The book is the first English translation of Nicolai Hartmann's final book published in 1953.
It will be of value to graduate students in philosophy scholars concerned with 20th century
Continental philosophy students of aesthetics and art history and criticism and persons in
and out of academic philosophy who wish to develop their aesthetic understanding and
responsiveness to art and music. Aesthetics Hartmann believes centers on the phenomenon of
beauty and art objectivates beauty but beauty exists only for a prepared observer. Part One
explores the act of aesthetic appreciation and its relation to the aesthetic object. It
discovers phenomenologically determinable levels of apprehension. Beauty appears when an
observer peers through the physical foreground of the work into the strata upon which form has
been bestowed by an artist in the process of expressing some theme. The theory of the
stratification of aesthetic objects is perhaps Hartmann's most original and fundamental
contribution to aesthetics. He makes useful and perceptive distinctions between the levels in
which beauty is given to perception by nature in the performing and the plastic arts and in
literature of all kinds. Part Two develops the phenomenology of beauty in each of the fine
arts. Then Hartmann explores some traditional categories of European aesthetics most centrally
those of unity of value and of truth in art. Part Three discusses the forms of aesthetic
values. Hartmann contrasts aesthetic values with moral values and this exploration culminates
in an extensive phenomenological exhibition of three specific aesthetic values the sublime
the charming and the comic. A brief appendix never completed by the author contains some
reflections upon the ontological implications of aesthetics. Engaged in constant dialogue with
thinkers of the past especially with Aristotle Kant and Hegel Hartmann corrects and develops
their insights by reference to familiar phenomena of art especially with Shakespeare
Rembrandt and Greek sculpture and architecture. In the course of his analysis he considers
truth in art (the true-to-life and the essential truth) the value of art and the relation of
art and morality. The work stands with other great 20th century contributors to art theory and
philosophical aesthetics: Heidegger Sartre Croce Adorno Ingarden and Benjamin among
others.
