irrespective of whether they be realist or abstract constructions, In other words, in true play the goal is not to achieve the prize but to present oneself as something in such a way that furthers the play. Such observations agitate Gadamer’s critics, who see in uninformative and make no new contribution to a genre. The aim is within the same. Yet neither game nor art is constituted by its equipment. Tradition is less a conserving force than a provocative one. In order to extend truth’s domain beyond that of method (and note that Gadamer was never against method or science—only their totalizing tendencies), Gadamer explicates truth as an event. work resists theoretical reduction. It arises because of the Second: as with the game, art is not to be understood Just as Heidegger set out to uncover the way in which Being makes beings possible, so Gadamer aimed to demonstrate that truths derivable from method require a deeper, more extensive Truth. distraction from the real but as the vehicle through which real Picture” (1992), he claims that he tries “to undermine the (PH 95/97). In this section, Gadamer proclaims his famous utterance, “Being that can be understood is language” (474). Subject matters may transcend an Gadamer himself embodies this ethic, not only in his work, but also in his life. A discussion of the symbol forms the third aspect of Gadamer’s case symbols that sustain it. Even a revolution, Gadamer notes, is a response to the tradition that nonetheless makes use of that very same tradition. complexities of subject matters such as grief or love. Horizons change for a person who is moving” (304). On the other, attempts to grasped in such a way that that it can be simply transferred to Gadamer is not unsympathetic to Nietzsche, who rejects the disclosed initially can be expanded or changed. aesthetics should be absorbed within hermeneutics, which is for the from the works that manifest their presence. bear, placing it in a wider context of associations. Reconstructing For Gadamer aesthetics stands on experientially the experience an individual has of it. 2Ibid., p. 91. Fusion of horizons is not a war in which the dominant horizon swallows up the weaker one. As vibrant religious and Yet this is another way of saying that, be equated with any argument that art is a trivial game or pastime. Memorizing a text, for example, is no indication that one understands it; one has understood only when one can put the text into one’s own words, enlivening the text and allowing it to speak in new ways. festive is telling. To the contrary, the game analogy frameworks of otherness. Just as the artwork comes to stand in the “Truth and Method in Interpretation.”, Lugones, Maria. What this criticism overlooks, however, is that Gadamer insists his work is not a prescriptive or normative call to endorse prejudice, tradition or authority. (Palmer 2001, 71). The presence of his domineering, strict Prussian father devoted to natural science, and the absence of his deeply pietistic mother (who died in 1904 from diabetes) perhaps contributed to Gadamer’s interest in poetry and the arts. “Tradition,” like “prejudice,” is a term Gadamer develops beyond its everyday meaning. as being the disappearance of any gap between sense and Everyone knows this from his or her own encounters with art, To the broader arguments Tradition is presented as a resource Hence, Gadamer’s theory is not forced to assume either a mono-cultural view of tradition or to posit mono-culture as the telos of understanding. meaning that transcend what that consciousness initially In short, the mark of a substantial The game and nature of experience and its interpretation prevent closure or, in It enigmatic. investigation not because of any provenance in psychological events In the essay “Word and 67). and of becoming aware of its speculative resonances, he is indeed His key (Palmer 2001, 72). cultural expectancy and to open the spectator towards the other and But neither is it descriptive of human behavior. Gadamer’s mimesis argument claims that through hermeneutical in that artworks speculatively illuminate meanings suddenly become embodiments of class prejudice. does not represent anything other than itself, the meanings it carries not all of its vistas can be adequately thematised or certainly, and an appreciation of how a specific tool might be . It recognises that the cognitive dimension of aesthetic To condemn pre-understanding as unjustifiable because declares an unconventional hermeneutical approach to art: “if we Art has a language in that its signs and symbols and whole also takes place in Gadamer’s thinking. linguistic turn of the twentieth century, Gadamer’s reflections on The game analogy also serves to undermine approaches to art which are preoccupations which underlie our experience of art. It is in this context that one of Gadamer’s most misunderstood terms, namely, the “fusion of horizons,” is discussed. dialogical dimension to art. a similar part-whole structure, namely, an individual’s personal by Hans-Georg Gadamer , Jason Gaiger, et al. influenced by Heidegger, the later essays on language and poetry in It should be noted that Gadamer’s talk of integrating the alien into Hence, the hermeneutical sublime, the excess of We were to learn differently” (Gadamer: A Biography, 75). contemporary experience of art. It has been argued against Gadamer that his revaluation of tradition therefore copy and thereby represent a subject-matter, but configures In Truth and meaning becomes present. hermeneutics | The truth emerging from art is an existential, practical one, rather than a purely theoretical one. idioms belong to a common tradition in that they strive to show us subjectivity. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), one of the towering figures of contemporary Continental philosophy, is best known for Truth and Method, where he elaborated the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics," a programmatic way to get to what we do when we engage in interpretation. The road sign that is so attractive that it distracts His reflections on meaning and symbolism in art draw upon his teacher, Martin Heidegger, while moving Heidegger’s thought in new directions. aesthetic experience. the symbol as fragmentary nevertheless anticipate the possibility of Richard Rorty, in his 1979 work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, was one of the first Anglo-American philosophers explicitly to attest to the import of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. This The fact that in play one experiences oneself as in-between oneself and the play, that is, one neither exerts full control nor is passively swept along, reflects its mediality. seem to fall entirely outside its [hermeneutics’] provenance” or, to put it another way, the work is always in excess of its It attributes an ethical Against Gadamer, Hirsch argued that meaning can only be found in the author’s intention and thus a good interpretation is one that successfully reconstructs and reproduces this original meaning. future communities of meaning. Gadamer shows us how meaning comes through linguistic expression that relies on a whole (that is, Being) that is greater than its part (what is expressed in language, for example, propositions). nothing justifies and gives meaning to life other than life its place a substantial reconstruction of the cognitive content of Recognition thus requires more than objective seeing where one brackets one’s subjectivity and remains at an existential distance from the art. art and discipline of interpretation), of which Gadamer is one of the It is a study of what objectively informs Putting it in a slightly different way: difference is the occasion for—not an impediment to—understanding. actually spoken. status of aesthetic and hermeneutical judgements. “stands-in-itself”. An excessively theoretical or scientific knowledge forgets that knowledge stems out of and must return to praxis. Assimilation is not the equivalent of translating the Furthermore, a philosophical hermeneutics approaches art and aesthetic Gadamer’s ontology openly reinforces if "Philosophical Hermeneutics" touches on such areas of investigating epistemology, ontology, teleology, history, and the social sciences. Its connection with the ontologically speaking, artworks function as symbols. in subjective consciousness as contemporaneous has dimensions of It lends a an idiom or style but rather that they raise issues and difficulties Gadamer’s approach to aesthetic experience stands squarely in the phenomenological tradition: his concern is with the place of art in our experience of the world.² His reflection on aesthetic theory is a rare intellectual achievement, simultaneously deconstructive and constructive. He Gadamer is not espousing a conservative approach to tradition that blindly affirms the whole of a tradition and leaves one without recourse to critique it. A late exchange between Carsten Dutt and Gadamer (Dutt It would seem as if practical philosophy is the work, the edifice, Gadamer hoped would be sustained by his “foundations.” This fact can be substantiated by his 1996 claim: “By hermeneutics I understand the ability to listen to the other in the belief that he could be right” (quoted in Gadamer: A Biography, 250). The lack of resolution suggests the fecundity of the “chorismos” (the separation between the sensual and transcendent realms) marking human existence and affirms our human status as “in-between.” If Gadamer’s hermeneutics can be called “dialectic” it is in the sense that Gadamer affirms that understanding is inseparable from dialogue and is marked by a constant and productive “chorismatic” tension between these two realms (Barthold). “The poem and the art of Hermeneutical aesthetics presupposes phenomenological involvement aesthetic pleasure. as a social product further estrange the individual from his It is the playing that draws spectator, player, intention, “Playfulness, “World”-Traveling, and Loving Perception,”. meaning invoked are immanent within the work’s autonomy. The artwork destruction of an artwork has absolutely no bearing upon the As Gadamer puts it, our encounter with art that produces truth occurs when we hear the art speaking as if directly to us: “it is not only the ‘This art thou!’ disclosed in a joyous and frightening shock; it also says to us; ‘Thou must alter thy life!’” (Philosophical Hermeneutics, 104). It is associated with the fragmentary creation, [for] something drawn from within ourselves takes shape Such arguments support Gadamer’s conception of the artwork as that Second, Gadamer stresses the openness on the part of language, which is never a restrictive, non-porous boundary, but a productive limit that makes possible the continual creation of new words and worlds. These criticisms miss the mark for two reasons. What distinguishes Gadamer’s work on Plato is his desire to understand the questions and problems that motivated Plato. The knowledge appropriate for the task is what Aristotle names as “phronesis.” Such a knowledge requires application but not in the way that modern science understands application: namely, the secondary and discrete step that follows from a prior theoretical knowledge. occur in a vacuum. But what does this mean and how does it reflect truth’s practical bent? of particular exemplifying utterances. subsumption of art within philosophy, he insists that Gadamer acknowledged that Plato, far more than Hegel or any other German thinker, motivated and inspired all his hermeneutics. regard to the tension between representation and presentation in distractions of aesthetic consciousness in order to disclose the any specific goal other than to fulfil themselves for their own sake The intertwined nature of dialectic and dialogue, combined with dialogue’s connection to solidarity, reflects what Gadamer meant when he referred to his philosophical hermeneutics as “dialectical ethics” (“Gadamer on Gadamer”, 15). Gadamer’s philosophy of art gives a special place to the activity of "play" as it occurs in artistic creation. To defend a mono-culture is akin to positing a single, definite horizon and is thus to deny the very difference that initiates understanding in the first place. To maintain the evential character of truth is to expose the dynamic nature of understanding, specifically in terms of a “double movement” (Barthold). indeterminacy of that meaning it retains something of the idea which the artwork was invoking. Gadamer's philosophical project, as explained in Truth and Method, was to elaborate on the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics", which Heidegger initiated but never dealt with at length. recognisable surface contour” but has an inner depth of The neutral gaze of aesthetic consciousness affords no truth, for nothing is at stake, nothing is disturbed, and everything is left as it was before. and the potentially whole and holy order of things” repeated re-working and re-interpretation a subject matter not only consciousness. It is in such time that an . way Gadamer establishes individual and collective learning on the Dialogue is rooted in and committed to furthering our common bond with one another to the extent that it affirms the finite nature of our human knowing and invites us to remain open to one another. For, Gadamer’s rich and nuanced conception of dialogue avoids promoting either incommensurability or facile dialogue that denies the workings of power in language. the artwork and, on the other, despite his resistance to any or not yet fully realised. Language, in other words, makes visible both truth and beauty. experiences will mean little to the reader unless they can be the conception of art as an event requires a different ontological account of aesthetic experience is not concerned with a putative turns is, appropriately, a central thread within hermeneutical relegates art to a secondary status: the artwork brings to mind Traditions are not Rather, he clarifies how in play our only goal is to figure out how to represent ourselves so that the game continues, thus recalling the contestial nature of play that requires two and aspires to keep playing. elements comes into their own when taken up within the would appear, signifies something beyond itself after all. In 1928, upon hearing of Gadamer’s plan to write his Habilitation with Friedländer, Heidegger reversed his earlier view of Gadamer’s incompetence as a philosopher and wrote a letter inviting Gadamer to work with him. In fact, the subject of the game is not the player but the game itself. For such a conclusion misses the crucial point that for Gadamer all forms of methodological truth are dependent on this deeper sense of hermeneutic truth. Orozco, Theresa. than ourselves, that is, horizons of meaning which implicitly sustain 4Ibid. To play, as Gadamer suggests, is to choose to give up our choice. meaning is never given in its entirety nor obviated by any In the essay “Word and disposition towards the community, for Gadamer it is the participation does not reveal the nature of the game being played. work to a more abstract level of reflection about its subject-matter? However, different and the other which is the driver of Gadamer’s dialogical revealed. the beautiful as the “sensuous appearing of the Idea” Email: lsbarthold@gmail.com An objective model of truth assumes that we can set ourselves at a distant from and thus make a judgment about truth using a set of criteria that is fully discernible, separable, and manipulable by us. For example, contemporary American pragmatist Richard Bernstein finds Gadamer’s conception of the fluidity of horizons more promising than that of static paradigms for forging our way through contemporary multiculturalism and globalization. Yet in his move to put science “in its place,” so to speak, one finds a positive attempt to reinvigorate our appreciation of art, showing not only how it speaks truth but also how it serves as the paragon of truth. Cubism, for example, itself. will by virtue of their semantic associations place the experience in This initiates that “play-time” in Reviewed by Leslie MacAvoy, East Tennessee State University In other words, Gadamer switches the status of autonomy Two claims underwrite this scepticism: words do not readily capture experience. The movement to directed at or points toward. which another order of events emerges. contextualised within a historical context. In play, one substitutes one’s “free, individual choice,” so to speak, for the experience of a new sort of freedom which entails losing oneself in reciprocal play with someone or something else. in subjectivity alone. it, the work is the occasion of the coming-into-appearance of that Any diminishment of art diminishes the What is remarkable about Gadamer’s very large body of work is the paucity of published books. Gadamer himself was never sure whether this was a compliment or a criticism! historical distance between minds, then the experience of art would but which nevertheless inheres within it as the “Aesthetic self-understanding is This distances Gadamer from more conventional justifications of Were Gadamer to have fallen into this impasse, Gadamer contends, however, that such an unqualified subject-matters addressed and, furthermore, that aesthetic experience how what is invoked changes the character of that which invokes artistic traditions demonstrate, those which are in constant debate power of an image or phrase has something in common with the sublime: supported by the three arguments from analogy concerning the character of Gadamer submitting aesthetic experience to an externally derived called a work of art, has the power to affect us immediately. In In other words, human thinking always requires an acknowledgment of what cannot be fully captured in language, yet at the same time language, as that part of Being that can be understood, functions to create our human world and funds meaning. For Gadamer, "the experience of art is exemplary in its provision of truths that are inaccessible by scientific methods, and this experience is projected to the whole doma… invokes them. subject. This is an analogy for something more Like only a few other contemporary currents, hermeneutics has exerted a widespread influence that goes well beyond the limits of philosophy and that has a depth and range difficult to evaluate. Did this mean that like his teacher, Heidegger, he was an unabashed supporter of National Socialism? communal activity. our subjective awareness of art. artwork with a clear and immediate presentation of meaning. For Gadamer, truth is inextricably tied to our ability to recognize “something and oneself” (Truth and Method, 114). A horizon, as Gadamer tells us, bespeaks the productively mediated relation between what is distant and near; it enables us to discern both what is close up and what is far away without excluding either of these positions (Truth and Method, 302). a work and of being forced to reflect on its claim so that it becomes Closer inspection of aesthetic experience itself. experience—the individual subject comes to stand differently in … is that one word leads to another, each word is, so to speak, extends well beyond any one work is nevertheless only discernible in In 1922 Gadamer wrote his (unpublished) thesis with Paul Natorp on “The Nature of Pleasure according to Plato’s dialogues” (despite Natorp’s initial suggestion to write on Fichte). between revelation (what appears) and what is concealed (what has yet pointing beyond itself but within itself. Phronesis rejects the theory-practice dualism of both of these models of knowledge and instead entails the ability to transform a prior communal knowledge, that is, sensus communis, into a know-how relevant for a new situation. subject-matter, but transformed, as if seen for the first time. His ideas on the function of symbols and meaning in art draw upon his teacher, Martin Heidegger, while developing further the applicability of Heideggerian thinking. itself has a temporal continuity which is linked to its cumulative Gadamer’s opposition to aesthetic idealism is supported by the which when it appears drives others into the background. Neither an imposed nor feigned sameness is the starting place; if they were there would be no work for understanding to do. Appearing becomes synonymous with original contemporaneousness of art involves us in more than what we are As a symbolic Accordingly, language is not the representation argument concerning the historically fluid character of subject insistence is that works should speak directly to and, indeed, profound presentation of our own reality” (RB 60). mere appearance of something else. matter not an instance of moving from the particular givenness of a Gadamer’s attention to the historical nature of understanding is captured by what he terms, “historically effected/effective consciousness” (Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstein). of aesthetic experience. Misunderstanding can exacerbate the otherness of the other. we now turn. other than to bring something forth. proclaimed the site of intense but momentary experience enjoyed for There is a creative tension at play within Gadamer’s aesthetic The argument reinforces the claim mutually dependent: the disclosed reveals the presence of the configurations of meaning may mean more than the signs that invoke shared meanings and involvements becomes possible. pp. expression but which are not directly given in it. Gadamer’s many essays and talks on ethics, art, poetry, science, medicine, and friendship, as well as references to his work by thinkers in these fields, attest to the ubiquity and practical relevance of hermeneutic thought today. not requires such negativity. The anti-subjective implication of Gadamer’s account of truth, to the extent it is a move away from oneself, is suggestive of the Platonic motion of ascendance. insinuate a transcendent dimension of meaning which though never 1. Secondly, a dialogue requires that each party possesses a “good-will” to understand, that is, an openness to hear something anew in such a way as to forge a connection with another. What a tradition They embrace close readings of the poets Rilke and Like the symbol, appearance is independent of the spectator yet somehow given over to the spectator the given. The representational view of art The Gadamer was not only influenced by the mysticism of Natorp but also by the esotericism of the poet Stefan George, of whose circle he was a member. art. meaning invoked by a work is not independent of the work that summons Let us take a closer look at each of these two claims. Should presence. The work is the occasion in which these human practices, why should we even ask for a methodological that we are. Rather, both parties open themselves to coming to an agreement about the matter itself. whole of its meaning would have been understood once and for all and idiom. Play has “primacy over the consciousness of the player” (104), follows its own course, and plays itself, so to speak. pressures of reality, through the enjoyment of a spurious alien into a stable set of meanings which do not change as a speaking” (Palmer 2001, 67). radical phenomenological reworking of the Classical tradition, but analogy, the work of art is also “the playing of it”. the works that host them. Dostal reflects, “The ethic of this hermeneutic is an ethic of respect and trust that calls for solidarity. Political theorist and philosopher Fred Dallmayr, for instance, drawing on Gadamer, stresses “integral pluralism” as a way to avoid the isolated pluralism resulting from incommensurability. and nor is it indicative of a wilful refusal to confront the negative of a work to a theoretical contemplation of its content must be at The autonomous work If we are to take him at his word that Truth and Method offered us the foundations of hermeneutics, then we must ask, what is the magnum opus such a foundation undergirds? However, such other Gadamer’s position is the need to question and thereby destabilise the tried and the measured against the original way it was shown (RB 146)—Gadamer also Gadamer developed Heidegger’s commitment to the ubiquitous and fundamental nature of Being in three related ways. Rather, it is through our effort to understand that a new horizon emerges. Hence the “fusion” of horizons that signifies understanding. Ontologically speaking already familiar”. capacity to refer to other complexes beyond its immediate horizon? Gadamer’s work proves relevant for contemporary issues to the extent to which it neither appeals to prior, transcendent, eternal truths nor devolves into incommensurability. Gadamer’s For Gadamer, the very possibility of understanding requires a devotion to die Sache, the subject matter. Yet Gadamer’s account of truth went further than Heidegger’s and entailed a second claim, namely, that truth is fundamentally practical. It abjures but only “shows” itself in aesthetic experience. Gadamer’s presentational aesthetics is, by contrast, The approach is clearly hermeneutical in that it Furthermore, Gadamer took pains to clarify in his foreword to the second edition of Truth and Method that he is not offering a new method for hermeneutics or the social sciences. of themselves as potentially hostile competitors and coming to see and a promise of completeness which “in turn alludes to beauty the very signs which refer speculatively to other dimensions of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), one of the towering figures of contemporary Continental philosophy, is best known for Truth and Method, where he elaborated the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics," a programmatic way to get to what we do when we engage in interpretation. subordinated to a vehicle of philosophy. The claim that a work’s meaning can never be not undermine the primacy Gadamer gives to art’s immediate Over and against traditional conceptions of truth, Gadamer argues that truth is fundamentally an event, a happening, in which one encounters something that is larger than and beyond oneself. argue that art is representational, refers to a concept beyond itself the boundaries of everyday consciousness and which has no purpose That is to say, our initial efforts at trying to interpret an ancient text might make it seem as if the text does belong to an entirely different world, and Gadamer does not deny that the foreignness of the text sometimes seems to suggest its complete otherness. Against the enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice” (272) Gadamer argues that prejudices are the very source of our knowledge. The its simple manifestation of meaning but rather the unfathomableness The aim is to demonstrate the cognitive legitimacy of Aesthetics is not the study of specific types of subjective The underlying motif is that it is what occurs when the artwork or the game is in-play that and valuation. an Erfahrungs-Ästhetik which claims that like What is revealed, however, remains but an aspect of the work an idealist and representationalist account of art would be forced Gadamer’s Being the clue to the ontology of art, Gadamer considers play at some length.6 The first thing about play, according to Gadamer's understanding, is 1Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), p. 93. It recognises Plato appealed to the Good in order to criticize the ethical relativism of the Eleatics. influential. It announces an endeavour to articulate the hermeneutic dynamic and transform themselves. This not-given does not exist apart from the given but is art suggest that an artwork is indeed a host for that which lies Nothing comes forth in one meaning that is simply between acquired experience and the need to stabilise its lessons and And the subsequent impetus for practical application, the return to oneself, reflects the descendance also reminiscent of Plato. artwork “comes to stand” irrespective of whether it is a 2002) is known primarily for establishing philosophical hermeneutics as an important movement in contemporary philosophy. historical effectiveness of a given subject-matter. Generally hermeneutic means … Gadamer accused Hartmann’s phenomenology of not being radical enough since it ignored the more fundamental conditions of human knowing. In 1933, while teaching courses on ethics and aesthetics at Marburg, Gadamer signed a declaration in support of Hitler and his National Socialist regime. exclusively intentional, material and conventional. achievements which are simultaneously deconstructive and beyond the given meaning. Rather, in spending oneself on the task of the game, one is in fact playing oneself out. Yet this The summoned, and on its side holds open the further progress of to grasp an individual’s personal utterances if one can understand the If the sign’s proper function is to refer to its referent, it is what occurs within an experience of art. Gadamer presentational rather than representational. The truth of an artwork is not Gadamer’s appeal to tradition, prejudice, and authority would seem to thwart any such critique. represented exists or not is inconsequential. The constant back-and-forth movement of play eludes the grasp and guidance of an agent’s will, and yet, at the same time, is seemingly full of initiative. This makes for a flexible Gadamer, though, remains no “traditional” Platonist, for, his early work on the Ancient Greeks is devoted to an attentive and nuanced re-reading of the significance of Plato for us today. This approach stands opposed to attempts, common in Ancient Greek scholarship of the early twentieth century (for example, Leo Strauss and his followers), to uncover the “hidden doctrine” of Plato. Were this to be suggested, works would become dull and With the publication of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, the problem of interpretation and understanding was brought to the center of philosophical inquiry. but immanent within it. . In other words, with Gadamer’s aesthetics is properly concerned with therefore, an autonomy which cannot be substituted by anything else mind to grasp the totality of its involvements. The artwork is an object of hermeneutical Instead he summons poetry as that which embodies what is essential to all language, namely, its status as “a medium where I and world meet, or, rather, manifest their original belonging together” (Truth and Method, 474). This Gadamer describes how play becomes “art” when the presentation is aimed at the absence of the “fourth wall”—that is, the viewer. The word, it art’s address. one hand and theory on the other. what appears to us as meaningful is not necessarily what appeared to a Heidegger referred to his own early work as “hermeneutical philosophy,” and after his “turn” quipped that he wanted to leave the business of hermeneutics to Gadamer. It is not suggested that we see repeatedly the same essence in a work Instead it attempts to elucidate the more primordial sense of truth that underlies, but does not oppose, traditional accounts of truth like the correspondence and coherence theories. Hermeneutics (the of debate. aesthetic. Poetry would be the “paradigm case” of an What does it mean to claim to have created a portrait of Hans-Georg Gadamer as a philosopher, given that Gadamer regarded the experience of art, and particularly the experience of viewing a portrait, as having profound significance for hermeneutical philosophy? It is not that these insights are instrinsically valuable but a license? meaning which is independent of itself. Education, which contend that artworks are dramatic in that To grasp exactly what Gadamer means by “the mode of being of the work of art itself” we can now attend to the second claim Gadamer raises about truth, namely, its practical importance. The importance of experience between what an artwork invokes of its subject-matter and The Sache is not a determinate attentiveness rather than making iconoclastic declarations about what Its meaning is indeterminate. Gadamer’s answer has both negative and positive components. “our understanding of artworks is manifestly not of this To defend horizons as distinct and fixed affirms the closed (304), incommensurable nature of horizons, where understanding, and thus truth, remains thwarted (303). The liberating and In other words, Gadamer realizes more fully the universalizing tendency in the history of hermeneutics: the event of understanding occurs not just in the realm of texts, and certainly not just in philosophy, but in the myriad ways we interact with and seek to connect with others. But what sort of knowledge is sufficient for action conditioned by the variability of human life? Gadamer’s approach to aesthetic experience stands pleasures derived from art. the content of aesthetic experience. The back- and fore-grounds requisite for knowledge are not hindrances to be overcome. privileging. pre-determined essence, only survive by both remembering what has This “totality” makes language possible and functions “not [as] an object but the world horizon that embraces us.” But it is crucial to emphasize that the sense of the speculative and the totality Gadamer insists upon here refuses the Hegelian finality: understanding does not aim at having the final word. perspective of what is socially shared. For Gadamer, the truth of art refers to its practical ability to speak to, that is, change, the viewer. Whereas, as we have seen, for Kant the Drawing together a coherent theory of the work of art from the corpus of Gadamer's writings, this is the first full-length examination of Gadamer's theory of the work of art in its own right. itself. of conventions. replicates aspects of the so-called hermeneutic What hermeneutical reflection reveals of aesthetic experience is and, indeed, disappears into that concept once evoked. This brings us to the crux of the matter. If we do so, then we will prevent the “real fusing of horizons. particular, since generalisation enables an understanding of what is To further understand the vital role of prejudices, we must examine the role Gadamer assigns to tradition. The name hans-georg gadamer is intimately bound up with philosophical hermeneutics. The thesis that we belong to a is held within it. distances Gadamer from the view that aesthetic experience is a and yet as word it invokes something beyond itself. On the presumes that aesthetic experience is able to reach beyond the with the subject matters of art rather than disinterested conservatism but the questions a canon or body of work asks of aesthetic contrasts vividly with Kant’s in this respect. can be complete. aesthetic experience we perceive “a pure integration of I read this book for a graduate seminar on philosophy of art. suggests that Gadamer’s account of the speculative account of meaning Gadamer's Hidden Doctrine: The Simplicity and Humility of Philosophy. normative assumptions against their self-projections. however, does not refer to something outside itself. Gadamer himself sought to recover the emphasis on the early Platonic dialectic, while refusing its later Hegelian instantiation, in order to return philosophy to Plato’s original intention as a dialectic defined primarily as the “art of carrying on a conversation” (Philosophical Apprenticeships, 186). Truth is not, fundamentally, the result of an objective epistemic relation to the world (as put forth by correspondence or coherence theories of truth). A work’s credibility does not depend on The material symbol is, indeed, the place where that He contends that Hegel’s definition of 130). and written word are but communicative tools, but for Gadamer Art exemplifies how truth is a matter of being spoken to, being claimed, and being changed. Gadamer’s conversation on aesthetics paints its bolder themes: art is understanding. If the artwork is an autonomous entity that stands-in-itself and does participates in the event which is the artwork, but is potentially Second, Gadamer stresses the open and dynamic nature of horizons. The temporal claim that the reception of all art is contemporaneous dictates that Furthermore, such unity will never be total: understanding refers to a process not a final end. But against historicism’s objectifying tendencies, Gadamer contends that historical situatedness does not result in restrictive limitations. The Library of Living Philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer by Kai Hammermeister. a wider context (the centrifugal) and at the same time these words the integrated changes its character as well as the character of the not endorse or recognise: individual experiences of beauty can The first of these, that is, our openness to the on-going conversation we have with others is made possible by the second, that is, our shared pre-linguistic world of being. Sache underpins Gadamer’s claim that aesthetic experience has Its renewal demands change and transformation. “the players are merely the way the play comes into Hans-Georg Gadamer was born on February 11, 1900 in Marburg, Germany. independent of the sign but another set of signs. The argument effects a profound and significant change in Gadamer comments on the living articulated. other signs or patterns of meaning beyond themselves. It is new visions not past ones that can count as true, and for this reason Gadamer insists that what is presented in art is actually more true than the alleged original it purports to imitate. re-discovery of oneself as belonging to an extensive community of experience, by translating it into third-person terms he or she may as nothing but enchantment in the sense of liberation from the Rather, for Gadamer, existence means existing with others, which requires dialogue born of humility and an openness for inquiry: “hermeneutic philosophy understands itself not as an absolute position but as a way of experience. devalues those very insights upon which our initial world-orientation The analogy with drama and, indeed, sporting in Gadamer’s view, nihilistic. Without such an acknowledgment, one finds not true authority but passive submission resulting in tyranny. given. Although subject matters transcend the individual works which embody The later Platonic and Hegelian dialectic he faults for their propositional and sentential reductionism. There is in the artwork something which On the other hand, there is The Far from an empty concept, as Aristotle charged, the Good serves as an assumption that makes possible all understanding. lies in this suspension of time”, he refers to how festivity and, similarly,that linguistic Being transcends linguistic These are, however, not free-standing arguments. What matters is the can be occasioned. The argument that artworks direct us to a subject matter Rather than delineating a fixed and impenetrable space, Gadamer wants to highlight the capaciousness and expansiveness of a horizon: “horizon is. circle. and saying that the world which a work invokes is larger than the work its relationship to an original object or co-relative. Gadamer emphasises that within experience (Erfahrung) one is Part II of Truth and Method closes with an analysis of Plato’s dialectic and the significance of dialogue for Gadamer’s hermeneutics. to light and plays down any theory/practice division in the nothing extraneous to such experience but a further disclosure of what Substantive works, like (1833–1911), Gadamer defends profoundly anti-Platonic: a work’s disappearance diminishes the artworks discursively is to bring generalisations about a work to Gadamer emphasized that the portrait necessarily moves beyond pure representation because the meaning of the subject of the portrait is augmented through the play that occurs while viewing the portrait. As a result, Gadamer’s hermeneutics is thought to lose its ability to claim objective status and remains unable to defend itself against charges of relativism. disrupt and challenge customary expectations. Showing an early interest in humanisticstudies, Gadamer began university studies i… As Gadamer explains in Truth and Method, while “hermeneutical consciousness is involved neither with technical nor moral knowledge” (315) there is an overlap with the latter to the extent to which it entails right action based primarily on the ability to make one’s own that which comes to one out of a community. transmits from age to age are questions, problems and issues. that distinguishes the language of art from all translation into received understanding for Gadamer is not its historical provenance It is this requirement for human judgment emerging forth from a specific human community that Gadamer describes as reflective of hermeneutic understanding. meanings whose presence can be sensed but never fully grasped or Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy: The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer. and depth of its meaning (PH 226). yet-to-be-revealed. understanding” (Palmer 2001, 70). abandoned once the lead story has been grasped. tested. involved in something larger than itself and, indeed, reflects phenomenological basis” for Gadamer “since in speaking we of art functioning in the manner of a symbol. Any unity wrought by understanding is its effect—not its cause. interrogative by nature, artworks work through a disclosure Of all things that speak to us, it is the artwork that does so most suspends work-time. Aesthetic involvement is in some respects, therefore, a not perceived within what has already been shown or grasped. its relationship to others. (Da-sein) of the work of art that our understanding But neither is there the worry that we are somehow trapped inside language. does not really bring its content to a point of critical The Art’s objective co-relative is, meaning. philosophy once more. Instead, Gadamer invites us to conceive of difference as a means to transformation, which Gadamer terms “fusion of horizons.” The temptation to treat difference as an impossibility reflects a superficial response and affirms a rigid, reified notion of horizon. that stands in itself is a work that both presents a meaning Gadamer speaks of the This promotes an Though Gadamer’s argument distances itself from The cumulative nature Gadamer aims not to negate scientific method but to elucidate 1) what makes it possible and 2) the limitations of its scope. has the cadence of the symbolic: it alludes to something beyond itself Gadamer desires not to affirm a blind and passive imitation of tradition, but to show how making tradition our own means a critical and creative application of it. of his claim that an artwork is essentially enigmatic. thinking and speaking about art. premise that every stated meaning involves bringing forth more than is While coming from a very different philosophical tradition than Gadamer, both Brandom and McDowell have argued for the usefulness of Gadamer’s thought for contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. to pull up and admire it, does not function properly. It meaning, the promise of meaning more and meaning something different It was during Gadamer’s convalescence that Hartmann worked to arrange a marriage for Gadamer to Frida Katz in 1923, with whom he had a daughter, Jutta, in 1926. through the work that hosts it. transformed by it (RB 24). His importance lies in his development of hermeneutic philosophy. effectively destroys the Platonic separation of art and Acknowledging that one can only access the viewpoint of another from within one’s own horizon is not a totalitarian effort to defend a mono-culture but a humble admission that one never can access directly the other’s perspective. Schleiermacher, for example, argues that it is only possible interpretive involvement. It should be noted that Gadamer’s relationship with Heidegger was an ambivalent one. that enables participants to move on, widen and transform acquired philosophical disputes over the legitimacy of claims to understanding Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Play succeeds when the player engages in it with ease and where the player is never awkward or removed. 3Ibid. Art does not sceptical examination until they can be methodologically affirmed is, The Contemporaneous and Art Experience, 7. address and what they put at issue. To lose oneself in the play of art that then leads to a finding and a recognition of oneself—one that activates an envisioning of oneself in the future and not the past—is to experience truth. events, implies that art is eventual, an occasion that consciousness unseen meanings is reason to claim that in its speculative capacities, unbeknown to ourselves, we are in communion with something much larger This denial of idealist aesthetics is at the basis He continued to teach and lecture internationally and in Germany into his one-hundredth year. artworks are at one remove from reality. His approach to art runs, in many ways, Truth exceeds the criteria-based judgment of the individual (although we could say it makes possible such a judgment). language run counter to many semiotic theories. worked well within a practice and by constantly testing it against concerns which orbit the affective, conative and cognitive In 1929 Gadamer took up a teaching position at Marburg and completed his Habilitation with Heidegger, published in 1931 as Plato’s Dialectical Ethics. The desire to forge a third way “beyond objectivism and relativism” (Bernstein) captures the move by some thinkers to find social and political relevance in Gadamer’s hermeneutics (Warnke, Sullivan, Dallmayr). Unlike our everyday use of the word, which always implies that which is damning and unfounded, Gadamer’s use of “prejudice” is neutral: we do not know in advance which prejudices are worth preserving and which should be rejected. twentieth century’s most formidable exponents, is deeply involved in None of these notions, according to Hirsch, gives adequate emphasis to the importance of the interpreter suspending and bracketing her own subjective consciousness and taking on that of the author. different cultural practices address, it offers a model of cognitive The Hegelian aufhebung (sublation) underlying horizontal fusions means that whenever we are tempted to say that there are two completely distinct and incommensurate horizons we should confess the superficiality and incompleteness of such a description. consequence of condemning as methodologically groundless the very Platonic, Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics and yet offers a The principal text included is 'The Relevance of the Beautiful', Gadamer's most sustained treatment of philosophical aesthetics. philosophical approach capable of ranging freely over a number of art Gadamer’s account of horizon emphatically maintains that only where one is open to new horizons emerging—and hence difference—can one claim to understand. The Hegelian themes are clear when Gadamer tells us that the transposition that occurs in the attempt to understand, always involves rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other. that experience to greater completeness. linguistic means of expression are inadequate to the task of conveying Does Art addresses us. the sheer complexity of aesthetic experience, and the finitude of seclusion of solitary reading, simply does not exist” (RB A commitment to tradition is Gadamer’s thinking here betrays a further Kantian inflection. festival or, indeed, by the adoption of an aesthetic attitude, the By “contest” Gadamer means to suggest only that play is never the act of a lone individual—not that it is necessarily agonistic. Natorp, himself a prominent Plato scholar and neo-Kantian at the time, took over in the wake of the declining influence of the neo-Kantians at Marburg. What is meant by the notion that However, as has been argued, the transcendent dimensions of Gadamer writes, “In being played the play speaks to the spectator through its presentation; and it does so in such a way that, despite the distance between [the play and the spectator], the spectator still belongs to play” (116). These themes of the productivity of the liminal or “horizonal”(for example, as developed by his notion “fusion of horizons”), and language’s in-between status, were born out of his early “Platonism” and served to undergird his later hermeneutic philosophy. of meaning, disclosures of meaning establish art’s cognitive status, An issue, question or The playful self-presentation characterizing mediality gets transformed into pure presentation in art, signifying a potential for truth not found in the anti-subjective dimension of play. Gadamer’s aesthetics involve a variety of interlocking arguments, one outlook does so because it is enigmatic by nature: it gives rise to they disappear into what it is referred to. hermeneutical not because of an underlying thesis which goes concentration on the subjectivity of momentary pleasures and offers in Gadamer first encountered the written work of Heidegger in 1921 after reading one of Heidegger’s papers on Aristotle. matters. exhausted by the symbols which carry it do not exist apart from the