Abstract
Does the meaning of artworks consist in authors’ intentions, beholders’ impressions, or the works themselves? Criticizing the traditional theory of author’s intention, psychologists in the late nineteenth century underscored the psychological effects of works upon their beholders. They looked for the meaning of artworks not in the subjective impressions, but rather in the objective structure of our mind based on the method of experimental psychology. And the first impacts of phenomenology on the philosophy of art were brought by the members of München circle, who wrestled with the psychologism as the students of Th. Lipps, one of the leaders of the psychologists then.
The present paper shall review W. Conrad’s object aesthetics (Gegenstandsästhetik) and Ingarden’s ontological aesthetics, both of which criticized psychologism and emphasized the meaning structure of artwork as objective being independent from the author’s mind and the beholder’s impression, while rightly acknowledging the “blanks” in the objective structures of artworks and giving attention to the concretizing process of artwork through the interactions between works and beholders. This view opened the door for Konstanz reception theory (Iser, W. 1976. Der Akt des Lesens – Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. München: Fink.), as is known, but it also shares insights that converge with A. Schutz’s theory of relevance, which has been accepted mainly in the field of sociology.
The paper is organized in the following way. First, I will review briefly the situation of aesthetics and the philosophy of art in the turn of the nineteenth century and then examine the significance of Conradean object aesthetics, which took the lead in applying the phenomenological method to the aesthetics in order to challenge psychologism, and also anticipated Schutz’s relevance theory in his discussion on the object field of music. The third section shall look at Ingarden’s phenomenology of artworks, which describes the multi-layers structure of aesthetic objects, and sees the necessity of indeterminate gaps and vacancies in artworks, to be fulfilled by beholders. And finally, we confirm the reflections on vacancy of artworks by Schutz and Iser situated in the historical development of phenomenological aesthetics.
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Notes
- 1.
Ingarden reports the situation of the literary study at the time: “What with the tendencies to psychologism in aesthetics which were still active at the beginning of the century (especially in Germany, for instance in the works of Theodor Lipps and Johannes Volkelt) and the aftereffects of psychology and historicism of Dilthey, literary study was constantly diverted into other fields of investigation, primarily into a historically colored individual psychology of the poets. Husserl’s antipsychologism and the attempts to reorient aesthetics took effect very slowly in the field of literary study” (Ingarden 1968/1973, pp. 3f.).
- 2.
See the details of Husserl’s first contacts with Münchener students in Spiegelberg 1982. The influences of the great mentor and the students were bi-directional. Scaramuzza and Schumann (1990) discusses that Husserl’s notes on aesthetics (Hua. XXIII Beilage VI, VII, LX) are based on the lessons from Fischer’s Habilitationsschrift entitled Untersuchungen über den ästhetischen Wert (unfortunately not published).
- 3.
As his methodological basis, Conrad refers to Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen and his lecture on “Hauptstücke aus der Phänomenologie und Kritik der Vernunft” (Husserl, 1973). This lecture is known nowadays under the title “Ding und Raum” published in Hussaliana XVI. By Conrad’s manner of applying phenomenology to music, poetry, and the spatial artworks, Husserl was “impressed greatly” (Spiegelberg 1982, p. 167).
- 4.
Mazzoni (1998) investigates possible developments of Conrad’s analysis of temporal melodic structure of music.
- 5.
Conrad’s object aesthetics also anticipates the New Criticism flourishing in the Anglo-Saxon world in the “autonomous” mode of being (Seinsweise) of the artworks, which they call “texts”. They also maintain that the literary criticism can be understood as an individual science by dispelling the so-called “intentional and affective fallacies” with which we identify the meaning of texts with either author’s intention or reader’s affection (Cf. Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946).
- 6.
See Rollinger (1990) for the relation between Twardowski and Husserl (pp. 139ff.).
- 7.
- 8.
However, Ingarden recognizes only one stratum of sound formations in a work of music, and two strata of objectivities and aspects in the case of painting.
- 9.
Although an interpretation is not indefinitely “free” since they it involves communicative processes within author’s mind and text itself. Ingarden requires “polyphonic harmony” of different strata for an “adequate” interpretation. Iser was skeptical of this normative assumption, as I will argue soon after.
- 10.
Luckmann also embodied the theory of Nichtwissen, opaqueness of our knowledge, in Strukturen der Lebenswelt (Schütz and Luckman 1979).
- 11.
See also Prof. Barber’s reflection in this volume.
- 12.
- 13.
And he also investigates the issue of negation as the other basic structure of indeterminacy in the text (Iser 1976, pp. 327ff.).
- 14.
Iser also refers to Gurwitsch’s theory of field of consciousness at the same place (Iser 1976, p. 305).
- 15.
See also Brinker (1980) who argues that Iser “misinterpret” Ingarden in this respect.
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Kimura, M. (2014). Irrelevant Spheres and Vacancies of Artworks: Phenomenological Aesthetics Revisited. In: Barber, M., Dreher, J. (eds) The Interrelation of Phenomenology, Social Sciences and the Arts. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 69. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01390-9_2
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