Art and Aesthetics in Husserl’s Phenomenology

Husserl's reflections on art and aesthetics can be discussed in four parts. First, a comparison of the phenomenological and aesthetical attitudes focusing on existential disinterestness and the suspension of the external world is drawn. Second, there are Husserl's views on image-consciousness which play a prominent role in understanding the work of art as a work of art, as well as its differences from other types of consciousness and its three-layer nature namely the physical substrate, the image-object, and the image subject. The third part concerns the division of art into the realistic, idealistic, and philosophical art. And the fourth part deals with the capabilities of Husserl's phenomenology to formulate a phenomenological theory of art. The concepts ‘artworld’ and ‘life-world’ as a framework or context play a crucial role in this regard. In this paper, it has been tried to point out some of these capabilities according to the basic elements of phenomenology such as opposition to reductionism, presuppositionless investigation, anti-psychologism and anti-naturalism, descriptive method and “going back to the things themselves”. Accordingly, the phenomenological aesthetics emphasizes more than anything the intentionality of aesthetic consciousness and the relationships between the subjects of the artworld, and seeks the foundation of art and the work of art in these intentionalities and relations. It can serve as a basis and framework for traditional aesthetical theories.