-
IX. Dewey
- Ohio University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
IX DEWEY O Schelling, there is no major philosopher who has devoted as much attention to the aesthetic or given it as central a role as John Dewey. This may come as a surprise to some. In their standard two-volume survey of American philosophy, Elizabeth Flower and Murray Murphey do not even mention Dewey’s Art as Experience, in spite of their relatively extensive period-by-period, work-by-work survey of his publications .¹ And yet for Dewey the aesthetic furnishes the basic measure of everything human. The centrality of the aesthetic is linked to the centrality of experience, for in Dewey’s view, the aesthetic is “experience in its integrity.”² Attention to the features given in experience returns us from the region of ultimate ontological construals, which is a battlefield of contending views, to that which is always already there when we set about to think. To the extent that he makes this turn, Dewey exhibits many parallels with the phenomenological orientation of this book. Though he falls, with C. S. Peirce and William James before him, in the general line of American Pragmatism, Dewey’s basic position is more accurately described by what he calls Instrumentalism, which indicates the fundamental character of an idea.³ Generally speaking, the common view of the nature of an idea in the tradition has been to conceive of it as either an intrinsic and higher reality (e.g., Plato and Hegel) or a mirror of such, whether relatively clear (Aristotle) or initially distorted by the medium (Locke). In any case, according to Dewey, for the tradition generally an idea is essentially retrospective, related to the past, to what has been; the idea is to that extent essentially a priori.⁴ In contrast, Dewey himself, reflecting on the function of modern scientific ideas, sees an idea as essentially prospective, future oriented, tied in with our action on things in experimentation and modified or rejected in terms of testable consequences. This view is related to his general strategy of trying to overcome the dualisms that occur within experience and that tend to be canonized by philosophers, especially those that are introduced in the Platonic tradition, which turns on the status of the Idea. The tendency toward dualisms is exacerbated in modern times by Descartes, who in some sense falls within the Platonic line. For Dewey it is the aesthetic which finally heals all such splits, for the aesthetic, as I have said, is experience in its integrity.⁵ Overcoming the Platonic Splits The basic split in the Platonic tradition is that between Being and Becoming , the stable and the changing, the eternal and the temporal, to which we have access through the distinction between Ideas and the things that mirror them.⁶ To recur to things noted in my first historical chapter, for Plato the Idea is superior since it does not come into being and pass out of being, though it may come into awareness and pass out of awareness. Idea is a technical term that does not cover any “bright idea” I might happen to have, but rather indicates something essentially objective that the mind sees or mirrors when it is properly attentive. Take, for example, the geometric demonstration that the internal angles of a triangle are equal to degrees. When seen, it shows itself to have a kind of atemporal validity , to have been true even before it was seen. Thus an Idea in the technical Platonic sense is not a subjective state of mind, although some of the things we call ideas are subjective states of mind. A Platonic Idea is an eternal truth over against the plurality of instances that mirror it in the changing context of the world of nature as well as in the changing character of human culture and human individual minds. Culture and the minds that carry it may be such that a given Idea never enters into their field of awareness or, having entered, has passed out of it; but the Idea remains an eternal measure of the things that instantiate it and the minds that mirror it. This sets up a basic split between the eternality of Ideas on the one hand, and the temporality of things and empirical states of awareness on the other. Parallel to this is a split between mind and body. Mind as intellect disPlacing Aesthetics [44.222.128.90] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:46 GMT) covers itself only when it pulls itself away from its...