Phenomenological Aesthetics and the Contemporary Arts

Abstract

Throughout the centuries the different aesthetics that have followed one another have conditioned artistic production, stressing either their object or the creative subject. Aesthetics of the first type have followed the principles of ontology, and those from the other type cast their lot under the sign of gnoseology and psychology. Where the nature of the object and aesthetics, but also the creation process, are concerned, things started to change with the reflections of Kant. In his “analysis of Beauty” he considered the object of art to be found in the play of the spiritual faculties, because according to the presence or the absence of that “play,” the object will appear beautiful or ugly. This opinion, which is more spontaneous than elaborated, quickly found itself a place in aesthetic and artistic conceptions that appeared after Kant, simply because the object of knowledge, namely things without distinction, is conditioned by the active interference of the object. Kant did not make any distinction between empirically real things and beautiful things. This opinion will later be found in Croce, Bergson, Lipps, Husserl and Geiger. Hartmann was of the opinion that the most important path that aesthetics follows in our century is that which proceeds from phenomenology “because nothing can help us here other than a tendency to come as close as possible to the phenomena themselves, to observe them more precisely than we have done up to now and to learn to see them in all their variety” (Hartmann, pp. 34–35). Phenomenological aesthetics was much influenced in its formation by psychology, and that is why sometimes confusion occurs between the empathic tendency and the phenomenological one. Moritz Geiger is the one who was credited with separating them. Concerning the relation between the object and the act, phenomenology lays stress on the latter, but not to exclude the former. Neglecting the object does not mean ignoring its objectivity. The two poles of phenomenological analysis, noema and noesis, virtually guarantee that analytical properties of phenomenological aesthetics incline toward an intuitionist view in which the concept of intentionality is the key not only for thw analytical method, but also for the entire aesthetic system.