Context: John Dewey

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Dewey's Aesthetics

In Art as Experience, Dewey claims that “Continuity of culture in passage from one civilization to another as well as within the culture, is conditioned by art more than by any other one thing.”^[1]. In earlier discussion of the expressive object, Dewey argues that what is required of an artist in the way of aesthetic production is equally required for aesthetic perception. Referring to the acquired motor dispositions and prior meanings and values necessary for the artist’s production of works of art, Dewey claims that “similar considerations hold from the side of the perceiver.”^[2] To what extent are these requirements in tension? On one hand sits the duty of art to serve as the medium of continuity and communicability of culture, and, on the other, the requirement that the perceiver of the expressive object undergo an aesthetic experience in exactly the same full sense that Dewey requires of the artist? Any answer to this question will at the very least have to explicate the specific meaning Dewey intends for such terms as medium, communication, expression, and experience.

A separate concern is whether Dewey’s claim at the beginning of the work – that to understand art and construct a theory of aesthetics requires the reunion of the reified objects of fine art with the lived experience of an organism – already assumes a continuity between the aesthetic and experiential that should not go without argument. Once Dewey’s opening claim is accepted, much of the work logically follows; but what recommends the view that aesthetic experiences are a cultural achievement of particularly sensitive animals over the notion that art is a unique category of experience or a constituent feature of humanity that distinguishes it from animal life. eric

1. ↑ John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005) p. 340
2. ↑ John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005) p. 102