Aesthetics Is Literacy
Most people treat aesthetics as a personal touch. But without literacy, aesthetics is general and never yours. Aesthetics and literacy are the same cognitive act, operating in different planes but always connected.
Literacy is not what you produce. It’s how you move through knowledge. A literate person doesn’t just decode words; they individuate meaning. They take general language and locate the specific claim inside it. They know what something is saying beneath what it appears to be saying. Literacy is the capacity to make the abstract particular, and the particular legible.
All aesthetics must be alive; when it is not, it becomes general utility. When you’re connecting to a living aesthetic, you’re individuating. You’re noticing yourself in relation to others and to value. You’re building the perceptual infrastructure to distinguish signal from convention.