ABSTRACT
Aesthetic feeling-intentionalities are always constitutively founded. This means that aesthetic contemplation always presupposes an already constituted objectity toward which it is directed. Waldemar Conrad was the first of Husserl’s disciples to apply the eidetic phenomenological method to the field of aesthetics. A genuine phenomenological aesthetics, according to Ingarden, must overcome distorted objectivist or subjectivist approaches to the aesthetic phenomenon and carry out the twofold task of investigating the correlation between constitutive intentional acts and constituted aesthetic formations. The distinction between the work of art and the aesthetic object occupies a central position in Ingarden’s phenomenology. Jean-Paul Sartre played a leading role in the reception of German phenomenology in France. He was heavily influenced by Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of intentional consciousness, but he also embraced Heidegger’s existential approach and focused his philosophical interest on the concrete human being and human condition. The French philosopher who most systematically and extensively dealt with phenomenological aesthetics was Mikel Dufrenne.
