 Substantive aesthetic judgments attracted much attention in the latter half of the twentieth century. If the hierarchical proposal is right, they cannot be studied in isolation, for the role of such judgments is to serve verdictive aesthetic judgments of beauty and ugliness. Beauty and ugliness are the primary aesthetic notions, which give sense to the wider class that contemporary aestheticians include as “aesthetic”. The broad notion of the aesthetic can be fixed by what it is to judge that something is beautiful or ugly, or that it has aesthetic merit or demerit. By seeing beauty and ugliness as the preeminent aesthetic notions we can make sense of a unitary category of the aesthetic, which includes the dainty and the dumpy, elegance and sublimity, and which excludes physical, sensory and representational properties of things, as well as their agreeableness. The hierarchical proposal seems to allow us to make the aesthetic/nonaesthetic distinction in a useful way and answer Beardsley and Sibley’s critics. Thus, the notion of the aesthetic can be defended. Some readers may think that Levinson is right about substantive aesthetic concepts and judgments, in which case the notion of the aesthetic will have a question mark hanging over it.