tailieunhanh - Pleasure and Its Modifications: Witasek, Meinong and the Aesthetics of the Grazer Schule

In the long link connecting Terminal 1 and Terminal 2, Norwegian painter Frans Widerberg and Danish glass artist Per Steen Hebsgaard have created an equestrian statue in glass and a glass frieze divided into three sections facing the apron outside. The glass sculpture, in natural size, is the first of its kind in the world. The glass frieze, entitled Arcadia, shows flying people, horses and centaurs in beautiful colour combinations, emphasised by the natural light that pours in through the south-facing facade, creating images of the motifs on the polished marble floor | Pleasure and Its Modifications Witasek Meinong and the Aesthetics of the Grazer Schule1 Barry Smith from L. Albertazzi ed. The Philosophy of Alexius Meinong Axiomathes VII nos. 1-2 1996 203-232 1. Preamble 2. The Elementary Aesthetic Objects 3. Aesthetic Experiences 4. Aesthetic Pleasure in what is Real 5. The Phantasy-Modification 6. Art and Illusion 7. Gestalt and Expression 8. Empathy and Sympathy 9. On the Modifications of Feeling in the Experience of Music 10. Characteristica Universalis Abstract The most obvious varieties of mental phenomena directed to non- existent objects occur in our experiences of works of art. The task of applying the Meinongian ontology of the non-existent to the working out of a theory of aesthetic phenomena was however carried out not by Meinong by his disciple Stephan Witasek in his Grundzuge der allgemeinen Asthetik of 1904. Witasek shows in detail how our feelings undergo certain sorts of structural modifications when they are directed towards what does not exist. He draws a distinction between genuine mental phenomena and what he calls phantasy-material asserting that the job of the aesthetic object whether it is 1 a work of art or a product of nature is to excite and support the actualisation of phantasymaterial in the experiencing subject . We might think of such phantasy-material as a matter of Ersatz-emotions or emotional slop . We could then see Witasek s aesthetics as an elaborate taxonomy of the various different sorts of Ersatz-emotions which the subject allows to be stimulated within himself in his intercourse with works of art and see works of art themselves as machines for the production of ever more subtle varieties of such phantasy-material in the perceiving subject. 1. Preamble Meinong is nowadays principally remembered as an ontologist his ideas valued as anticipations of work in rather deviant fields of logic and semantics. The Meinongian ontology was not however developed for its own sake and its logical and .