Dewey's Experience and Nature as a Treatise on the Sublime

1. Introduction

In the first section of this paper I lay out a reading of Experience and Nature as a treatise on the sublime and what that means in terms of our experience. In the following two sections I work out some of the implications and finer points of this reading of Experience and Nature, especially in relation to other critical works on Experience and Nature and Dewey's metaphysics. In the final section I go beyond the text of Experience and Nature to say something about how the concept of the sublime applies to Dewey in more general terms and something about how this Deweyan reading of the sublime might be relevant to us today politically, socially, and individually.

2. The Sublime and an Emotional Turn

The dynamic of the sublime strikes me as an especially useful one to analyze, especially now in this postmodern, anxious age, because it involves the transformation of an experience that is horrible, unsettling, or anxiety-provoking into an experience that is pleasurable, aesthetic, and life-affirming. I take the great American treatise on the metaphysics of the sublime to be John Dewey's Experience and Nature. Although Dewey does not explicitly call his subject the sublime, I read the title of this work as denoting the fundamental constituents of the sublime: us, our experience, which we have in response to the huge indeterminacy in which we find ourselves immersed, that is, nature. Nature, however, does not begin for us as something sublime. Our early experiences with nature will often suggest that our existence is, as Dewey says, "precarious and perilous" and that what comes to us comes by sheer luck or chance. Dewey says of this aspect of our condition: "Man finds himself living in an aleatory world; his existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk, it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their times and seasons" (LW 1:43). ¹ Dewey concludes, "man fears because he exists in a fearful, an awful world. The world is precarious and perilous" (LW 1:43-44). This is an acute description of the initial moment of the sublime. We, as human beings, have lived individually and communally, temporarily and interminably, in this moment. This condition is, of course, not the experience of the sublime. It is the experience of the world as more terrifying than pleasurable or aesthetic.

That we need not exist interminably in this moment, in this condition, takes a discovery. To make this discovery can be a somewhat arduous and painstaking undertaking, and it will take time. What the discovery is a discovery of is that there is another aspect to nature, to things in nature, that is initially invisible. It will take a certain amount of undergoing, training, practice, and discipline in order to be able to perceive this aspect of things in nature, but once one has, nature itself is transformed, and access to the sublime is opened.

Dewey refers to a remark by Herbert Spencer to elucidate this idea: "When he [Spencer] says that every fact has two opposite sides, 'the one its near or visible side and the other its remote or invisible side,' he expresses a persistent trait of every object in experience. The visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen . . ." (LW 1:44). I read Experience and Nature to be a kind of manual about how to see the invisible in the visible. Somewhat paradoxically, the discovery that will render the unseen visible will ultimately be about seeing the continuity between the visible and the invisible. It will have to do with understanding the continuity between our experience and nature. To make this discovery we will need a method. Dewey explicitly describes his...