What difference does aesthetic experience make in shaping who we are? If you’ve ever had a book or painting touch you to the core, you know how difficult it can be to explain that feeling to a friend, or to connect that feeling to other parts of your life. And yet you have no doubt that the experience has left you a different person. Or, as Michael Clune might put it, the experience has left you wanting to become a different person. “You must change your life,” Rilke says at the end of his poem about looking at a sculpture, “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” But change it how? In A Defense of Judgment, Clune outlines a vision for aesthetic education as an end in itself, full of potential for personal transformation, yet free of the moral prescriptiveness we sometimes attach to our encounters with art or literature.
