Dasein - Monoskop

230 PART III
In this epilogue, I shall go one—moderate—step further by suggesting
that not only the interpretational framework employed in
this study, but also the specific results that we arrived at with respect
to Husserl and Heidegger, can be brought to bear in attempts
to illuminate a good deal of more recent continental philosophy. This
suggestion can hardly seem surprising, for a considerable number of
eminent continental thinkers in Germany and France, thinkers like,
for instance, Derrida, Fink, Gadamer, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and
Sartre, either start out explicitly from Husserl and Heidegger, or return
to them as the touchstones against which to check their own
philosophy that perhaps was more directly informed by Hegel, Marx,
Nietzsche, Freud or Saussure. Especially those continental philosophers
who take their starting point fairly directly from both Husserl
and Heidegger are faced with a set of rather uncomfortable choices.
Since Husserl and Heidegger differ radically over almost every philosophical
issue, the student and admirer of both is drawn in two
radically different directions at the same time. The main choices
available are the following: either one uses Husserl and Heidegger
as two reservoirs of ideas from which one collects what one needs
for one's own enterprise; or one oscillates back and forth between
the Husserlian and the Heideggerian line; or one re-interprets both
projects in a way that makes them compatible. A good example of
the dangers of this last line is Sartre's L'Être et le Néant 1 : Heidegger
himself was so disenchanted by Sartre's attempt to assimilate
Husserl and Heidegger to each other that he stopped reading after
some 40-odd pages; he gave his copy—which had been sent to him by
Sartre himself with a personal dedication—to Hans-Georg Gadamer.
(Gadamer, pers. comm.)
Since I cannot interpret the philosophy of language of the main
figures of post-Heideggerian continental philosophy in anything less
than another book-size study, I shall here confine myself to a brief
discussion of just one example, Gadamer's hermeneutics. To concentrate
on Gadamer can be motivated in two ways. On the one hand,
Gadamer is undoubtedly the most eminent of German philosophers
that take their lead from Husserl and Heidegger. Gadamer also attended
both Husserl's and Heidegger's lectures and seminars. On the
other hand, more important than these so to speak 'external' reasons