Abstract

This essay presents Gadamer’s interest in temporality as his strategy for advancing the importance ofhermeneutics as philosophy of experience, a strategy that I show becomes significantly more salientwith the appearance of his 1992 essay, Wort und Bild. I show how temporal categories function todemarcate the ontological imbalance that is of such central concern in Gadamer’s philosophicalproject. The paper also considers some common misunderstandings of Gadamer that result from afailure to take full account of his experiential orientation, and thus prevent recognition of its radicalpotential. A full account must include a grasp of the exemplariness of art in his philosophy, and in thisconnection, the essay considers, not Gadamer’s ideal of lyric poetry, but the quite distinct exemplariness of narrative art. Though its temporal structure would seem particularly pertinent, it is not this feature, it turns out, that makes it particularly worthy of hermeneutical reflection