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

Chapter 4. Aesthetic Experience and the Experience of Moral Cultivation

4 Aesthetic Experience and the Experience of Moral Cultivation In the previous chapter, I detailed a theory of value based in the work of John Dewey that attempted to do justice to the immediacy and power of the sort of value that is attributed to the aesthetic. A vital part of that account focused on Dewey’s insistence on the fundamental connection between means and ends in action. This chapter will extend the Deweyan reading of value with the addition of the experiential perspective of the subject that figures so prominently in aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience is a special or unique (in degree) experience of some object or event, and the Western tradition has usually made it a response to the fine art object. This leads to the dilemmas noted in chapter 2 involving the radical separation of aesthetic value from moral value. Dewey’s aesthetics resists this move, however, noting that such a result is a consequence of the accidental separation of art from life, and not a feature of art itself. What is of importance is the way that we interact with the art object, an emphasis The Experience of Moral Cultivation 59 that seems prima facie transferable to moral activity because it deals with the how of activity instead of the specific what of activity. Although Dewey discusses art objects as the content of aesthetic experience, he often intimates the grand vision of aesthetic experience as integrally connectable to any facet of life. At an often-overlooked part of Art as Experience, Dewey (elaborating on an example from Max Eastman) notes the difference in the experience of different men crossing the Hudson River into New York City by ferryboat. One man sees this portion of his commute as drudgery, and cannot wait for it to end; he notes ‘‘landmarks by which to judge progress toward his destination .’’ Another man sees ‘‘the scene formed by the buildings . . . as colored and lighted volumes in relation to one another, to the sky and to the river. He is now seeing esthetically.’’ This person perceives an interconnected whole, a ‘‘perceptual whole, constituted by related parts. No one single figure, aspect, or quality is picked out as a means to some further external result which is desired, nor as a sign of an inference that may be drawn’’ (140–41). Two points of importance are found here. First, one sees the continuation of the previous chapter’s connection of means and ends—seeing the skyline aesthetically is distinct from seeing parts of the skyline as merely indicative of progress to the remote end of work. Second, the same situation or object can be experienced in a variety of ways. A certain way of experiencing an object with a certain sort of attention and absorption characterizes what Dewey labels ‘‘aesthetic experience.’’ The question now becomes, can such a way of experiencing a situation or object (be it a work of art or a nonintentional skyline) be morally valuable or cultivating? In other words, is such an experience merely aesthetic, or does it connect in some close way to moral betterment? The answer I will give in this chapter is that aesthetic experience does connect to moral improvement. In order to argue this point, I will build a notion of moral cultivation from Dewey that holds a place of importance for attentiveness to situations and relationships. Attentiveness denotes a firstperson sense of experience, so I will base my account on Dewey’s earlier ethical works, with their first-person focus on the individual and how one orients one’s attentiveness to activity. In later chapters, I will bring in Dewey ’s later work as a complement to this focus, demonstrating that the same sort of attentive adjustment is evident in his description of growth as a moral end for individuals. In the final portion of this chapter, I will argue that the immediacy of art not only involves its integration of means and ends, but also its focusing of personal attention in that particular situation. I draw on accounts of Dewey’s aesthetics that highlight the importance of absorption 60 John Dewey and the Artful Life in activity to argue a point that I intimated in the previous chapter—that aesthetic experience is an experience of moral cultivation insofar as it is an experience of attention to one’s situation and the relationships in which one is embedded. Dewey and Moral...