Abstract

The article aims at assessing the connection between art and the human sciences through an interpretation of Gadamer’s reflection on this subject. In Truth and Method, he reacts against the “subjectivization” of the Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics and uses the model of art to develop an account of knowledge and truth adequate to the human sciences. Gadamer argues that a work of art contains a truth claim and can be considered a form of knowledge, to the extent that it reveals aspects of reality that could go otherwise unnoticed. Because a wrong aesthetic theory also influenced the history of hermeneutics, Gadamer criticizes what he calls the hermeneutics of reconstruction of the XIX century, proposing as an alternative his own hermeneutics of integration, according to which understanding is conceived of as a “fusion of horizons”. Art and human sciences converge in being forms of human self-understanding and of disclosure of fundamental aspects of human reality, thereby playing complementary roles in the process of Bildung, a key concept in the German humanist tradition that plays an important role in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.