Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 36, No.

3, October 2005

AGAINST THE MYTH OF AESTHETIC PRESENCE:

A DEFENCE OF GADAMER’S CRITIQUE OF
AESTHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS
KRISTIN GJESDAL

Over the past twenty years a wide range of new and interesting readings of
German Romanticism have emerged. Manfred Frank’s study of the
Romantic continuations of Kant’s Third Critique, and Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s retrieval of The Literary Absolute offer only
two examples.1 Other examples would be works by Stanley Cavell, Charles
Larmore, and Richard Eldridge. 2 Within this discourse, the critics of
Romanticism have generally fared less well than its supporters. One such
critic is Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose Truth and Method (1960) opens with a
comprehensive review of post-Kantian and Romantic hermeneutics and
theories of art – of aesthetic consciousness, as he terms it. After it was shown
that Gadamer’s reading of Romantic hermeneutics, which presents it as
being based upon a problematic, quasi-Kantian theory of aesthetic genius,
was based on scanty philological material, 3 his critique of aesthetic
consciousness has faded into the background of the philosophical agenda.
Even within present discussions of Gadamer’s work, the first part of Truth
and Method is likely to provoke a feeling of mild embarrassment,4 and calls
for the need to rehabilitate aesthetic consciousness have remained at large.5
The aim of this essay is to counteract this tendency by arguing that
Gadamer’s critique of aesthetic consciousness has been misunderstood. Even
though Gadamer’s discussion of aesthetic consciousness starts out with an
analysis of the Romantic misreading of Kant’s conception of aesthetic genius
– an analysis that is, I shall argue, both biased and polemical – Gadamer
does not really criticize the Romantic movement as such. Rather, what he
does is to draw attention to a certain philosophical “picture,” a set of
intellectual presuppositions that tend to curb our contemporary thinking
about art and beauty. Gadamer traces these presuppositions back to the
longing for a pure, aesthetic presence, to the desire for an absolute
immediacy within the realm of art and artistic experience. As such,
Gadamer’s critique of aesthetic consciousness does not hamper the initiative
to return, again and again, to the insights of Romantic aesthetics. It simply
offers a critical test-case against which these re-readings should be
measured, a set of concerns and queries to which any theory of art, be it
Romantic or not, should be alert and responsive.
The argument is organized as follows. Having seen how Gadamer traces
aesthetic consciousness back to a Romantic misreading of Kant and Fichte
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(sections i, ii, and iii), I go through some possible objections to his critique
of this aesthetic paradigm (section iv). These objections, I argue, should not
keep us from seeing that Gadamer’s critique of aesthetic consciousness has
been misconceived, but rather chart an alternative route of interpretation
(sections v, vi, vii). Finally, I round off by offering some reflections on the
argumentative confusion that might have contributed to the systematic
misunderstanding of this part of Gadamer’s work (section viii).

1. Introducing the Term “Aesthetic Consciousness”

Although the term “aesthetic consciousness” is initially introduced in
order to characterize the subjectivist turn among the poets in Plato’s Athens,6
Gadamer’s aim is not to argue with an intellectual climate that belongs to a
historical past. “Aesthetic consciousness,” in his work, designates a set of
fundamental premises and prejudices that has come to impede our under-
standing of art and beauty. Hence Gadamer’s critique of aesthetic conscious-
ness does not, as Alan How suggests, address a position that reduces
aesthetic judgments to “matters of personal opinion,”7 that is, to what we,
roughly speaking, may designate as a Humean position within the
philosophy of taste. Nor can it, as Richard Bernstein proposes, be pinned
down as a critique of Kant’s subjectivization of judgment-power.8
According to Gadamer – at least if we follow the more mature version of
his argument9 – aesthetic consciousness belongs to the standpoint of art.10
The standpoint of art is distinguished from the standpoint of taste (TM 81;
WM 86f). And by claiming that the standpoint of art is itself “a product of
aesthetic consciousness” (TM 81; WM 87), Gadamer underlines the close
relation between aesthetic consciousness, on the one hand, and the
standpoint of art, on the other.
The standpoint of art, Gadamer argues, is achieved in the wake of (and
not by) the third Critique. Kant was interested in the normativity-claim that
inheres in our disinterested judging of natural beauty, but did not really enter
into a full-fledged discussion of art. It is, Gadamer maintains, first with
Schiller that we witness a shift from an interest in taste and the power of
judgment to an interest in artistic beauty (TM 84; WM 90). This shift, he
finds, is most decisive. Moreover, it is a shift that Gadamer in principle
endorses.
The problem with some post-Kantian philosophers, however, is that,
while moving from an investigation into the conditions of possibility for
ascribing to taste a transcendental principle of its own, to an interest in the
work of art, they tend to take too seriously the Kantian claim that “Fine art is
the art of genius.”11 According to Gadamer, the notion of genius thus comes
to provide post-Kantian philosophy with a “transcendental principle for
aesthetics in general” (TM 58; WM 64). “Genius” and “geniality” are turned

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into criteria for artistic production, that by which a work of art gets
distinguished from other kinds of objects and representations.
Gadamer’s first move is, in other words, to determine aesthetic
consciousness as a model which, although it leaves behind the Kantian
interest in taste and the power of judgment, remains influenced by Kant’s
reflections on creative genius. But, he continues in a second move, not until
it is detached from its Kantian framework, not until it is perceived through
the optics of post-Kantian philosophy, does the notion of genius reach its full
importance. How, then, does Gadamer account for this development?

2. The Aesthetics of Genius

In order to see why Gadamer finds the concept of genius to be so
important for aesthetic consciousness, one needs to bear in mind that
historically speaking, it is only in Kantian philosophy that the concept of
creation, hence also the notion of artistic genius, enters the language of art.
Kant deals with the problem of artistic genius in the “Deduction of Pure
Aesthetic Judgment” (CJ §§46-51). In the paragraph immediately prior to
this discussion, Kant repeats his claim, first mentioned in §16, that only free
beauty, i.e., beauty that is contemplated without regard to any concept, can
be an object of pure aesthetic judgment. Nature provides the privileged
examples of free beauty: the harmonious shapes of a petal, the weaves of
foliage, or the complex forms of a conch – that is, beautiful forms that have
not been intentionally brought forth and are not created in order to fulfil a
particular aim or purpose. If a work of art, as a product of intentional
activity, is to appear as beautiful, then it needs to display freedom of a
similar kind. The work of art cannot look as if it were designed to satisfy
some pre-existing concept, law, or idea. Can, then, the work of art be at all
an object of pure aesthetic judgment? In Kant’s opinion it can, but only to
the extent that it looks to us like nature (“als Natur aussieht,” CJ §45). The
work of art must show a spontaneity, a lack of external constraints, that
makes us perceive in it a freedom akin to the freedom we perceive in natural
beauty.12
Yet, being a product of human activity, the work of art must somehow be
thought through and organized. It must, as Kant puts it, display a rule. If it is
not to hinder the nature-like appearance of the artwork, this rule must be one
that shows “no hint that [it] was hovering before the artist’s eyes and putting
fetters on his mental powers” (CJ §45). This – to provide a rule that shows
no trace of having been consciously conceived by the artist – is the
achievement of aesthetic genius. Genius is the talent “through which nature
gives the rule to art” (CJ §46). In the work of genius, the rule of art is
intrinsically related to the immediacy (and the originality) of aesthetic
creation.

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 Kant’s Critique of Judgment, his concept of creative genius, is important
for Romantic aesthetics, Gadamer argues. However, it is only with Fichte
that the Kantian notion of genius reaches its “true apotheosis” (TM 59; WM
65). Fichte was perceived by his contemporaries as the faithful heir of the
Kantian spirit,13 and Fichte’s Theory of Science, Gadamer continues, elevates
“genius and what genius creates to a universal transcendental position” (TM
60; WM 65). The idea of an unlimited spontaneity is moved into the heart of
philosophical thinking, where it not only appears as the distinguishing mark
of art, but also as “a universal concept of value [einem universellen
Wertbegriff]” (TM 59; WM 65).
This is so, Gadamer suggests, because within the climate of Romanticism,
philosophy gets increasingly aware of how our understanding of ourselves
and our world, even our understanding of art, has been monopolized by
scientific reason. Seeking to uncover the universal laws of aesthetic
production, laws that were thought to be objective and everlasting, like the
laws of nature, the old aesthetics, that of rigid classicism, had been looking
for a “Newton of art.”14 The interest in artistic genius, by contrast, betrays a
new aesthetic sensitivity. Art is no longer seen as a further manifestation of
scientific rationality, but appears as a domain that transcends the logic of
science altogether. The art of genius offers a possibility to relate to nature
and ourselves in ways that differ from those provided by a rigid, theoretical
mind.
The post-Enlightenment philosophers perceive this as an entirely crucial
challenge, one that has to do with the most fundamental self-understanding
of human beings. Scientific rationality may well increase our understanding
of a causally determined nature. What it cannot do, however, is to account
for human spontaneity and freedom. 15 Art, by contrast, reflects these
dimensions of human life. And if, as Lessing suggests, it is the fate of an
educated, enlightened society to make “machines out of men,” then poetic
genius penetrates this mechanical existence in order to “make men again out
of these machines [aus diesen Maschinen wieder Menschen zu machen].”16
Poetic genius is ascribed a significance that by far exceeds the scope of art
and beauty.

3. Romantic Misreadings of the Critique of Judgment

In criticizing the aesthetics of genius, Gadamer wants to show that this
Romantic continuation of Kant – this “Fichteanized” approach to the
Critique of Judgment – fails to do justice to the philosophical impact of the
third Critique.
Even though the idea of creative genius plays an important role within the
first part of the Critique of Judgment, Kant never ascribes to genius a
sovereign position vis-à-vis taste and critical reflection. On the contrary,

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Kant is known to have warned against the “excesses of genius,”17 to have, in
Gadamer’s words, “steadfastly maintained the concept of taste that the Sturm
und Drang not only violently dismissed [verworfen] but also violently
demolished [stürmisch verletzt]” (TM 57; WM 62).
On Kant’s account, genius is a necessary condition for something to be a
work of art, but it is, by no means, a sufficient one. Only “shallow minds
[seichte Köpfe],” Kant claims (apparently referring to some prominent
representatives of the Sturm und Drang 18), would take the concepts of
originality and genius to constitute conclusive criteria of art (CJ §47). Genius
furnishes the material for products of art but can hardly vouch for its form
(ibid.). Form requires discipline and aesthetic education; it demands a talent
that is “cultivated in the schools” (ibid.), i.e., a capacity for judgment. Hence
the very idea of an entirely immediate and unconstrained creation is
incompatible with the spirit of Kant’s Critique. As Gadamer puts it, the
“systematic predominance of genius over the concept of taste” is “not
Kantian” (TM 59; WM 65). To the extent that aesthetic consciousness rests
on a given understanding of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, it rests on what
Gadamer deems a fatal misreading.

4. The Limitations of Gadamer’s Criticism

The first part of Truth and Method (where Gadamer works out his critique
of aesthetic consciousness) was conceived as early as the 1930s.19 This is the
time when Heidegger developed his criticism of the aesthetic tradition from
Plato to Schopenhauer, judging aesthetics to be “the element in which art
dies.” 20 It is a time that was still influenced by the way in which
Romanticism had been subject to fierce critique in the work of the right
Hegelians, Carl Schmitt, and others.21 Gadamer is obviously influenced by
this atmosphere. And in light of newer studies of Romanticism, such as those
mentioned at the beginning of this essay, his criticism may, at first glance,
appear dated, if not completely irrelevant to contemporary concerns and
queries.
Consider, as an example, Gadamer’s claim that the Romantics read Kant’s
notion of genius from the perspective of Fichte’s philosophy. What aspects
of Fichte’s philosophy does Gadamer have in mind? His theory of
subjectivity? However, Fichte’s theory of subjectivity changes throughout
his writing and can surely not be reduced to one, single position.22 Gadamer
does little to reflect this fact. Furthermore, he does not mention that even
though the Theory of Science explores the I’s capacity for an absolute self-
positing,23 Fichte also develops a concept of recognition that anticipates
Hegel’s understanding of intersubjectivity as based upon mutual recognition,
and therefore also Gadamer’s own emphasis on the dialogical nature of
hermeneutic reason.24 On Gadamer’s account, Fichte represents little but a

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problematic, subjective idealism.25 But what if it would be possible to show
that the Romantics were also influenced by other aspects of Fichte’s
philosophy, and that this also works back on their reading of Kant?26 Here,
again, Gadamer leaves us in the dark.
Another question is whether the Romantics, in their reading of the
Critique of Judgment, really did focus that one-sidedly on the idea of
creative genius. What about Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas? To the extent
that the Romantics were interested in a concept such as this – the notion of
an intuition (of the imagination) for which an adequate concept can never
be found – the recourse to genius would not at all be the only way in which
to distinguish a work of art from non-aesthetic objects and
representations.27
These objections are both valid and important. Yet they fail to do full
justice to Gadamer’s critique of aesthetic consciousness. For what Gadamer
wants is not really to offer a historical portrait of the Romantic continuations
of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. He is after something else – something more
fundamental – namely the way in which we, living and thinking in the
shadow of German Romanticism, are still inclined to think of art in terms of
aesthetic immediacy and pure aesthetic presence. This way of thinking is not
something that can be reduced to this or that philosophical position, e.g., the
Romantic aesthetics of genius. Rather, the Romantic aesthetics of genius
offers one particular example that is meant to direct our attention towards a
much wider aesthetic drive or paradigm.
Hence, in order to understand the full extent of Gadamer’s critique of
aesthetic consciousness, we need to see how he moves from a discussion of
creative genius to the more comprehensive question of aesthetic immediacy
and the notion of pure, aesthetic presence.

5. Two Varieties of the Myth of Pure Aesthetic Presence

As the work of genius, a work of art is defined as emphatically self-
contained. In order to appreciate its aesthetic qualities – lending voice to a
freedom akin to the freedom of natural beauty – one does not have to take
into account the relations in which the artwork stands. According to aesthetic
consciousness, Gadamer claims, “this is what is characteristic of the work of
art, the creation of genius: that its meaning lies in the phenomenon itself and
is not arbitrarily read into it [daß seine Bedeutung in der Erscheinung selbst
liegt und nicht willkürlich in sie hineingelegt wird]” (TM 77; WM 83). Upon
encountering the work of genius, what matters is the disinterested
appreciation of its forms, the pure aesthetic relation between work and
perceptive subjectivity. Both the aesthetic expression and the aesthetic
experience are distinguished “from the non-aesthetic relationships [den
außerästhetischen Bezügen]” in which they stand (TM 89; WM 95). As such,

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aesthetic consciousness undertakes a move that Gadamer characterizes as
that of an aesthetic differentiation (ästhetische Unterscheidung, TM 85; WM
91).
In Truth and Method, the idea of aesthetic differentiation gets further
elucidated by means of two examples: Richard Hamann’s understanding of
the aesthetic expression and the Romantic celebration of the symbol. Turning
to Hamann’s work – Hamann was a student of Simmel who taught in
Marburg in the 1920s – Gadamer is concerned with his understanding of
aesthetic experience as eigenbedeutsam or “significant in itself” (TM 89;
WM 95). According to Hamann, the aesthetic object is not fremdbedeutsam;
it is not significant in relation to something else (TM 90; WM 95). No
hermeneutic activity or synthesis is involved in order to distinguish a given
object as a work of art. Aesthetic experience is thought to be independent of
intellectual and linguistic mediation. It “has a definitive immediacy which
eludes every opinion about its meaning [sie hat eine betonte Unmittelbarkeit,
die sich allem Meinen seiner Bedeutung entzieht]” (TM 67; WM 72). Any
reference to the meaning of this experience would threaten the purity of the
aesthetic; it would threaten the particular kind of presence with which the
work of art is given to consciousness.
A different, but nonetheless related conception of pure aesthetic presence
is found in the Romantic celebration of the symbol. According to Gadamer,
the Romantic understanding of the symbol presupposes the idea of a
“coincidence of the sensible and the non-sensible” (TM 74; WM 80). Being
based on such a coincidence, there is an intrinsic relation between the
aesthetics of the symbol, on the one hand, and the idea of an “aesthetic
autonomy against the claims of the concept” (TM 79; WM 84), on the other.
The symbol testifies to a “relation of the ineffable to language” (ibid.).
The idea of this symbolic “relation of the ineffable to language” effects a
correspondingly negative evaluation of allegory. The allegorical expression
rests upon the possibility of replacing one order of signs with another, and
the interpretation of allegory is itself a matter of convention. In order to
unravel an allegorical representation, pure aesthetic feeling, no matter how
intense, does not suffice. Its meaning is only open to those who already
belong to a community of interpretation. As such, allegory has “a dogmatic
aspect” (TM 79; WM 85) which makes the Romantics attribute to it “an
external [äußerliche] and artificial [künstliche] significance” (TM 74; WM
80). The very distinction between art and non-art is conceived along the lines
of the symbolic/allegorical distinction. What is allegorical cannot be art.
Gadamer’s understanding of the Romantic conception of symbol and
allegory is not devoid of problems.28 Yet, what is important in this context is
to understand how Gadamer refers to a certain conception of
Eigenbedeutsamkeit and symbolic meaning in order to illuminate the much

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more comprehensive desire for pure aesthetic presence. This, he seems to
suggest, is what is at stake in the Romantic misreading of Kant: the idea that
either the work of art presents itself as free from conceptual and intellectual
reference, or it is not a proper work of art. But, according to Gadamer,
Kant’s point had not been to liberate aesthetic experience from conceptual
reference and linguistic mediation as such.29 Rather, he wanted to show that
as an object of pure aesthetic judgment, art cannot be perceived in terms of a
specific (objective) concept or purpose. In the Critique of Judgment, the
aesthetic experience is not detached from our linguistic capacities, but is, at
the end of the day, related, in a very subtle way, to our deployment of
empirical concepts.30
Aesthetic consciousness fails to see this. Misunderstanding Kant even
more grossly than Gadamer initially indicates, it gathers that because a work
of art cannot be approached in terms of specific ends or concepts, by which
its meaning would be determined once and for all, it needs to be detached
from linguistic mediation as such. Thus, aesthetic consciousness represents a
way of thinking that is based on the deeply problematic assumption that
either a work of art is conceptually determinable (which, as Kant has shown,
it is not), or it has nothing to do with our linguistic capacities at all. It is this
position – this unmediated either-or – and not the particular pitfalls of the
Romantic aesthetics of genius that Gadamer wants to combat in his critique
of aesthetic consciousness.31 Thus, the attempt at overcoming aesthetic
consciousness does not consist in trying to overcome a problematic
aesthetics of genius, but in turning to an adequate phenomenological account
of experience as such.

6. Gadamer’s Critique of the Myth of Pure Aesthetic Presence

Recalling the insights of Aristotle’s De Anima – which are further
elaborated in Heidegger’s Being and Time – Gadamer maintains that “all
aisthesis tends towards a universal, even if every sense has its own specific
field and thus what is immediately given in it is not universal” (TM 90; WM
95). The idea of an aisthesis that is present as merely given is, in Gadamer’s
view, an abstraction. No object of perception, he argues, is present in this
way. Rather “we see sensory particulars in relation to something universal
[In Wahrheit sehen wir, was uns sinnlich im einzelnen gegeben ist, immer
auf ein Allgemeines hin an]” (TM 90; WM 95f.).
A universal does not need to be, as the aesthetic consciousness assumes, a
determinative law or concept by which experience or meaning is ultimately
fixed. On the contrary, aesthetic consciousness is indeed correct to point out
that aesthetic experience is “characterized by not hurrying to relate what one
sees to a universal, the known significance, the intended purpose, etc., but by
dwelling on it as something aesthetic” (TM 90; WM 96). However, as

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Gadamer argues, this dwelling does “not stop us from seeing relationships”
(ibid.). All perception, be it aesthetic or not, refers to a wider context or
horizon of experience. Perception is “never a simple reflection of what is
given to the senses” (ibid.), but requires a synthesis in which one “looks-
away-from [wegsieht von], looks-at [hinsieht auf], sees-together-as
[zusammensieht als]” (TM 90f; WM 96).
This also applies in the realm of aesthetic creation and experience.
According to Gadamer, we simply do not, most originally, perceive a merely
aesthetic form that induces a pure aesthetic feeling or liking. What we see is
a beautiful tulip, a beautiful poem, or a sublime painterly presentation. The
very thought of an act of perception that includes no intellectual reference is
an abstraction [“die spezifische Wahrnehmung einer Sinnengegebenheit als
solche ist eben eine Abstraktion]” (TM 90; WM 95).
Upon encountering, say, a piece of literature, we do not perceive it as a
work of art because we have some sort of immediate access to its aesthetic
qualities (designed so as to induce a feeling of aesthetic presence or
Eigenbedeutsamkeit in us). “Only when we understand a text, only when we
are at least in command of its language, can it be a work of literary art for
us” (TM 91; WM 97). This is also the case upon proceeding to non-linguistic
art. Turning to the visual arts, it applies that “Only if we ‘recognize
[erkennen]’ what is presented [das Dargestellte] are we able to ‘read’ a
picture; in fact, that is what ultimately makes it a picture” (ibid., trans.
modified). And, as far as music is concerned, Gadamer maintains that “even
in listening to absolute music we must ‘understand’ it [sie verstehen]. And
only when we understand it, when it is ‘clear’ [‘klar’] to us, does it exist as
an artistic creation for us” (ibid.).

7. Understanding, Interpretation, Assertion

Gadamer’s point – and this is where he transcends the kind of either-or
thinking that characterizes aesthetic consciousness – is not that we, at this
fundamental level, have to grasp the full meaning of the work, i.e., that we
are forced to see the work in terms of a given, determinative concept. As it
is, the idea of determinative concepts does not belong to the realm of art, nor,
for that sake, to the larger realm of symbolic expression. This is the very
point of Gadamer’s attempt, in Truth and Method and other places, to rethink
the concept of the hermeneutic circle. 32 He wants to shift the focus of
hermeneutics from a didactic-methodological exposition of the way in which
the interpreter moves back and forth between the parts of a text and its
meaning as a larger unity, 33 to an awareness of the temporal aspect of
understanding. The meaning of a text is never fixed. It is not something that
lurks behind the work, only to be teased out by the clever interpreter.
Meaning, rather, is made possible by a fusion between the horizon of the

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interpreter, her larger system of beliefs and practice,34 and the horizon of the
text. The meaning of a text or a work of art is, in other words, not one over
against which the interpreter relates as a neutrally investigating subject. Such
a view, Gadamer reasons, only testifies to the “aesthetic-historical
positivism” that follows in the wake of aesthetic consciousness (TM 307;
WM 312). At stake, rather, is a kind of signification that reflects back on the
self-understanding of the interpreter herself, altering the standpoint from
which she, on another occasion, may return to the text.35 Hence there is a
constitutive temporal displacement woven into the structure of hermeneutic
labour. In understanding we never understand the same. What we
understand, when approaching the text anew, is always something different.
Or, as Gadamer puts it, “understanding, as it occurs in the human sciences, is
essentially historical – (…) in them a text is understood only if it is
understood in a different way” (TM 309; WM 314). This displacement in
understanding, Gadamer argues, is not a weakness. It is, rather, what makes
us come back to the work over and over again, what makes understanding a
genuinely historical task. It is this focus on the temporality of understanding
that Gadamer has in mind when he admits that even though his hermeneutics
is inspired by Hegel,36 it also ventures into vistas of our historicity that Hegel
would have characterized as “bad infinity.”37
By emphasizing the temporal aspects of hermeneutics, Gadamer wants to
overcome the position of aesthetic consciousness. But having argued that
aesthetic consciousness is trapped in a false opposition between immediacy
and conceptual determination, he will have to indicate how hermeneutics, in
his version, may point beyond these false alternatives. Gadamer does so by
expounding on what, in his view, constitutes the quasi-transcendental
conditions for all experience – the synthesizing work of understanding
(Verstehen).38
Understanding, Gadamer argues, is not a method or the outcome of a
willed and methodologically conducted procedure of reflection. It is in fact
not something we consciously do or fail to do, but something we are. The
pre-reflective way in which we move around in the world is itself of a
hermeneutic nature. 39 Yet, our understanding of the world implies no
theoretical knowledge. It is a kind of know-how that is revealed through
the way in which we, without theoretical consideration, orient ourselves in
the world. We open the door without objectifying or conceptually
determining the nature of the door-handle or the doorframe. The world is
familiar to us in a basic, intuitive way. Most originally we do not learn to
know the world by gathering a collection of neutral facts about which we
reach a set of universal propositions, laws, judgments, or hypotheses,
which to a larger or lesser extent correspond to the world as it is.40 As
Gadamer puts it, it is “always a human (…) world that presents itself to us”

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(TM 447; WM 451). The world is tacitly intelligible, saturated with
meaning all the way through.
According to Gadamer, this meaning is linguistically mediated. There is
no gap between world and language. “Language,” he argues, “is not just one
of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has
a world at all” (TM 443; WM 446). But language, on Gadamer’s
understanding, is precisely not a set of signs, tags, or determinations that we
stick on to this or that particular object (TM 403; WM 407). It is the larger
linguistic totality in which we live, through which we communicate, and by
which it is at all possible for us to gain a sense of orientation in the world
(TM 450; WM 453f.).
Our basic familiarity with the world is brought to reflective consciousness
through the work of interpretation (Auslegung). Interpretation, however, does
not need to be of a propositional and determinative nature. At stake is the
explicit foregrounding of a given thing or object. Heidegger here offers a
famous example, the experience of how the dysfunctional hammer forces us
to stop hammering and consciously consider what a hammer is for.41 This
sudden awareness is not to be equated with interpretation. Yet it highlights a
crucial dimension of interpretation, the way in which it makes things,
objects, the fabric of the world, appear as something, as Heidegger puts it
(SZ §32, 149). Gadamer generally endorses this line of reasoning. Playing on
the conceptual resources of Being and Time, he argues that all perception is
perception of something as something – “ein Auffassen von etwas als etwas”
(TM 90; WM 96). Still this as is only possible on the background of the
world as a totality of practices and intersubjective encounters, the world that
is opened up by our being linguistically there.
In the process of interpretation, understanding does not become something
different. Gaining a new reflective level, it becomes itself. Hence there is no
absolute distinction between understanding and interpretation. Rather,
“Understanding occurs in interpreting [Die Vollzugsweise des Verstehens ist
die Auslegung]” (TM 389; WM 392).42 Understanding and interpretation
make up two different aspects of the pre-reflective synthesizing through
which the world is disclosed as a totality of meaning, a space in which it is
possible for us to recognize an object as a hammer, a table, or a work of art.
This is the ultimate outcome of Gadamer’s critique of aesthetic conscious-
ness: that only when there is some sort of synthesizing activity involved (that
is, only when there is reference to some universal and not only a merely
sensuous or purely aesthetic perception) can something be an object of
experience. All experience implies cognitive or linguistic reference.
Cognitive or linguistic reference, however, is not the same as conceptual
determination.43 The most fundamental meaning of a thing, its “as-structure,”
is not something that we superimpose on a stratum of pure, immediate

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impressions. The “as-structure” of experience goes all the way down. This is
also the case when encountering aesthetic objects. Although one, in aesthetic
experience, “does not simply ‘look beyond’ what one sees – e.g., to its
general use for some end – but dwells within it,” it still applies that
“lingering vision and assimilation is not a simple perception of what is there,
but is itself understanding-as” (TM 91; WM 96).
Referring to Heidegger’s distinction between an understanding of objects
or things in the world as “ready to hand [Zuhanden]” and an understanding
of objects or things as “present to hand [Vorhanden]” – in ordinary practice
and circumspection we encounter things as ready-to-hand, in terms of their
reference to a comprehensive context of use or meaning; the scientific gaze,
however, strips the world of this dimension, regarding items in the world
solely as present-to-hand (SZ §§21ff.) – Gadamer maintains that “the mode
of being of what is observed aesthetically is not presence-at-hand” (TM 91;
WM 97). Hence, by embracing the myth of the aesthetically given, by failing
to take into account how the work of art presents itself through a more
comprehensive, hermeneutic synthesis, aesthetic consciousness is bound,
upon further philosophical analysis, to generate a feeling of ontological
embarrassment (ontologische Verlegenheit, TM 83; WM 89).
As an attempt to reflect on the ontological embarrassment induced by the
myth of pure aesthetic presence, Gadamer’s critique of aesthetic conscious-
ness is much more than a critique of the aesthetics of genius. It is, in fact, a
critique of a very problematic immediacy thinking in aesthetics, a kind of
intellectual fallacy by which aesthetics has been hampered since the
Romantic period, but which cannot uncritically be identified with Romantic
aesthetics as such.

8. Aesthetic Consciousness as Temptation or Total Explanation?

Approaching the final part of the essay, one more question remains to be
asked. If Gadamer’s critique of aesthetic consciousness really is more than a
(failed) critique of the Romantic aesthetics of genius, why has it been so
severely misunderstood? Why has his criticism of aesthetic consciousness
been perceived as an inaccurate reading of Romanticism rather than a
significant analysis of a particular philosophical temptation, a particular
fascination with the idea of immediacy and aesthetic givenness within our
thinking about art and beauty?
Addressing this question, it is hard to conclude that Gadamer himself is
free of responsibility. For throughout his discussion of aesthetic conscious-
ness, it is possible to trace an almost imperceptible, but nonetheless
confusing shift in his level of argumentation.
The initial discussion of modern aesthetics, in the first part of Truth and
Method, uses the concept of aesthetic consciousness in order to identify a

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general set of prejudices that, in Gadamer’s mind, restricts the scope and
relevance of post-Kantian aesthetics. Insofar as aesthetic consciousness is
conceived of in this manner, Gadamer brings attention to, as well as
criticizes, the temptation to view our relation to the work of art in terms of a
model of pure aesthetic presence. What he does not do, however, is to show
that aesthetic consciousness is the only option within post-Kantian aesthetics.
However, it is this assumption – that aesthetic consciousness, without further
ado, can be taken as a representative of post-Kantian aesthetics – that
Gadamer makes in the second part of Truth and Method, the most famous
example being the encounter with Romantic hermeneutics. At this point, the
initially flexible description of aesthetic consciousness is turned into a fixed
and pre-established scheme of exegesis through which Romantic
hermeneutics is deemed to emerge as a problematic application of the
Romantic aesthetics of genius.
Here – and in the case of Gadamer’s reading of Romantic hermeneutics
we talk about the second part of Truth and Method but also about a series of
subsequent essays and comments44 – it is as if Gadamer uncritically returns
to the Heideggerian idea that philosophy, from Plato onwards, has failed to
do justice to the authentic being of art.45 This is a turn that costs Gadamer
dearly. By turning the concept of aesthetic consciousness into a rigid scheme
of interpretation, Gadamer risks undermining the relevance of his critique for
a contemporary understanding of philosophical Romanticism – and, for that
sake, for contemporary theories of art. For realizing how Gadamer, in the
second part of Truth and Method, tends to perceive modern aesthetics as
nothing but aesthetic consciousness, even a more sympathetic reader might
feel tempted to follow his critics in rejecting the study of aesthetic
consciousness as too coarse and unsophisticated, and hence also as irrelevant
to the question of how we can best come to terms with the Romantic roots of
our own understanding of art and aesthetic experience. This, in my view, is
regrettable because the tendency of aesthetic consciousness to embrace the
myth of pure aesthetic presence is a threat to which every reader of
philosophical Romanticism – in its past as well as present varieties – must be
responsive.
Temple University

References
1. See Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1989), his interpretation of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics in Das individuelle
Allgemeine (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), as well as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute. The Theory of Literature in German
Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1988); L’ absolu litteraire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978).
2. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary. Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988); Charles Larmore, The Romantic Legacy (New York:

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 Columbia University Press, 1996); Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism.
Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
3. Gadamer’s criticism of Romantic hermeneutics in Truth and Method is based on the later
Dilthey’s interpretation of Schleiermacher. This interpretation was subsequently
questioned by the publication of some of Dilthey’s earlier manuscripts. Here Dilthey
emphasizes Schleiermacher’s affiliation with objective idealism, and thereby casts doubt
on the understanding of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics as a subjectivist conception of
interpretation. This led Gadamer’s student Heinz Kimmerle to edit a new version of
Schleiermacher’s handwritten manuscripts on hermeneutics. Kimmerle wanted to show
that Schleiermacher initially defended an almost Gadamerian notion of the intertwining of
thought and language, but that this position was later overshadowed by a more problematic
orientation towards the psychic life of the writer (i.e., by Schleiermacher as Gadamer
knows him). See Heinz Kimmerle, “Einleitung,” Hermeneutik. Nach den Handschriften,
ed. Heinz Kimmerle (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1974), 14.
Kimmerle’s retrieval of Schleiermacher’s manuscripts has lately been subjected to
criticism by Wolfgang Virmond. Virmond claims that a part of Schleiermacher’s
handwritten manuscript which Kimmerle (following Dilthey) places in the later parts of
Schleiermacher’s writing, belongs to the earlier period, which, in turn, makes it difficult to
speak of a development in Schleiermacher’s writing from a non-psychological to a
psychologically oriented hermeneutics. See Wolfgang Virmond, “Neue Textgrundlagen zu
Schleiermachers früher Hermeneutik. Prolegomena zur kritischen Edition,”
Schleiermacher-Archiv, vol. 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 578 ff.
4. It is symptomatic that so charitable a reader as Jean Grondin finds it necessary to retract
the significance of the first part of Truth and Method by characterizing it as “a detour.”
Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1994), 110.
It is also worth noting that to the extent that the Library of Living Philosopher’s volume
on Gadamer deals with aesthetics, it is in the form of offering a discussion of the
hermeneutic theory of art, not of the hermeneutic critique of aesthetic consciousness. See
Lewis E. Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Chicago: Open Court,
1997).
Two recent publications on Gadamer, Robert J. Dostal (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Jeff Malpas,
Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (eds.), Gadamer’s Century. Essays in Honor of Hans-
Georg Gadamer (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002), offer nothing at all on
Gadamer’s philosophy of art.
5. Such as the one issued by Gianni Vattimo in “Hermeneutics and Nihilism: An Apology for
Aesthetic Consciousness” in Brice R. Wachterhauser (ed.), Hermeneutics and Modern
Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 447.
6. See “Plato and the Poets” (1934), trans. P. Christopher Smith, in Dialogue and Dialectic:
Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 65;
“Plato und die Dichter,” Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1986-1995), vol. 5,
206.
Although Gadamer deploys the concept of aesthetic consciousness as early as 1934, it is
not expounded in any systematic manner until the end of the 1950s.
7. Alan How, The Habermas-Gadamer Debate and the Nature of the Social (Aldershot:
Ashgate Publishing Company), 25.
8. According to Bernstein, it is Kant’s “‘radical subjectivization’ of aesthetic judgment that
Gadamer calls ‘aesthetic consciousness’.” Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and
Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (London: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 119.
9. In the light of Gadamer’s first, systematic discussion of aesthetic consciousness, an essay
entitled “Zur Fragwürdigkeit des ästhetischen Bewußtseins” (1958), one might argue that
aesthetic consciousness is identified with our capacity for aesthetic judgement. As

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 Gadamer here puts it, “das ästhetische Urteil ist eine Funktion des ästhetischen
Bewußtseins.” (“Zur Fragwürdigkeit des ästhetischen Bewußtseins,” Gesammelte Werke,
vol. 8, 9.) However, although such an understanding of aesthetic consciousness might
prove sustainable by reference to this preliminary version of Gadamer’s argument, it
cannot, as such, be transferred to his later work.
10. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994), 81; Wahrheit und Methode, Gesammelte Werke,
vols. 1 and 2, 87. Subsequent references to this work will be given as TM; WM in the text
followed by page number.
11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1987); Kritik der Urteilskraft, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5 (Berlin:
Georg Reimer, 1913), §46, 307. Subsequent references to the Critique of Judgment will be
given in the text as CJ, followed by paragraph and/or page number.
12. This is an aspect of Kant’s aesthetics that Gadamer takes over. For in Gadamer’s opinion,
“Kant is right when he says that art must be capable of ‘being regarded as nature – i.e.,
please without betraying the constraints of rules. We do not consider the intentional
agreement between what is represented and the reality we know, we do not look to see
what it resembles, we do not measure its claim to significance by a criterion that we
already know well” (TM 52; WM 57).
13. Hegel lends his voice to this general assumption when claiming that “the shortcoming in
the Kantian philosophy was its unthinking inconsistency [gedankenlose Inkonsequenz],
through which speculative unity was lacking in the whole system; and this shortcoming
was removed by Fichte.” G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.
S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), vol. 3,
481; Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 3, Werke in 20 Bänden, vol.
15 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 389. Friedrich Schlegel makes a similar claim in
the Athenaeum Fragment no. 282, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans.
Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 202; Kritische und
theoretische Schriften (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978), 111.
14. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James
P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 280; Die Philosophie der
Aufklärung (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1932), 375.
15. Charles Taylor, whose analysis of Romanticism holds much in common with Gadamer’s
critique of aesthetic consciousness, expounds on this point in The Sources of the Self. The
Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapter
21.
16. Gottfried Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy, quoted from The Philosophy of the
Enlightenment, 296; Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, 395.
17. According to John Zammito, Kant “warned Herder, in a letter of 1789, against the excesses
of ‘genius’.” John Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 34.
18. On Zammito’s understanding, “Kant’s hostility to the Sturm und Drang is the decisive
context in which one must read not only his distinction of art from science in §43, but also
his whole treatment of genius in §§46-47. Kant has a very definite target in mind, even
within the Sturm und Drang: Johann Herder. His juxtaposition of science and art can be
read – should be read – as a juxtaposition, as well of his own method with Herder’s
manner.” The Genesis of Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” 137.
19. Gadamer, “Writing and the Living Voice,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry,
and History, 64.
20. The Origin of the Work of Art, trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry,
Language, Thought (San Francisco: Harper, 1975), 73; Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960), 83.

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21. For a clear account of the German criticisms of Romanticism, see Karl-Heinz Bohrer, Die
Kritik der Romantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989).
22. Dieter Henrich discusses the development of Fichte’s concept of self-consciousness in
“Fichte’s Original Insight,” in Darell E. Christensen (ed.), Contemporary German
Philosophy, vol. 1 (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982), 15-53;
Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967).
23. See for instance Johann G. Fichte, “Zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre,”
Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), 463.
24. Allen Wood emphasizes the influence of Fichte’s work on Hegel and suggests that
although “much in Hegel’s discussion of recognition is novel and provocative (…) both the
concept of recognition and its use as the basis of a theory of natural right are derived from
Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right.” Allen Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 78.
25. Also in a later essay, Gadamer plays on the idea of a fundamental opposition between
Fichte and Hegel. See “Hegel’s Dialectic of Self-Consciousness” (1973), in Hegel’s
Dialectics. Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1976), 54; “Die Dialektik des Selbstbewußtseins,” Gesammelte Werke,
vol. 3, 47.
26. Such a reading is pursued in Eldridge’s The Persistence of Romanticism, in particular the
introduction and chapter 1.
27. This is the reading suggested by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in The
Literary Absolute.
28. To provide only one example: Reflecting on the nature of the allegory – and I mention this
without any intent to enter the many-layered discussion of this rhetorical figure – Gadamer
takes it to be a mode of representation that “rests on firm traditions and always already has
a fixed, statable meaning which does not resist rational comprehension through the concept
[but is closely related to] the rationalization of the mythical” (TM, 79; WM, 85). Given this
conception, Gadamer cannot account for the aspects of allegory that are emphasized for
example in the work of Walter Benjamin: its anticipation of a modernist experience of
rootlessness, displacement, and nihilism. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German
Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (London: Verso, 1977); Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977).
29. I expound on Gadamer’s reading of the third Critique in more detail in “Reading Kant
Hermeneutically? Gadamer and the Critique of Judgment” forthcoming in Kant-Studien.
30. See Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste. A Reading of the “Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 21-28.
31. For a lucid account of this aspect of Gadamer’s critique, see Françoise Dastur, “Esthétique
et herméneutique. La critique de la conscience esthétique chez Gadamer,” Phénoménologie
et Esthétique (Paris: Encre marine, 1988), 41-60.
32. Gadamer discusses the hermeneutic circle in Truth and Method (TM 190ff., 265f., 291f.;
WM 194ff., 270f., 296f.), but also in the essay “On the Circle of Understanding,” trans. J.
M. Connolloy and T. Keutner, in Connolloy and Keutner, Hermeneutics versus Science?
(Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1988), 67-78; “Vom Zirkel des Verstehens”
(1959), Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, 57-65.
33. Such an understanding of the hermeneutic circle is found in Friedrich Ast’s work. See
Joachim Wach, Das Verstehen, vol. 1, Die großen Systeme (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
1926), 41ff.
34. A horizon, Gadamer explains, “is determined by the prejudices we bring with us (…) they
represent that beyond which it is impossible to see” (TM 306; WM 311). Yet, a horizon is
no fixed border of comprehension. Rather, “it is continually in the process of being formed
because we are continually having to test all our prejudices” (ibid.).
35. According to Gadamer, this implies that our self-understanding can never be complete. Or,
as he emphatically puts it, “to be historical means that knowledge of oneself can never be

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 complete [Geschichtlichsein heißt, nie im Sichwissen Aufgehen].” Yet, this is “due not to a
deficiency in reflection, but to the essence of the historical being that we are [liegt im
Wesen des geschichtlichen Seins, das wir sind]” (TM 302; WM 307).
36. “This almost defines the aim of philosophical hermeneutics: its task is to retrace the path of
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit until we discover in all that is subjective the
substantiality [recast, by Gadamer, in terms of the hermeneutic horizon of the interpreter]
that determines it”(TM 302; WM 307).
37. See for instance Gadamer’s response to Jacques Derrida in “Hermeneutics and
Logocentrism,” in Michelfelder and Palmer (eds.), Dialogue and Deconstruction. The
Gadamer-Derrida Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 21ff.
38. This is what Gadamer means when claiming that his “real concern” in Truth and Method
“was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us
over and above our wanting and doing” (TM xxviii; WM vol. 2, 438). In this connection,
he explains, “it seems (…) a mere misunderstanding to invoke the famous Kantian
distinction between quaestio juris and quaestio facti. Kant certainly did not intend to
prescribe what modern science must do in order to stand honourably before the judgment
seat of reason. He asked a philosophical question: what are the conditions of our
knowledge, by virtue of which modern science is possible, and how far does it extend? The
following investigation also asks a philosophical question in the same sense. (…) It asks
(to put it in Kantian terms): how is understanding possible?” (TM xxixf.; WM vol. 2,
439).
39. Gadamer here follows Heidegger, claiming that “Heidegger’s temporal analytics of Dasein
has (…) shown convincingly that understanding is not just one of the various possible
behaviours of the subject but the mode of being of Dasein itself” (TM xxx; WM vol. 2,
440).
40. Gadamer discusses the notion of truth as adequation in “What is Truth?” (1957), in
Wachterhauser (ed.), Hermeneutics and Truth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1994), 33-46; “Was ist Wahrheit?” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, 44-56.
41. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco:
Harper, 1962); Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), §§15-16.
Subsequent referenced as SZ, followed by paragraph and page number.
42. A claim that echoes the Heideggerian idea that in interpretation, “understanding
appropriates understandingly that which is understood by it,” so that, at the end of the day,
interpretation simply means to make something “explicitly understood” (SZ §32, 148f.).
43. Interestingly, this misunderstanding seems to drive Adorno’s critique of hermeneutics in
Aesthetic Theory. In Adorno’s view, “The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks
as hermeneutical objects.” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 118; Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt
am Main: Surhkamp, 1970), 179.) Being distinguished by their constitutive
incomprehensibility, all advanced artworks are, as he puts it, “enigmas [Rätsel]” (Engl.
120; Dt. 182). Hermeneutics does not realize this; it does not see that “understanding
[Verstehen] is itself a problematic category in the face of art’s enigmaticalness” (Engl.
121; Dt. 184). Rather than acknowledgeing the enigma of art, hermeneutics, in Adorno’s
view, tries to reject it. This, he continues, is a meaningless effort, one that threatens to
destroy the very phenomenon that hermeneutics originally set out to recover, i.e., the
phenomenon of art. Those who “peruse art solely with comprehension,” he claims, are
forced to see it “disappear” (Engl. 122; Dt. 185). They make art “into something
straightforward [zu einem Selbstverständlichen], which is furthest from what it is” (ibid.).
44. Most notably “The Problem of Language in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics” (1968), in
Robert W. Funk (ed.) Schleiermacher as Contemporary. Journal for Theology and the
Church, vol. 7 (New York: Herder and Herder), 66-84; “Das Problem der Sprache bei
Schleiermacher,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, 361-373 and “Schleiermacher als Platoniker”
(1969), Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, 374-383.

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45. This, it seems, is something that happens in spite of Gadamer’s previous attempt “to
emancipate [himself] from the style of Heidegger” (“Writing and the Living Voice,” 67) as
well as his late claim that, in his view, “Heidegger’s Destruktion of metaphysics has not
(…) robbed metaphysics of its importance today.” Gadamer, “Reflections on my
Philosophical Journey,” trans. Richard E. Palmer, in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg
Gadamer, 37.

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