VASILY SESEMANN’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL AESTHETICS
VASILY SESEMANN’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL AESTHETICS

Summary/Abstract: The paper offers a systematic account of Vasily Sesemann’s aesthetics. First, I ar-gue that, due to the primacy this aesthetics grants to intuition, intentionality and the objectivity of aesthetic values, its underlying principles are decidedly phenomenologi-cal. Secondly, I offer an account of the general structures of perceptual acts and I con-tend that the distinctive nature of aesthetic perception lies in the unique disposition of the aesthetic attitude. Thirdly, I maintain that there are three fundamentally different ways in which one can speak of aesthetic truth: in terms of formal requirements, subjec-tive material requirements, and objective material requirements. Fourthly, I open a short dialogue between Sesemann and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and argue that an artwork ful-fills the objective requirements of material truth when it succeeds in disclosing those levels of experience, on which the theoretical and practical attitudes rest and from which they take their departure.

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