Gadamer and Style as Wor(l)d-Making

Abstract

‘Style’ (‘Stil’) is not a term that appears frequently in Gadamer’s work. Gadamer proposes an ontological conception of art as a mode of ‘truth’, criticising the prioritisation of human expression or formal matters, which are, on the contrary, central to traditional theories of style. At the same time, however, Gadamer insists on what he calls ‘the essential linguisticality of all human experience of the world’ (PH 19). His hermeneutic interest in ‘truth’ is Heideggerian in orientation, with ‘truth’ conceived in terms of alētheia rather than adaequatio. In ‘the hermeneutic science’, he writes, ‘a verbal formulation does not merely refer to something that could be verified in other ways; instead it makes something visible in the how of its meaningfulness’. Language does refer to something that can be made visible but this ‘something’ can only be verified through language itself. For Gadamer, the ‘how’ of language — and here it is possible to think of ‘how’ as ‘way’ or, in one sense of the word, ‘style’ — is not simply a derivative reflection of something that exists as a thing or object before its bringing to ‘meaningfulness’ but a significant contributor to the unveiling of ‘truth’ (TM 567).