The Interrupted Promise of the Symbol: Gadamer and the Impossibility of the Sacred in Modern Art

Abstract

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics conceives the symbol as an original form of presence and truth, where the visible hosts the invisible. Against modern aesthetics, which renders art autonomous and self-referential, Gadamer exposes the rupture between art and truth, showing that the loss of the symbol entails a crisis of meaning. The symbol neither represents nor translates; it occurs as an epiphany of sense that transforms the viewer. Its interruption in modernity does not mean its definitive disappearance but a suspension that calls for a hermeneutic reopening. In dialogue with contemporary phenomenology, the symbol may reappear as excess, donation, or as the gaze that sees us. Rather than restoring a sacred aesthetics, the task is to recover the symbolic disposition, the openness that lets being manifest itself through sensible form. Where art once again hosts the invisible, the symbol regains its revelatory power and art recovers its ontological and transformative dimension.