Why Dewey Now?
Author(s): Richard Shusterman
Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education , Autumn, 1989, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Autumn,
1989), pp. 60-67
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3332763
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60 Symposium
4. Morris Weitz, ed., Problems in Aesthetics (New York: Macmillan, 1959).
5. W. E. Kennick, ed., Art and Philosophy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964).
6. George Dickie and Richard Sclafani, eds., Aesthetics, A Critical Anthology (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1977).
7. Patricia Werhane, ed., Philosophical Issues in Arts (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1984).
8. Joseph Margolis, ed., Philosophy Looks at the Arts (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1987).
9. Ralph A. Smith, ed., Aesthetic Concepts and Education (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1970).
10 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
11. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt, 1920).
12. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1979).
13. Monroe C. Beardsley, "Intrinsic Value," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
26 (1965):16.
14. Monroe C. Beardsley, " Aesthetic Experience Regained," Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 28 (1969):3.
15. All of these observations, it must be insisted, bear only upon American aesthetics.
(Other English-language philosophies of art, such as the British, have
never seriously attended to Dewey.) Recent Chinese aesthetics, on the other
hand, has been increasingly interested in Dewey, paralleling a fondness among
philosophers in China for his general philosophy, related not only to his
demonstrated curiosity and concern for their land and people during his
lifetime, but to a basic compatibility between pragmatism and current Chinese
thinking.
16. The central arguments are found in Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in
the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1958; reprinted
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981); "Aesthetic Experience Regained"; and Michael J.
Wreen and Donald M. Callen, eds., The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays of
Monroe C. Beadsley (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), chap. 16, "Aesthetic
Experience."
Why Dewey Now?
I
There is nothing in Anglo-American aesthetics that can compare with the
comprehensive scope, detailed argument, and passionate power of Dewey's
Art as Experience (1934).1 Yet though this book initially aroused considerable
interest, practically no one studies it today. Pragmatist aesthetics was, by
the late fifties, totally eclipsed by analytic philosophy of art, which by and
large dismissed Dewey's aesthetic theory as "a hodge-podge of conflicting
methods and undisciplined speculations."2
But there are signs of change. Analytic aesthetics' hegemony in the
English-speaking world is being severely challenged by Continentally inspired
aesthetic theory based on hermeneutic, poststructuralist, and Marxian
philosophies. In contrast to traditional analytic philosophy but in
accord with pragmatism, these philosophies oppose foundationalist distinctions
and ahistorical positive essences, emphasizing instead the mutability
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Dewey's "Art as Experience" 61
and socio-historical praxical constitution of human thought and its objects.
In aesthetics they emphasize, like Dewey, art's socio-historical context and
responsibility. Frustrated with analytic aesthetics' failure to treat these
themes, American theorists of the arts have rushed to embrace them in contemporary
Continental philosophies, forgetting that they are powerfully
present in Dewey, where they find a clearer, more direct, and more encouraging
expression. The time is right for American aesthetics to rethink
and redirect itself, and I believe Dewey's aesthetics provides the right direction.
In what follows I shall suggest its more prominent points of redirection
by showing where it diverges from analytic aesthetics and how it
accommodates the most appealing themes of Continental theory.
II
1. One of the most central features of Dewey's aesthetics is its naturalism.
The first chapter of Art as Experience is entitled "The Live Creature"; and
both it and all the subsequent chapters are dedicated to grounding aesthetics
in the natural needs, constitution, and activities of the embodied
human organism. Dewey aims at "recovering the continuity of esthetic experience
with normal processes of living" (p. 16). Aesthetic understanding
must start with and never forget the roots of art and beauty in the "basic
vital functions," "the biological commonplaces" man shares with "bird and
beast" (pp. 19-20). For Dewey all art is the product of interaction between
the living organism and its environment, an undergoing and a doing which
involves a reorganization of energies, actions, and materials. Though human
arts have become more spiritualized, "the organic substratum remains
as the quickening and deep foundation," the sustaining source of the emotional
energies of art which make it so enhansive to life (pp. 30-31, 85). This
essential physiological stratum is not confined to the artist. The perceiver,
too, must engage her natural feelings and energies as well as her
physiological sensory motor responses in order to appreciate art, which for
Dewey amounts to reconstituting something as art in aesthetic experience
(pp. 60, 103-4).
The major thrust of analytic aesthetics is sharply opposed to naturalizing
art and its aesthetic value. G. E. Moore established this attitude with his
doctrine of the naturalistic fallacy, a fallacy which "has been quite as commonly
committed with regard to beauty as with regard to good."3 Aesthetic
qualities must not be identified with natural ones and are not even
reducible or logically entailed by them. This is precisely the point of Frank
Sibley's seminal analysis of aesthetic concepts, and it is why Margaret Macdonald
held that "works of art are esoteric objects."4
2. Part of Dewey's naturalism is to insist that art's aim "is to serve the
whole creature in his unified vitality," a "live creature" demanding natural
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62 Symposium
satisfactions (p. 122). This stands in sharp contrast to the extreme emphasis
on disinterestedness that analytic aesthetics inherited from Kant. This emphasis
goes beyond the mere Moorean point that beauty, like good, is a
purely intrinsic value or end in itself, which can only be misconceived as a
means. There is the further characterization of art as something essentially
defined by its noninstrumentality and gratuitousness. Peter Strawson explains
the impossibility of any general rules for art by defining our interest
in art as totally devoid of any "interest in anything it can or should do, or
that we can do with it"; and Stuart Hampshire likewise tells us that "a work
of art is gratuitous," something "made or done gratuitously, and not in response
to a problem posed."5 The underlying motive for such analytic attempts
to purify art from any functionality was not to denigrate it as
worthlessly useless, but to place its worth apart from and above the realm
of instrumental value and natural satisfactions. However noble the intention,
this attitude portrays aesthetic experience as eviscerate and socially irrelevant.
No wonder many have turned to the theories of Nietzsche,
Bataille, and Foucault for recognition of the bodily factors and desires involved
in the aesthetic, just as they turn to Continental Marxian theories for
greater appreciation of art's historico-political and socio-economic determinants
and its power of praxis.
But these very themes we can find in Dewey. Though no less devoted
than the analysts to defending the aesthetic and to proving its infungible
worth, Dewey did so by insisting on art's great but global instrumental
value. For anything to have human value it must in some way serve the
needs and enhance the life and development of the human organism in
coping with its environing world. The mistake of the Kantian tradition was
to assume that since art had no specific, identifiable function which it could
perform better than anything else, it could only be defended as being
beyond use and function. Dewey's important corrective is to argue that
art's special function and value lie not in any specialized, particular end,
but in satisfying the live creature in a more global way, by serving a variety
of ends, and most importantly by enhancing our immediate experience
which invigorates and vitalizes us, thus aiding our achievement of
whatever further ends we pursue (pp. 140, 144, 199, 265). The worksong
sung in the harvest fields not only provides the harvesters with a satisfying
aesthetic experience, but its zest carries over into their work and invigorates
and enhances it. The same can be said for works of high art. They are not
merely a special function-class of instruments for generating aesthetic experience
(as they essentially are for Monroe Beardsley, the analyst closest to
Dewey's account of aesthetic value and experience); they modify and enhance
perception and communication; they energize and inspire because
aesthetic experience is always spilling over and getting integrated into our
other activities, enhancing and deepening them.
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Dewey's "Art as Experience" 63
3. Dewey's recognition of the global functionality of art is related to
another view where he seems to differ sharply from analytic
philosophers-the philosophical primacy and centrality of art and the aesthetic.
For Dewey, the aesthetic experience is the "experience in which the
whole creature is alive" and most alive (pp. 33, 24-25, 109). "To esthetic experience,
then, the philosopher must go to understand what experience is"
(p. 278). While Dewey saw art as the qualitative measure of any society,6
analytic philosophers see science as the ideal and paradigm of human
achievement. And analytic aesthetics, at least initially, was largely an attempt
to apply the logically rigorous and precise methods of scientific philosophy
to the wayward and woolly realm of art. Yet Dewey, appreciative
as he was of scientific method and progress, could not help but regard
scientific experience as thinner than art. For art engages more of the human
organism in a more meaningful and immediate way (pp. 90-91, 126, 278),
including the higher complexities of thinking: "The production of a work of
genuine art probably demands more intelligence than does most of the socalled
thinking that goes on among those who pride themselves on being
'intellectuals"' (p. 52). He therefore held "that art-the mode of activity that
is charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed possession-is
the complete culmination of nature, and that 'science' is properly a handmaiden
that conducts natural events to this happy issue."7
4. Dewey tries to deconstruct the traditional privileging opposition of
science over art not only be reversing the privilege but by denying there is
any rigid dichotomy or opposition between the two. He insists that "science
is an art," for "esthetic quality . .. may inhere in scientific work," and both
enterprises perform the same essential function of helping us order and
cope with experience.8 Like Derrida's idea of the general text, Dewey's
central continuity thesis was aimed at breaking the strangle hold of
entrenched dualisms and rigid disciplinary distinctions which stifle creative
thinking and fragment both individual experience and social life. He sought
to connect aspects of human experience and activity that had been divided
by specialized, compartmentalizing thought and then more brutally sundered
by specialist, departmentalizing institutions in which such fragmented
disciplinary thinking is reinscribed and reinforced. In these ways
he also anticipates Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault.
Dewey's aesthetic naturalism, aimed at "recovering the continuity of esthetic
experience with normal processes of living," is part of his attempt to
break the stifling hold of "the compartmental conception of fine art," that
old and institutionally entrenched philosophical ideology of the aesthetic
which sharply distinguishes art from real life and remits it "to a separate
realm"-the museum, theater, and concert hall (pp. 14, 9). But Dewey's aesthetics
of continuity and holism undermine not only the art/science and
art/life dichotomies, it insists on the fundamental continuity of a host of
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64 Symposium
traditional binary notions and genre distinctions whose long-assumed oppositional
contrast has structured so much of philosophical aesthetics:
form/content, fine/practical art, high/popular culture, spatial/temporal
arts, artist/audience, to name but a few. There is no space here to discuss
his critique of all such rigid dualisms and distinctions; nor to belabor its affinity
to deconstruction and postmodernism, and its radical contrast to analytic
aesthetics whose quest for clarity typically advocated "a ruthlessness
in making distinctions" combined with a respect for entrenched disciplinary
divisions and critical practices.9
5. Analytic aesthetics, pursued under the ideal of science, tended to shirk
issues of evaluation and reform. The aim was to analyze and clarify the established
concepts and practices of art criticism, not to revise them; to give a
true account of our concept of art, not to change it. In vivid contrast,
Deweyan aesthetics is interested not in truth for truth's sake, but in achieving
richer and more satisfying experience. For Dewey's pragmatism, experience-not
truth-is the final standard. The ultimate aim of all inquiry,
scientific or aesthetic, is not knowledge itself, but better experience or experienced
value; and Dewey insists on "the immediacy of aesthetic experience"
and its experienced value (pp. 294, 123, 125, 297-98). From this
follows his view of the supremacy of the aesthetic: art's "immediately enjoyed,"
active experience is the "culmination of nature, for which truth or
science serves as an auxiliary 'handmaiden'" (p. 33 n.). It also follows that
aesthetic values cannot be permanently fixed by aesthetic theory or criticism
but must be continually tested and may be overturned by the tribunal
of changing experience (pp. 100-101, 110, 325).
6. A more dramatic and radical consequence of this experiential standard
is that our aesthetic concepts, including the concept of art itself, are
revealed as mere instruments which need to be challenged and revised
when they fail to provide the best experience. This can account for Dewey's
obvious attempt to direct his aesthetic theory at radically reforming our
concept of art and the aesthetic, an attempt which was alien to the essentially
accepting, clarificatory spirit of analytic aesthetics. While analytic aesthetics
followed the romantic and modernist tradition of defending art's
value and autonomy by identifying the concept of art with the concept (and
associated sublimity and genius) of high art, Dewey deplores this elitist
tradition, which he attacks under the labels of "the museum conception of
art" and "the esoteric idea of fine art" (pp. 12, 90). The prime motive for his
opposition to the spiritualized sequestration of art was not ontological considerations
of naturalistic continuity and emergence. It was the instrumental
aim of improving our immediate experience through socio-cultural
transformation, where art would be richer and more satisfying to more
people because it would be closer to their most vital interests and better integrated
into their lives. The compartmentalization and spiritualization of
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Dewey's "Art as Experience" 65
art as an elevated "separate realm" set "upon a far-off pedestal," divorced
from the materials and aims of all other human effort, has removed art from
the lives of most of us, and thus has impoverished the esthetic quality of
our lives (pp. 9-12).
But more than art suffers from its spiritualized sequestration; nor was
this compartmentalization established simply by and for aesthetes to secure
and purify their pleasures. The idea of art and the aesthetic as a separate
realm distinguished by its freedom, imagination, and pleasure has as its underlying
correlative the dismal assumption that ordinary life is necessarily
one of joyless, unimaginative coercion. This provides the powers and institutions
structuring our everyday life with the best excuse for their increasingly
brutal indifference to natural human needs for the pleasures of
beauty and imaginative freedom. These are not to be sought in real life, but
in fine art, an escape that gives temporary relief. Art becomes, in Dewey's
mordant phrase, "the beauty parlor of civilization," covering with an
opulent aesthetic surface its ugly horrors and brutalities which, for Dewey,
include class snobbery and capitalism's profit-seeking oppression and
alienation of labor (pp. 14-16, 27, 346). Here again, we find Dewey anticipating
currently influential themes in aesthetic theory which we have imported
form the Marxian Frankfurt school.
7. Analytic theories of the historicity and institutional nature of art are
painfully narrow and rarefied compared to Dewey's, which sees "the compartmentalized
conception of fine art" and the austere esotericism of contemporary
high art not as mere "internal development" of art,1? but as
largely a product of nationalism and imperialism (which fed the museum)
and of industrialization and world-market capitalism (which deprived art
of its "intimate social connection"). Modern socio-economic forces have so
divided between joyless "externally enforced labor" and free enjoyment, between
production and consumption, that the "chasm between ordinary and
esthetic experience," art and real life, has become theoretically convincing.
Dewey realizes that not only art but philosophical theories about art (and
everything else) are significantly shaped by "extraneous" socio-economic
conditions; thus our concept of art needs to be reformed as part and parcel
of the reform of society which has so constituted it.
8. I conclude with perhaps Dewey's most central aesthetic theme: the
privileging of aesthetic experience over the material object which ordinary,
reified thinking identifies (and then commodifies and fetishizes) as the
work of art. For Dewey the essence and value of art are not in such artifacts
but in the dynamic and developing experiential activity through which they
are created and perceived. He therefore distinguishes between the "art
product" and "the actual work of art [which] is what the product does with
and in experience" (p. 9). In contrast, analytic aesthetics has been rather
suspicious of aesthetic experience (at times even denying its existence),
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66 Symposium
while privileging the art object. It expended enormous efforts in trying to
fix the precise criteria for identifying the same art object in its various
manifestations (e.g., copies or performances) and for individuating it from
other objects and inauthentic manifestations (e.g., forgeries). Analytic aesthetics
did this because its scientific ideal was objective truth about art
rather than the Deweyan goal of enhanced experience. Privileging objective
critical truth meant privileging objects. Thus even Beardsley, whose first
book followed Dewey in making aesthetic experience the crux of aesthetics,
eventually gave uncontested privilege to the object as the guarantor of objective
criticism. "The first thing required to make criticism possible is an
object to be criticized-something ... with its own properties against which
interpretations and judgments can be checked." Beardsley therefore posits
the reifying principles of "Independence" and "Autonomy": "that literary
works exist as individuals" and "are self-sufficient entities."11
Undoubtedly much of poststructuralism's current appeal derives from
its attack on the static, closed notion of the artwork as a fully fixed, self-sufficient,
and inviolable object and from its ardent insistence on the active role
and openness of reading as textual practice which reconstitutes literary
meaning. Such themes, central to the fashionable Continental theories of
Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Foucault, are anticipated in Dewey's
move from closed artistic product to open, transformative aesthetic experience.
But Dewey's theory is saner, for while rejecting structural fixity and
reification, he clearly preserves the notions of structure, unity, and object by
reconstituting them in a functional, contextual form rather than suggesting
their total rejection as inescapably rigid, foundational, and retrograde.
My conclusion should be obvious. Since Dewey's aesthetics offers crucial
insights lacking in the analytic tradition and obtainable from Continental
theory only at the costly price of conceptual obfuscation, rebarbative jargon,
and irrelevant theoretical baggage, it represents the best point of departure
for new aesthetic thinking in Anglo-American philosophy. Though some of
Dewey's views are undeniably dated, pragmatist aesthetics is not simply a
curiosity of the past; it points to the most promising future we can envisage
for aesthetic inquiry. To fulfil that future we will have to read and develop
its Deweyan past.
Richard Shusterman
Temple University
NOTES
1. I shall be quoting from the new scholarly edition of John Dewey's Art as E
perience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). Page reference
will appear parenthetically in the body of the text.
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Dewey's "Art as Experience" 67
2. The quotation is from A. Isenberg, "Analytic Philosophy and the Study of Art,"
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (1987):128. The rise and debatable fall of
analytic aesthetics is discussed at length in my "Analytic Aesthetics: Retrospect
and Prospect," and in other papers in the same special issue of JAAC on analytic
aesthetics which I guest-edited. Further and more recent discussion of analytic
aesthetics' past achievement and continuing value can be found in Richard
Shusterman, ed., Analytic Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
3. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p.
201.
4. See M. Macdonald, "Some Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism
of the Arts," in Aesthetics and Language, ed. W. Elton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954), p.
114. Frank Sibley's frequently anthologized article "Aesthetic Concepts"
originally appeared in Philosophical Review 68 (1959):421-50.
5. See Peter Strawson, "Aesthetic Appraisal and Works of Art," in his Freedom and
Resentment (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 178-88; and Stuart Hampshire, "Logic
and Appreciation," in Aesthetics and Language, pp. 161-69.
6. "Neither the savage nor the civilized man is what he is by native constitution
but by the culture in which he participates. The final measure of the quality of
that culture is the arts which flourish" (p. 347).
7. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Norton, 1929), p. 358. Similarly
in Art as Experience, Dewey describes science as "but a central art auxiliary to the
generation and utilization of other arts" (p. 33).
8. See Experience and Nature, p. 358; and Art as Experience, pp. 33, 125-26, 202.
9. The quote is from John Passmore, "The Dreariness of Aesthetics," in Aesthetics
and Language, p. 45. I assess the power and value of analytic aesthetics' argument
for distinctions and the way pragmatism can accommodate them by
reinterpreting their nature, in Richard Shusterman, "Analytic and Pragmatist
Aesthetics," in Proceedings of the XIth International Congress of Aesthetics
(forthcoming), and in "Analytic Aesthetics, Literary Theory, and Deconstruction,"
Monist 69 (1986):22-38.
10. The analytic aesthetician Arthur Danto characteristically argues that the factors
and imperatives directing art's history are those of its "own internal development"
in his The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), pp. 97-111, 204. The citations here from Dewey are from
Art as Experience, pp. 14-15, 285.
11. M. C. Beardsley, The Possibility of Criticism (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1970), p. 16.
CONTRIBUTORS
Joe R. Burnett is Professor of Philosophy of Education, Emeritus, with the Un
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he served for several years as De
College of Education. He is a coauthor of Democracy and Excellence in American
tion and has most recently published in Educational Theory.
John Fisher, a Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, was until rece
editor of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He has edited Perceiving
and is a coeditor of Puzzles about Art: An Aesthetic Casebook.
Richard Shusterman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Temple Univers
the author of T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism and The Object of
Criticism and the editor of Analytic Aesthetics. The most recent of his num
ticles has appeared in Philosophy and Literature.
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