Phenomenological Aesthetics Research Articles

GADAMER’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL AESTHETICS IN THE CONTEXT OF TIMBRE ANALYSIS OF TEXT

The article explores the phenomenological aesthetics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, specifically focusing on its application in the context of timbral text analysis. The study thoroughly investigates how Gadamer’s phenomenological perspective can enhance the understanding and interpretation of texts, by viewing them as intricate, multi-layered constructs that require analysis of their emotional and expressive elements. The authors delve into such fundamental concepts, as the fusion of the author’s and reader’s horizons, the hermeneutic circle, and the dynamic nature of these horizons within timbral analysis. A significant portion of the paper is dedicated to examining the role of historical context and personal preconceptions in the interpretation process. It underscores the importance of acknowledging historical and cultural horizons to achieve a comprehensive understanding of texts. The article presents an innovative approach to the interpretation of literary texts, merging Gadamer’s phenomenological aesthetics with timbral analysis techniques. This research redefines traditional text analysis methodologies by attempting to bridge the gap between philosophical aesthetics and practical text analysis. This work offers a novel perspective on text analysis and interpretation. The authors’ approach not only deepens the understanding of Gadamer’s phenomenology but also demonstrates its utility in text analysis. The study is poised to influence future research in text interpretation, encouraging a more nuanced and holistic approach that takes into consideration both the aesthetic and emotional components of texts, as well as the cultural and historical context in which they are embedded.

Vernacular garden as urban landscape element (сomparative analysis of Kyiv and Prešov cases)

Background. The aim of the paper is to compare the vernacular gardening within urban landscapes in Ukraine and Slovakia through its ability to enhance resident engagement and reduce levels of indifference and alienation. Methods. I apply Lehtinen's idea of urban aesthetics as a compromise, highlighting the significance of engaging with city imperfections to achieve urban harmony, as well as Jackson and von Bonsdorff offer contrasting perspectives on the landscape concept and urban environment, respectively. Cureton introduces the concept of "vernacular landscape," while Macauley emphasizes the embodied experience of walking in the city. Fenner's insights on gardens enrich the discussion by highlighting their historical resonance and aesthetic allure. Additionally, the text explores the interdisciplinary approach to analyzing vernacular gardens, drawing on concepts from Foucault and Heidegger to provide a comprehensive understanding of their socio-cultural and aesthetic significance within urban landscapes. Results. Vernacular gardens in Kyiv's Rusanivka microdistrict play significant role in intertwining private and public spaces through the lens of care. Amidst the backdrop of war in Ukraine, these gardens symbolize resilience and resistance. Contrasting vernacular gardening practices in Kyiv and Prešov , it highlights their distinct characteristics reflective of their urban landscapes, with Kyiv gardens representing individual initiatives against Soviet traditions and Prešov gardens seamlessly integrating into the urban fabric with a focus on post-Socialist architecture and individual creativity. Conclusions. The study of vernacular elements of the urban landscape, in particular – the vernacular garden and the practice of vernacular gardening, implemented through a combination of different approaches and disciplines: urban, negative and phenomenological aesthetics, cultural anthropology and cultural studies around the landscape, vernacular landscape and cityscape, as well as practical interview methods and walking the combination of different approaches made it possible to define a vernacular garden precisely as a place created by a creative subject within the urban landscape. It acquires the status of a heterotopia and a place that allows you to get involved in the urban environment, identify with it and feel its atmosphere.

Film Music and the Director’s Aesthetics: Concerning the Methodology of Film Text Analysis

The article raises the question of the necessity of applying special and individualized approaches in analyzing the music of author’s cinematography. The traditionally basic trend of research of cinema music centers around functionally semantic analysis of cinematic works. However, in the movies of author-directors, music is frequently included in the polysemantic artistic space of a cinematic text in the broad sense of this concept as the assemblage of the text (the storyline narrative), the context, the subtext, the intertext, and the metatext of the cinema product. As a rule, analysis of the music of the author’s film is inseparable from the visual images and peculiarities of the other elements of the phonogram (speech, noises, sound effects, silence). In this context, the following concepts require demarcation: “film music,” “music of the film” and “the audiovisual solution of film.” The suggested approach, based on the principles of film director’s aesthetics, is expounded on the example of analysis of Robert Bresson’s film Une femme douce (A Gentle Woman). The movie is of special interest due to the fact that in it Bresson’s general ideas regarding the use of sound, including music, in film, are manifested to the fullest degree, including declarative utterances from the screen. In the case of Bresson, the principles of phenomenological aesthetics manifested in the director’s works, especially those from his mature periods, are of foundational significance. However, the general approaches towards analysis of music in author’s cinematography suggested in the present article may be extrapolated and applied in the research of the works of film directors who created cinema works on the basis of other and most diverse aesthetic principles.

French Phenomenology of Art and Metaphysics

Abstract This article examines the relationship between French phenomenology of art and metaphysics. More specifically, it highlights four points. Firstly, French phenomenological aesthetics is characterized by a certain ignorance of the renewal of artistic questioning initiated by Anglo-Saxon aesthetics. Secondly, French phenomenology of art is a metaphysics of art, which considers that works of art contain an ontological (cosmophanic or theophanic) revelation. Thirdly, French phenomenology of art is part of the “theological turn of French phenomenology”. Authors tend towards theology or “cosmotheology”. Fourthly, French phenomenology of art, which is a metaphysics of the sensible, possesses the theoretical means to think philosophically about conceptual art.

Society Bites: Phenomenological Aesthetics of the Ordinary and the Ordinary Cannibal

Abstract Drawing on phenomenological aesthetics and on the haptic aesthetics of eating as a form of everyday aesthetics, I examine the phenomenon of eating our own as meaningful in three dimensions: vital/natural, somatic/individual, and cross-cultural. Usually conceived as a concrete, rare, and foreign practice, I show how cannibalism is present in our daily lives, both symbolically and as a liminal possibility towards which – as Freud noticed in 1913 – we all tended as children. Cannibalism is present not only in cinematic, literary, or visual art, and in anthropological research that situates it far from “us,” but through narratives and carnal dispositifs of differentiation/assimilation of the Same and the Other, fundamental for our subjective constitution. I conclude with a reflection on how the classical aesthetics of the sovereign subject develops towards alternative models like Pelluchon’s gourmet ego that re-establish the connexion and moral engagement lost by solipsism by means of alimentary metaphors, but also romanticizing them, failing to address the problem of voracity and overconsumption, both at a social and at an individual level. This is more suitably addressed by Viveiros de Castro’s idea of a cannibal cogito, but even better understood by Emmanuel Levinas’ enjoyment-contact model of subjectivity.

Conceptualizing Trajectories of Readability

Abstract: In an essay on "Phenomenological Aesthetics," the philosopher Roman Ingarden asserted that "works of art have the right to expect to be properly apprehended by observers who are in communion with them and to have their special value justly treated" (269). What does it mean to "properly apprehend" a novel? How do we know how to read something "justly"? What would it mean to claim that something has become "unreadable"? Can books somehow show us how they want to be read? Can lost forms of intelligibility and appreciation be recovered? How do we know whether the way we are reading a book is the way it asks to be read or is the product of our own, differently structured habitus? In this article, I ask these kinds of questions about novels by Sand, Gautier, and a few others with the help of Ingarden and Bourdieu as well as some recent critics.

Hedwig Conrad-Martius on Color, Light, and the Irreality of the Artwork

ABSTRACTIn her article “Die Irrealität des Kunstwerkes,” first published in 1938, Hedwig Conrad-Martius delves into the question of the artistic representation of the real reality of the world, which basically concerns the classical distinction between art and nature. It is in this context that Conrad-Martius rejects idealism and the concomitant assumption that an artwork imitates the “living reality” of Nature. She clearly distinguishes between the task of phenomenology and that of art: while phenomenology should surpass the sphere of mere sensuous appearances and inquire into the “real reality” (wirkliche Wirklichkeit) of the world, phenomenological aesthetics should conversely deal with the expressive character of appearances and assume their inherent “irreality” (Irrealität), such that phenomenological ontology and aesthetics involve distinctive ontological realms that vary according to the subject-matter. However, while she clearly distances herself from Husserl’s phenomenology in her search for the consciousness-independent facticity of the world, she concurs with him in her eidetic enquiries and in the assertion of the creative potential of art, which lies in the creation of a new, even “irreal,” world. For this purpose, I will explore confluences and divergences between their respective conceptions.

Art, Affectivity, and Aesthetic Value: Geiger on the Role of Emotions in Aesthetic Appreciation

ABSTRACTThis paper explores Moritz Geiger’s work on the role of emotions in aesthetic appreciation and shows its potential for contemporary research. Drawing on the main tenets of Geiger’s phenomenological aesthetics as an aesthetics of value, the paper begins by elaborating his model of aesthetic appreciation. I argue that, placed in the contemporary debate, his model is close to affective models which make affective states responsible for the apprehension of the aesthetic value of an artwork, though Geiger also makes important concessions to the intellectualist. Like proponents of the affective model, Geiger argues that a work’s aesthetic values are extracted by means of an affective state, more precisely, a “liking”. However, like the intellectualist, he considers that a focus on the emotions might interfere in the aesthetic appreciation of the artwork. Next, I reconstruct Geiger’s distinction between surface and depth effects in terms of a distinction between two types of emotional responses to artworks. It is argued that Geiger offers a powerful tool to distinguish those emotions that are intrinsically related to aesthetic values from those that are not and that this distinction can be useful to understand how different kinds of emotions contribute to aesthetic appreciation. I examine the historical sources of Geiger’s distinction in Theodor Lipps’s aesthetics and compare Geiger’s account with the works of other early phenomenologists. In the final part, I illustrate the place of Geiger’s model in the contemporary discussion by means of an example.

Phenomenology as an Abortive Science of Art: Two Contexts of Early Phenomenological Aesthetics (Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft and GAChN)

ABSTRACTThis article critically examines the usual characterisation of aesthetics as a fragmented, marginal or secondary field within phenomenology. The author argues in particular that phenomenological aesthetics was consciously and systematically articulated as an explicit programme in at least two distinct contexts of early phenomenology: the international project to establish a general science of art known as the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, and the Soviet State Academy of Art Studies (GAChN). The article explores the impact of these institutions on the development of early phenomenological aesthetics, highlighting how that development was conditional on the idea of a general science of art. It suggests, in conclusion, that these two attempts to mobilise phenomenology as a science of art, while abortive, cast important light not only on early phenomenological aesthetics, but on phenomenology’s fundamental relation with aesthetics.

“Quite Artificial, Awkward, and Unnecessarily Neologistic”: Early Phenomenology and Psychology Arguing About the Fundamentals of Aesthetics

ABSTRACTAs phenomenology rose to prominence at the beginning of the 20th century, several aestheticians tried to establish the Husserlian method of “phenomenological reduction” in the field of aesthetics. These ventures were met with resistance from psychological aesthetics, which was the predominant form of aesthetics in the German-speaking world at the time. This paper examines, first, practical attempts to apply the method of “phenomenological reduction” in aesthetics. Using Waldemar Conrad and Moritz Geiger as examples, I try to trace what aestheticians actually did when they applied this method in their investigations. Secondly, I reconstruct the four central objections with which psychological aesthetics reacted to such attempts. I have identified four central counterarguments in the work of Johannes Volkelt and Oswald Külpe, who were among the most eminent critics of phenomenological aesthetics: the transcendental argument, the susceptibility-to-errors argument, the constructivism argument, and the non-normativity argument. Finally, I also discuss the refusal of psychological aesthetics to acknowledge that a genuine phenomenological method even existed and the consequences of this refusal.

Editor’s Introduction: Rediscovering Early Phenomenological Aesthetics

ABSTRACTRecent years have witnessed a surge of interest in the early phases of the phenomenological movement. However, early phenomenological aesthetics has so far received very little attention in the current “Renaissance” of early phenomenology, albeit that the early phenomenologists made significant contributions to aesthetics and even argued for a special affinity between aesthetics and phenomenology. They also took part in the exceptionally lively debates of early 20th-century German aesthetics, which in general has remained all too underappreciated in today’s research. This special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology aims to kindle new interest in early phenomenological aesthetics and its wider intellectual contexts. In this introductory article, I will first provide a short overview of early phenomenology and then describe the main topics, proponents, and publications of early phenomenological aesthetics, setting them in the context of early 20th-century German aesthetics.

FROM STRUCTURE TO STYLE. MERLEAU-PONTY

In this article I try to show that there is an evolution in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the concept structure. Structure is neither an entity nor an a priori principle, but the expression of certain configurations of sense and meaning. There is a transition from a static to a dynamic approach, paralleling a movement from a philosophy of structure to a philosophy of individuation. There exists for each individual a general structure of behavior as a unity expressed in certain constants of its conduct. The structure is a momentary manifestation of the general orientation of the passive-affective life in its bodily expressions. Structuration is the act of creating order in the perception of the surrounding situation and the process of taking a position in it. By doing so Merleau-Ponty replaces the Gestalt psychology with a philosophy of the living being. This essential philosophical intuition culminates in the concept of style, which becomes an important element in Merleau-Ponty’s later phenomenological aesthetics and phenomenology of world appearance.

Aesthetic Experience in the Concepts of R. Ingarden, V. Schapp and K. Stavenhagen

The article summarizes the views of representatives of the phenomenological aesthetics of the twentieth century and the most famous students of Husserl. It is the aesthetic experience that becomes one of the key concepts in the concepts of Ingarden, Schapp and Stavenhagen. In them, aesthetic experience is associated with the ability of subjects to “ontologize” things, to individual and collective reactions to the status of things and objects. That is why the emphasis in the works of representatives of aesthetics is placed on the wisdom of subjects and determining their readiness for aesthetic experience. Such readiness can manifest itself in the beliefs and moral choices of subjects. The article concludes about the ways of «ontologization» of things proposed by thinkers. The views of thinkers in these matters were influenced by the fascination with the philosophy of history, ethics and partly the philosophy of religion. Socially oriented motives are traced in their concepts of aesthetic experience. In addition, thinkers defined the multidimensionality of aesthetic experience by offering their own constructions for measuring or fixing it. The article examines the structure of aesthetic experience proposed by them, and also makes judgments about some possibilities of applying approaches in assessing the formation of aesthetic experience in the modern world.

A New Interpretation of the Essence of Aesthetic Experience: From the Perspective of Cognitive Neuroaesthetics and Aesthetic Anthropology

Abstract In the transformation from classical to modern aesthetics, the proposition and exploration of aesthetic experience constitutes one of the major dimensions of various aesthetic problems. Pragmatic aesthetics, phenomenological aesthetics, hermeneutic aesthetics, analytical aesthetics, and new pragmatic aesthetics have comprehensively analyzed and discussed aesthetic experience. Through the construction and deconstruction of aesthetic experience in aesthetic history, the study of the key concept seems to have come to a certain predicament. This is mainly reflected in the fact that the subjective and objective attribute of experience remains unclear, and the material base of aesthetics is not solid enough. In this regard, cognitive neuroscience and anthropology provide new ways to understand aesthetic experience. From the perspective of aesthetic anthropology, the study on aesthetic experience is rooted in a broad field and serves as a solid material basis for its objectification. Cognitive neuroaesthetics explains the psychological mechanism of aesthetic experience. Together, they provide an opportunity for the study on aesthetic experience to enter a new realm. Moreover, the new interpretation of the essence of aesthetic experience will help to improve the theory and practice of aesthetic education.

Феномен демонического эстетства в современной русской рок-поэзии

The article considers the formal and meaningful structure of modern Russian rock-works in the context of phenomenological aesthetics. The reason for the chosen analytical approach was the phenomenon of demonic aesthetics revealed in the material under study, which is defined in the work, the specifics of its functioning and the structure are characterized, in connection with the elements of which the logic of the article is built. Using the example of original rock-poetry, interpreted by the author as an artistic paradigm close to the literary current, artistic intersections and individual markers are indicated in the lyrics of nine Russian rock-bands: “Mill”, “Refining”, “Yorsh”, “Crow”, “Give Two”, “The Seventh Race”, “Brain Abortion”, “Angel of Heaven”, “Lumen”. In the course of the analysis, the system-subjective, structural-semiotic, phenomenological research methods, the method of literary hermeneutics and the comparative approach were updated. The validity of such theoretical and methodological guidelines comes from the specifics of the material under study — rock-poetry as a synthetic text requires the use of new methods of study, an integrated approach. The chosen methodological path allowed us to identify and characterize such phenomena in modern Russian rock-poetry as game existentialism, game extra-subjectivity, clip-like image system, existential chronotope, etc. The conclusion is made that the poetics of modern original Russian rock-poetry requires further understanding in the context of interdisciplinary approaches based on the forms of embodiment and realization of creative consciousness associated with the processes of digitalization and virtualization of the poetic artistic world. The proposed method of analysis can become an occasion, on the one hand, for other scientific reflections on the uniqueness of Russian rock-poetry as a synthetic art form and part of rock-culture, and, on the other, for determining its philosophical and aesthetic foundations and the originality of the subject-figurative structure in the context of literary trends and trends, the modern literary process.

The Oil-Flower Unfurling Its Petals: The Phenomenological Aesthetics of Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

The article analyses Tom McCarthy’s novel Satin Island as giving literary form to the aesthetics of materiality. Acknowledging the work’s function as philosophical cognition, the investigation utilises the concept of Einfühlung (empathy) as the ‘feeling-into’ of aesthetic experience, while concomitantly determining that ordinary empathy as fellow-feeling is lacking. Combining that ahuman aspect with Husserlian time constituting flow, underlying time consciousness, as another aspect of the ahuman, the thesis argues that the novel stages the mattering of matter and the patterning of patterns as surface phenomena that constitute the aesthetics of this particular fictional world. The aesthetics appears as a near-metaphysical phenomenon in manifesting an instantiation of Nietzsche’s concept of the human only being eternally justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. As such a phenomenon, the human amalgamates with matter and is dead. However, the world can be said to harbour ‘A LIFE’ in the sense of the Deleuzean concept of pure immanence. Moreover, as an avant-gardist artwork, the novel may provoke an ethical counter-reaction in the reader, inducing an ecocritically grounded ethics that would empathise with the planet earth as a manifestation of life itself.

Голос операционной системы в фильме Спайка Джонза «Она» как гиперреальный объект любви

The article raises the topic of “new sensuality” (“new sensualism”) as a phenomenon that revived the sentimentalism of the 1960s movie drama in the computer age and was embodied in a number of films of the last decade. In such films as Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2017), Ex machina (dir. Alex Garland, 2015), I’m Here (dir. Spike Jonze, 2010) robots, replicant androids, and even laser projections act as men and women; and in the Spike Jonze film Her (2013), the main character, although a real man named Theodore, falls in love with the voice of the operating system Samantha, an affair with which becomes more real and valuable for him than anything he has previously experienced in relationships with real women. The plot of the film provides the basis for further practical and theoretical development of the film image of “akousmêtre”, a voice without a body. Digital technologies embodied in the film provide an opportunity to apply and rethink the concept of corporeality, which is relevant in phenomenological aesthetics, as well as to develop the meaning of synesthetic perception in the modern art space. At a new level of correlation between reality and virtuality, the ideas of dialogism that developed within the framework of philosophical anthropology in the twentieth century can be applied in the analysis of the film. Thus, the material of the presented films allows us to expand the art history discourse and raise a number of issues that are relevant not only for the screen arts of the 21st century, but also for people living in the world of digital technologies, but who have not lost the need for genuine human feelings.

ON FILOZOFÓWNA’S CRITICISM OF BLAUSTEIN’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Phenomenology originates in a critical assessment of descriptive psychology. In this regard, scholars emphasize mainly the problem of psychologism. Yet, the question of a methodological divide between both approaches is rather at the margins of contemporary scholarship. In the present paper, I analyze and discuss the 1931–32 debate held by Irena Filozofówna and Leopold Blaustein as a case study of the phenomenology-psychology divide. The debate addresses the structure of aesthetic experience, as well as a methodological background for describing psychic life. My main task is to present arguments, concepts, and methodologies of the opposing positions. To do so, in Sect. (1) I outline biographical sketches of Filozofówna and Blaustein. They were members of the Lvov-Warsaw School, but they presented different approaches: whereas Filozofówna advocated descriptive and experimental psychology, Blaustein—educated not only by Twardowski, but also by Ingarden, and Husserl—referred to the phenomenological tradition too. Sect. (2) summarizes Blaustein’s phenomenological aesthetics. His approach consists in analyzing aesthetic experience as a combination of nonreducible presentations. His key observation is that different types of art require different presentations, say, imaginative, schematic, or symbolic. In Sect. (3), I analyze Filozofówna’s criticism of this approach. Her main argument consists in emphasizing judgments as a necessary element of every lived experience. She claims that Blaustein comprehends acts as intentional, i.e., as presenting their objects as “such and such,” but by doing so, he confuses presentations with judgments. In this section I follow Blaustein’s replies to Filozofówna’s criticism. In Sect. (4), I analyze Filozofówna’s argument that Blaustein adopted an ineffective method, since he was too hasty in accepting unjustified hypotheses. In Sect. (5), I ask about a theoretical background of Filozofówna’s criticism, and I juxtapose both positions.

Онтологический статус искусства в философии Р. Ингардена

The study aims to determine the ontological status of art in R. Ingarden’s phenomenological aesthetics. The author touches upon the issues of specificity of an art piece existence within the framework of the phenomenological approach, the problem of identity and ontological structure of an art work. The study is novel in that it develops and provides rationale for the phenomenological approach to the issue of the ontological status of art demonstrated in R. Ingarden’s works. The research findings amount to the following points. Within the framework of the phenomenological approach to existence, Ingarden shows that an art piece cannot be reduced to its material existence and that it is necessary to acknowledge its existence as being of a special non-material kind - as an intentional object. The main characteristic of a work of art, according to Ingarden, is its schematic nature, so that the content expressed by it has an infinite potential for its actualisation.

Dynamic types of artistic image: Roman Ingarden’s phenomenology and literary theory

The article is devoted to the question of some data obtained by Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, and primarily to his study of the literary work of art. Development upon Ingardens ideas is associated with use of Russian authors which are rarely treated in phenomenological aesthetics. The dynamic types of the image structure is that appear as potential states and actualize themselves in the readers reception as problem of imageability of fictional entities. Thus the dynamic character of types of an image structure is a transition from non-thematic background into its actual state and back. To study the visual in fiction, one must understand that the readers encounter with the literary work actualizes potential types, which, according to R. Ingarden, sparkle and go out. The visual nature of the aesthetic object directly depends on which of these potential states are actualized.