287 on the Irrelevance of the Beautiful Kristin Gjesdal. Gadamer And

Review Articles / Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 279–294 287 On the Irrelevance of the Beautiful Kristin Gjesdal. Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xviii + 235pp. Bibliography and Index. In this often insightful and well-argued book, Kristin Gjesdal focuses valuable attention on Gadamer’s treatment of major philosophers of German Idealism and Romanticism in a critical consideration of some of the central ideas of philosophical hermeneutics. She concludes from her examination that recent interest in philosophical hermeneutics, especially among Anglophone readers, is misplaced, and she calls for a redirection of attention toward a reassessment of the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and “early nineteenth century theory of interpretation” (4). Philosophically, it is clear that Gjesdal hopes to return hermeneutics to a more secure and comfortable relationship with Enlighten- ment than she believes it can ever have with Gadamer, due in part to the influence of his “Heideggerian luggage” (6). Three main themes structureGadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism. The first and central theme of the book is that philosophical hermeneutics relies on misinterpretations of key figures in the German Idealist and Roman- tic traditions—Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher in particular. Gjesdal argues further that Gadamer’s hermeneutics is incoherent in that it relies on a use of artistic experience as a model that returns philosophical hermeneutics to the aestheticization of understanding that it rejects. Third, Gjesdal believes philosophical hermeneutics thematizes tensions and problems that it can only exac- erbate but that a hermeneutics reconceived along Schleiermacherian lines would overcome or avoid. Below, I mainly consider Gjesdal’s treatment of the book’s major theme concerning Gadamer’s appropriations of the philosophical tradition and what it can help to illuminate about the weaknesses and perhaps also the strengths of philosophical hermeneutics. The first chapters of the book explore the flaws and limits of Gadamer’s interpretations of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. The later chapters are focused on Schleiermacher and the ways a “renaissance” of his ideas may help to point hermeneutics beyond the impasses it has faced since Heidegger. Although Gjesdal argues that Gadamer misreads Kant, Hegel, and the Romantics, in her eyes, “his interpretation of Schleiermacher stands out as particularly faulty” (214). But she sees a lot of the problems emerging from the earliest stages of the argument of Truth and Method, in which Kant’s views on art play an especially important role. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156916411X581002 288 Review Articles / Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 279–294 In Gjesdal’s eyes, Truth and Method is built on the unstable basis of both an overestimation and an under appreciation of Kant’s views on art. She characterizes insightfully the positive part of Gadamer’s attitude toward Kantian aes- thetics, which would end up having to bear the weight of forging a link between Kant’s epistemological and moral theories. According to Gjesdal, Gadamer sees that Kant, in The Critique of Judgment, [N]ot only subjectivizes taste but paves the way for a wider, hermeneutically relevant response to the relationship between art and knowledge. Kant [in seeking an aesthetic bridge to link science and practice] plots a route beyond the narrow notion of pure aesthetic judging,. by showing that our experience of art benefits from the reference to rational concepts, and, second, by hinting at a dimension of knowledge that transcends the realm of science proper: the notion of knowledge as self-knowledge. (25–26) Nevertheless, Gjesdal sees Gadamer as ultimately slipping past Kant and the entire Enlightenment hermeneutical tradition under the influence of both Hegel’s interpretation of Kant and Heidegger’s interpretation of everything. For Gadamer, of course, that “hint” he attributed to Kant would lead beyond critical philosophy and well past Hegel all the way to Dasein. For Gjesdal, it is evidence of Gadamer’s misconstrual of Kant, who sought an integration of experience with science and epistemology rather than a transcendence of them: It is one thing to argue [as Gadamer does] that Kant’s notion of the ideal of beauty transcends the restrictions of pure aesthetic judging. It is something else, however, to suggest that Kant, while doing so, at the same time anticipates a hermeneutic conception of art and experience. Yet, this is precisely what Gadamer proposes. (26–27) It is telling that Gjesdal characterizes Kant’s meaning concerning art, experience, and hermeneutics this way, here, as merely one thing and not another and as limited merely to what it looks back upon rather than what it anticipates. What Gadamer sees in Kant’s thinking about art is precisely the prospect of overcoming just such a narrowly non-dialogical interpretative approach by following up the hint that art is more than Kant would ultimately say art is. As Gadamer succinctly summarizes the relationship between Kant’s philosophy and his own thinking about art, experience and hermeneutics, The artwork is a challenge for our understanding because over and over it evades all our interpretations and puts up an invincible resistance to being transformed into the identity of the concept. This is a point I think one could already have learned from Kant’sCritique of Judgment. It is for this reason that the example of art has the function of leading the way, a function which the first part ofTruth and Method possesses for my whole project. This .

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