Daniel Tate

Following Heidegger, Gadamer elaborates the “work-being” of the work of art. At the core of his hermeneutic understanding of the work is a distinctive concept of Gebilde. Gadamer conceives this as a sensuous configuration embedded in the individual work as an organic whole that displays a dynamic unity while possessing the stability of an identifiable pattern of internal relations that confounds conventional distinctions between matter and form, ideality and reality, sensibility and intelligibility, identity and difference, created work and living being. As a pure appearance that transcends its material support, Gebilde exhibits the hermeneutic identity of a work that is recognized through those interpretations by which it comes to presence while surpassing them all. Therein lies the truth-claim of art that is one while being many. Because of its centrality to Gadamer’s philosophy of art, Gebilde deserves the more concentrated attention that this essay seeks to provide.

ABSTRACTAlthough grounded in different philosophical traditions, Alexander Nehamas and Hans-Georg Gadamer each return to Plato's idea of the beautiful, to kalon, in order to reclaim the relevance of beauty for our understanding of art today. Their appeal to Plato challenges the reign of aesthetics that both see inaugurated by Kant's aesthetic theory. Nehamas criticizes the Kantian notion of “disinterest” as a “pleasure bereft of desire” in order to reassert the passionate longing that draws us toward art. Gadamer criticizes Kant's analysis for the way it divides the aesthetic from the cognitive, thereby alienating art and beauty from any claim to knowledge or truth. So Nehamas emphasizes the import of Platonic erōs to a phenomenological account of our experience of beauty. Love, so understood, elides any easy distinction between the sensual and spiritual, between the desire to possess and the passion to know—just as beauty cannot be captured in distinctions between what is and what appears. Gadamer draws out precisely the ontological dimension of the beautiful as self-presentation. In so doing he revives the intimacy of beauty and truth, alētheia, as the movement into unconcealment by which something comes forth into its presence. In the end, I suggest appropriating Nehamas's phenomenological analysis of the erotic to Gadamer's ontological understanding of the alethic in order to renew the relation of erōs and kalon into an account that recalls this Platonic legacy for a contemporary hermeneutics of art.

Posing the question of beauty anew, Gadamer pursues a hermeneutic remembrance of the original relation of beauty and truth forgotten by modern aesthetics. For Gadamer, the essential relation of kalos and aletheia is preserved, above all, in Plato. This essay elaborates his retrieval of Plato, re-thinking the splendor of beauty and the illumination of truth from being as an event of coming-to-presence. After discussing his engagement with Heidegger the essay reconstructs Gadamer’s interpretative argument, showing how he interprets the transcendence, radiance, and measure that characterize Plato’s idea of the beautiful as structural features of being as an event of truth.

Gadamer’s question “Are Poets Falling Silent?” is motivated by the “linguistic need” of modern lyric indicative of the “forgetfulness of language” that prevails today. In Paul Celan’s late work, Gadamer finds poetry that, bordering on the cryptic, stands on the verge of silence. Nevertheless, he insists that these poems do speak and that the title of Celan’s poem series, Breath-crystal, figures the truth of the poetic word. From this standpoint the paper discusses Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding of the poetic word treating the constitutive elements of the poetic word as an event of language, the way this conception of the poetic word both embraces and yet departs from the usual understanding of the radical turn to language in modern lyric, and the meaning of Gadamer’s claim regarding the truth of the poetic word that fulfills the original saying power of language.

Abstract In Gadamer's later writings on art, his investigation into the being of the work exploits the temporal resonance of the concept of performative enactment ( Vollzug ), which displaces the priority of play ( Spiel ) in his earlier account. Drawing upon Heidegger, Gadamer deploys the concepts of tarrying ( Verweilen ) and the while ( die Weile ) to elucidate the temporality of the work of art as an event of being. On the one hand, tarrying describes the temporal structure of the performance that enables the work to come forth. On the other hand, the while characterizes the unique presence of the work that takes place in and through its enactment. Here Gadamer's understanding of art engages his thought about “empty“ and “fulfilled“ time. For, the temporal event of the artwork is such that it interrupts the ordinary experience of passing time and thereby opens up another, more authentic experience of the fullness of time