Since XVIII century philosophers from different philosophical traditions (English
empiricism and French Enlightenment, German classical philosophy, positivism, Italian
neo-idealism, phenomenology, pragmatism, existentialism, hermeneutics, analytical
philosophy, etc.) have addressed the issue of aesthetic experience, questioning its
structures, its specific properties, its importance and relevance to the perception, the
understanding and the evaluation of art as well as to human relationship with nature
and technique.
Some of them, starting with Kant, investigated the specific quality and the supposed
autonomy of aesthetics; other ones argued for its relevance to the learning experience
as well as to the moral and the political experience, extending its scope beyond artistic
production and enjoyment; someone else highlighted above all the value of this
experience for artistic practices, articulating aspects and dynamics of aesthetic
experience especially in relation to the ontological properties characterizing these
practices and trying to answer to aesthetic and theoretical problems that emerged with
certain kinds of avant-garde art, in which the Kantian notion of aesthetic experience
seems to be taken out of the game; finally, some analytic philosophers (in particular
George Dickie and Nöel Carroll), in disagreement with the idea of the autonomous
nature of aesthetic experience, recently considered this concept as a “myth”, while –
especially in the German area– other philosophers (Rüdiger Bubner, Albrecht Wellmer,
Christoph Menke, just to name some of them) defended, on the basis of Hegel’s
philosophy of art, the fundamental reflexivity of aesthetic experience and its crucial
significance for human experience as a whole, also because of its potential of disruption
and transgression of ordinary everyday experience.
