Hence the concept of the decorative serves to complete our enquiry into the mode of
being of the aesthetic... What we mean by representation is, at any rate, a universal
ontological structural element of the aesthetic, an ontological event and not an
experiential event which occurs at the moment of artistic creation and is only repeated
each time in the mind of the viewer. Starting from the universal significance of play, we
saw the ontological significance of representation in the fact that ‘reproduction’ is the
original mode of being of the original art. Now we have confirmed that painting and the
plastic arts in general are, ontologically speaking, of the same mode of being. The
specific mode of the work of art’s presence is the coming into representation of being
NOTES
All notes for this article have been reproduced verbatim.
1 This is the sense of occasionality that has become customary in modern logic. A good
example of the discrediting of occasionality by the aesthetics of experience is the mutilation
of Hölderlin’s Rheinhymne in the edition of 1826. The dedication to Sinclair seemed so alien
that the last two stanzas were omitted and the whole described as a fragment.
2 Plato speaks of the proximity of the seemly (prepon) and the beautiful (kalon) Hipp. maj.
293e.
3 J.Burn’s valuable book Das literarische Porträt bei den Griechen suffers from a lack of
clarity on this point.
4 Cf Appendix II, p. 453, Truth and Method.
5 Cf p. 76, Truth and Method.
6 Karl Justi, Diego Velasquez und sein Jahrhundert, I, 1888, p. 366.
7 Cf Friedrich Heer, Der Aufgang Europas.
8 W.Kamlah in Der Mensch in der Profanität (1948) has tried to give the concept of the profane
this meaning to characterize the nature of modern science, but also sees this concept as
determined by its counter-concept, the ‘acceptance of the beautiful’.
9 Translator’s footnote: The German word Frevel is today rarely used except in the phrase
Kunst-Frevel. Frevel=sacrilege, outrage; Kunst=art.
10 Above all in the first of E.Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, in Dilthey’s studies on the
Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt (Dilthey, VII) which are influenced by Husserl, and in M.
Heidegger’s analysis of the ‘worldhood’ of the world in Being and Time, sections 17 and 18.
11 I said above that the concept of a picture used here finds its historical fulfilment in the
modern framed picture (p. 119, Truth and Method). Nevertheless, its ‘transcendental’
application seems legitimate. If, for historical purposes, mediaeval representations have been
distinguished from the later ‘picture’ by being called Bildzeichen (‘picture signs’, D.Frey),
much that is said in the text of the ‘sign’ is true of such representations, but still the
difference between them and the sign is obvious. Picture signs are not a kind of sign, but a
kind of picture.
12 Cf pp. 64–73, Truth and Method. The distinction, in terms of the history of the two ideas,
between ‘symbol’ and ‘allegory’.
13 Schleiermacher rightly stresses (as against Kant, Ästhetik, p. 201) that the art of gardening is
not part of painting, but of architecture.
14 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1799, p. 50, Meredith p. 73.Hans-Georg Gadamer 131