Methodology

Abstract

While the appreciation of art is itself typically unreflective or straightforward, phenomenological aesthetics is, at the very least, reflective, intuitive, analytic, and descriptive. In order to produce the methodology of this orientation in this discipline, one reflects on the already reflective practice, and thus engages in reflection on reflection. Cartesianische Meditationen (1931) and other works of edmund husserl contain quite a few methodological passages, but those of most post-Husserlian phenomenologists—martin heidegger and maurice merleau-ponty to begin with—contain hardly any. The post-Husserlian paucity of methodology also shows that reflective analysis of the way in which research results are obtained is not a necessity. This difference does not preclude the phenomenological tradition differing from other traditions by its broadly if implicitly shared approach.