On the idiom of truth and the movement of life : some remarks on the task of hermeneutics

The purpose of this paper is to argue that Kant's third Critique opened up the problematic of truth in a way that has yet to be properly grasped. More precisely, Kant's analysis of the a priori character of aesthetic experience poses a serious challenge to the long-standing philosophical assumption that the law of concept determines the nature and language of truth. Though Kant himself did not pursue the consequences of his analysis to the fullest extent, once one does, one sees the need to think the language of truth, its proper idiom, in a way that breaks out of the philosophical prejudice that the language of truth is the language of concept. To develop this argument, a discussion of the relevance of the beautiful, especially for Gadamer's hermeneutics, is undertaken. In the end, the claim is that this experience of the beautiful and this opening to a new sense of truth has a significance that one does well to understand as 'ethical' in the widest sense of the word.