Reflections on Richard Shusterman's Dewey

Presumably, when Richard Shusterman talks of an aesthetic experience, he has in mind the sort of experience that connotes an immediate, qualitative whole John Dewey calls "consummatory" in Art as Experience. Problematically though, with Dewey, he has the urge to tell us what is primary in an experience. Making liberal use of Dewey's own statements from Art as Experience Shusterman tells us it is just the "memorable and ultimately satisfying episode of living, one that stands out from the humdrum flow of life as "an experience by its "internal integration and fulfillment" reaching through a developing organization of meanings and energies which affords a "satisfying emotional quality" of some sort.¹ Also, "For there seems, after all, to be something autonomous about art's value, something about its own good for which we pursue them [sic] as ends in themselves rather than means to other goods in other practices. That something is an aesthetic experience. For the immediate, absorbing satisfaction of such experience makes it incontestably an end in itself" (PA, 46-47).

Two conclusions present themselves. The first is that an aesthetic experience is one immediately had. The second is that what counts as an aesthetic experience, what is primary, is satisfaction; the quality that is immediately present is an emotional one; felt not cognized. Immediacy is emphasized over reflection in an aesthetic experience; the consummatory experience par excellence, according to both Shusterman and Dewey, and this seems to conflict with an earlier claim that immediacy and reflection are accorded equal measure in the having of an experience.²

We may conclude at this point that what is immediately felt carries the weight, so to speak, of an aesthetic experience. It remains for reflection to organize, classify, and relate these experiences to each other in such a way that meaning develops. It functions in an ex post facto manner to relate upcoming experiences to each other. As such, reflection is accorded importance, though not priority, in an aesthetic experience. We might say that it functions, to use an analytic metaphor, as a second-order activity, with immediacy granted first-order status.

Yet, there is evidence to the contrary in Shusterman: evidence that suggests that he does not want to claim that immediacy is primary in an aesthetic experience. This evidence comes largely from an article written to address Richard Rorty's reading of Dewey's notion of experience, entitled, "Dewey on Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction?" Following on Rorty's criticism of Dewey's tendency to accord ontological status to generic traits of existence such as continuity, Shusterman laments that, "For a non-foundational philosopher like Dewey, this account of immediate quality as the underlying guide of all thought and discourse seems very much out of character. Had he simply argued that immediate quality can sometimes effectively ground or direct our thinking, his position would be convincing. Unfortunately, however, such quality is affirmed as what determines, in every particular situation, the coherence of our thinking, the structure of discourse, and the measure of adequacy in judgment."³ Shusterman's final analysis of Dewey's turn to immediate qualities is that, "Dewey's mistake is not in emphasizing the unifying quality of experience [which he does], but only in positing it as an antecedent foundational fact rather than regarding it as an end and means of reconstruction" (DE, 138). What Shusterman beneficially distills from Dewey's strong talk of immediate qualities is that, "Dewey's prime purpose was the aesthetic and practical one of improving experience by making it the focus of our inquiry, of enriching and harmonizing our experience, for example, by affirming and enhancing the continuity between soma and psyche, between nondiscursive experience and conscious thought" and that "nondiscursive background experience influences our conscious thought" (DE, 139, 138).

In sum, Shusterman takes Dewey to task for suggesting that immediate qualities are foundational and necessary (we might say "given") in the having of an experience, rather than...