ABSTRACT
Relegate aesthetics to matters of "mere" feeling, denigrate the role of feeling in human cognition, and one can conveniently marginalize aesthetics in philosophy. Once reduced to a single type of feeling-based engagement, aesthetic experience is taken to be subjective—a mere matter of taste. Insofar as aesthetics is conceived as embracing only the sensuous, perceptual, imaginative, feeling, and emotional dimensions of experience, aesthetic experience is viewed as too subjective to serve as the basis for our shared experience and cognition of our world. An historical survey of aesthetic theories might include factors such as mimesis, unity in variety, aesthetic ideas, significant form, expression of ideas, emotional communication, social context, and conceptual content, but try to identify a theory besides John Dewey's that is grounded on the qualitative unity of an experience. One of the biggest errors we can make in aesthetic theory is the fetishizing of "the aesthetic," as if only certain very special kinds of experience manifest the aesthetic.
