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AESTHETICS AS PHENOMENOLOGY
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This is a book about the experience of art. As the title Aesthetics as Phenomenology suggests, Günter Figal takes a phenomenological approach to aesthetic experience, rendering an account of what unifies it and distinguishes it from other experiences. In taking this approach, he aims to avoid the many pitfalls and dead ends of prior aesthetic theories, which in his view have either failed to delineate the proper object of aesthetics or to engage with it on adequate terms. The book’s title also indicates, conversely, the significance that aesthetic experience holds for phenomenological philosophy itself. It is by way of an artwork’s thing-like appearance, according to Figal, that we first encounter spatiality as such, thereby experiencing the very conditions of our embodied access to the world and unselfconsciously performing a Husserlian ἐποχή. (The German title, Erscheinungsdinge, rendered here as the subtitle The Appearance of Things, captures this prominence of phenomenality.)
The book is thus instructive in two directions at once. On the one hand, it shows that philosophy can still—and is perhaps now especially prepared to— contribute to the understanding of art and its enriching effect. Accordingly, Fi- gal considers a wide range of artworks, noting every aspect of how they appear, and deftly engaging the history of thought in his analyses. On the other hand, we see that art provides a corrective to philosophy itself, directing our attention to a relational, lived space of which artworks are exemplary appearances. In this regard, the works considered in the present volume are more than mere illustrations of a theory; they instead shift our gaze precisely to the appearance of things.
GÜNTER FIGAL - Personal Name
1st Edtion
978-0-253-01565-5
NONE
AESTHETICS AS PHENOMENOLOGY
Management
English
Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co
2010
India
1-289
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