Martin Jay 
Drifting into Dangerous Waters: 
The Separation of Aesthetic Experience from 
the Work of Art 
Modernization, runs a familiar story, is typified by the increasing diffe-
rentiation of value spheres, each with its own immanent logic and relative 
autonomy. Initially expressed in philosophical terms by Kant, whose three 
critiques neatly divide the mental world into cognitive, ethical and aesthetic 
realms, the process was given sociological grounding in the writings of Max 
Weber, who explored the institutional underpinnings of the differentiation 
based on specialization of function and the creation of separate cultures of 
expertise. In his more recent defense of the project of modernity, Jürgen 
Habermas has soberly appraised the benefits and costs of the splits among 
the spheres as well as between them and an allegedly prior lifeworld of 
unreflective practices out of which the spheres emerged. In the tradition 
broadly circumscribed by these three names, the differentiation of value 
spheres is by and large acknowledged as a progressive or at least irreversible 
process, which has allowed the clarification of theoretical issues and the 
increased efficiency that often accompanies a division of labor. While what 
Habermas has called the troubling »colonization« of one realm by another 
may be problematic, the solution has been the restoration of a balance rather 
than an overcoming of the distinctions themselves. 
Against such a reading, a formidable array of critics has bemoaned the 
loss of the allegedly integrated world that preceded the split into distinct 
and incommensurable value spheres. Mobilizing the now familiar rhetoric 
of dissociation of sensibility, alienation or diremption, these critics yearn to 
dedifferentiate, or at least render more permeable the boundaries between 
the spheres. They have sought ways to restore a condition of reconciliation 
or harmony that they believe once existed or at least posit it as a normative 
goal for a future in which the putative wounds of modern life would be 
healed. What has become transcendent and abstract, they hope to restore 
to immanent concreteness, and perhaps in so doing reenchant a world from 
which meaning seems to have fled or retreated into isolated enclaves. Even 
those critics normally placed in the postmodernist camp, who dismiss such 
a quest as little more than nostalgia for an imaginary prelapsarian bliss that 
never obtained and never will, are no less hostile to the alleged autonomy 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIVICA), pp. 63-85. 63 
Martin Jay 
and self-sufficiency of the three value spheres, whose boundaries and limits 
they eagerly transgress or rather claim are always already self-transgressed. 
In what follows, I do not want to add another round to this now familiar 
debate, which has taken many different forms and at times spilled out over 
the walls of the academy to inspire fervent movements of cultural, religious 
and political renewal. Instead, I want to hone in on one corner of it, in which 
a differentiation within a differentiation has taken place. That is, I want to 
examine the consequences within the aesthetic sphere of the distinction 
between works or objects of art and what has come to be called »aesthetic 
experience.« I will have to ask your indulgence for not attempting a serious 
analysis of what might count as an object or work of art, itself a distinction 
that cannot be entirely ignored. I simply don ' t have the time to rehearse 
the debates generated by Nelson Goodman's path-breaking Languages of Art 
with its opposition of »autographic« and »allographic« works, the former 
understood as singular, material objects, like paintings, with claims to 
authenticity based on their production history, the latter as ideal objects, 
like musical compositions or works of literature, with the ability to generate 
an infinity of valid instantiations.1 Nor will I be able to consider the fur ther 
refinement between immanent and transcendent works recently introduced 
by Gérard Genette, the former implying identity between the work and its 
material instantiation (or, if allographic, instantiations), the latter suggesting 
the ways in which works can exceed those instantiations and produce plural 
aesthetic effects.21 will simply take as given the heuristic usefulness of the 
distinction between art object, however it may be defined, and the experience 
it generates. In so doing, I hope to provide some insight into the dangers 
involved when either the differentiations of modernity become too firmly 
reified or conversely when the desire to overcome them results in a 
problematic confusion or conflation of categories, leading to that drift into 
dangerous waters suggested by my title. 
Although an awareness of the specificity of a variant of experience that 
might be called aesthetic has been discerned as far back as Pythagoras, it 
was perhaps not until the 19th century that the center of gravity in aesthetic 
discourse decisively shifted from the idea of beauty assumed to reside in 
objects in the world to the experiences of the humans who responded to 
them. The shift was evidenced, inter alia, by the ascendency of psychological 
accounts of that experience in the scientific work of Gustav Fechner and others 
1 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols ( Indianapolis , 
1968). 
2 Gérard Genette, The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence, trans. G.M. Goshgarian 
(Ithaca, 1997). 
64 
Drifting into Dangerous Waters 
in the 1860's and the general cult of experience in the so-called »philosophies 
of life« later in the century, in which intensity of experience (in the sense of 
vital Erlebnis, rather than cognitive or dialectical Erfahrung) was the highest 
value.3 The ground, however, was already laid in the 18th century with the 
development of a distinct branch of philosophical discourse focusing on 
»art,« a generic category unde r which all of the separate Muses were 
subsumed.4 That discourse, it is often noted, emerged at a time when objects 
that had previously been revered as sacred and played a role in religious 
worship or were appreciated as emblems of social or political power were 
redescribed and newly legitimated as works possessing purely artistic value. 
As Hegel was among the first to point out in his Lectures on Aesthetics, the 
cadavers of dead cults could be revived through redescription as living works 
of art. No longer expected to imitate an ideal world, illustrate a mythic story, 
or recreate a historical event, they could be justified in self-referential terms 
privileging form over content or function. The recontextualization of such 
objects in the heterotopic, atemporal space of the public museum, the 
classical example being the transformation of the palace of the Louvre during 
the French Revolution into a repository of the nation's cultural patrimony, 
accompanied and abetted the new discourse, which also emerged in the wake 
of an accelerated market for objects of beauty by private collectors outside 
of the aristocracy or church. Concomitant with the change was the new 
distinction between a fine artist and merely skilled artisan, neatly symbolized 
by the decision to exclude engravers from the newly created Royal Academy 
of the Arts in London in 1768. 
These aspects of the story have been widely remarked. What is perhaps 
less frequently realized is that at virtually the same moment that freshly 
redefined artworks were being freed from their entanglement in religious, 
political or utilitarian contexts, allowed to circulate in a new network of 
value, at once cultural and economic, and housed in secular temples of 
culture open to the people, they were paradoxically losing their integrity as 
self-sufficient entities in the world, definable in intrinsic terms as objective 
exemplars of universal beauty. In the vocabulary made familiar by Walter 
Benjamin, this loss meant the progressive dissipation of the cultic aura that 
3 See the discussion in Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, »Aesthetic Experience: The Early History 
of the Concept,« Dialectics and Humanism, 1 (1973); and »Aesthetic Experience: the Last 
Stages in the History of a Concept,« Dialectics and Humanism, 1 (1974). The importance 
of the »philosophy of life« is argued in Richard Shusterman, »The End of Aesthetic 
Experience,« Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55,1 (1997), p. 29. 
4 For a recen t discussion of the problematic implications of that generic subsumption, 
see Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Ca., 1996). 
65 
Martin Jay 
surrounded such entities, an aura predicated on the presence of a unique 
object that was distant and distinct f rom the beholder . Al though it is 
undeniable that some of the numinous atmosphere clinging to sacred objects 
was transferred to certain fetishized works of elite art, whose cultural capital 
was accordingly high, the philosophical legitimation of that transfer tacitly 
abandoned the claim that such objects possessed an aesthetic version of the 
religious notion of »real presence,« an incarnation of ultimate value that 
was prior to the beholder's response to it. In a context of increased openness 
to cultural difference, which mirrored the uneven, but widening toleration 
of religious pluralism and appreciation of geographical diversity, absolute 
and universal hierarchies of beauty were harder to maintain. The classical 
standards of a Boileau, confidently grounded in an objectivist belief in the 
order of nature, were challenged by the »sentimentalism« of a Dubos, who 
focused instead on the feelings of those who responded to specific works.5 
Increasingly, in fact, 18th-century aesthetic theory shifted attention to the 
experience of that beholder or the community of beholders. As David Hume 
famously put it in his essay »Of the Standard of Taste,« »beauty is no quality 
in the things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates 
them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.«5 
The Greek aiesthesis, the origin of the Latin word Aesthetica used by 
Alexander Baumgarten for his two-volume work of 1750 and 1758, implied 
gratifying corporeal perception, the subjective sensual response to objects 
rather than objects themselves. One of its antithetical terms was noesis, which 
signified pure conceptual thought separated from the senses. Another was 
poiesis, the active making of objects artistic or otherwise. Some of that activism 
may have been retained in the ancillary notion of taste, with its connotation 
5 For a still useful account of the transit ion, see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the 
Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C.A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston, 1955), chapter 
7. 
6 David H u m e , »Of the Standard of Taste,« in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. 
Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1987), p. 230. Later in the essay, H u m e does re t reat 
f rom the anarchic implications of this s ta tement and asserts the l ikelihood that »the 
principles of taste [are] nearly, if not entirely the same in all men,« (p. 241), bu t adds 
that few are educated to realize what they are. Here in a nutshell, we have the perennial 
problem of reconciling Hume's skeptical side with his naturalist one. For a good shor t 
account of his thoughts on aesthetics, see Pe te r jones , »Hume 's Literary and Aesthetic 
Theory,« in David Fate Norton, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge, 
1992). He underscores the importance of social context and conventions in H u m e ' s 
account of judgment . For a defense of his position against Kant's, see George Dickie, 
The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford , 
1996). 
66 
Drifting into Dangerous Waters 
of tact i le i n t e rven t ion in the world,7 which impl ied exper ience as 
experimentation. But even here the emphasis was on the emotional, even 
irrational reception of art epitomized by the »je ne sais quoi« attitude of 
ineffability that became emblematic of the retreat from conceptualization 
and production. As John Dewey was later to note with chagrin, the very 
concept of the »aesthetic,« when set apart from the overlapping, but not 
equivalent term »artistic,« tends to render experience as »appreciative, 
perceiving and enjoying,«8 rather than productive or creative. Although the 
discourse concerning aesthetic judgment that culminated in Kant's third 
Critique went beyond the passive and conventionalist subjectivism of taste 
represented by Hume and sought more universal criteria, it too focused on 
the response rather than the object per se. Kant did, to be sure, provide an 
account of the genius who created without criteria - a productive correlate 
of the beholder, who, as we will see, judges without them as well - the main 
emphasis of his aesthetics was on reception.1' 
This is not the place to trace the complex ways in which the concept of 
aesthetic experience was developed by such Enlightenment theorists as 
Baumgar ten , Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Kames and Kant, or to 
untangle the web of meanings surrounding the crucial term »taste,« but a 
few central points need to be made.1" First, whether the ground of aesthetic 
experience was assumed to be an innate capacity, an unmediated, non-rule-
bound sense of what was beautiful comparable to an inbred moral sentiment, 
as it was for the neo-Platonist Shaftesbury, or understood instead to derive 
f rom purely empirical encounters with the world, as the more skeptical 
Hume believed, it was irreducible to a mere recording of what was intrinsically 
there in objects deemed artistic or beautiful. The same conclusion was shared 
7 For a discussion of the origins of taste in these terms, see Howard Caygill, Ait of Judgment 
(Oxford 1989), chapter 2. 
8 J o h n Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1934), p. 47. 
9 It is t rue tha t what Kant called »productive imagination« plays a role in aesthetic 
a p p r e c i a t i o n , as it does in n o r m a l cogni t ion , albeit u n d e r the gu idance of the 
u n d e r s t a n d i n g . But wha t was p r o d u c e d was a men ta l synthesis , n o t an active 
intervention in the world. For a discussion of its importance, see Michael R. Neville, 
»Kant's Characterization of Aesthetic Experience,« Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 
33, 2 (Winter, 1974), p. 197. 
10 Fo r u se fu l a c c o u n t s , see D a b n e y Townsend , »From Shaf te sbury to Kant: T h e 
Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience,« Journal of the History of Ideas, 
4 8 / 2 (April-June, 1987), pp. 287-305; and Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and 
Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, 1982). For a more general 
history, f o r eg round ing the questionable political implications of aesthetic discourse, 
see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990). 
67 
Martin Jay 
by those who saw the source of the aesthetic sense in personal psychology, 
communal, intersubjective consensus, or the more philosophically grounded 
»reflective judgment« that had been posited by Kant as a way to get beyond 
the apparent antinomy of taste, at once personal and universal. In all of these 
cases, the stress was on the one or ones who did the experiencing rather 
than on the intrinsic qualities of the object that was experienced. »The 
beautiful,« as Kant would argue, appeared only as the pred ica te of a 
judgment, not as a quality of an object. In some ways reminiscent of the 
epistemological limits on knowing objects in themselves, whether couched 
in the Empiricist vocabulary of lacking access to primary as opposed to 
secondary qualities or the transcenden tal Idealist vocabulary of unknowable 
noumena, the object as such was less important than its aesthetic appreciation 
or enjoyment. Here too a kind of »Copernican revolution,«11 to cite the 
famous metaphor identified with Kant's first Critique, took place in which 
ontological or axiological questions were subordinated to those concerning 
the epistemological or, in this case, aesthetic subject. Objects were admired 
not for what they were in themselves, but for what they could do to us. The 
telos of this Copernican reversal was an increasing indifference to the object 
as such, perhaps even extending to its very existence. 
Before that endpoint was reached, and this is the second point worth 
emphasizing, the sensual pleasure produced by the object in aesthetic 
experience had to be distinguished from that enjoyed in other relations 
between self and world. As early as Johannes Scotus Erigena's 9th-century 
»De divisione naturae,« the spectatorial, non-instrumental nature of the 
aesthetic attitude had attracted attention.12 Although one might also covet 
the same objects for what a later age would call their commodity or exchange 
value, they were appreciated qua objects of art only from a more lofty point 
of view. Rejecting the egocentric anthropology of a Hobbes, Shaftesbury 
stressed the fallacy of reducing everything to the question of private interest 
or need. Instead, and this was related to his belief that aesthetic experience 
was intertwined with civic virtue and moral sent iment , »disinterested« 
benevolence was its crucial characteristic.13 
11 Whether or not the metaphor , which in this precise f o rm did not appea r in Kant, 
adequately describes the innovations of the Critique of Pure Reason need not concern 
us now. For a skeptical account of its applicability, see Rober t Hahn , Kant's Newtonian 
Revolution in Philosophy (Carbondale, 1988). 
12 See the discussion in Tatarkiewicz, »Aesthetic Experience: T h e Early History of the 
Concept,« p. 23.Jauss points to other examples of medieval anticipations of aesthetic 
experience, which produce anxiety because they are l inked with idle curiosity about 
the world rather than immersion in the word of God. See Aesthetic Experience and Literary 
Hermeneutics, p. 4. 
68 
Drifting into Dangerous Waters 
It was, of course, in Kant 's aesthetic theory that the concept of 
disinterestedness was fully articulated. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant 
claimed that our ability to experience pleasure took three forms. The first 
he called the »agreeable« or »the pleasant« (das Angenehme), which was 
caused directly by sensual stimulation. It involved a purely private and 
subjective response of attraction and aversion, without any meaningful 
cognitive or intersubjective dimension. Here the individual body with all its 
appetites and antipathies was the arbiter, not a cultural or universal norm. 
Personal gratification or lack thereof was all that mattered. The second 
variety connected pleasure to the question of the »good.« That is, we can 
derive »delight in the good« (das Wohlgefallen am Guten) through working 
for and achieving a beneficent goal, which is set by ideas and principles 
external to sensual gratification. In this case there is always a functional or 
utilitarian dimension to our pleasure, which is not an end in itself. The real 
end is the good that is realized, not the pleasure we have in realizing it, 
although that pleasure may be a subsidiary part of our motivation as well. 
The third form of pleasure (das Wohlgefallen am Schönen), Kant argued, 
is what we can properly call aesthetic. As in the case of the »agreeable,« the 
senses play a role and the body is involved, but with a crucial difference. 
Whereas in the former the object that produces the pleasure must actually 
exist - we cannot find a meal pleasant unless there is real food on the table 
- in the latter, it may not. Or more precisely, our perception of the aesthetic 
object, and its intrinsic properties or qualities need not coincide, as they 
must with an agreeable meal (food may look appetizing, but it must taste 
good to bring us genuine pleasure). Because of this distinction, we have no 
direct interest in the object, only in its representation or semblance. Or to 
be still more precise, since the media of representations can themselves be 
understood as objects (a gold statue is, after all, made of a substance whose 
value we find difficult to forget), what is important is a certain kind of 
experience of it. Our pleasure in beauty, in short, is disinterested because 
we are indifferent to the actual object, which is not itself an object of direct 
sensual desire. We are no longer immersed in being - inter-esse, as the 
etymology of the word »interest« suggests - but rather somehow outside it. 
We enjoy an aesthetic meal, as it were, without having to taste and swallow 
the food, as in the case of certain variants of nouvelle cuisine in which visual 
more than gustatory pleasure, let alone actual nutrition, seems the main 
purpose of what is on the plate. It is the same disinterestedness that permits 
13 For a history of t he concep t , see J e r o m e Stolnitz, »On the Origins of 'Aesthetic 
Disinterestedness, '« Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, XX, 2 (Winter, 1961),pp. 131-
143. 
69 
Martin Jay 
the transformation of the lust-arousing naked human form into the idealized, 
marmoreal nude and allows us to distinguish between pornography and high 
ar t (bo th of which may be r ep re sen t a t i ons of real objec ts , b u t a re 
differentiated according to our interest or disinterest in their referents as 
objects of desire). 
Aesthetic experience is, however, also akin to the second form of 
pleasure in its going beyond pre-conceptual sensual gratification or remaining 
on the level of what Kant dismissively called the mere »egoism of taste.« 
Aesthetic experience mobilizes cognitive powers, synthesizing transforma-
tions of pure sensation evolve into truth or at least value claims, which are 
then assumed to have universal validity. But it does so without subsuming 
specific cases under discursive rules, a priori categories or general principles, 
as is the case with the determinantjudgments of the understanding. The latter 
seem to come from above, as if through the coercive dictates of a ruler. In 
contrast, aesthetic judgments, singular rather than categorical, are allowed 
a kind of unhierarchical, free play in which universal claims of beauty can 
be made by each of us on the basis of analogical and paradigmatic rather 
than subsumptive or deductive reasoning. We move f rom particular to 
particular rather than from universal to particular, as was the case with the 
synthetic a priori judgments of cognition discussed in the first Critique. The 
concepts involved are thus » indeterminate« because they c a n n o t be 
expressed in schemat ic fo rm, as can the cognit ive concep t s of t he 
understanding. They appeal to a virtual sensus communis, an intersubjective 
community which is to be made, not simply found, as innatist neo-Platonists 
like Shaftesbury had thought possible. A crucial aspect of disinterestedness 
for Kant - although not, as we shall see, for the devotees of I'art pour I'art — 
was precisely this assumption that aesthetic judgments evoked an enjoyment 
and appreciation that was not just one's own, but that could be shared by 
all. To the extent that judgment was an inherent dimension of aesthetic 
experience, and not something added to it after the initial response of the 
senses, disinterestedness had this crucial communicative implication, which 
was lacking in expressions of idiosyncratic taste. 
What also distinguishes aesthetic experience, Kant argued, from the 
delight in the good, where practical outcomes are sought, is the intrinsic 
nature of the purposes involved, which are akin to the immanent telos of 
play rather than work, whose end is a transformation of the world. Kant's 
celebrated definition of art as »purposiveness without purpose« was designed 
precisely to set it apart from those activities in which extrinsic purposes 
dominate and real objects are there to be produced, consumed, possessed 
or exchanged. 
70 
Drifting into Dangerous Waters 
Whether or not the distinction between determinant and reflective 
judgments really solves the riddle of the antinomy of taste, at once subjective 
and objective, or provides a useful model for intersubjective consensus rather 
than merely an ideological simulacrum of one, are not questions I want to 
address now. Nor do I want to rehearse the debate over whether or not 
aesthetic j udgmen t and experience are based on a purely psychological 
concept of the beholding self or a more logically generated one, comparable 
in some ways to the transcendental, synthesizing self introduced in the first 
Critique to provide a foundation for epistemology. I am equally reluctant to 
take sides in the argument over the extent to which Kant's position can be 
reduced to nothing but a defense of an aesthetic attitude or mental state, 
which has exercised commentators like Jerome Stolnitz, George Dickie and 
Mary McKlosky.14 
What I want to do instead is focus on the implications of disin-
terestedness for the art object, which must be distinguished from objects in 
general, and the larger question of the differentiation of value spheres in 
modernity. For although aesthetic judgments are normally made by means 
of a rhetoric of objectivity - »'The Mona Lisa' is a beautiful painting,« not 
»/ think it is a beautiful painting« - Kant stresses that it is the subject who is 
really the source of the judgment . Objectivity, as one of Kant's recent 
interpreters Eva Schaper has pointed out, is merely an »as-if« concept in his 
understanding of aesthetics.15 That is, such judgments act as if they were 
directed at objects, but those objects are never analyzable for Kant entirely 
in intrinsic terms, and become important solely for what they produce in 
their beholder . Or as another student of the Critique of Judgment, John 
Zammito puts it, »While Kant stresses the degree to which the subject is 
affected (afficiert) in the experience, nevertheless it is striking how not merely 
the object but even the representation of the object shifts far into the 
background. Its form serves as the occasion, becomes at most a catalyst, for 
a complex subjective response.« lfl 
It is often argued, as we have seen, that the nature of that response is 
inherently contemplative, passive and spectatorial, distancing the self from 
14 See, for example, J e r o m e Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism (Boston, 
1960); George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca, 1974); Mary A. McClosky, Kant's 
Aesthetics (London, 1987). T h e r e were many other issues in the long-running debate 
between Stolnitz and Dickie. For a useful overview, see PeterJ. McCormick, Modernity, 
Aesthetics, and the Bounds of Art (Ithaca, 1990), pp. 147-157. 
15 Eva Schaper , Studies in Kant's Aesthetics (Edinburgh, 1979), chapter 6. The concept of 
»as-if« is, of course, taken f rom Hans Vaihinger, but Schaper wants to restrict it to 
aesthetic judgmen t s , no t to the cognitive ones discussed in Kant's first Critique. 
111 J o h n H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Critique ofJudgment (Chicago, 1992), p. 113. 
71 
Martin Jay 
the world and our appetite to possess or consume it. Although this primarily 
visual characterization may seem an odd way to describe ways in which some 
art can seize us and invade our interiority — an experience perhaps most 
obviously undergone in aural terms when listening to music — even here 
the subject may not always be actively and productively engaged in intervening 
in the world. Attentive listening, as James Johnson has recently shown,17 was 
an acquired skill in the 18th century based on the suppression of the 
kinesthetic body and the concentration of faculties on only one sensory input. 
The experience of passive listening was carefully segregated from that of 
dancing or communal singing as the ear was educated to have contemplative 
aesthetic experiences. The public concert hall worked like the museum to 
deracinate works that had their origins in the church or aristocratic chamber, 
turning them into what 19th-century aestheticians like Eduard Hanslick would 
call »absolute music.« In literature as well, the habit of looking for actual 
personal references in concocted narratives had to be lost and what Cathe-
rine Gallagher has called »nobody's story,« the realization of acknowled-
gedfictionality, put in its place before the novel could come into its own.18 
There is, in short, no practical or possessive intention realized in the 
act of listening, reading or beholding qua aesthetic experience. We may, to 
be sure, also want to own the object for its value in the marketplace or because 
of our passion to collect, but this is not the same as a purely aesthetic 
response. The possibility of that experience may be situated in an institutional 
context or cultural field, as philosophers like George Dickie and sociologists 
like Pierre Bourdieu have argued,19 but the experience itself cannot be 
reduced to a mere reflex of that enabling context. For it entails precisely 
the distance from extrinsic functionality that such reductionism wishes to 
impose on it from without. It is for this reason that Habermas can claim in 
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that »the problem of g round ing 
modernity out of itself first comes into consciousness in the realm of aesthetic 
criticism.«20 
" J a m e s H.Johnson , Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, 1995). 
18 Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Woman Writers in the Marketplace, 
1670-1820 (Berkeley, 1994). 
10 George Dickie, Aesthetics (Indianapolis, 1971); and Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural 
Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed., Randal J o h n s o n (New York, 1993). For a 
critique of Dickie, see Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking 
Art (Cambridge, Mass, 1990, pp. 38-41. For a critique of Bourdieu, see Paul Crowther, 
»Sociological Imper ia l i sm and the Field of Cu l tu r a l P r o d u c t i o n : T h e Case of 
Bourdieu,« Theory, Culture and Society, 11, 1 (1994). 
20 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence 
(Cambridge, Mass., 1987), p. 10. 
72 
Drifting into Dangerous Waters 
This is not, to be sure, to deny that the boundaries of aesthetic expe-
rience themselves may not be entirely impermeable. Recent scholarship has 
stressed how the third Critique itself struggled to find a way to bridge the 
gap between cognitive and moraljudgments and their aesthetic counterpart.21 
The larger project of the third Critique was, after all, to explore the ways in 
which nature could be understood teleologically rather than mechanistically, 
thus going beyond the rigid limitations on knowledge set by the first Critique. 
The purposiveness in art could thus be found in nature as well, which 
suggested a possible reunification of the varieties of reason. »Beauty,« Kant 
also went on to claim, could be understood as »the symbol of morality,«22 
because of its emphasis on purposiveness without extrinsic purposes, which 
was parallel to the moral ideal of treating every person as an end itself implied 
by the categorical imperative. Although the link between art and ethics could 
not be established discursively, drawing on rational arguments, it could be 
suggested symbolically and analogically. In both cases, the self-reflective 
subject had to achieve a certain distance to allowjudgment to occur. Even 
more decisively, that dimension of aesthetic experience Kant followed 
Longinus in calling »the sublime« provided a link with the noumenal origins 
of practical reason, because it got us in touch with supersensible realities 
that could not be grasped by synthetic a priorijudgments, helping produce 
a feel ing of respect for the moral law that was also beyond cognitive 
understanding. Here the objective correlate to our feelings is even more 
remote than it is in the case of the beautiful, as the paradoxical attempt to 
represent the unrepresentable is the essence of the sublime, which registers 
both the grandeur and the futility of the quest. 
How successful Kant's Critique of Judgment actually was in reintegrating 
what his earlier work had seemed so powerfully to split asunder is, of course, 
a matter of some dispute; the entire subsequent history of German Idealism 
suggests that at least his immediate successors thought it was a failure. 
Beginning as early as Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education, they sought to 
reunite art with the other spheres in the hope of reenchanting life, a project 
that continued well into the 20th century with not much success to show for 
it. It has often been remarked that when Kant's ideas were vulgarized in the 
19th century, as they were by certain French philosophers like Victor Cousin, 
they could easily be taken to countenance the opposite conclusion, the 
extreme aesthetic separatism that became the mark of the I'art pour I'art 
21 See in particular, Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment in which he discusses 
what h e calls the »cognitive and ethical turn« in the third Critique. 
22 This was the title of §59 of the third Critique. 
73 
Martin Jay 
movement.23 "With Schopenhauer 's 1818 World as Will and Representation, 
aesthetic experience was reduced to the att i tude of non-practical con-
templation, a way to fend off, at least temporarily, the meaninglessness of 
the world.24 Per haps one of the reasons for this outcome was the difficulty 
of reconciling the disinterestedness of aesthetic experience - now understood 
without the public, communicative moment Kant had attributed to it25 - with 
the interested qualities of both its cognitive and moral counterparts. In the 
case of the former, it was impossible to suspend for very long our interested 
involvement with the world, which gratified or frustrated our corporeal needs 
and desires. In the case of the latter, real objects or at least other human 
beings were necessary to test our will to act morally and be involved in the 
world of practical consequences. As Paul Crowther has noted, »for Kant the 
burden of emphasis in moral existence falls on obstacles and responsibilities 
in relation to the expression of freedom. In aesthetic experience it does not.... 
Hence, whilst the pure aesthetic judgment might figure in a moral image of 
the world, it could just as easily, if not more so, incline us to a life of self-
indulgent or indolent contemplation, wherein the demands of moral duty 
were the least of our preoccupations.«20 There was, in other words, a certain 
tension between the aristocratic leisurely premises of aesthetic disinte-
restedness — the ability to see a beautiful landscape where peasants toiling 
in the fields could only see recalcitrant soil - and the moral imperative to 
treat everyone as an end in h im/or herself. 
But whether or not a successful reintegration of the three spheres was 
achieved by Kant or anyone else, the tacit uncoupling of aesthetic experience 
from the art object within the sphere of the aesthetic allowed a problematic 
slippage between spheres that is the real subject of this paper. Schematically 
put, there were two implications that could be drawn from the withdrawal 
of emphasis on beauty in the ob jec t itself in favor of subject ive or 
23 See John Wilcox, »The Beginnings of I'art pourl'art,« Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 
11 (June, 1953), and Gene H. Bell-Villada, Art for Art's Sale and Literary Life: How Politics 
and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism, 1790-1990 (Lincoln, Neb., 
1996). 
24 For an account of the debates concern ing the reduc t ion of exper ience to at t i tude 
initiated by Schopenhauer , see Bohdan Dziemidok, »Controversy abou t Aesthetic 
Attitude: Does Aesthetic Attitude Condit ion Aesthetic Experience?,« in Michael H. 
Mitias, ed., Possibility of Aesthetic Experience (Amsterdam, 1986). 
25 According to Jauss, »as the new ideal of aesthetic pleasure, self-enjoying subjectivity 
abandoned the sensus communis as the expression of a sociable sympathy at the same 
moment the aesthetics of genius finally replaced the aesthetics of rhetoric.« Aesthetic 
Experience and Literary Herrneneutics, p. 26. 
26 Paul Crowther, »The Significance of Kant's Pure Aesthetic Judgment ,« British Journal 
of Aesthetics, 36, 2 (April, 1996), p. 118. 
74 
Drifting into Dangerous Waters 
intersubjective response. One, to which we have already alluded, was the 
progressive obliteration of the object, which paralleled the disappearance 
of the thing-in-itself in post-Kantian epistemology. Not only was the real world 
referent of the artwork bracketed in the service of pure fictionality, so too 
the materiality of the representation itself was often suppressed and forgotten. 
The second and seemingly opposite implication was the indiscriminate 
elevation of all objects into potential works of art, depending on the attitude 
of their beholder. In either case, the specificity of the work of art as such 
was undermined . Let me take each tendency in turn. Technologies of 
simulacral mechanical reproduction like photography and the cinema may 
have abe t ted the first ou tcome, leading to what has been called the 
»immaterialization of reality,«27 but it was already foreshadowed, I want to 
argue, in the privileging of disinterestedness in aesthetic theory. For an object 
that was prohibited from soliciting any desire or interest, an object that could 
never be possessed or consumed, was an object that would ultimately 
squander its power to engage the very corporeal response that aisthesis had 
sought to explore. Fur ther erosion followed from the leveling of the 
distinction between works of art and their critical reception, a tendency that 
culminated in deconstruction's pan-textualist breaching of the boundary 
between ergon and parergon (work and frame). By 1981, the literary critic 
Murray Krieger could loudly lament in a work called Arts on the Level the 
»obliteration of the realm of art, its objects, its museums...everything 
immersed within the indivisible flood of experience.«28 
In the visual arts, the same alarm bell was sounded a few years earlier 
in Michael Fried's celebrated and controversial essay »Art and Objecthood.«20 
According to Fried, the specificity of pictures as such was being undermined 
by a new literalness, which foregrounded the anti-illusionist, material support 
of the flat canvas, and a style of beholding he called »theatrical,« By the latter, 
he meant an indifference to the specific media of the separate arts and a 
willingness to privilege the experience of the beholder over time rather than 
the art object itself. The often cited example he gave of the new sensibility 
was an account given by the artist Tony Smith of a car ride he had taken on 
the New Jersey turnpike, in which he realized that traditional art was dead. 
In Fried's gloss, the result was that »the experience alone is what matters.«30 
27 Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford, 1993), p. 18. See also Arthur 
Danto, The State of the Art (New York, 1987). 
28 Murray Krieger, Arts on the Level: The Fall of the Elite Object (Knoxville, Tenn., 1981), p. 56. 
20 Originally publ ished in 1967, it is included with other essays of that period and a long 
in t roduct ion answering subsequent criticism in Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and 
Review (Chicago, 1998). 
30 Ibid., p. 158. 
75 
Martin Jay 
Fried's fierce resistance to this trend was not very successful, as he would be 
the first to admit. If postmodernism has meant anything, it has meant a 
further erosion of the integrity of the work of art. 
When the Minimalist art Fried bemoaned was jo ined by an even less 
pictorial Conceptual Art, the radical potential of leveling was still more 
powerfully realized. Artists like Joseph Kossuth or Michael Asher abandoned 
the materiality of the work entirely in favor of a textual surrogate (with only 
a residue of the acknowledgment that inscribed texts can themselves be 
treated as material objects). Marcel Duchamp 's readymades, in which 
random objects from everyday life rather than ones designed by artistic 
intention and fashioned by artistic talent were imbued with artistic value by 
the fiat of the artist, was a way-station to this end. Duchamp's famous visual 
indifference, his disdain for mere »retinal« pleasure, meant that not only 
the art object was being obliterated, but so too was the sensual dimension 
of aesthetic experience, which became a more cerebral, theoretically driven 
game like the chess he began playing seriously in the 1920s as an alternative 
to producing - or rather designating - even readymade works of art. Here, 
ironically, the end of aesthetics turned out to be a kind of anaesthesia in 
which not only the object stimulating the senses had vanished, but so too 
were the senses it was supposed to effect. Hegel 's notorious claim that 
philosophy would and should replace art seemed fulfilled by this outcome. 
Duchamp's elevation of urinals, snow shovels and bottle racks into 
objects worthy of being included in the sacred space of the museum was, 
however, more than a parodic gesture mocking the pretensions of art objects 
to possess inherent qualities of beauty, more than a denial of the pleasure 
of the gaze, more than a victory of the concept over the image. From a 
different angle, it exemplifies the second main implication that could be and 
was drawn from the privileging of aesthetic experience over art objects, which 
involved the drifting I have invoked in my tide. That is, rather than debunking 
art by bringing it down to the level of ordinary life, using, as Duchamp 
provocatively recommended, »The Mona Lisa« as an ironing board, it could 
seek to elevate life by bringing it up to the putative level of art. In other 
words, it could promote the promiscuous reenchantment of the entire world, 
the »transfiguration of the commonplace,«31 as if any object or event, however 
mean, were a legitimate occasion for aesthetic experience. As Jauss has noted, 
»aesthetic experience does not seem to develop 'organically,' on a field of 
its own, but to progressively expand and maintain its area of meaning at the 
expense of bordering experiences of reality, and this by usurpations and 
31 Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, 
Mass., 1981). 
76 
Drifting into Dangerous Waters 
compensa t ions , the crossing of boundar ies , the of fer of compet ing 
solutions.«32 The result was a leveling up rather than down, a conflation of 
representation with reference, a kind of imperialism of aesthetic sublimation 
in which every object could be redeemed in aesthetic terms. 
Duchamp himself, to be sure, would have scoffed at so lofty a program, 
but by lowering the threshold of what could be construed as an object of 
aes the t ic app rec i a t i on a n d en joyment (or at least their conceptua l 
counterpart) , he was drawing on, if in some ways also reversing the valence 
of, a venerable tradition that began as early as the Romantics and continues 
to our day. It could emerge only when the longstanding disdain for nature 
as a realm of fallen and debased matter in comparison with elevated spirit 
was reversed, a transformation that was anticipated by certain heterodox 
philosophies like Spinoza's pantheism in the 17th century. It was also evident, 
if in slightly displaced form in social or cultural terms, in that increasing 
incorporation of formerly »low« subject matter in allegedly »high« art, the 
democratization of content evident in the genre paintings of early modern 
Dutch art, the bourgeois, domestic tragedies of the Enlightenment, and most 
of all the rise of the novel. It was apparen t as well in the Romantic 
incorporation of the fragment, the sketch, and the incomplete or ruined 
torso into the canon of genuine art. It came into its own with what M. H. 
Abrams has followed Carlyle's Sartor Resartus in calling »natural superna-
turalism,«33 the infusing of the natural world with all of the numinous 
meaning that had hitherto been reserved for transcendent spirit. Now the 
everyday, the commonplace, could be understood as glowing with immanent 
significance, or least potentially possessing it through poetic transfiguration, 
which sough t to fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal of religious 
sacralization.34 
In a recent work entitled Into the Light of Things, George Leonard has 
traced what he calls the »art of the commonplace« from Wordsworth through 
Carlyle and Ruskin to John Cage, whose celebrated composition »4'33«« 
imbued even seemingly unmusical silence or more precisely, the ambient 
noise left when no notes were sounded, with aesthetic value.35 In visual terms, 
32 Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, p. 111-112. 
33 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature 
(New York, 1971). 
34 This impulse was later to be rechanneled into the quasi-political project of the avant-
garde to imbue life with the energies of art, a project whose problematic implications 
have been f o r e g r o u n d e d by Peter Burger in Theory of the Avant Garde, trans. Michael 
Shaw (Minneapolis, 1984). 
35 George J . Leonard , Into the Light: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage 
(Chicago, 1994). 
Martin Jay 
Leonard detects a similar transition already taking place between the time 
of Sir Joshua Reynolds and J o h n Constable . Al though he notes that 
Wordsworth more likely got his anti-hierarchical ideas about aesthetic 
experience from the English critic Archibald Alison's Essays on the Nature 
and Principles of Taste of 1790 than directly from Kant, whose German he 
could not read, the end result was similar. For Alison also argued against 
elite art objects and in favor of the subjective reaction we can have to 
anything, however trivial or mundane. Even the sublime, which had been 
reserved for awesome and unfathomable experiences in the 18th century, 
could now be applied to the commonplace, just as long as the aesthetic 
sensibility of the beholder was capable of appreciating it in this manner . 
There was, to be sure, an impor tan t dist inction between na tura l 
supernaturalism and the Kantian notion of aesthetic experience, which 
Leonard does not remark. Whereas the former implied a pantheistic project 
of reenchanting the world, somehow imbuing it with a secularized religious 
meaning, Kant had explicitly decried such attempts in his own day. In the 
famous »Pantheism Controversy,« which divided German intellectuals in the 
decade after F.H. Jacobi's 1785 attack on Lessing's supposed embrace of 
Spinozist atheism, he was a fervent critic of the rationalist immanentism 
implied in the Greek slogan hen kai pan (the one is the all) revived by 
Lessing.30 Kant vigorously resisted what he saw as die determinist implications 
of that position, which undermined the possibility of human freedom and 
made practical reason's exercise of will meaningless. He thus never went as 
far as the natural supernaturalists in reinvesting the world with any kind of 
aesthetic cum religious »real presence,«37 preserving instead a more orthodox 
believer's faith in a transcendent God. 
But what Kant's stress on the disinterestedness of aesthetic experience 
did allow, even if unintent ional ly, was the possibility of having such 
experiences in the face of objects or events or actions that had not been 
intended as works of art or deliberately created to provide aesthetic pleasure. 
In fact, he himself distinctly preferred natural to artifical beauty, the real 
thing to man-made representations. For this reason, he could be construed 
as an unwitting precursor of natural supernatura l ism. Insofar as this 
implication was a necessary accompaniment of the redefinition of previously 
35 For a good account of Kant's role in the debate , see Zammito, The Genesis of the Third 
Critique, chapters 11 and 12. 
3 ' The urge to do this is still alive, as evidenced by George Steiner 's r ecen t book, Real 
Presences (Chicago, 1989), which, to be sure, tries to see art f r o m the poin t of view of 
the creator rather than the beholder or critic, and in so doing, stress its links with 
f reedom. 
78 
Drifting into Dangerous Waters 
sacred or ornamental objects as purely artistic ones, it produced a valuable 
disarticulation of the inherent logic of the aesthetic sphere from its cognitive 
and moral counterparts. The same might be said of the later réévaluation 
of ritual or utilitarian objects from so-called primitive cultures as objects of 
formal beauty, which took place during the modernist era. Here too the 
extension of aesthetic appreciation to cultural artifacts that had hitherto been 
dismissed as mere examples of less advanced peoples can be accounted an 
advance in cosmopol i tan unders tand ing (however problematic such 
decontextualization may seem to defenders of the integrity of individual 
cultures). 
But when carried to an indiscriminate extreme, such an extension could 
lead to a promiscuous aestheticization of the entire world, reducing it to a 
mere occasion for disinterested subjective pleasure. All objects or events, 
whether or not they were ever intended as works of art, could be redeemed 
in aesthetic terms, if they produced an experience that somehow measured 
up to whatever the common sense of the time called aesthetic. As Jauss notes, 
»the aesthetic experience of role distance can be intensified and become 
aestheticism when it is taken up in a real-life situation where the conventions 
of morality or tact demand a wholly serious involvement. When, for example, 
a work such as the Isenheim altar is perceived and interpreted solely as a 
carrier of aesthetic qualities and abstraction is made from everything that 
makes the representation of the martyrdom shocking, cruel, and thereby 
exemplary, it is not only a devout sensibility that will be offended. Such an 
a t t i tude is also i napprop r i a t e to the unders tand ing the object itself 
demands.«38 
Perhaps the most troubling implications of this indifference to the 
qualities of the object were evident in what Walter Benjamin famously called 
the »aestheticization of politics.« This is not the place to launch a full-fledged 
rehearsal of its divergent implications, a task I have attempted elsewhere,39 
but several points should be made. Benjamin's critique was directed explicitly 
at what he saw as fascist aestheticized politics, in which human suffering could 
become an occasion for aesthetic delectation. Most clearly evident in the 
celebration of war as a spectacle in the work of Futurists like Marinetti, it 
also appeared in his own day in the threnodies to apocalyptic violence in 
Ernst Junger ' s technological sublime. Perhaps the most frequently cited 
expression of this att i tude was the remark made by the Symbolist poet 
Laurent Tailhade in reaction to a deadly anarchist bomb thrown into the 
38 Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, p. 6. 
30 Martin Jay, »The Aesthetic Ideology as Ideology: Or What Does It Mean to Aestheticize 
Politics,« Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York, 1993). 
79 
Martin Jay 
French Chamber of Deputies in the 1890's: »N'im porte les victimes, si le geste 
est beau.« Here contemplative disinterestedness was given an especially 
sinister twist because the object to be »enjoyed« was the destruction of human 
life. The rigid distinction between aesthetic and ethical values, which derived 
much of its impetus from a reductive misreading of Kant's third Critique, 
combined with the uncoupling of aesthetic experience from works of art, to 
coun tenance what in o ther spheres would be quickly u n d e r s t o o d as 
problematic. That is, in the realm of cognition, epistemological judgments 
about objects that do not exist are normally called hallucinations or fantasies, 
and are separated from those that can claim some warrant in the world 
external to the self. If ethical judgments are applied to behavior or events 
that have not occurred or that did not involve the exercise of human will, 
we worry about our inappropriately moralizing what should be understood 
in different terms. The same caution, it would seem, should apply with regard 
to aesthetic experience, when it seeks its detached pleasure anywhere it can 
find it. However much we may applaud the democratic expansion of the 
realm of art objects beyond the limits of their elite predecessors, however 
much we may recognize the value of learning to salvage objects that have 
lost their initial functional purpose in aesthetic terms, it may be wise to 
acknowledge limits to how far the aesthetic reenchantment of the world can 
go. The natural supernaturalist project, like all pantheist affirmations of 
immanence, comes up against the radical evil that exists in the world that it 
tries to valorize. Although violence can be aesthetically transfigured and 
represented in works of art - how else could we read with admiration The 
Illiad or stand comfortably before Picasso's Guernica?40 - when the f rame is 
broken, representation is confused with reference, and unmediated reality 
becomes fair game for aestheticization, the effect is very different. Aesthetic 
experience, in short, cannot be entirely freed from a consideration of which 
objects and events mayjustifiable evoke it, or else it courts the charge that 
it produces a theodicy of beauty, which is no less problematic than its ethical 
counterpart. 
Or rather, it cannot avoid that rebuke if we remain within the terms 
set by the 18th-century's version of that experience. But what if another notion 
of aesthetic experience could be defended that would avoid the privileging 
of subject over object and thus avoid the dangers of drifting? One such 
40 Kant himself makes this point when he notes that at least in one respect man-made art 
is superior to natural beauty: »Where fine art evidences its superiority is in the beautiful 
description of things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing. T h e Furies, diseases, 
devastations of war, and the like, can (as evils) be very beautifully described, nay even 
represented in pictures.« Critique of Judgment, §48, 5:321. 
80 
Drifting into Dangerous Waters 
alternative was, in fact, presented in John Dewey's well-known Art as 
Experience, which has recent ly been revived in the work of Richard 
Shusterman, in particular his Pragmatic Aesthetics of 1992.41 Dewey's ire was 
directed at all aspects of what he took to be the Kantian version of aesthetic 
experience, which he denounced as the fruit of excessive Enlightenment 
rationalism with its compartmentalizing mania for categorical distinctions. 
Against the isolation of aesthetic experience from other variants, he argued 
for their ultimate integration in an ongoing, participatory interaction between 
humans and their environment. Against the passive and contemplative notion 
of aesthetic experience, he argued for an active, practical and productive 
alternative, which would overcome the gap between artistic creativity and 
aesthetic reception. Against the tacit elevation of the visual arts through the 
spectatorial bias of traditional aesthetic theory, he stressed the need to 
involve the entire sensorium. Against the privileging of disinterestedness and 
psychological detachment as foundations of the aesthetic attitude, he argued 
that desire and interest were as integral a part of our sensual encounters 
with art as with the rest of the world. 
But most important for our purposes, against the evisceration of the 
object in the name of subjective or intersubjective response, he rallied to 
the defense of the artwork not entirely for itself as an exemplar of a Platonic 
notion of beauty, but as an integral dimension of aesthetic experience, rightly 
understood. The extreme separation of organism from world, he argued, 
»lies behind the idea that esthetic quality does not belong to objects as objects 
but is projected onto them by mind. It is the source of the definition of beauty 
as 'objectified pleasure' instead of as pleasure in the object, so much in it 
that the object and pleasure are one and undivided in the experience.«42 
»There can be no esthetic experience,« he argued, »apart from an object, 
and that for an object to be the content of esthetic appreciation it must satisfy 
those objective cond i t ions without which cumula t ion , conservat ion, 
reenforcement, transition into something more complete, are impossible.«43 
41 J o h n Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1934); Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics. See 
also Shusterman, Practicising Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York, 
1997), and »The End of Aesthetic Experience,« and his exchange with Alexander 
Nehamas in TheJournal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, 56,1 (1998). 
42 Dewey, Art and Experience, p. 248. It is passages like this that allow Shusterman to argue 
that ultimately Dewey privileges »dynamic aesthetic experience over the fixed material 
ob jec t which ou r convent iona l th inking ident if ies - and t h e n commodi f ies and 
fetishizes - as the work of art....art gets defined as 'a quality of experience ' ra ther than 
a co l lec t ion of objec ts o r a substant ive essence shared only by such objects. . .« 
{Pragmatist Aesthetics, p. 25). 
43 Ibid., p. 146-147. 
81 
Martin Jay 
Whereas a preliminary distinction between self and world may be justified 
in certain other areas of endeavor, such as natural science, »the uniquely 
distinguishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly the fact that no such 
distinction of self and object exists in it, since it is esthetic to the degree in 
which organism and environment cooperate to institute an experience in 
which the two are so fully integrated that each disappears.«44 
Such a disappearance does not, however, betoken the same thing that 
is implied by the loss of the referential object in 18th-century aesthetic theory 
or the religious/cum aesthetic reenchantment of the world in the natural 
superna tura l tradit ion. For a l though Dewey h o p e d for the u l t ima te 
reconciliation of life and art, he also recognized that it had not yet happened. 
Therefore, the artwork as object set apart from subject represented a covert 
protest against the unfulfilled potential for integrated experience in the 
modern world. The possibility for genuine experience in that world, he 
paralleled Benjamin and Adorno in lamenting, was severely limited: »Zeal 
for doing, lust for action, leaves many a person, especially in this hurried 
and impatient human environment in which we live, with experience of an 
almost incredible paucity, all on the surface. No one experience has a chance 
to complete itself because something else is entered upon so speedily. What 
is called experience becomes so dispersed and miscellaneous as hardly to 
deserve the name.«45 The work of art, as Dewey described it, provided a 
promise of the order, completeness and integration of experience that was 
missing in everyday life and that was wrongly projected onto the world in its 
present state. 
This argument, which will be familiar in certain respects to those made 
by the Frankfurt School, must, however, be set against the relatively optimistic 
expectations of the pragmatist tradition, in which fulfilled experience is now 
a possibility, despite obstacles that may prevail in the external world. Dewey 
may perhaps have been a bit too quick to dissolve the distinction between 
esoteric fine art, the art of museums and concert halls, f rom life lived 
aesthetically. As Shusterman has conceded, for Dewey aesthetic experience 
»could be achieved in virtually any domain of action, since all experience, 
to be coherent and meaningful, required the germ of aesthetic unity and 
development. By rethinking art in terms of aesthetic experience, Dewey 
hoped we could radically enlarge and democrat ize 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.«4tl As a result, despite its 
44 Ibid., p. 249. 
45 Ibid., p. 45. 
4fi Shusterman, »The End of Aesthetic Experience,« p. 33. 
82 
Drifting into Dangerous Waters 
laudable intention to redress the balance lost by Kantian aesthetics, the 
pragmatist attempt to fashion a new notion of experience, including both 
subject and object in an equiprimordial interaction, may too easily produce 
the same outcome as that of the natural supernaturalist tradition: the 
indiscriminate leveling of the distinction between art work and life world 
through projecting the qualities of the former onto the latter.47 
To avoid such an ou tcome, a certain respect for the cont inued 
dis t inct ion between the two may be required , at least as long as the 
reintegration remains more a desideratum than a real possibility. Such a 
distinction would involve acknowledging that works of art, although inevitably 
in tended to produce aesthetic experience in their beholders, somehow 
exceed that outcome. To honor this difference does not mean fetishizing 
the elite object or ascetically denigrating any pleasure in the present, as some 
defenders of aesthetic experience fear.48 It entails instead a recognition of 
the fruitful constellation that keeps subjects and objects irreducible to each 
other, even as they cannot be understood in isolation. As formed material 
objects - a characterization more self-evidently true for certain kinds of art 
than others, but arguably the case for all - artworks resist reduction to nothing 
but the form-giving or form-appreciating qualities of the creative or receptive 
subject. In this sense, they preserve the otherness of the nonhuman world 
that should not be made into a mere occasion for aesthetic delectation as 
exemplars of natural beauty. 
As specifically art objects, they resist leveling - either up or down - with 
other objects in our environment.4'1 The necessarily illusory quality of works 
47 Although appreciat ing many aspects of Dewey's approach, Jauss notes that he »assigns 
the t radi t ional pred ica tes of the beaut i ful in art to natura l p h e n o m e n a or those 
b e l o n g i n g to the world of objects . In o the r words, he pro jec ts them o n t o these 
p h e n o m e n a to t h e n d e m o n s t r a t e tha t they are everyday ' sources ' of aes thet ic 
experience. . . .The shor tcoming in Dewey's theory is...that it maintains the illusion of 
the objectively beau t i fu l wi thout t racing the aesthetic quality of the objects and 
p h e n o m e n a of the everyday world back to the att i tude of the observer.« Aesthetic 
Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, p. 113. 
48 This anxiety is evident in Jauss's critique of Adorno as a champion of ascetic Platonism 
in Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. For a different view, which shows the 
impor t ance of exper i ence in Adorno ' s work, see Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact 
Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno'sAesthetics (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), chapter I. That 
the rigid separation of aesthetic f rom other kinds of pleasure in the Kantian tradition 
can itself be accused of asceticism from a Frankfur t School position is demonstra ted 
in Robin May Schott, Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (Boston, 
1988), chap te r 11. 
41> This is not the place to a t tempt a serious account of the differences between aesthetic 
and non-aesthetic objects. Perhaps the best known defense of the distinction f rom a 
83 
Martin Jay 
of art - what German aesthetics designates by the word Schein (at once 
semblance and appearance) - sets them categorically apart from the objects 
that we encounter cognitively or morally. The pleasure they provide, if 
indeed in all cases they can be said to produce pleasure, is not of the same 
order as that provided by other objects that satisfy our desires and interests.50 
The celebrated claim made by Stendhal and repeated by Nietzsche and 
Marcuse that art is »une promesse de bonheur« must be understood not only 
as a rebuke to the coldness of the tradition of disinterested detachment, but 
also as a recognition that such happiness is not necessarily achievable in the 
present. 
Moreover, as George Steiner has noted, »the objects of scientific 
speculation and investigation, however uncertain their reality-status outside 
the relevant hypothesis and observation, are, nevertheless, given. They are 
prior and determinant in ways which differ fundamentally from the 'coming-
into-thereness' of the aesthetic....Only in the aesthetic is there the absolute 
freedom 'not to have come into being.' Paradoxically, it is that possibility of 
absence which gives autonomous force to the presence of the work.«51 
However much we may admire a sunset for its beauty or be awed by the 
sublime chaos of a battle, the experience we have of works created by human 
intentionality can never forget their unique status in this regard. Even if such 
works can no longer be understood as perfectly formed, organic wholes, an 
assumption that was laid to rest with Modernism (and anticipated by the 
Romantic cult of the fragment), they nonetheless still possess some residue, 
perhaps solely in negative terms, of the Utopian implications of that impulse.52 
phenomenolog ica l perspective was m o u n t e d by Roman I n g a r d e n , whose work is 
discussed in B. Dziemido and P. McCormick, eds. On the Aesthetics of Roman Ingarden 
(Boston, 1989). For a recent extension of his a rgument , see McCormick, Modernity, 
Aesthetics, and the Bounds of Art. See also the d i f fe ren t approaches in the books by 
Goodman and Genette cited in notes 1 and 2. 
50 For a recent debate over the role of pleasure in aesthetic experience, see Shusterman, 
»The End of Aesthetic Experience«; Alexander Nehamas, »Richard Shus te rman on 
Pleasure and Aesthetic Experience,« Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56, 1 (1998) ; 
and Shusterman, »Interpretation, Pleasure, and Value in Aesthetic Experience,« in 
ibid. 
51 Steiner, Real Presences, p. 154-155. 
52 Krieger claims that »the de throning of the aesthetic object and aesthetic value and 
the abolit ion of the aesthetic realm a l together destroy the closed sanctity of such 
objects as self-fulfilled, instead opening them anew to an immedia te re lat ionship to 
normal experience. With the theoretical d isappearance of closure, which is now seen 
to have been a deceiving myth, all objects, their would-be fictional boundaries dissolved, 
flow freely into and our of normal experience, now that they are declared n o more 
than a rout ine par t of that experience.« Arts on the Level, p. 55. Such a compla in t 
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Drifting into Dangerous Waters 
Not unt i l the world is itself made by humans who can fashion their 
e n v i r o n m e n t to realize such an ou tcome - a telos that may well be 
unattainable, and may even be itself a deeply problematic goal - can we 
forget the victims and praise the beautiful gesture that led to their demise. 
For the present, it is wiser to hold on to the irreducible constellation of 
objects and the experiences they engender that prevent us from collapsing 
one variant of experience into another. Flowever porous the boundaries 
may be, however great the yearning for a fully integrated form of life, the 
differentiations of modernity - not only among value spheres, but within 
them as well - may have a validity that we sacrifice at our peril. 
overestimates the necessity of absolute closure and boundar ied immanence in works 
of art, which ignores the impor tance of what Genette has called their t ranscendent 
potential . See his The Work of Art. 
85