Gadamer’s work opens with one of Rilke’s poems, which does not fail to capture the reader’s attention. It is also an issue of capture: “as long as you follow and capture only that which you yourself have initiated, it is nothing but competence and venial gain”. These words also remind us of Descartes and of his ideal of a method of knowledge thanks to which we will become the “masters and possessors of nature”. But who are we, Rilke seems to reply, to hope to master what has always captured us until now? Does true power not come from elsewhere?