Abstract

For philosophical hermeneutics as Hans‐Georg Gadamer conceived it, art plays an essential role. If hermeneutics and aesthetics are as strictly opposed as Gadamer suggests, the “abstraction” performed by aesthetic consciousness must be an abstraction from the truth of art. As the result of such an abstraction, the aesthetic view of art is secondary; it must be conceived of as nonoriginal experience of art, which, derivative as it is supposed to be, is only possible on the basis of original experience, as an abstraction from it. Aesthetic objects are essentially correlated to perception, the word for which in Ancient Greek is ‘aesthesis’. But aesthetic objects cannot be coextensive with everything perceptible; otherwise, the term “aesthetic” could not be used significantly in respect to artworks. Being perceptibly present, artworks present phenomenal structures of meaning, texts in textures, which must not be directly applied to the factual world or identified with its “essence”.