Abstract

In the intercultural communication, an issue facing aestheticians is: can the word beauty appropriately express the central aesthetic phenomenon of each culture? If not, how can the approach of aesthetics, which was originally introduced as a branch of European philosophy, be transformed in accordance with respective traditions? Based on these considerations, my article will deal with how the concept atmosphere, which has been newly developed in the context of aesthetics as a general theory of perception, would contribute to broadening the aesthetic boundaries and thus opening up new topics and themes for the contemporary dialogue between East and West. As a consequence, a general question What is aesthetics? might be not very important. The decisive issue would be rather how the aesthetic realities are constructed in respective cultural atmospheres and how the transcultural atmospheres, especially in the global context, arise from their interaction.