Response to Professor Bayles BY C . M . SMZTH

It is undeniably gratifying that Professor Bayles should have taken my con- tribution seriously enough to respond to it. Unfortunately, his comments appear to be about what he thinks I should have done but didn’t, or should not have done but did - in other words, a plain misunderstanding. That this is so is evident from the prominence Professor Bayles assigns to the well-worn citation from Dewey, ending with “. . . the idea that the artist does not think as intently and penetratingly as a scientific inquirer is absurd.” Clearly, Dewey refers here to the artist’s doing and undergoing, to the creative process. While this is another important theme in Dewey’s aesthetics, it has little if any relevance to the problems I had singled out: the nature of the percipient’s aesthetic experience and the status of the work of art as a public object, the Deweyan conception of which seems to lead to excessive subjectivity and purely private, non-sharable experiences which do not accord well with many of Dewey’s general objectives and with the function he claims for art.

Perhaps further clarification is in order. One can easily concede the essential soundness of what Dewey had to say about the experience of the artist, particularly his insight that the artist employs a respectable sort of intelligence, that he works toward a definite outcome in full awareness of the relationship between doing and undergoing, and that his experience does not differ much from ordinary intelligently directed endeavors in its combi- nation or alternation of the cognitive and the affective. It is also admitted that helpful methodological suggestions for the conduct of art instruction ( i.e., the production of art objects by students) have been derived from Dewey’s description of artistic activity. Lastly, as I have tried to indicate (pp. 137-138), it is quite possible to read Dewey as having meant that the percipient’s ex- perience should be exactly like the artist’s. Now by assimilating aesthetic to artistic experience and asserting that the latter is essentially the same as ordinary problem-solving, the continuity which Professor Bayles insists upon might be preserved. But, as I have attempted to show, this results in an un- workable aesthetic, unworkable particularly from the point of view of the educator concerned with art appreciation. For, as many aestheticians have been saying for a good number of years, how the artist goes about producing a work of art cannot serve as a model for attending to it properly in aesthetic experience.

In short, since the “discontinuity” of which I spoke (and I might have used a less offensive word, “disparity” perhaps?) is not between the artist’s engagement with his materials and everyday experiences, it cannot be argued away by reference to the creative process. What Professor Bayles has con- firmed, though, is what any reader of Art as Experience has come to appreciate: the richness and complexity of the work whose many facets cannot be treated adequately in a single article.

C. M . SMITH is currently book review editor for The Educational Forum. She was formerly a research assistant with the Philosophy of Education Project at the University of Illinois.

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