The value defining the aesthetic sphere, Lukács claims, can only be the work of art itself since this value is presupposed by any description of artistic production or aesthetic experience. Lukács proposes to explain the character of this distinctive value by undertaking a phenomenological analysis of artistic creation and aesthetic receptivity. Even though these activities are not constitutive for the value of works of art, they can still serve as a basis for reconstructing the independent normative status of the aesthetics. The result of this analysis is a conception of the work of art as an ideal of homogeneous unity of form and material. In the 1912 Philosophy of Art, this unity is characterized by the experiential content becoming completely communicable and containing all possible aspects of a possible experience, thus forming a “concrete totality” (GW 16: 83, 91, 112 and GW 17: 110) of its own world within itself. In contrast, in the 1916 Aesthetics, it is brought about through a process in which the constitutive function of experience becomes completely autonomous, determining both form and content. Such an ideal work of art is, in virtue of this harmony, a Utopian fulfillment of the attitudes that are already operative in the ordinary world of experience (GW 16: 82).