Gadamer calls for an intervention against the calculative rationality that increasingly organises our experience on a global scale – with Nancy, a global ‘network’ – through the discovery of solidarities. As Gadamer's approach suggests, the calculative rationality of the global network fails to make good on promises to expand and enhance meaningful connection. Quite to the contrary, it results above all in the alienation of interrelated foreignness. In Gadamer’s call for an intervention, he observes the significant role that the arts and humanities can play in our attempts to counter the calculative rationality of the global network through the discovery of solidarities. At a basic level, his point is simple. If the discovery of solidarities turns on making our lives in common visible, then the arts and humanities, which aim at nothing else than making things that matter to us visible, will be of invaluable help. Gadamer's approach thereby reminds us that the broken promises of the global network are no substitute for achievements in the arts and humanities that can and do arise from the world's multiple cultural and linguistic traditions.

Gadamer's call for us to intervene against the the calculative rationality of the global network surely calls for the discovery of solidarities with the help of all of the arts and humanities. In this chapter, though, I wish to focus on the contribution that can be made by the arts and literature in particular. Gadamer, as I wish to show, suggests that the arts and literature can help to make our lives in common visible because our experience of art as such aims at a distinctive experience of truth. For Gadamer, art discloses the truth as meaningful possibility. Accordingly, his account suggests that the arts and literature can make our lives in common visible as testimony to the possibilities of such a shared life.

Moreover, as I shall argue, Gadamer's approach suggests that this testimony unfolds in different, if no doubt always interrelated, spheres. First, as we shall see, Gadamer's discussion of art in Truth and Method, Part I, suggests that art is testimony to those possibilities of shared life that arise from our possibilities of belonging to tradition. Many scholars (and many of them critics) presume that Gadamer’s association of art with such testimony of tradition is the long and short of his view.