The Phenomenology Of Aesthetic Consciousness And Phantasy

This is the first book dedicated to Husserl’s aesthetics. Paul Crowther pieces together Husserl’s ideas of phantasy and image and presents them as a unified and innovative account of aesthetic consciousness. He also shows how Husserl’s ideas can be developed to solve problems in aesthetics, especially those related to visual art, literature, theatre, and nature. After outlining the major components of Husserl’s phenomenological method, Crowther addresses the scope and structure of Husserl’s notion of aesthetic consciousness. For Husserl, aesthetic consciousness in all its forms involves phantasy—where items or states of affairs are represented as if actually perceived or experienced, even though they are not, in fact, given in the present perceptual field. Husserl also makes some extraordinarily interesting links between aesthetic consciousness and nature, showing how natural things and environments become instigators of such consciousness when apprehended in the appropriate terms. This "unreality" of the object of aesthetic consciousness anticipates contemporary debates about pictorial representation and is also relevant to Husserl’s accounts of literature and theatre. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness and Phantasy will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in aesthetics, philosophy of art, phenomenological aesthetics, and Husserl’s philosophy.

This is the first English translation of Husserliana XXIII, the volume in the critical edition of Edmund Husserl's works that gathers together a rich array of posthumous texts on representational consciousness. The lectures and sketches comprising this work make available the most profound and comprehensive Husserlian account of image consciousness. They explore phantasy in depth, and furnish nuanced accounts of perception and memory.

Our environment is changing rapidly, as is the spectrum of possible relationships we can entertain with it. Against this background, one important task emerging in contemporary philosophical discussion concerns defining the status of contemporary images and the "iconic spaces" we encounter with ever-increasing frequency in their various forms. Within this context, the dimension of perception seems to be losing its primacy over the image, making a philosophical description of the relationships between image and reality all the more necessary. Among images, the classical distinction between documentary and fiction has been drastically called into question, and along with it the nature of the emotions and values we experience in these two domains. Rozzoni promotes a phenomenology of the image, that is, a return to a description of images that starts from their essential features while avoiding simplistic dichotomies. By elucidating images’ intimate relationship with phantasy and aesthetic experience and their role in shaping our experience of "reality," this book develops a perspectival notion of "truth" intended to shed light on our contemporary interactions with images and the events, emotions, and values we experience through them.

The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Fr. Ph nom nologie de l'exp rience esth tique) was first published in 1953. In the first of four parts, Dufrenne distinguishes the "aesthetic object" from the "work of art." In the second, he elucidates types of works of art, especially music and painting. He devotes his third section to aesthetic perception. In the fourth, he describes a Kantian critique of aesthetic experience. A perennial classic in the SPEP series, the work is rounded out by a detailed "Translator's Foreword" especially helpful to readers in aesthetics interested in the context and circumstances around which the original was published as well as the phenomenological background of the book.

Phenomenological analysis of beauty and art across various aspects of lived experience and culture. Through a careful analysis of concrete examples taken from everyday experience and culture, Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding develops a straightforward and powerful aesthetic methodology founded on a phenomenological approach to experience—one that investigates how consciousness engages with the world and thus what it means to take such things as tastes, images, sounds, and even a life itself as art. H. Peter Steeves begins by exploring what it means to see, and considers how disruptions of sight can help us rethink how perception works. Engaging the work of Derrida, Heidegger, and Husserl, he uses these insights about “seeing” to undertake a systematic phenomenological investigation of how we perceive and process a range of aesthetic objects, including the paintings of Arshile Gorky, the films of Michael Haneke, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, zombie films, The Simpsons, the performance art of Rachel Rosenthal and Andy Kaufman, and even vegan hot dogs. Refusing hierarchical distinctions between high and low art, Steeves argues that we must conceptualize the whole of human experience as aesthetic: art is lived, and living is an art. “This is a brilliant new contribution by our preeminent phenomenologist of culture. It’s extremely accessible, illuminating, original, and sophisticated while being philosophically probing.” — David Wood, author of The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction

In Aesthetic Genesis, the author argues for a reversal of the most fundamental tenet of phenomenology-namely, that all consciousness is intentional (that is, directed toward an object). Mitscherling suggests, as a new 'Copernican hypothesis,' that intentionality (i.e., directionality) gives rise to consciousness. This book describes not only the origin, or 'genesis,' of human cognition in sensation, but also the genesis of sensation from intentional structures belonging to nature itself. A phenomenological examination of our experience leads to the conclusion that the two sorts of being generally recognized by contemporary science and philosophy-that is, material being and ideal being-prove ontologically inadequate to account for this experience. Mitscherling rehabilitates the pre-modern concepts of 'intentional being' and 'formal causality' and employs them in the construction of a comprehensive phenomenological analysis of embodiment, aesthetic experience, the interpretation of texts, moral behavior, and cognition in general.

Historically, phenomenology began in Edmund Husserl’s theory of mathematics and logic, went on to focus for him on transcendental rst philosophy and for others on metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, and theory of interpretation. The c- tinuing focus has thus been on knowledge and being. But if one began without those interests and with an understanding of the phenomenological style of approach, one might well see that art and aesthetics make up the most natural eld to be approached phenomenologically. Contributions to this eld have continually been made in the phenomenological tradition from very early on, but, so to speak, along the side. (The situation has been similar with phenomenological ethics. ) A great deal of thought about art and aesthetics has nevertheless accumulated during a century and a handbook like the present one is long overdue. The project of this handbook began in conversations over dinner in Sepp’s apa- ment in Baden-Baden at one evening of the hot European summer in the year 2003. As things worked out, he knew more about whom to ask and how much space to allocate to each entry and Embree knew more about how to conduct the inviting, preliminary editing, and prodding of contributors who were late returning their criticized drafts and copyedited entries and was able to invest the time and other resources from his endowed chair. That process took longer than anticipated and there were additional unfortunate delays due to factors beyond the editors’s control.

​This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process linguistic or visual information, and what properties in artworks trigger aesthetic experiences. The examination of the properties of aesthetic experience reveals essential aspects of our perceptual, cognitive, and semiotic capacities. The second issue studied in this volume is related to the ontology of the work of art: Written or visual artworks are a specific type of objects, containing particular kinds of representation which elicit a particular kind of experience. The research question explored is: What properties in artful objects trigger this type of experience, and what characterizes representation in written and visual artworks? The volume sets the scene for state-of-the-art inquiries in the intersection between the psychology and ontology of art. The investigations of the relation between the properties of artworks and the characteristics of aesthetic experience increase our insight into what art is. In addition, they shed light on essential properties of human meaning-making in general.