Aesthetic Concepts of a Phenomenological Origin

Abstract

Though Edmund Husserl, father of modern phenomenology, is known not to have written an aesthetics in the proper sense of the word, his method proved to be very fruitful in this field of philosophical reflection.Noticing the virtues of this method even from the very beginning, Moritz Geiger, his colleagues for a generation not only dared to apply this method in the domain of aesthetics, but also thought that no aesthetics as an autonomous discipline can be conceived without combining it with the eidetic method. As a scientific approach in itself, phenomenological aesthetics aimed at studying aesthetic and artistic values, examining the structures of the aesthetic object, as well as determining their value. Still, such an aesthetics also implied imperiously some special theory on the essence of art, a reshaping of the theory on the psychological mechanism involved in the subjective and affective states of both the creator and the receiver.