The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology after Metaphysics

WHAT HERMENEUTICS IS REALLY MEANT TO ACHIEVE IS NOT MERELY TAKING COGNIZANCE OF SOMETHING AND HAVING KNOWLEDGE ABOUT IT, BUT RATHER AN EXISTENTIAL KNOWING, I.E., A BEING [EIN SEIN]. IT SPEAKS FROM OUT OF INTERPRETATION AND FOR THE SAKE OF IT. . . . AS FAR AS I AM CONCERNED, IF THIS PERSONAL COMMENT IS PERMITTED, I THINK THAT HERMENEUTICS IS NOT PHILOSOPHY AT ALL, BUT IN FACT SOMETHING PRELIMINARY WHICH RUNS IN ADVANCE OF IT AND HAS ITS OWN REASONS FOR BEING: WHAT IS AT ISSUE IN IT, WHAT IT ALL COMES TO, IS NOT TO BECOME FINISHED WITH IT AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE, BUT RATHER TO HOLD OUT IN IT AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. . . . IT WISHES ONLY TO PLACE AN OBJECT WHICH HAS FALLEN INTO FORGETFULNESS BEFORE TODAY’S PHILOSOPHERS FOR THEIR “WELL-DISPOSED CONSIDERATION.”

—MARTIN HEIDEGGER, ONTOLOGY: THE HERMENEUTICS OF FACTICITY (1923)

IN THIS LAST CHAPTER, I AM GOING TO TRY NOT ONLY TO explain where philosophy goes from this ontology of remnants or philosophy of remains but also to give a function to this same ontology through its logic. In other words, I am going to show how hermeneutics is the philosophy of generation, that is, that which generates Being. But how can it generate Being if, as I said, “to on,” “es gibt Sein,” and “il y a de l’être” always already? In order to answer this question, we need to further specify the hermeneutic ontology that has been guiding our path because, as Heidegger explains in the epigraph to this chapter, hermeneutics is in advance of philosophy. Hermeneutics is not in advance or beyond philosophy because it is capable of solving questions that philosophy cannot but, rather, for being able to hold them as long as possible.

If Dasein’s ontological priority over other entities, as I described in chapter 1, depended on its possibility of existence, and if interpretation was primarily the uncovering of the basic (existential) structures of Dasein, then hermeneutics is “philosophically primary,” because it sets out from the interpretation of Dasein. As Heidegger says, hermeneutics is not meant to achieve a cognizance of something in order to have “knowledge about it, but rather an existential knowing, i.e., a Being.”¹ Philosophy sets out from the hermeneutics of Dasein because all philosophical questioning arises from existence and also always returns to it. In the seminar on Heraclitus’s fragments (a seminar conducted with Eugen Fink in the winter semester of 1966–1967 at the University of Freiburg), Heidegger clarified further what he meant, by using Wittgenstein’s example of the difficulty of the thought of Being in relation to a man in a room from which he wants to get out: first, the man attempts to get out from the room through a window that is too high for him, then a chimney that is too narrow, but if he “simply turned around, he would see that the door was open all along. We ourselves,” continues Heidegger, “are permanently set in motion and caught in the hermeneutical circle.”²

Hermeneutics involves a circle; that is, it presupposes that we cannot understand a part without some understanding of the whole or understand the whole without some understanding of its parts, because to learn what being is we need to examine Dasein’s Being. This is why understanding the distinction between existence and reality (the ontological difference) means understanding Being as the horizon of that distinction. But whence does this circle come? Heidegger suggests in Being and Time that the circle in understanding stems from Dasein’s inherent circularity, that since it is in-the-world, its being is at issue. Heidegger agrees with Wittgenstein on the difficulty of thinking, because he also recognizes how philosophy has focused for too long on the “well-disposed considerations,” forgetting that Being, just as the door, was simply available all along. For Heidegger, it is not only necessary to know that we are permanently set in motion and caught in this hermeneutic circle, that is, to stay in it “in the right way”; it is also necessary to work out Being anew from within. Interpreting the destruction of metaphysics as the moment in history where we may begin to think the remains of Being—since we cannot overcome metaphysics but only appropriate it, come to terms with it, or attempt to grasp its last resonance (as we did in chapter 2)—implies that Being remains and that it cannot be set apart.

Being can only be generated through interpretation, because Being is already there; it is something that keeps remaining and that Dasein must hold as long as possible. Just as the interpretations of a piece of music emanate from the work of art itself, as Gadamer explained, our interpretations of Being emanate from Being’s “is,” its “gratuity” or “happening,” into which we were thrown well before we even attempted to grasp it in an ontology. This is why philosophy, guided by the question about Being, had to destroy the content of this traditional ontology down to the original experiences in which the first guiding determinations of Being were acquired, in order to reveal new possibilities and directions that had been obscured. As Heidegger explains, these new possibilities hold “the unborn generation beyond the deceased, and saves it for the coming rebirth of mankind out of the originary.”³

Although it is only through interpretation after the end of metaphysics that Being is newly generated, this same generation (always in the form of remnants) only occurs within metaphysics, hence, as the remains of Being, because, as we have seen, metaphysics can only be overcome through incorporation, that is, hermeneutics. Such a theory has its origin not only in Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida, Dilthey, and Schleiermacher but also extends as far back as Greek philosophy in Plato’s Symposium, where Socrates tells the truth of love by giving an account of the advice of Diotima that he had heard years before. Socrates, instead of speaking of his reception of the teachings of Diotima, of acquiring or possessing his knowledge, refers to initiation and appropriation. That is, truth, Being, or things in general do not make their way from the past by means of cultural transmission but by a kind of “translation that is appropriative rather than cognate with an original.”⁴ The peculiarity of this appropriation is that it resists objectifications and renderings in order to recuperate what was lost—not as an object, an apophantic entity, but rather as that which remains. As Gerald L. Bruns points out,⁵ such a theory of generation can be found in this passage from Plato’s Symposium:

Mortal nature [Diotima says] always seeks as much as it can to exist forever and to achieve immortality. But it is able to do this only by means of generation [genesei], its way of always leaving behind another, young one against old age. It is particularly in this that each living individual is said to be alive and to be itself—just as one is described as oneself and the same person from childhood until becoming old. But in actuality one hasn’t any characteristics at all whereby one can be called the same person. One is always becoming a new person, losing things, portions of hair, flesh, bones, blood, and all the stuff of the body. And not only the body. In the soul as well one’s habits and character, beliefs, desires, pleasures, pains, fears—none of these things remain the same in anyone—they arise and die out. But what’s even stranger than these facts is that we not only gain knowledge and lose it, so that we don’t remain the same people with respect to what we know, but that every single example of knowledge suffers the same thing. For a man is said to study when there is a departing of knowledge, and study, by implanting new knowledge in place of what has left, saves the memory of it, so that it seems like the same thing. It is in this way that everything mortal is preserved—not by its being utterly the same forever, like the divine, but by what is old and withdrawing leaving behind something else, something new like itself. It is by this method, Socrates, that the mortal partakes of immortality, she explained, in the body and in all other respects.⁶

Although this passage does not refer directly to Being, note that it brings forward a theory of generation whose logic legitimizes my ontology of remnants. Things remain by means of generation; in other words, although Being is not the same eternally, it is always becoming through its own remnants or, as Plato puts it, “by what is old and withdrawing leaving behind something else, something new like itself.” This is a hermeneutical process because, as we have seen in the introduction, hermeneuein is that exposition that not only brings tidings, with respect to “preserving a message,” but, most of all, brings “together what is concealed within the old.” In this way, it generates from what is concealed within the old “becoming,” through its own remnants, or, better, generating through its own generations. This is why not what is but what remains is essential for philosophy.

Being has taken leave of its metaphysical configurations not simply by revealing its nature as contingent or falsely foundational but also by giving itself in the form of that which “is not” but has always already been, that which holds sway only as a remnant, in a faded and weakened form. To this destiny of the weakening of Being belongs, according to Vattimo, the nexus between the event of Being and human mortality: “the historico-destination clearings in which things come to Being are epochal and not ‘eternal,’ simply because the generations or ‘Daseins’ through which and for which they come to light, are not eternal.”⁷ Nor are they eternal for Derrida, who considered that the activity connoted by the a in différance referred “to the generative movement in the play of differences [that] are neither fallen from the sky nor inscribed once and for all in a closed system.”⁸ The logics of remnants I am about to analyze will be neither eternal nor inscribed in a closed system, as most logics tried to be, but rather anarchic (in Schürmann’s sense) and historic (in Vattimo’s sense).

While Dasein is permanently caught in the hermeneutic circle holding the remains of Being, ontology, as I said, now depends not on Being but on Being’s remnants, on the remains of Being. These remains may only be grasped through interpretation, because productive interpretations, in addition to appropriating Being, also “generate Being.”⁹ The ontological meaning of the term “generation” (or “generational”) depends on offspring that are descended from a common ancestor (Being). In order to introduce the logical function of generation, that is, the logics of discursive continuities, it is important to read this passage, where Vattimo specifies the role of productive interpretation for the first time:

What does a productive interpretation generate? It generates Being, new senses of experience, new ways for the world to announce itself, which are not only other than the ones announced “before.” Rather, they join the latter in a sort of discursus whose logic (also in the sense of Logos) consists precisely in the continuity. . . . Ontological hermeneutics replaces the metaphysics of presence with a concept of Being that is essentially constituted by the feature of dissolution. Being gives itself not once and for all as a simple presence; rather, it occurs as announcement and grows into the interpretations that listen and correspond (to Being).¹⁰

An ontology of remnants has its own logic, which, as Vattimo suggests, consists of a discursive continuity that, since it is “generated from the dissolution of the metaphysics of presence,”¹¹ does not have any objective status but only “remaining” statutes, that is, regulations that emanate from within. Now, it is essential to note that “remaining” is not only the present participle of “remain” (from old French remaindre, to remain) but, most of all, the simple verb of “remain.” “Remaining,” through its verbal function, denotes the state or action of a remain that, for us, is nothing other than Being’s remnant. Thus, when I was questioning the remains of Being, I was actually seeking the moving verb within it, that is, its discursive continuity. This discursive continuity is “generational,” because in its act of bringing into Being it reproduces and produces Being. It produces Being because productive interpretations generate Being, and it reproduces Being because it is also a “remainder” of Being. A remainder is what remains in favor of one other than the grantor and follows upon the natural termination of a prior intervening possessor; in other words, it is what takes effect in favor of an unidentifiable person (as one not yet born) or upon the “occurrence” of an uncertain event that is not presentable because it is the condition of such presentations and escapes all forms of apprehension. It is also important to emphasize that this hermeneutical ontology of the logic of remains is bound up with our fundamental question—how is it going with Being?—because the fact that Being is nothing apart from its own remains implies a logic capable of being discursive and continuous, that is, of appropriating Being’s remains.

This logic of discursive continuities is, as I said, an-archic and historic because it goes beyond the traditional meaning of “logics” as the study of criteria for the evaluation of arguments. It is a logic in the basic Greek sense of logos (traced back by Heidegger from Aristotle’s understanding of life and praxis in his Seminar on Heraclitus and Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation Into Phenomenological Research), hence of “making manifest.” While in the traditional meaning logic ultimately comes to decide what may or may not be, the second, Greek sense is based upon an experience of speech, rede, as the basic trait of human cognition in order to make being manifest. Although Heidegger explains this in order to overcome the metaphysical idea according to which the supreme form of knowledge for Aristotle was contained in the simple apprehension of nous, he also gives a justification for my characterization of this logic as an-archic and historic, because this same “speech” is based upon the concept of kinesis, that is, change. Kinesis is an ontological movement of disclosure that is bound up with the ontological movement of Dasein, which is not only finite but also kinetic, that is, in motion. In Pathmarks, Heidegger explains, using the famous example of the production of a chair, the connection is between generation and this ontological movement:

Take the case of generation: a table coming into existence. Here we obviously find movements. But Aristotle does not mean “movements” performed by the carpenter in handling the tools and the wood. Rather, in the generation of the table, Aristotle is thinking precisely of the movement of what is being generated itself and as such. The change of something into something, such that in the change the very act of change itself breaks out into the open, i.e., comes into appearance along with the changing thing.¹²

Although I will analyze the problem of generation in the next section, note that the movement of what is generated and the generated thing are not infinite movements but rather movements from within the same being. The carpenter’s movement is nothing other than Dasein’s finite movement as opposed to the infinite apprehension of presence or nous. Dasein, living in finite possibilities, aware of its own possibility, precedes actuality in order to understand and produce a shift from the priority of the eternal to the priority of the finite. Now, since logic (in the logos sense) “is the phenomenon that is supposed to clarify what being means,”¹³ and Being is nothing other than its own remains, it is just through the experience of speech that the moving verb within the remaining Being can be clarified and kept. This logic is discursive, because it must converse with its tradition, and it is continuous, because this same conversation with its own tradition must not be interrupted but occurs continually.

The an-archism and historicism I mentioned above, in contrast to the eternal and closed systems of most logics, also depends on recourse to the original Greek meaning of logic, because while Heidegger was preserving the Greeks’ own practical wisdom, he also recalled that the issue of logic, understood more originally, is not only a “doing” but at the same time a “letting.” The an-archism of logic that I refer to is hidden in the same kinesis, which indicates, as Schürmann pointed out, a “doing” or an “action,” because “originally knowledge is thus something to be gained, conquered by the ‘logical’ measure over hubris, the lack of measure.”¹⁴ This conquering of the lack of measure implies not only that previous lack upon which it operated but also an an-archic action that allows a disposition that is “logical in the original sense.”¹⁵ Together with the an-archic action required by this logic, it is essential to emphasize its “letting” or “appropriating” nature—that is, its historicism. Regarding the necessary historicism of such logic, Vattimo explains:

The very logic with which discourse proceeds (for it does have one—and not an arbitrary one) is inscribed within a situation composed of controlling procedures given the time and again in the same non-pure mode in which historical and cultural conditions of experience are given. Perhaps the model to keep in mind—which is in fact always already operative in philosophical procedures—is that of literary and art criticism: all critical discourse and evaluation unfolds on the basis of a set of canons historically constituted by the history of art and taste.¹⁶

As it is discursive and continuous, the logic of remains must be capable of making its intrinsic “generational” procedure function. This procedure, as I said, consists in its production (an-archic) and reproduction (historic) of Being. The logic of remains reproduces Being because “Being” still counts as a used-up term. It is our duty to grasp its last resonance as a possession and a production because this “possession” is nothing other than the remains of Being, which inevitably offers itself for thought (before or beyond Being), “affecting” further remains. This is the logic that functioned through of all six remnants I worked through in chapter 2, since they are all “generational.” Each of them was a reproduction and production of Being beyond metaphysics. For example, Schürmann’s traits indicated the systemic features that connect epochs in order to give shape to new modalities of coming events, and Derrida’s traces belong, as a simulacrum of a presence, to metaphysics, and at the same time they unfold their own effects for further residues. Nancy’s copresence, instead, was a mark that shared itself continually with the past and future, just as Gadamer’s conversations allow themselves to be conducted from a previous subject matter in order to pursue interpretation without knowing where it will end. And while Tugendhat’s sentences were formed from linguistic signs that constitute the same material that made new meaningful formations of sentences, Vattimo’s events are constituted from the linguistic horizon that constitutes them in order to form further transmissions of itself.

The discursive continuity of this logic, as I noted, does not have any objective status but only remaining statutes. Etymologically, the Latin term statutum, law or regulation, comes from statutus, the past participle of statuere, to set up, station, and from status, position, state. All remains of Being share the same internal regulation, station, or position characteristic of Heidegger’s worn-out Being: indeterminability, unpresentability, and ungraspability. They do not presence or represent anything objectual except their own remnants, which, although they are not presentable (or objective), are the condition of such presentations and escape all forms of prehension. These remains constitute the horizon or realm within which every entity gives itself as something and through it appears and disappears. Schürmann’s traits did not represent anything except the so-called economic mutation that gave shape to the event of Being, while Derrida, in order to name the trace, which is always displacing itself and without site, had to come up with the différance that marks its movement. Neither do Nancy’s copresences nor Gadamer’s conversations represent anything. They are the names given to the unattainable place that never becomes accessible through presence. Although Tugendhat’s sentences could be meant to represent their own meaning (redness for the red castle), they always give birth to what is more than a pure object, just as Vattimo’s events become visible to us only within horizons that can be historically, linguistically, or even culturally determined.

The remaining (productive and reproductive) statutes of this logic belong also to the historical, finite, thrown constitution of Dasein, because, as I said, the logics of discursive continuities do not function in order to have an infinite apprehension of presence but only to make Being manifest, in other words, to “make it remain.” Although Dasein is historical as long as it is truly “Da,” “there,” it distinguishes itself from beings-in-the-world because it is an existence of continuous discourses. But this distinction from ontic beings is valid insofar as it constitutes itself as a historical totality that goes along continuously and historically among the various possibilities that make up its own existence, which may either be authentic or inauthentic. Although the historical authenticity of Dasein is dependent insofar as it can explicitly anticipate its own death, it must be true also in another, more profound “generational” sense, that is, have “at its disposal determined and qualified possibilities and [having] relationships to past and future generations precisely because it is born and dies in the literal, biological sense of the words.”¹⁷ This relationship to past and future generations (just as the an-archic production and historic reproduction of Being) constitutes the remaining statutes of this logic in such a way that is not something “reached” but rather “delineated by itself.” It is delineated by itself because it is Being that throws it, not Dasein. As a thrown project, Dasein is not the “one who throws” but, as I explained in chapter 1, the “one thrown.” The horizons within which entities, including Dasein as the thrown project, appear have “roots in the past and are open towards the future, that is to say, they are historical-finite horizons.”¹⁸ Since it is Being that is “preventing all ‘goals’ and breakdown of every explainability,”¹⁹ Dasein cannot consider itself the master of Being but only the one who experiences itself as projected by Being itself. It is in this condition that Heidegger proposed his hermeneutics of Dasein, his philosophy of finitude that generated around the concept of interpretation and, most of all, “from within.”

At the end of all ontologies it is always asked: Where do we go from here? How is such an ontology to be applied? Is this a foundational ontology? These are all practical-metaphysical questions that forget that ontology’s task is only to hold on to Being as long as possible because in philosophy, just “as in democracy, one should fight within the ongoing movement, from the inside, to turn it in other directions.”²⁰ These other directions are not different subject matters but further understandings of Being, that is, further remnants of Being, like the ones I have worked out anew through Schürmann, Derrida, Nancy, Gadamer, Tugendhat, and Vattimo. These philosophers have indicated other directions that have generated, following the logic of discursive continuities, different remnants that, as Wittgenstein’s conception of “family resemblance” indicates, share a lack of boundaries and exhibit the distances between them. Since metaphysics, as I explain in the introduction, cannot be overcome but only gotten over from within, hermeneutics becomes the only adequate way to think Being within its own history and modalities, as it (Being) requires. Hermeneutics is the philosophy of generations, that is, the most suitable for generating Being from within, as Being demands, because it is also a knowledge less of what Being means in itself than of how we stand with respect to it. Since Dasein moves within horizons where it is not possible to determine Being as such, once and for all, or in a way that a change in its perspective will not require us to revise it, then there can be no such thing as understanding that is not also interpretation. Rather, everything is interpretable to the point that “to know is to interpret, [and] to interpret is also to produce new history,”²¹ because “much remains for us to think but little for us to know,”²² as Vattimo and Schürmann taught us.

Ontology does not depend any longer on its destruction by metaphysics but only on its remnants, which follow the logic of discursive continuities, where the remaining statutes are also always already “ongoing” statutes of Being; in other words, they generate further Being through its verbal (kinetic) function. The verb that is inside the remains of Being reproduces and produces Being through interpretation because it denotes the state and action of the remains: that which emanates from within. The destruction of Being as presence essentially belonged to “the formulation of the question of Being and [was] possible exclusively within such a formulation,”²³ but the new question was also conceived from within the fundamental question: Heidegger considered it “the hearth-fire that glows in the asking of the fundamental question.”²⁴

Being requires such treatment because we are in a situation, as I explained, where principally there is Being: Being is in the “driver’s seat” and is given to us without our request, decision, or control, in the form of remains. But in order to understand the generation of Being from within, it is first necessary to show how such “gratuity” or “givenness” is not constitutive only of Being but also of Being’s remains. What models or examples are there from the history of philosophy of things so ontologically constituted as “remaining” so as to require and invite us to consider not what they are but what remains of them? Gadamer and Luther, through their understanding of the “classical” and the biblical Scriptures, have indirectly given us the closest model there is to Being’s remnant. In this famous passage, Gadamer explains the power of the “classical” and also indirectly provides us with a model of Being’s remains.

The classical is fundamentally something quite different from a descriptive concept used by an objectivizing historical consciousness. It is a historical reality to which historical consciousness belongs and is subordinate. The “classical” is something raised above the vicissitudes of changing times and changing tastes. It is immediately accessible, not through that shock of recognition, as it were, that sometimes characterizes a work of art for its contemporaries and in which the beholder experiences a fulfilled apprehension of meaning that surpasses all conscious expectations. Rather, when we call something classical, there is a consciousness of something enduring, of significance that cannot be lost and that is independent of all the circumstances of time—a kind of timeless present that is contemporaneous with every other present.²⁵

Gadamer here uses the classical to explain how one is always being exposed to a text and interpreted by it; in other words, the classical, just as the biblical text is for Luther, is something inescapable, in the sense that we cannot get around its normative power or, in ontological terms, its “gratuity.” The principle of sola scriptura, contrary to Luther’s primary intentions, was not a theory of or for the biblical text as much as it is a description of the hermeneutical situation in which Dasein is not the interpreter but the interpreted of a remnant. If, as Luther said, “Scripture is not understood, unless it is brought home, that is, experienced,”²⁶ then interpretation cannot be reduced to elucidation, exegesis, or eisegesis, because it is not concerned mainly with deciphering meanings but with the event of interpretation itself—because the Scripture requires it. Luther indirectly demonstrates how one’s relation with a text is primarily hermeneutical-ontological rather than exegetical because Dasein, instead of acting on the text, is listening, responding, and being transformed, because the Scriptures are something over which we do not have control. Gadamer’s classical and Luther’s Scripture confirm that we have always lived in a world where not what is but what remains is significant, in other words, in a world that is not primarily a realm of objects but of remains to which we are always subordinated.

If Gadamer’s classical and Luther’s Scripture cannot vanish or disappear but instead remain, independent of all the circumstances of time, it is because “of the effect they have on us,” explains Rorty, “not because of the source they came from.”²⁷ The effects, or remains, are more important than the source, because they are what constitute and will continue to constitute the source and its tradition. Tradition is not a fixed structure but rather the historically open-ended intersections of remains. But how is it possible to experience something that is not but only remains, such as the classics, Scripture, or even their traditions? The experience of remains is not merely a subjective encounter with an object that rests quietly in itself but is rather an encounter with something that befalls, strikes, and transforms us, as Heidegger explains:

To undergo an experience with something—be it a thing, a person, or a god—means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us. When we talk of “undergoing” an experience, we mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making; to undergo here means that we endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it. It is this something itself that comes about, comes to pass, happens.²⁸

Undergoing an experience of remains does not mean having an infinite apprehension of it but only making it endure, which is only possible through listening. And listening does not mean entering into the remains but, on the contrary, belonging to it. In German, the word for listening is also the word for belonging: “we have heard, ‘gehört,’ says Heidegger, when we belong to, ‘gehören’ what is said.”²⁹ Since we are in a situation where principally there is Being, experience can only be a mode of belonging, that is, an attitude of contemplative listening to Being. In this attitude of contemplative listening Derrida has rightly emphasized “that philosophy finds itself inscribed, rather than inscribing itself, within a space which it seeks but is unable to control, a space which opens out to another which is no longer even its other.”³⁰ The space in which philosophy finds itself inscribed is nothing other than its own discursive continuity, which is unable to exert control because it is continually disappearing and appearing, that is, reproducing and producing Being. This difference is nothing other than the remains of Being or, as I said above, the moving verb within it. But why do Being’s remnants, through the discursive continuities, indicate also the “space which opens out to another which is no longer even its other,” hence, to the future generation?

According to Heidegger, “each man is in each instance in dialogue with his forebears, and perhaps even more and in a more hidden manner with those who will come after him,”³¹ because hermeneutics in its generative (or constructive) phase always becomes unsatisfiable with respect to whatever it aims at. While something is always left undone in every construction, and because hermeneutics essentially aims to understand what remains undone, it becomes the appropriate philosophy of remnants. Being’s remnants are not generated by simple interpretation but as an interpretation that one lives and that carries one forward into the future. But why is it only possible to generate Being from within? In order to explain this, it is necessary to recognize that what remains always presents itself not only as what is always already coming and does not stop coming but also as something that is never anything outside its own folding: a remnant. This is also why Heidegger considered that “we attain an answer to our question only when we remain in conversation with that to which the tradition of philosophy delivers us.”³² Although it is the concrete situation in which we find ourselves to determine the way we are “framed” within metaphysics, it is only from such a frame that Being “remains constantly available to us.”³³ Heidegger called on us to settle down and live within metaphysical traditions, languages, and questions because he knew that philosophy could only work out anew Being from within, because the past includes its possibilities: “only what has already been thought prepares what has not yet been thought.”³⁴

Although “hermeneutics” (from the Greek verb hermeneuein), “generation” (from Greek genesei), and “within” (from Old English withinnan) do not share the same grammatical root, attentive readers will have noticed how I have been using the three terms as synonyms. They all descend from a common ancestor or from an inner part and limit, and all three terms refer to the future, to an unpredictable, unidentifiable, and unpresentable event that I refer to as the remains. The only way to approach such an event is to find the ground of interpretation. But, as Heidegger explained in Being and Time, interpretation is grounded in what we have, see, or know, always already and in advance, because it is simply a clarification that produces understanding where it is missing. Understanding only proceeds from the inside, and interpretation is never an explication of objects but only of situations in which we are involved. He specifies:

Interpretation is never a presuppositionless grasping of something previously given. When the particular concretion of the interpretation in the sense of exact text interpretation likes to appeal to what “is there,” what is initially “there” is nothing else than the self-evident, undisputed prejudice of the interpreter, which is necessarily there in each point of departure of the interpretation as what is already “posited” with interpretation as such, that is, pre-given with fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception.³⁵

Gadamer also insisted that we understand differently if we understand at all because our understanding is determined by the inescapability of history, that is, by the concrete prejudice and situations in which we find ourselves. We cannot stand outside history. History is always intervening from within our own understanding, and when one understands Being differently, it is only because Being’s remnants are given to us in another particular situation we are involved in. Hegel also thought that interpretation only occurs within the conceptual order of the one who interprets because, “no one,” he said, “can escape the substance of his time any more than he can jump out of his skin.”³⁶ This is the meaning of Hegel’s Aufhebung: there is no going back in history because it is something that one may only take forward. The point is that if we only exist historically it is because we are in a state, condition, or attitude of in-between, that is, a state in which something is called for in the way of “decisions” and “actions” to make and take. Such decisions and actions are similar to the original meaning of logos discussed earlier, because both refer to the intrinsic generational procedure of Dasein. As I explain in the introduction, Heidegger called this state, condition, or attitude of Dasein’s in-between “not a commodity,” since it requires that Dasein “in its very being, is in demand, is needed, that he, as the being he is, belongs within a needfulness which claims him . . . with respect to bringing tidings, with respect to preserving a message.”³⁷ This message is Being, and its tidings are the remains of Being, which vary from message to message. The more Dasein focuses on preserving the message, the more messages Being will generate, because it brings tidings, thus news, information, and reports that will always have the postmetaphysical nature of the remains.

As Jean Grondin points out, “there are very few things held in common in the fragmented field of contemporary philosophy, except perhaps for this very fact that we do live in a ‘fragmented field’ of philosophical discourse, that is, one that is inescapably characterized by interpretation.”³⁸ The fact that the sources or origins of hermeneutics cannot be reduced to a full, disciplined body of thoughts—since they belong to a variety of topics that spread out over many different historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts—makes hermeneutics not only “an-archic” in Schürmann’s sense but also “historistic” in Vattimo’s sense, because it does not try to take control of Being but seeks rather to appropriate its remains. It is in just this an-archic–historic, fragmented field that our generational hermeneutics is capable of overcoming (verwinden, that is, recovering, twisting, incorporating, or learning to live with) other classical philosophical problems linked to the question of Being—such as truth, nominalism, or even relativism—because the ontology of remnants, that is, the weakening of Being, can be used to come to terms with them. As far as relativism is concerned, the doctrine according to which all descriptions of a subject are equally valid, from the point of view of this logic of discursive continuities, preferring one description to another is justified as a response to the description’s own historical constellations; in other words, all preferences, decisions, or solutions become responses to the epochal order of the horizons from which they come, thus, “from within.” This also is why Heidegger, in What Is Called Thinking?, explained that “every way of thinking takes its way already within the total relation to Being and man’s nature, or else it is not thinking at all.”³⁹ If Being is the beginning of a gratuity given to us and it is our task, as thinkers, to make it remain, then it is no surprise that for Heidegger and for most of the six philosophers I studied in the second chapter the human being is the “shepherd of Being,”⁴⁰ because they all know, as Hölderlin said in the beginning of the fourth stanza of his hymn “The Rhine,” that “as you began, so you will remain [Wie du anfiengst, wirst du bleiben].”