Sorry for the delay in replying, Ms Sullivan. Several commitments took priority.
I find your conjecture concerning the relationship between Rand and the George circle interesting. I will have to take a deeper look, and see what I can find. Although, I would have to say that some notion of 'aura' has probably been in the ether of aesthetics since near the beginning. Insofar as aesthetics is only possible once one moves beyond the Cartesian binary of clear and distinct/dark and confused ideas (and past the inscrutibility of the Cartesian imagination) to the Leibnizean formulation of dark ideas and clear ideas, for which confused but clear ideas clear and distinct ones are species of clear ideas (and whose difference from one another is simply that confused ideas do not necessarily allow for the explicit formulation of their defining features the way that clear and distinct ideas do), there has always been 'a dark ground' to aesthetics. In fact, Baumgartens whole project seems to be nothing less than a propadeutic for moving from the darkness to clarity. As he writes in paragraph 7 of his _Aesthetica_ (my translation), "Nature makes no leap from darkness to clarity: from Midnight one passes through daybreak to Noon" I take it that Benjamins notion of 'aura' is merely another formulation of the dark ground.
