Gadamer is perhaps Heidegger’s second best known pupil, after Arendt. This book is a collection of his essays and lectures on Heidegger’s philosophical work and his evolving thoughts. Gadamer begins, “The first question of the first beginning was: What is the Being of the human Dasein? Certainly not mere consciousness. But what kind of Being is this that neither lasts nor counts the way that the stars or mathematical truths do, but rather constantly dwindles like all life caught between birth and death, and yet in spite of its finitude and historicity is a “there” [ein Da], a here, a now, a presence in the moment [Gegenwart im Augenblick], not an empty point, but a saturated temporality and a collected totality? The Being of the human Dasein is said to be just such a “Da” in which the future and past are not simply moments rolling toward and then away from the present; rather, the future is each individual’s own future, and each individual’s own history constitutes its own Being from the accident of birth on. Because this Dasein, which projects itself into its own future, must accept itself in its own finitude—a kind of discovery of oneself as “thrown” into Being…. Every “Da,” like all things earthly, dwindles, passes away, and is carried off into oblivion—yet, it is a “Da” precisely because it is finite, that is, aware of its own finitude…. That there is something at all and not nothing—this most radical exaggeration of the question of metaphysics speaks of Being as if it were something known.” Gadamer continues, “The question concerning “nothing” and the thought provoking, fundamental experience of “nothing” were brought up so that thinking would be forced to think the Da of Dasein. This is the mission that Heidegger, in an ever more-conscious turn away from the metaphysical question concerning the Being of beings and the language of metaphysics, recognized as his own. This question preoccupied him his entire life.”
Gadamer discusses Heidegger’s conception of time. “Light is shed not only on the enigmatic irreversibility of time—in that it never emerges, it only passes away—but it also becomes obvious that time does not have its Being in the now or in a series of nows; rather is has its Being in the futurity [Zukunftigleit] that is essential to Dasein…. Forgetting attests to the fact that something happens to us—rather than that we do it. It is a way in which the past and passing away show their actuality and power.” Gadamer continues, “Human Dasein is distinguished by the fact that it understands itself in terms of its Being. In order not to lose sight of the finitude and temporality of human Dasein, which cannot ignore the question of the meaning of its Being, Heidegger defined the question of the meaning of Being within the horizon of time. The present-at-hand, which science knows through its observations and calculations, and the eternal, which is beyond everything human, must both be understood in terms of the central ontological certainty of human temporality.”
One other major concern in Heidegger’s work is the nature of art. Gadamer suggests, “Heidegger asserts that the essence of art is the process of poeticizing. What he means is that the nature of art does not consist in transforming something that is already formed or in copying something that is already in Being. Rather, art is the projection by which something new comes forth as true…. The work of art is an exceptionally tangible event of the “Da” into which we are all placed…. The artwork cannot be considered an object, as long as it is allowed to speak as a work of art…. The thing [das Ding], as something of ours, possesses its own original worldliness and, thus, the center of its own Being so long as it is not placed into the object-world of producing and marketing.”
Finally, Gadamer concludes by, once again, noting the emphasis on the lifespan of the individual human in Heidegger’s work, “We know from our own personal, existential experiences [Existenzerfahrung] of Being how fundamentally interconnected the “Da” of human Dasein is with its own finitude. We know it as the experience of darkness, a darkness in which we stand as thinking beings and back into which all that we raise up into light falls. We know it as the darkness from which we come and into which we pass. But this darkness is not merely a darkness opposed to the world of light; we are ourselves shrouded in darkness, which merely confirms that we are. Darkness plays a fundamental role in constituting the Being of our Dasein.”
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