In the footsteps of Heidegger's and Gadamer's hermeneutics

The present article attempts to retrace the extent to which the so-called hermeneutics of factical life, first elaborated by Martin Heidegger in 1919-1923 and later explored from a somewhat different angle in his famous book Being and Time, receives further development in Hans-Georg Gadamer's project of a philosophical hermeneutics. Proceeding from Heidegger's idea of understanding as the mode of human existence, Gadamer shifts focus from explicating the existential structures to the view of language as a space where understanding takes place. Comparative analysis of both theories reveals that Heidegger's version of hermeneutics as an existential self-interpretation of Dasein actually attains its complete and definitive form not in his own studies of fundamental ontology, but rather in the thematization of the language character of the world as carried out by Gadamer. Hermeneutics of factical life contains a double paradox: on the one hand, it aspires to develop a theory of pre-theoretical understanding as equivalent to the actual realization of life while, on the other hand, making the Dasein face an a fortiori impossible task of achieving a self-referential understanding of its own being. By putting it in the forefront the idea of language as a specific space in which the sense is born and where a person discovers the world and wins him- or herself a place in this world, Gadamer effectively extends Heidegger's early hermeneutics into a universal model of understanding conceived as a language event. This view of human life as being conditioned by language emphasizes the value of the ontological dimension of understanding, discovered by Heidegger, and supplements the concept of hermeneutics of factical life, eliminating its contradictions by bringing together the theoretical and the practical planes of existence in the unity of language.