Education and Culture

The overriding question Stroud confronts in John Dewey and the Artful Life is how to render more of life’s experiences, including the ensuing benefits, as aesthetic or artful as possible. The answer to this question is challenging and complex. The claim most aesthetic theories make is that an object, activity, or experience is artful if and only if it has intrinsic value. Although what constitutes intrinsic value is widely contested, having value in and of itself is a necessary and sufficient condition for an object to be art or an experience aesthetic. This value gives art and aesthetic experience their unique quality and separates them from everyday objects, activities and experiences with only instrumental value; that is, value for the sake of something else. Such a view of art and aesthetic experience has long dominated not only our cultural narrative and practices, but our individual thoughts and behaviors as well.

As Dewey has shown repeatedly (e.g., in Experience and Nature, The Quest for Certainty, Art as Experience), this view of art and aesthetic experience is grounded in a distorted understanding of experience. This view is pervaded with intellectually fallacious dualisms, especially the belief that items of reflection are the constituents of primary experience. In contrast, for Dewey, the constituents of primary experience are noncognitive or pre-reflective, consisting of deep-seated habits (as acquired predispositions to manners or modes of response) of which we are minimally aware, at best. The fallacy of dualism and its consequent separation in experience fractures the unity of individual and collective experience and, in turn, the unity of self and community.

John Dewey and the Artful Life consists of eight chapters. In the first chapter, Stroud establishes the overall context for his project and introduces the reader to its basic structure in broad outline. The second chapter introduces the problem of the value of aesthetic experience using contemporary scholarship in art theory, and sets the stage for Stroud’s subsequent Deweyan analysis of experience. In the third chapter, Stroud presents a Deweyan account of aesthetic experience he refers to as “experiential” as an alternative to traditional “causal” theories. The fourth chapter [End Page 157] uses Dewey’s notion of “progressive adjustment” to argue that moral value and cultivation integrally involves attention to the present situation as both the spirit and method through which conduct is made morally worthy. Here Stroud emphasizes the importance of a first person focus on the individual and the orientation of one’s attentiveness to situations and relationships.

In the fifth chapter, Stroud illustrates the rich communicative value of art by placing its communicative aspect in the context of a particular audience. As such, it implies the notion of intention; that is, humans communicate purposely to achieve certain results, transform others, and so on. The sixth chapter examines how Stroud’s view of orientation fits into Dewey’s meliorism (as improvement of experience). This occurs by shaping one’s immediate and reflective attention in ways that render human experience more enjoyable and conducive to growth by making one’s activities more unified, alive, and absorptive. For Stroud, the type of orientation to be cultivated should guide one’s adaptive engagement with the present situation, with all its resources and obstacles, in such a way that the activities, desires, and goals makes one’s experience more unified. In the seventh chapter, Stroud shows how growth and the aesthetic represent a unified, consummatory, and absorptive engagement of a live creature with its present situation. What are vitally important to Stroud’s account are the mental habits/orientations that can be meliorated to increase one’s chances of and opportunities for growth. In terms of the subjective quality of experience, orientations are what make the difference between activity/conduct being artful or being fragmented drudgery. The eighth and final chapter lays out a number of possible criticisms of the arguments of previous chapters and Stroud’s...