Dispatched from the UK in 3 business days When will my order arrive? Home Contact Us Help Free delivery worldwide. A Critique of Modern Aesthetics. Description Gadamer's writing on art is typically seen as supporting his philosophical theory of truth. Drawing together a coherent theory of the work of art from the corpus of Gadamer's writings, this is the first full-length examination of Gadamer's theory of the work of art in its own right. Close readings of Gadamer's treatment of aesthetics in Truth and Method, as well as his many essays and lectures on art, highlight an approach to art that is not ancillary to historical, philosophical, and linguistic themes.
This book establishes Gadamer's position on the criteria for the judgment of art, and the balance between production and reception from a hermeneutic perspective. Offering useful insights to some of the most tantalizing and obscure Gadamerian themes, this not only makes a significant addition to Gadamer scholarship, but provides aesthetics scholars, critics, and interpreters with new ways of thinking about art. The Best Books of Check out the top books of the year on our page Best Books of Product details Format Paperback pages Dimensions x x Looking for beautiful books?
Visit our Beautiful Books page and find lovely books for kids, photography lovers and more. Other books in this series. Appearance always hints at a semblance of something incomplete or not yet fully realised. The claim that each artwork has its own temporality implies that each will never reveal itself completely. The claim that the reception of all art is contemporaneous dictates that what appears to us as meaningful is not necessarily what appeared to a previous generation as meaningful. Like the symbol, appearance is always partial.
However, appearance, when considered aesthetically, has the cadence of the symbolic: That which comes to stand is intelligible as the presentation of a certain meaning, but because of the indeterminacy of that meaning it retains something of the enigmatic. This eminent quality—a genuine work can never be measured against the original way it was shown RB —Gadamer also refers to as its hermeneutic identity. The truth of an artwork is not its simple manifestation of meaning but rather the unfathomableness and depth of its meaning PH Its truth embraces a tension between revelation what appears and what is concealed what has yet to be shown.
In short, the mark of a substantial work is that it veils possibilities of meaning. Such resistance is a stimulus to further interpretation.
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Substantive works, like significant symbols, have an opaque aspect. The symbol and its reticence about revealing the withheld aspects of its meaning do not connote something utterly alien to us. The yet-to-be revealed is a dimension of meaning overlooked, forgotten, or not perceived within what has already been shown or grasped.
In other words, the power of the symbol resides in its ability to reveal that, unbeknown to ourselves, we are in communion with something much larger than ourselves, that is, horizons of meaning which implicitly sustain reflection and which can, when made explicit, bring us to think quite differently of ourselves.
The mystery of the symbol is its promise of transcendence: The analogy of the festival, once again, is telling. In the festival, individuated work roles are renounced as we rediscover communal ties. Philosophical usage of the word evokes phenomenological notions of intentionality: The Sache is not a determinate concept but an area of significant meaningfulness, a constellation of concerns which orbit the affective, conative and cognitive complexities of subject matters such as grief or love.
Subject matters may transcend an individual work in that no one work can exhaust their significance, but as ideas Sachen are not independent of the body of works that exemplify them. If they were ontologically distinct, the idealism Gadamer rejects would be forced on him and he would be compelled to argue that art is representational, refers to a concept beyond itself and, indeed, disappears into that concept once evoked.
Art becomes philosophy once more. Art does not therefore copy and thereby represent a subject-matter, but configures a visual or literary space in which a subject-matter can be summoned. Gadamer counters an ancient line of argument that regards art as secondary to, inferior to, and a corrupter of, the real. Contrary to the Platonic tradition, his argument implies that art adds to the reality of its subject-matters.
Kant considers aesthetic experience to be indifferent to whether or not its object is real cf. Whether what is represented exists or not is inconsequential. What matters is the aesthetic merit of the work, not the strength of its likeness.
Should the artwork be harmed, the being of the correlative is unaffected. Although subject matters transcend the individual works which embody them, they do not exist apart from their historical embodiments but, unlike Platonic forms, they do not transcend history but mutate and develop ever new permutations.
Any diminishment of art diminishes the historical effectiveness of a given subject-matter. A semi-Platonic argument about mimesis reinforces a discernibly non-Platonic argument concerning the historically fluid character of subject matters. The argument that artworks direct us to a subject matter irrespective of whether they be realist or abstract constructions, suggests a moment of return and repetition. An issue, question or subject-matter is recognised. This passage strengthens the presentational approach to art but its reference to essences requires clarification.
It is not suggested that we see repeatedly the same essence in a work of art. Were this to be suggested, works would become dull and uninformative and make no new contribution to a genre. Such transformative power implies recognising in a work what was previously understood of a subject-matter, but transformed, as if seen for the first time. The life of a subject matter is one of change and development. Artworks allow subject-matters to become more what they are.
Artworks are the sites in which trans-individual both present and transform themselves. Whereas, as we have seen, for Kant the destruction of an artwork has absolutely no bearing upon the objectivities it represents, we can now understand why Gadamer is committed to the opposing view that the destruction of an artwork diminishes the reality of the subject-matters that come forth through it. The ability of artworks to bring things to mind and to hint at unseen meanings is reason to claim that in its speculative capacities, art functions essentially like a language.
Yet he acknowledges that linguistic means of expression are inadequate to the task of conveying what occurs within an experience of art. Two claims underwrite this scepticism: In other words, the experience of art always just eludes theoretical containment.
These are not difficulties with language per se, but rather reflect the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the totality of its involvements. The incompleteness of any interpretation of an artwork opens us to the possibility that there is always something more or something else that can be said. The temporal nature of experience and its interpretation prevent closure or, in other words, both are by nature always open to further ways of thinking and speaking about art. The argument reinforces the claim that art and its interpretation extend the being of the subject-matters addressed and, furthermore, that aesthetic experience itself has a temporal continuity which is linked to its cumulative character as a mode of Bildung.
The issue about the relationship between art and language is not one of linguistic capture but of finding the appropriate words to open the content of aesthetic experience. What is meant by the notion that an artwork addresses us with a meaning? Gadamer speaks of the perfection of the word as being the disappearance of any gap between sense and utterance. If aspects of its meaning are withheld, sense and utterance are once again separated.
The word, it would appear, signifies something beyond itself after all. There is, in other words, a tension between Gadamer wanting to hold that the work of art and the world that comes forth within it are indivisible and saying that the world which a work invokes is larger than the work itself. The poetic word, insofar as it is poetic, stands-in-itself; and yet as word it invokes something beyond itself. Speculatively charged words refer to other signs or patterns of meaning beyond themselves. This suggests that words are self-negating signs: To conclude that words operate as representational signs seems quite contrary to the account of art functioning in the manner of a symbol.
Let us restate the question. The theological notion of a host can dissolve the inconsistency. On the one hand, for an artwork to have a speculative capacity, it must invoke perimeters of meaning which transcend its own immediate circumstance. Without this, an artwork cannot connect us with frameworks of otherness. Art would once again be subordinated to a vehicle of philosophy.
On the other hand, there is something within the constitution of an artwork that makes it resist theoretical reduction. Its invocation of an excess of meaning resists conceptual capture. This brings us to the crux of the matter. Does the excess of meaning which a work can speculatively invoke exist apart from the work that summons them?
The speculative dimensions of art suggest that an artwork is indeed a host for that which lies beyond it and yet, at the same time, the transcendent dimensions of meaning its excess of meaning , remain immanent within the work that invokes them. The presence of the transcendental only manifests itself through the work that hosts it.
To put it another way, it is in the work that the transcendental set of meanings achieves its presence. The full resonance of a subject-matter which of course extends well beyond any one work is nevertheless only discernible in the works that host them. Indeed, subject-matters do not exist apart from the works that manifest their presence. Ontologically speaking they inhere within the work. The work is the occasion in which these dimensions of meaning appear and they command the attention of the viewer so long as the work holds them in play. Yet this is another way of saying that, ontologically speaking, artworks function as symbols.
Considered as a referential sign, what the artwork refers to is not a world independent of the sign but another set of signs. However, such other configurations of meaning may mean more than the signs that invoke them but they are inherent within those very signs. As a symbolic host, the artwork holds that which refers beyond itself within itself.
What binds us to a tradition, according to Gadamer, is not a misplaced conservatism but the questions a canon or body of work asks of us. It arises because of the way Gadamer establishes individual and collective learning on the acquisition of accrued experiences Bildung and practices, rather than upon any methodological norm.
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His argument exposes the Enlightenment prejudice against prejudice. The liberating and universalising aspects of reason tend to marginalise and chastise both the culturally different and the historically particular as divisive and irrational. Gadamer contends, however, that such an unqualified hypostasisation of reason and its methods has the unfortunate consequence of condemning as methodologically groundless the very valuations that ordinary linguistic and experiential practices are based on. Gadamer is not unsympathetic to Nietzsche, who rejects the claim that humanity is shaped by external necessity.
Our existence within the world and our place within it is, metaphysically speaking, utterly contingent. If there is no metaphysical necessity that governs human practices, why should we even ask for a methodological grounding, when language has neither required nor functioned with such a license?
Linked bibliography for the SEP article "Gadamer's Aesthetics" by Nicholas Davey - PhilPapers
Like Wilhelm Dilthey before him, Gadamer insists that nothing justifies and gives meaning to life other than life itself. This is not the invocation of nihilism, for life does not occur in a vacuum. Creatures such as humans, which have no pre-determined essence, only survive by both remembering what has worked well within a practice and by constantly testing it against contemporary needs and circumstances.
There is a constant tension between acquired experience and the need to stabilise its lessons and the need to question and thereby destabilise the tried and the tested. All expressive practices depend upon an inheritance of insight and valuation. They are dependent upon accrued learning and experience. In response to such scepticism, it must be acknowledged that inherited practices can, logically speaking, have negative entailments.
However, a commitment to tradition, is not a commitment to remaining the same, and nor is it indicative of a wilful refusal to confront the negative entailments within what is transmitted historically. Traditions which are incapable of changing risk becoming outmoded. Traditions are not founded upon core and fixed identities. As vibrant religious and artistic traditions demonstrate, those which are in constant debate over aim and direction often prove engaging and influential.
Traditions capable of subjecting their self-understanding to critique constitute continuities of conflict. The importance of received understanding for Gadamer is not its historical provenance but how it opens us towards and engages us with issues in a community of debate. The project is implausible since the range and depth of pre-understanding is so extensive as to be untheorisable. To condemn pre-understanding as unjustifiable because it cannot be methodologically grounded is highly dangerous as it devalues those very insights upon which our initial world-orientation depends.
It is not that these insights are instrinsically valuable but that they are essential staging posts in the journeys of understanding they enable. It is the continuous debate and dialogue over practice that enables participants to move on, widen and transform acquired experience. Movement and development is intrinsic to the German word for tradition: What a tradition transmits from age to age are questions, problems and issues.
The importance of canonic works is not that they are peerless exemplars of an idiom or style but rather that they raise issues and difficulties in an exemplary way. Traditions can check their self-understanding against their own historical projections. A commitment to tradition is not a commitment to an academic antiquarianism.
Gadamer's poetics : a critique of modern aesthetics
It is, essentially, a commitment to a field of debate. Tradition is presented as a resource and a provocation for thinking and creativity: It has been argued against Gadamer that his revaluation of tradition does not really bring its content to a point of critical reflection. He acknowledges that like any other temporal phenomenon, not all of its vistas can be adequately thematised or articulated. This does not mean, however, that tradition is beyond critical appraisal.
The 'Work' of Art 3. After this thorough and engaging book, this is thankfully no longer the case. A Biography Yale U Press, ,. Arthos' penetrating analysis is our best guide into the heart of Gadamer's work. Arthos provides a probing elaboration of Gadamer's ontology of the artwork, culminating with an innovative study of the figure of Clytemnestra that illustrates the historical dimensions Gadamer's hermeneutic approach. Gadamer's Poetics is essential reading for anyone interested in what hermeneutics, in its fully radical form, has to tell us about art.
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