James Hillman's The Thought of the Heart & the Soul of the World
Please, let me insist: by aesthetic response I do not mean beautifying. I do not mean planting trees and going to galleries. I do not mean gentility, soft background music, clipped hedges--that sanitized, deodorized use of the word "aesthetic" that has deprived it of its teeth and tongue and fingers. Beauty, ugliness, and art are neither the full content nor true base of aesthetics. In the Neoplatonic understanding, beauty is simply manifestation, the display of phenomena, the appearance of the anima mundi; were there no beauty, the Gods, virtues, and forms could not be revealed. Beauty is an epistemological necessity; aisthesis is how we know the world. And Aphrodite is the lure, the nudity of things as they show themselves to the sensuous imagination.
Thus, what I do mean by aesthetic response is closer to an animal sense of the world-- a nose for the displayed intelligibility of things, their sound, smell, shape, speaking to and through our heart's reactions, responding to the looks and language, tones and gestures of the things we move among.
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