Aesthetic experience has, for the greater part of the history of western philosophy, been regarded as subordinate to rational enquiry. Traditionally, sensory or aesthetic experience is dismissed as a means to truth either because it can be confused or indistinct or because it is not amenable to conceptual analysis, both Plato and Descartes offer arguments along these lines. This changes in the eighteenth century when two German thinkers make aesthetics central to philosophy: Alexan- der Baumgarten (1714-62) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Baumgarten addresses the charge of confusion. His Metaphysica (1739) reconfigures aesthetic confusion as a synthesis ('confusion's field' or campus confusionis) and, therefore, as a positive epistemological notion.1 Whereas rational judgement divides the world into subjects and predicates, aesthetic experience, Baumgarten avers, allows us to perceive these moments as a unified whole.
Kant's writing, however, has overshadowed Baumgarten's contribution. The reason for this, I suggest, is that Kant radically alters the modern European philosophical landscape. The major shift in thought he makes is to acknowledge the finitude of human experience. That is to say, he asserts that human consciousness is not detached from the world but rooted in and actively engaged with it. This is Kant's Copernican Revolution'. The comparison with Copernicus is made by Kant himself. Just as Copernicus tries to remove the anomalies affecting sixteenth-century astronomy by adopting a new model of the cosmos, so Kant proposes to resolve the problems of metaphysics by offering a new model of the relation between mind and reality: