In earlier seminal text he has acknowledged that language is not always the best means to express what we perceive when encountering a work of art. Yet, In a later essay Language and Understanding he defends the import he has placed on linguistic understanding writing: “the claim that all understanding is linguistically in character is admittedly provocative...” Yet, even silent understanding, he argues, rests on a network of previous understandings which rest in language, and any meaning we fix emerges out of “the fabric of a linguistic context.” Crucial to this discussion is the claim that use of language is crucial when inquiring into our experience of art. According to N. Davey, “hermeneutics’ deep concern with language does not subordinate …show more content…
This other . . . is this voice that awakens one to vigilance, to being questioned in the conversation we are.” It is the voice of the other, in this case the artwork’s address, that establishes the questions. As commitment to understanding, the model of a conversation, as conceived by Gadamer, asks us to be open to the other, be it a person, nature, animal or an object. The parallel with a dialogue points out to a complex experience which ascribes to art an ethical element by which to reveal the limitations of cultural expectations and to initiate an engagement with what is different, with the …show more content…
In an interview regarding the book he compares the writer, and by extension all artists, to angels who deliver messages. “The reason why angels are invisible,“ he says, “is because they are disappearing to let the message go through them.” For him the “the message itself is the ethics of the messenger. “ Following this line of thought, I consider the artwork itself is an ethical address, and will discuss it in details in the last section of the thesis, Beyond Horizons. Serres wishes to identify the elements of a global network of communication, in order to translate the several messages of the ‘world's disorder’ into different languages, to move over from one vocabulary to another. When reflecting on the network of languages he focuses on the dominance of verbal language and the subsequent marginalization of the senses by various philosophical systems. This primacy of words over the sensory has led Serres to reject phenomenological, structuralist and post-structuralist schools of thought which he finds “without sensations - everything via language,” and instead advocates a sensory-based