Gadamer’s Leveling of the Visual and the Verbal, and the “Experience of Art”

Abstract

In his relatively late text Intuition and Intuitiveness (1980), Gadamer says, relating to the development towards philosophical hermeneutics, that “(…) the sharp distinction between intuition and concept, as it is established by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, was no longer acceptable” (G8 202).¹ In other words, Gadamer ’s project of a philosophical hermeneutic rejects the Kantian “sharp distinction between intuition and concept.” But such a distinction has a venerable history that goes back to Plato’s criticism of Parmenides, who precisely based his doctrine of the identity of thinking and Being upon the confusion of the visual and the verbal.² From then on, the philosophical tradition distinguished between the visual and the verbal. Nevertheless, based on the “work of art,” Gadamer develops a theory of non-conceptual “sense [Sinn]” that abolishes the traditional, well established distinction between the visual and the verbal. The goal of this paper is to make a short account of this abolition with some of its implications for aesthetics. Above all, “aesthetics” is replaced by “experience of art” (G8 192), which according to Gadamer is certainly not “cognitio sensitiva,” but “cognitio imaginativa” (G8 192) in the sense of a non-conceptual, to be sure, ineffable knowledge. Such “knowledge” shows similarities with phenomena such as religion and, thus, the proper character of aesthetics seems lost.

Our main goal is to win a concept of truth that is as valid for images as for poetry. -Gadamer