Topological Fidelity: An Event‑Ontological Framework for Aesthetic Experience

Aesthetics has remained paralyzed by a false dilemma: beauty must be either a subjective response or an objective property. This paper argues that the dilemma itself is a grammatical error produced by noun‑ontology—the metaphysical presumption that existence is a collection of static entities. Drawing on a verb‑based ontology (Energein), I propose the concept of topological fidelity as an alternative foundation. Beauty is not an attribute of objects nor a feeling in subjects; it is the self‑manifestation of a local S³ neural topology as it approaches its eigen steady‑state. The framework distinguishes aesthetic awe from hedonic pleasure at the ontological level: pleasure arises from open, lower‑layer aggregation dynamics, whereas beauty emerges from the closure of cross‑layer integration across seven phenomenological‑functional scales. I offer topological re‑readings of Kant’s disinterestedness and Heidegger’s Unverborgenheit that preserve their phenomenological precision while anchoring them in dynamical systems theory. I then introduce the concept of no‑object beauty—aesthetic experience without an external stimulus, occurring when a topology ceases to resist its own eigen‑grammar. Finally, I derive two empirically falsifiable predictions concerning EEG multiscale entropy signatures and cross‑cultural topological invariants. The aim is not to reduce aesthetics to neuroscience, but to provide the formal ontological scaffolding that both philosophy and empirical science have lacked.