Conversazioni di Estetica (review)

304 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Conversazionl dl Estetica. By Lulgi Pareyson. (Milan: U. Mursia, 1966.Pp. 187. L 1600) Some of these 22 essays by Luigi Pareyson, editor of Riv~ta di Estetica, were read at international meetings or congresses; others were published in Rivista di Estetica or in Filosofia. But most of them have not been published thus far and deal with aesthetic problems which are of special concern to Pareyson. Some are historical and reflect on the aesthetics of Croce, Stefanini, or Kierkegaard, while others deal extensively with the aesthetics of Goethe and with the aesthetic philosophy of Schelling. In one article Pareyson rejects the notion that works of art have become superfluous because so many mass objects are wrought in an "artistic" form. Any human activity, Pareyson says, has some artistic character being "formed," but true art always aspires to perfection and is the object of "contemplation," while mass objects are merely "consumed," i.e., destroyed. Elsewhere Pareyson stresses that a true work of art carries with it its own law which is also the criterion of its real value and which pre=exists--as it were--in the creator whom it is guiding in the process of creation of the work. This "organic" character of the work of art is stressed in his review of Peinture et rdallte by E. Gilson, whose theory of painting is based, according to Pareyson, on the Aristotelian distinction between "Techne" and "organism." Gilson stresses the manual component ("techne") of painting, while pointing out that the theoretieians of the Renaissance would make of painting something cognitive and scientific while those of Romanticism would turn it into something purely contemplative. Since the Renaissance, Gilson maintains, the Western world has lived in the illusion that painting was a representational art; only abstractionism taught us the rude lesson that the pictorial object is not an image-sign but an object living by itself. Painting and imagery are two different things: the latter consists in making "signs" which have their point of departure and the criterion of their value outside of themselves, while painting acts "like nature rather than language," i.e., produces objects whose function is to be, not to signify. While Pareyson assents to this analysis, he qualifies it by saying that abstractionism is, after all, a program, i.e., a poetic, not the aesthetic of painting, since there were painters who aimed at being representational , and therefore both abstractionism and representationalism enter into the aesthetics of painting. Elsewhere Pareyson comments on Gilson's relativism concerning the aesthetic judgment. The latter is, according to Gilson, "dogmatic" and "fluid." Against this Pareyson makes a distinction between judgment and interpretation: while the latter is strictly personal and changing, judgment proper is unique and does not vary. Pareyson makes critical remarks on Croce's theory of intuition and expression, both of which Croce deems identical. Pareyson praises Stefaniui's personalist spiritualistic aesthetics and stresses three main points of his own aesthetics as essential: the spiritual 9 ud the material coincide perfectly in art, because art is not a formation of a content but vf some matter; the idea of forming and formed forms, according to which the forming form guides the process of formation of the work of art~---yet the forming form and formed form are not two different things, for they are really identical; all arts need some form of execution, and there is no execution without interpretation. Pareyson's presentation of the aesthetics of Goethe and of the metaphysical aesthetics of Schelling show a profound mastery of the subject and a light touch in exposition. In fact he has devoted two books to the subject: Fichte and The Aesthetics of German Ideal~m (both published in 1950). Pareyson is director of the Institute of Aesthetics at the University of Turin and successor to Stefanini as chief editor of Rivlsta di Estetica. He received the 1966 Philosophy Prize of the Academia dei Lincei; last year the Italian Society of Aesthetics was founded under his presidency. Pareyson evolved the theory of "formativity" in aesthetics which maintains that while all human activities always have some form, art is the paradigm of form as such and is therefore...