Gadamer Artworks in Word and Image

04_gadamer-3_063229 (jk-t) 1/3/06 8:40 am Page 57
Artworks in Word and Image

So True, So Full of Being! (Goethe) (1992)
Hans-Georg Gadamer
[Introduction]1
I
T MAY have come as a surprise to many readers, that Part One of my
1960 work, Truth and Method, does not take as its object of study the
human sciences and humanities [Geisteswissenschaften] in the totality of
their various disciplines, although the appearance of the term hermeneutics
in the subtitle might lead one to expect this2 but rather art art itself. In
making art my starting point, I was, in truth, responding to the experience I
myself had in my teaching, namely, that my real interest in the so-called
Geisteswissenschaften was not in their character as sciences (Wissenschaften)
but rather in how they dealt with art art in all its realms: literature, the
visual arts, architecture and music. For I believe that the arts, taken as a
whole, quietly govern the metaphysical heritage of our Western tradition. And
the (Geisteswissenschaften) stand in a particularly close and interactive
relationship with receptivity and sensitivity to art. For this reason I believe
they are able to claim a philosophical authenticity of their own. This is why
the general topic of artworks in word and image3 has occupied my thinking
from early on and why, again and again, I have sought to deal with it.
As everyone knows, the relationship of nonverbal art to verbal art is
an old, classical topic, with which we moderns have been very familiar at
least since Gotthold Lessings Laokoon (1766). Lessings famous analysis
of how the poetic word and the pictorial shape, in this case a statue, were
able to assert something in contrasting ways was directed towards differ-
entiating between them. If Lessing wanted to trace the pictorial arts back
to next-to-each-otherness in space and poetry back to succession in time,
then Herder had already contradicted him. What keenly interested me,
however, in contrast to Lessing, was trying to work out what the art of making
a picture or sculptural image and the art of making a poem have in common,
Theory, Culture & Society 2006 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 23(1): 5783
DOI: 10.1177/0263276406063229
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58 Theory, Culture & Society 23(1)
and to take this common element and place it within a more general classifi-
cation that says art is a statement of truth.
In taking up the topic of artworks in word and image, I do not propose
to deal with the important hermeneutic question of how an interpreter can
capture pictorial or sculptural works in words, or how it is possible to find
a pointing word that does not just express thoughts prompted by a picture,
but rather leads to a better seeing of the work itself. Certainly this is a topic
that has an important place in the theory of interpretation. But what will
occupy me here is the question of how word and image, the art of the word
and all the visual arts, share in a common endeavor, and how, within this
commonality, the role is determined that the one or the other will play in
forming our culture.
Now in what does the true commonality between art in images and
poetry consist? Certainly we call both creations works of art, and by this we
understand that they are marked by an immediate presentness in time and
at the same time by a rising above time. To the extent that we are familiar
with its language, a literary work that we recognize as worthy of being called
literature speaks to us across all temporal distance. Similarly, a picture or
sculpture that is worthy of being called a work of art has the power to affect
us immediately. Both forms of art require that one tarry with its form as one
views or hears it, and in both cases to speak with Kant there is much
that is completely unnameable to which the work directs our thinking.
In my own effort at developing a hermeneutical philosophy I have
sought to validate the claim of art to truth and to show the significance of
this for the human sciences. In connection with this I have, among other
things, also tried to refute the idea that the art image is a mere copy of some-
thing. In poetic language there is also something that corresponds to this. I
took this matter up and made it thematic in Part Three of Truth and Method
under the vantage point of arguing for the linguistic character of art. What
truth can mean in this context was only prepared for there and further
developed in my 1984 essay, Text and Interpretation.4
So the classical posing of the question by Lessing in his famous
Laocoon essay on the relationship of plastic and literary art arises for me
in a different form, and I have over the years dedicated many essays to
concretizing this question. What we call art today is obviously not limited
to this classical pair of arts. The question of truth also arises in other forms
of art: in music, dance, theater, and especially in architecture. Along with
the arts we have just named there are arts in which one cannot speak of the
self-presentation of the work of art in the same way, because their works are
classified according to the purposes they serve in the praxis of life. These
forms of art can at best claim a kind of co-presence for their artistic dimen-
sion, which remains in the background. In this category of arts, above all,
are oratory, architecture and all decorative art. To make the conclusions of
our argument here more persuasive, we will touch upon these cases, also.
But art in the form of the poetic word and in the form of shaped image will
remain central.

Gadamer Artworks in Word and Image 59
[The Absoluteness and Gleichzeitigkeit of Art]

Now the nature of hermeneutical reflection requires a constant return to the
praxis of hermeneutic experience. Schleiermacher confessed quite candidly,
I hate all theory that does not grow out of practice. To me, this statement
was an important confirmation of my own way of proceeding. In my own
early studies in art history, literary history, and in my training as a classical
philologist, whatever the limits of all these may have been, I found myself
more and more led, if I wanted to prove the claim of art to truth, into the
study of the pictorial and plastic arts and the art of poetry. Certainly the
pictorial magic of the early cave paintings or other prehistoric plastic images
is deeply significant, and, on the side of language, the earliest saying in art
is in the prior mythic world that stands behind our literary heritage and
fades back into the distance; both have remained a part of the picture for
me. For all of these, I find that the same affirmation we often utter as we
recognize a work of art as right, namely, So ist es! [Thats it! or Yes, thats
the way things are!], still applies.
This leads me to one of the fundamental concepts of modern phil-
osophy, a term which originated in the Neo-Platonism of late antiquity and
attained the status of a key word in German Idealism. It had survived since
antiquity and enjoyed an afterlife in which it was, for the most part, accorded
no thought, but in our context here it reclaims its original sense. It is the
concept of the Absolute. The word in its general Latin root simply means
that which is independent. In classical Latin it serves as the countercon-
cept to the relative. The term means independence from all restrictive condi-
tioning. Thus, Hegel speaks of absolute Spirit [absolute Geist] as that which
is a constant, full presence to itself and which is fulfilled in absolute knowl-
edge. And for Hegel art attains its timeless presentness because, like
religion and philosophy, it is detached from, and independent of all histori-
cal-social conditions. Art also claims absoluteness because it transcends all
historical differences between eras. So we understand at once why Hegel
maintained the inner closeness to each other of art, religion and philosophy.
In all three cases it had to do with a certainty of being that was absolute.
Now Christian theology understands the eschatological validity of the
Christian message in terms of its contemporaneity [Gleichzeitigkeit], of its
being the very same now, in the here and now that is to say, in terms of
the promised return of the Redeemer that truly occurs now, today in the
acceptance of the faith. This is something of which Kierkegaard has
reminded both his century and the 20th century, which were dedicated to
historical thinking. This contemporaneity holds also for philosophy because
it is in constant dialogue with all the great thinkers in our Western tradition
as if they were contemporary with us. And it is the same in the history of
art. When one views the whole of art, it is certainly not possible to think in
terms of some kind of historical progress toward an ultimate completion.
Even though one can see the development of central perspective in art
as progress, as the solution by painting of the problem of space, this
certainly is not the final consummation of pictorial art as such. Even Hegels

construction of world history, according to which everything that happens is

directed toward freedom, is more a description of what the struggle of world
history is at its core. And this concept also applies to philosophy, which
poses the old questions about ultimate things in ever new ways and there-
fore these questions remain contemporaneous with us. This is the reason
that Hegel himself arranged the history of philosophy as the dialectical
unfolding of philosophical knowledge.
But what is the time of this contemporaneousness or simultaneity?5
First, what is our own present time? Are we not somehow always aware of
it? The word for present, Gegenwart [warten = waiting], already points to
the fact that in it the future is in play. The future, as what is coming, is the
present that waits for us, and that we await. All expectation of the future,
however, as such, rests on experience. Therefore, in every present moment
not only is a horizon of the future opened up but also the horizon of the past
is in play. Even so, the present is less memory and backward-looking
thought than it is present experience! In much the same way, both phil-
osophy and art attune themselves to their own present time. In art and phil-
osophy one does not have to know at all from what distance in the past, from
what foreignness, what one encounters comes. Each has its presence and is
not gazed at as strange; rather, it draws one into its path even if there may
also be much that is foreign in it to be overcome.
Every present moment has its own life-space and its own tradition,
which is manifested in its forms of life, in its morals and customs, and in
all the institutions of social life; everywhere elements of ones religious
heritage accompany ones own history and ones own heritage and they are
a part of ones distinctive character. It is characteristic that every religion
is convinced of the absoluteness of its own truth. Religions find themselves
constantly setting up boundaries between themselves and other religions,
whose adherents are the unbelievers. In our enlightened times this is still
with us in the debate with a growing atheism. This poses new difficulties.
Today we need to unite the claim to absoluteness which belongs to the nature
of all holy knowledge with the recognition of other traditions, and even to
develop a solidarity with social structures that are completely hostile to
religion.
This is a task facing humanity today, and it is a task for which the
experience of art can strengthen our resolve. Certainly in the realm of art
there are certain respected traditions and firmly established tastes. And
the artistic creations of other ages or distant cultures often cannot reach
us very easily. But in the long run, art in all its innumerable forms gains
acceptance, even the most strange. This demonstrates, I think, the absolute
presentness of art to all times and places. Art is able to build bridges that
reach beyond the enclosure and space in which it originated. This is shown
most impressively today perhaps in music. In just a few decades East
Asians have appropriated Mozart and Schubert and all of European music,
so fully indeed that interpreters of music who come from there now number
among the leading figures of our musical life. On the other hand, as we

well know, Europe has taken to itself many of the musical languages of
Africa.
Obviously in our world of many languages the barrier of a foreign
language remains difficult to overcome when one is dealing with a work of
art that is being presented in another language. Yet even in literature our
literary age has attained a kind of contemporaneousness with other cultures
in what is we call world literature. Partly because of translations and partly
because an ever greater circle of readers is familiar with foreign languages,
one can speak of a vivid presentness and also contemporaneousness
Gegenwrtigkeit und Gleichzeitigkeit even in the literary arts. Of course,
for the pictorial and plastic arts, the barriers of language do not enter in as
much, or at least they can easily be overcome.
Obviously in pictorial art, what is foreign will affect one in a strange
way. But precisely an effect of strangeness is able to trigger its own power
to attract, which leads to the viewers appropriation. From time immemorial,
there has existed a continuous interaction between cultures and ages. Every
tradition appropriates what it encounters in order to move forward in the
continuous process of enriching its tradition. But we should not forget that
this appropriating does not mean just knowing but also being.
Now in the European tradition to which we belong, a historical
consciousness has gotten more and more highly developed, although the
path has been long. And this has brought an increasing refinement of our
historical sense. With the development of trade and travel throughout the
world, especially since the 19th century, and with new techniques of trans-
mitting the news which have also refined our sense of the world, it seems
that we have entered into something like an age of reproductions.
Nietzsche, in his famous essay titled On the Advantages and Disadvantages
of History for Life, was the first to see a problem in this. According to
Nietzsche, the combination of historical research and a basically scientific
consciousness have led to a weakening of the general mythos in our culture,
which is the only thing able to give it style and shape. In the shifting light
that is falling over them, things lose their own weight: we can see this in
the fact that even the experience of art has come to be seen as merely one
of the pleasures belonging to an historically refined education. We encounter
this phenomenon, for example, when visitors in a museum congratulate
themselves on recognizing a master or a familiar motif as coming from a
given period. But this recognition does not at all represent the real im-
mediacy of a genuine experience of art. For experience in its deeper sense
as experience is never merely a confirmation of expectations but a surprise.
Even at the highpoint of the historically cultured education of the 19th
century one was never able to see the artistic creations of a past age through
the eyes of that past age. And actually to do so never can and should be
ones goal. No, it is the vivid presentness and contemporaneousness of art
that constitute and maintain its power. Indeed, there is something repellent
in the very idea that art, which possesses such a captivating presentness,
could become a mere object of historical research. Just for this reason we

wish to pose here the question of what it is that establishes arts superior-
ity over time, a superiority that defies all restrictions.
Certainly I do not wish to exclude the possibility that scientific
research, which undertakes many very important historical tasks, can also
accomplish something with regard to the experience of art. But the kind of
knowing in science remains, as such, something quite different from experi-
encing the presentness of art. Schleiermacher once said that a religious
picture from a bygone century that we admire in the museum always has
burn marks on it, as if it had been rescued from a fire. Such a picture, we
know very well, has lost its place-in-life in a church or palace or wherever
it once was at home. And certainly we dont just recognize this today; we
learn also to see in the picture itself, for example, how it has been painted
for a certain place in the world and for a certain cultic function. And with
this we learn to see the relationships of light and shadow and to have in
mind the circumstances which had influenced the shaping of the picture.
All this can teach us to see better. This is even more true, of course, with
regard to the very detailed knowledge we now have in the religious and
profane realms of study for which we are indebted to the methods of science.
But I believe the remark of Hegel still holds: today we no longer bow down
before crucifix or madonna.
Still, much else will be speaking to us along with the statement made
by the work of art and this will enrich it, in some cases more and in others
less. For instance, the prior influences of ones religious heritage or of ones
own historical experiences are always operative in ones experience of an
artwork. Nevertheless, what grips us in a picture or stage play or poem,
suffers no substantial restriction if one has only a little background knowl-
edge. So we ask: what is it that makes a picture or a poem into a work of
art, that has such an absolute presentness for us? Certainly it is not the
noisy waves of the constant flow of information in this age of reproducibil-
ity. Rather, this reproducibility actually threatens to disintegrate the aura
of the work of art, to speak with Walter Benjamin.
[Some Greek Words and Concepts that Help to Describe our
Encounter with an Artwork]
In order to deal with the question that concerns us here, I would like to
begin with a linguistic observation that will throw some light on this
question. In Greek, the word poiesis, in which we recognize our German
word Poesie [poetry], has a double meaning. The word means, first of all
to make, that is, the construction or production of something that did not
exist before. This word encompasses the entire realm of producing things
that we call works of handicraft [HANDwerk], but it also includes the further
development of ways of producing things right up to industrial production
in modern times.
Along with this, however, the same word poiesis has the special
meaning of the art of composing poetry. To compose poetry is in a certain
sense also a making, a producing. But this word does not refer either to a

lecture given only once, nor the writing down which takes place in the case
of poetry. Rather, the making of which we are speaking in the case of poetry
is the making of a text. In this making whole worlds are able to rise up out
of nothingness, and non-being comes to be being. This is almost more than
making. With making in general go concrete materials, at least, that have
to be given to the craftsman in advance and from which he constructs some-
thing. Mnemosyne [goddess of memory, mother of the nine Muses], however,
does not need these. In the pictorial arts, the making is a real making in so
far as it does require concrete material out of which the picture is
constructed. In contrast, poetry appears to exist only in the airy breath of
language and in the miracle of memory. For the Greeks, it shares this with
music, which, however, only accompanies the poetic song. Nevertheless,
both poetry and music are as if not made from matter. It remains a second-
ary moment when poetry is finally fixed in writing and become literature
[something that can be read] and music becomes a score. This writtenness
is secondary in both cases and is not a necessary condition either to poetry
or to music. What is necessary to them is that the written texts as such attain
to speaking and come to be heard. The German use of the word schpferisch
creative signifies this. It retains an echo of the religious concept of the
Creation, which was not making in the sense of making an object by hand.
In the beginning was the word, the verbum creans the creating word.
Another semantic fact pointing in the same direction is linked with
the word work. This word is encountered first of all in the vicinity of what
the word techn means in Greek. What techn means, however, is not the
act of making or producing but rather the mental capacity for devising,
planning, undertaking something in short, the knowledge that actually
guides the making. In such a context one can always say that the action, the
ergon, brings something about; still, we scarcely call it a work in such a
case! The fact is, that when one is not dealing with art, one does not speak
of a work. Why is this? One does still speak of handiwork in the case of
craftsmanship. Apparently the reason is that the handiwork a work of
craftsmanship, like industrial production, but not of art is not truly there
for itself but stands in a serving function. It has been constructed for some
purpose. In contrast to this, an artist, even if he or she uses mechanical
means of production, constructs something that is for itself and is there only
to be contemplated. One allows an artwork to be exhibited or would like to
see it exhibited, and that is all. And precisely then is it a work. And it
remains a work by the artist, which, as a work by him, he can sign.
This is the case even when something like an organ improvisation, the
work of a creative instant, becomes so persuasive that it makes a lasting
impression. Likewise, plastic arts like painting or sculpture go through the
same thing that is expressed in linguistic terms of passing from poiesis
[producing] to poesie [a thing made]. For the poet, too, his creation creates
and shows us a world that is there for itself and as such. In the modern world
we say that the work is published. Of course, the term published is used
not only for what is poetic but also in reference to the publication of science

and other forms of information. But it has a special sonority when the work
being published belongs to what we call literature. In this case, the term
literature has a sound telling of existence and validity, a tone different from
when the literature is only pop literature or merely the specialized litera-
ture of a scholarly discipline.
Beginning with observations about how words are used we are able to
confirm that when we speak of the absoluteness of art, this has an exact and
literal meaning. What we observed to be the semantically distinguishing
marks of the poet and of poetry for the Greeks has, as has been shown, its
parallels with the resonance that the word for art has attained in modern
times. The same thing holds for the modern derivatives of the Latin word
for art in other languages. What we find running through these word usages
is accurately describing the path that leads from a producing that is directed
towards and determined by a certain use and benefit, to a producing that
brings about nothing useful, something that is not used for anything. Such
freedom as this work has is truly the distinguishing mark of the beautiful.
This is the reason why the expression fine art schne Kunst [beautiful
art] has also been used in reference to art. The beautiful is something
about which it is never appropriate to ask what it is for.
These remarks on the concept of the fine arts supplement the analysis
put forward in Truth and Method where my summing-up in the last pages
deals with the contrasting Greek concepts of kalon (fine) and chresimon
(useful). In the concept of arts that are free of useful purpose one already
senses the closeness between the theoretical and the aesthetic, and there-
with the closeness between the experience of contemplating the beautiful
and knowing the true. The concept of the beautiful [kalon, fine] in Greek
thought is very closely connected with the concept of the good, and, yes,
even with the concept of aret [virtue/excellence], which, contained in the
well-known expression of kalokagathia [Goodness], represents the ideal
concept of human excellence. On this point, Aristotle, who loves distin-
guishing one thing from another, gives us a point6 to ponder when he deter-
mines that good always has to do with praxis, but beautiful, in contrast,
has to do above all with unchanging things,7 and therefore with the realm
of numbers and geometry. Thus, the three kinds of the beautiful that he
names are taxis [order], symmetria [symmetry] and horismenon [the definite].
This corresponds to the line of argumentation in the Metaphysics M 3 and
4, which lays the groundwork for the critical discussion of the doctrine of
Forms and at its end leads into the most authentic domain of Aristotelian
thought the Physics.
Aristotles testimony is so very important here because it brings to light
the closeness that exists between the semantic field of poiesis, art and work,
on the one hand, and the semantic field of the beautiful and the true, on the
other. The beautiful here remains close to the realms of knowing and recog-
nizing. In light of this, it is not surprising that our return to the Greek begin-
nings in Western thinking, and therewith to the metaphysical role that the
concept of beauty played there, is of central importance for hermeneutical

philosophy. When I took the experience of art as my starting point in Truth

and Method, it was in order to include the whole wide compass of hermeneu-
tics in my topic, and to place it within the universal meaning of Sprach-
lichkeit linguisticality. And then my return at the very end of the book to
the concept of beauty and the breadth of the realm of its significance further
serves to substantiate the universality of hermeneutics.
[A Closer Look at the Concept of the Beautiful]
The concept of the beautiful in Plato brings us into contact not only with
the concept of the good but also with the concept of the true, and with the
standpoint of questioning in metaphysics, as such. In dealing with the
concept of the beautiful, we have to do not only with art, as such, but also
with the much broader concept of the beautiful as a topic in the Platonic
dialogues. Indeed, in these dialogues it is clear that what is meant by the
beautiful is not art, as such. One need only think of Plato driving the poets
out of the ideal state or the challenging assertion that art stands at a double
remove from the truth.8 In doing this Plato is applying his concept of
mimesis: for him, the individual thing is in each case an imitation of the
idea. Making a copy in art, according to this concept of mimesis, becomes
an imitation of what was itself an imitation. This represents a conscious
sharpening of the point by Plato. In contrast, Aristotle sees in mimesis not
so much the difference between imitations and the thing imitated, the idea;
rather, he emphasizes the similarity of both.9 Therefore what the mimesis
really accomplishes, according to Aristotle, is a cognition of something,
because cognition, as such, is precisely a recognition. I have discussed this
point elsewhere.
When Plato speaks of aletheia [truth] and sees truth connected with
beauty, he is not thinking of art and he is also not thinking of the poets, who
have much to say that is true but as the saying goes, The poets lie a lot.
What Plato has in mind with this connection between truth and beauty is a
joy in pure forms and colors, but not in flowers or animals or copies of them
(Philebus, 51c). This place in the Philebus teaches quite clearly how little
weight Plato actually accords to copying as such. Rather than this, we find
in the profound late dialogues of Plato that the concept of the beautiful, the
concept of truth and the concept of the good, all step into the foreground.
What Plato seeks in these dialogues as the good life is not the pure exact-
ness of a mathematical type but the measured proportionality of a well-
mixed drink of life. It is there that the good is to be sought. This is the idea
put forward in the Philebus.
In connection with this, the famous and much discussed expression in
the Philebus (65A) is of special interest: that the good, which Socrates had
been seeking as the right mixture of being, has taken refuge in the beauti-
ful.10 When it is emphasized there that the good only permits of being
grasped within the threeness [Dreiheit] of beauty, symmetry and truth, this
shows how important it is for Plato that the Good be clearly beyond being,
and that it contain in itself not only the One but necessarily, the many. This

also includes the important point that it is in the measured character of

appearances that beauty presents itself.
There is a parallel passage in the Statesman (Politikos, 283b ff.) where
Plato goes into this same topic. In this case, Plato seizes the opportunity to
engage in an almost absurd digression. The dialogue partner laments that
the way of dialogue is too long and difficult. In reply, the Stranger justifies
it through a long debate about the two kinds of measure and the fact that in
the end one always comes to the proper measure, to appropriateness. The
dialogue partner here is the young Socrates and truly not the Socrates of
the Republic who ridicules the stargazers. But the older Socrates in the
Philebus, too, is also no longer the one in the Republic (which is not to say
anything about the time of origin of these dialogues or indeed of Platonic
thought).
In the Statesman one finds an elaborately developed presentation
dealing with two arts of measure, and there, if I see it rightly, the proper
measure or the appropriate (metrion) is designated as the exact itself. But
in any case this is not the pure exactness which it is the distinction of math-
ematics to provide through numbers and measurements. Nor may one see
in this expression an allusion to numerological metaphysics in Plato, as
Werner Jaeger has maintained. He misses the point completely. Indeed, it
is expressly stated in the dialogue that the exact itself has to do with doing
the appropriate, the fitting and the needful in the favorable moment.11
What this clearly means is the median between opposites. This is not
a number mysticism but on the contrary an anticipation of the doctrine of
the mean in Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics. It is through this teaching that
Aristotle defines the concept of the ethos and of virtue. Plato emphasizes
that both concepts of the measured are indispensable. But if, in the realm
of ethics, he has in mind what he calls the exact itself, it is clear that here
we have to do with what is perfectly suitable because the application of the
pure knowing found in mathematics does not suffice to indicate the
perfectly suitable. So manifestly this is how it is with musical harmony,
harmoniousness, with the beautiful. In these cases, in fact, the smallest
deviation from the proper is bad. A single bad note in music, as well as in
human dealings with each other, already disturbs the harmony and the
agreement. In either case one cannot say at all what the appropriate thing
would really have been, and yet we know very well that the inappropriate
is what has disrupted the harmony.
One would perhaps find such a presentation, which is supposed to
establish that the conditioned character of the argument process is inexact,
to be not completely in place here. But actually Plato uses this means to
give emphasis to his point. He emphasizes here the importance of making
correct distinctions, which he calls dialectic, and through dialectic, here
turning critically away from those wise people who are blind to exactness.12
These wise people make a fundamental mistake if they acknowledge the
difference between the pure relationships of number and measuring, but do
not recognize the difference that separates this measuring from the exact

itself. In truth, they neglect in this way the true sense of the pure and take
it to be something which exists in the world. Then they hold something to
be a proof of something, when, as in the case with the famous squaring of
the circle, they are accepting only the sensory appearance as valid. This is
like the error into which the architect falls when he insists on taking math-
ematical exactness as the right measure of exactness. Aristotle criticizes this
error in the Platonists.
Our return to ancient times to examine the concept of beauty, to which
the closeness of beauty and truth in ancient thinking invited us, admittedly
now seems to end in disappointment with regard to the question of art. It
looks as if the problem of art and its claim to truth finds no support here at
all. The discussion of beauty is always about mathematics and the pure
relationships to which the mathematical science of numbers and circles was
dedicated. In many places Plato gives the appearance of having based his
view of sculpture and the pictorial arts, as well as poetry, on the crudest
concept of copying. Against this view, our main interest has been to free
ourselves altogether from this concept of art as a copy of something else and
at the same time to find a concept of truth that would be valid for both the
nonverbal arts and for poetry.
To do this, we need first of all to go more precisely into the formation
of certain concepts that were in play within Greek metaphysics. When we
do this, we find some very interesting connections that help to defend our
standpoint. Now certainly in Aristotles eyes Plato was a Pythagorean, and
indeed one can see Plato as more a meta-mathematician than as a meta-
physician. But the inner consistency of the Greek way of thinking moves
Plato and Aristotle closer together, and precisely this connection is signifi-
cant for our question of what makes art art, and on what the absoluteness
and contemporaneity of art are based. In any case, it is not seeing a picture,
statue or poem as a copy of something that makes understandable Goethes
exclamation, So true, so full of being! His exclamation does not refer to
something special about the muscles in a sculpture, its appearance, its form
or how well it is portrayed, but rather Goethe refers to something that lies
beyond our grasp and precisely its ungraspability is what has made an
overwhelming impression on us. Art can be overwhelming for us when it
appears to be a copy of something but also when it is a complete departure
from all copiedness, as can be the case in abstract painting and sculpture.
Clearly, we are dealing here with something quite different from the relation-
ship of original and copy. Works of art possess an elevated rank in being,
and this is seen in the fact that in encountering a work of art we have the
experience of something emerging and this one can call truth!
One should not be astonished by the fact that neither in ancient times
nor in the Christian Middle Ages was there any discussion of the elevated
rank in being that is possessed by works of art. The reason for this is that
their place in life was already self-evident for the ancient world and for its
sacred orders. The ecclesiastical as well as the secular forms of Christian
metaphysics both accepted as fact that the order of the world, which was

also the order of creation, included with it a high rank for works of art. This
was also true for the literary arts, whose myths and sagas were compellingly
brought forth in ever new ways of being presented. Indeed, the discord
between poets and the investigators that one called philosophers was
actually based on the fact that they both, in their own ways, were seeking
the truth. The various iconoclasms, too, that swept over eras of the history
of the Christian church are an echo of this tension between the true word
and the true image.
Only with the advent of Humanism, as the Middle Ages came to an
end, did the situation change. Here, alongside the creator God of the Old
and New Testaments, stepped the creative artist as an alter deus an other
God, a kind of second God. When the Revolution that belonged to the third
stage of the Enlightenment in modernity came to a head, art achieved its
highest rank. For instance, think of Lucile in Bchners play, Dantons Death
[1835]. Above all, it was the continued influence of Hegels lectures on
aesthetics, including their further development by Heinrich Gustav Hotho
(180273), that had great influence right up until Neo-Kantianism
[18701920].13 In this period, aesthetics no longer dealt with the beautiful
but with art. Also, Paul Natorp [18541924], in the age of the science of
religion, showed religion its place at the limits of reason a place it had to
share with art. As Western culture moved away from the closed, geocentric
image of the world and the Copernican turn caused unimaginable infinities
to open up, this sparked new directions for scientific investigation. Indeed,
the scientific Enlightenment pressed in all directions to explore the
unknown. After the early explorers of the globe there came the scientists
doing research, and from them came the increasing alteration and domi-
nation of nature through science and technology. This became the basic cast
of mind of the age. Ecclesiastical or secular topics were no longer the means
through which a holy world could come to presentation in art. In place of
these, it was the experience of order as such, mediated by sculpture and the
pictorial arts, poetry, and above all music, that stepped into the center of
bourgeois cultural life. In the miracle of art the modern era celebrated the
last pledge of an ideal world [eine heile Welt].
In other contexts I have shown how in modern times aesthetics in the
form of philosophy of art took over the place that had formerly been held
by cosmology and philosophy of nature in the realm of classical meta-
physics. In modern times it was physics that, in a certain way, put every-
thing under its jurisdiction. The older areas of teaching lost their validity,
but aesthetics or philosophy of art was given a new, higher rank. What a
powerful change this represented can be seen if we examine an individual
instance in the history of concepts. Astronomy in ancient and medieval
times was called musica caelistis music of the heavens in contrast to
the earthly music with its hearable sounds. What the old doctrine of the
Pythagoreans found to be the case with regard to pure relationships of
numbers among the stars, and what governed thinking in the middle ages
as that which was beyond physics, simply lost its validity in modern science.

In this way, what was a problem situation in antiquity basically repeated

itself in modernity. In antiquity it consisted in the opposition between the
Pythagorean Plato and the physics of Aristotle. In a certain sense this still
exists in the present day, if one thinks for example of the way statistics
breaks into and disrupts quantum physics. There you find equations but no
determinable connection to the whole of actually measured results.
[The Concept of Energeia]
Let us now undertake once again to work out with the help of older concepts
what is common to all art. Our goal in working with these older concepts
will be to grasp conceptually what we today call art, and what artists create,
in such a way that the claim of art to truth becomes clear.
In the Philebus, Plato distinguishes in the mixing of the drink of life,
which we mentioned before, between pure mathematics and actual practice,
which brings us to something quite different from either and he says this
something is indispensable. He names this different thing accuracy.14 He
expressly says that in the practice of life it is not enough to limit oneself to
the divine science of pure numbers, circles and triangles. For, as we know,
in the human application of these, a false circle and a false measure also
belong to human application of mathematics. Only in music and architec-
ture, in which numbers and measure play an especially prominent role, is
there the art of getting it just right. In them this is indispensable. And one
must admit that for the good life in general this [art of getting it right] is
needed if one is simply to be able to find ones way home.15
Here we have the decisive step that Plato takes beyond the Pythagore-
ans. He supplements the old Pythagorean opposition between the limited
and the unlimited through a third type of being. He calls it coming into
being.16 He used this highly paradoxical formula apparently with full
awareness of what he was doing as he also does in the Parmenides17 in
order to overcome as a false illusion the idea of any actual separation
between the two worlds, a world of ideas and a world of appearances.
As if to emphasize his point, Plato varied the expression of this term
so that instead of coming into being he called it simply being that has
been.18 In this way he emphasizes still more the unity of becoming and
being. This causes us now to think that for Plato the apparent opposition
between becoming and being, of becoming other versus being-in-itself, does
not have the last word. The purity of mathematics still remains a model for
knowing thanks to its exactness and truth. But Plato no longer speaks here
in the Philebus as he does in the Republic about the way that the study of
pure mathematics is needed to prepare for the ascent to pure dialectic.
Rather, what he now everywhere aims to show is that, in the structure of the
world as well as in the practice of life, we encounter the mixed, and within
it we must seek and find the exact. In the end, only the world of numbers
and measure remains connected to the concept of pure knowing. Becoming
is no longer simply some kind of non-being, that is, something seen as the
becoming of something different, but now it signifies coming into being

[Werden zum Sein]. This is the new step, and it finds expression in Platos
Philebus. The step from becoming to being leaves to being something of its
having come into being. This can already be observed in the manner it is
spoken of in the Philebus. Being emerges from becoming!
This is a turn in Platos thinking that it will repay us to ponder. In it
we recognize the basic experience we have in encountering a work of art,
and we say: Thats right! That is the way it is! It is right so. Aristotle
needed to go only one step beyond Plato when he made what Plato called
coming into being [Werden zum Sein] into his topic of the being of
becoming [das Sein des Werdens]. In this connection he introduced the
concept of energeia in order to establish his Physics. But let us take note
of this term. The word energeia is apparently a word newly created by Aris-
totle. One notices, for instance, Aristotles seeming embarrassment when he
attempts to define energeia, because he cannot invoke the use of the word
in ordinary language. So he has to define it by analogy to the word dunamis
in the Metaphysics.19 Now Plato had already in his Sophist20 carried this
term over from its general use in ordinary language to his philosophical
discussion. The concept of energeia oscillates between actuality, reality and
activity [Aktualitt, Wirklichkeit, und Ttigkeit] and is therefore also helpful
in determining the concept of kinesis (motion). With the new conceptual
expression energeia, then, a whole new horizon of problems opens up, a
horizon in which new light may be cast on the way of being of the artwork.
This is seen already with regard to a similar, almost synonymous, word
created by Aristotle, namely entelecheia (entelechy). It is an expression
that, like energeia, attracted to itself on the threshold of modernity some
new conceptual determinations. The thing that is common to both words is
that they designate something that is not an ergon [deed], that is, something
that has its existence through an already completed production. The Aris-
totelian terms that inquire into the being of movement like dynamis,
energeia, and entelecheia point to the side of the action in the process of
being carried out and not to the ergon the completed thing. The process
of being carried out, the execution or performance, already has its goal and
the fulfilling of its being in itself (telos echei). At the same time, it becomes
clear that energeia does not merely mean the same thing as motion (kinesis)
because motion is ateles [without goal]. So long as it is ongoing, it is not
completed. What is being moved is still under way, has not yet arrived. It
is still becoming. So in contrast to energeia, Aristotle explicitly mentions
that becoming and being that has become are not the same. On the other
hand, seeing and having seen are the same, as are likewise considering
something and having thought about it. Both of these mean a tarrying over
what is meant, as when we say, for example, we are totally immersed in the
matter. Now I believe that Aristotle described energeia with the word for
at the same time (hma) in order to point to the immanent contemporane-
ity of its duration. In other words, this is not a one-after-another sequence
but the at-the-same-timeness that the temporal structure of tarrying [with
an artwork] possesses. It is not a doing of this and that, first this and then

that; it is a whole that is present in the seeing, and in the considering that
one is immersed in or if we prefer to listen to the deep wisdom of language:
in dem man aufgeht in which one is absorbed. Aristotle adds the example
of living. In German too we say that one is alive. So long as one is alive,
one is united with both ones past and ones future.
[The Experience of Art]
Now lets apply this to art. In doing so we will ask not so much what it is
that is emerging or showing itself. Rather, we say [with Heidegger] simply:
it emerges. We say this both in the case of an art image we encounter as
well as of language in its powerfulness as poetry. We are having an experi-
ence. This having does not mean that we are doing something but rather
that we are realizing something as when we understand it correctly. This
does not at all mean that we read something into it or put something into it
that is not there. Rather, we read to find out what is in it and try to do so in
such a way that it comes forth.
An experience of art is like this: it is not a mere copy of something.
Rather one is absorbed in it. It is more like a tarrying that waits and
preserves in such a way that the work of art is allowed to come forth than
it is like something we have done. Again, we can listen to language: we say
that what comes forth addresses us and so the person who is addressed is
as if in conversation with what comes forth. It holds with seeing an artwork
as well as with listening to or reading such a work that one tarries with the
work of art. To tarry is not to lose time. Being in the mode of tarrying is like
an intensive back-and-forth conversation that is not cut off but lasts until it
is ended. The whole of it is a conversation in which for a time one is
completely absorbed in conversation, and this means one is completely
there in it.
Reading a poetic work is like this, even though we read it line by line
and page by page. Here, too, it is not like running through a stretch of space
until the finish line. Rather, when we read a work we are engaged completely
with it. We are there and at the end the impression grows on us: Thats
right! It is like a growing fascination that hangs on and even hangs on
through temporary disruptions because the harmony with the whole grows
and demands our agreement. We know this with special clarity in listening
to music. Dilthey often used music to illustrate the structural law govern-
ing all understanding. It is almost superfluous to say that what is true of the
experiencing of an artwork is also true of its creation: it is not merely produc-
tion. For the creator, the key thing is whether the work succeeds. The
perceiver does not know what it is. The famous French saying, Je ne sais
quoi, expresses it well. But the work of art has indeed succeeded and
possesses its ungraspable rightness. So it is meaningless, when it comes to
art, to ask the artist what he or she meant. Likewise it is meaningless to ask
the perceiver what it is that the work really says to him or her. Both of these
matters go far beyond the subjective consciousness of one or the other. It
simply goes beyond all thinking and knowing when we say, That is good.

In both cases this means that it has come forth. Thus the experience of the
artwork is not only an emergence from hiddenness but at the same time it
is something really there in that seclusion. It dwells in the work as if in
security. The work of art is an assertion, but it is one that does not form an
assertive sentence, although it is telling in the highest degree. It is like a
myth, like a saga,21 because in what it says it is equally unfolding things
and at the same time holding them back in readiness. The assertion it makes
will speak over and over again.
[The Truth of Art, Vollzug and Reading an Artwork]
It has now become clear that our return to the world of Greek concepts has
borne fruit for our question. We took as our starting point the special place
art holds today and the special ontological rank of the artwork which is
to say we started from a modern viewpoint on art in our questioning. The
Greek heritage denied us an answer to our question, to the extent that
the Greeks did not distinguish what the artist created and therewith also
the uniqueness of his skill from what the craftsman produced, which was
based on techn. At most the Greeks gave the great artists the honorary name
of wise ones. Our question, however, is the extent to which we can accord
truth to this wisdom. Would modern science, for instance, recognize it at
all? Could its manner of thinking be broadened enough that the true stands
alongside the beautiful and the good, as it did in the ancient world?
Certainly in the realm of art one says that something is true or right as it is.
This is even a good expression of what one means, but what is named in
this way is not something of the kind that we could point to, or about which
we could say that it shines forth in the way that the beautiful does. Also,
when we find everything right in a picture or a poem, this does not mean
correct in the sense of sentence correctness. For this reason Kant, too, criti-
cally distanced himself from the rule of aesthetics of 18th-century rational-
ism by referring the aesthetic a priori to the subjectivity of feeling.
As the result of the above considerations I wish to put forward the
following assertion: I take a different approach to the question of what truth,
aletheia or unconcealment, really means. I invoke the concept of energeia
here, which has special value because in dealing with it we are no longer
moving in the realm of sentence truth. With this new conceptual word Aris-
totle was able to think a motion that was without path or goal, something
like life itself, like being aware, seeing or thinking. All of these he called
pure energeia, and just this concept leads me to think of art. In Aristotelian
metaphysics God is introduced as the Unmoved Mover of the cosmos and
is also described as leading a life of pure energeia, that is to say, of unin-
terrupted pure gazing. Apparently the meaning of this sort of being is
presentness as such [and to itself]. On the basis of this Aristotelian teaching
one really does not know how to answer the question of what Gods contem-
plative seeing really has as it object everything or what? What this is for
Hegel is being, being as the fulfillment of self-consciousness, and he
called it the absolute Spirit. Without doubt he was also thinking of the

connection to the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Christian Trinity. But
one can also clarify the matter by thinking, for example, of the word Geis-
tesgegenwart the presence of spirit. In this case we also do not mean
something specific that one is aware of and to which one reacts; rather, this
simply means that one is awake and aware of everything that is present or
that may possibly come to be present. According to the interpretation in
Greek philosophy, it is the way of living of the gods, who find their complete
fulfillment in such looking, which they call theoria. Here the original sense
of the Greek term theoria is important. The word means to participate in
a festive act and to be with it. Thus, looking is not merely being a spectator.
Rather, it means to be fully there, which is the highest form of activity and
reality. Actually, one needs both words to translate the Greek word
energeia, for the two words are intended in it simultaneously: activity and
reality. Whoever participates in a cultic act in this way, lets the divine
emerge, so that it is like a palpable bodily appearance. This applies very
well to an artwork. Standing before its appearance we also say: Thats right!
[So ist es!] What has come forth is something to which we agree, not
because it is an exact copy of something but because as an image it has
something like a superior reality. It may perhaps also be a copy of some-
thing, but it does not need to have anything about it that is like a copy. In
thinking of it one thinks of what, for example, the mystery cults protected
as a holy secret. Thus the artwork is there and is, as Goethe said, So wahr,
so seiend, So true, so full of being! In the process it contains the goal of
its being (tlos chei).
This matter is quite significant for us. Aletheia does not simply mean
unconcealment. Certainly we say that it comes forth, but the coming forth
itself has something peculiar about it. This peculiarity consists in the fact
that the work of art presents itself in such a way that it both conceals itself
and at the very same time authenticates itself. For what the Greeks called
the shining forth of the beautiful belongs to a world order that presents
itself in its true fulfillment in the starry heavens. So the separation between
that which is produced by human craft or machine and that which we call
art in the modern sense refers to a coming forth in a radical sense. We say
that it comes forth because something resides within the work and, in a
certain sense, what comes forth was hidden there. The unconcealment of
what comes forth is of something that is hidden in the work itself and not
in whatever we may say about it. It remains always the same work, even if
in each new encounter it emerges in its own way. We know this well from
our experience. The viewer of a painting looks for the right distance from
it, a distance where it truly comes forth. The viewer of a sculpture must go
up and down and around it. Viewing an architectural work ultimately
requires that one walk around it and gain a range of vantage points from
many different distances and perspectives. Who dictates the right distance?
Does one have to choose ones own standpoint and firmly hold to it? No, one
must seek out the point from which it best comes forth! This point is not
ones own standpoint. One makes oneself a laughing stock if in front of an

artwork one says what one otherwise could say, that one is not standing at
his own standpoint. There is no such distance in this case. If an artwork
exercises its fascination, everything that has to do with ones own meaning
and ones own opining and opinion seems to disappear.
The same thing holds true when one is dealing with a poem. One does
well, here, to recall again Hegels concept of the Absolute. Indeed, we must
ask ourselves if with an artwork one can separate at all the making function
from the product the way one does with a work of craftsmanship, where one
just hands it over to its useful purpose. No, the artwork is apparently not a
work in the same sense. When we say about the artwork that to be an artwork
it must come forth, then I think it would be better to compare it to nature,
which lets the flowers come forth, instead of a work of craftsmanship. The
work of art is precisely not a product that is finished when the work on it is
done. Also, the artwork is not at all an object that one can approach with a
measuring tape in ones hand. A real artwork does not allow itself to be grasped
by processes of measurement, nor through the number of its computer bits.
Achievements with information technology, such as one can find in news-
papers, illustrations, travelogues or novels, are no measure of the artistic value
of an artwork. What information technology can determine about a picture,
for instance, is precisely not the art that gives it special excellence.
We can see this point also in the chances that art history as a disci-
pline [Wissenschaft, a science] has of really dealing with an artwork in its
function as art. I think, for example, of the iconographic current in the
history of art, which as a scientific way of studying artworks has undeniably
accomplished a great deal in the 20th century. But the extent to which art
history, treated as a science, possesses the right methodical consciousness
can be seen in the fact that in its perspective the artwork is simply a copy
of something. Plato has clearly showed us, and with great irony, what comes
from an orientation to the artwork solely as a copy and its correctness as a
copy, when he described a monumental sculpture as false because, for the
sake of the effect on the viewer, its upper parts were made bigger than was
correct (Sophist, 235e). Certainly the Platonic doctrine of the beautiful
immediately testifies against the artwork as a copy and this view has found
followers from Plotinus to Hegel; this latter view describes the work of art
as the sensory appearance of the Idea. Does not Plotinus give us a further
hint about this matter when he remarks that a face appears now beautiful
and now ugly, even when there has been not the slightest measurable change
in it? Plotinus always had in mind the beautiful in art, which is only
mentioned in passing by Plato and Aristotle. For us, however, what is essen-
tial is that we have to do here with an appearing [Er-Scheinen]. As a shining
forth [Scheinen] this is in keeping with its essence as shifting appearance.
And yet there is still the unique shining forth of the beautiful that is like
the magic of art, whether it be in our seeing or our hearing, in our experi-
encing of the sculpture, poetry or music.
Art has its being in the Vollzug the vital, living event of its appear-
ing, its performance. This conclusion about the artwork is the result of our

conceptual reflections on the Greek teaching about beauty and its appli-
cation. This means, however, that the way of being of the artwork does not
reside in its having been created, nor do conceptions like production or
reproduction from the side of the receiver hit the point. Indeed, these
concepts are precisely where many such theories go wrong. Certainly the
artist, sculptor, painter, or poet does carry out work that is planned; they
draft many designs and make many efforts to carry out their plans. But it is
not the artists construction of a work that another person might wish to have
in order to make use of it. Both of these ideas creation and reproduction
of the work are inappropriate concepts, concepts that cover up the secret
sameness in the creation and in the reception of an artwork. Artistic creating
itself is not something that one does [but something that comes through]
and the process of creating will also not be the thing that is repeated again
later in ones experiencing of the work. As I have repeatedly said: It comes
forth and It is something in the work. But what came forth and how it came
forth cannot be said in words. The painter can only say it in his painting,
and he can intend to be successful there, and the viewer can be caught up
in its concentrated power. If one is absorbed in and by the work, then
perhaps he or she will find that it comes forth or: There is really some-
thing there in it. But certainly it is not the thing that has been copied that
comes forth, such that one knows what it is and recognizes it. This is not
the kind of assertion that the artwork makes.
Rather, the it that comes forth in the exclamation, It comes forth! is
something that one has never seen in exactly this way before. Even when
one is dealing with a portrait, and the person portrayed knows and finds the
picture to be a likeness, it is still as if one had never seen the person before
in quite this way. So much is he it. One has, so to speak, been seen into,
and the more one looks, the more it comes forth. Certainly the portrait is
a special case. However, one also says this about an image of a god or about
an image of what is holy. The image has its own sovereignty. One says this
even about a wonderful still life or a landscape, because in the picture
everything is just right. This causes one to leave behind every relation to
what is copied. This is its sovereignty as a picture.22
Or one reads a poem. One reads it again. One goes through it and it
goes along with one. It is as if the poem began to speak, as if it began to
sing and one sings along with it. In the case of music, whether one makes
music oneself follows the notes, as we say, or if one only listens along with
the music as it is played, it is all there the repetition, variation, inversion,
resolution and it is precisely prescribed in advance. But only if one goes
along with it, be it as a musical performer or be it as listener, does it come
forward and one receives it. Otherwise it sweeps by and seems empty.
Let us linger a bit longer with the poem. Everything is there to be
understood in its plenitude whether one reads it or recites it from memory,
and it becomes completely present. When one reads a poem one is filled
with a veritable stream of images and sounds, and in the end one perhaps
says: How beautiful! or perhaps, Oh, how well it has been worked out, and

how right everything is! One has listened to what is dictated by the poem.
One can listen to the dictation directly or one can read the poem, but one
always gets it even a little bit less correctly in reading than if one had been
actually reciting it aloud.
What I have described here is the sovereignty of the image in painting
and sculpture and the dictation by the text in what we call literature. In
both cases, one is dealing with a normative power. As with every norm, one
can always come only relatively close to it. But no that is precisely what
we say when we reflect on the matter afterwards. In the Vollzug in the
execution, the performance it is different. In its appearing to you the
artwork is truly there the picture, the poem, the song. It has come forth.
On the basis of this one also understands the original sense of what critique
means that one separates the work as an artwork from its being as work
that is not art (and one should also not assert that one knows the artwork
better than the artist).
Today we no longer ask what such an event [Vollzug] really is, how it
begins, ends, how long it lasts; how it remains in ones mind, and in the end
how it fades away, and yet somehow remains with us and can surface again.
We do not inquire in this way. We have learned this from Aristotles energeia
but we have forgotten how to ask in this way. Certainly one can call this
process a while [Weilen] but this is something that nobody measures and
that one does not find to be either boring or merely entertaining.
Certainly an artistic image or a poetic text is constructed sequentially
in time, and this takes time. But again we only say this when we are
thinking in terms of what I call empty time, the kind of time in which things
like this are measurable. Filled time, on the other hand, does not last nor
does it pass away.23 And yet all kinds of things happen there. The name I
have for the way in which this event happens is reading, whether the
encounter is with an art image or a book. In the case of reading one knows
what it means to be able to do this and not be illiterate which of course
is only the first step in the skill a work of art requires. But at least with
reading one does not imagine, as most people think in regard to seeing, that
one can already do it. In reality, one must learn how to see and how to hear
music. Now the word Lesen in German carries within it a helpful multiplic-
ity of harmonic words, such as gathering together [Zusammenlesen], picking
up [Auflesen], picking out [Auslesen] or to sort out [verlesen]. All of these are
associated with harvest (Lese), that is to say the harvest of grapes, which
persist in the harvest. But the word Lesen also refers to something that
begins with spelling out words, if one learns to write and read, and again
we find numerous echo words. One can start to read [anlesen] a book or
finish reading it [auslesen], one can read further in it [weiterlesen] or just
check into it [nachlesen], or one can read something aloud [vorlesen]. All of
these also point toward the harvest that is gathered in and from which one
takes nourishment.
This harvest is the fullness of sense that is built up into a structure of
meaning and similarly with a structure of sound. There are likewise the

building blocks of meaning: motives, images and sounds. But these elements
are not the letters, words, sentences, periods or chapters. No, these belong
to grammar and syntax, which pertain to the mere skeleton of writtenness
and not to its design [Formgestalt]. It is the design that comes forth thanks
to the means possessed by the language of art in poetry, sculpture and
painting, which in the flow of its play builds up the Gestalt. Afterwards, the
work can be taken apart and this may enhance the real seeing or hearing of
the work so that it gains in differentiation. In general, however, the design
of the art image or of the text takes shape without any critical distance from
the event. The event of emerging as experienced by the viewer, hearer or
reader, that is, the performance as experienced the Vollzug is the
interpretation.24
I have focused on the concept of reading in order to distinguish clearly
between the externality of what merely exists for example the colors or
words or letters and what the concept of Vollzug (reception as an event)
has to show us. Here one has only to make clear to oneself how the process
of reading takes place. First, note that reading does not wish to be a repro-
duction of what was originally spoken. This is where Emilio Betti made a
great mistake. He distinguished two separate meanings of interpretation,
one in the theoretical realm and the other in the realm of the transitory arts,
for example in music or the theater arts, where one would like to speak of
a reproduction. But precisely in music it can be shown that interpretation
is not just playing the correct musical notes. In exactly the same way, when
one reads a linguistic text in a merely reproductive way one would not call
it truly reading; rather, we would just say one is verbalizing it. This shows
that the concept of reading must be completely distinguished from what one
calls reproduction, and so the concept of interpretation absolutely must be
distinguished from mere reproduction. Whoever truly makes music does not
just spell it out by the notes: an interpreter in truth is the fulfiller of the
music in such a way that it comes forth. The most perfect mechanical repro-
duction and unfortunately this includes tapes and records and every other
form of reproduction, even the color reproduction of paintings, for example
really offers only a reproduction without interpretation. In the age of repro-
ducibility we need to remember what interpretation really is.
Of course, polemics as well as justified critiques have been directed
against interpretation, when it asserts its priority over the artwork and in
consequence moves away from the encounter with the artwork. The fact that
interpretation arrogates this role to itself in our day is the result of a scien-
tific concept taken directly from the process of objectivizing from making
things into objects. An artwork has its being as a work of art in being brought
to fulfillment in experience. That which can be grasped by objectifying the
work and by applying scientific methods to it necessarily remains second-
ary to it and to that extent untrue. The truth that I seek in the artworks
assertion becomes accessible in the encounter. The well-known polemic by
Susan Sontag25 certainly does put its finger on the sore point when one
speaks of most modern scholarly interpretation of poetry and art. Basically

scientific methodology used in such interpretation does not allow a work of

art to appear in its own light. It has to over-illuminate it. Heidegger once
said that every interpretation must over-elucidate. In the end this is always
so, if one is talking about an event of encounter. Only by taking back all
individuating objectification can interpretation really serve the encounter
itself. In any event, this is the case with an artwork, which has its being in
the event of encounter, or with the performance. This is also the case in
philosophy, if one follows Kant or Platos Seventh Letter.
I was not speaking carelessly and without forethought when I alluded
to the flow of the interpretive shaping which accompanies reading, the
shaping which is expressed in the right emphasis given to a text in language
or in the right phrasing when one makes music. Here it again becomes clear
what Vollzug in art is. It is certainly not an objectifying process in knowing.
Rather, it is the composite multiplicity of elements that enter into it. It is
what Aristotle called energeia. His creation of this concept arose from a
certain pulling back from the Pythagorean mathematizing of the universe
and its music. What we call nature and what the Greeks called physis is
above all things what is alive through its being in motion. To run across a
mark in a certain stretch of a path or to cross a mark in time certainly makes
the motion calculable and construable, but this is not the energeia
possessed by living things or how the seeing and wakefulness of a person
who is thinking takes place. The conclusion I draw from this may at first
astonish you, but there is evidence for it: certainly nature and art stand
closer to each other than the planned construction of products that come
out of the workplace. And our language speaks of organic unity in refer-
ence to both nature and art. This unity is not something done by anyone.
Kant saw this when he grasped the aesthetic and teleological powers of
judgment together. Obviously what he had in mind was the fact that in the
scientific concept governing modern physics, the concept of purpose, was
not objectively acceptable either in aesthetics or in the knowledge of nature.
Only German idealism ventured to assert this and in doing so it discovered
art as art.26
What all this amounts to in the end is that art belongs in the neigh-
borhood of theoria. We know from the history of thought the inner kinship
between art and science, both of which see themselves as being different
from all practical and technical activity. So it is something positive, and at
the same time it justifies our going back to the basic concepts of theoreti-
cal philosophy in ancient times, that one goes back to these when one wants
to grasp more deeply the modern meaning of art and its claim to absolute-
ness. While the work of the craftsman or his industrial successor has a use,
the artwork is there for itself, and its way of being is pure energeia. But
other than this, the Greeks do not make this distinction between works of
craft and those of art. Nevertheless, they did distinguish with fundamental
sharpness between techn and physis! What is natural and living is in all
the phases of its existence still nature, as seed, as shoot when it comes out
of the ground, and in whole of its maturity, ripeness and fruit. All of this is

the fulfillment [Vollzug] of a single process from nature to nature, as Aris-

totle says. This same contrast, too, also distinguishes artworks from manu-
factured products. For the work of art is not constructed for a useful purpose
like a manufactured product (even if it is brought to market). When it is in
a collection, or in a museum, or is placed somewhere else awaiting our gaze,
or when a book waits for us in a library, in order to be experienced in the
fulfillment of reading, it is there as a work of art. This kind of reading is not
our customary way of doing things in the world; no, it is rather its highest
practice, which is what we have already found Greek theory to be. Art as
art is in Vollzug, just as language is in conversation.
[On Architecture and Decorative Art Concluding Remarks]
The topic of Picture and Poem [Bild und Gedicht], that is, of the pictorial
and poetic arts, does not by any means exhaust the compass of what we must
keep in mind in connection with the process or event character
[Vollzugscharakter] of art. Two important further forms of art need to be
discussed. The first of these is architecture.
As I stressed in Truth and Method,27 architecture has a certain weight-
carrying and space-creating function, a function which all of the enactment
processes of art possess. At the same time, architecture is also not merely
the construction of a product with a purpose, its purposes being to provide
a place in which the play of art can unfold: a theater, an art gallery, or a
concert hall, for example, are designed for this purpose. Rather, architec-
ture is true to what it is designed to be in a double respect.
Certainly a work of civic architecture cannot ever be a product of free
art. It serves a purpose and has its place in the midst of the many activities
of life. At the same time, we often call such buildings as a church, a palace,
a city hall, even occasionally a department store or a railroad station, archi-
tectural monuments. What does this mean? It means that there is some-
thing in the building that awakens thought and gives one something to think
about. It is indeed not merely there to be looked at but rather also serves
its purposes, and yet it is a work of art.
One must emphasize that the rage to reproduce things in our age
possessed by technology has created an illusion. The photographic repro-
duction of buildings, for instance, has the fatal tendency to falsify their
effect on one into that of a picture. This leads us to feel a false sense of
familiarity with the building and in consequence a feeling of disappoint-
ment when one does not see in the building itself the false appearance
presented by a painting but instead encounters it for the first time in its full
reality and is drawn deeply into the thought it generates. One could perhaps
compare it to the color copies of paintings depicting the image that has been
painted but not the painting itself, or to trying to experience a work of poetry
from just reading a critique of it in the newspaper.
Parallel to this is seeing a building only in terms of its purpose. It
emerges as an artwork only when, in the middle of its use, something
wonderful shines forth, as with everything that is beautiful. This experience

causes us to pause in the midst of our purposeful doing, for example in a

room of a church, or in a stairwell, when suddenly we stand there and remain
as if entranced. This does not necessarily mean that one forgets the purposes
of ones own activity. For example, in the midst of a cultic purpose being
carried out in a room of a church, an aesthetically significant staircase can
play an enhancing role in the fulfillment of ones life.
Already we find ourselves here dealing with the second problematic
concept I would like to discuss: the concept of the decorative. What we call
decorative is already thought of in relation to the concept of art, and if we
find a painting to be decorative, this is almost a criticism of it. Nothing
mysteriously comes forth from it, or perhaps there is nothing in the painting
to come forward. What is decorative really should not come forth in the way
artworks do but should have its place as part of the background. When such
a background presses forward too much, for example in a very colorfully
figured wallpaper, seemingly like the feverish dreams of my childhood, such
a decoration loses its true purpose. Nevertheless, we are still dealing with
art if we talk of a piece of jewelry that catches ones eye. In this case one
may admire the workmanship and good taste of the work, especially if it is
not too eye-catching and seems to hold back. A sharp difference between
art and handicraft does not always exist, and this is likewise the case with
architecture. But this points directly to the tension-filled dialectic of the
beautiful, in that in decorative art, as with all art, the work only has its being
as art in its character as something encountered [Vollzugscharakter]. With
architecture, however, it is different. There we have the artistic thought
possessed by the building holding back at first behind the purpose until it
takes hold of the viewers attention in its form. Then the relation to its
purpose steps into the background, so that what is distinctive in the building
completely fills us. It is then like music that has fallen silent (Goethe).
That a presence and an accompanying function are interwoven plays
a role not only here but in every encounter with art. All of our seeing, as
well as hearing, for instance, is governed by the law of contrast. The field
around what we look at, for instance, always plays its part. This applies
not only to sculpture and painting but also to poetry. The deadening effect
of taste and the increase in attractiveness of the new also play a role. With
architectural art it is a bit different. In architecture, the accompanying
conditions do not just enter in; the thought regarding its purpose belongs
to the very creation of the building. Where a buildings relation to its
purpose is quite unclear, this fact can be annoying: for example the Porta
Nigra in Trier, which has something eerie about it, like a gravesite; or when
the Pergamon-Altar in Berlin has steps that run right into the wall; or when
the choir-screen in the Hildesheim church dome just stands against a wall.
A building has a pre-given connection with its surroundings with which it
has to harmonize. The effect that will be caused by the space is co-
intended. Of course, buildings often stand as if forgotten now in an alien
environment as stone witnesses to the past, and yet they are an unshake-
able phenomenon.

Our discussion of architecture and of the role of the decorative has a

special significance today, since it has become characteristic of art in
modern times that its place in life has become questionable. Architecture
confronts the constant task of accomplishing what artworks that are free in
their own function as sculpture, poem or music, are able to do because of
the power of their form, namely to draw people to the work and to have an
effect on the quality of their way of living. This influence that a work exer-
cises we call style. It is a kind of whole that shapes various realms and fits
them together. There is style in writing and naturally style in speaking, style
in the way humans interact with each other, and in the whole surrounding
world in which human life plays itself out. The fact that in the end archi-
tecture plays a special role in all this, to shape the style and represent it,
is something it owes to its special space-forming task, through which, as the
same time it offers all the other arts a place-in-life for their own style-
creating power and their truth.
Our discussion of architecture and decorative art here is therefore not
merely an appendix to the investigation up to now, which has intentionally
focused on the concept of art that prevails in modern times. We saw that,
in fact, the philosophical relevance of art has only recently gotten through
to us. And of course this meant at the same time that for art its place in
life became questionable. Beginning with the cave drawings in primeval
times through the art of earlier eras and right up to the end of the 18th
century the place of art in the society was self-evident. Of course, architec-
ture and the decorative arts continue to be inseparable from the whole of
what gives shape to life. This means that, in these art forms, the claim of
art to absoluteness has to be carried out by an express suspension of any
serving of a purpose. In truth, such a suspension belongs to all appearing
of the beautiful. This was understood without further ado throughout the
ancient world and posed no problem: the Egyptian and Greek sculptural
images of the gods as well as the ancient funeral monuments were tied into
the sacred order of life. This was obvious. Even in Periclean Athens, when
the great art treasures on the Acropolis had to be hidden away, they
remained ready to be brought out for cultic occasions.
This is also true of the Christian era and its beginnings, with a few
characteristic changes. Hans Belting quite correctly took up the topic of
how the image [Bild] was only gradually removed from cultic observances
in the Christian West.28 Indeed, we have emphasized here that the icono-
graphic standpoint (in art history) is oriented to the artwork as a copy of
something. But the iconographic line of research is not simply research into
documents but research into art precisely because the function of copying
in art has special significance in the place in life occupied by art. Sir Ernst
H. Gombrich has a quite different methodological orientation when he
speaks of the fulfillment of a certain evolving way of thinking in images that
can found in the development of painting up to the Renaissance. Never-
theless, this should not lead us to ignore the fact that the representations of
Christ as Pantokrator [Ruler of All] that are found in medieval wall

paintings or in mosaic art contain a sacred radiance streaming out of them

with which the pictures of the Madonna and child in the Renaissance cannot
compare. This fact, I think, points in truth to the absoluteness and contem-
poraneity of all art, two topics which we have inquired into here.
At this point I need not go into the many possible arrangements that
people have made of the courses of historical development in art. I will
conclude only by recalling to you the case of Raphael and the checkered
history of his fame. Or also the way the status of the Baroque was later
enhanced. One could draw out lines of development in the history of the
sculpture and painting, articulating the shifting tastes, their new turns, and
the shifting influences from early on up to the present day. In particular, it
would be interesting to trace the history of the panel painting, which really
opened a new age in painting, from which arose the gallery, the museum
and the general exhibition of collections of art. And however much we may
lament the losses in recent centuries that have brought a new homelessness
and placelessness to art and to the artist, I still maintain that no political
program about art can be taken seriously if it does not recognize the claim
of all art to absoluteness. Of course, this does not change the fact that the
age of a common European architectural style has come to an end. Still,
Mnemosyne remains the mother of the Muses. The presence of the past in
the present belongs to the very nature of the human mind. And as Hegel
said, The wounds of the spirit leave no scars.
Notes
1. [All headings inserted by the translator.]
2. [Translators note: The subtitle, Elements of a Philosophical Hermeneutics, is not
even given in the English translations.]
3. [Translators note: Das Bild normally means a picture or illustration, as for
example the popular German illustrated magazine, Das Bild. But it can also mean
image, and Gadamer uses the term here to refer both to painting and sculpture and
even architecture, so I have decided on image rather than picture to translate
Bild in the title of this essay.]
4. It can be found in GW 2 (Tbingen: Mohr, 1986): 33036 (and translated in
Dialogue and Deconstruction: The GadamerDerrida Encounter, edited and trans-
lated by Diane P. Michalfelder and Richard E. Palmer [Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1989]: 2151).
5. [Translators note: Gadamer indicated to me that his preference was for simul-
taneity over contemporaneousness to translate Gleichzeitigkeit because it suggested
the element of presence, of being present for us in our time, whereas contempora-
neous could suggest a similar event in two countries. I have used both in most
cases.]
6. Metaphysics, M 3, 1078a, 312.
7. e soi aisoi.
8. In this regard see also my essay, Plato und die Dichter in GW 5: 187211 (Plato
and the Poets, in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato,
translated with an introduction by F. Christopher Smith [New Haven, CT and
London: Yale University Press, 1980]: 3972).

9. In this regard see Wahrheit umd Methode, GW 1:118 ff. and the relevant works
of volume 8: Art and Imitation (Nr. 4), Poetry and Mimesis (Nr. 8), and The Play
of Art (Nr. 9).
10. In this regard see Platos Dialectical Ethics (GW 5: 149 ff.) as well as The Idea
of the Good between Plato and Aristotle (GW 7: 185 ff.). See The Idea of the Good
in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, translated and introduced by P. Christopher
Smith (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 182 pp.
11. Statesman, 284e ff.:

d. [Trans. note: Fowler in the Loeb classics edition translates this into English
as the moderate, the fitting, the opportune, the needful.]
12. Statesman, 285a: w and
.
13. These dates are according to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1964).
14. In German, Treffsicherheit. Gadamer references Philebus, 55e7 and the Greek
word

g.
15. Philebus, 62b8.
16. Philebus, 26d8: t
.
17. 155e ff.
18. Philebus, 27b8: t
.
19. Metaphysics, Book 6.
20. Charmides, 168d ff., Sophist, 247e ff.
21. On the rise of the concept of mythos in the times prior to the Romantic period,
see Der Mythos im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft, in GW 8: 1808. Not translated.
22. [Translators note: See Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Nega-
tivity in Adorno and Derrida, translated by Neil Solomon [Cambridge and London:
The MIT Press, 1998] for a very subtle treatment of this sovereignty phenomenon
as aesthetic negativity.]
23. On distinguishing between empty and filled time, see my essay, ber leere
und erfllte Zeit, in GW 4: 13753. English translation by R. Phillip OHara,
Concerning Empty and Ful-filled Time, Southern Journal of Philosophy
8(4)(winter, 1970): 34154.
24. In this regard see Hren Sehen Lesen, GW 8: 2718 and ber das Lesen
von Bauten und Bildern, GW 8: 3318. [Translators note: neither is translated into
English yet. By the way, the word Vollzug means the carrying out, the execution of
something, its fulfillment, and in art the event in which the perception of an image
or poem as a tarrying in time is performed. See the next paragraph.]
25. [Translators note: See her 1963 essay, Against Interpretation in Against
Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966):
414.]
26. See the very solid study by Jrgen-Eckardt Pleines, sthetik und Vernunftkri-
tik (Hildesheim/Zurich/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1989) and his article Einheit
und Mannigfaltigkeit in sthetischen Urteil, Zeitschrift fr sthetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft 33 (1988): 15175.
27. GW 1: 16165/T&M, pp. 1569.
28. See Hans Belting, Bild und sein Publikum in Mittelalter (Berlin: Mann, 1981),
316 pp.; English translation, The Image and its Public in the Middle Ages: Form
and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond
Meyer (New Rochelle, NY: Caratzas, c. 1990), 298 pp.

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Artworks in Word and Image

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58 Theory, Culture & Society 23(1)

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