Our Mode of Being in History is Not Historical

What is it about?

Gadamer scholars of Heidegger are right. A transformation in ethos and opening to the meaning of Being depends on awareness of finitude. Yet this awareness does not yield openness to more of the same, i.e., discourse structurally incapable of coming to unity but instead, for both Gadamer and Cheng, openness to a distinctly different ontological dimension of reality. As Sandra Wawrytko and So-Seong Park indicate, this ontological dimension is prefigured in the experience of being-as-a-whole or the totality of all possible relations in both Chinese totemic shamanistic rituals, and Greek Dionysian festivals. Through these religious experiences human ethos and therefore consciousness is expanded and elevated from being centered on one’s ownmost concerns toward an affinity with all sentient beings from insects and plants to animals. The channel for this affinity is the receptivity of an auditory disposition and hence, the emotions, compassion, and feeling response.

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Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The aim is to disengage Gadamer's ontology of being-in-nature while in history from the influence of Heidegger's phenomenological horizon of time. This is important in repositioning our self-understanding (and making) in relation to the moving, self-unfolding structure of nature (one in many) as Gadamer understands.