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FOR POST-ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHERS SUCH AS Richard Rorty and John McDowell, Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960) has played an important role in their battles against Cartesian epistemology.1 In this context, it is little known that when Gadamer started working on Truth and Method in the early 1930s, he did not want only to criticize the framework of modern epistemology. Rather, the initial intention of his work was to "demonstrate that art can convey truth."2 In Gadamer's view, such a demonstration could not be of a merely systematic nature, but also had to engage with the historical development of aesthetics; it had to overcome the way in which Kant and the romantics had come to deny art any significance as knowledge.
Since the publication of Truth and Method, Gadamer's discussion of art and aesthetics-his critique of Kant, the romantics, and the general philosophical paradigm that he terms 'aesthetic consciousness'-has received only scant attention. 3 By contrast, the second and third parts of the work-addressing, respectively, the relevance of the human sciences and the linguistic foundation of hermeneutics- have been subject to much interest. Here Gadamer aims at transcending the way in which the Enlightenment conception of reason, truth, and knowledge, developing in the wake of Descartes, has had a tendency to evade the implications of our situatedness within tradition and history. Gadamer, however, has always insisted on the unity of his work. What he wanted, he explains, was not only to overcome the subjectivization of art by aesthetic consciousness, but also to "develop from this starting point a conception of knowledge and truth that corresponds to the whole of our experience."4
This essay explores the relation between Gadamer's understanding of art and his notion of hermeneutic reason, and argues that, while Gadamer's critique of the Enlightenment is itself inadequate and biased, his hermeneutics should not be understood in strict opposition to the Enlightenment project as such. Against the criticisms launched by Habermas, Apel, and Tugendhat, I claim that Gadamer's early notion of dialogue is itself fueled by enlightenment aspirations. The problem, however, is that Gadamer fails to live up to these aspirations. Modeling his notion of tradition on the sublime world-disclosure of art, his hermeneutics becomes entrenched in an unresolved tension between enlightenment and antienlightenment impulses.