On Beauty and Being: Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Virginia Woolf’s Hermeneutics of the Beautiful

List of Abbreviations:

TM – Truth and Method

TRB – The Relevance of the Beautiful

TTL – To the Lighthouse

MD – Mrs. Dalloway

TW – The Waves

The imagery of the sky, with its symbolism of heaven, deeply rooted in many cultures, can serve as an epitome of the theological insight into the beautiful which propounds that the divine speaks to us through the world of nature. The theological perspective, however, does not fully explain what happens to us when we contemplate beauty. It could even be understood as reducing the wide-embracing phenomenon of aesthetic experience, even if transparent to many of us (Crosby 2010, 144). An encounter with the beautiful invites us to turn inwards, to withdraw into the most intimate recesses of our hearts. The movement towards the inner self aims to reveal something crucial about being a human being and brings about an alteration of the way we are. The hermeneutic aesthetics in its non-reductionist quality, including the theological, the philosophical, the literary, and other angles of vision, provides an all-encompassing possibility to engage the beautiful.

Embracing the whole of human experience, beauty is a hermeneutic phenomenon which calls for interpretation and understanding. Understanding, as pertaining to an aesthetic experience engaged the hermeneutic sensibility of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and became the source of his hermeneutic interrogation into understanding in human sciences. Significantly, Gadamer begins his seminal Truth and Method with a discussion of the ontology of art in Part One: “The Question of Truth as it Emerges in the Experience of Art” (TM, 1–178). Reflection on an aesthetic encounter is, for Gadamer, the point de départ in furthering his hermeneutic enterprise. The experience of beauty in its multifaceted nature nourished the literary imagination of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and evolved into outstanding embodiments of beauty in her poetic narratives. To investigate the affinities between Gadamer’s hermeneutic aesthetics and Woolf ’s meditation on beauty is inasmuch challenging as exhilaratingly possible as the two great intellectuals of the twentieth century develop their philosophies of beauty as resting on the ontological oneness of beauty and Being.

Although Woolf is not a philosopher, her approach can be viewed as hermeneutically underwritten and expressive of hermeneutic sensitivity. The nuanced layers of meaning in the interactions between philosophy and literature inspire us to align Gadamer and Woolf as equitably concerned with beauty and Being. The inquiry into the encounter between Gadamer’s hermeneutic aesthetics and Woolf ’s philosophy of beauty takes us on a far-reaching and more liberating engagement with the potentialities of the hermeneutic endeavor, one which embraces both literary and philosophical discourse. Challenging the blunt interpretation of Woolf ’s fiction in light of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, which would place such reading solely within the framework of literary criticism, the present study regards her lyrical prose as a form of philosophy.

Instead of interpreting Gadamer’s hermeneutics of the beautiful as substantiated by Woolf ’s novelistic achievements, this book addresses his philosophical writings and her fictional imaginings to shed new light onto the modern conceptions of Being and beauty afforded by hermeneutics. Whereas Woolf ’s sophisticated ruminations on beauty and Being enshrined in her lyrical novels manifest her ‘doing philosophy’ in her own distinctive way, Gadamer’s philological and literary background contributes greatly to his unprecedented philosophizing. The responses to the questions of existence and beauty cannot be taken independently of philosophy, and, equally importantly, since they are thematized in literature and its interpretative practices with great profundity, one cannot think of those issues as detached from a literary discourse. Seeking analogies in the philosophies of Gadamer and Woolf precipitates an extension of the areas which the modern hermeneutic enterprise contains, as well as advances a recognition of hermeneutics’ usefulness in conducting comparative studies of literary and philosophical works.

Bringing Woolf and Gadamer into dialogue with one another ensues from their discoveries which unfold as convergent paths and generate involving prospects of understanding beauty and Being in a more profound way. Crucially, they both believe that to uncover any ultimate truth in relation to the matters in question is impossible. Meeting on the ontological level, the two intellectuals embark on a journey to illuminate Being and beauty to the effect of sensitizing their readers to the most recondite aspects of those entities. Gadamer and Woolf pursue the unfolding of the human existence as existentia hermeneutica with a parallel zest.

Intriguingly, as a belles lettres writer, Woolf poses questions relating to philosophical hermeneutics. The central concern which encourages an analysis of her fiction from the angle of her input into ontological hermeneutics is her overwhelming and genuine concentration on the evocation of the moment of being. Her essays, bearing the telling title – Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing (1976), are a valuable instance of this approach. Insofar as they go squarely to the heart of the novelist’s ontological investigation, her fictional imaginings are portrayals of a deepened, passionate, and intense sensing of Being. In her poetic novels, Woolf articulates her understanding of Being, which is of great relevance in unveiling the metaphysical backdrop of her thinking. In the ingeniously evoked moment of being, Woolf encapsulates her philosophy of existence and contributes to ontological hermeneutics per se. The moment of being is the sensation of an entrancement and has the quality of an aesthetic experience. Its arresting concision is a thing of beauty. The refined aesthetic experience which Woolf educes coincides with Gadamer’s assertion of the captivating force of art. Clearly, what brings Woolf ’s literary embodiments of the beautiful close to Gadamer’s hermeneutic aesthetics is their similar preoccupation with the ontic structure of the experience of beauty.

The two intellectuals focus on the visionary moment. The seizing of beauty’s captivating force, which is the pivot of this study, invites to recognize the profundity of the momentary illumination as lying both in the ontological and the aesthetic. The search for its essence has inspired thinkers and writers alike throughout the centuries. Juxtaposing Gadamer’s aesthetics, which draws extensively on Heidegger’s Augenblick, with Woolf ’s notion of ‘the moment of being’ yields noteworthy observations. Heidegger’s notion of Augenblick, “the look of resolute disclosedness in which the full situation of an action opens itself and keeps itself open” (Heidegger 1983, GA 29/30 224/148), can be traced back to Kierkegaard and to Luther’s translation of St. Paul’s kairos – the opportune moment. Explaining Heidegger’s Augenblick, Michael Watts highlights that it is “an expression of resolute Dasein’s sharpened sense, and authentic understanding, of the ‘moment,’ the pulsing heartbeat of time” (2014, 277). Woolf ’s ‘moment of being’ is an instant of intense beauty and awareness, and above all, it is a moment of authentic being as opposed to ‘non-being’ – the daily trivialities – the differentiation about which she writes in “The Sketch of the Past” (Woolf 1976, 83–84).

The moments of being, as Josiane Paccaud-Huguet explicates, are “moments of contact with the whatness of the thing, pressure points with the pulsating substance of the real. At such moments, the veil of our symbolic fictions (what she calls the cotton-wool of everyday life) tears open – hence the two associated affects: ecstasy and dread” (2006, 3). By extension, the close connection between Woolf ’s ‘moment of being’ and Heidegger’s notion of Augenblick, ‘the moment of insight,’ calls on us to interrogate the parallels between ‘the moment of being’ and Gadamer’s appropriation of Heidegger’s idea. Not only does Woolf ’s understanding of the moment of being resonate with Heidegger’s accenting the authenticity of Dasein which reveals itself in the moment of vision, but potently with Gadamer’ assertion of the revelation of truth which happens in an aesthetic encounter.

Woolf and Gadamer’s similar ontological and aesthetic views stem to a great degree from their shared interest in Plato’s thought, and his idea of beauty and truth (kalon and aletheia) as belonging together. Gadamer’s focus on beauty as epitomized in play and ritual corresponds to Woolf ’s insistence on the cycle of life as the origin of the human experience of beauty. The novelist’s evocations of the repetitive incantations of the waves, the incandescence of the recurring sunsets, the seasonal joys of the seascape, or the cyclical, mundane occurrences of the urban life bring to the mind a sense of unspeakable beauty whose genesis is the rite of repetition.