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Hermeneutics and rasa

In the traditions of interpretation and reception, the dynamic of meaning is just as visible but goes by other words — it runs as understanding, as disclosure, as relish, never filed under aesthetics and no less the motion of meaning for that. Look at where meaning is described as arriving.

Hermeneutics, in Heidegger: language is not a tool laid over a finished thought but the medium through which meaning discloses — the element in which anything comes to show itself at all, with poetry the keeping-open of that disclosive power. Here the dynamic runs under the name of disclosure. (The depth behind the name — Schleiermacher’s general art of understanding, Dilthey’s method of the human sciences — is carried on the hermeneutics page.)

Hermeneutics, in Gadamer: understanding happens as a fusion of horizons — meaning arrives in the meeting of interpreter and text, and neither party is left unchanged. Gadamer carries it on to truth; whether and how the meeting bears on truth is a question the surface holds open rather than settling here — the meeting itself is the resonance, its reach left in play.

The rasa tradition, in Abhinavagupta: the sharpest statement on the site of meaning arriving across the interface between expression and reception. In sadharanikarana, generalisation, the depicted emotion is lifted free both of the particular character and of the spectator’s own ego, so that a feeling that is privately one person’s becomes a relish that can be shared — the most shared and the most private of things meeting in a single act. Held as a peer theory of meaning, not as exotica. The rasa tradition follows the dynamic into reception, and on toward a contemplative end beyond art; the making side is taken up elsewhere.

Two traditions, three faces, and in none of them the word aesthetics. The motion runs here as understanding, as disclosure, as the relish of a shared feeling — interpretation and reception, meaning described as arriving in the meeting.

See also: Aesthetics (the surface this belongs to) · Hermeneutics · Rasa