Günter Figal
For philosophical hermeneutics as Hans-Georg Gadamer conceived it, art plays an essential role. In Truth and Method, Gadamer’s magnum opus and also a kind of charter for modern philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer not only discusses art at length, but also introduces it as a paradigm for hermeneutic experience. Thus, his conception of hermeneutics differs from Schleiermacher’s and Dilthey’s, for whom art had not comparably been decisive. For the same reason, Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy also differs from Paul Ricœur’s. Already at the beginning of his discussion of art, Gadamer sketches his main problem. He makes clear that retrieving the “question of the truth of art” needs and goes along with a critical discussion of what he calls “the abstraction of aesthetic consciousness” (Gadamer 1986, 94–106). Hermeneutics in Gadamer’s sense, then, has to be strictly distinguished from aesthetics; it cannot be a variety of aesthetics, just as aesthetics based on the abstraction of aesthetic consciousness cannot be an integral part or aspect of hermeneutics.
If hermeneutics and aesthetics are as strictly opposed as Gadamer suggests, the “abstraction” performed by aesthetic consciousness must be an abstraction from the truth of art. As the result of such an abstraction, the aesthetic view of art is secondary; it must be conceived of as nonoriginal experience of art, which, derivative as it is supposed to be, is only possible on the basis of original experience—as an abstraction from it. Accordingly, Gadamer’s critical move against aesthetics presupposes his understanding of the truth of art, which, therefore, has to be discussed first.
In retrieving the question of the truth of art, Gadamer wishes to elucidate the character of hermeneutic experience in general. In this sense, the experience of art is paradigmatic for his hermeneutical philosophy. Art is not just a specific field of hermeneutic experience, so that its experience could be separated from other modes of hermeneutical practice and their subject matter. As will become clearer in the following, for Gadamer such a distinction would be aesthetic, and would thus miss the truth of art. Nevertheless, for Gadamer art is distinctive too; with art, he thinks, the character of hermeneutic experience becomes especially clear.
Hermeneutic experience as Gadamer understands it is, first of all, nonreferential. It is not related to objects of whatever kind that can be distinguished from the perspectives and ways from and in which they can be discovered. Rather, hermeneutical experience consists in being involved in something, which actually is no thing, and it is also the experience of being involved. It is not related to something, but it belongs to what becomes manifest in it.
Before he turns explicitly to the question of art, Gadamer illustrates this conception of hermeneutic experience by the experience of play. For him play thereby functions as the “guide for the ontological explication” of art (Gadamer 1986, 107); it is the paradigm of a paradigm. For Gadamer, to play a game is not a subjective activity. Hence, it would be inadequate to describe and explain it in reference to the players and their intentions. In playing, one does not pursue one’s own interests and aims. Though there may be aims in games, for example, the aim of winning the game, these aims are only pursued in order to play the game. Aims like this are part of the game, which as such is autonomous. A game offers an encompassing “orderly structure” (“Ordnungsgefüge”; Gadamer 1986, 108) that can only be realized by players if they suspend their own intentions. In doing so, they get into the game; they become assimilated by the game, and their activities become integrated in the game’s own movement. What Gadamer has in mind may be illustrated by the example of tennis. For tennis players, it is the movement of the ball that prescribes their activities; their activities unfold and develop in this movement, which cannot be controlled by them. So the game is not played by the players, but rather the players are played by the game. The game becomes manifest with the integrated and assimilated activities of the players.
Gadamer’s attempt to apply this description of playing to art can be made plausible at least in one respect. Though art is no game, it can be a play, for example, a theater play, and so it is not surprising that Gadamer’s considerations on art are primarily devoted to theater. Though performing a drama is, indeed, playing, Gadamer’s assumption that games can be paradigmatic for theater plays may nevertheless be puzzling; a theater play is not a self-sufficient movement like a tennis match played just for the sake of the match. Rather, it is the presentation of a play by actors for an audience. But Gadamer makes his decisive point precisely in doubting this difference. According to his description, the audience is no group of distanced spectators, but an integral part of the play. Gadamer supposes this to be so because he conceives the audience as experiencing the “meaning of the whole” (“Sinn des Ganzen”), that is, of the play, and in addition he conceives this experience according to the model of the experience of games. Like the actors, who perform a theater play in basically the same way in which, for instance, tennis players perform the game of tennis, the audience also belongs to the play; the play is for the audience, and the audience participates in its meaning. As to this meaning, the audience, in comparison with the actors, is even supposed to have a “methodic advantage” (“methodischer Vorrang”), since for the audience the meaning of the play is present as such; it is present “as a whole,” purely for understanding, untainted by the activities that the actors have to perform. But, as Gadamer adds, basically the distinction between the actors and the audience must be suspended; for both, players and audience, the meaning of the play is the same (Gadamer 1986, 115).
The assumption of this sameness has a decisive consequence for Gadamer’s conception of hermeneutical experience led by the paradigm of the theater play, and thereby also for his critical attitude to aesthetics. Gadamer supposes the audience only to be a true audience if no attention is paid to the actors as actors, so that their acting is taken purely as the presence of the play’s meaning. As Gadamer says, an authentic experience of artworks is only possible on the basis of the “non-differentiation” (“Nichtunterscheidung”) between mediation and work (Gadamer 1986, 115). Mediation, which is not distinguished from the work, is “total”; only in “total mediation” is the meaning of the work immediately present. As Gadamer points out, this immediate and therefore authentic presence in presentation is truth (Gadamer 1986, 118).
Subsequent to these considerations of Gadamer, it is quite easy to capture his conception of aesthetics. In contrast to authentic hermeneutic experience, Gadamer regards the aesthetic attitude to artworks as essentially differentiating. The abstraction, which he supposes to be essential for aesthetic consciousness, is achieved by differentiation, so that the aesthetic attitude as such can be characterized as “aesthetic differentiation” (“ästhetische Unterscheidung”). Though, as an abstraction, this differentiation is negatively related to what it abstracts from, Gadamer stresses that it also must be regarded as a “positive achievement.” It lets appear what Gadamer calls “the pure artwork” (Gadamer 1986, 91). The pure artwork, that is, the artwork that is regarded as artwork, is the correlate of aesthetic consciousness.
Examined more closely, aesthetic differentiation in Gadamer’s sense proves to be a complex of differentiations. This complex includes the differentiation between the artwork and its purpose, its function and the meaning of its content, but also the distinction between the artwork and “all those moments of its content that determine our substantial, moral, or religious stance toward it.” Furthermore, aesthetic consciousness distinguishes the artwork from “all conditions of access through which the work shows itself” and thus also from the “original life-context” in which the work is rooted. What counts is only the aesthetic character of a work. Based on such an isolation of “aesthetic qualities,” aesthetic differentiation can draw a dividing line between an artwork like a theater play and its various performances, so that both sides can be taken separately as correlates of aesthetic experience; one can read a play, marginalizing its character as a stage play performed by actors, or adore a particular staging and the actors acting without really paying attention to the content.
Gadamer’s description of aesthetic differentiation as sketched can be summarized in two respects. Though Gadamer introduces the term only in the last chapter of Truth and Method (Gadamer 1986, 448), one can, first, understand aesthetic differentiation as an abstraction from the world. The purpose, function, and meaning of artworks belong to the world human beings live in, just as the moral and religious stances they adopt and articulate do. And if these stances are articulated in artworks, one may conclude that artworks are “rooted” in and, accordingly, are only accessible in a world. Differentiating between the worldly substance as present in an artwork and its being art, one inhibits, second, the experience of the world, more precisely of the world in its meaning. According to Gadamer’s conception of hermeneutic experience, this meaning can only be experienced without distance; one must be involved in it so that it can become manifest in experience. Only in being performed in an experience which is analogous to playing a game does meaning become immediately present. This immediacy, in which no distinction between representation and its content is made, is “the unity of truth” (Gadamer 1986, 122). In consequence, aesthetic differentiation must be regarded as untruth. Being attentive to the “aesthetic qualities” of the actors, one turns away from truth and thereby conceals it.
Examined in this way, Gadamer’s conception of hermeneutic experience and, going along with it, his critical assessment of aesthetics, comes close to Heidegger’s thinking on art as developed in his essay on the origin of the work of art (cf. Sallis, Klassiker Auslegen HGG). In this essay, Heidegger essentially relates art to the historical world of a people, understanding it as the “opening” of such a world (Heidegger 1977, 28). Accordingly, he describes the experience of artworks as dwelling in the truth as it is happening in the work (Heidegger 1977, 54). Heidegger also rejects the aesthetic understanding of art, only briefly in his essay (cf. Heidegger 1977, 24), but more extensively in his Contributions to Philosophy (Heidegger 1989) and mainly in his lecture course on Nietzsche, The Will to Power as Art, held in the winter 1936–1937 (Heidegger 1985). His key word in this context, “Erlebnis,” is also important for Gadamer’s view on aesthetics. Erlebnis is only approximately translatable as “experience,” since “experience” also covers the German word “Erfahrung,” which is Gadamer’s term for the process of understanding. In contrast to Erfahrung, Erlebnis for both Heidegger and Gadamer means a merely subjective experience of an artwork. As Heidegger points out, for Erlebnis the artwork is merely relevant as “exciter of experience” (“Erlebniserreger”; Heidegger 1985, 101). In the same sense, Gadamer understands the self-relatedness of Erlebnis by determining everything experienced in the sense of Erlebnis as “self experienced” (“Selbsterlebtes”; Gadamer 1986, 72). As Heidegger and Gadamer want to suggest, true experience of art is not self-centered, but completely taken up with the work.
Despite the sketched similarities, Gadamer’s conception of art and also his critique of aesthetics differ remarkably from Heidegger’s. Whereas Heidegger reduces the artwork to the particular historical world that is opened and set up by it, Gadamer conceives the meaning of an artwork as continuous historical meaning, which is handed down to the present time by tradition. And whereas Heidegger understands the subjective character of Erlebnis mainly in reference to Nietzsche’s conception of the Dionysian as inebriation (cf. Mirkovic 2011), for Gadamer Erlebnis is essentially distanced; it is Apollonian, as one might say. To be distanced, in turn, is essentially an aesthetic attitude. Gadamer understands aesthetic experience (Erlebnis) in his sense as representative for Erlebnis as such. What is aesthetically experienced is supposed to be withdrawn from all contexts of reality (Gadamer 1986, 75); the aesthetic attitude is this withdrawal.
Compared with Heidegger’s conception of art, Gadamer’s proves to be less problematic. Heidegger’s reduction of artworks to a particular historical world opened up by them makes it difficult to understand why artworks are still intelligible after the world they belong to has vanished. In contrast, Gadamer’s conception of tradition allows for a historical understanding of artworks, according to which artworks prove their intelligibility in the very process of their “effective history” (“Wirkungsgeschichte”) (cf. Gadamer 1986, 305–312) every time they are authentically experienced. But questions remain also in respect to Gadamer’s conception, not the least being questions concerning the experience of art and the role of aesthetic differentiation. One can doubt whether playing is a convincing paradigm for the experience of art in general. Not all artworks are like theater plays, and even the audience at such a play does not perform it in the way actors do. Rather, the audience is a group of contemplators and, in consequence, it is at least not in the same way involved as actors might be in a play or as players likely are in a game. Contemplators, rather, are distanced; they keep a distance from what they are contemplating. This is confirmed by the architecture of theaters, which allows or even prescribes this distance insofar as it separates the seats for the spectators from the stage. because of this separation, spectators realize that they are contemplating a play as a play; being spectators, they differentiate aesthetically.
This leads to the main problem of Gadamer’s considerations on art. Though Gadamer regards the aesthetic differentiation as an abstraction concealing the truth of art, he cannot avoid presupposing this differentiation; otherwise, he could not speak of “artworks” at all. He even admits this when he says that it is the aesthetic differentiation that lets the “pure artwork” appear (Gadamer 1986, 91). Of course, the “pure” artwork should be distinguished from just the artwork; the “pure” artwork, as Gadamer understands it, is the artwork which is merely regarded as a work of art, in complete abstraction from its content. One can doubt, however, whether such an exaggeration has ever been maintained. In any case, it must not be confused with the differentiation between artworks and other manifestations of meaning. This differentiation pertains to the character of artworks as artworks, and accordingly it must be valid in order to speak reasonably of artworks at all. This differentiation, then, cannot be an abstraction. Rather, it must be the implicit or explicit recognition of the particular character of artworks. And if, as even Gadamer suggests in referring to theater plays as a paradigm, artworks must be present for contemplators, who essentially are distanced from what they contemplate, the recognition of an artwork, then, must be the recognition of an aesthetic object. As the experience of an object, however, aesthetic experience cannot be a self-centered Erlebnis, but neither can it be an involvement like a tennis match.
With this conclusion, the relation of philosophical hermeneutics to aesthetics has to be conceived anew, and in a way that basically differs from Gadamer’s. Hermeneutical experience of artworks cannot be led by an “aesthetic non-differentiation” (“ästhetische Nichtunterscheidung”; Gadamer 1986, 122). Rather, it must also be aesthetic, and thus it cannot be reduced to the hermeneutical experience of meaning. Accordingly, aesthetics, understood as the philosophical inquiry of art, cannot be included in hermeneutics (Gadamer 1993, 5). Rather, philosophical hermeneutics and aesthetics must be conceptualized as basically independent from each other. Hermeneutical experience is not always aesthetic, since not everything understandable is as such an aesthetic object. Conversely, an aesthetic object does not as such have a hermeneutical character. There are even aesthetic objects that do not need hermeneutical experience, as do complex artworks, which, because of their complexity, are a challenge for understanding. Something simple like a ceramic bowl, for instance, is at once intelligible as what it is, but at the same time intense aesthetic contemplation can be devoted to it (cf. Figal 2014). Though hermeneutics and aesthetics are different, their subject matter may coincide. This is the case with objects, which are both hermeneutic and aesthetic, and there are even many of them. In respect of these objects, hermeneutics and aesthetics necessarily are complements.
In order to understand this complementarity, one has, first, to clarify the particular character of aesthetics. This can be done best by elucidating the character of aesthetic objects. An answer to the question of what aesthetic objects are is indicated by the term “aesthetics” itself. Aesthetic objects are essentially correlated to perception, the word for which in Ancient Greek is ‘aesthesis.’ But aesthetic objects cannot be coextensive with everything perceptible; otherwise, the term “aesthetic” could not be used significantly in respect to artworks. Artworks, however, are not just perceptible like everything in the perceptible world; they are intensely perceptible. Paintings, which are works of art, for instance, are intensely visible in demanding particular visual attentiveness; they are only adequately experienced in visual contemplation. They are primarily visible so that their experience should be based on and led by vision. Standing out in their primary visibility, they are visible objects that are primarily objective in being visible. They are the objects they are as appearances or, one can also say, as phenomena (Figal 2010, esp. 76–104). This characterization can be generalized; aesthetic objects can also be audible, like pieces of music or poems, and they can even be touchable like sculptures or pieces of ceramic art. In any case, however, their objectivity is objective phenomenality, and their phenomenality is objective.
Of course, aesthetic phenomenal objects can also have meaning, and this meaning has to be understood. But one will not do justice to artworks by regarding them just as manifestations of meaning. Their meaning never dominates so that their perceptible objectivity would merely have the purpose of making meaning accessible, as is the case with written or printed signs. It would be inadequate and perhaps even confusing to contemplate such signs instead of just reading them. Signs like letters are perceptible. But instead of being appearances, they remain inconspicuous. Being signs, they are not contemplated; they are seen and at the same time overlooked.
Meaningful aesthetic objects may also be overlooked in favor of their meaning, but then they are not realized as aesthetic objects. A cursory identification of their meaning would never realize their aesthetic character and would thus also ignore the particular status of their meaning. This meaning—one can call it aesthetic meaning—is adequately experienced only if it is realized as being closely intertwined with the artwork’s perceptibility. It is not accessible as a particular meaning separate from a particular aesthetic object. Nevertheless, the meaning of artworks does not coincide with the perceptible; in this case, the perceptible would be nothing but an immediate manifestation of meaning. Being perceptible and intelligible, aesthetic objects, then, are characterized by an immanent difference, which may be called the aesthetic difference.
This difference can be described in more detail first by referring to the character of the perceptible as such. There are always more colors and more nuances of color to be seen, more sounds and nuances of sound to be heard than one could ever determine, and the same holds true for surface properties one can sense by touching. Color, sound, and surface have certain properties, but these properties as such are not clearly structured. Their elements are not clearly distinguished from each other; they are too dense, too chaotic, too indeterminate, or too homogenous. The perceptible as such has no recognizable order. It is rather textured than ordered (Figal 2010, 222–223.). Also, language has a textural aspect—not only in its sounds but also in ambiguities of meaning, in allusions, and in metaphorical shifts.
What is intelligible must be ordered; only more or less distinct elements of an order can be understood as constitutive elements of meaning. Orders, however, that are distinguished from textures, but conceived in relation to them, can be called texts (cf. Figal 2006, 68–69. Figal 2010, 161–164). The Latin word “textus” means “fabric.” Applied to language, it means the more or less complex order of a speech, of a poem or of a piece of prose. In texts, the meaningful aspects of language are related to each other and thus interwoven in many ways. Text, understood as the structure of meaning, is not unique to language; pieces of music and pictures, and buildings too have texts, and insofar they can and must be read in order to be understood (cf. Gadamer 1993, 331–338). The texts of aesthetic objects, however, are not neatly placed on the surface of textures, so that they can be unambiguously read. Aesthetic texts are embedded in their respective textures; they emerge from them, and often it is not clear whether an element of an artwork belongs to its text or to its texture. Aesthetic texts cannot be understood without being seen or heard, and hearing includes listening to particular words and following their inexhaustible nuances and ambiguities.
The aesthetical intertwinement of text and texture has a decisive consequence for how the intelligibility of aesthetic objects is conceived. Since the texture of these objects, and thereby their perceptibility, is inexhaustible, and since their meaning is accessible only in being intertwined with the perceptible, the meaning of aesthetic objects as well is inexhaustible. With every new perceptive experience, then, at least a slightly different experience of meaning will be associated.
This, however, means that for aesthetic objects a pure manifestation of meaning is impossible. And if, with Gadamer, pure manifestations of meaning are understood as truth, then aesthetic experience cannot be an experience of truth. But artworks are also not untrue. Rather, they are beyond truth and untruth; in artworks, the truth-character of meaning is suspended. In artworks, meaning is potential, determined in its potentiality by the artwork itself.
The aesthetic potentiality of meaning can be understood from two standpoints. It is, first, the meaning experienced at a time in its intertwinement with the perceptible. Because of this intertwinement, the understanding of meaning is determined by the extent and closeness of perception. Because this interplay of perception and understanding is never definite, the experience of an artwork can improve; it can become more refined and nuanced, and also more distinct. In any case, the meaning of artworks, just like their perceptibility, is not immediately present, but rather emerges in the process of experience, in its reflection and articulation and thus in interpretation. In every interpretation, one knows more or less clearly that there is more to discover. Interpretations are not constructions; they discover the artworks in their objectivity, but they never come to an end.
Accordingly, and this is the second aspect, the meaning of an artwork cannot be the fulfilled presence, or, in Gadamer’s words, “the evidence of the subject matter” (Gadamer 1986, 485), which is articulated as “so it is” (Gadamer 1986, 118). Rather, the meaning of an artwork is something appearing in its possibility, and so an adequate comment is “so it can be.” Artworks do not present the “essence” of something (Gadamer 1986, 120); this is an assumption that is difficult to maintain if one takes into account how differently something can be presented in different artworks. Being perceptibly present, artworks present phenomenal structures of meaning, texts in textures, which must not be directly applied to the factual world or identified with its “essence.” In doing so, one would miss the disclosing potential of artworks, in which the possible is allowed to be just the possible and nevertheless has become objective, so that it can be explored and investigated as such. Investigations of that kind, aesthetic investigations, are hermeneutically illuminating; they are challenges to explore the potential and the limits of hermeneutic experience.