Aesthetic Experience in the Concepts of R. Ingarden, V. Schapp and K. Stavenhagen

The article summarizes the views of representatives of the phenomenological aesthetics of the twentieth century and the most famous students of Husserl. It is the aesthetic experience that becomes one of the key concepts in the concepts of Ingarden, Schapp and Stavenhagen. In them, aesthetic experience is associated with the ability of subjects to “ontologize” things, to individual and collective reactions to the status of things and objects. That is why the emphasis in the works of representatives of aesthetics is placed on the wisdom of subjects and determining their readiness for aesthetic experience. Such readiness can manifest itself in the beliefs and moral choices of subjects. The article concludes about the ways of «ontologization» of things proposed by thinkers. The views of thinkers in these matters were influenced by the fascination with the philosophy of history, ethics and partly the philosophy of religion. Socially oriented motives are traced in their concepts of aesthetic experience. In addition, thinkers defined the multidimensionality of aesthetic experience by offering their own constructions for measuring or fixing it. The article examines the structure of aesthetic experience proposed by them, and also makes judgments about some possibilities of applying approaches in assessing the formation of aesthetic experience in the modern world.