Abstract
Main aim of this paper is to present a philosophical exploration of the nature of aesthetic experience in the work of french philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. My attention is going to be paid mainly to the problem of Levinas's strong condemnation of some aesthetic phenomena - nevertheless not all of them.
The reason behind is that Levinas explored two possible but radically contrary conceptions of aesthetic experience. Without the effort of closer examination of the reason of this division, we are going to be concentrated directly to the question of second Levinas's determination of aesthetic experience: why does Levinas equal some sort of aesthetic experience with the possibility of escape from the world of efforts and sufferings which we undergo to take care of our neighbours - from the the ordinary world of responsibility - to the world of dreams, illusions and cowardice? I am going to show that we need to uncover the underlying context of this problematic, namely Levinas's philosophical polemic with Martin Heidegger's ontology and explain properly its implicit connection with the Levinas's critique of aesthetic experience in order to solve our problem of aesthetic immorality.
The necessity of clearing this connection between Levinas aesthetics and criticism of ontology is manifested since publishing Levinas's major work Otherwise than being or beyond essence where Levinas examines his idea that aesthetic experience is giving access to the "being itself" - key notion of Heideggers's philosophy. Nevertheless without any doubt, if Levinas de facto accepts this Heidegger's own description of the aesthetic experience he does it only to change radically the overal conclusion: this experience of being itself, different from the ordinary everyday experience (which is to be defined, according to phenomenological tradition, as based on consciouss activity of identifying and objectifying comprehension), is not the opening of the process of "transcendence" itself, is not something of the highest value for our lives - but the opposite.
My intention is to demonstrate that if, according to Levinas, the aesthetic experience is extra-ordinary exactly thanks to its ability to leads us beyond the scope of ordinary thinking - and if this simultaneously means that we are returning to the experience of pure being - it has to mean that the aesthetic experience is only reprehensible regress to the thoughtless naivity.