If contemporary hermeneutics is to continue to develop its vocation for ontology, the importance of Pareyson’s thought for the philosophy of interpretation is destined to have an increasingly central role.1 The following remarks intend to show: that the ontological implications of Pareyson’s hermeneutics above all spring from his reflection on the experience of art not only in its interpretative moment but also in the moment of artistic “producing”; the ontology of the inexhaustible elaborated in the last period of Pareyson’s philosophical speculation, which he also formulated in terms of “tragic thought,” is much more deeply bound with the theory of interpretation he elaborated in his Estetica than it is generally assumed.2 It is often the case that readers of the late Pareyson implicitly or explicitly connect his last work with his reading of existentialist philosophy and Schelling, thereby completely neglecting his works on aesthetics. I intend to show, instead, that reflecting on aesthetics is not a marginal or specialized current within Pareyson’s thought; rather, it is key to understanding his specific view on hermeneutics and the decisive role that his thought is increasingly and more distinctively destined to play in this domain.
To be sure, the point of departure can only be a hypothesis regarding the specific meaning Pareyson’s thought may take in contemporary hermeneutics, which is on its way to becoming more and more explicitly hermeneutic ontology. Now, it is precisely this meaning that appears to be summed up in his affirmation of tragic thought. If it can be shown that the radical consideration of the hermeneutic character of human existence as a whole—which for Pareyson appears emblematically in the experience of art—necessarily leads to tragic thought or in any case to an ontology of the inexhaustible (since there is no absolute identity between these two theoretical outcomes), then some significant progress will have been made in making clear the ontological outcomes of hermeneutics and the possible contents of such an ontology. In fact, there cannot be any philosophy of interpretation without radically revising the metaphysical conception of being.
Pareyson’s tragic thought has a decisive importance for contemporary hermeneutics, especially if we think of the objections that are not without some reason often raised against hermeneutics: that it is a “philosophy of culture” fatally destined to collapse into relativism or in any case confined to apology for the plurality of paradigms, the metaphorical systems that describe the world, tolerance, and so on. If, above and beyond the specific views of the singular authors, hermeneutics were really characterized by this general humanist orientation (and this would raise the question of whether its appeal to Heidegger would still be legitimate), Pareyson could not be considered a hermeneutic thinker at all. Surely, though, nothing appears to be less popular than tragic thought among the theorists of hermeneutics, from Gadamer to Rorty. So much so that as a result it would seem legitimate to distinguish within Pareyson’s thought between a hermeneutic trajectory (which revolves around interpretation theory and is elaborated in the direction of an ontology of the inexhaustible in the Estetica) and an existentialist trajectory that culminates with the proposal of tragic thought. However, if these two trajectories can be connected other than in a purely biographical way that pertains to the history of the thinker, it is possible that it will have a much broader significance: it will put in question several of the theoretical outcomes of the thinkers mentioned in my previous chapters, and consequently may well free hermeneutics from the limits for which it is often blamed because as it has been viewed exclusively in the light of those works.
Is there, then, a nexus that is not merely fortuitous between the existentialist Pareyson of Studi sull’esistenzialismo (1941), Jaspers (1940), and Esistenza e Persona (1950), and the more “naturalist” and almost Brunian (i.e., Giordano Bruno) Pareyson of the Estetica of 1954?
Let me clarify this nexus and the overall meaning of Pareyson’s theory for contemporary hermeneutics by starting with an elementary observation. Pareyson, among the theorists of hermeneutics (excluding Heidegger), is perhaps the one who has given the most complete and accurate analysis of the interpretative act as such. This may be surprising, but outside of his work, in the classical works of contemporary hermeneutics it is difficult to find a definition or even an in-depth description of interpretation. Gadamer, too, seems to be more or less satisfied with continuing the German tradition of Verstehen in opposition to Erklären. In fact, his interpretation theory is marked out only because it adds a more specific accentuation of the hermeneutic circle to the prevailingly empathetic features pointed out by Dilthey. Unlike Dilthey, though, Gadamer does not consider the hermeneutic circle in its vital meaning (i.e., that interpreter and text ultimately belong to living life) but rather in its more specifically historical meaning. The interpreter belongs to a history that has been shaped by the text itself. Furthermore: the interpreter belongs to objective spirit, broadly understood in a Hegelian sense. It is possible that the vagueness of hermeneutics results from its minor attentiveness, at the level of knowledge, to the problem of an in-depth inquiry into the interpretative act. It is this vagueness, for many critics, that makes hermeneutics suspicious of cultural relativism, of a purely apologetic emphasis on the plurality of paradigms, a sort of “hurdy-gurdy song” that Nietzsche saw in the superficial interpretation his animals give of the terrifying doctrine of the eternal return.3
By contrast, it is precisely in the analysis of the interpretative character of human knowledge that Pareyson brings to bear his familiarity with existentialism and with Kierkegaard. Before developing the multiple implications of existentialism in the Estetica, in an essay written in 1950 Pareyson had laid down the basis for his own personal overcoming of the metaphysical conception of truth as correspondence.4 To be sure, this did not occur independently of his reading of Being and Time and existentialist thinkers, though it was probably inspired by the study of German idealism in its Fichtian version. In that essay, interpretation—understood as the never purely passive character of knowledge—is shown to be already at work in sensible intuition. Sensible knowledge intuits things by actively configuring them by means of an image, both the image of the thing and the expression of the subject and of his feelings. Since it has its origin in sensations, “knowledge does not grasp something without expressing the knower, and … expression does not express feelings without grasping a known together with it.” From this reflection on the interpretative character of sensible knowledge, Pareyson draws the first and most complete definition of interpretation he has ever given, one that shapes the meaning of his entire philosophy for the problem of hermeneutics: “Interpretation is a form of knowing in which receptivity and activity are inseparable, and where the known is a form and the knower a person.” The two parts of this definition say the same thing from different viewpoints, and this is necessary in order to see the nexus between the existentialist heritage and Pareyson’s own notion of interpretation. Since everything characterizing Pareyson’s hermeneutics depends on the notion of interpretation as knowledge of forms on the part of persons, it is important to observe here (since we are seeking out the nexus between this definition of interpretation and Pareyson’s existentialism) that such a definition would not have been possible without having established the impossibility of disjoining the receptivity and activity that is constitutive of the finitude of interpretation. In Pareyson’s language, form and person are terms referring to finitude: they are both the outcomes of a formative process that generates a finality (definitività) starting from conditions that are always given and that orient it, while determining and delimiting the boundary of its possibilities. It is precisely insofar as it is knowledge of forms on the part of persons that interpretation has the character of infinitude, of being always open to further interpretative acts—and this brings Pareyson into proximity with the slightly vague and generic “optimism” of a hermeneutics according to which “everything goes,” for which the multiplicity of interpretation can only be an indefinite mode of growth. However, precisely insofar as it is knowledge of forms on the part of persons, interpretation involves risk and the possibility of setbacks, too. His infinitude is not a peaceful openness to a destiny of limitless growth; rather, it is an indication of an ontology characterized by the feature of inexhaustibility, which is also deeply marked by a specifically tragic character.
To put it differently: if we do not confine ourselves to a slightly vague conception of interpretation in terms of Verstehen and of the hermeneutic circle in terms of Erlebnis but rather analyze it more deeply as Pareyson does, we will probably reach the same ontological conclusions as Pareyson, summed up in an ontology of the inexhaustible and in the formulation of tragic thought.
Two questions should be clarified now: What cogency has Pareyson’s definition of interpretation? How is its origin disclosed in the reflection on aesthetic experience?
In regard to the first question, let us consider the central idea of hermeneutic circle. What is gained by defining it in terms of the inseparability of activity and receptivity and of knowledge of forms on the part of persons? The gain seems to consists above all in avoiding (mis)understanding the circle as the relativizing limitation of interpretation only, so that interpretation can still be conceived as a form of knowing that has the defect of not being a truly objective mirror of how things really are. There is a residue of this prejudice also in Dilthey, especially in his effort to legitimize the scientific character of historical knowledge.
Neither in Dilthey nor, perhaps, in Gadamer are the infinite openness of interpretation and its characteristic finitude brought back to the same source: on the contrary, they are two different aspects, not entirely reconciled, often in conflict with each other. Instead, in Pareyson these two aspects are inseparable. They ground each other reciprocally in a positive way. It is not only the person but also the form that is an infinity enclosed within a finality. Infinity is not at all theorized in terms of the metaphysical view of the person having infinite value as the bearer of freedom or of the form as the work of the person, of nature, or of God. The infinity of person and form is bound up with the outcome of a process, which precisely because it is determined and delimited by conditions that are always anterior to it, is open to indeterminate possibilities (its own origin always already escapes it, since all the possibilities disclosed by the origin are not entirely at its disposal) that remain effectively in the margins, constituting its precariousness and richness, even when they are excluded from the choice of a certain course of development. Person and form are therefore finalities that bear in themselves, as the trace of their formative process, an infinity that opens onto interpretation. Insofar as they are the outcomes of a formative process, they can be grasped only by a processional understanding. This process, in turn, has its own infinite possibility at play in the interpretation and reconstruction of the original process, which can bestow the characters of inventiveness and growth upon interpretation. However, as in the case of the formative process, the infinity of the interpretative act involves the risk of a setback. This possibility seems to fade away in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, because he has not made clear the ontological roots of the infinity of interpretation. Instead, he seems to entrust it to the indeterminate multiplicity of generations of interpreters (from Heidegger’s viewpoint, this is not without its own logic: perhaps death is “the coffer of being,” as Heidegger writes, inasmuch as the enriching interpretation of being arises out the interpreter’s mortality). The thing-form (text, event, work) is situated in history, and the wealth of its effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) seems to arise from the fact that an infinite number of interpreters approach it. Even though Gadamer refutes the hermeneutic nihilism expressed in Valéry’s statement, “mes vers ont le sens qu’on leur prête,” the recurring questions regarding the limits, methodological rigor, and validity of interpretation that are constantly addressed to him seem to indicate that this problem is present in his work. However, if, as occurs in Pareyson, the infinity of interpretation is grounded on the infinity of person and form, understood not as pure qualitative opening and indefinite growth of meaning, but rather as a result of openness and risk that is constitutive of the formative process, Wirkungsgeschicte appears to be more clearly explicated and justified, and the characters of engagement and risk belonging to the interpretative act less vaguely theorized.
Hence, knowledge of forms on the part of persons signifies that interpretation is distinguished by its own specific infinity, both as an indefinite opening to the growth of the work on the part of interpreters and to the risk of a setback. Such a risk, which constitutes the specifically existentialist aspect of Pareyson’s hermeneutics, is inseparable from the nature of interpretation, unless its infinite openness is understood merely in terms of “subjectivism,” resulting from the infinite succession of interpreters that come into contact with the form. Indeed, the infinity of interpretation is grounded on the infinity of the process that characterizes the genesis of the form and constitution of the person. Infinity is the source of risk in a horizon of indeterminate possibilities, which by virtue of its success leaves its traces on the form and on the person well after the process of formation has come to closure and keeps them open for further developments as well as for potential setbacks.
The aesthetic roots of this view of interpretation and its ontological implications are plainly visible. In Pareyson, even though interpretation is already at work in sensible intuition, the articulation of its moments and of its characteristic infinity are worked out in the analysis of aesthetic experience, especially in the instance of fruition and formation. Perhaps it is not necessary to underline that in its totality the interpretative character of human experience is not separable from its formative character. Formativity (producing by inventing a mode of production, as well as art’s law of producing) is the name for the initiated initiative that man is. If we consider the identity of the interpretative nature of the whole of experience and formativity understood as initiated initiative, then it is clear how deeply hermeneutics is bound up with the heritage of existentialism in Pareyson more than in other theories. Although he was quite familiar with Dilthey’s problematic,5 Pareyson did not draw his interest in interpretation from the reflection on the questions of the human sciences. In this, he is more akin to the framework of the existential analytic of Being and Time, where the question of hermeneutics results from the finitude of existence and from its formative character, the specific structures that come to the fore in the analysis of aesthetic experience. The existentialist roots, on the one hand, and the reference to aesthetic experience, on the other, lay the basis for the explicitly ontological turn of interpretation theory in his work.
The ontological elements shaping the whole subsequent development of Pareyson’s hermeneutics come to the fore in the analysis of the formative process, first, and of the interpretation of the work of art, later. The formation of the work of art is an act not of creation but of interpretation: of a cue, of the materials (which, of course, are not only given but chosen), of the spirituality of an artist bent on the act of forming. All these elements converge to generate a “forming form,” the intimate law of the productive process, which, albeit only completely “given” at the end of the work, must already somehow exist in the course of the process in which the “formed form” constituting the work is revealed; otherwise it would not be a process of inquiry in which one considered errors, corrections, adaptations, and remaking. The success of the work lies in reaching a point of convergence between the law and the work produced, the forming form and the formed form. Just as production already constitutes an interpretation (of the materials, one’s spirituality, the situation, and the cues) on the part of the artist, so is the interpretative act above all a formative act. The interpreter forms an image of the work expressing his spirituality and at the same time grasping the work’s form; it somehow retraces, albeit not chronologically, the entire process by which the work was formed. Interpretation succeeds when the image, reconstructed by the interpreter under the guidance of the forming form that speaks to him through the work, coincides with the effective physical nature of the work set before him.
As is well known, these are the main features of the two fundamental moments of aesthetic experience: the production and fruition of the work of art. A more detailed analysis—which is not possible here—could show that all the aspects of the hermeneutic problem take up a different meaning (which would make hermeneutics less open to vague and superficial readings) if situated in the background of Pareyson’s definition of interpretation as knowledge of forms on the part of persons, especially when seen in light of the two fundamental stages of aesthetics: the analyses of the formative process and of the interpretative process. I will touch upon only a few of them: the question of the hermeneutic circle, interpretation as an act for which “everything goes,” and the aesthetic model of the hermeneutic conception of truth.
According to the hermeneutic vulgate, the hermeneutic circle is conceived almost exclusively as the belonging of the interpreter to the historical context from which the text (work, form, event) to be interpreted comes from or at the limit (in Gadamer) of the historical-natural language in which the interpreter is always thrown. For Pareyson, instead, the hermeneutic circle is linked to the theory of congeniality, which is the condition for the success of interpretation, understood as the expression of the interpreter’s personality and revelation of the form in its truth. The elements of openness and risk we observed in the definition of interpretation are involved in this central point of interpretation theory. First of all, the concept of risk: in its more generic version, the text is given to the interpreter in a situation to which they both belong as the very condition of understanding; here it does not seem possible to conceive of the failure of interpretation. In Gadamer, for example, we could conceive of the failure of interpretation only in the sense of an inaccurate recognition of the Wirkungsgeschichte, in addition to the unconscious prejudices that tend to appear in every pretense of an absence of prejudice. (Is there a trace of Cartesianism in this aspect of Gadamer? If the analysis, synthesis, and enumeration is complete, the errors should not be possible.) Pareyson places two conditions on the success of interpretation that cannot be clearly separated: the involvement of the interpreter and the congeniality that may or may not subsist between the interpreter and the text-work. Involvement produces no results without congeniality; or better, it does not even arise, because congeniality is the underlying condition for the work to address the interpreter to stimulate his interest, and ultimately his engagement. On the other hand, as always happens in the structure of formativity as initiated initiative, congeniality is never given as an entirely external or preliminary condition: it is there inasmuch as it is always already interpreted and actively taken up. The point here is that this “naturalistic” element (congeniality is an always already given spiritual affinity with which the interpreter starts but does not create) enforces a limitation against the radically historicist framework in which the play of interpretation appears to unfold in Gadamer, such that he cannot easily account for the possible failure of interpretation. In Pareyson, the hermeneutic circle loses the trait of tranquilizing completeness that it appears to possess (and perhaps really does) in Gadamer’s historicist humanism. To be sure, the price of all this is a naturalistic type of ontological disclosure, which remains a characteristic of the last Pareyson’s tragic thought, around which both the achievements and the problematic aspect of his thought are crystallized.
Whenever the hermeneutic circle is conceived in more existentialist terms, the act of interpretation is dramatized, and rightly so. The possibility of a setback is brought back to its horizon, together with the whole involvement of the interpreter who plays with his own destiny. Here, too, it is perhaps just a matter of nuances, which in the end assign a different ontological meaning to hermeneutics. True, in Gadamer’s hermeneutical notion of truth as genuine modification of the interpreter’s world, which is brought about by the encounter with the text-work and by the fusion of their horizons, the interpretative act is not conceived as an operation among others that could happen to an indifferent subject. Even though in its purview it has mainly the experience of the human sciences, hence a specific epistemic performance that must be liberated from the hegemony of the objectivist model of positivistic scientism, Gadamer opens the epistemological significance of his premises in the direction of a more global and more existential view of the interpretative act. Nevertheless, it is always a kind of shock, for those of us who are accustomed to viewing hermeneutics almost exclusively in the light of Truth and Method, to read once again the passages in Being and Time where Heidegger argues that interpretation is grounded in the understanding in which Dasein always already appropriates its own being.6 The shock is probably motivated by the fading away of the element of destiny, of the person’s total engagement, in the present version of hermeneutics, though not without betraying or reductively reading Gadamer’s text.
If we consider hermeneutics in the version proposed by Rorty, the impression of disorientation is even more sharply marked. As is well known, for Rorty everything that has to do with arguments regarding the solution to problems that arise within accepted and shared (Kuhnian) paradigms falls into the realm of the epistemological. By contrast, Rorty calls hermeneutical every encounter with, or invention of, new paradigms, namely, new ways of describing the world, unheard-of systems of metaphor (as the Nietzsche of the fragment on “Truth and lies in an extra-moral sense” would say), which are presented as novel ways of reorganizing experience. It is difficult to say whether here the interpretative act or the invention of new metaphors involves the possibility of a dramatic outcome, since the failure of interpretation could still be conceived as a kind of invention. It is even more difficult to decide whether someone encountering a new system of metaphors “understands” it or goes on to invent a newer system (Wittgenstein: someone who calculates differently than me makes a mistake or plays a different game?). It is difficult to say what has become here of the “projection of one’s own foremost possibility,” of which Being and Time speaks as the very condition of interpretation. It is true that the inventor/interpreter’s spirituality is engaged and expressed both in invention and in the interpretation of new systems of metaphors. However, every drama linked to the possibility of a setback seems to be excluded, so that in a certain sense “everything goes”; at best one may experience a shock on account of the metaphors’ novelty.
Is this the meaning of the aesthetic model that seems to be at work in the hermeneutic conception of truth?7 Once again, if we think of Gadamer and Rorty (the two extreme versions of hermeneutics today: the classic founder versus the “urbanizing” successor), it is plain enough that an aesthetic model is at work in contemporary hermeneutics, one that is not always recognized but still extremely powerful. To be sure, Rorty would deny such a statement insofar as he refuses to put forth any theory of truth, which he sees merely as an abstract noun that is no longer useful. Whatever one might call it, the truth of experience is still conceived on the model of an aesthetic or, better, aestheticist experience. It was already evident in the distinction between epistemology and hermeneutics Rorty put forth in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that the latter term was privileged over the former, a point that is underlined even more in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Rorty has neither chosen for himself nor enthusiastically recommended to others the task of resolving the questions that arise within accepted paradigms. Both in the way in which he emphatically connects pragmatism to Nietzsche and Sartre in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and in his admiration for poets and writers expressed in the other book, there is an extremely mitigated and yet audible echo of Heidegger’s notion of authenticity, of the existential involvement of which Being and Time speaks, albeit conceived in terms of pure poetic creativity. Ethics, too, is worked out in these terms in Rorty. Here, however, the aesthetic model intends to say more than the aestheticist model: the truth—or whatever one might call it—of experience coincides with the creation of forms of life that are proposed solely to the extent that they are “successful” forms of redescription of the self and of its experience. Nonetheless, it seems hard to conceive how once this is formulated in a work one could judge such forms to be unsuccessful. Once again, then, here the aesthetic model signifies that “everything goes.”
Equally aestheticist, though in a more subtle way, seems to be the outcome of Gadamer’s description of hermeneutics that is modeled on the experience of the truth of art. As is well known, Truth and Method begins its defense of the extra-methodological truth of the human sciences precisely with the recognition that there is an experience of truth in art, insofar as the encounter with the work of art truly transforms the interpreter. It is a fusion of horizons in which neither the one nor the other term of the relation remain what they were at the outset, since the work, too, is loaded with the traces of interpretation left by that particular encounter, which constitute its Wirkungsgeschichte and from which it cannot isolate itself. Nonetheless, as I have argued elsewhere,8 the adoption of this aesthetic model to think the truth of hermeneutics enables Gadamer to articulate the experience of truth as the an experience of integration into a reconstructed totality rather than as the metaphysical evidence of a content of consciousness to be clearly and distinctly seen in Cartesian fashion. As a result, the outcomes of Gadamer’s hermeneutics are deeply in contrast with Heidegger’s critique of truth as correspondence, since a reconstructed totality, like Hegel’s self-returning of Spirit, is deeply akin to the metaphysical notion of truth. Furthermore, his conception of truth seems to exclude once again any drama and any authentic possibility of a setback, thus giving reason to the objections that oppose this optimistic and peaceful outcome of hermeneutics to its Heideggerian and more generally existentialist origins (which should not be denied).
As I have already mentioned, in Pareyson and in the other hermeneutic thinkers the experience of art remains the fundamental point of reference for conceiving the notion of truth. However, it is precisely in its constitutive aspect of risk, which appears more visibly in art, where the formative character of the whole of human existence comes to light in all its specified purity (for Pareyson, art is a “specified formativity”),9 that interpretation, actualizing itself in the production and interpretation of the work, is shown to be open to success or failure, according to a destiny that is never delivered into the hands of the artist or the interpreter but in which the unpredictable element of congeniality is involved. The success of the productive and interpretative process is then the model of the happening of truth, the coincidence of forming form and formed form, or image and thing. But the specific feature that characterizes these events specifically as truth is neither the attainment of a quiet integration to which Gadamer refers (Hegel’s statement that “the whole is the true” still holds true), nor the pure and simple recognition of an original system of redescription of the world (as in Rorty’s case). Instead, it is a matter of opening to an ulterior character—the rising of new formative and interpretative acts—which in the form and in the person are derived from the trace of infinity that has been stamped on them by virtue of the process whose outcome they are. To corroborate it, let me remind you that in the essays in Verità e interpretazione, where Pareyson elaborates the contrast between revelatory and expressive thought, the only possible criterion for distinguishing the latter (i.e., a pure ideology) from the former is precisely the claim to ultimacy characteristic of it. (In other words, we could say that every foundationalist thought that pretends to possess and enunciate the first principles is purely ideological and therefore not revelatory of truth.)
I have put forth only a few indications for a more detailed comparison between key concepts of contemporary hermeneutics (as they are found above all in Gadamer and in the theorists who refer to him) and the specific declination they undergo in Pareyson’s work; I have attempted to provide a more in-depth and accurate analysis of the interpretative act, in its varied dimensions, while at the same time remaining faithful to the existentialist origins of Pareyson’s theoretical approach. The ontology of the inexhaustible and tragic thought, two formulations summing up the philosophy of the last Pareyson, clearly spring from the premises of interpretation theory that Pareyson elaborated with a specific view to aesthetic experience, in the light of the existentialist heritage. His radical theory of interpretation has led to the recognition that the ontology of inexhaustibility is the unavoidable background of interpretation. In other words, it is not enough to stop with the observation that the mere succession of generations of interpreters naturally generates the multiplicity of interpretations that produce the text’s infinity. The different interpretations put forth by various interpreters stand in need of an ontological justification, too. However, to confine oneself to the sheer affirmation of interpreting subjects would make it impossible to recognize the difficulties and possibility of specific setbacks, which in fact do occur in every event of interpretation. It is not only the world of interpretive subjects that is inexhaustible, but also that of the forms that are offered to interpretation. However, if the only argument for infinity (of person and form) is the concrete difficulty of the interpretative process, the ontology of the inexhaustible (which, in its varied forms, is only implicitly shared by a number of hermeneutic thinkers) is open to further development in tragic thought. Tragic thought links the inexhaustibility of Being (hence the fundamental hermeneutic character of Being) to a vision of being that is characterized by essential conflict. If Being is no longer to be thought under the category of necessity, as a metaphysical foundation that is fully actualized (making freedom unthinkable and generating all the figures of metaphysics described by Nietzsche and Heidegger, all the way up to the total technologically organized and administered world), Being will have to be thought under the category of “reality,” as an affirmation that holds its own by triumphing over a negative possibility, which carries in itself the indelible trace of an originary conflict. There is nothing to be surprised that in his last works Pareyson makes recourse to the language of the Old and the New Testaments in order to reflect on these topics, especially when considering that the philosophical thematic of hermeneutics is linked to, and perhaps is unthinkable without, the Judeo-Christian tradition.10 Pareyson’s work was interrupted precisely while he was engaging these crucial issues, which have to do not only with his own specific thought but with the whole of contemporary hermeneutics. Hence, it will be a matter of further tapping into his work (the unpublished writings) to develop as best as we can the indications he has left us, with the conviction that only an ontology capable of rediscovering its links to the religious tradition of the West will enable contemporary hermeneutics to find a line of development that will eventually remove it from the reassuring tautologies of a “philosophy of culture.”