Gadamer, Theories of ART

1. What is art? The word “art” has had its current meaning only in the last 200 years
Production vs. mechanical arts (Aristotle’s distinction; distorted)
“art is possible because the formative activity of nature leaves open productions of the human spirit” [Hegelian influence]
Art intends the universal (13). What does he mean by “universal”?
Art intensifies our feeling for life [Kant]. The play of form and color: what is the relationship between play and meaning, purpose, learning?
“In the case of art…we always find ourselves held between the pure aspect of visibility presented to the viewer by the ‘in-sight’ (Anbild), as we called it, and the meaning that our understanding dimly senses in the work of art. And we recognize this meaning through the import that every encounter has for us. Where does this meaning come from? Genius (20-21)
Art is the creation of something exemplary which is not simply produced by following rules (21). [Longinus would agree, but a different view of reality.]
“Kant’s great achievement…lay in his advance over the mere formalism of the ‘pure judgment of taste’ in favor of the ‘standpoint of genius’ (21)…Taste was also characterized as a similar play of the imagination and the understanding. It is, with a different emphasis, the same free play as that encountered in the creation of the work of art. Only here the significant content is articulated through the creative activity of the imagination, so that it dawns on the understanding, or, as Kant puts it, allows us ‘to go on to think much that cannot be said’ (21).”
“art is the containment of sense, so that it does not run away or escape from us, but is secured and sheltered in the ordered composure of the creation…Heidegger…enabled us to perceive the ontological plenitude or the truth that addresses us in art through the twofold movement of revealing, unconcealing, and manifesting, on the one hand, and concealing and sheltering, on the other (34)….This philosophical insight, which sets limits to any idealism claiming a total recovery of meaning, implies that there is more to the work of art than a meaning that is experienced only in an indeterminate way (34).”
Art is always symbolic, and “the symbol is that other fragment that has always been sought in order to complete and make whole our own fragmentary life”(32).
“the symbolic in general, and especially the symbolic in art, rests upon an intricate interplay of showing and concealing…the meaning of the work of art lies in the fact that it is there...we should replace the word ‘work’ by the word’ creation’ (33)”
[art as imitation] it is characteristic of art that what is represented…calls us to dwell upon it and give our assent in an act of recognition. We shall have to show how this characteristic defines the task that the art of past and present lays upon each of us. And this means learning how to listen to what art has to say” (36).
“Art demands constructive activity” (vs. idealism) (37).
Play, symbolic, festival

2. Non-art: objects of production with a practical purpose: technology and manufacture.
Intoxication vs. communication; mass media makes people passive

3. Art vs. bad art/ pseudo-art:
kitsch: enjoyed because familiar;
connoisseurship: focus on performance and/or performers rather than the unconcealment, the ontological dimension of art.

4. “The work of art signifies an increase in being.”
“If we really have had a genuine experience of art, then the world has become both brighter and less burdensome” (26).

“the work seems to possess a kind of center. Similarly, we understand a living organism as a being that bears its center within itself in such a way that the various parts are not subordinated to any particular external purposek, but simply serve the self-preservation of the organism as a living being. This ‘ purposiveness without purpose,’ as Kant so well described it, is as characteristic a feature of the organism as it clearly is of the work of art…Aristotle says that t hing is beautiful ‘if nothing can be added and nothing can be taken away’…the work of art does resemble a living organism with its internally structured unity..it too displays autonomous temporality” (43).

5. Beauty: “The expression ‘beautiful ethical life’ still preserves the memory of the Greek ethico-political world which German idealism contrasted with the soulless mechanism of the modern state (Schiller, Hegel)…the ethical life of the people found expression in all forms of communal life, giving shape to the whole and so allowing men to recognize themselves in their own world. Even for us the beautiful is convincingly defined as something that enjoys universal recognition and assent. Thus it belongs to our natural sense of the beautiful that we cannot ask why it pleases us. We cannot expect any advantage from the beautiful since it serves no purpose. The beautiful fulfills itself in a kind of self-determination and enjoys its own self-representation” (14).

“In the beautiful presented in nature and art, we experience this convincing illumination of truth and harmony, which compels the admission: ‘This is true…The ontological function of the beautiful is to bridge the chasm between the ideal and the real” (15). [But how do you define “ideal” and “real”?]

6. The creative process: “this creation is not something that we can imagine being
deliberately made by someone…someone who has produced a work of art stands before the creation of his hands in just the same way that anyone else does. There is a leap between the planning and the executing on the one hand and the successful achievement on the other. The thing now ‘stands’ and thereby is ‘there’ once and for all, ready to be encountered by anyone who meets it and to be perceived in its own ‘quality.’ This leap distinguishes the work of art in its uniqueness and irreplaceability...the aura of the work of art [Walter Benjamin] (33-34).”

7. Artist and work of art:
[focus is not on the artist’s source of inspiration, but on effect on audience; what Collingwood would call craft, psychological art, not real art at all]

“One of the basic impulses of modern art has been the desire to break down the distance separating the audience, the ‘consumers,’ and the public from the work of art…
The hermeneutic identity of the work is much more deeply grounded…
it is the hermeneutic identity that establishes the unity of the work…
there cannot be any kind of artistic production that does not similarly intend what it produces [effect on audience] to be what it is” (25) i.e. bottlerack

8. Relation between the artist/work of art and audience:
focus is not on the source of inspiration of the artist, but on the effect of the work of art, not of the artist, on the audience, the aesthetic experience [Kantian].

[the purpose of aesthetics is to supply an answer to the question of what is relevant about the fact that] cognitio sensitiva means that in the apparent particularity of sensuous experience, which we always attempt to relate to the universal, there is something in our experience of the beautiful that arrests us and compels us to dwell upon the individual appearance itself” (16).

“We are seized and uplifted by the profound harmony and rightness of a work.” (8)

“What is called spirit lies in the ability to move within the horizon of an open future and an unrepeatable past” (10).

“In any encounter with art, it is not the particular, but rather the totality of the experienceable world, man’s ontological place in it, and above all his finitude before that which transcends him, that is brought to experience (33).

“learning to listen means rising above the universal leveling process in which we cease to notice anything—a process encouraged by a civilization that dispenses increasingly powerful stimuli” (36).

“The work issues a challenge which expects to be met. It requires an answer…The participant belong to the play…If we really have had a genuine experience of art, then the world has become both brighter and less burdensome” (26).

All art (ancient and modern): “some reflective and intellectual accomplishment involved” (28). “we take the construction of the work upon ourselves as a task” (28).

“What is presented to the senses is seen and taken as something…’aesthetic non-differentiation’…cooperative play between imagination and understanding…a free play and not directed towards a concept…free play between the faculties of imagination and conceptual understanding” (29). (not natural imitation)

“in the experience of art we must learn how to dwell upon the work in a specific way. When we dwell upon the work, there is no tedium involved, for the longer we allow ourselves, the more it displays its manifold riches to us. The essence of our temporal experience of art is in l earning how to tarry in this way. And perhaps it is the only way that is granted to us finite beings to relate to what we call eternity” (45).

9. Purpose of aesthetics: [#8 above: explain relation between work and audience and why that is relevant/important]
Baumgarten:
“recognized for the first time the experience of art and beauty as a philosophical question in its own right…its does not simply express a subjective reaction of taste” (18)…

[the purpose of aesthetics is to supply an answer to the question of what is relevant about the fact that] cognitio sensitiva means that in the apparent particularity of sensuous experience, which we always attempt to relate to the universal, there is something in our experience of the beautiful that arrests us and compels us to dwell upon the individual appearance itself” (16).

aesthetics is “the art of thinking beautifully;’ anology with the ‘art of speaking well’ or rhetoric. “Rhetoric is the universal form of human communication, which even today determines our social life in an incomparably more profound fashion than does science” (17).

10. Art and nature:
“ we learn how to perceive beauty in nature under the guidance of the artist’s eye and his works” [agrees with Hegel] (31)

Kant “creationist theology” led to a view of natural beauty; Gadamer: natural beauty is indeterminate, an indeterminate feeling of solitude; we see nature through culture

Modern landscapes are symbolic and intended to be; art is symbolic, not imitative

11. Art and culture:
Aesthetic experience is uniquely human, beyond nature (#10 above). Festivals.

Aesthetics is a kind of rhetoric which has an effect on culture:
aesthetics is “the art of thinking beautifully;’ anology with the ‘art of speaking well’ or rhetoric. “Rhetoric is the universal form of human communication, which even today determines our social life in an incomparably more profound fashion than does science” (17).

12. Art and science:
“Kant’s definition of the autonomy of the aesthetic, in relation to practical reason on the one hand and theoretical reason on the other” (19).
Art: sensuous cognition vs. rational cognition

13. Art and politics/community
Earlier: art had a place in society, reinforced collective worldview; now-pluralism:
19th century artist seen as a social outsider; a new savior, rejected bourgeois religion and ritual expression; new kind of solidarity and communication.

“A festival is an experience of community and represents community in its most perfect form. A festival is meant for everyone” (39).

[there are] Two fundamental ways of experiencing time…These two extremes of bustle and boredom both represent time in the same way: we fill out time with something or we have nothing to do…There is…a totally different experience of time…’fulfilled’ or ‘autonomous’ time…the festival fulfills every moment of its duration…” (42).

14. Art and religion: we don’t use the word the same way anymore; no relation
Art and philosophy: art reveals being
Art rejects bourgeois religion and empty ritual observation

15. Art and education or manipulation:
Art as play: [anthropological foundation/justification] elemental, free impulse, repeated movement, no goal, leeway, self-motion is basic to human nature; self-representation, human impose self-discipline and order when playing, reason set rules with no ultimate purpose (23)

Relation between work of art and audience is a kind of free play of the imagination and “aesthetic nondifferentiation” done without practical purpose but which reveals something of being in the process (see above, #8)

“we have seen play’s excess to be not only the real ground of our creative production and reception of art, but also the more profound anthropological dimension that bestows permanence. This is the unique character of human play and of the play of art in particular, distinguishing it from all other forms of play in the realm of nature” (47).

Art as symbol: example: Aristophanes’ speech in Symposium
Greeks: recognize something already known (something broken, halves brought back together after a period of time)

“The work of art compels us to recognize this fact. ‘There is no place which fails to see you. You must change your life.’ The peculiar nature of our experience of art lies in the impact by which it overwhelms us…The symbolic does not simply point toward a meaning, but rather allows that meaning to present itself. The symbolic represents meaning”(34).

“the symbol allows us to recognize something…Recognition means knowing something as that with which we are already acquainted…Recognition always implies that we have come to know something more authentically than we were able to do when caught up in our first encounter with it. Recognition elicits the permanent from the transient. It is the proper function of the symbol and of the symbolic content of the language of art in general to accomplish this.

16. Art and ethics: Is the increase in being, unconcealing, etc. either positively good or
else never evil? Could this theory be used by a sophist/used to justify irrational motives, such as Naziism?

17. Art and reason: Accepts Kant’s distinctions and definition of reason

18. Art and emotion: sensuous cognition: a deeper level of perception; festivals unite
people, different foundation for community; not much discussion of any specific emotions, i.e. pride, greed, lust, sloth, envy, anger, gluttony/drunkenness.
Play is pleasant, even necessary to maintain a balanced life, but no theory of emotion

19. Art and psychology: Blank slate/historicist consciousness such as Hegel’s, or a
theory of unchanging aspects of consciousness which is what is recognized and brought back together through symbols? Needs more explanation; non-trivial.

20. Art and truth: art unconceals Being, which would imply it is a way to increase
Being, hence increase truth and meaning. But how can one tell if it is increasing a capacity for good or evil? What is real Being vs. unreal Being?

21. Aesthetic experience vs. all other kinds of experience: (see above)

Does he leave himself open for misunderstanding?
Do modern artists have to work on their souls in order to maintain the ability to create meaningful works of art which reveal being? Or do they focus on the effects of their works on audiences, and from where do they get any notion of what sort of effects they should have on audiences other than whatever comes to mind, or whatever elicits the most extreme response? How can this theory avoid exhibitionism among artists?

Compare to Collingwood as the foundation from which we went through the texts in the first half of the class. Gadamer’s essay brings up the major issues, positions and problems of modern art and modern aesthetics.