John Dewey (1859–1952) was an American philosopher in the tradition of pragmatism, known in particular for his work on democracy and education.
1 Dewey’s foil
It can often help us make sense of what a thinker is up to if we try to construct the view of someone with a different view than they have. That then becomes useful because we can ask why you would hold one or the other view, that is, offer explanations. Doing all of that is then useful for the many sorts of things we do in philosophy:
- describe
- explain
- object
- respond
Throughout, let’s try to make out what the alternative views might be to Dewey’s various claims, and use that to think about how we might describe, explain, and otherwise interpret his claims. (“Foil” in this context is a metaphor taken from fencing; a “foil” is a fencing sword, specifically the sword of your opponent.)
2 Art and experience
Dewey is going to claim toward the end of our reading that “the aesthetic is no intruder in experience from without, whether by way of idle luxury or transcendent ideality,” and that this is “the only secure basis upon which esthetic theory can build” (p. 46). Let’s try to reconstruct why he might think that, and why you might think something different.
Aesthetics is the study of certain sorts of experiences. The reason it is often confused with or taken to be equivalent to philosophy of art is that the experience of art is prototypically the sort of experience aesthetics is interested in. Aesthetics is interested most generally in two sorts of sensory experiences: attraction and repulsion. Aesthetics is interested in why we get absorbed in certain experiences, repelled by others.
Now consider the experience of watching a movie. You go into a large room, they turn out the lights, and you stare at a wall for two hours. (Another example to hand: You sit in front of a screen for hours playing video games.) That absorption is exactly the sort of experience interesting to aesthetics, and there are almost no experiences like it. Hence the focus on art (movies, video games, etc.). (I want to note as a possible part of this question or as a possible second question: What is the nature of doomscrolling? An excellent artifact of our time in part because it marries both the absorbed attention of the, say, classical experience of art with a slightly repulsive dimension.)
Now, again very generally, you could imagine at least two views about what’s going on when we watch a two-hour movie. One—which, frankly, has an intuitive ring to it—is that it’s a sort of “vacation” from experience. Whatever ordinary life is like, the two-hour movie is not like it. We shut ourselves down, turn off our ordinary perceptual and intellectual apparatus. We make an “escape” from our “real” lives. Let’s call this the escape view: Aesthetic experience is an escape from average or everyday experience, or: Aesthetic experience is not experience in the same way.
Another view—which is Dewey’s view—is that the two-hour movie is an experience like any other. Not “like any other” as if there were no difference; but “like any other” as in: is structurally identical to. For example, cycling through the woods and through an industrial park are both cycling, even though we might regard the first as more pleasant than the second (or vice versa, as the case may be). We might also say that the two-hour movie is a good or better or more enjoyable or more relaxing or more interesting experience than, say, waiting for a bus for two hours, but both are nevertheless experiences. In contrast to the “escape” view of aesthetic experience, let’s call this the continuity view.
Dewey gives, in that passage quoted above, a theoretical justification for treating the experience of art like other experiences. First he mentions the “theory” of the aesthetic. In this case, “theory” would mean answers to questions like: What is the nature of aesthetic experience? (“Aesthetic experience” might name particularly the absorbed attention of watching a movie or playing a video game for two hours or doomscrolling.) And Dewey thinks a theory of the aesthetic is only possible if aesthetic experience is, in some structurally significant way, experience like any other.
I think there could be a few reasons why Dewey thinks a theory of the aesthetic is only possible on the continuity view.
- One is the more or less default empiricist presuppositions of philosophy and science. Empiricism is the view that knowledge is derived from sense experience. If aesthetic experience is something inaccessible to us through sense experience, it should be strictly unknowable, or a ‘theory of’ it would be impossible.
- Another is the idea that, if aesthetic experience is not continuous with experience, a theory of aesthetic experience would not be a theory of aesthetic experience, and we would have to instead conceive of aesthetic experience as of a category of activity entirely unlike experience in general, which seems an extravagant demand.
In any event, Dewey’s strategy here isn’t going to be to argue just that aesthetic experience is experience like other forms, but that experience (of a certain though significant and general sort) is infused with the aesthetic. In other words, he’s not just going to claim that watching a movie is structurally like watching paint dry or waiting for a bus, but that there is something about watching paint dry or waiting for a bus that is similar to, and has the specific sort of content of, the experience of watching a movie.
3 Two conceptions of experience
Dewey begins by distinguishing two conceptions of experience from each other:
- experience as a continuous ‘flow’, and
- experience as a discrete unity.
The first results from interaction between “live creature and environing conditions.” See the yellow and green passages on p. 35.
Philosophers tend, in Dewey’s view (here’s the foil), to treat experience as if it were all the first sort (a flow) but in our everyday speech we often describe experience in terms of discrete unities. (Note incidentally how this claim evidences a particular, though ambiguous, philosophical attitude toward the relevance of ‘the everyday’: that it is either the thing to be explained by philosophy or that its ‘truths’ are of philosophical value.)
What are the alternative views of experience? One alternative view would be the idea that experience is merely passive, a record of perception, a sort of image or picture of reality. Dewey by contrast makes experience something that a living organism does.
4 Art, thought, and action
Experience in a sense is discrete, Dewey claims, but the constituents of that discrete unity flow into each other—as in a work of art, or in a conversation. See pp. 36–37.
Thinking, too, is its own sort of experience, but Dewey thinks it is not so unlike sensory (or ‘aesthetic’) experience than perhaps it seems. See p. 38.
Indeed, Dewey goes on to argue, thought has the same sort of structure as aesthetic experience. See the green passage on p. 38. There is an “emotional quality” that goes together with reaching a conclusion; “no intellectual activity is . . . an experience . . . unless it is rounded out with this quality” (p. 38).
The same goes for acting. It too has an “esthetic quality” (p. 39), especially when it is of the sort that is neither aimless nor mechanical. See p. 39. Such actions—perhaps the bulk of them—are ‘aesthetic’ because what gives them the sort of unity they have is a ‘sense’, a certain ‘emotional quality’.
The idea here seems to be that thinking and acting, and experiences generally in the discrete sense of “having an experience,” have a certain intentional structure. Intentional in this context means that they involve an aim or goal and the achievement of that aim or goal. Intentional acts become experiences through achievement of their aims. The sense of ‘wholeness’ joining intention to achievement is, Dewey is arguing, an aesthetic quality. The sense of ‘satisfaction’ that makes an experience an experience is not something we merely sense with our senses; not something we infer logically. It is aesthetic in nature, that is, it has to do with modalities of absorption. What makes an experience an experience is its having this aesthetic quality.
Thought and action thus seem to admit of a structure that is constitutively ‘aesthetic’. See p. 40. When thoughts and actions achieve completeness, they do so in terms of the achievement of a ‘sense’. “The esthetic,” Dewey claims later, “is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience” (p. 46).
What are the alternative views? The simplest one is: that these three are different realms or sorts of activity; that
- thought is intellectual activity, guided by the truth; and
- action is practical activity, guided by the good;
- art is aesthetic activity, oriented toward the beautiful.
We reason and think about and conceive of each of these in distinct ways, in reference to distinct sorts of objects (sensible as opposed to intelligible objects, say), with a view to different ends, under entirely different constraints and for entirely different reasons, and so on.
5 Art as intellectual activity
The Deweyan gambit is that thought, action, and aesthetic experiences are all experiences, all have a similar structure. See pp. 43–44. Note how Dewey ties this to that basic idea from the beginning in the passage at the end of the first paragraph on p. 44.
By the same token, making art involves as much in the way of deliberation and thought as intellectual activity. See these two passages on p. 45 and p. 46.
What are the alternative views? Probably the chief alternative view has to do with what we call artistic genius. ‘Genius’ in this context doesn’t mean (in fact doesn’t mean at all) ‘being very intelligent’. It means: producing something of intellectual or aesthetic value without knowing why or how. Another view might be that making art isn’t intellectual work at all but work of the senses or the imagination.
6 Art as experience
Dewey has previously claimed that an experience, experience in the sense of “having an experience,” is something that achieves its sense through completeness, and that this completeness is an “aesthetic quality.” See p. 49. Dewey argues here that artistic production and appreciation are joined in a single “aesthetic” act.
- The artist makes; making art is doing something. See p. 47
- The critic or audience appreciates. See the green passage on p. 47.
- The artist’s production and the audience’s appreciation are joined in the relation of doing and completing that is distinctive of experience. See the passages highlighted on p. 48 and p. 49.
Thus, we wouldn’t say, for Dewey, that we have experience of a certain sort so much as we would say that the aesthetic dimension of experience is brought into a certain intensity and focus through art—both through the artist’s bringing a certain, say, artistic vision into existence, and through the audience’s appreciating that artistic vision as such.