A Reflection on the Difference between the Hermeneutical Approaches of Gadamer and Heidegger to the Problem of Finitude of Truth

In this paper, I attempt to interpret Gadamer’s critical approach to Heidegger’s conception of tradition and language of metaphysics. This interpretation is based on finding the ground of this critique in their different understandings concerning the problem of the finitude of truth. That problem signifies the unavailability of the ground of the phenomenality of phenomena and the impossibility of founding of the ontological truth on the absolute presence in its immediacy or total mediation. According to a brief interpretation of the finitude of the event of truth in Heidegger’s later thought with reference to the basic concept of “facticity”, I attempt to reveal how Gadamer essentially modifies the Heideggerian central idea of abyss, i.e. the concealment of event of truth, and its unavailability for metaphysical concepts, and how he negates the transcending origin of Heidegger’s later thinking concerning the metaphysics and thereby leads the finitude of truth back to traditionally metaphysical concepts. It will be illuminated firstly through Gadamer’s interpretation of facticity as belonging to tradition in his theory of history of influence with reference to Hegel, i.e. the identification of truth with “the whole” and understanding of this whole as history; secondly through the interpretation of the finitude of truth as a permanent unfinished process of total unification in the dialogue between our understanding and the historical tradition with reference to the concepts of “perspective” and “horizon” in Husserl’s phenomenology of perception.