## 1. Art as Interlocutor



Gadamer's aesthetics fosters an attentiveness towards the
mystery of the given and its unexpected folds of meaningfulness.
Gadamer's arguments are varied, ushering the reader towards an
aesthetic attentiveness rather than making iconoclastic declarations
about what the aesthetic is. They embrace close readings of the poets
Rilke and Celan as well as broad strategic manoeuvres which defend the
cognitive status of aesthetic and hermeneutical judgements.
Hermeneutics (the art and discipline of interpretation), of which
Gadamer is one of the twentieth century's most formidable
exponents, is deeply involved in philosophical disputes over the
legitimacy of claims to understanding in the visual and literary arts.
It does not oppose "scientific" modes of knowledge but
resists their cultural privileging. For Gadamer aesthetics stands on
experientially accumulative modes of learning (*Bildung*) which
orientate and ground sound judgement in the arts. Conversation and its
unpredictable turns is, appropriately, a central thread within
hermeneutical aesthetics. A late exchange between Carsten Dutt and
Gadamer (Dutt 1993, 61-67) offers a gentle point of entry into
how philosophical hermeneutics approaches art and aesthetic
experience.



Gadamer insists that a picture or image that is worthy of being called
a work of art, has the power to affect us immediately. (GW 8, 374).
Art addresses us. The claim that a work of art "says something
to someone" (Palmer 2001, 70) alludes to the surprise, shock
and, sometimes, dismay at being directly affected by what is in a work
and of being forced to reflect on its claim so that it becomes more
understandable to both oneself and others. Gadamer argues that
"the experience of art is an experience of meaning, and as such
this experience is something that is brought about by
understanding" (Palmer 2001, 70). To this extent, then,
"aesthetics is absorbed into hermeneutics" (Palmer 2001,
76). This distances Gadamer from more conventional justifications of
the aesthetic as offering a special kind of pleasure. The essay
"The Play of Art" suggests that "the mere
onlooker who indulges in aesthetic or cultural enjoyment from a safe
distance, whether in the theatre, the concert hall, or the seclusion
of solitary reading, simply does not exist" (RB 129-130).
A person who takes himself to be such an onlooker, misunderstands
himself. "Aesthetic self-understanding is indulging in escapism
if it regards the encounter with the work of art as nothing but
enchantment in the sense of liberation from the pressures of reality
through the enjoyment of a spurious freedom" (RB 130). These
remarks divorce Gadamer's thinking from Dilthey's
*Erlebnis-Asthetik* in which artworks are proclaimed the
site of intense but momentary experience enjoyed for their own sake
independent of their cognitive content. The hedonistic personalisation
of aesthetic response has two alienating consequences. On the one
hand, the judgement that aesthetic experience is purely subjective
severs the individual from communal networks of meaning capable of
illuminating personal experience from the perspective of what is
socially shared. On the other, attempts to render subjective
experience academically legitimate by presenting it as a social
product further estrange the individual from his experience, by
translating it into third-person terms he or she may not endorse or
recognise: individual experiences of beauty can suddenly become
embodiments of class prejudice. In contrast to Dilthey
(1833-1911), Gadamer defends an
*Erfahrung-Asthetik,* which claims that like significant
life-experiences, our relationships with artworks are deep and
ongoing: we revisit them, and, in doing so, understanding is
continually renegotiated. Gadamer speaks of the
"interminability" of such experience (*die
Unabschliessbarkeit aller Erfahrung*, Palmer 2001, 66). It is
forever open because of its cognitive movement. The cumulative nature
of such experience is an instance of *Bildung* (formation and
learning through experience) and is, as such, a living process of
becoming (*Werden*).



Gadamer's aesthetics is, in many respects, strictly anti-Kantian
and yet is influenced by Kant's insights. Regarding its
anti-Kantian aspects, it abjures phenomenalist disinterestedness for
the sake of phenomenological involvement. It is also anti-idealist. It
refuses the idea that in aesthetic experience we perceive "a
pure integration of meaning." His aesthetics is consequently
anti-representationalist. There is in the artwork something which
Gadamer describes as its resistance to integration, to being reduced
to a concept (Palmer 2001, 25). He contends that Hegel's
definition of the beautiful as the "sensuous appearing of the
Idea" presumes that aesthetic experience is able to reach beyond
the specific type of appearance to its underlying idea. In this model,
aesthetic experience becomes the expectation of a semantic fulfilment.
Once the idea behind the appearance is grasped, "the whole of
its meaning would have been understood once and for all and thus
'brought in to our possession so to speak'" (Palmer
2001, 71). The work of art becomes a carrier of meaning to be
abandoned once the lead story has been grasped. But, Gadamer argues,
"our understanding of artworks is manifestly not of this type.
Everyone knows this from his or her own encounters with art, from
concerts, visits to museums, and from his or her reading"
(Palmer 2001, 71). This denial of idealist aesthetics is at the basis
of his claim that an artwork is essentially enigmatic.



Gadamer's opposition to aesthetic idealism is supported by the
claim that art "cannot be satisfactorily translated in terms of
conceptual knowledge" (RB 69). A work does not simply refer to a
meaning which is independent of itself. Its meaning is not to be
grasped in such a way that that it can be simply transferred to
another idiom. Indeed, because it invites many interpretations, an
artwork acquires an ideality of possible meanings which cannot be
obviated by any possible realisation (RB 146). The work has,
therefore, an autonomy which cannot be substituted by anything else
or, to put it another way, the work is always in excess of its
readings, its meanings are always more than its interpretations. This
is congruent with Gadamer's theses that Being exceeds knowing
and, similarly, that linguistic Being transcends linguistic
consciousness.



An important consequence arises from this, namely, Gadamer conceives
art as presentational (*darstellen*) rather than
representational (*vorstellen*). In the essay "Word and
Picture" (1992), he claims that he tries "to undermine the
idea that the picture is a mere copy" (GW 8, 374). As a work
does not represent anything other than itself, the meanings it carries
can only come to the fore in its self-presentation. Yet the emergent
meaning is never given in its entirety nor obviated by any
realization. This is consistent with the *eventual* nature of
art. "When a work of art truly takes hold of us, it is not an
object that stands opposite us which we look at in hope of seeing
through it to an intended conceptual meaning ... The work is an
*Ereigniss*--an event that 'appropriates us'
to itself. It jolts us, it knocks us over and sets up a world of its
own, into which we are drawn" (Palmer 2001, 71). What is
revealed, however, remains but an aspect of the work, which when it
appears, drives others into the background. Disclosure and hiddenness
are not contraries in Gadamer's aesthetics, but mutually
dependent: the disclosed reveals the presence of the undisclosed in
the disclosed. "It is in the sheer being there
(*Da-sein*) of the work of art that our understanding
experiences the depths and the unfathomability of its meaning"
(Palmer 2001, 72). The claim that a work's meaning can never be
completely fulfilled is supported by a linguistic analogy concerning
the speculative. Art has a language in that its signs and symbols
function like semantic units. Gadamer comments on the living
virtuality of meaning contained in each word, as an inner dimension of
multiplication. Accordingly, language is not the representation
(*mimesis*) of a set of pre-given meanings but a "coming
to language" of a constant reserve of meanings (Palmer 2001,
67). The finitude of linguistic expression is such that no utterance
can be complete. Nothing comes forth in one meaning that is simply
offered us (PH 103). "The only thing that constitutes language
... is that one word leads to another, each word is, so to speak,
summoned, and on its side holds open the further progress of
speaking" (Palmer 2001, 67). No meaning can be completely
revealed. Because we can re-visit artworks repeatedly, the meaning
disclosed initially can be expanded or changed. The partial nature of
any given meaning-disclosure *enhances* rather than diminishes
the possibility of meaning within a work. "The work of art
consists in its being open in a limitless way to ever new integrations
of meaning" (PH 98) and furthermore, "the inexhaustibility
that distinguishes the language of art from all translation into
concepts rests on an excess of meaning" (PH 102).



Gadamer's conversation on aesthetics paints its bolder themes:
art is interrogative by nature, artworks *work* through a
disclosure of meaning, disclosures of meaning establish art's
cognitive status, the cognitive content of art is partly intelligible
and partly enigmatic, and artworks are always open to
re-interpretation. These are, however, not free-standing arguments.
Gadamer's position is hermeneutical not because of an underlying
thesis which goes unremarked but because it is informed by a
constellation of various arguments which shape the central position.
To the broader arguments we now turn.


## 2. The "Substance" of Aesthetic Subjectivity



Gadamer's determination to reveal the cognitive content of
aesthetic experience requires him to expose the ontological grounding
of subjectivity. To approach artworks solely on the basis of
subjective responses to them or, to read them only in terms of an
artist's intentionality, is, for Gadamer, always to miss the
point. Hermeneutically speaking, the philosophical focus should be on
what shapes subjectivity and guides its expectations. This initiates a
speculative refiguring of aesthetic subjectivity. In *Truth and
Method* he writes,



> 
> All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pre-given, what
> with Hegel we call "substance," because it underlies all
> subjective intentions and actions, and hence both prescribes and
> limits every possibility for understanding any tradition whatsoever in
> its historical alterity. This almost defines the aim of philosophical
> hermeneutics: its task is to retrace the path of Hegel's
> phenomenology of mind until we discover in all that is subjective the
> substantiality that determines it. (TM 302)
> 



In his essay "Image and Gesture" Gadamer elucidates
substance as follows:



> 
> "Substance" is understood as something that supports us,
> although it does not emerge into the light of reflective
> consciousness, it is something that can never be fully articulated,
> although it is absolutely necessary for the existence of all clarity,
> consciousness, expression and communication. (RB 78)
> 



Uncovering the ontological foundations of aesthetic experience does
not undermine the primacy Gadamer gives to art's immediate
address. The aim is to demonstrate the cognitive legitimacy of
subjective experience by revealing how aesthetic experience is both
involved in something larger than itself and, indeed, reflects
(*speculum*) that larger actuality within itself. The ability
of aesthetic experience to express trans-individual phenomenological
structures explains what is meant by substance and his speculative
attitude towards it. Gadamer's aesthetics is properly concerned
with *experiencing* what underlies its more abstract concepts.
This is not a matter of naming or describing the reality which
manifests itself in aesthetic experience but of trying to say
something about the experience an individual has of it.
Gadamer's reflections commence with the immediacy of art's
claim, its contemporaneous nature, and then explore what influences
the experience of that claim. The aim is seemingly paradoxical: to
understand that which shapes, lies beyond, but only
"shows" itself in aesthetic experience.


## 3. The Contemporaneous and Art Experience



Of all things that speak to us, it is the artwork that does so most
directly (PH 95). The phenomenological immediacy of art which
initiates Gadamer's hermeneutic inquiry into aesthetic
experience may not seem a promising starting point from a hermeneutic
perspective. It declares an unconventional hermeneutical approach to
art: "if we define the task of hermeneutics as the bridging of
personal or historical distance between minds, then the experience of
art would seem to fall entirely outside its [hermeneutics']
provenance" (PH 95/97). However, Gadamer does not define
hermeneutics this way. It is not the reconstruction of artistic
intention which forms the object of his inquiry but the question of
what informs the immediacy of an artwork's claim. The artwork is
an object of hermeneutical investigation not because of any provenance
in psychological events but because of the fact that it *says*
something to us (PH 98). Hermeneutic involvement is required because
the meaning transmitted can never be fully complete and unambiguous.
It demands interpretive involvement. Hermeneutics is required wherever
there is a restricted transposition of thought. The historical
finitude of meaning and the fact that no meaning can be given
completely necessitates hermeneutical involvement in our experience of
an artwork. The task of interpretation is to probe the possible
meanings held within the experience of a work, and by drawing on them,
to bring that experience to greater completeness.



It should be noted that Gadamer's talk of integrating the alien
into what is understood as meaningful is not to be grasped as
subsumption within the same. Assimilation is not the equivalent of
translating the alien into a stable set of meanings which do not
change as a consequence of that subsumption. Integration implies a
*reciprocity*: the integrated changes its character as well as
the character of the whole within which integration occurs.
Furthermore, whatever is given in subjective consciousness as
contemporaneous has dimensions of meaning that transcend what that
consciousness initially grasps. Gadamer is concerned to probe the
ontic dimensions of aesthetic experience. The thesis that experience
of the contemporaneousness of art involves us in more than what we are
presently aware of (i.e., the "substance" of underlying
and on-going trans-individual linguistic and cultural practices) is
supported by the three arguments from analogy concerning the character
of play, the festival, and the symbol.


## 4. Play



Gadamer's discussion of the relation between art and play should
not be equated with any argument that art is a trivial game or
pastime. He follows the precedent of Schiller's *Letters on
Aesthetic Education*, which contend that artworks are dramatic in
that *they put something into play*. The underlying motif is
that aesthetic consciousness is far from self-contained but is rather
drawn into the play of something much larger than what is evident to
subjective consciousness. The analogy with drama and, indeed, sporting
events, implies that art is eventual, an occasion that consciousness
surrenders to and participates in. Spectatorial participation (like
much art research) demands immersion in that which cannot be fully
anticipated or controlled by individual consciousness. The game and
the artwork are both forms of self-movement which require that the
spectator play along with what they bring into being (RB 23). Gadamer
asserts the "primacy of the play" over consciousness:
"the players are merely the way the play comes into
presentation" (TM 92, 98). Participation takes the individual
players out of themselves. The individual subject is that upon which
success, satisfaction, or loss is imposed from within the game.
By analogy, the work of art is also "the playing of it."
An autonomous event comes into being, something comes to stand in its
own right which "changes all that stand before it" (RB
25). Like the ancient *theoros*, the spectator not only
participates in the event which is the artwork but is potentially
transformed by it (RB 24).



The game analogy also serves to undermine approaches to art which are
exclusively intentional, material, and conventional. First: the
subjectivity of an artist cannot be an appropriate interpretive
starting point. Grasping what transpires in a player's
consciousness does not reveal the nature of the game being played.
Reconstructing the conscious life of an artist, *pace*
Dilthey's hermeneutics of *nacherleben* (re-living), may
reveal interesting aspects of an artist's intentions, but it
does not uncover what informs that subjectivity. Second: as with the
game, art is not to be understood by reference to its tools and
equipment alone. Art, no doubt, requires materials and an
appreciation of how a specific tool might be used. Yet neither game
nor art is constituted by its equipment. Third: comprehending a game
or an artwork requires an appreciation of the appropriate rules or
conventions. What constitutes fair or foul play depends upon a set of
pre-understood principles just as what is esteemed excellent in art
requires normative expectancies of appraisal. Yet art's vitality
clearly does not reside merely in the following of conventions.



The overall argument is not that a game or an artwork cannot be
reduced to intention, material, or convention but rather that each of
these elements comes into their own when taken up within the
*playing* of the game or in the *practice* which is art.
It is the playing that draws spectator, player, intention, equipment,
and convention into the one event. This promotes an interactive view
of art as a communicative event. It lends a dialogical dimension to
art. An artwork involves more than one voice as, indeed, the word
*inter-*pretation implies. Furthermore, the conception of art
as an event requires a different ontological structure to those
standard accounts of aesthetic experience grounded in subjectivity
alone. An artwork is not an object completely independent of the
spectator yet somehow given over to the spectator for his or her
personal enjoyment. To the contrary, the game analogy suggests that
the act of spectatorship contributes to enhancing the being of the
artwork by bringing what is at play within it to fuller realization.
The spectator just as much as the artist plays a crucial role in
developing the subject-matters that art activates. The aesthetic
spectator is swept up by her experience of art, absorbed in its play,
and potentially transformed by that which spectatorship helps
constitute. Though Gadamer's argument distances itself from
traditional subject-object paradigms, it does retain certain features
of Kant's aesthetics. In other words, Gadamer's engagement
with Kantian aesthetics is a complicated matter. In *Truth and
Method*, Gadamer's tone vis-a-vis Kant's claims in the
*Critique of Judgment* is at times polemical; however, his
reading of Kant is not simply dismissive and critical but also
involves creatively reworking many of Kant's insights. For
example, whereas Kant attributes a non-purposive rationality to the
aesthetic attitude, Gadamer attributes it to the playful process of
art practice itself. Both art and the game share a to-and-fro movement
not tied to any specific goal other than to fulfil themselves for
their own sake (TM 103): no one knows how a game will end and no one
knows to what end an artwork works (Lawn 2006, 91). However, what is
clear is that it is what occurs when the artwork or the game is
in-play that matters. Often contrary to their own willing and doing,
the spectator is taken over by a substantial and consequential event
that transcends the boundaries of everyday consciousness and which has
no purpose other than to bring something forth.



Perhaps the most important difference between Kant's aesthetics
and Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics is the latter's
claim that art communicates truth. In the *Critique of
Judgment*, Kant argues that aesthetic ideas elude conceptual
determination and linguistic capture. Such claims resonate with
Gadamer's view of art, as he contends that an artwork's
meaning cannot be conceptually exhaused. In other words, the artwork
always has an excess of meaning. However, unlike Kant, Gadamer affirms
that in our expeience of art, we are confronted with truths that have
the potential to foster greater self- and world-understanding. In
short, Gadamer maintains precisely what Kant denies - namely,
Gadamer claims that art is *not separated* from truth and
knowledge but rather our experience of art as event discloses truth.
As Daniel L. Tate observes, Gadamer parts ways with Kant by insisting
that "the experience of art attests to a *truth* that
cannot be exhaustively presented in terms of definitive
knowledge" (Tate 2009, 292). Another key difference between
Gadamer's and Kant's accounts is Gadamer's
thematization of the spectator's *active* role. Gadamer
stresses the active role of the spectator in his 1980 essay
"Intuition and Vividness" (in RB, GW8) which can be
understood as a further development of his reflections on spectatorial
engagement in *Truth and Method*. In "Intuition and
Vividness," written twenty years after the publication of
*Truth and Method*, Gadamer reworks Kantian insights regarding
the formative or productive role of the imagination into his own
account of the spectator's *creative* and *active*
participation in the artwork's coming to presence. For instance,
he claims that when the spectator lingers with an artwork, her
imagination synthesizes the intuitions in which the presentation of a
meaningful whole emerges as a formed image. While this formed image is
brought into relation with the understanding and incites thought,
neither it nor the entire formative process is determined by given
concepts; rather, as Tate points out, the formed image that comes to
stand is *originally* constructed by the imagination (Tate
2009, 292). The formed image enables engaged spectators to make
connections and draw conclusions that exceed their present experience.
As a result, art has the ability to present us with future, unrealized
possibilities. Gadamer's creative reworking of Kantian
imagination and aesthetic ideas underscores both the creative and
formative abilities of the imagination vis-a-vis our experience of art
and, importantly, the power of art's truths -
"truths that disclose the finitude of our being and our need for
others. In the dynamic, participatory event that art is, we are
invited - even provoked - to imagine ourselves, others,
and our present world otherwise, which is to imagine (and perhaps
even hope for) a different (and better) future" (Nielsen 2023,
38).


## 5. The Festival



Conventional accounts of aesthetic experience stress its intense and
individuating nature (*Erlebnis*). Yet despite its intimacy,
Gadamer emphasizes that within experience (*Erfahrung*) one is
always participating, perhaps unwittingly, in something beyond
oneself. Aesthetic involvement is in some respects, therefore, a
communal activity. The analogy between aesthetic experience and the
festival or festive celebration is telling.



> 
> Work is something that separates and divides us. For all the
> cooperation necessitated by joint enterprise and the division of labor
> in our productive activity, we are still divided as individuals as far
> as our day to day purposes are concerned. Festive celebration, on the
> other hand, is clearly distinguished by the fact that here we are not
> primarily separated but rather gathered together. (RB 40)
> 



Gadamer's thinking here betrays a further Kantian inflection.
The Kantian conception of aesthetic pleasure, as a variety of
experience which arises only where the egotistical interests that
constitute the commerce of everyday life are not in play, suggests the
possibility of a community forming around shared non-hostile
pleasures. Gadamer's account of aesthetic experience is not
concerned with a putative kingdom-to-come but with rediscovering and
forging the communality that we are. Despite this difference,
aesthetic experience establishes for both thinkers a meditative space
in and through which something can be occasioned. The underlying point
remains. Whereas for Kant it is a change in the disposition of
*subjective* consciousness (i.e., its adoption of an aesthetic
attitude) that initiates a better disposition towards the community,
for Gadamer it is the participation in a *trans-subjective
event* that effects a change in subjective dispositions towards
the community.



When Gadamer argues that "the mystery of festive celebration
lies in this suspension of time," he refers to how festivity
suspends work-time (RB 59). This initiates that festival or
"fullfilled" time in which another order of events emerges (RB 42). It
is in such time that an artwork "comes to stand"
irrespective of whether it is a painting, drama, or symphony. The
festive "represents a genuine creation: something drawn from
within ourselves takes shape before our eyes in a form that we
recognise and experience as a more profound presentation of our own
reality" (RB 60). This distances Gadamer from the view that
aesthetic experience is a solitary subject's personal response
to an artwork. In the festive--an analogy for the communal
dimensions of aesthetic experience--the individual subject comes
to stand differently in its relationship to others. Just as the
artwork comes to stand in the festival, so too does the artwork bring
its spectators to stand as a community: "in the festive the
communal spirit that supports us all and transcends each of us
individually" discloses the real power of both the festive
and the work of art (RB 63). The festival occasions individuals
surpassing their everyday view of themselves as potentially hostile
competitors and coming to see themselves as a community formed around
a shared interest in what the artwork brings forth. This is an analogy
for something more fundamental.



Instrumentalist conceptions of language persuade us that the spoken
and written word are but communicative tools, but for Gadamer
participation in language acknowledges that an individual is located
within a substantive horizon of meanings which transcends subjective
consciousness. Pragmatic concerns encourage the forgetting of such
interconnectedness but when such individualism is suspended by the
festival or, indeed, by the adoption of a hermeneutically-attuned
aesthetic attitude, the re-discovery of oneself as belonging to an
extensive community of shared meanings and involvements becomes
possible. The artwork's communicative capacity awakens the
realization that in as much as I understand myself as being addressed,
I must acknowledge that I already belong to something larger than
myself. The artwork *festivises*: it reveals our personal
indebtedness to past and future communities of meaning. The thesis
that we belong to a hermeneutic collective which is the effective
underpinning of art's ability to communicate is further
elaborated in Gadamer's discussion of the symbol.


## 6. The Symbol



A discussion of the symbol forms the third aspect of Gadamer's
case that aesthetic experience involves an *ex-stasis* of the
aesthetic subject. It provides a further analogue for the speculative
dimension of aesthetic experience. The word "symbol" is a
Greek term for a token of remembrance (*tessera hospitalis*)
that could be broken in two so that should a descendent of a former
guest enter his house, the co-joined pieces would kindle into an act
of recognition. (RB 31). The symbol connotes (explicitly) what we
recognise implicitly (RB 31). It is associated with the fragmentary
and a promise of completeness which "in turn alludes to beauty
and the potentially whole and holy order of things" (RB 32). The
symbol is associated, then, with notions of repetition and the hope
for an abundance of meaning. Its connection with the speculative is
best appreciated by reference to the sign.



If the sign's proper function is to refer to its referent, it is
self-cancelling. The road sign that is so attractive that it distracts
from the danger it refers to and causes a new one by prompting drivers
to pull up and admire it, does not function properly. The symbol,
however, does not refer to something outside itself. It presents its
own meaning. The material symbol is, indeed, the place where that
meaning becomes present. Yet the symbolically delivered meaning is
never given completely. Its meaning is indeterminate. References to
the symbol as fragmentary nevertheless anticipate the possibility of
wholeness. The speculative dimension of such reasoning resides in the
premise that every stated meaning involves bringing forth
*more* than is actually spoken. Resonance and depth depends
upon animating the statement's hermeneutic *Hintergrund*,
lighting up unstated meanings or revealing anticipated ones. The
"speculative" capacity of an image or word concerns its
ability to sound out or insinuate the unstated nexus of meanings which
sustain a given expression but which are not directly given in it. The
speculative power of an image or phrase has something in common with
the sublime: it illuminates in the spoken or visual image a penumbra
of unstated meanings whose presence can be sensed but never fully
grasped or conceptualised. Hence, an artwork can always mean more
- that is, insinuate a transcendent dimension of meaning, which
though never exhausted by the symbols that carry it, do not exist
apart from the symbols that sustain it. The symbol is resonant with
the suggestion of meaning because it constantly invokes what is not
immediately given. This not-given does not exist apart from the given
but is inherent within it. Hence, the hermeneutical sublime, the
excess of meaning, the promise of meaning more and meaning something
different which is made apparent by the symbol, is held within, is
immanent in the given.


## 7. Presentation, Representation and Appearance



Gadamer's account of the symbol establishes that artworks are
presentational rather than representational. Presentations occasion
the meanings they invoke and do not represent a meaning independent of
themselves. The argument effects a profound and significant change in
the meaning of aesthetic appearance. The representational view of art
relegates art to a secondary status: the artwork brings to mind
something other than the artwork, an original state of affairs, a
specific meaning or reality. Art's objective co-relative is,
accordingly, positioned outside the work so that the work becomes the
mere appearance of something else. The presentational account of art
is consistent with Gadamer's phenomenological orientation. If
the meaning invoked by a work is not independent of the work that
summons it, the work is the occasion of the coming-into-appearance of
that meaning. Appearing becomes synonymous with original creation.
Aesthetic appearance is not secondary to reality or truth but is the
medium through which the work's truth shows/presents itself.
Even as presentation, appearance does retain a certain negativity,
though in Gadamer's hands it has a positive quality. Appearance
always hints at a semblance of something incomplete or not yet fully
realized. Gadamer's ontology openly reinforces if not requires
such negativity. The claim that each artwork has its own temporality
implies that each will never reveal itself completely. The claim that
the reception of all art is contemporaneous dictates that what appears
to us as meaningful is not necessarily what appeared to a previous
generation as meaningful. Like the symbol, appearance is always
partial. However, appearance, when considered aesthetically, has the
cadence of the symbolic: it alludes to something beyond itself but
which nevertheless inheres within it as the yet-to-be-revealed.



Such arguments support Gadamer's conception of the artwork as
that which stands-in-itself. That which comes to stand is intelligible
as the presentation of a certain meaning, but because of the
indeterminacy of that meaning it retains something of the enigmatic.
This eminent quality--a genuine work can never be measured
against the original way it was shown (RB 146)--Gadamer also
refers to as its hermeneutic identity. The truth of an artwork is not
its simple manifestation of meaning but rather the unfathomableness
and depth of its meaning (PH 226). Its truth embraces a tension
between revelation (what appears) and what is concealed (what has yet
to be shown). The artwork does not simply offer "a recognizable
surface contour" but has an inner depth of self-sufficiency
which Gadamer calls after Heidegger a
"standing-in-itself." In short, the mark of a substantial
work is that it veils possibilities of meaning. Such resistance is a
stimulus to further interpretation. Substantive works, like
significant symbols, have an opaque aspect.



The symbol and its reticence about revealing the withheld aspects of
its meaning do not connote something utterly alien to us. The
yet-to-be revealed is a dimension of meaning overlooked, forgotten, or
not perceived within what has already been shown or grasped. In other
words, the power of the symbol resides in its ability to reveal that,
unbeknown to ourselves, we are in communion with something much larger
than ourselves - that is, horizons of meaning which implicitly
sustain reflection and which can, when made explicit, bring us to
think quite differently of ourselves. The mystery of the symbol is its
promise of transcendence: an effective and affecting symbol reveals
that we belong to a hermeneutic community always larger than we
envisage. The analogy of the festival, once again, is telling. In the
festival, individuated work roles are renounced as we rediscover
communal ties. Gadamer's arguments about play, festival, and
symbol serve, then, as the basis for his claim that aesthetic
experience, our experience of art, is a demonstrable instance of how
subjectivity is informed by a substantiality that transcends an
individual consciousness.


## 8. The Issue in Question



Gadamer's aesthetics involve a variety of interlocking
arguments, one of the most significant of which concerns
*die* *Sache selbst*. The term is difficult to
translate, but it refers, loosely speaking, to a work's
subject-matter, to what it addresses or to what issue has been placed
in question. Philosophical usage of the word evokes phenomenological
notions of intentionality: what a work is directed at or points
toward. The *Sache* is not a determinate concept but an area of
significant meaningfulness, a constellation of concerns which orbit
the affective, conative, and cognitive complexities of subject-matters
such as grief or love. The *Sache* underpins Gadamer's
claim that aesthetic experience has a significant cognitive content.
Subject-matters may transcend an individual work in that no one work
can exhaust their significance, but as ideas, *Sachen* are not
independent of the body of works that exemplify them. If they were
ontologically distinct, the idealism Gadamer rejects would be forced
on him, and he would be compelled to argue that art is
representational, refers to a concept beyond itself and, indeed,
disappears into that concept once evoked. Hence, art, in this way of
understanding, becomes philosophy once more. If, however, art is
presentation, as Gadamer insists, a work's meaning is not
independent of it. Art does not, therefore, copy and thereby represent
a subject-matter, but configures a visual or literary space in which a
subject-matter can be summoned. Gadamer counters an ancient line of
argument that regards art as secondary to, inferior to, and a
corrupter of, the real. Contrary to the Platonic tradition, his
argument implies that art *adds* to the reality of its
subject-matters. Gadamer's evaluation of the aesthetic contrasts
vividly with Kant's in this respect. Kant considers aesthetic
experience to be indifferent to whether or not its object is real (cf.
TM 89). A work's credibility does not depend on its relationship
to an original object or co-relative. Whether what is represented
exists or not is inconsequential. What matters is the aesthetic merit
of the work, not the strength of its likeness. Should the artwork be
harmed, the being of the correlative is unaffected. Gadamer's
presentational aesthetics is, by contrast, in this regard profoundly
anti-Platonic and anti-Kantian: for Gadamer a work's
disappearance diminishes the reality of that which presents itself
through it.



Although subject-matters transcend the individual works which embody
them, they do not exist apart from their historical embodiments.
Moreover, unlike Platonic forms, subject-matters do not transcend
history but mutate and develop ever new permutations. Any diminishment
of art diminishes the historical effectiveness of a given
subject-matter. Were John Donne's love poems all lost, our
understanding of the exquisite joys and pains of human love would be
irreparably diminished. A semi-Platonic argument about
*mimesis* reinforces a discernibly non-Platonic argument
concerning the historically fluid character of subject-matters. The
argument that artworks direct us to a subject-matter irrespective of
whether they be realist or abstract constructions, suggests a moment
of return and repetition. An issue, question, or subject-matter is
*recognized*.



> 
> Where something is recognized it has liberated itself from the
> uniqueness and contingency of the circumstances in which it was
> encountered. It is a matter neither of there and then, nor of
> here and now but it is encountered as the very self-same. Thereby it
> begins to rise to its permanent essence and is detached from anything
> like a chance encounter. (RB 120)
> 



This passage strengthens the presentational approach to art, but its
reference to essences requires clarification.



> 
> It is part of the process of recognition that we see things in terms
> of what is permanent and essential unencumbered by the contingent
> circumstances in which they were seen before and are seen again. What
> imitation reveals is the real essence of the thing. (RB 99)
> 



It is not suggested that we see repeatedly the *same essence*
in a work of art. Were this to be suggested, works would become dull
and uninformative and make no new contribution to a genre.
Gadamer's insistence is that works should speak directly to and,
indeed, transform our self-understanding. Such transformative power
implies recognising in a work what was previously understood of a
subject-matter, but transformed, as if seen for the first time. The
life of a subject-matter is one of change and development.
Gadamer's *mimesis* argument claims that through repeated
re-working and re-interpretation a subject-matter not only accrues
more aspects, but also, in so doing, they allow that subject-matter to
become more fully what it is. "A work of art belongs so closely
to what it is related to that it enriches the being of that as if
through a new event of being" (TM 147). The "joy of
recognition is rather the joy of knowing more than is already
familiar." Artworks allow subject-matters to become more what
they are. In conclusion, Gadamer's phenomenological aesthetics
effectively destroys the Platonic separation of art and reality.
Artworks are the sites in which the trans-individual both present and
transform themselves. Whereas, as we have seen, for Kant the
destruction of an artwork has absolutely no bearing upon the
objectivities it represents, we can now understand why Gadamer is
committed to the opposing view that the destruction of an artwork
diminishes the reality of the subject-matters that come forth through
it.


## 9. Art and Language



The strategic centrality of language in Gadamer's aesthetics is
beyond doubt. The ability of artworks to bring things to mind and to
hint at unseen meanings is reason to claim that in its speculative
capacities, art functions essentially like a language. Yet he
acknowledges that linguistic means of expression are inadequate to the
task of conveying what occurs within an experience of art.



> 
> Language often seems ill-suited to express what we feel. In the face
> of the overwhelming presence of works of art, the task of expressing
> in words what they say to us seems like an infinite and hopeless
> undertaking ... One says this, and then one hesitates (TM 401).
> 



Two claims underwrite this skepticism: words do not readily capture
the sheer complexity of aesthetic experience, and the finitude of
language itself prevents it from capturing the totality of such
experience. In other words, the experience of art always just eludes
theoretical containment. These are not difficulties with language
*per se*, but rather reflect the limited capacity of the human
mind to grasp the totality of its involvements. Yet in Gadamer's
thought these negative aspects incentivize further hermeneutic
involvement in aesthetic experience. The incompleteness of any
interpretation of an artwork opens us to the possibility that there is
always something more or something else that can be said. The temporal
nature of experience and its interpretation prevent closure or, in
other words, both are by nature always open to further ways of
thinking and speaking about art. The argument reinforces the claim
that art and its interpretation extend the being of the
subject-matters addressed and, furthermore, that aesthetic experience
itself has a temporal continuity which is linked to its cumulative
character as a mode of *Bildung*.



The issue about the relationship between art and language is not one
of linguistic capture but of finding the appropriate words to open the
content of aesthetic experience. What is meant by the notion that an
artwork addresses us with a meaning? Although an agent of the
linguistic turn of the twentieth century, Gadamer's reflections
on language run counter to many semiotic theories. According to
Weinsheimer, "the dualism of signifier and signified has no
phenomenological basis" for Gadamer "since in speaking we
have no awareness of the world as being distinct from the word"
(Weinsheimer 1993, 162). Gadamer speaks of the perfection of the word
as being the disappearance of any gap between sense and utterance.
Poetry would be the "paradigm case" of an artwork with a
clear and immediate presentation of meaning. Yet this is seemingly
inconsistent with the notion of a work that
"stands-in-itself." If aspects of its meaning are
withheld, sense and utterance are once again separated. The word, it
would appear, signifies something beyond itself after all. There is,
in other words, a tension between Gadamer wanting to hold that the
work of art and the world that comes forth within it are indivisible
and saying that the world which a work invokes is larger than the work
itself. The poetic word, insofar as it is poetic, stands-in-itself;
and yet as word it invokes something beyond itself. Gadamer's
speculative account of meaning collapses, it would seem, into a
referential account of signs. Speculatively charged words refer to
other signs or patterns of meaning beyond themselves. This suggests
that words are self-negating signs: when they function as they should,
they disappear into what it is referred to. To conclude that words
operate as representational signs seems quite contrary to the account
of art functioning in the manner of a symbol. Closer inspection
suggests that Gadamer's account of the speculative account of
meaning is presentational after all. Let us restate the question.



If the artwork is an autonomous entity that stands-in-itself and does
not refer to anything outside itself, what of art's speculative
capacity to refer to other complexes beyond its immediate horizon? The
theological notion of a host can dissolve the inconsistency. On the
one hand, for an artwork to have a speculative capacity, it must
invoke perimeters of meaning which transcend its own immediate
circumstance. Without this, an artwork cannot connect us with
frameworks of otherness. Yet this argument threatens to turn
Gadamer's aesthetics into an idealism referring specifically to
the *idea* which the artwork was invoking. Art would once again
be subordinated to a vehicle of philosophy. On the other hand, there
is something within the constitution of an artwork that makes it
resist theoretical reduction. Its invocation of an excess of meaning
resists conceptual capture. This brings us to the crux of the matter.
Does the excess of meaning which a work can speculatively invoke exist
apart from the work that summons them? The speculative dimensions of
art suggest that an artwork is indeed a host for that which lies
beyond it and yet, at the same time, the transcendent dimensions of
meaning (its excess of meaning), remain immanent within the work that
invokes them. The presence of that which transcends the work only
manifests itself *through the work that hosts* *it*. To
put it another way, it is in the work that the transcendent set
of meanings achieves its presence. The full resonance of a
subject-matter, which of course extends well beyond any one work, is
nevertheless only discernible in the works that host them. Indeed,
subject-matters do not exist apart from the works that manifest their
presence. Ontologically speaking they inhere within the work. The work
is the occasion in which these dimensions of meaning appear, and they
command the attention of the viewer so long as the work holds them in
play. In other words, with regard to the tension between
representation and presentation in Gadamer's position, the
speculative charge of artworks does indeed suggest that they function
as representational signs always referring beyond the given meaning.
Yet this is another way of saying that, ontologically speaking,
artworks function as symbols. Considered as a referential sign, what
the artwork refers to is not a world independent of the sign but
another set of signs. However, such other configurations of meaning
may mean more than the signs that invoke them, but they are inherent
within those very signs. In other words, the very signs which refer
speculatively to other dimensions of meaning also function
symbolically in that the other horizons of meaning invoked are
immanent within the work's autonomy. As a symbolic host, the
artwork holds that which refers beyond itself within itself.


## 10. Tradition



> 
> Art seems to solve the riddle of the temporal core of truth (Adorno).
> A work that proves itself a "classic" through the ages and
> remains constant in its effect remains binding, no matter how the
> interpretations and the criteria of evaluation change in the course of
> time. (Habermas quoted by Krajewski 2004, 20)
> 



What binds us to a tradition, according to Gadamer, is not a misplaced
conservatism but the questions a canon or body of work asks of us.
However, the question of tradition is one of the most controversial
within Gadamer's philosophy. It arises because of the way
Gadamer establishes individual and collective learning on the
acquisition of accrued experiences (*Bildung*) and practices,
rather than upon any methodological norm. His argument exposes the
Enlightenment prejudice against prejudice. The liberating and
universalizing aspects of reason tend to marginalize and chastise both
the culturally different and the historically particular as divisive
and irrational. Gadamer contends, however, that such an unqualified
hypostasization of reason and its methods has the unfortunate
consequence of condemning as methodologically groundless the very
valuations that ordinary linguistic and experiential practices are
based on. Gadamer is not unsympathetic to Nietzsche, who rejects the
claim that humanity is shaped by external necessity. Our existence
within the world and our place within it is, metaphysically speaking,
utterly contingent. If there is no metaphysical necessity that governs
human practices, why should we even ask for a methodological
grounding, when language has neither required nor functioned with such
a license? Like Wilhelm Dilthey before him, Gadamer insists that
nothing justifies and gives meaning to life other than life itself.
This is not the invocation of nihilism, for life does not occur in a
vacuum. Creatures such as humans, which have no pre-determined
essence, only survive by both remembering what has worked well within
a practice and by constantly testing it against contemporary needs and
circumstances. There is a constant tension between acquired experience
and the need to stabilize its lessons and the need to question and
thereby destabilize the tried and the tested. All expressive practices
depend upon an inheritance of insight and valuation. They are
dependent upon accrued learning and experience. Such observations
agitate Gadamer's critics, who see in the unreflective
acceptance of the given an irresponsibly conservative privileging of
the received, and a wilful blindness to possible repressive or
exclusionary practices within inherited modes of operation. In
response to such scepticism, it must be acknowledged that inherited
practices can, logically speaking, have negative entailments. However,
a commitment to tradition, is neither a commitment to remaining the
same, nor is it indicative of a willful refusal to confront the
negative entailments within what is transmitted historically.
Traditions which are incapable of changing risk becoming outmoded.
Traditions are not founded upon core and fixed identities. As vibrant
religious and artistic traditions demonstrate, those which are in
constant debate over aim and direction often prove engaging and
influential. Traditions capable of subjecting their self-understanding
to critique constitute continuities of conflict. The importance of
received understanding for Gadamer is not its historical provenance
but how it opens us towards and engages us with issues in a community
of debate. The Cartesian project of subjecting all beliefs to
sceptical examination until they can be methodologically affirmed is,
in Gadamer's view, nihilistic. The project is implausible since
the range and depth of pre-understanding is so extensive as to be
untheorisable. To condemn pre-understanding as unjustifiable because
it cannot be methodologically grounded is highly dangerous as it
devalues those very insights upon which our initial world-orientation
depends. It is not that these insights are instrinsically valuable but
that they are essential staging posts in the journeys of understanding
they enable. It is the continuous debate and dialogue over practice
that enables participants to move on, widen, and transform acquired
experience. Movement and development is intrinsic to the German word
for tradition: *Uberlieferung* has the active connotation
of both transmitting and handing something on. What a tradition
transmits from age to age are questions, problems, and issues. The
importance of canonic works is not that they are peerless exemplars of
an idiom or style but rather that they raise issues and difficulties
in an exemplary way. Traditions can check their self-understanding
against their own historical projections. A commitment to tradition is
not a commitment to an academic antiquarianism. It is, essentially, a
commitment to a field of debate. Tradition is presented as a resource
and a provocation for thinking and creativity: whereas sameness is the
currency of a conservative conception of tradition, instability,
questions, and the challenge of otherness are the drivers of
Gadamer's more dialogical concept of tradition.



It has been argued against Gadamer that his revaluation of tradition
does not really bring its content to a point of critical reflection.
He acknowledges that like any other temporal phenomenon, not all of
its vistas can be adequately thematized or articulated. This does not
mean, however, that tradition is beyond critical appraisal. Traditions
can, as Pannenberg argues, check their normative assumptions against
their self-projections. Other critics suggest that Gadamer's
approach to tradition and aesthetics is overtly Classical in its
preoccupation with forms that maintain a continuity through time
rather than radically alter themselves. It does not allow for those
radical intrusions or revolutionary interjections which alter the
perceptual paradigm of an age. The counter-objection is not only that
the charge overlooks Gadamer's embrace of Heidegger's
quite radical phenomenological reworking of the Classical
tradition but also the fact that for one paradigm to replace
another, there must be a certain relation between them. One must
address an absence, fullfil an unseen possibility or a lack within the
other. Cubism, for example, implies a visual orientation quite
different from realism, but both idioms belong to a common tradition
in that they strive to show us something of the real. Without a degree
of continuity with tradition, any radical emergence would have no
bearing upon the received and thereby lack the ability to call into
question received notions and understanding. It is, however, precisely
the challenge of the different and the other which is the driver of
Gadamer's dialogical conception of tradition. It is a conception
which is in part modernistic: tradition is presented as being in
constant debate with itself. Its renewal demands change and
transformation. Furthermore, a virtue of this dialogical conception of
tradition is that it is not culturally specific. Because its main
focus is on the subject-matters which different cultural practices
address, it offers a model of cognitive engagement that can operate
between distinct traditions rather than in just any one.


## 11. Paradox of the In-between



There is a creative tension at play within Gadamer's aesthetic
thinking. On the one hand, Gadamer stalwartly defends the autonomy of
the artwork and, on the other, despite his resistance to any
subsumption of art within philosophy, he insists that aesthetics
should be absorbed within hermeneutics, which has for the most
part been understood as a theoretical enterprise. This tension
replicates aspects of the so-called hermeneutic circle.
Schleiermacher, for example, argues that it is only possible to grasp
an individual's personal utterances if one can understand the
general structure of the language which that individual operates
within. Conversely, general structures are only intelligible in terms
of particular exemplifying utterances. Wilhelm Dilthey operates within
a similar part-whole structure--namely, an
individual's personal experiences will mean little to the reader
unless they can be contextualised within a historical context. A
movement between part and whole also takes place in Gadamer's
thinking. The artwork is initially presented in its singularity. But
then, the particular is illuminated by being brought under a
subject-matter. To engage with artworks discursively is to bring
generalizations about a work to bear, placing it in a wider context of
associations. The movement to the wider level of generalization also
returns the spectator to the particular, since generalization enables
an understanding of what is singular about a work by locating it
within a broader background. This double hermeneutic movement is
highly characteristic of Gadamer's aesthetic. It recognises that
the cognitive dimension of aesthetic experience is, like all
linguistic experience, both centrifugal and centripetal in nature.
When a work addresses us its impact is centrifugal: it upsets and
transforms what we customarily recognise. It awakens us to the
hermeneutical sublime, to what lies beyond but nevertheless shapes our
normal range of understanding. Thus, Gadamer can argue
that "something is a poetic structure when everything
pre-structured is taken up into a new, unique form ... as if it
were being said for the first time to us in particular" (GW 8,
62). Yet this estranging moment initiates a centripetal return, a
homecoming. "The poem and the art of language generally as a
heard or written text is always ... something like a recognition
in every single word" (GW 8, 62). Yet the question remains: is
the passage from the immediacy of the given artwork to theoretical
contemplations about its subject matter not an instance of moving from
the particular givenness of a work to a more abstract level of
reflection about its subject-matter? Does not the contemplative
movement away from the work betray its particularity and suggest that
the sense of a work lies beyond it in its concept? Were Gadamer to
have fallen into this *impasse*, an idealist and
representationalist account of art would be forced upon him. The
vehemence of his resistance to these stances suggests that something
other than a simple shift from the particular immediacy of a work to a
theoretical contemplation of its content must be at play.



The accusation of inconsistency requires the assumption that the
aesthetic experience of a work, on the one hand, and its
contemplation, on the other, are separable. However, it is in
Gadamer's mind part of an intense experience that it impels us
towards seeking to bring it into words. Experience endeavours to bring
itself into words. These words will by virtue of their semantic
associations place the experience in a wider context (the centrifugal)
and at the same time these words will, because of their poetic
capacity for singularity, make the experience clearer and more
distinct.



> 
> Experience is not wordless to begin with, subsequently becoming an
> object of reflection by being named, by being subsumed under the
> universality of the word. Rather experience itself seeks and finds
> words that express it. We seek the right word--i.e., the word
> that really belongs to the thing (or experience) so that in it the
> thing comes into language. (TM 417)
> 



This suggests that Gadamer is not applying a hermeneutic method to
aesthetic experience but seeking to expose the hermeneutical movement
from part to whole *within* aesthetic experience. In other
words, the claim that aesthetics should be taken up within
hermeneutics is not an attempt to reduce aesthetics to another idiom.
It announces an endeavor to articulate the hermeneutic dynamic of
aesthetic experience itself. Let us briefly recapitulate the
argument.



The tension in Gadamer's position arises from (1) asserting
art's autonomy and (2) demanding that aesthetics be subsumed
within hermeneutics. Undoubtedly, the weight of argument is on the
latter. He systematically criticizes Kantian aesthetics for its
narrow-minded concentration on the subjectivity of momentary pleasures
and offers in its place a substantial reconstruction of the cognitive
content of art's address. In other words, Gadamer switches the
status of autonomy from the sensible irreducibility of a work to its
hermeneutic autonomy. This entails the argument that a work which
challenges our outlook does so because it is enigmatic by nature: it
gives rise to difficulties of meaning and interpretation which cannot
be explained away by a more fundamental level of understanding. The
autonomous work that stands in itself is a work that both
*presents* *a meaning* and at the same time *holds
something back*. It is in other words always pointing beyond
itself but *within* itself. This substantiates Gadamer's
claim that the hermeneutical constitution of an autonomous work
resists theoretical reduction. In the essay "Word and
Picture," he expresses sympathy with Schleiermacher's
remark, "I hate all theory that does not grow out of
practice" (GW 8, 374). However, as has been argued, the
transcendent dimensions of meaning which a work speculatively invokes
are not outside the work but immanent within it. In other words, we do
not need a special hermeneutic method to access the withheld but just
a deeper, more attentive contemplative acquaintance. When Gadamer
speaks of being attentive to what an artwork says, of discerning its
enigmatic quality, and of becoming aware of its speculative
resonances, he is indeed speaking in a hermeneutical idiom, but this
is most clearly not a case of Gadamer submitting aesthetic experience
to an externally derived theory. To the contrary, Gadamer is trying to
draw out the hermeneutical dynamics of aesthetic experience itself.
Thus the tension between the immediacy of experience and reflection
upon the content of that experience is not a tension between
experience, on the one hand, and theory on the other. It is a tension
within aesthetic experience between what an artwork invokes of its
subject-matter and how what is invoked changes the character of that
which invokes it. What hermeneutical reflection reveals of aesthetic
experience is nothing extraneous to such experience but a further
disclosure of what is held within it. To conclude, if aesthetic
experience is hermeneutical in that artworks speculatively illuminate
meanings beyond what is immediately disclosed, hermeneutical
experience should equally be taken up by aesthetics in that
subject-matters only manifest their presence in the singular and
particular.