Following Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer states that the primordial way we experience the past is through forgetting rather than memory. This essay seeks to explore the various senses of forgetting as it appears in Gadamer’s thought with a particular emphasis on how forgetting and memory structure the unique temporality of the work of art. This exploration reveals that the interplay between forgetting and remembering is more complicated than mere opposition; this interplay is specifically revealed in Gadamer’s analyses of the epochal (...) transition and the transmissive event of history. In both cases, forgetting is revealed not as a lack or lacuna, but as a dynamic generating structure that elevates the work of art from its original past—constituting the immemorial dimension of the work. This essay concludes by gesturing toward the repercussions of forgetting on subjectivity and a theory of time in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. (shrink)

In religion, as in science, man has attempted to comprehend the links between himself and the world around him. Though his search was limited before the scientific revolution, it was no less meaningful nor less intense than ours is today. Every sacred building had to possess the same ‘functional’ relationship to God as a modern laboratory has to the discipline it serves. The proportions used in the building would epitomise their ideas of the god, and the geometric shapes employed in (...) the building would involve meanings every bit as profound, and stemming from as much thought, as our scientific ideas. The major difference was that they judged truth by consistency rather than by experiment. If we consider the issues involved in siting an atomic power station, and the care we would use to do so, then we may get some idea of what was involved in siting and orienting a sacred building. The way this was done was one of the most powerful tools they possessed for relating man and his world to the gods so that man could understand and where possible control the natural forces around him. In this his purpose is the same as the modern scientist's, though his premises and his methods differed. To illustrate this, I shall discuss the churches in and around the small southern Italian town of Positano. (shrink)