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would deny such concepts as "aesthetic value" and "aesthetic ex-
perience" so far as they assert or imply some unique category. Is
there a distinct autonomous realm of "aesthetic experience" or of
aesthetic objects and qualities, by their nature capable of eliciting
such an experience?
Most philosophers since Kant and most men seriously con-
cerned with the arts agree that the fine arts, including literature,
have a unique character and value. One cannot, says Theodore
Greene, for example, "reduce artistic quality to other more prim-
itive qualities" j and he goes on: "the unique character of the
artistic quality of a work can only be immediately intuited, and
though it can be exhibited and denoted, it cannot be defined or
even described." 5
Upon the character of the unique aesthetic experience, there is
large agreement among philosophers. In his Critique of Judg-
ment, Kant stresses the "purposiveness without purpose" (the
purpose not directed toward action) of art, the aesthetic su-
periority of "pure" over "adherent" or applied beauty, the dis-
interestedness of the experiencer (who must not want to own or
consume or otherwise turn into sensation or conation what is
designed for perception). The aesthetic experience, our contemporary
theorists agree, is a perception of quality intrinsically
pleasant and interesting, offering a terminal value and a sample
and foretaste of other terminal values, other "rests" and fulfill-
ments. It is connected with feeling (pleasure-pain, hedonistic
response) and the senses ; but it objectifies and articulates feeling
—the feeling finds, in the work of art, an "objective correlative,"
and it is distanced from sensation and conation by its object's
frame of fictionality, its character of "imitation," that is, conscious
perception. The aesthetic object is that which interests me
for its own qualities, which I don't endeavor to reform or turn
into a part of myself, appropriate, or consume. The aesthetic ex-
perience is a form of contemplation, a loving attention to qual-
ities and qualitative structures. Practicality is one enemy j the chief
other is habit, operative along lines once laid down by practicality.
The work of literature is an aesthetic object, capable of arous-
ing aesthetic experience. Can we evaluate a literary work entirely
upon aesthetic criteria, or do we need, as T. S. Eliot suggests, to
judge the literariness of literature by aesthetic criteria and the