Art’s Claim to Truth

2. G. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. J. R. Snyder (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1988); The Adventure of Difference, trans. C. P. Blamires and T. Harrison (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); Beyond Interpretation, trans. D. Webb (1994; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); Belief, trans. L. D’Isanto and D. Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); After Christianity, trans. L. D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); R. Rorty and G. Vattimo, The Future of Religion, ed. S. Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); J. D. Caputo and G. Vattimo, After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey. W. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

3. I should point out that the Italian Publisher Meltemi began, in the fall of 2007, to release the Complete Works of Vattimo, edited by Mario Cedrini, Alberto Martinengo, and S. Zabala.

4. G. Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Dialogue with Nietzsche is not only a collection of essays from the 1960s to the 1990s, as is this book, but also includes a book from 1967, Ipotesi su Nietzsche (Turin: Giappichelli, 1967).

5. G. Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law, ed. S. Zabala, trans. W. McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

6. R. Rorty and G. Vattimo, The Future of Religion, ed. S. Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

7. I am specifically referring to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), and Alfredo Jaar’s photographs in Let There Be Light: The Rwanda Project, 1994–1998 (New York: Actar, 1998).

8. A. C. Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 18.

9. See chapter 3, page 33.

10. An introduction to the history and meaning of weak thought can be found in my introduction to Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo, ed. S. Zabala (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 3–34.

11. M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 22–23.

12. “Thrownness” refers to the fact that Dasein always finds itself already in a certain spiritual and material, historically conditioned environment; hence, in the world, in which the space of possibilities is always historically limited. It represents the phenomenon of the past as having-been.

13. Dasein’s “fallenness” characterizes its existence in the midst of beings that are both Dasein and not Dasein.

14. Existence means that Dasein is potentiality-for-being, “Seinkönnen”; it projects its being upon various possibilities, especially the phenomenon of the future.

15. Heidegger, Being and Time, 16.

16. This is the title of an essay by Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” (1938), in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 57–85.

17. See A. C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).

18. See chapter 6, page 95.

19. For a complete historical account of the different epochs of hermeneutics, see Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics (1991), trans. J. Weinsheimer, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); G. L. Bruns, Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); and David Jasper, A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004).

20. Evidence that hermeneutics has become the common language of contemporary philosophy can be found in G. Vattimo, “The Age of Interpretation,” in The Future of Religion, ed. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 43–54; and G. Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation (1994), trans. D. Webb (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); and also in the recent Diccionario de Hermenéutica, ed. A. Ortiz-Osés and P. Lanceros, Bilbao, Universidad de Deusto, 2006. Recent series dedicated to hermeneutics thought, such as Studies in Hermeneutics, ed. Joel Weinsheimer (Yale University Press); Hermeneutics: Studies in the History of Religions (SUNY Press); Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics (Mercer University Press), The Interpretations Series (Melbourne University Publishing), and Hermeneusis (Anthropos Editorial), make up a very large library publishing not only the books of Heidegger, Pareyson, and Gadamer, but also contemporary authors such as J. Grondin, K. Eden, J. Sallis, J. Risser, and others.

21. A fine study on the historical grounding of modern hermeneutics is Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).

22. M. Heidegger, On the Way to Language (1959), trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 32.

23. Luigi Pareyson, Verità e interpretazione (1971; Milan: Mursia, 1985), 53.

24. Anticipating both Gadamer and Paul Ricouer, whose hermeneutic theses were exposed in the early 1960s, Pareyson had, in the early 1950s, already developed his theory of interpretation. His complete works are currently being published in twenty volumes by Mursia Publisher of Milan and are edited by Giuseppe Riconda, Giovanni Ferretti, Claudio Ciancio, and Francesco Tomatis. Robert Valgenti is translating volume 15 of Pareyson’s complete works, Truth and Interpretation, for SUNY Press (forthcoming) and has published “The Primacy of Interpretation in Luigi Pareyson’s Hermeneutics of Common Sense,” Philosophy Today 49, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 333–41. Silvia Benso is currently translating Pareyson’s later work, Dostoevsky, also for SUNY Press (forthcoming). Existing translations of Pareyson’s work are limited to “The Unity of Philosophy,” Cross Currents 4, no. 1 (Fall 1953): 57–69; and “Pointless Suffering in the Brothers Karamazov,” Cross Currents 37, nos. 2–3 (Summer/Fall 1987): 271–86. See also H. T. Bredin, “The Aesthetics of Luigi Pareyson,” The British Journal of Aesthetics (1966): 193–202; M. E. Brown, “On Luigi Pareyson’s ‘L’estetica di Kant,’” Journal of Art and Art Criticism (1971): 403–10.

25. Luigi Pareyson, Esistenza e interpretazione (1950; Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1985), 218.

26. H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), 164.

27. L. Pareyson, Estetica. Teoria della formatività (1950; Milan: Bompiani, 1988), 59.

28. Information on the production of the pilot and film can be found in http://www.lynchnet.com/mdrive.

29. See chapter 5, page 88.

30. M. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–36), in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 1–56.

31. H.-G. Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, ed. Richard Palmer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 55.

32. See chapter 9, page 143.

33. See chapter 7, page 121.

34. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 290.

35. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 291.

36. See chapter 11, page 162.

37. See chapter 11, page 164.

38. See chapter 11, page 164.

39. See chapter 10, page 158.

1. J. Warry, Greek Aesthetic Theory (London: Methuen, 1963); E. Grassi, Die Theorie des Schönen in der Antike (Cologne: Dumont, 1962); W. Perpeet, Antike Aestetik, (Freiburg: Alber, 1961).

2. For example, see Warry, Greek Aesthetic Theory, 84.

3. Warry, Greek Aesthetic Theory, 18–20.

4. Warry, Greek Aesthetic Theory, 80.

5. Warry, Greek Aesthetic Theory, 150.

6. Warry, Greek Aesthetic Theory, 107.

7. However, Warry reaches this concept with a bit of confusion. See Greek Aesthetic Theory, 108–9.

8. Warry, Greek Aesthetic Theory, 123.

9. Grassi, Die Theorie des Schönen, 187–266.

10. Grassi, Die Theorie des Schönen, 93.

11. Grassi, Die Theorie des Schönen, 94.

12. Grassi, Die Theorie des Schönen, 143.

13. See for example for the author says in Die Theorie des Schönen, 148.

14. Perpeet, Antike Aesthetik, 112 n. 1.

15. Perpeet, Antike Aesthetik, 66–67.

16. Perpeet, Antike Aesthetik, 103.

17. Perpeet, Antike Aesthetik, 37.

1. Though no less conclusively, since every introduction always implies the reprise of the general meaning of an argument.

2. For a more detailed interpretation of Heidegger’s thought, I refer to my book Essere: storia e linguaggio in Heidegger (Turin: Marietti, 1963). The theses I am arguing here are more clearly understandable in light of my reading of Heidegger.

3. Heidegger theorized the epochal character of Being in the essay “Der Spruch des Anaximanders,” published in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 950), especially pp. 310 ff.; Off the Beaten Track, trans. Kenneth Haynes and Julian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

4. The human being has a central role in the illumination of the horizon within which things come to being: this role is indicated by the word Dasein (Being-There), which Heidegger employs in Being and Time to refer philosophically to the human being; it is further clarified in the interpretation of the “there” of Being-There that Heidegger puts forth in the Letter on Humanism Über den Humanismus [Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1946; 1949]). It is in and through the human being that the epochs of Being—the historical openings within which beings appear—are instituted.

5. I am using the term “metaphysics” in the sense Heidegger assigns to it beginning from the Introduction to Metaphysics (Einführung in die Metaphysik [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1953]), a lecture course taught in 1935, re-elaborated and published in 1953; An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959–1987) to identify a type of thinking that is oblivious to the ontological difference and thus conceives Being on the model of beings.

6. From this perspective, every ontological proof of the existence of God that considers God as first cause, supreme entity, and so on falls into the purview of metaphysics and of ontic thought. In this respect, Heidegger speaks of the onto-theo-logical character of metaphysics in Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957); Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).

7. This is the conclusion by many of Heidegger’s essays on the development of metaphysics in its final phase, which for him is emblematically represented by Nietzsche and his concept of the will to power. On this, Heidegger’s most complete discussion is found in Nietzsche, 2 vols. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961); Nietzsche (San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1979).

8. See especially Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), which still represents a relatively orthodox phase of his thought.

9. See especially Lukacs, Geschichte und KlassenBewusstsein (Neuwied: Literatur Verlag, 1922); History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), which provides the basis for his later development, even though Lukacs rejected it afterward.

10. When this book was originally written only two volumes of Lukacs’s Heidelberger Ästhetik (1916-1918) (Darmstadt: Luchterhand) had been published.

11. This is testified to, at the very least, by Jean Paul Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960); Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sherida-Smith (London: Verso, 1991).

12. For a scholarly review of neo-Kantian aesthetics, and more generally for the presence of neo-Kantian thematics in subjectivist philosophies, see G. Woland, “Ueber Recht und Grenzen einer Subjektstheoretischen Aesthetik,” Jahrbuch u. allg. Kunstwissenschaft 9 (1964): 28–48. For a more theoretical discussion, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Zur Fragwürdigkeit des aestetischen Bewusstseins” (On the questionableness of aesthetic consciousness), Rivista di Estetica 3 (1958): 347–83.

13. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

14. Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, 112.

15. This direction is quite typical of the Italian school of phenomenology. On the interpretation of Husserl’s Krisis, see Enzo Paci, Funzioni delle scienze e significato dell’uomo (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1963); Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972).

16. The conception of being as Lebenswelt, and as living background at work within the history of culture as a life that continuously renews the forms, is to be found in the works of M. Merleau-Ponty (e.g. Phénoménologie de la perception [Paris: Gallimard, 1945]); Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). A substantial development of the notion of being in the later work of Merleau-Ponty is testified to by his posthumous work Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University Press, 1968) and especially by the notes on the question of truth, which are published in appendix to the volume, where some of Heidegger’s themes are reexamined.

17. See Mikel Dufrenne, Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953); Le poétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); Jalons (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966). On Dufrenne, see G. Morburgo Tagliabue, L’esthétique contemporaine (Milan: Marzorati, 1960), and H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, vol. 2 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), 579–85.

18. See Ugo Spirito, Critica dell’estetica (Florence: Sansoni, 1964), and A. Plebe, Processo all’estetica (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1959).

19. See, above all, Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, 7, and the first part of Was Heisst Denken (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1954); What Is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).

20. Heidegger explicitly theorizes silence in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfulligen: Neske, 1952), 152; On the Way to Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

21. True, in paragraph 44b of Being and Time Heidegger speaks of violently “wresting” or tearing truth from beings, in the sense that it is necessary to leave out of the condition of “falleness” and inauthenticity in which thought is always already thrown. Nevertheless, it should be noted that in the later works, inauthenticity is increasingly linked, historically, to the event of metaphysics. Hence, metaphysics belongs to the epochal character of Being, too. One can no longer violently extract truth from inauthenticity as Being and Time argued, remaining bound to an essentialist vision of Being and truth.

22. For an integral reading of the art phenomenon, see Luciano Anceschi, “Che cos’è l’arte,” Rivista di Estetica 2 (1962): 161–85; Fenomenologia della critica (Bologna: Marzorati, 1966).

23. A discussion of the ontological and ulterior character of philosophical thought is given by Luigi Pareyson, “Pensiero espressivo e pensiero rivelativo,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 2: 177–90; and “Elogio della filosofia,” Le conferenze della Associazione Culturale italiana 2 (1966–67): 43–58. On the ontological bearing of art, see also Pareyson, “Potere e responsabilità dell’artista,” in Teoria dell’arte (Milan: Marzorati, 1965).

24. Here we should recall the famous passage from the Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, where he lays the basis for an authentic revision of the metaphysical notion of possibility, beginning as he always does with the etymology of the word (7–8?). There he shows that the possible is truly possible only if the relation between Being and beings is no longer conceived in terms of the foundation (which, instead, is typical of every thought that forgets the ontological difference), but in terms of a mögen that consists in the gift of “essence.”

1. On dodecaphony and its characteristic as an impure technical revolution, see the interpretations of T. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1973) and T. Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrien Leverkün (1924; New York: Knopf, 1965). See also the material published in A. Plebe, La Dodecafonia (Bari: Einaudi, 1962); R. Vlad, Modernità e tradizione nella musica contemporanea (Turin: Einaudi, 1955), 185 ff; L. Rognoni, Espressionismo e dodecafonia (Turin: Einaudi, 1954); Rognoni, Fenomenologia della musica radicale (Bari: Garzanti, 1966); and the essays, translated into Italian, by Anton Webern, Verso la nuova musica (Milan: Bompiani, 1963) (The Path Toward the New Music, trans. Willi Reich [Bryn Mawr, Penn.: T. Presser, 1963]).

2. Luigi Pareyson has argued that Hegel’s philosophy is characterized by ambiguity (on the basis of which one can understand the subsequent developments of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy). See Luigi Pareyson, Esistenza e persona, 3rd ed. (Turin: Taylor, 1966); see also the historical reconstructions of the question in the first edition of 1950, eliminated in subsequent editions.

3. Here I am not going to address the question whether it can be said that art is language and that the systems of signs on which artists work are precisely symbolic or, as Luigi Pareyson argues, that the they are not “matter” of art (see Estetica. Teoria della formatività, 2nd ed. [Bologna: Zanichelli, 1960], 28 ff). This is even more the case since this concept of matter entails that what the artist works on is laden with a history, involves internal rules of use and manipulation, and encloses given symbolic systems that the artist takes up into his work, to the extent that he adopts that matter. In this sense, too, one can speak of “languages” of art for the theory of formativity. A decisive objection against the “linguisticality” of art has been recently leveled by Mikel Dufrenne, “L’art est-il langage?” Revue d’Esthétique 19, no. 1 (January–March 1966): 1–42. Dufrenne especially argues that the discourse of art is not “informative” but “expressive,” and thus expresses precisely through the very presence of the work in its own physical reality rather than referring somehow to a meaning. Furthermore, and for the same reasons, the artist is such not insofar as he observes the rules of a given grammar, but rather in that he violates them, creating the work. One could object to the last argument that the work constitutes a significant alteration within the context of a code, and therefore presupposes, uses it at least as a background.

4. On the links between art and play in Spencer, see, for example, the Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 3rd ed. (New York: Appleton, 1897), 627. On Spencer, see also G. Morpurgo Tagliabue, L’esthéthique contemporaine (Milan: Marzorati, 1960), 7. The history of the concept of play in Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics has been nicely placed in relation with the entire development of aesthetics between the Enlightenment and romanticism by V. E. Alfieri, “L’estetica dall’Illuminismo al Romanticismo fuori d’Italia,” Momenti e problemi di storia dell’estetica, vol. 2 (Milan: Marzorati, 1959), 577–783.

5. See Tagliabue, L’esthéthique contemporaine, 577–783.

6. On neo-Kantian aesthetics, I refer to G. Wolandt, “Über Recht and Grenzen einer Subjektstheoretischen Aesthetik” Jahrbuch u. allg. Kunstwissenshaft 9 (1964): 28–48, and to the large bibliography published there.

7. For such an interpretation of pictorial impressionism, I refer to G. C. Argan, Salvezza e caduta nell’arte moderna (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1964), especially 16 ff; however, Argan does not consider impressionism a traditional poetics as I believe one should when considering the programs with respect to figurative and representational reality. Instead, Argan sees impressionism as the first pictorial poetics that fully realizes the spirit of modern humanism. On the “realism” of the impressionists, in the specific meaning alluded to here, see also W. Hofmann, Grundlagen der Modernen Kunst (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1966), 181 ff; M. de Micheli, Le avanguardie artistiche del novecento, 2d ed. (Milan: Schwarz, 1966), 200; see the anthology, too, by W. Hess, Dokumente zum Verständnis der modernen Malerei (Stuttgart: Rowohlt, 1956). On impressionism and expressionism in relation to poetry in German scholarship, see B. Markwardt, Geschichte der deutschen Poetik, vol. 5 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967), 367–461.

8. On cubism, in addition to the already cited volume by Argan, see especially M. De Micheli, Le avanguardie artistiche del novecento, 213 ff; on Picasso and his permanent links to the objectivity of the world, see especially 226 ff. See also the various documents gathered by de Micheli in the second part of his book. We have of Picasso the Scritti, in Italian, edited by De Micheli (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1964). A detailed exposition of cubist poetics in its various stages of development is given in C. Gray, Cubist Aesthetic Theories (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), which pays attention to the philosophical background of the movement, too. A philosophical interpretation of pictorial cubism, which is not in disagreement with the thesis I am putting forth here, is proposed in Jan M. Broekman, “Maleirei als Reflexion. Prolegomena zu einer Philosophie des Kubismus,” Jahrbuch f’aesth. U. allg. Kunstwissenchaft 10 (1965): 35–64. Broekmann broadens the concept to include numerous artistic phenomena ranging from poetry to cinema, and reconstructs broad correspondences with the philosophy of the time, perhaps ending up ultimately with a very vague idea.

9. Futurist poetics has been documented in M. Drudi Gambillo and T. Fiori, eds., Archivi del futurismo (Rome: De Luca, 1958). Futurism’s debts to the preceding art have been examined in G. Ballo, Preistoria del futurismo (Milan: Maestri, 1960). See also M. De Micheli, Le avanguardie artistiche del novecento; and W. Hofmann, Grundlagen der modernen Kunst, 225–304.

10. See Picasso, Scritti, 5 and 12, for example.

11. See G. Delfel, L’esthétique de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris, 1951) with a preface by E. Souriau; on his relationship with Poe, see 46 ff. On Baudelaire, see H. Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956), 27 ff; The Structure of Modern Poetry (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974).

12. On Valéry, see two essays by Luigi Pareyson, “Le regole secondo Valéry,” Rivista di Estetica 2 (1962): 229–59; and “Suono e senso secondo Valéry,” Rivista di Estetica 1 (1966): 56–98. Furthermore, see W. N. Ince, The Poetic Theory of Paul Valéry: Inspiration and Technique (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1961).

13. This problem is posed more vehemently by the concrete products of surrealist and Dada art than it is by theoretical perspectives. The scandal triggered by pictorial and poetic works by surrealists and Dadaists is not merely the temporary scandal characteristic of every new language; these works radically refuse traditional forms of aesthetic contemplation. On surrealism, see: A. Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme (Paris: J. J. Pauvert, 1962); M. Nadeau, Histoire du Surréalisme (Paris: Table Ronde, 1964); P. Waldberg, Der Surrealismus (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1965); and moreover, M. De Micheli, Le Avanguardie artistiche del novecento; W. Hofmann, Grundlagen der modernen Kunst (Munich: Haus der Kunst), 397. On Dada, in addition to the general texts cited above, see T. Tzara, I manifesti del dadaismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1964); H. Richter, Dada. Kunst und Antikunst (Cologne: Dumont Schauberg, 1964) (Dada: Art and Anti-Art [New York: Abrams, 1970]); and H. Hülsenbeck, Dada. Eine Literarische Dokumentation (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964). Philosophical interpretations of surrealism are given by F. Alquié, Philosophie du surréalisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1955) (Philosophy of Surrealism [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975]); A. del Noce, “Interpretazione filosofica del surrealismo,” Riv. Di est 1 (1965): 22–54; and the essays by E. Castelli, F. Alquié, E. Zolla, J. Brun, M. Dufrenne, R. Giorgi, and M. M. Olivetti gathered in Archivio di filosofia 3 (1965), “Surrealismo e simbolismo.”

14. See E. Zolla, in Archivio di filosofia 3:28. Only someone claiming to contemplate Duchamps’s Fontaine (which is actually just a common igenic object) with the proper attitude of enjoyment of traditional art could be diagnosed with the illness of copro-filia, as Zolla does in the cited essay.

15. For example, Duchamp: see H. Richter, Dada, 92.

16. All the general works cited above contain large sections on expressionism. For the texts, see the essential anthology edited by P. Pörtner, Literatur-Revolution, 1910–1925, vol. 1, Zur Aesthetik un Poetik (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1960), vol. 2, Zur Begriffsbestimmung der “ismen” (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1961). More oriented toward literary expressionism is the anthology edited by H. Friedmann and O. Mann, Expressionismus. Gestalten einer literarischen Bewegung (Heidelberg: Wolfgand Scheunemann, 1956). For expressionist poetry, see the newly published edition of the classical anthology, and the new introduction by K. Pinthus, Menschheitsdämmerung. Ein dokument des Expressionsmus (Berlin, 1920; Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1959). For a recent account of expressionist art and poetics, see L. Mittner, L’espressionismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1965), which contains an appendix on “L’espressionismo nella critica di oggi,” 133–44, to which I refer for a broader bibliography. For this, see also R. Brinkmann, Expressionismus. Forschungsprobleme, 1952–60 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1961); and L. Mitnner, ed., Il bilancio dell’espressionismo, with essays by L. Mittner and V. Pandolfi, L. Rognoni, P. Bucarelli, G. C. Argan, and L. Chiarini (Florence: Vallecchi, 1965).

17. On this point, see the introduction by P. Chiarini in Caos e geometria (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1970) and that of O. Mann in Brinkmann, Expressionismus. Of the numerous texts available, I will mention only Y. Goll, “The Appell an die Kunst,” in Literatur-Revolution, ed. P. Pörtner, vol. 1 (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1960), 144–45.

18. Gegen, “Lyrik,” in Literatur-Revolution, ed. P. Pörtner, vol. 2 (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1961), 218–20.

19. G. Benn, “Die Dichtung der neuen Generation,” in Literatur-Revolution, ed. P. Pörtner, vol. 2 (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1961), 241–45.

20. W. Kandinsky, Essays über Kunst und Künstler (Stuttgart, 1955), in Complete Writings on Art, vol. 2 (1922–1943) (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 215.

21. Kandinsky, Essays, 214.

22. Kandinsky, Essays, 233–34.

23. W. Kandinsky, “Every Spiritual Epoch,” in Complete Writings on Art, vol. 2 (1922–1943) (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 842.

24. W. Kandinsky, Essays, 232.

25. See Argan, W. Gropius e la Bauhaus (Turin, 1951); in addition to his essays published in Progetto e destino (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1965), which examines the question of architecture in the context of the art of our century. On the relationship between architecture and the avant-gardes of our century, it is useful to look at the documents collected in U. Conrads, Programme und Manifeste zur Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Bertelsmann, 1964) (Programs and Manifestoes on Twentieth-Century Architecture [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970]). Theoretical writings by Gropius are translated into Italian: Architettura integrata (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1963) (Scope of Total Architecture [New York: Harper, 1955]). What has been said here about the Bauhaus should be extended to the group of De Stijl, emphasizing the mysticism connected to the project of a human world. On this group, in addition to the general works already mentioned above, I refer to G. C. Argan, Studi e note (Rome: Fratelli Bocca, 1955), 155–72; and H. Jaffe, “Die niederländische Stijl-Gruppe und ihre soziale Utopie,” Jahrbuch f. Aesth. U. allg. Kunstwiss. 10 (1965): 25–34.

26. See Pareyson, Estetica, 223; Pareyson, Teoria dell’arte (Milan: Marzorati, 1965), 128–29.

1. Heidegger himself speaks of a “turning” in his thought in Letter on Humanism (Brief über den Humanismus [Frankfurt: Klostermann Verlag, 1946; 1949]), 17. For a discussion of the various interpretations of Heidegger’s turning, I refer to my book Essere, storia e linguaggio in Heidegger (Turin: Marietti, 1963), especially chapters 1 and 4.

2. On this, see Moritz Geiger, Zugänge zur Aesthetik (Leipzig: Der Neue Geist Verlag, 1928), who links his analysis of the aesthetic fact to the exhibition of the aesthetic Erlebnis.

3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press 1996), 152.

4. For Heidegger’s view of metaphysics, see chapter 2, note 4.

5. See Letter on Humanism, 29.

6. See chapter 4 of my book Essere, Storia e linguaggio in Heidegger.

7. From the point of view of an ontology of emotions and more generally of the psychic life, the outcomes of existential psychoanalysis (the Daseinsanalyse of Binswanger and M. Boss) are more negative than positive. The psychoanalysts who refer to Heidegger were compelled by force of circumstances to make the terms of the existential analytic of Being and Time more rigid than they were in order to apply them to their fields of investigation.

8. These two essays go back to 1935–36. The first, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” is included in the volume Holzwege (Frankfurt, 1950), partially reedited in the Stuttgart edition of 1960; the second, “Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung,” is published in the volume Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1951) (Elucidations of Holderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller [State College: Penn State University Press, 1991).

9. Here I am using the term in the sense specified in L. Pareyson, I problemi dell’estetica (Milan: Marzorati, 1966), 71.

1. I refer here to my essay “Hermeneutics as Koine,” Theory, Culture, and Society 5, no. 2 (1988): 399–408.

2. Luigi Pareyson, Estetica. Teoria della formatività (1954), 4th ed. (Milan: Bompiani, 1988).

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Convalescent,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Classics, 1961).

4. Pareyson, “Arte e conoscenza. Intuizione e interpretazione,” in Filosofia 2 (1950); a more complete version was published in Teoria dell’arte (Milan: Marzorati, 1965), 45–52, from which I am citing.

5. On this see his autobiographical notes in Veritá e interpretazione (Milan: U. Mursia, 1971), 238.

6. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 238.

7. For a broader discussion of this point, see my essay, “The Truth of Hermeneutics,” in Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 75–96.

8. See “The Truth of Hermeneutics.”

9. I am thinking above all of the essays published in the volume on Dostoevski, 1993, and those Pareyson published in various volumes of his Annuario filosofico (Milan: U. Mursia) from 1985 onward, in addition to the Filosofia della libertà (Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1989).

10. On this, I refer to my essay “History of Salvation, History of Interpretation,” in After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

1. For a more extended discussion of this Aristotelian theme and its meaning for aesthetics, I refer to my book Il concetto di fare in Aristotele (Turin: Università di Torino, 1961).

2. On Spencer, see chapter 3, note 4.

3. See especially L’estetica e I suoi problemi (Milan: Marzorati, 1961); now it is available in its third edition in three volumes: Teoria dell’arte (Milan: Marzorati, 1965); L’esperienza artistica (Milan: Marzorati, 1974); and Conversazioni di estetica (Milan: U. Mursia, 1966).

4. Roland Barthes, Critique et verité (Paris, 1966), 55 (Criticism and Truth, trans. and ed. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987]). With the increasingly marked recognition of the “objectivity” of language, the fact that it speaks “in” us, the nouvelle critique has gradually acquired a more or less open Heideggerian tonality, whose precedent can be found in one of the masters of the new critics, M. Blanchot, La part due feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955); Le livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).

5. Luigi Pareyson, Esistenza e persona, 3rd ed. (Turin : Taylor, 1966).

6. Mikel Dufrenne, Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 1:256 and passim.

7. In this perspective, Brecht’s observations on the Aristotelian concept of catharsis and on the necessity of non-Aristotelian drama are quite relevant for highlighting the aestheticism latent in the entire aesthetic tradition of the West. See, for example, Brecht, “Breviario di estetica teatrale,” in Scritti teatrali (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), 96–97; his note on “la madre,” in Scritti teatrali, 27; and furthermore, Schriften zum Theater (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1963), 3:68–69, 97, 100, 271–72.

8. See Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” in Holzwege (Stuttgart: Reclam-Bibliothek, 1960), 75 (“The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter [New York: Harper and Row, 1971], 163–86).

9. See W. Kandinsky, Essays über Kunst und Künstler (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1955), in Complete Writings on Art, vol. 2 (1922–1943) (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).

1. These observations on the hermeneutic question are raised in the context of the general question of interpretation formulated by Luigi Pareyson in the essays cited in previous chapters (see also “Filosofia della persona,” in the volume Esistenza e Persona, 3rd ed. [Turin: Taylor, 1966], 185–201); and of the investigations, still within the domain of existentialism, carried out by some of Heidegger’s disciples, especially Hans Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall [New York: Continuum, 1993]).

2. It seems necessary to quote from the original text: “Lesen aber, was ist anderes als sammeln: sich versammeln in der Sammlung auf das Ungesprochenes im Gesprochenen?” (in E. Staiger, Die Kunst der Interpretation, 2nd ed. [Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1957]), 48). A philosophical elaboration of the etymology of reading (lógos, léghein, legere, lesen) can be found in many Heideggerian texts, for example, in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1963), 270.

3. See M. Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfulligen: Neske, 1959), 96 (On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz and Joan Stambaugh [New York: Harper and Row, 1971]). On the importance of the Bible for Heidegger’s reflection on hermeneutics, see the observations in O. Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1963), 270 (Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magushak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1987), 218.

4. See Erich Auerbach’s essay “Figura,” in Neue Dante-Studien 5 (Istanbul, 1944): 52. For a discussion of the relationship between allegorical and anagogical meaning and the questions related to it, see H. de Lubac, Exègèse Mediévale (Paris: Cerf 1993).

1. H-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsmeier and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993), 89.

2. W. Dilthey, Plan der Fortsetzung zum Aufbau der geschictlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1927).

3. T. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962), chap. 1 (Introduction to the Sociology of Music [New York: Seabury Press, 1976]).

4. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 30.

5. Gadamer. Truth and Method, 39.

6. On this, see my book, Il concetto di fare in Aristotle (Turin: Giappichelli, 1961), chap. 4.

7. F. D. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik, ed. Heinz Kimmerle (Heidelberg: Winter, 1959); in English, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977).

8. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 132.

9. See Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 45 and 119.

10. Unless the subject recognized himself with the id rather than the ego, in the sense in which Lacan interprets Freud’s statement “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.” See, for example, Lacan, Ècrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil 1966).

11. J. Habermas, The Logic of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988).

12. As argued by Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l’imaginaire; ou l’autre scène (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969).

1. I shall examine here the last work of Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1975). See also Gadamer, “Che cos’è la verità,” Rivista di Filosofia 3 (1956): 251–66, and his introduction to Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: Reclam-Bibliothek, 1960). Important critical observations on Gadamer’s work are found in Oskar Becker, “Die Fragwürdigkeit der Transzendierung der ästhetischen Dimension der Kunst (H. G. Gadamer),” Philosophische Rundhschau (October 1962): 225–38.

2. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 111.

3. On this see Gadamer, Truth and Method, part 1, and “Die Fragwürdigkeit des ästhetischen Bewusstseins,” Rivista di estetica 3 (1958): 374–83.

4. See Heidegger, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klosterman, 1959), 60–104 (“The Epoch of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt [New York: Harper and Row, 1977], 115–54), and Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954).

5. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 100.

6. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 110.

7. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 111, 113.

8. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 137.

9. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 137.

10. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 300.

11. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 304.

12. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 300 ff.

13. Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 119.

14. “Solang du Selbstgeworfnes fängst, ist alles / Geschicklichkeit und lässlicher Gewinn/ erst wenn du plötzlich Fänger wirst des Balles, / den eine ewige Mitspielerin / dir zuwarf, deiner Mitte, in Genau / gekonnten Schwung, in einer jener Bögen / aus Gottes grossem Brückenbau: / erst dann ist Fangen-können ein Vermögen,—/ nicht deines, einer Welt [Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is mere skill and little gain; but when you are suddenly the catcher of a ball thrown by an eternal partner with accurate and measured swings towards you, to your center, in an arch from the great bridgebuilding of God: why catching then becomes a power—not yours, a world’s]” (Rilke, cited in the epigraph to Gadamer’s Truth and Method).