Abstract
This essay will argue that philosophical hermeneutics offers a critique of our experience of art by enquiring not only into the ontological pre-conditions of aesthetic experience but also into its communicative structures. The form of that critique will be discussed, what it might reveal considered, and how it illuminates the hermeneutical operations which shape our interactions with art will be debated. We intend to be critical of Gadamer. Despite his hostility to Kant’s heritage, it will be contended that a hermeneutical aesthetics cannot operate without either an appeal to disinterestedness or without invoking an equivalent of Kant’s “aesthetic idea”. We shall argue, furthermore, that Gadamer’s aesthetic theory needs the intervention of disinterested interpretive method in order to avoid unquestioning complacency within any hermeneutical setting and to provoke precisely the unexpected responses to an art work that his theory strives to stimulate and articulate. This involves taking something of a heretical stance with regard to Gadamer’s critical attitude towards Kant’s aesthetics but, as we intend to show, re-working of certain aspects of Kant’s argument strengthens Gadamer’s broad hermeneutical approach to aesthetics.
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Notes
- 1.
See Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity, On the Kantian Aftermath (London: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 68.
- 2.
Martin Heidegger, “Origin of the Art Work,” in Poetry, Language and Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971).
- 3.
Gadamer makes this remark in the (untranslated) essay “Word and Picture”, 1992 (See Gesammelte Werke, J. C. B. Mohr, Band 8, s 374).
- 4.
G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven ed., The Presocratic Philosophers (London: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 199.
- 5.
See Yves Abrioux, “Ian Hamilton Finlay,” in A Visual Primer (London: Reaktion Books, 1895), 106.
- 6.
In this respect, Terry Eagleton follows Nietzsche in seeing the Dionysian and the Apollonian in art as reconciling energy and order, individual and universal, flux and stillness and, as such “is a riposte to political absolutism … ” (and) “an argument against anarchy”. See his Holy Terror (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), 87.
- 7.
See Richard Kearney’s observation about Ricoeur’s though, in Paul Ricoeur, On Translation (London: Routledge, 2004), xx.
- 8.
Wolfgang Iser is eloquent about this feature of interpretation. See his The Range of Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 147, 153.
- 9.
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 135 ff.
- 10.
F. Nietzsche, “The Most Valuable Insights Are Arrived at Last: But the Most Valuable Insights Are Methods,” in Will to Power (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), sect. 469.
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Davey, N. (2012). In Between Word and Image: Philosophical Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and the Inescapable Heritage of Kant. In: Halsall, F., Jansen, J., Murphy, S. (eds) Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 64. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1509-7_3
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