181: Hermeneutics bridges the distance between the personal and the historical. Hegel says that art is a form of the Absolute Spirit and the Spirit’s self-knowledge. An absolute contemporaneousness exists between art and its beholder that persists despite the intensification of historical consciousness. Historical context can’t explain the power of art. The work of art is the expression of a truth that cannot be reduced to what its creator actually through in it. The work of art communicates itself. The main tenent of hermeneutics is the historicity of humans to meditate itself to itself understandingly (i.e., all the traditions (life-forms, text, institutions, etc) of the world) Art integrates all of these things.
182: The claim of historical hermeneutics is legitimated precisely by the fact that while the work of art does not intend to be understood historically and offers itself instead in an absolute presence, it nevertheless does not permit just any forms of comprehension. In all its openness, it requires a standard. Several questions:
1. Does a work of art say something about the social context? Then, within that context, doesn’t the work gain its full meaning?
2. Does a work from the past speak only about the past and the social context within which it was constructed?
3. Does art have to ‘say’ something because it is grounded in the aesthetic formative value (the truth)?
4. Is the aesthetic formation only the condition for the fact that the work bears its meaning within itself and has something to say to us?
Natural beauty does not ‘say’ something to us in the way that art works do. A work of art doesn’t satisfy us in a pure aesthetic way, the way a flower does. Kant speaks of ‘intellectualized’ pleasure as impure, but this element is what most aestheticians are interested in. Hegel said that natural beauty was a reflection of the beauty of art… i.e., how nature pleases us belongs instead to the context that is stamped and determined by the artistic creativity of a particular time.
183: We must proceed from the work of art rather than natural beauty if we want to define the relation between aesthetics and hermeneutics. Art does ‘say’ something. Hermeneutics is the art of clarifying (by our own effort of interpretation) what is said by persons we encounter in situations. Hermeneutics operates wherever what is said is not immediately intelligible.
1. Expressions of meaning are all linguistic manifestations.
2. Hermeneutics deals with the translation of one language to another.
The entire experience of the world is mediated by language (language is also the way that tradition is defined). The work of art does and doesn’t belong to the linguistic category. The craft is linguistic, the experience may not be. There are:
1. vestiges (fragments of a world that survived and helps us to intellectually reconstruct the world that they came from)
2. sources (constitute a linguistic tradition and they serve our understanding of a linguistically interpreted world).
184: Sources are records handed down for the purpose of recollection. Monuments are a hybrid, so are works of art. But the work of art does not intend to be a historical document when it is conceived. However, permanence and a historical lifespan is hoped for by an artist. What we are calling the language of a work of art, for the sake of which the work is presenced and handed on, is the language the work of art itself speaks, whether it is linguistic in nature or not. The work of art says something to the historian: it says something to each person as if it were said especially to him, as something present and contemporaneous. The non-linguistic work of art falls under the proper task of hermeneutics because is must be integrated into the self-understanding of each person. Hermeneutics bridges the distance between minds and reveals the foreignness of the other mind. But revealing what is unfamiliar does not mean merely reconstructing historically the ‘world’ in what the work had its original meaning and function. It also means apprehending what is said to us, which is always more than the declared and comprehended meaning. Whatever says something to us is like a person who say something. It is alien in the sense that it transcends us. To this extend, there is a double foreignness in the task of understanding, which in reality is one and the same foreignness. Speech is not the step-by-step construction of words, but a unitary meaning that always transcends what is expressed by what is said. We can’t understand without wanting to understand, without letting something be said. It would be an inadmissible abstraction to contend that we must first have achieved a contemporaneousness with the author or the original reader by means of reconstruction of his historical horizon before we could begin to grasp the meaning of what is said.
185: The experience of art is experience in a real sense and must master ever anew the task that experience involves: the task of integrating it into the whole of one’s own orientation to a worls and one’s own self-understanding. The language of art is constituted precisely by the fact that it speaks to the self-understanding of every person, and it does this as ever present and by means of its own contemporaneousness. That contemporaneousness allows it to come to expression in language. Everything depends on how something is said. But this dones not mean that it should reflect on the means of saying it. The more convincingly that something is said, themore self-evident and natural the uniqueness and singularity its declaration seems to be, that is, it concentrates the attention of the person being addressed entirely upon what is said and prevents him from moving to a distance of aesthetic differentiation. What is said does not present itself to us as a kind of content of judgment, in the logical form of a judgment. Rather, it is what we want to say and what we will allow to be said to us. Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone want to say to us by claiming we already know it. The language of art adhere to this rule. The excess of meaning is stored into the art work.
186: Being that can be understood is language. Everything is a symbol. Everything points to another thing. For only the universal relatedness of being is concealed from human eyes does it need to be discovered. As universal as the hermeneutical idea is that corresponds to Goethe’s words (everything is a symbol), in an eminent sense it is fulfilled only by the experience of art. For the distinctive mark of the language of art is that the individual art work gathers into itself and expresses the symbolic character that, hermeneutically regarded, belongs to all beings. A work of art is a present for all particular presents.