Hermeneutics and Aesthetics

Hermeneutics is a theory of interpretation and understanding that has roots in Biblical exegesis and German romanticism. It emerged as a significant branch of contemporary continental philosophy primarily through the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, a philosophical heir to Heidegger. Gadamer's hermeneutics is relevant for aesthetics in two ways: first, in his 1960 magnum opus Truth and Method, he uses art and aesthetic experience as examples to defend the kind of understanding appropriate to the human sciences from methodological scientism and to develop a general theory of hermeneutics.

Gadamer's general approach to hermeneutics seeks to defend the human sciences from reduction to the kind of methodology appropriate for the natural sciences. He argues that the human sciences aim at understanding works (theoretical or literary texts, artworks, and other cultural products) which themselves cannot be understood to be entirely separate from the one who seeks to understand. Instead, both are inscribed within a common horizon of tradition. Tradition must not be understood in the static sense of conserving what already exists but rather as a transmission through which works from a world different to the one we inhabit are passed down to us. Understanding becomes something like a translation, with the aim being a fusion of horizons of the world of the work and the world we inhabit.

In later essays and Gadamer's more explicit 'aesthetics', we continue to see Heidegger's influence and several significant differences. Gadamer seeks to challenge and overcome what has been called aesthetics in modern philosophy for different reasons and with a different aim in mind. He objects to Kant's thesis of the disinterested nature of aesthetic experience, insisting that such experience brings a cognitive content which connects artworks with our understanding of other features of the world and other types of experience, including our interests. Gadamer believes that modern philosophical aesthetics should be overcome by being absorbed into hermeneutics.

In 'The Relevance of the Beautiful,' Gadamer uses his hermeneutic approach to understand the nature of artwork, particularly in relation to trans-historical works. He proposes that art can be understood through the anthropological basis of our experience of art, which he develops through three key ideas: play, symbol, and festival.

Play is an intentional activity involving repetition without any real purpose or goal, and it implies that there is no real separation between the work itself and the receiver. This activity constitutes the work and brings its different aspects together through the synthetic activity of interpretation, constituting the unity of the work. This understanding challenges the modern aesthetic tradition, which maintains a distinction between the subject and object in aesthetic experience.

Gadamer uses the notion of the symbol to explain the way in which an artwork should be thought to be meaningful. He wants to underline the cognitive dimension of artworks, their connections to our interests and involvements, while objecting to Hegel's idealist account of artworks, which reduces them entirely to conceptual content. Gadamer takes inspiration from Heidegger's idea that every revealing is also a concealing, so that every artwork always maintains something concealed within it which resists the current interpretation.

The symbol expresses the way that an artwork can have a meaning that is cognitive and quasi-linguistic yet excessive and inexhaustible. Language stands as a paragon for all experience of meaning, so even apparently non-linguistic experiences such as encounters with artworks must be understood according to a linguistic model. Understanding a work of art is an interminable affair involving repeated encounters and acts of interpretation.

Festival reveals something about the temporal character of the artwork and its affinity with human community. Like the experience of a festival or holiday, the artwork invites us into an experience of time which differs from the quantitative, calculative experience of time we have when engaged in work (and similar everyday activities). Gadamer calls this 'fulfilled' or 'autonomous' time, which has a certain unity and cannot be dissolved into separate moments.

Art, Gadamer proposes, can be experienced in a way that does not appeal to any particular social class but unites people in sharing the same kind of experience. While hermeneutics has been criticized for its emphasis on tradition and community, it must be emphasized that Gadamer sees both in terms of openness and transformation.