ABSTRACT
Phenomenological aesthetic concerns itself exclusively with the description of phenomena, with objects as they appear in perception, and not at all with their causal explanation; with the tones of a symphony, for instance, and not with the physical vibrations which produce the sound we are actually hearing. Further, it regards such objects not in their casual, accidental, and purely individual detail, but only in so far as they conform to general laws; it grasps the essential and intimate nature, 'das Wesen', of the object. Artistic values, as they appear universally in works of art, are of three distinct kinds: the formal values stressed exclusively by the formalist school, the imitative values which are the foundation of the theory of imitation. And those positive values derived from a vital or spiritual content and emphasized, to the exclusion of all others, by the aesthetic of content.
