In The Relevance of the Beautiful, Gadamer hopes to justify the ways of art to modern man. He's answering Plato's banishment of the poets in The Republic, and every other such banishment, including Hegel's, who claimed that "art is a thing of the past" on the grounds that art re-establishes our sense of transcendence and order, that it "bridges the chasm between the ideal and the real," establishes our sense of "play," and otherwise enlarges our experience of life, communally, spiritually, culturally, and individually. It teaches us to go beyond ourselves. German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, famed student of Heidegger and author of the seminal Truth and Method, offers this phenomenological defense. As translated by Robert Bernasconi, Gadamer writes such a poetic and aphoristic prose that anyone with a moderate background in the arts can read it, as well as philosophers, artists, and critics. This essay is useful for a number of reasons: it gives articulate defenses-or condemnations-of translation, modern music (both pop and experimental), kitch, religious art, and historical painting. It is further particularly useful to me in that the grounds on which he makes many of his defenses mirror those of P.B. Shelley in "A Defense of Poetry."
