  There is a creative tension at play within Gadamer’s aesthetic thinking. On the one hand, Gadamer stalwartly defends the autonomy of the artwork and, on the other, despite his resistance to any subsumption of art within philosophy, he insists  that aesthetics should be absorbed within hermeneutics, which is for the most part understood as a theoretical enterprise. This tension replicates aspects of the so-called hermeneutic circle. Schleiermacher, for example, argues that it is only possible to grasp an individual’s personal utterances if one can understand the general structure of the language which that individual operates within. Conversely, general structures are only intelligible in terms of particular exemplifying utterances. Wilhelm Dilthey operates within a similar part-whole structure, namely, an individual’s personal experiences will mean little to the reader unless they can be contextualised within a historical context. A movement between part and whole also takes place in Gadamer’s thinking. The artwork is initially presented in its singularity. But then, the particular is illuminated by being brought under a subject-matter. To engage with artworks discursively is to bring generalisations about a work to bear, placing it in a wider context of associations. The movement to the wider level of generalisation also returns the spectator to the particular, since generalisation enables an understanding of what is singular about a work by locating it within a broader background. This double hermeneutic movement is highly characteristic of Gadamer’s aesthetic. It recognises that the cognitive dimension of  aesthetic experience is like all linguistic experience both centrifugal and centripetal in nature. When a work addresses us its impact is centrifugal: it upsets and transforms what we customarily recognise. It awakens us to the hermeneutical sublime, to what lies beyond but nevertheless shapes our normal range of understanding. Thus, Gadamer can argue that, “something is a poetic structure when everything pre-structured is taken up into a new, unique form … as if it were being said for the first time to us in particular” (GW 8, 62). Yet this estranging moment initiates a centripetal return, a homecoming. “The poem and the art of language generally as a heard or written text is always … something like a recognition in every single word” (GW 8, 62). Yet the question remains: is the passage from the immediacy of the given artwork to theoretical contemplations about its subject matter not an instance of moving from the particular givenness of a work to a more abstract level of reflection about its subject-matter? Does not the contemplative movement away from the work betray its particularity and suggest that the sense of a work lies beyond it, in its concept? Were Gadamer to have fallen into this impasse, an idealist and representationalist account of art would be forced upon him. The vehemence of his resistance to these stances suggests that something other than a simple shift from the particular immediacy of a work to a theoretical contemplation of its content must be at play.