Absolute Relativism Beyond Relativism

Gadamer takes play and games as the starting point of his discussion of the ontology of art, and then asks what happens when we introduce an audience and make the game repeatable, when play becomes a play that can be played-for over and over again.

Joel Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method , pp. 108-9) offers this helpful explanation of Gadamer’s intentions: “A play is not there – it does not exist, is not fully itself- until it is performed. Performance is not something ancillary, accidental, pr superfluous that can be distinguished from the play proper. The play proper exists first and only when it is played. Performance brings the play into existence, and the playing of the play is the play itself.” Gadamer wants to extend this to art in general: “An artwork is to be represented. Representation is its mode of being. Thus the work cannot be differentiated from the representations of it since it exists only there, only in the flesh. It comes to be in representation and in all the contingency and particularity of the occasions of its appearance.”

Doesn’t this imply an absolute relativism? Weinsheimer initially says Yes: “Not merely the meaning but the very existence of the work is relative to interpretation.” But it’s a very different sort of relativism:

“In being absolute this relativism turns out to be not what we usually call relativism at all. If by relativism we mean that the artwork exists in the mind of the author, actor, or spectator, that it consists therefore in a discontinuous series of experiences, or that it is an empty schema waiting to be filled with meaning by an experiencing subject, then Gadamer is not a relativist. Moreover, if we mean by relativism that the work is one thing and the interpretation of it another, and that the meaning of the work is relative to the interpretation, then it is also clear that Gadamer is no relativist, for these are precisely the theses he is intent on subverting.”

Absolute relativism as Weinsheimer uses the word means “that the work exists nowhere but in its representations” and “that these representations are not to be found in any individual consciousness.” Going to see Macbeth means going to see an interpretation of Macbeth , since “interpretation brings it into existence.” But this doesn’t mean that we watch Macbeth and also an interpretation, as if the play and the interpretation were distinct such that one could be relative to another. Rather, “the only way to experience the work itself is in an interpretation that is not differentiated from the work.” The success of the interpretation of the play lies in the inability to differentiate the play and the interpretation.

Gadamer denies that “the uninterpreted work exists and is knowable” apart from interpretations; and he also denies that there is a single interpretation that cannot be differentiated from the work: “There can be no determinate criterion of correct interpretation nor any single, correct, canonical interpretation.” But this doesn’t mean a free for all, since “every interpretation strives to be true. Many succeed, many fail.” But how can one even recognize a failure on Gadamer’s premises? Weinsheimer answers, that for Gadamer “decision on the basis of a non-given rule is the function of taste, judgment, and common sense . . . . Whether an interpretation is true is a matter of taste.” Taste decides that the interpretation is an interpretation of the work: “Taste is the capacity that enables us to know the sameness of a work that changes, whose identity and continuity are open to the future.” Again, an abyss begins to open, but for Gadamer the emphasis on taste seems to “denigrate truth” only because “we have denigrated taste as a cognitive capacity able to arrive at the truth. It is because we have thought truth is exclusively something that has been or can be proven.”

Weinsheimer notes at the outset of his summary that Gadamer’s introduction of the category of “play” functions quite differently from the way it functions in Derrida and others: Instead of being a way of side-stepping the question of truth, Gadamer introduces play precisely at the beginning of a discussion of truth.