Aesthetics and Hermeneutics: Between Symbol and Allegory*

José F.Zú?iga

Abstract: In this article I argue that in the Western tradition there have appeared three different conceptions of art that correspond to three different philosophical positions: according to the first,the Platonic-Christian,there would be a close relationship between art and truth;according to the second,which corresponds to Modernity,art would be autonomous with respect to the truth;and finally,in its form—we could say—ultramodern,there would be a discrepancy between art and truth.Furthermore,I argue that in each of these interpretations of art and philosophy,our relationship with tradition is transformed and,with it,hermeneutics is also transformed into its function of preserving and transmitting said tradition.The main thesis consists in affirming,in the first part of the article,that aesthetics transforms hermeneutics and therefore philosophy itself.In the second,I describe the three different conceptions of philosophy that have occurred in the West and their different conceptions of art.I also argue that tradition must be preserved,but not because it possesses the truth that has to be accepted without any dispute,but because,among other things,following a suggestion from Nietzsche,art defends us from the truth.Here I highlight the tension between the Platonic-Christian tradition and the Greek tradition and I indicate,in the last part of the article,a possible synthesis between the two,distinguishing between symbol and allegory.

Keywords: Art;philosophy;aesthetics;hermeneutics;Gadamer;Benjamin

1

Hegel named the lectures on aesthetics that he taught in Berlin on several different occasions“Philosophy of Art or Aesthetics,”the last of which took place during the winter semester of 1828/29. Georg W.F.Hegel,,trans.Domingo Hernández Sánchez (Madrid: Abada Editores/UAM Ediciones,2006),6.Since then we do not differentiate between these expressions:“aesthetic,”as an adjective,is everything pertaining to“the discipline that studies beauty”and“the philosophical foundations of art,”as described by the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language.As such,we can use the two expressions as synonyms.However,depending on whether one or the other is used,there will be different problems with the emphasis.Thus,Hegel uses the expression“philosophy of art”to replace the expression“aesthetic”that had been introduced by Baumgarten in the previous century.Hegel is interested in art as one of the forms of what he calls the Absolute Spirit.The others are religion and philosophy.This means that,from the Hegelian philosophical point of view,art is one of the ways in which the spirit knows itself,before everything that is alien to it,before what is out there,matter or nature,the world outside of us,that is merely given and will never be part of that us (not even in its animal form).Therefore,art occupies a privileged position for Hegel (along with religion and philosophy) when it comes to constructing the idea of the human being that has been shaped throughout history.The“truth”of the spirit is nothing other than the construction of an“us”that does not leave anyone out: the set of all human beings who,assuming the inexhaustible variety of their differences,recognize each other as equal and free beings.

It is not strange that Gadamer in 1964,four years after the publication of his magnum opus,

Truth and Method

, Hans-Georg Gadamer,,trans.Ana Agud Aparicio y Rafael de Agapito (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme,1984).when he had managed to establish hermeneutics as a philosophical current,turns to Hegel to deal with the subject presented here.“Aesthetics and Hermeneutics” Hans-Georg Gadamer,“Estética y hermenéutica,”trans.José F.Zú?iga, 12 (1991): 5-10.is the title of the lecture delivered by Gadamer in Amsterdam before the 5th International Congress of Aesthetics,and can be considered as a magnificent summary of the position of philosophical hermeneutics in its relation to art.The absence of references to his teacher,Martin Heidegger,in this text is significant.This shows that the position of Gadamer is,in the end,more Hegelian-Platonic than Heideggerian (we must bear in mind that Heidegger is diametrically opposed to Hegel in the field of thought).Or,more accurately,it shows that Gadamer’s philosophical position was built on the difficult (perhaps,ultimately,impossible) mediation between Hegel and Heidegger.It is about reflecting on the place that Hegel assigns to art as one of the figures of the Absolute Spirit.From that point of view,according to Gadamer,art and hermeneutics belong to each other,since the task of the latter would be to build bridges to span the“historical”and“human”distance between spirit and spirit.The starting point is Hegelian: the historical constitution of man.Man is immersed in traditions and understands himself being inserted in the forms of life and institutions that he has inherited.But it is above all in art where the complete historical integration of all past with all present and all future would take place.The assumption is that everything that has reached the category of art is always art and that,therefore,tradition and history are never broken because art has“a timeless present.”

Art would be something like the store of everything created by man and worthy of being preserved,admired,imitated and transmitted.It is what truly is permanent.It is what man contributes to being.It is the truth in the sense of the symbolization of man with the world,which will be explained later.And so,the problem of aesthetics and hermeneutics,the problem of the relationship between them,and therefore,the problem of our relationship with tradition,all converge on the question of the essence of art.

In the tradition of philosophy,Hegel represents the last great metaphysician in which the Greek and the Christian are (supposedly) combined,the two great pillars of the West.His philosophy of art or aesthetics is a part of that synthesis.But meanwhile,the modern and enlightened principles,of which Hegel himself participated in his youth,have produced a break with tradition in the West and,in the words of Gadamer,“the destruction of Western Christian society.”In this sense,the autonomy advocated by Kant for aesthetics versus knowledge and morals is more illustrated,more modern,than the connection of art with truth that Hegel established in his system,although these words should be qualified,because,as we shall see later,Hegel’s position defines very well the space that contemporary art occupies in our world,having declared the end or death of art as a display of truth.Gadamer,aware of this,recognizes that perhaps his own approach,owing a debt,as we have said,to Hegel’s thinking,would have arrived too late,as we have also said.Indeed,Gadamer has formulated the last great defence of the link between truth and art (this is the core of his hermeneutical philosophy),and in this his position is also indebted to the thinking of his teacher,Martin Heidegger.Both are heirs of a nostalgic romanticism that defends the return to the origin (the moment in which art and truth were united) now lost because of the maelstrom of modernity.But the fact is that the Enlightenment has happened in Europe and,with it,the questioning of tradition as a whole.

We can take Nietzsche as a thinker of reference in this matter.Therefore,hermeneutics,in its classical form,has to confront Nietzsche.Obviously,I will only refer here to how this issue affects the relationship between aesthetics and hermeneutics,that is,the question of the essence of art.

In 1961,a year after the publication of

Truth and Method

,the book

Nietzsche

appeared,in which the romantic Heidegger confronts the anti-romantic Nietzsche.It gathers together the classes taught by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg between 1936 and 1940,as well as unpublished manuscripts up until 1946.Therefore,the historical context needs to be taken into account: the political domination of fascism in Germany and World War II.The first section,dedicated to“The will to power as art,”reproduces,with some modifications,a good part of the text used by Heidegger in the winter semester of 1936-37.It is an authentic confrontation between Heidegger and Nietzschean aesthetics,in reality with the whole of Nietzsche’s thought,the most profoundly enlightened thinker who,on the one hand,as a destroyer of tradition,is more enlightened than Kant himself and surpasses and leaves behind any restorative thinking of old orders;but,on the other hand,is also a fierce critic of modernity.Therefore,in my opinion,only by assuming his philosophical position before art can we think about a relationship between aesthetics and hermeneutics that matches up to our time.Thus,modern reflection on art affects the philosophical tradition of the West and its status in the whole of human knowledge.Since philosophy seeks the truth,since philosophy is,as Nietzsche says,the will to truth,the way in which art relates to truth also affects philosophy itself.From my point of view,there are different positions in the Western philosophical tradition before art that correspond in turn to different ways of conceiving the“destiny”of the human spirit.In its ancient form (which corresponds to our Platonic-Christian tradition),one might say,there would be a close relationship between art and truth;in its modern form,art would be autonomous with respect to truth;in its ultramodern form—we might also say—there would be a discrepancy between art and truth (basically,this would be a return to another of our great traditions: the Greek-tragic tradition,although not only this).Each interpretation of the relationship between art and truth transforms philosophy itself.Hermeneutics is also transformed in its function of preserving and interpreting tradition.Aesthetics transforms hermeneutics and also philosophy.How do we preserve the legacy of tradition and at the same time assume the radical Nietzschean break,which leaves nothing unscathed? My thesis is: tradition must be preserved,but not because it has

truth

that must be acknowledged without any discussion (we cannot preserve what,now,after everything known and experienced,has already lost its original sense),but because,among other things,it defends us from truth.This philosophical position that I propose arises from Nietzsche himself,but it tries to situate itself in that rich and surprising tradition that allows us to think of Plato,Kant,Hegel,and Nietzsche as philosophers

in the same

sense of the word.Although they are so opposite (or precisely because they are) they all belong to the great tradition of Western thought.

I will show first different conceptions of philosophy that have been given in the Western philosophical tradition and their corresponding conceptions of art.Here the tension between the Platonic-Christian tradition and the Greek tragic tradition will be revealed.Next,I point to a possible synthesis between both,contrasting symbol and allegory.

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Let us consider Kant,Hegel and Nietzsche’s conceptions of philosophy.For Kant,philosophy is“the science of the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human reason (

teleologia rationis humanae

)” Immanuel Kant,,trans.Pedro Ribas (Madrid: Alfaguara,1984),651 (A 839,B 867).and truth lies in the impossibility of reason“appearing”fully in the world,although this fact does not remove the moral duty that every human being has to try to make that happen.Hegel,on the other hand,maintains that truth consists of the

necessary

conciliation between nature and spirit,and philosophy is nothing more than the (rational,scientific) exposition of how this happens (science of logic) and how it has been happening (phenomenology of the spirit,philosophy of history).For Nietzsche,in short,the philosopher is fundamentally different from the man of science and the truth is that truth is ugly.I will briefly analyse these three ways of conceiving philosophy to show how they influence their different conceptions of the relationship between art and philosophy.In the case of Kant,I turn to the table of the superior capacities of the soul that appears at the end of the introduction to the

Critique of Judgment

. Immanuel Kant,,trans.Roberto R.Aramayo y Salvador Mas (Boadilla del Monte: A.Machado Libros,2003),145 (B LXVIII).When Kant speaks of“knowledge”in his definition of philosophy,he refers to what he calls the cognitive faculties or capacities (faculties of representation,we could say,that is,of everything that can appear before the conscience;according to Kant,basically three things: knowledge,feelings and desires),which are understanding,judgment (discernment) and reason.Understanding would be,properly,the faculty of knowledge,while judgment would be in relation to feeling (of pleasure or pain) and reason would be directly connected with the faculty of desire,with the will.The fields of application of each one of these faculties would be: understanding applies to nature (to phenomena) while will refers to the field of freedom (to that which is not a phenomenon).Feeling refers to art as a field of application,and this is quite unusual,since Kant does not postulate an intermediate field between phenomenon and noumenon.In any case,the table of the superior capacities of the soul puts art next to the two areas that,according to Kant,constitute reality: nature and freedom.We must bear in mind that the

Critique of Judgment

was written by Kant when he was already in his maturity,when he thought he had found something he never thought could happen,namely: a differentiated

a priori

principle for the feeling of pleasure or pain.Following his philosophical instinct,“the love which the reasonable has for the supreme ends of human reason,” Kant,,quoted by Gilles Deleuze,trans.Mario Aurelio Galmarini (Madrid: Cátedra,1997),11.he discovers that,just as the

a priori

principle that governs understanding is conformity to laws,and that just as the

a priori

principle that governs reason (practical) is the“final end,”so there is an

a priori

principle,different from the other two,which governs feeling,namely: finality or conformity with an end.I will explain this later more carefully.Now it only needs to be stated that the conception of Kant’s philosophy is based on the hypothesis that there are ends to reason and that these ends are beyond the natural order:“［T］he final end,”he writes,“is not an end that nature suffices to carry out and to produce things according to its idea,because it is unconditioned.” Kant,,423 (paragraph 84,B 397).This conception of philosophy will be determinant to understand the position taken by Kant before art as an autonomous area with respect to truth.

The second conception of philosophy that I want to present is that of Hegel.For this,the philosophical point of view is that of necessity (logic),and,therefore,in philosophical terms,the question is why there is a need for the spirit to manifest itself in art.Hegel believes that art is one of the modes (the others are religion and philosophy) in which man becomes aware of the highest ideas,of that which is the most valuable that can be possessed.Making this statement does nothing other than placing the consideration of art within the general task of philosophy.It departs from Kantian dualism and affirms the existence of two distinct and separate areas: the laws of freedom and the laws of necessity (Hegel also calls these the laws of the universal and laws of the particular,or of concept and of life).He argues that the task of philosophy is to overcome the opposition between both legislative areas,that the truth of each part is in the end partial,false,and that what is really true is the conciliation of the parts.Thus,on the one hand,in the field of natural inclinations there is no freedom,only necessity;but,at the same time,freedom only exists when faced with natural inclinations.Opposition,thinks Hegel,is resolved in favour of the spirit of man:“Truth—he writes—exists only and firstly as the opposition resolved,as the contradiction reconciled.What is shown in philosophy is that the opposition is always resolved;and in any case,that is something that for the good listener is only solved in philosophy.” Hegel,,79.

Finally,I will briefly deal with Nietzsche’s concept of philosophy.Since I consider that Heidegger’s book

Nietzsche

is fundamental for determining the concept of art in our time (even though it is through a negative way),I use the two texts by Nietzsche on which Heidegger bases his work to define the concept of philosophy by the thinker of the eternal return.The first part taken from the work that Nietzsche was preparing when he fell into madness,

The Will to Power

:

I do not wish to convert anybody to philosophy: it is both necessary and perhaps desirable that the philosopher should be a rare plant.Nothing is more repugnant to me than the scholarly praise of philosophy which is to be found in Seneca and Cicero.Philosophy has not much in common with virtue.I trust I may be allowed to say that even the scientific man is a fundamentally different person than philosopher.What I most desire is,that the genuine notion of philosopher should not completely perish in Germany. Quoted by Martin Heidegger,,vol.1,trans.Juan Luis Vermal (Barcelona: Destino,2000),19 (fragment number 420 of according to the edition prepared by A.Baeumler,which is what Heidegger uses).

The second is a posthumous text by Nietzsche that was written when he was 28 years old,as a teacher in Basel:

It is in the times of great danger in which the philosophers appear—there when the wheel turns faster and faster—they and art appear instead of the myth that is diluted.But they are sent with much anticipation,because the attention of contemporaries turns towards them only slowly.A people who are aware of their dangers begets genius. Ibid.;the fragment is found on page 112 of Volume X of the first of Nietzsche’s ,which was published at the beginning of the 20th century under the auspices of the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar.

Heidegger treats them as if from both came the same vision of philosophy in Nietzsche.But they come from two periods of Nietzsche’s thought that are very different: the“romantic”era of his first work,

The Birth of Tragedy

,in which he still believed that a genius like Wagner could signify the truth of an entire people and a whole culture;and the later time,the one that comes from the break with Wagner and with all the romanticism that he represents.

So,to understand Nietzsche’s position on art,we must insist on the first quote.It should be noted that Nietzsche is interested in distancing the concept of philosopher from moralist and scientist.Really perhaps he had in mind Kant,or perhaps even Hegel,as those who define philosophy around the integration of the rational and moral.In front of them,Nietzsche uses the rarity of the philosopher,the strange one,the one that is outside of all systems and classifications.The philosopher,a rare plant.

But the second text serves to determine how Heidegger saw Nietzsche and his definition of art.Heidegger situates the following exergue as an introduction to“The will to power as art”:“Almost two millennia and not a single new god.”The text comes from the work

The Antichrist,

which Nietzsche published in 1888.Heidegger introduces the mentioned exergue just after saying that the name he has given to his book,

Nietzsche

,designates the topic that Nietzsche thinks about.“Nietzsche”gives a name to the thing (

Sache

) of Nietzsche’s thinking.It is about entering into a confrontation with him,as a great interpreter of the event of nihilism: two millennia have passed and not a single new god has appeared.

Each one of these three conceptions of philosophy gives rise to three philosophical positions before art.Let's look at the three positions,starting with the modern one,which defends the autonomy of art and usually appears linked to Kantian thought and the concept of disinterest introduced in the first moment of the analysis of the judgment of taste. Kant,,151-60 (paragraphs 1 to 5,B 3-B 16).The lack of interest is,according to Kant,the characteristic feature that differentiates aesthetic judgments from moral and cognitive ones.Correspondingly,from this point of view,art would be autonomous before other areas of human activity,such as science or morality,which in turn would also be autonomous with respect to artistic activity.This can lead to a formalist interpretation of art Francisca Pérez Carre?o,“El formalismo y el desarrollo de la historia del arte,”in ,vol.2,ed.Valeriano Bozal (Visor: Madrid,1999),256;Leopoldo La Rubia de Prado,“La autonomía del arte: de Wassily Kandinsky a Frank Stella,” 62,no.181 (2013): 449-74.and the experience of art according to which,in the face of all subordination of form to the content of art (heteronomy),the properly artistic would be in the form (the“content”of the art would be its form) and the aesthetic experience would be a specific experience (the experience of the form in the objects) before the experience in general.Consequently,the history of art is understood,from this point of view,as a history of forms,not as a mere chronicle of cultural events,linked to the religious,political and social history of men.Thus,as a pure form,the work of art would be independent of the experience it might provoke (be it ethical or cognitive),it would even be independent of pleasure or displeasure (of emotions).Art would have an object of its own,pure form,whose evolution would depend on its own context,and art history would answer questions like: what is there in common between a Greek temple and a Gothic church,or between a fresco by Leonardo and an oil painting by Vermeer?

We can think of formalism as the best example of the position that defends the autonomy of art because,in fact,formalism had appeared as a reaction to the philosophy of romantic-idealist art,which defends a contrary position.The Hegelian definition of beauty as“sensitive manifestation of idea”is,so to speak,pure idealism applied to art,the best expression of the subordination of form to the content of art.If,in addition,to the opposite position is also given the qualification of“romantic,”this is because the romantic is understood as the nostalgia for an original time in which art was the expression of the perfect unity of man with nature,now already,in our time,lost.Only in this sense can one understand the Hegelian definition of beauty,in accordance with the position that art occupies within the system,namely: art would be the exhibition of the absolute insofar as it gives the reconciliation of freedom with nature,that is,insofar that art is a mode of truth,in the philosophical (Hegelian) sense of the word.

From this other position,the link between art and truth is defended,then,against the autonomy of art.In it,as we have just seen,one can include,as is usually done,Hegel's thought,that of the first Nietzsche (the“romantic”Nietzsche of

The Birth of Tragedy

) and,clearly,that of the main representative of classical hermeneutics,Gadamer;but also,paradoxically,that of Heidegger (for,in a certain sense,there is no thinker more opposed to Hegel than Heidegger),as is clearly seen in the following quote:

Great art and its works—Heidegger writes—are great in their historical emergence and being because in man’s historical existence they accomplish a decisive task,they make manifest,in the way appropriate to works,what beings as a whole are,preserving such manifestation in the work.Art and its work are necessary only as an itinerary and sojourn for man in which the truth of beings as a whole,i.e.,the unconditioned,the absolute,opens itself up to him. Heidegger,,vol.1,88.

Thus,Heidegger understands art as a historical process in which is revealed“what beings as a whole are”,a process that is necessary to reveal and preserve that truth.Hence the“unconditionality”and the“absolute”character of art.But unconditioned is the notconditioned,precisely the opposite of art,which is always historically conditioned.Unconditioned is the Kantian postulate of pure practical reason,which is a theoretical proposition not theoretically demonstrable,but which formulates a demand for human praxis with unconditional value.Thus,for example,for Kant God is the unconditioned that guarantees the relationship between reasonable beings as members of a“kingdom of ends”or the immortality of the soul is the unconditioned that gives the individual a representation of his infinite perfectibility.Both are unconditioned postulates of practical reason that cannot be demonstrated theoretically,in the same way that freedom cannot be demonstrated.“Absolute”is

abgel?st

,in Greek

apólytos

: resolving itself,perfect,that which does not depend on anything else;that which does not need any determination or definition more approximate or exact,the unconditioned,the not limited and,therefore,absolute: that which has worth for itself and cannot be compared with anything else. Johannes Hoffmeister, (Hamburg: Félix Meiner,1955),6.The link with the classical,then,that both Hegel and Heidegger place at the centre of their reflections on art is understood.

But,also,when Heidegger links art with truth and the absolute,he is thinking about the position that Hegel assigned to art in his system.When Hegel defines art as a sensitive manifestation of the Idea he does so by presupposing that it is one of the ways in which the Spirit appears phenomenally.To understand what art is from the Hegelian philosophical point of view,it is necessary to pay attention to the relationship that it establishes between idea,spirit and nature.The idea is for Hegel the truth in itself and for itself,the universal spiritual or absolute spirit.The spirit is absolute when it is not found in the opposition between nature and the finite spirit. Hegel,,111.One can then understand that the absolute spirit arises when opposition between nature and the finite spirit does not occur (when it is overcome).In addition there are,according to Hegel,three ways to resolve the contradiction between nature and finite spirit,and the differences between them refer to the form of reconciliation.Firstly,in art,reconciliation occurs in intuition,in intuitive awareness.Art is,according to Hegel,“the immediate and,for that very reason,sensitive knowledge”of the absolute spirit.Secondly,in religion,reconciliation occurs in representation,which would be the“representative awareness of the absolute spirit”;and finally,in the third place,in philosophy,reconciliation occurs in thought,which is the“thinking awareness”of the absolute spirit.Therefore,the past character of art necessarily“follows”from the rational order (an affirmation that,as we have said,is usually interpreted as a thesis concerning the end of art).For Hegel,art is a past because,in“our times,”in which reflection and rationality prevail,art no longer has the function it had in other times: precisely,being the“sensitive manifestation of the idea,”which is another definition of the classical form of art,where an adequate conformation of the idea is given with its sensitive manifestation,unlike the symbolic form that precedes it,in which there is an inadequacy between the (sensitive) exposition and the Idea,and also unlike the romantic form that follows it,in which the Idea surpasses,so to speak,nature precisely because of the discovery of the inadequate character of nature for expressing and gathering the spirit. See a more extensive treatment of these topics in José F.Zú?iga,“?Qué queda de espíritu en el arte cuando este deja de ser su manifestación adecuada? A propósito de Hegel y el arte contemporáneo,” 64,no.185 (2015): 49-61.

Heidegger’s defence of the link between art,truth and the absolute must be understood as a confrontation with Hegel.In fact,his most famous and influential“aesthetic”writing,“The origin of the work of art,” Martin Heidegger,,6th ed.(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,1980),1-71;spanish translation by Helena Cortés y Arturo Leyte, (Madrid: Alianza Editorial,1998),11-63.can only be understood from here,as an attempt to highlight the nefarious consequences of the logic of the“l(fā)ast great aesthetic”of the West,in order to restore the (supposed) original link between art and truth.

The last philosophical position I want to comment on concerning the relationship between art and truth is that of Nietzsche.On the one hand,compared to the link that traditional metaphysics establishes between good,truth and beauty (which is also assumed by Platonic-Christian philosophy),it has a contrary position.In the fragments published posthumously,written at the end of his life,he affirms:

If my readers are sufficiently initiated into the idea that“the good man”represents,in the total drama of life,a form of exhaustion,they will respect the consistency of Christianity in conceiving the good man as ugly.Christianity was right in this./For a philosopher to say,“the good and the beautiful are one,”is infamy;if he goes on to add,“also the true,”one ought to thrash him.Truth is ugly.We possess art lest we perish of the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche,,trans.Agustín Izquierdo Sánchez (Madrid: Tecnos,2004),127.

So,Nietzsche defends,on the one hand,that“truth is ugly”and,on the other,that“we possess art lest we perish of the truth.”In my opinion,the first sentence refers to a statement about the“destiny”of man: we know that life on earth has a beginning and an end in absolute terms,we know that everything is doomed to be nothing,we know that our destiny does not lead to a happy ending.We know that there is no eternal order of things and that the universe has not been built following a moral order.Truth,therefore,is ugly.The second sentence is almost a necessary consequence of the previous one: in order to live,so that life continues to be sustained on that dark background of nothing,art is necessary in the sense of an activity that hides or at least makes that truth less transparent which tells us that everything ends in nothing.But let us understand this not as a conscious activity of man,but as an ontological principle,we could say,as the principle on which life and being are based before nothingness.Starting from this ontological principle,truth and art do not find themselves in a direct relationship,such as the one projected by traditional metaphysical thinking when wanting to establish an ontological link between beauty and truth and good.

The fragment to which I have just alluded is the sixth in a set of seven fragments grouped under the title“Well considered: what is beautiful and ugly.”The seventh says the following:

I took the relationship between art and truth very seriously from the beginning;and even today I am still paralyzed in sacred horror in the presence of that break.My first book was devoted to this problem;

The Birth of Tragedy

believes in art on the background of another belief: that it is not possible to live with the truth;that the ‘will to truth’ is already a symptom of degeneration ...In it Nietzsche expresses his clear opposition to the connection that the philosophical tradition establishes between art and truth,as we have mentioned before.He has learned from the Greeks that art was opposed to truth,to the will of truth,to philosophy.Indeed,one of the central themes of

The Birth of Tragedy

is the opposition between a tragic vision and a rational (Socratic) vision of existence,the death of tragedy at the hands of the theoretical man,of the Socratic man,who believes in the ability to dominate existence through reason.

In the first fragment of those mentioned,Nietzsche is opposed to the link between beauty and the absolute:

Nothing is more relative,let us say more limited,than our feeling for the beautiful.Whosoever would like to think pleasure separate from man,would immediately lose the ground beneath his feet.In beauty,man is admired as a type;in extreme cases he worships himself.It belongs to the essence of a type to be happy only in the contemplation of itself,to say yes only to oneself.Man,however much he sees the world as full of beauty,has always filled it with only his own ‘beauty’;which means that he has as beautiful everything that reminds him of the feeling of perfection with which as a man he is among things.Has he really embellished the world with that? ...And finally,maybe the man would not even be beautiful in the eyes of a superior judge of taste? ...I do not mean that this is unworthy,but a little comical?

Compare this with the link between art and the absolute (as we have seen in Hegel and Heidegger).Facing the absolute,the relative of beauty.Beauty is relative to man,to man as type: the beautiful as relative to man and to what makes him happy with himself,being as a man in the world.And,perhaps,what seems beautiful to man is not beautiful for anyone.Nietzsche says ironically: perhaps if someone had to judge the beauty of man from outside,he would see it as worthy of laughter.Nietzsche thus eliminates any reference of beauty to being,to the universe;he proposes the elimination of any ontological reference to beauty.At best,maybe what we think is beautiful is not in itself beautiful.Beautiful is what affirms man on earth,what gives him power to be in the world;ugly is what weakens him,what afflicts him,what depresses him and takes away his strength:

“Nothing is beautiful,only man is beautiful.”All our aesthetics is based on this ingenuity: it is its first ‘truth.’

Let us add the complementary“truth”right away,it is no less ingenuous: that nothing is ugly but the

ill-fated

man.

Where man suffers from ugliness,he suffers from the abortion of his type;and where it reminds him,even if it is very far away,that that abortion puts the ‘ugly’ predicate there.Man has filled the world with ugliness: that means with his own ugliness only ...Has he made the world uglier?”

Nietzsche’s answer to this question is obvious: no,he has not made the world more ugly.Ontologically,the world is neither affected by beauty,nor by ugliness.We can beautify the world,make it more liveable,order it and put it at our disposal.Equally,we can make all the ugliness that we are capable of appear in the world,we can dirty it,contaminate it and make it unliveable,we can pour out all the misery that we have inside,all the destruction and violence of which we are capable,but we will not change the world.All the beauty and all the ugliness that we are capable of remains for us.It is ours.

In this way,Nietzsche is opposed to a consideration of art that,like that of Gadamerian hermeneutics,maintains that through art man contributes something to being,produces growth in being and completes creation,in a theological sense.This concerns the symbolic character of art,to which I referred above and which I will now explain,to end.

3

Philosophy is,from its beginnings in Greece,a search for truth.As a philosophical reflection on art,aesthetics asks for its truth—in the words of the German philosopher of the Frankfurt School Christoph Menke—asks“for how the human spirit is shown in art;so what existence of art says ...about the origin,constitution and destiny of the human spirit.” Christoph Menke,,trans.Niklas Bornhauser Neuber (Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados,2017),9.“The truth”of art then consists in being the mediation between our sensitive natural condition and our rational condition and the“destiny”(the“achievement”,the“condition of possibility”) of the human spirit would lie in that mediation.Indeed,the word“truth”has been used in the tradition of philosophical thought concerning art to designate the possibility or necessity of mediation: the idea that the conflict between nature and spirit can be resolved,as Kant assumes when he finds in beauty a clue to be able to affirm that man“fits”in the world, Immanuel Kant,“Reflection 1820a,”in ’,edition by the Prussian Academy of Sciences of Berlin (1902-1956),vol.56 (Berlin: De Gruyter,1956),127.as it is quoted both by Menke Menke,,153.and by Bertram; Georg W.Bertram,,trans.José F.Zú?iga (Granada: Comares,2016),48.or,on the other hand,the idea that the conflict between nature and spirit necessarily resolves,as Hegel thinks:“Truth exists alone and primarily as the opposition resolved,as the contradiction reconciled.What is shown in philosophy is that the opposition is always resolved.” Hegel,,79.

But the Greeks already sensed the impossibility of resolving the conflict.Nietzsche and Menke are situated in this tradition,for example.The latter states:“［T］he human spirit lies in the conflict between the aesthetic force and the capacity of reason,” Menke,,153.between a force,which is not rational,and reason.There are,then,two great traditions in Western thought that have been opposed throughout history: the Platonic-Christian tradition and the Greek tragic tradition.Taking the Greek tragic tradition as reference,Nietzsche can affirm the lack of value (nihilism) that affects the Platonic and Christian traditions,as he does,for example,in the following fragment that is to be found in his posthumous writings:“Our religion,our morals and our philosophy are forms of

decadence

in man.The

countermovement

: art.” Quoted by Heidegger,,78.I will show the opposition between these two traditions by focusing on the question of the symbolic character of art.In the final paragraphs of his 1964 lecture,Gadamer states that the ontological presupposition of hermeneutics (“the being that can be understood is language”) comes to coincide with Goethe’s motto“everything is symbol.”The concept of symbol has many meanings,but the sense in which Gadamer uses it can be very well taken from the beautiful story about the essence of love that Aristophanes tells in Plato’s

The Banquet

(189A-193D): men—says Aristophanes—were originally spherical.But they behaved badly and the gods punished them by splitting them in half,dispersing their parts and condemning them to look for their lost half in order to have a joyful and full existence.So,according to this story,we are fragments of being and love appears in our lives when we find the fragment that completes us and reintegrates us into the lost order.In art there is,according to Gadamer,something similar,a symbolic experience:［T］he symbol—he writes in

The Actuality of the Beautiful

—the experience of the symbolic,means that this individual,this particular,is represented as a fragment of Being that promises to complement in an integral whole that which corresponds to it....［T］he experience of the beautiful and,in particular,...of the beautiful in art is the evocation of a possible integral order,wherever it is found. Hans-Georg Gadamer,,trans.Antonio Gómez Ramos (Barcelona: Paidós,1991),85.Plato’s story has several aspects to reflect on,two fundamental: the fragmentary character of our existence (let us call this“the allegorical”) and the possibility that the fragments meet (the symbolic itself;

symbállein

meaning“to gather”,“to join”).Gadamer focuses his attention on the“evocation of an integral order”and applies it to art: thanks to art,the meaning that links some things with others and all of them with the totality is shown.Revealing this meaning,showing the intertwining of some things with others is the“destiny”of the human being.And hence the hermeneutical task and its fundamental presupposition: the being that can be understood is language.There is language as a place of possible communication and capture of the totality of the real;and there are also the languages,the different particular languages that symbolize with the totality.Just as there is the concept of being human which is always the same,which is always the idea that we are all equal and free,under which the infinite variety of individuals is manifested.In the same sense,each man is no more than a fragment of the idea of humanity.

So,in every thing in the universe is hidden its reference to the totality.Anything that encounters man has a meaning that must be revealed,anything refers to the totality that gives him the sense of his being.Revealing that meaning,showing the intertwining of some things with others,is the mission of the human being,which consists,as it were,of contributing something to the Being and thus completing the world,closing the abyss that separates the sensitive from the supra-sensitive.Art has,according to this tradition,that mediating function that allows reality to be closed in a complete,integral order.Art is symbol.Consequently,the hermeneut has the task of rediscovering what art itself has already undertaken for itself as art.

The best example of this conception of art is found in Goethe,and that is why Gadamer rightly says that the fundamental postulate of his philosophical hermeneutics coincides with Goethe’s motto“everything is symbol.”The final verses of

Faust

,Goethe’s most famous tragedy and one of the great works of universal literature,summarize very well what this statement means: Quoted by Friedrich Nietzsche,,trans.Andrés Sánchez Pascual (Madrid: Alianza Editorial,1985),450.

Everything perishable

Is just a symbol,

The inaccessible

Here is an event;

The indescribable

Has been done here;

The eternal-feminine

Lifts us upwards.

Indeed,Goethe’s poem describes very well what Gadamer means by the evocation of a“possible integral order”(in fact,in the English text the German adjective

heil

,which also means“salvific”,is translated by“intact”).It is the remission of the apparent order of the sensitive to the true order of the supra-sensitive,of the perishable to the imperishable.In

Faust

,the great oppositions of forces that have shaped the Western world are presented: Modernity and Antiquity,paganism and Christianity,art and technology,poetry and science,romanticism and classicism.

Faust

analyses the disproportion and restlessness of man,his belief in science and technology and in his limitless possibilities.It is also a study of the forces that we have to face as humans,with which we have to make a pact.We have to pact with the spirit of negativity,division and discord (personified in Mephistopheles,the devil—I cannot fail to mention here that

diabállein

means“disunite”or“separate”),we have to fight against everything that pushes us not to aspire to have a dignified life,and we must not be afraid of being punished for wanting to know all the secrets of the world,because...because why? Because in the end God will not allow Mephistopheles to take our soul (that is,to lose our freedom) saying:“Those who always aspire and strive /we can save.”The final verses of

Faust

are the metaphysical justification of the whole: the symbolization of man in the world seeking an immutable,eternal and imperishable order of being as conceived by the Platonic metaphysical tradition and by Christianity (the order of the spirit,the order of truth) and which leads to Hegel’s thinking that proclaims,as we said at the beginning,the“truth”of the spirit,the“we”that does not leave anyone out,the set of all humans who recognize themselves as equal and free beings.However,in

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

,in the paragraph of the second part of the work entitled“Poets,” Nietzsche,,188-91.Nietzsche interprets these final verses of

Faust

in a very different sense.From its radically enlightened position and from its Greek tragic paganism,it completely reverses its meaning,assuming the perishable nature of our body and our radical finite condition.From here it reads that the search for immortality (the eternal,immutable and imperishable) by man is nothing more than a“symbol”(here the word is used ironically) of a strange animal that has become aware of his mortal condition and his terrible fate and does not want to die.We men do not want to die,we rebel against our mortal destiny.We have projected onto art and artists the embodiment of that desire for immortality.Artists also want to be immortal,but they have lied when they have invented an eternal and immutable order,as Goethe lies when he says that the perishable leads to the imperishable,or that we can access the inaccessible or that we can describe the indescribable or that the eternal-feminine lifts us upwards.

We said that the beautiful story about the essence of love has a second aspect on which to reflect: the fragmentary character of our being.This concerns insisting not so much on the fact that the singular is part of the whole,but to point out that the singular can refer to an infinity of possibilities that can never be totalized.From this point of view,the integral order would always be fragmentary and,consequently,the totalization of the real would be impossible as an integral order.Let us see how this affects the fundamental presupposition of classical hermeneutics,considering the relationship between the multiplicity of languages and the language.Each language would be a fragment in relation to the integral order that language would represent.From the“symbolic”point of view,each language could express everything that can be expressed and each language could symbolize with any other because all would have in themselves the same connection with language (as they participate in the ontological presupposition of hermeneutics:“The being that can be understood is language”).From the“allegorical”point of view,however,it is about thinking that each language is a unique fragment because it always preserves something that is untranslatable to other languages.

In the case of the concept of man (of his“destiny”) the allegorical point of view would be as follows: each individual from their finite existence may have multiple relationships that do not complete a symbolic totality that reveals the meaning of their life.Therefore,the existence of each individual is inviolable.Each individual in his unique individuality lives the world in a unique way.That is why the Law (the Hegelian Idea,the concept of man,the totality) must preserve every fragment;it must preserve the sovereign will of each individual to live life as they wish.

Art has to do with our creative condition,with our freedom.This is something that,as I said at the beginning,we have in common.Or,at least,we have in common the search for freedom and,therefore,we have to learn from each other.

I will end by telling a story about the thinker who revitalized allegory as opposed to the symbol.Walter Benjamin,fleeing,like so many others,from the Nazis,arrived by train in September 1940 in Portbou,a small town on the border which separates France from Spain,with the intention of continuing the journey to Lisbon to then go by boat to his final destination in the United States.The Spanish authorities closed the border for a few days and Benjamin,fearing that he would be deported to a concentration camp for being a Jew,committed suicide.Since then his remains have rested in a tomb in the cemetery in Portbou.In the tomb there is a small mound made of loose stones,which are left there by the people who visit it,following a Jewish custom.But because so many stones have accumulated,they fall from the top of the mound and are left loose on the ground.Some people who visit the cemetery have the habit of picking them up and putting them back on top.But,due to the wind or due to their own weight or due to the weight of the stones bought by other people,some stones fall back to the ground.So it is not possible for Benjamin’s tomb to be finished in an integral whole.

Translated by Michael Wise /Reviewed by Francisco de Borja González Tenreiro

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