The Journal of Aesthetic Education

I

The year 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of John Dewey's birth and also the 75th anniversary of the publication of his aesthetic masterpiece Art as Experience—a book that has been extremely influential within the field of aesthetics, not only in philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic education but also in the arts themselves.¹ I am honored to commemorate this double Deweyan anniversary with an essay that reexamines Art as Experience by briefly tracing some of its major themes and clarifying its generative context of production and philosophical roots, while also suggesting, in passing, how some of these themes and roots contribute to its continuing philosophical relevance. Before going further, I should offer two preliminary cautions. First, Dewey's aesthetic magnum opus is obviously too rich and masterful in ideas and influence for any brief commemorative essay to hope to do it sufficient justice. Second, as Dewey defined philosophy as "a criticism of criticisms," so my remarks will include a critical dimension.² This in no way denies my immense admiration for Dewey's achievement in Art as Experience, just as my noting of some formative influences on this work is in no way meant to diminish the impressive originality of his contribution.

Dewey's Art as Experience first established pragmatist aesthetics on the philosophical map, yet his text makes no mention of pragmatism. There are good reasons for Dewey's reluctance to highlight the term. The pragmatic is closely linked to the practical, precisely the idea against which the aesthetic has, since Kant, been traditionally contrasted and often oppositionally defined as purposeless and disinterested. To describe his new aesthetic [End Page 26] explicitly as pragmatist might have aroused too much skepticism to insure Dewey's views a fair hearing. Moreover, the pragmatist movement did not yet have a real tradition of philosophical aesthetics on which Dewey could securely rely, a suspicious lack that encouraged the presumption that pragmatism had nothing worthwhile to offer the arts and no real interest in them. Neither C. S. Peirce (who first conceived and baptized pragmatism) nor William James (who made it an internationally famous movement and converted Dewey to it) provided any treatises on aesthetics in their voluminous and wide-ranging writings.

It would be wrong to conclude, however, that these first prophets of pragmatism dismissed the aesthetic dimension as unimportant and that they contributed nothing to our understanding of art and criticism. As the originator of semiotics, Peirce significantly advanced the theory of symbols and interpretation in ways that enrich aesthetics. Appreciative of the role of play in creative expression and thought (which he tried to capture through an intriguing concept he called "musement"), Peirce also emphasized the immediately felt quality of experience (so crucial to aesthetics) as his first category of consciousness or "Firstness." Finally, Peirce urged the continuity and collaboration of aesthetics and ethics, even going so far as "making Ethics dependent upon Esthetics" and treating "the morally good … as a particular species of the esthetically good." If "Ethics is the science of the method of bringing Self-Control to bear to gain" what we desire, "what one ought to desire … will be to make [one's] life beautiful, admirable. Now the science of the Admirable is true Esthetics."³

William James, whose keen aesthetic taste, wide culture, and love of art inspired his first career choice for painting, offered almost no theorizing in philosophical aesthetics because he was convinced that its abstract formal principles and discursive definitions necessarily failed to capture (and even tended to obscure) the crucial nameless subtleties of art that make all the difference in actual aesthetic experience. But James held the aesthetic dimension of experience (its immediately and distinctively felt but nameless qualities and the appeal that such qualities exercised on our minds and behavior) to be extremely important, well beyond the field of fine art. Maintaining that such aesthetic considerations deeply pervaded one's ethical and philosophical perspective, he even argued that contentions between rival worldviews rested largely on "aesthetic" discords or conflicting temperaments.⁴ James also devoted specific attention to the aesthetic emotions as "subtler emotions" (along with intellectual and moral...