John Dewey’s notion on Art as Experience
INTRODUCTION
John
Dewey, a contemporary American philosopher who was highly influenced by Hegel
and Darwin posits that an art experience is the philosophical center of all
thinking. Whether in Metaphysics, Logic, Ethics, Theory of Education, Political
Theory or Philosophy of Law, all these come to actuality in aesthetics. For
experience to be understood, all philosopher must go aesthetic experience, thus
only aesthetic can bring us to experience to its integrity and clear all or
confusion in the development of experience. This integrity is the great subject
matter for aesthetics.
Our
aim in this work is to summarize and understand John Dewey’s notion on Art as Experience
and it relevance to aesthetics.
Dewey
in his first chapter the live creature, explain that emphasis should be lay
more on the experience of art rather on mostly the act object itself.
Experience is continuous, aesthetic and it also begins as an Impulsion.
Therefore there must be some intent that springs from the artwork and through the
immediate realization of this intent that art arises. Furthermore, experience
is born from and run on just imagination.[1]
He
defined art as a dynamic experience, self-forming, self-fulfilling, interaction
between man and reality. These artworks are products that exist externally and
physically, and formation of aesthetic theory has become an obstruction to
them. For an artwork to be meaningful, some impulsion or intent must be within
if not, the work become meaningless and just a hollow shell.[2]
Work of art has always neglect human experience, but identifies itself with
building, books, painting and statue. When an art product once attains classic
statue, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it genders
in actual life experience. Experience and appreciation help in the
understanding of artistic products.[3]
Furthermore, for
aesthetic to be understood in its ultimate and approved forms, one must begin
it in the raw, in the events and sense that hold the attentive eye and ear of
man, arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens.[4] Aesthetic experience
involves a drama in which action, feeling, and meaning are one. The result is
balance. Such experience would not occur in a world of mere flux in which there
was no cumulative change. Nor would it occur in a world that is finished, for
then there would be no resolution or fulfillment. It is only possible in a
world in which the live being loses and reestablishes equilibrium with its
environment.
Dewey held that the sources of aesthetic
experience are to found in sub-human animal life. Animals often attain a unity
of experience that we lose in our fragmented work-lives. The live animal is
fully present with all its senses active, especially when it is graceful.
Therefore Experience signifies heightened life and active engagement with the
world. In its highest form it involves an identification of self and world.
Such experience is the beginning of art.[5]
In his work on the live creature and ethereal
things, Dewey posited that experience is the result and sign that brings
interaction between organisms and its environment. When carried out fully leads
to transformation into participation and communication. The sense organs for
communication are carried to their full realization through sense itself, i.e.,
through meaning embodied in experience. The world is made actual in the
qualities so experienced. Here, meaning cannot be separated from action, will,
or thought. Experience is not only the result of interaction of subject and
world, but also the subject's reward when it transforms interaction into
participation. Dualisms of mind and body, by contrast come from a fear of life.[6]
He proposed that it is important here to
distinguish mere recognition from perception. Recognition uses matter as means.
Perception, by contrast, entails the past being carried into the present to
enrich its content. A life that involves merely labeling things is not really
conscious. The conscious activity of man develops out of a cooperation of
internal needs and external materials that result in a culminating event. Man
converts cause and effect into means and end, and thereby makes organic
stimulation the bearer of meaning. Rather than reducing the human to the animal,
Dewey holds that man takes the unity of sense and impulse of animal life and
infuses it with conscious meaning through communication. Human is more complex
than animal life: for humans there are more opportunities for resistance and
tension, for invention, and for depth of insight and feeling. The rhythms of
struggle and consummation are more varied and long-lasting, and the
fulfillments are more intense.[7]
In having an experience, Dewey defines “An experience”
as one in which the material of experience is fulfilled or consummated, for
example when a problem is solved, or a game is played to its conclusion. “An experience,”
is also marked off from other experiences, containing within itself an
individualizing quality. Dewey believes his talk of “an experience”
is in accord with everyday usage, even though it is contrary to the way
philosophers talk about experience. For Dewey, life is a collection of
histories, each with their own plots, inceptions, conclusions, movements and
rhythms. Each has a unique pervading quality.[8]
Furthermore, he holds that works of art are
important examples of “an experience.” Here, separate elements are
fused into a unity, although, rather than disappearing, their identity is
enhanced. The unity of an experience, which is neither exclusively emotional,
practical, nor intellectual, is determined by a single pervasive quality.
Thinking has its own aesthetic quality. It differs from art only in that its
material consists of abstract symbols rather than qualities. The experience of
thinking satisfies us emotionally because it is internally integrated, and yet
no intellectual activity is integrated in this way unless it has aesthetic
quality. Thus, for Dewey, there is no clear separation between the aesthetic
and the intellectual.[9]
The end of art is significant only as an
integration of parts. Dominant in aesthetic experience are the characteristics
that cause the experience to be integrated and complete. In integral experience
there is a dynamic form that involves growth. This form has three stages:
inception, development, and fulfillment. Aesthetic experience converts
resistances into movement towards a close. Experiencing is a rhythm of intake
and outgiving between which there are pauses each of which, in turn,
incorporates within itself the prior doing. The consummation phase of
experience is not merely located at the end. For an artist is engaged in
completing her work at every stage of the process. And this involves summing up
what has gone before.[10]
On the art of an expression, Dewey holds that
it is the double change which converts an activity into an act of expression.
For instance the expression of cry or smile of an infant may be expressive to
mother or nurse but yet not an act of expression of the baby, but to an
onlooker it is an expression since it tells something about the stage of the
child.[11] Dewey stresses that
expression and art require material used as media. An intrinsic connection
exists between medium and the act of expression. Tones only express emotion,
and hence are musical, when they occur in a medium of other tones, as when they
are ordered in a melody. Therefore, the act of expression is a construction in
time.
There is no expression without excitement and
turmoil. Though what is sometimes called an act of self-expression might be
self-exposure which discloses character or lack of character to others.[12] Etymologically, an act of
expression is a squeezing out a pressing forth. Thus expression is considered
as an act.
In his discussion on substance and form, Dewey
based his idea on medium. He asserts that there are many languages of art, each
specific to the medium. And also believes that meanings expressed in art cannot
be translated into words. Moreover, language requires not only speakers but
listeners. Thus, in art, the work is not complete until it is experienced by
someone other than the artist. Artist, work and audience form a group, for even
when the artist works in isolation she is herself vicariously the audience.[13]
Language is involved, in both what is said and
how it is said: substance and form. The artist's creative effort is in forming
the material so that it is the authentic substance of a work of art. But if art were mere self-expression,
substance and form would fall apart. Still, self-expression is important.
Without it, the work would lose its freshness and originality, and although the
material out of which the work is made comes from the public world the manner
of its making is individual.[14]
On art and civilization, he begins by noting
that communication is the foundation of all activities that involve internal
union between human beings. Many relations between persons, for example between
investors and laborers, are external and mechanical, and hence not really
communication.[15]
Art is a universal mode of language. It is not affected by the accidents of
history in the way that speech is. For example, music can bring people together
in loyalty and inspiration. Although each culture is held together by its own
individuality, it is still possible to create continuity and community between
cultures as long as one does not try to reduce one to the other. One can expand
experience to absorb the attitudes and values of other cultures. Friendship is,
on a smaller scale, a solution to the same problem, for it comes from sympathy
through imagination. We understand others when their desires and aims expand
us. To civilize is to instruct others in life, and this requires communication
of values by way of imagination. The arts aid individuals in achieving
civilization.[16]
CONCLUSION
Having through John Dewey’s work, we see that
experience are situations and episodes that we spontaneously refer to as being
“real experiences”, those things of which we say in recalling them. It is
continuous, aesthetic and it also begins as an Impulsion. And thus it aids in
civilization.
[1] John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and
Richard Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press,1976) p.579.
[2] John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and
Richard Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty, p.579.
[3] John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and
Richard Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty, p.580
[4] John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and
Richard Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty ,p.581
[5] John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and
Richard Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty, P.583
[6]John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and Richard
Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty, P.593
[7]John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and Richard
Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty, P.594
[8]John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and Richard
Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty,
P.596
[9] John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and
Richard Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty, P.597
[12]John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and Richard
Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty, P.605
[13]John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and Richard
Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty, P.619
[14] John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and
Richard Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty, P.620
[15]John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and Richard
Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty, P.643
[16]John Dewey “Art as Experience” seen in Albert Hofstadter and Richard
Kuhns ed., Philosophies of Art and Beauty, P.645
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