John Dewey our selection is from the book Art as Experience 1934
"John Dewey (1859-1952) is known mostly as a philosopher of education. But his relevance to modern cognitive psychology is often underestimated. Dewey's philosophy of education, instrumentalism (also called pragmatism), focused on learning-by-doing rather than rote learning and dogmatic instruction, the current practice of his day. He rejected authoritarian teaching methods, regarding education in a democracy as a tool to enable the citizen to integrate his or her culture and vocation usefully. To accomplish those aims, both pedagogical methods and curricula needed radical reform. Dewey's philosophy, called instrumentalism and related to pragmatism, holds that truth is an instrument used by human beings to solve their problems, and that it must change as their problems change. Thus it partakes of no transcendental or eternal reality. Dewey's view of democracy as a primary ethical value permeated his educational theories."
His books include "Art as Experience (1934), Democracy and Education (1916), Ethics (1932), Experience and Nature (1929), Liberalism and Social Action (1935), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), Philosophy and Civilization (1931), The Public and Its Problems (1927), The Quest for Certainty (1929), Reconstruction in Philosophy (1948)."
For a good account of his aesthetics see Richard Shusterman at in John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Knowledge
For a more elaborate account of his aesthetics see my own article on John Dewey’s Aesthetics in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
See also the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
1) Experience
a)The interaction of the live creature and its environing conditions is involved in the very process of living.
b)Conditions of resistance and conflict: the self and the world qualify the experience with emotions and ideas.
c)Conscious intent then emerges.
d)Often the experience is inchoate [meaningless], not an experience.
i)It is characterized by distraction and dispersion.
ii)What we observe and what we think, desire and get, are at odds.
iii)We start and stop because of interruptions or laziness.
2)an experience
a)The material experienced runs its full course to fulfillment.
b)Then it is demarcated from other experiences.
c)A piece of work is finished satisfactorily.
d)Its close is a consummation, not a cessation.
e)It is a whole, has its own individualizing quality, and is self-sufficient.
f)Everyday speech refers to experiences that are singular.
g)An experience has its own beginning and end.
h)Life is a thing of histories.
i)inception and close
ii)plot
iii)rhythmic movement
iv)pervading quality
i)"real experiences" "that was an experience"
i)They include events that were tremendously important: e.g. a fight with a lover.
ii)Or less important: the meal in a Paris restaurantthat was an enduring memorial to food.
iii)A storm which seemed to sum up what a storm could be.
3)Here, every successive part flows freely into what comes next.
a)But there is no sacrifice of the self-identity of parts.
b)The enduring whole has successive phases.
c)The flow is from something to something as one part leads into another and carries what came before.
4)There are no holes or mechanical junctions in an experience.
a)However, there are pauses that define the quality of movement, and sum up what has happened.
b)A work of art [provides us ideally with "an experience"].
i)Here, different acts and episodes melt into a unity without losing their character.
ii)This is similar to a genial conversation.
5)An experience has a unity which gives it its name: for example, "that storm."
a)This is constituted by a pervasive single quality.
b)It is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual, although in talking about the experience afterward we may find that one of these characterizes the experience as a whole.
c)Philosophers and scientists can have an “experience” too.
d)Although ultimately intellectual, such experiences are emotional too.
i)Thinkers need the reward of integral experiences that are intrinsically worthwhile.
ii)Ideas form trains as phases of a developing underlying quality. This is vs. Hume’s and Locke's "ideas" and "impressions."
e)The conclusion of an experience of thinking is a consummation of an integral experience.
i)The premises are not independent ready-made entities that give rise to a third.
ii)They arise only as the conclusion becomes manifest.
iii)A conclusion is no separate thing, but a consummation of a movement.
f)An experience of thinking has its own esthetic quality.
i)Intellectual activity must bear an esthetic stamp to be complete.
ii)But unlike fine art, its materials are signs with no intrinsic quality of their own.
iii)This makes intellectual thinking less popular than music.
iv)But it possesses an internal integration and fulfillment which is felt.
v)No intellectual activity is an experience unless it is rounded out with this quality.
6)The non-esthetic has two poles.
a)One pole is loose succession, and the other involves arrest and constriction where parts only have mechanical relations.
b)These are taken to be normal experiences, and the esthetic is given outside status.
c)But no experience is a unity unless it has esthetic quality.
d)Enemies of the esthetic are not the practical or the intellectual: they are the humdrum, slackness, and submission to convention.
7)Aristotlesaid the "mean proportional" distinguished virtue and the esthetic.
a)The mathematical interpretation of this is wrong.
b)The proportional is a property belonging to an experience developing toward its own consummation.
8) A close or ending of an integral experience is the opposite of arrest, fixation.
a)It ceases when the energies in it have reached their proper end, which is maturation.
b)Struggle and conflict may be enjoyed, although painful, when experienced as means to this.
c)There is undergoing in every experience. This involves "taking in" what came before.
9)The esthetic quality is emotional.
a)We may think of emotions, e.g. joy, sorrow, as entities whose growth is irrelevant.
b)But emotions, when significant, are qualities of a complex experience that changes.
c)Otherwise they are just outbreaks of a disturbed child.
d)They are qualifications of a drama, and change as the drama develops.
e)Although people speak of love at first sight, love is not a thing of an instant. It needs room for cherishing.
f)An emotion needs a plot, a stage, wherein to unfold.
g)There are no separate things called emotions in experience.
10)Emotions are not private: they are attached to events and objects.
a)They belong to a self concerned with movement of events towards culmination.
b)Fright and shame are just automatic reflexes: to be emotional they must become parts of an inclusive situation that involves concern for objects. Fright becomes, then, emotional fear.
11) Emotion givesqualitative unity to an experience.
How is Dewey similar to or different from Hume?
How is he similar to or different from Kant?
How would Dewey define art?
Is love aesthetic? In what way?
Relations to Collingwood?
Relations to Aristotle?