John Dewey and the Artful Life: Pragmatism, Aesthetics, and Morality

Chapter 6. Orientational Meliorism and the Quest for the Artful Life

6 Orientational Meliorism and the Quest for the Artful Life Art and morality can and should be connected. Yet not all aesthetic experience should be conceptually tied to fine art as it is traditionally designated. The previous chapters have advanced a sustained argument concerning how experiences can be aesthetic or nonaesthetic depending on a subjective variable . I have alluded to this element as orientation, or a deep-seated way an individual has of approaching and thinking through the objects of experience . Such objects include conventional art objects, but they can also be expanded to any activity that one is doing and undergoing. Activity can be aesthetic or artful as a creation insofar as we attend to it in its immediacy, and not as something merely of value as an instrumental means to something additional (be it monetary gain through owning a painting, the paycheck after the ferry ride, etc.). The vital core to Dewey’s aesthetic theory, I argue, is not an analysis of the objective properties of those varied things we dub as ‘‘art objects,’’ but instead concerns the spirit and method of Orientational Meliorism 137 one’s habits of attending. When one sees an art object, is one captivated and absorbed in what is there in front of one, or is one drawn away to nonpresent issues? When one thinks about and criticizes an art object, is one’s reflective activity closely tied to the experience of that art object, or is it removed from the present experience in its details and import? When one undergoes activity, is attention paid to how it structures, shapes, and instantiates one’s relations with others, one’s desires, and so forth, or does one merely want to get through it to the desired end or goal? All of these possible alternatives involve similar or identical objective conditions , but all entail different experiential qualities to the individual undergoing them. What differs is the subject’s orientation toward the activity or object in question. In this chapter, I will characterize what I mean by orientation, and how it fits into a Deweyan program of meliorism, or the improvement of one’s lived experience. In order to do this, I will discuss orientation and the notion of orientational meliorism in general terms. Following this, I will explicate a point that has been hinted at in various ways in the previous chapters—how one’s general orientation can shape reflective attention and immediate attention in ways that render human experience more enjoyable and more conducive to growth. Thus, I will return to the topics of aesthetic experience and moral progress in a different fashion; in this case, I approach them from the point of how to make our activities more unified, alive, and absorptive. In earlier chapters I built such a case from foils in the philosophy of art literature, but here I will do so from the perspective of Dewey’s moral theory. What sort of individuals ought we to be? I engage the important issue of how ought we to act from an angle that is particularly Deweyan—with what spirit or method ought we to engage the struggles and demands of life? In the terms I will develop, the question becomes—what sort of orientation ought we to cultivate? This necessitates the qualitative insights of Dewey’s reading of aesthetic experience, as well as his notion of growth or progressive adjustment as a moral endpoint of sorts. The latter parts of this chapter therefore deal with what sort of orientation toward activity, desire, and goals we ought to take, guided largely by the demand to make more of our experience unified and adaptively engaged with the present situation in all its obstacles and resources. In other words, we return in a slightly more general fashion to the question driving this entire study—how can we render more of life’s experiences aesthetic or artful? 138 John Dewey and the Artful Life Meliorism and Orientation What is meant by the term ‘‘meliorism?’’ This is an important term in pragmatism , but its true meaning is sadly missed in many contemporary pragmatist projects. Let’s start with a more general question, one that will lead us directly to the melioristic point. What is the purpose of writing or discussing philosophical problems? This question could apply to any instance of theorizing . Richard Shusterman provides a useful distinction between what he...