The art of the inexhaustible. Aesthetics and hermeneutics in Luigi Pareyson

Piedmontese philosopher Luigi Pareyson played a major role in the Italian context of the twentieth century, developing a highly original philosophical perspective. The present paper focuses on his aesthetics, his hermeneutics, and the relationship between the two. After a first introductory section on Pareyson's life and on the different stages of his philosophical reflection, the article turns to Pareyson's aesthetic theory of formativity, with a focus on the aspects that most clearly enucleate its hermeneutic bases. The third section examines Pareyson's explicit contribution to hermeneutics, by drawing attention to the fact that art best exemplifies the dynamics that are at work in any act of interpretation. The fourth section takes into account the concept of "persona" as a trait d'union that runs through Pareyson's whole philosophy, shedding further light on the interpretative process as it involves both artworks and truth. Ultimately, the paper aims to show how in Pareyson's thought the hermeneutics, although outlined more than fifteen years after the aesthetics, logically precedes and underpins it.