How The British Fucked ‘Aesthetics’ Up

So here’s the story with ‘aesthetics’: it originally meant, and still sometimes does, the applied epistemology of intuitive cognition. Baumgarten coined it to mean that. Kant was interested in the transcendental evaluation of aesthetics, not aesthetics itself, so his discussion of aesthetics is focused on the judgment of taste – the judgment of the goodness of an intuitive cognition – which happens to itself be an intuitive cognition, and because of that when Kant hit the English speaking world, which already had a discourse about the judgment of taste, and introduced the term aesthetics to the English speaking world, a mess was created whereby aesthetics turned into a hybrid of its meaning in German philosophy and ‘matters of the judgment of taste,’ or even worse a hybrid of its meaning in German philosophy and ‘matters of beauty.’

Like, the definition that Baumgarten gives aesthetics is ‘the theory of sensate cognition.'  Part of Baumgarten’s theory of sensate cognition was the hypothesis that the sensation of beauty is a sensate cognition of the fact that your faculty of sensate cognition is going turbo. Kant was very interested in this exact part of Baumgarten, and especially its implications for the judgment of taste, and the British read Kant but not Buamgarten and took aesthetics to mean 'the theory of the sensation of beauty’ or ‘the theory of the judgment of taste.’ But the Baumgarten meaning’s also still around, because it’s still the meaning used in France and Germany, hence clusterfuck.