Introduction. Art and Aesthetic Experience

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.