Abstract
The Paradox of the Concept of Symbol in Gadamer’s Hermeneutical Aesthetics
HIJIKATA Naoko
In this paper, I will reconsider the significance of the “symbol” that Gadamer deals
with in his hermeneutical aesthetics. In his major work, “Truth and Method” (1960),
Gadamer argues that the primacy of the symbol as a universal principle in modern
aesthetics is relativized in relation to allegory. Furthermore, his ontological analysis of
artworks, he deals with the symbol in the consideration of the concept of the “image”
in plastic arts. The essence of the image is characterized as intermediate between
a sign and a symbol, but even there, the symbol is only mentioned in terms of its
contrast with the sign concerning the image. In “Truth and Method”, the concept of
the symbol is merely secondary, but in his later essay, “The Relevance of the Beautiful”
(1974), it is transformed into a central theme of “art as the symbolic character (das
Symbolische der Kunst). In this essay, Gadamer attempts to overcome the conventional
idealistic meaning of the symbolic concept from a hermeneutical standpoint by relying
on a Heideggerian ontological understanding of art. Thus, I clarify the process of
transformation of the substance of the symbolic concept in Gadamer’s hermeneutics as
a “paradoxical change.”
