Fictional and Aesthetic Objects: Meinong’s Point of View

In contemporary philosophy there are a great many texts on aesthetics and the ontology of narrative discourse, that discuss Meinong’s theses, agreeing or disagreeing. But Meinong never wrote a single book or article on aesthetics or the ontology of art works, nor did he provide a structured system to deal with fictional aesthetic objects. What he wrote on these matters is to be found in texts dealing with the wide horizon represented by object theory. To assess whether object theory provides the right tools for the treatment of fictional aesthetic objects and hence deserves to be looked at in greater depth and developed further, I have thought fit to consider certain critical points from a general point of view, passing over specific analyses. Meinong does not use the term ‘fictional,’ indeed he only speaks of ‘aesthetic objects’; having brought together the two terms to delimit my discourse, I will not deal with fictitious objects in their totality, but only with the subclass of fictional aesthetic objects. By ‘fictional’ I mean ‘figuring in fiction,’ i.e. in a story or narrative context – of course not all that is fictitious is necessarily given in a narrative context; whereas by ‘aesthetic object’ I mean an object with aesthetic properties – and again, not all that is fictitious (including the fictional) is also necessarily an aesthetic object. Meinong himself refers above all to literature, sometimes to music, seldom to the visual arts, when he speaks of aesthetic objects.