 The aesthetic theory that Dewey develops in Art as Experience could be labeled moderately naturalist. While Dewey locates the “active seeds” of art and other aesthetic phenomena in natural processes (AE: 18), he in no way seeks to reduce them to natural reality nor does he try to explain their origins and perseverance by locating a place for them in the development of the human species, as some contemporary forms of evolutionary aesthetics do. Rather, Dewey’s naturalism is of an emergent sort, in the sense that he seeks to show how aesthetic experience and culture emerge from the natural basis of life, as he understands it (Alexander 2013). The key element of this moderate naturalism is the idea of an organism, or of “the live creature”—a term that Dewey also often uses—which is in a constant interaction with its surrounding world. Dewey argues that this interaction is marked by shifting and reinforcing phases of disarray and stability, of unsettlement and restoration of harmony, which, in Dewey’s view, give experience its basic structure. As Dewey explains in an oft-quoted passage, 