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definitive knowledge but in that openness to experience that is made possible byexperience itself.” (TM, 355) As a young Lithuanian phenomenologist has correctlyobserved, “while for Hegel experience is overcome in the closure of absolute knowledge,for Gadamer it is fulfilled in the openness to new experiences.” 166All language, even that of philosophy, Merleau-Ponty maintained, is indirect, and inwhatever comes to understanding in our speaking of it there are always many things thatnecessarily remain unsaid. The most profound insight of Heidegger, who pursued withdetermination always the same question, the question as to the “meaning of being” -- or,as he preferred later to say, the “truth of being” -- was that the truth-process, the adventof truth (unconcealment, a-letheia), always has the dual character of both revealing andconcealing. That being so, the self in search of self-understanding never experiences a“full” presence of itself to itself. Being in the nature of a process, human understandingis always only “on the way.” The important thing, that which allows for a certaincoherence and meaning in our lives, is persistence in the asking of questions, for asMerleau-Ponty remarked, “Every question, even that of simple cognition, is part of thecentral question that is ourselves.” (VI, 104) Or, as Ricoeur’s mentor, Gabriel Marcel, hadsaid earlier on, the question concerning the self is the question on which “all otherquestions hang.” 167An ancient Chinese sage once said: “The various artisans dwell in their workshops inorder to perfect their craft, just as the junzi [the “gentleman” or wise person] keeps onlearning in order to discover the truth [to reach the utmost of the Way].” 168 Thispersistence -- “To know how to question,” Heidegger said, “means to know how to wait,even a whole lifetime.” (IM, 206) -- is what the Confucians called virtue (de), whichconsists in “awaiting one’s destiny (ming)” in “steadfastness of purpose.” 169 This is theWay (Dao) of understanding and the basis of humanness (ren; humanitas) and the morallife. 170PostscriptIn this paper I have sought to cast a retrospective glance over some one hundred years ofphenomenology, taking as my theme the interpretive turn in phenomenology. Despitesignificant differences between the leading figures I have considered (and despite the factthat some of them branched off in directions others declined to follow), there are,nonetheless, many commonalties binding them together. There is, indeed, as I hope tohave shown in this “phenomenology of phenomenology” (limited, as it necessarily hasbeen, to a select number of general themes), a certain logic -- dictated by the thingsthemselves -- in the way in which phenomenology has unfolded over the last manydecades and during which time new themes and concerns have appeared at this or thatmoment and some older ones have faded away.Given the protean way in which phenomenology has developed, it would undoubtedlybe best to avoid speaking, as is often done, of “the Phenomenological Movement” (the166Saulius Genusias, “Analysis of Historically Effected Consciousness,” manuscript (2003).167See Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1:130.168Confucius, Analects, 19.7.169See Mencius, The Mencius, 7A1 and 7B33.170The Dao to which I have here alluded is the Dao of humanistic self-cultivation (Bildung) of theearly Confucians and should not be confused with the mystical and anti-humanist Dao of Laozi, i.e., of“Daoism,” which was, not surprisingly, the Dao invoked by Heidegger (see Martin Heidegger, On the Wayto Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz [New York: Harper and Row, 1971], 92).49