The first third of Gadamer’s Truth and Method could have been titled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about German Aesthetics but Were Afraid to Ask. And come on, that’s a lot, right?
Ol’ Hans Solo here is on a mission for which he’s well paid (in the philosophical sense of payment, that is). Gadamer argues that the truth of art cannot be found just in someone’s aesthetic experiences of the work of art, but instead in the ontology of the work of art, which Gadamer says has got to be representation or reproduction. Literature, for example, has its being not in the original manuscripts, but in the event of being read and interpreted. The truth of literature is not contained in the past, but is rather newly present in every representation.
According to Hans, meaning, and therefore truth, occurs in the event of each reading, whether the work in question is the script to a video game, Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, or Freud’s psychological works. Meaning and truth are not fully contained between the covers of the text; the reader and the world she inhabits bring something to these. For hermeneutics, truth is objective, relative, and created, in both the writing and the reading.
Think about it through a classical work of art: Star Wars. It’s probably fair to say that the audience is meant to cheer the destruction of the Death Star—a response that presupposes that the audience shares the basic moral setup of the film. This setup includes not only the association of the Empire with evil and the Rebellion with good, but also the legitimacy of violence in responding to imperial oppression. How might someone who believes that all violence is inherently unjust interpret the ending of Star Wars?
Here’s another. Say you’re assigned in class to read The Iliad by Homer. How do you think your reading the epic will be informed by your reading a translation and by your reading it from the standpoint of a world far removed from ancient Greece?