Abstract

My first aim is to examine place, status, and forms of aesthetics in the context of emerging psychology in the German academic world during the second half of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century. For the sake of historical contextualization, some additional aesthetically relevant views from a broader context of modernity will also be analyzed.My further purpose would be to explore an interpretive hypothesis on whether a different historical relationship between aesthetics and psychology, which means a different role of aesthetics and more importantly different choices than those that have been dominantly made, either originally or in reception of psychological ideas, could have brought about a psychology that would be better able to conceptualize human experience and activity in the existentially relevant human world.In an overview of subjectivist, psychological approaches and objectivist approaches to aesthetics, the forms of encounter between aesthetics and psychology will be examined.Additionally, aesthetics could be used as a strong argument against atomism and in favor of holism and perspectivism in understanding human experience. Another important historical lesson is an insight that subjectivism is compatible with universalism.From a historical reconstruction, I will try to derive some lessons relevant to aesthetics, and more specifically to my interpretive hypothesis that aesthetics could have served as a fruitful source for more encompassing psychological conceptualizations of human experience and activity. This historical lesson could be relevant to further developments in psychology and aesthetics.