My sense is you have a long way to go, Johnny Mompou, but you do display an acuteness and pertinacity of a strength that will help you get somewhere a lot faster than a less gifted scholar. That sounds condescending, but I don't mean it so. Instead, in saying it I feel a bit like an elder teacher bent on conveying some "tips" to a very bright student. I'm one of several members of this forum who have been at the subject long enough to have learned something worth passing forward.
My guess is you'll want to dwell a bit on ontology and philosophy of language in your studies, because this well help you to spy out when you are unawaredly making unjustified assumptions, and when, instead of your using language, language is using you. I applaud your basic concern with what you call "aesthetic experience." I can buy your (notional) distinction between contemplated objects that are "intentional" (a painting, where every mark was done "on purpose"), and those objects we'd agree were produced by insensate causes (a sunset, an engaging piece of driftwood on the shore). But when you go on to make certain stipulations about those objects, and the effects occasioned by those objects, I think I perceive a lack of clarity, and an arbitrariness. For one example, Conger's perception seems right to me. Your attempt at a definition of "a work of art" would apparently make every man-made object a "work of art". And it's not clear to me if you're saying those objects "ARE" "works of art", or you're only saying the likes of "Hereinafter I shall CALL these objects 'works of art'". The first, an assertion that these objects in some sort of mind-independent way "are" works of art seems to me totally unsubstantiated, a murky, mystical, arbitrary fiat about non-mental ontic entities. For a second example, take a piece of driftwood that someone finds so engaging they take it home and mount it over their fireplace. You say of this object: "there can certainly be no talk of aesthetic experience, as nothing of that pleasure can be traced back to the fact of anyone having made any decisions Intentionally." For one thing, you've said almost nothing to help us grasp what you have in mind when you say "aesthetic experience". For another, your assertion seems to "beg the question". If someone were to remark that the feeling they get when they contemplate that driftwood is similar to what they might get from an intentionally carved (or metallic) wall sculpture - "similar" in the sense that they call both ecstatic experiences "aesthetic", on what grounds could you say they are wrong? Now, your sensibility may be such that you'd insist you never get an "aesthetic" experience from a "natural" object. Your distinction-apparatus may indeed be so exquisite that all your responses to natural objects are as categorically different from those to man-made objects as, say, a taste experience is categorically different from an auditory one. But, even if you are so equipped, I can easily imagine someone claiming, "I say there can indeed be talk of aesthetic experiences occasioned by natural objects because, by God, I've had them!" You can't prove that person wrong; all you can say is he isn't using the adjective 'aesthetic' the way you arbitrarily stipulate it should be used. Rephrased: you're saying either, "Regardless of how it feels, it's an ontic fact that the feeling IS not aesthetic," or "By my definition, it should not be CALLED 'aesthetic'." I hope you can sense why either assertion feels arbitrary and unpersuasive.
