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I.

	Experience, quipped Oscar Wilde, is the name one gives to one's mistakes. Does 
aesthetic experience then name the central blunder of modern aesthetics?  Though long 
considered the most essential of aesthetic concepts, as including but also surpassing the 
realm of art, aesthetic experience has in the last half-century come under increasing 
critique. Not only its value but its very existence has been questioned. How has this once 
vital concept lost its appeal? Does it still offer anything of value? The ambiguous title, "the 
end of aesthetic experience," suggests my two goals: a reasoned account of its demise, and 
an argument for reconceiving and thus redeeming its purpose. 
	Though briefly noting the continental critique of this concept, I shall mostly focus on 
its progressive decline in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. Not only because 
here its descent is most extreme, but because it is in this tradition--that of John Dewey, 
Monroe Beardsley, Nelson Goodman, and Arthur Danto--that I situate my own aesthetic 
work.   While Dewey celebrated aesthetic experience, making it the very center of his 
philosophy of art, Danto virtually shuns the concept, warning (after Duchamp) that its 
"aesthetic delectation is a danger to be avoided."  The decline of aesthetic experience from 
Dewey to Danto reflects, I shall argue, deep confusion about this concept's diverse forms and 
theoretical functions. But it also reflects a growing preoccupation with the anaesthetic thrust 
of this century's artistic avant-garde, itself symptomatic of much larger transformations in 
our basic sensibility as we move increasingly from an experiential to an informational 
culture.
	To appreciate the decline of the concept of aesthetic experience, we must first recall 
its prime importance. Some see it as playing a major role, avant la lettre and in diverse 
guises, in premodern aesthetics (e.g., in Plato's, Aristotle's, and Aquinas's accounts of the 
experience of beauty, and in Alberti's and Gravina's concepts of lentezza and delirio).   But 
there can be no doubt that its dominance was established in modernity, when the term 
"aesthetic" was officially established. Once modern science and philosophy had destroyed 
the classical, medieval, and Renaissance faith that properties like beauty were objective 
features of the world, modern aesthetics turned to subjective experience to explain and 
ground them. Even when seeking an intersubjective consensus or standard that would do 
the critical job of realist objectivism, philosophy typically identified the aesthetic not only 
through, but  also with subjective experience.
	"Beauty," said Hume in arguing for a standard of taste, "is no quality in things 
themselves; it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them," though some minds are, 
of course, more judicious and authoritative than others. Kant explicitly identified the 
subject's experience "of pleasure or displeasure" as "the determining ground" of aesthetic 
judgment.  The notion of aesthetic experience moreover helped provide an umbrella concept 
for diverse qualities that were distinguished from beauty but still closely related to taste 
and art: concepts like the sublime and the picturesque.
	In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, aesthetic experience gained still 
greater importance through the general celebration of experience by influential 
Lebensphilosophies aimed at combating the threat of mechanistic determinism (seen not 
merely in science but also in the ravages of industrialization). In these philosophies, 
experience replaced atomistic sensation as the basic epistemological concept, and its link to 
vividly felt life is clear not only from the German term "Erlebnis" but also from the vitalistic 
experiential theories of Bergson, James, and Dewey. As art subsumed religion's role by 
providing a nonsupernatural spirituality in the material world, so experience emerged as 
the naturalistic yet nonmechanistic expression of mind. The union of art and experience 
engendered a notion of aesthetic experience that achieved, through the turn of the century's 
great aestheticist movement, enormous cultural importance and almost religious intensity.
	Aesthetic experience became the island of freedom, beauty, and idealistic meaning in 
an otherwise coldly materialistic and law-determined world; it was not only the locus of the 
highest pleasures, but a means of spiritual conversion and transcendence; it accordingly 
became the central concept for explaining the distinctive nature and value of art, which had 
itself become increasingly autonomous and isolated from the mainstream of material life 
and praxis. The doctrine of art for art's sake could only mean that art was for the sake of its 
own experience. And seeking to expand art's dominion, its adherents argued that anything 
could be rendered art if it could engender the appropriate experience.
	This hasty genealogy of aesthetic experience does not, of course, do justice to the 
complex development of this concept, nor to the variety of theories and conceptions it 
embraces. But it should at least highlight four features that are central to the tradition of 
aesthetic experience and whose interplay shapes yet confuses twentieth-century accounts of 
this concept. First, aesthetic experience is essentially valuable and enjoyable; call this its 
evaluative dimension. Second, it is something vividly felt and subjectively savored, 
affectively absorbing us and focusing our attention on its immediate presence and thus 
standing out from the ordinary flow of routine experience; call this its phenomenological 
dimension. Third, it is meaningful experience, not mere sensation; call this its semantic 
dimension. (Its affective power and meaning together explain how aesthetic experience can 
be so transfigurative). Fourth, it is a distinctive experience closely identified with the 
distinction of fine art and representing art's essential aim; call this the demarcational-
definitional dimension.
	These features of aesthetic experience do not seem, prima facie, collectively 
inconsistent. Yet, as we shall see, they generate theoretical tensions that propel recent 
analytic philosophy toward growing marginalization of this concept and have even inspired 
some analysts (most notably George Dickie) to deny its very existence.  Before concentrating 
on the Anglo-American scene, we would do well to note the major lines of recent continental 
critique. For only by comparison can we grasp the full measure of the analytic depreciation 
of aesthetic experience.

II.

From critical theory and hermeneutics to deconstruction and genealogical analysis, the 
continental critique of aesthetic experience has mostly focused on challenging its 
phenomenological immediacy and its radical differentiation. Although Adorno rejects its 
claim to pleasure as the ideological contamination of bourgeois hedonism, he joins the 
virtually unanimous continental verdict that aesthetic experience is not only valuable and 
meaningful but that the concept of experience is crucial for the philosophy of art. Unlike 
facile pleasure of the subject, "real aesthetic experience," for Adorno, "requires self-
abnegation" and submission to "the objective constitution of the artwork itself."  This can 
transform the subject, thereby suggesting new avenues of emancipation and a renewed 
promesse de bonheur more potent than simple pleasure.
	Here we see the transformational, passional aspect of aesthetic experience; it is 
something undergone or suffered. Though the experiencing subject is dynamic, not inert, she 
is far from a fully controlling agent and so remains captive and blind to the ideological 
features structuring the artwork she follows. Hence a proper, emancipatory understanding 
of art requires going beyond immediate experience, beyond immanent Verstehen, to 
external critique ("secondary reflection") of the work's ideological meaning and the socio-
historical conditions which shaped it. "Experience is essential," Adorno dialectically 
concludes, "but so is thought, for no work in its immediate facticity portrays its meaning 
adequately or can be understood in itself" (AT, p. 479).
	In the same dialectical manner, while affirming aesthetic experience's marked 
differentiation from "ungodly reality," he recognizes that such apparent autonomy is itself 
only the product of social forces which ultimately condition the nature of aesthetic 
experience by constraining both the structure of artworks and our mode of responding to 
them (AT, pp. 320-322, 478-479). Since changes in the nonaesthetic world affect our very 
sensibilities and capacity for experience, aesthetic experience cannot be a fixed natural kind.
	This is a central theme in Walter Benjamin's critique of the immediate meaning of 
Erlebnis privileged by phenomenology. Through the fragmentation and shocks of modern 
life, the mechanical repetition of assembly-line labor, and the haphazardly juxtaposed 
information and raw sensationalism of the mass media, our immediate experience of things 
no longer forms a meaningful, coherent whole but is rather a welter of fragmentary, 
unintegrated sensations--something simply lived through (erlebt) rather than meaningfully 
experienced. Benjamin instead advocated a notion of experience (as Erfahrung) that requires 
the mediated, temporally cumulative accretion of coherent, transmittable wisdom, though 
he doubted whether it could still be achieved in modern society. 
	Modernization and technology, Benjamin likewise argued, have eroded aesthetic 
experience's identification with the distinctive, transcendent autonomy of art. Such 
experience once had what Benjamin called aura, a cultic quality resulting from the artwork's 
uniqueness and distance from the ordinary world. But with the advent of mechanical modes 
of reproduction like photography, art's distinctive aura has been lost, and aesthetic 
experience comes to pervade the everyday world of popular culture and even politics. 
Aesthetic experience can no longer be used to define and delimit the realm of high art. 
Unlike Adorno, Benjamin saw this loss of aura and differentiation as potentially 
emancipatory (although he condemned its deadly results in the aesthetics of fascist politics). 
In any case, Benjamin's critique does not deny the continuing importance of aesthetic 
experience, only its romantic conceptualization as pure immediacy of meaning and isolation 
from the rest of life.
	Clearly inspired by Heidegger's critique of aesthetic experience,  Gadamer attacks the 
same two features of immediacy and differentiation, which are even conceptually linked. By 
radically differentiating the artwork from the socio-historical world in which it is created 
and received, by treating it as an object purely of direct aesthetic delight, aesthetic 
consciousness reduces the work's meaning to what is immediately experienced. But, 
Gadamer argues, this attitude simply cannot do justice to art's meaning and lasting impact 
on our lives and world:The pantheon of art is not a timeless presence which offers itself to 
pure aesthetic consciousness but the assembled achievements of the human mind as it has 
realized itself historically. ... Inasmuch as we encounter the work of art in the world, ... it is 
necessary to adopt an attitude to the beautiful and to art that does not lay claim to 
immediacy, but corresponds to the historical reality of man. The appeal to immediacy, to the 
genius of the moment, to the significance of the "experience," cannot withstand the claim of 
human existence to continuity and unity of self-understanding. To take the work as merely 
experienced immediacy is to rob it of enduring wholeness and cumulative meaning through 
communicative tradition, disintegrating "the unity of the aesthetic object into the 
multiplicity of experiences" (TM, p. 85) and ignoring art's relation to the world and its 
claims to truth.
	Such critique of immediate, differentiated aesthetic consciousness does not, however, 
constitute a repudiation of the central importance of experience for aesthetics. Indeed, 
Gadamer claims it is undertaken "in order to do justice to the experience of art" by insisting 
that this experience "includes understanding," which must exceed the immediacy of pure 
presence (TM, pp. 89, 90).  Rather than identifying art with its objects as in typical analytic 
philosophy, Gadamer insists "that the work of art has its true being in the fact that it 
becomes an experience changing the person experiencing it"; this experience "is not the 
subjectivity of the person who experiences it, but the work itself" (TM, p. 92), which, as a 
game plays its players, submits those who wish to understand it to the rigors of its 
structures.
	Although it rejects Gadamer's faith in experiential unity and stability, the 
deconstructionism of Derrida and Barthes takes a roughly similar stand: its radical critique 
of firm disciplinary boundaries and the "myth of presence" challenges the radical 
differentiation and immediacy of aesthetic experience without dismissing its importance 
and power of jouissance.  From a quite different perspective, that of sociologically informed 
genealogical critique, Pierre Bourdieu attacks the very same two targets. "The experience of 
the work of art as being immediately endowed with meaning and value" that are pure and 
autonomous is an essentialist fallacy. Aesthetic experience is "itself an institution which is 
the product of historical invention," the result of the reciprocally reinforcing dimensions of 
art's institutional field and inculcated habits of aesthetic contemplation.   Both take 
considerable time to get established, not only in the general social field but also in the 
course of each individual's aesthetic apprenticeship.  Moreover, their establishment in both 
cases depends on the wider social field that determines an institution's conditions of 
possibility, power, and attraction, as well as the options of the individual's involvement in it.
	What shall we make of the two main thrusts of the continental critique?  Aesthetic 
experience cannot be conceived as an unchanging concept narrowly identified with fine art's 
purely autonomous reception. For not only is such reception impoverished, but aesthetic 
experience extends beyond fine art (to nature, for example). Moreover, aesthetic experience 
is conditioned by changes in the nonartistic world that affect not only the field of art but 
our very capacities for experience in general.
	The second charge, that aesthetic experience requires more than mere 
phenomenological immediacy to achieve its full meaning, is equally convincing.  Immediate 
reactions are often poor and mistaken, so interpretation is generally needed to enhance our 
experience. Moreover, prior assumptions and habits of perception, including prior acts of 
interpretation, are necessary for the shaping of appropriate responses that are experienced 
as immediate. This insistence on the interpretive is also the crux of the Goodman-Danto 
critique of aesthetic experience. So when Gadamer urges that "aesthetics must be absorbed 
into hermeneutics" (TM, p. 146), he is expressing precisely the dominant analytic line.
	However, the claim that aesthetic experience must involve more than 
phenomenological immediacy and vivid feeling does not entail that such immediate feeling 
is not crucial to aesthetic experience. Likewise, Bourdieu's convincing claim that aesthetic 
experience requires cultural mediation does not entail that its content cannot be 
experienced as immediate. Though it surely took some time for English to become a 
language and for me to learn it, I can still experience its meanings as immediate, grasping 
them as immediately as the smell of a rose (which itself may require the mediation of 
gardening and complex cognitive processes of sense and individuation). 
	The decline of aesthetic experience in analytic philosophy partly reflects such false 
inferences. But it also stems from confusions arising from the changing role of this concept 
in Anglo-American philosophy from Dewey to Danto, and especially from the fact that this 
diversity of roles has not been adequately recognized. Viewed as a univocal concept, 
aesthetic experience seems too confused to be redeemed as useful; so the first task is to 
articulate its contrasting conceptions.

III.

The contrasting conceptions of aesthetic experience are best mapped in terms of three 
different axes of contrast whose opposing poles capture all four of its already noted 
dimensions. First, we can ask whether the concept of aesthetic experience is intrinsically 
honorific or instead descriptively neutral. Second, is it robustly phenomenological or simply 
semantic? In other words, are affect and subjective intentionality essential dimensions of 
this experience, or is it rather only a certain kind of meaning or style of symbolization that 
renders an experience aesthetic? Third, is this concept's primary theoretical function 
transformational, aiming to revise or enlarge the aesthetic field, or is it instead 
demarcational, i.e., to define, delimit, and explain the aesthetic status quo?
	My claim is that, since Dewey, Anglo-American theories of aesthetic experience have 
moved steadily from the former to the latter poles, resulting eventually in the concept's loss 
of power and interest. In other words, Dewey's essentially evaluative, phenomenological, 
and transformational notion of aesthetic experience has been gradually replaced by a purely 
descriptive, semantic one whose chief purpose is to explain and thus support the established 
demarcation of art from other human domains. Such changes generate tensions that make 
the concept suspicious. Moreover, when aesthetic experience proves unable to supply this 
definition, as Danto concludes, the whole concept is abandoned for one that promises to do 
so--interpretation.  That aesthetic experience may nonetheless be fruitful for other 
purposes is simply, but I think wrongly, ignored.  To substantiate this line of narrative and 
argument, we must examine the theories of Dewey, Beardsley, Goodman, and Danto.
	Dewey's prime use of aesthetic experience is aimed not at distinguishing art from the 
rest of life, but rather at "recovering the continuity of its esthetic experience with the 
normal processes of living," so that both art and life will be improved by their greater 
integration.   His goal was to break the stifling hold of what he called "the museum 
conception of art," which compartmentalizes the aesthetic from real life, remitting it to a 
separate realm remote from the vital interests of ordinary men and women. This "esoteric 
idea of fine art" gains power from the sacralization of art objects sequestered in museums 
and private collections. Dewey therefore insisted on privileging dynamic aesthetic 
experience over the physical objects that conventional dogma identifies and then fetishizes 
as art. For Dewey, the essence and value of art are not in such artifacts per se but in the 
dynamic and developing experiential activity through which they are created and 
perceived. He therefore distinguished between the physical "art product" that, once created, 
can exist "apart from human experience" and "the actual work of art [which] is what the 
product does with and in experience" (AE, pp. 9, 167, 329). This primacy of aesthetic 
experience not only frees art from object fetishism but also from its confinement to the 
traditional domain of fine art. For aesthetic experience clearly exceeds the limits of fine art, 
as, for example, in the appreciation of nature. 
	Dewey insisted that aesthetic experience could likewise occur in the pursuit of science 
and philosophy, in sport, and in haute cuisine, contributing much to the appeal of these 
practices. Indeed, it could be achieved in virtually any domain of action, since all 
experience, to be coherent and meaningful, requires the germ of aesthetic unity and 
development. By rethinking art in terms of aesthetic experience, Dewey hoped we could 
radically enlarge and democratize the domain of art, integrating it more fully into the real 
world which would be greatly improved by the pursuit of such manifold arts of living.
	Its potential pervasiveness did not mean that aesthetic experience could not be 
distinguished from ordinary experience. Its distinction, however, is essentially qualitative. 
From the humdrum flow of routine experience, it stands out, says Dewey, as a distinctly 
memorable, rewarding whole--as not just experience but "an experience"--because in it we 
feel "most alive" and fulfilled through the active, satisfying engagement of all our human 
faculties (sensual, emotive, and cognitive) that contribute to this integrated whole. Aesthetic 
experience is differentiated not by its unique possession of some specific element or its 
unique focus on some particular dimension, but by its more zestful integration of all the 
elements of ordinary experience into an absorbing, developing whole that provides "a 
satisfyingly emotional quality" of some sort and so exceeds the threshold of perception that 
it can be appreciated for its own sake (AE, pp. 42, 45, 63).  An essential part of that 
appreciation is the immediate, phenomenological feel of aesthetic experience, whose sense 
of unity, affect, and value is "directly fulfilling" rather than deferred for some other time or 
end.
	The transformational, phenomenological, and evaluative thrust of Deweyan aesthetic 
experience should now be clear.  So should the usefulness of such a concept for provoking 
recognition of artistic potentialities and aesthetic satisfactions in pursuits previously 
considered nonaesthetic. It is further useful in reminding us that, even in fine art, directly 
fulfilling experience rather than collecting or scholarly criticism is the primary value. Nor 
does this emphasis on phenomenological immediacy and affect preclude the semantic 
dimension of aesthetic experience. Meaning is not incompatible with qualia and affect.
	Unfortunately, Dewey does not confine himself to transformational provocation, but 
also proposes aesthetic experience as a theoretical definition of art. By standard 
philosophical criteria, this definition is hopelessly inadequate, grossly misrepresenting our 
current concept of art. Much art, particularly bad art, fails to engender Deweyan aesthetic 
experience, which, on the other hand, often arises outside art's institutional limits. 
Moreover, though the concept of art (as an historically determined concept) can be 
somewhat reshaped, it cannot be convincingly defined in such a global way so as to be 
coextensive with aesthetic experience. No matter how powerful and universal is the 
aesthetic experience of sunsets, we are hardly going to reclassify them as art.  By employing 
the concept of aesthetic experience both to define what art in fact is and to transform it into 
something quite different, Dewey creates considerable confusion. Hence analytic 
philosophers typically dismiss his whole idea of aesthetic experience as a disastrous muddle.
	The major exception is Monroe Beardsley, who reconstructs this concept as the core of 
his analytic philosophy of art, which, like most analytic aesthetics, is preoccupied with 
projects of differentiation. Instead of Dewey's quest to unite art to the rest of life, 
Beardsley's aim is to clearly distinguish art and the aesthetic from other practices. This 
means renouncing the transformational use of aesthetic experience. Instead, this concept 
serves to define what is distinctive of works of art and what is constitutive of their value 
(issuing in what Beardsley calls a "persuasive analysis of artistic goodness," APV, p. 79).
	Beardsley's strategy is to argue that art can be defined as a distinctive function class if 
there is a particular function that works of art "can do that other things cannot do, or do as 
completely or fully"(A, p. 526). The production of aesthetic experience is claimed as this 
function, and so he explains both the general value of art and the differing value of its 
particular works through the basic value and intrinsic pleasure of that experience; better 
works, for Beardsley, are those capable of producing "aesthetic experiences of a greater 
magnitude" (A, p. 531). Beardsley thus retains the Deweyan evaluative, affective, and 
phenomenological features of aesthetic experience. It is, he says, an "intrinsically enjoyable" 
"experience of some intensity" where "attention" and "the succession of one's mental states" 
is focused on and directed by some phenomenal field in a way that generates a satisfying 
"feeling" of coherence or "wholeness" and "a sense of actively exercising constructive powers 
of the mind" (A, p. 527; APV, pp. 287-289). And he clarifies such defining characteristics of 
this experience in considerable detail. 
	After careful scrutiny, analytic aesthetics has rejected Beardsley's theory on three 
major grounds. One is skepticism about its phenomenological validity. George Dickie, an 
influential advocate of this line of critique, offers two principal arguments.  First, Beardsley 
must be wrong to describe the aesthetic experience as unified, coherent, etc., because doing 
so is simply a category mistake--treating the term "experience" as if it denoted a real thing 
that could bear such descriptions instead of recognizing that it is merely a empty term 
denoting nothing real. Talk about aesthetic experience is just a roundabout and ontologically 
inflationary way of talking about the aesthetic object as perceived or experienced. 
Beardsley's claim of the "unity of experience" is simply a misleading way of describing the 
experienced, phenomenal unity of the artwork. It alone can have such properties of 
coherence or wholeness. Particular subjective affects resulting from the work cannot have 
these properties, and the global aesthetic experience that purports to have them is just a 
linguistically constructed metaphysical phantom. Secondly, Dickie argues, even what is 
wrongly identified as aesthetic experience does not always have the affective content that 
Beardsley claims; and this critique can be extended to traditional claims that aesthetic 
experience is always pleasurable or unified.
	What should one make of these two arguments?  To the first, we can reply that 
empirical psychologists do accept the reality of experiences (including aesthetic ones) and 
the validity of describing them in terms of predicates (like unity, intensity, etc.) that, 
admittedly, are more often used to describe the objects of such experiences.  Of course, one 
could challenge this response by dismissing it as confused folk psychology and adopting 
philosophy of mind's once fashionable trend of dismissing the role of consciousness or first-
person experience. For many reasons (including aesthetic ones), I think this trend should be 
resisted, and consciousness is indeed making a comeback in recent philosophy of mind. 
	The argument that Beardsley's phenomenological ascriptions of affect, unity, and 
pleasure are in fact phenomenologically incorrect can be considered along with the second 
major criticism of his theory: that (the capacity to produce) aesthetic experience just cannot 
serve to identify and individuate works of art.  Here the standard strategy is to show that 
such a definition would be both too wide and too narrow. It has been charged, for instance, 
that by Beardsley's criteria of aesthetic experience, good sexual experience would be falsely 
included as art, a conclusion Dewey would have welcomed but which runs against 
Beardsley's analytic aim of explaining established classifications. 
	However, Beardsley's definition is most often attacked for being too narrow. It 
wrongly excludes all the many artworks that are not capable of producing enjoyable 
experiences of unity and affect. Certain good works neither produce nor even try to produce 
such experiences, but clearly the problem is most severe with bad works of art. Since 
Beardsley's concept of aesthetic experience is essentially honorific and definitional, it cannot 
accommodate bad works as aesthetic objects or art, and yet clearly this is how we analytic 
philosophers think they must be classified.  The concepts of art and aesthetic must allow for 
bad instances. Being a work of art cannot entail being a good work of art, otherwise negative 
evaluations of artworks would be impossible.
	This leads to the third major difficulty: the inadequacy of Beardsley's theory of 
aesthetic experience to explain our judgments of value. Because this experience is by 
definition enjoyable or positive, it can in no way account for strongly negative aesthetic 
judgments (e.g., of hideousness, repulsion, etc.), which cannot be explained by the mere 
absence of a positive aesthetic experience. Yet negative verdicts are central to the field of 
aesthetics, and any concept which claims to define this field must be able to account for bad 
as well as good art. 
	Two conclusions emerge from all this critique. If aesthetic experience is to do the job 
of demarcating the entire realm of art, then its essentially evaluative content must be 
abandoned. Moreover, if one is suspicious of subjectivity and immediate feeling, then one 
must find a notion of aesthetic experience not centered on first-person phenomenology but 
rather on nonsubjective accounts of meaning. These two inferences determine the new 
semantic direction of Nelson Goodman's theory of aesthetic experience.  Though he shares 
Beardsley's analytic goal of demarcational definition, of "distinguishing in general between 
aesthetic and nonaesthetic objects and experience" (LA, p. 243), he insists that such 
distinction must be "independent of all consideration of aesthetic value," since the existence 
of bad art means "being aesthetic does not exclude being ... aesthetically bad" (LA, pp. 244, 
255). Aesthetic experience must also be defined independently of phenomenological 
accounts of mental states or immediate feelings and meanings. For Goodman rejects 
intentional entities, explaining all meaning in terms of varieties of reference, just as he 
renounces the very idea of an immediate given before or apart from its symbolic 
representation.
	Nor can aesthetic experience be distinguished by its peculiarly emotive character, 
since "some works of art have little or no emotive content." Even when emotion is present, 
its role, Goodman argues, is simply the cognitive one "of discerning what properties a work 
has and expresses" by providing "a mode of sensitivity" to it (LA, pp. 248, 250, 251).  But 
such cognitive use of emotion (as Dewey also tirelessly urged) is equally present in science. 
Goodman concludes that while emotion is not an aesthetic constant, cognition of some sort is. 
He therefore defines aesthetic experience as "cognitive experience distinguished [from 
science and other domains] by the dominance of certain symbolic characteristics"(LA, p. 
262). 
	Goodman calls these features "symptoms of the aesthetic" and individuates five of 
them:(1) syntactic density, where the finest differences in certain respects constitute a 
difference between symbols--for example, an ungraded mercury thermometer as contrasted 
with an electronic digital-read-out instrument; (2) semantic density, where symbols are 
provided for things distinguished by the finest differences in certain respects (not only the 
ungraduated thermometer again but also ordinary English, though it is not syntactically 
dense); (3) relative repleteness, where comparatively many aspects of a symbol are 
significant--for example a single-line drawing of a mountain by Hokusai where every 
feature of shape, line, thickness, etc. counts, in contrast with perhaps the same line as a 
chart of daily stock market averages, where all that counts is the height of the line above 
the base; (4) exemplification, where a symbol, whether or not it denotes, symbolizes by 
serving as a sample of properties it literally or metaphorically possesses; and finally (5) 
multiple and complex reference, where a symbol performs several integrated and 
interacting referential functions, some direct and some mediated through other symbols. 
(WW, pp. 67-68)
	If an object's "functioning exhibits all these symptoms," Goodman claims, "then very 
likely the object is a work of art. If it shows almost none, then it probably isn't" (OMM, p. 
199). Although these symptoms may fall short of being disjunctively necessary and 
conjunctively sufficient conditions for defining our concept of art, Goodman blames this on 
the fact that ordinary usage of this concept is too "vague and vagrant" to allow any clear 
definition and thus requires reform (WW, p. 69). His symptoms are therefore offered 
provisionally in the "search for a definition" (OMM, p. 135) that will achieve this 
clarification.
	Rather than focusing on provisional symptoms, criticism of Goodman's theory should 
be directed at the underlying premises that generate their proposal. Three problems seem 
most central. First is the premise of radical aesthetic differentiation, with its consequent 
presumption that the function of the concept of aesthetic experience is to explain art's 
compartmentalized distinction. Goodman's theory, like Beardsley's, is haunted by this goal of 
clearly defining art from all other realms, of seeking (in his words) "a way of distinguishing 
aesthetic from all other experience" (LA, p. 251). Thus, though keen to emphasize the great 
affinities between art and science, he feels compelled to seek a definition that will clearly 
mark off aesthetic from scientific experience. Invoking his symbolic symptoms to achieve 
this, he rightly worries that they cannot adequately do the job by providing necessary and 
sufficient conditions.
	Yet such worries only arise by presuming that the concept of aesthetic experience 
should be coextensive with art, that aesthetic experience cannot occur in science and other 
standardly nonartistic pursuits, but must apply in all art no matter how bad. There is ample 
testimony to challenge this presumption, but Goodman must ignore it. Methodologically 
wedded to the project of demarcating art by aesthetic experience, he cannot recognize a 
concept of aesthetic experience that cuts across disciplinary boundaries while maintaining 
its evaluative sense as enjoyably heightened, affective, and meaningful experience. Yet such 
a concept is fruitfully employed in common usage, not only in Dewey.
	A second problem with Goodman's definition of aesthetic experience is that it seems to 
render the very notion of experience--the conscious, phenomenological feel of things--
entirely superfluous. If the aesthetic is defined entirely in terms of the dominance of certain 
modes of symbolization, with no essential reference to sentience, immediate feeling, and 
affect, then what is the point of speaking about aesthetic experience at all? We might as 
well just talk about the semantic symptoms of art and aesthetics, and simply drop the term 
"experience" (as Goodman indeed does in his most recent discussions). But apart from the 
once chic suspicion of consciousness, is there any reason why the concept of aesthetic 
experience must omit this phenomenological dimension with its immediacy of quality and 
affect? Goodman's discussion suggests (though never fully articulates) the following 
argument: Aesthetic experience is essentially meaningful and cognitive through its use of 
symbols. Use of symbols implies mediation and dynamic processing of information, while 
phenomenological feeling and affect imply passivity and immediacy that cannot account for 
meaning. Hence, aesthetic experience cannot be essentially phenomenological, immediate, or 
affective.
	This argument is very problematic. First, even assuming all its premises, what follows 
is only that aesthetic experience requires more than these phenomenological features, not 
that they are not central to such experience. Secondly, we can challenge the premises by 
arguing that phenomenological consciousness can include immediate perceptions of 
meaning, even if such immediate understandings on the conscious level require unconscious 
mediated processing, or rely on a background of past conscious mediation. Further, one can 
argue that phenomenological feeling involves more than immediacy, just as affect (on both 
psychological and physiological levels) involves more than passivity. Moreover, if Goodman 
brings the argument that affect is not central to aesthetic experience because it is not 
always present in the experience of artworks, we can counter by challenging the 
presumption that aesthetic experience can only be understood as an artistically 
demarcational concept, applying necessarily to our encounter with all (and only) artworks, 
no matter how feeble the encounter and the works may be.
	Finally, Goodman's semiotic theory of aesthetic experience has a third grave problem. 
Not only does it neglect the phenomenology and nonartistic extension of that experience, it 
is also wholly inadequate for its designated role of demarcating the realm of art. For its use 
in this role requires that we already know whether or not we are dealing with artworks. 
Here is the argument. According to Goodman an object is an artwork when its symbolic 
functioning saliently employs the symptomatically aesthetic modes of symbolization. But an 
object does not wear its symbolic use on its sleeve; a visually identical sign may function 
differently in different symbolic systems. For instance, as Goodman remarks, the same 
drawn line may be a "replete" character artistically representing a mountain or instead a 
nonreplete character merely representing profits in a chart. But we do not know which 
symbolic functioning the object has until we know whether the object is an artwork or just a 
chart. Hence symbolic functioning (and thus aesthetic experience as symbolic functioning) 
cannot be the basis for defining the artistic status of an object.
	This argument is, of course, a variation of the argument from indiscernibles employed 
by Arthur Danto to argue that perceptual properties alone, including those involved in 
aesthetic experience, are insufficient for distinguishing between artworks and nonart, 
between Warhol's Brillo Boxes and their nonartistic counterparts. Our experience should 
differ, Danto says, "depending upon whether the response is to an artwork or to a mere real 
thing that cannot be told apart from it." But "we cannot appeal to [such differences]...in order 
to get our definition of art, inasmuch as we [first] need the definition of art in order to 
identify the sorts of aesthetic responses appropriate to works of art in contrast with mere 
real things"(T, pp. 94-95). Aesthetic experience has the further problem, Danto notes, of 
being traditionally defined as inherently positive, while many artworks, being bad, induce 
negative responses (T, p. 92).
	Since aesthetic experience cannot adequately demarcate art, Danto virtually ignores it, 
subordinating it to another concept that he thinks can do the definitional job (and do it with 
the same semantic emphasis that Goodman advocated). This concept is interpretation. 
"There is," he says "no appreciation without interpretation," since "interpretations are what 
constitute works"; and "interpretation consists in determining the relationship between a 
work of art and its material counterpart" (T, p. 113; PD, p. 45). As I argue in "Beneath 
Interpretation,"  I think these claims are problematic. But even granting them does not 
nullify the idea of aesthetic experience. Its failure to provide a nonevaluative definition of 
our current concept of art does not entail that it has no important role to play in aesthetics, 
though we need, of course, to specify what role this could be.
	Danto, however, suggests a further argument. The concept of aesthetic experience is 
not only useless but a "danger," because the very notion of the aesthetic intrinsically 
trivializes art by seeing it as "fit only for pleasure," rather than for meaning and truth. (PD, 
pp. xiv, 13). This argument not only falsely equates the aesthetic per se with a caricature of 
the narrowest of Kantian formalisms. It also wrongly suggests a divide between pleasure 
and meaning, feeling and cognition, enjoyment and understanding, when instead, they tend, 
in art, to constitute each other. As T. S. Eliot remarked, "To understand a poem comes to the 
same thing as to enjoy it for the right reasons." 
	We can reinforce this point and the centrality of aesthetic feeling by adopting Danto's 
argument from indiscernibles, but applying it this time not to objects but to subjects. 
Imagine two visually identical art viewers who offer identical interpretations of the very 
powerful paintings and poems before them. One is a human who thrills to what he sees and 
interprets. The other, however, is only a cyborg who, experiencing no qualia, feels no 
pleasure, indeed no emotion at all, but merely mechanically processes the perceptual and 
artworld data to deliver his interpretive propositions. We would surely say here that the 
cyborg, in an important sense, doesn't really understand these works. He doesn't, in a big 
way, get the point of such art, even if he recognizes that some feeling he cannot feel is 
somehow appropriate. For much of the point is precisely to feel or savor art's qualia and 
meaning, not just compute an interpretive output from the work's signs and artworld 
context.
	For this reason, even if the cyborg's interpretive propositions were descriptively more 
accurate than the human being's, we would still say that the human's general response to 
art was superior and that the cyborg, since he feels absolutely nothing, does not really grasp 
what art is all about. Now imagine further that aesthetic experience was entirely expunged 
from our civilization, since we were all transformed into such cyborgs or exterminated by 
them. Art might linger on a bit through inertia, but could it continue to flourish and robustly 
survive? What would be the point of creating and attending to it, if it promised no enriching 
phenomenological feeling or pleasure?
	The uncertainty of art's future in such a sci-fi scenario implies the centrality of 
aesthetic experience--in its evaluative and phenomenological sense--for the concept of art. 
Though surely neither a necessary or sufficient condition for application of this concept, it 
might be regarded as a more general background condition for art. In other words, though 
many artworks fail to produce aesthetic experience--in the sense of satisfyingly heightened, 
absorbing, meaningful and affective experience--if such experience could never be had and 
never had through the production of works, art could probably never have existed.  If 
artworks universally flouted this interest (and not just on occasion to make a radical point), 
art, as we know it, would disappear. In contrast to necessary and sufficient conditions that 
aim at mapping art's demarcational limits, such a background condition concerns the point 
rather than the extension of the concept of art. In naming and so marking this point, 
aesthetic experience is not a useless concept. 
	My futuristic cyborg parables are not so hard to imagine because they reflect real 
developments in recent aesthetics and contemporary life. Rejecting what he calls the 
traditional "strong and cold" "grip of aestheticism on the philosophy of art" (PD, p.33), Danto 
joins Goodman and many others in what might be termed a radical anaestheticization of 
aesthetics. Felt experience is virtually ignored and entirely subordinated to third-person 
semantic theories of artistic symbolization and its interpretation. Once a potent embodiment 
of art's sense and value, aesthetic experience is now "hermeneutered."
	Forsaking such experience for semiotic definitions of art should not be seen as merely 
the arbitrary preference of linguistic philosophers addicted to semantic theory. Goodman 
and Danto were sensitively reflecting developments in the artworld, which required ever 
more interpretation as art became more cerebrally conceptual in pursuing what Danto 
describes as its Hegelian quest to become its own philosophy: art as theory of art. Goodman 
and Danto were also responsive to artworld realities in claiming against Beardsley and 
Dewey that much contemporary art neither evokes nor aims to evoke powerful experiences 
having enjoyable affect and coherent meaning.
	So much the worse, one might say, for contemporary art, which, having completed its 
philosophical transformation and lost the financial prop of eighties' speculation, now finds it 
has lost an experiential point and a public to fall back on. For the public retains a deep need 
for aesthetic experiences, and as these became artistically dépassé, it learned to satisfy 
this need outside the official realm of contemporary art, beyond the white cube of gallery 
space. So aesthetic interest is increasingly directed toward popular art, which has not yet 
learned to eschew the experiential goals of pleasure, affect, and meaningful coherence, even 
if it often fails to achieve them. Mourning the artworld's loss of public, the prominent artists 
Komar and Melamid, together with The Nation, engaged a scientific marketing-survey of 
popular aesthetic taste in the (perhaps ironic) quest to develop a new plastic art that would 
engage people as broadly and as powerfully as popular music does. One point emerging 
from the polling statistics is the demand that art provide positive affective experience 
through coherence. 
	Branding this demand as stiflingly conservative, we may insist that art should not be 
confined to supplying agreeable unities or emotions.  We may rightly claim that today some 
of our most exciting, rewarding artistic encounters involve unpleasant shock and 
fragmentation.  But can we make sense of art as a whole without admitting the traditional 
and still formative centrality of vivid, meaningful phenomenological experience that is 
directly felt as valuable, even if not always as pleasant and unified?
	Of course, the presence of such experience does not entail the presence of art; so it 
cannot in itself legitimize popular art as true art, just as it cannot alone justify the claim that 
a given work is good art. In all these cases, since experience itself is mute, critical discourse 
is needed. Still, the power of aesthetic experience impels one to undertake such legitimating 
discourse through its felt value, just as it impels the public toward the arts wherein it can 
be found. If the experience has this power, then the concept of such experience has value in 
reminding us of it and directing us toward its use.
	If art is in extremis, deprived (through completion) of its sustaining narrative of 
progress and thus groping without direction in what Danto calls its "posthistory," where 
anything goes; if art's groping is as lonely as it is aimless, cut off from the popular currents 
of taste in a democratic culture, then the concept of aesthetic experience is worth recalling: 
not for formal definition but for art's reorientation toward values and populations that could 
restore its vitality and sense of purpose. 
	Art's turn from the aesthetic experience of enjoyable affective unities is no more an 
act of perverse willfulness than Danto and Goodman's semantic anaesthetics. Like them, 
contemporary artists are simply responding to changes in our lifeworld, as we move from a 
more unified experiential culture to an increasingly modular, informational one. This results 
in art that highlights fragmentation and complexities of information-flow that are often too 
helter-skelter to provide the coherence needed for traditional aesthetic experience's 
pleasurable sense of focused, funded affect. Already in the 1930s Walter Benjamin drew a 
stark contrast between experience and information, expressing the fear that through the 
fragmentation of modern life and the disjointed sensationalism of the newspapers, we were 
losing the capacity for deep experience and feeling. We have since undergone a far more 
extensive series of informational revolutions--from television and facsimile to the Internet 
and newer interactive systems of cyberspace and virtual reality.
	Given this informational overload, it is not surprising that "the waning of affect" (in 
Fredric Jameson's phrase) is diagnosed as a prime symptom of our postmodern condition.  
There is growing concern, far beyond the academy, that we are being so thoroughly 
reshaped by our informational technology that our experiential, affective capacities are 
wearing thin, so thin that we risk assimilation to the mechanical information processors that 
are already our most intimate companions in work and play. This worry is expressed 
nowhere more clearly than in cyborg fiction. The only way of distinguishing human beings 
from their physically identical cyborg Terminators or Replicants is the human capacity to 
feel, which itself is continuously buffeted and jeopardized by the unmanageable flux and 
grind of futuristic living. In the story Blade Runner (though not in the film) there is even a 
crucial device to reinforce these affective experiential capacities--an "empathy box" that 
produces through virtual reality a powerful aesthetico-religious experience of empathetic 
fusion with others likewise plugged in. 
	It may seem very "retro" to suggest that aesthetic experience can function something 
like an empathy box, restoring both our ability and inclination for the sorts of vivid, moving, 
shared experience that one once sought in art. Perhaps our informational evolution has 
already gone too far, so that an evening of beauty at the Met can do nothing to counter a life 
on Wall Street's chaotic trading floor. Perhaps aesthetic experience, and not just the 
philosophical value of its concept, has almost reached its end.  How could philosophy do 
anything to forestall its total loss?
	First, it can remind us of the variety this concept still embraces as heightened, 
meaningful, and valuable phenomenological experience. So the threatened loss of one 
traditional form does not entail its utter extinction. Second, in any of its rewarding forms, 
aesthetic experience will be strengthened and preserved the more it is experienced; it will 
be more experienced, the more we are directed to such experience; and one good way of 
directing us to such experience is fuller recognition of its importance and richness through 
greater attention to the concept of aesthetic experience. We thus find at least one good use 
for philosophical recognition of this concept: its orientation toward having the experience it 
names.  Rather than defining art or justifying critical verdicts, the concept is directional, 
reminding us of what is worth seeking in art and elsewhere in life. Wittgenstein said: "The 
work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose."   If the 
same holds for philosophical concepts, that of aesthetic experience should not go 
unemployed.

Richard Shusterman
Department of Philosophy
Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
INTERNET: SHUSRICH@ASTRO.OCIS.TEMPLE.EDU

	 . One reason for my interest in this concept is its important role in my pragmatist 
aesthetics. See Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 
especially chap. 2.
	 . I also see Joseph Margolis and Richard Rorty as major figures in the aesthetic 
tradition that shapes my work, but their theories are not so central to the topic of this 
paper.
	 . See Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (Columbia University 
Press, 1986), p. 13; henceforth referred to as PD. I shall also be using the following 
abbreviations in referring to other works of Danto, Beardsley, Dewey, and Goodman: Arthur 
Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard University Press, 1981): TC; 
Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: 
Harcourt Brace, 1958): A, and The Aesthetic Point of View, (Cornell University Press, 1982,): 
APV; John Dewey, Art as Experience (Southern Illinois University Press, 1987): AE; Nelson 
Goodman, Languages of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), LA, Ways of 
Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978): WW, and Of Mind and Other Matters (Harvard 
University Press, 1984): OMM.
	 . See, for example, the account by the renowned Polish historian of aesthetics, W. 
Tatarkiewicz in his A History of Six Ideas (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980), pp. 310-338.
	 . See David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 234; and Immanuel Kant, The Critique of 
Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 41-42.
	 . See George Dickie, "Beardsley's Phantom Aesthetic Experience," Journal of Philosophy 
62 (1965): 129-136. Eddy Zemach also argues that there is no such thing as the aesthetic 
experience in his (Hebrew) book, Aesthetics (Tel Aviv University Press, 1976) pp. 42-53.
	 . Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge, 1984), pp. 474, 476; 
henceforth AT.
	 . Though he advocates Erfahrung over Erlebnis, Benjamin is critical of the neo-Kantian 
and positivist notion of Erfahrung as being too narrowly rationalistic and thin. My 
compressed account of Benjamin is based on his essays "The Storyteller,"  "On Some Motifs 
in Baudelaire," and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." All these texts 
are found in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968).  Fuller discussions 
of Benjamin's theme of experience can be found in Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An 
Aesthetic of Redemption (Columbia University Press, 1982), and in Martin Jay, "Experience 
Without a Subject: Walter Benjamin and the Novel," New Formations 20 (1993): 145-155.
	 . Challenging the idea that art is something for detached, immediate "appreciation and 
enjoyment," Heidegger insists that "art is by nature ... a distinctive way in which truth 
comes into being, that is, becomes historical."  It therefore cannot be separated from the 
world of its truth-disclosure simply for the narrow goal of experienced pleasure. In this 
sense, Heidegger warns, "perhaps experience is the element in which art dies."  See Martin 
Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper 
& Row, 1975), pp. 78,79.
	 . Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1982), pp. 86-87; 
henceforth TM.
	 . In highlighting the cognitive dimension of aesthetic experience, Gadamer writes: 
"What one experiences in a work of art and what one is directed towards is rather how true 
it is, i.e., to what extent one knows and recognizes something and oneself." The joy of 
aesthetic experience "is the joy of knowledge" (TM, pp. 101, 102).
	 . See Pierre Bourdieu, "The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic," in Analytic 
Aesthetics, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989): pp. 147-160, citations from 
pp. 148, 150.
	 . For more detailed argument of this point, see the chapter on "Beneath 
Interpretation" in Pragmatist Aesthetics. I develop the arguments further in Sous 
l'interprétation (Paris: L'éclat, 1994), and Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the 
Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1996).
	 . Dewey thus sees aesthetic experience as central not only to art but to the philosophy 
of experience in general. "To esthetic experience," he therefore claims, "the philosopher must 
go to understand what experience is" (AE, p. 11).
	 . Although I think this is obvious, there is an argument that denies it, asserting that 
our appreciation of natural beauty is entirely dependent on and constrained by our modern 
concept of fine art, as indeed is all our aesthetic experience. For a critique of this argument 
and a fuller discussion of Dewey's views, see Pragmatist Aesthetics, chaps. 1 and 2.
	 . As Dewey later adds, "The experience is marked by a greater inclusiveness of all 
psychological factors than occurs in ordinary experiences, not by reduction of them to a 
single response" (AE, p. 259).
	 . Even if we could effect this reclassification, Dewey's definition of art as aesthetic 
experience would remain problematic.  For this experience is itself never clearly defined but 
instead asserted to be ultimately indefinable because of its essential immediacy; "it can," he 
says, "only be felt, that is, immediately experienced" (AE 196). For more detailed critique of 
Dewey's definition of art as experience, see Pragmatist Aesthetics, chaps.1 and 2.
	 . Beardsley's precise list of defining characteristics of aesthetic experience changes 
slightly over the years, but almost all his accounts insist on the features I mention. Apart 
from his book Aesthetics, his most detailed treatments of aesthetic experience can be found 
in "Aesthetic Experience Regained" and "Aesthetic Experience" both reprinted in APV (pp. 
77-92, 285-297).
	 . See Dickie's "Beardsley's Phantom Aesthetic Experience," and his Art and the 
Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Cornell University Press, 1974).
	 . Beardsley himself cites Maslow's psychological research into peak experiences (APV, 
p. 85). See A. H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Princeton University Press, 1962). 
Use of the notion of experience and its characterization in terms of coherence and intensity, 
is also found in more contemporary experimental psychology. For one example, see the 
influential work of Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic 
Books, 1985).
	 . For a vigorous defense of the centrality of consciousness, see John Searle, The 
Rediscovery of the Mind (MIT Press, 1992). More specifically, I defend the notion of 
immediate experience against charges that it is cognitively empty and entails commitment 
to foundationalism's myth of the given; see Richard Shusterman, "Dewey on Experience," 
Philosophical Forum 26 (1994): 127-148; and the chapter on somatic experience in 
Practicing Philosophy, chap. 6.
	 . See Joel Kupperman, "Art and Aesthetic Experience," The British Journal of 
Aesthetics 15 (1975), and Beardsley's response in APV, p. 296.
	 . There is also the problem that aesthetic experience in itself is too elusive, ineffable, 
subjectively variable, and immeasurable in magnitude to provide sufficient grounds for 
justifying particular evaluative verdicts. Thus, when it came to actual critical practice, 
Beardsley recognized that one had to demonstrate the unity, complexity, and intensity of 
the actual work, not of its experience. However, he held that demonstration of the former 
could allow inference of capacity for the latter, and it was the latter (i.e., experience) that 
constituted actual aesthetic value.
	 . Since these characteristics make no reference to phenomenological consciousness, 
Goodman's concept of aesthetic experience can be characterized as semantic rather than 
phenomenological. Like Dewey and Beardsley, Goodman insists on the dynamic nature of 
aesthetic experience, but he does not emphasize, as they do, the passive aspect in which one 
surrenders oneself to the work. This idea may be too suggestive of subjectivity and affect 
for Goodman. But the etymology of "experience" suggests the peril of undergoing something, 
and it is perhaps not too fanciful to note that some notion of submission is even hinted at by 
the "under" in the word "understanding." For more on this, see note 30.
	 . See Pragmatist Aesthetics, chap. 5.
	 . T. S. Eliot, "The Frontiers of Poetry," in Of Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), p. 
115. Eliot adds that this means "enjoying it to the right degree and in the right way, relative 
to other poems. ... It should hardly be necessary to add that this implies one shouldn't enjoy 
bad poems--unless their badness is of a sort that appeals to our sense of humour."  For a 
detailed account of Eliot's theory of literary understanding, see Richard Shusterman, T. S. 
Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (Columbia University Press, 1988), chaps. 5 and 6.
	 . A growing number of sociobiologists further maintain that the gratifications of 
aesthetic experience not only explain art's emergence and staying power but also help 
account for the survival of humanity itself. Such experiences, says the Oxford anatomist J. Z. 
Young, "have the most central of biological functions--of insisting that life be worthwhile, 
which, after all, is the final guarantee of its continuance."  J. Z. Young, An Introduction to the 
Study of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 38. A more recent and detailed 
case for the evolutionary value of art and its affective experience can be found in Ellen 
Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (New York: Free Press, 
1992). See also Nathan Kogan, "Aesthetics and Its Origins: Some Psychobiological and 
Evolutionary Considerations," Social Research 61 (1994): 139-165.
	 . The idea that aesthetic experience fails miserably at formally defining art's 
extension but nonetheless is essential for understanding art's point and value is developed 
in more detail in my Pragmatist Aesthetics, chaps.1 and 2. I emphasize there (and the point 
bears repeating) that art's valuable uses go far beyond the creation of aesthetic experience. 
I should also note that Richard Wollheim draws a somewhat similar distinction between a 
concept's "conditions of application" and its background "assumptions of applicability" in 
"Danto's Gallery of Indiscernibles," in Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: 
Blackwell, 1993), pp. 28-38.
	 . See "Painting by Numbers: The Search for a People's Art," in The Nation, March 14, 
1994, pp. 334-348, particularly questions 68 and 70, which relate to art's coherence and 
ability to "make us happy."
	 . These values include not only heightened, positive affect but an enhanced 
appreciation of the nonconceptual and the sensual. Another possible value of aesthetic 
experience comes from its making us aware, through its power to transport us, of the 
benefits that can be derived by opening or submitting oneself to things typically seen as 
mere objects of our domination and use. This holds, of course, as much for the experience of 
nature as well as art, and it bespeaks of the transformational role of experience in which, as 
Dewey insisted, we are subjects as well as agents, undergoing as well as acting. Heidegger 
makes a similar point: "To undergo an experience of something ... means that this something 
befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us." Martin Heidegger, On 
the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 57.
	 . Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke 
University Press, 1991), pp. 10-16. For a specific study of the problematics of embodied, 
affective aesthetic experience and the new media, see Richard Shusterman, "Soma und 
Medien," Kunstforum International 132 (1996): 210-215.
	 . See Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner (originally, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) 
(Ballantine: New York, 1982).
	 . Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956), § 127.9