Q Academy of Management Review 2017, Vol. 42, No. 4, 745–755. WHAT INSPIRES THE ACADEMY: Jean M. Bartunek BOOK REVIEWS AND BEYOND Review Essays Editor Luigi Pareyson’s Estetica: Teoria della The contemporary reader should note that formativita` and Its Implications for Pareyson’sbookappearedinItalianin1954and Organization Studies that it was almost fifty years later that Peter Carravetta wrote as follows in the introduction to By Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento and the recent publication in English of a selection of ’ University of Oslo, and Antonio Strati, University Pareyson sessays: of Trento and i3-CRG, Universite´ Paris-Saclay The appearance of a substantial selection of Luigi Pareyson’swritingsinEnglishismotivefor Luigi Pareyson wrote, “The whole of spiri- atransnationalcelebrationinthehistoryofideas. tual life is in some way ‘art’:ineveryfieldof AthinkeroftherankofGadamerandRicoeur,to whom he is often compared, surprisingly little has human industriousness nothing can be done been known or written about him. An original in- without also inventing in some way how it is terpreter of existentialism and German Idealism, to be done” (1988: 63). Therefore, if we want to Pareyson developed an authentic hermeneutic in follow in Pareyson’sstepsandappreciate the nineteen-fifties, a time in which the Italian his contribution to organization and manage- panorama was being shaped by growing Marxist hegemony and the turn towards the sciences es- ment studies, we can see management as pecially linguistics (2010: 99). art, production processes as artistry, a work well done as a work of art, and, of course, art in Pareyson was not attracted by Marxist philos- itself. ophy, since he was a Catholic and a militant in “ ’ ” “ ” The very idea that art is always an art of Partito d Azione and Giustizia e Liberta` dur- something is what motivates us to propose ing the Resistance to Nazi fascism. He was born in a reading of Pareyson’s aesthetic philosophy that 1918, and he worked at the University of Torino can talk to the hearts and minds of organiza- almost until his death in 1991. In 1935 and 1936, he spent time with Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg, and tional scholars. One of our aims in reviewing during the 1940s and 1950s, he published, in Ital- Pareyson’s main oeuvre—Estetica: Teoria della ian, several essays on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, formativita` —is to encourage the readers of this and mainly Schelling’s existentialist philosophy. journal to engage with literature they might not In the following years he published on aesthetics normally read. Our other purpose is to take the and on interpretation: Estetica: Teoria della for- opportunity provided by a recent and partial mativita` in 1954, Conversazioni di estetica in 1966, ’ translation of Pareyson s work into English to in- Verita` e interpretazione in 1971—recently trans- troduce management scholars to a philosopher lated into English (Pareyson, 2013)—and his last whose work resonates with a relatively new in- work, Ontologia e liberta,` published posthumously terest in practical knowledge and in forms of in 1995. As an academic at the University of Torino, knowing outside the cognitive domain. In fact, if among his followers were the semiologist Umberto we locate a “turn to practice” in social sciences Eco and the philosophers Gianni Vattimo, Mario around the year 2000, we may argue that it is Perniola, and Sergio Givone, who worked on aes- through the organizational aesthetics approach thetics. He was also the director of the journal that the idea of sensible knowing and aesthetic Rivista di estetica. judgment arrived in practice-based studies. Today we can gain a more complete overview Pareyson’s philosophy is important for grounding of his inquiries in philosophy, hermeneutics, a philosophy of knowing that is an aesthetic phi- and existentialism because of the translations losophy of production—that is, based on doing— of his writings into English, French, Portuguese, rather than contemplation. Spanish, and other languages. It has been a very 745 Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed, posted to a listserv, or otherwise transmitted without the copyright holder’s express written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only. 746 Academy of Management Review October long time since 1954, when Pareyson, “at the existentialist aesthetics. The Italian philosophi- time aged thirty-six” and despite his young age, cal context of Formativita` , therefore, was influ- “was not an unknown scholar” (Tiberghien, enced by social ideologies at the basis of political 2007: 5). and economic choices that would give rise to both Why did it take so long to translate Pareyson’s the decade of economic boom of the 1960s and the work? After all, he is celebrated as a great phi- student protests and the workers’ and trade union losopher. One possible answer is that his work struggles of 1968 and 1969. focused on the “practical” character of art and If, then, on the one hand, Formativita` “marked the productive moment of art. In commonsense the decisive moment of the renewal of Italian language, as in philosophy, practice is opposed aesthetics in the middle of this century involving, to theory, and the two terms are considered not besides the legacy of pre-Hegelian German ide- only oppositional but hierarchically related alism, also the ontological-hermeneutic current so that practical knowledge is devalued with of twentieth-century existentialism” (wrote Gianni respect to theory and theoretical knowledge Vattimo [1977: 42], an Italian philosopher in- (Gherardi, 2000). In this regard we argue that an ternationally known for his theory of “weak aesthetic philosophy, like the one elaborated by thought”), on the other hand, there were other Pareyson, can provide a firm grounding for the- currents that creatively rethought themes of orizing about knowing in practice and knowing Marxist (Galvano della Volpe) or phenomeno- as corporeal doing. logical (Luciano Anceschi and Antonio Banfi) In the following sections we address three origin. The decisive renewal represented by themes: (1) the Italian philosophical context in Formativita` was due to the definitive liberation which Estetica: Teoria della formativita` appeared, of Italian aesthetics from the “dictatorship of (2) how the book was received within the aes- Crocean idealism.” In 1902 Benedetto Croce had thetic organizational research field, and (3) published his thesis on aesthetics as the sci- Pareyson’scontributiontothestudyoforgani- ence of expression, in which art is considered zational practices. We conclude with a discus- to be knowledge that is intuition and expression sion of the value of reading Pareyson today within at the same time because there are no pro- a community of organizational and management found intuitions unless they are formed and scholars. expressed—as happens with a musical motif, where there is no intuition unless it is heard al- most as if it were being played. Moreover, for THE ITALIAN PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT OF Croce, intuition was art, and the distinction be- THE BOOK tween the intuition of ordinary people and that of Estetica: Teoria della formativita` (henceforth an artist was a mere empirical distinction owing simply Formativita` )waspublishedinTurinby to the fateful separation of art from common Edizioni di Filosofia, in 1954, as mentioned spiritual life. In fact, for Croce, art techniques above. The Second World War was now long and practices constituted a level of reflection past, the fascist period was over, and Italy was that had little to do with aesthetics because it no longer a monarchy but, rather, a republic with was an economic fact that reverberated on the universal suffrage, because the right to vote had diversity of arts and artistic genres. been extended to women. This was the historical This thesis of Benedetto Croce is well known period in Italy known as the “Ricostruzione,” and because it had broad international resonance there was heated political debate between the and projected the Italian aesthetic philosophy communist and socialist left, on the one hand, of the twentieth century along idealist lines and the Christian democrat and liberal center, on (D’Angelo, 1997; Restaino, 1991). What is perhaps the other hand, which had participated in the Re- less well known is that the devaluation of the sistance against the fascist dictatorship and Nazi “practical” character of art and the productive occupation. moment of art was the aesthetic issue that gen- There was also a sharp division among com- erated aversion to Crocean theoreticism. This munist, socialist, Catholic, and liberal intellec- aversion was shared by several salient move- tuals regarding aesthetic philosophy, which was ments of Italian aesthetic philosophy in the expressed by the opposition of the aesthetics of postwar period because it developed both Marxist origin against the phenomenological and among philosophers extraneous to Crocean 2017 What Inspires the Academy: Book Reviews and Beyond 747 idealism, such as Luigi Pareyson and Luciano We can find the first reference in organizational Anceschi, and among philosophers tied to studies to Pareyson’s aesthetic philosophy in the Croce’s thought. What happened in Italy, in fact, book Organization and Aesthetics (Strati, 1999)—that was that is to say, when the study of the aesthetic dimension of organization was becoming established, and much of the aesthetics of the 1950s set itself on the part of the producer rather than that of the user or not at its beginnings in the late 1980s, nor even the art work. This is interesting also out of [the contemporaneously with the proposal for the Italian] context, because an attitude of this kind is aesthetic study of organization made in the early relatively rare in the history of aesthetics. We find 1990s in the pages of this journal, the Academy of it, to a very marked extent, also in Pareyson and Management Review (Strati, 1992). This signals Brandi, and in Anceschi’s strong interest in critics who are also artists (D’Angelo, 1997: 174–175).