The article consists of four parts. In the first three parts the author investigates Husserl's and Ingarden's theses concerning the appearances of objects of perception and imagination. Though Ingarden's concept differs from Husserl's in some important respects, both philosophers agree that objects of imagination present themselves to our consciousness via appearances. According to Husserl only acts of immanent perception do not require appearances to present their object. As far as Ingarden's concept is concerned, the necessity of appearances stems from the thesis of the transcendence of intentional objects. In part four the author argues that objects of imagination, in opposition to real spatio-temporal objects, cannot present themselves through appearances, thus an object of perception is nothing more than its 'appearances'. In turn his arguments are pointed against the thesis of the transcendence of intentional objects and go in the direction of a critique of their (double) subject-properties structure.
The scope of the article is twofold. The first issue is connected with the problem of materiality and non-materiality of art, the difference between a sensual object and an idea, between an analogue and an object of imagination. I endeavour to show that H.-G. Gadamer’s and J.P. Sartre’s contemporary conceptions, despite their revolutionary conclusions, are deeply rooted in classical aesthetics. The second part of the article is an attempt to reconstruct the aforementioned question on the examples of the eighteenth-century philosophies of Ch. Batteux and Shaftesbury in which the idea (or the object of imagination) was esteemed superior to the empirical object of the work of art.
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