Eduard Hanslick's Legacy in Moritz Geiger's Music Aesthetics
Eduard Hanslick's Legacy in Moritz Geiger's Music Aesthetics

Summary/Abstract: Moritz Geiger, Edmund Husserl's pupil, was the first phenomenologist to devote himself to the issues of aesthetics throughout all his life. Growing out of a background in psychological aesthetics, mainly the aesthetics of empathy, he was chiefly concerned with the study of aesthetic experience. The present article pays attention to Geiger's concept of aesthetic enjoyment and especially the position in it of music, while analysing the most important assumptions of Eduard Hanslick's music aesthetics as Geiger implemented them into his own reasoning. The paper shows that Geiger's position was mainly rooted in the Kantian formulation of the aesthetic attitude as it was echoed in Hanslick. Both Hanslick and Geiger were helped in their thoughts about the position of music among the arts by the role of perceptual parameters. While Geiger acquired a more differentiated position in classifying aesthetic perception over Hanslick's brusque distinction between the right (aesthetic) and inappropriate (pathological) experience of art, in the context of his seemingly puritan formalism he could also appreciate Hanslick's cautious claim about the ideas conveyed by music because his position later shifted toward positing the existential significance of art.

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