As we have seen, Gadamer's attempt to advance the ontological turn in hermeneutics promises an original possibility for the philosophical study of ethics, one that rehabilitates the weightiness of responsibility experienced by us in factical life. This is a responsibility to understand. But, as we have seen in Part I, such responsibility is not first of all a responsibility to seek out and achieve mutual understanding or agreement with others. Rather, the responsibility to understand calls for us to cultivate and enact a capacity for displacement. The purpose of Part II is to examine the contours of this capacity for displacement in terms of what Gadamer calls practical relations of ‘I and thou’. These contours concern the capacity to be displaced in our intimate, everyday affairs. Yet, the scope of the role that this capacity plays in our intimate, everyday relations is not fully captured by Gadamer's construal of the ‘I and thou’. Whereas Gadamer leaves the impression that ‘I and thou’ relations are restricted to encounters with other persons (or texts), the displacement at issue in our intimate, everyday affairs in fact also extends to encounters with other kinds of being. These include, for example, encounters with things and animals as well as other persons and texts.

The purpose of the present chapter is to examine the responsibility to understand that is at issue in our interactions with things. This is a topic not typically addressed within the philosophical study of ethics. However, as I wish to show, even our intimate, everyday interactions with things confront us with hermeneutical demands. As we shall see, our interactions with things demand that we displace our prejudice to subjugate things to our subjective wills, instead enacting and cultivating the capacity to ‘correlate’ ourselves with them as they are in their respective being.

Gadamer suggests that the hermeneutics of facticity is what Husserl would call a ‘correlation’, but one that extends beyond the transcendental subject's relation with itself to things. Now, Gadamer himself will not develop the responsibility at stake in such correlation with things in any detail. Thus, in order to develop the possibility of responsible correlation with things, we shall consider two views closely related to Gadamer's concerns.