Category: John Dewey

Aesthetic Sensibility

Nick and I are scheduled to have our second discussion of Dewey’s Art As Experience on Monday. We will focus on chapters four and five, where Dewey has all kinds of interesting things to say about art as the expression of emotion. But I thought it would make sense prior to that conversation to offer a kind of summary of where the previous posts on the aesthetic have landed me to this point.

The aesthetic sensibility, depending on how you understand it, can encompass:

1) Certain sensitivities to (and an inclination to pay attention to) perceptual encounters (hearing for music; seeing for the visual arts etc.)

2) Those sensitivities might stretch to include an attentiveness to or susceptibility to being moved by form (narrative structures; organizations of space in architecture or the plastic arts).

3) An expanded (or cultivated) capacity to sympathize with other ways of being in the world through acts of imagination that make those ways of being more “present” to the perceiver.

4) A propensity to consider multiple possible ways of understanding and responding to situations in which the self finds itself. (Could possibly tie this propensity to an account of “creativity”).

5) Tied (perhaps) to number 4 would be a tendency to consider meanings and values that step outside customary and prevailing views. Tied (perhaps) to number 1 would be a tendency to dwell on certain perceptual experiences, valuing them for their own sake (the pleasure of the encounter), thus abstracting from a product-oriented relationship toward what a situation presents to the self.

6) An interest in the intensities generated by what Dewey calls “compression and concentration.” That is, an appreciation of the ways in which formal organization of the materials of experience can heighten their impact.

I don’t see how any of these six possible features of aesthetic sensibility establishes any necessary connection to a leftist—or anti-capitalist—politics. Yet I don’t want to endorse the kind of absolute divide between a “private” pursuit of intensities, of aesthetic experiences, and a “public “ pursuit of justice like that proposed by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. The boundaries between the aesthetic and politics are more porous than that.

To be clear: I think that politics attends to desired arrangements for living in the world with others. The fact that I share the world with others makes politics necessary. (Hannah Arendt on plurality.) Those who are passionate about politics care deeply about justice and/or about power. Either they want social arrangements that they can affirm as just (there are, of course, competing versions of what justice entails), or they want social arrangements that serve and protect their interests against the (real or perceived) threat posed by others. The exception to that either/or are those who desire power for its own sake—or for the status it confers (as contrasted to the safety or material goods it can secure).

However, it does seem that a focus on the quality of experiences pushes against the instrumental logic of capitalism (with its emphasis on production and efficiency). The arts do seem to push in the direction of taking one’s time, of savoring available sensations, of focusing on process over product. In addition, the pluralism of the arts—both the multiple different kinds of artistic practice/enjoyment and their imaginative play with different possibilities—does push against the way things are now, refusing to take the status quo as self-evident or necessary. Finally, I think Nick’s position tends to a different way of understanding how the arts become political: namely, that the intense and fulfilling experiences that art offers stand as a rebuke to the dullness or positive suffering of the life on offer in contemporary societies. The arts show that a higher quality of life is possible and desirable.

Three final points:

I have not said anything yet about how the arts can create community. One problem of Rorty’s position is that it makes artistic practice and enjoyment so individualistic. But the arts are in many cases collaborative (making a film, putting on a play, the studios of Titian or Barbara Hepworth). And the arts are often enjoyed with others (going to a play or a concert)—and foster a sense of fellowship with those others. Fandom is powerful social glue. And maybe that works much more intensely at a football game, or is mobilized much more powerfully by nationalism, but sports and nationalism are at least cousins of the aesthetic in their mobilizing emotions to promote participation in collectivities in which the self is submerged.

Everything said in this post as summary doesn’t help at all with my ongoing attempt to delineate the connection (which I think is intimate) between art and meaning. My hunch (but I am having severe problems cashing that hunch out) is that the arts (in many instances) push us toward asking the local question of what this phenomenon in front of me means and the global question of which things to value over others (i.e. what ways of being are most meaningful). Do the arts forefront questions of value in a way that other activities do not? I think they do, but am having a devil of a time coming up with an account that portrays how and why the arts are distinctive in that way.

Aesthetic education stands in a fairly straight-forward relation to the observations in this post. The ability to experience the intensities offered by any given situation is enhanced by knowledge. The person who knows the rules of baseball is going to “get more” out of watching a baseball game. There are very few experiences that are not going to be enhanced by knowing something about the various participants in that interaction. This is what Dewey calls “funded” experience; what we know—and bring from past experiences, memory, and knowledge—into the present contributes to how the present interaction unfolds. The experience will be different for different people with different degrees of knowledge. Education provides students with that knowledge. (Dewey, of course, thought the royal road to knowledge was experience itself–nowadays known as “active learning.”)

But there still remains the fact that education understood as I have just described it is about providing the student with knowledge. What about that other goal: shaping the student’s sensibility. Will enabling the student to be attentive to the nuanced qualities of a certain perceptual experience also awaken an appreciation of, a positive desire for, such experiences? That’s why I find Sianne Ngai’s meditation on “interesting” so profound. She shows how the description of something as “interesting” is a plaintive plea, a call sent forth in hopes of hooking one’s auditors. Don’t just notice this thing, but acknowledge its worthiness as an object of attention, as a phenomenon worth dwelling on, spending time with. Take an interest in it. We have succeeded in shaping someone’s sensibility when we have inculcated that minimal psychic investment of their now finding something “interesting.” They will not pass it by. They will attend to it.

A political sensibility is formed when someone dwells on questions of justice—or questions of social order. She finds those questions of import, of significance, worth attending to. Those “matters of concern” (the great Bruno Latour term) are not, it seems to me, the same matters of concern that occupy the aesthetic sensibility. The two sensibilities are compatible; they can co-exist without much strain; they may even mutually influence or reinforce one another in some cases; but they are far from identical, and the presence of one says nothing about the possible presence of the other.

The Aesthetic (Six)

Today’s post will introduce three additional features/effects often attributed to the aesthetic.

The aesthetic has the effect of widening our sympathies because it bring us into contact with a diverse range of content—and allows us to “get inside” the motives and ways of being of that diverse content. George Eliot offers a much-cited version of this argument in her writing about the novel, and this assertion also figures prominently in Martha Nussbaum’s work. If it is true, as I argued some posts back, that compassion (which grows out of sympathy) is a key feature of left/liberal sensibility, then the connection between the aesthetic and a leftist politics is fairly direct if the arts do make us more sympathetic.

Dewey offers his own version of the “sympathy” assertion (even though only in passing and even though that assertion would not seem connected—or even compatible with—the main argument about consummatory experiences.) Here’s Dewey (once again downplaying “knowledge” in favor of a more emotion-laden relationship to the thing beyond the self that is to be known). “Friendship and intimate affections are not the result of information about another person even though knowledge may further that formation. But it does so only as it becomes an integral part of sympathy through the imagination. It is when the desires and aims, the interests and modes of response of another become an expansion of our own being that we understand him. We learn to see with his eyes, hear with his ears, and their results give true instruction, for they are built into our own structure” (336). This kind of relationship to others’ “modes of response” (a good synonym for sensibility, I think) is “instruction in the arts of living (336)” Dewey writes. This instruction is “something other than conveying information about them [the arts of living]. It is a matter of communication and participation in values of life by means of imagination, and works of art are the most intimate and energetic means of aiding individuals to share in the arts of living” (336).

To put it crudely, imagination allows us to walk a mile in another way of life’s shoes.

The flaws in the sympathy theory are obvious. There are whole realms of art—classical music for instance—it seems to neglect altogether. Does a Mozart symphony introduce us to “an art of living”? To a “mode of response” maybe, insofar as it shapes or alters our abilities to hear, but a way of life? And the notion that the arts foster compassion runs us into too many counter-examples to hold much water. Are aesthetes really consistently better people than those indifferent to the arts? And are those aesthetes more likely to be bleeding heart liberals than hard-hearted Scrooges?

Finally, and more substantially, the sympathy assertion requires a robust account of imagination and how it works. We are in the realm of “faculty psychology” at this point: the psychology that divides up mental functions by positing something that thinks (cognition), something that wills (desires), something that feels (emotion), something that judges (phronesis), and something that images (imagination). The adequacy of faculty psychology to actual mental functioning is pretty doubtful; it is a kind of high-level “folk psychology” that doesn’t fit with current developments in neurology or cognitive science. But questions of adequacy aside, the “imagination” as a mental capacity/act is very hard to pin down, since it gets appealed to every time artists want (as I talked about in the last post) to posit “ways of knowing,” and forms of apprehension, not covered by traditional canons of rationality, evidence, and knowledge formation. Certainly Dewey does not come close to offering a full scale account of imagination in Art As Experience.

And yet. At issue (recall) is if the arts shape sensibility—and, if so, how? The sympathy assertion has going for it the fact that it addresses sensibility (openness to and sympathy for other ways of being in the world) and offers an account of how that sensibility is fostered by (at least some) art.

An alternative version of how the arts shape a certain kind of sensibility is offered by Dewey just a few pages later, once again with imagination doing the heavy lifting. The arts alert us, “not directly, but through disclosure, through imaginative vision addressed to imaginative experience . . . possibilities that contrast with actual conditions” (346). “Only imaginative vision elicits the possibilitis that are interwoven within the texture of the actual” (345). [I don’t see how this version of what the arts do can be anything but contradict the main argument of the book, which seeks to embed the aesthetic in “actual conditions.” But let’s leave that aside to pursue the account of the arts suggested here.]

Because the arts provide a place where unrealized possibilities can be imagined, Dewey even goes so far as to say that tomorrow’s realities can be found shadowed forth in the arts of today. “Change in the climate of the imagination is the precursor of the changes that affect more than the details of life” (346). Thus, Dewey ends his book with an engagement with Shelley’s apology for poetry. The poets are the unacknowledged legislators not only because they imagine what has not yet been accomplished, but also because they avoid having “their vision of possibilities . . . converted into a proclamation of facts that already exist and hardened into semi-political institutions” (348). “Art has been the means of keeping alive that sense of purposes that outrun evidence and of meanings that transcend indurated habits” (348).

What gives art this power is precisely its separation from facts on the ground. We can imagine what does not exist—and meditate on “purposes” and “meanings” apart from their entanglement in the institutions of socio-political life and the habits of the daily grind. Art exists in the realm of the hypothetical, not the actual. We can try things on for size (in imagination) in that realm. This appeal to the advantages of art’s “fictional” nature has been fairly common in accounts of the aesthetic—and often is linked to an ability to consider alternatives to prevailing customs and social arrangements. The artist is a dreamer.

Dewey gives this idea a pragmatist twist. The artists is someone trying to play out—in thought—the consequences of particular possible courses of action. As such, that artist looks like the scientific experimenter who figures so prominently in all of Dewey’s work. Yet Dewey, for the most part, doesn’t take this path in his book on aesthetics. Why? I think it is because he dislikes pretty heartily thought experiments. They smack too much of the spectator theory of knowledge. For him, experiments are very much about working materially and concretely with things. The experiment is a motivated and controlled, but real, interaction with the stuff of the world. Experiments are not conducted by armchair cogitating.

For myself, I think there is much to be said about the arts occupying a hypothetical space. Accounts of the arts that neglect their fictional nature miss something important. The arts do seem to allow for a certain kind of reflection, a certain kind of stepping away from immediate demands. But I share Dewey’s uneasiness with extracting the arts too far from the daily chore of getting on with a life. That said: I do think it part of an aesthetic sensibility to be especially alert to alternatives to current modes of being. Attuned (because of stepping aside into a hypothetical space?) to other possible ways to live, the aesthetic sensibility pushes against the taken-for-granted.

Whether this belief that things could be different is more a left than right wing outlook is a different question. I am tempted to say that when the vision of a different life is located in a lost past we should recover, then we have a conservative or right-wing sensibility. When that alternative is located in a future we should strive for, then we have a left-wing sensibility. In both cases, the present is unsatisfactory and to be transformed into something else. The arts do seem to provide a particularly suitable place for displaying that possible transformation.

These first two ways of describing what the aesthetic does—or what it affords—rest on the level of content. The aesthetic presents another way of life and elicits our sympathy for it through enhancing our understanding of it. Or the aesthetic presents possibilities that lead us to question the forms life in the present takes.

But there is another route to take, one that places the emphasis on the Form, not the content, characteristic of the aesthetic. This approach is the dominant one in Dewey’s book, even though he slips in all these other ways of thinking about what the aesthetic is or does. This is where Dewey aligns with the modernists—at least insofar as certain modernists wished to downplay the representational content of art in favor of an emphasis on form.

This is where (if I understand him correctly) Nick wants to plant his flag. The “ordered intensity” art creates is an effect of form, not content (or message). The arts are emotionally compelling, capture our attention, sharpen our focus, and provide satisfactory experiences through the intensities of form’s elegant constraints. Think of water collected into a container and then heated. Instead of dissipating (flowing away) as uncontained water does, contained water acquires a shape while heated water reaches the consummation of boiling (if enough heat is applied).

Dewey, then, like the modernists, wants to focus not on what the art work says, but on the experience it offers both the artist and her audience. In his own key, he is actually not that far from Adorno, who also wants to locate art’s importance—and its political effects—on its form (since form is what makes something, in Dewey’s terms, “an experience”).

How does this work? For Adorno, artistic form offers a riposte to the “damaged life” offered by modern capitalist societies. Dewey in the 1930s, influenced by the economic conditions of the Depression and by leftist responses to that catastrophe, offers an argument not that far removed from classic Marxist accounts of alienation. (In his biography of Dewey, Robert Westbrook suggests that Sidney Hook was a key factor in Dewey’s adoption of various left-wing arguments.) On pages 341—344 of Art As Experience, Dewey offers his version of the Marxist argument that a more equitable distribution of the products of economic activity will not suffice in curing the ills of capitalist productive and social relations. “Production of objects enjoyed in direct experience by those who possess, to some extent, the capacity to produce useful commodities expressing individual values, has become a specialized matter apart from the general run of production. This fact is probably the most important factor in the status of art in present civilization” (341).

Hardly the clearest statement in Dewey’s corpus, famous for its many obscurities. My translation: we get here a mixture of Ruskin and Marx. The artist has the privileged experience of “producing” objects “that express individual values.” (Nick and I will be exploring Dewey’s understanding of art’s connection to “expression” in our next meeting, so I will hold off on that topic.) Most workers, by way of contrast, just follow orders. Their work cannot be satisfactory because, even if they are helping to produce well-formed objects, “there is esthetic form only when the object having this external form fits into a larger experience” (341). The aesthetic, in other words, stands for the possibility of a satisfactory experience, for an undamaged life.

Access to that undamaged life requires workplace democracy and some workplace autonomy. Dewey is always insistent that democracy is judged by the quality of the individual lives it makes possible—and his model of artistic creation and the enjoyment of artistic experiences is primarily individualistic. (Importantly, he does insist continually that democracy is a mode of sociality, and that individuals can only find fulfillment in “association” [a favorite Dewey term] with others.) We will only have access to the kinds of satisfactory and consummatory experiences that constitute “the aesthetic” for Dewey when we stand in the proper relation to the activities (of which work is a crucial one) that make up our daily existence. That proper relationship requires a sensitivity to the possibilities of harmonious form (a sensitivity the aesthetic can impart) and an individual investment/ownership of our daily activities that strive to achieve that harmonious form. Current social arrangements make that individual investment/ownership only available to a privileged few.

To sum up this post: the aesthetic may develop one’s sensibility through the messages it communicates. It may promote sympathy/compassion and it may shape a habit of considering alternatives to what the present offers and an expanded sense of possible paths out of the present. It may also be the case that even when the message to be offered is fairly straight-forward and easily conveyed by non-aesthetic means (sermons, moral treatises, political platforms, sociological studies, statistical demonstrations), that the aesthetic is more effective because pitched at an emotional level that resonates more than more “rational” or argumentative discourses.

In short, when we consider the sources of one’s sensibility, to what extent has it been shaped by aesthetic works as contrasted to non-aesthetic ones?

But Dewey’s primary focus (and I think Nick’s) is not in such a direct, message-driven, attempt to shape sensibilities. Rather, the idea is that the aesthetic models a form of unalienated existence; it offers and instantiates the possibility of the “equilibrium” and “harmony” that would constitute an undamaged life. Dewey thinks this desire and striving for a satisfactory, consummatory experience is built into human nature. So it is not as if the aesthetic has to teach us to want it—and that there are sensibilities which forego (or even condemn) this endeavor.

But I do think a position that wants to use the aesthetic to re-form the experiences available under current “damaged” conditions will end up with some version of an alienation argument. We have become “alienated” from the appreciating (even recognizing?) consummatory experiences, often embracing pale substitutes for it. Our aptitude and appetite for such experiences needs to be “awakened” in contemporary life—and the arts can do that awakening work.

However, that brings us back to the better/worse judgments discussed in the last post. Only some of the arts can do this job because contemporary culture also offers a multitude of degraded aesthetic experiences. The trick will be to make these judgments of satisfactory versus unsatisfactory aesthetic experiences without falling into the mandarin contempt of Adorno. Snobbishness is not only a hallmark of the inegalitarian right. The damaged life argument doesn’t belong exclusively to either the left or the right since T. S. Eliot offers an obvious example of a conservative version. But whether deployed from the left or the right, it always entails judging some forms of life damaged even if participants in that form do not themselves register it as unsatisfactory.

The Aesthetic (Five)

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed. Tolstoy, War and Peace (Epilogue, Chapter One).

I still have some more features of the aesthetic that I want to enumerate and discuss. But this post will return to the feature considered in the last post to make some further observations on that feature’s consequences.

The burden of the last post was that art is understood to communicate something. That understanding is not completely inevitable or obligatory. The art work could offer a simply perceptual or sensual experience. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But we humans are often inclined to take bodily experiences—eating, sex, walking—and imbue them with significance. Such things are taken to “say something” either about the character of the person who performs the activity or about the nature of life itself. Furthermore, actions, events, and experiences are not only endowed with “meaning,” but they are also (almost inevitably) subject to judgments of value. Was this experience a good or bad one of its kind? And was this experience worth having in light of the other possible experiences I might have been having instead?

Three immediate consequences:

There is rarely any chance to have experiences that are purely corporeal. It is not just the aesthetic that partakes of the non-corporeal, but just about everything. Meaning is not bodily. Just what meaning is remains a bit of a stumper, one this whole project hopes to unravel. But meaning cannot be sensed by the five senses—and if it is embodied in the material of the art work or in the experience, it is still not identical to that material, but something that is inferred from it by acts of interpretation. Still, we are going to have to come to terms with the nature of the incorporeal (even if we agree, with Dewey, that the corporeal and incorporeal are inextricably mixed).
It is very difficult, close to impossible, to avoid ranking experiences. There can be different standards for ranking: does this poem work, i.e. is it a better poem qua poem than that one?; does this experience or art work provide more pleasure than that one?; does this art work or experience seem more meaningful than that one?; is this experience or art work morally superior to that one? Judgments of better or worse are, I believe, generally comparative; absolute judgments are rare, if not impossible. But judgments of better or worse are inescapable (it seems to me). We should not pretend in our classrooms or in our reception of art works to neutrality.

There are multiple paths toward the communication of meaning. In the academic world, those paths yield the different disciplines. In ordinary experience, there is assertion as contrasted to anecdote, as well as how one describes one’s own intentions and how those intentions might be understood by those who observe one’s behavior. (Just two examples of different modes–hardly mean to be exhaustive). Those invested in the arts will (in many cases) a) be interested in the specific modes of communication that are deployed by artists and b) often argue vehemently that artistic modes are superior to other possible modes.

Let me say a little bit more about this second point—which gets me to the Tolstoy epigraph to this post. Those committed to the arts are often defensive, thinking that art’s modes of perception and communication are undervalued in a world that seems to prefer “hard” (often coded as scientific) knowledge. What the arts communicate is fuzzy, messy, open to conflicting interpretation, and non-definitive. If the arts have cognitive value, it remains unclear how to harvest that cognitive offering since agreement about what exactly the art work says is hard to reach.

In response to such widely held objections to art’s communicative obscurities, artists are prone to insist that more scientific, more rational, more straight-forward knowledge (and meaning) claims miss essential features of life as we humans live and know it. For example, a novelist might claim that the word “grief” hardly gives us enough or adequate information about how one human might respond to the death of another. We need an elaborated story that tracks the grieving person over time to really gain some understanding of “grief.” There is a welter of emotions, a variety of moods and thoughts, that comprise the experience of grief.

At its extremes, this apology (I am thinking of the classic “apologies” for poetry) for artistic modes approach mysticism—both in the insistence that indirect, a-rational modes of thought and expression are required to fully express vital facets of experience, and in a tendency to claim some of those facets (complex emotions for example, or certain states of “harmony” such as the ones that interest Dewey) are close to, if not entirely, “ineffable.” The arts struggle to express that which defies expression. That is why the arts must resort to indirection—and why art works are so often “difficult” to understand and interpret. The artist ventures into the unknown and doesn’t always come back with a clear account of what her exploration has revealed.

Apologies for the arts as “another way of knowing” often entail considering the status of the emotions. The arts, it is said, appeal to the audience on an emotional, as contrasted to a rational, level. Aristotle’s pity and terror. So then questions get raised about the status of “emotional knowledge,” with someone like Martha Nussbaum claiming that non-emotional, disinterested knowledge is inferior to the kind informed by the emotions.

In James and Dewey, the emotional investment that underwrites “inquiry” is taken for granted and as inevitable. With James, this immediately becomes very complicated since he sees emotion as grounded in a purely corporeal reaction to a situation, with the naming of the emotion the coming to consciousness of that bodily response. (Unlike Nussbaum, who would see the emotion as the combined body/mind assessment of a situation.) James, similarly, thinks most knowledge claims and rational justifications are secondary—layered on top of the primary temperament or sensibility that actually governs our assessments (with the term “assessment” covering everything from our naming of the situation, our attitudes toward it, and our judgments about values and possible courses of action). Thus, James appears (as we might expect from a psychologist) to give “reason” a very small role to play in the determination of human beliefs, values, and even interpretations of the environment.

Dewey, with his commitment to “intelligence,” is more of a “rationalist” than James. But, as we have already seen, in Art As Experience (at least), he seems to agree that emotional appeals are more rhetorically powerful and effective than reasoned arguments. He seems close to accepting the James (and later Rorty) claim that “sensibility” (or “temperament”) more fully determines one’s way of being in the world than the kinds of arguments that philosophers deploy in hopes of persuading their readers to one set of beliefs or another.

I think the artistic sensibility tends towards the mystic, toward the assertion that “there are more things under heaven and earth than dreamt of in your philosophy”—and that sensibility is committed to the arts as a mode of access to and a way to communicate about those “things.”

A final, quite different, point. Technically, the arts are difficult—and require a fairly single-minded obsession. The pianist and the ardent golfer alike can think, live, and breathe playing. Marx was, it seems, very wrong (at least about a certain subset of humans) when he imagined the denizens of his communist utopia fishing one day and philosophizing the next. Instead, many people hunker down into one pursuit which they find endlessly fascinating as they struggle to master all its intricacies–and neglect most other possible ways of spending their time.

This fact presents a problem to what I have called the almost inevitable tendency to make judgments of better and worse. How do we avoid labeling some people’s obsessive pursuits as trivial? Here is the world going to hell—and someone devotes his life to breeding and training show dogs. Yet how do we distinguish that activity from the person who devotes his life to becoming a virtuoso on the piano? And doesn’t pluralism entail not just a tolerance for the varied activities in which people find meaning (that term again!), but also a recognition that life would be diminished if we didn’t have pianists and entomologists and obsessive chefs and adepts at various games?

I could never in a million years devote my life to identifying 10,000 different varieties of beetles, but I hardly feel inclined to condemn the person who does. I am even willing to acknowledge that that person is as entitled to a university position and its support for her research as much as I am. And yet: I have more trouble making that concession when it comes to the person teaching golf on my campus—and to university athletics altogether. This reluctance to extend university support bleeds into a reluctance to think a life devoted to golf a life well lived. Harmless I suppose (although the environmental harms done by golf courses are not insignificant), but really worth this one life you are given?

Such questions are inevitably raised by the arts because it is hard to explain how the arts are necessary. Perfectly admirable lives can be led by those totally indifferent to the arts, while a devotion to the arts can preclude one contributing to what appear more pressing social needs and concerns. On the other hand, how far do we want to take a kind of Peter Singer type puritanism that would condemn every activity that doesn’t redound directly to benefit of our fellow humans? “O argue not the need” pleads Lear. Life would be awfully grim if we only attended to necessities. Yet how to we justify these luxuries when some people are denied those necessities, leading lives even more grim than those lives which can only focus on the daily struggle to get what’s needed?

Well-worn worries here, but ones (I am arguing) that will inevitably arise once the question of “meaning” is on the table. And since the arts seem to be entangled (in many instances) with questions of meaning (including what makes one way of life more “meaningful” than another), “the art of our necessities” (Elizabeth Bishop) and the arts of transcending the compulsions of necessity will arise in most considerations of aesthetics. And such considerations are definitely ethical (how to live a life), pretty directly moral (what do I owe others, both human and non-human), and possibly political (what political consequences do my ethical and moral commitments entail).

The Aesthetic (Four)

The traditional worry about associating the aesthetic with epicurean sensibility/sensitivity has been the fear of sensuality. The aesthete will just be someone who hedonistically indulges in pleasurable bodily sensations. It seems a short step from Pater to Sade, from a healthy pagan sensuality to the perverse. Hence we famously get John Stuart Mill trying to disentangle the pleasure/pain calculus of Benthamite utilitarianism from endorsing swinish bodily pleasures as humanity’s goal. From Epicurus to Bentham, Mill tells us, utilitarians have always been attacked for being bestial sensualists—to which Mill offers this riposte.

When thus attacked, the Epicureans have always answered, that it is not they, but their accusers, who represent human nature in a degrading light; since the accusation supposes human beings to be capable of no pleasures except those of which swine are capable. If this supposition were true, the charge could not be gainsaid, but would then be no longer an imputation; for if the sources of pleasure were precisely the same to human beings and to swine, the rule of life which is good enough for the one would be good enough for the other.

The comparison of the Epicurean life to that of beasts is felt as degrading, precisely because a beast’s pleasures do not satisfy a human being’s conceptions of happiness. Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification. . . . It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognise the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. . . . [I]t is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both [i.e. bodily as contrasted to mental pleasures] , do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they would exchange their lot for almost any other, however undesirable in their own eyes. A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. (Utilitarianism, Chapter Two)

I don’t want to linger on the tangles Mill gets himself into in trying to make this argument. (Especially worth noting is his claim that the higher faculties of humans means that they suffer more than beasts, a point that makes a straight-forward pleasure calculus problematic as well as encouraging a comparative indifference to the suffering of animals.) What I want to highlight instead is the theme of this post, to wit: almost every account of the aesthetic insists that art has some kind of significance or provides some kind of experience that cannot be reduced to the corporeal. Art entails more than just perception and bodily sensation.

What is this more? Let me dispense immediately with theories of the aesthetic that attempt to abstract away from the bodily altogether. Kant seems to belong in this camp. I always present this to students as the attempt to distinguish pornography from the nude. Kantian disinterest and the elevation of form over matter/content is designed to protect the nude from awakening either desire or bodily lust. A hard and fast line (a wall) is to be established between pornographic representation and the nude that figures so prominently in art from the Greeks to the present day. If it is bodily it is not art; if it is spiritual it is art. And the appeal to “form” over “matter” allows us to make—and preserve—this distinction between representations that are art and ones that are not.

Like Dewey, I have no interest in this way of understanding the aesthetic. Dewey’s effort to embed the aesthetic in everyday experience means he is opposed to abstraction in all its forms. He doesn’t want the art object, the aesthetic experience, or mental processes to be alienated into some separate realm apart from the ordinary–or from the corporeal. He is firmly committed to overcoming any mind/body dualism. (What follows draws on Chapter three of Art As Experience, esp. pp. 52-55.) Dewey’s interactive model of experience means that perception is both passive and active at the same time. As he never tires of saying in all his works, experience is both a doing and an undergoing. Perception (which is bodily and mental for Dewey) registers the impact of the situation, which is not chosen but which is imposed upon the perceiver. However, that perceiver is always already pushing back against the circumstances in which she finds herself, trying to shape those circumstances toward her purposes, toward fulfillment. The “matter” of perception (the material offered by the situation) is being pushed toward “form” by the active engagement of the perceiver with the environment.

Revising Dewey a bit (see page 55), we get four elements of an experience, all of which occur just about simultaneously, and all of which do not exist separately or self-sufficiently. We perceive a situation; it is registered bodily by our senses. We have an emotional response to what we perceive; we consider it a threat, an opportunity, pleasing, disgusting, as something mostly indifferent, or something of tremendous interest/significance. Dewey adds that this emotional response binds the different elements of the situation into a whole, since the emotion gives us an overall assessment of our relation to that situation. (He underplays ambivalence or confusion in this last claim). There is also an intellectual response/assessment of the situation. This response deals with meaning (in the very distinctive pragmatist understanding of meaning as the potential consequences of the things and/or situation perceived and emotionally registered.) Intelligence (that favorite Dewey term—and the highest value in his overall philosophy) entails acting in relation to those understood meanings/consequences in such a way that we can produce the “fulfilled” or “satisfactory” relationship to the environment for which a meliorist pragmatism aims. Finally, there is the practical component of an experience—which is the actual interactions through which we try to put the meanings/vision imagined by intelligence into action. The practical is the site of the actual interaction with the environment.

The association of intelligence with imagination—with the projection in thought of a future state of affairs through a vision of possible consequences—is crucial here since it links intelligence with art. After all, if we consider all human action as aiming toward a satisfactory relationship with the environment, then there is no difference between science, art, and just daily life. Dewey’s position appears to be (see page 26) that art is the all-encompassing term for the human way of interaction, with science a subset of art (a “handmaiden” that attends to natural events), and daily life the less conscious, more habitual, and thus often less satisfactory dealing with what life throws at us. Art is the effort to find fulfillment raised to full consciousness.

Now back to the main problem this post wants to explore—and a devilishly difficult problem it is. To restate: almost all accounts of the aesthetic assume—or explicitly argue—that the aesthetic transcends the corporeal. “Intelligence” is the site of that transcendence in Dewey. The field of candidates as agents of transcendence is crowded. And my “meaning” project obviously (or so it seems to me) is located precisely here.

Let me sharpen this point. I do not suppose—and believe no one else would suppose—that an epicurean pleasure in antique automobiles has much of great significance to tell us. We might certainly learn something about the character of my friend who devotes much time and mental (as well as bodily) energy to the appreciative gazing upon those cars, and we may also learn (from him or from the books written on the subject) much about how those cars worked, were designed, manufactured, preserved etc.

But we are very unlikely to think this aesthetic pursuit has much to say to us about how to live one’s life, or about how to judge different possible ways of being in the world. In short, this pursuit has little to say about what is significant or what has meaning in relation to the primary ethical question: how am I to live my life? (I adopt here the Bernard Williams distinction between ethics and morality. Ethics is about how to live one’s life in the best possible way given that there are many possible ways to live a life; morality is about the best possible ways to arrange relationships among humans–and between humans and all the non-human beings and things–in the world we humans find ourselves in.)

There are, of course, those who would divorce art from any pretension to offer “meaning,” any effort to address the ethical question of how to live. For those who take this position, there is nothing more to be said of or claimed for fancying Moby Dick than there is for being a devotee of 1934 Rolls Royces. Art is a hobby like any other, equally non-essential if relatively harmless, and we should just give up all these efforts to make it into something more.

But that is a minority position. While we don’t find many car fanciers arguing for the centrality of their pursuit to living a good life, the majority of artists do believe—and often declare that belief passionately in public—that the aesthetic is the royal road to a meaningful or fulfilled or good life. Examples are everywhere, but most telling for me are figures like Kandinsky and Rothko, who insist that their non-representational art is loaded with meaning, is completely removed from any Flaubert-like aspiration to create an art “about nothing.”

The insistence that art has vital things to say about how to live explains how the aesthetic gets connected 1) to a critique of the an-aesthetic way many lives are lived and 2) political programs that would make daily life more aesthetic. And I take it that any project of “aesthetic education” is connected to the ethical project and, at the very least, to the critique of an-aesthetic forms of life–even if that educational project is not signed on to some reformist or revolutionary political re-vision.

I will postpone further thoughts on the connection of the aesthetic to the ethical and/or political. Right now, I want to push harder at what the hell we mean by “meaning” or “significance” in art. I will start with Dewey.

The aesthetic is significant (or important) to Dewey because it alerts us to fulfilling, consummatory experiences. Teasing out exactly how that works is difficult. Here are some possible ways of explicating Dewey’s position.

One, we have fulfilling experiences all the time in ordinary existence. But we do not always register them as such. Art calls them to our attention, makes us realize their qualitative difference from less satisfactory experiences.

Two, fulfilling experiences don’t just happen. They require an especially conscious effort of crafting them, a highly intelligent mode of interaction that imaginatively grasps the possibilities of the given situation, and is joined with a highly conscious and focused pursuit of one’s purpose. Art alerts us to these conditions for achieving satisfaction—and/or is the name for that kind of concerted effort.

Three, the arts offer models of satisfactory experiences from which we can expand our vision of what is possible and learn ways to make such possibilities realities. (See pages 346-347.)

Fourth (and finally), the aesthetic offers us a vision of a fully integrated “experience,” one that combines in a harmonious equilibrium all the subjective elements (perception, emotion, intelligence, practice, and purpose/motive/desire) with a sensitive, careful interactive relationship to the non-self (whether than non-self is other people or non-human features of the environment or the existential fact of time.) Many (most) of our interactions are partial; they neglect (fail to take into account) all the elements of a situation. Art is the place of holism—and holism enhances the chance of fulfillment.

Note that none of these accounts of the aesthetic has anything to say about “meaning.” Technically, Dewey reserves the term “meaning” for its pragmatic sense. Following the pragmatic maxim, “meaning” only refers to the possible consequences of the interactions that are made available by a given situation. Intelligence is the grasping of such meanings; satisfaction follows from the satisfactory achievement of the outcomes that intelligent imagination has predicted will follow from a certain course of action.

But Dewey in certain places departs from the technical use of the term “meaning.” He seems to assume that satisfactory experiences are “more” meaningful. We find them more significant. Why should that be so? It is easy to see why fulfillment of any desire is more pleasurable than its frustration. But why should we think fulfillment more meaningful? After all, many would argue that frustration tells us more about the nature of the world, teaches us more, than satisfaction does. Dewey’s position depends on his benign (Romantic?) view of the human condition. Art teaches us how to live because it teaches us that nature can be aligned with human desires and needs. The meanings (consequences) human intelligence can discern can be activated to provide fulfillment. An existentialist, absurdist reading of the human relation to nature would yield a different model of how to live (think of Camus’ rebel). This is the way that “meaning” gets attached to the ethical question of how to live one’s life—and how art could be a site for the portrayal of such meanings. What the world can “afford” to us makes a big difference in the strategies we might then adopt for living.

Once we abandon the goal of an art about nothing, the focus usually shifts to the ways in which art delivers its message. In other words, what meanings the art work conveys depends on how that specific art work is interpreted. (Or, in Dewey’s case, I think we are to understand that “aesthetic experiences” come in many different varieties; not all fulfillments or the means to them are the same. So there is still the work of attending to the particular details in different cases even though the general outline of “fulfillment” is provided by his theory of the aesthetic.)

There are, of course, multiple theories of interpretation. I want to bypass those to consider instead how we account for the art work’s having a meaning at all. By what means does art convey its meanings? The answers to this question are very often contrastive. Unlike logic, reason, polemic, or assertion, art works by indirection. It doesn’t state things outright (showing instead of telling); it works by inference and through emotional, more than intellectual, appeal. The superiority of aesthetic modes of communication—or at least such modes being equally valid as more direct ones—motivates many discussions of this issue.

There are different schools of thought. The Martha Nussbaum camp wants to insist on the aesthetic as cognitive. Art provides knowledge about the world just as much as science does—and art’s knowledge might very well be superior because it blends the emotional and the reasonable instead of trying to purge emotion like positivism does.

Dewey inflects this all differently. He holds on to science as our best means for learning the potentials of nature. Then the knowledge that science offers contributes to the more comprehensive aesthetic project of fulfillment. Art can convey the knowledge that satisfactory experiences are possible. But more important to Dewey than the possible “cognitive” function of art is its enabling impact on its audiences. The shaping of sensibility (character) that art can accomplish “is far more efficacious than the change effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude” (334). “Compared with [art’s] influence things directly taught by word and precept are pale and ineffectual. . . . The sum total of the effect of all reflective treatises on morals is insignificant in comparison with the influence of architecture, novel, drama, on life” (345).

Why does Dewey think the arts more effective in shaping our values and our ways of living? It is precisely here that he falls back on the term “meaning”—and uses it in the non-technical, non-pragmatist way. The “stabilizing” and “enduring forces” in a “civilization” (or “culture”; Dewey uses the terms interchangeably) are founded upon the “meaning given in imagination” it provides for its members (326). “[T]he multitudes of passing incidents” that comprise life must be “organized into the meanings that form minds” (326). We process experience through those meanings—which shape our interpretations of our situations and influence the values (attitudes, concerns) by which we understand and judge those situations. Art serves to “consolidate” these available meanings, by giving them enduring “objective expression” (326). “If social customs are more than uniform external modes of action (i.e. if they become internalized structures of feeling), it is because they are saturated with story and transmitted meaning” (326).

Here’s my attempt at the best way to understand Dewey at this point. (I don’t know if I personally subscribe to this view. I have to think about it more. But I do think this is what Dewey believes.) Science provides meanings in the technical pragmatist sense. The scientist aims for the fullest account possible of the consequences that might flow from any particular state of affairs. The experimental method provides the best way to tease out all those possible consequences. Intelligence entails relying on the experimental method–and in cases where that method has provided reliable (even though “fallible”) knowledge, intelligence acts upon that knowledge.

There is, however, also another set of meanings—the meanings that human actors have given to their experiences, meanings that relate to how satisfactory, how fulfilling, how important or trivial, they find some experiences as compared to others. These meanings are connected to desire and to the formation of purposes. Science is never disconnected from purposes for Dewey; all inquiry is motivated in his view. Still, conscious reflection on purposes is not pursued via the experimental method. (Dewey does not appear interested—except in one short passage I will get to in a subsequent post—with the idea that art works are thought experiments.) Rather, such reflection involves 1) an introspective awareness of one’s desires; 2) an engagement with (internalization of) the values provided by one’s culture; and 3) an image of possible fulfillment that is responsive to the situation at hand and enacted by a practical interaction with the elements of that situation. “Meaning” is the term that sums up this combination of received values, individual purposes, and evaluation of/ interaction with the environment. Meaning is what motivates. It moves the philosopher toward an account of what Kenneth Burke called “the grammar of motives.” Art is a privileged place where meanings in that sense are stored, examined, articulated, displayed, interrogated, fooled around with in playful and not so playful ways. And art seems to be a privileged place for one’s immersion into the realm of meanings—and one’s becoming initiated into various attitudes toward the values that meanings instantiate

Enough for today. As I said, I don’t know if this account is what I mean by meaning. I do think I have offered a fair “reconstruction” of Dewey’s use of the term. All I know for myself is that I think there is some kind of connection between art and the claim that “meaning” is important.