My on-going engagement with Dewey has been the result of a series of conversations with Nick Gaskill. Nick now responds to my recent Dewey posts, to wit:
I’ve just read through the last two Dewey posts, and I understand now why it’s important to differentiate the aesthetic and the everyday: namely because, as you put it at the end of #3 and again in #4, the aesthetic has resources that simply aren’t available in everyday experience. And so, if we take it a step further, any argument for rendering social relations “aesthetic” in the way Dewey wants (“the values that lead to the production and intelligent enjoyment of art have to be incorporated into the system of social relationships”–p.344) has to square up to the way that any translation of “aesthetic” values outside of those conditions will meet with difficulties. Is that right? The aesthetic has its own affordances, and this is why even though all experience can potentially have an aesthetic quality, there’s still a need to think about the arts as the paradigms.
You’re helping me to get at another question I’ve had about Dewey, especially in light of the way that everyone from Rorty to Walter Benn Micahels to Colin Koopman wants to throw away “experience” as a bad term/concept. The question is about the difference between experience and practice. You know from my Rorty essay that I’ve been focusing a lot on how the science studies line thinks about practice. There’s a lot of overlap with “experience” but they aren’t synonymous: practice is a special case, practices have specific conditions. I’m wondering if it is useful to think of the aesthetic as a practice that is one way of cultivating or working up experience more generally. And I’m wondering if Dewey has a way to differentiate between experience in general and experience as it occurs within specific practices. Is that what inquiry is?
I liked how you elaborated the point about “feeling one’s way” and judgment. And yet I couldn’t help think that the answer to your questions–“How do you know it feels right? What is that feeling based on?”–is qualitative thinking with its emphasis on the “unity” of situations. The reason Dewey thinks that this “intuitive” way of going on is not just a subjective feeling or hunch is that it is a way of thinking qualitatively, a way of thinking with and through the qualities of a situation, which has a shape or color that can guide one in the same way other constraints work in scientific or logical pursuits. I know you’re resistant to Dewey’s emphasis on qualitative unity, but it’s worth noting that part of the reason he offers it (or at least part of the way he develops it in AE) is to answer those very questions about how artists proceed.
I am going to think about “practice” and offer my thoughts on that concept in a future post.
For now two quick points.
- Different “affordances” does seem the exactly right way to talk about the distinction between the aesthetic and everyday experience. We have to navigate the world in somewhat different ways than we navigate aesthetic experiences. Furthermore, there are also differences between the experience of creating an artistic work (writing King Lear) and experiencing that work as its recipient or audience. The language of “affordances” pushes us to be concrete about those differences.
- I am inclined, as I said, to see “judgment” as a black box. (Just as the “unconscious” often functions as a black box.) Meaning that we trot out the notion of judgment to indicate the presence of something—an ability to assess a situation and develop/create a fruitful way of going forward—that we can see exists but which we have a very hard time explaining. To say “she showed good judgment” is to acknowledge that achievement, but does not go very far toward explaining how it was done or how it was possible. Kant usefully distinguishes “determinate” from “reflective” judgment—but can only fall back on the possession of “taste” when pushed to say what makes some people more adept at judgment than others.
But Nick’s comment pushed the account of judgment forward. Judgment is now something like empathy, and something like the “concentration, compression, clarity” triad that Dewey links to “form.” “Empathy” because judgment is based on a participatory, interactionist engagement with and feeling for the “qualities” of a situation. Dewey, of course, is always against any notion that knowledge comes from standing at a distance from something and contemplating it. Rather, knowledge is a product of immersion, of getting one’s hands dirty, of feeling one’s way forward, with a sensitivity to the feedback one receives from each step of the process. But those steps are also guided by a sensitivity to the qualities of the non-self elements of the situation. Judgment is a product of that two-way traffic between self and situation. Dewey’s usual term for this process is “inquiry”—which Nick then asks us to consider as one example of a “practice.”
And judgment is like “form” in that it clarifies and concentrates by giving the situation a “unity.” Which get us back to the question of the extent to which situations possess an “integral” or “intrinsic” (two words Dewey uses) unity or if that unity is mostly created by the human agent.
McGowanBlog 