Sundara Deyehi Adalathvaya, Sinhala translation of Gadamer’s essay The Relevance of the Beautiful is published ‘Kathikā’ Study Circle, a voluntary group, has published in Sinhala, a translation of The Relevance of the Beautiful, Art as Play, Symbol and Festival, by Hans Georg Gadamer, a major contemporary European philosopher, whose profound critique of modernity has been well recognised. ‘Sundara Deyehi Adalathvaya’ is a complete Sinhala translation of the principal text in Gadamer’s book The Relevance of the Beautiful and other Essays. This essay is considered to be Gadamer’s ‘most sustained work devoted specifically to the question of art.’ Gadamer demonstrates the continuing importance of such concepts as imitation, truth, symbol, and play for our appreciation of contemporary art, and thereby establishes its continuity with the Western tradition,’ says the publisher’s introduction to the English translation. Gadamer’s work on art is essentially a turning away from the modern domination of philosophy and human sciences by scientific method. Gadamer seems to have taken to heart Nietzsche’s reminder to the moderns that it is not the victory of science that distinguishes modernity but the victory of scientific method over science. In his magnum opus Truth and Method of 1960, when Gadamer sought to show the drawbacks of methodology’s rule within the human sciences he turned first to our experience of the work of art. Gadamer’s point was that essentially, we gain access through the arts to an irresistible truth that the dogmatic application of method overlooks. Gadamer’s contention is that concentration on scientific method can conceal much that art and history has to teach us. In his studies, Gadamer is more concerned with what our experience of art actually is than what it thinks it is. A central claim in Gadamer’s understanding of art is that the work of art brings its own world with it, so that there is in our encounter with it what he calls a fusion of horizons. In this way the work of art makes a claim on us. He means by this that in our experience of the work of art, we do not encounter the work of art without being transformed in the process. Gadamer finds in ancient tragedy an illustration of how art contributes to our self-understanding on the basis of a continuity of the world presented by art with that of our own at present. Tragedy is dependent on the spectators’ acknowledgment that the actions on the stage takes place in a world continuous with their own. He believes that tragedy is possible only in so far as the spectators recognise themselves and their finiteness in the power of a fate that affects everyone. Gadamer appeals to such notions as imitation, participation, play, symbol, and festival with the aim of showing their relevance to modern as much as to traditional art. Gadamer is simply offering their resilience as evidence of the way the art of modernity stands united with the great art to the past. (Compiled from, Robert Bennasconi’s Editor’s introduction to The Relevance of the Beautiful and other essays, Cambridge University Press, 1986) The Sinhala book also contains an introduction to Gadamer’s key philosophical ideas behind his hermeneutics. kathika@gmail kathika.blogsome/2005/10/
Posted on: Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:13:03 +0000
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