Dewey's Aesthetics: The Tragic Encounter with Nature

Dewey's Aesthetics: The Tragic Encounter with NatureAuthor(s): Bertram MorrisSource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter, 1971), pp. 189-196Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/429537 .

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BERTRAM MORRIS

Dewey's Aesthetics: The Tragic

Encounter with Nature

DEWEY INTENDED his philosophy to be the philosophy of experience, and its ripest fruit is to be found in his philosophy of art. Art is the distillation of experience in its most intense and clarified and vivid form. It is the mirroring of man in his emergence from nature-not the alone man, nor the man of the lonely crowd, but the man richly endowed with qualities and attitudes that come from human and civic associa- tions. Dewey's major task, I believe, is to accommodate within experience the contin- uum of man from his physical to his social being. In pursuing it, Dewey is forced to assault ordinary language with the result that his philosophy has variously come to be regarded as nonsense, romanticism, or, by the more sympathetic, as one of the great contributions to intellectual thought-this last being the opinion I share. My intent, however, is not to eulogize but indicate the sweep of his thought and to point up the crucial elements that make it not only ago- nizingly difficult to understand but deeply rewarding.

Even if it is correct to assume that the theme most central to Dewey's philosophy is that of the "continuity-discontinuity" of experience, no one has been more aware of

BERTRAM MORRIS is professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. His most recent book is Institutions of Intelligence, published by the Ohio State University Press. Delivered at a symposium on Relevance of John

Dewey Today, Antioch College, May 19, 1969.

the fragmentation of experience than Dewey, and no one has more consistently applied his talents for overcoming fragmentation than he. Bitterness, strife, divided al- legiance, man and nature, God and man, inner and outer, spiritual and physical, yes, even aesthetic and nonaesthetic-the list of divisiveness is without end. The seamless web of nature turns out in men's lives to be thoroughly seamy. Why? Have we miscon- strued experience? Do men impose discon- tinuities upon nature? Or, is nature that way in itself? Is man condemned to a futile task of trying to bring together disparate things that refuse to be brought together? Does intelligence require him to reject all that is old for the sake of a brave new world? These are some of the many perplexities that clearly underlie Dewey's philosophy.

Fortunately, we may limit consideration of these perplexities to ways in which they figure in his philosophy of art. From this somewhat narrowed point of view, we may hope to see how they bear upon the interre- lations of art and life, and especially as art and life gain meaning by complementing each other. Then it may be easier to observe that in relation to life art is precious, not because it is art but because it exercises the human powers of perception and mem- ory and imagination, and creates a link in the present between past and future. True, art is to be enjoyed with abandonment and irresponsibility, but only as constituting a



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romantic phase of the fugitive present, which soon calls for a more considered sense of human fulfillment. Idle joy has a way of passing over into serious engagement which rejuvenates the past and also welcomes a future. James Joyce comes to a similar posi- tion when at the conclusion of A Portrait of the Artist he wrote: "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Even if Joyce never succeeded in forging such a conscience, he certainly did welcome life. In this success, he never lost track of what the artist is, however trying it might be to follow the mazes he constructed. Yet for all our assent to the term experience, there still remains much that is opaque in it.

Dewey attempts to clarify the term by dis- tinguishing between "experience" and "an experience," and this is a help. Experience refers to the actual connections in human encounters, whereas an experience is that limited, intense perception which has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and which he identifies with art. A sizeable problem of Dewey's aesthetics is to discern how he copes with the relation between the two. At the outset of Art as Experience, he excites the reader by insisting that the task of the philosophy of art is "to restore continuity between refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the every- day events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience" (p. 3). And restating the same notion, he defines the problem of the philosophy of art to be "that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living" (p. 10). In thus suggesting what aesthetics is all about, he immediately sets the reader on the track of the instrumentalistic point of view, namely, that point of view which acknowledges experience in whatever mode it appears, and which con- stantly searches out the connections that make it meaningful.

To proceed we need some strategy by which we can come to the fullest possible understanding of what the instrumentalistic aesthetic has to offer, both with respect to the first rate, that is, philosophical, ques-

BERTRAM MORRIS

tions it copes with and with respect to what counts as appropriate answers to them. The questions are three. How does art relate to nature? What is aesthetic about art? Why is art a social phenomenon? There lurk exas- perating difficulties in each of these questions, and in searching for answers we discern unsuspected depths of experience, leading us all the way from complex meta- physical issues about the physical world, to the need for a reexamination of what we can possibly mean by something's being unique, and, finally, to a host of subtleties pertaining to that kind of life that we call culture. Even though volumes are required to set forth the elaborations of these questions, I shall nevertheless try to restate them briefly as they relate directly to Dew- ey's philosophy of art. The questions are each of a different order, yet they all con- tribute to the continuity which is the seamless web of experience and nature.

I

How does art relate to nature? A traditional answer is that art copies nature. Plato said it, and Dewey believes it too, but not the way Plato believed it. Plato was probably thinking about the kind of fore- shortening that Apollodorus discovered in making a two-dimensional bunch of grapes look like a three-dimensional bunch.

Possibly, however, Plato meant something different, such as some kind of "inner mimicry" which would relate experience to nature. But if he did, he certainly did not give us any clear idea of what this could mean. Dewey could have meant that a copy is a kind of inner mimicry, but he clearly rejects this language because he does not like to talk about inner and outer, since for him they do not make sense. They are not like the inside and outside of a rubber ball, which do exist, but like the inside and outside of an idea, which do not exist. Closer to what Dewey actually means is that art sets up rhythms in man, which are also found in nature. And this is so, but they are not copies, for perception is an activity, not a copy of nature. Or even if it were a copy, we should note that what we respond to in art is not, say, to the sea, but to the omi-



The Tragic Encounter with Nature

nous rhythm of A Rough Sea by Turner or to the playful rhythm of La Mer by De- bussy. Our response then is not to what Turner or Debussy may have taken as his model, assuming that there was such a model in nature. Rather it is to the painting or to the music, and this is not the model but the thing itself. So again it appears that we have not really made much headway by assuming that art is a copy of nature.l

But even if there is a sense in which art corresponds to nature as its model that somehow gets incorporated in it (and we really cannot rule this out), there is another kind of copy or mimicry that defi- nitely we cannot dismiss. This is a mimicry that is in the piece of sculpture or the painting or the dance that we cannot perceive without responding to it rhythmically. As Dewey notes when the artist works his material, "There are [found] the recurrent beats of patting, chipping, moulding, cut- ting, pounding, that mark off the work into measures" (AE, p. 148). In music there are what Sigmund Spaeth called "the foot-lis- tener." And so on in all the arts. Why "so on"? In a sense the answer is too simple. All the arts have media, and the media are always physical, and physical things are always rhythmical-simply because they are. Light and sound come in vibrations and so do all the other physical events that figure in perception. And art is at bottom percep- tual (aesthesis); there is no getting away from it. Therefore, since art as experience is a copy, an inner mimicry, of the physical world, of which man is an indissoluble part to be sure, man contributes to it because he is an animal, and animals perceive and consequently respond selectively to the world. There is more to the story than this, but this is a big chunk, and we had better stop to ponder before we go on.

What about the dogmatism that nature is inherently rhythmical? Never mind. It is. All the evidence says so. What if the evidence turns out to be mistaken? Then we shall just have to recant and rewrite this part of our philosophy later on. What about perceptions being selective? Well they are! You cannot perceive something without its being something-neither can a

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bear nor a mouse nor a mosquito. There- fore perception is that way, and we must let that matter rest here. But there remains another matter: even if we know about perception and it is what animals do, that does not make it art, for animals are not artists. This objection has more substance. It raises a whole new set of questions that need to be coped with in quite another way. We shall turn to them in a moment. But before doing so, we owe it to Dewey to see what his analysis was intended to do.

His analysis is meant to tell us something about the physical world, and it does, as we discover in a brilliant chapter in Experi- ence and Nature called "Nature, Life and Body-Mind." Nature and living things co- operate, not because there is a design or purpose in the world but because living things are physical things, and consciousness or perception is a complex function of the physical world. The analysis is much too detailed to reproduce here. The curious student must dig it for himself. But we can say here that it represents Dewey's attempt to explain the kind of continuity that exists between living and non-living things and he means to show that though they are different, they are not so different that there is no real correspondence between them. Per- ceptions do copy things, not literally but through a sort of one-to-one correspondence that provides a new dimension to the world. If the account he gives is in princi- ple correct, it is also an authentic philosophical revelation-man and nature are so a part of each other that what we experience is nature. True, nature is not experienced except in experience, but we have to settle for it on these terms, for there really are no other terms. Our sense of natural piety had better accede to whatever mani- festations of the interactions and undergoings and impositions that appear, because there is nothing more-except, of course, future interactions and undergoings and impositions. Protagoras was right: "What appears is!"

Now there is still a difficulty we encounter in this view, namely, experience does not always make sense. No philosopher, except possibly Tertullian or Kierkegaard or J. P. Sartre, can quite condone this. Nor



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can Dewey. Therefore, he seeks a model for experience in its most meaningful form, and that model is history. History has a development from obscure beginnings; it unfolds, however many surprises it may contain; and finally it has a conclusion. There are many difficulties about what the unfoldings are, but we cannot possibly cope with them here.

Instead, I wish to point to the purest form in which Dewey represents the process, which for him is the art-process. It too poses a question about continuity-discontinuity which we may consider to be the question: What is aesthetic about art?

II

Art, we have noted, is the intensification, clarification, and vivification of experience. In its intensity, it will not allow distrac- tions, for then it would be condemned to dissolution. In its clarification, it excludes all that is extraneous to its end, for otherwise it would be so muddied as to be not art but chaos. In its vivification, the artist so concentrates the inner relevancies of the work that it shines forth with that luminos- ity that is traditionally regarded to be dis- tinctive of art. The description of art as intensification, clarification, and vivification of experience is, of course, very general. It is in fact too general except for one purpose: it allows the term aesthetic to de- note much more than just the fine arts. The broadened use remains, however, to haunt us just because it permits us to speak, on the one hand, of art as fine art and, on the other, as at least a potential quality of all experience, whether or not ordinarily asso- ciated with art. I suggest that for the present we allow the ambiguity to stand, and that we first turn attention to the narrower interpretation of experience, and only after- wards look to the broader interpretation, which includes the full range of the instrumentalistic theory of art.

Dewey really does regard a work of art as having a beginning, a middle, and an end, however much his account seems to differ from the Aristotelian. We find clear illus- trations of this in the temporal arts. A Bach fugue begins with a statement, proceeds to

BERTRAM MORRIS

its counterstatement, is elaborated in its development, and comes to a resounding finality in its tierce de Picardie. In the opening scene of Lear, Shakespeare has Gloucester broach the difficulty of dividing the king- doms according to each of the dukes' appropriate share, only to have the issue immediately confounded by the degree of love which each of Lear's daughters confers upon him. The scene is further confounded when Cordelia confesses that, unlike her sis- ters she "cannot heave [her] heart into [her] mouth." From these beginnings, the drama appears increasingly inauspicious, becoming more and more complicated, al- most unmanageable, until the very end when Lear finally expostulates: "A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all! I might have saved her; now she's gone forever." And then a plaintive, "Cordelia, Cordelia! stay a little"-Cordelia whose "voice was ever soft, gentle and low-an excellent thing in a woman."

The musical and the literary arts lend themselves to an unfolding, because they are intrinsically temporal. We might add that the film too is of this sort, except for a film like 8 1/2, which demands of us a radical effort of reconstruction to bring any order to it at all. Yet, never mind. Paintings and sculptures do not unfold in the way that fugues and dramas do. There is no starting point except as our own somewhat arbi- trary involvement makes one. From then on, the degree of arbitrariness recedes until it finally approaches zero in the full perception of the picture or the sculpture as the artist has presented it to us. Art as form Dewey interprets as art that is fully per- ceived in a complete experience. Percep- tion, as we have previously noted, is therefore not an instantaneous event but a complicated process come to fulfillment. Hence, perception contains antecedents which, car- ried in the stream of consciousness, make experience far richer than we can ever quite realize. How does this bear upon our question: What is aesthetic about art?

The instrumental view regards art as aesthetic because it is a process of a very special kind. It is experience that, begun from initial rumblings or forebodings or uneasi- ness, in general from some kind of urgency,




sets up tensions that engage us in an object through which we find satisfaction. It is aesthetic, first because it lives in the immedi- acies of experience, second, because the involvement forces us to respect the course which the handling of the medium imposes on us, and finally because consummation (fortunately, only relatively consummatory) is effected in the object itself. The continuity is thus realized in a form that we can designate as "an experience," for it has a completeness, integrity, and finality that mark it off from everything else in the world. In short, it has individuality and individuality of this sort is aesthetic-at least, Dewey would have us believe so. The achievement of this form of aesthetic continuity results in what Dewey calls a "quality"; and as a quality of experience, it con- stitutes his considered definition of art. Hence, art is simply defined as a quality of experience. Art is much more, but at least it is this.

Art is more because a quality is of something, and this is no less true of a work of art than it is of the yellow moon. The question we raise is: What sustains the quality? What is the complex that makes the quality possible? It is either something beyond this earth or it is something on earth. Dewey declares that:

Ultimately there are but two philosophies. One of them accepts life and experience in all its uncer- tainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities-to imagination and art. This is the philosophy of Shakespeare and Keats. (AE, p. 34)

The stuff of art is life and experience. The task of the artist is to transform it into art. To do so, he converts the living processes, which are man's tragic encounter with nature, into a new form. He makes experience whirh is otherwise dim and opaque and listless into a form intense and clear and vivid. He is a teacher.

The artist teaches, not by moralizing but by disclosing the human situation. Man's urgent search is for self-awareness, and art is one of the ways in which he discovers himself. The artist, more sensitive to man's situation and more articulate in defining it in his work, helps men to a keener sense of

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the world in which they live and which in an important way is one of their own making. Art is born of experience, and for the most part comes out of travail: it is a work of art. Likewise the task of appreciating is not ordinarily easy, however much it involves intrinsic gratification that cannot be postponed. Both creation and appreciation are difficult, because the artist says something new in a language that is also new. This adds up to the fact that he teaches by making images of a very special sort.

The images that the artist makes arise from his encounter with nature, that is, from experience. But they are not, as we have observed, copies; they are creations, his transformations of raw experience. They are transformed by his vision in the language he knows best. The vision and the language are of course not separable. What he sees clearly is what he can express, and he expresses it in words, sounds, pigments, stone, film, or any other materials he has mastered. Finally, we observe, the transfor- mation, being a creation, is the unmasking of the conventionalities of social life. Con- ventionalities are the commonplaces of life, already expressed in a people's institutions. In unmasking them, the artist carries us beyond the aesthetic, presumably without sac- rificing the immediate aesthetic qualities. These qualities are defined as immanent unfolding of experience which entails pro- gressive gratification and which ends as consummatory experience. But by reason of the artistic encounter with nature, art becomes social. Thus a whole new set of issues is raised, issues which Dewey neither can nor wishes to avoid.

Dewey's virtue in coping with the form of continuity that is purely aesthetic resides in his dogged insistence that art is first and fundamentally a process, and only secondar- ily a product. The part-whole kind of analysis of traditional, idealistic aesthetics is junked, except for a few scraps he over- looked. The part-whole analysis is too much like the jigsaw puzzle, in which the parts are ready-made, just waiting to be put into place. Dewey's insistence upon the aesthetic process is not idealistic but naturalistic: it is an urgency born of experience and



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demanding a completion that can come only from authentic creation.

The question then arises whether art is unique or universal. Dewey actually says that it is both and neither (AE, pp. 91-4, 247). Art is instanced only in the immedi- acies of unfolding experience-an experience-and that is always a person's experience. Yet its purport is surely transpersonal. Art does have a logic, an inevitability, whose vehicle is the medium. The medium controls the outcome and thus assures finality in art. Exegetically speaking, I would suggest that Dewey believes the uniqueness of art to consist in the directly experienced movement which is prefigured in the medium transformed into the work of art. And again, despite the freshness and novelties that appear in art, universality consists in the inevitability displayed in the ordered outcome of a work of art. Dewey thus rein- terprets the idealist's "concrete universal" in terms of a process the unfolding of which progressively becomes consummatory experience. Hence, by subjecting the concrete universal to the immersion of time, he transforms art from a timeless entity into a timely product. This product can then be correctly regarded as a natural phenomenon. Thus Dewey insists that immanent aesthetic continuity is an indispensable feature of art. The advantage of this notion of the inner continuity of art is that Dewey can now avoid many of the old quandaries of aesthetics, such as the intolerable one of matter and form. In turn, of course, he creates new ones. But at least this turn dis- closes the stuff of which real philosophy is made.

Recognizing the considerable advance Dewey has made in the field, I quarrel with him only when he abandons the authentic instrumentalistic point of view and substi- tutes for it a formalistic one. When he does this, he forsakes the "inclusive naturalism" that justly occupies such an important posi- tion in his considered philosophy, such as one finds in Experience of Nature.2 His inclusive naturalism is precisely that which makes social life integral to the definition of nature. In his terms, the social is the inclusive category. His authentic instrumen- talism harvests his maturest insights by

BERTRAM MORRIS

showing how art is intrinsically social. Hence, the third form of continuity, that between art and society.

III

Art, Dewey insists, is inherently social. This insistence is a real challenge. Why is art social? What is meant when art is said to be social? How can we account for some continuity between the aesthetic process which is individual, and the social which is trans-individual? These are far-reaching questions. At best we may clarify them, for we surely cannot answer them definitively.

I am pleased by the arrangement of squares in a work by Vasarely. What is so social about this? In an oblique way, Dewey answers:

In experience, human relations, institutions, and traditions are as much a part of the nature in which and by which we live as is the physical world. Nature in this meaning is not "outside." It is in us and we are in and of it. (AE, p. 333)

Yes, Vasarely surely came out of a society and learned from others and he presents his paintings to the world. Yet we may still be puzzled why these squares of his are social? I think Dewey means to say that art is social because it reflects the human condition. In some sense surely the squares do, but in the sense of providing real illumination on man's condition-this still leaves us, or at least me, puzzled. Does art-all art-reflect the human condition? Keats does and Shakespeare does and Anouilh does, and many others do. But do they all? We may not be prepared to answer this question. And even if all art is social in some very general sense, there is this specific sense in which Ernest Bacon does, and Victor Va- sarely does not, reflect the human condition. We need to be clearer on what we mean by social.

If by social we mean some authentic in- sight into our lives and the cultures of which they are a part, then by social we surely do not mean simply that something pleases us, or even, as Kant insists, that it pleases us objectively. Rather we seem to mean that the artist is in touch with men's problems and the quality of issues they raise in their lives in society. If everything




were basically frustrating, men would be driven not to art but despair. If, on the other hand, everything were harmonious, then men would declare, as the Balinese are said to have declared, "We have no need of art; we do everything well." Between these two notions of society apparently lies the kind of society Dewey talks about-a society too good to be entirely degrading and too bad to be quite satisfactory. Between total alienation and total well-being, men are restless and inquiring and needing change.

The nagging question then is how can art serve its social function without losing its character of being art? This question mystifies us, and rightly so, because, losing its autonomy, art then appears as a social dogma justifying the ways of art to society. The confusion results from the fact that the question has subtly been reversed, and therefore does not allow a clear answer. Rather, we need to see the question in the light of man's being a social animal fundamentally and that the social at its very best is intrinsically artistic. The question then is how to understand art in the context of society, and not that of how to understand society in the context of art. The former allows us to see art as a natural phenomenon; the latter makes art precious in the form of the fine arts, and then seeks a context for understanding the fine arts when that context has already been obliterated by the method employed. Consequently the method negates the naturalistic point of view in favor of aestheticism, whether of the Crocean or psychedelic variety.

From the naturalistic point of view both nature and man become "naturalized"- and this naturalization is more than a pun. However much it is an obstacle to human activity, nature is not just "out there." It is of course out there in an alien way, but there is required all the ingenuity of the scientific enterprise, superimposed upon common-sense deliverances, to make it resil- ient to human powers and sensitivities. Out of this process come the arts of man, both practical and fine. The genius of art is a gift of the gods only as men are themselves a part of nature capable of coping with other parts. The genius consists precisely in the process of naturalizing both, such that

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man and nature are complements. The gift of the gods is presented in the form of experience-aesthetic experience-by which men come to a more perfect union with themselves and their environment. In the process, it is to be observed, men achieve a real sense of the social, which itself is a manifestation of art. This, I take it, is Dew- ey's way of envisioning the continuity between art and society. Speaking for himself, he says:

The problem of conferrng esthetic quality upon all modes of production ... is a human problem for a human solution; not a problem incapable of solution because it is set by some unpassable gulf in human nature or in the nature of things. In an imperfect society-and no society will ever be perfect-fine art will be to some extent an escape from, or an adventitious decoration of, the main activities of living. But in a better-ordered society than that in which we live, an infinitely greater happiness than is now the case would at- tend all modes of production. We live in a world in which there is an immense amount of organization, but it is an external organization, not one of the ordering of a growing experience, one that involves, moreover, the whole of the live creature, toward a fulfilling conclusion. Works of art that are not remote from common life, that are widely enjoyed in a community, are signs of a unified collective life. The remaking of the material of experience in the act of expres- sion is not an isolated event confined to the artist... it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity. (AE, pp. 80-81)

Dewey makes art the naturalization of life because, as Ruskin would say, it makes man whole. Naturalized art cannot be decoration, which conceals substance; it cannot reside in inner feeling or be the "fanning of the soul's sleep," which are a repudiation of the art work; and it cannot exist as an es- sence or eternal object, because it would then have no local habitat or relevance to life. In other words, he makes art the completion of life, which is living at its utmost. As he says,

Art is the extension of the power of rites and ceremonies to unite men, through a shared cele- bration, to all incidents and scenes of life. This is the reward and seal of art. That art weds man and nature is a familiar fact. Art also renders men aware of their union with one another in origin and destiny. (AE, p. 271)

Dewey's point of view, finally, is that of Promethean man set in the context of what



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seemed to him to be the peculiarities of the Experience, p. 150; hereafter referred to in text as twentieth century. AE). Yet he decries the Freudian appeal to the sub-

conscious, which he insists explains nothing of art. 2 Elsewhere I have called attention to the discrep-

ancies between his naturalism in Experience and Nature and his formalism in Art as Experience. A

1Dewey sometimes suggests that art does copy major factor in them, I conclude, is traceable to the nature and that there is a deep subconscious in man influence of Albert Barnes upon Dewey's later aes- that primitively relates him to nature (cf. Art as thetic.



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Dewey's Aesthetics: The Tragic Encounter with Nature