Two Faces of Art – Public and Private – In John Dewey's Aesthetic Experience, (original) (raw)
Related papers
Notes on aesthetic experience and everyday experience in John Dewey
Cognitio-Estudos: revista eletrônica de filosofia, 2019
The aesthetics developed by John Dewey relies on the philosopher's effort to re-establish the broken bonds between life and art, thus demonstrating that aesthetic experience and everyday experience are intertwined and not completely different experiences. From this, Dewey also criticizes cultural institutions and museums as they were conceived, as they are responsible for strengthening this separation between art and life. This paper aims to clarify and show how Dewey re-establishes this bond and how it appears in his philosophy.
John Dewey and the Artful Life: Pragmatism, Aesthetics, and Morality
2016
The overriding question Stroud confronts in John Dewey and the Artful Life is how to render more of life's experiences, including the ensuing benefits, as aesthetic or artful as possible. The answer to this question is challenging and complex. The claim most aesthetic theories make is that an object, activity, or experience is artful if and only if it has intrinsic value. Although what constitutes intrinsic value is widely contested, having value in and of itself is a necessary and sufficient condition for an object to be art or an experience aesthetic. This value gives art and aesthetic experience their unique quality and separates them from everyday objects, activities and experiences with only instrumental value; that is, value for the sake of something else. Such a view of art and aesthetic experience has long dominated not only our cultural narrative and practices, but our individual thoughts and behaviors as well. As Dewey has shown repeatedly (e.g., in Experience and Nature, The Quest for Certainty, Art as Experience), this view of art and aesthetic experience is grounded in a distorted understanding of experience. This view is pervaded with intellectually fallacious dualisms, especially the belief that items of reflection are the constituents of primary experience. In contrast, for Dewey, the constituents of primary experience are noncognitive or pre-reflective, consisting of deep-seated habits (as acquired predispositions to manners or modes of response) of which we are minimally aware, at best. The fallacy of dualism and its consequent separation in experience fractures the unity of individual and collective experience and, in turn, the unity of self and community. John Dewey and the Artful Life consists of eight chapters. In the first chapter, Stroud establishes the overall context for his project and introduces the reader to its basic structure in broad outline. The second chapter introduces the problem of the value of aesthetic experience using contemporary scholarship in art theory, and sets the stage for Stroud's subsequent Deweyan analysis of experience. In the third chapter, Stroud presents a Deweyan account of aesthetic experience he refers to as "experiential" as an alternative to traditional "causal" theories. The fourth chapter
“Dewey’s Art as Experience: The Psychological Background”
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. In this essay, the author 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. The author first offers two preliminary cautions: (1) 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; and (2) as Dewey defined philosophy as "a criticism of criticisms," so the author's remarks will include a critical dimension. Then, the author illustrates how the essential unifying qualitative element in Dewey's philosophy of mind is transformed into the core of his aesthetic theory in "Art as Experience." The author comments on passages in the book that echo Dewey's formulations in "Qualitative Thought." Finally, the author shows how Dewey's views on the pervasive underlying unifying quality of immediate experience strongly echo William James's account of the immediate experience of thought as formulated in "The Principles of Psychology."
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, V/2013
The purpose of this paper is to consider Dewey's influence on American artistic culture between the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-fifties by focusing on the social and political implications of his approach to art in terms of experience. This entails recapturing, in a concise form, the impact of Dewey's thought on the development of the Federal Art Project and on Abstract Expressionism. On the basis of the pragmatist assumption that the soundness of a theoretical proposal is to be measured according to its capacity to meet the difficulties arising in our everyday interactions, the present paper systematically examines the theoretical implications of Dewey's aesthetics in the light of the historical consequences of a specific cultural policy. Dewey's conception of art and aesthetic experience appears to have made a decisive contribution by providing new opportunities to enjoy the arts and by widely promoting practices with the potential to be aesthetically satisfying. Dewey's ideas actually led to an undermining of the hierarchy between the fine arts and crafts, between popular culture and design, etc. More problematic are their connections with questions of cultural identity and of art market. Dewey's influence on the Abstract Expressionists is evident in the way it shifted the artistic focus from art objects toward the experiential dimensions of artistic practices. Some problems regard the accessibility of this kind of works for a general audience and a certain reinforcement of the conception of the artist as creative genius, included the related interpretation of artistic creation as extreme subjective expression.
The Formative Role of Art: John Dewey’s Art as Quotidian Experience
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 2017
The present manuscript aims to examine the impact of art on the cultivation of personality and sensitivity. The author suggests that education in art contributes to evolving sensibility towards the surrounding world. The artistic knowledge or attitude helps us perceive and feel the quotidian with affection, imagination, and creativity. It functions as a complement to a rational understanding of reality. This paper retakes Aristotelian category of poiesis, considering it a creative act and delves into John Dewey's view of relations between education and art. Dewey finds in the aesthetic-artistic experience of the quotidian a way to engage with the other and to treat life as something with deep aesthetic sense. The discussion shown in this article follows four main threads under the scope of the Deweynian notion of art as experience. They are the education for art, education by art, education in art, and the creative act of the quotidian.