Founder: Professor Wolfe Mays

Art as Cognitio Imaginativa: Gadamer on Intuition and Imagination in Kant’s Aesthetic Theory
Daniel L. Tate, Philosophy Department, St. Bonaventure University

Jean-Luc Nancy observes that “[t]he Kantian imagination is indeed the first modern figure … of a faculty of images that is not representative, but presentative, … constitutive or productive of its object … and thus in the end a purveyor of knowledge.”*1 Hans-Georg Gadamer is one of those thinkers drawn to this “modern figure” of the Kantian imagination. His engagement with Kant’s aesthetic theory seeks to retrieve the concepts of intuition and imagination for a hermeneutic understanding of art. According to the argument I elaborate below, Gadamer affirms the autonomy that Kant grants to imagination in the experience of art. However, he holds that Kant’s account of art remains fettered by an epistemological framework that sets intuition and concept in exclusive opposition. In order to retrieve Kant’s insight into the role of imagination in the experience of art, it is necessary to liberate the concept of intuition from the distorting influence of this opposition. Only when art is seen as an “original mode of intuition” that takes place in the work does it become possible to release the radicality of Kant’s definition of art as the presentation of imagination. As I interpret it, the crux of Gadamer’s argument is that the productivity of imagination requires the originality of intuition. At this juncture a new concept of the image emerges, one that conceives it not as a “representation” of something already given, but as a “presentation” of something original. Instead of being a copy that merely duplicates the thing, the image is rather a novel synthesis of intuition created by imagination in which something original comes to presence. The intuitive presence brought forth in the image is, I argue, what provides the basis for reclaiming art’s claim to truth.

In Truth and Method (1960) Gadamer pursues an analysis of the grounding of aesthetics that traces its “subjectivization” back to Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.”*2 Despite this critical appraisal, he concedes that the concept of genius as the presentation of aesthetic ideas marks an important advance over the pure judgment of taste, allowing Kant to overcome “mere formalism” in his understanding art. Moreover, Gadamer acknowledges that the doctrine of aesthetic ideas offers an opening for the retrieval of Kantian aesthetics into a philosophy of art. He even proposes that Kant’s “leading insight” – that the beautiful exerts a binding force even though grasped without a concept – be taken up anew in order to articulate the claim (Anspruch) experienced in the encounter with art.*3 Indeed, this insight expresses nothing less than the claim to truth that seizes us when we find ourselves addressed by the work of art. And while Kant does not ultimately do justice to this claim, Gadamer believes that the discussion of genius and aesthetic ideas contributes to the principal task of aesthetic theory: namely, to provide a legitimation of art and its claim to truth. Nevertheless, it is another twenty years before he returns to this problematic in Kantian aesthetics in order to take up the task that he calls for in Truth and Method. In “Anschauung und Anschaulichkeit” (1980) *4 Gadamer fulfills this task by rethinking the role of intuition and imagination in the experience of art with reference to Kant. My aim in this paper is to reconstruct the argument in that essay by which Gadamer executes the critical appropriation of Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic ideas and thereby justifies the conception of art as a “cognitio imaginativa” *5

1. Sensible Immediacy: Duality of Intuition and Concept

What is most important to Gadamer about Kant’s discussion of art is the priority it grants to imagination over understanding in the experience of the beautiful. According to the Kantian analysis, the experience of beauty achieves a certain “harmony” of the cognitive faculties without a given concept. Being “without a concept” means that the harmony achieved is free or spontaneous rather than determined. In ordinary cognition, where intuitions are subsumed by concepts, understanding rules over imagination. But in the experience of the beautiful, where imagination is released from conceptual constraints, it is the reverse. Gadamer seeks to affirm the autonomy of imagination in Kant’s theory of art while retaining the demand that it be related to the understanding in general. “Now surely the real intention of Kant’s grounding of aesthetics is to dissolve the subordination of art to conceptual knowledge without at the same time eliminating the significant relation of art to conceptual understanding.”*6 In order to reenact this guiding intention he finds it necessary to dismantle the abstract opposition between intuition and conception that obscures Kant’s insight into the creativity of imagination and distorts his doctrine of aesthetic ideas. An appropriate account of imagination and its essential role in art thus requires a reevaluation of intuition that recognizes its originality as a formative process. Hence it is the concept of intuition that provides the pivot upon which Gadamer’s critical appropriation of Kant’s aesthetic theory turns.

According to Gadamer, “the grounding of aesthetics went hand in hand with its delimitation from concepts and conceptual knowledge – and with that, the concept of intuition underwent a decisive reevaluation.” *7 This critical delimitation is worked out in the grounding of aesthetics provided by Kant’s Critique of Judgment. For Kant, judgments of taste can never rest on a concept of the beautiful that is given in advance. Hence aesthetic judgments do not involve the application of universal criteria; they are not objectively grounded on certain properties of the object that could be specified in a determinate concept. Instead aesthetic judgments are subjectively grounded on the distinctive feeling of pleasure in the judging subject. Because aesthetic judgments are “reflective” they lack the validity of “determinate” judgments. As a consequence, Kant denies aesthetic judgments any cognitive significance; without deploying a determinate concept, such judgments can supply no knowledge of objects. What justifies aesthetic judgment is that the representation of the beautiful object animates the mind by stimulating the free play of imagination and understanding. “Kant claims that this free play of the cognitive faculties, this animation of our feeling of life occasioned by the sight of the beautiful, implies no conceptual grasp of an objective content and intends no ideal of the object.”*8 Kant thus secures the foundation of aesthetics by delimiting it from concepts and conceptual knowledge. But it is precisely this withdrawal of the concept from the sphere of beauty that requires the role of intuition be conceived anew.

The reevaluation of intuition that this demands can best be gauged if we recall the epistemological framework of the Critique of Pure Reason. There intuition functions as the analytic counterpart to the concept in Kant’s account of knowledge and its two-fold root in sensibility and understanding. According to Kantian doctrine, something can be “given” to finite human beings only through space and time, the a priori forms of sensible intuition. However, something can be recognized – and therefore known – only by virtue of the pure concepts of the understanding which supply the manifold of intuition with the unity proper to objects. Cognition is thus a matter of unifying or “synthesizing” a manifold of intuition by the application of an appropriate concept. Judgment explicitly serves as the model here inasmuch as knowledge consists in subsuming the sensuous particular under the universality of the concept. But while Kant’s theory provides a corrective to rationalist metaphysics by tying finite intuition to the sensible given in perception, it also legitimates the notion of “intellectual intuition” that belongs to the “infinite intellect” denied human beings. The unus intuitus is thereby instated as the ideal of theoretical knowledge. What is given in an intellectual intuition is not mediated by concepts but is rather “present” all at once. Because the mode of givenness here is intellectual rather than sensible, the infinite intellect does not depend on the understanding and its concepts but has the capacity “to see into being” (“ins Sein zu schauen”) the thoughts that it thinks.*9 The concept of intuition is thus formed according to a model which reinforces its exclusive opposition to conception. It is precisely this model that distorts the role of intuition in the experience of art.

What Gadamer finds so problematic here is the characterization of immediate givenness that defines intuition and marks its opposition to conception. “In fact,” he writes, “as the immediacy of sensible or intellectual givenness …, intuition is a pure *10 limiting concept, an abstraction from the mediations through which the human orientation in the world is achieved.”*11 As long as intellectual intuition is treated as a “critical concept” that simply marks the limits of the human mind and its cognitive faculties, Gadamer seems to have no quarrel. It is only where intellectual intuition is treated less critically as positive capacity (albeit unavailable to finite human beings) for unmediated access to “the real ground of nature” that he finds it unacceptable. So there is no doubt that Gadamer would refuse Schelling’s provocative recourse to intellectual intuition as the capacity to both produce and know the Absolute. And he would most certainly reject Schelling’s appeal to revelatory role of art as the privileged site of the appearance of the Absolute “for us.” The concept of intuition that Gadamer seeks to reclaim for art thus has nothing to do with Schelling’s notion of “aesthetic intuition” in which the contradictions of subject and object, history and nature, freedom and necessity are reconciled in the artistic work of genius that likewise reconciles conscious and unconscious production.*12 If Gadamer draws on Kant’s account of intuition and imagination for his understanding of art this is, in part, to maintain a critical distance from the excesses of idealist aesthetics in its overestimation of both intuition (Schelling) and concept (Hegel).

However, the epistemological concept of intuition is not just inadequate to our experience of art; it even falsifies our understanding of sense perception. For Gadamer, “our perception is never a simple reflection of what is given to the senses.”*13 Instead we typically relate the sensory particular to something universal; using Aristotle’s example, we see something white and recognize it as a man. Perception, then, is not adequately understood merely as the response to a stimulus for it always involves understanding something as something. “All understand-as is an articulation of what is there, in that it looks-away- from, looks-at, sees-together-as.”*14 Contrary to Kant’s epistemological account, what is “given” in perception is not just some indeterminate manifold of sense that must be subsumed under a concept. “We live in the logos, and the logos, [that is,] the linguistic dimension of human being-in-the-world, fulfills itself by making something visible so that the other sees it.”*15 The immediate givenness of intuition is, as he says of “pure perception,” an “inadmissible abstraction.”*16 Recognition of this abstraction enables us to transcend the contrast of sensible and intellectual intuition as well as the opposition between intuition and concept on which it is based. Once the requirement of immediacy is rejected, intuition need not be confined to the sensible given in perception. Hence, Gadamer concludes, “the concept of intuition is not really defined by its relation to the sensible.” *17

Gadamer carries this conclusion over to art as well.*18 “It is not the immediacy of sensible givenness that provides the basis of the fine arts, but rather what Kant calls the ‘presentation of the imagination’ ….”*19 Gadamer appeals to the Kantian imagination, first, because it suggests a concept of intuition that does not endorse the dogma of immediate givenness. Instead it emphasizes the power of imagination to synthesize intuitions and, in the case of art, to do so in novel combinations quite independent of a given object. As I argue below, this concept of intuition as a “formative process” is decisive for Gadamer’s attempt to reconstruct intuition as the function of imagination. Freed from the requirement of sensible immediacy, the originality of intuition is liberated by its realignment with the productivity of imagination. This involves the spectator as well who is engaged by the work and participates in the formative process, thereby confirming Gadamer’s claim that “intuition plays the constitutive role whenever the work of art addresses us.”*20 Gadamer appeals to the Kantian imagination, second, because it invokes an experience of the beautiful in art that is not governed by the understanding and its concepts. Instead it emphasizes the autonomy of imagination in relation to the faculty of understanding. By unifying the manifold of intuition into a synthetic whole the work of art communicates a totality of sense that conveys meaning, but without deploying concepts. Now it becomes possible to speak of the work of art as an “invitation to intuition” that provokes much thought but without allowing its meaning to be fully rendered in determinate concepts. Thus the re-evaluation of intuition is central to Gadamer’s re-appropriation of the Kantian imagination. Further, the originality of intuition this entails is crucial to his retrieval of Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic ideas for a hermeneutic account of the experience of art.

2. Aesthetic Ideas: Art as the Presentation of Imagination

Gadamer’s effort to reevaluate the concept of intuition in the theory of art seeks to enlist rather than dismiss Kant. Consequently, his reading of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” does not so much dispute Kant as it pursues (more rigorously and radically) the dismantling already at work in his argument – especially where it is governed by the claim that the beautiful pleases “without a concept.” As we know, the “disinterested” quality of this pleasure indicates that our experience of the object is “free” of any interest in its existence. This requirement guarantees that the sheer presentation of the object is what engages us and not its value for other purposes. Thus the pleasure one takes in the beautiful object cannot be circumscribed by any concept that would determine it. Further, one’s pleasure in the beautiful is universally communicable. It makes a claim to validity that is not merely subjective, even if that validity has no objective ground. For while the aesthetic judgment behaves as if it were objective, as if it possessed a universal validity grounded in a concept of the object, its universality has instead a subjective ground. When something pleases me in the appropriate way, I judge that it “is” beautiful. But the binding validity of this judgment consists in the claim it makes on the agreement of everyone “without a concept.” Moreover, the experience of the beautiful exhibits “purposiveness without purpose” which means that the aesthetic judgment cannot be based on the realization of a concept of the object’s purpose. Nevertheless, Kant argues, our pleasure in the beautiful must be purposive with respect to our cognitive faculties; that is, the experience must enliven them. Hence this distinctive pleasure derives from the harmony of the cognitive faculties achieved through a free play of imagination and understanding that is not determined by a given concept.

Despite this dominant line of argument Kant has difficulty disentangling his emerging insights about art and beauty from the epistemological dichotomy of intuition and concept. The debilitating effects of this dichotomy for Kant’s understanding of art are evident in the series of dualities that organize Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful,” beginning with the distinction between free and dependent beauty, running through the distinction between pure and ideal beauties, and culminating in the distinction between intellectual and empirical interest in the beautiful.*21 In Truth and Method Gadamer shows how these dualities preclude Kant from providing a satisfactory account of art. In particular, he shows that the notion of “free beauty” is inadequate to account for our experience of art. According to this doctrine the beautiful in art can only be “free” where the represented object remains unrelated to any concept of the object’s purpose, as in the case of ornament. Here the claim that the beautiful pleases without concept is construed in a way that completely segregates art from concept. Gadamer finds this to be a “particularly dangerous doctrine” insofar as it implies that art can be truly beautiful only on condition that it sacrifice any meaningful content.*22 The distortions these dualities inflict upon his account of art come to head at the very point where Kant’s discussion would seem to overcome the opposition that mobilizes them – namely, with his doctrine of aesthetic ideas. It is not surprising, then, that Gadamer’s critical appropriation of Kantian aesthetic theory turns to this doctrine. However, he recognizes that “it is difficult for Kant, without claiming the superiority of the concept, to hold on to his leading insight that the beautiful is grasped without a concept and yet at the same time has binding force.” *23  This indicates Gadamer’s own goal: to recover Kant’s insight into art as the presentation of aesthetic ideas, but without reinstating the superiority of the concept.

Only with the introduction of genius and aesthetic ideas does Kant’s analysis first turn to art in a way that is not viewed exclusively from the standpoint of taste. Kant argues that genius “inspires” works of fine art giving them “spirit,” which he identifies as the animating principle of the mind that genius imparts through its works. As manifest in art, Kant holds that spirit is “nothing but the ability to exhibit aesthetic ideas.” He further defines the aesthetic idea as “a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it.”*24 The aesthetic idea is thus conceived as a counterpart to the rational idea to which nothing sensible or imagined can be adequate. By deliberate contrast the aesthetic idea offers a synthesis of intuition to which no concept can be adequate. Within the framework of Kant’s critical philosophy the term “aesthetic idea” no doubt has a paradoxical ring. As a concept of reason, the “idea” transcends sensibility and yet as “aesthetic” it points to sensible intuition.*25 The paradox conjured by the presentation of aesthetic ideas lies in the fact that sensibility is transcended – by means of sensible intuition!*26 In art the productive imagination provides a novel synthesis of intuitions to which the artist gives form in the work. The presentation of an aesthetic idea thereby achieved offers a unity of intuition in imagination that invites – and yet outstrips – conceptual comprehension.

However, Kant’s way of expressing this point seems to reinstate the superiority of the concept. This is especially evident where he suggests that the aesthetic idea embodied in works of genius strives to provide the intuitive presentation of a concept.*27 He writes, for instance, that the aesthetic idea “gives unbounded expansion to the concept itself” and that it “is a presentation that makes us add to a concept the thought of much that is ineffable ….”*28  Such statements tend to reinforce the view that the aesthetic idea is the exhibition of a given concept in imagination.*29 As Jay Bernstein acutely notes, with this doctrine Kant “reiterates the standard comprehension of concept and intuition at the very moment it is being thrown into question.”*30 Gadamer echoes this objection when he warns that the concept of the aesthetic idea is “much too oriented toward its opposite the rational idea” and “remains much too bound to the concept of an object which the [aesthetic] idea is said to enlarge.” Here we can see how the dichotomy of intuition and concept insinuates itself into Kant’s account even at this most decisive point. “The traditional superiority of the rational concept over the inexponible artistic representation is so strong that even with Kant there arises the false appearance that the concept has precedence over the aesthetic idea, whereas it is not at all the understanding, but the imagination that takes the lead among the faculties in play.” *31

Gadamer believes, however, that the presentation of aesthetic ideas need not be bound to the given concept. Instead, he proposes an interpretation of the aesthetic idea as “the indeterminate anticipation of sense” that makes a work of art significant for us even though its meaning can never be fully recuperated by conceptual thought. “Although an idea is not a concept, it is nevertheless something in whose direction we must look, even if no determinate concept of an object is presented through the idea.” But if the aesthetic idea is not a concept, then “all talk about the ‘enlarging’ of a given concept becomes meaningless.”*32  Here it becomes possible to surpass the limits imposed by the dichotomy of intuition and concept in the theory of art. Gadamer even detects a subtle gesture in the Kantian text that suggests a departure from the otherwise dominant explication of the presentation of aesthetic ideas as the exhibition of a given concept. Specifically, he cites a remark where Kant states that genius consists in the capacity “to apprehend the imagination’s rapidly passing play and to unify it in a concept that can be communicated without the constraint of rules (a concept that on that very account is original, while at the same time it reveals a new rule …).”*33 Emphasizing the parenthetical proviso in this passage, Gadamer notes that “the concept is actually not ‘given,’ but is ‘original.’” With the aesthetic idea the “concept” is not given in advance, but is rather built up through the formative process of intuition. Hence the unity of intuition is accomplished without a concept. In other words, what Kant (mis)identifies as a concept is really a mode of intuition that results from the productivity of imagination. “This ‘concept’ is ultimately the unity of intuition itself, an original mode of intuition that the work of art discloses.” *34

This “unity of intuition” is the work of imagination – not the understanding. In art, Gadamer says, “imagination produces inner intuition without presupposing the determinacy of a given concept.”*35 The image supplies the relevant unity by providing a synthesis of intuitions produced by the imagination without recourse to the understanding and its concepts. It is this unity of imagination that allows the work of art to speak us in a significant and definite way. According to Gadamer, “the wonderful and mysterious thing about art is that this definiteness is by no means a fetter for our mind, but in fact opens room for play, for the free play of our faculties.”*36 Indeed, he finds this to be an apt description of the play with appearance that takes place in our encounter with art. In art the demand for unity characteristic of understanding does not (ideally) inhibit the spontaneous production of imagination.*37 Engaged by the work of art, imagination is not so much constrained by the concepts put in play as it is stimulated by them. In the encounter with art imagination is released into “a field of play where the understanding’s desire for unity does not so much confine it as suggest incitements to play.”*38 Thus the productivity of imagination is richest not when it is merely free, but rather when it seeks a “free harmony” with the understanding. Explicitly referencing Kant, he writes that “it is only in the presence of the particular work that concepts ‘come to reverberate’ [‘in Anschlag gebracht’].” Originating from the musical discourse of the eighteenth century, this phrase refers to the special effect of suspended reverberation created by the clavichord. Here it describes the creative tension between image and concept in the experience of art. For “Kant obviously means that the concept functions as a kind of sounding board capable of articulating the free play of imagination.” *39

 

By affirming the play of image and concept in the experience of art Gadamer holds Kant to a more consistent view of the aesthetic idea as an intuitive presentation that is not the mere exhibition of a concept. Indeed it is here that Gadamer sees “the real task of carrying Kant’s philosophical achievement further and liberating his insight from the fetters of the opposition of intuition and concept.”.*40  Released from the distortions of this opposition, it becomes possible to locate the proper role of intuition and imagination in the experience of art, a role obscured by the dualities that frame Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful.” The beautiful in art cannot be “free” of any relation to conceptual understanding and still have significant content. Consequently, the concept of free beauty is not what Kant intends when he speaks of the experience of beauty in art as the free play of the cognitive faculties. Nor can the beautiful in art be understood as “dependent” on a determining concept, for that would restrict imagination to exemplifying a given concept, thereby sacrificing the “free play” of image and concept. Gadamer thus follows Kant by affirming both that the productivity of imagination “is not bound by the limits of a given concept” and that the freedom of imagination is nonetheless bound by the requirement that it “harmonize with the understanding in general.” By retrieving the notion art as the presentation of aesthetic ideas Gadamer reenacts the guiding intention of Kantian aesthetic theory – namely, to dissolve art’s subordination to conceptual knowledge without eliminating its meaningful relation to conceptual thought. In his view, however, this reenactment demands a more radical reevaluation of the concept of intuition.

3. Formative Process: Intuition as a Function of Imagination

Gadamer maintains that intuition remains the proper element of art. “In art,” he asserts, “intuition (Anschauung) is not a secondary moment.” *41 Because it seeks to make visible, to “show” (rather than “say”) what it is about, art is primarily “intuitive” (“anschaulich”); that is, it aims at “visuality” (“Anschaulichkeit”).*42 As I interpret it, Gadamer’s task is to reaffirm the primacy of Anschauung in art by reconstructing intuition as a function of imagination. I argue that this requires the re-conception of both intuition and imagination as those are deployed in Kantian aesthetic theory. On the one hand, intuition must no longer be construed (as it is by Kant) in terms of immediate givenness. Once released from this requirement it becomes possible to reconstruct intuition as a mode of the productive imagination. With productive imagination the “act of intuiting is not limited by any determinate object given in intuition.” *43 Such a reconstruction is implied where the active power of imagination to form novel combinations of intuition is not constrained by what is given in perception. Re-conceived as a function of the productive imagination, intuition is no longer defined by the immediacy of sensible givenness and can therefore be re-defined as the formative process of intuition. “It is not the immediacy of sensible givenness that provides the basis for all the arts,” Gadamer asserts, “but rather what Kant calls the ‘presentation of the imagination,’ the formative process of intuition together with resulting formed intuition.”*44 Only when re-conceived as a mode of imagination can intuition take its proper place in the philosophy of art.

Gadamer reminds us that Kant does not restrict the faculty of imagination to its function in theoretical knowledge where finite intuition is tied to the sensible given in perception. In fact, this possibility is already broached in the Critique of Pure Reason where imagination is conceived as the capacity to have an “intuition (representation) even without the presence of the object.”*45  But only in the Critique of Judgment does Kant exploit the active capacity of imagination to form intuitions in the absence of a determining concept as well. Where the beautiful pleases without concept, the play of imagination is not subordinated to the understanding and its concepts. Hence the unity of intuition that we encounter in the experience of art is not determined by any concept. It is the capacity of the productive imagination to “synthesize” intuitions apart from any concept that constitutes its crucial contribution to the experience of art. Nancy appeals to the meaning of the German word “Einbildung” as a unifying force, as a “bringing-into-the-one” that forms the image (Bild). However, he insists that this “one” is not a unity that would be opposed to a multiplicity. Instead “it is the possibility that anything at all, including something multiple or fluid, may come to presence.”*46  For Gadamer, the “living unity” of the work of art is what allows something to present itself so that it may be identified and understood.*47

Yet according to its Kantian conception, imagination still remains bound to the framework of knowledge and the function of representation within which it is first articulated. But this conception is no longer adequate where imagination is (re)conceived as a faculty of images that is presentative rather than representative. Nancy is more explicit than Gadamer on this decisive point: “Imagination is not the faculty of representing something in its absence; it is the force that draws the form of presence out of absence: that is to say, the force of ‘self-presenting.’” *48

No longer bound to the sensible immediacy of the given object, Anschauung is reconceived as a formative process that yields novel syntheses of intuition. No longer bound to the determining rule of the given concept, Einbildung is reconceived as an active power to form intuitions into a unified image. As Gadamer tersely reports, “‘Intuition’ here means nothing but a ‘presentation of imagination’.” *49

By this equation he effectively erases any difference between the productive capacity of imagination and the formative process of intuition. Similarly, any distinction between the unified image and the formed intuition disappears. When he describes the power of imagination as “the human capacity of building images” this is nothing other than the capacity exercised in forming intuitions.*50 The productive imagination is thus an “act of intuition” that “builds up something so that it ‘stands’ for a while.” *51 By the same token, what is “built up” by this formative process of imagination is just the image itself as the synthesis of inner intuitions. This indicates the temporal dimension that belongs to the concept of intuition. Even for Kant, the synthesis of imagination which constitutes the unity of “apprehension” (in the Critique of Pure Reason) proceeds successively. Reconceived as a mode of productive imagination, “intuition itself is something that first has to be formed through the process of intuition, a process that implies a certain progression from one thing to another.” Here the temporality of Anschauung receives a new emphasis. As Gadamer observes, “we cannot miss the temporal component of tarrying and dwelling, which our absorption in the act of intuition implies.”*52 Likewise, there is a temporal structure that belongs to the image. As an “internally structured unity,” the image exhibits its own “autonomous temporality” (“Eigenzeit”) to which the viewer must submit.

In order to describe the play of imagination in the experience of art Gadamer draws upon the language of German mysticism and its daring new word “Anbild.” He deploys this term precisely because it “captures both the image (Bild) and the viewing of it.” The process of image formation takes place between the viewer and the artwork; that is, the image is formed through their cooperative activity. In fact, Gadamer consistently emphasizes the role of the spectator in his account of art. More than just an observer the spectator is a participant, one who literally “takes part” in what is taking place.*54 The spectator actively engages the work, synthesizing the intuitions into a structured whole that “intends” something. As a “synthetic act” Gadamer often characterizes this formative process as a “reading” in which what is read is formed through the very process of reading it. This is true of painting as well as poetry. We “read” a picture like a text. Reading, however, is more than just following the words and sentences or merely looking at the colors and shapes. It means “performing a constant hermeneutic movement guided by the anticipation of the whole” that is “fulfilled by the individual in the realization of the total sense.”*55 Anbild expresses this aspect inasmuch as it indicates that “we both elicit the image from things and imaginatively project the image into things in one and the same process.”*56 What is built up through this cooperative interaction – or play – between spectator and work is just the image itself as that emerges from the formation process of imagination. Conceiving intuition as a presentation of imagination involves the viewer as one who is actively engaged in the process of image-formation. “Above all, intuition plays a constitutive role whenever the work of art addresses us.”*57 This becomes decisive for the hermeneutic account of the experience of art where “we always find ourselves held between the pure aspect of visibility presented to the viewer by the Anbild … and the meaning that our understanding dimly senses in the work of art.” *58

Appropriating intuition to imagination, Gadamer affirms the “intuitive quality” (Anschaulichkeit) of the image formed through the presentation of imagination. As John Sallis asserts, “it belongs to the character of the image to be intuitive (anschaulich),” which means that “it appears as such before our eyes, … inviting one to follow its lead and be shown something.”*60 The image is intuitive precisely because it lets something be shown. For Gadamer too Anschauung is a kind of showing in which something is made present such that “‘we literally see it before us.’” Thus the Anschaulichkeit of the image marks the very appearance of something, the original, in and through it. This is true of linguistic as well as pictorial art. Gadamer observes, for example, that one ordinarily praises the “vividness” (“Anschaulichkeit”) of verbal descriptions, particularly narratives, insofar as they enable us to “vividly imagine” what is so described. “Vividness is here an authentic presence of that which is narrated."*61 But the vividness of literary narrative cannot be measured by its reproductive fidelity; rather it invites the imagination of the reader to form intuitions. So the “authentic presence” achieved there is only brought about through the imagination of the reader or listener who is engaged by the narrative. Hence we praise the vividness of such presentation where it “sets our intuitive capacities in motion.” What is anschaulich is the “singular presence” achieved where one “tarries” with the work so that something “comes forth.” Anschaulichkeit thus characterizes the presence of what is presented in the work of art to the spectator.

By recasting imagination in terms of intuition, Gadamer reconceives Einbildung as the active capacity to synthesize intuitions into a unified image. By realigning intuition with imagination, he redefines Anschauung as a formative process which produces a formed image that brings something to presence. Anschaulichkeit, in turn, is now understood as the very presence of what comes to presence there by virtue of the spectator’s participation. What Kant calls the presentation of imagination, Gadamer thus reinterprets as an event of self-presentation that takes place in the image; by the same token, the image is reinterpreted as the site of such presencing by which we “hold something in our hesitant stay.” Gadamer thereby appropriates the role of intuition and imagination in Kant’s aesthetic theory to his hermeneutic understanding of the artwork as an ontological event.

4. Cognitio Imaginativa: Art’s Claim to Truth

Having reconceived the role of intuition in the experience of art as a formative process and realigned it as a function of productive imagination, Gadamer now seeks to retrieve the truth claim which Kant withholds from art. This involves revisiting the definition of art as the presentation of aesthetic ideas. For Kant, it is definitive of aesthetic ideas that their presentation outstrips conceptual determination. Indeed, the autonomy of imagination in art is guaranted by the “inexponiblity” of the aesthetic idea, the presentation of which offers a “fullness of intuition” (“Anschauungsfülle”) that cannot be exhaustively rendered by concepts.*62 This allows him to stress that the presentation of aesthetic ideas invites and expands thought, thereby animating our mental faculties. But it also explains why Kant denies that art conveys knowledge. As a presentation of imagination, an aesthetic idea can never yield knowledge precisely because it offers a unity of intuition for which no adequate concept can be found. Here Gadamer’s appropriation of Kant’s doctrine arrives at a dilemma. On the one hand, he endorses Kant’s argument privileging imagination over understanding and affirms art’s resistance to conceptual determination. (He is adamant that the meaning encountered in art is profoundly misconstrued if viewed as fully redeemable by conceptual thought. *63) On the other hand, he also seeks to reassert the relation of art to knowledge that Kant refuses to grant art. (He declares that the claim of the beautiful in art to more than merely subjective validity is tantamount to a truth claim. *64) I hold that Gadamer negotiates this dilemma by reinterpreting the inexponiblity of aesthetic ideas in terms of the originality of intuition and the latter in terms of the creativity of imagination. It is at this juncture that Gadamer decisively departs from Kant – that is, where the originality of intuition provides a legitimate form of knowledge and the productivity of imagination offers an independent source of truth.

According to my reconstruction of his argument, Gadamer conceives the image as a unity of intuition which offers a “totality of sense” that brings it in relation to the understanding and its concepts. However, the unity of intuition is not supplied by reference to a given concept but is rather originally formed by imagination. Yet it is by virtue of the formed image that something comes to stand in the work such that art invites thought. In fact, art invites thought wherever “the image built up in the inner act of intuiting lets us look out beyond everything that is given in experience.” *65 The unity of intuition constituted through the viewer’s engagement of the work draws the experience of art into the orbit of language and its concepts, even if it cannot be held fast there. The intuitions formed by imagination are thus images offering what I am tempted to call “intimations of meaning” that, as Kant says, “give rise to thought.” Although Gadamer does not sufficiently emphasize the point, what is at stake is the integrity of the image. At issue is a way of comprehending the image that does not make it depend for its meaning (or truth) on language and its concepts. “In the image,” Nancy says, “there is a sense that is non-signifying but not insignificant.” *66 So when Gadamer characterizes art as “statement” or “expression” (“Aussage”) I believe he means that art is a non-linguistic “showing” whose sense does not belong to the order of signification. The work of art is not just a sensuous particular; it is a synthetic whole that points beyond what is immediately given towards meaning, spirit. Thus “in any encounter with art, it is not the particular, but 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.” *67

On this view there is more to the work of art than being the mere bearer of an indeterminate meaning and this “more” consists in its very existence as a work. “The fact that it exists, its facticity, represents an insurmountable resistance against any superior presumption that we can make sense of it all.” *68 By bringing something to stand in a unified image, the work of art achieves a presentation that can only be encountered in the singularity of this work. “Whatever comes to speak to us through this presentation cannot be grasped or even come to be ‘there’ for us in any other way.” *69 The work of art does not simply point toward meaning; rather that meaning is made present there in the work itself. *70 This accounts for the ambiguity we encounter in the work of art. The work points our understanding in a certain direction, even if the meaning it reveals is simultaneously withdrawn into the work itself. “The unity of form,” Gadamer writes “is sensuously present, and to that extent cannot be reduced to the mere intention of meaning. But even this presence contains an intentional element that points toward an indeterminate dimension of possible fulfillments.” *71 Insofar as the artwork gestures toward an “indeterminate dimension” that can only be fulfilled “in a unique intuitive fashion” it transcends any specific meaning intention that could be explicitly fulfilled. It is the “open dimension of indeterminacy” created by the work of art that renders it “conceptually inexhaustible.” *72 The resistance of art to conceptual determination thus lies in its very being as a work that intimates (rather than intends) meaning.

On this basis Gadamer appropriates the play of imagination into his own account of the artwork as “a unique manifestation of truth.” *73 But this is possible only because – contra Kant – Gadamer accepts the productivity of imagination as a source of truth. He supports this claim by (re)conceiving Anschauung as a formative process that confirms the originality of intuition. The Anschaulichkeit of art is now interpreted as the evocation of a singular presence that constitutes the work’s claim to truth. At this point my reconstruction of Gadamer’s argument turns to reconsider the role of intuition in the phenomenological conception of truth. For we find that he specifically draws on Husserl’s famous analyses according to which intuition provides the fulfillment of those intentions in which something is merely meant. In acts where one intends something in its absence, Husserl refers to “empty” intentions – that is, of intentions that lack intuitive givenness. Such intentions are “filled” when one encounters the thing intended in its “bodily presence.” Intentional fulfillment takes place as the coincidence of what is intuitively given (“in the flesh”) with what is emptily intended. Where the intuited coincides with the meant we have the phenomenological experience of truth. Husserl’s account enables Gadamer to underscore the bond between intuition, presence, and truth in the experience of art. Moreover, it allows him to capitalize on Heidegger’s early insight that this coincidence marks the emergence from absence into presence. According to the Heideggerian idiom that he adopts, something comes to presence in our encounter with the work of art. Where this happens Gadamer, like Heidegger, speaks of a revealing-concealing event of truth that takes place in the work of art. *75

However, by referring the moment of intuition to the activity of imagination Gadamer importantly modifies the phenomenological account. It is crucial in his view that intuitive fulfillment is not just given in perception, but is also produced in the encounter with art as a presentation of imagination. In this way, as we have seen, Gadamer displaces the priority that Husserl still grants to perception. Insofar as imagination accomplishes the presence of what is intended, it too provides an experience of truth. Properly understood, then, intuition provides the genuine basis for the arts and their claim to truth. Indeed, the work of art is a presentation of imagination that is properly received as an invitation to intuition.*76 Speaking of literature he says: “It is this capacity of the ‘art’ of language to arouse intuitions in the imagination that establishes the linguistic work of art in its own right makes of it a ‘work’ – like a kind of self-giving intuition [selbstgebende Anschauung] ….” *77 In this passage Gadamer deliberately alters the concept of intuition in the Husserlian analysis of intentionality sketched above. By characterizing the artwork as a “self-giving intuition” he is insisting on the intuitive self-givenness of imagination that Husserl tends to reserve for perception as the sole mode of “givenness in person.” From Husserl’s perspective the absence of an object that could give itself in imagination constitutes a decisive objection since there would be no “self” to its self-givenness. But what Husserl sees as a weakness, Gadamer views as a strength, precisely because it acknowledges that, in the presentation of imagination, intuition is not restricted to a given object. Instead intuition is original where imagination is productive.

Because the work of art evokes the intuitive presence by means of which its’ indeterminate meaning intention would be fulfilled, Gadamer also refers to the work as “self-fulfilling” (“Selbsterfüllung”). This has a two-fold implication for art. First, to say the work is self-fulfilling implies its autonomy. This means that the intuitive fulfillment achieved is not validated by reference to anything outside the work itself. Instead, by arousing intuitions in the reader’s (or viewer’s) imagination, the work produces its own intentional fulfillment. Referring to The Brothers Karamozov, Gadamer recalls the scene where Smerdjakov falls down the staircase. “Not one of us has exactly the same image of it and yet we all believe we see it quite vividly. It would be absurd to ask what the staircase ‘intended’ by Dostoevsky really looked like. … [Nevertheless,] the writer succeeds in rousing the imagination of every reader to construct an image [of it] ….” The reader does not seek confirmation of this construction by appealing to any facts or by further experience. Here we see the limits of an intentional analysis of art’s truth. For the artwork is not strictly an “empty” intention which is to be “filled” by something beyond the work; rather the work invites the very intuition by which it fulfills itself. Second, to say that the work is self-fulfilling implies its truth. It means that what is made present in the work of art “bears witness to itself and does not admit anything that might verify it.” Because it evokes intuition Gadamer declares that poetry accomplishes “the highest fulfillment of that revealing which is the achievement of all speech.” It is in the poetic word that language alone discloses what is there to be seen, thereby producing its own fulfillment. But this applies to all art as a presentation of imagination. Art is therefore true where it evokes the singular presence by which it achieves the intuitive fulfillment that marks it as a work. What he says of poetry thus pertains to art as such: “[the work] does not intend something, but rather is the existence of what it intends.” *78

The claim to truth that Gadamer seeks to reassert for art thus hinges on the intuitive self-givenness of the work as a presentation of imagination. There is a unique manifestation of truth in the artwork insofar as the unity of intuition that it invites us as viewers (or readers) to construct provokes us to produce the fulfilling intuition by which something comes to presence there. What is distinctive about this truth, however, is the disclosure of world that takes place in the work of art. As a self-fulfilling intuition we are not directed to look beyond the work for its confirmation. This implies that the work of art suspends any direct reference to the outside world. As Gadamer observes, the work of art “is capable of canceling or forgetting any reference to reality that discourse normally has.” *79 By virtue of canceling such reference the artwork is able to render the world intuitively present. According to Paul Ricoeur, “the effacement of descriptive reference” provides the “negative condition” for releasing a “more radical power of reference” to our being-in-the-world.*80 We imaginatively construct the world of the work from the work itself. This is the basis for Gadamer’s characterization of art as “an Anschauung, indeed, as a Weltanschauung” – literally, an intuition of the world.*81 The world, the very familiarity of which renders it (for the most part) concealed and forgotten, is made anschaulich – that is, “intuitively visible” – to us in art. As Gadamer says, “the ‘inner intuition’ in play here brings the world – and not just the objects in it – to intuition.” *82 Here we find a “knowing” appropriate to the experience of art that can justify its own claim to truth over and against scientific knowledge. Indeed, “prior to all conceptual-scientific knowledge, the way in which we look upon the world, and upon our whole being-in-the-world, takes shape in art.” *83 The knowledge in question concerns the limits of our finite being in the world. Here intuition and imagination are joined in a theory of art that justifies the work’s claim to truth. In contrast to Kant’s refusal of knowledge to art, but with the aid of his insight into the productivity of imagination, Gadamer thus retrieves the originality of intuition for an account of art as a cognitio imaginativa.

1 - Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, tr. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 81.
2 - Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd revised ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1989), 37-49. Hermeneutik I: Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, Gesammelte Werke Band 1 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1986), 48-61.
3 - Truth and Method, 46; Wahrheit und Methode, 57.
4 - Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Intuition and Vividness,” trans. Dan Tate in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 157-170. (Nicholas Walker is the translator of the other essays collected in this volume.) Ästhetik und Poetik I: Kunst als Aussage, Gesammelte Werke Band 8 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1991), 189-205.
5 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 161; Kunst als Aussage, 192.
6 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 164; Kunst als Aussage, 196.
7 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 157; Kunst als Aussage, 189.
8 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 96; Kunst als Aussage, 29.
9 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 157; Kunst als Aussage, 189. Gadamer therefore claims that Kant’s critical turn against eighteenth century rationalism represents a return to the Platonic contrast of sensible and intelligible intuition, of aisthesis and noesis. He holds that this Platonic heritage exerts its influence wherever the concept of Anschauung is extended from perception to thought where it is treated critically as intellectual intuition.
10 - F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath, intro. Michael Vater (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 231.
11 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 160; Kunst als Aussage, 191.
12 - Although Gadamer does not address Schelling’s concept of “aesthetic intuition” it seems to me appropriate to do so even if only in passing, especially in this context. Peter Bürger provides a critical discussion of Schelling and idealist aesthetics from a standpoint influenced by Adorno and critical theory. See his Zur Kritik der idealistischen Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 17-25.
13 - Truth and Method, 78; Wahrheit und Methode, 96.
14 - Truth and Method, 79; Wahrheit und Methode, 96.
15 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 160; Kunst als Aussage, 192. Gadamer enlists Aristotle in his opposition to the duality of intuition and concept installed by Kantian epistemology. For Aristotle, he notes, aisthesis tends toward the universal such that what we perceive is a man and not merely “something white.” Nor, he adds, can Aristotle speak of nous as having a distinct ontological status because the “noetic grasp” of principles does not occur in its own right, but only by virtue of the mediations in human thought.
16 - Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California), 120.
17 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 160; Kunst als Aussage, 192. Gadamer even asserts that modern thought has gone astray by taking sensible givenness as its point of departure.
18 - In fact, this opposition of intuition and concept is especially problematic with respect to art. According to this opposition, intuition lacks (significant) form and meaning while conceptuality lacks (sensible) givenness and materiality. In order to do justice to the role of intuition in art it is necessary to question this rigid opposition. In art the role of intuition is distinctive because it transgresses the epistemological boundary separating it from the concept. As a sensible configuration (Sinngebilde), the work of art is simultaneously sensuous and significant; it points beyond its sensuous particularity toward a universality of meaning. Without recourse to concepts, the elements of the work are unified into a synthetic whole that articulates a significant content. Solely by virtue of its “configuration” (“Gebilde”) the artwork accomplishes a synthesis of a manifold of intuitions, thereby providing a “unity of form” (“Gestalteinheit”) that is “sensuously present” (“sinngefällige Präsenz”). (Relevance of the Beautiful, 70; Kunst als Aussage, 21) In the work of art, then, we find that intuition appropriates the functions otherwise accorded to the concept: it constitutes a singular whole, thus achieving unity – but without subordinating the sensuous particular to the universality of the concept; it communicates a totality of sense, thus conveying meaning – but without relying on the semantic resources of language and concepts. In the artwork the moment of intuition thus includes form as well as content, unity as well as manifold, particularity as well as universality, meaning as well as materiality. The epistemological opposition of intuition and concept is clearly inappropriate to the work of art.
19 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 160; Kunst als Aussage, 192.
20 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 163; Kunst als Aussage, 195.
21 - J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park; Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 31. Bernstein also includes Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime within the series of dualities that disfigure the Kantian account. (Cf. n. #26)
22 - However, Gadamer also maintains that Kant does not finally privilege free over dependent beauty in his account of art. He sees this already in section 17 where Kant articulates an ideal of beauty which, he holds, applies only for the human form because it alone is capable of a beauty fixed by the concept of an end. The end in question, of course, is the moral vocation of humanity. There is an ideal of beauty for the human form just because it is a “direct expression of the moral” that engages our intellectual interest. Here our intellectual interest in the beautiful is not at odds with our aesthetic pleasure, but rather one with it. Hence the ideal of beauty can never be the subject of a pure judgment of taste. By arousing our interest, the ideal of beauty reintroduces the relationship between artistic representation and the concept that seemed banished by the doctrine of free beauty. “Kant’s demonstration that the beautiful pleases without concept does not gainsay the fact that only the beautiful thing that speaks meaningfully to us evokes our total interest.” Here, Gadamer claims, we find the appropriate basis for art. Here, I would argue, Gadamer finds that Kant’s own account abandons the opposition of intuition and concept.
23 - Gadamer, Truth and Method, 46; Wahrheit und Methode, 57.
24 - Kant, Critique of Judgment #49, 182. (Kant’s italics.)
25 - Brigitte Scheer, Zur Begründung von Kants Ästhetik und ihrem Korrektiv der ästhetischen Idee (Frankfurt a. M.: Horst Heiderhoff Verlag, 1971), 23.
26 - In art we encounter the self-transcendence of the sensible within the sensible. Here Gadamer sees the possibility of incorporating the sublime into the theory of art. Although the Critique of Judgment treats the sublime as an aesthetic judgment, Gadamer maintains that the experience of sublimity already points beyond the standpoint of taste to that of genius. Further, the interest in our “supersensible vocation” prompted by the experience of the sublime relates to the experience of the beautiful in art inasmuch as the aesthetic idea also transcends the sensible. Of course, Gadamer recognizes that the artwork does not present the formlessness and immeasurability of the natural sublime. But “it is not the mere pleasantness of the ‘form of the object’ that allows us to find the work of art beautiful.” The paradoxical pleasure that we take in the otherwise painful experience of our insignificance and powerlessness is found in our encounter with the beautiful in art as well as in our experience of the sublime in nature. “That the work of art not only pleases but elevates us clearly includes the fact that it excites not only pleasure but displeasure.” Thus the feeling Kant ascribes to the sublime also characterizes the experience of art where imagination produces images that provoke, yet surpass, the capacity of understanding to conceptually determine them. “Is not the intuition to which imagination seeks to elevate itself in the act of intuiting the work of art of a similar immensity (and a similar overwhelming power) insofar as it cannot be expounded by concepts?” (Relevance of the Beautiful, 168-9; Kunst als Aussage, 199-200.)
27 - Douglas Burnham, An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 114.
28 - Kant, Critique of Judgment #49, 185.

29 - Kant, Critique of Judgment #49, 186. Here Kant states that genius involves “a presentation (though an indeterminate one) of the material, i.e., of the intuition, needed to exhibit this concept ….” He goes on to say that this is accomplished not in the exhibiting of a determinate concept, but rather through aesthetic ideas which are nonetheless “purposive for exhibiting the given concept.” I am suggesting that Gadamer objects to this persistent reference to a “given concept” in Kant’s account of aesthetic ideas.
30 - Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 200.
31 - Truth and Method, 46; Wahrheit und Methode, 58.
32 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 165; Kunst als Aussage, 196.
33 - Kant, Critique of Judgment #49, 186.
34 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 165; Kunst als Aussage, 197.
35 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 166; Kunst als Aussage, 198.
36 - Truth and Method, 45; Wahrheit und Methode, 56.
37 - As Joel Weinsheimer observes, “[c]oncept and purposes (the impulse toward unity) are thus reaffirmed as the surplus by which art exceeds aesthetic pure judgment.” Joel Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 83.
38 - Truth and Method, 41; Wahrheit und Methode, 52.
39 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 21; Kunst als Aussage, 112. Cf. Kant, Critique of Judgment #48.
40 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 165; Kunst als Aussage, 197.
41 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 164; Kunst als Aussage, 195.
42 - In order to elaborate this conception of intuition (Anschauung) Gadamer appeals to the quality of visuality or vividness (Anschaulichkeit). While acknowledging that the reference of “Anschauen” to the sphere of the visible tends to privilege the visual arts, he believes that the Anschaulichkeit of the linguistic arts better enables us to grasp the formative process of Anschauung involved in the experience of art. He even describes the “art” of language as its capacity to arouse intuitions in the reader’s imagination. But he nonetheless maintains that the same is true of visual art which requires a “synthetic act” of intuition that brings together its different aspects in a formative process that has its own temporality. (Cf. Relevance of the Beautiful, 162; Kunst als Aussage, 194)
43 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 166; Kunst als Aussage, 196-197.
44 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 160-161; Kunst als Aussage, 192. Where Gadamer refers to “the formative process of intuition,” I understand him to mean the productivity of imagination; where he refers to “the resulting formed intuition,” I understand him to mean the image itself that is produced.
45 - Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (London: MacMillan, 1929) 165,
B 151.
46 - Nancy, Ground of the Image, 84.
47 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 43; Kunst als Aussage, 133.
48 - Nancy, Ground of the Image, 22.

49 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 158; Kunst als Aussage, 190.

50 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 18; Kunst als Aussage, 109.

51 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 161; Kunst als Aussage, 193.

52 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 159; Kunst als Aussage, 190.

53 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 43-45; Kunst als Aussage, 134-136. Here Gadamer argues that every work of art imposes its own temporality upon the spectator such that the genuine experience of the work requires that one learns how to tarry with it. Indeed, he claims that “the essence of our temporal experience of art is learning how to tarry in this way.”

54 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 24; Kunst als Aussage, 115.

55 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 27; Kunst als Aussage, 119.

56 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 17; Kunst als Aussage, 109.

57 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 163; Kunst als Aussage, 195.

58 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 20; Kunst als Aussage, 111.

59 - Robert Sokolowski, “Picturing,” The Review of Metaphysics, 31/121 (1977), 21.

60 - John Sallis, Double Truth (Albany: State University of new York Press, 1995), 123.

61 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 162; Kunst als Aussage, 194.

62 - Scheer, Zur Begründung von Kants Ästhetik, 24.

63 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 33; Kunst als Aussage, 124. For this reason he warns against conceiving art (á la Hegel) as the “sensible appearance of the Idea” (“sinnliches Scheinen der Idee”). In fact, Gadamer appeals to Kant precisely in order to avoid our falling prey to the “idealist temptation” which “expect[s] that we can recuperate within the concept the meaningful content that addresses us in art.” (ibid.; ibid.)

64 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 18; Kunst als Aussage, 109.

65 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 166; Kunst als Aussage, 196-197.

66 - Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 11.

67 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 32-33; Kunst als Aussage, 123. In Nancy’s words, “the image delivers a totality of sense or a truth.” (Ground of the Image, 12.)

68 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 34; Kunst als Aussage, 125.

69 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 36; Kunst als Aussage, 127.

70 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 33; Kunst als Aussage, 124.

71 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 70; Kunst als Aussage, 21.

72 - Gadamer makes a similar point in his introductory essay to Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” where he writes of the artwork that “its truth is not its simple manifestation of meaning but rather the unfathomableness and depth of its meaning.” (Philosophical Hermeneutics, 226)

73 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 37; Kunst als Aussage, 128. With this appropriation, however, the topos marked by die Frage nach der Kunst decisively turns from judgment to interpretation, from pleasure to truth, and hence from aesthetics to hermeneutics.

74 - For an insightful discussion of Heidegger’s critical appropriation of Husserl’s phenomenological account of truth see Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 48-174.

75 - Gadamer explicitly endorses Heidegger’s insight that “the truth that addresses us in art” is always experienced through “the twofold movement of revealing, unconcealing, and manifesting, on the one hand, and concealing and sheltering, on the other.” (Relevance of the Beautiful, 34; Kunst als Aussage, 125.) The coming-to-presence that takes place through art as an emerging and sheltering preserves itself within the work. Hence he sees the being of the artwork as a gesture that withholds as much as it reveals.

76 - Gadamer even remarks that “beauty is nothing but an invitation to intuition. And that is what we call a ‘work.’” (Relevance of the Beautiful, 161; Kunst als Aussage, 193.)

77 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 163; Kunst als Aussage, 194.

78 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 110-113; Kunst als Aussage, 75-77. This citation includes all the passages quoted in this paragraph.

79 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 163; Kunst als Aussage, 194. Gadamer speaks specifically of literature here, but I believe that his statement applies to all works of art. 

80 - Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 80.

81 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 164; Kunst als Aussage, 195.

82 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 164; Kunst als Aussage, 195-196. Jens Kulenkampf arrives at a similar conclusion by developing Kant’s theory of art from the paradigmatic import of the beauty of nature. Showing that the speculative significance of natural beauty requires the “unity of a world,” he argues that the artwork must likewise assume the form of a world. Indeed, he claims that the aesthetic idea presents the relation of human being to its world – which includes both the natural and the human world. See “Über Kants Bestimmung des Gehalts der Kunst,” Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung, 33/1 (1979), 62-74.

83 - Relevance of the Beautiful, 164; Kunst als Aussage, 196.