3 Lingering in Art
Our experience of the aesthetic too is a mode of self-understanding. (TM 97/GW1 102)
The essence of temporal experience in art is that we learn to tarry. That is perhaps the finite equivalent given to us of what we call eternity. (RB 50/GW8 136)
1. Toward a Phenomenology of Play
It may seem surprising—and Gadamer himself admits this in retrospect—that Truth and Method, despite the title’s promise of a close examination of truth, begins with an extensive discussion of art (GR 195/GW8 373). However, art in particular plays a key role in philosophical hermeneutics, and this is because a new experience of truth can be achieved only from art; thus the need arises to free aesthetics from the quarrel with modern science. The modern scientific demand for objectivity forces aesthetic experience to understand itself merely subjectively, as if we were dealing with a form of subjectivity that is engaged in a frivolous, self-referential play. The abstraction of aesthetic consciousness underwrites the triumph of science.
How can this dead end be avoided? Gadamer does so by conceiving of art as the experience of being, or better, an “increase in being,” in which subjectivity plays a secondary role (TM 140/GW1 145). Against the rigid dichotomy of subject and object, he offers the dynamic model of an encounter that has the character of an event: “all encounter with the language of art is an encounter with an unfinished event and is itself part of this event” (TM 99/GW1 105). The “ontology of the work of art” will clarify this new model.
Gadamer’s ontology of the work of art unfolds through the theme of play. More generally, play is the guiding thread of Gadamer’s entire oeuvre. It is play or game that unites art and language (RPJ 41/GW2 5), insofar as play belongs to the concepts that fundamentally undermine, unhinge, and call the metaphysics of subjectivity into question. In fact, Kant and Schiller had already discussed play, and precisely in an aesthetic sense. Whereas Kant refers to the free play of our faculties, Schiller sees in art the play that frees us from the constraints of knowledge and morality. In opposition to the seriousness of knowledge and morality, the play of art unlocks the aesthetic space of enjoyment and entertainment. Even prior to asking whether art is a serious matter, Gadamer first asks whether play is a serious matter. Hence, he draws on the categories of aesthetic consciousness in order to overturn them. The play of subjectivity turns into the play of art, which limits and calls subjectivity into question; while unreality, that is, the beautiful appearance of aesthetic consciousness, becomes the reality of art, which is more real than reality itself.
Far from being mere leisure, play demands to be taken seriously. Play occurs when the player is drawn into and captivated by the game, when the player becomes completely immersed in the game. As Gadamer has it, “Someone who doesn’t take the game seriously is a spoilsport” (TM 102/GW1 108). The game does not allow the player to remain outside, or to address the game as if it were an object. Gadamer follows the allusions offered by language, which speaks of the play of lights, the play of waves, of forces, of colors, even of words. The German terms Spiel/spielen indicate, much like the English cognates, a semantic field that includes the playing of an instrument, acting, and the performance of a musical or theatrical piece. If play has a subject, as these examples show, it is not the player but the game itself. Gadamer refers to the “primacy of the game over the players engaged in it” (TM 106/GW1 111), insofar as to play means to let oneself be taken by the game; for it is the game that asserts itself and takes hold of the player with its rules, its movement, and its primacy. It is the game that entices the player, holds him or her captive and at play—not the other way round. The player cannot but give himself or herself over to the game, to bend to “a reality that surpasses him,” which thereby raises the player beyond his or her own limits (TM 109/GW1 115). The player should not claim to dominate the game, to rule, or to lead it. Indeed, players should not even believe they are the active components. Gadamer speaks of the “medial sense” of play, referring to the character of the Greek verb indicating an activity that involves the subject in such a way that he or she crosses over into passivity (TM 105/ GW1 111). In this sense it can be said that “all playing is a being-played” (TM 106/GW1 112). Hence playing is not simply an activity that the subject does for him- or herself. It requires reciprocity: even in solitary games it is necessary for something to correspond to the player’s movement with a symmetrical countermovement. This happens when a child plays with a ball, or a cat plays with a ball of wool. It happens, too, when one plays with life’s possibilities.
The phenomenology of play, which runs through and connects concepts such as art, festival, ritual, and language, acquires an importance in Gadamer’s hermeneutics that should not be underestimated. But what status does play have in an ontology of the work of art? Play brings to light two contradictory and yet correlated aspects of aesthetic experience. On the one hand, it can be said that subjectivity, as it bends itself in play to the autonomous reality of the game, also accepts the transcendence of art. On the other hand, it must be added that this transcendence is neither indifferent nor detached, since it calls subjectivity into play, entices it, and holds it captive. Being held captive is another way of saying understanding. The poem speaks to me, the painting looks at me. Subjectivity that plays the game of art is raised to a higher reality, but does not cease to be addressed in the process. Insofar as it responds to the demand of art, subjectivity remains secondary. This demand resembles a decree, a kind of injunction that points to the sacred character of art, to its absoluteness or its majesty (Hoheit).1 Gadamer insists on this theme, most of all in his later works.
Absoluteness evokes a “distinction.” Indeed, Gadamer uses the word Auszeichnung, “distinction,” many times. But if this is the case then perhaps we risk falling back into the “aesthetic differentiation” that separates the work of art from the real world and transports it to the realm of beautiful appearance. Hence it is necessary to follow Gadamer in his subtle differentiation. The work of art distinguishes itself from reality, but never separates itself from reality. Consequently, Gadamer speaks of an “aesthetic non-differentiation” because non-differentiation presumes a differentiation that should not be read as a distinction, but rather as a distinguishing trait (TM 117/ GW 1 122). Art is more real than reality; it is an excess of reality, an increase in being. In this way, it can claim a “rightness” for itself that no scientific rightness can challenge: the rightness of an astronomical discovery will fade away sooner than that of the Mona Lisa. Art can claim a truth that makes it an assertion (Aussage). Indeed, Art as Assertion (Kunst als Aussage) becomes the title of volume 8 of Gadamer’s Collected Works, a volume dedicated entirely to aesthetics. The concept of the “assertion” is taken in a polemical sense from that logic which would reduce truth to propositional truth. Gadamer argues that, in light of its truth, art is more of an assertion than every other assertion. However, it never ceases to concern us and awaits our response. This response will be a playing along with, a Mitspielen, playing along with the play of art. In this playing along with, the work of art enacts itself.
2. On Transformation
It remains to be clarified, however, how the work of art, understood as play, is more than a fleeting event, acquiring consistency and autonomy as a work. Gadamer speaks of the ontological process of art as an emanation or presentation (Darstellung). If play’s manner of being is that of self-presentation, insofar as it does not refer to a finalistic context, art’s way of being is that of presentation, because the closed space of the world of play, letting down one of its walls, points beyond itself to those who share in the event as spectators (TM 108/GW1 114). Art is both the presentation of something and presentation for someone. With this the being of the artwork is structured. In this respect, Gadamer speaks in Truth and Method of the “transformation into a structure” (Verwandlung ins Gebilde). But what might this mean? “Transformation means that something is suddenly and as a whole something else, that this other transformed thing that it has become is its true being, in comparison with which its earlier being is nil” (TM 111/GW1 116). First of all, Gadamer means that the play of art condenses itself into a structure in which it reaches its own “ideality” (TM 114/GW1 119). Yet the word “transformation” (Verwandlung), which should not be confused with change, and which can also be translated as “metamorphosis” or “transfiguration,” has numerous resonances that need to be further determined in order to clarify such a complex concept.
What is presented is structured by way of transfiguration as a work of art, and as a result it gains an increase in being, or better—in order to avoid the mistake to which the idea of quantity could lead us, it acquires its own true being. Transformation in this sense is “transformation into the true” (TM 112/GW1 118). What is presented does not change its identity. Think for example of a portrait. It can be said, in the case of a successful portrait: “there she is,” or “she is exactly like that”; in the case of an unsuccessful portrait, by contrast, it is said: “she is not like that,” or “she is not like that at all.” In both cases it is a matter of the same person: only the successful portrait enables her being to become knowable or recognizable. Here lies “the ontological valence” of the image (TM 134/GW1 139).2 This valence comes to light even more when art presents what does not exist in reality. The religious image is paradigmatic—for example, the icons of the Eastern churches—since it is “in ontological communion with what is copied” (TM 143/GW1 147). Transformation as transfiguration thus also has a religious dimension and, in the sense that it recalls an epiphany, points to an elevation to a rank of being that sheds new light on what the one presented once was. But transfiguration is a process that not only involves the one presented. Art also transforms the ones it comes into contact with. Whoever takes part in the play of art cannot avoid the transfiguration of his or her very being. While it reveals the transfigured being of what is presented, at the same time art uncovers our being, our entire being-in-the-world, that Being of our world which is suddenly transfigured.
Another way of saying transfiguration is “mediation” (Vermittlung), which also has the twofold sense of performance and interpretation. It refers, on the one hand, to the staging or the performance of a work, as for example a piece of music, and on the other hand, to the way in which the spectator interprets it. One could speak here of “total mediation,” which means not only that art merges with its interpretation, but also that “the medium as such is superseded” (TM 120/GW1 125). An interpretation is successful when it is not noticed, when it lets the work of art speak.3
3. Between Mimesis and Anamnesis
When Truth and Method states that art should be conceived as a happening of Being, as the opening of world, or as the event of truth, one would expect to encounter the name of Heidegger; yet his name does not appear once in Gadamer’s ontology of the artwork. This absence is actually quite surprising, especially if one listens to the unmistakable echoes: the transfiguration into the work reminds us for example of the “setting-into-work of truth,” which Heidegger discusses in his famous essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art” from 1935–36. This absence is even stranger if one thinks that Gadamer had written in 1959, on Heidegger’s invitation, an important afterword entitled “The Truth of the Work of Art” for the Reclam edition of Heidegger’s essay.4 Gadamer’s debt to Heidegger is unquestionable, and it should be traced back to Heidegger’s way of understanding art as an experience that reveals Being.
Notwithstanding these affinities, however, there are a number of differences between the two philosophers that gradually emerge. Most importantly, the philosophical contexts in which Being, truth, and the work are embedded are completely different—as are their positions on the “question of Being,” metaphysics, and its overcoming.5 Gadamer shares neither Heidegger’s idea of the forgetfulness of Being, which characterizes the history of Western metaphysics, nor the need to overcome metaphysics. Instead, Gadamer insists in a simply a-metaphysical way on the reminiscence of Being, where this reminiscence is understood as that which always goes beyond subjectivity (TM 103/GW1 108). In such a way, in art subjectivity captivated by the play is drawn beyond itself until it experiences its own limits, that is, it remembers Being. Art is this very reminiscence of Being for Gadamer, and the encounter with the work of art is an anamnetic recognizing. In a word, art is mimesis insofar as it is always anamnesis.
Gadamer distances himself from Heidegger by retrieving two concepts from Plato. The concept of mimesis, which was abandoned with the affirmation of the aesthetics of genius and the dominance of science, both of which deny the epistemological value to art, is taken up again and rehabilitated by Gadamer. Already for Aristotle mimesis is not a mere repetition or copy, which would end up duplicating the real. “In imitating, one has to leave out and to heighten” (TM 115/GW1 120). However, if Plato’s doctrine of mimesis offers important hints, it also presents some difficulties. In the Republic (595a–608c) Plato famously bases his argument on ontological difference, not only to distinguish between the image as copy (Bild) from the image as original (Urbild), but also to relegate to a third level the image as a copy of a copy (Abbild). Gadamer begins here and in a certain way plays Plato against Plato.6 At first he reverses the relation between the image and the original, since the original is always only given in the image. Then he argues that this is even truer for the artistic image, which, far from being a loss, is rather an increase of Being. Only here, in the artistic image, does the original become knowable and recognizable. This recognizing, provoked by mimesis, is always a knowing “more” than one knew before (TM 114/GW1 119). His point becomes easier to understand in light of what Plato says in the Phaedo about anamnesis, where recognizing is not a simple knowing but rather a remembering of innate ideas.7 Due to their higher ontological status, anamnesis is already concerned with an increase in Being.
In his essay “Art and Imitation,” Gadamer again corrects the Platonic doctrine of mimesis through the Pythagorean (RB 92–104/GW8 25–36). This new aspect of mimesis should not go unnoticed, because the recollection of the original model might give the impression that it is a matter of a realistic imitation aiming at an essence. Pythagorean mimesis introduces the idea of a cosmic order—kósmos is the order of the starry skies, which for the Greeks is the shining of the beautiful itself. According to the ancient meaning of the word, mimesis means “chosen from the dance of the stars” (RB 40/ GW8 127). And the stars represent pure mathematical laws and proportions. No less than the heavenly harmonies, the stars are constant and unfailing in contrast to the inconstancy of human life. In art a need for order finds expression, which distinguishes art from the chaos in which the world’s relations commonly appear. Such a conception of mimesis draws less on an “original image” (Urbild) and more on an “original relation” (Urverhältnis), in which everyday disorder is transfigured into a cosmic order; it is especially the contemporary arts, from absolute music to abstract painting, that correspond to such mimesis. These arts can be called mimetic insofar as by holding together what is divided and fragmented, they evoke the possibility of an order. This does not mean, however, that the new establishment of an order does not challenge what was previously accepted: “The intimacy with which the work of art touches us is at the same time, in enigmatic fashion, a shattering and a demolition of the familiar” (PH 104/GW8 8).
The order-generating mimesis of art is thus an anamnetic recollection, because it wakes us from the ontic sleep in which we, bewildered, confused, and consumed in the chaos of the beings of everyday life, have lost the sense of Being. It is the event of art that reminds us of this. In the work of art we recognize the world in which we live, as if we knew it for the very first time, and in recognizing what was already known we say gratefully, though not without surprise: “so it is,” “it is just so,” to affirm its rightness. Here aesthetic experience reveals its continuity with existence, which encounters itself in art.
4. The Time of Art
Yet what does “presence” (Gegenwart) mean in relation to art? The concept of presence is closely bound up with the concepts of “presentation” or “representation.” In Truth and Method Gadamer uses the word Darstellung, which is gradually replaced by the word Vollzug, “enactment,” which has a clear Heideggerian provenance. “Hermeneutics in its Enactment” is the title of volume 9 of the Collected Works, which is dedicated to poetic hermeneutics. It could also be said that the work of art exists only in the setting-into-work of its enactment, that is, the being of the artwork lies in its presentation. Emphasizing a further affinity between art and literature, Gadamer states: “Art as art is in Vollzug, just as language is in conversation” (GR 220/GW8 395).
What distinguishes the artistic image, as well as the poetic word, is its “presentness” (Gegenwärtigkeit). The work of art reaches us by bridging all distance. It is “absolute” in the Hegelian sense of the word because it can claim absoluteness despite the differences and distances of history, but “despite” here means “throughout.” Art runs throughout history, though not as an essence that survives all changes unchanged and thus remains victorious over history. Rather, it is an event in which the times of history encounter each other. In the presentation, where the artwork is called to a new life, the past becomes present. Art—Gadamer writes in his article on the “End of Art?”—is the “presence of the past” (GW8 208). He is referring here to Hegel’s famous thesis on the “past character of art” (Vergangenheitscharakter der Kunst) or on the “death of art,” a thesis that Gadamer often considers in order to emphasize that it should not be conceived in a banal way as the mere end of art, just like when one speaks of the end of philosophy. The character of art as past means that art for Hegel will no longer be understandable; it will require justification, since the divine we revere no longer exists in the work of art (RB 6/GW8 97). For Hegel, art appears “past” in comparison to the concept.
Thus to speak of the end of art is to affirm, in a speculative way, both its contemporaneity, because art is not subject to any progress, and its sovereignty in relation to history.8 In this sense, the past presence of art is an absolute present and an absolute presence, which can be fruitfully compared to the Christian parousia (TM 127/GW1 132).
To clarify the time of art, that “present time sui generis,” Gadamer introduces explicitly theological concepts. For him the concept of “contemporaneity” (Gleichzeitigkeit) plays a key role, which he adopts from Kierkegaard by way of the dialectical theology of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann (TM 127/GW1 132). For Kierkegaard, the Christian message of salvation retains its contemporary urgency: far from being a story from past centuries, it appeals to us here and now. Gadamer relates this appeal to the aesthetic experience in order to show that the temporality of art is not one of distance—marked by both aesthetic consciousness and historicism. Art is always contemporaneous. Yet what does this mean? To understand this it is necessary to distinguish the concept of contemporaneity (Gleichzeitigkeit) from that of simultaneity (Simultaneität). When walking through a museum, for example, in which works are exhibited according to epochs and styles, there is the experience of simultaneity. Aesthetic consciousness moves from one room to another, from the Renaissance to the Baroque, from Impressionism to Expressionism, where the different works simultaneously become the object of a single aesthetic experience. Though historicizing is unavoidable—well before we look at a Braque, we know that he is a cubist—the temporality of an artwork cannot be reduced to such historical distance. Not even aesthetic simultaneity can dispel the original contemporaneity that radiates from the truth of art. There is always something appealing in a work of art, something that removes it from historical research and lets it appear present and contemporaneous (GR 199 /GW8 377). This time is a present (Gegenwart) in which there comes, from the past, a future that is waiting and for which we are waiting. It is in this space of time, this Weile, which is neither long enough for boredom nor brief enough for recreation, that art invites us to linger (Verweilen) (GR 211/GW8 392–393).9
5. The Example of Tragedy
It is not surprising that Gadamer finds an excellent example of contemporaneity in tragedy. The complexity of tragedy has long posed a problem for aesthetics, and led theorists such as Hamann and Scheler, who were important interlocutors for Gadamer, to view the tragic as an ethical-metaphysical, and thus extra-aesthetic, phenomenon (TM 129/GW1 134). With respect to the differentiation that characterizes aesthetic consciousness, here we have an “aesthetic non-differentiation.” The tragic work of art refers directly to the tragedy of life, which drives Gadamer to think of tragedy as a fundamental aesthetic phenomenon. This is so not only because tragedy has its being in presentation, and not only because the spectator is involved in the performance of the tragedy, but especially because in tragedy there is a continuity with life that cannot be found elsewhere.
Even if contemporaneity is more than evident here, what interests Gadamer is another aspect of art that Aristotle reveals in the Poetics.10 It involves the famous definition, whereby tragedy produces a kαthársis, or purification, of the passions of éleos, or sadness, and phóbos, or fear. This definition can be interpreted in various ways, depending on whether the genitive is meant in the objective sense, as liberation from the passions, or in the subjective sense, as purification of these passions (TM 130/GW1 135). Gadamer chooses the second interpretation, but for him the key to this phenomenon is found elsewhere. Aristotle himself provides the key, when he stresses that the effect on the spectator belongs to the essence of the tragedy. The spectator becomes involved to the point where he or she experiences the cleansing of his or her own passions. Tragedy becomes exemplary because it dramatizes what actually happens in every art: the spectators’ encounter with themselves. Though participating in tragedy may appear to mean stepping out of everyday life, in reality it deepens the spectator’s “continuity with himself” (TM 133/GW1 137, emphasis added). Whoever is present at the tragedy discovers himself and the tragic nature of his finite existence. Participation becomes an experience of truth.
6. The Event of Being in Presentation
More than merely an example, tragedy constitutes an exceptional case for Gadamer, both for its continuity—it is after all a small step from the tragic work to the tragedy of life—and for its staging, or better, for its presentation. Tragedy clearly confirms his thesis: “we must recognize that ‘presentation’ is the mode of being of the work of art” (TM 115/GW1 121).11 To put it differently, once play (Spiel) has been transformed into a structure (Gebilde), and despite the ideal unity it has reached, which can be presented and understood repeatedly, its form remains nonetheless a play and reaches its full being only when it is “played” (gespielt), that is performed, presented, and staged (TM 117/ GW1 122). Gadamer speaks in this context of a “double mimesis,” as for example that of the poet and the actor (TM 117/GW1 122). Yet what comes into being in both mimetic processes is the same, namely, the work of art. In short, the work of art cannot be separated ontologically from its presentation. Whereas in his later writings Gadamer focuses more on the process of understanding, that is, of listening to and answering the appeal of art, in Truth and Method he concentrates on “the event of being that occurs in presentation” (TM 116/GW1 122).
The so-called transitory arts show this most clearly. It suffices to think of a piece of music, which does not exist as long as it is not performed. In fact, the example of music is the most telling. But the same could be said for the recitation of a poem or the staging of a theater piece. Each presentation brings the work into being; it lets the work be in a certain way. The presentation is also an interpretation, and the work achieves its being only insofar as it is interpreted. One should not think here, however, of an interpretation that remains locked within the subjectivity of the interpreter, mainly because the work must be performed for others. In the process we do not arrive at a merely subjective multiplicity of interpretations, but rather at possible ways of Being for the work (TM 118/GW1 123). This ontological inseparability of the work and its performance does not prevent us, however, from distinguishing them. Thus a staging of Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard can disappoint us because the performance of the piece goes too far. We might say that the staging does not seem to have done justice to the work, and hence does not appear “right” to us. We can assert this because we have in mind another performance that seems more right. But “more right” here does not mean “right” in an absolute sense: the idea of a single right presentation for all occasions contradicts our finitude. It is not that there is one right presentation fixed for all time, but neither is there an arbitrariness of reproduction (TM 120/GW1 124). We would never allow a violin player to produce all possible random effects from a piece by Mozart. This means that all the possible presentations of a work remain subject to the criterion of a “right” presentation, even where the criterion is changeable. Although the work of art is distinguishable from its performance, the work cannot be separated from the performance and remains dependent upon it.
While this happens in the transitory arts, which hold the identity and continuity of the work open to the future, it is less clear what happens in the other arts. Can similar claims be made for painting, architecture, or literature? Gadamer believes that his thesis can be extended to all art forms. It should be emphasized, however, that the sections on art in Truth and Method do not intend to provide a comprehensive and integrated account of aesthetics. Gadamer is interested in recovering a truth from art that puts the methodological concept of truth into play: beyond art, he points to a hermeneutics that would be revealed as universal according to the guiding thread of language. The truth derived from art is that of transformed and presented Being, recognizable as a “heightened truth” (TM 137/GW1 142). This truth is at the same time, however, the truth of the encounter with oneself in art.
If the performing arts are particularly relevant in this respect, it does not exclude the possibility that the event of Being in presentation would also occur in the pictorial and plastic arts. Gadamer uses the example of painting. Enclosed by its frame, the painting proves to be completely autonomous and independent from every location, so that it can be moved from one gallery to another. The painting presents itself in this way as a prime example of aesthetic consciousness. Nothing about the painting seems to refer to either mediation or presentation, and the difficulty of showing how the painting cannot but offer itself in its presentation forces Gadamer to state his concept of presentation more precisely. In the first place it is important to remember what was said for all works of art: the painting presents something or someone, and it presents this for someone.
Although the picture, as an image (Bild), cannot be reduced to a mere copy (Abbild), the painting nevertheless does not have an autonomous reality and refers to an original (Urbild). The relation Gadamer seeks to draw between these concepts had already appeared in his reversal of Platonic mimesis. Thus this picture further confirms his theory of the “ontological valence of the picture” (TM 134–144/GW1 139–149). There follows an answer to the question of presentation. The first step is to distinguish the image of the painting from a mere copy. The copy has no other purpose than to resemble the original. The criterion used to measure the copy is one of adequacy. In this sense the ideal copy would be the mirror image, since one sees the being itself in the mirror. Strictly speaking it is not a question of a copy, because it does not exist in itself. The copy wants to be seen. Yet the copy is only instrumental: it points back to the original, but as soon as its purpose has been achieved, it no longer has reason to exist and is destined to cancel itself out. On the contrary, the image of the painting does not cancel itself out, because it does not relate to the original as a means to an end. Here the picture “points by causing us to linger over it” (TM 153/GW1 158). Its purpose is not what is presented, but how it is presented. The how of the presentation is one and the same as what is presented.
This ontological inseparability, which also justifies its sacred character, refers already to the ontological status of the picture, which comes further to light through its particular relationship to the original. The picture is, indeed, more than a simple copy, for it “says something about the original” (TM 140/GW1 145). The relationship to the original is no longer one-sided. The original needs the picture that presents it in order to present itself in it. This does not mean that it needs this particular picture; it could just as well come to presentation in another picture. But the mode of presentation is not accidental for the Being of what is presented. Rather, each presentation changes the ontological condition of what is presented, so that it gains an “increase in being” (TM 140/GW1 145).12 The ontological relationship between the original and the copy reverses itself: “For strictly speaking, it is only through the picture [Bild] that the original [Urbild] becomes the original [Ur-bild; also, ur-picture]—e.g., it is only by being pictured that a landscape becomes picturesque” (TM 142/GW1 146). This is also true for the most banal objects of everyday life, those that are most quickly forgotten, or least observed and considered, which suddenly, through their presentation in a picture, reach a new ontological level. This is the case, for example, in still-life painting. One could also mention numerous examples from contemporary art, from van Gogh’s shoes to Matisse’s stool. Yet Gadamer’s thesis is directed at a different subject, on the basis of which it can be radicalized in a way that could perhaps appear strange but that shows, on the contrary, it relevance. What is presented in a painting already tends toward presentation because it fulfills a representative function. This is the case of the sovereign, the statesman, or the hero. Such a representative picture seems to lose a certain amount of status, because it presents the need of the one presented to present him- or herself. Considered more closely, the one presented should correspond to the expectations aroused by his picture. The paradox lies in this: if the picture is the manifestation of the original, then the original becomes an original only in the picture. Whoever is in need of showing themselves no longer belongs to themselves, and “must ultimately show himself as his picture prescribes” (TM 142/GW1 147).
7. The Occasionality of Art
The presentation, which turns out to be equally constitutive for both the plastic and performing arts, seems to bind the work of art to the world depicted in it. The portrait, but also the poem dedicated to someone or something and the comedy, can be seen as telling examples of this.13 The portrait, for example, even if drawing attention to itself, conceals in the content of the picture a reference to the original. This very referring, however, seems to belong to every work of art that for this reason is embedded in the horizon of life. This means that the artwork is situated because it has been occasioned. One can speak of “occasionality” in relation to every artwork, even if it does not appear at first to have been occasioned: “Occasionality means that their meaning and contents are determined by the occasion for which they are intended, so that they contain more than they would without this occasion” (TM 144/GW1 149). The occasionality of art, which for Gadamer can also be found in language, forms an additional argument against the abstraction of aesthetic consciousness. It could also be interpreted as a historical or historicizing perspective, as though one would have to begin with the historical context to interpret a work. But Gadamer wants to avoid both aesthetic consciousness, which abstracts art from the continuity of life, and historicism, which willingly forgets that the work is a work of art. In order not to be misinterpreted in a historicizing sense, he speaks of a “universal occasionality” (TM 148/GW1 153). With this he makes clear that it is not necessary for the interpretation of a work to solve the problem of references in the work; that is, it is not a matter of reconstructing the entire historical context. It is not necessary to know all the references to understand a satire by Horace, for example. On the other hand, Picasso’s Guernica will preserve its references to the context of the painting, even when these references are no longer known. Occasionality is hence nothing other than the work referring to the original for its meaning. Its occasionality is also ours, that of our world.
The occasional meaning of the work is also the meaning it gathers for us in the course of its effective history. Hence, this occasional meaning constantly determines itself anew. Sculpture and architecture offer examples of this. Statues and monuments, for example, regularly acquire new functions and new tasks. But architecture is even more significant. For aesthetic consciousness, architecture is an art form that, because of its practical dimension, has only marginal value and nearly falls outside of aesthetics. Yet architecture is also a problem for historical consciousness, because a building can actualize itself only in responding to the changing requirements of its environment. In this sense, too, the work lies in its presentation, and its ontological valence is not static. The work does not remain fixed in its original world, thereafter living in a kind of alienation (TM 157/GW1 162). Rather, it demands the mediation between past and present. Well-known examples of this include the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Tate Gallery in London, a former train station and a former factory, which have been transformed into museums. Their occasionality demonstrates the importance of understanding and situating the works each and every time. From Truth and Method to his last essays, architecture has a paradigmatic value for Gadamer, not only due to the character of its enactment, but also for the understanding that it demands of us. “Understanding” here means “visiting,” “frequenting,” and “occupying.”14
In his ontology of art Gadamer finally considers the decorative arts, which are normally taken as the opposite of authentic works of art, and hence dismissed from aesthetic consideration. They again offer Gadamer the opportunity to test his concept of occasionality, and to reconsider the concept of presentation. Decoration is not merely external, but belongs to the “self-presentation of its wearer” (TM 159/GW1 164). It is thus the ornament that brings to expression the Being of its wearer and allows it to be in the first place. This Being is there only in the ontological process of its presentation. Here, too, Gadamer’s intention is to show that presentation is essential to all the arts. The presentation points to a Being that occurs only in this process and comes to its truth there. Yet the spectator also takes part in the presentation, and gets drawn from his present into the play of art.
8. Play, Art, and Festival
A question emerges out of the way in which Gadamer outlines the process of presentation, which also emerges in the time of art, that is, in the presence of the past. This question concerns the identity of a structure (Gebilde) that runs throughout history and its differentiations. What kind of “identity” is at stake if the work of art is brought to life in a new way by each presentation? And is it even justifiable to speak of an identity?
This question is very complex, because it points beyond the context where it is raised to a much more comprehensive philosophical question. It puts in doubt the metaphysical concept of identity, which has already been shaken by the concept of “play.” Following the phenomenology of play, the phenomenology of art further undermines the concept of identity. From the experience of art, the need arises for a new understanding of truth and a new conception of identity. In the years following Truth and Method, Gadamer speaks of a “hermeneutic identity” (RB 23/GW8 116), and for him it is “the hermeneutic identity that founds the unity of the work” (RB 23/GW8 116). It concerns a kind of identity that exists only in its difference, only in its differentiation, or in the radical temporality of its becoming and recurrence.15 This sense of identity contains the paradox of the repetition of the unrepeatable: “Here ‘repetition’ does not mean that something is literally repeated—i.e., can be reduced to something original. Rather, every repetition is as original as the work itself” (TM 122/GW1 127–128). Any new identity that comes to light is an identity that forms itself only in difference. Thus difference becomes indispensable for identity. Even though Gadamer moves from identity to difference, and not the other way round, his proximity to Derrida on this point should not be overlooked.16
Gadamer highlights the notion of “festival” in order to illuminate the hermeneutic identity that we encounter in play and art. The themes of “festival” and the festive quality of art extend throughout his entire work, from Truth and Method to the article on “Art as Play, Symbol, Festival” from 1974, and his essay entitled “Towards a Phenomenology of Ritual and Language” from 1992. Yet what is a festival? An initial answer might be: “A festival exists only in being celebrated” (TM 124/GW1 129). To attend a festival, to celebrate it, does not simply mean that one does not work. More than work, the festival founds communal being. A festival occurs when a community gathers, and the community exists as such thanks to the festival. Yet this is something we hardly remember.
“To celebrate is an art” (RB 37/GW8 130). This art, which was well known in antiquity and is the art of being together, has become increasingly rare today. To understand the multilayered temporal experience of festival, the word “celebration” or “procession” (Begehung) becomes important, since it points to “walking” or “going” (Gehen) (RB 38/GW8 131). But this is not the kind of movement to reach a goal. Rather, the goal has already been reached in the moving. The festival is there, it has its existence in the time in which it is celebrated. Yet the present time of the festival is not simply present; it is rather a present time in which the past returns and recurs. Hence one speaks of the recurrence of the festival. The recurrence belongs to the festival no less than the community who celebrates it. To “recur” means that a past event repeats itself in the present, despite its unrepeatability. Thus every festival is always identical and always different. It is identical because it is a festival that recurs, as for example that of Easter. And it is different, because it is always celebrated in different ways. It does not refer to an original historical event that becomes present in commemoration. Even if a major part of the festival refers back to an event, there are also festivals that exist only in the ritual enactment of their celebration. This is shown to be the case, for example, in that no one thinks back to the original event anymore. Every summer in Heidelberg the castle is illuminated and everyone takes part in the festival, but only a few remember, when celebrating it, that it is in memory of the great fire that destroyed the old city during the French retreat in the seventeenth century (LL 31/GW8, 415). Hence the recurrence of the festival has its “own time” (RB 40/ GW8 133). “It is the celebration. The calculating, dispensing character with which we otherwise manage time is brought to a standstill in the celebration” (RB 40/GW8 133).
The time of the festival is very important for Gadamer. It is important in the first place because recurring festivals cannot be put in a temporal order, but rather the reverse: the temporal order emerges only in accordance with the festivals—beginning with the year itself. Secondly, the primacy of the festival’s recurrence is the primacy of an event that comes into its time and has its own time; it can be neither calculated nor filled out. The practical experience of time is the experience of time that is at our disposal, the time one has or thinks one has for something. But this is an “empty time,” which can be filled out by being busy or can remain empty in boredom. The time of the festival is, by contrast, a “fulfilled time,” which brings the time of calculation to a standstill and brings a halt to it. It is a time of celebration, which is the celebration of time itself.17
The experience of the festival resembles the experience of art, because it invites us to linger, to participate and be present. As in play, however, so too in art and in festival: whoever participates in the presentation, whoever plays together with (mitspielt) and celebrates the event, is changed, transformed, and raised from his or her subjectivity to a higher reality, the reality of a nearly “sacral” commonality that seizes everyone (TM 124/GW1 129).
9. “That’s it!” Art and Its Truth
Lingering with the work of art, for Gadamer, has a great significance that goes beyond aesthetic experience itself. Yet what does it mean to linger? Mere amusement, in the sense of entertainment, is quite different from lingering, which appears to be closer to contemplation. Already in Truth and Method, Gadamer brings the Greek word theoría into connection with the sacral communion of festival and art (TM 124/ GW1 129). Theoría here means not being merely spectators but rather participating in a festive act and being entirely immersed in it.18 “Theoria is a true participation, not something active but something passive [páthos], namely being totally involved in and carried away by what one sees” (TM 124–125/GW1 130). The théoros, who is present at and participates in the ritual of the festival, is outside of himself. This being outside of himself, however, is nothing other than that self-forgetfulness which results when one is entirely swept away and taken in by something. “In fact, being outside oneself is the positive possibility of being wholly with something else” (TM 126/GW1 131). Thus the state of being there alongside (dabeisein) requires devoting one’s attention to the matter at hand, and corresponds to a continuity with oneself (TM 125–126/GW1 130). Already through culture, one learns to forget one’s own immediate interests.19 Thus, beyond the aesthetic experience, it is in such a way that the hermeneutic approach to oneself and toward others comes to be characterized.20
Yet lingering as waiting and attentiveness has a further meaning for Gadamer, which comes to light in the important essay from 1992, “The Artwork in Word and Image: ‘So True, So Full of Being!’” (GR 192–224) (“Wort und Bild—‘so wahr, so seiend,’” GW8 373–399). This essay marks the final stage of Gadamer’s aesthetic thought. Whoever is swept away, whoever participates, for example in worship, enables the divine to “come forth” (GR 212/GW8 389). Lingering is associated here with the emergence of the divine in the case of worship, and with the “emergence” of truth in the case of art. To clarify this association Gadamer refers especially to Plato’s Philebus, in which becoming is interpreted as a coming into Being that leaves something in Being of its having become. “Being emerges from becoming” (GR 209/GW8 386).21 From this coming into Being Aristotle in his Physics makes the transition to the Being of becoming, and in that context introduces the concept of enérgeia. This concept suggests “contemporaneity,” which characterizes the temporal structure of those activities that have no goal beyond themselves, like seeing and having seen, observing and having observed. At the same time, this Being also characterizes the lingering that is a kind of beingpresent in which we are immersed and absorbed. Aristotle mentions life as an example, and Gadamer returns to this example. To linger in this sense is another way of saying “that one ‘is alive’” (GR 211/GW8, 387).22
Yet what happens if one accepts the invitation of art and lingers over the image or the word? To linger does not mean to achieve something, to do this or that, but to be completely absorbed, so as to let the work of art emerge—as if it were a making (GR 211/ GW8 389). Such an emergence distinguishes the experience of art. “We are there—and at the end the impression grows on us: ‘That’s right!’” (GR 211/GW8 388). We say, “That’s it,” or “That’s right,” to the emergence of art, to the “shining forth” of the beautiful, which has the perfection of the starry skies above.
The truth of art is thus not only that of alétheia. In contrast to Heidegger, the truth of the artwork for Gadamer does not so much occur in the ontological entwinement of unconcealment and concealment. The truth of art is not only the unconcealment of something that emerges from concealment, but rather, and above all, this emergence itself (GR 211/GW8 388).23 Even if the work is always the same, it emerges differently in every encounter (GR 214/GW 8 390). It is in this differing emergence that each work exists as true. For those who experience it, it has neither the ontological status of a created object nor the ontological status of a reproduction. It happens only in the fulfillment of its emergence. It would be difficult to imagine this emergence other than as an encounter, or better, with Gadamer, as a dialogue.
It is necessary at this point to question the distinction between word and image. Neither here nor elsewhere does Gadamer grasp this distinction in a theoretical manner. Yet the proximity to poetry and poíesis indicates that writing poetry, too, no less than painting or sculpting, is a kind of making. In these latter cases, to be sure, the making is a “real making,” because material, for example, colors or stones, is needed for production. In the case of poetry, by contrast, it is “almost more than making,” because poetry enables entire worlds to arise from the lightness of breath and the miracle of memory (GR 201/GW8 378). Here, on the strength of the ontological status of the word, Not-Being becomes Being.
10. The Transcendence of the Beautiful
Gadamer evokes religious overtones when he describes the majesty or solemnity of art, the way in which art “emerges” like the divine, the event that resembles that of worship, the contemporaneity that distinguishes it and the ecstatic immersion of those who are swept away by it, as well as the sacred communion that art founds. This correspondence is obviously no coincidence. In several essays from different periods, which are gathered together in volume 8 of his Collected Works under the title The Transcendence of the Beautiful, Gadamer explicitly insists on the proximity between art and religion—indeed, even on the religious dimension of art.
This religious dimension can be traced back to myth. But what is myth? The concept of mythos from antiquity appears to be indissolubly linked to the divine, even if mythos occurs only in narration. The myth is what is said, the saga that must be taken as it is because it allows no other possibility of experience. It is content from tradition that can only be believed.24 In the 1981 essay “Mythology and Revelatory Religion” (“Mythologie und Offenbarungsreligion”), Gadamer distances himself from Bultmann who, in the context of “demythologization,” which he applies to the biblical tradition, sees myth as the polar opposite of reason, something that can be no longer believed. Yet for Gadamer, it is precisely in relation to logos that myth becomes relevant. In this context he turns above all to the work of Max Weber (1864–1920), and especially to his famous thesis on the “demystification of the world,” which was developed in his 1919 work, Science as Vocation. The demystified world for Weber is the world that no longer believes in magic; indeed it believes in nothing outside of science. It is the world of the Enlightenment and of scientific atheism, which so rationalizes life that it excludes everything from discussion that cannot be verified by method. Myth is seen here in opposition to the logos of reason. “Demystification,” according to Weber, would be the result of a universal law development. This development is summarized in the title of a work by Wilhelm Nestle from 1940, called From Myth to Logos (Vom Mythos zum Logos). For Gadamer, it is a matter of revising this paradigm. Far from a universal law of development, it is rather a “historical fact,” to which the secularization produced by Christianity contributed, by destroying the worldview dominated by myth and pagan gods:
From myth to logos, the de-mystification of reality would only be the single clear direction of history if demystified reason were certain of itself and realized itself with absolute determination. What we see, however, is the actual dependence of reason on a superior economic, social and state-supported power. The idea of absolute reason is an illusion.” (GW8 167)
The paradigm, “from myth to logos,” arises from the opposition of myth to reason and from reason’s claim to absoluteness. Reason tries to bring myth back under its rule or to diminish it, which means to overcome or even to extinguish it. Yet precisely because reason is not absolute, but real and historical, it fails to abolish myth or other nonscientific experiences of truth, which may have been driven to the margins of our world, but which still bear witness to the limits of reason. Gadamer inquires into the consequences of this opposition, especially in light of the fruitful bond between myth and logos in Greek culture, whose highest expression is to be found in the Platonic dialogues.25 What remains from this culture is the word mýthos itself, which points to a realm “beyond” knowledge and science (GW8 170). It is this very “beyond” that is denied today. The current situation is quite different from the one described by Weber, who still recognized the limits of science. This situation is singular and unprecedented because access to a beyond is considered closed off for the first time. In its planetary extension, science leaves no room for the beyond. Similarly, the atheism of indifference no longer recognizes the religious question. Is this the end of an illusion?—Gadamer asks. Or should we not consider the rejection of a beyond as an illusion?
The more the beyond is denied, the more strength it gains, in the process not only revealing the impossibility that reason could occupy all areas of life, but also pointing to the possibility of a “more reasonable” reason, which, proceeding from the experiences of the beyond, both in art and in religion, could understand itself better (GW8 168). The essential proximity of religion and art can be seen in the beyond of transcendence. The aesthetic and religious experience awaken us from an ontic sleep, and point us toward Being. The proximity between them is such that, even when religion seems to disappear, art rushes in to fuse with myth: in this way “the poetic experience of the world sees mythically” (GW8 168). It is no coincidence that Gadamer mentions Rilke’s angel in this context. In another passage, too, this figure indicates for him the movement of transcendence, which is so indispensable for life.26 The beauty of art is also crucial for life since, like the sacred in its truth, it is simply there. “The beautiful is something about which it is never appropriate to ask what it is ‘for’” (GR 203/GW8 380). At the same time, the beautiful is always the evocation of a possible sacred order (RB 15/GW8 123).
11. Literature and Reading
The final art form that Gadamer considers in Truth and Method is literature, to which only five pages are dedicated (TM 159–164/GW1 165–169). This is particularly surprising considering the role literature will later play in Gadamer’s thought, which ultimately confirms the importance of literature more fully. Volumes 8 and 9 of the Collected Works gather together the numerous essays in which hermeneutics is applied, not only and not so much to the pictorial arts, but especially to literature and poetry. From Goethe to Hölderlin, from Rilke to George, and the lyric poetry of the twentieth century, above all the works of Hilde Domin (1909–2006) and Paul Celan (1920–70), poetic hermeneutics acquires a significance that goes far beyond the act of application and has an effect on fundamental philosophical concepts, including the conception of language itself.
The role of literature in his later work makes it all the more important to ask why literature is dealt with so briefly in Truth and Method. Clearly Gadamer thought that this case, too, would verify his theory of presentation. Yet it is just as evident that the milieu of 1960 was not yet ready for such an argument, and thus Gadamer clashed with a conception whereby the literary work is a closed form, a form that exists only in the ideality of the text. Presentation with an ontological import seemed to be excluded from literature (TM 160/GW1 165). After all, what would constitute presentation? Gadamer’s answer is that presentation in literature lies in reading. Reading a book is “an event in which the read content brings itself to presentation” (TM 160–161/GW1 166). From today’s perspective it seems nearly self-evident that the literary work realizes itself in reading, which in some ways contributes to the meaning of the text. But this is the case only because philosophical hermeneutics has had considerable influence on literary criticism, in particular on Jauss and Iser.27
Perhaps influenced by these developments, Gadamer paid more and more attention to reading, since for him it characterizes the event in which the work, including the literary work, but also the musical, pictorial, and even architectural works, realize themselves. Consequently, what does reading mean? It means to decipher the ciphers of the work, to give them back a voice and hence a life. Especially if we consider the sense of reading as “gathering,” or “gathering oneself” in listening, which is part of the German word “Lesen,” then reading means giving voice to, that is, letting speak. “In this way reading is a genuine universal: All our experience is reading” (GW8 178). The expansion of this concept for Gadamer connects with the recognition of the universality of language: for the later Gadamer, reading, that is, giving voice, expands until it coincides with hermeneutics itself.28
12. Aesthetics and Hermeneutics
It is therefore unavoidable that the question of the relation between aesthetics and hermeneutics should be asked in Truth and Method. Yet what kinds of aesthetics, and what of hermeneutics? It can no longer be a matter of aesthetics as aesthetic consciousness conceives it. Truth is at stake in art. And truth can not be dominated, controlled, or possessed, since it emerges only in an encounter: in the encounter with art that, because it speaks to us and invites us to linger, demands to be understood. It also becomes clear that the encounter with art is for each of us an encounter with ourselves. The understanding of this truth always implies an understanding of oneself, and from this event we constantly emerge transformed. With this transformation the transition from aesthetics to hermeneutics is completed. This transition shows itself as necessary in the light of art and its truth, which at the same time brings a critical revision of aesthetics and an expansion of its range. “Aesthetics has to be absorbed into hermeneutics” (TM 164/GW1 170). But hermeneutics, too, must for its part broaden its horizon in order to do justice to the experience of art. As Gadamer emphasizes in his essay “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” it is crucial that hermeneutics, which had acquired a certain relevance in the human sciences but nevertheless remained marginal and limited in its impact, should now conceive of itself differently and in a new way, on the basis of the central question of understanding (PH 95–104/GW8 1–8).
Notes
1. See João Manuel Duque, Die Kunst als Ort immanenter Transzendenz. Zu einer fundamentaltheologischen Rezeption der Kunstphilosophie Hans-Georg Gadamers (Frankfurt/M: Knecht, 1997).
2. See Guy Deniau, “Bild und Sprache. Über die Seinsvalenz des Bildes. Ästhetische und hermeneutische Folgerungen (GW1, 139–176),” in Hans-Georg Gadamer. Wahrheit und Methode, ed. Günter Figal (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 59–74.
3. See in this volume chapter 8, part 11.
4. Now in Gadamer, “Die Wahrheit des Kunstwerks (1960),” in Neuere Philosophie I—Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, GW3 249–261; “The Truth of the Work of Art,” in Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 95–109.
5. See in this volume chapter 4, part 5, and chapter 9, part 2.
6. See in this volume, chapter 6, part 5.
7. Plato, Phaedo, 72e–73b; Plato, 63–64.
8. See Valerio Verra, “L’esthetique hégélienne dans l’interpretation de Hans-Georg Gadamer,” in Pierre Osmo, ed., Autour de Hegel (Paris: Vrin, 2000), 417–427.
9. See chapter 3, part 8, in this volume.
10. Aristotle, Poetics, 1449b 24–28.
11. On the multiple connotations of “presentation” in Gadamer, see Jean Grondin, “L’art comme présentation chez Hans-Georg Gadamer. Portée et limites d’un concept,” Études Germaniques (Hans-Georg Gadamer—Esthétique et herméneutique), ed. Frank Delannoy, 62 (2007): 337–350.
12. See on this Gottfried Boehm, “Zuwachs an Sein. Hermeneutische Reflexion und bildende Kunst,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed., Die Moderne und die Grenze der Vergegenständlichung (Munich: Klüser, 1996), 95–125; see also Boehm, “Das Bild und die hermeneutische Reflexion,” in Günter Figal and Hans-Helmuth Gander, eds., Dimensionen des Hermeneutischen. Heidegger und Gadaner (Frankfurt a/M: Klostermann, 2005), 23–35 at 29–30.
13. On the portrait as an “iconic logos,” see Gottfried Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum. Über den Ursprung der Porträtmalerei in der italienischen Renaissance (Munich: Prestel, 1985).
14. Gadamer, “Über das Lesen von Bauten und Bildern” (1979), GW8, 331–338 at 334.
15. For more recent reflections on this theme see Béla Bacsó, “Die ‘Wiederholung’ als ästhetische und existenzielle Kategorie,” in Die Unvermeidbarkeit des Irrtums. Essays zur Hermeneutik (Cuxhaven/Dartford: Junghans, 1997), 57–66.
16. See in this volume, chapter 10, part 4.
17. On this distinction, see Gadamer, “Concerning Empty and Ful-filled Time,” trans. R. P. O’Hara, in Martin Heidegger: In Europe and America, ed. Edward G. Ballard and Charles E. Scott (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 77–89; “Über leere und erfüllte Zeit” (1969), GW4 137–153.
18. On the question of théoros, see Guy Deniau, Cognitio imaginative. La phénoménologie herméneutique de Gadamer (Brussels: Ousia, 2002), 159–320.
19. See in this volume chapter 2, part 2.
20. See in this volume chapter 9, part 5.
21. See Plato, Philebus, 27b 8.
22. For a discussion of art as enérgeia, see Dieter Teichert, “Kunst als Geschehen. Gadamers antisubjektivistische Ästhetik und Kunsttheorie,” in István M. Fehér, ed., Kunst, Hermeneutik, Philosophie (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2003), 193–217, 211–212.
23. On Gadamer’s distance from Heidegger in relation to the truth of art, see John Sallis, “The Hermeneutics of the Artwork. Die Ontologie des Kunstwerks und ihre hermeneutische Bedeutung (GW 1, 87–138),” in Günter Figal, ed., Hans-Georg Gadamer—Wahrheit und Methode, 45–57, 55–56.
24. Gadamer, “Mythos und Vernunft” (1954), GW8 163–169 at 162 and 165.
25. Gadamer, “Mythos und Logos” (1981), GW8 170–179 at 173.
26. See in this volume chapter 8, part 6.
27. See in this volume chapter 10, part 1. Compare on this also Joel C. Weinsheimer, Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
28. See in this volume, chapter 8, part 2.