As metaphysics diminished in the twentieth century, Gadamer took up his own approach to ontology. His analogy of ‘play’ described Being as an encompassing phenomenon in which all things are essentially defined by their infinite, complex, dynamic relations. Language, understood as pure conceptuality, replaced substance. He saw proleptic hints of this account of Being in the works of Plato, Hegel and Heidegger: the complex positional relationality of all form and identity was ably expressed by Plato, not least in his ‘unwritten dialectic’ of the One and the Many. Hegel brought out the dynamism and fertile potential within in each form of existence, and Heidegger incorporated the insight that our own position in and as Being always inflects our conflicted attempts to understand it. Each helped to shape a Gadamerian position that can sometimes resemble the ‘pantheistic’ or ‘idealistic’ ideas of past philosophers. Finally, we consider what this means for the nature of metaphysics and metaphysical understanding of the self, and compare Gadamer’s thought with that of postmodern thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze and Badiou, looking at some more recent moves to reposition Gadamer as an objectivist, realist or metaphysical thinker.