John Dewey: Aesthetic Experience and Artful Conduct

John Dewey Aesthetic Experience andArtful Conduct Kenneth A. McClelland But it was not a choice Between excluding things. It was not a choice Between, but of. He chose to include the things That in each other are included, the whole, The complicate, the amassing harmony. -Wallace Stevens1 Dewey's writings on art and aesthetics have, since the time of their publication, received somewhat modest attention in comparison to the coverage given other important areas of his philosophy. In recent years, however, there has been a gradual recognition that Dewey's writings on art and aesthetics, written later in his career, exhibit a deeper and more comprehensive synthesizing of the major themes that had been developing throughout his entire philosophy. 2 Failure to come to terms with Dewey's writings on art and aesthetics is, in many ways, a failure to come to fuller terms with the deeper implications of his entire philoso­ phy. It is my contention, therefore, that Dewey's writings on art and aesthetics provide the most thoroughgoing and mature rendering of the major themes that preoccupied his entire philosophical project. Experience is the major theme run­ ning throughout Dewey's work, and it is my focus here. The many aspects of his philosophical project are difficult to grasp unless his reconstruction of experi­ ence is understood. Attempting to overcome the gulf between theory and prac­ tice begun in Greek philosophy and continued throughout much of the history of Western philosophy, Dewey comes to this bold conclusion in chapter 9 of Ex­ perience and Nature: But if modern tendencies are justified in putting art and creation first, then the implications of this position should be avowed and carried through. It would then be seen that science is an art, that art is practice, and that the only distinction worth drawing is not between practice and 44 • E&C/Education and Culture 21 (2) (2005): 44-62 John Dewey: Aesthetic Experience and Artful Conduct. 45 theory, but between those modes of practice that are not intelligent, not inherently and immediately enjoyable, and those which are full of en­ joyed meanings. When this perception dawns, it will be a commonplace that art-the mode of activity that is charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed possession-is the complete culmination of nature, and that "science" is properly a handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue. Thus would disappear the separations that trouble present thinking: division of everything into nature and experience, of experience into practice and theory, art and science, of art into useful and fine, menial and free.3 No doubt, this passage still sounds radical today. A cursory look at how and why it is radical is the intention behind this paper. Art and the Commons In his writings on art and aesthetics, Dewey seeks to bring art back into the fold of the sociocultural and the sociotemporal, making aesthetic experience less elite and escapist and more applicable to everyday life experiences. The origin and destiny of aesthetic experience and artistic works is, for Dewey, the commons. The task, for Dewey, "is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, suffer­ ings that are universally recognized to constitute experience. ,,4 It is not Dewey's intention that everybody will, upon following this road, rise to the level of fine artist (he has room for the unique qualities, insights, and even the genius of par­ ticular artists and their work). He is saying, however, that the creative process and expressive potential so vividly expressed in fine works of art-the complex movement from some vision (end-in-view) through that vision's manipulation in production toward an aesthetic outcome (consummation)-is a process ex­ emplary of how we intelligently experience and shape our world. We all have an ongoing aesthetic hunger. This hunger is not easily dimin­ ished by faulty personal and social bearings. Understanding that experience's embodied movement in time constitutes us as the shapers of our world, and that our world is a canvas of unlimited possibility, we may begin to appreciate more fully the aesthetic possibilities of an ameliorative stance to the...