The interpretative mode of being alludes to the Gadamerian claim that language is a porous, open structure such that in understanding through interpretation we are not applying universal categories in particular situations as if the relation of understanding were one of subsumption of the particular by the universal. Such is the epistemological relation which Gadamer finds to be ahistorical and, as such, faulty. We participate in language as interpretive beings, i.e. rendering intelligible and meaningful 'for us' what seems incoherent, incomprehensible or alien to us. The activity consists in appealing to the familiar to make sense of the unfamiliar or distant. In this regard, there is never question of stepping outside of language for getting a better view of the world, for, quite simply, there is no world outside language.
Interpretive understanding is always the mediation between the familiar and unfamiliar in language .
But the hermeneutics of interpretative understanding is no simple linguistic theory. Hence the mediation of the familiar and unfamiliar is determined not by subjective will nor by divine providence. Gadamer seeks a mediation that would neither attribute unilateral determining properties to identity nor to otherness, to the self nor the other, to the present nor the past. Both sides, Gadamer wishes to claim, are participants in understanding or fusion of horizons. He does not wish an active self and a passive other nor a passive self and an active other nor even an equal activation of both sides if, by that, we mean an active will.