The Aesthetics of John Dewey and Aesthetic Education

EDUCATIONAL THEORY

The Aesthetics of John Dewey and Aesthetic Education

BY C. M. SMITH

The cohesiveness bctween John Dewey’s educational prescriptions and his general philosophy - his views on liberalism, democracy, intelligcnce, science, individualism, etc. - has been noted frequently enough. What will be attempted here is an investigation into the question whethcr a similarly close connection can be presumed to exist between Dewey’s aesthetics as elaborated in Art As Experience1 and the kind of recommendations for aesthetic education that would be consistent with his broad educational objectives. To put it differently: The aim is to see whether the main thrusts of Dewey’s thinking on art coincide with his major philosophical concerns and, if not, to indicate possible consequences of discrepancics found for the theory and practice of schooling in the arts. The project calls for an effort to gain some understanding of certain key points in Dewey’s aesthetic theory, and it is to this end that the greater portion of the present discussion will be directed.

ART IN EXPERIENCE

There is at least one respect in which Dewey quite obviously intended his aesthetics to be of a piece with his general philosophy: his emphasis on cxperience. For him the main task of aesthetics was to rcstore continuity between art and “thc everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.”2 “Philosophy of art,” he said, “is sterilized unless it makes us aware of the function of art in relation to other modes of experience, and unless it indicates why this function is so inadequately realized, and unless it suggests the conditions under which the office would be successfully perf~rmed.”~ As it develops, Dewey actually accomplished more than he set out to do, at least if one takes seriously-as many have-one of the main emphases in his thinking on art. For instead of merely reconnecting art to everyday living, he allowed it to be absorbed by experience. This, at any rate, seems to be the import of his saying that “art is a quality that

lJolin Dewe), ‘41 I As f i ; x p i k t r (Sew Yoth: <,ripiicoin Roobb, G. 1’. Piitnani’s

Vbid., p. 3. 3Ibid., p. 12.

Sons, 1958; first published 1934).

131

permeates e~perience,”~ and “art is a strain in experience rather than an entity in i t~elf .”~ Several ramifications of this assertion might be elucidated by following Dewey’s methodological recommendation to go “back to experience of the common or mill run of things to discover the csthetic quality such experience possesses.”~

But here Dewey is not to be taken at his word, for the experience he bids 11s examine is not at all “conimon run.” Rather, it is to be an experience and as such must meet a variety of quite stringent rcquirements. Granted, then, that art can be found only in a n experience, what is it? The most liberal interpretation would bc to say that the aesthetic is whatever allows experience to qualify as an experiencc, but this still leaves a number of possibilities, and it is not clear whether the whole rangc of then1 would amount to a specifica- tion of necessary and sufficient conditions. It may seem picayune to demand rigor where Dewey perhaps did not wish to speak with great precision. However, if it is thought that art is an clement or strain in experience rather than an independent entity and if, as educators have been quick to point out, important pedagogical considerations would derive from this view, it should be helpful to be able to isolate just what it is that is aesthetic about an experience, The candidates for “the acsthetic” may be roughly categorized under two rubrics: structural or formal properties of the experience itself and qualities of the subjective reaction of the individual having the experience (though Dewey would probably not have countenanced such a “separation”).

To begin with formal properties : “h expcricnce,” explains Dewey, “has pattern and structure.”’ This apparently is what Dorothy Walsh has singled out as definitive of the aesthetic, for she says: “In discussing the nature of an experience, Dewey is intent on emphasizing the fact that an experience may be said to have ‘aesthetic quality.’ Certainly when and if an experience has a marked formal pattern of inception, development and consummation, the claim that it has aesthetic quality is plausible enough.”8 Also on the formal side would be the relationship between the objective components in an experience, specifically, the intimate interconnection of means and ends. Dewey states, “all the cases in which means and ends are external to one another are non- esthetic. This externality may even be regarded as a definition of the non- esthetic.”g Conversely, then, one of Dewey’s several definitions of the aesthetic would be the integration of means and ends in an experience.

The means-ends continuum seems to have a subjective or emotional counterpart in the fact that in an experience no conscious awareness exists of the discrete phases the individual passes through while living the experience.

elbid., p. 3%. slbid., 1’. 330.

TIbid., p. 44. SDorotlly Tl’alsh, Lilerature rri i t l Aizozcledge (Middleton, Conn.: TVcs81e)an IJaivcrsity

9l)ewey, op. [it.. p. 19H.

Wbid., 17. 1 I .

I ’ l ~ ~ S S . 1969), p. 84.

AESTHETIC EDUCATION 133

An experience is “not just doing and undergoing in alternation, but consists of them in relationship.”lO It may not be far wrong to say that the aesthetic in experience is constituted by a feeling of unity or unification.

However, elsewhere in Dewey’s writing on art it becomes evident that this emotional or intuitive unity is brought about not so much by the seamless flow of doing and undergoing as by the presence of “pervasive quality.” The importance Dewey attached to this notion cannot be escaped, and more will have to be said about it further on. D.C. Mathur has taken pervasive quality to be the “key concept and guiding thread of Dewey’s theory of art.”ll But like so many others, it is a very vague idea, for pervasive quality is sometimes described as that which causes attention to move in a unified direction instead of wandering12 yet it is also something that pervades every part of the whole as well as being the quality which uniquely identifies the experience as a whole. At still other times Dewey seems to have thought of it as a general feeling tone or emotional background against which experience plays itself out. Whatever its nature, there is some justification for saying that “pervasive quality is esthetic quality.”l3

But is it? For still another interpretation is possible according to which the aesthetic is not so much a unifying presence throughout experience but a feeling of consummation that concludes the experience. Mathur, for instance, decided that “the final phase of the ‘moving’ experience is what Dewey calls its ‘consummatory phase’ and, as such, is aesthetic in nature.”14 Dewey has described this feeling of relieved tension as the “closure of a circuit of energy.”l5

The point of it all is this: Since Dewey’s definition of art as a quality or strain or element in experience is the more popular one, there is some virtue in showing that what is popular is not necessarily simple and clear-cut. Any educator subscribing to the notion that aesthetic education will take care of itself as long as the student has experiences containing the requisite aesthetic element (or elements ) might still be in a quandary concerning the conditions that would need to be satisfied. Whether any educator would be well advised to take his cue from this particular emphasis in Dewey’s aesthetics is a question yet to be discussed.

AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

In addition to what will hereafter be referred to as his “popular version,” Dewey also elaborated a narrower and more specialized view of aesthetic experience which he resorted to on the many occasions when he spoke of art not as a quality in a n experience, but more in terms of “the arts” in the

N b i d . , p. 44. l lD. C. Mathur, “A Note on the Concept of ‘Consummatory Experience’ in Dewey’s

12Dewey, op. cit., p. 192. 13Richard J. Rernstein, fohn Dcuiev (New York: Washingion Square Press, 1%6), p. 96. 14Mathur, op. ciL., p. 226. IsDewey, op. cit . , p. 41.

.4csthetics,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXIII, No. 9 (April 28, 1966), p. 225.

134 EDUCATIONAL THEORY

generally accepted sense. D. W. Gotshalk believes that Dewey was perhaps not sufficiently aware that he did have two quite distinct conceptions of aesthetic experience. “He moves in and out of them noiselessly,” Gotshalk says, “as if they were the same, now emphasizing one, now the other. . . . Dewey seems torn between the recognition that fine art is different and an egalitarian horror of anything different, and he adjusts his sights to one view or the other, and gives changed meaning to the concept of the aesthetic according to the situation or context in which he is operating.”’G It will be one of the objectives of the remaining pages to support the contention that, had Dewey recognized how far he had moved toward positing a discontinuity between art and everyday events in his separate versions of “aesthetic experience,” he might also have realized the subversive consequences ( subversive, that is, of some of the emphases usually associated with his educational thought) of the special way in which he characterized that difference.

It is now time to adjust one’s sights to the identifying marks of what Dewey would call predominantly or distinctively aesthetic experience, which in its pure form is experience involving works of fine art, This is how he defines it: “In a distinctively esthetic experience, characteristics that are subdued in other experiences are dominant; those which are subordinate are controlling - namely, the characteristics in virtue of which the experience is an integrated complete experience on its own account;”l7 and “the factors that determine anything which can be called an experience are lifted high above the threshold of perception and are made manifest for their own sake.”l8 It was pointed out previously that the factors which cause any experience to be an integrated experience are “the aesthetic”; this is now dominant, controlling, and enjoyed for its own sake. Because of the ambiguities surrounding “the aesthetic” in experience, it is somewhat difficult to know just what is being lifted above the threshold of perception; but this is a minor point. What deserves special attention is that in distinctively aesthetic experience, as it highlights what is aesthetic in an experience, the emphasis is on qualities. And this opens up a topic -the qualitative - which cannot be treated here with anything approximating the philosophical sophistication it demands. But neither can it be sidestepped, for Dewey is emphatic that “the material of the fine arts consists of qualities; that of expcrience having intellectual conclusions are signs and symbols having no intrinsic quality of their 0~n.’’19

One of the most important distinctions between ordinary and dominantly aesthetic experience, then, is in the “material” used by each, that of distinctively aesthetic experience being qualities. It sounds convincing, because one normally thinks of art as being properly attended to in terms of its sensuous, formal, expressive, etc., qualities. Yet this is not necessarily what Dewey had

16D. W. Gotshalk, “On Dewey’s Aesthetics,” Tlie Jonnzal of Aesthetics arid At t Ciiticisi ir , Vol. XXIII, No. 1 (Fall, 1964), pp. 131.138; ieprinled in Ralph A . Smith (r~l.) Aesthptirs and Criticisrrt in Art Education (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966), p. 142.

17Dewey, op. cit., p. 55. W b i d . , p. 57. IgIh id . , p. 3 8 .


in mind, although in his more relaxed moments he does speak of works of art as “having such and such qualities. Generally, though, he wanted qualities to be understood as belonging to a context rather than “residing” in the mind or in external objects. This would allow qualities to cut across one of the dualisms he despised, viz., the separation between the mental and the physical. As properties of situations qualities would not be exhausted by sense qualities or primary or secondary qualities; they could also make their appearance in the guise of tertiary or pervasive qualities20 In all these forms, one would assume, qualities could come to constitute the material of dominantly aesthetic experience. Important is that one is led back once more to the concept of pervasive quality.

It is by virtue of being “pervasive” that quality can exercise control over experience, and whenever the development of an experience is found to be controlled through reference to quality, that experience is dominantly aesthetic in nature.21 An explanation of this somewhat foreign notion might be that in distinctively aesthetic experience, the qualitative tone determines what elements may or may not be incorporated into that experience; and as anything in- congruent with pervasive quality is rejected, it could be said that quality guides and directs that experience. This also makes sense out of Dewey’s saying that in dominantly aesthetic experience characteristics which are ordinarily subdued are controlling. For intellectual experience, while it does of course operate against an emotional background, keeps the qualitative subordinated and is controlled by its materials, i.e., the import of signs and symbols. Further- more, it is now seen why Dewey can maintain that in distinctively aesthetic experience aesthetic quality may become manifest for its own sake. If the qualitative aspect of experience exercises a control that excludes everything extraneous, then certainly quality may penetrate to the foreground of awareness and be consciously enjoyed.

To assert that specifically aesthetic experiences are instituted for the purpose of enjoying qualities leads to still another distinction between them and ordinary experiences. This is the matter of interest or result. Experiences “are dominantly intellectual or practical, rather than distinctively esthetic, because of the interest and purpose that initiate and control them. In an intellectual experience, the conclusion has value on its own account. It can be extracted as a formula or as a ‘truth,’ and can be used in its independent entirety as factor and guide in other inquiries. In a work of art there is no such single self- sufficient deposit.”% What Dewey has recognized here is a peculiarity of experiences with art sometimes referred to as “self-enclosedness” or “disinter- estedness”; namely, the fact that such experiences are sought for no ulterior reasons and that nothing further is expected to come of them. But this perfectly respectable phenomenon must raise some misgivings when a genera1 good- making feature of experience - as understood by Dewey - is called to mind. And this is precisely the fact that experience, to be valuable, should leave a

2QBrrnstein, op. cit., pp. 94 95. ZlDewey, op. cit., 1’. 50. zzlbid., p. 5 5 .

136 E ~ u C h T r o N A L THEORY

“deposit,” something that can provide a starting point for or material in new experiences, something enabling the individual to move onward and outward, Measured against this standard, would not distinctively aesthetic experience mark a point of stasis, disruption, discontinuity? Would not education designed to lead to such experience violate Dewey’s stipulation that education should be growth for further growth? In other words, do not Dewey’s specifications for predominantly aesthetic experiences render these experiences somehow incom- plete or inferior according to the criteria for good experiences that hold elsewhere in his philosophy?

This negative judgment might be avoided if a case could be made that what Dewey calls “distinctively aesthetic experience” is not merely experience with a special emphasis, though still subject to the canons applicable to good and complete experiences in general, but that it is a special kind of experience with unique characteristics and benefits. It is now suggested that arguments in favor of such a view could be derived from the preceding discussion. That is to say, Dewey’s “dominantly aesthetic experience” might be shown to be sufficiently different in significant ways - in material (qualities); in interest or purpose (enjoyment of qualities for their own sake); in control (by pervasive quality); and in outcome (none beyond the consummation of the experience) - to be called a separate sort of experience, aesthetic experknce. (The phrase will be used in this sense throughout the remaining pages.) As such, aesthetic experiences would be distinct from intellectual or practical experiences that may attain to the status of an experience when they feature elements or qualities which Dewey has chosen to call “the aesthetic.”

It would now appear that what had been called the “popular version” of Deweyan aesthetics does not go far enough educationally. ( I t will be argued later that it also contributes to some gross misunderstandings.) For if there is such a thing as an aesthetic experience which is sufficiently different from and more subtle and complex than “the aesthetic” in un experience, then pro- viding consummatory experiences in schooling cannot be all there is to aesthetic education. In what sense it would be deficient as art education should become clear once Dewey’s vision of the special office of the fine arts is recognized.

THE WORK OF ART

An evaluation of Dewey’s assumptions about the purpose and function of art presupposes some clarification of his conception of the work of art; this will be attempted presently. Yet to say that discussion now shifts from aesthetic experience to the work of art proper would be misleading in a fundamental sense, because for Dewey these are not strictly separate entities. As Monroe C. Beardsley puts it, Dewey was “haunted by the spectre of separations and oppositions,” and this to such an extent that he often deplored “even distinctions that have been carefully won by long thought, and have proved helpful to man~.”~3 Whether Dewey’s attempt to obliterate the distinction between

asMonroe C . Beardsley, Aesthetics front C l n c t i c d Greece lo the Previ11 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 337.


the work of art and aesthetic experience supports Beardsley’s contention remains to be seen.

And it is a difficult issue, because as so often in his writings, Dewey uses the phrase “work of art” in both the ordinary and his own special senses, hence misinterpretations are bound to occur. Generally, though, there is little doubt that for Dewey the work of art is not what issues from the hands of the artist; that is only the “art object.” This object is but one ingredient in an experience which he describes as follows: “. . . the uniquely distinguishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly the fact that no . . . 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.”24 This experience is the “work of art,”25 because “a work of art no matter how old and classic is actually, not just potentially, a work of art only when it lives in some individualized experience,”26 Perhaps Dewey merely wishcs to point out that works of art which, after all, have been framed for aesthetic perception rather than for consump- tion or cogitation, have to be experienced actively to fulfill whatever function they may have. But what he really seems to be getting at is that the art object has to be experienced in a special manner: “For to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience. And his creation must include relations comparable to those which the original producer underwent.”27

This last statement will be shown to contain a tension which in itself is one of the difficulties with Dewey’s aesthetics. Furthermore, it will be argued that attempts to resolve it in either of two possible directions will lead to additional problems, especially for the educator. The opposition is between the exhortation that the experience be the pcrcipient’s own creation and the insistence that it also be somehow analogous to the experience of the artist. Now “comparable relations” is probably vague enough to co-exist with “create,” but elsewhere Dewey also asserts that “‘we lay hold of the full import of a work of art only as we go through in our own vital processes the processes the artist went through in producing the work.”28 Thic is specific enough to

24Dewey, op cit., p. 249. %In the remainder of this essay, the phiase “worh of n i t ” will he cnclosrtl in quotation

26Dewey, op. cit., p. 108. I t must be admitted that doubts can be raised concerning how far Dewey actually meant

to go toward identifying the work of art with aesthetic experience, for on p. 326 he says: “Art is a quality that permeates experience; it is not save b y a figure of speech, the experi ence itself” (emphasis added). However, he also insists that “As a piece of paichment, o f n~aihle, of canvas, it remains . . . self-identical throughout the ages. But as a work o f ait , i t is iecreated eveiy time it is esthetically experienced.” p. 108 And even mote emphat idly “The product of art- temple, painting, statue, poem-is not the work of art. Thc work tdkes place when a human being cooperates with the product so that the outcome i\ an experience that is enjoyed because of its liberating and ordered properties” p. 214. I t is this latter interpretation of “work of art” which is hasic to Got3halk’s critqiie whose general thrust informs much of the present argiiment.

n i a i k \ whenever it is used in this special sense.

271bid.. p. 54. 281bid., p. 325.


require reduplication of the artist’s pulse rate and heartburn, insofar as they were caused by his creative travail. In any case, one way of interpreting Dewey is that the beholder is urged to recreate imaginatively the original artistic process. But this imposes a task which some aestheticiansZ9 have thought to be as impracticable as it is irrelevant to the apprehension of aesthetic value. It is impossible because the finished product rarely contains clues unambiguous enough to permit a retracing of the creative process, And it is a fairly irrelevant undertaking because a work of art is always more than a record of its inception and development; how it was brought into being does not indicate a great doal about how it should be evaluated. Enough has been said to suggest that attempts to resolve the aforementioned tension by stressing recreation, that is, by assimilating aesthetic to artistic experience, are likely to send art appreciation and the teaching of art off in an unpromising direction.

However, many educators are wont to emphasize “creativity” even in aesthetic experience, and they seem to have a spokesman in Dewey when he says that the beholder “must create his own experience.” The question is, how is this to be understood? Surely Dewey could not have meant to make the utterly trivial assertion that the percipient’s experience must be his own; it could not be anybody else’s. The emphasis therefore seems to lie on creating the experience. This, of course, contradicts the notion that the beholder re- creates the artist’s experience, for no one should be urged to be original while paying close attention to what another person has done or intended to do. One must therefore assume that the beholder is given a free hand with the work of art and is encouraged to manipulate the elements of his experience toward a novel outcome, the “work of art.” That the “work of art” is thus created anew by each percipient in his interaction with the art object seems also to have been D. W. Gotshalk‘s understanding of Dewey. Gotshalk points out that on this view there can be, strictly speaking, no one work of art; it will be something fundamentally different for each beholder, and a multitude of “works of art” will result from the experiences different persons have with the same art work. However, this leads to an outcome that should bave been uncongenial to Dewey. For each beholder of a particular work “will be sealed off in his own private aesthetic world, and discussion, communication, sharing, cooperation, and all the other fine things Dewey wished to cmphasize as essential to high-grade human experience, will break down here, since on this level a common basis in a common work of art on which they might rest is non-existent.”30 High-grade educational experiences with art would, of course, be similarly called into question.

Perhaps the problem can be traced to certain misconceptions about the nature of art objects which Dewey may have entertained. One concerns the

29A well-known argument against the idea that what the artist intended and went through is of importance to appleciation and criticism is found in William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley, “Thc Intentional Fallacy,” Chaptri 1 in Wimsatr, Thr Verbal Icon (1,esington: University of Kenturhy Press. 1954) .

sOGotshalk, op. cit, p. 144


importance of the public character and objective features of art works. While Dewey was of course correct in pointing out that aesthetic experience should require active engagement on the part of the percipient, he failed to realize that this is not incompatible with Gotshalk‘s assumption that an art object “becomes actually what it is as a work of art only when we appreciate it properly, and that proper appreciation is not remaking the work of art but apprehending what it actually is as made.”31 It could be that Dewey was led to underestimate the status of the work of art “as made” by his general theory of experience. For him an object is always external and unformed prior to being experienced; it acquires meaning, becomes an object of knowledge only as the individuaI interacts with it during the experiential process. Now it is possible that despite his obvious sensitivity to art, Dewey classed art objects with external objects, that is, things to be subjected to transformation. But there is reason to doubt that works of art are rightly thought of as unformed external things in quite this sense, for they already represent unique transformations of antecedently existing material. Moreover, they may be embodiments of meaning and should be respected as such rather than being reworked capriciously or “creatively.” An implied educational requirement would be that students be induced to pay close abtention to works of art as made and be taught the skills and procedures requisite to doing this properly.

In short, it is suggested that Dewey, through his commitment to the pre- eminence of experience as the creative transformation of the externalIy given, elevated the percipient’s experience to “the work of art.” Consequently, he may have tended to leave the public status and objective character of works of art in some doubt. “As a result,” says Gotshalk, “he makes the crucial difference hetween the physical and the artistic to lie in the seclusive and esoteric and private experiences of individual percipients. This is idealism come home to roost with a ~engeance.”3~ But when aesthetic experience, and hence the “work of art,” are thought of as being excessively private, subjective, and un- sharable, they also become uneducative in a Deweyan sense. Somewhat similar conclusions will be among the outcomes of a closer inspection of another of Dewey’s focal concerns, one which had been present tacitly in much that went before. This is the concern with immediacy, a topic which will also provide the appropriate context for indicating - and questioning - Dewey’s ideas about the function of art in the lives of men and society.

IMMEDIACY: VALUE, MEANING, COMMUNICATION

The quest for immediacy has been called one of the main motifs of nine- teenth century thought.33 It was evident, for instance, as a thread running through much of Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy in the form of “firstness” or “suchness,” and Dewey extended this preoccupation into the present century. Immediacies are final, indivisible; they are intuited, felt, or “had”; in short,

slfbid., p. 145. Wbid., p. 146. JBBernstein, op. cit., p. 89.


they are qualities. It is indispensable to an understanding of Dewey’s philosophy to keep in mind that qualities are directly or immediately experienced but never directly known. In fact, Dewey’s distinction between “knowing” and “having” can hardly be overemphasized. The objeotive to be pursued now is io bring the knowledge/immediacy dichotomy into relationship with the claim Dewey wants to make for the function of art and with his contention that “it cannot be asserted too strongly that what is not immediate is not esthetic.”34

The first move is a step backwards to what had been called the “popular version” of Deweyan aesthetic experience. Since what is not immediate cannot be aesthetic, “the aesthetic” in an experience must be felt, had. Earlier it was shown that in Dewey’s view the consummatory phase of experience was one of the loci of the aesthetic; it deserves another look. This consummatory phase does not merely terminate experience. As a problem is solved, continuity restored, and an apprehension of the interpenetration of means and ends (unity) achieved, a positive emotional reaction occurs. Consummation, in other words, is experienced as a good, a value. This is another significant feature of Dewey’s thought: values too are immediate, had (as distinct, of course, from the methodic, mediated, deliberate value inquirg aimed at testing alternative goods and creating conditions that make the enjoyment of value experiences possible). Now when Dewey maintained thaft anything to be aesthetic must be immediate, he naturally did not mean to say that everything which is immediate is therefore aesthetic. Hence there is no theoretical constraint for holding that values, being felt or had, are always aesthetic sorts of goods. Yet there are two reasons for suggesting that, although “immediacy” could be considered as merely subsuming concepts such as the aesthetic in general, the qualitative, pervasive quality, aesthetic unity, consummation, aesthetic value, etc., the re- lationships among these concepts are too unclear to guard against simple equations between “the aesthetic,” “immediacy,” and “value.” One is that Dewey himself does not seem to have been overly careful to map the distinctions between these terms, The other reason is that on at least one ocoasion Dewey apparently did identify value with art or the aesthetic. This, at any rate, seems to be the most sensible reading of his celebrated statement: “Art, the mode of activity that is charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed possession, is the complete culmination of nature, and Ithat] science is properly a handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue.”35 “Art” in this context is perhaps best understood as not merely the “fine arts,” but as prototypical value experience in general, i.e. that for the sake of which all theoretical, scientific, and practical endeavors are ultimately undertaken:

MDewey, up. cit., p. 119. W b i d . , p. 26. Dewey is here quoting from his Expeiience and Nature (Chicago: The

Open Court Publishing Company, 1925), p. 358. A similar interpretation of “art” as par- adigmatic value experience may be derived from Dewey’s s,tatemeiits in Art As Experience: “In art ‘the forces thalt are congenial, that sustai,n not this or that speci,al aim but the processes of enjoyed experience itself, are set free. Tha t release gives them ideal quality”; and ‘ I . . . art operates by selecting those potencies in things 1)y which an experience - any expcrience - has significance and value.” p. 185.

things immediately had and enjoyed, things such as consiunmations, values, and - it now appears - meanings.

But before exploring the consequences of including meaning among the things immediately enjoyed, it might be instructive to pause and see what the confusion of concepts hinted at above has done to certain views of education in the arts and of education in general. Accepting the notion that the aesthetic is an element in experience (but generally ignoring Dewey’s strict requirements for an experience), that it is a value or good, and that it is immediate in the sense of being other-than-knowledge, many educators have been led to identify “the aesthetic” with “the non-cognitive.” Hence the non-cognitive has come to acquire both, the honorific status of being aesthetic and a presumption of being valuablc. Thus providcd with an aura of respectability, the non- cognitive has been further extended in at least three educationally interesting ways. First of all, it has been linked to “the qualitative,” a concept itself closely connected with immediacy and, through a conversion of dubious validity, with the aesthetic. And great hopes have been held out for the educational benefits of allowing free rein to qualitative thinking, problem-solving, rtc.36 Secondly, the non-cognitive has been interpreted as “the affective.” Consequently, whatever is affective in experience or in an educational situation comes to be seen as acsthetic and thereby as valuable, which in turn has led to the notion that it is at least as important to encourage the student to emote as it is to make him think. Thirdly, the non-cognitive is frequently equated with the “non-verbal.” From this it is concluded that some of the educationally most valuable experiences are of such a kind that it would be vain to try to “verbalize” them; and, by only a slight further extension, “the aesthetic” becomes whatever cannot be made sense of otherwise. Art education, when taught as a separate subject, is claimed to train students’ affective responses by involving them in qualitative operations. But it is particularly suitable for “the non-verbal child; for, though he may never learn his Three R s , his education is still doing him a great deal of good (other-than-knowledge=the aesthetic= something valuable and desirable) and no further trouble need to be taken about him. All this by way of proposing that an unwise emphasis on certain unclear aspects of Dewey’s aesthetics, in conjunction with the “popular version,” can easily lcad down the path of least cognitive strain to the kind of anti-intellectualism and educational irresponsibility that would have appalled Dewey.

A return to the subject of meaning in aesthetics focuses discussion once again upon aesthetic experience in the narrower sense recommended previously. It is now seen that capacity to provide immediately enjoyed meanings is still another feature which sets aesthetic experiences off from ordinary ones. Dewey believed that unmediated or intuited meaningfulness is exemplified by

36Atnong thoughtful delincations of this \ iew a ~ ‘ e : David T’V. Eckcr. “l‘lic A4rtistic PI-ocess as Qualitative Problem Solving,” The Jourr~al of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XXI, No. 3 (Spring, 1963) ; Nathaniel L. Champlin, “John Dewey: Beyond the Centennial,” Educa- tional Leadershi@, Vol. XVIII, No. 1 (October, 19GO) ; and Francis T. Villemain, “Delnocracy, Education, and Art,” Educatio?~al Theory, Vol. XIV (Janaary, 1964), pp. 1-14, 30.

thc work of ait. Words and syinhols, he says, represent objects and actions in the sense of standing for them, just as a signboard points to its referent. But meanings belong to words and signboards only by convention, not intrinsically. In art, by contrast, meanings “present themselves directly as possessions of objects which are experienced. Here there is no need for a code or convention of interpretation; the meanicng is as inherent in immediate experience as that of a flower garden.”3’ It is through its ability to embody meanings immediately that art can perform the functions Dewey would assign to it. “Men associate in many ways. But the only form of association that is truly human . . . is the participation in meanings and goods that is effected by communication. The expressions that constitute art are communication in its pure and undefiled form.”3* And again: “In the end, works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication betwcen man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of e~perience.”~~

These specificatioiis for thc pui poses of ail are indeed comrncndable. Still, the matter cannot be allowed to rest here. The question is not whether works of art do have or communicate meanings -this is a perennial issue in aesthetics which certainly cannot be settled within the present context. Rather, the problem is whether this position is compatible with both, some of the main principles of Dewey’s aesthetics and some of the chief emphases of his general and educational philosophy.

An initial doubt concerning art’s ability to provide for unhindered and complete communication can be raised simply by recalling the uncertain status in Dewey’s thought of the work of art as a public object. If the “work of art” is what each percipient freely creates during his interaction with the art object, it should follow that the resultant meaning of the work is whatever it means to that person at that particular time. It is not easy to imagine how anything this ineffable and irretrievable could contribute to community of experience and a sharing of meanings.

However, the more interesting question is how well Dewey’s conviction that the arts are the only media of pure and undefiled communication can maintain itself in the face of his unrelenting differentiation between knowledge ( associated with intelligence, mediation, inquiry, scientific or experimental method, instrumentality, etc. ) and the aesthetic ( associated with immediacy, the qualitative, felt value, intrinsic meanings, etc. ).

It might be helpful to inquire first just what Dewey could have meant by saying that in art “meaning is as inherent in immediate experience as that of

37Dewey, Art As Experience, p. 83. 38Ibid., p. 244. 391bid., p. 105. One may wonder how this could be reconded with the assertion that

“scientific method is the only authentic means at our command for getting at the significance of our everyday experiences in the world in which we live.” Dewey, Exeerieme and Educa- tion (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1956), pp. 111-112. If works of art are the best instruments for the communication of meaning, it should also be possible to say of them that they provide a way of getiting a t the significance of everyday experience. But what would this do to the primacy of scientific method?


a flower garden.” How can a flower garden have meaning? A particular garden may mean a great deal to a particular person because of the memories and images it evokes. But this is meaning by association; it is neither immediate nor intrinsic. One could also say that a flower garden means something like “man creating beauty in the environment.” Yet this type of meaning is arrived at via a cognitive process: the garden is recognized as an artifact and then classified among those transformations of the environment which can be said to manifest a concern for beauty. And there is nothing unmediated about this, either. There may be no sense at all in which a flower garden can be thought of as possessing meaning, and Dewey may simply have chosen a poor example. -4 flower garden, like most natural and man-made objects and like many works of art, can certainly be enjoyed aesthetically in terms of its design, color, and other sensuous and formal properties without being expected to have or express meaning. Therefore, a first modification of Dewey’s sweeping claim for art’s benefits might be to propose that communication of meanings is not a legitimate function of all works of art.

This is not to deny that many works of art, the great masterpieces among them, are frequently conceded to have, express, or convey messages, import, meaning, etc. Dewey says this meaning is immediately enjoyed, hence would not be knowledge; he also contends that there is to be participation, sharing, communication. How can this be? The difficulty is not easily enunciated in an age so hospitable to talk about ‘<meaningful experiences.” But supposing that all beholders of a particular work of art came to agree that it was “meaningful,’’ perhaps even very much so, what are they sharing? What has been communicated? It is now suggested that “is meaningful” can also translate into “has a meaning,” “means something,” and that this is a more apt conception of “meaning” in art, A work of art is not really characterized by a free-floating, generalized meaningfulness. It does not just mean; one usually feels that it has the capacity to enrich awareness in a more or less definite way (though one would not expect to find an exact verbal equivalent of that meaning). Furthermore, since Dewey insists that the meanings which come through in experiences with works of art are capable of being held in common, he should also have wanted to admit that persons who share in being affected in certain ways by certain art objects would wish to converse about the enlightenment they have received, to communicate and compare their ideas. All of which adds up to a first question: If it can be asserted that art brings about fairly specific forms of enlightenment which, moreover, must at least convey an impression of intersubjectivity to arouse expectations of communication and sharing of experiences, how reasonable is it to deny art status as some form of knowing?

The same question may be approached via a somewhat different route by asking how sensible it is to insist that meaning in art is immediate, i.e., unmediated and non-cognitive. Many philosophers of art would agree with Dewey’s view that immediacy is what contrasts the aesthetic most strikingly with ordinary experience, hence is a feature to be retained at all theoretical cost. But there is another way of thinking sometimes identified as “semiotic

acsthetics,” of which a vastly simplified version follows. -4ccording to this position meaning is not an attribute of a work of art in the way its colors, shapes, textures, etc. are. What a work of art expresses or means somehow (just how is another puzzle in aesthetics) emerges from the totality of its properties and is such that any major change in the work‘s qualities would also produce a change in meaning. It is because meaning or expressiveness is so closely dependent upon the work‘s perceptual features that it has come to be thought of as intrinsic, as a possession of the work; there is, in other words, no consciousness of having gone “behind the work to what it stands for. And it is of course true that, since each work of art is individual and signifies whatever it does mean or express through the unique constellation of its qualities, it is most unlike a character in a rule-governed symbolic system such as discursive language, as was duly noted by Dewey. Nonetheless, as the work of art is other than that which it refers to, expresses, or exempli- fies metaphorically, there is enough conceptual distance in thc aesthetic situation to satisfy the logical requirements of symbolization, though it is symbolization of a peculiar kind.40 But a symbolic process is a cognitive process. Consequently, the apprehension of meaning in art is thought of more appro- priately as being mediated, cognitive - the result of an attempt to make sense of a datum in the environment -than as being of the nature of an immediate, emotional, or reflex-like response to a stimulus.

Since, as mentioned before, the debate concerning immediately embodied versus mediated meaning (or no meaning at all) in the arts is very much alive, it would bc arbitrary to insist that Dewey ought to have taken a stand on the cognitive, mediated side of the issue. However, thcre is some justification for holding that this would indeed have given him a more cohesive aesthetic, and it is found in his allegation that works of art are the most complete form of communication. “To communicate” is what is sometimes called a success verb, for it makes sense to say that a person is conimunicating only when his message is being received and comprehended. Successful and complete communication, then, would seem to involve a sender, a message, a medium, and a recipient of the message who comes to understand its import. It is suggested that this fairly extended chain of relations is explained more plausibly in terms of stages in a process than in terms of a series of unrelated flashes of immediate awareness. Furthermore, if communication is not complete until understanding has been accomplished, there ought to be some method for ensuring success and criteria for determining it. But “method and “criteria” are concepts commonly associated with deliberate, mediated activities. The point here is not to argue that methods or procedures of verification similar to those in the sciences should or could apply to the arts -that there is or should be a way of determining unequivocally what a work of art means and a procedure for making sure everyone “gets” that meaning. Rather, the inten- tion has been to suggest that Dewey’s strong emphasis on complete communi-

40.4 recent work on the symbolic processes in a r t is Nelwn Guod~iidii’\ Laiigucigues of A? ts: A n App?oach t o (I Theory of Sjvnbols (Indidnapolis: T h e Bobhs-~ler~i l I Company, Inc , 19668).

cation through art is somehow at odds with his eqiially strong emphasis on the immediacy of the aesthetic.

To summarize the arguments in connection with immediacy: If art is to perform the communication function Dewey has assigned to it, it is difficult to see how it can be said to do so successfully without some form of mediution being involved. And if art does in fact operate in the manner described by Dewey, i.e., if it allows persons truly to share in meanings, then it is difficult, to see why this may not be considered as a form of knowing. Briefly, Dewey’s wise and generous view of the role of the arts in the life of the individual and society echoes the general tone of his educational and philosophical concerns but seems to be undermined by his separation of art from knowing.

In conclusion, there are two areas in which the foregoing explorations might have some significance for aesthetic education. First is the practical conduct of art teaching. It was found that on the popularly accepted view of Dewey’s aesthetics, art is dissolved into experience in general, thus no special subject of instruction seems to remain. In Dewey’s more specialized version of the aesthetic, the work of art as a public object disappears in an experience so private and esoteric that it is hard to estimate just what pedagogical nieasures could be of much help.

Secondly, there is the matter of a workable philosophical foundation for aesthetic education. If the preceding pages have succeeded in making any point at all, it should have been to discourage attempts at constructing a theoretical base for teaching in the arts upon Dewey’s thought. For it would be exceedingly difficult to make such a foundation consistent with three equally “Deweyan” aspects: 1) The major emphases in his social and educational thought, specifically a ) intelligence and its instrumental nature; b ) growth and the continuity of experience; c ) the acquisition of shared meanings through deliberate and intelligent social interaction. 2 ) Some of the theoretical presuppositions of his aesthetics, specifically a ) the claim that the aesthetic is not a form of knowing; b ) the essentially discontinuous, self-enclosed nature of aesthetic experience; c ) the private, subjective character of the “work of art” and its meaning. 3 ) Many of the insightful things Dewey has written about the arts which have not received attention here and which are not necessarily in harmony with either 1) or 2), above.

Documents

The Aesthetics of John Dewey and Aesthetic Education