Aesthetic Experience: From Analysis to Eros

Despite its technical and relatively modern coinage by a rationalist philosopher in the mideighteenth century, the concept of the aesthetic has proven so very vague, variable, and contested that theorists working in the field it supposedly defines have often expressed distinct frustration and sometimes even skepticism concerning this concept and its cognates (such as aesthetic attitude, aesthetic judgment). One source of the concept's blurredness is that the aesthetic ambiguously refers not only to distinctive but also diverse objects of perception (whether these be artworks, other artifacts, natural things, or even simply distinctive qualities, such as beauty, grace, and so forth, that can be found in these objects). It also refers to a distinctive mode of consciousness that grasps such objects-the very term 'aesthetic' being derived from the Greek word for sensory perception and used by Alexander Baumgarten, its inventor, to characterize what he regarded as our lower or more sensory faculties of cognition. To complicate things further, 'aesthetic' also applies to the distinctive discourse used to discuss those objects and modes of perception. Even more elusively vague, problematically polysemic, and confusingly controversial than the aesthetic, while also older, more central, and more influential in philosophical inquiry, is the concept of experience. Already a contested notion in ancient Greece where it was often