A. The Live Creature

1. Humans live in interplay with culture and nature; typically society divides experiences into facts, values, science, morality, etc; but this is contrary to our basic experiences

2. "Experience in the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality. Instead of signifying being shut up within one's own private feelings and sensations, it signifies active and alert commerce with the world; at its height it signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events."

3. Experience is hence neither chaotic nor finished; it's always active and passive; received and interpreted.

B. The Live Creature and "Etherial Things"

1. Art coming from the human effort to interplay with reality.

2. "Art is the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning the union of sense, need, impulse and action characteristic of the live creature."

C. Having an Experience

1. There is a difference between experience and an experience--"There is that meal in a Paris restaurant of which one says 'that was an experience.'" It gives a unity to experience.

2. Since "an experience" gives unity, for the intellect to be complete it must look for the "an experience", which is the aesthetic experience

3. The enemies of the aesthetic experience--"the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission to convention in practice and intellectual procedure; rigid abstinence, coerced submission, tightness on one side and dissipation, incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other are deviations in opposite directions from the unity of experience

D. The Act of Expression

1. Every experience is interpreted by the emotions but they are not a sufficient condition of aesthetic expression; the poet's poem is wrung from him by the subject, which excites him; the etymology of expression is "a squeezing out"

2. "The real work of art is the building up of an integral experience out of the interaction of organic and environmental conditions and energies. The thing expressed is wrung from the producer by the pressure exercised by objective things upon the natural impulses and tendencies.

3. In art it is not emotion which is expressed but the experience of integrity;

a. without emotions there is craftsmanship but not art

b. but emotions are not the aim or sufficient conditions of art

c. in art emotion is thus objectified in the medium

E. The Expressive Object

1. Esoteric art is meaningless; it has to express concentrated meanings contained in scattered and weakened ways in the material of other experiences

a. science states meanings

b. art expresses meanings

F. Substance and Form

1. From Aristotle--art is a "formed matter"

2. The goal of art is the purpose of the whole of experience; this is its sufficient condition

3. "Form"--"as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment."

4. The artist is always looking for the right expression of this purpose; "a lover of the unalloyed experience;

G. The Common Substance of the Arts

1. Difference art objects have particular mediums "by which the qualitative pervasive whole is carried"

2. The medium is a mediator between the artists and perceiver.

H. The Challenge to Philosophy

1. Since the aesthetic experience is experience in its integrity, and philosophy is about experience and thought; philosophy must go to the aesthetic to understand experience

2. The imaginative work of art challenges philosophy to think to the integrity of experience