Aesthetic Consciousness

Aesthetic consciousness (ästhetisches Bewußtsein) is Gadamer's diagnostic name, in Part One of *Truth and Method*, for the modern stance — founded by Schiller's "standpoint of art" — that makes the experiencing subject "the experiencing center from which everything considered art is measured." It rests on an abstraction Gadamer calls aesthetic differentiation (ästhetische Unterscheidung): the act that strips the work of art of its world (its function, content, occasion, and — in the performing arts — its performance) to isolate the "pure work of art." Gadamer argues that this abstraction, hardened into a content (Schiller's imperative "Live aesthetically!"), "runs into indissoluble contradiction with the true experience of art" — which is rather one of aesthetic non-differentiation.

Key Points

Aesthetic differentiation is an abstraction. It "selects only on the basis of aesthetic quality as such," disregarding the work's world; it produces the museum, the concert hall, the "simultaneity" of all art held indifferently at once, and it uproots the artist (bohemian, loss of commission).
Aesthetic consciousness "is itself nothing." Having abstracted from all content, it "no longer chooses, because it is itself nothing" — a purely formal experiencing center.
Perception is never pure. Following Aristotle (all aisthesis tends toward a universal) and Heidegger (understanding-as), "pure seeing and pure hearing are dogmatic abstractions that artificially reduce phenomena."
Aesthetic non-differentiation is the true experience. The non-distinction of the work from its presentation, and of the picture from the pictured, "remains essential to all experience" of art. In Part Two's terms, "the real experience of art does not experience art as art."
The aesthetics of Erlebnis ends in nihilism. If the work is "only an empty form, a mere nodal point in the ... variety of aesthetic experiences" (Lukács), then "every encounter has the rank of a new production" and no criterion of reception survives — an "untenable hermeneutic nihilism." The corrective: art is knowledge.

What the Concept Does

The critique of aesthetic consciousness is the opening move of the whole book — the wedge by which Gadamer pries the question of truth loose from the grip of scientific method. The argument runs: the post-Kantian subjectivization of aesthetics (taste as non-cognitive feeling) discredited every kind of truth except natural-scientific knowledge, and so forced the human sciences onto the natural-science model while offering "feeling" and "empathy" as consolations. By exposing aesthetic consciousness as an abstraction mistaken for the thing itself, Gadamer reopens art's claim to truth — and the same diagnostic pattern ("an abstraction hardened into a content") recurs throughout the book (objectivism is the historian's version of it). This clears the way for the positive account in which play is the mode of being of the work and "aesthetics has to be absorbed into hermeneutics."

What It Rejects

Schiller's "standpoint of art" and the imperative "Live aesthetically!" — the elevation of the aesthetic into a separate, sovereign sphere.
Aesthetic differentiation — the isolation of the "pure" work from its world and performance; the museum-and-concert-hall "simultaneity" of aesthetic consciousness.
The aesthetics of Erlebnis — art as the occasion of punctual "lived experiences"; "the essence of experience per se." (Contrast its dialectical counter-concept, *Erfahrung*.)
The post-Kantian subjectivization of aesthetics — taste reduced to subjective feeling with no "significance as knowledge" (though Gadamer credits Kant's move as an "epoch-making" methodological abstraction, later wrongly hardened into content).

Stakes

If aesthetic consciousness is a distorting abstraction, then art is not a sphere of subjective pleasure walled off from truth but a mode of knowledge continuous with the rest of our finite, historical self-understanding. This is the premise on which the entire book rests: the truth of art is the first and most insistent admonition to scientific consciousness "to acknowledge its own limits." The recovery also rehabilitates what aesthetic consciousness had devalued — the occasional, the decorative, allegory (against the cult of the symbol) — as belonging to the work's own claim to meaning.

Details

The humanist concepts the subjectivization displaced

Before the Kantian subjectivization, the guiding concepts of the humanist tradition — *Bildung*, sensus communis, judgment, and taste — were modes of truth and knowing, not subjective feeling. Taste, for instance, was originally a moral and social-cognitive concept that "claims (not merely predicts) universal agreement." Kant's grounding of taste on the a priori of subjective feeling "denied taste any significance as knowledge" — an achievement Gadamer calls "epoch-making" but also reads against the grain (the third Critique is "concerned only with nature"; the genius-cult that followed is not Kantian).

Aesthetic non-differentiation across Parts One and Two

The concept escalates between chapters. In the critique of aesthetic consciousness (Ch 1) aesthetic non-differentiation is the critical counter-concept; in the ontology of the work of art (Ch 2) it is made constitutive — the non-differentiation of the work from its presentation/mediation, and of picture from pictured, "remains essential to all experience of pictures." Aesthetic differentiation, by contrast, is possible "only in a critical way — i.e., where the interpretation breaks down."

Connections

is overcome by play-spiel — play as the mode of being of the work grounds aesthetic non-differentiation.
opens hermeneutics — "aesthetics has to be absorbed into hermeneutics."
contrasts with *Erfahrung* — Erlebnis-aesthetics (the punctual aesthetic unit) vs. the dialectical, finite hermeneutic experience.
exhibits the same mechanism as historical objectivism (see effective-history) — "an abstraction mistaken for the thing itself."
recovers Bildung, sensus communis, and taste as pre-subjectivist modes of truth.

Open Questions

Does Gadamer's "true experience of art" (non-differentiation) under-describe the genuine achievements of aesthetic attention — the formalist's isolation of the "purely aesthetic"? A defender of aesthetic autonomy would resist.
The relation of Gadamer's critique to the wiki's other treatments of representation and the picture-theory tradition is worth a dedicated comparison.

Sources

gadamer-1960-truth-and-method — Ch 1, "Transcending the Aesthetic Dimension": the guiding humanist concepts (pp. 9–38), the subjectivization of aesthetics through Kant (pp. 38–54), the aesthetics of genius and Erlebnis (pp. 48–64), "Critique of the abstraction inherent in aesthetic consciousness" (pp. 75–91); Ch 2 for aesthetic non-differentiation made constitutive.