Dewey seems prepared to dismiss this sort of thing as non-aesthetic (or, as he would say, ‘anesthetic’) (p. 40). Indeed, it seems plausible to deny that experience can have an aesthetic character (or, perhaps, that it can be experience at all) if it is completely unconscious. If there were really nothing that it’s like for me to swing my foot up and down while engrossed in a novel, how could the foot swinging make any aesthetic contribution to my experience? Given that we are minimally conscious, if at all, of so many aspects of what we experience.
