 Dewey’s description of aesthetic experience as a process of both doing and undergoing is still worth noting, as it appears widely in the commentary literature. With this conceptual pair, Dewey draws attention to the kind of interplay between activity and passivity that he thinks aesthetic experience involves. The development of an aesthetic experience often requires effort and imaginative activity from the experiencer, but these moments of doing are also joined with phases when the object or the environment is felt to take the lead in the experience without any real sense of doing from the experiencer. Undergoing is the receptive phase of the experience, the taking in of energy, which the experiencer can, then, more consciously work on. A balance between these experiential phases represents for Dewey an ideal of all experience and, again, aesthetic experience becomes an acute expression of the potentialities that Dewey believes are inherent in the basic interaction between the live creature and its environment; 