The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

I. Langer's Dismissal of Dewey

Early in Feeling and Form Susanne Langer disparages what she calls "the pragmatic outlook" in philosophy for its purported reduction of human experience, including aesthetic experience, to "'drives' motivated by animal needs" (1953, 35). She claims that this assumption "limits the class of admitted human interests to such as can, by one device or another, be interpreted in terms of animal psychology" (53). As Langer sees it, this "pragmatic outlook" necessitates a theory of art in which "aesthetic values must be treated either as direct satisfactions, i.e. pleasures, or as instrumental values, that is to say, means to fulfillment of biological needs" (36).

John Dewey is among the theorists Langer finds culpable in this regard. In support of her claim that Dewey is guilty of conflating aesthetic and "practical" experience, she cites a passage from Art as Experience:

The forces that create the gulf between producer and consumer in modern society operate to create also a chasm between ordinary and esthetic experience. Finally we locate it in a region inhabited by no other creature, and that emphasize beyond all reason the merely contemplative character of the esthetic.¹

Langer interprets Dewey as meaning that there is no essential difference between "artistic experience" and "ordinary physical, practical, and social experience," and therefore that there is none between the emotions generated in aesthetic experience and those that emerge in mundane experience (36). This position is inimical to her own, according to which "to treat great art as a source of experiences not essentially different from the experiences of daily life . . . is to miss the very essence of it. " Aesthetic experience is:

different from any other, the attitude toward works of art is a highly special one, the characteristic response is an entirely separate emotion, something more than common enjoyment—not related to the pleasures or displeasures furnished by [End Page 16] one's actual surroundings, and therefore disturbed by them rather than integrated with the contemporary scene.

(36, my italics)

Furthermore, Langer admonishes,

This conviction does not spring from a sentimental concern for the glamour and dignity of the arts, as Mr. Dewey suggests; it arises from the fact that when people in whom appreciation for some art . . . is spontaneous and pronounced, are induced by a psychologistic fashion to reflect on their attitude toward the works they appreciate, they find it not at all comparable with the attitude they have toward a new automobile, a beloved creature, or a glorious morning. They feel a different emotion, and in a different way.

(36–37)

Langer's overt contempt for Dewey's aesthetics can be explained at least partially by her antipragmatist bias. She mistakenly assumes that Dewey, like other "pragmatist" aestheticians, reduces aesthetic experience (and all "human interests") to "direct or oblique manifestations of 'drives' motivated by animal needs" (35).² She is understandably concerned to protect the arts and aesthetic experience from theories that would trivialize their power to "define and develop human feelings" and their meaningfulness in human life—a power so great that she likens it to that of religion (402). There is something peculiar, though, about Langer's criticisms of Dewey in Feeling and Form. In making them, she seems inclined to misrepresent precisely those aspects of his aesthetic theory which are in fact most consistent with her own. In Chapter 3 of Art as Experience, for instance, Dewey critiques the tendency to treat the distinction between the "artistic," constructive process of creation and the "aesthetic," receptive process of perception as if it were a dichotomy according to which only the artist actively creates and the audience-perceiver merely "takes in" work for contemplation. In an extended discussion, he examines how the activities of both artist and perceiver are simultaneously constructive and receptive (LW 10:53–61). Late in Feeling and Form, however, Langer attributes to Dewey the very dichotomy that he rejects. What she thinks to be a rejoinder to Dewey is in fact consistent with her own view: "Actually, of course, we move freely from one attitude to the other; every responsive person has some creative imagination, and...