Aesthetic Experience and Empathy in Vasily Sesemann’s Phenomenological Aesthetics

ABSTRACT

Vasily Sesemann’s aesthetics is a transcendental philosophy that seeks to answer the question of how an experience of beauty is possible. Sesemann insists that aesthetics should focus on the study of the aesthetic object itself, and through it go to the problematics of the act of perception and creativity. Sesemann states that not only the relationship between the work of art and the perceiver is important in order to understand the aesthetic object, but also the relationship between the work of art and the creator. The aesthetic object in its sedimented form not only retains indications of the act of creation, but also makes demands on the perceiving subject. Aesthetic objects are sedimented passive structures that can be activated by the performative actions of the perceiver when she discovers the appropriate way of perception. Sesemann, like Moritz Geiger, claims that aesthetics is impossible without an analysis of feelings. He, like Geiger, recognizes the importance of empathy in aesthetic experience. However, Sesemann develops the concept of aesthetic empathy using Max Scheler’s arguments. Empathy is necessary, because the perceiver must be able to understand expressions. The aim of this paper is to analyse the phenomenological aspects of Vasily Sesemann’s aesthetics. Firstly, this paper analyzes the Sesemann’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Secondly, it shows that the analysis performed by Sesemann demonstrates why empathy plays a leading role in aesthetic experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetic experience
• aesthetic object
• aesthetic structure
• sedimentation
• phenomenology
• empathy
• Vasily Sesemann
• Moritz Geiger

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to anonymous reviewers for very helpful suggestions to improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Vasily Sesemann (Wilhelm Sesemann, Vosylius Sezemanas) was born in 1884 in Vyborg, Finland. He studied philosophy at St. Petersburg Imperial University with Nikolai Lossky, and in Marburg with Neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. Sesemann maintained a lifelong relationship with his childhood friend Nicolai Hartmann. In Marburg (1909–1911), he possibly attended Hartmann’s seminar in which José Ortega y Gasset also participated, and became interested in phenomenology. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Sesemann taught philosophy and classical languages in a high school until the outbreak of World War I, after which he was a volunteer in the Russian army (from 1914 to 1915). From 1915 to 1917 he taught philosophy as a Privatdozent at the University of St. Petersburg, and from 1918 to 1919 at the Viatka Pedagogical Institute. From 1922 to 1923, he had a teaching position at the Russian Institute in Berlin. In 1923 he was invited, on Nicolai Hartmann’s recommendation, to teach at the University of Lithuania in Kaunas and eventually became a professor there. In 1950 he was accused of anti-Soviet activities, arrested and spent six years in the Gulag. After being released he was rehabilitated and work as a professor of philosophy until his death on March 23, 1963 in Vilnius. For more information on Sesemann’s biography, see Botz-Bornstein, Vasily Sesemann: Experience, Formalism, and the Question of Being.

2. Sesemann, “Aesthetic Evaluation in the History of Art.”

3. Sesemann, “The Nature of the Poetic Image.”

4. Sesemann, “Art and Culture.”

5. Sesemann sought to combine the formalist analysis of the aesthetic object and the phenomenological analysis of aesthetic experience. Lambert Wiesing argues that in analyzing the visibility of visual objects, formalists had to reveal the conditions of visibility itself. Aesthetic visibility had to be revealed as an objectively existing area which is correlated with aesthetic vision. Formalist aesthetics turned into a transcendental theory of aesthetic expression and aesthetic perception. I claim that Sesemann’s aesthetics is also a transcendental theory of aesthetic expression and aesthetic perception. See Jonkus “Formalism and phenomenology in Vasily Sesemann’s aesthetics.” For more information on formalism and phenomenology, see Wiesing, Die Sichtbarkeit des Bildes.

6. Christansen’s book Philosophie der Kunst was translated into Russian in 1911 and greatly influenced formalist theory and aesthetics. For more information on Broder Cristainsen’s philosophy of art, see Gerigk, “Wer ist Broder Christiansen.”

7. The basis of Sesemann’s philosophy is intuitive cognition and understanding, so empathy is significant not only in aesthetic but also in ethical and religious experience. See Jonkus, “Vasily Sesemann’s Theory of Knowledge, and Its Phenomenological Relevance.”

8. See Jonkus, “La fenomenología de la razón y la experiencia estética”; Jonkus, “Vasily Sesemann’s Theory of Knowledge”; and Jonkus, “Critical Ontology and Critical Realism.”

9. Sesemann, “Review: Zugange zur Aesthetik.”

10. While interpreting Geiger’s phenomenological aesthetics, Sesemann formulated four theses. The first of these is that the aesthetic dimension can only be opened through subjective experiences, however the aesthetic experience is distorted by various extraneous moments and tendencies. Therefore, the task of aesthetics is to purify aesthetic experiences and reveal their true nature. One such negative tendency is dilettante sentimentalism, where the subject does not enjoy the aesthetic object itself, but his feelings towards the object. The second of these is that the aesthetic dimension cannot be adequately understood when the superficial and deep effect (Oberflächen- und Tiefenwirkung) of art are confused. The first one affects only the vital needs of a person, and is only a reaction to external stimuli, however the true aesthetic effect is experienced only when the subject is affected fundamentally, that is to say when the core of him as a person is affected. The third of these is that aesthetic experience is characterized by antinomy. On one hand, the subject completely immerses itself in its aesthetic experience and identifies with the aesthetic object, and on the other hand, the subject remains in opposition to the object and the subject not only remains itself, but also expands and enriches itself with the values of the aesthetic object. The fourth and final one is that the phenomenological method is particularly important to aesthetics because it focuses attention on sensual phenomena and not on what is hidden behind them. Sesemann “Review: Zugange zur Aesthetik.”

11. Sesemann, “Estetinių teorijų apžvalga.”

12. See for example Botz-Bornstein, Vasily Sesemann. Saulius Geniusas argues that the underlying principles of Sesemann’s aesthetics are decidedly phenomenological due to the primacy that it grants to intuition, intentionality, and the objectivity of aesthetic values. I agree with the opinion of Geniusas, but my thesis is that Sesemann understands aesthetics as a transcendental analysis of the correlation between the expressivity of the aesthetic object and the act of aesthetic perception. Geniusas, “Vasily Sesemann’s Phenomenological Aesthetics,” 125.

13. Botz-Bornstein, Vasily Sesemann, 58. I strongly disagree with Botz-Bornstein’s statement “Sesemann answers this question by denying intuition its positive aspect, which means that Bergson’s, as Lossky’s, and also Husserl’s models of intuitive perception are rejected.” Botz-Bornstein, Vasily Sesemann, 58. On the significance of intuition in Sesemann’s philosophy, see Jonkus, “Vasily Sesemann’s Theory of Knowledge, and Its Phenomenological Relevance.”

14. Sesemann, Aesthetics, 1–2.

15. Sesemann, “Dvasinio grožio problema.”

16. Drumond, Introduction, 8.

17. Sesemann, Aesthetics, 17–88.

18. Sesemann adopted the concept of a dominant component of an artwork from Christiansen.

19. Sesemann, Aesthetics, 34.

20. Ibid., 167.

21. Ingarden argued the following: “The creative behavior of an artist covers not only his productive experiences, but also certain physical actions which suitably shape a particular thing or process so that it can perform the function of an ontological basis of a painting, a sculpture, a poem, or a sonata. On the other hand, the already produced work of art, the schematic entity, must be completed (concretized) by the consumer in many ways and must be actualized in its potential elements before it can acquire the shape of an aesthetic object valuable in a specific way. For this, the work requires an observer who must achieve a certain particular experience, namely the aesthetic experience. In this way, the internal connection of the work of art with its creator and its observer who is fulfilling the aesthetic experience become manifest. The material world enters as a background and displays itself in the shape of the ontological foundation of the work of art. All these elements form a single true whole of a higher order which gives a unity to the field which includes the work and the human being in communion with it.” Ingarden, “Phenomenological Aesthetics,” 260.

22. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodied expression, like Sesemann’s, was partly inspired by Scheler’s investigation of expressivity. Concerning how Merleau-Ponty understands the paradoxical logic of expression, see Landes, Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression. Fotti, Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty.

23. Sesemann, Aesthetics, 22–29.

24. Sesemann, “O prirode poeticheskogo obraza.”

25. See Vendrell Ferran, Die Emotionen.

26. Geiger’s contributions to the study of empathy and emotional expression have recently attracted attention (see Crespo, “Moritz Geiger on the Consciousness of Feelings”; Salice, “Moritz Geiger”; Vendrell Ferran, “Geiger and Wollheim on Expressive Properties”; and Vendrell Ferran, “On Liking and Enjoyment”).

27. Geiger, “Zum Problem der Stimmungseinfühlung bei Landschaften,” 33.

28. Ibid., 53.

29. Sesemann, Aesthetics, 59.

30. Scheler, while studying the perception of other minds, states that: “The difficulties of this problem are mostly self-engendered, owing to the assumption that each of us is ‘primarily’ aware only of his own self and its experiences, and that among these only a proportion of such experiences, images, etc., are related to other individuals. The question then arises: (1) how can this portion be distinguished from that other portion which relates only to the self and its own experience? (2) How does the portion relating to others acquire a title to make us acquainted with the actual existence of other people? There have been two ways of resolving these difficulties hitherto: the theory of analogical inference, whereby, on perceiving expressive movements similar to those which we experience in ourselves in consequence of our own individual self-activity, we infer a similar self-activity in others; and the theory especially associated with Theodor Lipps, whereby this assumption involves a belief in the existence of mind in others, based upon a process of empathic projection of the self into the physical manifestations evinced by the other. Neither of these theories succeeds in achieving its object.” Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 238.

31. Sesemann, Aesthetics, 43.

32. Dan Zahavi uses the phenomenological concepts of empathy and expression in discussing theories of contemporary social knowledge and argues that others’ understanding is directly dependent on their understanding of expressive behavior. See Zahavi, “Expression and Empathy”.

33. Hartmann, Aesthetics, 49.

34. Sesemann criticizes Lipps’ concept of empathy in a similar way to Lossky. In discussing Sesemann’s philosophical context, Botz-Bornstein argues the following: “Opposed to all kinds of subjectivism, Lossky discovered in Lipps’s philosophy a particularly vicious device, which appeared to him to be a philosophical model by means of which Lipps declares everything to be subjective. The disagreement with such tendencies represents one of the cornerstones of Lossky’s entire ‘organic philosophy.’ If we follow Lipps, Lossky explains, then not only objects, but also relationships between objects (structures) would be subordinated to nothing more than the mind of the subject; and this is unacceptable.” Botz-Bornstein, Vasily Sesemann, 27.

35. Lipps, Ästhetik, 126–141. Vasily Sesemann.

36. Sesemann, Aesthetics, 45.

37. Ibid., 46, 47.

38. Ibid., 48.

39. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 73–74.

40. See Schloßberger, “Phänomenologie der Naturerfahrung.”

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was supported by the Research Council of Lithuania, grant [Nr. SMIP- 22-17].

Notes on contributors

Dalius Jonkus

Dalius Jonkus is a professor of Philosophy at Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania). He is president of the Lithuanian Society for Phenomenology. His research interests include phenomenological philosophy, aesthetics, and the history of early phenomenology. He has published articles on Husserl, Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. He has also compiled and edited Semann’s manuscripts for publication. His publications include Experience and Reflection: Horizons of Phenomenological Philosophie (Vytautas Magnus university Press, 2009, in Lithuanian) and The Philosophy of Vasily Sesemann: A Phenomenology of Self-awareness and Aesthetic Experience (Vytautas Magnus University Press, 2015, in Lithuanian).