The present volume, translated and edited by Leonardo V. Distaso, features the first Italian translation of two of Victor Basch's most significant essays: Les grands courants de l'esthétique allemande contemporaine (1912) and L'esthétique et la science de l'art (1934).
In 1918, Victor Basch (1863-1944) became the first full professor of Aesthetics and the Science of Art at the Sorbonne in Paris. He was also the founder of the French Society of Aesthetics and Science of Art. Even though he played an important role in the development of 20th-century French aesthetics, nowadays Basch is rarely mentioned in scholary works on the subject.
Ever since the publication of his volume on Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (Essai critique sur l'esthétique de Kant) in 1896, Basch's approach to aesthetics was linked to the concept of "Einfühlung", which drew on the work of German scholars of aesthetics of the second half of the 19th century, and particularly on Fechner's, Lipps's and Groos's psychological aesthetics. Basch's approach inserted French aesthetics within broader European debates, and opened it up to new thematic preoccupations and new methodologies. Basch soon demonstrated his originality as a thinker by contributing in fundamental ways to the conceptualization of sympathetic symbolism and by abstracting it form the context of positivism. Basch redefined the basic relationship between subject and object in its specific determination of Self-Nature. A necessary moment in this process of redefinition in the suspension of physical-logical thought, and the consideration of the object (and of the subject opposing it) from the point of view of its appearance. As a result, the relationship between the self and the world is conceptualized as rooted in a way of feeling that opens up the world in itself in its appearance and at the same time defines its symbolic status. This relationship of immediacy becomes essentially aesthetic, and can therefore be defined as aesthetic experience.