Suzanne Foisy Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

What follows is a short extract of Interview with Attilio Taverna by Suzanne Foisy, at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. I hope you will appreciate it as much as I did.

Suzanne Foisy: I would like to know why, in a previous conference at Museum of Modern Art of Udine in 1994, you stated that the aesthetic experience, at a certain level of the philosophic analisys, can be considered mother of the ethic.

Attilio Taverna: If we take a Dostoevskij's statement from his novel The Idiot, the protagonist, Ippolit, says: «Will come the Beauty and will save the world». We must ask, ourselves, the reason of this radical statement; why should the Beauty have the possibility of saving the world? And Saving from what? Here: in my opinion, the most accurate interpretation of this thought is the following: the Beauty has the power of saving the world because the Beauty --only she-- has the possibility of riconverting the man's glance on the world. In other words, from a glance of domination, to one of astonishment. And the possibility of this reconversion accomplished by Beauty, is the very one reconversion from which the philosophic's question originates itself. In fact, philosophy borns from the astonishment (thauma); only the astonishment gives birth, in turn, the questioning possibility. Therefore, if the Beauty reconverts the man's glance tossed on the world, glance, that begins with a domain's opinion, and reconverts in a glance of astonishment, for this very reason, so, the man will relate with the world with wonder and gratitude. He will be grateful of what is freely gifted him. The world, indeed. And from there so, both, his ethical and questioning dimensions will begin. In this sense, so, Aesthetic, that asks about the nature of the art, which, on its own, asks of Beauty that reconverts the glance, as we said, will never be at the original ethic's dimension. Aesthetic, therefore, as mother of the Ethic.

Source[web.archive.org]