Richard Detsch: “Approximately the first half of this poem serves as a motto for
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s book Truth and Method, in which the renowned Heidelberg
philosopher sought to formulate a non-subjective concept of play” (Rilke’s Connec-
tions to Nietzsche, 113–4). Arnd Kerkhecher more insightfully connects the Rilke
poem to Gadamer’s rehabilitation of modern humanism in the opening sections of
Truth and Method (“Bedeutung der humanistischen Tradition für die Geisteswis-
senschaften [GW1 1, 9–47],” 9).
44. It is helpful to remember in this connection that Gadamer’s originally intended
title for Truth and Method was the evocative “Verstehen und Geschehen,” which
was rejected by the publisher (Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke 10: Hermeneutik im
Rückblick, 75).
45. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bxiii.
46. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 291/Gesammelte Werke 1, 295. Translation modified.
47. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 211/Holzwege, 282. Translation modified. Heidegger
does not provide his own close reading of Rilke’s poem “As long as you catch self-
thrown things,” the epigraph to Truth and Method, in “What Are Poets For?” Rather,
236 David Liakos

he quickly cites, in the passage just quoted, Rilke’s line “thrown by an eternal partner”
in connection with the rest of his own broader analysis of Rilke’s poetry, which I
have explained above.
48. For Gadamer as a thinker of belongingness, see Robert Bernasconi, “Bridging the
Abyss: Heidegger and Gadamer,” 21; and Jerome Veith, Gadamer and the Transmis-
sion of History, 81.
49. Walter Lammi refers, not without justification, to “Gadamer’s orientation toward
the historical past versus Heidegger’s orientation toward the future” (“Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s ‘Correction’ of Heidegger,” 501). I would amend this judgment, however,
to say that Gadamer is also oriented toward the present. This immanent focus in the
context of the reference to Rilke is also evoked by the title of James D. Reid’s insightful
study, which is responsive to but critical of Heidegger’s reading of Rilke throughout,
entitled Being Here is Glorious: On Rilke, Poetry, and Philosophy. The author would
also like to thank Haley Burke, Theodore George, Charles Kalm, Cynthia Nielsen,
Joachim Oberst, and Iain Thomson for their helpful comments on and suggestions
for this manuscript.

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