HTA 13.3; Dewey; Art as Experience [1934]; Chapters 1-3

Abstract

This episode is part three 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.

Guiding Questions

Ch. 2, The Live Creature and “Etherial Things”

• How does art’s capacity for emotional resonance and affection across diverse bodies and histories provide the foundations for a common civil life of democracy and for sharing being-existence-consciousness-experience?

  • The fact that works of art can have overlapping, pseudo-universal common impacts despite our differences implies a common biological life, which simultaneously can serve and function as the stable grounding of democracy; moreover, art promotes this democratic grounding.

  • Artworks (in experience) intensify and crystallize universal biological processes and struggles as previous experiences, i.e., as histories, and as future goals, i.e., as needs. This common biological life stably grounds democracy in shared interactions.

  • The fact that works of art can resonate with diverse sets of lived experience implies a universal common life of all live creatures deep below conscious awareness, which we might call “primitive relationships.” This grounding stabilizes democracy.

• How is animism related to esthetic experience?

  • Animism (i.e., spirits-gods animating-pervading the material world) speaks to uncanny and untimely experiences where the esthetic is not properly understood and does not transparently disclose-reveal itself.

  • The experience of spirits-gods in animals and nature (i.e., animism) is a misattribution of the inherent esthetic-spiritual-ideal qualities in culminative, consummative, harmonious, in-step, present, engaged environment-material experiences in (i.e., with-through) the world.

  • The belief that spirits animate matter (i.e., animism) is a fundamental misattribution of esthetic experience as a fluid hyper-awareness of the present.

• How does reasoning require deflection and abeyance of objections in favor of intuition and imagination?

  • True reason is impossible and instead requires grace but is fine when instinctive and impulsive; philosophers must ignore their counterarguments when writing. One must obey the overpowering intuition and esthetic imagination — i.e., emotionally charged sense.

  • All writers, if they don’t get stuck in their self-criticisms, have had to ignore foreseeable objections in pursuit of their conclusions. Reasoning as instinctive, as impulsive, is fine; it has grace. “Beauty is truth; truth, beauty.” – John Keats

  • Expression requires ignoring conflicting thoughts, but earnest, instinctive efforts are still fine; they have grace. Intuition seeks and pursues its goal.

• How does esthetic perception require acceptance of half-knowledge?

  • Half-knowledge frees the live creature onto the present moment in full force, simultaneously allowing for the effortful, tense strife which serves as the precondition for the esthetic consummation of experience doubling back on itself to intensify.

  • Esthetic perception and experience take the mysteries and half-knowledge of life and turn them back on themselves to intensify living itself.

  • Esthetic perception turns life’s uncertainties in on itself to intensify living; this is the production and refinement of art and esthetic experiences.

Ch. 3, Having an Experience

• How is an experience different (from inchoate experience)?

  • An experience has a beginning and an end, which is not a cutting stop but which is itself a consummation of the previous disorder (distinct but not disintegrated from the rest of your life or itself).

  • Self-organized; composed; integrated within; demarcated; self-sufficient; game of chess; dinner with family; political campaign

  • Interchange: flows freely without seams, unfilled blanks, mechanical junctions (dovetails), or dead centers; yet self-identity of parts-elements.

  • Experience at large vs. specific experiences; its own beginning and end

  • Each with its own unrepeated quality pervading it throughout

  • Real experiences; “that was an experience!” That meal; that storm; that quarrel with a friend

  • Chapters; acts; scenes; in a drama

  • Total integral experiences that are intrinsically worthwhile.

  • Stairsteps vs. incline vs. sinusoidal rhythms

  • Whole-phases as a unity-multiplicity hybrid; leads into another and carries on

  • Continuous merging, interchanging, and blending;

  • Pauses and places of rest that punctuate movement

  • Rounded out; whole

  • Premises and conclusion arise all at once.

• Why can the esthetic not be sharply marked off from intellectual experience?

  • Both involve engagement, perspectival interpretation, and personal value to yourself. A conclusion is the consummation of a movement — not a separate thing (interwoven). Without esthetic fulfillment, thinking is inconclusive.

  • The esthetic possesses internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement. Conclusions of thought are arrived upon as esthetic consummations, fulfillment of a process.

  • The conclusions of intellectual experience are fulfillments of an experience, the fulfillment which is itself esthetic consummation. “It possesses integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement.”

• What is required for a stone rolling down a hill to have an experience?

  • The stone starts from somewhere and moves, as consistently as conditions permit (such as experiencing gravity or hitting oppositional forces, e.g., trees, branches, rocks, walls, etc.), toward a place and state where it will be at rest — toward an end. In other words, experience needs a coherent, self-organizing process with gratification. The stone looks forward with desire to the final outcome, and it is interested in the things it meets on its way, conditions that accelerate and retard its movement with respect to their bearing on the end. The stone having an experience acts and feels toward them according to the hindering or helping function it attributes to them. The final coming to rest is related to all that went before as the culmination of a continuous movement.

• How are emotions related to experiences?

  • “Experience is emotional, but there are no separate things called emotions in it.” Unique emotions are attached to unique events and unique objects in their movement. Emotion is the moving and cementing force of the miracle of mind that provides unity in and through the varied parts of experience. (Not simple, compact, or discrete.)

  • Emotions are the felt quality carried by the vehicle of unique occasions and events. Different emotions from different qualitative feelings from different environmental interchanges and experiences. “Experience is emotional, but there are no separate things called emotions in it.” Emotions are attached to events and objects in their movement, as vehicles or occasion. Emotions unify and cohere a diverse history of past experiences in conscious thought, which is to say conscious perception.

  • “Experience is emotional, but there are no separate things called emotions in it.” Emotions are attached to events and objects in their environment. The dominant emotion pervades an experience and subtly changes throughout with different shades. The predominant emotion is attached to the whole event (both spatial whole of the environment and temporal whole of an experience), and the varying shades are attached to the objects, moments, scenes, and beats. The environment as occasion carries (like a vehicle) and produces emotions in the nexus of the subject (like a resonating chamber).

  • Different qualities of the same general kind of emotions (or sensual-emotional-qualitative perceptions) operate in different experiences, specific to each environmental (environing on the mental) and mental context (e.g., different fears, different joys, different loves, different reds, different blues, different senses each time). Specific emotions are carried and produced alongside the vehicle of the occasion-event-environment.

  • “Emotion is the moving and cementing force of the miracle of mind, selecting what is congruous and dying [painting, staining, coloring, or tinging] what is selected, thereby giving qualitative unity to materials externally disparate and dissimilar, in and through the varied parts of an experience.”