What may have been the most profound explorations of religious experience were conducted by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. He began his career as a youthful devotee of Erlebnis but gradually developed an outlook more open to otherness, which culminated in I and Thou (1923). He steered a subtle course between psychology and theology. Criticizing James's psychologism, he wrote that "the great mystics did not have experiences, they were had by them." Yet he was also wary of Otto's emphasis on divine Otherness, observing that "of course, God is 'the wholly other,' but he is also the wholly same: the wholly present. Of course, he is the mysterium tremendum that appears and overwhelms, but he is also the mystery of the obvious that is closer to me than my own I." Seldom have the extraordinary and the ordinary been so gracefully merged in the philosophical discourse of experience.

Like seekers of religious experience, worshipers at the shrine of beauty aimed to reconnect body and soul, self and world, by turning a particular form of experience into a stand-in for the whole--or at least a path to wholeness. Aestheticism arose in the cultural capitals of Europe during the late eighteenth century, when ornament and luxury were spreading and a commercial traffic in images threatened to erase any distinction between objets d'art and mere commodities. Neoclassical aesthetes wanted to restore a sacred aura to the artwork but on a secular basis, as an embodiment of universal beauty.

Still, there was no denying that in a (comparatively) disenchanted universe, the work of art could no longer embody "real presence"--and beauty could no longer be seen as an emanation of the divine. Not that Kant, Burke and a few of their contemporaries didn't try. Indeed, they began to make even more extravagant claims. The idea of the sublime evoked an experience of transcendence that resonated with Kant's noumenal realm. Aesthetic theorists refashioned the sacred by viewing objets d'art as its vessels. But rather than seeking to reconnect the sensuous and the spiritual, eighteenth-century aesthetes elevated aesthetic experience to an ethereal plane by stressing its "disinterested" quality. This kind of thinking turned naked women into "nudes."

Despite the theorists' efforts, Jay notes, objets d'art continued "losing their integrity as self-sufficient entities in the world" and as "exemplars of universal beauty." Patterns of patronage became more commercial and more complex; according to Jay, the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere meant an unleashing of centrifugal forces, with new aesthetic emphases on pluralism, tolerance, variability. Romantic aesthetes, led by Friedrich Schiller, grew impatient with the bloodless passivity of Kantian "disinterest" and eager for a more active conception of aesthetic experience.

Out of this dissatisfaction arose two influential ideas: the belief in art as promesse de bonheur (Stendhal's phrase, which signified profound fulfillment for thinkers from Friedrich Schlegel to Herbert Marcuse) and the notion of the Romantic genius. As Jay wryly observes, "there was general agreement that the genius possessed a heightened capacity for authentic experience, which put him above the common herd of men." There was much masculine hysteria behind this idea: Sade epitomized it and Goethe satirized it in Faust (1808-32). By midcentury the flâneur had displaced the genius, and Romantic tradition had narrowed into the separatist vision of l'art pour l'art. Despite the efforts of John Ruskin and William Morris to combine aesthetic and social criticism, the popular image of the aesthete became that of a wan and withdrawn figure, too sensitive to withstand the slings and arrows of ordinary experience.

The understanding of aesthetic experience as something subjective, receptive and contemplative had begun to collapse in on itself, exacerbating the fear that (as in religion) the "real presence" of the artwork (like the presence of God) would be lost in a fog of incommunicable feelings. As Heidegger observed, "even the much-vaunted aesthetic experience cannot get around the thingly aspect of the art work." For Heidegger's contemporaries Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, the battle to save the material basis of aesthetic experience was part of a much larger struggle against the corrosive cultural impact of "late capitalism"--which threatened to destroy all forms of genuine experience by reifying abstractions into things ("the economy") and alienating the worker from his work. Adorno suspected the struggle was already lost, but Benjamin held out some hope. In the Wordsworthian tradition, he evoked the child's-eye view as the criterion of "absolute experience" and sought opportunities to sustain that perspective in the unpromising world of the present.

Like Schleiermacher and Otto, Benjamin wanted to rescue experience from the splintering impact of capitalist modernity. But he never bought into the nonsense peddled by Ernst Jünger and other proto-Fascists, never reduced Erlebnis to battlefield combat. In search of a god-language, he fell in with Louis Aragon and the Surrealists, who persuaded him that archaic longings and dreams could still be found in the banalities of kitsch. This was heartening; maybe the culture of late capitalism was not as monolithically reified as he had feared. But he could not escape the feeling, especially in the wake of World War I, that something had snapped in history, that the world was being overtaken by a new barbarism, that the resources of culture were exhausted. Even his friendship with Bertolt Brecht, and their dalliance in revolutionary fantasies, could not stop him from mourning lost experience--most memorably in his lament that the objet d'art had surrendered its "aura" of singularity to the standardizing processes of mass production.

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