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Art as Festival in Heideggerand Gadamer

Ingrid Scheibler

Abstract

In Art as Festival, I put Heidegger and Gadamer into dialogue concerningtheir respective critiques of traditional aesthetics and their more positiveviews on the work of art. I use the festival theme to examine some of thephilosophical issues in Heideggers and Gadamers approaches to the workof art. Specically, I look at the way both gures conceive the work of artas an encounter which, like the festival, involves a transcendence of subjec-tivity in an encounter with an event in this case, the artwork which theindividual does not direct, but rather in which they participate. Puttingthe theme of festival into play also provides a useful critical lever, especiallyin the way that it raises important issues of community. More specically,reecting on the festival celebration raises questions of the nature of thiscommunity, of the relation of the community created in the festival eventto the community of the everyday, and thus also of the relation of theaesthetic and the political.

Keywords: aesthetics; hermeneutics; festival; play; community

Introduction

This paper connects Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamersperspectives on the work of art with the theme of the festival.1 Boththinkers conceive the encounter with a work of art through a critique ofthe subjectivization of traditional aesthetics. Further, as an alternative toa subjective basis for aesthetics, both Heidegger and Gadamer conceive

the encounter with a work of art as a transcendence of subjectivity thatis, the encounter with the artwork has the character of an event. The workof art is like a festival in two ways. First, in the festival, the focus is notdirected to the individual, but to their participating in something (an event)

International Journal o f Phi losophical St udies Vol.9(2), 151175

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International Journal of Philosophical StudiesISSN 09672559 print 14664542 online 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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which transcends their subjective standpoint.2 Second, the festival cele-bration is shared; participation is a sharing in an event, and thus involvescommunity. The celebration is of something a certain group holds incommon, and what is being honoured, in turn, can be said to hold them

in common.Given these initial points of analogy, I found that putting the theme offestival into play provides a useful critical lever, especially in the way thefestival theme raises important issues of community, which can be usedto problematize this issue in both Heideggers and Gadamers views onthe artwork. In what follows, I would like to examine how, for bothHeidegger and Gadamer, the work of art can function as a site where thestandpoint of subjectivity is surpassed, aufgehoben, in an encounter with

a greater context.The claim that the work of art can be subjective yet universal has itsreference point in traditional aesthetics in Kants Critique of Judgment.3

More recently, phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches toaesthetics especially the work of Heidegger and Gadamer posit acritique of traditional aesthetics, and what is seen as its subjective basis.For Heidegger, Nietzsche (himself a strong critic of Kants aesthetics) isa central target in the critique of subjectivized aesthetics; for Gadamer,

it is Kant himself.4

A phenomenological approach to aesthetics provides an alternative tothis subjectivization. For Heidegger, self-transcendence in an event takesplace through a recognition of our ineluctable relation to what he calledthe event of Being, which is manifested in the work of art as a site whichgrounds a peoples history. For Gadamer, it is an experience of plenitudeand truth that is related to our self-understanding.

Heideggers Account of the Work of Art

Heideggers essay on The Origin of the Work of Art (1936) posits a newrelation between the work of art and truth.5 This notion of art is distinc-tively Heideggerian because it is thought against the perspective of eithera subjective or objective extreme: that is, it is thought neither from thestandpoint of the artist as creator nor from a subjective standpoint of thefeelings or experiences produced in the viewer/recipient. Further, for

Heidegger, as we will see, the work of art is also not merely an object. 6It is not evaluated only in terms of its ability as a beautiful object toproduce these subjective states.

The question of the dominance of subjective aesthetic experience israised in the Epilogue to Heideggers OWA essay in terms of the destinyof art. Here Heidegger says that in aesthetics we are to look at the wayman experiences art to give information about art: Everything is an ex-perience. Yet perhaps experience is the element in which art dies.7

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Heidegger adds that this death is a slow one, taking several centuries. Inthe Epilogue Heidegger invokes Hegel, who says, art is and remains forus, on the side of its highest vocation, something past.8 If aesthetic expe-rience now rules, then art is indeed something of the past, and Hegel is

correct. But, it is not yet a foregone conclusion that the rule of the subjec-tivization of art through experience is determinant:

The truth of Hegels judgment has not yet been decided; for behindthis verdict stands Western thought since the Greeks, which thoughtcorresponds to a truth of beings that has already happened. Decisionupon the judgment will be made, when it is made, from and aboutthis truth of what is.9

To determine whether Hegels claim is true, we need rst to consider thenature of art, and for Heidegger, this means asking the question about itsorigin (Ursprung).

In addition to Heideggers critique of the dominance of aesthetic ex-perience, a second and more general point is that the OWA essay,and Heideggers views on the signicance of art (written just after thisessay),10 should be seen in relation to his more general project of thinking

and retrieving the question of Being. In the OWA essay, Heidegger makesthe work of art one instance, or site, where the enigmatic event of Being the distinctive event of truth, a revealing and concealing takes place.Here, the relation between Being and human beings, a peculiar type ofinterdependence, is manifested and can be brought to awareness after along tradition in the West of oblivion to this question of Being. This inter-dependence, a co-relation, is thematized for us in the encounter with thework of art. In Heideggers OWA essay, self-transcendence occurs in

the movement from viewing the artwork as aesthetic experience, conceivedas a rootedness in subjective states, to an awareness of the relation toBeing, which occurs through our encounter with the artwork and comesfrom the artwork itself.

Heideggers reections on the work of art, and on the tradition ofaesthetics in general, then, move beyond what he considers their meta-physical determinations; since the beginning of the nineteenth century(according to him), the metaphysical determination takes the form of a

subjectivization of aesthetics. That is, his views on modern aestheticsmust be understood as a part of his more general account of the modernperiod, which is part of the longer trajectory of a forgetfulness of Beingand the dominance of a metaphysics of presence. The modern period isdominated by the rule of the cogito, the modern subject, and what canbe called the dominance of modern subjectivism. What I have beendescribing in terms of a subjectivization of aesthetics is, then, the mani-festation of this subjectivism in the sphere of art.

ART AS FESTIVAL IN HEIDEGGER AND GADAMER

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The chapter on the history of aesthetics, Six Basic Developments inAesthetics, in Heideggers Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art, Vol. 1,characterizes modern aesthetics as an expression of modern subjectivism.The account of the modern period Heidegger gives is the third of ve

basic developments in the history of knowledge about art, the origin andformation of aesthetics. According to Heidegger, it is a development thatdoes not ow directly from art, or meditation on it; rather it is somethingthat involves our entire history: the beginning of the modern age. Further,it is this modern development that makes meditation on the beautifulslip into a preoccupation with mans state of feelings.11 To quote at somelength:

Man and his unconstrained knowledge of himself, as of his positionamong beings, become the arena where the decision falls as tohow beings are to be experienced, dened, shaped. Falling back uponthe state and condition of man, upon the way man stands beforehimself and before things, implies that now the very way man freelytakes a position toward things, the way he nds and feels them tobe, in short, his taste, becomes the court of judicature over beings.In metaphysics that becomes manifest in the way in which certitude

of all Being and all truth is grounded in the self-consciousnessof the individual ego; ego cogito ergo sum. . . . I myself, and mystates, are the primary and genuine beings. Everything else thatmay be said to be is measured against the standard of this quitecertain being. My having various states . . . participates essentially indening how I nd the things themselves and everything I encounterto be.12

The subjectivization of aesthetics begins here: with modern aesthetics,meditation on the beautiful is tied to mans state of feeling. For Heidegger,Nietzsche is responsible for this subjectivization of aesthetics.13 Heideggernotes that what occurs alongside this formation of modern aesthetics isthe decline of great art, great in the designated sense.14 This doesntmean that quality is declining in a real sense, but that art gives up itsessence; it loses its immediate relation to the basic task of representingthe absolute, to establishing the absolute denitively for historical man.

I turn now to Heideggers own, alternative account of the work of art,starting with another chapter in Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art. Inchapter 15, Kants Doctrine of the Beautiful: Its Misinterpretation bySchopenhauer and Nietzsche, Heidegger challenges Nietzsches readingof Kant.15 Nietzsches approach to art gives a central signicance to theproducer and artist, and this dictates Nietzsches own criticism of Kantsaesthetics. Heidegger quotes Nietzsche in The Will to Power,16 whereNietzsche takes aim at Kant:


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Our aesthetics heretofore has been a womans aesthetics, inasmuchas only the recipients of art have formulated their experiences ofwhat is beautiful. In all philosophy to date, the artist is missing.17

Philosophy of art for Nietzsche means aesthetics, but masculineaesthetics and not a spectators or womans (recipients) aesthetics. Itsthe perspective of the artist/creator which provides the standard of whatis beautiful.

Heidegger, however, sees this as a misinterpretation of what Kantsrequirement of disinterestedness on the part of the spectator means.18

In his discussion of Kant, Heidegger criticizes Nietzsches reading ofKants aesthetics not only as one of the spectator the woman/recipient

and not active creator but further, one in which the spectator is disin-terested and, hence, for Nietzsche, disengaged. For Nietzsche, Kantsaesthetics suggests an attitude ofindifference. In contrast to this (supposed)state of indifference, Nietzsche contends that the aesthetic state is one ofrapture (Rausch).19

In contrast, Heidegger sees Kant as having discovered and made a callfor an encounter with a work of art in which we suspend all constructionof the object. Kantian disinterestedness, rather than being a relation

of disengagement or indifference, is instead a most committed form ofengagement with the object, and even to refer to the artwork as objectis to miss the achievement Heidegger sees in Kant. What Heidegger afrmsin Kant is important here precisely because it is a moment in the historyof the West modernity and aesthetics characterized by subjectivism where subjectivization is resisted; that is to say, in Kant, Heidegger locatesa discovery that he himself has made. In Kants approach, Heidegger says:

in order to nd something beautiful, we must let what encountersus, purely as it is in itself, come before us in its own stature andworth. We may not take it into account in advance with a view tosomething else, our goals and intentions, our possible enjoyment andadvantage. Comportment toward the beautiful as such, says Kant, isunconstrained favoring. We must release what encounters us as suchto its way to be; we must allow and grant it what belongs to it andwhat it brings to us.20

For Heidegger, Kants awareness of a pure encounter with things21 is amagnicent discovery and approbation of aesthetic behaviour.22 Thecrucial point for Heidegger is that it is wrong to interpret disinterest asmeaning that all essential relation to the object is suspended, that one isdisengaged. For this does not provide an alternative to the basicsubject/object structure of modern aesthetic experience. Rather, Heideggerclaims, in this suspension of interest, the essential relation to the object


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itself comes into play. The misinterpretation fails to see that now for therst time the object comes to the fore as pure object and that such comingforward into appearance is the beautiful. The word beautiful meansappearing in the radiance of such coming to the fore.23

Here, as in the OWA essay, the artworks mode of being is seen ascoming forth out of itself (Greek phusis).24 This is an essential moment:the work is no longer experienced out of the ground of the spectatorssubjective feelings and experience. Rather, the work of art is itself anevent, a happening of truth. It is, further, a foundational event, a ground.

In the OWA essay, Heidegger approaches the question of arts originfrom the mode of being of the work itself. He denes art as a settinginto work of truth,25 where truth is dened as a revealing disclosure

(aletheia). Arts mode of being has two elements the sheltering agentHeidegger calls earth and the disclosive world. These two elements arein a relation of conict (polemos), yet not a violent one. Their relation ismore of an interdependence: earth and world work with, yet against, eachother in a striving (Streit) in which each lets the other be what it is: Insetting up a world, the work sets forth the earth.26 For Heidegger, thisstriving, the conict and opposition of clearing and concealing, is wheretruth establishes (sich einrichtet) itself.27

Once we encounter the artwork from the mode of being of the workand not from the standpoint of our subjective states, we are drawn intowhat Heidegger describes as the event-character of the work, a settinginto work of truth in which we participate. Heidegger calls this a liber-ation into the Open, the setting into work of truth that is the mode ofbeing of the artwork itself. What he calls the clearing of openness andestablishment in the Open belong together;28 when this occurs, truthhappens. Heidegger adds that this happening is historical, and truth

happening in the work of art is one of several ways he mentions in thisessay that truth establishes itself in beings.29

This is one way in which the mode of being of the work, the happeningof truth and what it brings into the Open, is related to the community. Thework is a founding event which, Heidegger writes, can occur in just thisway, and only once. As an event which institutes a world, the work of art isan unmediated source of something entirely new. In the example of a Greektemple, Heidegger sees the world opened up by the work in this strong

sense of a foundation for a historical people: the temple rst gives to thingstheir look and to men their outlook on themselves.30 The world of the workis a meaningful order that gives to persons and things their proper place. TheGreek temple, then, is a genuine response to the god that is present there,an integrating power. In the temple-work, the presence of the god gathershumans into community, the world of this historical people: Only fromand in this expanse does the nation rst return to itself for the fullment ofits vocation.31 This is the world of the temple-work of ancient Greece.


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What in traditional aesthetics would be called spectators or viewersHeidegger calls the preservers (die Bewarhenden) of the work. Bypassingtheir subjective states, Heidegger situates these preservers as taking partin the event of the artwork; they are standing within the truth that is

happening in the work.32

Towards the end of the essay, Heidegger statesthat all art is essentially poetry.33 The nature of poetry, in turn, is thefounding of truth.34 Here Heidegger links the bestowing and groundingof art-as-poetry with the idea of a beginning. And this is the move, ortranslation, by which he displaces the traditional modern subjectivistaesthetic conception of the artist/creator of the work, a masterful per-formance of genius, as the works beginning.35 Rather, it is thegrounding/bestowing of the work which itself has the unmediated char-

acter of . . . a beginning.36

Heidegger further describes the strife of truthin terms of founding as beginning: Always when that which is as a wholedemands, as what is, itself, a grounding in openness, art attains to its histor-ical nature as foundation.37 This notion of the unmediated character ofthe work of art, that it is a leap out of the unmediable,38 is very differentfrom the way Gadamer will see the work as not only nota singular eventwhich is foundational, but also one which is mediated.

The enigma of truth, a-letheia, unconcealedness, to which Heidegger

brings our attention, and the Open into which we are brought as co-related preservers through encounter with the artwork, is thought fromout of the ontological status of the work itself. Here we nd the momentof self-transcendence, a transcendence of the subjectivizing ground oftraditional aesthetics, which is, recall, itself an expression of the domi-nance of the modern cogito. And it is here, crucially, that Heideggersown approach to the work of art locates the individual taking part in theevent of truth (a-letheia); we do not direct this encounter; rather, we are

called to participate in the event of the work itself. Our taking part in,and being drawn into, the Open, then, shares the movement in which weare similarly transported in the festival or carnival celebration.

From this brief look at Kant and Heidegger himself, we can see thatthe shadow cast on the essay on the origin of the work of art is that ofthe question of the meaning of Being. I want to mention at this pointthree statements from the end of Heideggers discussion in the OWAessay:

1 The origin of the work of art that is, the origin of both the creatorsand preservers, which is to say of a peoples historical existence isart. That is so because art is by nature an origin: a distinctive way inwhich truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical.

2 But this reective knowledge (reection on art) is the preliminaryand therefore indispensable preparation for the becoming of art. Onlysuch knowledge prepares a space for art, their way for the creators,their location for the preservers.


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3 Are we in our existence historically at the origin? Do we know, whichmeans do we give heed to, the nature of the origin? Or, in our rela-tion to art, do we still merely make appeal to a cultivated acquaintancewith the past?

These comments by Heidegger suggest a question. If the work of art func-tions as a site where we are brought into an experience of Being throughthe enigma of the artwork, no longer grounded in and directed by theexperience of subjectivity but rather having the character of an event inwhich we participate, how is this to be mediated with the everyday, whichin Heideggers view is under the sway of metaphysical/instrumentalthinking? Yet, this event is also, we are told, an unmediated beginning.One response is to recognize that, as Heidegger says in the above quot-

ation, the origin of the work of art is the origin of a peoples historicalexistence; the work of art institutes a foundation, which grounds a peoplehistorically. Just as the temple-work served as a founding event for theGreeks, allowing the god to be present, and creating a space for gatheringin its presence, the essay suggests in the end that all art is in essencepoetry; that a new, founding event is possible.

Heidegger seems to be talking about and inciting and inviting us to an experience of Being and truth (aletheia) which we encounter in the

event of the artwork, suggesting that, in what we encounter and partici-pate, something is transformed. We undergo a transformation. At thisjuncture it is important to ask about the relation of the aesthetic and theeveryday, and the relation of the aesthetic and the political. These arerelated, but not the same. The rst concerns the question of how the trans-formation we undergo in the encounter with the event of the work of artis connected to our everyday experience: is Heidegger saying that theencounter with the artwork is necessarily a moment outside our usual

comportment towards things and the world of the everyday, and yet that,once we return to the everyday, we ourselves are changed, having partici-pated in the event of the artworks truth and having thus become awareof the Open to which we are ever subject? This is a question of themediation of our encounter with the artwork and the everyday. Yet thequestion of mediation with the everyday is also a question of the relationof the aesthetic to the political, in reference to the more specic questionof how this trans-subjective encounter can function as a site of resistance.

That is, how can an encounter with the work of art transform thosedeformed aspects of our modern age?

With these questions in mind, let us look at one passage in the OWAessay where Heidegger refers explicitly to the relation of the encounterwith the artwork and ordinary experience:

The more solitary the work, xed in the gure, stands on its ownand the more cleanly it seems to cut all ties to human beings, the


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more simply does the thrust come into the Open that such a workis, and the more essentially is the extraordinary thrust to the surface,and the long-familiar thrust down. But this multiple thrusting isnothing violent, for the more purely the work is itself transported

into the openness of beings an openness opened by itself themore simply does it transport us into this openness and thus atthe same time transport us out of the realm of the ordinary. To submitto this displacement means: to transform our accustomed ties toworld and to earth and henceforth to restrain all usual doing andprizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth thatis happening in the work.39

It is clear that our encounter with the artwork is transformative: thereis a displacement from the everyday and we are transported into theopenness of beings. Our encounter with the work of art is one of parti-cipating in an event where the artwork takes us beyond ourselves and oursubjective standpoint. In the light of my questions above, what doesdisplacement mean, and what is the relation of this experience to theeveryday, which is in need of transformation?40

In terms of my initial analogy of the work of art with the festival,

reecting on these issues vis--vis Heidegger leads one to ask about therelation of the distinctive space/time of the festival enactment of the workof art and everyday life. One question raised here concerns the differentsenses of community of the everyday and of the festival: the everydayis an intersubjective, public and social domain, which is a communitycomprising difference and plurality, and the community created in thesharing and participation in the festival is a sharing in which differencesrecede and are elided. In this light, it is important to ask whether the

trans-subjective experience of the work of art is continuous or discontin-uous with everyday life. Heidegger seems to suggest a discontinuity, namelythat the transformation we encounter through participation in the eventof the work of art instantiates a new form of community.

We have seen that Heidegger views the artwork as a founding event,an unmediated source of something entirely new. Recall the example ofthe Greek temple in which the world opened up by the work serves as afoundation for a historical people: the temple rst gives to things their

look and to men their outlook on themselves. We may want to ask whatkind of community Heidegger envisions if one of its dening characteris-tics is to be unmediated. He seems to envision at this time a transformationthat occurs like a lightning bolt. His idea of an unmediated foundingevent, which occurs only once, is precisely not rooted. It is in this sensegrounding but not grounded. This aspect of Heideggers account seemsunconcerned with how the artwork is related to the everyday, or withhow it is itself rooted in and emerges out of an everyday lifeworld, a given


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community. His approach is thus at odds with theories of art concernedwith the works production and reception. For Heidegger, the very trans-formation we undergo in the founding event which the artwork institutesserves as a new site in which a people is gathered together in a (new)

community.Within the context of a critique of the subjectivization of aesthetics,Heideggers reections on the artwork and its mode of being as an eventstrives to awaken us to what it means to be aware of the event-characterof the artwork, and to participate in it. We become aware of the unusualcomportment Heidegger describes in Kants aesthetics, in which we mustrelease what encounters us to its way to be; we must allow and grant tothe work what belongs to it and what it brings to us. In this encounter,

we are moved beyond a rootedness in our own subjective states.Heideggers focus is rmly to direct our attention to the relation to Beingwhich is opened up by the artwork. I turn now to Gadamer, who addressesthese questions of mediation more directly.

Gadamers Account of the Work of Art: Play and Festival

Gadamers account of the work of art also takes shape as a critique of

traditional aesthetics, of what he calls aesthetic consciousness, the atti-tude to art which he says is a consequence of Kants aesthetics.41 ForGadamer, Kant is the root of the modern subjectivization of aestheticsbecause he narrows the notion of aesthetic experience to the subjectsstate of mind (the free play of the cognitive faculties, understanding andimagination).

Gadamer sees a problem with aesthetic consciousness in the way theencounter with the work of art is related to the life-context of the one

experiencing the artwork; the aesthetic experience is one of abstractionfrom the life-context of the viewer. Gadamer makes a quite subtle,but important, distinction: in the experience of art from the standpointof aesthetic consciousness, the work of art wrenches the person experi-encing it out of their life-context, yet relates them back to the whole oftheir existence. This type of aesthetic experience (Erlebnis) is a particular and ultimately for Gadamer, decient mode of experience for tworeasons: (i) it conceives experience as discontinuous; and (ii) it takes

place in immediacy. Gadamer says of both the status of the work andour experience of it, from the standpoint of aesthetic consciousness,As the work of art as such is a world for itself, so also what is experi-enced aesthetically is, as an Erlebnis, removed from all connections withactuality,42 with the ow of experience which makes up the continuityof ones life. This is problematic for Gadamer, for whom aestheticexperience does not combine with other experiences to make one openexperiential ow:


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An aesthetic Erlebnis always contains the experience of an innitewhole. Precisely because it does not combine with other experiencesto make one open experiential ow, but immediately represents thewhole, its signicance is innite.43

The effect of this is that art is conceived as at a remove of some kindfrom real being, an abstraction from everyday life and from reality itself.Given this, Gadamer wants to retrieve (from the Kantian subjectivization)the question of artistic truth against the notion of a separation of aestheticexperience from the whole, experiential ow, of ones life. He wants toemphasize in contrast a notion from Hegel of experience as Erfahrung,one in which we ourselves are changed through encounter with the work

of art; this thus also emphasizes a negative moment of experience.Gadamer locates the theoretical basis of the denition of art as separatefrom real being in the epistemological dominance of scientic method,and the discrediting of all knowledge which isnt scientic.44

A further problem with the standpoint of aesthetic consciousness is itsdependence on a notion of immediate aesthetic experience; it also explainsthe inexplicability of art through a momentary ash of genius producing thework. Aesthetic consciousness is the counterpart to a second abstraction

which Gadamer perceives in traditional aesthetics: the abstraction ofthe work of art from its original life-context. He calls this abstraction of thework aesthetic differentiation. Art is conceived as beautiful appearance(not reality) and is also characterized by abstraction, an alienation from re-ality. And here we see one major source for Gadamers discontent: aestheticconsciousness isnt related to any unity of an ideal of taste which, he says, isa source of unity and community.45 Gadamer writes,

What is considered valid in a society, its ruling taste, receives its stampfrom the commonalities of social life. Such a society chooses andknows what belongs to it and what does not. Even its artistic interestsare not arbitrary or in principle universal, but what artists create andwhat the society values belong together in the unity of a style of lifeand an ideal of taste.46

It is important to distinguish what Gadamer seems to mean in speaking

of a unity of a style of life and an ideal of taste. One might interpretthis to mean that there is a single taste, or that what art creates isconsonant with thestatus quo, a mere reection of it. Yet Gadamer empha-sizes that the work emerges out of a particular world; and further that asocietys taste is validated by the commonalities of social life. Giventhat he goes on to talk about this ideal and unity as emerging out of abelonging together of what artists create and what the society values,it is crucial to read this belonging together as a reciprocity between the


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artists interests and the values of society. For Gadamer, aestheticconsciousness, in contrast, doesnt recognize any belonging together of thework of art and the world. Instead, and here is the real problem forGadamer, aesthetic consciousness no longer admits that the work of art

and its world belong to each other, but on the contrary, aesthetic conscious-ness is the experiencing (erlebende) center from which everythingconsidered art is measured.47

In contrast to Heidegger, then, Gadamer is expressly concerned withthe relation of the work of art to the everyday, shared world. With asubjectivized aesthetics, both the work of art and aesthetic experiencedepend on a process of alienation; here we have a view of the work ofart which lifts the work from its rootedness in an original life-context,

the removal of aesthetic differentiation. The aesthetic differentiation ofaesthetic consciousness preserves such sites of simultaneity as museumsand the universal library.48 That is, Gadamer seems to be saying thataesthetic differentiation which doesnt recognize the belonging togetherof work and world, where decisions about what is meaningful for thatsociety or community get articulated creates institutions, like themuseum, in which works are presented and determined from outside, asit were, as meaningful or as worthy art objects lifted out of a communal

context and which, moreover, are presented for the viewer as works ofart. In contrast, it is in this communal context where, for Gadamer, deci-sions about meaning and signicance should be articulated in theinteraction between artist and society; this is not an imposition fromoutside.49 Thus, Gadamer writes, through aesthetic differentiation,the work loses its place and the world to which it belongs insofar as itbelongs instead to aesthetic consciousness.50

To sum up, Gadamer says:

Basing aesthetics on experience leads to an absolute series of points,which annihilates the unity of the work of art, the identity of theartist with himself, and the identity of the person understanding orenjoying the work of art.51

There is, then, a task: to preserve the hermeneutic continuity which consti-tutes our being, despite the discontinuity intrinsic to aesthetic being and

aesthetic experience.In contrast to the abstraction of aesthetic consciousness and aesthetic

differentiation, one of Gadamers main contributions is to see our ex-perience of the aesthetic as a mode of self-understanding.52 And here wecome to the heart of the specic hermeneutical/phenomenological notionof self-transcendence. Conceiving of the encounter with an artwork as amode of self-understanding, while also conceiving of it as a mode of self-transcendence, may seem counter-intuitive: the encounter with the work


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of art as a mode of self-understanding might seem to suggest a returnto subjectivism. For Gadamer, however, all self-understanding requires anelement of self-transcendence. In a characterization which is unlikeHeideggers explicitly concerned to thematize the relation of the work

of art to the everyday, Gadamer says:

Self-understanding always occurs through understanding somethingother than the self, and includes the unity and integrity of the other.Since we meet the artwork in the world and encounter a world inthe individual artwork, the work of art is not some alien universeinto which we are magically transported for a time. Rather, we learnto understand ourselves in and through it, and this means that we

sublate (aufheben) the discontinuity and atomism of isolated ex-periences in the continuity of our own existence.53

This characteristic of self-understanding dictates Gadamers more positiveelaboration of the nature of the work of art and our encounter with it.He says, For this reason, we must adopt a standpoint in relation to artand the beautiful that does not pretend to immediacy but corresponds tothe historical nature of the human condition.54

Gadamer says that art is knowledge and experiencing an artwork meanssharing in that knowledge. He asks, Is there to be no knowledge in art?Does not the experience of art contain a claim to truth which is certainlydifferent from that of science, but just as certainly is not inferior to it?And is not the task of aesthetics precisely to ground the fact that theexperience (Erfahrung) of art is a mode of knowledge of a unique kind,certainly different from all moral rational knowledge, and indeed from allconceptual knowledge but still knowledge, i.e. conveying truth?55

Conceiving our encounter with the work of art as an event of self-under-standing also requires that Understanding must be conceived as part ofthe event in which meaning occurs.56 This unique mode of knowledge ismediated through the claim the work makes upon us.

Gadamer maintains that the experience of art contains an experienceof truth which is unlike that of scientic truth, and that the individual istransformed through an encounter with the work and its claim. Comparedwith Heidegger, Gadamer is more explicitly concerned with the idea of

the mediation of the encounter with the artwork and ones experienceof the everyday. Yet, one must also ask whether Gadamer is clear aboutwhat this distinctive truth of the work is, and also whether he gives anadequate picture of the kind of transformation the individual/viewerundergoes in an encounter with the artwork.57 Having raised thesequestions, it is nonetheless clear that Gadamer keeps the pole of subjec-tivity his emphasis on the self-understanding of the viewer and itstransformation as a prominent moment of his account of the artwork.


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And this is one way mediation occurs. Further, unlike Heideggers under-standing of the event of the artwork as a foundational, instituting event,which occurs once, Gadamer sees the claim of the work as one which isrepeatable. I will return shortly to this important distinction. Here,

however, I want to highlight Gadamers emphasis on the unique knowl-edge of the experience of art. To examine this more fully, Gadamer says,we must ask about the mode of being of the work itself.58

For him, the mode of being of the work of art is play: play is the clueto the ontological explanation of art.59 Gadamers notion of play, however,is free from the subjective meaning it has in Kants Critique of Judgmentor Schillers On the Aesthetic Education of Man, where play harmonizesthe form impulse and the matter impulse.

Gadamers own effort to think the mode of being of the artwork asplay follows Heidegger in being oriented to a critique of a subjectivizedaesthetics. For Gadamer, play is something not aimed at the playerssubjective reection, nor are players the subjects of play. Rather, playmerely reaches presentation (Darstellung) through the players.60 Further:

The movement of play as such has, as it were, no substrate. It is thegame that is played it is irrelevant whether or not there is a subject

who plays it. The play is the occurrence of the movement as such.Thus we speak of the play of colors and do not mean only that onecolor plays against another, but that there is one process or sightdisplaying a changing variety of colors.61

The playful subjective attitude of the players, then, isnt central to theactivity of play. And here, as I noted, we see Gadamers own Heideggerianmove to shift an approach to the work of art from the standpoint of

subjectivity, a move of self-transcendence. Instead of starting from thestandpoint of subjectivity, the primordial sense of playing is the medialone.62 A constantly self-renewing, to and fro movement constitutes playitself. In a more recent characterization of the nature of play, Gadamerstates that its great mystery is its one-anotherness (das Einander).63

Gadamer asserts the primacy of play over the consciousness of the playerand the idea that all playing is a being-played.64

Equally, central to the work of art is that play is limited to presenting

itself.65 Its mode of being is self-presentation. And where does theviewer/participant enter in? Gadamer states that All presentation is poten-tially a representation for someone.66 The intention of this possibility isthe characteristic feature of art as play. In this view, the spectator is trans-formed into a player: Artistic presentation, by its nature, exists forsomeone, even if there is no one there who merely listens or watches.67

Gadamer calls plays consummation into art transformation into struc-ture. He proposes, further, that:


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Only through this change does play achieve ideality so that it canbe intended and understood as play. Only now does it emerge asdetached from the representing activity of the players and consist inthe pure appearance (Erscheinung) of what they are playing. As

such, the play even the unforeseen elements of improvisation isin principle repeatable and hence permanent. It has the characterof a work, of an ergon and not only of energeia. In this sense I callit a structure (Gebilde).68

Gadamer, then, makes the work of art autonomous, while still linking itessentially to the player. The work of art is dissociated from the repre-senting activity of the player, but is still linked to representation. The

link isnt a dependence because the artwork does not acquire a denitemeaning only through the persons representing it, or through the originalcreator, artist. In relation to them all, the play has an absolute autonomy,suggested by Gadamers notion of the concept of the plays transforma-tion into structure, through which it becomes a work.

Transformation is not gradual, but to clarify this Gadamer asks us tothink of a person transformed; they become, he says, like another person.The plays transformation into structure means that what existed previ-

ously exists no longer, and that what now exists, what represents itself inthe play of art, is the lasting and true.69 To start from subjectivity is tomiss the point. What no longer exists is the players.

To continue the analogy briey, one who perceives the comedy andtragedy of life also recognizes the element of play life shares with art:that we are not entirely the masters of our own fate (the standpoint ofsubjectivism) but are part of a game that is played with us. It is for thisreason that Gadamer calls arts transformation into structure a trans-

formation into the true.70 In terms of the encounter with the work andits relation to everyday reality, it is not enchantment, but it is itselfredemption and transformation back into true being. In being presentedin play, what is emerges. It produces and brings to light what is otherwiseconstantly hidden and withdrawn.72

As the concept of play accounts for the work as a representation,but one not dependent on the persons representing it, to characterizefurther the mode of being of the artwork, Gadamer also looks to the

distinctive temporality of the work of art, which he refers to the temporalcharacter of festivals.72 This also marks a singular departure fromHeideggers view of the event of the work of art as a foundational, singular,event. The temporality of the festival has the character of repetition, butit is not a literal repetition. Every repetition is as original as the workitself. Here Gadamer draws further on the nature of the time of festivals,their periodicity. Describing festival temporality, he draws a contrastbetween what he calls empty and fullled time. The temporal character


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of celebration, fullled time, is not temporal succession: it doesntdissolve into a series of successive moments. Gadamer distinguishes thisfrom our usual, pragmatic experience of time, empty time, which is moresubject to calculation.

In contrast, the temporality of the festival fullled or autonomoustime is entirely different; and it is also characteristic, according toGadamer, of the work of art:

We all know that the festival fulls every moment of its duration.This fullment does not come about because someone has emptytime to ll. On the contrary, the time only becomes festive with thearrival of the festival.73

Another feature of festival times periodicity is also signicant: it givesus insight into the way the festival can be both the same and yet different.We celebrate the ending of the old year this is the same but eachyear we do it differently. That is, the festival what is celebrated isdifferent in each celebration. The experience of time of the festival,Gadamer says, is rather its celebration, a present time sui generis.74 Thatthe festival exists always by different means, Gadamer says, suggests

that it is temporal in a more radical sense than everything belonging tohistory. It has its being only in becoming and return: a festival only existsin being celebrated.

Finally, the claim of the work of art is also important; that the workof art makes a claim upon us is another way Gadamer overcomes subjec-tivized aesthetics, where the signicance of the work is seen to be whollydecided by the viewer. The claim to which Gadamer refers means thatthat which presents itself to the spectator as the play of art doesnt exhaust

itself in the momentary transport, but has a claim to permanence and thepermanence of a claim.75 He draws on Kierkegaards thought that a claimis something lasting; because a claim lasts, it can be enforced at any time.A claim isnt a xed demand, but the ground for such a demand.76 Forthis reason, Gadamer says that contemporaneity belongs to the beingof the work of art. It constitutes the essence of its being present.77 Thisis not the simultaneity of modern subjective aesthetic experience, whereseveral objects of aesthetic experience are held in consciousness at the

same time, all indifferently with the same claim to validity, but meansthat in its presentation this particular thing that presents itself to usachieves full presence, however remote its origin may be.78 Crucially, thecontemporaneity of the work of art is not a mode of givenness inconsciousness, but a task for consciousness and an achievement demandedof it.79

In Truth and Method, Gadamer emphasizes that contemporaneity is likea religious ritual. What he calls here the total mediation in the experi-


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ence of art is that Neither the being that the creating artist is for himself call it his biography nor that of whoever is performing the work, northat of the spectator watching the play has any legitimacy of its own inthe face of the being of the artwork itself.80 What unfolds in the artwork

is something that is so much lifted out of the ordinary world and so muchenclosed in its own autonomous circle of meaning that no one is promptedto seek some other future or reality behind it.81 It is here that the spec-tator experiences a loss of self, an ecstatic self-forgetfulness; yet Gadamermaintains that this experience also corresponds to his continuity withhimself. He says of this loss of self and its connection nonetheless to theself that Precisely that in which one loses oneself as a spectator demandsthat one grasp the continuity of meaning. For it is the truth of our own

world the religious and moral world in which we live that is presentedbefore us and in which we recognize ourselves.82 He continues:

Just as the ontological mode of aesthetic being is marked by parousia,absolute presence, and just as an artwork is nevertheless self-iden-tical in every moment where it achieves such a presence, so also theabsolute moment in which a spectator stands is both one of self-forgetfulness and of mediation with himself. What rends him from

himself at the same time gives him back the whole of his being.83

Connecting the account of the festival temporality of the work and thediscussion of contemporaneity, one can locate a prominent place givento the role of the viewer/interpreter of the artwork, their experience ofself-understanding, and the fact of their specic historical situatedness.Recall that Gadamer speaks of the task of achieving contemporaneity,suggesting that the achievement rests in the task of engaging with the

work in a way that encounters its truth, renews its claim in the presentact of engagement with the work, and weaves this into the fabric of oneslife, ones self-understanding.

This understanding of the temporality of the artwork is very differentfrom Heideggers view of the artwork as a founding event which occursonly once. For Gadamer, in contrast, the event of the artwork carriesa claim that is permanent, yet not xed. Although Gadamer elaborateshis positive account of the work of art from an ontological starting

point and I have noted that perhaps he is not always clear about thetype of knowledge and truth the viewer encounters there nonetheless,in the account of the (festival) temporality of the artwork, that its beingis to be the same yet different, we can locate a hinge where the onto-logical joins the ontic. Although this is not his main concern, Gadamerinstantiates a space not only for the pole of individual subjectivity itis subjectivity on whom the achievement of contemporaneity, and theenactment of the artworks difference (that it is the same, yet different),


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is dependent but also for the ontic dimensions of meaning and inter-pretation of the work.

That is, it is here that one can locate the work in the ontic realm in whichone can discuss the works meaning and signicance. Further, that Gadamer

accounts for this ontic dimension means that the experience of the work ofart can be shared. For, it is precisely here that a work can be a pivot aroundwhich different historical and cultural interpretations get articulated.

For both Heidegger and Gadamer, the critique of modern aesthetics ispart of a broader critique of modern subjectivism. For Heidegger, this cri-tique is launched in service of the asking of the question of Being, which islater tied to a profound meditation on the nature of language in which it is

not we who speak language, but it which speaks us. For Gadamer, it is partof his elucidation of the universality of the hermeneutic phenomenon, a pro-ject concerned to demonstrate the belonging together of the interpreter andwhat he calls the movement of meaning in the work.84 Gadamers majorwork Truth and Method demonstrates this belonging together of interpreterand work, calling for a recognition of the historical nature of all under-standing, and of the ways that the self (-understanding) stands within, andbelongs to, the supra-subjective dimensions of tradition and language.

For both Heidegger and Gadamer, moreover, in encountering the eventof the artwork, we undergo a transformation. Heidegger emphasizes adiscontinuity of this transformation with the everyday. For him, theartwork instantiates something new, an unmediated beginning, which inturn gathers a people together and can form a community around it. ForGadamer, encounter with the artwork is also the source of something new.But he emphasizes that what we encounter in the work, its truth, is notat a remove from everyday reality; it is not a simple transposition into

another world. Moreover, Gadamer, unlike Heidegger, is concerned withthe artworks grounding in a given social and historical community. Hiscritique of aesthetic consciousness and his discussion of the temporalityof the artwork, linked with the periodicity of the festival, grounds theartwork in actual and concrete historical communities and traditions.

For Heidegger, the artwork is dened as a setting-into-work of truth,the event of dynamic revealing and concealing that comes about throughthepolemos of earth and world. Heideggers discussion of the two elements

earth and world is entirely new, and the truth that is set into the workis familiar as Heideggers reformulated concept of truth as a-letheia, as anevent of disclosure. Second, Heidegger, like Hegel in his lectures on neart, sees art as a vehicle for truth, much as Hegel dened art as thesensuous presentation of the Idea to immediate perception. FollowingHegel, Heidegger asks whether art is something past or whether it is stillcapable of accomplishing the task of representing the absolute for histor-ical man; it seems to have a historical vocation. Further, although


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Heidegger raises the question of the historicality of art, he does not talkof a distinctive temporality internal to the artwork. Gadamers account ofthe festival temporality of art situates the artwork historically, describingits essence as the same, yet different in each enactment. For him, the

work of art is not an event that occurs just once, in the sense of Heideggersaccount; rather, Gadamer accounts for how the same work resounds atdifferent historical moments. Unlike Heidegger, Gadamer also accords adistinctive temporality internal to the artwork festival periodicity andits fullled or autonomous time.

Heideggers OWA essay concludes by linking the truth of the artworkwith poetry, the poetic word: all art, he says, is in essence poetry. To seethe import of this connection, one must look to Heideggers other writ-

ings at the time of the OWA essay his writings on the poet Hlderlin as well as the later Letter on Humanism and the later writings onlanguage and poetry. In his turn to language, Heidegger writes of thecapacity of the poetic word to give being; that is, in the development ofthis thought, he talks less of the event of Being, and more of languageitself, as a site where the event of truth happens. We see the beginningsof this in the 1936 OWA essay.85

This connection of art and language is central in Gadamer as well. For

him, too, there are parallels in our experience of an artwork and our expe-rience of language. Like our encounter with the work of art, language isnot an object external to our understanding a vehicle for it. Rather,understanding takes place in the medium of language, from its middle.Similarly, we control neither the encounter with the artwork nor languagegames, but are part of the game which is played with us. In and throughthe medium of language, the self engages in dialogue with others, in anevent of self-understanding in which we encounter what is other than

ourselves, and in which we are taken beyond our subjective starting pointsand transformed in the process.

There is a strong connection between art and language for bothGadamer and Heidegger. Both look to language as a fundamental modelof our human experience of an event, a serious game, which we do notcontrol, but in which we take part. In this taking part, we become morethan we were, not a hubristic enlargement, but one in which our becomingmore is the result of a fundamental recognition that, as Gadamer says,

we are part of a game that is being played with us far more than we aremasters of our own fate. This point resonates with contemporary currentsin continental philosophy to nd alternatives to a philosophy of conscious-ness, to modern subjectivism. It is important nally to recall thatHeideggers overarching concern in his ontological approach to the workof art is also a practical one. It is a concern with a critique of modernaesthetics and its attending subjectivization, which is itself a manifesta-tion of modern metaphysics and its problematical rootedness in subjective


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states. When this is linked to, for example, Heideggers later analyses ofthe dangers of modern subjectivism, such as in the essay The QuestionConcerning Technology, Heidegger keeps us focused on the gravity ofvarious deformations of late modernity resulting from the dominance of

unbridled subjectivism and instrumental thinking. This critical impulse isalso behind the effort to transcend the self through the work of art.

Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA

Notes

1 A version of this paper was rst presented at a conference on Theater ofLife at the American Society of Phenomenology, Aesthetics, and Fine Arts,

held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in April 1999.2 Transcendence of the self is an achievement of the phenomenologica l

approach to describing the alternative to a subject-centred position in termsof an alternative which presupposes neither an inside nor an outside, adistinct subject-versus-object, but rather to conceiving the connection as a co-relation. In the context of Heideggers and Gadamers account of the workof art, the notion of the individuals participation in something greater thanoneself is a tting description of this movement of self-transcendence.

3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis:Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), pp. 534. Cf. The Second Moment of aJudgment of Taste, S.6, The Beautiful is What is Presented without Conceptsas the Object of a UniversalLiking. Kant says, It follows that, since a judg-ment of taste involves the consciousness that all interest is kept out of it, itmust also involve a claim to being valid for everyone, but without having auniversality based on concepts. In other words, a judgment of taste mustinvolve a claim to subjective universality (p. 54).

4 I will not go into detail about Heideggers and Gadamers different readingsof Kant. It is interesting to note, however, that Heidegger ignores altogetherKants link between judgments of taste and sensus communis, between the

subjective and the intersubjective. Gadamer, in Truth and Method, doesexamine this link in Kant, but claims that in Kant there is a dissolution ofthe moral element ofsensus communis. Because of this, Gadamer does notpursue the importance ofsensus communis in Kants discussion as a linkbetween the aesthetic (subjective) and the political and ethical (intersubjec-tive) dimensions. For an excellent elaboration of this, which links Kantsdiscussion of (reective) judgments of taste to reective judgment in general,see Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: TheHermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1990), especially pp. 1578, 1689.5 Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Poetry, Language,Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row Publishers,1971). Hereafter I will refer to this essay as OWA.

6 Jacques Taminiaux discusses the shifts in Heideggers discussion of art: in theearlier, 1935, version of the 1936 Origin of the Work of Art essay, Heideggerisnt interested in the enigma of art but in Daseins basic stand towards art.Jacques Taminiaux, Poetics, Speculation and Judgment: The Shadow of theWork of Art from Kant to Phenomenology (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1993), p. 164.


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7 OWA, p. 79.8 Ibid., p. 80.9 Ibid.

10 A few months after his conferences on the origin of the work of art, Heideggergave a lecture course in the winter semester of 19367 on The Will to Power as

Art. I will examine this in terms of Heideggers discussion of Nietzsche inNietzsche: The Will to Power as Art, Vol. 1, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York:HarperCollins Publishers, 1979). Hereafter I will refer to this as N., Vol. 1.

11 Ibid., p. 83.12 Ibid. This is Heideggers account of modernity, and it is monolithic to the

degree that it does not allow for signicant ruptures in the dominance of thisemphasis on the cogito. I will return to question this below, with referenceto the position of Kant in the history of aesthetics.

13 Heidegger singles out Nietzsches emphasis on art in terms of the artist; theartist as producer and creator. Decisive for Heidegger is that Nietzsche is the

last metaphysician, in that his notion of artist as creator is (simply) an expres-sion of Nietzsches view of the will to power. For Heidegger, it means thatNietzsches thought about art still invokes a traditional-metaphysical notionof truth and of beings, and does not get to what, for Heidegger, is the centralquestion, the question of Being; concomitantly, Nietzsches approach does notallow us to think of the possibility of art beyond modern subjectivism.

14 N., Vol. 1, p. 84.15 Ibid., p. 107.16 Ibid., p. 70 (citing Nietzsche in Der Wille zur Macht, aphorism 811).

17 N., Vol. 1, p. 70.18 Kants aesthetics is, for Heidegger, one of the only places he locates outsidethe modern expression of the Western tradition of a forgetfulness of Being,and its manifestation in modern subjectivized aesthetics. The question of howto account for Kants ability to see differently, beyond the subjectobjectdualism which dominates the modern period, raises interesting questionsabout the monolithic character of Heideggers characterization of the historyof the West as one of a metaphysics of presence and increasing forgetfulnessof Being. On this theme, see Jacques Taminiaux, Poetics, Speculation,Judgment: The Shadow of the Work of Art from Kant to Phenomenology, ed.

and trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press,1993), p. 151.

19 N., Vol. 1, p. 108.20 Ibid., p. 109.21 One nds a particular resonance with this discussion of Kant in passages in

The Origin of the Work of Art essay where Heidegger calls for a simple recog-nition of the work, thatit is. See, for example, OWA, pp. 656. Note, too, thatthere is a certain ambiguity in Heideggers validation of this purity. ForHeidegger himself is well known for his critique of a theory of pure percep-

tion, undertaken on the basis of pragmatic experience. Gadamer criticizes thenotion of purity in Truth and Method, claiming that purity is never possiblesince even when we encounter something like absolute music pure in form although there is no objective meaning, nonetheless, our experience of itinvolves entering into a relation with what is meaningful, TM, p. 91.Gadamers statement, a bit later, that Pure seeing and pure hearing are dog-matic abstractions that articially reduce phenomena. Perception alwaysincludes meaning forms the basis of his critique of purity, TM, p. 92. Gadamersclaim that perception always includes meaning signals a difference bet-ween Heidegger and Gadamers approaches to art. Gadamers emphasis on


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meaning, which is a meaning for the subject/viewer, places greater emphasison the constructive element of the pole of subjectivity than does Heideggersaccount.

22 N., Vol. 1, p. 109.23 Ibid., p. 110.

24 OWA, p. 42. Heidegger describes the example of a Greek temple and invokesGreek phusis when he says: The temples rm towering makes visible theinvisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surgeof the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree andgrass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket rst enter into their distinctive shapesand thus come to appear as what they are. The Greeks early called thisemerging and rising in itself and in all things, phusis. It clears and illuminates,also, that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this groundthe earth (p. 42). Heidegger refers to what comes into being through thework of art as occurring in the midst of the being that grows out of its own

accord, phusis. (p. 59).25 Ibid., p. 36.26 Ibid., p. 46. In his Introduction to the Reclam version of Heideggers Der

Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, Gadamer discusses his sense, at the time itappeared, of the originality of Heideggers notion of earth. See Hans-GeorgGadamer, Zur Einfhring, in Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung desKunstwerkes (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1990), pp. 989. GadamersIntroduction appears in translation in both Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philo-sophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David Linge (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1976), pp. 21328 and as The Truth of the Work of Art(1960), in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heideggers Ways (Albany: State Universityof New York Press, 1994), pp. 95111.

27 OWA, p. 61 German edition, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart:Philipp Reclam, 1990, p. 61).

28 OWA, p. 61.29 Other examples Heidegger gives are: the act that founds a political state;

truth shining forth as the nearness of the being that is most of all; essentialsacrice; the thinkers questioning, which names the question-worthiness ofBeing. OWA, pp. 612.

30 Ibid., p. 43.31 Ibid., As the OWA essay is written in 193536, Heidegger clearly has in mind

the question of the German nation and whether it is poised for the fullmentof its vocation. At the time, Heidegger makes references to the political sphereof the present, and to the poet Hlderlin, as the one who may ground theGerman people historically. For a brief discussion which links HeideggersOWA essay with his writings on Nietzsche and Hlderlin, and which connectshis comments in the OWA essay with Heideggers views on the historicalpossibility of the German people, in the context of his membership of

the National Socialist Party, see Kathleen Wrights entry, Heidegger andHlderlin, in the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 3836. For a general discussion ofHeideggers involvement with National Socialism, and his silence on this, thereis much recent literature. See Richard Wolin (ed.) The Heidegger Controversy(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993) and Rdiger Safranski, Ein Meister ausDeutschland: Heidegger und Seine Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag,1998), especially chapters 1317, pp. 231344. For a specic critique ina contemporary context of the concept of dwelling , note Neil Leach, TheDark Side of the Domus: The Redomestication of Central and Eastern


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Europe, in Neil Leach (ed.) Architecture and Revolution: ContemporaryPerspectives on Central and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1999),pp. 15062.

32 OWA, pp. 678.33 Ibid., p. 72. Heidegger writes, All art, as the letting happen of the advent of

the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry.34 Ibid., p. 75.35 Ibid., p. 76.36 Ibid.37 Ibid.38 Ibid.39 Ibid., p. 66. My italics.40 At this juncture, a reading of Kant which gives weight to the account of

common sense (sensus communis) provides a crucial link between the subjec-tivity of judgments of taste and their intersubjectivity. As noted above,

Heidegger ignores this feature of Kants aesthetics.41 In TM, his critique of aesthetic consciousness is part of an overall project of

describing the universality of the historical nature of understanding, and ofthe way that interpreter and object are not separate, but belong together.From his treatment of art in Part I of TM, Gadamer turns to a critique ofhistorical consciousness and next to language. In TM, then, his attention toart is in the service of a larger aim. Gadamers reections on art not neces-sarily harnessed to this context can be found in his collection of essays TheRelevance of the Beautiful, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1985).42 TM, p. 70.43 Ibid.44 Ibid., p. 84.45 Ibid. While this is close to Hegels view, Gadamer does not share the idea

that art is the sensible presentation of the Idea, nor does he share Hegelshierarchy of art, religion and philosophy as best capable of expressing theabsolute.

46 Ibid., pp. 845.47 Ibid., p. 85.

48 Ibid., p. 87.49 Gadamer says that artistic interests will be determined by an interplay of

artistic and social values. He does not himself make the following distinction,but again it is important to emphasize that these interests can be seen asrooted in a given society yet still critical of that society and its values. Thatis, a societys values, what Gadamer calls its unity of a style of life, need notbe what determines the artists interests, but the artists interests can, in turn,create a communitys ideal(s). An ideal of taste and a unity of a style oflife could, for example, be one in which that style and ideal are based on a

recognition of plurality and the importance of difference as the basis forcommunity. Gadamer needs a richer, more highly differentiated account ofhow the impact of artists on society/community and society/community onthe artists interests, can take place: I will pursue this in another essay morespecically on art and the nature of community in this context. For an indi-cation of the greater complexity involved, see David Hickeys Enter theDragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty. Hickey discusses a tension betweenthe art market, which designates what art is in terms of what it looks like,and those institutions, like the museum, which seek to regulate the deeperquestion of what art means, and of what art should be seen by a given


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society to be meaningful: in David Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essayson Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993), pp. 1516. My point is thatGadamers emphasis on arts belonging to a given society can be read asdirected against a directive or mandate as to what a societyshould nd mean-ingful. In the passage by Gadamer, above, the museum, associated with

aesthetic differentiation, makes such directives, while in Gadamers alterna-tive, what is signicant for a given community is not dictated as such butarises out of the interaction between artist and society.

50 TM, p. 87.51 Ibid., p. 95.52 Ibid., p. 97.53 Ibid.54 Ibid.55 Ibid., p. 978.56 Ibid., p. 164.

57 I am examining Gadamers account of the artwork in TM, where he perhapsdoes not elaborate clearly enough what this transformation of the viewer intheir encounter with the truth of the artwork is like. For a discussion ofGadamer on this point, see Kte Hamburger, Wahrheit und aesthetischeWahrheit(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1979). Gadamer does elaborate on the natureof aesthetic experience in some of his more recent writings on aesthetics ina way that addresses the lacunae I have just noted. See Hans-Georg Gadamer,Gesammelte Werke, Vols 8 and 9, entitled respectively, Esthetic und Poetik Iand II (Tbingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993). For a brief discussion

of this, see Jean Grondins entry, Gadamer and the Truth of Art, in theEncyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. in Chief Michael Kelly (New York, Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 26771.

58 TM, p. 100.59 I am not concerned primarily with evaluating Gadamers notion of play here.

See Jeff Mitscherling, Hegelian Elements in Gadamers Notions ofApplication and Play, in Man and World (Dordrecht: Klewer AcademicPublishers) 25: 617. See also Richard Detsch, A Non-Subjectivist Conceptof Play Gadamer and Heidegger versus Rilke and Nietzsche, in PhilosophyToday, (Summer 1985), pp. 15672.

60 TM, p. 102.61 Ibid, p. 103.62 Ibid.,63 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ber den Ernst des Fehlens von Festen: Hans-Georg

Gadamer im Gesprch mit Rainer Buland, in Homo Ludens (Munich:Musikverlag Emil Katzbichler, 1991- ), Vol. 8 (1998), p. 23. Gadamer sayshere, Das grosse Geheimnis des Spiels ist das Einander. The noun DasEinander is not easily translatable. It suggests interactiveness, but moreoverthe state of being with another.

64 TM, p. 106.65 Ibid., p. 108.66 Ibid., p. 108.67 Ibid., p. 110.68 Ibid.69 Ibid., p. 111.70 Ibid., p. 112.71 Ibid.72 In what follows, I will also draw on Gadamers description of the festival in

his essay The Relevance of the Beautiful: Art as Play, Symbol and Festival,


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in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 353. Hereafter I willrefer to this as RB. This essay originally appeared in German in 1977. Gadameralso discusses the festival, more briey, in Truth and Method, pp. 1223. Inhis interview with Rainer Buland, ber den Ernst des Fehlens von Festen:

Hans-Georg Gadamer im Gesprch mit Rainer Buland, Gadamer respondsto Bulands suggestion that there is a general contemporary difculty incoming together in festival celebration (p. 35). In responding to this, Gadameris pessimistic about what he agrees is a decline in the contemporary experi-ence of community, stating that it remains to be seen whether suchdevelopments as Internet communication and new technology will contributeto this decline. See especially pp. 3540.

73 RB, p. 42.74 TM p. 123.75 Ibid., p. 126.

76 Ibid., p. 127.77 Ibid.78 Ibid.79 Ibid. My italics.80 Ibid., p. 128. In his essay Marburg Theology (1964), Gadamer further

discusses the way that an aesthetics of genius, with its emphasis on the uncon-scious origin of the genius expression (from Nature or something else outsidethe artist), provides one reason to argue against an appeal to the artists ownintentions as offering an adequate horizon for interpretation of the work. See

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heideggers Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany:State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 40.81 TM, p. 128.82 Ibid.83 Ibid.84 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heideggers Ways, p. 40. I am not suggesting that

Gadamer does not examine the work of art on its own, as, for example, inthe essays collected in The Relevance of the Beautiful. But in TM, his critiqueof aesthetic consciousness is part of an overall project of describing the univer-sality of the historical nature of understanding.

85 I compare Heidegger and Gadamer, and examine in greater detail howHeidegger shifts from an explicit concern with the question of Being to thatof language as a site for the event of truth in Gadamer: Between Heideggerand Habermas (New York: Rowman and Littleeld, 2000), especially chap-ters 4 and 5.


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