The Aesthetic Core of the Work of Art: The Boundaries of Its Phenomenological Description

Abstract

Being in agreement with Marvin Farber’s claim that “a strict interpretation of phenomenology as a descriptive philosophical method and discipline is possible, and is alone capable of gaining general acceptance,”1 I intend to draw attention to the pertinence of this idea to the efforts of aestheticians who have tried to describe the aesthetic structure of the work of art. I would not insist that a rigorous application of Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology is a conditio sine qua non of this project. Nevertheless, in analyzing Lukacs’s aesthetics I found that his conscious self-distantiation from even the rudiments of phenomenological methodology had no beneficial effect on the terminological clarity and abstractive distinctness of his presentation.2 Nevertheless, it is perhaps no accident that despite differences of philosophy and methodology both of these thinkers set the limits of description at the same level, that of the structural model of the work of art.