Definition
Aesthetics — from the Greek aesthesis (perception, sensation). The study of beauty, art, and sensory experience.
Ontology — from the Greek ontos (being) and logos (study). The branch of philosophy that asks: what exists? What is the nature of being? What kinds of things are real?
Aesthetic ontology asks: what is the being of beauty? How does beauty exist in the world? Where does beauty live? In the object, independent of anyone perceiving it? In the perceiving subject, produced by the mind encountering the world? In the relationship between the two, neither fully in the object nor fully in the mind but in the encounter itself? Does beauty exist without a perceiver? If a shadow falls in a room with no one in it, is it beautiful? Or does beauty require a conscious being to bring it into existence? What kind of existence does an immaterial experience have? A shadow has no mass. No fixed form. It exists only in relation to light and the object that interrupts it. But it is real. It can be measured, photographed, experienced. What kind of being is that? Is beauty discovered or created? Do we find beauty that was already there? Or do we produce beauty through the act of attending to something carefully? What is the difference between something being beautiful and something producing a beautiful experience? The steel plate is not beautiful in itself, cold, heavy, industrial. The shadow it casts might be beautiful. So is the beauty in the object or in what the object does? Can immaterial things be more real than material things? The shadow is produced by the stone but outlasts the stone's specific position. The atmosphere of a room persists after you leave it, in memory, in the body. Is the immaterial experience more real than the material object that produced it? What is the ontological status of atmosphere Atmosphere is real, you feel it immediately entering a space, but you cannot point to it, cannot locate it in any single element. Where does it exist?