2 The Event of Truth
What the tool of method does not achieve must—and really can—be achieved by a discipline of questioning and inquiring, a discipline that guarantees truth. (TM 491/GW1 494)
1. Against Method?
What does Truth and Method mean? The significance of the conjunction “and” has almost turned this title into an enigma. If “method” has a negative value in the title, then the “and” does not connect, but rather represents an alternative. The title could be revised accordingly as Truth or Method.1 In an even more radical version, one could think of the formulation: Truth against Method.2 If “method” is taken as a model and metaphor for the natural sciences, then truth occurs outside method. Thus it is possible to speak of “extramethodical” experiences of truth.
Yet it is necessary to address a misinterpretation. Certainly Gadamer no longer understands hermeneutics in a traditional sense as a doctrine of interpretation, and thus he aims to free it from the burden of methodology. But he does not want to put method as such into question altogether. The title implicitly contains a tension between “method” and “truth.” When he considers this tension later in greater detail, Gadamer admits that he had sharpened it in a polemical sense (RHT 317/GW2 238). This was indispensable to show the limits of science to an age in which the faith in science borders on superstition. In the “Afterword to the Third Edition” of Truth and Method, Gadamer writes: “Ultimately, as Descartes himself realized, it belongs to the special structure of straightening something crooked that it needs to be bent in the opposite direction. But what was crooked in this case was not so much the methodology of the sciences as their reflexive self-consciousness” (TM 555/GW2 453). If philosophical hermeneutics highlights the tension between truth and method, its aim is not to enter into conflict with science and its method, but to offer an occasion for critical reflection on the truth implied by science. The “and” in the title points to this critical reflection. Hence the epistemological relevance of hermeneutics, according to Gadamer, should be seen as an attempt “to mediate between philosophy and the sciences” (TM 552/GW2 450).3 The polemical tension in the title should be read neither as an antithesis nor as a hiatus: “It was, of course, a flat misunderstanding when people accused the expression ‘truth and method’ of failing to recognize the methodical rigor of modern science” (TM 551/GW2 449). It is not that hermeneutics disallows or dismisses method. It would be absurd not to recognize the need for a method when, for example, a mathematical problem is being solved, a skyscraper is being built or a vaccination against a disease must be found. Yet hermeneutics does not allow the imposition of a method—because of its fascinating and enormous results—in a mechanical way everywhere. A method presupposes that the object can be definable and the subject can define it objectively with a scientific demonstration; it proceeds from an instrumental conception of knowledge in which the subject is confident that it can dispose of the object. But if the method is adequate for scientific projects it cannot be for all others; on the contrary, it may bring a reduction or even a distortion of the experience of truth.
Husserl had already opposed the tendency to reduce our experiential world—the world that precedes all scientific research, our everyday “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt)—to mathematics. Gadamer follows in Husserl’s wake, but takes the truth claim of the lifeworld more strongly into account. For Gadamer, a method can be a valid and legitimate procedure for gaining knowledge.4 It remains, nevertheless, secondary and derivative when compared to all those experiences of truth that do not fall under its logic, for example those that remain outside of methodical logic and in some cases precede it. Here, “outside of” means “before.” The extramethodical experiences of truth that hermeneutics aims to bring to light have a priority that signifies autonomy as well. To put it differently: the truth that precedes method is autonomous, because it does not need a method to be verified, validated, or founded. On the contrary, in any method there is always already a hermeneutic pre-understanding at play. Its application begins with our linguistic orientation, which “is and remains the vehicle of all understanding,” just as every specialized language stems from a common language, from which it is inseparable (TM 561/GW2 459). “Thus all science involves a hermeneutic component” (TM 559/GW2 458). If there is a foundation here, it is that of hermeneutics and its truth.
2. Understanding Is Like Breathing
Yet what does “hermeneutic truth” mean? Is this not a contradiction in adjecto, if truth is supposed to be objective, verifiable, and indubitable? The point is that philosophical hermeneutics does not think of truth in terms of the scientific doctrine of knowledge. Thus hermeneutics does not aim for a cognitive method from which a new theory of truth would be derived. The expectation of finding such a theory in Truth and Method is necessarily disappointed.
Understanding, not knowing, is at stake in hermeneutic truth. Hermeneutics interrogates neither the conditions for the possibility of knowledge nor what kind of a method should be followed. Instead it asks what happens when one understands (TM 5/GW1 3).5 This is the new question that hermeneutics poses. It concerns what occurs in understanding, the event of truth. Hermeneutics strives for nothing other than to understand understanding. But understanding is neither a process nor a cognitive procedure, and knowing is rather a modality derived from understanding.
What is the understanding? It is a capability that is less active than passive. In this sense one can speak of the experience of understanding. Understanding means not conceiving, dominating, or controlling. Understanding is like breathing. And one does not decide not to breathe any more. Understanding is not a matter of knowing, but of being. Thus it is the understanding that supports and grounds us. The great mistake of modern methodology is that it allows us to forget this supporting ground.
But should the foundation of understanding be founded in turn? “Does what has always supported us need to be grounded?” (TM xxxvii/GW2 447). Gadamer’s position is not simply anti-foundationalist. His intention is to allow the ground to emerge from forgetfulness in order to bring it to light as ground, that is, so fundamental that it escapes all foundations. Thus hermeneutics proves to be, in Plato’s sense, anamnetic.
If truth is an event of understanding, then it can neither be deduced nor theoretically conceived, but only shown each time at the place where it happens. Hermeneutics aims to describe the event of truth. Although it confronts the most significant philosophical and scientific theories of truth, it avoids all temptations to define its own theory of truth. This corresponds to its conviction that truth, including its own truth, is an event (TM 5/GW1 3).6 Hermeneutics seeks to let those experiences of truth reemerge that even the humanities, with their mania for method, have driven into hiding: for example, the study of art, history, and language.
3. The Rediscovery of Vico: Humanistic Culture and Hermeneutic Meaning
To this end, it is indispensable to consider the place where the humanities arise, as suggested by their ancient name of humaniora. It becomes necessary, in other words, to rediscover the humanistic tradition, which today is either repressed or even at times openly dismissed. Especially striking is the case of Heidegger, who, above all in his famous Letter on Humanism, decisively distances himself from the humanistic tradition.7 Gadamer, by contrast, suggests a rediscovery of humanism, and this difference between the two philosophers should not be overlooked.
From the constellation of humanism Gadamer chooses a few “leading concepts” that could shed light on a model of knowledge as an alternative to the methodical one: culture, the community’s sense, judgment, and taste. These concepts point to each other and delineate the stages of his important rediscovery.
The first concept is that of Bildung, which could be interpreted as “education” or “formation,” but also as “culture” (TM 9–19/GW1 15–24). In the final years, Gadamer returned again and again to the question of Bildung, which for him is one of the most urgent of our time.8 But what does Bildung mean? In order to clarify this concept, he interrogates the history of the word.
Following the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), the word Bildung gained a complex meaning. On the one hand it corresponds to the Latin formatio; on the other hand Bildung contains Bild, or image, which points back to the old mystical tradition and ultimately to Genesis 1:26: if the human being was created in the image of God, then humans must develop this likeness. Here Bildung does not suggest a being, but a becoming; it is not the result of a process but rather the process itself of constant and further development (TM 11/GW1 17). It does not involve something given, as when a talent is cultivated or material is assimilated. Bildung means to form oneself.
At this point it is necessary to follow Hegel, who recognized in the concept of Bildung the prerequisite for philosophy itself. Bildung meant for him “rising to the universal,” a movement that demands “sacrificing particularity for the sake of the universal” (TM 12/GW1 18). Another way of saying Bildung is “the capacity for abstraction” or the detachment from oneself.
How is the cultivated person to be distinguished from the uncultivated person? “Whoever abandons himself to his particularity is ungebildet [unformed]—e.g., if someone gives way to blind anger without measure or sense of proportion” (TM 12/ GW1 18). The uncultivated ones are those who cannot look away from themselves, who cannot distance themselves from their own immediate experience and are incapable of raising themselves to a universal standpoint from which to see their own particularities in a new and different way. If culture means detachment, then each form of detachment from oneself and hence each practical behavior, beginning with work, is itself already culture, because it forces individuals to go beyond their own limits.
This becomes more evident with theory, which requires an effort to deal with things that do not exist immediately but are rather distant and strange. It is also similar to the study of ancient languages and the ancient world. Here the greatest distance from oneself is reached. It is the foreignness that provokes it. To recognize oneself in the other: that is culture. Thus the cultured person is not the one who is cultivated, who has gathered a manifold erudition. The cultured person is the one who knows in the Socratic sense about their own not-knowing, who recognizes the limit of their own finitude. By recognizing this limit one recognizes the other and the standpoint of the other. This is the ideal of humanistic culture, which begins with the condition humana. Hence Gadamer wrote in his last years: “Bildung means to be able to look at things from the standpoint of another” (GW8 349). This also means to see oneself with the eyes of the other and from their standpoint.
It appears then that the universality to which one raises oneself is “not that of the concept,” it is not the methodological subsumption of the particular under the universal (TM 17/GW1 23). Here Gadamer follows the lead of Hermann L. F. von Helmholtz (1821–94), who, although he characterized the model of the humanities negatively, saw induction as the basis of the humanities. Instead of a “logical” induction, the humanities employ an “artistic-instinctive” induction, which he characterized as a “kind of tact” (TM 5/GW1 11).9 The universality reached along this path is neither abstract nor forever fixed and everywhere valid. It is, by contrast, the universality of the standpoint that the cultivated person leaves open to the extent that he or she recognizes the standpoint of the other. This universality is so concrete that cultivated consciousness can be compared to one of the senses. Yet it is not a matter of a sixth sense that might be added to the others, but a universal, or more precisely, a common sense (TM 17/GW1 23).10
With the sensus communis, the notion of a communal or common sense, the core of humanism is reached. The name encountered in Truth and Method is, not coincidentally, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) (TM 19–24/GW1 24–29). It is not necessary to agree with Gadamer’s interpretation of Vico here, which he derives primarily from a single work, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time), Vico’s first Latin work from 1701. But it is significant that Gadamer writes an important chapter on the Italian philosopher, which represents one of the few exceptions in the realm of German philosophy.11
In his “pedagogical manifesto,” which contains in nuce many elements of his later scienza nuova, his “new science,” Vico revaluates the rhetorical tradition (RHT 48/ GW2 280). The theme of his work is the opposition between topic and critique. Against the Cartesian method, which starts from an initial truth and by proceeding deductively reduces everything “true” to a “mathematical truth,” Vico develops the new concept of “verisimilitude,” which would legitimize not only the dignity, but also the autonomy, of the artes or the humanities. The critical-deductive method, which is fully self-enclosed, cannot discover anything new and can only make explicit whatever is already contained in its premises. These premises have not been established by critique, but by topic and the ability of topics to reveal something new. Critique is thus dependent on topic, just as ratio or reason is dependent on ingenium or disposition. Topics actually require the art of discovering tópoi, the “commonplaces” from which all argument proceeds. Whereas Descartes had criticized these as the mere accumulation of prejudices and pseudo-truths, which cannot be traced back to a clear and distinct foundation, for Vico the commonplaces of rhetoric are the places of inductive and creative knowledge. Without being founded on something else, they are for their part foundational: the places where “common sense” gets articulated. With a connotation that already suggests communication and language, the word communis or “communal” in the sense of “common,” points to what can be communicated and shared with one another. The same can be said for that concrete, temporary, and historically valid universality that substantiates common sense. Here it becomes clear why Gadamer’s interpretation of Vico had precisely this common sense in mind: it should not be interpreted as an ability that can be shared by all, but as “the sense that founds community” (TM 21/GW1 26). Vico’s appeal to common sense, in which Gadamer finds the recuperation not only of the Latin sensus communis but also of the Aristotelian phrónesis, is an appeal to that sense which lives in all of us and can be gained only by living together: the sense of the common good. The cultivated person is the one who has a sense of community.
What corresponds to common sense in the German language and the German tradition? In the Latin, Italian, and French traditions, as well as in the English tradition, common sense indicates the general quality of citizens. An example of this is the “common sense” that Shaftesbury (1671–1713) had understood as the social virtue of sympathy; from this would arise the doctrine of moral sense (TM 25/GW1 31). In the German tradition, by contrast, which takes shape first through reflection on the humanities, common sense was intellectualized, robbed of its political and social content, and reduced to a mere corrective, the faculty of judgment (TM 30/GW1 36).
Common sense can also be called the Urteilskraft or faculty of judgment, because this sense cultivates the ability to judge what is convenient and right. The faculty of judgment is not merely a formal ability, but an exigency that arises from social and moral solidarity: it manifests itself from case to case. Thus it is not possible to refer to it by a principle or a method. Hence the dilemma felt by those who judge. Judging, which goes together with the sensory ability to differentiate, is more like tasting, as in the immediate rejection or acceptance of things. Taste, which has a more moral than aesthetic value, is another way to say judgment, common sense, and culture (TM 34/ GW1 40).
In all these ways, that sense can be described which can be neither taught nor learned, which is the result of neither rules nor contents, but which is instead a practical wisdom of living that can only be cultivated and refined, and would be unthinkable without human social life. The hermeneutic sense gains a more precise contour from the rediscovery of humanism, as a kind of knowledge completely different from the exact and methodical knowledge of the sciences. If the hermeneutic sense were measured by the natural sciences, it would have to be excluded from the realm of knowledge or be reduced to an aesthetic function. With this not only would the entire heritage of humanistic study be lost, which is based on the hermeneutic sense, but a humane conception of knowledge as well.
4. Kant’s “Caesura”: From the Aesthetics of Taste to the Aesthetics of Genius
For Gadamer, the slow but inexorable darkening of the humanistic tradition is closely bound up with the name of Kant; yet Kant, for his part, had recognized the value of this tradition. So how could Gadamer charge Kant with this responsibility?
The humanities, which came to exist as such only with Kant, were from then on faced with a radical alternative: to become either a method or aesthetics. In other words, either they would have to measure themselves as a method in relation to the exact sciences and risk disappearing, or they must submit to aestheticization. The starting point for the discussion is in both instances Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason from 1781. Kant perceives the need to redefine metaphysics with the intention of saving it. The result of his project, however, is quite the opposite: by measuring metaphysics against the pure science of nature, metaphysics becomes discredited forever. This condemnation also falls on all forms of knowledge that do not follow the criteria and methods of the sciences, so that the latter will be identified exclusively with exact science.
At this moment the fate of the “humanistic” sciences is sealed, especially those in which any echo of the humanistic tradition can still be heard, and which in Germany are given the name of “the Arts” (Geisteswissenschaften). These “sciences,” or better, “arts,” are negatively defined. From the beginning they have been characterized by a lack. Thus Kant’s “caesura” discredits every form of nonmethodical knowledge that had developed in the humanistic tradition (TM 41/GW1 46).12 How could culture, common sense, judgment, and taste be grounded and legitimized now? Obviously, taste has nothing to do with science. But if it is not a science, then what is it? Taste is aesthetic. This is the answer introduced by Kant and radicalized after him. Indeed today the culture of taste or of good taste falls entirely within the realm of aesthetics. As this realm is more clearly profiled, two phenomena emerge that are closely bound up with one another. On the one hand, the humanities are separated from the humanistic tradition, forced to be measured against the monopoly of truth held by the exact sciences, and obliged to understand themselves from the standpoint of a completely different identity (TM 41/GW1 46). On the other hand they find the possibility of surviving, with the loss of their identity and origin in this aestheticization, at the price of losing all cognitive value. A source as untrustworthy as judgment can be entrusted with nothing or next to nothing.
In this sense Gadamer can say that the Kantian foundation of aesthetics is “epochmaking” (TM 41/GW1 47).13 After the first Critique and the Critique of Practical Reason from 1788, Kant laid the foundation of the new aesthetics in an autonomous domain, beyond knowledge and beyond morality, in his Critique of Judgment from 1790. His central question concerns the possibility of discovering an a priori in taste that would legitimize his requirement of universal validity. In order to understand better the drastic reduction that this question implies, it is important to remember that everything which was aesthetic, above all aesthetic judgment, had belonged to the realm of taste, and that taste, which was almost a synonym for common sense, also had a moral and political connotation. After Kant, taste was abstracted from this connotation, aestheticized, subjected to critique, and required to meet a criterion of validity that ultimately is that of science. Obviously it will not be able to respond. So it is robbed of all “significance as knowledge” and reduced to a subjective principle (TM 43/GW1 49). Indeed, one cannot know anything cognitively from objects judged to be beautiful. With great effort Kant attributes to taste a “subjective universality,” a paradoxical formulation meant to show the free play of the faculties. This free play is the source of aesthetic pleasure, and, although it is purposively subjective, it is nevertheless identical in every subject and universally communicable.14
In the complex interpretation that he gives of Kantian aesthetics, Gadamer highlights a distinction that remains somewhat secondary in the third Critique, yet is indispensable if the autonomy of the aesthetic is to be understood in Kant’s sense. It is the distinction between “free” and “adherent” beauty.15 This topic represents one of the core issues of Gadamer’s Kant interpretation; he returned to it many times, as for example in his essay “Intuition and Vividness” (“Anschauung und Anschaulichkeit”) from 1980 (RB 155–170/GW8 189–205). But what makes this distinction possible? Free beauty, or authentic beauty for Kant, may become the object of a “pure judgment of taste,” where neither intellectual nor moral factors intervene. Kant’s examples include pure music, or music without content, arabesques, and floral ornaments. These objects are beautiful because they have no other purpose than pure beauty. Less pure, by contrast, is the beauty of “adherent” objects, which are called this because they adhere to a concept. Their purpose is no longer purely aesthetic. Examples of this beauty are the beauty of a human figure, of an animal, or of a building. Here a further purpose is presupposed. Indeed, a building should also be useful. In these cases a pure judgment of taste becomes impossible, since it is compromised by the representation of the purpose. Gadamer calls this doctrine “particularly dangerous,” because it marks the moment from which the aesthetic judgment is robbed of all cognitive value. From this point on, aesthetics survives only by delimiting itself in a negative way from both knowledge and morality (TM 44/GW1 50).
At the same time Gadamer is aware that aesthetics did not reach the climax of this development with Kant, for whom the beautiful was nevertheless a “symbol of the moral good.”16 The beautiful in this context is “natural beauty.” It is as if nature itself were to contribute to aesthetic pleasure. The “wonderful purposiveness [Zweckmässigkeit] of nature for us” indicates that we are the ultimate goal of creation and reveals our moral destiny (TM 50–51/GW1 56). While this destiny reduces the moral significance of aesthetics, it also explains the priority Kant grants to natural beauty over artistic beauty.17 If the “products of art” speak to us through something that is already a language of the spirit, then natural objects do not exist to speak to us; but precisely because they do not assert anything determinate, they are even more eloquent: they remind us of our moral destiny by the accord they excite in us (TM 53/GW1 57). Yet however much it pretends to be autonomous, the Kantian founding of aesthetics requires a further ground, which is that of a teleology and theology of creation.
It is this further ground that is called into question in the post-Kantian era. Beginning with Schiller, the preoccupation with safeguarding the autonomy of aesthetics becomes dominant. This is expressed in a new distancing from the humanistic tradition, to which Kant, who still conceives of taste and natural beauty in a moral framework, nevertheless remained bound. In his famous work from 1795, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller speaks of an “education” that is nevertheless still aesthetic. Thus he prepares the turn to Romanticism, which consistently gives preference to artistic beauty and consistently, by emphasizing creativity, privileges genius over taste. The transition from taste to genius appears symptomatic in many respects (TM 55–57/ GW1 59–61). If aesthetics occupies an autonomous realm outside knowledge and morality, a realm characterized by the free exercise of subjectivity, then it should allow room for that subjectivity which expresses itself in the artistic creation of the genius. The opposition between genius and taste becomes unavoidable: taste, another name for common sense, becomes the discipline imposed on the invention of the genius. After Kant it is thus the revolt of the genius, with the originality of his production, which will prevail. In the nineteenth century one can speak with Gadamer of a “true apotheosis” of genius and creativity (TM 59/GW1 65). This “apotheosis” is promoted by irrationalism and the cult of unconscious production, which will contribute to separating the world of art from the world of knowledge and morality.
The protagonists of this turn are, above all, Goethe and Rousseau, both of whom merge aesthetic experience with personal and autobiographical experience. It suffices to think of Goethe’s Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit), and Rousseau’s Confessions. Following these works, art appears more and more bound up with Erlebnis, with “lived experience.” The theorist of this connection was Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), who made Erlebnis a key concept not only of aesthetics, but also of hermeneutics and indeed of all the humanities.18
As far as it seems to originate from lived experience, art becomes increasingly separated from truth and marginalized by reason. Gadamer documents this process with his account of the development of the concept of Erlebnis (TM 64–70/GW1 70–76). In the course of the nineteenth century the concept followed two apparently contrary, but actually complementary, lines of development. On the one hand, in the Erlebnis a certain givenness is discerned that would counterbalance the “fact” of the empiricists. On the other hand, the cult of lived experience declines into a “pantheistic” horizon, which—precisely because of its unfathomable many-sidedness—escapes all rational knowledge (TM 64/GW1 69). Erlebnis finds its last instance in the “philosophy of life.” Yet positivism and pantheism are, ultimately, two sides of the same coin. In the age of “science,” which dominates reason, the humanities search indefatigably for an ultimate givenness that could legitimate them, and inevitably fall into an irrationalism that confirms their marginality.
5. The Superiority of Science and the Unreality of Art: Aesthetic Consciousness
Hence a new realm for aesthetic experience takes shape: the realm of appearance alongside the real world. Throughout the entire nineteenth and twentieth centuries it becomes accepted that art has nothing to do with knowledge. From this perspective, and on the basis of the Kantian and Romantic concepts of genius, aesthetic consciousness develops.
In order to show the limits of this consciousness, Gadamer dwells on allegory (TM 70–81/GW1 76–87).19 Why did the extension of aesthetic consciousness correspond simultaneously to a dismissal of allegory? More than a form of visual art, as for example with allegorical painting, allegory is a rhetorical and exegetical form. To give just one example: the allegorical representation of justice is a goddess with blindfolded eyes who holds a pair of scales in her hand. The image suggests that allegory is not only the work of a genius, but rests on consolidated traditions (TM 79/GW1 85). It is a kind of cryptic script that points beyond what it expresses to a determined reality. In this sense, it is an experience of reality (TM 76/GW1 82). But this claim, which makes it suspicious for aesthetic consciousness, lets allegory appear all the more interesting for Gadamer. In fact, he proceeds toward a “rehabilitation of allegory.” His intention underlines the necessity of recovering a relationship between art and reality (TM 70/ GW1 76).
With regard to the fatal separation of art and reality, Gadamer speaks of the abstraction of aesthetic consciousness. This has been the price for the autonomy of the aesthetic. Schiller already had to pay that price. Although he wanted to overcome Kant’s dualisms, Schiller created a deeper abyss between art and reality (TM 81–88/ GW1 87–94). Yet the abyss is actually made possible and consolidated by the scientistic reduction that limits reality more and more to the spatiotemporal matter investigated and controlled by science. Everything else for science is appearance, or even fiction. It is no coincidence that the Anglo-Saxon world uses the word “fiction” to designate literature (LL 36/GW8 424).
Through “aesthetic differentiation,” art is made unreal (TM 85/GW1 91). Aesthetic consciousness, which recognizes only the “aesthetic quality” of the object, separates and abstracts it from the real world in order to transpose it into the realm of beautiful appearance (TM 85/GW1 91). This could happen only because science has already appropriated authentic being. The abstraction of aesthetic consciousness is the product of the occult empire of science. Art gains its autonomy, to be sure, but this is merely imaginary. The clearest proof of this imaginary autonomy is those places that, though they are destined for art, ultimately marginalize it. There is no city that does not have theaters, concert halls, or museums. But these places banish art from reality—which is different and elsewhere—where it can be managed and dominated by the economy and by science. For Gadamer the museum functions as the place of this marginalization par excellence. In contrast to the older collections, which reflected a taste or contained the works of a single school, today’s museum is a “collection of such collections” that hides its own origin, even through its historical disposition (TM 87/GW1 92). Here aesthetic consciousness celebrates its unreality.
In this context it is not surprising that such de-realization also has consequences for the artist, who “loses his place in the world” because he falls under the illusion that he can produce art in complete independence. He becomes an outsider, someone allowed to live as a bohemian. The desacralized and secularized world of science, through its relentless search for new myths, turns the artist into a kind of “secular savior,” on whom the world’s salvation would depend. The artist’s tragedy is that he can accomplish only a particular redemption, which is actually the negation of redemption. In the attempt he merely experiences, through the public around him, the failure of this particularity (TM 88/GW1 94). Gadamer’s point is that, historically, works of art were generally commissioned. From Mozart’s Requiem to the Sistine Chapel, it would be difficult to find an exception. What aesthetic consciousness calls inspiration, geniality, and creativity, is for the artist in a very prosaic way a matter of career and work, above all commissioned work.
In the end, however, the abstraction of aesthetic consciousness abstracts from art itself, which must therefore be recovered in its relation to reality. This relation is not a relation of discontinuity. Art interrupts, but does not cut off, the hermeneutic continuity of our existence. Far from a kind of experience that ends only in disenchantment, the encounter with the work of art can impact life so profoundly that it can be the beginning of a renewal, of an entirely new way of living in the world (TM 99/GW1 105). Since art is not an unreal reality, but on the contrary a reality elevated to a higher power, it can be said that being increases, strengthens. Gadamer speaks of an “increase in being” (TM 140/GW1 145). Art is then an experience of truth. But wherever the conception of art changes, the conception of truth will change as well.
Notes
1. See Gianni Vattimo’s introduction to the Italian edition of Truth and Method (L’ontologica ermeneutica nella filosofia contemporanea).
2. This is the interpretation of, for example, Rorty. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 358n1: “Indeed, it would be reasonable to call Gadamer’s book a tract against the very idea of method, where this is conceived of as an attempt at commensuration. It is instructive to note the parallels between this book and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method.” See Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (New York: New Left Books, 1975). Habermas, too, had interpreted the title in a polemic sense, as “truth against method,” though in a way his reading is much closer to Gadamer’s intention than Rorty’s reading. On Gadamer’s discussion with Habermas and Rorty, see chapter 10 in this volume, parts 2–3.
3. See Michael Kelly, “On Hermeneutics and Science: Why Hermeneutics is Not Anti-Science,” in Southern Journal of Philosophy 25 (1987), 481–500. For a study on this topic that is still important, see Wolfgang Wieland, “Möglichkeiten der Wissenschaftstheorie,” in Rüdiger Bubner, Konrad Cramer, and Reiner Wiehl, eds., Hermeneutik und Dialektik. Hans-Georg Gadamer zum 70. Geburtstag, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1970), 1:31–56.
4. See Tuan A. Nuyen, “Truth, Method and Objectivity: Husserl and Gadamer on Scientific Method,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 20 (1990): 437–452.
5. On the conception of understanding, see Damir Barbaric, “Event as Transition,” in Günter Figal, Jean Grondin, Dennis Schmidt, eds., Hermeneutische Wege. Hans-Georg Gadamer zum Hundertsten (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 63–83.
6. See Jean Grondin, Hermeneutische Wahrheit? Zum Wahrheitsbegriff Hans-Georg Gadamers (1982), 2nd ed. (Weinheim: Belz-Athenäum, 1994).
7. Martin Heidegger, “Brief über den ‘Humanismus,’” in Wegmarken, GA 9, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1996), 313–364; “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 217–265.
8. See Gadamer, Erziehung ist sich erziehen (Heidelberg: Kurpfälzischer Verlag, 2000).
9. See Reinhard Schulz, “Helmholtz und Gadamer: Provokation und Solidarität. Über den Ursprung der philosophischen Hermeneutik im Geist der Naturwissenschaft,” in Philosophia naturalis. Archiv für Naturphilosophie und die philosophischen Grenzgebiete der exakten Wissenschaften und Wissenschaftsgeschichte 32/I (1995): 141–153.
10. See Allen Hance, “The Hermeneutic Significance of the Sensus Communis,” in International Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1997): 133–148.
11. See Donald P. Verene, “Gadamer and Vico on Sensus Communis and the Tradition of Humane Knowledge,” in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn, Library of Living Philosophers 24 (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 137–153. A critique of Gadamer’s interpretation was formulated by John D. Schaeffer, “‘Sensus Communis’ in Vico and Gadamer,” New Vico Studies 5 (1987): 117–130, and by Christoph Jermann, “Gadamer und Vico. Zwei Modelle philosophischer Hermeneutik,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Philosophie 25 (1993): 145–161.
12. See Istvan M. Fehér, “Gadamers Destruktion der Ästhetik im Zusammenhang seiner philosophischen Neubegründung der Geisteswissenschaften,” in Dietmar Koch, ed., Denkwege. Philosophische Aufsätze (Tübingen: Attempto Verlag, 1998), 25–54.
13. See Dennis J. Schmidt, “Aesthetics and Subjectivity. Subjektivierung der Ästhetik durch Kantische Kritik (GW 1, 48–87),” in Günter Figal, ed., Hans-Georg Gadamer—Wahrheit und Methode (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 29–43.
14. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1978), vol. X, #6, B 18–19/A 18/19, 124–125.
15. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, #16, B 49–50/A 49–50, 146–147.
16. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, #59, B 257/A 254, 297.
17. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, #42, B 166–173/A, 163–171, 231–236.
18. See in this volume chapter 4, part 3.
19. See on this Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 89–90.