Truth and Interpretation

Luigi Pareyson, Robert T. Valgenti

Description

Luigi Pareyson (1918–1991) was one of the most important Italian philosophers to emerge after World War II and stands shoulder to shoulder with fellow hermeneutic thinkers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. The product of a well-developed theory of interpretation that stretches back to the late 1940s, his 1971 masterpiece Truth and Interpretation provides the historical impetus and theoretical framework for the questions of existence, art, and politics that would motivate his most famous students, Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo. In a time when the meaning of truth as an interpretation is challenged by the chaotic din of media on the one side and the violent force of absolute claims from science, religion, and political economy on the other, Pareyson's meditation on the value of thinking that is shaped by the traditions of philosophy and yet responds to contemporary demands remains timely and pressing more than forty years after its initial publication.
Acknowledgments
Translator’s Note
Foreword by Gianni Vattimo
Translator’s Introduction: Luigi Pareyson’s Vindication of Philosophy by Robert T. Valgenti
Preface
Introduction: Expressive Thought and Revelatory Thought

Part I: Truth and History

1. Permanent Values and Historical Process

2. The Originarity of Interpretation

Part II: Truth and Ideology

3. Philosophy and Ideology

4. The Destiny of Ideology

Part III: Truth and Philosophy

5. The Necessity of Philosophy

6. Philosophy and Common Sense

Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Philosophie générale
• Philosophy
• History of philosophy
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 04 septembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438447513
• Langue: English

Extrait

Truth and Interpretation
SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy

Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors
Truth and Interpretation
Luigi Pareyson
Translated and with an Introduction by
Robert T. Valgenti
Revised and Edited by
Silvia Benso
Foreword by
Gianni Vattimo
© 2005 Ugo Mursia Editore S.p.A - Verità e interpretazione by Luigi Pareyson
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pareyson, Luigi.
[Verità e interpretazione. English]
Truth and interpretation / Luigi Pareyson ; translated and with an introduction by Robert T. Valgenti ; revised and edited by Silvia Benso; foreword by Gianni Vattimo.
pages cm — (Suny series in contemporary Italian philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4749-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Truth. 2. Ideology. I. Valgenti, Robert T. II. Title.
BD171.P3713 2013
121—dc23
2012037054
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Translator’s Note
Foreword
Gianni Vattimo
Translator’s Introduction: Luigi Pareyson’s Vindication of Philosophy
Robert T. Valgenti
T RUTH AND I NTERPRETATION
Preface
Introduction: Expressive Thought and Revelatory Thought
P ART I: T RUTH AND H ISTORY
1. Permanent Values and Historical Process
2. The Originarity of Interpretation
P ART II: T RUTH AND I DEOLOGY
3. Philosophy and Ideology
4. The Destiny of Ideology
P ART III: T RUTH AND P HILOSOPHY
5. The Necessity of Philosophy
6. Philosophy and Common Sense
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
There are many who have been instrumental to the idea and execution of this long-overdue translation. In particular I would like to thank Claudio Ciancio, Marco Ravera, Maurizio Pagano, Francesco Tomatis, Gianluca Cuozzo, Ezio Gamba, and all those at the Centro Studi Filosofico-Religiosi “Luigi Pareyson” in Turin, whose generosity, time, and resources in 2001 and again in 2005 helped to initiate this project; the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University, and the Office of Academic Affairs at Lebanon Valley College, who in varying stages of this project provided the time and financial support necessary for this work; my colleagues in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Lebanon Valley College—Noel Hubler, Jeffrey W. Robbins, Noëlle Vahanian, and Matthew Sayers—who deserve special recognition for creating and supporting an environment where such work can thrive; Anthony Feudale, for his careful and timely work on the index; and Gaetano Chiurazzi and Santiago Zabala, who have served as trustworthy guides and colleagues in this long process. Of course, I am indebted to Gianni Vattimo, who many years ago first suggested I study his teacher Pareyson and undertake this translation, and whose mentorship over the years has been invaluable and inspiring. I especially want to thank Silvia Benso for her expert and patient editing of this text, which was absolutely essential to the successful translation of Pareyson’s profound and often difficult thinking.
Translator’s Note
In the following translation I have tried to remain true to the language and intent of Pareyson’s original. When appropriate, I have provided the original Italian word in brackets to indicate a particularly difficult and/or important term in the work. I have retained Pareyson’s original notes, placing them at the end of each of the work’s sections. When possible, I have provided the English-language references and translation of quotations, placing those in brackets in his notes. Where Pareyson’s original included non-Italian words or quotations, I have retained the original Greek, Latin, German, or French but provided the appropriate translation: from extant English translations if available, or in certain cases, my own translation.
Foreword
Gianni Vattimo
Translated by Silvia Benso
“There are no facts but only interpretations. And this too is an interpretation.” Most likely, Luigi Pareyson would have never subscribed to this famous claim by Nietzsche although (considering myself loyal to his philosophy) I think that he should have at least confronted it.
We speak, however, from a place that is only partially still similar to the one from which Pareyson spoke, in the early seventies of the last century. What we share with the original situation of his Truth and Interpretation is what I consider to be the still unsurpassable timeliness of hermeneutics.
What we experience today, and was not equally present in the cultural climate of forty years ago, is probably a hardening of the realm of facts. This circumstance reduces some of the urgency of Pareyson’s rejection of “praxis” and of the enslavement of philosophy to politics in order to defend instead the transcendence and eternity of truth.
We should not forget that Truth and Interpretation was originally published in Italian in 1970, that is, immediately after the protest movements that had occurred in universities (and later in factories) throughout the Western world starting in 1968. Not without some good reason, Pareyson suspected (and of a similar mind was also an intellectual such as Pier Paolo Pasolini) that the youth protest movement was merely a way of asserting one’s right to a more consumerist society, more tolerant but certainly also more “American” and subjected to the rules of dominating monopolistic capitalism. The student movement’s proposal of a reformation of the university system seemed to him (and to us) to be in the end inspired by an American, productivistic model that risked destroying, together with the “university chair barons” [ i baroni delle cattedre ], also the patrimony of typically European values. It is not by chance that, some years later, one of Bush’s ministers would scornfully dismiss such values as things belonging to “old Europe,” no longer fit for the modern world (of the Iraqi and Afghan wars).
Already at that time, Pareyson’s position in those years (and on those issues) seemed to me to be the view of an enlightened conservative—whom I always respected since I knew of his anti-fascist involvement (he had been part of the Italian Resistance movement against Fascism and the Nazis when he was a high school teacher in Cuneo), but whose political convictions I could not share. In his insistence on the transcendence and eternity of truth, which he coupled with the great claim that “ of truth, there is only ever interpretation , and … there is no interpretation, lest it be of truth ” ( Truth and Interpretation , p. 47 ), I forebode, and perceive even more clearly today, the persistence of a metaphysical residue that will be more frankly dissolved, I think, in his later “ontology of freedom.”
When thinking of Pareyson’s lesson today, the question I once again ask myself is this: Can we think of hermeneutics in such radical terms as his (“of truth, there is only ever interpretation, etc.”) and not assert at the same time, as Pareyson conversely did, the transcendence and eternity of truth?
What I name, or what appears to me as a metaphysical residue in Pareyson’s philosophy of those years is the fact of still thinking of truth as “substance,” that is, in the end as a permanent “being,” somewhat like the “existing” God of Christian dogmatics. A thesis that Pareyson probably never considered is the one expressed in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous claim that “ Einen Gott den es gibt, gibt es nicht [a God that exists, does not exist].” The question that I still ask Pareyson, and that I ask myself as his reader and disciple, is: What do transcendence and eternity of truth mean if truth gives itself only in interpretation—that is, in interpretations that occur historically … ?
The answer remains the same as that which Pareyson offered ever since the time of his aesthetic theory as theory of formativity: In artistic making, and truly in all forms of human invention, something entirely new happens that, however, is neither arbitrariness nor subjective contingency, but rather implies the presence of something else that, like “the forming form,” guides the act of concrete formation. Briefly, according to Pareyson we must acknowledge that when artists create, they also and always correct and change under the guidance of the law of the thing itself, as it were, which transcends the artist’s arbitrariness and the contingency of the circumstances. In Heideggerian terms, we can speak of an event of being, which, as is well known, for Heidegger occurs eminently in the work of art (the putting to work of truth). That an event is an event of being, opening of a new way of being’s self-giving (and thus happening of a new paradigm, of a new epoch) can be said only afterward. Likewise, a great “classic” artwork can be recognized only when it has become such, in a happening that is not contained in its origin or in the initiative of its author.
I propose that we should think of the relation between truth and interpretation in Pareyson along similar lines: There is no truth except than in the interpretative event, which is always historically situated; yet interpretation is such only if, as is the case for the artwork, it “succeeds.” This is so first of all in the sense that interpretation is true only if it does not claim to replace truth, its unicity, and transcendence. Unicity and transcendence operate here not so