Abstract

It seems as if the act of understanding would always have to revert to something which already exists. When you ask for life, you already live. When you ask for experience, you already experience. When you ask for the one specific moment in which all questions regarding the relationship towards the other are clarified instantaneously, this moment is already gone. It seems as if the phenomena were always ahead of the perceiving person, as if the reflection always came too late and was running after the object of understanding. Whereas the act of realization always takes place after the event in the world of cognitive understanding, the cognitive reflection is carried out in the future of the actual moment of experience, the moment of aesthetic understanding coincides with this moment of experience. However, this fact should not be astonishing. Due to the fact that aesthetic understanding is always bound to the body, it has to feature this specific nearness to the object, the immediacy to the experienced which shows the particularity of aesthetic understanding. In the moment of aesthetic understanding, the nearness encloses aesthetic distance without the need for temporal distance. The main part of my paper addresses the anthropological and phenomenological investigation of the dynamics of the emergence of sense within aesthetic understanding. Unlike the cognitive reflection where the moment of experience precedes its understanding, the particularity of aesthetic understanding is presented through the fusion of the moment of experience of the phenomenon and the understanding of it. That is why the evidence of the moment can be assumed. Verf.-Referat