Dewey's Art as Experience - Ch 12_ The Challenge to Philosophy

Okay, hi everyone. Welcome back to Great Texts. We're talking once again about John Dewey's artist experience. This week, chapter 12, the challenge to philosophy. And it is more or less what it sounds. He's talking about the challenge posed by philosophy of art as a subject and aesthetic experience, in particular, to different kinds of philosophies, philosophical systems, philosophical ideas. So actually, I think on my reading, there are really two kinds of challenges to philosophy here in the chapter. The first, maybe the more basic, comes from his view that aesthetic experience reveals really the nature of experience as such. It's somehow a more, he problematizes this word, but he says in a sense, it's more pure kind of experience or more full kind of experience. Although he's, you know, he doesn't want to step in it, so to speak, with problematic philosophical views about purity. But he does think that it really does reveal something important about the nature of experience, which can challenge philosophical theories and systems insofar as they have views about experience. And we know that's quite common. Secondly, and perhaps more in the forefront of this chapter's argument, is that one's philosophy of art and philosophy of aesthetic experience or theory of aesthetic experience can reveal limitations of one's whole philosophical system. Now, these are two closely linked challenges. One might say they're sort of the same. But I think, you know, Dewey does sort of range widely across some major philosophical concepts here. And so I think thinking about how aesthetic experience poses a challenge to philosophy in both of these ways is actually pretty helpful. So quoting from some key sentences in the very early parts of this chapter, I just want to highlight a few things. Dewey says, there's no test that so surely reveals the one-sidedness of a philosophy as its treatment of art and aesthetic experience. Philosophies of aesthetics have often set out from one factor that plays a part in the constitution of experience and have attempted to interpret or explain the aesthetic experience by a single element. We can ask what element in the formation of experience each system has taken as central and characteristic. So here, these are three sentences from slightly different contexts, although they're within a few paragraphs of each other, or two pages of each other, at least. And you see, he really emphasizes the one-sidedness, the single factor, the single element. On the one hand here, Dewey's pointing towards the limitations of these different philosophical systems and the way they focus on a single element and certain preconceived ideas about art and how it relates to this element. On the other hand, though, he does give credit in a way to each system that he discusses in the sense that it draws our attention to a genuinely significant element. So this is a kind of common way that Dewey sort of wades through the history of philosophy, looking on the one hand at what each philosophy gets right about experience, what thing it rightly emphasizes, and then what it leaves out, the way in which its picture is incomplete. And then he says we can ask what element each system has taken as central and characteristic. So in determining which element each system emphasizes, we also create a pretty natural categorization scheme for philosophies of art. So we can kind of split philosophies up into types and then look at just how well those systems do. And this way, we don't have to review kind of the whole history of the philosophy of art to get at what we can learn from these challenges. So here are what I take to be the main types of philosophy of art discussed in the chapter. The first is what he calls the make-believe theory, which emphasizes the role of imagination, which he says from the very beginning of this chapter and also in the previous chapter, is definitely a crucial part of all aesthetic experience. But the make-believe theory kind of conceives of imagination as mere reverie, sort of a dream state almost. And there, Dewey thinks we're leaving out the material of art, the medium, its embodiment eventually in some object or event. So this is a partial and incomplete theory. On the one hand, it emphasizes something important, imagination. On the other hand, it leaves a lot out by the way it treats imagination as a sort of separate thing. A second theory, but closely related to this first, in fact, he puts these together as a sort of broad type. He sort of describes there being three broad types, is what he calls the play theory or sometimes the escape theory, or I might call it escapism. And I think that's pretty familiar, the idea that you use art to kind of escape from your worries in the world, but also the sort of connection between art and play as in children's play. He thinks this improves upon the make-believe theory, which emphasizes just reverie because it emphasizes action, right? Play involves action, typically involves objects of some kind. Maybe it involves other people in many cases, not always. But it still sort of leaves out the medium of art in the sense of the sort of purposeful reconstruction of materials, right? Art sort of as such takes stuff in the world, whether that's, you know, talking about the shaping arts or we're just talking about maybe dance, the way you move your body, and deliberately reshaping it. When that happens, he says play becomes work. I mean, not in the sense of drudgery or labor, but it becomes work in the sense of, you know, you're making things, you're doing things, you're creating the work of art, you're doing the work of art. So play becomes work when it becomes expressive, and the play theory kind of leaves that out as well. Okay, the next major kind of theory, which you might sort of characterize, if you characterize the first kind of theories, theories sort of focus too much on the self. This set of theories focuses too much on the object or the other. This is the representation theory or the imitation theory, the idea that what art does is somehow capture some other thing in reality. And doing contrasts here, the ancient version of this, which he sees most clearly in Aristotle, although he also thinks that Joshua Reynolds is somehow stuck in this idea that what art represents is not so much individuals, but essences, right, or universals, right. And then there's the more modern version of this, which is, you know, it's individual things, people, moments in time that art is representing or imitating. But either way, this theory emphasizes only the objective, right. It neglects the individuality of art, right. And so that's where it goes wrong. Another related theory, Dewey talks about briefly is the idea that what art really does is, is it's a form of knowledge, right? Art is a mode of knowledge in the sense of a kind of revelation. And what does it reveal? Well, again, in the ancient theories, it's sort of inner natures of things that are revealed through art. And Dewey sort of sees a host of figures as somehow connected with this idea, which, you know, he includes Aristotle again, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Benedetta Croce, all come in to this discussion. And then the last view, okay, so these two theories, the representative and knowledge theory of art are both too focused on sort of the object or something outside of and separate from the individual. The third theory, in a way, kind of has aspects of the first two types of theory or the first four theories, if you want to split them up that way. It treats art, on the one hand, as leading to something else, right? But on the other hand, because it does have the sort of aspects of individuality, it's actually inadequate for that, for that thing. So it's like the imitation theory. But it's a bad imitation, right? So we, this is, this is a core Plato's idea, right, that we encounter beauty through art in a kind of limited and weak way. And that leads us to contemplation of pure beauty, the idea or the form of beauty. And then we don't need art anymore. So it's, it's the idealist theories of art, see art as sort of leading to but inadequate for something else, ideas, essences. And these, these theories typically treat the mind in some aspect, or mind-like things in some aspect as ultimate, right? Whether that's a kind of Platonic view, the ultimate ideas, or a kind of Hegelian idealist view, where it's the sort of, it's the absolute mind, like, like Croce, right? But Schopenhauer also follows into this this type of idealist theory. For Schopenhauer, it's the will, right, rather than the concept of the idea. But for Dewey, it's much the same kind of mistake. Now, Dewey, in the course of the argument, brings up a variety of philosophical ideas that are somehow brought into doubt, or shown to be sort of limited or one-sided through these analyses of aesthetic experience, and through what's sort of analyzing what goes wrong in these different philosophies of art. So on the one hand, there's the distinction between subject and object, right? The make-believe theory clearly depends on this distinction, right? It over emphasizes the subject, the separate subject, when in fact, in art, you can't rely on that distinction. It's not valid in that case. A very similar related distinction between subjective and objective, right? Subjective, the individual contribution. Objective, the nature of the thing coming from outside. The problems with the representational theory of art show what's wrong with thinking about art in terms of subjective and objective, and the sort of ultimate distinction between subjective and objective factors. In art, they're not separable, distinguishable, in the same sense. The dichotomy or dualism of freedom and necessity is problematized by the play theory, the escapist theory of art, over emphasizing freedom. Essences are problematized in his discussion of the more epistemic or knowledge-based theories of art. He says that essence turns out to be either ghostly metaphysics with no real connection to art, or merely the gist of things, the essence of the matter, right? There's a perfectly ordinary notion of essence that he's happy with, and he thinks is important to understanding art. It just gets blown out of proportion, philosophical proportion, by certain metaphysical views. Then the philosophical operation of intuition, which for figures like Schopenhauer and Croce become this kind of mysterious philosophical activity with no direct connection to perception or experience. He problematizes those as well. To end with this great quote from the final paragraph of the chapter, Dewey says, in art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection. Of art as experience, it is also true that nature has neither subjective nor objective being, is neither individual nor universal, sensuous nor rational. Now, what's Dewey emphasizing there? I mean, it's a theme that he's emphasized before, which is this sort of integral unity that is essential to aesthetic experience. Art reveals for us the way in which these myriad philosophical distinctions are not perfect dichotomies, because in art they're transfigured, they're unified. The dichotomy doesn't hold up. Not because we choose one side or the other, but rather we see that the two sides blend together in the aesthetic experience. So, of course, there's more things going on in this chapter, including some of Dewey's more specific criticisms of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Croce, that I've only barely alluded to. So there's a lot more to talk about. We can, of course, get into those discussions via the discussion board or the comments here or in class. Next week, we're going to be focusing on the chapter on criticism, which is a very important chapter in that it sort of explains the nature and function of art criticism, both philosophically speaking and to the artist. So I look forward to seeing you next week and those of you I'll see in class today talking about this chapter more. All right, have a good week.