  Gadamer’s aesthetics involve a variety of interlocking arguments, one of the most significant of which concerns the Sache selbst. The term is difficult to translate, but it refers, loosely speaking, to a work’s subject matter, to what it addresses or to what issue has been placed in question. Philosophical usage of the word evokes phenomenological notions of intentionality: what a work is directed at or points toward. The Sache is not a determinate concept but an area of significant meaningfulness, a constellation of concerns which orbit the affective, conative and cognitive complexities of subject matters such as grief or love. The Sache underpins Gadamer’s claim that aesthetic experience has a significant cognitive content. Subject matters may transcend an individual work in that no one work can exhaust their significance, but as ideas Sachen are not independent of the body of works that exemplify them. If they were ontologically distinct, the idealism Gadamer rejects would be forced on him and he would be compelled to argue that art is representational, refers to a concept beyond itself and, indeed, disappears into that concept once evoked. Art becomes philosophy once more. If, however, art is presentation, as Gadamer insists, a work’s meaning is not independent of it. Art does not therefore copy and thereby represent a subject-matter, but configures a visual or literary space in which a subject-matter can be summoned. Gadamer counters an ancient line of argument that regards art as secondary to, inferior to, and a corrupter of, the real. Contrary to the Platonic tradition, his argument implies that art adds to the reality of its subject-matters. Gadamer’s evaluation of the aesthetic contrasts vividly with Kant’s in this respect. Kant considers aesthetic experience to be indifferent to whether or not its object is real (cf. TM 89). A work’s credibility does not depend on its relationship to an original object or co-relative. Whether what is represented exists or not is inconsequential. What matters is the aesthetic merit of the work, not the strength of its likeness. Should the artwork be harmed, the being of the correlative is unaffected. Gadamer’s presentational aesthetics is, by contrast, profoundly anti-Platonic: a work’s disappearance diminishes the reality of that which presents itself through it.