1. TMxxii-xxiii. For Gadamer's claim that such truth is unique to art, 105. I will return to this issue below. [BACK]

2. On the issue of truth claims in art see, for example, TMgy. Although the expression ‘truth claim’ suggests a notion of propositional truth, that is not what Gadamer has in mind; he works with a notion of truth as disclosure, which is discussed below. So, among other problems with this expression in Gadamer's aesthetics, his use of it is simply misleading. [BACK]

3. Joel Weinsheimer makes a three-way distinction regarding truth and art: the truth about art, the truth of art, and the truth about truth as revealed through the truth of art. Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 99. In effect, I am confirming the first truth while criticizing the last two, and especially the second. [BACK]

4. Gadamer discusses other art forms, of course, but a modern picture is paradigmatic for him because it exists only along with “aesthetic consciousness” and, for that reason, it best exemplifies the results of “aesthetic differentiation”—two notions discussed below. [BACK]

5. TMi4o; RB35. The notion of “increase in being” is tied to (and, I think, could be replaced by) the notion of autonomy because it implies that a work of art is not a means to something else the way, for example, a mirror image is. [BACK]

6. TMi40. Gadamer makes much of the distinction between Darstellung (presentation) and Vorstellung (representation). [BACK]

7. RBno. For Gadamer, such self-fulfillment is what defines beauty, as the beautiful “fulfills itself in a kind of self-determination and enjoys its own selfrepresentation%

8. “The significance of that whose being consists in expressing an experience cannot be grasped except through an experience” (TMyo). This quote is discussed in more detail below. [BACK]

9. TMg8; cf. RBi6-i7;andTMioo: “We do not ask the experience of art to tell us how it conceives of itself, then, but what it truly is and what its truth is, even if it does not know what it is and cannot say what it knows.” [BACK]

10. Gadamer does acknowledge, however, that the experience of art constitutes a kind of evidence that is both too strong and too weak: too strong because nobody would venture to develop a model of progress in art as an analog to progress in science, too weak “in the sense that the artwork withholds the very truth that it embodies and prevents it from being conceptually concise” (“Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” PHGG6). [BACK]

11. RBgg: “the meaning of the work of art lies in the fact that it is there.” [BACK]

12. Another issue here is whether the aesthetic qualities of a work of art can ever be isolated in the pure terms to which Gadamer claims aesthetic consciousness aspires. He may be mistaking their aspirations for achievements, aspirations which his own critique shows to be impossible to achieve. [BACK]

13. This point could also be tied to Heidegger's acknowledgment that it is misleading to call aktheia (unconcealment) truth because it is “not yet truth”; rather, aletheia “first grants the possibility of truth.” “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being, ed. and trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 69-70. [BACK]

14. Gadamer says that a text—and, by analogy, a work of art—“captivates us” before we are in a position “to test the claim to meaning that it makes” (TM4go). [BACK]

16. “In performing this abstraction, aesthetic consciousness … shows what a work of art is, and allows it to exist in its own right. I call this ‘aesthetic differentiation’” (TM8s). [BACK]

17. In Gadamer's words, “In order to do justice to art, aesthetics must go beyond itself and surrender the ‘purity’ of the aesthetic” (TMg2). Cf. alsoTMSi: “Is the aesthetic approach to a work of art the appropriate one? Or is what we call ‘aesthetic consciousness' an abstraction?” And “Heidegger's Later Philosophy” (PH2i8): “In the last analysis, we need to overcome the concept of aesthetics itself.” Based on interpretations of these quotes, some people consider Gadamer's aesthetics to be anti-aesthetics. I think, rather, that he critiques one type of aesthetic theory (the one based on what he calls “aesthetic consciousness”) and defends another, herme-neutic type (based on the experience of truth in art). I, in turn, am challenging Gadamer's aesthetics and proposing another, neither of which involves a critique of aesthetics tout court. [BACK]

18. TMxxxiv. Elsewhere, Gadamer says that historical consciousness in relation

19. Gadamer discusses two distinct notions of experience, Erlebnis and Erfahrung. He is not satisfied with the former because it stresses the fragmentariness of experience and thus cannot capture the truth of the hermeneutic continuity that constitutes human existence (TMg5-g7). The concept of Erfahrungis, introduced to capture this continuity (TMgy-gg). [BACK]

20. Is Gadamer setting up an opposition here between (the experience of) art and aesthetics, and siding with the former? Is this part of what some have referred to as his anti-aesthetics? If so, I again think that reconciliation rather than conflict is what is needed here. [BACK]

21. TMn6. See also PHGG43-44: the work of art distinguishes itself in “that one never completely understands it”; and 1*634: the fact that a work exists at all “represents an insurmountable resistance against any superior presumption that we can make sense of it all.” [BACK]

22. 16164, 32. There are some passages, however, that reaffirm the role of truth. Gadamer says, for example, that it is by virtue of the beautiful that we are able “to acquire a lasting remembrance of the true world” (RBi5). [BACK]

23. Amajor philosophical issue that the subjective ground of aesthetic judgment raises, of course, is how such judgment can be objective or universal. This is one of the issues which first gave rise to philosophical aesthetics in the eighteenth century and which has continued to trouble philosophers ever since. [BACK]

24. This confirms, I think, that truth is the normative basis of Gadamer's aesthetic critiques. [BACK]

25. Cf. RB, passim. Such appropriation is as much the means as the result of the overcoming of subjectivism Gadamer proposes. It consists of the redefinition of a number of central aesthetic concepts; in addition to beauty, see, for example, mimesis: TMi 13-15 and RBg2-io4, 116-22. [BACK]

26. Also at issue in Gadamer's critique of the subjectivization of aesthetics is its universality. Since the inception of modern aesthetics in the eighteenth century, subjectivity has been a virtual given because of the subjective status of beauty and, by extension, all other aesthetic concepts, and universality has been a problem because, prima facie, such subjectivity seems to preclude universality. For Gadamer, however, universality is a given (RB13) because of the truths we experience in art, and subjectivity poses a problem because it threatens to undermine the universality of such truths. Despite Gadamer's emphasis on universality, however, he acknowledges in his later writings that it is rather weak. For example, he says, “The only thing that is universally familiar to us today is unfamiliarity itself, momentarily illuminated by an ephemeral glimmer of meaning. But how can we express that in human form” (RB79)? He also says “there is no longer a unified symbolic language capable of commanding our acceptance” (RB75); in fact contemporary art is characterized by “the dearth of the symbol, the very renunciation of the symbolic” (RB674). Such doubts put the universality of art seriously into question. [BACK]

27. Gadamer would not agree that the ontology of art changes over time. On this point he is an essentialist, which enables him to claim that what Plato and Aristotle say about art still has truth for us today. Although I agree, as I have said, that we can

28. In his later writings on art, those after Truth and Method, Gadamer stresses the problem raised by contemporary art, namely, that it breaks from all the traditional ways in which art has been legitimated by philosophy (RBy, 10, 22, 46, 77-78, 83). Although I agree that contemporary art makes such a break, I also think that part of the break is a challenge to the assumption of traditional aesthetics that art is something that needs to be legitimated. It is only from the perspective of the theories that regard art as a lie that art needs to be legitimated. Once the ontology of art is altered in the way that Gadamer himself proposes, the need for legitimation ends. [BACK]