Fifty years ago, in September 1937, Moritz Geiger died suddenly at Seal Harbour (Maine), not long after his 57th birthday. He had been forced to emigrate to the United States at the end of 1933, when, due to the fact that he was Jewish, the Nazis had deprived him of his chair at the University of Göttingen.
Having studied under Wundt in Leipzig and under Lipps in Münich, he subsequently was heavily influenced by Logische Untersuchungen and was the coeditor with Husserl of the "Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phanomenologische Forschung". He carried out his research in various fields: from philosophy to geometry and psychology. He was among the first - and certainly the first as regards the quality and quantity of the results - to apply phenomenological method to aesthetics, in which field he confronted above all problems linked with aesthetic subjectivity and values. From 1907 to 1923 he held courses and seminars (partly in aesthetics) at the University of Münich, where he was among the main representatives of the socalled Münchener Phänomenologie. Among those who attended his lessons in those days was Walter Benjamin, who conserved of them (as he would later write) «einen nachhaltigen Eindruck».
Published in 1928, the work here translated and commented on looks further into certain essential features of the aesthetic approach, which Geiger had already started outlining in some of his previous studies. In particular he returns to the theme of the essay of 1913, dedicated to the phenomenology of artistic enjoyment, a theme on which, according to Jauß, Geiger wrote «das klarende phanomenologische Schlußwort». Dilettantism in artistic experience is an approach qualities; it is the behaviour of a person who lives art in inner concentration, taken up, that is, with his own experiences, rather than concentrating on the structures and values of the aesthetic object. It has social, as well as psychological motivations, in so far as it seems to be the typical attitude of the emotive, careless exploiter of modern masssociety (related to which is Kitsch, or at least an exploited "kitschig" art). In the background, by contrast, we see outlined the model of a classical contemplation, which, albeit largely in a state of crisis, acts as an inescapable term of comparison to reveal the degeneration of the present situation.
Gabriele Scaramuzza's presentation puts the essay on dilettantism into its context in the whole of Geiger's aesthetic thought. It reveals its moments of actuality and discusses them with reference to the problems raised by Benjamin. Finally, the work is accompanied by an ample bibliography of the writings of and on Geiger.