Textual Reflection on Gadamer

Gadamer begins his essay Aesthetics and Hermeneutics by suggesting that the way we normally define hermeneutics is not accurate because art would not be included.  To him, it is important that we know art's role and purpose in hermeneutics because "it is the work of art that speaks to us most directly" over all the other things that confront us in nature and history (187).  As we have already heard, calling something beautiful we are discovering something about ourselves we did not already know, and Gadamer calls it "an encounter with ourselves" every time we are gripped by the "mysterious intimacy" of art (187).  He argues that art is so powerfully expressive that it overcomes its "own historical origin" so that "the experience of art... always has its own present... the work of art communicates itself" (187).  However, Gadamer is not saying that just because a work of art can be interpreted in many does not mean it should; there is "a standard of appropriateness... a universal validity" required not only of judgment of taste (Kant) but also of interpretation (188).  He then asks a series of questions that "transform the systematic problem of aesthetics into the question of the experience of art," focusing on how art has something to say to us, that it is a language (188).  But art cannot belong to only to the category of the linguistic because it also has nonlinguistic qualities, using the example of an archaic image of a god (189).  "Every interpretation of the intelligible that helps others to understand has the character of language," and art can function in this way, while it can also be a "fragment of a past world... assisting us in the intellectual reconstruction of the world in which they are a remnant" (189).  So is art a tool or a language?  Whatever it is, art "says something" to everyone and "our task is to understand the meaning of what it says and to make it clear to ourselves and others" (190).  This sounds similar to Plato, in that art has didactic purpose, but Gadamer's view of art differs from Plato's; he recognizes that art has value in society and because it says something to everyone, that the"language of art is constituted precisely by the fact that it speaks too the self-understanding of every person, and it does this as ever-present and by means of its own contemporaneousness" (191).  In the hermeneutic circle, in order to understand a whole, we must first understand a part, and to understand a part, we must also be aware of the whole.  According to Gadamer and hermeneutics, everything is a symbol (something that points to another thing).  Art is also a symbol that "gathers into itself" (192).  He ends his essay mentioning the intimacy of art that he discussed at the beginning, that art quiets us with its mystery and simultaneously shatters us with the familiar, saying to us that we are this way and we must change.