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

Chapter 3. Dewey on Experience, Value, and Ends

3 Dewey on Experience, Value, and Ends The experience of the aesthetic is taken by most scholars to be a particularly valuable occasion. Yet, the devil is in the details when it comes to describing this value. To build an account of aesthetic experience that does justice to its immediate value and enjoyment by an auditor, one can profitably turn to the work of John Dewey. Dewey sets out to defend the qualitative feel of ordinary experience as it is prior to discursive dissection by analysts. He also has a great regard for the intellectual adaptations of humans, and his thought consequently tries to do justice to the critical or reflective phase of human experience as well. What Dewey does not do, however, is give certain aspects of experience a reified ontological or normative status. This is the fault, I have argued, of the scholars discussed in the previous chapter who hold a ‘‘groomed’’ conception of the art object, as well as those who argue that the experience of art has a value that is different in kind from the value accorded to other experiences. Both of these positions take certain ways of analyzing 36 John Dewey and the Artful Life aesthetic experience to be the way that the experience actually is. This is the root of what I have called the causal approach to aesthetic experience and the problems such an approach poses for accounts of aesthetic value. Looking at aesthetic experience from an external perspective of causal effects naturally leaves it bereft of what makes it so important in schemes such as Dewey’s—its experienced, qualitative feel for the one experiencing it. The experiential approach I find in Dewey will do justice to this immediately experienced aspect of aesthetic experience, and also will provide a theoretical grounding for readings of its value. To proceed with such an account, I turn to Dewey’s analysis of experience, specifically in its primary and secondary phases. This will prepare the way for a focus on the experiencing subject in aesthetic experience, and will lead naturally into a discussion of value and valuation in Dewey’s work. Using Dewey, I will demonstrate how one can do justice to the immediacy of aesthetic experience without making its value intrinsic in an ontological sense (separate in kind from other sorts of value). Both the discussion of experience in its main phases and of value/valuation leads to the final portion of this chapter, in which I attempt to show how a causal approach relies on a strong separation of means and ends, a problem that Dewey finds endemic in modern society. His aesthetics is an attempt to meliorate such a problem through redescription and prescription, and I will illustrate how his thought shows that ends and means are not separated in objects and activities. My analysis becomes a key part of an experiential reading of aesthetic experience, since it allows one to account for causal factors noted by reflection that are simultaneous with its experiential, qualitative aspects. Primary and Secondary Experience In Experience and Nature (1925), Dewey argues that experience is not something that is separate from nature, but is instead in and of nature. Objects are as they are experienced, and nature is inconceivable outside of experience. There have been some interesting debates as to the extent of the metaphysics presented in Experience and Nature,1 but I will sidestep that issue to focus on how Dewey can be seen as accommodating both the holistic, qualitative, experiential side to experience as well as the analyzed and intellectual side. Dewey abhorred strong dualisms, but his insistence on continuities in nature often led him to postulate what one can call working distinctions. One such Dewey on Experience, Value, and Ends 37 distinction, highlighting the sort of emphasis that can be seen in the major types of experience, is made when he divides experience into primary experience and reflective experience. These types are not absolutely separate, as they meld into each other in life and reinforce the qualitative feel of each other. Dewey, however, thought it important to advance this general distinction to highlight differing qualities or emphases in experience. Primary experience is described by Dewey as ‘‘gross, macroscopic, crude subject matters’’ (15). Dewey does not intend to demean or debase experience; he uses such terms because the point of primary experience is to denote that which...