Peculiarities of Lithuanian aesthetics: phenomenological and postmodern approaches

Abstract

This paper presents the recent situation of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art and aesthetic experience. The paper reflects rather a subjective author’s review than an objective analysis of the phenomenological and postmodern Lithuanian aesthetics of the past decades. Reasons for an increasing interest in the problems of aesthetics and some main transformations in the recent Lithuanian aesthetics are analyzed. The author argues appropriateness of a phenomenological approach toward the questions of aesthetics, especially on the topics of aesthetic experience and visuality. It is shown that the postmodern aesthetics very often tends to take an interdisciplinary approach and to combine philosophy with literary theory, psychoanalysis, sociology, popular culture theory and other areas.