Philosophical theories concerning the arts have undergone significant changes in the past few centuries. These changes ran parallel to the reconception of philosophy itself. As is known, the beginning of the 20th century bore witness to the “linguistic” turn, and there has also been a second, no less significant event: the “hermeneutical turn,” enacted by Heidegger and Gadamer. In an essay written in 1990 with the title “The Multiplicity of Languages and the Understanding of the World”, Gadamer summed up the philosophical developments of the 20th century as follows: “In this century we have performed, as is known, a kind of »linguistic turn«, that is, a turn to linguisticality. [...] A second development, of equal import, has taken place in our German tradition. Thereby I mean the transition from Neo-Kantianism to phenomenology and, in particular, the further development of phenomenology to the hermeneutic turn which Heidegger has initiated” (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, p. 343). In the aftermath of Heidegger’s thinking, and due especially to Gadamer’s major contributions, hermeneutic philosophy has come to be one of the main philosophical trends of 20th century philosophy. It has transformed traditional ways of approaching philosophical problems, of looking upon and dealing with them. Indeed, it modified to a great extent our understanding of philosophy itself. “To speak of a revolution in the history of thought is perhaps too grand,” an interpreter wrote, “but certainly there has been a general movement that can be called the ’hermeneutic turn’” (David C. Hoy, “Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn,” in: The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Ch. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), p. 170). Central to the hermeneutical perspective of viewing things is a new attitude to the history of philosophy and to the philosophical disciplines themselves. What Heidegger called “destruction” means going back to the original experiences of factical life and legitimizing philosophical concepts and theories originating from, and with reference to, them. Hermeneutics is reluctant to recognize the traditional splitting of philosophical disciplines into fields separate and isolated from each other, such as, e.g., theory of knowledge, morals, aesthetics. In their effort to go back to the fundaments of human experience, Heidegger and Gadamer undertook a radical re-thinking of the theoretical fundaments of the discipline destined to account for, and to do justice to, the arts – that is, aesthetics as well. What they achieved is a veritable “destruction” of aesthetics. Heidegger’s decisive step in the thirties lay in his attempt to connect arts with truth, thereby questioning the traditional view according to which truth is a character of knowledge, and a work of art can be “beautiful” but not “true.” Heidegger’s hints have then been elaborated in detail by Gadamer in his Truth and Method.
The present paper proposes to show the essential steps taken by Heidegger and Gadamer in their re-examination of the autonomy of the realm called “aesthetics” and their efforts to replace it by a hermeneutical arts theory.
