Abstract

To honor the 50th anniversary of the publication of Truth and Method, this paper discusses the phenomenological foundations of the hermeneutical claim to an eminent epistemological relevance of art. While Gadamer, following the early Heidegger, tends to conceive such relevance as the contribution of art to historical self-understanding, the attempt is made to integrate art into philosophy through a reeximanation of phenomenological method. An interpretation of the London Lectures not only shows the close resemblance of Husserl’s later account of phenomenological method as ‚the method of zig-zag‘ to Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s accounts of understanding. Furthermore, the idea of method being closely tied to the evident experience of things as ‚exemplary objects‘ used as ‚transcendental guiding threads’ for phenomenology prefigures Heidegger’s account of the truth of artworks in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. In conclusion, I argue that the truth of art can be integrated into phenomenological method by conceiving artworks not as transitory sedimentations of self-understanding, but as phenomenological models, which as objects of interpretation allow one to access and explicate the phenomenological givenness of earth and world.