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Veronica Ventura

868040

Dipartimento di Filosofia

Estetica II (6/12 CFU)

May 25th, 2020

A Response to Gadamer’s Re-Valuation of Aesthetic Truth

Abstract: This essay examines Gadamer’s position in Truth and Method (1960) regarding
the question of artistic truth. First, the paper gives an overview of the reasons that led to devalue
any claim of knowledge in the field of Aesthetics, then it clarifies Gadamer’s hermeneutical
approach to the nature of the work of art through an analysis of the concept of play, especially
revealing of art’s truth import.

In the nineteenth century, the philosophical debate around the value of art was largely affected by
developments of Kantian thought and by the cognitive hegemony of natural sciences. In this
context, art emerged as an enclosed realm of appearance belonging to an aesthetic consciousness
and independent from the real objective world. In the first part of Truth and Method, Gadamer
asserts the aesthetic experience as a meaningful event of truth in contention to the claim that only
“measurable” experiences can be candidates for knowledge. By setting light on our experience of
the work of art, he raised awareness of the potentiality of an “extra-methodical” knowledge of
the world and ourselves, and challenged a consolidated conception that placed art away from
reality. His work brought issues about the ontological nature of artworks to the forefront of
Aesthetics debate and provided an innovative reflection on the nature of aesthetic experience
(intended as Erfahrung).
In this paper, I will address the questions to what amounts Gadamer’s critique of aesthetic
consciousness and to what extent he is able to give an appropriate resolution to the problems it
raises. I will argue this critique exposes every subjective experience to a larger ground in that it
aims at revealing the cognitive content of art as participative. First, I will briefly summarize
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Gadamer’s perspective regarding the subjectivization that led to aesthetic differentiation and to
the limits of an Erlebnis-Ästhetik, following from the concept of aesthetic consciousness.
Second, I will analyze the open-ended conception of truth at the roots of Gadamer’s
hermeneutics and emphasize the role of play within the reciprocal relation between artwork and
subjectivity. Overall, I address to Gadamer that his arguments effectively justify aesthetic truth
within the finitude of our understanding and that they are able to value in the work of art its
autonomy as well as its reliance on a spectator as essential factors for its truth claim.

1. The limitations of aesthetic consciousness

In order to redeem the question of artistic truth, it is necessary for Gadamer to clarify the genesis
of aesthetic consciousness, held responsible for a de-realisation of art. Therefore, Gadamer
proposes to investigate the “specific, historically developed meaning of the concept of aesthetic
consciousness”1. That is, he proposes to trace back in time the conditions from which, on the
basis of the Kantian account of genius, aesthetic consciousness flourished.

1.1 Kant’s Critique of Judgement

In Gadamer’s view, Kant’s aesthetic is “epoch-making”2 . That is, on the one hand, it lays ground
for Aesthetics’ validity and autonomy from natural sciences. On the other hand, Kant is able to
do so by placing the legitimization of taste in subjective consciousness alone. In fact, taste is for
Kant the faculty that judges a feeling of pleasure (or displeasure) which arises within a subject
that looks at a beautiful object apart from any interest in its existence, i.e. for its own sake.3 In
opposition, Gadamer contends that “the language of art exerts its claims, and does not offer itself
freely and indeterminately for interpretation according to one's mood, but speaks to us in a
significant and definite way”.4 In other words, art - by addressing our interests - is able to
transform not only our understanding of the object, but also our understanding of ourselves (a
claim impossible to acknowledge in Kant’s analysis). Furthermore, Gadamer contends that Kant

1
Gadamer, H.G. Truth and Method, trans. Weinsheimer J. and Marshall D.G. (London/New York:
Continuum, 2004), p.70.
2
Ibid., pp.36.
3
Kant, I. Critica del Giudizio, trans. Gargiulo A. (Bari: Laterza, 2011), p.71-87.
4
Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 45.
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“denies taste any significance as knowledge” and “reduces sensus communis to a subjective
principle”5 because, despite taste having universal validity in that an aesthetic object produces
pleasure in suiting a faculty of knowledge common to all, the feeling connected to the object is a
priori located into every subjectivity and it has nothing to do with the object itself. Therefore,
Gadamer ascribes to Kant the fault of reaffirming the scientific method as the only legitimate
model of knowledge and confining human sciences into subjective judgement.

1.2 The developments of aesthetic consciousness

If Kant represents the premise for a “radical subjectivization”6 and aesthetic autonomy, the real
turning point in the development of aesthetic consciousness is the subsequent interpretation of
his doctrine of the genius. For Kant, it is nature that gives the rule to art through the natural talent
of genius, who is then able to communicate - within his artistic creations - that specific freedom
that occurs when our cognitive faculties engage in play. In addition, the artist must be educated
through taste, which he needs in order to choose and select his new aesthetic ideas.7
Nevertheless, Gadamer notices that “in the nineteenth century the concept of genius rose to the
status of a universal concept of value and - together with the concept of the creative - achieved a
true apotheosis”.8 Namely, Romanticism reversed Kant’s thought in that it gave preference to
artistic beauty over natural beauty as well as it favored genius over taste. In this context, artistic
experience became more and more linked to a personal “lived experience” (Erlebnis) exhausted
in one separated moment and it established its own ideal domain next to the real world, of which
the institution of theaters and museums are striking examples as special locations for
extra-ordinary artistic experiences. To contrast this view, Gadamer states:

Pure seeing and pure hearing are dogmatic abstractions that artificially reduce
phenomena. Perception always includes meaning. Thus to seek the unity of the work of

5
Ibid., p.38.
6
Ibid., p.36.
7
Kant, I. Critica del Giudizio, p. 291-317.
8
Gadamer, Truth and Method., p.52.
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art solely in its form as opposed to its content is a perverse formalism, which moreover
cannot invoke the name of Kant.9

This means that after Kant, the methodological subjectivation of taste became a presupposition
of content for which an aesthetic experience involves an abstraction of aesthetically pleasurable
qualities from actuality, performed through an “aesthetic differentiation” that allows to look at
things in a purely aesthetic way, i.e. as a temporary relief from the everyday life. This attitude led
to a “neutralization of the question of truth” that Gadamer wants to overcome.10 Hence, Gadamer
focuses on the fundamental event of truth within a work of art: an authentic experience
(Erfahrung) that cannot be separated from the work’s frame of reference and in which the subject
is inevitably involved and transformed.

2. The true being of an artwork

In this section, I will show how Gadamer is able to raise the question of truth in a new way by
looking at the work of art as an hermeneutical phenomenon, i.e. not as an object in itself, but as
an open-ended mover of understanding. To this respect, criticism claims that Gadamer hardly
discusses the issue of truth in art and does not provide a persuasive account of it.11 I say that this
kind of interpretation fails to recognize Gadamer’s whole perspective on the concept of truth.
The truth Gadamer is concerned with is never something definite or independent from the
interpreter and therefore could not be a product of formal demonstration handed over in one
singular way. Consequently, his hermeneutics does not aim to outline conditions of possibility
for a new theory of truth, but questions what happens during the events of understanding and
highlights the intrinsic truth in each event.12 The encounter with a work of art is a revealing
experience of truth in that it always addresses us into a new and different perspective by

9
Ibid., p.80.
10
Ibid., p.74-85.
11
Grondin, J. Gadamer’s Aesthetics. The Overcoming of Aesthetic Consciousness and The Hermeneutical
Truth of Art (267-271). New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol.2, 1998. p.5-6.
12
Gadamer, Truth and Method., Foreword to the Second Edition (xxv-xxxiv)
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demanding our participation. This participative relation becomes evident when we refer to play
as “the mode of being of the work of art itself”13.

2.1. Play

The "subject" of the experience of art, that which remains and endures, is not the
subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work itself. This is the point at
which the mode of being of play becomes significant. For play has its own essence,
independent of the consciousness of those who play.14

Just like the player’s consciousness does not reveal the nature of the game being played, neither
the interpreter nor the author subjectivity shows what occurs when the artwork is in play. In this
sense, Gadamer insists that the work of art has a primacy both on those who produce it and on
those who enjoy it: if there is a subject in the game this is not the player, but is the game itself
that rules the individuals and drags them out of themselves. Moreover, art and game share a
to-and-fro movement not tied to any specific purpose other than to fulfill themselves for their
own sake: they’re mode of being is presentational (they manifest themselves). Yet, art differs
from the self-presentational movement of other kinds of play in that it always points beyond
itself, it always re-presents something for someone, for an audience. Gadamer goes on to note
that “the audience only completes what the play as such is”,15which means art is not merely
indifferent to us, but requires an involvement that would contribute in bringing what is at play
within the artwork into fuller significance. It is only in this mitspielen (the play along of artwork
and spectator) that the work of art fully realizes itself and acquires structure (Gebilde).
Ultimately, Gadamer calls “transformation into structure” the change through which the reality
represented within the work of art gains an increase of being, i.e. reaches its true being. Here, the
artistic representation of something that is already known does not stand for a transition of the
represented into another magical world, but - once recognized - it emerges anew in its essence,

13
Ibid., p.102.
14
Ibid., p.103.
15
Ibid., p.109.
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detached from all accidental conditions and revealed in its own being.16 By placing the
represented in its truth, the authentic being of those who participate in its play is also heightened
because it is only by understanding something other than the self, that self-understanding is
possible.17

In conclusion, I say that the subjectivization inherent to aesthetic consciousness

undervalues the truth claim and knowledge of the essence in play within a work of art. Gadamer
not only exposes the limitations of such orientation towards aesthetic experience, but also - far
from discrediting the role played by subjectivity - he lays the cognitive import of the artistic
presentation in that specific recognition of the represented and of oneself that occurs when
someone realizes to know more of what he knew before. By doing so, Gadamer was able to
positively revalue truth as an ongoing process of understanding displayed in art in an exemplary
way that retains the character of being transformative, and, consequently, meaningful despite
never being totally graspable by a determinate concept.

16
Gadamer, Truth and Method., p.113-114.
17
Ibid., p.83.
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Work Cited

Di Cesare, D. Gadamer. Bologna: il Mulino, 2007.

Gadamer, H.G. Truth and Method (Part One). Second, Revised Edition by Weinsheimer J. and
Marshall D.G., London/New York: Continuum, 2004.

Grondin, J. Gadamer’s Aesthetics. The Overcoming of Aesthetic Consciousness and The

Hermeneutical Truth of Art (267-271). New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press,
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol.2, 1998.

Kant, I. Critica del Giudizio. Translated by Gargiulo A., Bari: Laterza, 2011.

Mirto, M. L’Opera d’Arte Come Epifania della Verità dell’Ente in Hans Georg Gadamer,
Caserta: Ars Brevis, 2013.