Abstract
This episode is part two of four of the lecture series [HTA 13] on John Dewey’s Art as Experience [1934], Chapters 1-3, of which the entire text’s fourteen chapters were delivered in some format as a ten-lecture series in 1931 at Harvard for the honorary William James lecture series, with the assigned topic being the philosophy of art.
Primary Source
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.
Guiding Questions
Ch. 1, The Live Creature
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How do the rhythms of disintegration and consummation between the live creature and its environment produce esthetic experience?
- Esthetic experience itself is the gratifying feeling between rhythms of the live creature with its environment and past. Without disintegration, strife, conflict, and effort, consummation would not be possible. Without reunion and consummation, conflict would be painful without meaning or purpose.
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How does emotional sense in direct experience produce but also absorb intellectual, linguistic symbolism?
- Because artworks are a language, we can see the continuity of expressive thought and communication. Sense is organized and refined into its more technical forms, such as math and science. Because sense evokes language and historical knowledge, we can infer that holistic sense absorbs such language.
Ch. 2, The Live Creature and “Etherial Things”
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What is the difference between mere recognition and esthetic perception?
- Mere recognition is about identifying something without engaging with it on a deeper level, whereas esthetic perception is about experiencing it while also connecting an emotional response to it dependent on one’s past. Recognition is quickly identifying something familiar from past experiences without much thought. Perception involves a deeper engagement where you fully appreciate the details and emotions of what you are experiencing, without reducing it to what you already know and without assuming what it will become. In perception, the past surges forth to invigorate the present, rather than conquering the present and reducing it to the past idea or experience.
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Why is art primary to science, i.e., why is science merely a handmaiden to the arts?
- The purpose of the arts is to enrich life’s intrinsic meaning; science as a specific, refined, technological art is only ultimately useful or meaningful insofar as it supports esthetic enrichment. Art is the complete culmination of nature. Therefore, science is its handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue.
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What is art’s relation to material and etherial things?
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Art is a bridge between material and etherial things. Art acts as a ley line from past to present, unifying supposed dualities. Art is a material expression of etherial things through-via-with-as the medium of matter.
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Artmaking is the transformation (organization) of material (matter) into etherial things.
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Art is the melding of material things to express, symbolize, convey, and form etherial experiences. Our relation to art is not just with the complete art piece but with our experiences and formation of the art. Works of art transform material (matter) into etherial things.
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