Vasily Sesemann\'s Phenomenological Aesthetics

The paper offers a systematic account of Vasily Sesemann's aesthetics. First, I argue 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 contend 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, subjective material requirements, and objective material requirements. Fourthly, I open a short dialogue between Sesemann and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and argue that an artwork fulfills 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.