This paper analyses the paradigms of interpretation and the evolution of the creative processes in music and law. Whether it is matter of a score or a law, the text is reborn through the work of the interpreter who, in dealing with the epistemological problem of the understanding, has to harmonize the purity of the philological reconstruction of the object with the need to actualize its sense. Moving from the creative character of every interpretation—neither the musician can be reduced to (...) a mere executor of a concatenation of musical symbols on the staff as Stravinsky wanted nor the judge may be conceived as a bouche de la loi according to Montesquieu’s theory—this work, after having discussed Gadamer and Betti’s hermeneutical approaches to music and law, focuses on the issue of the limits to the interpreters’ freedom. The interpretation here proposed revolves around improvisation, seen as a typical cultural practice of the aesthetic dimension of music. Improvisation, which from baroque to jazz does not correspond to the realm of absolute freedom, is used as a trait d’union in order to make a comparison with legal experience. This is particularly true with the development of case law, which becomes increasingly problematic especially in the light of “liquid modernity”, where the “polytheism of values” has been gaining strength. Seen from this perspective, the comparison between the judge and the musician in their activity as interpreters of a formalized system of signs highlights the controversial relationship between form and creativity, the accuracy of the text and the requisites deriving from the social context, certainty and justice. (shrink)

_Formatividad_ es el concepto clave de la estética de Luigi Pareyson, pero también de su hermenéutica filosófica. El artículo no se propone ilustrar la teoría estética de Pareyson sino: analizar en qué consiste esa formatividad intrínseca a toda actividad humana ; aclarar porqué la formatividad nos obliga a concebir el conocimiento como interpretación y, por tanto, a legitimar la hermenéutica ; señalar algunas implicaciones de tal hermenéutica susceptibles de importantes y fecundos desarrollos.

Luigi Pareyson’s concept of formativity is one of his most relevant and original concepts. In this paper I will give a short exposition of this concept in Pareyson’s Estetica and try to show how it can account, better as other object-, subject-, target- oriented theories, even of some features of contemporary art. The very relevant innovation that we can find in this concept is the shift from a concept of art as poiesis—as it is in Aristotle, namely, as a production (...) of an object—to the concept of art as praxis, that is, as an activity which involves the entire doing of the artist. As a doing that invents the form of doing, formativity appears as a kind of schematism that operates, not only without concept, as it is in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, but even without object. The thesis here suggested is that formativity can be understood as a transcendentalism of invention. (shrink)