Aesthetics and Pragmatism: John Dewey's "Art as Experience"

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Aesthetics and Pragmatism: John Dewey's "Art as Experience"Author(s): Thomas J. MusialSource: Notre Dame English Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter, 1967/1968), pp. 7-13Published by: The University of Notre DameStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40066419 .

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AESTHETICS AND PRAGMATISM:

John Dewey1 s Art as Experience

by Thomas J. Musial

Most critical discussions about the nature and function of art fail to be satisfying - most of all to the creative artist, and even for the equally sensitive recreative beholder of the arts. The reasons are understandable. Esthetics belongs to philosophy, and for the esthetician to show how it is reasonable that what he says about art has universal significance, he must employ philosophical methodology and yield his results in rational abstractions. But this is precisely why most attempts to explain art fail. The work of art, by its very nature, is too individual, too meaningful In its particularity to admit of philosophical definition or of categorical classification without distorting its individual integrity. While the art work itself is capable of endowing its object with universal significance, in so doing it establishes its own unique character and to abstract anything about it is, in some degree, to falsify it.

It is even more unfortunate that we have come under the influence of so many theories of art that have been formulated by systematic thinkers who have first developed a metaphysics, and then, in their attempt to have their system embrace the whole of reality, have turned to esthetics. The usual result of their work is to state what the work of art and the artistic process ought to be^ in terms that are consistent with their great system, and pass it off for what is.

I admit the rational need and value of such superstructures. Moreover, the Kants and Eegels have made substantial contributions to our rational understanding of what the artistic process is all about. But I share the pragmatist's despair with such approaches to explain those particulars of concrete experience which so deeply affect the life process in and by virtue of their particularity. Witness some of the absurdities that Plato's great rationalistic system forced him to say about art.

However modest the results may be of clinging to facts and con- creteness, of observing truth at work in particular cases, of making a simple criterion out of tracing an experiential consequence, the pragmatic methodology seems in principle best suited to deal with the problems of esthetics. Aristotle was probably the first to demonstrate the value of this kind of methodology, and what he had to say about art twenty three hundred years ago, still bears up pretty well today.

I know of no better way to illustrate this and show some actual fruits of the work of a pragmatic esthetician than to examine some of the principle ideas of John Dewey1 s Art as Experience.

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•••the esthetic is no intruder in experience from without, whether by way of idle luxury or transcendent reality, but •••it is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience. This fact I take to be the only secure basis upon which esthetic theory can build. 1

The above passage is worth reading a second time for it with- stands a good deal of careful analysis, and is fundamental to Dewey1 s, and the pragmatist's, approach to art* In order to understand the esthetic, it is necessary to turn to the very stuff of human experience which gives rise to object if ication in art.

In order to understand the esthetic in its ultimate and approved forms$ one must begin with it in the raw; in the events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man, arousing his interest and afford- ing him enjoyment as he looks and listens; the sights that hold the crowd - the fire-engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous holes in the earth; the human-fly climbing the steeple-cide; the men perched high on girders, throwing and catching red-hot bolts. The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of the housewife in tending her plants, •• the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and watching the darting flames and crumbling coals, (pp. ^-5)

I find it meaningful that Dewey posits the basis for art in some common denominator of human expedience in which all people can share and moreover find dej.ight. But every human experience is not esthetic, nor does it give rise to art. Further, since any kind of activity, thought, feeling, or sensation may be loosely called an experience, if we are to come to some understanding of what is signi- fied by the title of Dewey1 s book, it is necessary to define the term "experience11 more precisely.

Dewey distinguishes between experience which is often inchoate and consequently non-esthetic, and an experience which occurs "when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Tf (p. 35) It

John Dewey, Art as Experience. Capricorn Books, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 193*t, p.~%. All subsequent quotations from this book will list page references in parentheses immediately following the quotation.

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is a unity, a whole, an organized pattern clearly distinguished from anything else. It results when we have reached the satisfying con- clusion of bringing order to the state of tension we are always experiencing. When we play the game through, when we resolve the diminished or augmented chord, when we demand that "the rest be silence,1' we have had an experience.

Dewey views the world as "a combination of movement and culmi- nation, of breaks and re-unions. «..

In a finished world, sleep and waking could not be distnguished* In one wholly perturbed, conditions could not even be struggled with* In a world made after the pattern of ours, moments of fulfillment penetrate experience with rhythmically enjoyed intervals." (p. 17)

This is what makes esthetic appreciation-- an experience - possible.

An experience occurs when one enters into action with the conditions, the forces, of his environment. (I hate to use the term after what the sociologists have done to it, but it was Dewey' s choice, and the way he uses it, it does not have all the behavioral connota- tions.) He undergoes, he suffers, something. Dewey illustrates the form of the ordinary process by taking the simp3.e example of someone lifting a stone. He encounters its weight, shape, texture. He determines whether the stone is appropriate for the use for which he intends it. If not, perhaps a mutual adaptation will continue until the self and the object are in harmony. The experience has come to a close. What is true of this instance is no different in form for the metaphysician in his study or the mathematician solving an equa- tion-there is an interaction of the self and the world until all tension is resolved and there results perfect harmony* This fulfillment is the basis of an experience.

Yet, this fulfillment, this resolution of action in itself does not constitute the esthetic experience. It is necessary for the doer to go beyond the action and its consequences and perceive his action in its relationship to other experiences. The perception of this relationship is what gives an experience its meaning. This is the task of all intelligence. This is the joy of beholding life's unities.

For Dewey it is the task of the artist to exercise a supreme act of intelligence upon his already sensitive experience in such a way as to perceive the relationship between what has already been done and what must be done next, and to express this unity of relationships through a technical mastery of symbols. As a matter of fact, Dewey asserts that since the artist must be conscious of the way he manipu- lates his material, genuine art probably demands more intelligence than does most of the so-called thinking that goes on among those who pride themselves on being "intellectuals* !!

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The esthetic experience arises, then, from experiencing and perceiving the meaning of life's cadenced form - not an artificial order that the individual imposes upon either the world or his own experience, but a very natural and organic thing, and thus artistic form, the expression of this order, is rooted deep in the very nature of the world itself • Dewey seems to possess an almost Emersonian con- viction in nature's forms and rhythms - in the harmonious order of dawn and sunset, day and night, rain and sunshine; of the cycle of the son and the seasons, the moon and the earth; of the natural rhythms of waking and sleep, hunger and satiety, work and rest, life and death; of the longer rhythms of agrarian pursuits punctuated by the more directly perceptible operations of the crafts.

Because rhythm is a universal scheme of existence, underlying all realization of order in change, it pervades all the arts, literary, musical, plastic and architectural, as well as the dance* Since man succeeds only as he adapts his behavior to the order of nature, his achievements and victories, as they ensue upon resistance and struggle, become the matrix of all esthetic subject- matter; in some sense they constitute the common pattern of art, the ultimate conditions of form* Their cumulative orders of succession become without express intent the means by which man commemorates and celebrates the most intense and full moments of his experience* Underneath the rhythm of every art and of every work of art there lies, as a substratum in the depths of the subconsciousness, the basic pattern of the relations of the live creature to his environment, (p* 150)

Dewey enables us to come to a new understanding of what Aristotle may have meant when he said that art imitates nature; a new understanding of why all the great theogonies are composed in verse; of why Lucretius, Plato and Dante were in principle able to achieve the supreme wedding of philosophical didacticism and poetical form; of why formal ritual is so important in the life of man. Artistic form is the organic rhythm of the reality which it describes. It thus cannot be arbi- trary. Whenever it is, we immediately sense the falsity of a con- trived form. An esthetic experience is only possible when we experience and perceive the relationships among the objects and events of the specific kind of world that we have.

It may be debated at this point whether Dewey has indeed stepped beyond what his pragmatic methodology, in its strict sense, would allow. It is almost hard to believe that he has not based this hypothesis on just as much a transcendental principle as did Dante when he perceived such rhythms and harmonies in the medieval world.

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But one can come to Dewey fs defense and say that reference to a transcendent principle is not necessary, that these rhythms and unities in the natural order are common experiential facts, easily empirically verified. But the problem is not so easily answered. Again a glance at Eknerson will reveal the difficulties of trying to satisfactorily rationalize a similar view of the natural order that was based on his experience.

Dewey seems to believe that an analysis of experience is a trustworthy clue to understanding traits of the world - that particular truths can be verified by perceiving the experiential synthesis of subject and object. The test is just as applicable in physical sci- ences as in the humanitarian pursuits.

The flights of physicists and astronomers today answer to the esthetic need for satisfaction of the imagination rather than to any strict demand of unemotional evidence for rational interpre- tation, (p. 31)

Early in his book Dewey insists that "the terms natural law and natural rhythm are synonymous.11 (p. I*f9) In the concluding paragraphs of Art as Experience, he insists that because of its foundation in esthetic "experience,

...art is more moral than moralities. For the latter are or tend to become consecra- tions of the status quo,, reflections of custom, re-enforcements of the established order. The moral prophets of humanity have always been poets even though they spoke in free verse or by parable, (p. 3^8)

If Dewey is going to place such a burden on the esthetic experience, it is necessary for him to insist that the esthetic, more than any other, furnishes us with the most comprehensive way of know- ing. Here is where the pragmatic methodology begins to yield fruit. With the pragmatist's disdain for merely verbal "solutions11 to problems which never have much consequence in fact, Dewey insists that experience is a composite of all of man's faculties, and it is the shortcoming of traditional philosophies (the rationalists, the idealists) , to compartmentalise by definition the different ways in which a man comes to know.

There are not intrinsic psychological divi- sions between the intellectual and the sen- sory aspects; the emotional and ideational; the imaginative and the practical phases of human nature, (p. Zkj)

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It is helpful to make such distinctions for the purpose of rational understanding, but in actual practice, such distinctions cannot be drawn* Hence, it becomes clear that what Dewey means by the esthetic experience is precisely that kind of encounter in which all of man's faculties are involved uneff ected by any pre-conceived scientific methodology. In the true esthetic experience, the whole man, more or less naturally and spontaneously, is in communion with the objective order*

For the uniquely distinguishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly the fact that no such distinction of self and object exists in it, since it is esthetic in the degree in which organism and environment cooperate to institute an experience in which the two are so fully integrated that each disappears, (p. 2^9)

Since there is such a fusion of self and object, such a nconaturalfl (to use, I think, a scholastic term) experience of the fullness of being (not in an absolute, but in a particular sense, for Dewey), I feel that Dewey has a good argument for giving the esthetic experience such responsibility. Further, since the art work is the objective embodiment of this unified experience, it too must be a complete unity. There can be no subject/object, observer/observed, matter/form, expressive-object/theme-expressed dualities. Since these distinctions are not categories of experience, they are not meaningful when applied to the art object. The work of art must be considered the chief example of experience where it is pure in the sense of being realized without distraction or distortion. Art is what experience in a humanly successful life, in a genuinely free society, would always be. In that sense and in that sense only may art be said to be a flight, graded or sudden, to fullness of experience, not a retreat from it.

It is indeed unfortunate that modern critical tendencies to- gether with socio-economic factors have tended to remove art objects from the center of human experience. The pragmatic esthetician cries out in despair: "Since the actual work of art is what it does with and in experience ...it is necessary to see it as such if we are going to understand anything about it.11 (p. 3)

So extensive and subtly pervasive are the ideas that set art upon a remote pedestal, that many a person would be repelled rather than pleased if told that he enjoyed his casual recreations, in part at least, because of their esthetic quality, (p. 5)

Today the art work seems to have assumed an autonomy that would have horrified any generation up to at least the seventeenth century. We have limited art to the gallerys and the concert halls. The crude

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paintings of the pre-historic cave man were just as functional as the Parthenon was for the ancient Greek. The practical and the esthetic were at one, heightening the sense of actual life. The very useful artifacts of the Ancient, of the Mediaeval, of the Renaissance man are curiously sealed away in our museums. Modern artists themselves have tended to remove art from life and place it in the realm of the independent and esoteric by all his personal airs of eccentricity. They have separated the fine from the practical arts, and have built their own cult around the former, believing that they own the exclu- sive rights to the esthetic. I personally know many artist s~ writer a- who feel it is a degradation of their special calling to do such things as cut a lawn, repair their own car, or build a cabin. But for Dewey the esthetic belongs to every living man, and

esthetic experience is a manifestation, a record and celebration of the life of a civilization, a means of promoting its development, and also the ultimate judgment upon the quality of the civilization, (p. 326)

Yes, Dewey has shown us afresh something that the Renaissance mind more than any other since the height of Athens in the fourth century before Christ was constantly and acutely aware of - that art and life are inseparable. It was Dewey fs fervent desire to re-awaken this awareness - for reasons that are obvious in a democracy - in the minds of twentieth century Americans.

It is curious and regrettable that Dewey fs initial efforts in

pragmatic esthetics to date have produced no serious following. The American philosopher has opened a new door on an exciting world - if we will but take his lead and enter.

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Aesthetics and Pragmatism: John Dewey's "Art as Experience"