Hermeneutics and its excesses:

Gumbrecht’s criticism to Vattimo

Abstract

This paper intends to develop a confrontation between the works of Vattimo and Gumbrecht, from a background horizon that approximates them as actors of a double sharing: both of their Heideggerian heritage and of a critical-philosophical project that makes them interpreters of the contemporary culture. The structural divergences of this confrontation, which should guide our comparative analysis, however, come forward in the different reactions taken by each of the authors to the Heideggerian concept of history of Being [Seinsgeschichte] – especially regarding the understanding of the structure of the experience of Being – and, as a consequence, each one's understanding of hermeneutics and its meaning for a criticism of culture. The last subject to be drawn from this dialogue, finally, lies in the essential difference between Vattimo’s and Gumbrecht's understanding of how to overcome metaphysics in contemporaneity: whether through the assumption of a hermeneutic nihilism, or else in a search for the once forgotten presence of things.