Günter Figal

Gadamer’s hermeneutics is no discipline or simply a foundation of the Humanities, but addresses the fundamental problem of phenomenology: how things show themselves and can be attained. It does so, however, not in Husserl’s terminology but in its “ontological turn”. In elaborating on the ontology of language, Gadamer equates the accessibility of things and their Being, a move eminent in the “speculative character of language” discussed in the third part of Truth and Method. For Gadamer as well as for Heidegger, ontology is possible only as phenomenology. How things show themselves, however, cannot be understood in relation to an absolute consciousness or understanding Dasein, but, following Plato, from the “evidence of the beautiful” in an hermeneutics of the artwork. Gadamer’s phenomenology thus describes the accessibility of things as the coming to pass of their truth and presence, much as the later Heidegger does in relation to physis and openness. Hermeneutical reflection of the fundamental problem of phenomenology also reveals the displacement in the continuity of coming to pass as the “space between words” opened in the manifold of interpretations. mehr

In this essay, I wish to elucidate the specific function architectural photography has for the experience of buildings. With photographs, the image character of buildings can be discovered and represented, and thereby the nature of habitation can be revealed as well. Taking or contemplating pictures of habitable rooms one could learn that habitation is primarily perceptional—a character mostly concealed by the dominance of everyday practice. In order to give an impression of the manifold possibilities architectural photography holds, I discuss the work of five quite different photographic artists, namely Julius Shulman, Yutaka Saito, Candida Höfer, Cy Twombly, and Yasuhiro Ishimoto. mehr