Creatio ex nihilo o creatio ab aliquo?

Un contributo alla questione della creatività nell'estetica di Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

Paul Ricoeur is one of the most important contemporary hermeneutical thinkers. However, his poetical work represents an important contribution to the aesthetical thought: I discuss this point in the first part of this paper. Then, I show the contribution of the French philoso-pher, who studied and acquired some essential thesis of the structuralism and of the religious thought, to the question of creativity. In The living metaphor he identifies the creative function of metaphors with a specific role played by the lector of the metaphorical statement. But in another study of the same work Ricoeur strictly forbids to speak about the role of the reality in the creation of metaphors and suggests that metaphors could have been created from nothing similar before. Has Ricoeur meant with this acreatio ex nihilo? Is it possible to understand the artistic creation as a creatio ex nihilo, almost for a thinker who takes regard to the religious background of the thought? At last I present another interpretation of Ricoeur's poetry in which he suggests a different consideration of the role of the author in the creation of metaphors.