THE PROBLEMATIZATION OF THE “AESTHETICAL EXPERIENCE” IN HENRI MALDINEY’S PHENOMENOLOGY

In this paper I undertook a study of Henri Maldiney's problematization of the way which we aesthetically experience the world in. The notion of aisthesis unites the aesthetic, in its etymological meaning, as related to the sensory perception, and the aesthetic, as related to the theory of art. According to Maldiney, aisthesis, or sensing, cannot be described in Kantian terms of experience as being structured by intelligence; being pre-reflective and ante-predicative, sensing should be classified as épreuve, passive experience that puts one to the test. Sensing is not just the sensory perception: it is holistic and gives the access to the world as a whole; in sensing one senses not the qualities of individual objects but, rather, the world which is not got crystallized in objects yet. Sensing is also a basic level of communicative human experience: through sensing one obtains an access to the world as being shared with others. Sensing is aesthetically important inasmuch as it possesses its own rhythm. I have carried out the analysis of two metaphysical notions, i.e. transpassibility and transpossibility, introduced by Maldiney in order to overcome the classical dichotomies of passibility/impassibility and possibility/impossibility accordingly. Aesthetically, rhythm as opposed to schema, is transpossible; it also constitutes the work of art in a dynamic unity. The hypothesis I come to can be formulated as follows: there is a special synthetic function of rhythm that can be opposed to the synthetic function of intentionality. This synthetic function cannot be normalized and, thus, it paves a way to de-transcendentalized and de-normalized phenomenology. In the conclusion I contemplate the experience of depression as described by Matthew Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe deals with a methodological challenge of how to apply transcendental notions to the empirical. I argue that the language of transpassible and transpossible can be used as a replacement for the Husserian language of transcendental constitution.