ABSTRACT
As a rule one associates with the program of a phenomenological aesthetics oriented on Husserl names such as Roman Ingarden, Moritz Geiger, or Fritz Kaufmann, but not Oskar Becker. Whereas Ingarden grounds his phenomenological aesthetics in reflections on axiology that Husserl himself later abandoned, Geiger bases his aesthetics on prior decisions that are not phenomenological in the proper sense but rather phenomenal-psychological, and Kaufmann goes beyond phenomenology in the interest of a (ultimately theologically motivated) realistic ontology. On closer inspection it thus becomes apparent that it is Oskar Becker alone who, in a number of brief studies and reflections (only a portion of which have been published so far), develops a phenomenological aesthetics that is free of prior empirical (phenomenal-psychological) decisions, drops a doctrine of value that is extraordinarily problematic particularly for aesthetics, and keeps its distance from the snares of a realism of whatever kind (even of a critical one) in the ontology of art. 1
