On Two Themes in Leopold Blaustein’s Aesthetics

The paper critically examines the thesis, popular in the literature, that Leopold Blaustein’s aesthetics is first and foremost a phenomenological discipline. I argue that the “phenomenological” nature of Blaustein’s philosophy follows from Brentano and Twardowski, rather than from Husserl. I therefore claim that Blaustein’s aesthetics is determined by two equally important themes: (1) a descriptive-psychological and (2) a “phenomenological” one. The article is structured as follows. The introduction situates Blaustein’s aesthetics within classical aesthetics. Section 1 reconstructs the Brentanian background of Blaustein’s aesthetics. Section 2 contains a discussion of Blaustein’s assessment of Twardowski’s theory of presentations, which is followed, in Section 3, by an analysis of Blaustein’s example descriptions of aesthetic experiences. These descriptions are discussed in Section 4, which also reconstructs the main elements of Blaustein’s phenomenology of aesthetic experiences. Against this background, the question of the alleged psychologism of Blaustein’s aesthetics is addressed in Conclusions.