The constellation of understanding

As he starts with Heidegger and Being and Time, Gadamer also starts with the circle of understanding. To the circle of understanding Heidegger gave an ontological, non-epistemological direction, because Dasein is an object of care and its future forms the priority of care, which he understands as the function of more or less implicit anticipations. Through these anticipations of meaning, he tries in a way to ward off attacks, knowing that existence itself will still reserve some for him, up to the unanswerable blow, death, which all the dispositions of metaphysics seek to escape.

The reason is that there is no understanding without anticipation, no interpretation without prior understanding, which the circle raises from Dasein's mode of being. But already Heidegger does not like to speak of “circle”, as the imagery is spatial, or more precisely geometric. In Heidegger's terminology, it is of an image modelled on subsisting being, and therefore misplaced in the unquiet flexibility of Dasein.