Art’s Claim to Truth

What follows could be easily entitled “variations on the ontological perspective opened to aesthetics by existential philosophy.” The horizon within which we are moving here is more or less defined by the questions and conclusions that were elaborated by ontological existentialism. By existentialism, I mean Heidegger’s philosophy as well as the philosophy that more or less explicitly finds its inspiration in him. By virtue of this opening horizon, I argue, it is possible to satisfy the exigency of an ontological foundation of art that increasingly rises not only from aesthetics but also from contemporary poetics.

To speak of the ontological foundation of art involves, sketching out the theoretical as well as historical horizon within which we move. Accordingly, it is necessary to situate this argument with respect to the contemporary situation of aesthetics and to the history of philosophical investigations of art. To make the argument more productive and more comprehensible, we will have to reconstruct a preliminary understanding of the global interpretation of the history of modern aesthetics, which by force of circumstances will be inevitably generic. I shall briefly outline, then, such global interpretation to introduce the actual discussion of the problem.

As with all philosophical questions—though here perhaps in a more particularly sharp manner—aesthetics does not emerge as a question about the constitution and structure of the peculiar world of art, the world of production and artistic enjoyment. Instead, it emerges as a question of the very fact of art. What constitutes an element for reflection and above all gives food for thought is the general fact that there are works of art at all, objects that do not satisfy any advisable needs, whose existence is not required by any identifiable motive that might justify them. This is how Aristotle already posed the question, which he solved by elaborating the well-known doctrine of imitation, according to which art exists because it causes pleasure in us inasmuch as it is an imitation; such pleasure is connected to our natural tendency to know. Imitation, then, constitutes precisely a way of knowing.¹

By means of this theory Aristotle’s position became the foundation for the mimetic tradition of art (or at least his position became canonical in a very specific form, which has remained unaltered throughout the history of Western intellectual thought), and anticipated a series of answers to the question of art produced by modernity. These are based on the fact that art should be led back to a more fundamental and more constitutive attitude of consciousness, which could be summarized more or less as follows: there is art insofar as there is, in human consciousness, an attitude, a way of relating that is aesthetic rather than practical or cognitive.

In any case, Aristotle’s answer, unquestionably accepted for centuries, was responsible for the degradation of aesthetics to the level of poetics. After Aristotle, it was no longer a matter of posing the question of art with respect to its roots as it was of discovering a way of producing good works of art, of encoding and handing them over by means of handbooks. In comparison with this tradition, the novelty of Kantian aesthetics seems to consist in its having taking seriously, once again, the question of art as an event that cannot be derived or explained by recourse to preexistent laws or needs. The Kantian doctrine of the genius, which brings the work of art back to nature, elevates the underivability of art to the level of theory. In fact, the nature that gives art its law through the genius is almost exclusively a negative term: the work comes from nature (i.e., from genius) inasmuch as it cannot be led back to a principle or concept that could be formulated intellectually. The fact that art’s underivability leads to the grounding of the artwork upon nature only means that while Kant wanted to take seriously the enigmatic nature of art—the radical novelty of the work—he was also conscious of the need to provide a foundation for this novelty. Kant’s recourse to nature, whose definition is left unspecified (this is the terrain in which idealist philosophies will carry out their investigations), only bears witness to his attempt to give an ontological foundation to art.

While Kant’s doctrine of genius comprises the two essential elements—the novelty of the work and the ontological rooting of art—with which every aesthetics must reckon, it is also true that these two elements are precariously synthesized in the overall formulation of his aesthetics. Indeed, in post-Kantian philosophy throughout the eighteenth century, these two elements of aesthetics will be separated, motivating two diametrically opposed directions for the development of aesthetics.

To illustrate this separation, I shall refer to two examples that should be sufficiently familiar. On the one hand, the positivistic aesthetics of play as it is formulated and carried to the limit of its extreme banality by Spencer;² on the other hand, Hegel’s aesthetics. In the first case, art consists in the activation of surplus energies that are not necessary for the life struggle; art is play in the fullest sense of the term, an unnecessary and gratuitous activity that has nothing to do with the seriousness of existence. In this case, the novelty and originality of the work is guaranteed by its own gratuity: the work does not respond to any need, nor has it any meaning in addition to the exercise of the faculties that it puts in motion and that otherwise would remain inactive. Here, the maximum freedom and gratuity of art is accompanied by the maximum ontological meaninglessness. By contrast, Hegel’s aesthetics recognizes the irreplaceable and peculiar position of art within the life of Spirit, and yet precisely to the extent that it assigns such an important position to art, this theory takes away any true originality from it and from all the spiritual activities of man. The ontological bearing of art is recognized and guaranteed only within a dialectical scheme that grounds its “necessity,” that is to say, its derivability, wiping out its novelty.

This alternative between an aesthetic of play and an aesthetic of derivability of art, which here is merely schematized for the sake of clarity and brevity, is present in different shades and forms in all of eighteenth-century aesthetics. The revival of Kantianism, too, which in Europe accompanied the twilight of the great philosophical systems (idealism and positivism) during the first half of the twentieth century, does not substantially escape from this alternative. It merely reproposes Kant’s solution, emptied out of the ontological opening that somehow it still possessed in Kant. In fact, neo-Kantianism absorbs every exigency of ontological foundation by reducing art to the dimension of consciousness. While for Kant, once the aesthetic attitude has been identified as the transcendental possibility of the beautiful and of art, there still remains the problem of giving an ontological rooting to the genius, for neo-Kantianism such a problem no longer exists. The whole philosophy of art is reduced to the identification of its transcendental possibility, to the exhibition of the aesthetic dimension of consciousness.

Nevertheless, it is not only that in neo-Kantianism and in the many perspectives that are more or less connected with it the foundation of art amounts to a reduction to an attitude of consciousness. The whole dimension of consciousness is cognated on the model of knowledge and theory; therefore, both the moral sphere and, above all, aesthetics are defined only negatively on the basis of the model of knowledge. Neo-Kantianism dilutes the meaning of Kantian philosophy to its more strictly rationalist aspect of the enlightenment. The fundamental relation to Being remains that of knowledge; at the same time, Being continues to be thought above all as fully present “spectacle” (even though it is ordered by the a priori forms). In this framework, it is difficult to think positively of art’s relation to being, that is to say, to resolve the problem of art’s ontological foundation that Kant had indicated and left open in his doctrine of the genius.

In this framework, it seems to me that precisely the philosophy of existence, by virtue of its clearest ontological trajectory, offers the means for reproposing the question of art’s ontological foundation on a radically new ground. If these means are indeed available in Heidegger’s philosophy—as I believe they are—it is because he has revised from the ground up the question of truth and Being, which had remained largely unquestioned in neo-Kantianism and in all implicitly neo-Kantian attitudes, in spite of the Copernican revolution.

The necessity of recovering philosophically the ontological bearing of art, that is to say, its relation to Being, without at the same time sacrificing the originality and novelty of the work, did not grow in the realm of philosophy only. This is also the philosophical meaning that can be drawn from the manifestos and artistic revolutions of the avant-garde of the twentieth century. All the great artistic revolutions of the nineteenth century, ranging from expressionism to surrealism, from Dada to the poetics of engagement, arose to defend the fundamental meaning and importance of art for history and human existence. While philosophers believed they had resolved the problem of art by assigning to it an a priori structure that legitimated it, thus determining its position of subordination among the forms of the life of Spirit, poets and the artists rebelled against this very violence of reason and refused to be resolved, classified, accounted for, and pigeonholed in it. In this sense, they more or less explicitly defended the right to recognize the deeper relation between art and existence, history and Being.

If we consider that every grounding of art reduces it to the aesthetic dimension of consciousness, opposing it to knowledge insofar as it has nothing to do with the distinction between true and false, and to morality insofar as it has nothing to do with the distinction between good and evil, we realize that the characteristics of aesthetics ultimately coincide with those that Kierkegaard attributed to the aesthetic stage of existence. In other words, the aesthetic condition becomes synonymous with disengagement, so that it is possible to say that the artistic revolutions of our century rebelled against the aestheticism that was latent in every theory that has foregone the need to address the question of art’s ontological foundation.

In this framework, the need for an ontological foundation of art grew up not only in philosophy but also in the concrete experiences of the artists. The expression “ontological foundation,” which I have left undefined so far, signifies every attempt to recognize art’s relation to being; that is to say, art’s relationship not only to man but to what transcends consciousness and the human being, whose possibility it authentically grounds.

This attempt to raise the question of art’s relation to being necessarily presupposes as given a description of art and aesthetic experience, so that one may generally know what has to be recognized as having a relationship with Being. I call such a description phenomenological aesthetics.

The “phenomenological aesthetic” to which I shall refer—even though it cannot by any means be reduced to a phenomenological description of the “fact” of art, insofar as it contains ontological disclosures that can be understood fully only at the level of ontology, at least in the interpretation of that I am proposing—is the theory of formativity that Luigi Pareyson worked out in his Aesthetics, published in 1954, and further elaborated in other essays in the following years.³

Two reasons justify my choice: Pareyson’s specific sensibility for the most lively exigencies present in contemporary aesthetics, to which he intends to give a systematic response, makes these exigencies his own in his aesthetics, so that by starting out with his aesthetics we have to take account of the exigencies of contemporary aesthetics. Furthermore, Pareyson’s aesthetic reflection, which took shape in the context of ontological existentialism, presents the maximum openness for the argument I am elaborating here.

The theory of formativity takes the question of art back to its roots. It poses once again the question of the artwork with respect to the enigmatic fact of its existence. The failure of all the attempts to find a canon of the beautiful, to which the whole history of art bears witness, signifies that the artwork is so precisely insofar as it does not allow itself to be reduced to laws that precede or transcend it, on the basis of which it could be evaluated, accounted for, or condemned. The inexplicability of art as a fact is, therefore, truly inexplicable. It is not a provisional character as numerous theories have argued; inexplicability is the definitive and constitutive aspect of works of art as such.

Nevertheless, although the work of art is radically new, it is not arbitrary. In other words, in the subjective experience of art we experience, combined with its novelty, a rigorous lawfulness (legalità). What drives us to say that a work is beautiful is not only or principally the fact that it is original but more radically that, in its wholeness, it is rigorously governed by a law. In particular, we assume we have truly “appropriated” the work once we have grasped the law giving order to its structure, so that each part appears in its necessary links to the whole and the whole is revealed in each of its parts. After all, this is the characteristic of aesthetic experience to which the formalist school, whose influence is large in the aesthetics of the twentieth century, has made us particularly sensitive.

Pareyson draws the fundamental concept of his aesthetics, that is, the theory of formativity, from his reflection on the novelty and underivability of the work of art and on its rigorous lawful character. To the extent it is radically new, and insofar as it rigorously responds to an intimate and constitutive law, the artwork reveals itself as the outcome of a formative process. Pareyson defines the act of forming as a doing that, in doing, invents a new way of doing. There is forming in all human activities. Even when it is a matter of applying the law to a specific situation, it is necessary to invent the mode of such an application, that is to say, the individual rule for the operation to be carried out. In the case of artistic production, however, invention has a much more radical meaning. Here it is not only a matter of inventing the specific mode of applying a general law that is always already given; with the specific rule of operation one must invent the law, too. In fact, the law is nothing other than the single rule of operation. All this amounts to saying that the artwork is truly new and does not respond to any pregiven laws. The exigency, to which the work responds, and which it satisfies, is instituted by the work.

The radical novelty of the work of art seems to be sufficiently broad and universally accepted to form the basis of the argument (at least as a fact: the problem arises when one has to put an artwork in relation to its law and when one has to disclose the meaning of this relation) to the extent that as aesthetics and criticism successfully liberate themselves from the residues of the Hegelian mindset, the absolute novelty of the work remains a fundamental aspect. Indeed, even where the critics give a less radical interpretation of the work, the absolute novelty of the work remains a fundamental feature. Consider, for example, Roland Barthes—the representative of the nouvelle critique—for whom the work is “retirée de toute situation.”⁴ We can recognize this situation, according to Barthes, thanks to the polyvalent language of the work, which does not allow itself to be overcome by or reduced to contingent situations, to which the work would refer as its own world and its own explanation. Whatever Barthes’s use of the idea of the novel character of the work, note here is that the nouvelle critique has once again discovered the fact of art’s radical novelty above and beyond the facile historicist schemes. This is precisely what philosophy has to account for and take as seriously as possible.

Once we acknowledge that the work is radically new and that it is rigorously ruled by a law, which becomes visible in the concrete experiences of the artists who make corrections, changes, adaptations, and remaking under the guidance of the principle of judgment, it remains to be seen how a law that is born with the work could be held to be the true criterion for judging the same work. If, in fact, the law identifies itself completely with the work, it responds to its own law precisely insofar as there is work. Hence, it is declared to be beautiful and valid. Now, to explain how the law of the work can serve as a guide and criterion for discriminating between what is good and what has failed in the course of the process of production, we need to concede that somehow the law transcends the process. It is possible to say that the law is invented insofar as it is created, but it is also invented in the other sense of the word, insofar as it is discovered as such. In other words, it imposes itself not only on the reader once the work is accomplished, but also over the author while he is producing the work. Only in this sense can it be rightly called a law. Pareyson’s theory illustrates this transcendence by distinguishing within the work the forming form, that is, the law that guides the process and transcends it, and the formed form, that is, the work once it has been produced concretely. Only if one acknowledges this distinction is it possible to explain why the work, once it is made, can be judged without referring to preexistent needs or laws. Even in the work that is made and presented to the reader there remains a certain transcendence of the forming form over the formed form. The reader will judge the work as successful—that is, beautiful—if, after comparing these two terms, he sees that the work is truly what it wanted to be and what it should have been. The work is, then, the bearer of a law that is born with it; at the same time, this law transcends and judges the work.

In my view, the most noteworthy contribution of Pareyson’s theory of formativity to the philosophical clarification of the meaning of the work of art and art’s ontological foundation lies precisely in his idea that the law of the work transcends the process of production, the conscious will of the artist and the work insofar as it is formed. None of the numerous theories of the objectivity of art has ever given such a radical description of this phenomenon, without at the same time taking leave of the concrete terrain of artistic experience. Heidegger’s theory of poetry as gift (Dichtung as Geschenk), elaborated in the final pages of the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” suspends in a mythical aura the relationship between freedom and law. Poetry, says Heidegger, is Stiftung, foundation of the framework of man’s historical experience insofar as it also Gründung, the collocation of the world on its own foundation, a foundation it does not create but finds and merely announces to men. It is the poet’s gift to humanity because, more radically, it is the gift that the poet himself receives.

The distinction between forming form and formed form, which took shape in a thought that was attentive to the concrete elements of artistic experience, may well be taken as a less mythical and more phenomenologically faithful formulation of the idea of poetry as gift.

However, aesthetic discourse cannot stop here once it has identified the phenomenon of art and the basic structures of this type of experience. The transcendence of the law over the work is an indication that in the work of art there is something more at work than the simple activity of the artist. Only in a neo-Kantian perspective could one argue that the novelty and absolute legality of the work are grounded once one has discovered a human activity that has the characteristic of producing something new. Instead, as Pareyson underscores in his Aesthetics and more generally in other philosophical works,⁵ the dialectic of receptivity and activity explicitly excludes that what is born into art might be reduced to the artist’s activity. Let me now briefly attempt to work out this argument in order to point in the direction of an explicit ontology of art.

If among the human activities there is one whose characteristic it is to produce radical novelties like works of art, we need to raise the following questions: How is the absolute novelty of which aesthetics speaks possible? In regard to the question thus formulated, the larger part of aesthetics has chosen either the way of transcendental justification (reducing art to an aesthetic dimension or direction of consciousness) or a way that I would call demystification; in other words, this school of thought has ultimately conceded that the novelty of the work is not truly as absolute as it appeared at first, for it can and should be explained with respect to the historical conditions, psychological structures, and intimate history of the language to which it belongs.

There is a third way that is neither satisfied with the—ultimately tautological—transcendental justification nor ready to liquidate the existence of the problem by conceding that the novelty is not truly so. The third way lies in deepening the idea of the work’s novelty.

First of all, the genuine novelty of the work of art becomes visible insofar as it does not allow itself to be set into the world as it is. Nowadays, there is an exponential growth of expedients in contemporary figurative art—as in op-art, for example—which are new only in the sense in which an expedient can be new; these can be easily positioned in the existing order things, immediately becoming fashionable insofar as they respond to the specific needs of the market and of public sensibility. It is certainly not these works that present themselves as “retirée de toute situation”; their novelty is nothing other than a variation that is internal to the situation and that can be easily led back to it.

If we want a more radical description of the work’s absolute novelty, we shall have to seek it in some of the decisive pages of Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which I mentioned earlier. In that essay, the work’s novelty is linked to the force by which it suspends our habitual relationships with the world or with the matter-of-fact-ness of the world in which we are accustomed to live. It is not only that the work does not allow itself to be situated as an object next to other objects of our experience; by virtue of its refusal, the work somehow puts our own world into crisis. If you will, by refusing to be situated into our world, the work reveals its insubstantiality and demands to be renewed. The encounter with works of art is never the encounter with another thing in the world; what one encounters is another perspective on the world entering into dialogue with our own. The work, as Mikel Dufrenne beautifully puts it, is a “quasi-sujet” (almost a subject).⁶ To put it better: insofar as art is a perspective on the world in its totality, the work has a decisively personal character.

Nonetheless, it is necessary not to misunderstand the idea of the work as having a perspective on the world as a Weltanschauung. The concepts of perspective and Weltanschauung generally presuppose the idea of our world as the massive totality of the given, around which Weltanschauungen come and go just as Aristotelian accidents change the world without changing its substance. Now, when we speak of the work as a radically new disclosure on the world, we cannot reduce it to the purely accidental appearance of a new “world-vision.” The fact is that the world is not the totality of the given, as Heidegger’s analytic of Being and Time has shown once and for all. The world constitutes itself only in the openness instituted by Dasein, that is, by man. In their fluctuations these perspectives, which are the historically variable openings of Dasein, have to do with the very substantiality of the world, for the world is only in the perspectives. So the foundation of a new perspective on the world constitutes the real foundation of a new world, of a new comprehensive order within which things become visible, coming into being—and within which they are. So in employing this radical concept of world, we see that the work of art really constitutes the foundation of a new world; it cannot be set into the world because in its comprehensive totality it consists in a different perspective on the world.

In this sense, the novelty of the work of art may be called originality. The aesthetic discourse that wants to take seriously the work’s novelty, in its underivability from the world as it is, and that wants to remain faithful to this premise, ultimately discovers that the aesthetic condition by virtue of which art is reduced completely to originality. In other words, the work of art is truly a work of art—beautiful and aesthetically valid—only to the extent that it constitutes an origin, an opening of a world. There is no other idea of the beautiful except that which reduces the beautiful to the originating and founding force of the work.

Having formulated this thesis so radically, we have to deal with a number of issues that follow from it and that may lead to an ontological foundation of art. Such a foundation would show how all the characteristics of aesthetic experience ascertained by phenomenological inquiry must be led back to the fact that the work of art is the origin of a world. Hence, it is really a matter of translating more radically aesthetics into phenomenology of art.

Here I shall discuss only the point of departure and the general principle for a more extensive argument, which should link beauty to the originality of the work. According to the theory of formativity I have discussed, the beautiful is resolved in the idea of success (riuscita). In other words, the work is declared beautiful when one discovers that it corresponds to its own law: it has succeeded in being what it wanted to be. According to this view, even excluding canons that are external to the work, the beautiful may be recognized on the basis of a rigorous judgment that has its criterion in the work. Now, what has the beautiful (as success) to do with originality? This point is especially important because all the specific features of aesthetics revolve around the concept of the beautiful.

The links between beauty as success and beauty as originality become visible only if the idea of success is not abstractly given a formal, geometric meaning. If the work truly succeeds to the extent that it corresponds perfectly to its own law, then this law is not an abstract prescription regarding its own purely physical structure. On the contrary, as Pareyson rightly shows, the law that rules the work arises out of the concreteness of the spiritual process, involving the whole personality of the artist. This personality constitutes the true content of the artwork. If the law of the work is such a spiritually rich and profound principle, it may truly found a world, rather than exclusively explaining the abstract perfection of the object. If the correspondence of the work to its own law is understood as a pure and simple perfection of the object, it is not clear how aesthetics could evade the view of art as play, hence the aestheticism of those who take art to be the production of perfect but useless machines. Conversely, if the transcendence of the law over the work is genuine—in the sense that insofar as it is a product, the work makes itself adequate to the law without ever exhausting it and therefore constitutes the first realization of such a law—the law has founding force with respect to the work and to the world. The work corresponds to its own law—that is, it is a success—not so much because, by virtue of its mere physical existence, it realizes and exhausts it completely in itself; rather, it represents, as it were, the first entity of the new world founded by the work, the entity around which all other beings in the world will be eventually situated, in accordance with the law instituted by the work. The instituting force (forza istituente) of the work may be explained by assuming that the work as product does not exhaust the law that it bears in itself and lets happen in the world.

It seems clear that the success cannot be conceived in terms of an exhaustive realization of the law by work, otherwise the work would be definitively closed; it would no longer open itself to reading and interpretation. The theory of formativity has shown how the distinction between forming form and formed form is necessary to justify the historicity and multiplicity of interpretation. This means, translated ontologically, that only the radical transcendence of the law over the work as product makes work an origin rather than a final point, an opening of history rather than its definitive closure.

The success of the work should be understood, then, as correspondence with a law that the work institutes but does not exhaust. It succeeds to the extent that it has a substantiality; that is to say, it truly announces itself as the bearer of a law that will reorganize the structures of the world. According to this view of the work as instituting event, the beautiful is to be measured not so much on the basis of an internal conflict between the work as product and its law but by its demonstrative capacity to found a history.

By resolving beauty into the founding force of the event, we deny the “aestheticist” temptation that accompanies all the aesthetics of our century in their efforts to identify and delimit the field of art, to mark its differences from the other spiritual activities. In this view, the meaning of enjoyment of the work of art changes as well. To encounter a work of art, to enjoy it as such no longer means statically contemplating it in its perfect correspondence with itself. The whole Western philosophical tradition has accustomed us to conceiving contemplation on the model of visual experience—as immediacy, simple presence—and the pleasure procured by contemplation as a state of tranquillity that has reached a point of repose and accomplished satisfaction from which no ulterior desire or curiosity to know may distract one any longer.⁷ According to the view I am proposing here, such characterization of aesthetic contemplation should be denied. We truly encounter a successful-perfect object, its beauty, if the object is capable of generating movement rather than a place of repose and stillness. The work of art is beautiful insofar as it is a success. However, since the transcendence of the law remains at work in the work, its success can be ascertained only by moving away from the work toward the world that it has instituted. This is the sense in which I understand Heidegger’s statement to the effect that it is a matter of dwelling in (verweilen) the truth opened by the work,⁸ or as I would put it, of inhabiting the world founded by the work.

The only way in which the work of art can be genuinely evaluated is to see whether it really spurs a reconfiguration of our being-in-the-world. he criteria are that, at first, the work is successful in itself and then, in a second moment, it is also capable of reconfiguring our being-in-the-world because of its success. Its success depends entirely and exclusively on the work’s instituting and originating force, as Kandinsky suggestively stated in the essay “Der Wert eines Werkes der Koncreten Kunst”:⁹ to evaluate a work ultimately signifies measuring its prophetic dimension, its capacity to exhibit a world.

While this perspective leaves any aestheticist temptation behind, it may lead for the same reason to the resurgence of the question of the specificity of aesthetic experience, of its difference from other forms of experience. It is clear that the encounter with a work of art, thus understood, does not exclude but involves the intervention of the intellect or the will. In other words, to speak Kantian language against Kant, this encounter is neither atheoretical nor apractical. The world opened up by the work is a world of concepts and ways of looking at things that has to be recognized conceptually, before which regard we must take an ethical position. From the perspective of ontology, if we were to seek out a definition of aesthetic experience in terms of the faculties or, as in neo-Kantianism, of the different directions or dimensions of consciousness, this path would not lead to any viable outcome.

Nevertheless, based on the concept of originality it may be possible to distinguish between aesthetic condition and art, on the one hand, and the other forms of experience, on the other. Accordingly, any experience may be called aesthetic, which does not confine itself to articulating, developing, and changing our belonging to a given world but rather radically puts this world in its totality in question. To move within a world signifies elaborating theories that are always grounded on an initial evidence, that is to say, on the recognition of certain presuppositions that are the same ones on which the world is founded; this movement also consists in acting to satisfy certain needs that have become visible in a specific situation. In sum, it remains true that aesthetic experience is not “committed” to things, though this must be understood in a completely different sense than in the past. Every commitment, be it cognitive or practical, already involves moving within a specific historical opening, assuming its fundamental substantiality rather than putting it into question, developing, changing, improving, or worsening it from the inside out of the situation. Insofar as it is an encounter with an entirely other world, aesthetic experience has nothing, immediately, to say that would change or otherwise articulate the world to which we belong. Instead, it confines itself to a denial of this world in its totality by refusing to let itself be situated in it.

The links among art, aesthetic condition, and feeling, which have been ascertained at all times, are radically justified in this perspective. In fact, if feeling and, more generally, the sphere of affectivity is not merely a contingent connotation of our being-in the-world but rather determines (be-stimmt) being in its fundamental roots, it makes sense to say that aesthetic experience concerns the sphere of affectivity as initial opening onto the world.

Finally, I should tackle at least three more questions, above and beyond the developments that this approach may provide for addressing various aesthetic problems ranging from the process of production to interpretation, from criticism to the “naturally beautiful,” which here seems to acquire a greater meaning. First, what does reducing art to originality have to do with ontology, namely, with Being? Second, is this way of considering art truly adequate to the concrete experience of those who, like us, read and enjoy artistic products? Third, is it not the case that the theory I am putting forth here is merely a mythologizing of art, which assigns to art boundaries that are far too extensive, and whose bearing is too radical with respect to man’s historical experience?

Insofar as the links between the work as opening of a world and ontology are concerned, I shall refer to Heidegger’s notion of world: things exist to the extent that they come into the world; however, they come into the world only insofar as they arrange themselves within Dasein’s open perspective. Such perspective is not accidental in things but constitutive of their being. Being is never fully given as a presence that could be seen in different ways; on the contrary, being is the lighting of horizons, the realm in which things acquire their meaning, that is, receive Being. Now, any fact that concerns not only beings taken as fully present but the opening in which they come to visibility—that is, the world in its totality—is original and ontological. A new opening of the world, the birth of a new world as a new order within which beings acquire new meanings and relationships, is not an event that regards beings only; it regards the lighting itself, that is, Being. Inasmuch as it is the origin of the world, art is the happening of Being, an ontological event.

It is only in light of this idea of being that we can fully justify the novelty of art. If being were fully given as the metaphysical tradition always thought, the novelty of art would not be genuine. It would always be an accidental change within a situation that could never substantially change. Lavoisier’s law, according to which “nothing is created and nothing is destroyed,” is the rigorous formulation of the vision of being as simple presence, full of metaphysical meaning.

As the event of being, the art work re-presents the instituting moment of historical epochs, the inauguration of a certain order of things within which humanity lives and makes its choices. A second question arises at this point: Is it possible to apply this vision of art to our experience as readers and consumers of artistic products? In other words, it seems that the idea of the work as origin could be valid for the great, epochal masterpieces, such as the Bible and the Divine Comedy, rather than for the short compositions of chamber music, for paintings hanging on the hall of a house, or for short lyrics. In other words, it does not seem to hold for many of the things that we are accustomed to consider artworks.

This question can be solved only if we acknowledge that the aesthetic characters of what we might call minor artworks are analogues of true originality, which belongs instead to great art. This means that true aesthetic experience—the encounter with an event that founds a world and a history—is far more rare than we are accustomed to think. What we commonly take as aesthetic experience—the enjoyment of works that are not unquestionably epoch making or foundational like the examples just mentioned—retains, albeit transformed and decreased, the character of an encounter with the origin that constitutes the essence of the enjoyment of art.

An example of this can be seen precisely in the type of aesthetic experience that might seem also the farthest removed from authenticity, the experience of the “mass arts” of the mass media. I would say that the belongingness of the reader to the work, a belongingness that in its authentic form is typical of the experience of encountering great works of art, can be found also in the mass media, albeit mystified. A mystified form of aesthetic belongingness to the work is found also in the attitude of the public to James Bond, which takes him as the model for its own behavior, ranging from the manner of dressing to that of treating women to the more general way of relating toward life. Even though we can concede that it is a mystified form (but we should ascertain to what extent and why this is the case), an encounter with the movie character James Bond and its public represents an encounter with a world in which one must inhabit, attempting to live up to it in one’s experience.

Now, just as in the case of James Bond, we have an example of aesthetic experience as the experience of the origin in the form of the maximum distance away from authenticity, so all our aesthetic experiences can be arranged on a kind of scale of maximum or minimal nearness to authentic originality. What I wanted to highlight here was precisely the principle behind the solution to the problem: even though the aesthetic experience we habitually have never or rarely involves encountering originality in the sense described above, it is only by taking such an encounter as the model that we can explain it, even in its less genuine forms, because it always realizes this model more or less completely and faithfully.

The last question, not in terms of importance, is: Is the theory I am putting forth here an ontology of art or a mythology? In fact, one could think that my having assigned to art the character of opening and founding history is purely and simply a return to the idea of the poet possessed by the muse or inspired by the gods. On the contrary, it is clear that if the work truly has the meaning of founding a world, insofar as it is the event of being, it is necessary that the work not depend exclusively on the arbitrariness of the artist. It is not Being that is for man, rather man is available for Being. Indeed, the phenomenology from which we started off explicitly recognized that the law of the work is transcendent over the will and consciousness of the artist. The law of the work is both invented and discovered, created and found as mentioned above. The whole discourse I have developed so far has led us increasingly to highlight that the novelty of the work itself is inconceivable apart from its own lawfulness; the work is new only as the bearer of a law giving a new order to the world. Without the presence of this law, the novelty of the work is reduced to pure expediency, fortuitousness. The work founds inasmuch as it is, in turn, grounded; it is not the consciousness or will of the artist that is at work in art, even less the consciousness or historical situation of an epoch that might be expressed through the artist, but rather Being. Being as opening force institutes the realms and horizons within which a historical humanity unfolds its experience.

If you will, this is truly a mythology of art in the sense that in the light of it art no longer appears to be a “historical” fact that could be reduced and explained on the bases of the situation, the world, the same psychological structures from which it originates. However, this is precisely the point of departure, namely, the fact that the work is not in a situation, does not allow itself to be positioned and reduced to what it was beforehand. Now, if the recognition of the novelty of the work has any meaning, we must concede that something else is operating in the work apart from the artist and the historical world. To be sure, attributing the work’s novelty to the pure arbitrariness of the artist, besides the fact that it does not explain the character of the productive process (the very obedience of art to the law of the work), does not in any way guarantee such novelty; psychology teaches us that it is precisely what appears to be arbitrary that conceals a rigorous and well-defined determination. In sum, in order to authentically guarantee the novelty of the work it is necessary to recognize in the same lawfulness that is present within it, which transcends the work, the artist and the interpreters, the very presence of Being. Any other way of conceiving the novelty of the work “reduces” it in the sense that it leads it back to preexisting conditions, making of the work something derivable from what it already was.

It is here that aesthetics as ontology of art becomes philosophy of history. Having established the equivalence of aesthetic condition and originality, to pose the question of art signifies, more generally, to inquire into the possibility of novelty within history or, more simply, into the very possibility of history. Based on what I have argued so far, it may well be that the only way of guaranteeing this possibility is to recognize in human activity and in art in particular what I would call the “ontological dimension,” which means that in whatever he does, the human being expresses, that is, reveals and rearranges in always different ways, not only the world as it is, namely, the totality of inner and external conditions of human activity, but also, somehow, being present as an originating force.