Normal Experience

Theory is concerned with discovering the nature of the production of works of art and of their enjoyment in perception, How is it that the everyday making of things grows into that form of making which is genuinely artistic? How is that our everyday enjoyment of scenes and situations develops into the peculiar satisfaction that tends the experience which is emphatically esthetic? These are the questions theory must answer. The answers cannot be found, unless we are willing to find the germs and roots in matters of experience that we do not currently regard as esthetic. Having discovered these active seeds, we may follow the course of their growth into the highest forms of finished and refined art.

If artistic and esthetic quality is implicit in every normal experience, how shall we explain how and why it so generally fails to become explicit?

--'The Living Creature',Art as Experience, p. 11

在這裏Dewey認爲理論發於背景理解。藝術是從日常生活經驗發展得來，因此我們要去追溯日常-審美經驗的形成過程。

但我把它聯繫到日常生活本身就是審美經驗構建這一點上。我們從自己日常生活的決策和計劃中發現，這正是在滿足自己的審美體驗。