Problems with Gadamer's Hermeneutics

In Hans-Georg Gadamer’s essay “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” the distinctions between hermeneutics and aesthetics are explored, as well as their relation to each other. Gadamer spends most of his time in this body of explaining how the experiences of art fall into the category of hermeneutics, and the nature of hermeneutics itself. While his theory on hermeneutics and what the experience of art entails are logically sound, I find a few problems with his ideas.

Gadamer begins with a definition of hermeneutics as “the bridging of personal or historical distance between minds,” and later expands on this definition as saying it is the way in which we go about “clarifying and mediating by our own effort of interpretation what is said by persons we encounter in tradition” Tradition, simply put, is anything encountered in human experience that can be linguistically expressed. Originally, Gadamer claims that art must not exist within hermeneutics, but then explains how it must be included as real art is able to say something beyond its historical confinement, and is experienced by each person individually in a “timeless present.” This transforms all the problems of aesthetics into the question of the experience of art, and his views on the experience of art are strongly in line with Kant. Since works of art all “say” something to us, they belong in the realm of things we are able to understand and interpret linguistically, and therefore aesthetics is not a realm of study on its own, but a study under hermeneutics.

Gadamer then goes on to attempt to explain the meaning of experience of art. He claims that art is impactful because of the “surprise at the meaning of what is said.” That is, to say, the work of art always says something to the viewer in a way that the viewer experiences something new, and subsequently must confront himself with the disclosure of this new thing. All works of art cause this introspective experience, and the real experience of art is to integrate this newfound thing into one’s own world and orientation to the world.

Gadamer, however, in explaining the language of art, says that art is art because it has an “excess of meaning” that is present in the world itself, and this extra meaning cannot be translated into ordinary language. Certainly it is true that when experiencing what you believe to be a good work of art, there are feelings and experiences and emotions that arise in you without being put into play. This is where my main concerns arise.  If the experience of art is defined by the way in which some sort of truth is unconcealed to us as viewers, and it is necessary to apply this truth to our own experience in relation to the world, then how is this excess knowledge to be defined or utilized if it is outside the scope of ordinary linguistics?
            Our we to create our own new linguistic dimensions or terms to define these, or are we simply to just try to encompass them in the fleeting moment of experience and attempt to recreate them when recalling the work of art and hope some of that experience remains? If hermeneutics is the bridging of distance between minds and clarifying what we encounter in tradition, this can only be done linguistically in our conventional language. Gadamer asserts that the experience of art itself and its defining characteristics themselves exist outside of linguistics. It seems to me then, that aesthetics, and subsequently, the experience of art, if not able to exist within tradition and linguistically, must therefore not be considered a hermeneutic study but that of something else.

I believe Gadamer attempts to address this by saying that he has previously stated that “being that can be understood is language,” but I still find it problematic that he places the study of art, which he claims the real experience of is outside of language, into a system that utilizes language as its defining characteristic.