Dewey's Art as Experience - Ch 11: The Human Contribution (Psychology)

Hi, welcome back to Great Texts. As you know, we're talking about John Dewey's artist experience this week, Chapter 11, The Human Contribution. This chapter takes up topics which typically fall under the heading of psychology. So you can think of this as Dewey's chapter on psychology of art. And again, this is a fairly critical chapter like the last chapter. Dewey spends a lot of time criticizing other points of view. Dewey entertains this discussion of philosophy of art because, as he says right at the beginning, the history of philosophy, the history of philosophy of art and aesthetic theory has made frequent use of psychology. And as he tells us, aesthetic theories are filled with the fossils of antiquated psychology, antiquated psychologies, excuse me. So this is the reason Dewey takes up the basic ideas of psychology of art because he thinks that bad psychology has led past philosophers and aesthetic theorists to bad theories of art. Now, the psychological ideas Dewey is criticizing all seem to start, again, from the separation of subject and object that he's told us about before. According to these views, subject and object are distinct and things like perception have to cross the boundary between them. So one kind of view that Dewey rejects is the idea that perception is a matter of an impression caused by objects outside us. You might think of the wax tablet view that we see originally in Plato, but definitely there in Locke, right? The idea that perceptions come in and make an impression on our mind, something similar in Hume as well. And one of the things that's key to the problem in this view is the passivity with which perception leads to some kind of experience. Descartes is also popularly associated with this idea, with the separation of the subject from the world and the objects of experience. And indeed, we can see in Descartes, and certainly in later interpretations of Descartes, the idea that experience is something like a movie that plays on the screen of the mind, or in the ideas of later materialist revisions to Descartes, that the experience plays on a movie screen in the brain. Neuroscientists, in fact, sometimes talk this way. This is called the Cartesian theater view of experience or of the mind. And the philosophy of art, this conception of psychology, these sort of misconceptions, rather, of psychology lead to the idea that art objects out in the world produce in us aesthetic effects through the process of perception. And sometimes the idea that aesthetic attributes are sort of projections out of our subjectivity onto the objects. And these lead to a host of sort of misconceived ideas of art. Whether you think the term art applies to some object out in the world, or whether it applies to the aesthetic effect in our mind, whether you think beauty is a property of objects, or beauty is in the mind of the beholder, all of these are different variations on what Dewey sees as a problematic psychology of art. And so they lead to a host of philosophical misconceptions. Now, Dewey breaks down the separation. As we've seen before, he wants to break down the conception of subject and object, focus instead on their interaction, the mutual back and forth interplay between subject and object as forming the sort of the whole sort of location of experience. So it's this whole situation is the location of experience. And indeed, Dewey tells us in the case of art, that the total effect of the subject object interaction is art, right? The work of art is that whole interplay. The aesthetic experience is constituted by that whole situation. And, you know, we can use the term subject and object or self and world or organism and environment for Dewey, they come to much the same thing. And Dewey tells us in particular, that aesthetic experience has this character of not really being able to make a subject object distinction as such. In lots of contexts, we do make the subject object distinction, we want to, you know, understand whether, you know, you're mistaken about what happened, or whether what happened is different than what we think we have to locate certain things inside the subject inside the object. But an aesthetic experience in particular, there's a kind of total blending such that you can't really pick out what belongs to the subject and what belongs to the object. Dewey also gives an interesting historical origin to this to this set of distinctions, right? He says, in fact, before setting out in on any detailed discussion, I shall refer to the way in which sharp psychological distinctions historically originated. They were at first formulations of differences found among the portions of classes and the portions and classes of society. Plato provides an almost perfect example of this fact, he openly derives his threefold division of the soul from what he observed in the community life of his day. And this is typical, actually, of Dewey, to link the history of philosophy, or in this case, psychology to a kind of larger social history, to look at sort of cultural and material factors of a particular society to help us understand philosophical ideas that come from that time. And here again, Dewey is pointing to Plato, although he could point to many other eras in the history of philosophy, to see these sort of invidious distinctions or sort of harmful distinctions between mental or philosophical concepts mirrored in divisions in society, class divisions in society. Now, there's several key results for Dewey of these mistaken separations. One is the compartmentalization of sense, feeling, desire, purpose, etc. He says, when the linkage of the self with the world is broken, then also the various ways in which the self interacts with the world cease to have a unitary connection with one another. They fall into separate fragments of sense, feeling, desire, purpose, knowing, volition. So the idea here is that when we make this sort of original mistaken separation between subject and object, not that, again, for some purposes, we can make those distinctions, but the full sort of dichotomizing of subject and object, self and world leads to these subsequent fragmentations of these aspects of the self, whether it's sense, volition, knowledge, purpose, action, etc. Emotion often in there as well. The idea of aesthetic appreciation as contemplation here in the chapter is a key example of this. He points to Kant's compartmentalization of feeling, reason, and will as leading to the idea of beauty as an object of pure contemplation, sort of unrelated to action and desire and emotion. Towards the end of the chapter, Dewey also gives us an interesting discussion of imagination that comes out of some of this. So he tells us that imagination shares with beauty the doubtful honor of being the chief theme in aesthetic writings of enthusiastic ignorance. Kind of harsh, Dewey, but okay. More perhaps than any other phase of the human contribution, imagination has been treated as a special and self-contained faculty, differing from others in possession of mysterious potencies. And if you think of it, that makes sense, right? Dewey doesn't want us to think about the mind as separated out into these different faculties that are distinct from one another, compartmentalized, and so he doesn't want us to think of imagination in that way. Imagination, Dewey says, designates a quality that animates and pervades all processes of making an observation. It's a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole. It is the large and generous blending of interests at the point where the mind comes in contact with the world. When old and familiar things are made new in experience, there is imagination. So here, in typical Deweyian fashion, he's connecting the idea of imagination with a particular quality, right, of making observation, seeing, and feeling, and not as a sort of separate, independent faculty, independent thing. It rather qualifies certain kinds of experiences in a particular way, right, as sort of making new, right? That's what imagination consists in. A more, maybe, contemporary term would be creativity, although I think Dewey is trying to connect something like our new use of the word creativity with the older concept of imagination as it appears in thinkers like Kant as a sort of separate faculty. So how do we understand that role for imagination without it being an independent factor? So those are some of the key ideas from this chapter. Dewey really wants to emphasize the integration and unity of the self and the world in experience and in what we would call mind or psychology. He really wants to break down philosophical and psychological notions that depend on the sort of separateness, compartmentalization, dichotomizing of the self and the world. So that's what I found particularly significant in this chapter, although there's a lot of things going on here that I didn't mention. Hopefully we will get to it in our later discussions in class or on the discussion board or in the comments here. So I look forward to talking more with you about the human contribution to art, and I'll see you next week.