


In this paper, I argue that Luigi Pareyson’s hermeneutics, the mature form of which appears in Verità e interpretazione [1971], is at the same time a radical ontology with consequences for both moral and aesthetic theory. In contrast to the better known approaches of Hans–Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, Pareyson’s account of interpretation strives to respect the interpreted object — whether an everyday thing, a work of art, or a human other — as an inexhaustible plenum whose unitary meaning remains irreducible to any given interpretive framework or historical expression, but which requires a multiplicity of such frameworks and expressions. My argument proceeds via an analysis of the four major features of Pareyson’s thought: (1) aesthetic form as formativity, (2) ontological personalism, (3) the ulteriority of truth, and (4) ethical tragedism. The view that emerges presents the sensible intuition of objects as essentially interpretive on the part of concretely existing persons, who in each case aim to reveal the truth of the object in their interpretive expression. But, owing to the inexhaustibility of being as such, every interpretive expression is doomed to fall short, thus establishing hermeneutic experience as an inescapable and infinite ethical task.



application/pdf
2036-542X
7989
1
it
Justin L.  Harmon
Trópos
Ontology
Interpretation from the Ground Up: 
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos
10
Monografica
2017-04-01
2023-08-01
2017-06-01
2023-08-01
69-90
1
Justin L.  Harmon
2017/04/01
69
2036-542X
1
Ontology
90
Interpretation from the Ground Up: 
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/7989/6714
10
                                                         trópos • anno X • numero 1 • 2017 – ISBN 978-88-255-0482-8
                                                             DOI 10.4399/97888255048285 – pag. 69-90 (giugno 2017)




                               Interpretation from the Ground Up
                               Luigi Pareyson’s Hermeneutics of Inexhaustibility
                                         and its Implications for Moral Ontology
                                                                             Justin L. Harmon⇤




   abstract: In this paper, I argue that Luigi Pareyson’s hermeneutics, the mature
      form of which appears in Verità e interpretazione [1971], is at the same time a
      radical ontology with consequences for both moral and aesthetic theory. In
      contrast to the better known approaches of Hans–Georg Gadamer and Paul
      Ricoeur, Pareyson’s account of interpretation strives to respect the interpreted
      object — whether an everyday thing, a work of art, or a human other — as
      an inexhaustible plenum whose unitary meaning remains irreducible to any
      given interpretive framework or historical expression, but which requires a
      multiplicity of such frameworks and expressions. My argument proceeds via
      an analysis of the four major features of Pareyson’s thought: (1) aesthetic form
      as formativity, (2) ontological personalism, (3) the ulteriority of truth, and (4)
      ethical tragedism. The view that emerges presents the sensible intuition of
      objects as essentially interpretive on the part of concretely existing persons,
      who in each case aim to reveal the truth of the object in their interpretive
      expression. But, owing to the inexhaustibility of being as such, every interpretive
      expression is doomed to fall short, thus establishing hermeneutic experience as
      an inescapable and infinite ethical task.

   keywords: Luigi Pareyson, Hermeneutics, Ethics, Personalism, Ontology.

    In his 1985 work Poesia e ontologia , Gianni Vattimo asks, “Is a herme-
neutics possible. . . that would really place itself at the disposal of its object
instead of reducing it completely to itself ?” (Vattimo 2010: 114). In the
following pages I answer aYrmatively and try to articulate what a succes-
sful object–oriented hermeneutics calls for. I do so largely on the basis of
a theoretical approach of which Vattimo himself claims to be a follower
(Vattimo 2013: xii): that of his teacher, Luigi Pareyson. Pareyson’s herme-
neutics of inexhaustibility aims to put the object, the other, the focus of the
interpretation, first, and this constitutes an essentially ethical task.
    I will also show that Vattimo’s notion of “weak thought” [ pensiero debole ]
— according to which the ultimate task of philosophy is to weaken or soften
    ⇤
        Professor at Southern Oregon University (justin.lee.harmon@gmail.com).


                                                                                                              69
70      Justin L. Harmon


the connection between being and knowing — is a fruitful development
and elaboration of Pareyson’s work on interpretation and “tragic thought”
[pensiero tragico], and, as a result, that Vattimo’s criticism of what he calls
a “metaphysical residue” (Vattimo 2013: xii) in Pareyson is misplaced. By
elevating the ontological to the center of hermeneutic experience, Pareyson’s
account of interpretation makes room for the effectuality of being , place,
and synchronicity in a domain of theory typically hyper–focused on time ,
history, and diachronicity. This is important: while the role of tradition in the
handing down of sense and normativity — as Gadamer, Pareyson’s more
famous counterpart, persuasively emphasizes — must not be understated,
the myopic privileging of tradition facilitates an overly anthropocentric
linguistic idealism. For Pareyson, genuine interpretation is at once expressive
and revelatory : it is the former insofar as it does not forget time and the latter
insofar as it does not forget being (Pareyson 2013: 16). The oblivion of being
in the murky relativity of historicity is, on this view, the origin of ideology,
i.e. the instrumentalization of reason and reduction of beings thus cut off
from their being.
    For Pareyson, the goal of an adequate hermeneutic theory is not a pro-
mise to dissolve all misunderstanding by way of an “angelic” view of com-
munication that suppresses particularity and diVerence in favor of universal
linguistic formulae and their translatability.1 The diYculty, instead, is to
preserve the diYculty of relationality, and this is precisely the unavoidable
challenge of ethics, which, for Pareyson, “is at the same time the easiest
and most diYcult thing” (Pareyson 2009: 155). Ethics is the “easiest” thing
because everyone is always already doing it (however poorly) and the most
diYcult because, like interpretation itself, it constitutes an infinite task. The
aim of this paper is therefore threefold, the first being largely exegetical and
the others more ambitious: (1) to giver a fuller explication of Pareyson’s
hermeneutics of inexhaustibility than is presently available in English; (2)
to defend the metaphysical element in Pareyson’s theory of interpretation
against Vattimo’s critique by underscoring its intimate ethical character; and
(3) to present Pareyson’s hermeneutical ontology as an untapped resource
for the ongoing debates surrounding speculative realism, new materialism,
and object–oriented ontology.




     1. Cf. Michel Serres (1995) for a contemporary example of the sort of “intellectualistic angelism”
against which Pareyson argues in the “Destiny and Ideology” chapter of his 1971 opus, Truth and
Interpretation.
                                             Interpretation from the Ground Up   71


1. Clearing the Terrain

Pareyson’s notion of interpretive performance — which has at once an ae-
sthetic and an ethical register — relies on the idea of a normative structure
at the place of the object from which interpreters must draw cues or directi-
ves. The object as such “appropriates,” makes demands. The source of these
cues, however, can never be revealed as a whole. In other words, “interpre-
tation is infinitely various not only because of its subject, but also because
of its object” (Bubbio 2009: 13). A succinct statement of this ontological
pluralism is found in Estetica. teoria della formativitá [1950], where Pareyson
puts things and persons on equal footing: “The knowledge of things, as with
the knowledge of persons, requires interrogation and dialogue. . . [T]hings
also contain a singular openness and unpredictability in their definiteness
due to their plastic nature, so that the interpretation required to know things
is as diYcult as that required to know persons” (Pareyson 2009: 95).
    In 1986, one year after the publication of Vattimo’s question mentioned
above, Pareyson responded in an essay called “Pensiero ermeneutico e pensiero
tragico” [“Hermeneutic Thought and Tragic Thought”]. Here, just five
years before his death, Pareyson stipulates that precisely because interpreta-
tion is always interpretation of something (and not merely interpretation of
other interpretations, as is the case, perhaps, for some hermeneutic thinkers
such as Richard Rorty), “the interpretation which dissolves within itself
what it is to interpret, and in so doing replaces it, ceases to be interpretation”
(Pareyson 2009: 220). This means that, at the intersection of interpretation
and truth, there is an irresolvable excess whose reduction results in ideo-
logy, whether “absolutist” (e.g. “mine is the only correct interpretation”)
or “relativist” (e.g. “there is no correct interpretation”). The problem with
Gadamer’s approach is that, as Bubbio puts it, he “focuses on language as
‘total mediation’ of experience and world.” Thus, “Gadamer’s hermeneu-
tics tends to solve every problem in terms of language and its finiteness”
(Bubbio 2009: 24), beyond which there is no being of which to speak at all.
    Paul Ricoeur, Gadamer’s French counterpart, also fails in his account of
interpretation to sustain diVerence and ontological excess, since he explicitly
identifies interpretation with “appropriation” [Aneignung], and not on the
part of the object, as Pareyson argues, but of the subject: “. . . the aim of all
hermeneutics is to struggle against cultural distance and historical alienation.
Interpretation brings together, equalizes, renders contemporary and similar”
(Ricoeur 1991: 119). On this view, the task of the interpreter is to achieve
a clarity of understanding by assimilating the otherness of her object to
a “common ground,” which, made possible by the linguistic infinity of
the interpreting subject, is ultimately the subjectum. In the “Sixth Study”
of Oneself as Another [1990], Ricoeur entertains objections to the notion
72    Justin L. Harmon


of “appropriation” in the context of interpreting literary texts — e.g. the
equivocal nature of the author’s voice, the entanglement of life histories
(so that it remains unclear just “who” is doing the appropriating), and
the necessary incompleteness of life as lived — only to conclude briefly
that “these [objections] are less to be refuted than to be incorporated in
a more subtle, more dialectical comprehension of appropriation” (Ricoeur
1992: 161–162). In other words, all of the intransigent points and sources
of diVerence in any interpretive encounter are merely elusive barbarian
features to be more and more urbanized along the path of the Aufhebung,
which always ends where it began: with itself (albeit, to be charitable, a self
transformed).
    Pareyson insists that genuine interpretation “implies the always new
and diVerent personality of its subject, and the unfathomable infinity of its
object” (Pareyson 2013: 139). In contrast to Gadamer, as Vattimo makes clear,
Pareyson’s notion of “[infinity] 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” (Vattimo 2010: 80). At stake in this debate, I submit, is
the fundamental nature of the ethical as such: do ethical (or protoethical)
norms issue most originarily from “within,” i.e. as part of the necessary
structure of (inter)subjectivity and natural language, or from “without,”
i.e. as from an inexhaustible ontological excess with which we are called
to engage interpretively? The former position, to my mind, is complicit in
the modern “technologicization” of ethics inasmuch as it identifies without
remainder reality itself with the discourse with which we strive to navigate
that reality. The upshot is a kind of residual Hegelianism according to
which the possibility of a legitimate shock, of a genuine transformation or
reorientation of one’s point of view in the face of disturbing phenomena,
is sacrificed in favor of the possibility of simply deepening or expanding
entrenched conceptual schemes.
    It is in virtue of this Hegelianism that, according to Gadamer, the “being
that can be understood is language” (Gadamer 2013: 490). As Vattimo sug-
gests, this claim “announces a development of Heideggerian thought in the
direction of a dissolution of Being into language — or, at the very least, its
resolution into language” (Vattimo 1988: 131). As indicated above, such lin-
guistic reductionism is incompatible with Pareyson’s view of interpretation
to the extent that it neutralizes being qua diVerence. JeV Malpas, bringing
Jean–Luc Nancy’s argument in Being Singular Plural to bear explicitly on
the ontological character of hermeneutic experience, writes: “To be given
over, as we always essentially are, to the hermeneutic situation, and so to be
given over to understanding (so that we cannot draw back from the attempt
to understand), is thus always to find ourselves standing in a relation to
                                                          Interpretation from the Ground Up            73


that which is outside of and other to us, and yet which, by virtue of its
very relatedness, also calls unavoidably for a response from us” (Malpas
2010: 272). In Pareyson we find Nancy’s insistence on the inseparability
of ontology and ethics — of being and, not value, but, mattering, calling, in
short, demanding — articulated in a hermeneutic theory that “invites phi-
losophy to re–appropriate its own speculative vocation, while at the same
time remaining faithful to the concreteness of existence” (Bubbio 2009: 25).
   There are four essential features of Pareyson’s thought that I shall em-
phasize in elaborating his hermeneutics: (1) aesthetic form as formativity, (2)
ontological personalism, (3) truth as ulterior, and (4) ethical tragedism.



2. Sensible Intuition and Interpretation: Form as Formativity

From the perspective of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics, ar-
guably opened up to its decisive trajectory in the early works of Martin
Heidegger, even sense perception is interpretation. In Ontology: The Her-
meneutics of Facticity [1923], Heidegger grounds the pervasive necessity of
interpretation in the everyday: “. . . interpretation begins in the ‘today,’ i.e.,
in the definite and average state of understanding from out of which and
on the basis of which philosophy lives and back into which it speaks” (Hei-
degger 2008: 14). This is because, as Merleau–Ponty argued more explicitly
throughout his career, conceptuality “is always parasitical on perceptual play,
wherein an individual finds a world, and a world finds them” (Mootz 2010:
89). Perception, as pre–reflectively always unfolding, provides the substance
with which conceptuality does its work.
    How does this notion of the primacy of perception over conceptuality
connect to the issue of interpretation? The claim that even sense perception
has an interpretative ground seems to suggest that, since the material reality
tracked by sensory engagement is never simply given in its brute immediacy,
there is something right about the transcendental idealist’s case against
naïve realism. Consequently, hermeneutic ontology and materialism (i.e.
the view that reality is ultimately material, however variedly this latter term
is understood) are taken to be mutually exclusive.2 In the 1950s Pareyson
was already pursuing this line of inquiry within the field of philosophical
aesthetics.

     2. The “fleshly” trend of contemporary phenomenology, best represented by the work of
Merleau–Ponty and Alphonso Lingis, rejects this conclusion. For example, in Sensation: Intelligibility
in Sensibility (1996), Lingis asks rhetorically: “Is the theoretical objective, to represent the things we
observe as objects and the field opened by our perception as an objective universe, itself motivated
by the structure of things which command our perception? (Lingis 1996: x).”
74     Justin L. Harmon


    Rejecting the neo–Hegelian system building of Benedetto Croce’s ex-
pressivist aesthetic theory, Pareyson insists that the role and function of art
in human life must be appraised on the terms of concrete, existing artworks
themselves. The question that here seems to immediately arise, “How does
one know what terms these are?,” is, for Pareyson, not a very philosophical
one. Answering it presupposes what, from Pareyson’s perspective, is deci-
dedly impossible: to compare an interpretation with the object interpreted.
Since truth is only given in (necessarily multiple) interpretations, that is, in
Pareyson’s words, personal pathways to it, there is no space from which
to freely evaluate the revelatory power of the artistic gesture (Pareyson
2013: 22). Hence, “truth is unobjectifiable above all in the sense that it is
inseparable from the interpretation that it is given and incomparable with
its formulation” (Pareyson 2013: 63). Even before a work of art is formed
[formata], it works as “forming” [formante], but in the direction of a telos that
cannot be formulized in advance.
    Openness to the demands of this telos is perhaps what separates authentic
works of art from kitsch. Hermann Broch claims that the “essence of kitsch
is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce
not the ‘good’ but the ‘beautiful’” (Broch 2002: 33). In this case a particular,
historically shaped aesthetic criterion, “the beautiful,” is imposed on the
creative act in the form of a dogmatic prescription, excluding a priori from its
scheme any unpleasant, confusing, or otherwise undesirable element. Milan
Kundera makes the same point more forcefully: “Kitsch is the absolute
denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch
excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in
human existence” (Kundera 1984: 248). For this reason “that which is past
and proven appears over and over in kitsch; in other words. . . kitsch is
always subject to the dogmatic influence of the past — it will never take
its vocabulary of reality from the world directly, but will apply pre–used
vocabularies, which in its hands rigidify into cliché. . . ” (Broch 2002: 33–34).
Thus, Thomas Kinkade, who, according to Salon co–founder Laura Miller,
“was always the first to present his work as a form of ideology” (Miller 2012),
is survived by a legacy of light without shadow, of a nauseatingly saccharine
refashioning of the world, which, so interpreted, remains closed and inert.
Kitsch is the product of aesthetic prescriptivism, in Pareyson’s terminology,
the dominance of “formed form” [forma formata] over “forming form”
[forma formante], amounting to the perpetual recirculation of dead gestures.
There is no determinate set of criteria that can be applied a priori for the
diVerentiation of art from kitsch, since the drive to prescribe such formulae
is itself built into the productive praxis of the latter.
    Art, for Pareyson, manifests as “form,” that is, “a structured object, uni-
ting thought, feeling, and matter in an activity that aims at the harmonious
                                                         Interpretation from the Ground Up           75


coordination of all three and proceeds according to the laws postulated and
manifested by the work itself as it is being made” (Eco 1989: 159). “Form,”
then, realizes itself in a productive process governed by a dynamic tension
between stasis and action. Such a poietic conceptualization of form makes
it impossible to distinguish it from any determinate content. The Crocean
paradigm of form as the internal expressivity of subjective feeling is here re-
jected in favor of a concrete formativity — encompassing the relative stability
of the object in its present state of formation, and the fluid originarity from
which the object derives its impetus — that operates in the intercourse of
real objects in the external environment. As Umberto Eco observes, “The
Crocean illusion of an interior figuration, whose physical exteriorization
is only a corollary event, deliberately ignored one of the richest and most
fruitful areas of creativity” (Eco 1989: 160).3 In the productive act the artist
takes her “cues” from matter in the world, presented as “a set of autonomous
laws” which she “must be able to interpret and turn into artistic laws” (Eco
1989: 161).
    The development of the work proceeds in accordance with this ongoing
“interpretation,” wherein the resistant materiality of the selected objects
makes certain demands on the artist with respect to how it “wants” to be
treated. Such a productive interpretation, while relying on the sensuous voice
of the matter for its direction, also requires the responsive ear of the artist,
which is oriented from and toward a particular point of view: “Every voice
must be respected in its unique physiognomy and no consensus or false
authority can be imposed. One must interrogate, and not just by talking,
one must listen too, and not only know how to listen” (Pareyson 2009: 62).
Every artist’s material manipulation thus results in the empirical articula-
tion of her personality in the form of choices, traces, retraces, decisions,
and reconsiderations. This “articulation” always already commences at the
level of sensible intuition: “Intuition, as that which includes sensation and
sentiment, which is at the same time portrayal of things and figuration of
passions, which presents itself simultaneously as sensory knowledge and
expression of an emotion, is always discrimination, judgment, and choice:
in a word, interpretation” (Pareyson 2009: 83).
    Similarly, Deleuze claims that artistic production “is not a matter of

      3. This way of characterizing the artistic process resonates well with contemporary practices in
experimental music, for example, such as Einstürzende Neubauten’s program of soliciting sounds
from non–traditional materials via contact microphones. Rather than recording the airborne acoustic
transmissions of objects, these devices allow one to explore their inner depth, disclosing the hidden
sonorous vibrancy of air–conditioner parts, automotive shock absorbers, shattering glass, and scraped
hunks of discarded sheet metal. The artist “lets” the material “be,” but in a way that bypasses the
distinction between “activity” and “passivity,” insofar as her singular interpretation, the creative act
in its deployment, provides the time–space in which the material cues and directives manifest.
76     Justin L. Harmon


reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces” (Deleuze 2002:
48). In the domain of painting, the artist achieves this by populating a
surface with invisible rhythms made visible, not as “representations,” but as
presentations of sensuous vortices. The diYculty of this task is exacerbated
by the fact that the artist, in responding to these aVective forces, does not
work on “a white and virgin surface. The entire surface is already invested
virtually with all kinds of clichés, which the painter will have to break with”
(Delueuze 2002: 12).
    Whatever the particular theme or character of a work may be, the work’s
“content,” broadly construed, consists partly in the sensuous constitution of
the artist’s personality, which exhibits itself in the tactics it adopts to resist
and transform the cliché, the dead gesture. The direction or trajectory of
this constitution — what Pareyson calls the “natural intentionality” of the
work — is delineated in the suggestive germs from which the formative
act draws its impetus: the first line of a poem, a cursory brushstroke, the
shadow cast by a downtown skyscraper. These “germs” or “cues” give
a multitude of senses or directions that the artist must choose from and
develop. The natural intentionality (i.e. arising from a place other than
the artist’s self–conscious intentions) of which the artist’s intentionality is
a part — insofar as the artist herself is part of nature — makes up what
Pareyson calls the “forming form” (forma formante). The “forming form” of
a work serves as the teleological guide of its own empirical realization; it
is the dynamic, processual principle governing the formative development
of a work from its germinal initiation (Pareyson 1960: 59). Once the work
is shaped into a suYciently autonomous, harmonious whole, it presents
itself as a finished model, a “formed form” (forma formata), in short, the
completed artwork. This “formed form” demands aesthetic evaluation in
terms of how closely it approximates the ongoing “forming form” to which
it owes its life: “. . . the work of art draws its value from being in line, not
with something other, but with itself; the process of its formation consists
in the completion of the forming form in a formed form” (Pareyson 1960:
61).
    Pareyson’s intuitional view of interpretation as a responsiveness to sen-
suously disclosed directives in the lived environment parallels James Gib-
son’s ecological theory of perception developed in the 1970s. For Gibson,
to perceive a material surface is at the same time to perceive what that
surface “aVords” the perceiving animal, what it makes possible for the
animal in the navigation of its physical milieu. As he points out, “this is a
radical hypothesis, for it implies that the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ of things in
the environment can be directly perceived. Moreover, it would explain the
sense in which values and meanings are external to the perceiver” (Gibson
1979: 127). When a hiker perceives the upward sloping grade that discloses
                                             Interpretation from the Ground Up   77


a hill qua hill, she does not represent it as a Newtonian object, an inert
aggregate of quantifiable properties, but instead catches on to the peculiar
style of the hill by a total bodily orientation in which certain possibilities are
revealed. The character of “meaningfulness,” while in each case relative to
the perceiving organism, is not something conferred upon the surface by
the perceiver, but is rather discovered as something already there.
    “Forming form” is always already “out there” in the world, emerging
from an environment of objects and actions coordinately with the artist’s
own thinking. In the interpretation of a “formed form,” a finished work,
one similarly engages with an “otherness,” but in this case the sensualized
personality of the artist (again, in the form of choices, reconsiderations,
etc.). One interprets precisely by “reading” the “formed form” in a critical
retracing, a reactivation of the “forming form” through whose originary
direction the artist brought the work to fruition. The artist gives herself
as part of the “content” in the form of her production. That is, every work
carries with it the trace of a peculiar style to which the interpreter “catches
on.” Alphonso Lingis describes this process as that by which “our bodies
perceive and move in a field” (Lingis 1998: 36). In “stylizing,” he goes on,
our bodies’ “positions and initiations pick up the style of the field, catch on
to its levels and follow its directives” (Lingis 1998: 36).
    Two seemingly contradictory elements are necessary for an interpre-
tation to successfully sustain the formativity of a work: freedom and faith-
fulness. Pareyson writes, “. . . the execution of an interpretation is always
carried out by a single interpreter who wishes to render the work as it itself
desires” (Pareyson 1960: 195). Freely adopting one point of view, one ave-
nue of approach from among many, the interpreter addresses a “revelatory
aspect” of the work in a manner appropriate to its mode of disclosure. In
this way, Pareyson avoids the pitfalls of an extreme relativism on the one
hand (any interpretation is a “right” interpretation), and an extreme dogma-
tism on the other (only one interpretation is the “right” interpretation). Every
instance of genuine interpretation is simultaneously a personal execution
and the work itself (Pareyson 1960: 195). The “subject” does not appropriate
the work through a kind of “transcendental” mediation. Instead, the work
appropriates the person, places a claim on her, demands to be attended to and
respected in accordance with its irreducible diVerence.
    In everyday conversation, one does not have to translate the other’s
language into “one’s own.” That is, to invoke more overtly the spirit of
Lévinas, one is not compelled — in the interest of genuine understanding —
to assimilate “the other” into “the same.” Nor does one have to “represent”
one’s interlocutor’s thoughts through an inscrutable internal mechanism
of “symbol” processing, however “transparent” it may be. Rather, one is
“presented” with the other’s thoughts as other. This does not mean that I
78      Justin L. Harmon


am incapable of understanding my interlocutor; on the contrary, it means
that I am capable of understanding her as not me and as not assimilable to
me. A reader of Yukio Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion does not, in
order to understand him, subjectively identify with, i.e., adopt the point
of view of, Mizoguchi, the troubled acolyte at the center of the story, but
instead catches on to the style in which his point of view is presented and
engages with it as a source of guidance towards its unique intelligibility.
Similarly, in the context of social life one does not subjectively “represent”
the other’s perspective in order to understand it, but instead engages with
her self–presentation as diVerent, that is, as a call from the outside that
cannot be assimilated.
    For Pareyson, the execution of an interpretation does not aim to translate
the work of art as though it were an impoverished shell waiting to be
filled with meaning, or an unfinished project requiring an interpreter to
complete it in accordance with a relative point of view (Pareyson 1960: 201).
The interpretive engagement must instead aim only to make the work
live its own life. One’s appropriation by the work — or by the other — is
not some alien operation to which one passively falls prey. It is instead
openness to revelation, attentiveness to the self–disclosive potentiality of
form that transcends the simple active–receptive dichotomy: “In fact, the
activity performed for the purpose of interpretation is the adoption of
the rhythm of the object” (Pareyson 2009: 105). According to the idealism
of neo–Hegelian aesthetics, in contrast, “the work does not exist in its
determinateness and independence, but dissolves in an always new creative
act, in which it is no longer possible to distinguish it from the interpretive
execution itself ” (Pareyson 1960: 205). Understood in this deficient way,
every act of interpretation becomes a radical whitewashing of that which is,
an implosion of diVerence into identity.
    Pareyson writes:
     In the work of art, completeness means infinity, and infinity means inexhaustibility.
     If the aspects of the work are innumerable, and if each interpretation shows one
     aspect, even though it grasps the whole work, it can be said that none of the
     innumerable interpretations of a work can exhaust or monopolize it, because it
     promotes, provokes and requires them all (Pareyson 1960: 238).

    The aesthetic theory espoused here, as an account of sense–experience,
is not confined to works of art as privileged entities, but fruitfully applies to
the perception of objects in general. To insist that objects are “complete”
means precisely that they endure as what they are without reliance on exter-
nally imposed “values” or “translations.” But it is an “infinite” completeness,
which gets at the epistemic inexhaustibility of the object’s material excess.
Pareyson’s hermeneutic ontology goes farther than Gadamer’s; while the
                                            Interpretation from the Ground Up   79


latter takes the interpreting subject to be existentially inexhaustible, the
interpreted object is always of limited depth. For Pareyson, by contrast, “it
is not only the world of interpretive subjects that is inexhaustible, but also
that of the forms that are oVered to interpretation” (Vattimo 2010: 89).
    Phenomenal objects abide as real precisely in the manner of an al-
ways–open invitation to further engagement, which is in each case directed
by the norms opened up at the place of the object itself. Norms, as con-
ditions of adequacy that govern inter–object relations, reveal themselves
in meaningful forms from which one derives directives for action. But in
every event surviving the various instances of deformation to which things
fall prey is the excess of materiality. The “formed forms” from which we
derive clear practical meanings tend to withdraw into a recalcitrant and
substantial materiality that conceals more than it reveals.


3. Existence Qua Singularity: Ontological Personalism

For Pareyson, “the best guarantee against the danger of subjectivism is
oVered by the concept of person, according to which, while aYrming that
everything with which the person comes into contact must become interior
to her, at the same time asserts its irreducible independence” (Pareyson
1960: 194). Reflecting on the apparent contradiction between the unity of
philosophy (as the pursuit of truth), and the multiplicity of philosophies,
Pareyson claims that these “are thus reconciled and imply one another, for
the unity of philosophy is but a philosophizing–with [confilosofia] of single
philosophies” (Pareyson 1952: 69). As he goes on to stress, however, “this
unity never hardens into a totality” (Pareyson 1952: 69). While the truth of
something holds itself, however obscurely, in an ontological unicity, i.e. a
selfsame plenum (contra relativism), it is always expressed or articulated
by way of a non–totalizable multiplicity of singular sites, each exposed to
the other in mutual subjection (contra absolutism). In other words, all
truths about something are truths of the same thing and, conversely, this
one, selfsame thing (the source of a truth’s “unicity”) is always expressed
from a multiplicity of perspectives on it.
    For this reason, Pareyson designates the “person” as the site where the
unicity of a truth is revealed, but revealed precisely in the expression of one
viewpoint among many others — a multiplicity that cannot be overcome
by appeal to some hypostasized organic unity, because it is a necessary
condition for revelation. To exist is to stand forth as the non–privileged place
at which truth is exposed towards other openings, which, as “infinite” (in
the sense explored above), withdraw from total appropriation: “The reason
why the person becomes the organ of truth’s revelation is above all so as to be
80     Justin L. Harmon


able to be the site of its coming” (Pareyson 2009: 72). Thus, every existence is
simultaneously a truth and a philosophy, i.e. expression of truth (Pareyson
2009: 49).
    There are, for Pareyson, roughly two ways in which interpretation fails:
assimilation and alienation. Assimilation occurs when the would–be interpre-
tation has no “respect for the object that has to be interpreted, [when] it is
not a grasping of something which is received and looked upon, a surveying
of something which allows itself to be seen and known” (Pareyson 2009:
104). In other words, the problem here is ultimately that of the artificial
shrinking of distance between interpreter and interpreted, a case of one
“overlap[ping] [oneself] with what [one] must interpret,” thereby undercut-
ting the “possibility to grasp the inner nature of the object” (Pareyson 2009:
105).
    On the other hand, alienation occurs “if something imposes itself on me
to the point where I submit to it, or better, if I fix the thing in front of me,
in an imposition which is no longer a proposal, in an exteriority which is no
longer an appeal, in an opposition which makes it impenetrable to me. . . ”
(Pareyson 2009: 105). Alienation from objects is the result, not of exteriorizing
them from oneself or of thematizing their otherness, but of silencing their
self–presentation qua specific proposals or appeals.
    Ontological personalism means above all that the individual interpreter,
as a concrete existence, i.e. a place for the exposure of truth, cannot be
understood as an abstract and anonymous transcendental category (like
the subject). Yet, as Francesco Tomatis points out, “personalism cannot limit
itself to the finite expression of the person and the person’s needs and desi-
res. In fact, it cannot understand and express the person except in taking it in
its fundamental and existential opening of itself to the being that originates
and transcends it” (Tomatis 2011: 131). Because the interpreter and the in-
terpreted stand together on equal ontological footing, the relation between
person and interpreted thing cannot be identified with the subject–object
relation, which always privileges the subject as unilaterally determinative.
“A thing is susceptible to interpretation,” Pareyson tells us, “only because it
is unrepeatable and singular; the subject of interpretation is necessarily an
unrepeatable and singular person” (Pareyson 2009: 110).
    Two primary conditions, then, guide a person’s successful interpreta-
tion of a given form: interest and respect. The former allows the interpreter
to question, while the latter enables her to listen. When interest — in the
ego–independent demands of objects — is lacking, forms are rendered
silent. If the condition of respect — for the excess of objects — is not met,
the person errs by burying the form under a pile of her own discursive
expression. In both cases, the form, that is, the self–presentation of objec-
ts to be interpreted, is concealed, neutralized, in a word, spectralized. As
                                                   Interpretation from the Ground Up         81


self–presentation, in fact, “the form appears as such only in a judgment di-
rected by interest and guided by respect, not in the sense that interest and
respect constitute the form, but in the sense that without them there can
be no vision of forms” (Pareyson 2009: 99).4
    The person is the site of truth, then, not because the specificity of her
expression somehow makes the truth what it is, but because as a person
she is ipso facto at once (1) exposed to the self–revelation of the other, and
(2) the interpretive expression of this exposure:

   Interpretation is always characterized by the inseparability of expression and re-
   velation, that is, on the one side, by the personality of its subject who expresses
   herself in the act of becoming the organ of revelation, and on the other side, by the
   inexhaustibility of its object, which reveals itself in the very act of aYrming its own
   unobjectifiability, as inseparable from the interpretation that is given of it and yet
   always ulterior to the interpretation that it engenders (Pareyson 2013: 89).

      The inseparability of expression and revelation constitutes the heart of
Pareyson’s theory of interpretation. Tied up with this inseparability is the
inextricable chiasm of time and being at the very place where each interpre-
tation unfolds. The guiding telos of every personal expression is truth, i.e.
revelation, but since there is no ultimate ur–revelation, no kosmotheoros from
which to recover a unified Being that has been splintered across countless
horizons, mirroring the mythic aftermath of Babel, the tragically irrecon-
cilable multiplicity of expressions is not something that can be overcome:
“. . . the revelatory aspect cannot do without the expressive and historical
aspect because there is no objective manifestation of truth; rather, one must
grasp it always with a historical perspective, that is, within a personal in-
terpretation” (Pareyson 2013: 16). Time — of the living person — is in this
way “both access and residence, entrance and dwelling, figure and exercise”
(Pareyson 2013: 136) of the truth of beings in their being. But in this capacity
time neither exhausts the truth, nor grounds it, neither completes the truth,
nor authors it. Historicity and temporality, as conditions of personal expres-
sion, form instead the necessary pathway to an ulteriority whose fulfillment
is always deferred.


4. Truth as Ulterior

It is a mistake to lament the inescapably personal character of the articula-
tion of truth as some unfortunate mask behind which resides the “actual
truth” — if only we were favored enough by providence to attain it. The

   4. Emphasis added.
82     Justin L. Harmon


“depersonalization” sought in an authentically faithful interpretation “is no-
thing more than a way to keep historicity and personality from gaining the
upper hand, and thus becoming ends in themselves rather than pathways to
truth, and concealing truth rather than opening access to it” (Pareyson 2013:
51). In fact, it is not enough to recognize the compatibility of the unicity of
truth and the multiplicity of its expression; they are, much more than this,
co–essential (Pareyson 2013: 53). To put the point diVerently, the transcenden-
ce of truth (vis–à–vis the particular perspective of this or that interpreter)
is in no way compromised by its necessarily plural expression at the sites
of historical persons. On the contrary, it is precisely the nature of truth as
such — understood as the originary revelation of the being of beings —
to show itself by way of innumerable voices, each irreconcilable with the
other: “Interpretation is neither a part of the truth nor a partial truth, but
is the truth itself as personally possessed. As such, interpretation not only
has no need for integration, but also will not even tolerate it, and in fact,
dismisses it, already having all that it can and must have” (Pareyson 2013: 66).
To integrate or reconcile diVerent interpretations would be to dissolve the
multiplicity without which the peculiar unicity of truth cannot be revealed.
    Yet, owing to its unicity, it seems that we can and do characterize truth
as a kind of whole. What is the specific character of this “unicity” [unicità]?
For Pareyson, it is not the unity of a substance and its quantifiable properties,
but a plenum housing an inexhaustible source of self–presentations, to which
every interpreter appeals, however diVerently his or her interpretation
might proceed. It is the “thing” about which everyone involved in the
conversation discourses, however varied the specific discourses turn out
to be. What we must avoid is the temptation to conceive of this plenum
as a possession, potential or actual. While the whole truth, understood as
a plenum, is never possessed, it is always already present, and in a quite
distinctive way: “. . . the whole truth does not oVer itself to human being
in the form of a possession achieved and definitely conquered. It is rather
present as exigency and norm; as exigency exciting man to search for the
truth, as norm acting as judge of the truths such inquiry attains” (Pareyson
1952: 65). The holism of truth is therefore a consequence of its essential
status as normative. Truth is present as exigency because, as Socrates argued
— apparently unpersuasively — at his apologia, it is not available as an
unadulterated whole, but rather demands ceaseless inquiry. Truth is present
as norm because there is no measure of what trajectory this inquiry should
take beyond what is exposed in this or that interpretation.
    This is the case because, as we know from Husserlian phenomenology,
sense and intelligibility issue only from meaningful wholes; as Heidegger
showed in Being and Time, we never hear only abstract, partial, disembodied
noises, but, in the first place, concrete things (Heidegger 1962: 207). Although
                                                   Interpretation from the Ground Up        83


phenomenality only ever manifests for perceivers in provisionally obscure
adumbrations (since there is no “view from nowhere”), each profile, as given,
manifests the personality of the whole, and it is the self–presentation of this
“whole” that directs and orders the interpreter’s response. However, Parey-
son’s treatment of the multiplicity of truthful expressions ought not to be
understood as a kind of perspectivism according to which each view constitu-
tes a fractured piece of a puzzle, which, if successfully joined with the others,
would give us the “whole picture.” “Every philosophy is always. . . lateral
(literally, sided). . . But this does not mean that every philosophy is uni–lateral
(one–sided), i.e. open to integration in a systematic whole, as if it snatched
only one part of truth, and then demanded fulfillment in the other partial
visions in the system of total knowledge (Pareyson 1952: 63).”
    The unicity of truth is “none other than an infinity that stimulates and
feeds all such perspectives without letting itself be exhausted by any of the
formulations and without privileging any one formulation” (Pareyson 2013:
16). We can see from this that the infinity that constitutes the unicity and
that underwrites the multiplicity of truth is both quantitative and qualitative:
truth is infinite in the number of its expressions and in the depth of each
individual expression. In short, for Pareyson, “the only way to grasp the
whole truth [i.e. as a plenum] is to possess it as inexhaustible” (Pareyson
2013: 66). To so “possess” a truth is to adopt a particular attitude towards it,
an attitude that recognizes it as an infinite task and not a prize to be won. In
one luminous passage from Truth and Interpretation [1971], Pareyson writes:

   Inexhaustibility is that thanks to which, instead of presenting itself under the false
   appearance of concealment, absence, or obscurity, ulteriority shows its true origin,
   that is richness, fullness, and excess, through its inexhaustibility: not nothingness
   but Being; not steresis [lack], but hyperoche [pre–eminence]; not Abgrund [abyss],
   but Ungrund [ungrounded ground]; not the mustikos gnophos tes agnosias [mystical
   darkness of the lack of knowledge], but the anexichniaston ploutos [unsearchable
   richness]: not the mysticism of the ineVable, but the ontology of the inexhaustible
   (Pareyson 2013: 24).

    Revelatory thought, without which all claims to knowledge amount to
ideological mystification, opens one to a plenum that is a singularity and not
a totality, an ulteriority whose depth means not impenetrable silence, but
infinite noise.
84      Justin L. Harmon


5. Ethical Tragedism

From the foregoing I have established that, in Pareyson’s hermeneutic
theory, truth appears as an “infinite gathered in a definiteness” (Pareyson
2009: 115), that is, in the self–presentation of an object. In the language of the
philosopher’s aesthetics of formativity, infinity operates as “forming form”
while the definiteness at play shows up in static schemata as “formed form.”
While one interpretation (of a work of art, of a fact, of a social phenomenon,
etc.) leaves out certain aspects of its object, these aspects remain — under
the infinition of the whole — not in a merely negative way, but positively
as an appeal for further engagement and ongoing self–correction. The
insuperable metaphysical dynamic of forming and formed form makes
interpretation, whether in the domain of ethics or aesthetics, an infinite task,
a kind of Sisyphian tragedy.
    “The essence of tragedy,” according to Schelling, is “an actual and ob-
jective conflict between the freedom of the subject on the one hand, and
necessity on the other, a conflict that does not end such that one or the other
succumbs, but rather such that both are manifested in perfect indiVerence
as simultaneously victorious and vanquished” (Schelling 1989: 251). This is
the nature of the ethical relation among entities in the world: subjectivity
emerges as the space of diVerence between objects, interpellated but under-
determined by the other’s demands, and unrelentingly disposed towards
their exposure. It is a “tragic” condition because no matter the degree of
competence attained by those saddled with it it can never be overcome.
That the most consistently moral of moral agents incur rather than abroga-
te increasingly demanding tasks is surely, in these terms, a tragic state of
aVairs.5
    In his foreword to the recent English–language translation of Pareyson’s
Verità e interpretazione, Vattimo criticizes what he calls a “metaphysical
residue” in his mentor’s work, the result of his “still thinking of truth as
‘substance,’ that is, in the end as a permanent ‘being,’ somewhat like the
‘existing’ God of Christian dogmatics” (Vattimo 2013: xii). By the lights
of Vattimo’s avowed nihilism (as developed, for example, in La fine della
modernità [1985], which is significantly informed by Nietzsche’s account of
the death of God) with the self–devaluation of humanity’s need for “ultimate
causes” also collapses any “meaning of an imperative demand for truth”
(Vattimo 1988: 24). Heidegger’s concept of the Abgrund is also central to
this nihilistic weakening of the real, insofar as, for Vattimo, it “calls us to

     5. Rousseau, in a 1754 letter to D’Alembert, famously defends what he sees as “something sacred
in the origin” of tragic theater, because of which “at first its actors were regarded as priests rather
than buVoons” (Rousseau 2004: 308).
                                            Interpretation from the Ground Up   85


a fictionalized [i.e. “aestheticized”] experience of reality which is also our
only possibility for freedom” (Vattimo 1988: 29). What is most salient in
Nietzsche and Heidegger for Vattimo’s own anti–metaphysical project of
“weak thought” [pensiero debole] is the “non–identification of Being and
foundation” (Vattimo 1988: 118), where “foundation” is taken to suggest an
ahistorical metaphysical permanence.
    Vattimo misunderstands his teacher’s project. As I have tried to make
evident in this paper, one of the principal contributions of Pareyson’s her-
meneutics is the decoupling of the real normativity of truth (of beings in
their being) from any kind of metaphysical foundationalism that would
serve to undermine diVerence. Truth is normative because it opens up as
an appeal to its aYrmation, transcending every formulation of it, but at
the same time “guiding” them all. The transcendence at play in Pareyson’s
ontology is like that found in Jean–Luc Nancy: transcendence in multiple
immanence, which amounts to the weakening of the transcendent in a state
of unflagging diVusion.
    Apparently anticipating Vattimo’s critique, Pareyson clarifies the sense
of “meta–historicity” at work in his theory of interpretation: “In short,
what follows is that the meta–historicity of reality appears less from its
power to transcend its own historical forms, than from its power to be
embodied in ever newer historical forms” (Pareyson 2013: 145). At stake here
is the metaphysical possibility of “Being,” understood now in terms of
“forming form,” to outstrip self–presentations circumscribed by this or that
determinate historical moment. In this sense, owing to the originary excess
of being, what Pareyson calls the “meta–cultural” is “gradually embodied in
diverse historical forms without ever identifying itself with them” (Pareyson
2013: 145). Nonetheless, and here is where Vattimo’s critique goes astray,
the transcendence intimated by this notion of the “meta–cultural” and
“meta–historical” turns out to be radically immanent, “since it has no other
life than those very forms in which it is embodied and resides time after
time” (Pareyson 2013: 145). In a word, the imperative that issues from the
truth of beings in their being is a feature, not of a super–historical foundation
which cannot in principle be fully embodied anywhere, but of the essential
multiplication of that truth which is embodied everywhere, but as ulterior
— having more to give — and, in each case, diVerent.
    Precisely because Pareyson considers interpretation to be an originary
ontological opening, i.e. tied up inextricably with the self–showing of reality,
it is also at the same time responsibility and fidelity to being. This is why,
as Bubbio remarks, “Pareyson’s hermeneutics also implies a fundamental
ethical dimension” (Bubbio 2009: 14). But, in contrast with the approaches
of other thinkers in the continental tradition such as Scheler, Sartre, and
Marcuse, for example, this normative dimension does not, for Pareyson,
86      Justin L. Harmon


necessitate conceiving of value as an ideal order that transcends the real,
however “objective” (as in the case of Scheler) it is purported to be. The
concept of “value” fails to do the job here because, as Pareyson points out,
“in history there would exist on the one hand values that lack permanence,
and on the other hand constant characteristics that do not suYce as values”
(Pareyson 2013: 33). The naïve idea — against which Vattimo has consistently
argued, albeit not explicitly — that “history is the temporal realization of
supra–temporal values” rests on the unchecked assumption of a distinction
“between permanent insofar as supra–historical values and historical and
thus temporal facts” (Pareyson 2013: 33).6 Such a distinction lacks legitimacy,
on Pareyson’s view, since the ontological character of interpretation — i.e.
its being bound up with a reality at once historical and ulterior — makes
it impossible to distinguish “its temporal and transient aspect from an
immutable and permanent nucleus because everything there is equally and
simultaneously historical and revelatory, personal and ontological” (Pareyson
2013: 49).
    For similar reasons it is also impossible to distinguish, in any meaning-
fully clear way, between theory and practice. In Kierkegaard e Pascal [1971],
Pareyson argues that because “the ethical implies an existential commitment
[impegno existentiale],” we should not understand it in terms of a “’moral
science,’ based on the observation of human beings in their comportments
and behavior” (Pareyson 1998: 155). He then turns to Kierkegaard’s Con-
cluding Unscientific Postscript for clarification of this negative prescription:
“But the ethical is not merely a knowing; it is also a doing that is related
to a knowing, and a doing such that the repetition may in more than one
way become more diYcult than the first doing” (Kierkegaard 1992: 143).7
Thought and action, as possibilities for persons conceived as sites of truth’s
unfolding, are co–inhabitants of truth, each, in their own way, bearing an
interpretive function. When, as stated above, thought is divorced from truth
(thereby becoming merely expressive–historical), it yields ideology; when,
on the other hand, action is cut oV from truth, it is relegated to mere technics
(Pareyson 2013: 85). Ideologically driven ethics, in either its absolutist or
relativist forms, becomes the “technologization” of the practical sphere,
in the sense discussed above. Schopenhauer’s critique of Kantian ethics is
relevant here, insofar as he accuses Kant of dressing up the absolutist mora-
lism of the Great Decalogue in the language of a theory that gives reason
— as the seat of freedom — a uniquely positive vocation. From a Marxian
perspective, Kantian ethics is ideological to the extent that it claims to be
ultimately disinterested, that is, “universal,” while at the same time aiding

     6. Emphasis added.
     7. Quoted in Pareyson (Ibid.).
                                            Interpretation from the Ground Up   87


in the sustainment of the status quo, bourgeois form of social organization.
    Because truth, the singular self–showing of beings in their being, is onto-
logically originary, it transcends the ontic separation of theory and practice
in a way that indicates the “primordial unity of the two terms that alone
is capable of explaining and directing their derived distinction and their
genuine reciprocal relation at every level” (Pareyson 2013: 89). Thought
always expresses and reveals, albeit rarely directly or overtly, practical conse-
quences, and conversely, every action expresses and reveals the thought that
would explain, endorse, or repudiate it. It is the primary ontological relation
— i.e. radical exposure to the other — that in oVering “truth both to theory
and to praxis, completely overcomes the distinction between them, being
instead its root and originary norm” (Pareyson 2013: 89).
    One’s engagement with truth, understood in these terms, does not
permit one “to know,” even in the sense of Gadamer’s proposed revision of
the latter as “recognition,” that is, “pick[ing] something out of the stream of
images flowing past us as identical” (Gadamer 1976: 14). Instead, truth, as
always ulterior, makes demands and confronts one with the responsibility
of personally formulating it (in theory and praxis) without ever succumbing
to the totalizing power of ideology. The problem with “knowledge” — and,
correlatively, the history of modern “epistemology” — is its grounding
in the Cartesian plexus of certainty–control, a grounding which does not
appear to be displaceable.
    Philosophy, as revelatory thought, does not have the role of either gene-
rating or uncovering norms that should then be applied, via praxis, to the
“real world.” Farther still from the truth is the idea that philosophy, as a gua-
rantor of quietism, serves to critically neutralize action, which would then
have to remobilize itself more thoughtfully. Rather, properly understood,
philosophy itself constitutes a kind of action, namely, action as reticent
flexibility in the face of dynamic phenomena. The often–lauded figure of
the political “man of action” seems to suggest, on the assumption of the
“thought/action” dichotomy, that thought somehow stands in the way of
or tends to bewilder action. But the only sort of “contemplation” that praxis
tends to bewilder or mortify is solipsistic and narcissistic thought, divor-
ced as it is from “the memory of truth, realizable not only in speculative
thought, but in every human activity” (Pareyson 2013: 156). When “reason”
is touted as the sole and originary locus of normativity and, thus, as that
which must be imposed on this or that practice, it “becomes a norm only
through the pitiless face of rigorism, the inflexible severity of moralism,
and the squalid ferocity of fanaticism” (Pareyson 2013: 159). An ethics that
promulgates the task of reason as this — and it is hard to avoid seeing
the specter of Kant in the following quote — “becomes the surrogate for
religion and absolutizes autonomous and suYcient human reason, with the
88    Justin L. Harmon


result that human reason, proud of its own absolute nature, ends up either
with the suspension of guilt and thus with universal justification, or with
the establishment of an abstract moralism that is uselessly intransigent and
constricted” (Pareyson 2013: 169).
    JeV Malpas echoes the Pareysonian insight that theory and practice are
ontologically indissoluble with respect to place. He argues that the failure
to adequately think this indissolubility is most problematic in the domain of
contemporary ethics, “in which the very idea of ‘applied ethics’ is suggestive
of a divorce of ethical theorizing from ethical practice — in which priorly
articulated principles or ‘ethical theories,’ often of a highly abstract nature,
are employed to resolve ‘practical’ ethical problems” (Malpas 2010: 271).
The chiasm of theory and practice at the place of truth demands that we
look for truth at the place where we find ourselves — and this calls for “a
responsiveness to the demands of the place itself and of that which appears
within that place” (Malpas 2010: 271). Tying together explicitly the concepts
of truth and place, Malpas concludes that the former “names that demand
that is placed on us beyond our own interests, preferences, or opinions
— the demand that comes from the reality of our inevitable and concrete
placedness [what Pareyson has called embodiment] in a world, as ourselves,
and among others” (Malpas 2010: 273).
    This final prescription amounts to a tragic commitment to the ongoing
subordination of political teleology and expediency to the moral impera-
tive that is truthfully exposed, without hierarchy or completion, in every
engagement with the other. Ethics and ontology can be decoupled only at
the risk of releasing political commitment from its proper dwelling within
moral commitment, whereupon the direct relation of praxis to ontology —
forming an “originary unity–distinction of theory and practice” (Pareyson
2013: 151) — is ruptured and forgotten. To think an imperative whose validity
and heterogeneous voice — expressed by each being in its being — cannot
help but survive the most far–reaching and decisive of catastrophes, whose
non–totalizable and irreconcilable demands must continue to proliferate
even after the “death of God,” is to recognize the “unfathomable and deep
tragedy which is implied in reality itself ” (Pareyson 2009: 219), at the heart
of which reside, inexorably, “duplicity and contrast,” in a word: diVerence.
    A theory of interpretation from the ground up, as I have developed it,
means that every interpretation draws its impetus from the concrete place
where the interpreter finds herself, and that interpretation is itself part
of this “ground,” inextricably wrapped up with it. There is no total and
self–same Being onto which an interpreter can latch by way of accurate
representations or propositions. Truth, then, is not a matter of mimetic
correspondence. Instead, truth has to do with mimetic engagement with —
always concomitant with historical expression — objects in their being.
                                                Interpretation from the Ground Up   89


Objects present themselves, in these terms, precisely as demand, that is, as an
imperative to adequacy, whether theoretical or praxical (which are unified
ontologically). Alphonso Lingis has this point in mind when he observes
that “what really is, what is given, is not just a pattern hovering before our
eyes, and which may be a will–o’–the–wisp, an image, a memory, or a
dream. What is given crowds in on us, imposes itself on us, weighs on us”
(Lingis 1996: 23).


6. Bibliographical References

Broch, H., 2002, Geist and Zeitgeist: The spirit in an unspiritual age: Six essays, New
  York, Counterpoint.
Bubbio, P.D., 2009, “Introduction,” In Existence, interpretation, freedom: Selected
   writings, Aurora, Davies Group.
Deleuze, G., 2002, Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation, Minneapolis, University of
  Minnesota Press.
Eco, U., 1989, The open work, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Gadamer, H–G., 1976, Philosophical hermeneutics. Berkeley: University of Califor-
  nia Press.
Gadamer, H–G., 1960, Warheit und Methode, Tübingen; English Translation by
  Joel Weinsheimer and
Donald G. Marshall, Truth and Method, New York, Continuum, 2013.
Gibson, J.J., 1979, The ecological approach to visual perception, Boston, Houghton
   MiZin.
Heidegger, M., 1988, Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität, Frankfurt, Vittorio Klo-
  stermann; Translated to English by John Van Buren, Ontology: Hermeneutics of
  Facticity, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008.
Heidegger, M., 1927, Sein und Zeit, Being and time, Frankfurt, Vittorio Kloster-
  mann; English Translation by J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Being and Time,
  New York, Harper Collins, 1962.
Kierkegaard, S., 1992, Concluding unscientific postscript [1846], Princeton, Prince-
   ton University Press.
Kundera, M., 1984, The unbearable lightness of being. New York, Harper & Row.
Lingis, A., 1998, The imperative, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
––––– 1996, Sensation: Intelligibility in sensibility, Atlantic Highlands, Humanities
   Press.
Malpas, J., 2010, “The origin of understanding: Event, place, truth,” Consequences
  of hermeneutics: Fifty years after Gadamer’s Truth and method. Evanston, North-
  western University Press.
90     Justin L. Harmon


Miller, L., 2012, “Thomas Kinkade: The George W. Bush of Art,” Salon, http://ww-
  w.salon.com/2012/04/09 thomas_kinkade_the_george_w_bush_of_art/
Mootz, F.J., 2010, Law, hermeneutics and rhetoric, Farnham, Ashgate.
Nancy, J–L., 1996, Être singulier pluriel, Paris, Êditions Galilèe; Translated to En-
  glish by Robert D.
Richardson, Being Singular Plural, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000.
Pareyson, L., 1960, Estetica: Teoria della formatività Bologna, Zanichelli.
––––– 2009, Existence, interpretation, freedom: Selected writings. Aurora, Davies Group.
––––– 1998, Kierkegaard e Pascal [1971], Milano, Mursia.
––––– 1971, Verità e interpretazione, Milano, Mursia; English Translation by Robert
   Valgenti, Truth and Interpretation, New York, SUNY Press, 2013.
––––– 1952, Unità della filosofia: Prolusione al Corso di storia della filosofia, letta nell’U-
   niversità di Pavia il 23 novembre 1951. Torino: Edizioni di filosofia.
Ric˜ur, P., 1991, From text to action. Evanston, Northwestern University Press.
––––– 1992, Oneself as another [1990], Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Rousseau, J., 2004, Letter to d’Alembert ; and Writings for the theater (A. D. Bloom,
  Trans.), Hanover, University Press of New England.
Schelling, F. W., 1859, Die Philosophie der Kunst, Stuttgart, Cotta; English Transla-
   tion by Douglas W.
Stott, The philosophy of art, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Serres, M., 1995, Angels, a modern myth, Paris, Flammarion.
Tomatis, F., 2011, “Luigi Pareyson: Good, evil, freedom,” Annali d’Italianistica: Ita-
  lian critical theory (Vol. 29), Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Chapel
  Hill Press.
Vattimo, G., 1985, La fine della modernità, Milano, Garzanti; English Translation
   by Jon R. Snyder, The end of modernity: Nihilism and hermeneutics in postmodern
   culture, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
––––– 2013, “Introduction,” Truth and Interpretation, New York, SUNY Press.
––––– 1985, Poesia e ontologia , Milano, Mursia; English Translation by Luca D’I-
   santo, Art’s Claim to Truth , New York, Columbia University Press, 2010.
