  The tension in Gadamer’s position arises from (1) asserting art’s autonomy and (2) demanding that aesthetics be subsumed within hermeneutics. Undoubtedly, the weight of argument is on the latter. He systematically criticises Kantian aesthetics for its narrow-minded concentration on the subjectivity of momentary pleasures and offers in its place a substantial reconstruction of the cognitive content of art’s address. In other words, Gadamer switches the status of autonomy from the sensible irreducibility of a work to its hermeneutic autonomy. This entails the argument that a work which challenges our outlook does so because it is enigmatic by nature: it gives rise to difficulties of meaning and interpretation which cannot be explained away by a more fundamental level of understanding. The autonomous work that stands in itself is a work that both presents a meaning and at the same time holds something back. It is in other words always pointing beyond itself but within itself. This substantiates Gadamer’s claim that the hermeneutical constitution of an autonomous work resists theoretical reduction. In the essay “Word and Picture”, he expresses sympathy with Schleiermacher’s remark, “I hate all theory that does not grow out of practice” (GW 8, 374). However, as has been argued, the transcendent dimensions of meaning which a work speculatively invokes are not outside the work but immanent within it. In other words, we do not need a special hermeneutic method to access the withheld but just a deeper, more attentive contemplative acquaintance. When Gadamer speaks of being attentive to what an artwork says, of discerning its enigmatic quality and of becoming aware of its speculative resonances, he is indeed speaking in a hermeneutical idiom, but this is most clearly not a case of Gadamer submitting aesthetic experience to an externally derived theory. To the contrary, Gadamer is trying to draw out the hermeneutical dynamics of aesthetic experience itself. Thus the tension between the immediacy of experience and reflection upon the content of that experience is not a tension between experience on the one hand and theory on the other. It is a tension within aesthetic experience between what an artwork invokes of its subject-matter and how what is invoked changes the character of that which invokes it. What hermeneutical reflection reveals of aesthetic experience is nothing extraneous to such experience but a further disclosure of what is held within it. To conclude, if aesthetic experience is hermeneutical in that artworks speculatively illuminate meanings beyond what is immediately disclosed, hermeneutical experience should equally be taken up by aesthetics in that subject-matters only manifest their presence in the singular and particular.