 The goal of aesthetic theory, in Dewey’s view, should not, therefore, be to spiritualize works of art and to set them apart from the objects of ordinary experience, but to disclose the “way in which these works idealize qualities found in common experience”. (AE: 17) It is in other words wrong to think of the aesthetic as a luxurious or transcendentally ideal “intruder in experience from without”. Rather, the aesthetic in experience should be understood as “the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience”. Precisely this kind of naturalist approach represents for Dewey “the only secure basis upon which esthetic theory can be built” (AE: 52–53).