(GW 1, 87 – 138)
Art lies in between. It lies in the between, is situated between the extremes, hovers there in the middle, enduring the tension between these extremes. This medial character of the artwork is attested by Hegel: „the artwork stands in themiddlebetween immediate sensibleness [Sinnlichkeit] and ideal thought“ (Hegel 1985, 148). Liberated from the scaffolding of its sheer materiality, the artwork nonetheless shines forth to the senses, offering itself as pure shining, not as ideal thought. Through its shining the artwork, in turn, accomplishes a certain presentation, becomes a sensible presentation of the true as such.
For the hermeneutics of the artwork, both of these features of the artwork, broached by Hegel, are decisive: first, its character as medial, indeed as medial in several respects and not only in that thematized by Hegel; and second, the orientation of art to truth, its capacity to present truth or in some other manner to bring it forth. Indeed it was the reemergence of art’s orientation to truth that obliged Gadamer to construe the analysis of art as a major segment of the new hermeneutics, which, as he says, is dedicated to see-king „the experience of truth that transcends the domain of scientific method wherever this experience is to be found“ (GW 1, 1).1Yet the reengagement of art with truth that was decisive for Gadamer was that carried out by Heidegger inThe Origin of the Work of Art. Even though Gadamer’s discussion of art inTruth and Methodmakes no mention of Heidegger’s essay, with which Gadamer had of course long been familiar,2reading
1 Despite its placement at the beginning of the work, the analysis of art was reportedly added at a very late stage of the composition of the work. Presumably this addition became necessary as the project came to extend further and further beyond the scope of classical hermeneutics and beyond concern solely with the methodology of the human sciences. Once the project was broadened to encompass the experience of truth as such, it was obliged to investigate the experience of truth that takes place in art.
2 It is remarkable that Gadamer’s discussion of art makes no mention of Heidegger’s essay, even though Hei-degger’s text, first published in 1950, precededTruth and Methodby ten years and was undoubtedly known
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this discussion together with Heidegger’s essay makes it eminently clear that Gadamer is writing within the space first reopened by Heidegger’s text. I propose to examine the way in which Gadamer takes up the Heideggerian initiative, to consider how he am-plifies, reshapes, and extends that initiative while also in certain connections going his own way. The question toward which these considerations move is whether these ways cohere sufficiently to constitute a single hermeneutics of the artwork.
InThe Origin of the Work of Arta tension is set out between two extreme conceptions of the artwork. Though both conceptions are subtly in play throughout the essay, they are most explicitly identified in their specific character at the extremes of the essay, one at the outset, the other in the Epilogue. In this regard the accomplishment of the essay is to install the artwork within the field of this tension, determining the work as medial and hence setting it apart from each of these two conceptions while also retaining in the new determination a certain moment from each extreme but now fundamentally recast in ontological rather than aesthetic terms.
The conception of the artwork set out in the Epilogue to the essay is the aesthetic conceptionpar excellence. The word expresses the approach: aesthetics takes the artwork as an object of ἀἴσϑησις, of apprehension through the senses. Heidegger notes that today such apprehension is called lived experience (Erlebnis) and that, accordingly, it is now lived experience that is taken to provide the standard for all artistic enjoyment and creation. Everything about the artwork is to be understood by reference to the lived experience of those who create or enjoy the work, that is, by reference back to subjectivity. One cannot but hear the tone of irony as Heidegger sets this conception aside: „Yet perhaps lived experience is the element in which art dies. The dying occurs so slowly that it takes a few centuries“ (Heidegger 1977, 67).3
to Gadamer even earlier, at least in the form in which it had been presented in lectures in 1936. The lack of reference to Heidegger’s essay is even more remarkable in view of the fact that at the very time when he was completingTruth and MethodGadamer wrote, at Heidegger’s request, an Introduction to the Reclam edition ofThe Origin of the Work of Art. This Introduction was virtually the first text in which Gadamer discussed Heidegger’s work as such (as distinct from the mere references, largely toBeing and Time, made in the course of elaborating his own problematic). Gadamer’s later ref lections about this Introduction are instructive regar-ding his relation to his teacher. In the Preface written for a collection of his essays on Heidegger published in English translation in 1994, he explicitly marks a connection between Heidegger’s essay on the work of art (and his own Introduction to the essay) and „some of the very questions […] voiced inTruth and Method“. He also hints at what may have motivated his silence inTruth and Methodregarding Heidegger’s essay: „As is always the case when one is attempting to find one’s own position, some distance was needed before I was able to present Heidegger’s way of thinking as his; I first had to distinguish my own search for my ways and paths from my companionship with Heidegger and his ways“ (Gadamer 1994, vii).
3 The definitive version of Heideggers’ text was presented as three lectures in 1936 and first published in 1950. In a marginal note keyed to the passage cited, Heidegger writes: „But everything depends on moving from lived experience to Da-sein, and this says: on gaining a completely different ‚element‘ for the ‚becoming‘
of art“ (Heidegger 77, 67 note b).
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Gadamer’s more historically oriented account near the beginning of Truth and Method supplements Heidegger’s almost cryptic identification of this conception.
Gadamer, too, links this conception to the aesthetic approach to art, links it to what he calls aesthetic consciousness. The conception both of the artwork itself and of aesthetic consciousness he marks as abstract; indeed it is precisely this abstractness that renders this entire approach extreme. For the unsituated aesthetic consciousness the artwork has lost all connection to its world; indeed aesthetic consciousness has become „the experiencing [erlebendes] center from which everything considered art is measured“ (GW 1, 90). By being referred back to aesthetic consciousness, to lived experience, to subjectivity, by being taken as determined in its artistic character solely through this reference, the artwork is abstracted from every-thing in which it is rooted; it is differentiated from everyevery-thing worldly and conceived as a pure work of art. Gadamer puts it succinctly: „Thus through ‚aesthetic differentiation‘
the work loses its place and the world to which it belongs insofar as it belongs instead to aesthetic consciousness“ (GW 1, 93).
Gadamer’s account focuses on the way in which the subjectivization of aesthetics was prepared in theCritique of Judgment, specifically by Kant’s doctrine of taste, which re-fers the beautiful in nature and art back to the interplay of the mental powers and to the corresponding feeling of pleasure. Along with this referral of art to subjectivity and fee-ling, a thorough separation was introduced between judgments of taste and knowledge of objects. Thus, Kant maintains – at least in the Introduction to theCritique of Judg-ment– „that aesthetic judgment contributes nothing to the knowledge of its objects“
(Kant 1913, 194). Hence, in the wake of the subjectivization of aesthetics, the orienta-tion of art to truth is disrupted, at least insofar as truth is taken to be strictly correlative to knowledge.
In contrast to Gadamer’s historically turned account, Heidegger emphasizes less the source than the extreme outcome to which the subjectivization of aesthetics led. Most pertinent in this regard are Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche, which stem from the same years asThe Origin of the Work of Art: specifically, in his lecture-courseThe Will to Power as Art, Heidegger shows that subjectivization is intrinsic to the very project of aesthetics as such. He shows, too, how Nietzsche’s reversal of aesthetics – from a feminine aesthetics focused on the recipient to a masculine aesthetics focused on the artist – remains, on the one hand, trapped within the very framework it would reverse and yet, on the other hand, points ahead toward a strategy that would twist free of that framework by overcoming aesthetics as such (see Sallis 2005).
Over against the aesthetic extreme, Heidegger’s strategy is to interrogate art by re-ference neither to the creative artist nor to the experiencing recipient but rather by holding fast to the work itself. In the most direct formulation, his question becomes:
What is at work in the artwork? Virtually the entire essay is required in order to unfold the sense of the answer to this question: that what is at work in the artwork is truth.
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Hence everything is shown to depend, not on the experience of art, but on the artwork itself, on the working of truth that takes place in and as the artwork. Thus the essay brings art back into the orbit of truth, reengages its orientation to truth.
The artwork is, then, set apart from the aesthetic extreme by being freed from aes-thetic consciousness, by being withdrawn from determination by subjectivity. Restored thus to itself, its character as a work needs, then, to be determined. More specifically, its distantiation from subjectivity needs to be determined and secured, and this requires that it be conceived, if not simply in terms of objectivity, then in terms of its thingly character. For indeed one might well suppose that it is precisely because artworks are present in the manner of things that they intrinsically resist assimilation to aesthetic consciousness. Thus, near the beginning of the essay, Heidegger remarks: „But even the much-vaunted aesthetic experience cannot get around the thingly aspect of the artwork.
There is something stony in a work of architecture, wooden in a carving, colored in a painting, sounding in a linguistic work, sonorous in a musical composition“ (Heideg-ger 1950, 3f.). The thingly character of the work is acknowledged in the other extreme conception set over against the aesthetic conception: according to this other conception the artwork consists of a thingly substructure upon which is built a symbolic or properly artistic moment. This is the conception of the artwork that is introduced at the outset of the essay, the other extreme that counterbalances, as it were, the aesthetic conception explicitly broached only in the Epilogue. In this other extreme conception, Heidegger is alluding in a general manner to what could be called the metaphysical conception of art, that is, to the conception of the artwork determined by the distinctively metaphysical opposition between sensible and intelligible, that is, to a conception that merely pairs a sensible, thingly component with a symbolic, intelligible component. Such rigid, ex-ternal juxtaposition of sensible and intelligible is something entirely different from the medial conception found, for instance, in Hegel.
The first part of Heidegger’s essay – and indeed even more – is required in order to set the artwork apart from this other extreme conception and install it in its properly medial place within the field of tension corresponding to the two extreme conceptions. Yet Heidegger’s strategy in this regard is perhaps most evident in his discussion of a certain characteristic of the artwork. The discussion occurs in the last of the three parts of the essay, and the characteristic on which he focuses is the createdness of the work, or, more precisely, the manifest inherence of the createdness in the work. Heidegger explains:
„Yet in contrast to all other modes of production, the work is distinguished by being created so that its createdness is part of the created work. […] In the work, createdness is expressly created into what is created, so that it stands out from it, from the being thus brought forth“ (Heidegger 1977, 52). In addition to this peculiar reference to the createdness of the work and, to this extent, to the creator, the creative artist, Heidegger insists also on a reference to those who let the work be what it is, those who preserve it: „Being a work, it always remains tied to preservers, even and particularly when it is
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still only waiting for them“ (Heidegger 1977, 54). With these moves it becomes evident how, freed from the extreme of aesthetic consciousness, the artwork is in a certain way drawn back nonetheless in that direction. Freed of theaestheticreference back to creator and recipient, the artwork comes to be referred to these in another way, by way of the createdness manifest in the work itself and by way of its tie to those who, rather than submitting it to their measure, would let it be the work it is. Set apart from subjectivity in the direction of things, the artwork is set apart from things by its distinctive references to its creation and preservation. Yet in both regards what is decisive in giving the artwork its medial position is that in the artwork truth is at work, that the artwork is the locus of a happening of truth.
Gadamer’s originality in elaborating the hermeneutics of the artwork lies primarily in his mobilizing the concept of play as a way of thinking the essence of art.4The appro-priateness of this concept for understanding the work of art stems from the fact that play too is medial. At least if the concept of play is taken up in a certain rigorous way, then what is thought in this concept proves to be set out between the same two extremes that are operative in the delimitation of the work of art, the two extremes from which, according to Heidegger’s essay, the work of art must be set apart.
On the one side, play has its own essence independent of the consciousness and the behavior of the players. Thus, Gadamer insists, it is not constituted or determined as such by the subjectivity of the players. Play requires that the player relinquish his subjec-tivity, that he lose himself in the play. Play is not so much something that a person does but rather is such that it absorbs the players into itself. Gadamer orients the concept in such a way that it designates the to-and-fro movement that is signified in common when one speaks of the play of light, the play of the waves, the play of parts of machinery, the play of forces, even a play on words. He grants that in this connection he is taking the word in its metaphorical sense, yet he insists that this sense has a certain methodologi-cal priority, since in taking up the metaphorimethodologi-cal sense thinking can simply resume the abstraction already achieved in advance by language itself. Indeed Gadamer goes even further and suggests that inasmuch as human play – the allegedly literal sense – is no less a natural process than is the play of animals, of light, and of water, „it becomes finally meaningless to distinguish between literal and metaphorical usage“ (GW 1, 111).
4 In the interest of clarity it should be noted that the semantics of the GermanSpieldoes not correspond very closely to that of the Englishplay.Spielmeans also what would normally be expressed in English by the word game, and indeed the inclusion of this meaning is significant for the development of Gadamer’s exposition.
The effect of the definite and indefinite articles is also somewhat different: whereasein Spieldenotesa game or aplaying,a playtends to suggesta dramaunless something further is added (as ina play of light). On the other hand, German readily distinguishes a drama from the more general sense by such words asSchauspieland Theaterstück.
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In any case the play lies in the occurrence of the movement, of the to-and-fro. For this reason there is a sense in which one cannot play simply by oneself. Playing is al-ways also being played. Alal-ways there is something else – though not necessarily another player in the literal sense – with which one plays, something from which there comes a countermove to one’s every move. Gadamer mentions the example of a cat that plays with a ball of yarn because such an object responds in precisely this way.
Play occurs, not on the side of the players, but between them, and this occurring in-between is one of the senses in which play is medial. Indeed Gadamer says that „the most originary sense of playing is the medial sense“ (GW 1, 109) and that it is with the
„medial sense of play“ that „the being of the work of art is connected“ (GW 1, 111).
And yet, the medial sense of play involves another side and not just its priority over the players.
On the other side, play requires players. This is not to say that they are the subjects of the play, that play is reducible to the behavior or interaction of the players. Yet, while the players are not the subjects of play, it is through them that the play comes to be presented, that it reaches presentation (kommt zur Darstellung). Gadamer points out, furthermore, that self-presentation belongs intrinsically to play; it must therefore be performed, and in being performed it is potentially presented to someone, represented for a potential audience. In these two references, to the players who must perform it and to the audience to whom it is potentially presented, play thus exhibits a structure analogous to that which Heidegger attributes to the artwork in its relation to its creator and preservers. Gadamer stresses, as does Heidegger, that these are not merely ancillary references but that they belong essentially to play and to the artwork, respectively. In other words, it is not as if there is the play, which may then happen to be played for an audience; rather, the playing for an audience, the presentation, belongs intrinsically to the play, so that the play is the whole.
Play is, then, medial in the same way that the artwork, according to Heidegger, is medial: it is irreducible to the behavior of the players, set apart from them, granted a certain priority; and yet, it essentially refers to them, to the presentation they effect, refers to them so essentially that the play as such includes this reference. It is this medial
Play is, then, medial in the same way that the artwork, according to Heidegger, is medial: it is irreducible to the behavior of the players, set apart from them, granted a certain priority; and yet, it essentially refers to them, to the presentation they effect, refers to them so essentially that the play as such includes this reference. It is this medial