If they did one of those Edge-dot-org questions of ‘what is a scientific concept you think everyone should learn’ but for aesthetics I would say 'romantic irony.’ Only there’s never been a really good direct description of the concept: it is more or less the cognitive-affective state of being simultaneously inside and outside of a worldview, or inhabiting a worldview while at the same time sensing its contingency and specificity within the space of worldviews, but it’s hard to get more clear than that without constructing a specific theory of romantic irony. The other part that’s tricky is that while most everyone intensely literary has had rich experiences of romantic irony in art, the case that any one specific literary work creates romantic irony rather than (purely) negative or mocking irony is more or less impossible to make on other than 'I know it when I see it’ grounds. I think 'romantic irony’ names one of the most subtle and profound capacities that set apart a human subject from most animals and AIs categorically, so I would love to have a solidly reliable, widely accessible reference point for demonstration
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like “romantic irony’ is the faculty that reading Eugene Onegin calls on,’ but more popularly accessible.