Enjoyment

Abstract

The concept of enjoyment and its approximate equivalents (sentiment, emotion, pleasure, Genuss, Wohlgefallen, etc.) play a central role in eighteenth century philosophy of art and beauty, and afterward in the psychological aesthetics of the late eighteenth century. Phenomenological aesthetics never denies this hedonistic component of aesthetic experience, and relates it mainly to the perceiver’s experience rather than to artistic creation. However, the specifically phenomenological reaction against psychologism led, particularly in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, to a critique of psychological aesthetics and of all theories that considered enjoyment the culmination of aesthetic experience (Theodor Lipps, Emile Utitz, etc.). Phenomenological aesthetics emphasizes instead the constitution of the aesthetic object through the subject’s acts; the structure of the aesthetic object; and the issue of artistic truth.