Dewey's Art as Experience - Ch 14_ Art and Civilization, and Wrap-Up

Okay, hi there. Welcome back to Great Texts. We're talking about John Dewey's Art as Experience, and this week we're on Chapter 14, Art and Civilization. And that's the last chapter of the book, so we'll also have a little wrap-up discussion today. Now, in so many ways, this chapter brings the book full circle, right? It powerfully restates the main claims of the book, reinforces some of the deep connections drawn between art and human experience, obviously the main sort of agenda of the book, between human experience, human aesthetic experience, and human nature, right? And, you know, reminds us of both the biological and social cultural elements of human nature. This chapter also returns to the problem raised in the beginning of the book of the isolation of art and much of the rest of our everyday lives, the sort of isolation of art that the museum conception of art brings with it. Now, the role of art in civilization could not be more significant for Dewey. I mean, it's really significant, really major. It's here in this discussion that we see the full value of Dewey's account of the role of art in civilization. For Dewey, the continuity of culture, the very notion of cultural memory, are provided by art more than by anything else, right? For Dewey, art is the universal language by which the past speaks to and is carried on in the future and the present and the future, as well as the way that one culture speaks to another. For Dewey, art is a powerful medium of cultural exchange, allowing us to expand our horizons, our own individual horizons, right, as well as the horizons of our society and our culture. As Dewey says, works of art are means by which we enter through imagination and the emotions they evoke into other forms of relationship and participation than our own. I think this passage here captures it nicely as well. He's considering the relationship of art and civilization through the meaning of the words civilization and civilize. He says, the verb to civilize is defined as to instruct in the arts of life and thus to raise in the scale of civilization. Dewey says, instruction in the arts of life is a matter of communication and participation in values of life by means of the imagination and works of art are the most intimate and energetic means of aiding individuals to share in the art of living. But there's a significant problem in this process as concerns our contemporary society, Dewey tells us, and this is connected to problems he's raised before, and that's the isolation of art from other aspects of our life, right. So again, this is a major problem from the very beginning of the book. Dewey says, the isolation of art that now exists is one manifestation of the incoherence of our civilization produced by new forces so new that the attitudes belonging to them and the consequences issuing from them have not been incorporated and digested into integral elements of experience. And just what are these new forces? The new forces in question are natural science on the one hand and the machine industry and mass production that science sort of creates on the other hand. So we'll talk about each of these problems in turn, right. These are the forces which are not integrated with art in some way or other, right. Physical science, natural science presents us with a world that is, as Dewey says, stripped of its familiar qualities, replaced with quantities, right, and relations and abstractions, and often in a way that is really sort of destructive to our own conception of how things work, right. So when the physicist tells you what you think of as a solid table is actually just a mostly empty space and a few atoms here and there, electrons and protons. What is an electron and proton? Well, he gives you a complicated mathematical explanation that, you know, really is very different from the way you ordinarily think of things. What's even further, right, science conceives of a physical world that is in many ways opposed to the moral, spiritual, and ideal elements of our civilization, right. So there's no world, there's no place in this picture of the natural world that science gives us for the moral or the spiritual, right. And that creates a sense of alienation, right. But one of the major benefits of science, according to Dewey, for art is that it shows that humanity is a part of nature, right. It's not really separate from it, and that actually improves our ability to understand art as well as our relation to our experience. What's more, Dewey reminds us that tension, right, and friction are key aspects of art, right. So the fact that there's a sense of disintegration, opposition between ideas, old and new, right, resistance to sort of adopting scientific methods in other parts of our life, and seeming tensions between the physical and moral images of the world. This is not something that sort of should be taken as hostile to art, as reasons for thinking that there are two separate cultures, the artistic and the scientific, or the humane and the scientific. It's just material for art, right. This is the kind of material that ought to lead to drive art forward. If there weren't a sense of resistance to sort of our everyday impulsions, there'd be no art in the first place. The other major force causing a problem for the integration of art in society is, that creates that sense of tension with art, is industry, right. Machine industry, which obviously is a product in some sense of the progress of science. But Dewey, Dewey says mass production in our society intensified, it didn't create it, but it intensified the separation between fine and useful arts, fine art and useful arts. The production of goods in our society, increasingly mechanical, perhaps even more so today than in Dewey's time. And I think Dewey speaks here to not only how machine industry works, but also what can be produced under the conditions of machine industry. The requirements of mechanical production often interfere with the aesthetic. Now, it's easy to read Dewey here as totally hostile to sort of industrial conditions, modern mechanical production practices. But I think that's not ultimately the issue for Dewey. And I think he tells us quite directly that there's no inherent disconnect between machine production and aesthetics, right, between industrial conditions and aesthetics. And indeed, in certain moments here, and he references the things like train cars and architecture, Dewey seems actually to show a preference for sort of modernist design principles over more sort of ornamental design. So what's the problem then? Well, Dewey seems to really focus in on is the alienation of the worker who produces goods from the production process and the final product, right? So ultimately, it's not the role of machines in that process, so much as the underlying economic system that Dewey objects to. And what is it particularly about that system? Well, it's that alienation, right? It's the presupposition of a kind of labor leisure dualism, right? Where working conditions on the one hand are unpleasant, alienating, exhausting, meaningless to the individual engaged in them. And enjoyment is something that happens somewhere else, right? Reserved for leisure time, right? So we sort of give away our life in one place to earn leisure in another place. This whole sort of set of relationships to Dewey is hostile to the very aesthetic dimension of life. And, you know, look at this quote by Dewey here. What is true is that art itself is not secure under modern conditions until the mass of men and women who do the useful work of the world have the opportunity to be free in conducting the processes of production and are richly endowed in capacity for enjoying the fruits of collective work. In other words, I think for Dewey, worker participation in production, where the worker has the freedom over themselves and a certain amount of control over the product, leads to personal interest by the worker in their work, right? Which leads to the possibility of aesthetic satisfaction in the product, right? So this is typically not the case under current economic conditions, right? But Dewey sees this as the sort of the future for reintegration of art into society. Now, Dewey concludes the book with a discussion of the relation between art and morality. Dewey, I think, is opposed to both the Marxist view, right, that art is just propaganda, right? So although some of his analysis of the problems that we face have a kind of Marxist sound to them, he's opposed to the Marxist analysis of art. And he's also opposed to the kind of moralist view of art as direct instrument of moral education, right? The content of art has to somehow directly communicate on the moral level. Rather, for Dewey, art creates an imaginative vision of how reality could be, right? It trades in possibility and it's realized in right? And it's that sort of function of art, right? That sort of imaginative projection that is essential to the moral function of art. So as such, art is only moral or political indirectly, right? In that it encourages these elements that are important. It encourages imagination, right, in particular, which is needed both for empathy and for the creation of ideals, right? It is emotionally engaged also in a way that's important for both of those things. And thus, art is sort of essential for the creation of shared values, right? And future progress, right? So that's sort of the moral function of art for Dewey. And that's where he ends the book. So to sort of wrap up the discussion of art as experience, I want to talk a little bit about the sort of overall theory of the book. Dewey answers not only the question of what is art, but also several other questions. When is art? Where is art? How is art? And why is art? In consideration of the question of what is art, Dewey tells us, again, reminding us at the beginning of the final chapter of his basic idea that art is a quality that permeates experience, permeates an experience, right? It is not, saved by figure of speech, the experience itself. It's an important caveat. Art is adjectival in nature, he tells us earlier in the book. So art is a characteristic of a certain kind of experience, or it's better to say it's a quality that permeates certain experiences that have a certain structure. Which brings us to the second question of when is art? And in a sense, this really gets to the key definition for Dewey of art. So he asks, when is art? And he tells us, when the structure of the object is such that its force interacts with the energies that issue from the experience itself, when their mutual affinities and antagonisms work together to bring about a substance that develops cumulatively toward a fulfilling of impulsions and tensions, then there is a work of art, right? So remember that the experience that is aesthetic in nature has to have that kind of cumulative integrating quality to it. So in addition to what and when, Dewey talks about the where of art, and in particular, his answer here is negative. Art is not something that should be isolated in museums. It's not to be found only in special contexts. If it's to be vital, it has to be a part of life everywhere. He gives thorough descriptions of the creative process, how art is produced, and the nature of aesthetic perception and appreciation, how art is, or at least ought to be consumed. And the final chapter, I think, deals especially with the why of art, right? What is the purpose or function or goal of art? I won't rehearse everything we've just said about the social, cultural, and moral roles of art, but maybe the best way to wrap up the discussion is to consider this quote that Dewey gives us from Shelley, in which Shelley says, The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our nature, and the identification of ourselves with the beautiful, which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively. And I think that captures nicely the significance to Dewey of imagination and artfulness in morality. In a way, the creation of a moral life for Dewey is a large-scale work of art. So I just want to, you know, it's worth a moment with that quote. All right, well, that's chapter 14, and some sort of final thoughts about the book. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I look forward to further discussion with you in the various places where those take place. So I will see you in class, many of you, or I hope to hear from you in the discussion board or the comments. Take care, and thank you for joining us as we've discussed John Dewey's art as experience. Bye.