Art·Truth·Understanding

Hermeneutics has a very long history in the west. As a popular psychometric approach developed by Schleiermacher and Dilthey, Gadamer further developed it into a philosophy, i. e., philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics was based on Husserl's phenomenology and Herdegger's fundamental ontology. Gadamer comprehensively applied descriptive and analytic methods in phenomenology to conduct an abstruse study in art, aesthetic experience and aesthetic understanding. Philosophical hermeneutics has also established its theoretical value in philosophy, aesthetics, literature, art and natural sciences.Philosophical hermeneutics started from Gadamer's aesthetic orientation, which also contributed a lot to the study of aesthetics. Gadamer proposed a series of unique questions in aesthetics from the perspectives of aesthetics and hermeneutics. The prerequisite for Gadamer to bridge hermeneutics and aesthetics is his belief on the equality of the art experience and the truth. Without this prerequisite, he would have not been able to define the truth of art. Based on the idea of truth in Herdegger's ontology, Gadamer explored the truth in art experience, and clearly claimed "aesthetics is part of hermeneutics" .Gadamer conducted analysis on the ontology of art with great focus on art experience. He finalized the construct of the ontology of art by defining the essential characteristics of play, exploring the relationship between the play and the art experience, and analyzing the being, meaning expression, and temporality of art.One of the important characteristics of Gadamer's aesthetic orientation is his focus on the aesthetic understanding on the text meaning of the art. He emphasized that "prejudice" is the first step of the aesthetic understanding to defend the authority and the tradition. For him, the temporal distance is taken as the positive and creative possibility of understanding. Principles such as the "fusion of horizons" between the horizon of the text and the interpreter's own horizon, and "effective history" constitute the main content of his art aesthetic hermeneutics. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutic aesthetics not only encouraged the establishment of the school of reception-aesthetics in Germany, but also made the research models in the contemporary western art theories transfer from "author-centered" and "text-centered" to "reader-centered" . Meanwhile, his ideas of aesthetics directly opened up a new era in the study of aesthetics.