## 1. Early Forays into Aesthetics



Dewey was in his seventies when *Art as Experience* was
published, but also his earlier work contains numerous discussions of
aesthetic related themes, beginning already from his very first book,
*Psychology* (1887), in which Dewey discusses aesthetics and
the arts at various points. Dewey, for example, emphasizes the
importance of rhythm to our psychic lives, both in perception and in
expression. The soul tends to express its most intimate states,
especially emotion, in rhythmic form. Rhythm is defined as the
mind's reduction of variety to unity or its breaking unity into
variety. It happens when certain beats are emphasized at regular
intervals, and it requires that elements be organized temporally,
through the mind being carried back and forth, to form a whole. It is
not confined to the arts but is pervasive in our experience of
time.



*Psychology* comes from Dewey's idealist period, which
for example shows up in the book's treatment of imagination,
aesthetic feeling, and beauty. Dewey distinguishes between different
forms of imagination, which he defines as intellect embodying ideas in
particular images. The highest form of imagination is creative
imagination, which allows us to penetrate into the hidden meaning of
things through finding sensuous forms that are both highly revealing
and pleasurable. It makes its objects anew through non-mechanical
separation and combination. Implicitly following Kant, Dewey holds
that creative imagination's goal is free play of the
self's faculties. Its function is to seize meaning and embody it
in sensuous form to give rise to feeling, thus representing the freely
active subjective self.



Part Two of *Psychology* is devoted to feeling, including, in
Chapter Fifteen, aesthetic feeling. This chapter also deals with fine
art and taste. Aesthetic feelings characteristically accompany
perception of "the ideal value of experience"
(*PS:* 267). The mind responds to certain relations to ideals
through feelings of beauty or ugliness. Every content of experience
has beauty in it to the extent that it contains an ideal element.
Echoing recent views on functional beauty, Dewey argues that a train
engine, for example, is beautiful insofar as it is felt to
successfully embody its ideal, i.e., its ability to overcome distances
and bring humans together. The beautiful object requires a sensuous
material. However, this sensuous material is only important insofar as
it presents the ideal. Art cannot be purely idealistic in the sense of
abandoning sensuous material, but it is idealistic in that it uses
such material to promote the appreciation of ideal values of
experience. The aesthetic feeling of beauty is universal and not a
thing of place and time.



This universality excludes such lower senses as taste and smell from
the beautiful. It also excludes the feeling of ownership and any
reference to external ends. Harmony constitutes beauty. Harmony is
defined as the feeling that accompanies agreement of experience with
the self's ideal nature (*PS:* 273). Art attempts to
satisfy the aesthetic in our nature, and it succeeds when it expresses
the ideal completely. The idea, in turn, is the "completely
developed self". So the goal of art is to create the perfectly
harmonious self. Against this background, Dewey ranks the fine arts
according to their level of ideality. Architecture is the least ideal
art, while poetry is *fully* ideal, having little that is
sensuous in it, concentrating as it does on the vital personality of
man himself (and nature as only a reflection of this).



Especially outside of philosophical circles, Dewey is best known for
his work in education. One of his major works in this area,
*Democracy and Education* (1916), also includes reflections on
aesthetic themes, particularly on the imagination, which Dewey regards
"as the sole way of escape from mechanical methods in
teaching" (*DE:* 245) that he, in general, opposes.
Anticipating the naturalism of *Art as Experience* Dewey argues
that there is no essential gap between aesthetic experience and other
forms of experience. The function of the fine arts is not to provide
an escape from ordinary life. Rather, it is the enhancement of
qualities that make ordinary experiences appealing. The arts are the
main means of achieving "an intensified, enhanced
appreciation" (*DE:* 246). Their purpose, beyond being
enjoyable, is that they fix taste, reveal depth of meaning in
otherwise mediocre experiences, and concentrate and focus elements of
what is considered good. In the end the fine arts are "not
luxuries of education, but emphatic expressions of that which makes
any education worthwhile" (*DE:* 247). Dewey is also
critical of the Aristotelian distinction between useful labor and
leisure, where the second is privileged over the first, and believes
this prejudicial distinction is still dominant. He comes back to this
issue in *Art as Experience*, where he suggests a new
understanding of the relationship between means and ends as a way of
improving the quality of people's daily experience. Means should
not be seen as mere disposable preliminary stages, which can be thrown
away like a ladder once the end is reached, but as integral parts of
the ends that they help to fulfill. This reversal, Dewey believes,
will infuse people's everyday experience with a sense of
direction and meaning.



The essay *Reconstruction in Philosophy*, published in 1920,
concludes with a view of an ideal future in which ideas are deepened
because they are expressed in imaginative vision and fine art.
Religious and scientific values will be reconciled and art will no
longer be a mere luxury or a stranger to everyday life. Making a
living will be making a life worth living, and the hardness of
contemporary life will be bathed in a new light.



Dewey returned briefly to issues of the role of art in society in
*The Public and its Problems* (1927), where art is seen as
something that can resolve the problem of dissemination of ideas
appropriate for social change. Artists are the real purveyors of news
insofar as they cause happenings to kindle emotion and perception. For
Dewey, Walt Whitman was the exemplar of such an artist. He concludes
that for a great community and a real public to come into being an art
of "full and moving communication" must take possession of
our mechanized world (*PP:* 350).



In "Qualitative Thought", which appears in *Philosophy
and Civilization* (1931), Dewey says some things that anticipate
some of the moves he makes in *Art as Experience*. For example,
he argues that there is a "logic of artistic construction"
and that refusal to admit this is a sign of breakdown of traditional
logic. When a work of art does not hold together so that the quality
of one part reinforces and expands the qualities of the other parts it
fails. Works that are genuine intellectual and logical wholes have an
underlying quality that defines them and that controls the
artist's thinking. The logic of such an artist is the logic of
qualitative thinking.


## 2. *Art as Experience*



As much as there is fascinating preliminary material in his earlier
writings, *Art as Experience* raises Dewey's theorizing
about aesthetics and art to a new level. Not only is the density of
thought and insight in the later work greater, but the understanding
of the arts that it is built on is much more sophisticated compared to
the earlier investigations. An important event that significantly
contributed to the development of Dewey's aesthetic thinking was
his collaboration with the industrialist and art collector Albert C.
Barnes to whom *Art as Experience* is dedicated. Dewey was a
member of the staff of the Barnes Foundation of which he was named
director in 1925. Not only does Dewey quote at length from
Barnes' writings on painting, but also many of the art examples
in Dewey's book came from his friend's impressive art
collection. One of the focus points of the Barnes collection is early
modernist painting, and *Art as Experience* includes numerous
examinations of the paintings by the leading figures of early
modernism, particularly Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, August
Renoir, and Paul Cezanne.



*Art as Experience* forms a systematic aesthetic theory in a
similar sense to such classics of twentieth century aesthetics as
Robin George Collingwood's *Principles of Art*, Martin
Heidegger's *The Origins of the Work of Art*, Theodor
Adorno's *Aesthetic Theory*, and Monroe Beardsley's
*Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism*. It is a
far more important source of inspiration and target of criticism
compared to Dewey's earlier texts. The following six sections
take a look at the main themes of *Art as Experience*, all of
which are, in some way or another, connected to aesthetic
experience.


### 2.1 The Naturalistic Roots of Aesthetic Theory



The aesthetic theory that Dewey develops in *Art as Experience*
could be labeled moderately naturalist. While Dewey locates the
"active seeds" of art and other aesthetic phenomena in
natural processes (*AE:* 18), he in no way seeks to reduce them
to natural reality nor does he try to explain their origins and
perseverance by locating a place for them in the development of the
human species, as some contemporary forms of evolutionary aesthetics
do. Rather, Dewey's naturalism is of an emergent sort, in the
sense that he seeks to show how aesthetic experience and culture
emerge from the natural basis of life, as he understands it (Alexander
2013). The key element of this moderate naturalism is the idea of an
organism, or of "the live creature"--a term that
Dewey also often uses--which is in a constant interaction with
its surrounding world. Dewey argues that this interaction is marked by
shifting and reinforcing phases of disarray and stability, of
unsettlement and restoration of harmony, which, in Dewey's view,
give experience its basic structure. As Dewey explains in an
oft-quoted passage, 



> 
> 
> life goes on in an environment; not merely *in* it but because
> of it, through interaction with it. (*AE:* 19, italics in the
> original) 
> 
> 
> 



Not surprisingly, Dewey's conception of experience, upon which
his aesthetics is built, has been described as
"ecological" (Hildebrand 2008).



In line with his naturalism, Dewey is highly critical of attempts to
idealize art and the aesthetic away from "the objects of
concrete experience" (*AE:* 17), as well as of the
aspiration to explain art's value by its supposed capacity to
disclose some higher forms of reality from the natural one we share
with other animals. For Dewey, this kind of spiritual take on art is
yet another example of the human ambition to build permanence within
the constantly changing and unpredictable natural world. He traces the
origins of many influential dualisms, for example between "high
and low" and "material and ideal", as well as
"the contempt for the body" and "the fear of the
senses", to this more fundamental dualism between spirit and
nature (*AE:* 26). Already in *Experience and Nature*,
Dewey argues that there are but two alternatives, 



> 
> 
> either art is a continuation... of natural tendencies of natural
> events; or art is a peculiar addition to nature springing from
> something dwelling exclusively in the breast of man, whatever name be
> given to the latter. (*EN:* 291) 
> 
> 
> 



He favors the first alternative and takes the movement between
instability and stability, activity and passivity, doing and
undergoing that he thinks are intrinsic qualities of all experience as
the starting points of his aesthetic theorizing. Dewey: 



> 
> 
> These biological commonplaces are something more than that; they reach
> to the roots of the esthetic in experience. (*AE:* 20)
> 
> 
> 



While Dewey promotes a naturalistic starting point for aesthetic
theory, he is equally aware of the negative connotations which have
often been attached to naturalist understandings of art and the
aesthetic, and the scale of the transformation that the rapid
development of the natural sciences had on people's sense of
themselves. For physical science seemed to strip 



> 
> 
> its objects of the qualities that give the objects and scenes of
> ordinary experience all their poignancy and preciousness.
> (*AE:* 341) 
> 
> 
> 



However, Dewey finds these worries unfounded. A naturalist aesthetics,
which fully recognizes "the continuity of the organs, needs and
basic impulses of the human creature with his animal forebears",
does not imply a "necessary reduction of man to the level of
brutes". Rather only a naturalist approach can properly account
for the nearly miraculous fact that something as complex and
"marvelous" as art and aesthetic experience can emerge
from the most basic units of life (*AE:* 28).



The goal of aesthetic theory, in Dewey's view, should not,
therefore, be to spiritualize works of art and to set them apart from
the objects of ordinary experience, but to disclose the "way in
which these works idealize qualities found in common
experience". (*AE:* 17) It is in other words wrong to
think of the aesthetic as a luxurious or transcendentally ideal
"intruder in experience from without". Rather, the
aesthetic in experience should be understood as "the clarified
and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally
complete experience". Precisely this kind of naturalist approach
represents for Dewey "the only secure basis upon which esthetic
theory can be built" (*AE:* 52-53).


### 2.2 Against "The Museum Conception of Art"



Dewey's critique of a position that he calls "the museum
conception of art" is one of the most famous parts of his
aesthetic theory. It is for him a textbook example of the kind of
compartmentalizing attitude toward art which his naturalism seeks to
overcome. In Dewey's rendering, the museum conception of art by
and large corresponds to the modern idea of fine art which emerged in
the eighteenth century and which received its most theoretically
developed account in Charles Batteux's *The Fine Arts Reduced
to a Single Principle* (*Les Beaux Arts reduits a
un meme principe*, 1746). Around this time, the different
arts were gradually seen to form a unified group separate from the
sciences, religion, and most importantly from the practical arts. The
idea of the autonomy of art surfaced. Art was considered a
self-regulating field for which the different art institutions, which
were emerging simultaneously, provided a setting. As opposed to the
practical arts, such as embroidery and shoe making, whose value
depended on the external goals they served, the fine arts were
considered to have their own intrinsic measures of value, which could,
moreover, be realized in full only within the spaces of the developing
art institutions.



The museum conception also represents a more general tendency Dewey
sees in philosophical theory, "the philosophical fallacy".
With this term Dewey refers to a set of preconceptions underlying
inquiry which frame research and guide its progress before any
conscious inquiry has even taken place. In aesthetics, the fallacy
has, in Dewey's view, taken the form that art and the aesthetic
must *necessarily* be something separate from ordinary everyday
modes of experience and activity. This is an assumption to which any
aesthetic inquiry must fit itself. As in other fields of philosophy,
the cure to the fallacy in the case of aesthetics is to look at
experience more carefully, in particular at the ways in which
aesthetic experience emerges from the common patterns of all
experience, which Dewey's naturalism examines.



Dewey thinks there are historic reasons why the idea of art as
something essentially autonomous from other areas of life became so
dominant. He traces these back to the rise of nationalism and
capitalism. Both of these developments, in his view, reinforced the
inclination to set art "upon a remote pedestal" apart from
other activities and modes of experience (*AE:* 11). The
conception of art connected to nationalist and imperialist tendencies
rendered museums into "the beauty parlor[s] of
civilization", (*AE:* 346) where each nation exhibited
its greatest artistic achievements and, as in some cases, also its
artistic loot. Artworks received "a holier-than-thou"
aura, which reinforced their esoteric character as something opposed
to everyday life (*AE:* 15). Dewey also refers, in an unusually
spiteful tone, to "the nouveaux riches" of his time, whom
he thinks collected expensive artworks merely for the sake of
buttressing their social statuses with little care for their artistic
value and for engaging with them aesthetically. All this meant for
Dewey that works of art were in danger of becoming mere stale
"art products" instead of art*works* that actually
do something "with and in experience" (*AE:*
9).



Dewey believes that there have been no winners in this development:
art is concealed or "wrapped", to follow the terminology
of contemporary Deweyan, Richard Shusterman (Shusterman 1992), in a
realm of its own separate from people's everyday needs, values,
and attitudes. To achieve a genuine aesthetic experience required
leaving this everyday package behind and entering the confined
settings of the museum and other institutions of art. In Dewey's
view, the resulting discrepancy between aesthetics and more mundane
areas of life is not restricted to theory. It has "deeply"
affected 



> 
> 
> the practice of living, driving away esthetic perceptions that are
> necessary ingredients of happiness, or reducing them to the level of
> compensating transient pleasurable excitations. (*AE:* 16) 
> 
> 
> 



The result has been an "esoteric idea of fine art"
(*AE:* 90) and a conception of the everyday as something
inherently unaesthetic.



The many examples of non-Western art Dewey discusses in *Art as
Experience* are especially important parts of his argument for
restoring the continuity between art and life, releasing it from the
yoke of the museum conception of art. For the ways aesthetic practices
and artifacts are incorporated into the very center of daily life and
common rituals in many such cultures show that aesthetically
significant objects do not require any special institutional setting.
According to Dewey, such everyday objects as "domestic utensils,
furnishings of tent and house, rugs, mats, jars, pots, bows,
spears" were essential parts of the life of a community and had
a key role for example in 



> 
> 
> the worship of gods, feasting and fasting, fighting, hunting, and all
> the rhythmic crises that punctuate the stream of living. (*AE:*
> 14) 
> 
> 
> 



Art then for Dewey is a far older phenomenon than the modern concept
of fine art; it has its origins already in the world of "archaic
man" and should be seen as 



> 
> 
> an extension of the power of rites and ceremonies to unite men,
> through a shared celebration, to all incidents and scenes of life.
> (*AE:* 275).
> 
> 
> 


### 2.3 Aesthetic Experience



What, then, is an aesthetic experience for Dewey? His account can be
regarded as a form of "internalism", in that it seeks to
separate aesthetic experience from other types of experience by
looking at its internal qualities, that is, at what aesthetic
experience feels like from the inside (Shelley 2009 [2017]).



Aesthetic experience marks for Dewey a unique experience, which shows
what experience at its best can be in all quarters of life, not just
in art; "esthetic experience is experience in its
integrity" (*AE:* 278). It is a distinctive kind of
experiential condensation within the general stream of experience. It
is the most important specimen of a form of experience that Dewey
terms "*an* experience", often italicizing the
indefinite article of this concept to emphasize the standout character
of the referred experience. In "*an* experience"
the material of experience is fulfilled, consummated, and forms an
integral whole, as for example, when a game is played through, a
conversation is rounded out or when we finish "that meal in a
Paris restaurant" (*AE:* 43).



Dewey never puts forth an explicit definition of aesthetic experience
in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. However, certain
features recur in his numerous discussions. Most importantly,
aesthetic experience has a temporal structure. Aesthetic experience is
something that develops and attains specific qualities as the
experience proceeds. It is in this sense "dynamic because it
takes time to complete" (*AE:* 62). To qualify as an
aesthetic experience, there must, moreover, be *accumulation*
between the different phases of the experience: aesthetic experience
includes a sense that the later phases build on earlier ones and carry
them further rather than just mechanically following them. Aesthetic
experiences are also *intensive*; they condense, for example,
emotional and formal features to a single experience. Another key
quality of aesthetic experience is a feeling of *resistance*.
These resistances are not obstacles: they feed the experience's
development and accumulation and are converted into movement toward a
close. In aesthetic experience, the experiencer is also overcome by a
sense of *rhythm*. Aesthetic experience has an internal
*momentum* and, already from the initial phases, the
experiencer can feel a sense of *direction* in it. In other
words, in an aesthetic experience "every successive part flows
freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what
ensues". Moreover, "as one part leads to another and as
one part carries on what went before, each gains distinctness in
itself" (*AE:* 43). Aesthetic experience also does not
terminate at some random point. Rather, its close is a summation of
its earlier phases, either in the sense that the energy that has
gathered up during the experience is released or the experience
reaches a *fulfillment* in some other sense. In short,
aesthetic experience involves "inception, development, and
fulfillment" (*AE:* 62).



From a Deweyan viewpoint, aesthetic experience, then, has roughly the
following structure. The experience is set off by some factors, such
as opening a book, directing a first glance at a painting, beginning
to listen to a piece of music, entering a natural environment or a
building, or beginning a meal or a conversation. As aesthetic
experience is temporal, the material of the experience does not remain
unchanged, but the elements initiating the experience, like reading
the first lines of a book or hearing the first chord of a symphony,
merge into new ones as the experience proceeds and complex
relationships are formed between its past and newer phases. When these
different parts form a distinctive kind of orderly developing unity
that stands out from the general experiential stream of our lives, the
experience in question is aesthetic.



Dewey contrasts aesthetic to "inchoate" and
"anesthetic" experiences. These experiences, too, have a
temporal dimension, but instead of exhibiting the unified development
as an aesthetic experience, they include "holes",
"mechanical junctions", and "dead centres"
(*AE:* 43). The different phases of the experience merely
follow each other, but in no way develop or build on the earlier
phases. There is no sense of the kind of "continuous
merging" that characterizes aesthetic experience. Due to their
punctured and mechanical quality, inchoate and anesthetic experiences
also lack the ordered development that is a condition of an
experience's aesthetic fulfillment. The anesthetic experience is
a function either of loose succession or mechanical connection of
parts. As Dewey explains,



> 
> 
> Things happen, but they are neither definitely included nor decisively
> excluded; we drift... There are beginnings and cessations, but no
> genuine initiations and concludings. One thing replaces another, but
> does not absorb it, carry it on. There is experience, but so slack and
> discursive that it is not *an* experience. (*AE:*
> 46-47)
> 
> 
> 



Given the general character of aesthetic experience, it is no surprise
that Dewey attributes such high significance to it in his late
naturalist philosophy. Aesthetic experience shows how complex and
meaningful the experiences which emerge from the basic factors of all
interaction--sense of direction, resistance, rhythm,
accumulation--can be. Dewey's aesthetic theory is
naturalist precisely in the sense that even an experience as complex
as aesthetic experience is seen as continuous with the interaction
that he believes characterizes the relationship of even the simplest
biological organisms to their environments. Similarly, art is only one
of the many practices and areas of life which can be sources of
aesthetic experience. Conversation, for example, is one such everyday
activity, for it can exhibit the kind of "continuous interchange
and blending" which Dewey thinks is essential to aesthetic
experience (*AE:* 43).



Dewey also argues that there is no reason to think of such conceptual
categories as "the practical" or "the
intellectual" as some way contradictory to the supposedly pure
and non-utilitarian category of "the aesthetic". It is
possible to have aesthetic experiences while engaging with practical
and intellectual activities. The aesthetic status of the experiences
had in these connections, again, depends solely on the
experiences' internal qualities; even "a mechanic"
and "a surgeon" can be "artistically engaged"
in Dewey's sense (*AE:* 11, 103). The practical and the
intellectual should not, thereby, be considered "the enemies of
the esthetic": the real enemies are 



> 
> 
> the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission to convention in
> practice and intellectual procedure. (*AE:* 47) 
> 
> 
> 



Aesthetic experience, in fact, is something that precisely ties the
practical, the emotional, and the intellectual into "a single
whole" (*AE:* 61). Upon reflection it is in many cases
possible to disentangle these different strands, but in the moment of
experience they are all active in constituting aesthetic experience
for the whole that it is.



Dewey's description of aesthetic experience as a process of both
doing and undergoing is still worth noting, as it appears widely in
the commentary literature. With this conceptual pair, Dewey draws
attention to the kind of interplay between activity and passivity that
he thinks aesthetic experience involves. The development of an
aesthetic experience often requires effort and imaginative activity
from the experiencer, but these moments of doing are also joined with
phases when the object or the environment is felt to take the lead in
the experience without any real sense of doing from the experiencer.
Undergoing is the receptive phase of the experience, the taking in of
energy, which the experiencer can, then, more consciously work on. A
balance between these experiential phases represents for Dewey an
ideal of all experience and, again, aesthetic experience becomes an
acute expression of the potentialities that Dewey believes are
inherent in the basic interaction between the live creature and its
environment; 



> 
> 
> art, in its form, unites the very same relation of doing and
> undergoing, outgoing and incoming energy, that makes an experience to
> be an experience. (*AE:* 54)
> 
> 
> 



The concepts of doing and undergoing also lead Dewey to emphasize the
similarities between the work of an artist and the undertakings
required from the audience of art. The final artwork is, among other
things, the result of planning, choosing, highlighting, clarifying,
simplifying, and other ways of organizing and reorganizing material.
In Dewey's view, the experiencer does not just take in
"what is there in finished form": he or she should achieve
a sense of the possibilities and challenges that the artist faced in
her work, as well as the decisions she took out of which the work grew
to its finished form. Both the making of art and experiencing of art
are, thereby, 



> 
> 
> process[es] consisting of a series of responsive acts that accumulate
> toward objective fulfillment. (*AE:* 58) 
> 
> 
> 



In this sense, aesthetic experience is for Dewey a kind of mirror
image of the artist's activities. It means "[the]
recreation of the object" (*AE:* 60). 


### 2.4 Aesthetic Form



As internalist as Dewey's approach to aesthetic experience is,
and as much as he emphasizes the distinction between an art product as
a physical thing and the artwork as an experienced thing, Dewey also
presents a detailed examination of the formal features of aesthetic
objects similar to those carried out by numerous other philosophers of
art. Dewey states that aesthetic experience has "objective
conditions" (*AE:* 68): not all objects and environments
inspire the kind of interaction that he thinks constitutes an
aesthetic experience. His analysis of "aesthetic form" is
an attempt to capture these conditions. Similarly to his understanding
of aesthetic experience as dynamic and developing rather than as a
clear-cut sense perception, Dewey seeks to bring out the livelier
sides of form. Aesthetic form is something that "enhance[s],
prolong[s] and purif[ies] perceptual experience" (*EN:*
292).



On a basic level, by form Dewey means the thing that "organizes
material into the matter of art" (*AE:* 139). Form is
constituted by the different parts of the aesthetic object and by
their relationships to one another. For Dewey, the parts of aesthetic
form are not independent units. Rather, relationship is
"something direct and active... dynamic and
energetic" (*AE:* 139). With his conception of form,
Dewey draws attention to 



> 
> 
> the way things bear upon one another, their clashes and unitings, the
> way they fulfill and frustrate, promote and retard, excite and inhibit
> one another. (*AE:* 139) 
> 
> 
> 



In the case of aesthetic form, the different parts of the object must
adjust themselves as parts of the same object. The individual parts
have a functional and active role in the whole of which they are a
part.



This also means that perception of aesthetic form is not a matter of
unrelated singular perceptions, but it is "serial", in
that "each sequential act builds up and reinforces what went
before" (*AE:* 136). According to Dewey, aesthetic form
possess "qualitative unity" which can be immediately felt.
A fuller aesthetic experience, nevertheless, requires engaging with
the form's organization precisely in the sense of serial
perception. (*AE:* 141) Against this background, Dewey calls
into question the traditional distinction between the arts of time
(music, theater, dance) and the arts of space (painting, sculpture,
architecture). Even the spatial arts include important temporal
dimensions and have to be "perceived by accumulative series of
interactions" (*AE:* 223). Through this sort of serial
and cumulating engagement the aesthetic object gradually builds up for
the experiencer. This, according to Dewey, is especially the case with
the supposedly static art of architecture:



> 
> 
> [Even] a small hut cannot be the matter of esthetic perception save as
> temporal qualities enter in. A cathedral... makes an
> instantaneous impression... But this is only the substratum and
> framework within which a continuous process of interactions introduces
> enriching and defining elements... One must move about, within
> and without, and through repeated visits let the structure gradually
> yield itself... in various lights and in connection with changing
> moods. (*AE:* 224)
> 
> 
> 



If aesthetic experience has objective conditions, aesthetic form, in
turn, has a set of "formal conditions", which are
"continuity, cumulation, conservation, tension and
anticipation" (*AE:* 143). Dewey draws special attention
to the factor of resistance. It is a kind of condition of conditions,
for "without internal tension" experience of form would be
just "a fluid rush to a straightaway mark" in which case
there "could be [nothing] called development and
fulfillment" (*AE:* 143). Dewey further specifies the
relationship between aesthetic form and aesthetic experience:



> 
> 
> [T]here can be no esthetic experience apart from an object... for
> an *object* to be the content of esthetic appreciation it must
> satisfy those *objective* conditions without which cumulation,
> conservation, reenforcement, transition into something more complete,
> are impossible. (*AE:* 151, italics in the original)
> 
> 
> 



The naturalist underpinnings of Dewey's aesthetics are apparent
also in his analysis of aesthetic form, for its conditions are
objective precisely in the sense that they belong "to the world
of physical materials and energies" (*AE:* 151). His
naturalism, thereby, locates the origins of aesthetic form "deep
in the world itself" (*AE:* 152).



One of these deep conditions of aesthetic form is rhythm. Dewey finds
rhythm "the first characteristic of the environing world that
makes possible the existence of artistic form" (*AE:*
147). The rhythms of art are grounded in the basic patterns of the
relation of the live creature and its environment. Dewey opposes the
theory of rhythm as the steady recurrence of identical elements as in
a ticking clock: "the tick-tock theory" of rhythm
(*AE:* 168). Rather, each rhythmic beat or tick does not merely
repeat the past but drives the rhythmic process forward. Various
natural phenomena exemplify this type of rhythm, including "a
pond moving in ripples, forked lightning [and] the waving of branches
in the wind" (*AE:* 159). These are contrasted to
rhythmless phenomena, such as "a monotonous roar"
(*AE:* 159), which do not involve mutually resisting forces and
thus do not entail a gathering up of energy which would create an
anticipation of release, as in the case of the beating of a
bird's wing. Neither do these wholes possess the kind of
accumulation that Dewey finds essential to aesthetic form.



What this all means is that the recurrence typical to aesthetic form
should not be understood "statistically" or
"anatomically", but functionally. In the case of aesthetic
form, rhythm is something that furthers experience (*AE:* 171).
The beating of a bird's wing is a good example: it marks the
release of energy, but at the same time the beginning of a new
accumulation of energy, which again discharges in a new beating of the
wing and so on. Dewey finds this form of rhythm 



> 
> 
> whenever each step forward is at the same time a summing up and
> fulfillment of what precedes, and every consummation carries
> expectation tensely forward. (*AE:* 177) 
> 
> 
> 



While Dewey admits that rhythm can be most easily associated with
music, he thinks it, in the end, cuts across the arts, to embrace even
painting and architecture: 



> 
> 
> denial of rhythm to pictures, edifices, and statues, or the assertion
> that it is found in them only metaphorically, rests upon ignorance of
> the inherent nature of every perception. (*AE:* 180) 
> 
> 
> 



Again, the distinction between the spatial and the temporal arts turns
out overly strict. Perception of rhythm in pictures is as essential to
their experience as it is to the experience of music.


### 2.5 Expression



Another central question of aesthetics that Dewey considers at length
in *Art as Experience* is artistic expression. How can an
artwork be expressive and serve as means of communication? The issues
are intertwined, for Dewey believes "objects of art...
communicate" because they are "expressive"
(*AE:* 110). Artistic expression is for Dewey not a simple
matter of the artist transmitting her inner emotions to the work. When
for example Van Gogh tried to express "utter desolation"
in one of his paintings he did not "pour forth" an emotion
to the artwork, but selected and organized material, such as paint and
pigments, in a certain way to capture this emotional tone, turning the
material used into means of expression, or a medium in Dewey's
terminology.



In Dewey's explanation, the expressive act is set off by
"an impulsion", a state of unsettlement in the organism,
which creates a need to restore a state of balance. Impulsion, as
distinguished from "impulse", is a developmental movement
of the "whole organism" in response to a need arising from
interaction with the environment, for example a craving for food
(*AE:* 64). It is the beginning stage of a complete experience,
whereas impulse is momentary, for example a tongue reacting to a sour
taste. Impulsion leads to reflection on the possible means and actions
for restoring a state of harmony and a decision to act accordingly,
like in the case of finding some water to satisfy one's thirst.
The reflective movement caused by the impulsion also makes the
creature more aware of itself. "Blind surge" turns into
"a purpose" and "the resistance" the creature
faces when trying to complete the impulsion "calls out
thought" and "generates curiosity" (*AE:*
65). The act of expression involves similar mental undertakings, which
precisely makes the emotive impetus behind expression closer to an
impulsion than a reflexive type impulse. It is as if something
requires squeezing out or pressing forth, that is expression
(*AE:* 70). Out of this expression the expressive object
gradually takes shape.



Another important distinction is between an expression and a discharge
of emotion. All expression involves discharge, but only a particular
kind of discharge counts as expression. Dewey insists that someone who
simply acts angrily is not expressing anger. Mere "giving
way" to impulsion does not constitute expression. The goal of
expression is not to get rid of the initial emotion, as is the case
with screams that merely discharge emotion, but to achieve a clearer
sense of its content and significance. For Dewey, expression means
"to stay by, to carry forward in development, to work out to
completion" (*AE:* 67-68). For an emotional
discharge to turn into expression in Dewey's sense also requires
an external channel for releasing and working on the emotive energy of
the background impulsion. Dewey writes: 



> 
> 
> where there is no administration of objective conditions, no shaping
> of materials in the interest of embodying the excitement, there is no
> expression. (*AE:* 68) 
> 
> 
> 



The expressive object is the embodiment of this expressive act.



What also separates expression from an action caused by a mere impulse
is that expression has a medium. For example, a crying baby does not,
in Dewey's view, use the cry to express her emotions; the cry is
just an ulterior sign of dissatisfaction. However, when the smile and
the outreached hand, for example, are used to express the joy of
seeing a friend, these bodily movements function as media for
expressing joy. Whether something counts as a medium of expression or
not thus "depends upon the way in which material is used"
(*AE:* 69). When the artist works on an expressive object based
on her initial impulsion, the materials of art--pigments, clays,
notes, words--turn into media of expression.



Some of Dewey's formulations on the artistic medium come close
to the so-called medium-specificity claim according to which each of
the arts has its own specific medium that gives a kind of internal
ground mechanism for the art's potencies and development;
"color does something in experience and sound something
else" (*AE:* 230). Different artistic media are,
according to Dewey, suited for different expressive ends in the sense
that 



> 
> 
> every medium has its own power, active and passive, outgoing and
> receptive, and... the basis for distinguishing the different
> traits of the arts is their exploitation of the energy that is
> characteristic of the material used as a medium. (*AE:* 248)
> 
> 
> 
> 



Aesthetic effects, thereby, attach to their medium.



For Dewey, expression is also not a matter of finding an outer form to
an already complete emotion. Emotions, in Dewey's sense, do not
come in ready-made form, but are more like processes. Especially the
emotive impulsion behind expression initially lacks a clear-cut
content. We might be overcome by a certain emotion but might also be
unable to immediately grasp its ultimate content and why we feel the
way we do. Dewey compares the position the emotive impulsion has in
artistic expression to a magnet that draws in certain material while
rejecting others. The impulsion constitutes a kind of gathering
principle of the artist's work, for example explaining her
choice of material and ways of using and working on them (*AE:*
75). In Dewey's view, the act of expression is driven by the
effort to find an appropriate fit between the impulsion and the outer
material and involves a constant monitoring of the impact that the
artistic decisions have on the development of the initial impulsion.
Do they, for example, feed it, clarify it, or obscure it? In other
words, "emotional energy" does "real work" in
the build-up of artistic expression leading to the expressive object
as it 



> 
> 
> evokes, assembles, accepts, and rejects memories, images,
> observations, and works them into a whole. (*AE:* 160) 
> 
> 
> 



This is why Dewey emphasizes that in artistic expression it is not
just the external materials of marble, pigment, and words that undergo
a change. Similar changes occur "on the side of
'inner' materials", such as "images,
observations, memories and emotions"; in the development of the
expressive act they too receive a new form and structure (*AE:*
81).



From a Deweyan viewpoint, expression then means processing external
material "through the alembic of personal experience".
However, the material itself belongs to "the common world and so
has qualities in common with the material of other experiences".
Expression thereby organically connects "a personal act"
and an "objective result" (*AE:* 88). The fact that
in expression the artist's personal experience is mediated
through objective material opens the possibility for the audience to
share the artist's vision embodied in the work. An effort to
communicate by these sorts of objective means is what turns the
external material into a medium, that is, "an
intermediary" between the artist and audience (*AE:*
201). But as the experience behind expression is "intensely
individualized", the work can also open for the public 



> 
> 
> new fields of experience and disclose new aspects and qualities in
> familiar scenes and objects. (*AE:* 149) 
> 
> 
> 



In Dewey's view, communication in the arts, however, takes a
different form than in the sciences for example: "science states
meanings; art expresses them" (*AE:* 90). Like many other
philosophers of art, Dewey emphasizes that artistic communication does
not take place on the level of statements and propositional knowing.
Aesthetic art, by contrast to science, constitutes an experience.
Art's manner of communicating is "evocative": by
rendering objective and physical material into an expressive medium,
the artist seeks to evoke "the experience he or she wants the
audience to have or reflect upon" (Stroud 2011: 105). The
cognitive and the experiential sides of art are thereby seen to be
very much intertwined in Dewey's aesthetics.


### 2.6 Culture and Art's Significance



Dewey's take on culture also shows the moderate character of his
aesthetic naturalism. He does not consider culture an illusory or in
some other way irreal phenomenon, something that should be explained
away by reducing it to natural reality. Dewey even finds it
unfortunate how often the term "naturalism" has been
wrongly thought "to signify a disregard of all values that
cannot be reduced to the physical and animal" (*AE:*
156). In contrast, Dewey believes that humans are both natural and
cultural creatures through and through and that the real challenge is
to investigate how these two ineliminable sides of human life, nature
and culture, are intertwined. Dewey, in fact, became so interested in
this issue that he even had plans of naming his late philosophy
"cultural naturalism" (Alexander 2013).



Dewey explains culture as a form of "emergence", that is,
culture is something that in time emerges from nature. In other words,




> 
> 
> culture is the product not of efforts of men put forth in a void or
> just upon themselves, but of prolonged and cumulative interaction with
> environment. (*AE:* 34-35) 
> 
> 
> 



Nature and culture are two different layers of human life. The two key
concepts in this instance are rhythm and ritual. Rhythm is for Dewey a
fundamental feature of the world, whose existence in nature predates
"poetry, painting, architecture and music" (*AE:*
147). He, again, refers to such rhythmic processes in nature as
"dawn and sunset, day and night, rain and sunshine",
"the circular course of the seasons", "the
ever-recurring cycles of growth", and "the never-ceasing
round of births and deaths", which he believes created a
rhythmic space for human experience already from its very dawn. Dewey
argues further that new layers emerged into human existence once
humans no longer merely observed the rhythmic changes of nature but
started to participate in them in the form of rituals and other
communal gatherings. Humans came to use the rhythms of nature to
celebrate their relationship with nature and to commemorate their most
intense experiences. Dewey writes: 



> 
> 
> Experiences of war, of hunt, of sowing and reaping, of the death and
> resurrection of vegetation, of stars circling over watchful shepherds,
> of constant return of the inconstant moon, were undergone to be
> reproduced in pantomime and generated the sense of life as drama.
> (*AE:* 153)
> 
> 
> 



With these rituals Dewey believes humans' relationship to the
surrounding world rose to a level where they started to reflect on
their place in the order of things more intently. And the rituals
formed in response to the cycles of nature started to embody the
worldviews and values of the human groups that they gathered together.
The rituals created a sense of community with one's immediate
fellows, as well as a sense of continuity of past generations, thereby
widening and enriching "the designs of living"
(*AE:* 29). In Dewey's view, these rituals were
"esthetic", but they were "also more than
esthetic", for 



> 
> 
> each of these communal modes of activity united the practical, the
> social, and the educative in an integrated whole having esthetic form.
> (*AE:* 330-331) 
> 
> 
> 



Culture is, then, for Dewey something "situated" as well
as "situating" (Alexander 2013: 13).



An important value that Dewey sees in art is related to these communal
sides of experience. Although Dewey believes each culture is held
together by its own individuality, it is still possible to create
continuity and community between cultures by expanding experience to
absorb the attitudes and values of other cultures. In the end, Dewey
regards works of art as 



> 
> 
> the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man
> and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit
> community of experience. (*AE:* 110) 
> 
> 
> 



For example, 



> 
> 
> barriers are dissolved, limiting prejudices melt away, when we enter
> into the spirit of Negro and Polynesian art. (*AE:* 337) 
> 
> 
> 



As a result of such engagements we start to "learn to
hear" with someone else's "ears" and
"see" with someone else's "eyes". Works
of art are, then, for Dewey "the most intimate and energetic
means of aiding individuals to share in the arts of living"
(*AE:* 339).



There has been considerable discussion in aesthetics whether art has
intrinsic value or whether its value is dependent on some external
goal it helps to fulfill. Dewey rejects the dichotomy, because he
thinks talk of art's utilitarian aspects tends to involve a too
narrow conception of utility. The utility of an artwork is different
in kind from the utility of an umbrella or a mower. While these and
similar utilitarian objects serve "a particular and limited
end", an artwork "serves life", for example by
carrying us to "a refreshed attitude toward the circumstances
and exigencies of ordinary experience" (*AE:* 140, 144).
Artworks can serve life through their evocative function; they can
raise experiences that educate us. Dewey also emphasizes how the work
of the artwork does not end at the close of the immediate experience,
but "continues to operate in indirect channels"
(*AE:* 144).



Like all important experiences, our engagements with artworks can also
lead to what Philip Jackson calls "experiential growth"
(Jackson 1998: 111). Here Jackson follows Dewey's notion of
growth, which is central to his philosophy of education. The idea of
growth is also related to Dewey's naturalist underpinnings; when
the organism overcomes some problematic situation, there is at least
some minimal degree of growth. The organism learns something and can
use the experience in new circumstances in the future. Growth, in
other words is, for Dewey, 



> 
> 
> essentially the ability to learn from experience; the power to retain
> from one experience something which is of avail in coping with the
> difficulties of a later situation. (*DE:* 49) 
> 
> 
> 



Through the different types of experiences artworks can evoke, art too
can be an important source of this sort of growth. This is why Dewey
thinks we should feel a similar type of respect toward "the
creators" of perceptive artworks as we do toward "the
inventors of microscopes and microphones"; in both cases we are
dealing with artefacts, which can train us in new modes of perception
and "open new objects to be observed and enjoyed"
(*EN:* 293).


## 3. Critical Reactions



Criticism of Dewey's aesthetics dates from even before *Art
as Experience*. Curt Ducasse (1929), for example, believed that
Dewey's instrumentalism generates a strange theory which holds
that human life is a matter of tool-making, all tools are essentially
tools for tool-making, and only satisfactions arising from tool-making
should be acknowledged (see Alexander 1998). He also criticized Dewey
for not allowing for meaningless satisfactions and anarchistic
pleasures. Aesthetic perception of colors and tones as such does not
need any presence of meaning; nor does appreciation of rainbows or
sunsets. Meaning also need not be present in things of pure design. He
agreed with Schopenhauer, contra Dewey, that aesthetic contemplation
requires not attending to meanings. Also, because the creation of art
may on occasion occur in one stroke, it too can be without meaning.
Further, it is only by accident that the feeling expressed in the
creation of art is due to the perceived situation. Emotions are not
always responses to concrete situations and many emotions are about
nothing. Artistic expression of emotion should be distinguished from
utilitarian expression. It is only the latter that deals with the
object of emotion.



Another early critic, Edna Shearer (1935a), thought that Dewey buried
art under extraneous ethical and political considerations. She
rejected the idea that all life ought to be like art in combining the
consummatory and the instrumental. Dewey's desire to overcome
the means/ends distinction is also problematic since a work of art
does not seriously contain as ingredients the process that led to its
production. The perfect amalgamation of means and ends is utopian.
Further, toil just cannot be eliminated from society or from the
creative process.



*Art as Experience* early on had the misfortune of receiving
two reviews that negatively impacted its reception. The first, by an
avowed follower, Stephen Pepper, complained that it was not truly
pragmatist and that Dewey had reverted to an earlier Hegelianism
(Pepper 1939). The second, by Benedetto Croce, seemed to confirm this
(Croce 1948). Croce, widely seen as Hegelian himself, saw so many
similarities between Dewey's work and his own that he accused
Dewey of lifting his ideas. Dewey (1948) insisted otherwise, but the
sense that there was something too Hegelian in *Art as
Experience* remained. This did not stop many philosophers,
educators, and other intellectuals from producing works in aesthetic
theory that were strongly influenced by Dewey. Even before *Art as
Experience* Dewey's writings on aesthetics and art
influenced, and were influenced by, such writers as Mary Mullen
(1923), who taught seminars on aesthetics and was Associate Director
of Education for the Barnes Foundation; Lawrence Buermeyer (1924), who
was another Associate Director of Education at the Barnes Foundation;
Albert Barnes himself (1928); and Thomas Munro (1928). After the
book's publication his followers included Irwin Edman (1939),
Stephen Pepper (1939, 1945, 1953), Horace Kallen (1942), Thomas Munro
again (numerous books) and Van Meter Ames (1947, 1953). Art historian
Meyer Schapiro was one of his students.



After the publication of *Art as Experience* there emerged a
long chain of both criticism and defense. Eliseo Vivas (1937) argued
that Dewey holds two theories about the emotions' role in
aesthetic experience, one that the esthetic object arouses emotion in
the spectator, and the other that the content of meaning of art,
objectively speaking, is emotion. But, he argued, experimental
aesthetics has shown that emotion is an accidental consequence of
aesthetic apprehension, and so should not be included in its
definition. The same aesthetic object can arouse different emotional
reactions in different spectators. Some trained persons in music even
deny that adequate aesthetic experience involves emotion. Dewey also
has not given an explanation of the means by which the object
expresses emotion. Vivas himself defined aesthetic experience in terms
of rapt attention involving apprehension of the object's
immanent meanings.



In a second article (Vivas 1938), he asked: Are emotions attached to
the material? How is this consistent with the idea that emotion is not
expressed in the object? And how are these ideas consistent with the
idea that emotion is aroused in the spectator? Vivas insisted that not
all art arouses emotion in everyone who has effective intercourse with
it. Music, for sophisticated listeners, is often not suggestive of
emotions. When we find "sadness" in music we would do
better to call it an objective character of the music than an emotion.
Another problem for Dewey: if the self disappears in experience then
how can the object arouse emotion in the self or have emotion attached
to it? Also, if the self disappears into harmony, how can there be the
kind of disharmony associated with emotion?



We have already mentioned Pepper's objection that Dewey's
theory is not sufficiently pragmatic (Pepper 1939). His specific
objection was that Dewey's views were eclectic, incorporating
elements both of pragmatism and of Hegelian organicism. Pepper
believed that both theories, as well as formalism, can be valuable
when taken separately, but that the mixture in Dewey hurts pragmatism.
Pepper identified organicism with the view that the ultimate reality
is The Absolute. Dewey replied (1939) that he had based his aesthetic
theory on examination of the subject-matter and not on any *a
priori* theory. Words he used, such as "coherence",
"whole", "integration", and
"complete", were intended to have meaning consistent with
his pragmatic empiricism and did not by themselves indicate a
commitment to idealism. Moreover, it was one of his main points that
although these terms *were* applicable to aesthetic matters
they could not, contra the idealists, be extended to the world as a
whole. The terms had a special sense applying only to experiences as
aesthetic. Dewey rejected any theory of a great cosmic harmony
associated with the Hegelian notion of the Absolute.



In a later work, Pepper (1945) agreed with Dewey that each reading of
a poem brings a new experience, but thought that, since there is also
identity of context that can make the differences minor, we can speak
of an identical quality running through the different situations.
Pepper had many positive things to say about Dewey's
"contextualism" (his word for pragmatism in aesthetics),
but he insisted that there is much more permanence of aesthetic values
in the world than Dewey would admit. A great work of art may be
appreciated as long as the physical work exists and someone exists to
perceive it, and insofar as it appeals to common instincts, it may
appeal to people of varied cultures.



Isabel Creed (1945) complained that Dewey leaves no place for works
that celebrate equilibrium achieved, or for works that result from the
artist playing around with the medium. Nor does Dewey explain
accidentally encountered aesthetic experiences of natural objects. She
thought, contra Dewey, that struggle with our environment is not
necessary for aesthetic experience.



Croce, mentioned earlier, rightly pointed out many similarities
between his own and Dewey's thought (Croce 1948). There were,
however, still three points of serious contention: (1) Croce placed
significantly more importance on the universality of art than Dewey,
(2) he still insisted that the material of art consists not of
external things but of internal sentiments of human passions: a
characteristically idealist position that Dewey vehemently rejected,
and (3) whereas he believed that art gives knowledge of a higher
reality, Dewey did not. Croce asserted that Dewey is still arguing
against Hegelians of his youth who held, for example, to a notion of
"the Absolute", which Croce had rejected. Dewey (1948), in
responding to Croce, argued that the list of shared beliefs Croce
mentioned in his review were just ideas widely familiar to
aestheticians. He thought that because of Croce's idealism there
can be no common ground of discussion between them. In return, Croce
(1952) argued that Dewey is too wedded to empiricism and pragmatism
and that it is only because Dewey, contrary to his own claims, is
committed to a kind of dualism, that he cannot understand
Croce's identification of intuition and expression or recognize
how similar Croce's view is to his own. Frederic Simoni (1952)
argued that neither Croce nor Dewey was Hegelian in the sense of
believing in the Absolute. George Douglas (1970) agreed with Simoni,
finding many similarities between Dewey and Croce. However, Douglas
did agree with Pepper (1939) that Dewey never reconciled the
pragmatist and historicist (Hegelian) dimensions of his thought (cf.
Vittorio 2012, Copenhaver 2017).



Patrick Romanell (1949) held that Croce and Dewey at least share the
view that art is about aesthetic experience. However, Dewey's
definition of the subject matter of philosophy of art as aesthetic
experience (which treats it as a special type of experience) is
inconsistent with his definition of it as the aesthetic phase of
experience. Also, when Dewey speaks of aesthetic experience he is not
functionalist and is not consistent with his pragmatism. Dewey should
have held that just as there is no such thing as religious experience,
there is no such thing as aesthetic experience. Dewey (1950) replied
that every normally complete experience is aesthetic in its
consummatory phase, that the arts and their experience are
developments of this primary phase, and that there is nothing
inconsistent in this. Where Romanell saw incompatibility Dewey saw
continuity of development. Van Meter Ames (1953), however, defended
Dewey against critics up to this point in time.



George Boas (1953) argued that Dewey yearns for universality in art
where none can be found. He believed that Dewey wrongly takes the term
"art" to have only one meaning where it has many.
Moreover, while some art communicates, other art conceals: it is wrong
to say that all art, or even that all great art, communicates
universally. Also, not everyone who practices art is interested in
communion and democracy. Some art is intended for communion with God,
not with humanity; some art is intended for communion with no one but
the artist him or herself.



One of the leading aestheticians of the time, Susanne Langer (1953)
saw pragmatism in general, and Dewey in particular, as guilty of
psychologism and therefore unable to deal with the issues that really
challenge aestheticians. Pragmatism's assumption is that all
human interests are manifestations of drives motivated by animal
needs, thus reducing human to animal psychology. Aesthetic values are
thereby interpreted either as direct satisfactions or as instrumental
to fulfilling psychological needs, making artistic experience no
different from ordinary experience. This misses the essence of art,
what makes it as important as science or religion. Whereas Dewey held
that there is no essential difference between art experience and
ordinary experience Langer thought that the appreciative attitude
toward art is not at all like that toward a new car or a beautiful
morning. But Felicia Kruse (2007) argued that Langer misinterpreted
Dewey on several points and was actually much closer to Dewey than she
thought.



In the 1950s there was an analytic revolution in English-speaking
aesthetics. Prior aesthetic theories were considered to be too
speculative and unclear. Dewey's work was caught up in this
condemnation. Arnold Isenberg, for instance, in a founding document of
analytic aesthetics, originally published in 1950, dismissed *Art
as Experience* as a "hodgepodge of conflicting methods and
undisciplined speculations", (1950 [1987: 128]) although he
found it full of profound suggestions. Dewey's theories of
expression and creativity were particular targets of analytic attack.
His was among the views singled out in a general critique of
expression as a defining characteristic of art, although often his own
distinctive theory was ignored in the process. A situation followed,
and continued well into the 1980s, in which, according to one editor
of *The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism*, Dewey's
aesthetics was virtually ignored (Fisher 1989). While Monroe
Beardsley, one of the most important late twentieth century
aestheticians, kept an interest in Dewey alive (1958, 1975, 1982),
particularly in his discussions of aesthetic experience, other major
figures, including Arthur Danto, Mary Mothersill and Richard Wollheim,
completely ignored him. Nelson Goodman may be a partial exception
(Freeland 2001). He certainly shared with Dewey a conviction that art
and science are close in many ways. And, like Dewey, he replaced the
question "what is art?" with "when is art?"
They also both took a naturalist approach to the arts. However,
Goodman, who never refers to Dewey in his *Languages of Art*
(1976), saw art in terms of languages and other symbol systems,
whereas Dewey saw it in terms of experience.



Edward Ballard (1957), in a move characteristic of the rise of
analytic philosophy in aesthetics, asserted that Dewey rejects many
distinctions that are necessary for philosophy, and that this leads to
a kind of irrationalism which results in his depending on problematic
metaphors like "funding" and "energy". He
thought Dewey's avoidance of specific techniques in forming
theories, for example the technique of formal definition, to be
anti-intellectual. Dewey's rejection of universals as illusions
and his enthusiastic acceptance of nominalism must ultimately fail,
for theory requires logically inter-related propositions that refer to
concepts.



Charles Gauss (1960), like Pepper before him, protested that
Dewey's organicism in *Art as Experience* disconnects
from his earlier pragmatism. Pragmatism, unlike organicism, focuses on
interaction with a background that is partially inorganic. Also,
*contra* Dewey, he maintained that aesthetic enjoyment is not a
particular *kind* of enjoyment, but enjoyment of aesthetic
characteristics.



Marshall Cohen (1977, originally 1965) complained, also in the
analytic vein, about the vagueness of Dewey's terms. He
especially wondered whether *unity* can really distinguish
aesthetic from non-aesthetic experience. He reasoned that the
experience of being badly beaten can have as much unity as hearing a
sonata. Moreover, aesthetic experience can often have the
discontinuous character that Dewey ascribes only to practical
experience.



Contemporary American aesthetician Arnold Berleant began his career
(1970) in a way that was much more sympathetic to Dewey. He has, in
his many writings, developed themes similar to Dewey's, for
example, in his concepts of the "aesthetic field" and
"engagement" (1970; 1991). His work on the aesthetics of
the environment had a strong influence on the recently emergent field
of everyday aesthetics which we will discuss below.



By contrast, Roger Scruton (1974) objected mainly to Dewey's
naturalism. He interpreted Dewey as insisting that aesthetic need must
underlie all our interest in art, and believed that Dewey fails to
capture what we mean when we say that we are interested in a picture
"for its own sake". Needs can be satisfied by many objects
but one cannot substitute pictures for one another. Unlike animal
need, interest in a picture involves thought of its object. As a
political conservative, Scruton has been opposed to Dewey's
views on education. However, his work on architecture (Scruton 1979),
with its emphasis on context, unity, functionalism, and the relations
between architecture and everyday aesthetics, is remarkably similar to
Dewey's views about art in general, although Dewey's name
is never mentioned.



John McDermott (1976), one of the leaders of the American Philosophy
tradition in the later part of the twentieth century, followed Dewey
in arguing that all experience is potentially aesthetic, where the
aesthetic sensibility refers to how we feel about our situation. Art
today leads us to life. In order to achieve consummatory experience we
need to cooperate with our environment.



Although Monroe Beardsley (1982) often spoke positively of
Dewey's notion of aesthetic experience, he thought that Dewey
was obsessed with the dangers of dualism and that he talked about
"separation" in a misleading way. Dewey thinks the
practices of hanging paintings in special buildings would deny
continuity between art and life. Yet Beardsley sees no real problem
here, for people who see a painting in a museum bring their culture
with them. Also, against Dewey's stress on continuity, Beardsley
thought that *discontinuity* in nature and in culture is
required for the emergence of genuine novelty in art. As opposed to
Dewey, Beardsley stressed the ways in which art is independent,
relatively self-sufficient, and autonomous to a degree. Alan Goldman
(2005) argued that Beardsley borrows too much from Dewey's
obscure discussion of experience, but articulates better than Dewey
the idea that aesthetic experience is a matter of complete engagement
of our faculties with both instrumental and intrinsic benefits. More
recently, Goldman (2013) has developed what he calls "the broad
view of aesthetic experience", whose similarities to
Dewey's view he readily acknowledges.



Joseph Margolis (1980) is perhaps the most important contemporary
aesthetician coming out of the analytic school to take Dewey
seriously, having a natural affinity to pragmatist ways of thought.
His idea that works of art are culturally emergent but physically
embodied entities is Deweyan in spirit, as is his insistence on a
robust relativist theory of interpretation. However, Margolis seldom
refers to Dewey and, although he believes himself closer to
Dewey's "Hegelianism" than to Peirce's
"Kantianism", he finds Peirce more interesting. He also
faults Dewey for not being an historicist (1999).



The relative lack of interest in Dewey changed for several reasons in
the late 1970s. First, Richard Rorty turned analytic philosophy on its
head by advocating a return to pragmatism (Rorty 1979, 1982). In this,
Dewey was one of his avowed heroes. Unfortunately, Rorty was not a
close reader of Dewey's aesthetics.



Dewey's aesthetics finally received an excellent exposition in
the work of Thomas Alexander (1987). Alexander developed his ideas
further in a book on eco-ontology and the aesthetics of existence
(2013). Mark Johnson, in a project inspired by cognitive science, drew
on Dewey's anti-dualism to develop a theory of the aesthetics of
human understanding (2007, 2018). Meanwhile, there has been a steady
interest in Dewey's aesthetics in the philosophy of education,
with articles appearing on a regular basis in such publications as the
*Journal of Aesthetic Education* and *Studies in the
Philosophy of Education* and several books (Jackson 1998, Garrison
1997, Greene 2001, Maslak 2006, Granger 2006). Ueno (2015) continued
in this tradition, stressing the importance of aesthetics in
Dewey's theory of democracy and education during a period of
urbanization and industrialization.



Dewey's renewed influence was due in part to increased interest
in various continental aestheticians. The similarities between Dewey
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are the most striking (Ames 1953, Kestenbaum
1977), but he also shares certain features with Hans-Georg Gadamer
(Gilmour 1987, who also notes important differences, and Jeannot
2001). Given his critique of capitalism, one can also find connections
between his thinking and that of Marxist aestheticians, particularly
Theodor Adorno (Lysaker 1998), although there are important
differences, especially where Adorno advocates the autonomy of art
while Dewey stresses continuity (Lewis 2005, Eldridge 2010).



There has also been some work on marked similarities between
Dewey's aesthetic thought and that of Taoism (Grange 2001),
Transcendental Meditation (Zigler 1982), Dogen's version of Zen
(Earls 1992), the great Indian aesthetician Abhinavagupta (Mathur
1981), the Bhagavad-Gita (Stroud 2009), and Confucius (Shusterman
2009, Man 2007, Mullis 2005, Grange 2004). Alexander has recently
discussed relations between Dewey and Eastern aesthetics generally
(Alexander 2009).



As mentioned earlier, many attacks on Dewey focused on his views on
expression. Tormey (1986) for example chided Dewey for assuming that
an artist is always expressing something and that the expressive
qualities in the work are the result of that act. He thought that
Dewey wrongly abandons the distinction between voluntary and
involuntary expression, and in doing so, undermines paradigmatic
examples of expressive behavior. A work of art may possess expressive
qualities of sadness but this is not necessarily the intended
consequence of the productive activity of the artist. For Alan Tormey,
the artist is not expressing him or herself: he/she is simply making
an expressive object. Michael Mitias (1992) defended Dewey against
these criticisms.



David Novitz (1992), who approved of Dewey's ideas that art
derives from experiences of everyday life and that the artistic
process infuses our daily lives, questioned the idea that fine art
always embodies consummatory or unified experiences. He thought Dewey
has an idealized view of art that borrows from the very aestheticist
theories he criticizes. Further, Dewey does not sufficiently question
the boundaries of art.



Richard Shusterman (1992, etc., see bibliography) is the most widely
known advocate of Dewey's pragmatist aesthetics. He especially
emphasized the possibilities of treating popular art as fine art with
his well-known example of rap as fine art. He also extended aesthetics
into the realm of everyday life with his concept of
"somaesthetics" (2012). Shusterman strikingly contrasted
Dewey's approach to that of analytic aesthetics. Like Dewey, he
stressed the idea that art and aesthetics are both culturally and
philosophically central. Some of his most trenchant comments involved
similarities between Dewey's thought and that of such
continental thinkers as Foucault and Adorno. However he also had his
criticisms of Dewey. He took Dewey to be redefining art in terms of
aesthetic experience, which he believed to be too slippery a concept
to explain much. Moreover, he asserted that although Dewey has much to
say about aesthetic experience, Dewey also holds that it is
indefinable, and this leads to problems with its being a criterion of
value in art. On the other hand, Shusterman thought that Dewey sees
defining art in terms of experience as a matter of getting us to have
more and better experiences with art, and not of giving a definition
in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. So, although he
doubted that philosophical theory can redefine art, he suspected Dewey
is not trying to do this anyway. Moreover, he thought it not only
possible but valuable to make less dramatic classificatory changes, as
for example in legitimating rock music as fine art. He believed that
whereas Dewey sought a global redefinition of art, he was simply
trying to remedy certain limitations in art practice. Later, he said
that much art fails to generate Dewey's aesthetic experience
(Shusterman 2000). He also observed that art cannot be redefined to be
*equivalent* to aesthetic experience, as we are hardly going to
reclassify an incredible experience of a sunset as art. Shusterman
also insisted on the value of aesthetic experiences that are
fragmented and ruptured, contrary to Dewey's emphasis on unity,
and noted that Dewey neglected the possibility of lingering reflection
after moments of consummation (Shusterman 2004). Paul C. Taylor
addressed Shusterman's criticism of Dewey as trying to find a
definition of art arguing that Dewey provides 



> 
> 
> a very different kind of definition, one offered in full view of its
> sociohistorical contingency and pragmatic fuzziness. (Taylor 2002: 24)
> 
> 
> 
> 



This strand of pro-Deweyan thinking was also pursued by Crispin
Sartwell in response to multi-culturalism and everyday aesthetics
(Sartwell 1995, 2003). In the later instance Sartwell connected
everyday aesthetics to Dewey in the ideas that art arises from non-art
activities and that the domain of aesthetics goes well beyond the fine
arts.



Some contemporary feminist aestheticians have noted that Dewey shares
many of their concerns, for example their rejection of mind/body
dualism, their democratic instincts, their contextualism, and their
tendency to break down traditional distinctions (Seigfried 1996, Duran
2001). Charlene Seigfried found several aspects in Dewey's
thought that may enrich feminist exploration of women's
experiences, including his antidualism, his perspectivalism, his
working from concrete experience, his emphasis on the role of feeling
in experience, his stress on doing and making, and his attack on the
division between practice and theory. However, she noted that Dewey
neglected sexism in his analysis, and sometimes made sexist
assumptions.



Noel Carroll (2001) thought that Dewey's theory of art
fails to cover many contemporary works which then act as
counterexamples to his definition of art as experience. For example,
as Rothko's paintings can overwhelm us at one shot, their
experience may not have Dewey's requisite development and
closure. Carroll also thought that the view that experiences of art
must be unified is too narrow. Cage's
*4'33''*, which Carroll takes to obviously be a work
of art, does not consummate or have qualitative unity. Finally, he
thought that if experiences of everyday dispersion can be aesthetic
then Dewey's distinction between "an experience" and
disconnected daily experience dissolves. This might be contrasted to
Philip Jackson's (1998) defense of Dewey against similar
criticisms, especially with respect to Cage's
*4'33''* which he saw as fitting Dewey's
definition nicely. For Jackson, it is the *experience* that
requires unity, not the physical product.



George Dickie (2001) said that Dewey sets forth an expression theory
of art without any supporting argument. Lumping Dewey with
Collingwood, he thought such theorists place art in the same domain
with the growl of a dog with a bone. They made the creation of art
like the bowerbird's production of bowers, i.e., a result of
innate natures without a plan in mind. For Dickie, expression of
emotion is neither sufficient nor necessary for defining art. He
thought these theories wrongly hold that psychological mechanisms in
human nature are sufficient for the production of art, as if the
production of artworks is teleologically determined by such.



In her popular introductory textbook, Cynthia Freeland (2001) observed
that Dewey held that art is the best window to another culture, that
it is a universal language, and that we should try to experience
another culture as from within since barriers and prejudices can melt
away when we enter into the spirit of another culture's art.
Although this universalism seems similar to Clive Bell's
formalism, Freeland noted that for Dewey art is defined not as form
but as expression of the life of a community. She thought, however,
that we must also know many external facts about the community, and
that we must recognize that no culture is homogeneous: there may not
be *one* viewpoint in a culture. She also gave a positive nod
to Dewey's call for a revolution in which the values leading to
intelligent enjoyment of art are incorporated into our social
relations. Finally, she classified Dewey's aesthetics as a
cognitive theory since it focuses on art's role in helping
people to perceive and manipulate reality. Thus she found continuity
between Dewey's and Goodman's approaches to art as a kind
of language.



Dewey's thought in aesthetics has also sometimes been brought to
bear in analysis of other aspects of his philosophy. Noteworthy is the
ethical work of Gregory Pappas (2008), especially his chapter titled
"The Intelligent, Aesthetic, and Democratic Way of Life".
Here he discusses Dewey's aesthetic notion of balance as it
applies to ethics. Mark Johnson (1994) and Steven Fesmire (2003) also
introduce Dewey's aesthetic theories into discussion of ethics.
Scott Stroud (2011), previously mentioned, further develops the
Deweyan idea of moral self-cultivation, while Nathan Crick (2010)
applies Dewey's aesthetic ideas to a conception of rhetoric as
an art which in a democracy promotes freedom.



Recently there have been lively debates over the Deweyan tradition in
the aesthetics of everyday life. Most of the contestants are inspired
by Dewey's valuation of everyday aesthetic experience but depart
from him in various ways. Sherri Irvin (2008a) has argued that the
fragmented character of everyday aesthetic experiences might, contra
Dewey's emphasis on consummation, be what gives them their
distinctive quality. She goes so far as to assert that even scratching
an itch can be aesthetically appreciated (Irvin 2008b). Glenn Parsons
and Allen Carlson (2008) contend that, although Dewey's
aesthetic theory may seem particularly appropriate to appreciating
everyday objects since we interact with them in a more intimate and
multi-sensory way than with art objects, this approach, shared by
Korsmeyer (1999), Brady (2005), Leddy (2005, 2012), Shusterman (2006,
2012), and Saito (2007), fails to honor traditional distinctions
between aesthetic and mere "bodily" pleasures. They might
have also mentioned Glenn Kuehn (2005) who takes an explicitly Deweyan
approach to the aesthetics of food, and Katya Mandoki (2007) who takes
Dewey as one source of her everyday aesthetics. They think it wrong
that the pleasures of taking a bath, for example, could be considered
aesthetic. Rather, the objects of everyday aesthetics should be
appreciated mainly for their functional beauty (pleasures of the
proximal senses are not aesthetic, although they may still add some
value to the overall experience), and knowledge of the function of
everyday objects is required for their appropriate appreciation. Brian
Soucek (2009) and Christopher Dowling (2010) raise criticisms against
everyday aesthetics along similar lines. However, Kalle Puolakka
(2014, 2015, 2017, 2018) defends a Deweyan approach to everyday
aesthetics drawing on Dewey's theory of imagination and on
recent work on Dewey and moral imagination.



Dewey continues to have influence with respect to particular art
forms. For example David Clowney and Robert Rawlins (2014) use Dewey
to argue that risk-taking and showmanship are integral to music as
performed, and Aili Bresnahan (2014) develops a Deweyan theory of
performing arts practice with a special view to dance.



A significant recent development in philosophical aesthetics has been
the placing of more attention on biology. Along these lines, Alva
Noe (2015) has taken a markedly Deweyan stance in discussion of
art as strange tools. He writes that although we can take seeing as
something that happens in the head, it is, in "Dewey's
image, a transaction of doing and undergoing" (Noe 2015:
78). He agrees with Dewey that lives are not made up of a series of
sensations, but are 



> 
> 
> composed of experiences that demand to be named--*that dinner
> in Venice*... [etc.]. (2015: 113) 
> 
> 
> 



Most notably, he takes a quote from Dewey about how the existence of
works of art has become an obstruction to a theory about them as an
epigraph to his book. He ends his book by noting that in Dewey's
view we are all artists since we are all engaged in making
experiences. And yet, 



> 
> 
> true artists don't only make experiences. They make
> objects... that afford the opportunity for integral experience.
> (2015: 205)
> 
> 
> 



It is a mark of the endurance and power of Dewey's aesthetic
theory that it has been so frequently criticized and defended from so
many different angles. Although many of these criticisms rest on an
incomplete or distorted understanding of Dewey's thought, there
are also many that should be answered by anyone who seeks to carry on
Dewey's legacy.


## 4. Wider Cultural Relevance



Dewey was ahead of his time in his devotion to multiculturalism. The
selection of illustrations Dewey chose for *Art as Experience*
included Pueblo Indian pottery, Bushmen rock-painting, Scythian
ornament, and African sculpture, as well as works by El Greco, Renoir,
Cezanne and Matisse. He was interested in traditional and folk arts in
Mexico, admiring the designs of the rural schools over those of the
cities (1926). He was also associated, mainly through Barnes, with
African-American culture. Barnes was invited to write a chapter for
*The New Negro* edited by Alain Locke (Locke 1925). *The New
Negro* was one of the founding documents of the Harlem
Renaissance. The students in Dewey's and Barnes' first
experimental classes in art education were mainly from the black
working class. Barnes collected African-American art and also
encouraged African-American students to study at the Barnes
Foundation. African-American painter and illustrator Aaron Douglas,
who came to the foundation in 1927, studied in Paris in 1931 under a
Foundation fellowship (Jubilee 1982). Barnes also had a long
association with Lincoln University, a historically black college,
many students of which studied at the Barnes Foundation (Hollingsworth
1994). Dewey was one of the founding members of the NAACP (National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and one of the
sixty signatories to the 1909 "Call" for a National
Conference to Address Racial Inequality, a founding document for the
NAACP (Library of Congress
 [Other Internet Resources]).



Dewey also sought to promote cross-cultural understanding through his
founding of the China Institute in New York City in 1926. The China
Institute, which continues today, advertises itself as the only
institution in that city to focus solely on Chinese civilization, art
and culture. Hu Shih, a student of Dewey's at Columbia and one
of the leading figures in the creation of the Institute, invited him
to Peking in 1919 (Yong Ho 2004
 [Other Internet Resources]).



Although Dewey was widely versed in literature, architecture,
painting, sculpture, and the theater, he was relatively uneducated in
music, and he was said to be tone-deaf. Yet he often had insightful
things to say about music, and many musicians and music educators have
drawn inspiration from his theory (e.g., Zeltner 1975). Unfortunately,
he did not discuss photography or film as separate art forms.



Many writers complain that Dewey showed little interest in the
avant-garde art of his time (for example, Eldridge 2010). It is true
that Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism play no role in his writing, and
his theory seems to actually preclude Non-objective painting (Jacobson
1960), although he does speak positively of abstract art. Nor did he
refer much to such innovative poets as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
Although this may indicate a conservative approach to the arts, he
nonetheless had considerable influence on various innovative art
movements both in his own time and later. Perhaps most significantly,
the director of the Federal Art Project from 1935-1943, Holger
Cahill, was a Dewey follower (Mavigliano 1984). Amongst painters,
Thomas Hart Benton, the regionalist realist, was an early convert to
his philosophy. Dewey was also on the board of the influential Black
Mountain College, which had students such as Merce Cunningham and John
Cage. Josef Albers, an important painting teacher there, was first
influenced by Dewey's educational theory and later by his
aesthetics (Gosse 2012).



In Mexico, Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre, or open-air painting
schools, began during the Mexican Revolution and achieved an
established structure under the government of Alvaro Obregon
(1920-24). They were promoted by Alfredo Ramos Martinez, who was
inspired by Dewey.




Turning to late twentieth century artists, Dewey's influence on
Abstract Expressionism was especially strong (Buettner 1975, Berube
1998). For example, Robert Motherwell, who studied *Art as
Experience* when he was a philosophy major at Stanford, considered
it to be one of his bibles (Berube 1998). Donald Judd, the Minimalist
sculptor, read and admired Dewey (Raskin 2010). Earth Art, with its
emphasis on getting art out of the museum, might even be seen as
applied Dewey. There is also reason to believe that Allan Kaprow, one
of the originators of Happenings and Performance Art, read Dewey and
drew on his ideas (Kelley 2003). Although one author has argued that
contemporary Body Art has moved away from the integrated consummated
aesthetic experience Dewey commends (Jay 2002), another argues that
Dewey anticipates this movement (Brodsky 2002).