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GADAMER, AESTHETIC MODERNISM,

AND THE REHABILITATION OF ALLEGORY:
THE RELEVANCE OF PAUL KLEE

by

STEPHEN H. WATSON
University of Notre Dame

ABSTRACT
Paul Klee’s art found broad impact upon philosophers of varying commitments, includ-
ing Hans-Georg Gadamer. Moreover, Klee himself was not only one of the most impor-
tant artists of aesthetic modernism but one of its leading theoreticians, and much in
his work, as in Gadamer’s, originated in post-Kantian literary theory’s explications of
symbol and allegory. Indeed at one point in Truth and Method, Gadamer associates his
project for a general “theory of hermeneutic experience” not only with Goethe’s meta-
physical account of the symbolic but equally with a “rehabilitation” of allegory. In this
paper, I examine this position and Gadamer’s own use of it in his analysis of Klee’s
work, contrasting it with that of Walter Benjamin’s account of allegory, equally indebted
to Goethe and this archive. Finally, I contrast the resulting interpretations of Klee, dis-
cussing the implications that evolve for understanding both Gadamer and Benjamin—
but equally for understanding Klee’s work and, provisionally, the work of art, thus
construed, for philosophy.

“Believing in tradition and always straining at new insanities; frenetically

imitative and proudly independent . . . Can you guess to what great body
of literature these traits correspond?”
August W. Schlegel1
“The currents of yesterday’s tradition are really becoming lost in the
sand . . . and I hail the impending reform.”
Paul Klee (D, 266)
“The painter gifted with poetry can find in the driest geometry the lad-
ders he needs for his deep diving.”
René Crevel, Paul Klee, 19302

In a paper entitled “The Speechless Image” Gadamer began by consider-

ing the possibility that “the ancient classical relation between nature
and art, that of mimesis, no longer holds” (RB, 83). Ultimately he

Research in Phenomenology, 34
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2004
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46  . 

concluded otherwise, not without a certain irony, by appealing to the

diary of Paul Klee. For an author who had argued for a certain
rehabilitation (Rehabilitierung) of allegory in Truth and Method (TM, 70f .),
the irony here is doubtless a complicated affair. Gadamer’s reference
was to a passage in Klee’s ‘debate’ with Franz Marc in which Klee
had “protested against the notion of theory in itself ” (D, 318)—pre-
cisely in order to stress a return to the works themselves. Gadamer’s ges-
ture in this citation was over-determined therefore. On the one hand,
he surely was arguing that the classical notion of mimesis was in fact
not simply dead: as he put it, even though the experiments of mod-
ern art no longer take nature as their exemplary model “the work of
art does come to resemble nature: there is something regular and bind-
ing about the self-contained picture that grows from within” (RB, 91).
If so, the ancient homoiosis between mimesis and Kosmos would not sim-
ply have been lost in modern art—nor perhaps its refiguration of
Beauty (kalon). There even remains, he concluded, something of a reha-
bilitation of Aristotle’s account of phronesis and its doctrine of the mean,
where “a proper work is one in which there is neither too little nor
too much” (ibid.).
Not only is Gadamer’s appeal to Klee complicated by its own inner
logic—like all attempts to abandon theorizing—but the status of Klee’s
theoretics remain complicated in themselves. Composed as a defense
of the independence of romanticism and “the divine Ego as a center,”
Klee’s appeal to the works themselves nonetheless drew heavily on
Marc’s own accounts—refiguring a history with mixed effect.3 To this
day Klee is an artist who remains hotly contested between those who
would see in his work the perdurance of classicism and the legacy of
Goethe and romanticism and those who would see him to be not only
absorbed by, but embracing, the revolutions of the avante garde and
artistic modernity’s abrupt rupture with tradition, an oeuvre that, even
in its allusions to the past, internally alludes to this past only in rup-
ture. In either case Klee was preeminently a theorist, however, not
only in his Bauhaus addresses or notebooks and lectures but in his
quite theoretically constructed Diary.
The irony at stake here will not be readily resolved. Most obviously,
if in modern art “the idea of mimesis fulfills itself with new meaning,”
it does so in a way that leaves the artists themselves, to use Gadamer’s
term, “speechless.” Klee’s rejection of theory is taken as evidence for
the claim that “the self-interpretation of art is always a secondary phe-
nomenon” (RB, 91). The paradox here of course is that it is precisely
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Klee’s theoretical stance, i.e., his self-interpretation, that is being used

to deny theory any but a secondary role. Such theorizing, after all, is
not just a matter of the mens auctoris, but of the intelligibility of the
work at stake. And that he appeals to Klee’s Diary, so carefully inter-
preted and reinterpreted not only by its author (it was a Tagebuch in
name only) but by leading philosopher’s of art in the twentieth cen-
tury in attempting to grasp the impact of modern art—e.g., Adorno
or Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty—is striking. We might wonder whether,
consequently, Klee had no more to say about art than that we must
return to “the things themselves,” to cite that metaphor of Husserlian
mimesis. The dissonance may even be more pointed; while phenom-
enologists, after all, claimed that all abstract—and paradigmatically, all
mathematical—entities required experiential foundation, Klee’s writ-
ings continuously speak to the necessity of making one’s way through
mathematics to expression. Indeed the result has been compared to a
Principia Aesthetica of a new era, in which Klee occupies a position sim-
ilar to Newton’s in the realm of physics.4
Mathematics and physics provide a lever in the form of rules to be observed
or contradicted. They compel us—a salutary necessity—to concern ourselves
first with the function and not with the finished form. Algebraic, geo-
metrical and mechanical problems are still in our education towards the
essential, towards the function as opposed to the impressional. We learn
to see what flows beneath, we learn the prehistory of the visible. (N, 69)

This is a critically complicated gesture, divided between the formal and

intuitional, the visible and the invisible, the historical and the prehistoric:
“a very special progress that leads towards a critical striving backwards
towards the earlier on which the later grows” (N, 69). If there are any
remnants of romanticism in what Klee referred to elsewhere as “the
fusion” between “the architectonic and poetic” (D, 125), the only pre-
cursors might be Novalis’ strange Fichte Studies or Maimon’s mysterious
‘differentials’ that link sensibility and understanding, where mathematics
takes on a similar (almost hermetic) importance, almost in anticipation
of what came to be called a century later, the “ontological difference.”
Fichte himself had used the mathematical analogue for understanding
the self as a synthesis of interdetermination—or what will later be
called dialectic.5 Klee’s attempts to outline the interplay and fusion
between individual and ‘dividuals’, between structure and instance,
might ultimately need to be similarly related to this ‘constructivist’
archive (N, 238).6 Whatever we have to say about such connections,
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the question in any case would seem to veil a certain denial. That is,
granted Klee’s commitment to abstraction, we might wonder whether
there is something of a denial by Klee concerning a return to the phe-
nomena: for Klee, after all, abstraction (and construction) turn out to
be not the danger—or even evil construed ‘one-sidedly’—that pheno-
menologists took it to contain at times. Instead it was something ‘essen-
tial’ to the inner dynamism of Klee’s eruptive linearity, to the schemat-
ics of rendering the inner dynamics and energy of things’ visibility—an
energetics whose very concept arguably depends upon the notion of
formal ‘permutation’ or mathematical function. And strict phenome-
nological returns to the things themselves would only recoil before it.
It is in this sense that we should take Sartre’s remark that “the greatness
and error of Klee lie in his attempt to make a painting both sign and
object.”7 While clearly not mathematically constructed or deduced, the
“lever” that such formalisms provide Klee’s account is more a provo-
cation than a determination—after all, this lever occurs in “the form
of rules to be observed or contradicted.” Beyond mere imitative repre-
sentation, beyond the mere optics of impressionism, this prehistory of
the visible is no more pre-theoretical than it is pre-schematic. With Klee’s
proviso that art does not represent, but renders the invisible visible in
mind, we might say that, rather than optical possibilities of represen-
tation, this schematics opens up possibilities of ‘rendering’ visible.
Latent to the question of such a ‘schematism’—and doubtless the
question of artistic abstraction—there remained something that a phe-
nomenological optics had perhaps too often avoided confronting, namely,
its own status as theoretical construction: the genesis of its return to
the “things themselves.”8 You might say, indeed Roland Barthes had
at one point, extending his old criticism of Sartre—that what had been
avoided in such immanent appeals was their own theoretical ‘cubism’.9
Against this constructive moment, the appeal to the articulation of
immanence or pure (i.e., schematic) description of perceptual adum-
bration—the logical (or grammatical) equivalent of its return to the
“things themselves”—might be construed to invoke a grammatical (i.e.,
self-reflexive) autoclitic that seemed always to couch (or require) hidden
‘inferences’. And Gadamer too endorsed the account of phenomeno-
logical ‘adumbration’. To use a term of Marc Richir’s, such appeals
might then betray not only a matter of transcendental illusion, but
more radically, a “transcendental distortion” in its optics—in precisely
the same way that the good forms of optical impressionism were dis-
tortingly illusory. It is almost as if this question–begging return to the
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things ‘themselves’ here might have already circumscribed and veiled

‘thingliness’. The attempt to keep intuitions and concepts distinct (or at
least strictly correlated and thereby well founded) seems all too evidently
demarcated in such ‘autoclitics’—not to speak of the attempt to keep
theories out of art. Instead, the argument for return to experience, as
opposed to the “fossilized” and almost “lifeless hieroglyphics” of math-
ematical notation, required a “plastic discourse.” Indeed all these terms
are Hegelian, in a way that already prefigures the contrast and the
conflict between the symbolical and the allegorical. Moreover such a
plasticity, i.e., a concrete symbolics, was necessitated, Hegel claimed,
if the Absolute were to be made manifest within the “peculiar rest-
lessness and distraction of our modern consciousness.”10 If such terms
are derived from Absolute idealism, however, they accompanied phe-
nomenology in the guise of the problem of a transcendental language
for experience—arguably modeled on the description of the experi-
ence that would found the concept of number itself. And this attempt
to found the rational beyond the formal was seen to be equally
‘Aristotelian’ throughout. Here too however Klee seems to confound:
his writings appealed continually to formal models of compositions
modeled on the ‘formal’ aspects of language, i.e., a method similar to
that by which children learn, first, letters, then syllables, and finally,
how to read and write.11 This same ‘generativity’ would be at stake
between formally individual and individuals in pictorial theory. As the
“Creative Credo” put it: “abstract formal elements are put together
like numbers or letters to make concrete being or abstract things: in the
end a formal cosmos is achieved” (N, 79). In all of this Klee seems far
removed from a rehabilitation of Aristotle—or perhaps anything else.
Such matters, in any case, seem equally far removed from a
hermeneutic of experience based soundly on the aesthetic or the task
of interpreting traditions. As such, this may seem a matter of “sec-
ondary phenomena,” a matter of regional ontology to the phenome-
nologist or a specific and troublesome hermeneutic object. But for
Gadamer, who had made aesthetic experience itself nothing less than
exemplary for his task of deriving “elements of a theory of hermeneu-
tic experience” (TM, 265), this cannot do. The problem is that while
Truth and Method had ‘elevated’ aesthetic experience, it did so by pre-
senting a certain genealogy of hermeneutics through nineteenth-century
aesthetics—or what Truth and Method calls at one point “the century
of Goethe” (TM, 71): hence giving rise to the charges concerning its
neoclassicist ‘bent’ that Gadamer continuously denied.
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50  . 

This neoclassical ‘bent’ seemed to effect, certainly as Wirkungeschichte,

much of the elements of the resulting Elementlehre. Even the gloss on
modern mimesis cited above, in which the work comes to inwardly
resemble nature, sounds as true to Goethe’s organicism as to Gadamer’s
own claims that Goethe’s use of the term ‘Bildung’ makes him our con-
temporary (TM, 9) or that Goethe’s understanding of “adventure,”
rightly understood, underlies experience as Erlebnis (TM, 60ff.)—or,
finally and perhaps most significantly, the understanding of the symbol
as an appearance of reality (TM, 76). What Gadamer calls “the century
of Goethe,” while perhaps not our own and doubtless theoretically
naive, lacking precisely an account of hermeneutics of historical Erfahrung
(hence Hegel) (TM, 98) or of Being (hence Heidegger)—does not seem
any more past than the classical concept of mimesis itself, as Truth and
Method itself had already argued (TM, 113). Indeed in a summary of
that work published a few years afterward, he asserted directly that,
“in the last analysis, Goethe’s statement, ‘Everything is a symbol’ is
the most comprehensive formulation of the hermeneutic idea” (PH,
103). Having written on the importance of Goethe two decades pre-
viously, Truth and Method’s various characterizations would serve as a
reaffirmation. All in fact still have the hold of “contemporaneity” for
Gadamer, even if such contemporaneity is always both a “task” (TM,
127) and a certain consciousness of its loss and estrangement in rela-
tion to tradition, as he had learned from Schleiermacher and Hegel
(TM, 165). Therefore, all of this still makes possible, beyond the frag-
mented or instantaneous Simultaneität of aesthetic experience (Erlebnisse),
a true contemporaneity (Gleichzeitigkeit) between the present and the
past that acknowledges authentic traditionality. Doubtless it is just this
vision of the contemporary that underlies Gadamer’s insistence that
Heidegger’s Dasein analysis is misread if it is read as the claim that
the temporality of Dasein precludes the “the everlasting or eternal”
(TM, 99). And indeed Gadamer’s conjunction of Erfarhrung as the truth
of art and Heidegger’s Dasein analysis, taken conjointly as an account
of hermeneutics and the historicity of understanding (TM, 98–100),
was precisely to provide this rehabilitation of allegory and tradition,
by adding to the experience of symbolic presentation (Darstellung), the
historicity and the intelligibility that the matrice of tradition, under-
stood hermeneutically, would provide. Thus it is clear that both the
ontology and the intelligibility of the historical are transcendentally at
stake: indeed a glance at Kant’s transcendental categories affirms that
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the question of simultaneity is both a question of relation and sub-

stance. At the same time the account that results, which always claimed
that it must “do justice to the experience of art” (TM, 164)—while
explicitly acknowledging both “the fragility of the beautiful and the
adventurousness of the artist”—revealed how a hermeneutic phenom-
enology remained relevant to the aesthetic precisely insofar as “it sets
the task of preserving the hermeneutic continuity which constitutes our
being, despite the discontinuity intrinsic to aesthetic being and aes-
thetic experience” (TM, 96).
Still, this is why it is hard not to wonder about Gadamer’s citation
of Klee in all this. Klee, as has become evident, was surely a mod-
ern, and Gadamer often enough seems to have problems with not only
modernity but also its art, both of which, as Gadamer has acknowl-
edged seem to make hermeneutic continuity increasingly questionable.12
Moreover, without simply rejecting ‘method’, Gadamer had found its
modern ‘formulation’ highly problematic—and unquestionably Klee’s
was perhaps the most methodical of modern art’s formulations. Indeed
pointedly, as Klee scholars have increasingly made evident, Klee’s work
consciously retraces and refigures the steps of Gadamer’s ‘genealogy’
in decisive ways that seems both to challenge and transforms it—or
at least our grasp of it.
What is decisive about Klee is not only that he “theorizes” aesthetic
modernism, but that he does so precisely in relation to Gadamer’s own
post-Kantian archive. The modern artist, Gadamer insists, “is less a
creator than a discoverer of the as yet unseen, the inventor of the pre-
viously unimagined that only emerges into reality through him” (RB, 91).
This sounds close to Klee’s proclamation that the artist does not imitate
the visible but renders the invisible visible—a formulation that became
almost paradigmatic for Merleau-Ponty. But to return to Gadamer’s
own ‘naturalism’, a few sentences before his reference to Klee as assist-
ing in the return to the works themselves, in this regard, he states, we
might think of the crystal. Art, “like the crystal,” Gadamer argued, in
restoring art to nature, “has its own timeless necessity” (RB, 91).
The figure of the crystal and the crystalline had accompanied German
aesthetics at least since Schegel and Goethe or Caspar David Friedrich.
Even before that it had furnished a theoretics divided between the
hermetic and the mathematical.13 But this time the example is close
enough to Klee to be almost question begging. A few pages previous
to Gadamer’s citation of Klee’s concern for the works themselves, Klee’s
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diary presents its own decisive account of abstraction and the crystalline.
And, neither the work of art’s timelessness nor the Pythegorean eternity
of beautiful form seem to be what Klee has in mind. Rather, precisely
here we reencounter the dynamics—ontogenetic, menosymic, and permu-
tational—of Klee’s 1915 account of abstraction as “cool Romanticism.”
One deserts the realm of the here and now to transfer one’s activity
into a realm of the yonder where total affirmation is possible.
Abstraction.
The cool Romanticism of this style without pathos is unheard of.
The more horrible this world (as, today, for instance), the more abstract
our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.
Today is a transition from yesterday. In the great pit of forms lies
broken fragments to some of which we still cling. They provide abstrac-
tion with its materials. A junkyard of unauthentic elements for the cre-
ation of impure crystals.
That is how it is today. (D, 314)

Abstraction here occurs, as he goes on to say, out of the need “to

work my way out of my ruins” (D, 315), beyond the broken fragments
of history: the more terrible our history the more the necessity for
authentic abstraction. The complications of Klee’s text, his refigurations
of Franz Marc, of Kandinsky, and Worringer, have been copiously
noted by Klee scholars.14 Without going into the details (or to psy-
chologize through recourse to Klee’s own personal motivations) this
much seems relevant here. Even in invoking a world beyond the here
and now, Klee seems precisely to be invoking the shock and discontinuity
of both history and art that Gadamer’s task of “hermeneutic continu-
ity” sought to overcome. Moreover—and perhaps decisively—rather
than something organic and natural about it, or perhaps eternal and
timeless, as Gadamer suggested, this crystal seems metonymically jux-
taposed—almost despite itself—not with eternity, but with death. As
Klee begins the above passage: “The heart that beats for this world
seems mortally wounded. As if only memories still tied me to ‘these’
things . . . Am I turning into the crystalline type?”
Hence the complications in Klee’s concept of the crystalline: “But
then: the whole crystal cluster once bled. I thought I was dying, war
and death. But how can I die, I who am crystal? I, crystal” (D, 313).
Gadamer’s invocation of the crystal, five sentences before his citation
of Klee, seems only to have missed this ‘metonymy’, its allegorical allu-
sion (or ‘effect’). Turning its truth ‘symbolic’ seems to have missed pre-
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cisely the modernity Gadamer sought to grasp ultimately in pairing

Klee with Aristotle and the doctrine of the mean, a harmony in which
the works themselves, properly encountered, would be found to have
neither too little nor too much, nothing in excess and nothing miss-
ing (RB, 91). All this sounded to many to miss the truth not only of
Romanticism but, beyond even neoclassicism, just archaicism, all but
avoiding its horrors.
As is often noted, Gadamer’s “The Relevance of the Beautiful” more
directly confronts the question of aesthetic modernity than did Truth and
Method. Explicitly confronting the question of how we are to understand
“trends of contemporary art,” happenings or anti-art, Duchamp’s Ready
Mades, the cubism of Picasso and Braque, the work of Bertolt Brecht,
modern architecture, the role of dissonance in modern music, non-
objective painting all receive attention. Now while Gadamer is critical
of “the alienation and shock” of “extreme modernity” and modern
art, or “the obsessive rhythms of modern music” or “very barren forms
of abstract art” (RB, 7:51), it is clear that this is a strong endorsement
of modern art at its best and a recognition that a difference is at stake
between it and traditional art-forms. Moreover, this is not only true
technically, but it is true of the relation between artist and commu-
nity, where the artist “no longer speaks for the community,” but forms
his own idea of community (oikumene) and challenges us to it (RB, 39).
Nonetheless, while recognizing that “the concept of a work is in no
way tied to the classical ideal of harmony” (RB, 25), here too Gadamer
argued strongly for the continuing legacy of the “profound truth” in
the Goetheian notion of symbolics (RB, 34)—as opposed to allegory
that “says one thing and gives us to understands something else” (RB,
37). The error of idealism is again to have mistaken symbolics for
metaphysics—to use Hegel’s terms, “the sensuous appearance of the
Absolute Idea.” In this it fails to grasp that “the work speaks to us as
a work and not as the bearer of a message” that it merely re-presents
(RB, 33). Against this Gadamer approvingly cites Walter Benjamin’s
account of the aura of the work in its uniqueness and irreplaceability
(RB, 34). Still, it is clear that it is not Benjamin but again Heidegger
to whom “we owe the possibility of escaping the idealistic conception
of sense,” precisely in recognizing the twofold movement of revealing
and unconcealing as elaborated in the latter’s account of the Greek’s
account of truth (aletheia). What perdures with respect to aletheia likewise
obtains with respect to the continuing relevance of their account of
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the beautiful (kalon). Here too we experience, in “marked contrast with

the ambiguity and instability of human affairs . . . the convincing illu-
mination of truth and harmony which compels the admission: ‘This is
true’ ” (RB, 14–15). Moreover, acknowledging this motivates Gadamer
to argue, despite what Truth and Method called “the fragility of the beau-
tiful” (TM, 96), for its continuing relevance, one which successful works
of art everywhere fulfill—events themselves of fulfilled time, and the
contemporaneity of the past and the present (RB, 42). Indeed this con-
temporaneity, Gadamer held, is precisely the riddle that the problem
of art set for us, and it is itself fertile for our understanding the logic
of traditionality (and community) itself, where the translations between
past and present articulate neither simple return nor simple rupture,
but dictate that “something can be held in our hesitant stay.” But,
Gadamer claims, “this is what art has always been and still is today”
(RB, 53). And, the institution of this contemporaneity constitutes our
hermeneutic task, to “produce this shared community of meaning which
the work of art outlines” (RB, 48), in which the present and the past
become bound together. Indeed in this perdurance Gadamer found
his own task: “It was one of my basic intentions of my exposition to
show that in our relationship with the world and in all our creative
labors . . . our accomplishment lies in retaining what threatens to pass
away” (RB, 46). In this he reiterates ‘aesthetically’ what he once said
to Strauss: unlike Heidegger or Buber, he declared that we do not live
“between” worlds. “I remember, instead of this, the one world which
I alone know, and which in all decay has lost far less of its evidence
and cohesion than it talks itself into.”15 And perhaps this is the final
claim concerning the beautiful’s continuing relevance: “For although
modern art is opposed to traditional art, it is also true that it has been
stimulated and nourished by it” (RB, 9).
All of this might seem to contrast once more with his citation of
Benjamin. But in order to grasp this contrast, first it should be said that
Benjamin too thought himself to be advancing upon classical German
thought and, in particular, Goethe’s account of the symbol and the
beautiful. As he put it in the Arcades Project, in relation to Simmel:
I came to see very clearly that my concept of origin in the Trauerspiel
book is a rigorous and decisive transposition of this basic Goethean con-
cept from the domain of nature to that of history. Origin—it is, in effect,
the concept of the Ur-phenomenon extracted from the pagan context of
nature and brought into the Jewish contexts of history. Now, in my work
on the arcades I am equally concerned with fathoming an origin. To be
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specific, I pursue the origin of the forms and mutations of the Paris
arcades from their beginning to the their decline, and I locate this ori-
gin in the economic facts. (AP, 462)

What perhaps is equally as portentous as this text’s relation to Goethe

is that it is immediately connected—like Gadamer’s own account—to
Heidegger. Expounding upon the notion of image, that founds his
account of such historical constellations, Benjamin states, “what dis-
tinguishes images from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology is their historical
index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology
abstractly through ‘historicity’) (AP, 462). Instead at stake is an event
that is the death of intention (AP, 462). This event is to be grasped,
as the The Origin of German Tragic Drama had put it, not by intention
and knowledge, “but rather a total immersion and absorption in it”
(T, 36), an absorption that depends upon grasping its factical constel-
lation for its “illumination,” to use Benjamin’s term. And thereby, “It
is not that this past casts its light on what is present, or what is pre-
sent its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has
been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation”
(AP, 463). Rather than such an inter-illumination or interdetermination,
the resulting ‘surreal’ flash of ‘recognition’ is “the perilous critical
moment on which all reading is founded” (AP, 463).
Seemingly, then, Benjamin and Gadamer could not be further apart.
Gadamer had hope to avoid both “the delusion of culture” that identifies
art as the already familiar and the delusions of the critique of ideol-
ogy that sees art as something progressive (RB, 46). At most, for
Benjamin, history was the recurrence of catastrophe, and allegory the
experience of its mourning—as Lotz had also recognized about history
(AP, 478). And, it was precisely here that Benjamin prized Klee’s vision
in his Angelus Novus. Moreover, leading Klee scholars have affirmed the
Benjaminian tone of the “ambivalent, dynamic process leading from
recollection to rejection of reality which Klee called ‘abstraction’.”
While Benjamin himself owned the Angulus Novus painting, he could not
have known Klee’s own description of abstraction, published only after
Benjamin’s death. Yet the similarity between Benjamin’s description of
it as the Angel of history, in which the Angel sees in the past “a single
catastrophe which ceaselessly keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”
(IL, 257), has been affirmed by art historians of Klee’s work as an
“astonishing analogy.” Indeed in this analogy, it has been claimed
“Benjamin was able to gather Klee’s fundamental idea solely from his
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56  . 

picture.”16 Gadamer, on the other hand, found in Klee the recurrence—

perhaps better said, the reminiscence—of Greek kalon, first, as we have
seen, in the Pythagorean vision of crystalline purity, second, in the
perdurance of the mean that he found ubiquitous in authentic works
of art (RB, 91).
But this brings us back to the symbolic and provisionally to a place
where Benjamin and Gadamer finally in agreement seem to collide,
head-on, precisely in the “rehabilitation of allegory.” If Gadamer seemed
to continuously favor the symbolic, he acknowledged, as has become
evident, that allegory had been falsely “devalued.” Indeed his own
account of modern art in “The Relevance of the Beautiful” seemingly
continues this devaluation, to the extent that it focuses on the “pro-
found truth” of the symbolic. But Truth and Method, noting that even
the neoclassicist Wincklemann still used allegory and symbol synony-
mously (TM, 72), itself wondered whether the contrast could be absolute,
that is, whether “the symbolic-making activity” like the presence of
modern art itself was “also in fact limited by the continued existence
of a mythical, allegorical tradition” (TM, 81). Consequently, the ele-
vation of the symbol, in contrast to allegory, is seen as a prejudice of
Erlebnisasthetik and requires that we “revise the fundamental concepts
of aesthetics” (TM, 81). In that case the rehabilitation of allegory would
reveal itself, again, to be a hermeneutic task—doubtless, precisely the
task of Heideggerian historicity and its “reciprocal rejoinder” with tra-
dition that Benjamin had found insufficient.17 But why? For this we
can further look to the geneology of their ‘archive’.
For example, both Gadamer and Benjamin centered their accounts
of allegory on the problem of finitude in early medieval accounts. But
for Benjamin, the problem of the relation between the finite and the
infinite is ‘solved’ allegorically only in a certain ‘expulsion’. “For it was
decisive for the development of this mode of thought that not only
transitoriness but also guilt should seem evidently to have its home in
the province of idols and of the flesh. The allegorically significant is
prevented by guilt from finding fulfillment of its meaning in itself ” (T,
224). Indeed only the past allows for the time of redemption and unre-
demption, not the parousia of the festive present and the contemporaneity
of works of art that Gadamer finds fulfilled in the symbol. And Gadamer’s
argument too stems from this archive, in privileging the symbol. If
“the allegorical procedure of interpretation and the symbolical proce-
dure of knowledge are both necessary,” still Gadamer claims:
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[ T]he concept of symbol has a metaphysical background that is entirely

lacking in the rhetorical use of allegory. It is possible to be led beyond
the sensible to the divine. For the world of the senses is not mere noth-
ingness and darkness but the out-flowing and reflection of truth. The
modern concept of symbol cannot be understood apart from this gnos-
tic function and its metaphysical background. The only reason that the
word “symbol” can be raised from its original usage (as a document,
sign, or pass) to the philosophical idea of a mysterious sign and thus
become similar to a hieroglyph interpretable only by an initiate, is that
the symbol is not an arbitrarily chosen or created sign, but presupposes
a metaphysical connection between visible and invisible. (TM, 73)

Clearly this is what lies behind Goethe for Gadamer and, rightly under-
stood, what Erlebnisästhetik misunderstood.
What Benjamin finds in Goethe, then, is not what Gadamer found.
“Words of Goethe express . . . the final conclusion of wisdom: ‘Everything
that has had a great effect can really no longer be evaluated.’ Beauty
in its relation to nature can be defined as that which ‘remains true to
its essential nature only when veiled [in dem das Unzugängliche Ereignis
wird ]” (IL, 199). This almost sounds like it resonates with Gadamer’s
construal of mimhsiw in which “the work of art does come to resemble
nature: there is something regular and binding about the self-contained
picture that grows from within” (RB, 91). Still, what lies ‘within’ for
Benjamin is surely not the eternity of kalon and the classical, but its
‘explosion’ outside of all such ‘eternity’ or ‘contemporaneity’, which
reveals any such perduring parousia illusory. And in this, again, we find
the contrast:
Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face
of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the
observer is confronted with the facies hippocractica of history as a petrified,
primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very begin-
ning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—
or rather in a death’s head. (T, 166)

Correlatively, the contrast in intelligibility could not be more stark, a

contrast between the sign and the hieroglyph that for Benjamin threat-
ens romantic semiotics from the outset: “It is not possible to conceive
of a starker opposite to the artistic symbol, the plastic symbol, the
image of organic totality, than this amorphous fragment which is seen
in the form of allegorical script. In it the baroque reveals itself to be
the sovereign opposite of classicism, as which hitherto, only romanticism
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58  . 

has been acknowledged” (T, 176). Finally we should not miss Benjamin’s
evaluation of this effect within the field of the baroque:
In the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune. Its
beauty as symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon
it. The false appearance of totality is extinguished. For the eidos disap-
pears, the simile ceases to exist, and the cosmos it contained shrivels
up. . . . A deep-rooted intuition of the problematic character of art . . .
emerges as a reaction to its self-confidence at the time of the Renaissance.
(T, 176)

The antinomy between Benjamin and Gadamer now seems to have

grown even starker. The question that is ‘looming’ is, then, whether
notwithstanding the meaningless simultaneity that both authors agree
threatens the modern—Benjamin had used the term too after all (AP,
394)—Klee’s “Ich krystal” was symbolical or allegorical? And more to
the point, when Gadamer conceives the work of art to be the still
mimetic fulfillment of nature, an event in which “there is something
regular and binding about the self-contained picture that grows within,”
has he missed the deeply problematic character of the work of art?
Like the crystal, as he argued, the work of art has something of “time-
less necessity” about it; “surrounded by a wealth of chaos” like the
crystal, “we encounter it as something rare, adamatine, brilliant” (RB,
91). But while all of this has something of Aristotle to it, it sounds
even more like the Naturphilosophie of Goethe’s successors and their spec-
ulative Idea, which, to quote Hegel, overcomes the petrification inert-
ness, and abstraction of geological nature in organics, “the crystal of
life.”18 It was, after all, the analogy between life and self-consciousness
that Gadamer claimed remained at stake in hermeneutics—and that,
to use Heidegger’s term, “nurtures” the hermeneutic circle between
interpretans and interpertandun (TM, 252). The question is whether Gadamer
has fully encountered Klee’s chaos, whether his crystal is indeed falsely
totalized, not the “living symbol,” but petrified—as Klee had put it,
dead in “this world.” And the question, moreover, is whether Gadamer’s
attempt to cite this example of Klee’s for his account of a “beautiful”
tradition itself was equally “petrified” and had missed the truth of its
inner allegory, unredeemed, where “the streams of tradition surge down
violently,” a violence to which Gadamer’s attempt to symbolically
redeem Klee would only contribute in disarming the onslaught of
nature in advance.
To begin to answer such questions, we should be wary of false antin-
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omies. Certainly Gadamer had equally emphasized the experience of

the negative (TM, 353). And his very notion of experience as openness
to the other (TM, 343), or of the account of history as the experience
of suffering (TM, 352), both belie the humanist self-confidence of the
Renaissance and its neoclassical retrievals of the Beautiful. We should
recall that it was Truth and Method that had declared the antinomy
between symbol and allegory abstract, and claimed that “especially in
recent decades, the rediscovery of baroque poetry, together with mod-
ern aesthetic research has led to a rehabilitation of allegory” (TM, 81).
As such, Truth and Method’s “Theory of Hermeneutic Experience” was
in part, or construed itself to be in part, the fulfillment of allegory’s
rehabilitation, precisely insofar as it articulated the “rehabilitated” tra-
ditionality that had problematically accompanied the symbolic. Moreover
it is not the need for historical augmentation that divides Benjamin
and Gadamer. Gadamer would surely deny that his reliance on the
beautiful or his emphasis on the symbol is simply a “timeless” present:
“The pantheon of art is not a timeless present that presents itself to
a pure aesthetic consciousness, but the act of a mind and spirit that
has collected and gathered itself historically” (TM, 97). When Gadamer
invokes the potentiality for wholeness in the symbol it is again to grasp
in its historicity “not the particular but rather the totality of the expe-
riencable world, man’s ontological place in it, and above all his finitude
before that which transcends him” (RB, 33). Moreover, part of what
is at stake in what transcends us is the specificity of what historically
threatens in the reduction of experience within “modern techniques of
reproduction” and which levels contemporaneity into mere “simul-
taneity” (TM, 87). Benjamin would fully concur, though the claim must
be that the concrete truths of history (the “economic facts”) have been
missed in Gadamer’s symbolic investment and its attempt to retain the
beautiful, which had become perhaps both insufficient—and “irrelevant.”
Such a hermeneutics remains radically insufficient to the truth in
allegory, for Benjamin. Apart from the concrete analysis of detail and
structure, “all love of beauty is no more than empty dreaming. In the
last analysis structure and detail are always historically charged. And,
the object of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of
artistic form is as follows: to make historical content, such as provides
the basis of every important work of art, into a philosophical truth”
(T, 182). Thereby, as in a flash, “here it is a question of the dissolu-
tion of mythology into the space of history” (AP, 458)—our awaken-
ing. “Knowledge” conceived as love of the beautiful or the symbolic
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60  . 

totality is what must be foresworn precisely as “eluded by things,” their

“enigmatic allegorical reference” in the image of organic totality. It is
in this sense that it “is not possible to conceive of a starker opposite
to the artistic symbol, the plastic symbol, the image of organic total-
ity, than this amorphous fragment which is seen in the form of alle-
gorical script” (T, 176).
But then has Gadamer merely symbolized or ‘crystallized’ tradi-
tionality? As we have seen, Gadamer has often denied that his notion
of tradition is simply neoclassical in any substantitive sense; that is, he
has denied that ‘traditionalism’ has the final word. At the same time
he sought to separate himself from those who would deny the truth
of tradition, the truth continued in prejudice, in hopes indeed, as he
put it to Strauss, of remembering “the one world that I alone know
and which in all decay has the far less of its evidence and cohesion
than it talks itself into.” But does he admit the “unredeemed” thereby,
the “nature” (and mourning) that lies beyond symbolic redemption and
even perhaps the Goethean ‘nature’ that, on Benjamin’s account, the
elevations of symbol excludes? Blinkingly perhaps:
Admittedly, the natural, as joint condition of our mental life, limits our
self-understanding and does so by projecting itself into the mental in
many forms—as myth, as dream, as the unconscious preformation of
conscious life. And one must admit that aesthetic phenomena similarly
manifest the limits of Dasein’s historical self-understanding. (TM, 96)

All of these—myth, image, nature—lie in the background of the symbol,

as Schelling had already realized, Gadamer claimed (TM, 77). But
equally, as Schelling realized, what lies at stake therein is the other of
consciousness—and more to the point—the unconscious, to use a term
that Klee too invokes, that similarly lies at stake in our ‘prehistory’.
Now Benjamin’s emphasis upon the explosive image clearly invests
itself in an “enlarged” Freudian account of repression: “The greater
the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more con-
stantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the
more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience
(Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s
life” (IL, 163, AP, 403). This both explains the modern diminution of
experience to simultaneity while problematizing images which render
(qua shocking or provocative) that experience moribund; hence the
privilege of Baudelaire for him, whose stylistics recapture the darkness
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inherent to medieval allegory and “that ebony to which has been

likened the style of Tertullian” (B, 51). It begins to look as though the
quarrel between Benjamin and Gadamer—like that between Freud and
his “chosen son” Jung (or that between Husserl and his “chosen son”
Heidegger)—concerns the issue of repression (or ‘inauthenticity’) and
its symbolic affects. Moreover, it is worth noting that Benjamin him-
self saw the Arcades Project, following Adorno’s suggestion, as correct-
ing the regressive ‘expressionism’ of Jung’s collective unconscious (AP,
472).19 Jung’s views, too, were explicitly derived (in opposition to Freud’s
naturalism) from post-Kantian views of the symbolic in Schiller and
Goethe, Fichte and Schelling.20
Gadamer’s own notion of the requisite ‘shock’ of the Beautiful, while
a shattering and demolition of the familiar (PH, 104), remains, unlike
Benjamin’s auratic: his account of hermeneutics is, accordingly, still
linked to consciousness insofar as it remains linked to the task of “self-
understanding.” In so doing, like Jugenstil, Benjamin would insist, it
“forces the auratic” in the attempt “to win back symbols,” but it
remains regression “insofar as it loses the power of looking the every-
day in the face” (AP, 557f .). And in this it would remain both mythic
and unconscious about its own history. Like all phenomenologists from
Husserl and Fink onwards, Gadamer claims that the notion of the
unconsciousness remains perniciously entangled in an illicit metaphysics
(of inner substance). As Fink famously put it: “As long as the exposition
of the problem of the unconscious is determined by such an implicit
theory of consciousness, it is in principle philosophically naive.”21 But
then the result of such metaphysical conflicts would seem to be just
perniciously (dogmatic) ‘metaphysics’ itself. Gadamer too nods towards
the phenomenological claim here: “we need to cast a critical eye upon
just what sort of untested presuppositions of a traditional kind are still
at work” (RAS, 104). Nevertheless unlike the transcendental idealist, as
we have seen, Gadamer has equally affirmed the ‘nature’ that inter-
rupts consciousness and the task of self-understanding, conceived, as it
had been classically by Fichte, by means of mental construction or
activity, where “[c]onstruction, production, generation are transcendental
concepts describing the inner spontaneity of self-consciousness” (RAS,
103). Instead, remarkably perhaps, for Gadamer, such transparency is
clearly interrupted before its own “impossibility,” almost its own “limit-
experience” to use the language of those more directly influenced by
surrealism. And in this regard, the passage deserves full citation:
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62  . 

Self-understanding is always on-the-way; it is on a path whose completion

is a clear impossibility. If there is an entire dimension of unilluminated
unconscious; if all our actions, wishes, drives, decisions and modes of con-
duct (and so the totality of our social existence) are based on the obscure
and veiled dimension of the conations of our animality; if all our con-
scious representations can be masks, pretexts, under which our vital energy
or our social interests pursue their own goals in an unconscious way, if
all the insights we have, as obvious and evident as they may be, are
threatened by such doubt; then self-understanding cannot designate any
patent self-transparency of our human existence. (RAS, 103–4)

At stake here, Gadamer adds, is not only the field of the unconscious
that concerns the psychoanalyst: it is just as much the world of the
dominant social prejudices that Marxism claims to elucidate. In both
cases consciousness equally submits to a certain “reversal,” to use a
word that he applies to the reversal (and dialectic) of horizons that
occurs in the passage from Husserl to Heidegger, too (TM, 257, 562).
Hence “[p]sychoanalysis and critique of ideology are forms of enlight-
enment” (RAS, 104). But as was made clear in “The Relevance of the
Beautiful,” such forms of enlightenment for Gadamer still suffer from
the myths of progressivism and, in this respect, presumably, of the
dogmatic teleology of a “traditional kind” of metaphysics (RAS, 104).
Here it seems Gadamer would attempt to be more critical than crit-
ical theory itself. Again what “The Relevance of The Beautiful” had
asserted in response was that “the riddle that the problem of art sets
us is precisely that of the contemporaneity of the past and the pre-
sent” (RB, 46).
In such moments, perhaps, one can only wonder. Once, in an inter-
view discussing the early Frankfurt school, and Horkheimer and Adorno
in particular, Gadamer stated that, while he did meet with these peo-
ple regularly and had the impression they were “very clever,” they
were lacking in competence. Doubtless the rhetoric was complicated
on all sides. At the same time he felt a certain unease about this
encounter. “So all I can say is, we felt like country cousins visiting the
big city. To hear us talk, you would think we had a superiority com-
plex, and of course hidden behind that, there was an inferiority com-
plex” (EPH, 141). Granted such dissonances, inevitably, it will be
objected: should not Gadamer’s claim to the contemporaneity of the
Beautiful and the nature it invokes then simply be taken to instantiate
the “screen” of ideological repression? Is not the riddle of contempo-
raneity precisely the riddle of the crystal itself, not the organic redemp-
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tion but the petrification of time, “stillborn” to use Hegel’s term for
the crystalline? Does not all this affect the account of traditionality
itself, burdened too often with the legacy of Fichte, as Gadamer de-
scribed? The commonality that underlies hermeneutics, Gadamer claims,
is not metaphysical any more than the hermeneutic circle is merely
formal:
But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition.
Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it
ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tra-
dition, and hence further determine it ourselves. (TM, 293)

All this sounds too much like the hermeneutic version of Fichte’s tran-
scendental Ich or Hegel’s Geist or Marx’s proletariat (versions of which
admittedly still haunt Benjamin via Lukacs), a production whose self-
certainty is guaranteed precisely because we make it. And yet Gadamer
surely knew the limitations of such talk concerning self-reflexivity. “The
focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror” (TM, 276)—and especially
insofar as it concerned the question of temporal difference and its
‘reversals’. After all, as we have seen, Gadamer himself had acknowl-
edged our distance from the past. Indeed it is almost axiomatic for
Truth and Method (and distances him from those like Strauss or Husserl):
“The continuity of the Western philosophical tradition has been effective
only in a fragmentary way” (TM, xxiv).
Yet this forces us finally to confront the logic of such a fragment.22
The question of continuity or ‘contemporaneity’ only arises precisely
in this fragmentary way, to the extent, as he put it elsewhere, that the
“encounter with the language of art is an encounter with an unfinished
event [Geschehen] and is itself part of this event” (TM, 99). But in that
case contemporaneity too—like self-understanding—would be always frag-
mentary, i.e., never fully achieved. Tradition would be always already
‘detraditionalized’, ‘non-contemporaneity’; allegory always already the
absence that interrupts ‘Kalonic’ presence; hermeneutic articulation
always the fragmentary articulation of an historical (allegorical) encounter
with an ‘other’, a ‘thou’, or a beyond that interrupts simple presence.23
The movement of ‘allegorization’ here would be no more fixed than
is the tradition whose perdurance it belies as riddle or as shock, an
open (and perhaps still interdetermined) ciphering between the ontic and
the ontological. The ‘shock’ would be precisely the provocative encounter
with a fragmentary effect that disarticulated or transcended simultaneity,
or instant—an encounter, to use Klee’s term, with “the prehistory” of
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64  . 

the ontic. In that case Gadamer could no more be denying the ‘screen’
that blocks consciousness than he could be affirming the transparency
of its self-presence. Rather, to use words of Heidegger, in the event
of the ‘screen’ itself we would be articulating a synthesis between the
symbolic and the allegory, as an “exhibitive disparting,” which neither
simply affirms appearance nor denies it, but rather, places its inter-
pretation in question.24 Moreover, unlike many of his glosses on psycho-
analysis, hermeneutics here could not operate under what he calls the
“prejudice of completeness” (TM, 294), but rather “shed[s] light”—
and meaning—where both are ultimately lacking. Neither hermeneutics
nor psychoanalysis would involve simply “completing an interrupted
process into a full history, a story that can be articulated in language”
(PH, 11). Such interruption—such ‘shock’—and the fragmented char-
acter of its decipherment would be in some sense essential to the
hermeneutics “story,” as it was to some of the “oldest stories” on which
it relied and which Gadamer continually retold and refigured: that of
Being or the Good or the Beautiful itself (RAS, 77).
Indeed Gadamer himself (like Klee, at points) ‘grounds’ the beautiful
in the interplay or ‘interdetermination’ of the visible and the invisible,
in the ‘prehistory’ which descends from the metaphysics of illumina-
tion (and darkness, it should be added) in neoplatonism.
We have described the ontological structure of the beautiful as the mode
of appearing that causes things to emerge in their proportions and their
outline, and the same holds for the reality of the intelligible. The light
that causes everything to emerge in such a way that it is evident and
comprehensible in itself is the light of the word. Thus the close relationship
that exists between the shining forth (Vorscheinen) of the beautiful and
the evidentness (das Einleuchtende) of the understandable is based on the
metaphysics of light. This was precisely the relation that guided our
hermeneutical enquiry. (TM, 483)

Hence the final question. Is this to abandon the traditional prejudices

of Enlightenment for the metaphysics—doubtless we should add the
allegory—of light (and apparition) “itself ”? Despite everything has
Gadamer abandoned critique for metaphysics, Kant for Grossetest?
Has his hermeneutics of application simply lost the critical moment?
Recall that it was precisely here that Benjamin had insisted upon the
allegorical intuition and its image as not only fragment but ruin, one
in which the beautiful as symbol “evaporates when the light of divine
learning falls upon it” (T, 176). But then has Gadamer sufficiently
grasped the moment in which radiance has turned dark or the image
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in which dialectic has been brought to a standstill and the ekstasis of

the beautiful has been transformed into mourning? Or has hermeneu-
tics from the outset, and in particular in contesting aesthetic moder-
nity through its genesis, its “teleology in reverse,” (TM, 256) been a
work of mourning?
And what finally was the relevance of Paul Klee for all this? If Klee
too still sought a cosmological significance for art, if art had to do
precisely with the visible and the invisible, he also acknowledged that
we have the part but not the whole. This higher crystalline world will
need to be constructed, synthesized from fragments: hence doubtless
the allegory of mathematics, one which, as was noted at the outset,
looms inescapably over all modern theoretics. But Klee too knew the
limits of such constructs in the midst of fragmentation: and for this
he knew we will require intuition. But what remains most provocative
still, a provocation that still speaks of the beautiful, is that the work
of art remains not simply drowned in allegory but rather—and doubtless
the fragments of Goethe are again not far off—a symbol. As the
“Creative Credo” concludes, its affirmation of formalism notwithstanding,
“The relation of art to creation is symbolic. Art is an example, just
as the earthly is an example of the cosmic” (N, 79). But if so, what
then is the relation between interpretation and its ‘prehistory’, its his-
tory, its historical models, not least of which are its “old stories,” those
of Being or the Beautiful, but equally their theological and cosmolog-
ical allegories?
We should note, to begin with, that the Beautiful and the Ugly
coexist in Klee’s writings as essentially co-related (and relative) terms.
They did so explicitly in thinkers before him, for example in Nietzsche,
whom Klee knew as early as 1904, and Schopenhauer before him—
and even before that in Kant himself. Indeed Kant’s third Critique men-
tions the allegorical only once, in claiming that, in opposition to the
beautiful, the allegorical facilitates the presentation of the ugly. Klee
had said precisely this as well.25 And of course more anciently, the
beautiful and ugly, like all transcendentals, are analogically ‘interre-
lated’. Here again we confront the emergence of the problem of cri-
tique before what Kant called “the ruins of the ancient systems.”
Gadamer himself claimed the third Critique’s discussion of the symbolic
to be “one of the most brilliant results of Kantian thought,” decisively
rediscovering the analogia entis (TM, 75). At stake here, as Adorno saw,
is a fourth question that is needed to augment the questions that framed
the Kantian project (“What can I know?”, “What ought I to do?”,
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“What can I hope for?”), namely a question as to “how a thinking

obliged to relinquish tradition might preserve and transform tradi-
tion.”26 Indeed understood in this sense the question of tradition informs
(logically, conceptually, and transcendentally) the deeper unity of the
critical project itself. Similarly, perhaps only by confronting “the ruins
of the ancient systems” can we begin (and only begin) to assess what
lies contested in Benjamin’s and Gadamer’s rehabilitation of allegory
and the question of interpretation that still unites them.
Gadamer summed up the effect of this account in claiming that
“Understanding proves to be an event” (TM, 309). At stake was an
encounter with the other that acknowledged the limitations of reflection
(the death of intention, to use Benjamin’s term.) Put otherwise, application
is not a matter of mere judgment, nor can it be captured by the logic
of connotations (TM, 30–31). Rather, it involves an historical encounter
and ciphering of a never finally determined meaning that exceed us.
Both saw—perhaps much to the chagrin of those close to them—the
denial of progress that this entailed, the continual interruption of our
ontic prejudices. Even if we depend factically upon our prejudices, as
Gadamer argued for coherence, both truth and our epistemic capac-
ities exceed such prejudices—and, correlatively, legitimation emerges
only through such exceeding (ekstasis). Benjamin too found truth only
in this excess, in the shock of the surrealist encounter with the dialec-
tical image, one that occurs in Gadamer again, first and foremost in
relation to the radiance of the beautiful.
What perhaps becomes most apparent, however, is that at stake is
not simply a decision between two thinkers, their judgments or even
their archives: between the beautiful and sublime, the symbol and the
allegory, fulfillment and catastrophic allusion. As has become evident,
such alternatives are perhaps now always already fragmented—even
while depending ‘analogically’ upon one another’s intelligibility. As
Gadamer’s invocation of the analogia entis acknowledged, in such
‘differences’ the issue of transcendence was never far away—nor for
the same reason seemingly, the remnants of the of theological.27 This
was true of the messianic view of redemption of the past in Benjamin’s
case (and it certainly occurs in the question of the spiritual in Klee’s
own work). But we should not be surprised when Gadamer’s asserts
that his “task of redefining the hermeneutics of the human sciences”
is undertaken “in terms of legal and theological hermeneutics” (TM,
310–11): both thinkers have the understanding of this event at stake
that Gadamer characterizes as ‘theological’, where understanding as
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an event is itself “claimed” in the history of effects by what lies beyond

ontic categorization, thereby “bridging temporal distance.” And yet
this ‘excess’ left both equally open to their critics. Fairly or not, Adorno
charged that Benjamin’s messianic view of history remained too cir-
cumscribed, limited even in its denial of autonomy “to a voluntarily
installed, subjectively chosen tradition that is as unauthoritative as it
accuses the autarkic thought of being.”28 On the other hand, Gadamer’s
access to ‘eternity’ through the event of (Kierkegaard’s) “contempo-
raneity” may be too indeterminate: in such notions, as he noted of
the festive, he sought escape from the dispersion of simultaneity, and
he had sought, by so doing, to release its temporality (its Jetztzeit or
“fulfilled time”) from “theological justification.”29 And yet he had per-
haps overlooked the complications in such contemporaneity—not only
with respect to “de-sacrilization,” but also to primitivism, as is noted
by historians of religion such as Eliade.30 The time of the sacred remains
not only staunchly heterogeneous and interrupted, but equally, granted
the dispersions of modernity, fragmented, i.e., non-contemporaneous
and plural, in such a way that neither hireophany nor “ontophany”
(to use Eliade’s terms) will readily reduce.
Neither Benjamin nor Gadamer escapes this agonistic of understanding
and the dispersion of its ‘effects’, an agonistic (the ‘collective unconscious’,
as Adorno reminded Benjamin) tossed between tradition, construed
either as treasure or wasteland, and the beautiful, construed either as
cathartic fulfillment or as ideologically illusory. At stake is the inter-
pretation of the allegorical resonance of what exceeds and escapes the
simultaneity of (ontic) lived experience and our coming to awareness,
or understanding—and thereby what perdures in the “veil” of the
beautiful, to use terms of Goethe, cited by Benjamin.31
Similarly we would be hard put not to deny that both symbolic and
the allegorical are at stake in Klee’s work—as they were perhaps tacitly
in Goethe himself. Both indicate a more general, or better, dispersed,
phenomenon. Klee’s work in this regard instantiates the dispersion or
fragmentation of tradition itself, one that, like all fragments, is fully
captured neither by Benjamin nor Gadamer. For reasons already evi-
dent, one would not be wrong to wonder about the limitations of
Gadamer’s reading of Klee: notwithstanding the task of rehabilitating
allegory, Gadamer openly awarded symbolic Darstellung a “metaphysical
privilege”—and it may even confound his own ‘classical’ reading of
Heideggerian historicity as its allegorical corrective. But we should be
no less remiss to think that the allegorical (or its ‘ruins’) could simply
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68  . 

supplant, let alone ‘sublate’, the complex economy in which the sym-
bolic exhibits and articulates itself. In this sense we will need to think
of the Auseinandersetzung between Gadamer and Benjamin as the task
of interrogating the ruins of traditionality itself—and it doubtless should
affect our readings of both. In this respect, beyond “ancient harmony,”
there remains always, to cite another of Klee’s works from the same
time (1925), a “Crescent Moon over the Rational.” Granted our remove
from origins, we only perhaps figure and refigure these ruins, our inter-
pretations, to use a term of Klee’s, always a matter of tension (Spannung)
among differences. The result for Klee however remained still a mat-
ter of “idealism,” one neither to be reduced nor resolved, but articu-
lated precisely through such differences. Doubtless this is what Gadamer
meant in saying that “the true locus” of hermeneutics concerns the
‘between’ that connects the familiar and the strange (TM, 295). But it
is worth recalling that even this ‘between’ too is only ever ‘schema-
tized’ and ‘refigured.’ This is perhaps its link with tragedy—as Klee’s
own ‘figures’ realized. Two years after painting the Angelus Novus that
influenced Benjamin’s materialist ‘angelology’, Klee wrote, in attempt-
ing to provide an account of “the figuration of dynamic forces.”
Man’s ability to measure the spiritual, earthbound and cosmic, set against
his physical helplessness; this is his fundamental tragedy. The tragedy of
spirituality. The consequence of this simultaneous helplessness and mobil-
ity of the spirit is the dichotomy of human existence.
Man is half a prisoner, half born of wings. Each of the two halves per-
ceives the tragedy of its halfness by awareness of its counterpart. (N, 407)

ABBREVIATED WORKS
Works by Hans-Georg Gadamer
EPH On Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics, ed. Dieter Misgeld, Graeme
Nicholson. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992.
HL “Hermeneutics and Logocentrism,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction, ed. Diane
Michelfelder and Richard Palmer. Albany: SUNY Press, 1989.
IG The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Christopher Smith. New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986.
PH Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge. Berkeley: California
University Press, 1976.
RAS Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1981.
RB The Relevance of the Beautiful and other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas
Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
TM Truth and Method, rev. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshal. 2 rev.
ed. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1990.
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Works by Walter Benjamin

AP The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
B Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn. New
York: Verso, 1983.
IL lluminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books
1969.
T The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborene. New York: New Left
Books, 1977.

Works of Paul Klee

D The Diaries of Paul Klee, trans. P. Schneider, R. T. Zachary, and M. Knight.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.
N Note Books, vol. 1, The Thinking Eye, trans. Ralph Mannheim, and vol. 2, The Nature
of Nature, trans. H. Norden. London: Lund Humphries, 1961.

NOTES
1. Athenaeum Fragments, #58, in Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans.
Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 25.
2. See Rene Crevel, Paul Klee (Paris: Gallimard, 1930); translated by Gert Schiff under
the title “Rene Crevel as a Critic of Paul Klee,” Arts Magazine 52 (1977): 136.
3. Klee letter to Marc, June 8, 1915, cited in O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of
Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 269 n.
86. For Werckmeister’s analysis, see 56f.
4. Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Art (London, 1959), 186.
5. See Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), 128–29.
6. For further discussion of this issue, see Rainer Crone, “Cosmic Fragments of
Meaning: On the Syllables of Paul Klee,” in Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
7. Jean Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Gloucester: Peter
Smith, 1978), 29.
8. The link between phenomenology and optics (perspectivism, theoretical or experi-
ential) had been explicit throughout its history, beginning with Lambert. See my
Extensions. Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1992), chap. 8.
9. See Roland Barthes, S/Z , trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974),
61.
10. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press,
1969), 40.
11. Klee’s Bauhaus theory course was modeled after Fux’s fundamental musical coun-
terpoint manual Gradus ad Parnassum (1720). The stated goal of this work was “to
work out a method similar to that by which children learn, first letters, then syl-
lables, and finally how to read and write.” See A. Kagen, “Paul Klee’s ‘Ad
Parnassum’: The Theory and Practice of Eighteenth Century Polyphany as Models
for Paul Klee’s Art,” Arts Magazine 52, no. 1 (1977): 92. Elsewhere I have further
explored this compositional account in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Klee.
See my “On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful: Adorno and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings
of Paul Klee,” Chiasmi International 5 (2003): 201–20.
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12. For example, in a 1987 interview with Klaus Davi, Gadamer claimed that “American
art has been very ably puffed up by the media, but it has never produced any-
thing of real significance, nothing that a hermeneutic analysis can’t classify as pure
imitation.” See Flash Art, no. 136 (1987): 79.
13. See Regine Prange, Das Kristalline als Kunstsymbol: Bruno Taut und Paul Klee (Hildescheim:
Georg Olms Verlag, 1991), chap. 1.
14. Werkmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 418.
15. See “Leo Strauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit
und Methode,” The Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978): 10, letter of Gadamer to
Strauss, 5 April 1961 (Gadamer’s emphasis).
16. O. K. Werckmeister, “Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and the Angel of History,”
Oppositions, no. 25 (fall 1982): 104. Werkmeister’s (Benjaminian) view is not uncon-
troversial. See Donat de Chapeaurouge, Paul Klee und der christliche Himmel (Stuttgart
Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990), 53.
17. On the notion of reciprocal rejoinder see my Tradition(s): Refiguring Community and
Virtue in Classical German Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997),
Inroduction; hereafter cited as Traditions(s) I.
18. See G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, pt. 2 of Encyclopedia, trans. A. V. Miller
(London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 293. The full force of this connection
becomes even more explicit in Hegel’s own use of the artistic model in the pre-
ceding Zusatz for the understanding of crystallization, where once again the metonymy
between life and death is not far away. Unlike more primitive geological formations:
The calcareous formation thus represents the transition to organic being; on the
one side, arresting the leap into dead neutrality, and on the other side into life-
less and unitary abstraction. These organic forms (not all of course, but those oth-
ers are not in question) are not to be thought as having once actually lived and
then died; on the contrary they are stillborn. To suppose otherwise is like sup-
posing that bone-fibres were once veins or nerves, and subsequently hardened. It
is organoplastic Nature which generates the organic in the element of immediate
being and therefore as a dead shape, crystallized through and through, like the
artist who represents human and other forms in stone or on a flat canvas. He
does not kill people, dry them out and pour stony material into them, or press
them into stone (he can do this too, for he pours models into moulds); what he
does is to produce in accordance with his idea and by means of tools, forms which
represent life but are not themselves living: Nature however does this directly, with-
out needing such mediation. (ibid.)
One might then, following Benjamin, question what the affirmation of organics
excluded in such a ‘sublimation’—not only with respect to Gadamer’s attempt to
reinstitute an organic aesthetics but equally on the particulars of Hegel own aes-
thetic—for example, the notion of sculpture as the culmination of artistic media
and the classical idea in the presentation of the human form, the “organoplastic”
interpenetration of Spirit and Nature.
19. As the correspondence reveals, Adorno had urged Benjamin to undertake a criti-
cal analysis of Jung—and the latter himself regarded such a study as assisting in
providing the “epistemological foundations” of the Arcades Project. See Theador Adorno
and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 61f., 201.
20. See C. J. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R. F. C. Hall (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1956). Klee’s more mystical views are perhaps at least as easily
accessed here, as interpretors have suggested—rather than Benjamin’s angelology
of historical materialism.
21. E. Husserl, The Crisis of The European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans.
David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 387.
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22. See my “The Rationality of the Fragment,” in Extensions, chap. 10.

23. For further discussion of such “non-contemporaneity,” see my Tradition(s) II:
Hermeneutics, Ethics, and the Dispensation of the Good (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2001), Introduction.
24. This “exhibitive disparting” is Heidegger’s characterization of the complex ‘syn-
thesis’ of judgment. See The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 209. For further discussion of this
account, see my “Heidegger, Rationality, and the Critique of Judgement,” Review
of Metaphysics 61, no. 3 (March 1988).
25. “The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the
subject, but to the pictorial representation. This way and in no other does art
overcome the ugly without avoiding it” (D, 192).
26. See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:
Continuum, 1973), 54–55.
27. At stake here is not so much a ‘religious’ claim as a conceptual claim, one that
follows Gadamer’s invocation of the analogia entis in the third Kritik; but this “retrieval”
and “dispersion of the sacred” is even more explicit in the Dialectic of the Second
Kritik. See my Tradition(s) I, chap. 2, “Kant, the Architectonics of Reason, and the
Ruins of the Ancient Systems: On the Symbolics of Law.” For its implications for
a theory of hermeneutics, see my “Hermeneutics and the Retrieval of the Sacred,”
in Extensions, chap. 3.
28. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 54.
29. Cf. TM, 122, and Gadamer, “Concerning Empty and Ful-filled Time,” trans. R. P.
O’Hara, in Martin Heidegger in Europe and America, ed. E. G. Ballard and C. E. Scott
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).
30. See Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 393–94: “This contemporaneity with the great
moments of myth is an indispensible condition for any form of magico-religious
efficaciousness. Seen in this light, Soren Kierkegaard’s effort to express the Christian
status as ‘being contemporary with Jesus’ is less revolutionary than it at first sounds;
all Kierkegaard has done is to formulate in new words an attitude common and
normal to primitive man.” Eliade himself argued in favor of such ‘primitive sacral-
ity’ over against Heideggerian historicism. Still, he acknowledged elsewhere that
“Hermeneutics—the science of interpretation—is the Western man’s reply—the
only intelligent reply—to the demands of contemporary history, to the fact the
West is committed (one might be tempted to say ‘condemned’) to a confrontation
with the cultural values of the ‘others’.” See forward to The Two and the One, trans.
J. M. Cohen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 11. The agonistic per-
haps lies at the heart of hermeneutics, however. Paul Ricoeur, for example, links
hermeneutics to a “transcendental deduction” of the symbol explicitly understood
in terms of Eliade’s notion of hierophany in the conclusion of his The Symbolism of
Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 347ff. Yet it is pre-
cisely at this point that Adorno invokes Benjamin’s concept of allegory to criticize
Kierkegaard’s account of contemporaneity and the doctrine of the instant. See his
Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hallot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 54. In either case the conceptual adumbra-
tions involve—and without dissolving their evidence—a certain “wager,” to use a
term Ricoeur invokes (The Symbolism of Evil, 355).
31. It is precisely in this sense, as Benjamin puts it in a passage in the Arcades Project,
immediately following a characterization of Heidegger (as the “[s]ecularization of
history in Heidegger”), that “Goethe saw it coming: the crisis in bourgeois edu-
cation [Bildung]” (AP, 472). Klee’s late work, as is often recognized (inter alia, it was
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what fascinated Heidegger), was often preoccupied with the figures (and fate) of
death (cf. Sees It Coming). And yet, like Goethe, Klee continually articulates nature
as Urphenomenon in another sense, one Gadamer’s account of him fully affirmed.
Indeed a 1929 work entitled “Crystalline Landscape” exhibits precisely the Darstellung
that Gadamer claimed restrictedly as Klee’s point. In these works, beyond the alle-
gorical dissonances of works such as the Angelus Novus, still precisely consistent with
the pedagogical strategy of the Bauhaus based on counterpart, Klee seems to rein-
voke, to cite the title of a 1925 abstract work, “Ancient Harmony” (Alter Klang). In
any case, we should doubtless be leery of Benjamin’s characterization of “secular-
ization” here, for the reason we have already said: “theology”—at least in Benjamin’s
sense—seems no more absent in Heidegger than in Gadamer: indeed that was the
point of understanding interpretation as an event, an Ereignis, to use Heidegger’s
term. But as we have seen, this Ereignis is clearly there in Goethe’s own charac-
terization—on Benjamin reading: a beauty that “remains true to its essential nature
only when veiled” (in dem Unzugängliche Ereignis wird ) (IL, 199).