Art as Experience

Carl H. Flygt

May 2007

John Dewey (1859-1952) turned from an early Hegelianism to a pragmatic, experimentalist stance toward experience and logic, and the ultimate view that “the social is the inclusive philosophic idea” (Stuhr, p. 440). At the University of Chicago (1894-1904) he founded a progressive ‘laboratory school,’ “a vehicle and focus of cultural inquiry” (Stuhr, p. 433) which gained world fame and led to productive scholarship by Dewey and others. His middle and later work was concerned to clarify a philosophy of experience set in contextual situation. All philosophy, says Dewey, is constituted by its location in history and culture, in society in other words, and is really nothing but attempts to solve the problems of experience within that situation through drawing empirical distinctions and exercising criticism.

As a result of this situation of background and context, together with a certain tendency to overlook it as essential to what philosophy really is, there arises the “analytic fallacy” (Stuhr, p. 437), a philosophical practice in which “distinctions or elements that are discriminated are treated as if they were final and self-sufficient,” and in which “a principle valid under specifiable conditions is perforce extended without limit” (Stuhr pp. 437-438). Thus, for example, philosophy finds itself inquiring into the nature of the universe as a whole, or into reality as an unconditioned unity. Such inquiry, for Dewey, is “without intellectual import” (Stuhr p. 438) and “creates artificial problems which deflect the energy and attention of philosophers” (Stuhr p. 435). Ultimately, philosophy should not be a study of philosophy, but “a study, by means of philosophy, of life-experience and our beliefs about and in this experience” (Stuhr p. 435).

Experience for Dewey is radically unified. Not only are spurious ontological distinctions between subject and object, knower and known and nature and culture rejected, but even the biological distinction between organism and environment. “Natural operations like breathing and digesting, acquired ones like speech and honesty, are functions of the surroundings as truly as of a person. They are things done by the environment by means of organic structures or acquired dispositions” (Stuhr p. 438, emphasis added). Things done by the environment? What has an environment ever done? What autonomous willpower does it have? Perhaps Dewey is suggesting a form of panpsychism here, in which the spirit of God animates all movement and all sentience. But Dewey would reject any attribution of panpsychism to his way of thought as an invented ontology. He has no wish to reify his conception of the environment, or to give it existential status. Instead, he wants to reform philosophy and language use according to an artistic sense, and to reconstruct culture along naturalistic lines

The key to artistic sense is qualitative unity. Dewey calls this type of unity artistic form (A.E. p. 141), a unity in which parts, either material or experiential, become mutually adapted to one another to constitute a whole. Their transport and assembling is a function of the imagination, the “miracle of mind” (A.E. p. 44). The resultant whole is what Dewey calls an experience, a meaning that the organism enjoys or suffers in interacting with events and objects that surround it. Any experience, when it rises to the level of self-conscious unity, embodies the attitude of perceiver and maker of meaning simultaneously. It is composed of practical activity that qualifies what is perceived. This combination of the faculties of perception and practical action is what Dewey understands by “esthetic,” and it is this combination through which experience of any sort, even the pedestrian and prosaic, becomes a unity (A.E. p. 42). “To esthetic experience the philosopher must go to understand what experience is” (A.E. p. 286).

To qualify what is perceived, and to give value to it, either truth or falsity, is to intellectualize it at some level and in some degree. To intellectualize perception is to accomplish the assimilation of past meaning into the attitudes of the self (c.f. A.E. p. 290). The fact that an experience has quality is to say that it is in some degree intellectual, and the qualitative unity of experience, its being subject to judgment, is a sign of this intellectuality. Esthetic unity, by way of contrast, is a broader notion than purely intellectual or truth-functional unity, if such a notion is possible at all. It is a combination of intellectual qualification and practical, intentional action. Esthetic experience, as we have established, is inherently connected with the experience of making, but making by the entire live creature. It is never, for example, making by a disjunction of hand and eye. It is never a disinterested making. It is making that “harmonious interactions of energies bear to one another” (A.E. p. 13). Hence, esthetic experience is emotional as well as intellectual and practical.

So esthetic unity, emotional, intellectual and practical, is fundamental to all self-conscious experience. We both embody and we continually encounter works of art in the lived world. They are the continuous conditions of intentional satisfaction, the movement from consummation to consummation (A.E. p. 37). Art, moreover, is so fundamental to human experience that it alone marks out epochs of culture and civilization. Art is the force that effects the consolidation of mere meanings into minds, and minds are the substance of history and civilization.

The individuals who have minds pass away one by one. The works in which meanings have received objective expression endure. They become part of the environment, and interaction with this phase of the environment is the axis of continuity in the life of civilization. The ordinances of religion and the power of law are effective because they are clothed with a pomp, a dignity and a majesty that are the work of imagination. If social customs are more than uniform external modes of action, it is because they are saturated with story and transmitted meaning. Every art in some manner is a medium of this transmission, while its products are no inconsiderable part of the saturating matter (A.E. p. 340).

Let me suggest an intentionalistic model to account for what Dewey is characterizing descriptively, through analysis of the social milieu. To say that experience is au fond intellectual, at least in part, is to say that it is propositional, even semantic. Experience is experience that something is the case, and experience that something is the case is sensitivity to its truth, the primordial quality of self-conscious experience. Intentional states generally are thought to be captured by the formal notation

(1) F(p)

where F is an emotional attitude of mind such as belief, desire, sympathy or antipathy and p is the propositional (intellectual, semantic) content of that attitude. Thus an earthworm responding to the irritation of a fishhook has the experience “(it is true that) there is something noxious there and I don’t like it.” Should this earthworm survive that experience, and should it be capable of learning from it, the next analogous irritation will be somewhat different. The earthworm will have a new attitude, subtly nuanced, informed by the meaning (the imagination, the memory) of its past experience. The new experience will always be an esthetic combination of a propositional value, an emotional attitude, and a stance prepared for intentional action.

Now the virtue of the analytic conception of intentionality is that it can be extended to a practicable theory of conversation, which seeks to characterize a succession of esthetic states in terms of their causal necessity. Each conversational moment, under conditions of rigorously practiced conversation, is the work of art Dewey has characterized as experience. All conversation is or should be art. The theory of conversation purports to be the way to cause conversational art to be practiced with some objective control. This control is to be accomplished in large part by common knowledge of the intentionality of conversation. Distributed control of that mechanism, if that mechanism proves to be an explicit reality even to a small number of practitioners, should be sufficient to render the esthetic structure of experience culturally subject to unbounded refinement.

The relevance of pragmatism and the pragmatic attitude to a program of this sort cannot be overstated. That purported real mechanism is something in each of us, and nothing more can be hoped for conversation than what individuals choose to do with it. Conversation can only be what we are each able and willing to do, on a small and entirely manageable scale, to remake a cultural context that abolishes the large number of artificial separations we generally take for granted in the present cultural epoch, separations for example between individual and society, between education and life, between public interest and private interest (Stuhr, p. 441). For conversation theory, which defines and makes practicable a pure social experience created out of individual impulses of understanding and good will, this abolition is altogether congenial, so far as it remains possible to pursue it. Dewey’s pragmatism sees this abolition as not merely congenial, but essential if life is to be true to experience.

Dewey’s pragmatism of course is made possible by its forerunners, Peirce and James, and in a large number of ways these thinkers also anticipate conversation theory in spirit and in substance. Overall, however, I think it is Emerson who most effectively anticipates the revolution in experience that these three thinkers have helped to ground, because that revolution can only be spiritual. Dewey sees his pragmatism as a response to the demands of American democracy, to a social contract in which everyone shares an equality of condition and is simultaneously thrown into an individualism more profound than in any society in history. Emerson describes the power in this democracy in the following way. “Everything that tends to insulate the individual – to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as sovereign state with sovereign state – tends to true union as well as greatness” (Stuhr, p. 26). These are the conditions and causes of esthetic conversation as well. Perhaps they will be added to the school of American pragmatism.

References

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Berkley Publishing Group (Perigree/Penguin), 2005.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” In Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, John J. Stuhr, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. pp. 17-27.

Flygt, Carl H. Conversation – A New Theory of Language. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2006.

Stuhr, John J. “John Dewey.” In Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, John J. Stuhr, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. pp. 431-444.