David Ecker’s Phenomenology of Viewing

Dr. David Ecker has offered a great deal of insight into the phenomenological approach to aesthetic education. Here I emphasize "aesthetic education" -- not art education -- because Ecker has always been primarily concerned with the objective(s) of the receiver. That is to say, the receiver of an object or event -- whether viewer or percipient, this depending on the degree of conceptuality -- is often cited as a subject. The subject, in turn, is assumed to be subjective in his or her response to the object or event. One of Ecker's points is to shift the assumption away from the subject as being directly subjective to a more distant position of phenomenological viewing. This suggests that the subject of an aesthetic experience carries a certain distance in relation to the perception, inventory, interpretation, and evaluation of a work of art. (I believe these four sequential categories are indebted to Edmund Burke Feldman.)

Ecker's position moves the subject toward a methodological approach through the intervention of a phenomenological inquiry that employs "bracketing" (Husserl's epoche) in relation to the art object or event. In so doing, the receiving subject is less inclined toward a mindless "opinion" of the work, and more deeply engaged with a more subtle analytical and emotional process in seeing the work as an expanding center, that is, an inductive understanding of the art object or event that goes toward a wider circle of understanding.

Whereas Husserl's approach may have been deductive, I see Ecker's position as inductive, that is, drawing out from the center (eidos) a possibility that exceeds the predetermined notion of an essence that carries the consciousness of the receiver toward another stratosphere of "eidetic" interpretation. The essence derived from attending to an object or event goes not only go inward, but expands outward at the same time. Therefore, the phenomenological approach to art is an equivocating inductive and deductive reasoning that perpetually elides the center (eidos) in favor of the outward periphery. This tends to orient Ecker's phenomenology more in terms of the social, rather than toward the individual notion of essence.

Robert C. Morgan, Ph.D.

School of Education, NYC '78