John Dewey's Art As Experience (3 of 15)

All right, so here we go, we are going to do one more video. I think it's all it's going to take. We hope to finally finish the first chapter of John Dewey's art is experienced chapter titled The Live Creature. And we're just going to continue right where we left off here in the presentation. And he's already talked a bit about the relationship between the live creature and its environment. We're also going to talk now in this video a bit about emotions. We're going to talk about animal life and how it relates to our experience, the sort of the differences, the similarities between animal experience and ours, what that what that has to do, if anything, with the static experience. And he's going to start to unravel, maybe not super obviously, but he's going to get at least hints about his theory about what his general sorry, what his theory of experience in general is. So, again, here we start with this long quote. He's going to bring it back to the environment, but also he's going to tie the emotions into this in a very interesting way, which I'm going to explain here in a minute, I think also ties a bit into those parallels with some of the work of Heidegger, who's who's you know, Heidegger is the next philosopher that we're moving on to. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't even mention him here. We're going to be talking about him later, so might as well. But let's look at what Dewey says here about emotions. And the environment. The live animal does not have to project emotions into the objects experienced. Nature is kind and hateful, bland and morose, irritating and comforting long before she is mathematically qualified or even a conjuries of secondary qualities like colors and their shapes. So this is, again, where I think he shares this with Heidegger, especially the early Heidegger for being in nothingness. There's this, you know, you could argue whether or not it's true, but they seem to think there's this philosophical prejudice. Both Dewey and Heidegger seem to think there's this philosophical prejudice that prejudices theory over practice. So our understanding of objects, for instance, should be based on mere reflection, reason, rationality and not on how we understand those objects naively. And our everyday interaction with those things. Dewey and Heidegger flip the script and say, no, we just start with our everyday interactions of things and our everyday interactions with things is more direct. You know, we don't experience the emotions as some things that are the quality of the object, as something that attaches to the environment. The emotions engulf our entire experience. They're directly felt. They're not intellectualized. They're not conceptualized. And then, you know, like, for instance, if I see let's imagine I'm a caveman, hunter, gatherer, whatever, you know, prehistoric man walking through my environment and I see a dangerous animal, right, a wolf or a bear, tiger who looks threatening, right? I don't sit there as this sort of brute thinking about that object and analyzing its size mathematically, how tall it is, how far it is away from me, how big it is, how sharp its teeth are. I'm not thinking about all these and then attaching the word threat to it or the concept threat to it. This threat is an immediate realization, right? It colors my environment. I see that object jumps out at me. Right. So again, nature's kind and hateful, bland and morose. We you know, we don't project these emotions onto the object. They are a part of the environment. So the he says here, the dictionary will inform anyone who consults it that the early use of words like sweet and bitter was not to denote qualities of sense as such, but to discriminate things as favorable and hostile. I didn't check the dictionary for this. I have an old copy with all the etymologies, but I'm assuming he's correct. He probably would have written it if there was something to this. And how could it be otherwise? Direct experience comes from nature and man interacting with each other. It's very Darwinian in this interaction. Human energy gathers is released, damned up, frustrated and victorious. We talked about this, I think, at length in the last video. Pulses of doing and being withheld from this constant strife for existence. But at the same time, this is being the basis for Dewey. This is the basis for the aesthetic. Actually, according to him, if we didn't have strife, if we didn't have tension in our experience, then we couldn't have art. We couldn't have aesthetic experience at all. So he says here in this quote, right? There are two sorts of possible worlds in which aesthetic experience would not occur in a world of mere flux. Change would not be cumulative. It would not move toward a close. Stability and rest would have no being. So in a world where everything is constantly moving and there's no resolution and no repose, no equilibrium ever felt, that world would be a world without aesthetic experience. And then Dewey says equally. Is it true, however, that a world that is finished ended would have no traits of suspense and crisis and would offer no opportunity for resolution? Right. So in other words, the opposite of that, a world where there was no change and there was no strife, that would also be an unesthetic world as well. There'd be no resolution and therefore no aesthetic experience as well. Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment. We envision we envisage with pleasure, nirvana and a uniform heavenly bliss only because they are projected upon the background of our present world of stress and conflict in a finished world. Sleep and waking could not be distinguished in one wholly perturbed conditions could not even be struggled with in a world made after the pattern of ours. Moments of fulfillment punctuate experience with rhythmically enjoyed intervals. So there's something rhythmic about experience. And this necessitates not absolute stability, but not absolute chaos. Right. There has to be some flux and some some stasis. Right. If we had a world that was purely flux or purely chaos, purely change, at least if that's how it was experienced, Dewey's arguing that we would not have such a thing as aesthetic experience. Pleasures may come about through chance or through chance, contact and stimulation. Such pleasures are not to be despised in a world full of pain. Nietzsche is not an anti hedonist. He's sorry. Dewey is not an anti hedonist. So he's saying, look, if you get some pleasure out of something and it's just a happenstance, it's just chance to contact the stimulation. Hey, that's great. Good for you, man. We all need a little help, right? But it's not the same thing as what he's talking about here. Happiness and delight are a different sort of thing. They come to be through a fulfillment that reaches to the depths of our being. This sounds a bit mystical and kind of fanciful and romantic. But I don't think that's what he's not trying to be. This is talking about, again, the struggle for life. It's very Darwinian. But we have a struggle and then there's a calm, there's struggle and calm. So it reaches the very depths of our being, one that is in an adjustment of our whole being with the conditions of existence in the process of living attainment of a period of equilibrium is at the same time the initiation of a new relation to the environment, one that brings with it a potency of new adjustments to be made through struggle. The time of consummation is also one of beginning anew. But we hinted at this in the last video, right? When the organism is able to somehow fulfill some some not obligation, some demand of the environment, some impotent of some some implement or obstacle, something pushing against in the environment, right? Once it sort of comes up with a game plan or a way to deal with this and struggles against it and overcomes it, that in a sense, that overcoming is aesthetic. It's this equilibrium, that pause, that that that relaxation, that unity is is is aesthetic, says Dewey. But there's different ways that we deal with our environment, sometimes coping with. We just sort of barely get by. But there's others in which that overcoming adds something to our potency. Here's the word that he uses, right? It expands our experience is what he was using in previous quotes. So in a sense, it's the end of a process. It's the fulfillment of a need or desire. At the same time, it's a new beginning. It's a new engagement with the world, new understanding. If we're able to incorporate that overcoming in our our proceeding, you know, the following experiences are, you know, all the experiences that follow. So our relationship to time in general is key here for for doing again, this is this is all very maybe I read too much Heidegger, so I see Heidegger in a lot of things. But again, this is this reminds me a lot of what he says and being in time, one of his most famous works. But Dewey, again, focuses a lot on our relationship to to time, specifically our concept of past, present and future. He writes, Most mortals are conscious that a split often occurs between their present living and their past and future. Then the past hangs upon them as a burden. It invades the present with a sense of regret, of opportunities not used and of consequences we wish undone. It rests upon it rests upon the present as an oppression instead of being a storehouse of resources by which to move confidently forward. Right. We're dwelling on the past past as a burden instead of seeing it as an experience from which we can grow from. It's, you know, what? Why couldn't I do it this way? Why didn't I do it that way? Why didn't I try this? Right. But the live creature adopts to its past. It can make friends with even its stupidities, using them as warnings that increase present wariness instead of trying to live upon whatever may have been achieved in the past. It uses past successes to inform the present. Right. What Santayana calls these husk reverberations of the past to the being fully alive, right? The one who doesn't dwell on the past or doing being fully alive. The future is not ominous. But a promise. Right. So just like the past can be something that we dwell on, we worry about, why didn't I do this way? Why? Why didn't happen that way? But the future can also have this ominous tone. Oh, my God, I don't know if I'll be able to do the test. I don't know how I'm going to do. I'm going to pass this class, et cetera. But he says, when you're fully present, when you're fully alive, the future is not ominous, but it's a promise. It surrounds the present as a halo. It consists of possibilities that are felt as a possession of what is now and here. Right. So we bring the future into the present. We bring the past and the present in life that is truly life. Everything overlaps and merges. But all too often, we exist in apprehensions of what the future may bring and are divided within ourselves. Even when not over anxious, we do not enjoy the present because we subordinate it to what is absent. We're preoccupied with something else. So for Dewey, the aesthetic will not have this quality. The aesthetic will not be, you know, the aesthetic experience will not be one where we're dwelling on the past, dwelling on the future. And again, this, I think, is something he's going to share with Schopenhauer. He's going to agree with him on this. But for much different reasons, you might argue that Schopenhauer is a bit mystical. He's he's drawing from Buddhism and Hinduism, you know, from the Vedic literature and Hindu. But Dewey's just thinking about the sort of calm repose. And he's actually you're going to see here in a minute. He's drawing from examples, you know, from the animal kingdom because of the frequency of this abandonment of the present, past, future, the happy periods of an experience. It is now complete because it absorbs itself into itself, memories of the past and anticipations of the future come to constitute an aesthetic ideal. So in other words, those moments when we're able to incorporate the past into our present and we're able to we're able to use the future as some sort of grand anticipation. Right. Those for Dewey are what constitute the conditions of an aesthetic ideal only when the past ceases to trouble. And anticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united with this environment and therefore fully alive. Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reinforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is. But we have a picture here of Ganesh, right? This figure of Ganesh at the Ganesh Kachori Festival, Kachori Festival in India. And right. I mean, I'm just imagining the people there. You know, it's from what I understand, Ganesh, he's a symbol of new beginnings and new celebration. And when you graduate from high school or get married or something, Ganesh is often invoked or worshipped or something like this. OK, and so perhaps if you are able to sort of like become one with this celebration, this is all sounding kind of Nietzschean, kind of Dionysian. But that, I think, is what Dewey would like. That's what he's that's what he's going to he's going to say is the essence of the aesthetic, right? It's these moments when we're fully present and. And the the celebration of the future is there, and the past is not seen as a burden or as a regret, but as something that has brought us to where we're at now and has sort of made us who we are, and we can sort of see that and appreciate it and incorporate it to our present experience. And again, this sounds very fanciful, but, you know, he's not drawing from mysticism. He's not drawing from Eastern thought. He's drawing from the animal kingdom here. So, you know, for him, aesthetic experience is even present in animal life. So he writes that in order to grasp the sources of aesthetic experience, it is therefore necessary to have recourse to animal life below the human scale. The activities of the fox, the dog and the thrush may at least stand as reminders and symbols of that unity of experience, which we so fractional fractionalize when we when work is labor and thought withdraws us from the world. The live animal is fully present all there in all its actions, in its wary glances, its sharp sniffing, its abrupt cocking of ears. All senses are equally queevee. I'm not sure if that's how you say that French word. Right. But fully alive. Right. You know, on the sort of the peak. Now, even I've got this picture of a tiger who looks really vibrant, beautiful and in nature, like he's about to pounce at you, staring at you like a predator. Right. But even my cat laying on the bed in my bedroom, they're taking a nap. You know, she's not worrying about yesterday and, you know. The past, I'm assuming maybe she is, she's got regrets, I don't know about. She does. She's really good at hiding it. Right. She's just she's just there. She's just a dumb animal. Right. But for Nietzsche's, that's not dumb. That's that's what you should be aiming for. Right. It's just let go and be a cat. This is very Nietzschean, too. Reminds me of like, you know, this passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where he talks about how you have to become a what is it, a tarantula? And then it totally screwed up. You're a you're a tiger, a tarantula and then a baby. Right. You go through this metamorphosis and the baby is just like a completely present and just not judging things, not putting them in these boxes. You know, the past is not really a burden. The future is not an ominous, threatening presence, but we're just fully there and just let go. We're like at one with our with our with our experience and our environment. Right. So we take a lesson from animals, not just this lion, but my little lazy cat laying down on my bed. It is mere ignorance, do he says, right, it's mere ignorance that leads them to the supposition that the connection of art and aesthetic perception with experience signifies a lowering of their significance and dignity, experience and the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality. We're going to talk more about this in the next video, because he's kind of vague, I think so far. What does he mean by experience? Isn't everything experience, right? Like what what is his general notion of experience and how does aesthetic experience differ from this? It's not that clear yet. We're going to have to kind of wait to chapter two, the title of which is having an experience to kind of get a I guess a clearer, more detailed answer. But he's he's hinting at it here. So, you know, you might kind of already have a sense of where he's going with this. So in any ways, experience and the degree in which it is is experience is heightened vitality instead of signifying being shut up within one's own private feelings and sensations. It signifies active and alert commerce with the world. So you're actively engaged with the environment. You're not this separate subjectivity, you know, willlessly contemplating it like Schopenhauer would have you think at its height. It signifies a complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events because experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of things. It is art in its gym, right? So art is experience, right? Well, at least experience is art in its gym, right? Well, what what we call art begins and what we call just basic living experience, the lived experience of the organism as it interacts with its environment. Experience is the result, the sign and the reward of that interaction of an organism and environment, which, when it is carried to the full, is a transformation of interaction into participation and communication. Since sense organs with their connected motor apparatus are the means of this participation, any and every derogation of them, whether practical or theoretical, is at once effect and cause of a narrowed and dulled life experience. Oppositions of mind and body, soul and matter, spirit and flesh all have their origin fundamentally in fear of what life may bring forth. They are marks of contraction and withdrawal. This is a very obscure passage. Hard to follow. I admit, but I felt like I needed to put it in here, right? This is a very key. This is key, I think, to Dewey's philosophy in general. He was a philosophical pragmatist. You know, I recommend if you want to look it up, look at pragmatism. You know, maybe get a general view of pragmatism. But this is also controversial. But I got to take sides with Dewey here, right? You're probably not going to like this, maybe, because it's kind of confusing. But I think he's on to something here, right? This sort of constant conception of a self you find throughout philosophy. This is, I think, something he shares with Heidegger. They reject it, right? This is something I think they would share with the Buddha, right? Buddhism, OK? The environment and the self are the same thing. What? What? Environment? No, what do you mean, right? OK, the world, the environment, the self. Two sides of the same coin, at least you might say, right? You can't have one without the other. Philosophy tries to separate the two. Go back to Descartes. We've been talking about Descartes throughout the semester, although Descartes never wrote about philosophy of art. He had a big influence on a lot of these guys, right? Maybe negatively or positively, they were reacting a lot of them to Descartes. So Descartes famously said, I think, therefore, I am. And that's all I know for sure. Everything else I get from that certainty, that certainty of self. We see this this method of doing philosophy repeat itself in the works of Kant, in the works of Schopenhauer, David Hume, even you can argue. They start with this notion of I exist the self. What else? Right. That's what I know. I could maybe everything that I see, my perceptions could be all deceptive. We all be like it's a matrix scenario. Plato's cave or whatever. But I can't doubt I exist. So the self thought itself is the sort of basic building block of all other truth and all of the truth is derived from that sort of one foundation, right? But for for John Dewey, for the pragmatist in him and for, you know, the phenomenologist Heidegger, another fancy word we'll get to later. The self is really a construction that is a result of your interaction with your environment. And in this case, do you say it's a retraction from it? Right. So the separation of mind and body, the physical and the mental the organism from its environment for him, it's an artificial sort of line that we draw. It only comes about in certain types of experience in which things are not sort of fit together. They were dwelling on the past. We're worried about the future. Maybe things aren't working out again. These are marks of contraction and withdrawal. Man excels need. Sorry, Dewey says man excels in complexity and minuteness of differentiations. So what makes us different from other living organisms? He's going to start getting into that. We share this sort of intertwinedness with the environment of other living organisms. It's our consciousness, our over intellectualism, you know, of especially do we probably say traditional Western philosophy that has led us to lose sight of this. But what is really different between humans and other creatures? Obviously, there's something different. And Dewey is going to give us his take on this. It might not be the traditional take that you find in Aristotle or Kant. Man is a rational animal. But there's something about our experience that is more refined and more variegated might be a good word than is true for other organisms, you know, that he would say are maybe below us in this scale. So he says man excels in complexity and minuteness of differentiations. The very fact this very fact constitutes the necessity for many comprehensive and exact relationships among the constituents of constituents of this being. There are more opportunities for resistance and tension, more drafts on experimentation and invention, and therefore more novelty in action, greater range and depth of insight, an increase of poignancy and feeling as an organism increases in complexity. The rhythms of struggle and consummation in its relation to its environment are buried and prolonged, and they come to include within themselves an endless variety of sub rhythms. In other words, we are more complicated because we struggle with more things in our environment because of the development of our consciousness, you know, because of our rising above and I guess conquering nature and all these sort of other things. You know, we are able to do more with our experience. This is akin, I think, to Schopenhauer. This is akin to Nietzsche, especially when Nietzsche writes in in the gay science in one of his famous works, how unlike the animals who are sort of stuck in their world, we have this relationship to our world that is both creative and adaptive. Right. We create it and we adapt to it. So we're a product of our environment and our product is an environment that's much less true of animals and other creatures. And Dewey is seeming to say the same thing. You know, he's obviously tying this more to, you know, Darwinian biology. You know, we overcome all these, you know, obstacles. And through this, we evolve. We gain more skills. We gain more capacities, more things to do and more ways to manipulate our environment. So we're much more complex in that regard. And so our mode of aesthetic expression obviously will be that way, too. Our relationship to space and time is also going to be shaped in a much different way than traditional philosophy has somehow represented it. I think particularly here, he's not naming names, but he particularly seems to be targeting philosophers like Kant, but not just Kant. This is a pretty typical move or or mode of thought of modern Enlightenment philosophers. They tend to think of space and time as these very abstract properties. If you remember back to the first lecture on Kant, if you watched it, that was a really tough lecture. So if you didn't really quite get some of the points, I don't blame you. Kant is not easy. Kant mentions that space and time are the basic forms of all experience. All experience takes place under the conditions of space and time. But what Kant means in that context is space and time in a very abstract sense. Space is completely open and wide and infinite. There's no borders to it. Right. Again, so space is boundless and endless. Time is same. It's just duration, which can be divided up into distinct, discrete points. But for Dewey, and I would argue also for Heidegger, although this video is really on Dewey, time and space are originally not experienced as these abstract constituents. They're not experienced in this super abstract way. So there's a way that human beings and a living creature experiences time and space that is certainly not abstract. And yet these abstract understandings, these conceptual understandings of time and space are actually derived from these more primal, direct experiences, more human experiences, space and time. So let's read this quote where Dewey tries to elaborate on this point. Space, he says, thus becomes something more than a void in which to roam about, dotted here and there with dangerous things and things that satisfy the appetite. It becomes a comprehensive and enclosed scene within which are ordered the multiplicity of doings and undergoings in which man engages. So the human space is a much more significant. It's not an abstract. We're not just these sort of subjectivities floating around, looking for satisfaction and avoiding dissatisfaction. Kind of mindlessly wandering, almost like if you've ever read the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, that's kind of his sort of his characterization of human experience, kind of hedonistic. But no, you know, for Dewey, much like Heidegger, I would say we inhabit these spaces that are fully contained. We we're aware of our neighborhood and how our neighborhood is connected to the adjoining neighborhood. And if we have a job across town, we have sort of a sense of the space between where we're living and where we're working. And we have a sense of, you know, space between ourselves and our loved ones, right? This sort of space is much more significant and sort of contained and enclosed. And it's a space in which human action is made possible. It's the space in which human actions can be significant, right? It's where we have jobs and we go to work. It's not an abstract space. And so for him, also, time similarly ceases to be either the endless and uniform flow or the succession of instantaneous points, which some philosophers have asserted it to be. It, too, is the organized and organizing medium of the rhythmic ebb and flow of expected impulse, forward and retracted movement, resistance and suspense with fulfillment and consummation. It is an ordering of growth and maturation. So this quote here, right, this sort of brings us back to the beginning of the lecture, right, the first lecture. And it kind of makes a little bit more sense why he would use the example of a fire fire truck and its siren driving by or the construction worker drilling a hole in the earth, boring a hole in the earth as an example of some sort of aesthetic in our everyday experience. But now that we sort of have a fuller picture, maybe of what he means by human experience and the interaction with the environment, perhaps those examples are not quite so obscure. So let's read this quote here and see how he ties that together. When a flash of lightning illumines a dark landscape, there's a momentary recognition of objects, but the recognition is not itself a mere point in time. It is the focal culmination of long, slow processes of maturation. It is the manifestation of the continuity of an ordered temporal experience in a sudden, discreet instant of climate. It is as meaningless in isolation as would be the drama of Hamlet where it confined to a single line or word with no context. Form, as it is present in the fine arts, is the art of making clear what is involved in the organization of space and time prefigured in every course of a developing life experience. So what Dewey is saying here is elaborating on what he's already said about time and space. The way they're experienced to us is not the way they're described by the philosopher. Why is it that the lightning bolt strikes out and is something that is significant to us? Right. It's because of all the things that led up to it, the calm, the rumble, the sort of luminous clouds. All of that was a part of this whole organic, full experience, which made that lightning bolt be as striking and as. Captivating, I guess you might say, as it is on its own, and maybe this is debatable. It would not be significant, right? So we can't understand objects discreetly, independent of other objects and without there also being part of some sort of culmination of a process, says Dewey. This is the basis for the possibility of any sort of aesthetic experience at all. Let's see what he says about recognition and perception. This is also how. In our experience, certain things that might be kind of mundane and silly because they are. Novel, unexpected. Come out of nowhere. They, too, can be aesthetic in a sense. So moments and places, despite physical limitation and narrow localization, are charged with accumulations of long gathering energy. A return to a scene of childhood that was left long years before floods the spot with the release of pent up memories and hopes. Right. So this this this accumulation doesn't have to be something that's so obvious, right? You might have all these memories of your childhood that you don't reflect on all the time, but they're there. They come from time to time. Maybe you've been holding them back a bit. Maybe they're sad. Maybe they're happy. But you're too busy to think about that. You got to come back to the present. But then you go to that old playground where you used to hang out when you were a kid and all that just jumps right out. Right. And there's that aesthetic moment of recognition. Likewise, to meet in a strange country, one who is a casual acquaintance at home may arouse a satisfaction so acute as to bring a thrill. Right. So, yeah, you bump into somebody who, you know, there's just a casual acquaintance. You're not going to get all excited about it if it's just at home. Right. When you're at your home city. But if you bump into him while you're on, you know, on vacation in Europe or the Bahamas, it's kind of exciting. Well, you're here, too. Wow. Fancy meeting you here. Mere recognitions occur only when we are occupied with something else than the object or person recognized. It marks either an interruption or else an intent to use what is recognized as a means for something else to see, to perceive is more than to recognize. I'm not just seeing this object as this is a book. This is a table. Right. I'm actually when I'm perceiving it. It's something actually significant to me. It jumps out. It does not identify something present in terms of a past disconnected from it. The past is carried into the present so as to expand and deepen the content of the latter. Oh, wow. That reminds me of this. And now it makes me appreciate this moment even more. But this is the idea that he's doing that. More on nature, right? These are all some examples that you might want to push back on, right? They don't seem so obviously aesthetic. This is art is thus prefigured in the very processes of living. A bird builds its nest and a beaver its dam when internal organic pressures cooperate with external materials so that the former are fulfilled and the latter are transformed in a satisfying culmination. So all these pressures from outside, all the materials that are available, they all come together and they're fulfilled in the dam, in the nest, which offers protection or some function for the living organism. We may hesitate to apply the word art since we doubt the presence of directive intent. But all deliberation, all conscious intent grows out of things once performed organically through the interplay of natural energy. So he's arguing here again, this is something Heidegger, I think, would agree with him about is that all of these things that we call art can be traced back to modes of experience, modes of behavior that were a part of the the organism's interaction with this environment. And even the the sort of the beaver building a dam can be an example of this, a primal example to the primal ancestry of the artist in us. But you might be asking, well, how did we ever use dancing in nature? How is this ever spontaneous, right? I mean, you got to think, I don't know, maybe you got happy. You were just happy. It was a way of just jumping around and showing how happy you were. That's why you dance. Also, your religious intent. Maybe they thought that the gods would be, you know, somehow sanctified and give you some props or something like that. The point he's making, though, is that anything that we theorize about now that we talk about is having rules or regs or norms, horse riding, for example. For him, this is something that we just figured out. We didn't like theorize about it and then set out to do it. Keep experimenting. No, it was something that through our struggles with our living environment, through trial and error, you know, human beings figured out how to tame the horse, how to ride it, and then eventually how to train it to do all sorts of tricks. Jump over, you know, larger and larger fences. Eventually, throughout time, theories were developed from that direct, experienced practice. So for him, that's the direction that all it always takes, right? Art is created in and from nature, as are all these things we theorize about. Well, I thought I'd be able to finish the first chapter in one more video, but I noticed that I'm going way too long already. We're almost done, though. We've only got a few more slides left before we're finished with Dewey's chapter one of art as experience, the live creature. So this next video that we're going to move into here, we're going to we're going to get into chapter two. Fine. We're going to have to wrap up. What little is left here of the first chapter, which is fine because it's a pretty good segue. I think that these two chapters are quite related because in the first chapter, it's not just talking about a live creature, a living organism, obviously. He does mention his sort of general theory of experience. And he talks also about theories of art and why they fail and where his theory is going to go, how he's going to correct some of those failures. So you've got a lot to come, right? A lot more material. But I swear, I promise from here on out, these videos are going to get a lot shorter. So I hope to see you on the other side and probably have to take a quick break because I'm running out of it. It's a bit of steam. So the next video, the lighting might be a little different and I might be in a different shirt or something like that. So.