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Nicholas Davey

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Gadamer's AestheticsFirst published Wed Jun 13, 2007

Gadamer (1900–2002) does not provide an account of the aesthetic in anycustomary sense. His approach to art runs, in many ways, againstconventional philosophical expectations. Aesthetic qualities are notdebated in the manner of the analytic tradition of modern philosophy, nordoes he concern himself overtly with the problems of aesthetic pleasure.Gadamer's approach to aesthetic experience stands squarely in thephenomenological tradition. He is primarily concerned with the place ofart in our experience of the world. Furthermore, his approach to aesthetictheory is one of those rare intellectual achievements which aresimultaneously deconstructive and constructive. He dismantles elementsof the grand tradition of Platonic, Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics and yetoffers a phenomenological reconstruction of many of the central insightsof that tradition to demonstrate their continuing relevance to ourcontemporary experience of art. Gadamer is primarily concerned with thecognitive dimension of such experience, with what art works address andwhat they put at issue. This makes for a flexible philosophical approachcapable of ranging freely over a number of art forms and styles,discussing both the singularity of works and their broader significance.The approach is clearly hermeneutical in that it endeavours to re-acquaintus with those received meanings and pre-occupations which underlie ourexperience of art. Openly influenced by Heidegger, his later essays onlanguage and poetry in particular, Gadamer's aesthetics is far fromtraditional. His key claims are:

Aesthetics is not the study of specific types of subjective pleasuresderived from art. It is a study of what objectively informs oursubjective awareness of art.Hermeneutical aesthetics seeks to break through the pleasurable

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distractions of aesthetic consciousness in order to disclose thecultural and linguistic realities that manifest themselves within it.Hermeneutical aesthetics presupposes phenomenologicalinvolvement with the subject matters of art rather than disinteresteddetachment.Hermeneutical aesthetics regards aesthetic appearance not as adistraction from the real but as the vehicle through which real subjectmatters reveal themselves. It over-turns the notion that art works areat one remove from reality.Hermeneutical aesthetics is dialogical in character. It recognises thatpractitioner and theoretician share in bringing a subject matter tolight and plays down any theory/ practice division in the arts.Interpretation is a means to a work's realisation.Hermeneutical aesthetics is not a theory of art per se, more a set ofpractical contemplative notes for enhancing one's encounter with art.The end of hermeneutical aesthetics is not to arrive at a concept ofart but to deepen our experience of art. In hermeneutical aesthetics,theory is deployed to deepen contemplation of artworks rather thanto categorise their nature.Gadamer's aesthetics is deeply respectful of art's ability to disruptand challenge customary expectations. It attributes an ethicalsignificance to art as being able to reveal the limitations of fixedcultural expectancy and to open the spectator towards the other andthe different.

In this entry, we discuss the leading arguments which inform thesecontentions.

1. Art as Interlocutor2. The “Substance” of Aesthetic Subjectivity3. The Contemporaneous and Art Experience4. Play


2 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

5. The Festival6. The Symbol7. Presentation, Representation and Appearance8. The Issue in Question9. Art and Language.10. Tradition11. Paradox of the In-betweenBibliography

Gadamer BibliographiesPrimary LiteratureSecondary Literature

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1. Art as Interlocutor

Gadamer's aesthetics fosters an attentiveness towards the mystery of thegiven and its unexpected folds of meaningfulness. Gadamer's argumentsare varied, ushering the reader towards an aesthetic attentiveness ratherthan making iconoclastic declarations about what the aesthetic is. Theyembrace close readings of the poets Rilke and Celan as well as broadstrategic manoeuvres which defend the cognitive status of aesthetic andhermeneutical judgements. Hermeneutics (the art and discipline ofinterpretation), of which Gadamer (1900–2002) is one of the twentiethcentury's most formidable exponents, is deeply involved in philosophicaldisputes over the legitimacy of claims to understanding in the visual andliterary arts. It does not oppose “scientific” modes of knowledge butresists their cultural privileging. For Gadamer aesthetics stands onexperientially accumulative modes of learning (Bildung) which orientateand ground sound judgement in the arts. Conversation and its

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unpredictable turns is, appropriately, a central thread within hermeneuticalaesthetics. A late exchange between Carsten Dutt and Gadamer (Dutt1993, 61–67) offers a gentle point of entry into how philosophicalhermeneutics approaches art and aesthetic experience.

Gadamer insists that a picture or image that is worthy of being called awork of art, has the power to affect us immediately. (GW 8, 374). Artaddresses us. The claim that “art is able to say something directed tosomebody” (Palmer 200170) alludes to the surprise, shock and,sometimes, dismay at being directly affected by what is in a work and ofbeing forced to reflect on its claim so that it becomes moreunderstandable to both oneself and others. Gadamer argues that “theexperience of art is an experience of meaning, and as such this experienceis something that is brought about by understanding.” To this extent, then,“aesthetics is absorbed into hermeneutics” (Palmer 2001 76). Thisdistances Gadamer from more conventional justifications of the aestheticas offering a special kind of pleasure. The essay The Relevance of theBeautiful suggests that “the mere on-looker who indulges in aesthetic orcultural enjoyment from a safe distance, whether in the theatre, theconcert hall, or the seclusion of solitary reading, simply does not exist”(RB 130). A person who takes himself to be such an onlooker,misunderstands himself. “Aesthetic self-understanding is indulging inescapism if it regards the encounter with the work of art as nothing butenchantment in the sense of liberation from the pressures of reality,through the enjoyment of a spurious freedom” (RB 130). These remarksdivorce Gadamer's thinking from Dilthey's Erlebniss-Ästhetik in whichartworks are proclaimed the site of intense but momentary experienceenjoyed for their own sake independent of their cognitive content. Thehedonistic personalisation of aesthetic response has two alienatingconsequences. On the one hand, the judgement that aesthetic experience ispurely subjective severs the individual from communal networks ofmeaning capable of illuminating personal experience from the perspective



of what is socially shared. On the other, attempts to render subjectiveexperience academically legitimate by presenting it as a social productfurther estrange the individual from his experience, by translating it intothird-person terms he or she may not endorse or recognise: individualexperiences of beauty can suddenly become embodiments of classprejudice. In contrast to Dilthey (1833–1911), Gadamer defends anErfahrungs-Ästhetik which claims that like significant life-experiences,our relationships with artworks are deep and on-going: we re-visit themand in doing so understanding is continually re-negotiated. Gadamerspeaks of the “interminability” of such experience (dieUnabschliessbarkeit aller Erfahrung, Palmer 2001, 66). It is forever openbecause of its cognitive movement. The cumulative nature of suchexperience is an instance of Bildung (formation and learning throughexperience) and is, as such, a living process of becoming (Werden).

Gadamer's aesthetics is strictly anti-Kantian. It abjures phenomenalistdisinterestedness for the sake of phenomenological involvement. It is alsoanti-idealist. It refuses the idea that in aesthetic experience we perceive “apure integration of meaning”. His aesthetics is consequently anti-representationalist. There is in the artwork something which Gadamerdescribes as its resistance to integration, to being reduced to a concept(Palmer 2001 25). He contends that Hegel's definition of the beautiful asthe “sensuous appearing of the Idea” presumes that aesthetic experience isable to reach beyond the specific type of appearance to its underlyingidea. In this model, aesthetic experience becomes the expectation of asemantic fulfilment. Once the idea behind the appearance is grasped, “thewhole of its meaning would have been understood once and for all andthus brought in to our possession so to speak”. The work of art becomes acarrier of meaning, to be abandoned once the lead story has been grasped.But, Gadamer argues, “our understanding of art works is manifestly notof this type. Everyone knows this from his or her own encounters withart, from concerts, visits to museums, and from his or her

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reading”(Palmer 2001 66). This denial of idealist aesthetics is at the basisof his claim that an artwork is essentially enigmatic.

Gadamer's opposition to aesthetic idealism is supported by the claim thatart “cannot be satisfactorily translated in terms of conceptual knowledge”(RB 69). A work does not simply refer to a meaning which is independentof itself. Its meaning is not to be grasped in such a way that that it can besimply transferred to another idiom. Indeed, because it invites manyinterpretations, an artwork acquires an ideality of possible meaningswhich cannot be obviated by any possible realisation (RB 146). The workhas, therefore, an autonomy which cannot be substituted by anything elseor, to put it another way, the work is always in excess of its readings, itsmeanings are always more than its interpretations. Two importantconsequences arise from this.

First: Gadamer's conceives art as presentational (darstellen) rather thanrepresentational (vorstellen). In the essay “Word and Picture” (1992), heclaims 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, themeanings it carries can only come to the fore in its self-presentation. Yetthe emergent meaning is never given in its entirety nor obviated by anyrealisation. This is consistent with the eventual nature of art. “When awork of art truly takes hold of us, it is not an object that stands oppositeus which we look at in hope of seeing through it to an intendedconceptual meaning … The work is an Ereigniss – an event that”appropriates us“ to itself. It jolts us, it knocks us over and sets up a worldof 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 drivesothers into the background. Disclosure and hiddenness are not contrariesin Gadamer's aesthetics, but mutually dependent: the disclosed reveals thepresence of the undisclosed in the disclosed. “It is in the sheer being there(Dasein) of the work of art that our understanding experiences the depths



and the unfathomability of its meaning (Palmer 2001 72). The claim that awork's meaning can never be completely fulfilled is supported by alinguistic analogy concerning the speculative. Art has a language in thatits signs and symbols function like semantic units. Gadamer comments onthe living virtuality of meaning contained in each word, an innerdimension of multiplication. Accordingly language is not therepresentation (mimesis) of a set of pre-given meanings but a ”coming tolanguage“ of a constant reserve of meanings (Palmer 2001 67). Thefinitude 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 toanother, each word is, so to speak, summoned, and on its side holds openthe further progress of speaking“ (Palmer 2001 67). No meaning can becompletely revealed. Because we can re-visit art works repeatedly, themeaning disclosed initially can be expanded or changed. The partialnature of any given meaning disclosure enhances rather than diminishesthe possibility of meaning within a work. ”The work of art consists in itsbeing open in a limitless way to ever new integrations of meaning“ (PH98) and furthermore, ”the inexhaustibility that distinguishes the languageof art from all translation into concepts rests on an excess of meaning (PH102).

Gadamer's conversation on aesthetics paints its bolder themes: art isinterrogative by nature, art works work through a disclosure of meaning,disclosures of meaning establish art's cognitive status, the cognitivecontent of art is partly intelligible and partly enigmatic, and artworks arealways open to re-interpretation. These are, however, not free-standingarguments. Gadamer's position is hermeneutical not because of anunderlying thesis which goes unremarked but because it is informed by aconstellation of various arguments which shape the central position. Tothe broader arguments we now turn.

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2. The “Substance” of Aesthetic Subjectivity

Gadamer's determination to reveal the cognitive content of aestheticexperience requires him to expose the ontological grounding ofsubjectivity. To approach art works solely on the basis of subjectiveresponses to them or, to read them only in terms of an artist'sintentionality, is, for Gadamer, always to miss the point. Hermeneuticallyspeaking, the philosophical focus should be on what shapes subjectivityand guides its expectations. This initiates a speculative re-figuring ofaesthetic subjectivity. In Truth and Method he writes,

In The Relevance of the Beautiful Gadamer elucidates substance asfollows.

Uncovering the ontological foundations of aesthetic experience does notundermine the primacy Gadamer gives to art's immediate address. Theaim is to demonstrate the cognitive legitimacy of subjective experience byrevealing how aesthetic experience is both involved in something larger

All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pre-given, whatwith Hegel we call “substance,” because it underlies all subjectiveintentions and actions, and hence both prescribes and limits everypossibility for understanding any tradition whatsoever in itshistorical alterity. This almost defines the aim of philosophicalhermeneutics: its task is to retrace the path of Hegel'sphenomenology of mind until we discover in all that is subjectivethe substantiality that determines it … (TM 302).

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



than itself and, indeed, reflects (speculum) that larger actuality withinitself. The ability of aesthetic experience to express trans-individualphenomenological structures explains what is meant by substance and hisspeculative attitude towards it. Gadamer's aesthetics is properly concernedwith experiencing what underlies its more abstract concepts. This is not amatter of naming or describing the reality which manifests itself inaesthetic experience but of trying to say something about the experiencean individual has of it. Gadamer's reflections commence with theimmediacy of art's claim, its contemporaneous nature, and then explorewhat influences the experience of that claim. The aim is seeminglyparadoxical: 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 art work that does so most directly(PH 95). The phenomenological immediacy of art which initiatesGadamer's hermeneutic enquiry into aesthetic experience may not seem apromising starting point from a hermeneutic perspective. It declares anunconventional hermeneutical approach to art: “if we define the task ofhermeneutics as the bridging of personal or historical distance betweenminds, then the experience of art would seem to fall entirely outside its(hermeneutics') provenance” (PH 95/97). However, Gadamer does notdefine hermeneutics this way. It is not the reconstruction of artisticintention which forms the object of his enquiry, but the question of whatinforms the immediacy of an artwork's claim. The artwork is an object ofhermeneutical investigation not because of any provenance inpsychological events but because of the fact that it says something to us(PH 98). Hermeneutic involvement is required because the meaningtransmitted can never be fully complete and is unambiguous. It demandsinterpretive involvement. Hermeneutics is required wherever there is arestricted transposition of thought. The historical finitude of meaning and

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the fact that no meaning can be given completely necessitateshermeneutical involvement in our experience of an art-work. The task ofinterpretation is to probe the possible meanings held within theexperience of a work, and by drawing them to bring that experience togreater completeness.

It should be noted that Gadamer's talk of integrating the alien into what isunderstood as meaningful is not to be grasped as subsumption within thesame. Assimilation is not the equivalent of translating the alien into astable set of meanings which do not change as a consequence of thatsubsumption. Integration implies a reciprocity: the integrated changes itscharacter as well as the character of the whole within which integrationoccurs. Furthermore, whatever is given in subjective consciousness ascontemporaneous has dimensions of meaning that transcend what thatconsciousness initially grasps. Gadamer is concerned to probe the onticdimensions of aesthetic experience. The thesis that experience of thecontemporaneousness of art involves us in more than what we arepresently aware of (i.e., the “substance” of underlying and on-going trans-individual linguistic and cultural practices) is supported by the threearguments from analogy concerning the character of play, the festival andthe symbol.

4. Play

Gadamer's discussion of the relation between art and play should not beequated with any argument that art is a trivial game or pastime. Hefollows the precedent of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education, whichcontend that artworks are dramatic in that they place something in play.The underlying motif is that aesthetic consciousness is far from self-contained but is rather drawn into the play of something much larger thanwhat 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 fullyanticipated or controlled by individual consciousness. The game and theart work are both forms of self-movement which require that the spectatorplay along with what they bring into being. (RB 23). Gadamer asserts the“primacy of the play” over consciousness: “the players are merely theway the play comes into presentation” (TM 92 and 98). Participationtakes the individual players out of themselves. The individual subject isthat upon which success, satisfaction or loss is imposed from within thegame. By analogy, the work of art is also “the playing of it”. Anautonomous event comes into being, something comes to stand in its ownright which “changes all that stand before it” (RB 25). Like the ancienttheoros, the spectator not only participates in the event which is theartwork, but is potentially transformed by it (RB 24).

The game analogy also serves to undermine approaches to art which areexclusively intentional, material and conventional. First: the subjectivityof an artist cannot be an appropriate interpretive starting point. Graspingwhat transpires in a player's consciousness does not reveal the nature ofthe game being played. Reconstructing the conscious life of an artist, paceDilthey's hermeneutics of nacherleben (re-living), may reveal interestingaspects of an artist's intentions but it does not uncover what informs thatsubjectivity. Second: like with the game, art is not to be understood byreference to its tools and equipment alone. Art requires materialscertainly, and an appreciation of how a specific tool might be used. Yetneither game nor art is constituted by its equipment. Third:comprehending a game or an artwork requires an appreciation of theappropriate rules or conventions. What constitutes fair or foul playdepends upon a set of pre-understood principles just as what is esteemedexcellent in art requires normative expectancies of appraisal. Yet art'svitality clearly does not reside in the following of conventions.

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The overall argument is not that game or artwork cannot be reduced tointention, material or convention but rather that each of these elementscomes into their own when taken up within the playing of the game or inthe practice which is art. It is the playing that draws spectator, player,intention, equipment and convention into the one event. This promotes aninteractive view of art as a communicative event. It lends a dialogicaldimension to art. An artwork involves more than one voice as, indeed, theword inter-pretation implies. Furthermore, the conception of art as anevent requires a different ontological structure to those mode standardaccounts of aesthetic experience grounded in subjectivity alone. Anartwork is not an object completely independent of the spectator yetsomehow given over to the spectator for his or her personal enjoyment.To the contrary, the game analogy suggests that the act of spectatorshipcontributes to enhancing the being of the art work by bringing what is atplay within it to fuller realisation. The spectator just as much as the artistplays a crucial role in developing the subject-matters that art activates.The aesthetic spectator is swept up by her experience of art, absorbed inits play and potentially transformed by that which spectatorship helpsconstitute. Though Gadamer's argument distances itself from traditionalsubject-object paradigms, it does retain certain features of Kant'saesthetics.

Whereas Kant attributes a non-purposive rationality to the aestheticattitude, 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 anyspecific 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 whatoccurs when the art work or the game is in-play that matters. Oftencontrary to their own willing and doing, the spectator is taken over by asubstantial and consequential event that transcends the boundaries ofeveryday consciousness and which has no purpose other than to bring



something forth.

5. The Festival

Conventional accounts of aesthetic experience stress its intense andindividuating nature (Erlebniss). Yet despite its intimacy, Gadameremphasises that within experience (Erfahrung) one is alwaysparticipating, perhaps unwittingly, in something beyond oneself.Aesthetic involvement is in some respects, therefore, a communalactivity. The analogy between aesthetic experience and the festive istelling.

Gadamer's thinking here betrays a further Kantian inflection. The Kantianconception of aesthetic pleasure, as a variety of experience which arisesonly where the egotistical interests that constitute the commerce ofeveryday life are not in play, suggests the possibility of a communityforming around shared non-hostile pleasures. Gadamer's account ofaesthetic experience is not concerned with a putative kingdom-to-comebut with rediscovering and forging the communality that we are. Despitethis difference, aesthetic experience establishes for both thinkers ameditative space in and through which something can be occasioned. Theunderlying point remains. Whereas for Kant it is a change in thedisposition of subjective consciousness (i.e., its adoption of an aestheticattitude) which initiates a better disposition towards the community, for

… work is something that separates and divides us. For all thecooperation necessitated by joint enterprise and the division oflabour in our productive activity, we are still divided asindividuals as far as our day to day purposes are concerned.Festive celebration, on the other hand, is clearly distinguished bythe fact that here we are not primarily separated but rathergathered together (RB 40).

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Gadamer it is the participation in a trans-subjective event which effects achange in subjective dispositions towards the community.

When Gadamer argues that “the mystery of festive celebration lies in thissuspension of time”, he refers to how festivity suspends work-time. Thisinitiates that “play-time” in which another order of events emerges. It isin such time that an art work “comes to stand” irrespective of whether itis a painting, drama or symphony. The festive “represents a genuinecreation, (for) something drawn from within ourselves takes shape beforeour eyes in a form that we recognise and experience as a more profoundpresentation of our own reality” (RB 60). This distances Gadamer fromthe view that aesthetic experience is a solitary subject's personal responseto an art work. In the festive—an analogy for the communal dimensionsof aesthetic experience—the individual subject comes to stand differentlyin its relationship to others. Just as the artwork comes to stand in thefestival, so too does the artwork bring its spectators to stand as acommunity: “in the festive the communal spirit that supports us all andtranscends each of us individually represents the real power of the festiveand indeed the real power of the art work” ( RB 63). The festivaloccasions individuals surpassing their everyday view of themselves aspotentially hostile competitors and coming to see themselves as acommunity formed around a shared interest in what the artwork bringsforth. This is an analogy for something more fundamental.

Instrumentalist conceptions of language persuade us that the spoken andwritten word are but communicative tools, but for Gadamer participationin language acknowledges that an individual is located within asubstantive horizon of meanings which transcends subjectiveconsciousness. Pragmatic concerns encourage the forgetting of suchinterconnectedness but when such individualism is suspended by thefestival or, indeed, by the adoption of an aesthetic attitude, the re-discovery of oneself as belonging to an extensive community of shared



meanings and involvements becomes possible. The artwork'scommunicative capacity awakens the realisation that in as much as Iunderstand myself as being addressed, I must acknowledge that I alreadybelong to something larger than myself. The art work festivises: it revealsour personal indebtedness to past and future communities of meaning.The thesis that we belong to a hermeneutic collective which is theeffective underpinning of art's ability to communicate is furtherelaborated in Gadamer's discussion of the symbol.

6. The Symbol

A discussion of the symbol forms the third aspect of Gadamer's case thataesthetic experience involves an ex-stasis of the aesthetic subject. Itprovides a further analogue for the speculative dimension of aestheticexperience. The word “symbol” is a Greek term for a token ofremembrance (tessera hospitalis) that could be broken in two so thatshould a descendent of a former guest enter his house, the co-joinedpieces would kindle into an act of recognition. (RB 31). The symbolconnotes (explicitly) what we recognise implicitly (RB 31). It isassociated with the fragmentary and a promise of completeness which “inturn alludes to beauty and the potentially whole and holy order of things”(RB. 32). The symbol is associated, then, with notions of repetition andthe hope for an abundance of meaning. Its connection with the speculativeis 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 refersto and causes a new one by prompting drivers to pull up and admire it,does not function properly. The symbol, however, does not refer tosomething outside itself. It presents its own meaning. The materialsymbol is, indeed, the place where that meaning becomes present. Yet thesymbolically delivered meaning is never given completely. Its meaning is

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indeterminate. References to the symbol as fragmentary neverthelessanticipate the possibility of wholeness. The speculative dimension of suchreasoning resides in the premise that every stated meaning involvesbringing forth more than is actually spoken. Resonance and depthdepends 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 soundout or insinuate the unstated nexus of meanings which sustain a givenexpression but which are not directly given in it. The speculative powerof an image or phrase has something in common with the sublime: itilluminates in the spoken or visual image a penumbra of unstatedmeanings whose presence can be sensed but never fully grasped orconceptualised. Hence, an artwork can always mean more, that is,insinuate a transcendent dimension of meaning which though neverexhausted by the symbols which carry it do not exist apart from thesymbols that sustain it. The symbol is resonant with the suggestion ofmeaning because it constantly invokes what is not immediately given.This not-given does not exist apart from the given but is inherent withinit. Hence, the hermeneutical sublime, the excess of meaning, the promiseof meaning more and meaning something different which is madeapparent by the symbol, is held within, is immanent in the given.

7. Presentation, Representation and Appearance

Gadamer's account of the symbol establishes that art works arepresentational rather than representational. Presentations occasion themeanings they invoke and do not represent a meaning independent ofthemselves. The argument effects a profound and significant change inthe meaning of aesthetic appearance. The representational view of artrelegates art to a secondary status: the art work brings to mind somethingother than the art work, an original state of affairs, a specific meaning orreality. 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'sphenomenological orientation. If the meaning invoked by a work is notindependent of the work that summons it, the work is the occasion of thecoming-into-appearance of that meaning. Appearing becomessynonymous with original creation. Aesthetic appearance is not secondaryto reality or truth but is the medium through which the work's truthshows/presents itself. Even as presentation, appearance does retain acertain negativity, though in Gadamer's hands it has a positive quality.Appearance always hints at semblance, of something incomplete or notyet fully realised. Gadamer's ontology openly re-enforces if not requiressuch negativity. The claim that each art work has its own temporalityimplies that each will never reveal itself completely. The claim that thereception of all art is contemporaneous dictates that what appears to us asmeaningful is not necessarily what appeared to a previous generation asmeaningful. Like the symbol, appearance is always partial. However,appearance, when considered aesthetically, has the cadence of thesymbolic: it alludes to something beyond itself but which neverthelessinheres within it as the yet-to-be-revealed.

Such arguments support Gadamer's conception of the art work as thatwhich stands-in-itself. That which comes to stand is intelligible as thepresentation of a certain meaning, but because of the indeterminacy ofthat meaning it retains something of the enigmatic. This eminent quality –a genuine work can never be measured the original way it was shown(RB 146)—Gadamer as also refers to as its hermeneutic identity. Thetruth of an artwork is not its simple manifestation of meaning but ratherthe unfathomableness and depth of its meaning (PH 226). Its truthembraces a tension between revelation (what appears) and what isconcealed (what has yet to be shown). The artwork does not simply offera “a recognisable surface contour” but has an inner depth of self-sufficiency which Gadamer calls after Heidegger a “standing-in-itself”. In

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short, the mark of a substantial work is that it veils possibilities ofmeaning. 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 itsmeaning does not connote something utterly alien to us. The yet-to-berevealed is a dimension of meaning overlooked, forgotten, or notperceived within what has already been shown or grasped. In other words,the power of the symbol resides in its ability to reveal that unbeknown toourselves we are in communion with something much larger thanourselves, that is, horizons of meaning which implicitly sustain reflectionand which can when made explicit bring us to think quite differently ofourselves. The mystery of the symbol is its promise of transcendence: aneffective and affecting symbol reveals that we belong to a hermeneuticcommunity always larger than we envisage. The analogy of the festivalonce again is telling. In the festival, individuated work roles arerenounced as we rediscover communal ties. Gadamer's arguments aboutplay, festival and symbol serve, then, as the basis for his claim thataesthetic experience, our experience of art, is a demonstrable instance ofhow subjectivity is informed by a substantiality that transcends anindividual consciousness.

8. The Issue in Question

Gadamer's aesthetics involve a variety of inter-locking arguments, one ofthe most significant of which concerns the Sache selbst. The term isdifficult to translate, but it refers, loosely speaking, to a work's subjectmatter, to what it addresses or to what issue has been placed in question.Philosophical usage of the word evokes phenomenological notions ofintentionality: what a work is directed at or points toward. The Sache isnot a determinate concept but an area of significant meaningfulness, aconstellation of concerns which orbit the affective, conative and cognitive



complexities of subject matters such as grief or love. The Sache underpinsGadamer's claim that aesthetic experience has a significant cognitivecontent. Subject matters may transcend an individual work in that no onework can exhaust their significance, but as ideas Sachen are notindependent of the body of works that exemplify them. If they wereontologically distinct, the idealism Gadamer rejects would be forced onhim and he would be compelled to argue that art is representational, refersto a concept beyond itself and, indeed, disappears into that concept onceevoked. Art becomes philosophy once more. If, however, art ispresentation, as Gadamer insists, a work's meaning is not independent ofit. Art does not therefore copy and thereby represent a subject-matter, butconfigures a visual or literary space in which a subject-matter can besummoned. Gadamer counters an ancient line of argument that regards artas secondary to, inferior to and a corrupter of the real. Contrary to thePlatonic tradition, his argument implies that art adds to the reality of itssubject-matters. Gadamer's evaluation of the aesthetic contrasts vividlywith Kant's in this respect. Kant considers aesthetic experience to beindifferent to whether or not its object is real (cf. TM 89). A work'scredibility does not dependent on its relationship to an original object orco-relative. Whether what is represented exists or not is inconsequential.What matters is the aesthetic merit of the work, not the strength of itslikeness. Should the artwork be harmed, the being of the correlative isunaffected. Gadamer's presentational aesthetics is, by contrast, profoundlyanti-Platonic: a work's disappearance diminishes the reality of that whichpresents itself through it.

Although subject matters transcend the individual works which embodythem, they do not exist apart from their historical embodiments but, unlikePlatonic forms, they do not transcend history but mutate and develop evernew permutations. Any diminishment of art diminishes the historicaleffectiveness of a given subject-matter. Were John Donne's love poemsall lost, our understanding of the exquisite joys and pains of human love

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would be irreparably diminished. A semi-Platonic argument aboutmimesis re-enforces a discernibly non-Platonic argument concerning thehistorically fluid character of subject matters. The argument that artworksdirect us to a subject matter irrespective of whether they be realist orabstract constructions, suggests a moment of return and repetition. Anissue, question or subject-matter is recognised.

The passage strengthens the presentational approach to art but itsreference to essences requires clarification.

It is not suggested that we see repeatedly the same essence in a work ofart. Were this to be suggested, works would become dull anduninformative and make no new contribution to a genre. Gadamer'sinsistence is that works should speak directly to and, indeed, transformour self-understanding. Such transformative power implies recognising ina work what was previously understood of a subject-matter, buttransformed, as if seen for the first time. Mimesis does not entail seeingan unchanging and endlessly repeated. The life of a subject matter is oneof change and development. Gadamer's mimesis argument claims thatthrough repeated re-working and re-interpretation a subject matter not

Where something is recognised it has liberated itself from theuniqueness and contingency of the circumstances in which it wasencountered. It is a matter of neither of there and then, nor of hereand now but it is encountered as the very self-same. Thereby itbegins to rise to its permanent essence and is detached fromanything like a chance encounter (RB 120).

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



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 closelyto what it is related to that it enriches the being of that as if through a newevent of being” (TM 147). The “joy of recognition is rather the joy ofknowing more than is already familiar”. Art works allows subject-mattersto become more what they are. In conclusion, Gadamer'sphenomenological aesthetics effectively destroys the Platonic separationof art and reality. Art works are the sites in which trans-individual bothpresent and transform themselves. Whereas, as we have seen, for Kant thedestruction of an artwork has absolutely no bearing upon the objectivitiesit represents, we can now understand why Gadamer is committed to theopposing view that the destruction of an art work diminishes the reality ofthe subject-matters that come forth through it.

9. Art and Language.

The strategic centrality of language in Gadamer's aesthetics is beyonddoubt. The ability of artworks to bring things to mind and to hint atunseen meanings is reason to claim that in its speculative capacities, artfunctions essentially like a language. Yet he acknowledges that linguisticmeans of expression are inadequate to the task of conveying what occurswithin an experience of art.

Two claims underwrite this scepticism: words do not readily capture thesheer complexity aesthetic experience, and the finitude of language itselfprevents it from capturing the totality of such experience. In other words,

Language often seems ill-suited to express what we feel. In theface of the overwhelming presence of works of art, the task ofexpressing in words what they say to us seems like an infinite andhopeless undertaking … One says this, and then one hesitates (TM401).

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the experience of art always just eludes theoretical containment. These arenot difficulties with language per se, but rather reflect the limited capacityof the human mind to grasp the totality of its involvements. Yet inGadamer's thought these negative aspects incentivise further hermeneuticinvolvement in aesthetic experience. The incompleteness of anyinterpretation of an artwork opens us to the possibility that there is alwayssomething more or something else that can be said. The temporal natureof experience and its interpretation prevent closure or, in other words,both are by nature always open to further ways of thinking and speakingabout art. The argument re-enforces the claim that art and itsinterpretation extend the being of the subject-matters addressed andfurthermore, that aesthetic experience itself has a temporal continuitywhich is linked to its cumulative character as a mode of Bildung.

The issue about the relationship between art and language is not one oflinguistic capture but of finding the appropriate words to open the contentof aesthetic experience. What is meant by the notion that an art workaddresses us with a meaning? Although an agent of the linguistic turn ofthe twentieth century, Gadamer's reflections on language run counter tomany semiotic theories. According to Weinsheimer, “the dualism ofsignifier and signified has no phenomenological basis” for Gadamer“since in speaking we have no awareness of the world as being distinctfrom the word” (Weinsheimer 1993 162). Gadamer speaks of theperfection of the word as being the disappearance of any gap betweensense and utterance. Poetry would be the “paradigm case” of an art workwith a clear and immediate presentation of meaning. Yet this is seeminglyinconsistent with notion of a work that “stands-in-itself”. If aspects of itsmeaning are withheld, sense and utterance are once again separated. Theword, it would appear, signifies something beyond itself after all. Thereis, in other words, a tension between Gadamer wanting to hold that thework of art and the world that comes forth within it are indivisible andsaying 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 itinvokes something beyond itself. Gadamer's speculative account ofmeaning collapses, it would seem, into a referential account of signs.Speculatively charged words refer to other signs or patterns of meaningbeyond themselves. This suggests that words are self-negating signs:when they function as they should, they disappear into what it is referredto. To conclude that words operate as representational signs seems quitecontrary to the account of art functioning in the manner of a symbol.Closer inspection suggests that Gadamer's account of speculative accountmeaning is presentational after all. Let us re-state the question.

If the art work is an autonomous entity that stands-in-itself and does notrefer to anything outside itself, what of art's speculative capacity to referto other complexes beyond its immediate horizon? The theological notionof a host can dissolve the inconsistency. On the one hand, for an art workto have a speculative capacity, it must invoke perimeters of meaningwhich transcend its own immediate circumstance. Without this, an artwork cannot connect us with frameworks of otherness. Yet this argumentthreatens to turn Gadamer's aesthetics into an idealism referringspecifically to the idea which the art work was invoking. Art would onceagain be subordinated to a vehicle of philosophy. On the other hand, thereis something within the constitution of an art work that makes it resisttheoretical reduction. Its invocation of an excess of meaning resistsconceptual capture. This brings us to the crux of the matter. Do those theexcess of meaning which a work can speculatively invoke exist apart fromthe work that summons them? The speculative dimensions of art suggestthat an art work is indeed a host for that which lies beyond it and yet, atthe same time, the transcendent dimensions of meaning (its excess ofmeaning), remains immanent within the work that invokes them. Thepresence of the transcendental only manifests itself through the work thathosts it. To put it another way, it is in the work that the transcendental setof meanings achieve their presence. The full resonance of a subject-matter

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which of course extends well beyond any one work is nevertheless onlydiscernible in the works that host them. Indeed, subject-matters do notexist apart from the works that manifest their presence. Ontologicallyspeaking they inhere within the work. The work is the occasion in whichthese dimensions of meaning appear and they command the attention ofthe viewer so long as the work holds them in play. In other words, withregard to the tension between representation and presentation inGadamer's position, the speculative charge of artworks does indeedsuggest that they function as representational signs always referringbeyond the given meaning. Yet this is another way of saying that,ontologically speaking, artworks functions as symbols. Considered asreferential sign, what the art work refers to is not a world independent ofthe sign but another set of signs. However, such other configurations ofmeaning may mean more than the signs that invoke them but they areinherent within those very signs. In other words, the very signs whichrefer speculatively to other dimensions of meaning also functionsymbolically in that the other horizons of meaning invoked are immanentwithin the work's autonomy. As a symbolic host, the artwork holds thatwhich refers beyond itself within itself.

10. Tradition

What binds us to a tradition, according to Gadamer, is not a misplacedconservatism but the questions a canon or body of work asks of us.However, the question of tradition is one of the most controversial withinGadamer's philosophy. It arises because of the way Gadamer establishes

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



individual and collective learning on the acquisition of accruedexperiences (Bildung) and practices, rather than upon any methodologicalnorm. His argument exposes the Enlightenment prejudice againstprejudice. The liberating and universalising aspects of reason tend tomarginalise and chastise both the culturally different and the historicallyparticular as divisive and irrational. Gadamer contends, however, thatsuch an unqualified hypostasisation of reason and its methods has theunfortunate consequence of condemning as methodologically groundlessthe very valuations that ordinary linguistic and experiential practices arebased on. Gadamer is not unsympathetic to Nietzsche, who rejects theclaim that humanity is shaped by external necessity. Our existence withinthe world and our place within it is, metaphysically speaking, utterlycontingent. If there is no metaphysical necessity that governs humanpractices, why should we even ask for a methodological grounding, whenlanguage has neither required nor functioned with such a license? LikeWilhelm Dilthey before him, Gadamer insists that nothing justifies andgives meaning to life other than life itself. This is not the invocation ofnihilism, for life does not occur in a vacuum. Creatures such as humans,which have no pre-determined essence, only survive by both rememberingwhat has worked well within a practice and by constantly testing itagainst contemporary needs and circumstances. There is a constanttension between acquired experience and the need to stabilise its lessonsand the need to question and thereby destabilise the tried and the tested.All expressive practices depend upon an inheritance of insight andvaluation. They are dependent upon accrued learning and experience.Such observations agitate Gadamer's critics, who see in the unreflectiveacceptance of the given an irresponsibly conservative privileging of thereceived, a wilful blindness to possible repressive or exclusionarypractices within inherited modes of operation. In response to suchscepticism, it must be acknowledged that inherited practices can, logicallyspeaking, have negative entailments. However, a commitment to tradition,is not a commitment to remaining the same, and nor is it indicative of a

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wilful refusal to confront the negative entailments within what istransmitted historically. Traditions which are incapable of changing riskbecoming outmoded. Traditions are not founded upon core and fixedidentities. As vibrant religious and artistic traditions demonstrate, thosewhich are in constant debate over aim and direction often prove engagingand influential. Traditions capable of subjecting their self-understandingto critique constitute continuities of conflict. The importance of receivedunderstanding for Gadamer is not its historical provenance but how itopens us towards and engages us with issues in a community of debate.The Cartesian project of subjecting all beliefs to sceptical examinationuntil 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 methodologicallygrounded is highly dangerous as it devalues those very insights uponwhich our initial world-orientation depends. It is not that these insightsare instrinsically valuable but that they are essential staging posts in thejourneys of understanding they enable. It is the continuous debate anddialogue over practice that enables participants to move on, widen andtransform acquired experience. Movement and development is intrinsic tothe German word for tradition: Überlieferung has the active connotationof both transmitting and handing something on. What a tradition transmitsfrom age to age are questions, problems and issues. The importance ofcanonic works is not that they are peerless exemplars of an idiom or stylebut rather that they raise issues and difficulties in an exemplary way.Traditions can check their self-understanding against their own historicalprojections. A commitment to tradition is not a commitment to anacademic antiquarianism. It is, essentially, a commitment to a field ofdebate. Tradition is presented as a resource and a provocation for thinkingand creativity: whereas sameness is the currency of a conservativeconception of tradition, instability, questions and the challenge of



otherness are the drivers of Gadamer's more dialogical concept oftradition.

It has been argued against Gadamer that his revaluation of tradition doesnot really bring its content to a point of critical reflection. Heacknowledges that like any other temporal phenomenon, not all of itsvistas can be adequately thematised or articulated. This does not mean,however, that tradition is beyond critical appraisal. Traditions can, asPannenberg argues, check their normative assumptions against their self-projections. Other critics suggest that Gadamer's approach to tradition andaesthetics is overtly Classical in its pre-occupation with forms thatmaintain a continuity through time rather than radically alter themselves.It does not allow for those radical intrusions or revolutionary interjectionswhich alter the perceptual paradigm of an age. The counter-objection isnot only that the charge overlooks Gadamer's embrace of Heidegger'squite radical phenomenological re-working of the Classical Tradition, butalso the fact that for one paradigm to replace another, there must becertain relation between them. One must address an absence, fulfil anunseen possibility or a lack, within the other. Cubism, for example,implies a visual orientation quite different from realism, but both idiomsbelong to a common tradition in that they strive to show us something ofthe real. Without a degree of continuity with tradition, any radicalemergence would have no bearing upon the received and thereby lack theability to call into question received notions and understanding. It is,however, precisely the challenge of the different and the other which isthe driver of Gadamer's dialogical conception of tradition. It is aconception which is in part modernistic: tradition is presented as being inconstant debate with itself. Its renewal demands change andtransformation. Furthermore, a virtue of this dialogical conception oftradition is not culturally specific. Because its main focus is on thesubject-matters which different cultural practices address, it offers amodel of cognitive engagement that can operate between distinct

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traditions rather than in just any one.

11. Paradox of the In-between

There is a creative tension at play within Gadamer's aesthetic theory. Onethe one hand, Gadamer stalwartly defends the autonomy of the art workand, on the other, despite his resistance to any subsumption of art withinphilosophy, he insists nevertheless that aesthetics should be absorbedwithin hermeneutics, which is for the most part understood as atheoretical enterprise. This tension replicates aspects of the so-calledhermeneutic circle. Schleiermacher, for example, argues that it is onlypossible to grasp an individual's personal utterances if one can understandthe general structure of the language which that individual operateswithin. Conversely, general structures are only intelligible in terms ofparticular exemplifying utterances. Wilhelm Dilthey operates within asimilar part-whole structure, namely, an individual's personal experienceswill mean little to the reader unless they can be contextualised within ahistorical context. A movement between part and whole also takes placein Gadamer's thinking. The art work is initially presented in itssingularity. But then, the particular is illuminated by being brought undera subject-matter. To engage with artworks discursively is to bringgeneralisations about a work to bear, placing it in a wider context ofassociations. The movement to the wider level of generalisation alsoreturns the spectator to the particular, since generalisation enables anunderstanding of what is singular about a work by locating it within abroader background. This double hermeneutic movement is highlycharacteristic of Gadamer's aesthetic. It recognises that the cognitivedimension of of aesthetic experience is like all linguistic experience bothcentrifugal and centripetal in nature. When a work addresses us its impactis centrifugal: it upsets and transforms what we customarily recognise. Itawakens us to the hermeneutical sublime, to what lies beyond butnevertheless 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 saidfor the first time to us in particular” (GW 8, 62). Yet this estrangingmoment initiates a centripetal return, a homecoming. “The poem and theart of language generally as a heard or written text is always… somethinglike a recognition in every single word” (GW 8, 62). Yet the questionremains: is the passage from the immediacy of the given art work totheoretical contemplations about its subject matter not an instance ofmoving from the particular givenness of a work to a more abstract levelof reflection about its subject-matter? Does not the contemplativemovement away from the work betray its particularity and suggest that thesense of a work lies beyond it, in its concept? Were Gadamer to havefallen into this impasse, an idealist and representationalist account of artwould be forced upon him. The vehemence of his resistance to thesestances suggests that something other than a simple shift from theparticular immediacy of a work to a theoretical contemplation of itscontent must be at play.

The accusation of inconsistency requires the assumption that the aestheticexperience 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 intenseexperience that it impels us towards seeking to bring it into words.Experience endeavours to bring itself words. These words will by virtueof their semantic associations place the experience in a wider context (thecentrifugal) and at the same time these words will because of their poeticcapacity for singularity make the experience clearer and more distinct.

Experience is not wordless to begin with, subsequently becomingan object of reflection by being named, by being subsumed underthe universality of the word. Rather experience itself seeks andfinds words that express it. We seek the right word—i.e., the wordthat really belongs to the thing (or experience) so that in it the

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This suggests that Gadamer is not applying a hermeneutic method toaesthetic experience but seeking to expose the hermeneutical movementfrom part to whole within aesthetic experience. In other words, the claimthat aesthetics should be taken up within hermeneutics is not an attempt toreduce aesthetics to another idiom. It announces an endeavour toarticulate the hermeneutic dynamic of aesthetic experience itself. Let usbriefly recapitulate the argument.

The tension in Gadamer's position arises from (1) asserting art's autonomyand (2) demanding that aesthetics be subsumed within hermeneutics.Undoubtedly, the weight of argument is on the latter. He systematicallycriticizes Kantian aesthetics for its narrow-minded concentration on thesubjectivity of momentary pleasures and offers in its place a substantialreconstruction of the cognitive content of art's address. In other words,Gadamer switches the status of autonomy from the sensible irreducibilityof a work to its hermeneutic autonomy. This entails the argument that awork which challenges our outlook does so because it is enigmatic bynature: it gives rise to difficulties of meaning and interpretation whichcannot be explained away by a more fundamental level of understanding.The autonomous work that stands in itself is a work that both presents ameaning and at the same time holds something back. It is in other wordsalways pointing beyond itself but within itself. This substantiatesGadamer's claim that the hermeneutical constitution of an autonomouswork resists theoretical reduction. In the essay “Word and Picture”, heexpresses sympathy with Schleiermacher's remark, “I hate all theory thatdoes not grow out of practice” (GW 8, 374). However, as has beenargued, the transcendent dimensions of meaning which a workspeculatively invokes are not outside the work but immanent within it. Inother words, we do not need a special hermeneutic method to access thewithheld but just a deeper, more attentive contemplative acquaintance.

thing comes into language (TM 417).



When Gadamer speaks of being attentive to what an art work says, ofdiscerning its enigmatic quality and of becoming aware of its speculativeresonances, he is indeed speaking in a hermeneutical idiom, but this ismost clearly not a case of Gadamer submitting aesthetic experience to anexternally derived theory. To the contrary, Gadamer is trying to draw outthe hermeneutical dynamics of aesthetic experience itself. Thus thetension between the immediacy of experience and reflection upon thecontent of that experience is not a tension between experience on the onehand and theory on the other. It is a tension within aesthetic experiencebetween what an artwork invokes of its subject-matter and how what isinvoked changes the character of that which invokes it. Whathermeneutical reflection reveals of aesthetic experience is nothingextraneous to such experience but a further disclosure of what is heldwithin it. To conclude, if aesthetic experience is hermeneutical in that artworks speculatively illuminate meanings beyond what is immediatelydisclosed, hermeneutical experience should equally be taken up byaesthetics in that subject-matters only manifest their presence in thesingular and particular.

Bibliography

Gadamer Bibliographies

Two Gadamer bibliographies are worthy of note. Lewis Edwin Hahn'sThe Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Chicago, Open Court, 1993 hasa “Selected Gadamer Bibliography” with five sections. The secondbibliography is a recently extended edition of Etsuro Makita's excellentGadamer Bibliographie, Frankfurt, Lang, 1995.

Primary Literature

In German

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Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Wahrheit und Methode, Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr,1975

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1993 (GW), Gesammelte Werke (9 Bände),Tübingen: (UTB) Mohr Siebeck.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1993 (GW 8), Kunst als Aussage (GesammelteWerke Band 8), Tübingen: J.C.B.Mohr (Paul Siebeck).

In English

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1976 (PH), Philosophical Hermeneutics, D. Linge(ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1986 (RB), The Relevance of the Beautiful,London: Cambridge University Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1989 (TM), Truth and Method, London: Sheedand Ward.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1992, On Education, Poetry and History, Albany:State University of New York Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1994, Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue,Albany: State University of New York Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1994 (HW), Heidegger's Ways, Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press.

Secondary Literature

Barnes, Annette, 1988, On Interpretation, Oxford: Blackwell.Bruns, Gerald, 1992, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, New Haven:

Yale University Press.Connor, Steven, 1992, “Modernism and Postmodernism” in Cooper 1992,

pp. 288–293.Cooper, David E., 1992, A Companion to Aesthetics, Oxford: Blackwell.Davey, Nicholas, 2006, Unquiet Understanding, Albany: State University

of New York Press.



Dilthey, Wilhelm, 1976, Selected Writings, P. Rickman (ed.), Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Dostal, Robert J., 2002, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dutt, Carsten, ed., 1993, Hermeneutik-Ästhetik-Praktische Philosophie:Hans-Georg Gadamer im Gespräche, Heidelberg: C. WinerUniversitäts Verlag. An English translation of this volume appears in2001, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, NewHaven and London: Yale University Press.

Grondin, Jean, 1995, Sources of Hermeneutics, Albany: State Universityof New York Press.

Harrington, Austin, 2004, Art and Social Theory: Sociological Argumentsin Aesthetics, Cambridge: Polity.

Heywood, Ian, 1997, Social Theories of Art: A Critique, London:Macmillan.

Krajewski, Bruce, 2004, Gadamer's Repercussions: ReconsideringPhilosophical Hermeneutics, Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Lawn, Chris, 2006, Gadamer: A Guide for the Perplexed, London andNew York: Continuum.

Szondi, Peter, 1995, Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics, London:Cambridge University Press.

Weinsheimer, Joel, 1991, Philosophical Hermeneutics and LiteraryTheory, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Wolff, Janet, 1975, Hermeneutic Philosophy and the Sociology of Art,London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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