The Final End of Man: Reading the Moralist Aesthetics of Fr. Alfredo Panizo, O.P.

Abstract

Alfredo Panizo was a philosopher who served in various capacities at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) during the twentieth century. In 1954, he gave an address at the university that was also published in book form as Art and Morals. In his address/book, Panizo systematically laid out his aesthetics, which offers a criticism of modern art during a time when Edades and other modernists received institutional support from UST. Unfortunately, scholars have neither provided a comprehensive explication of Panizo’s aesthetics nor situated it in the broader history of Philippine modern art. This paper aims to address this problem. By employing Gadamerian hermeneutics, the author of the paper offers an interpretation of Panizo’s aesthetics that (1) forms a connection between his ideas and S. P. Lopez’s thoughts on proletarian art, (2) explicates Panizo’s views on beauty and transcendence, and (3) investigates Panizo’s position on modern art. Through this paper, the author hopes to add more nuance to the story of modern art in the Philippines. Although much has been written about the modernists, who made UST a springboard for spreading their ideas, scholars have barely looked at what the Dominicans at the university thought about modern art.