Category: the ordinary

Aesthetic Education and Democracy

I have just participated in a terrific three day seminar on Aesthetic Education as part of the 2021 ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) conference. I got caught up in (instigated?) a debate about expertise in which I think I failed to clarify my position or, more importantly, what is at stake for me in taking the position I did. I think it likely that I misunderstood the paper by Michael Clune that I was over-reacting to. At the very least, I need to wait until I read Michael’s forthcoming book on judgment and Michael Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension before pursuing that quarrel. Clune thrillingly described the ways in which subject and object can be co-constituted through their encounter, especially (it was implied) when the object is an aesthetic one. “The work organizes our experience of the world” and “the subject is shaped by the work” are two phrases from his talk. One is changed by this encounter; one’s world is enriched.

Inspired by this account, I wanted to say that such meaningful encounters are open to all. Everyone has aesthetic experiences from an early age. Aesthetic education can (I hope) heighten or intensify those experiences and (at a high school and college level) make students more reflective about the nature of their aesthetic experiences and the reasons/causes for their tastes. (Mark Wollenberg in his talk introduced me to the wonderful notion of a “taste journey,” the narrative of one’s evolving tastes.) But I want us to understand aesthetic experience as utterly normal and as universal as the ability to speak a language. One acquires aesthetic sensibilities and aesthetic tastes pretty much the same way one acquires a language or one acquires a set of moral commitments: through the give and take with others and the world, shaped by feedback loops that point in one direction as the way to “go on” and tell us that other directions are inappropriate, non-fruitful, or actively harmful.

The barrier to entry into language, into aesthetic experience, and into morality is incredibly low. As Kant says, we expect these competencies of everyone past a certain age (probably four years old). We expect people will become more adept at all three practices as they grow older—and education aims to facilitate that enhancing of competence. But there is no clear threshold between the expert and the novice, only a continuum because from a very early age people are always already linguistic beings with a sense of right and wrong and with a sensuous engagement with worldly objects that shape their selves and their selves’ understanding of the world. To put it a little differently, one’s way of being in the world (one’s character in an Aristotelian sense) is a product of one’s interaction with others, with the language into which one is born, with the prevailing mores of one’s society, and with the sensuous apprehension of worldly objects, situations, and events. And lest that list look too sanguine and ethereal, let’s make sure to add the society’s compulsions, the things it demands of its members in terms of norms of productivity and accountability. Systems of debt are omnipresent as David Graeber taught us, and Kristen Case’s talk at the conference introduced me to the notion of chrono-normativity, the ways in which our time is structured for us by social demands.

So, in this post, instead of pursuing what quickly became a muddled and unhelpful debate over the term “expert,” let me try to articulate the positive vision that was behind my inclination to instigate that debate. Of course, the clarity of this positive vision only came to me after the fact—and so is a good result (at least I hope so) of the ruckus. Thinking it all through afterwards helped to clarify for me why I think aesthetic education and democracy can (and should) be deeply intertwined.

My position is an unholy mixture of Arendt, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Kant, and Latour. The best way to start is with Arendt’s insistence that truth and politics don’t mix. Here’s a simple way to illustrate her point. The local river does not have a bridge over it. That’s a fact and is pre-political for Arendt. If we can’t agree that there’s no bridge, we’ve got nowhere to go. A scary thought in this day and age when millions deny the fact that Biden won the 2020 election. Fact (the truth about the way things are) is compulsive for Arendt. There is no room for negotiation or compromise; that’s why it is not political. I can only insist that the election was fair and won by Biden.

But let’s go back to our bridge-less river. Should we build a bridge over it or not? That’s a matter of opinion—and the very stuff of politics for Arendt. The political community should meet together as equals, with everyone’s opinion heard. In this agonistic understanding of democracy, some opinions may, in the course of the debate, prove more persuasive than others. But the community is engaged in a fundamental process of asking for and giving reasons—and of weighing those reasons. Chances of reaching consensus are pretty slim. We live in an irreducibly plural world, ranging from the mysteries of individual idiosyncrasies (evident to any parent who has more than one child) to different social positionings, to different life experiences. Where a decision has to be reached, a vote is a way to cut off discussion. But in aesthetic matters we don’t take votes. We simply let the discussion, with the different judgments about an aesthetic experience’s worth, and different descriptions of its distinctive qualities, roll on. In fact, those endless disagreements are much of the fun, a point to which I will return.

Once the community decides to build the bridge, we exit politics again and call in the expert. Everyone’s opinion is not equally entitled to be heard and respected when it comes to the question of how to build the bridge. We are back in the realm of positive knowledge, where only certain trained persons know how to build bridges that won’t collapse. Because any debate on that subject will not be between equals and only among a small group of qualified people, the debate (if there is one) is technical, not political.

My positive point overlaps with Nick Gaskill’s wanting to identify plural modes of apprehension, although I don’t know enough Whitehead to be sure. Still, I like the idea that science as a mode of knowledge deals in facts ranging from the river has no bridge to assertions about the stress loads a particular bridge can hold. Aesthetics is more attuned to the “qualities” of things—more properly the qualities of experiences since I want to hold on to the interactive emphasis I saw in Clune’s talk. As Kant tried hard to explain, aesthetics is about the self’s engagement with the non-self, and the non-self meant not only nature but also one’s society, as represented by the sensus communis. Everyone is engaged with the world and others—and they are the best witness to their own understandings and judgments of that engagement. And surely we wouldn’t want to have it any other way. The only thing worse than a world in which everyone disagreed with me all the time would be a world in which everyone agreed with me. The parent delights in the child’s first signs of willfulness, of independence, just as the English literature teacher delights when students discover pleasure in a Browning poem. In the case of the poem, the teacher can lead the student to water, but can’t make him drink. The class can be the occasion for discovering how the self can be shaped by the work, but the occasion is non-compulsive, and there is no single or right way for that shaping to occur. Mathematics is compulsive, aesthetic experiences are not.

Thus, when aesthetic education fosters the formation of aesthetic opinions, reflection upon the reasons and felt experiences that underlie those opinions, and debates with others about them, it is a simulacrum of democracy itself.

This linking of aesthetic education with democracy (as Arendt envisions it) entails that the job of the aesthetic ed teacher is 1) not to claim his students begin in ignorance; 2) not to disparage the views they currently hold; and 3) not to intimate in any way that his views are preferable in any way to those of the students. But that last point is outrageous!!!!

[Digression #1: it seems to me no surprise that when aesthetic education and aesthetic educators are threatened, it will seem particularly foolhardy to downplay our expertise and our contributions to positive knowledge since those are the coin of the realm. But I agree with Nick Gaskill that we aren’t going to fool anybody, including ourselves, by trying to assimilate what we do to the knowledge producing protocols of the natural or social sciences. Better to grab the nettle and explain how and why we are doing something different.]

Not so outrageous if you consider how seldom we offer to students the experience of equality. If, as I believe is true, democracy is dependent on all members of society taking equality utterly seriously, then why would we think that depriving people (in the workplace as well as the classroom, not to mention the patriarchal family, and hierarchical stigmas of race, profession, wealth etc.) of any experience of equality would redound to the health of democracy? I am suggesting that the aesthetics classroom is an ideal place (and currently one of the few places) where equality can be the norm. Dare I say that’s because so little is at stake, that in the last analysis aesthetic disagreements have very few consequences, that (as I have already suggested), disagreements are what give flavor to aesthetic debates. The aesthetic is a safe space in which to practice the democratic ethos of meeting with one’s peers in equality to debate about things on which you disagree, but where there is never a conclusive, knock-down argument to be had, one that brings the debate to a halt because now everyone agrees or because we have reached a disagreement about fact that is conversation-stopping.

[Digression #2:Joseph North and Kate Stanley in our seminar would point out how individualistic this account of aesthetic experience and aesthetic debate is. What about the ways that aesthetic experiences can foster, even generate, collective identities? Arendt seems to think that the ability to participate in the conversation as an equal, to be heard, is enough to underwrite a commitment to the necessarily collective action that establishes and sustains the conversation. In other words, our collectivity is enacted–performatively created–through our talking to one another even as the substance of that talk is often our disagreements. It is also the case if no one’s opinion was ever changed, if we never achieved some partial agreements, the conversation would seem utterly futile and would most likely come to an end. That attachment to the collectivity achieved through the conversation may explain why almost everyone in the seminar tried to say that Clune and I really didn’t have a deep, fundamental disagreement.]

I challenge your opinions and you challenge mine. In that pragmatic give-and-take, that attempt to offer reasons and grounds for one’s opinion, opinions and even experiences are changed. I come to see that I had failed to see some aspect (Wittgenstein) of a work that now leads me to reconsider my opinion of it. But maybe not. Maybe I still think it trite and meretricious. In Arendt’s lovely phrase (which she claims she takes from Kant, but which I can’t find in Kant), my challenger can only “woo” my consent with her view, lacking any way to compel it.

So what does the teacher of aesthetic education bring into the classroom? Three things, I would hope. 1) An ability to facilitate productive conversations about aesthetic experiences. These conversations enhance our ability to reflect upon those experiences and (absolutely crucially as will become clearer in a moment) foster an ability to hear about other’s different experiences/values/tastes and accept the way their views challenge me to revise my own. The teacher helps the student learn how to assemble (Latour) his reasons, his evidence, his articulation of his experiences in order to make an eloquent rendering of his opinion to himself and to his auditors.

2) The teacher can bring a trained eye or ear. That is, the teacher has spent a lot more time around aesthetic objects and thinking about them, and thus may be in a position to enhance the students’ aesthetic experiences by pointing out features of the aesthetic object they may miss. If this is what we mean by expertise, I’m down with it. But with the important reservations that the teacher’s judgments, at the end of the day, are no more authoritative than the students’ judgments. If someone still finds Shakespeare a bore after all I have done to make him more accessible and interesting, that student (once again) is fully entitled to that opinion. We cannot expect to persuade everyone all the time—and it would in fact be a nightmare if we did persuade everyone to hold the same views. Which is another way of saying that communicability (Kant), not assent, is what is crucial here.

3) Communicability means that success in articulating my position—and yours as I comprehend it—is the good the teacher should be aiming for. Students are to be engaged in the language game of asking for and giving reasons. The teacher has been around the block and so is familiar with many of the moves in reason giving, with various types of reasons, of evidence, of persuasive appeals, and can guide the students toward a recognition of those means, and work to enhance their abilities of expression and comprehension. One way to say this (I would reference Nick Gaskill’s paper here) is that intelligibility, not knowledge, is what is at issue. I don’t know definitively that Moby Dick is the greatest American novel ever written after talking to you; but I understand (you have made intelligible to me) your reasons why you think it is and the reasons you think I should agree with you. You have done your wooing—and our teachers (and other exemplars in this art of reason giving) have helped me learn how to hone my reason giving. Communicability rests on the same feedback loops I keep invoking. I know I have to try again when my auditor says I don’t see what you are driving at. What we have here is a failure to communicate. That failure, not a failure to agree, is what is fatal to sociality–and any hope of democracy. Need I add that the person who believes the 2020 election was stolen is not intelligible to me–and apparently not at all interested in talking to me in an effort to make his views intelligible, or listening to my account of how his conviction threatens our polity. Which is why I fear for democracy.

There are other things aesthetic education can aim to achieve. I don’t mean to slight the value of aesthetic experience in and of itself—its essential place in anything I would deem a flourishing life. But I do think, if stringently tied to equality, that the aesthetic classroom can be a laboratory of democracy in a world where we talk democracy all the time but very rarely experience it, which is another way of saying that our social spaces and social interactions persistently infantilize people, belittling their own understandings of their experience, their confidence in their tastes, and their ability to articulate their opinions in the face of a healthy, but respectful, skepticism.

The Critique of Experience

Nick’s question about the status of Dewey’s concept of experience—and the preference for the term “practice” in writers like Latour—makes me feel like I have fallen into a deep well. I will try to talk about “practice” and what that concept entails in future posts. For now, I just want to consider the critique of experience. I will start out with Joan Scott’s extremely influential 1991 essay “The Evidence of Experience” (Critical Inquiry, Summer 1991) and then move on to Richard Rorty’s explicit critique of Dewey’s reliance on experience (in the essay “Dewey’s Metaphysics” in Consequences of Pragmatism [University of Minnesota Press, 1982: 72-89).

Here’s a long passage from Scott that lays out her argument (note her reliance on the term “practice” in making her case):

Michel de Certeau’s description is apt. “Historical discourse,” he writes, “gives itself credibility in the name of the reality which it is supposed to represent, but this authorized appearance of the ‘real’ serves precisely to camouflage the practice which in fact determines it. Representation thus disguises the praxis that organizes it.”

When the evidence offered is the evidence of “experience,” the claim for referentiality is further buttressed–what could be truer, after all, than a subject’s own account of what he or she has lived through? It is precisely this kind of appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation–as a foundation on which analysis is based–that weakens the critical thrust of histories of difference. By remaining within the epistemological frame of orthodox history, these studies lose the possibility of examining those assumptions and practices that excluded considerations of difference in the first place. They take as self-evident the identities of those whose experience is being documented and thus naturalize their difference. They locate resistance outside its discursive construction and reify agency as an inherent attribute of individuals, thus decontextualizing it.

When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one’s vision is structured–about language (or discourse) and history–are left aside. The evidence of experience then becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world.

To put it another way, the evidence of experience, whether conceived through a metaphor of visibility or in any other way that takes meaning as transparent, reproduces rather than contests given ideological systems–those that assume that the facts of history speak for themselves and those that rest on notions of a natural or established opposition between, say, sexual practices and social conventions, between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Histories that document the “hidden” world of homosexuality, for example, show the impact [of] silence and repression on the lives of those affected by it and bring [to] light the history of their suppression and exploitation. But the project making experience visible precludes critical examination of the workings of the ideological system itself, its categories of representation (homosexual/heterosexual, man/woman, black/white as fixed immutable identities), its premises about what these categories mean and how they operate, and of its notions of subjects, origin, and cause.

Homosexual practices are seen as the result of desire, conceived as a natural force operating outside or in opposition to social regulation. In these stories homosexuality is presented as a repressed desire (experience denied), made to seem invisible, abnormal, and silenced by a “society” that legislates heterosexuality as the only normal practice. Because this kind (homosexual) desire cannot ultimately be repressed–because experience is there–it invents institutions to accommodate itself. These institutions are unacknowledged but not invisible; indeed, it is the possibility that they can be seen that threatens order and ultimately overcomes repression. Resistance and agency are presented as driven by uncontainable desire; emancipation is a teleological story in which desire ultimately overcomes social control and becomes visible. History is a chronology that makes experience visible, but in which categories appear as nonetheless ahistorical: desire, homosexuality, heterosexuality, femininity, masculinity, sex, and even sexual practices become so many fixed entities being played out over time, but not themselves historicized. Presenting the story in this way excludes, or at least understates, the historically variable interrelationship between the meanings “homosexual” and “heterosexual,” the constitutive force each has for the other, and the contested and changing nature of the terrain that they simultaneously occupy. (pages 777-778.)

Scott’s position is clear enough. Inspired by Foucault’s notion of “discursive power,” she is saying that there is no innocent experience. Rather, what we experience is shaped by the categories through which we process and understand what happens to us, what we see, and whom/what we encounter. Furthermore, the experiencing self has also been shaped by the culture/society of which it is a member. A consequential analysis of an historical scene must take those shaping processes into account, must make evident that that scene is historical through and through, the contingent product of a construction that could have been otherwise.

Rorty’s critique of Dewey takes the same path. “Experience” in Dewey is a metaphysical term—and belies Dewey’s more productive efforts to escape metaphysics altogether. For Scott, experience “naturalizes” that which should be understood as historical and constructed. Rorty makes much the same move. He opens the essay by quoting, approvingly, a late letter from Dewey to Bentley in which Dewey says he is thinking of a writing a new edition of Experience and Nature. This time around, Dewey will “change the title as well as the subject matter . . . to Nature and Culture. I was dumb not to have seen the need for such a shift when the old text was written. I was still hopeful that the philosophic word ‘Experience’ could be redeemed by being returned to its idiomatic usages—which was a piece of historic folly, the hope I mean” (quoted in Rorty, 72).

For Rorty, it’s a choice between Kant and Hegel. Rorty sees Dewey as accepting the break with Humean empiricism which recognizes “that intuitions without concepts [are] blind and that no data [are] ever ‘raw’”(83). Once accepting that basic fact, the Kantian sees the concepts as universal, shared by all rational creatures, while the Hegelian sees the concepts as historically and culturally relative all the way down. Rorty writes: “By being ‘Hegelian’ I mean here treating the cultural developments which Kant thought it was the task of philosophy to preserve and protect as simply temporary stopping-places for the World Spirit” (85) Dewey, Rorty tells us, “agrees with Hegel that the starting point of philosophic thought is bound to be the dialectical situation in which one finds oneself caught in one’s own historical period—the problems of the men of one’s time” (81).

In his inimitable fashion, Rorty offers us a pocket-sized definition of metaphysics, utilizing a term from Dewey’s Experience and Nature. Dewey’s metaphysics aim to designate “the generic traits of experience.” For Nick and me, Dewey’s metaphysics are most fully and fruitfully present in his interactionist account of human being-in-the-world. It is that account, complete with its notion of “funded experience,” its unsettling of subject/object and other dualisms, and its dynamic picture of the ongoing production of identities, meanings, and novelty that we find attractive and see as adopted by Latour (and, presumably, Stengers, whose work I don’t know, but which Nick admires greatly).

Rorty is unimpressed. “What Kant had called ‘the constitution of the empirical world by synthesis of intuitions under concepts,’ Dewey wanted to call ‘interactions in which both extra-organic things and organisms partake.’ But he wanted this harmless-sounding naturalistic phrase to have the same generality, and to accomplish the same epistemological feats, which Kant’s talk of the ‘constitution of objects’ had performed. He wanted phrases like ‘transactions with the environment’ and ‘adaptation to conditions’ to be simultaneously naturalistic and transcendental—to be common-sense remarks about human perception and knowledge viewed as the psychologist views it and also to be expressions of ‘generic traits of existence.’ So he blew up notions like ‘transaction’ and ‘situation’ until they sounded as mysterious as ‘prime matter’ or ‘thing-in-itself” (84).

It is the easiest thing in the world—and so is done constantly—to say Rorty himself cannot escape transcendental or metaphysical claims. After all, to say all thinking starts from the historical position in which one finds oneself is to identify a generic trait. But such a critique of Rorty misses the point—and would miss his very significant difference from Joan Scott. Scott wants to replace one kind of historical claim—the kind that relies on the evidence of experience—with another kind of claim—one that analyzes what enables (serves as the transcendental conditions of) experience. She is looking for a more accurate or more adequate way of understanding discursive, ideological forces and the way they construct how humans constitute and are constituted by history. Rorty finds that enterprise just another way of remaining trapped within the wrong-headed set of metaphysical and epistemological questions that philosophy has obsessed over since Descartes. Rorty thinks we should just walk away from that game.

Why? What’s wrong with that game? Rorty has a complicated, but coherent (if not utterly convincing) answer to that question.

That answer hinges on what I am fond of calling “transcendental blackmail.” In most every case, the metaphysician is trying to sell his audience on something. The tactic used is to get that audience to accept a seemingly neutral and irrefutable (and almost invariably universalistic) description of the human condition (“the generic facts of human existence”). Once the writer thinks he has established that irrefutable fact, its consequences are unfolded. I followed this strategy in my liberalism book. I tried to begin with the most uncontroversial claims and then lead the reader down the primrose path to liberalism by showing that, if they bought in to the foundational claims, then they, as a matter of logic and consistency, should accept positions that didn’t seem as self-evident and attractive to them at first blush. Thus, Scott’s critique of experience attempts to establish its constructed nature and is meant, eventually, to serve to get her reader to question established powers and the categories that serve that power’s ends.

Rorty, first of all, hates any kind of blackmail, any strategy for establishing an authority that deems itself irrefutable. Everything is up for question in his preferred version of liberalism, just as everything could be constituted differently in a different historical period or culture. There are no transcendentals, just historical contingencies.

Rorty would like that last sentence to be true. But often recognizes that it is not. His talk about “common-sense naturalism” in the passage I quoted above is a nod to that recognition. Let’s be concrete about this. Here is a universalized, metaphysical statement of a generic fact of human experience: All humans die. Rorty would not deny that statement. What he denies is that it has any necessary consequences beyond the brute fact of death. How to face death, think about it, avoid or embrace it, respond to the death of others, etc. are all underdetermined by the brute fact. We know that various cultures have established an incredibly wide range of practices in the face of the brute fact.

Thus, for Rorty, all humans die is a common-sense platitude that has no straight-forward or inevitable consequence for human beliefs, values, or behavior. I think this position—while tied to Rorty’s resolute anti-authoritarianism—is also linked to his positivist origins. Rorty maintains a strict fact/value dichotomy. Facts are value-neutral. How we understand and interpret them is radically disconnected from their existence. In his metaphysics, Rorty tells us, “Dewey betrayed precisely the insight . . . that nothing is to be gained for an understanding of human knowledge by running together the vocabularies by which we describe the causal antecedents of knowledge with those in which we offer justifications of our claims to knowledge. . . . [W]hat Green and Hegel had seen, and Dewey himself saw perfectly well except when he was sidetracked into doing ‘metaphysics,’ was that we can eliminate epistemological problems by eliminating the assumption that justifications must rest on something other than social practices and human needs” (81-82). What Rorty says about epistemology here is fully consistent with his position on value as articulated in other works. Our commitments in terms of value rest on “social practices” and what we (and/or our society) understands to be “human needs” and not on any facts that transcend (or dictate) a humanly produced vocabulary. [Note that Rorty’s quick acknowledgement of “causal antecedents” of some statements belies the idea that he is an anti-realist. He is perfectly willing to say that the statement, “all humans die,” is motivated—or caused—by the encounter with death. He is not denying the fact’s existence, just its consequences, while he also—as I am about to discuss—does not think that the elaborate gymnastics of modern philosophy’s epistemologies do anything at all to either confirm or unsettle one’s beliefs about facts. Philosophic metaphysics and epistemology are unproductive games.]

An unproductive game because metaphysics has no consequences—a position taken up aggressively by Knapp and Michaels in their essay “Against Theory” and in numerous works by Stanley Fish. Describe the facts of existence—and nothing necessarily follows. Scott’s essay seems to belie that conclusion. Surely, the practitioners of historical studies will proceed differently if convinced by her case that an appeal to experience is not sufficient. I think that the pragmatist response (certainly it would be William James’s position and probably Rorty’s and Fish’s) is that my last sentence puts the cart before the horse. What comes first is the commitment to a certain set of values—and then the theoretical (or transcendental) claim is constructed as a buttress for that commitment. Certainly that was how my liberalism book was germinated. Rawls’ Theory of Justice offers a more grandiose and even comical case. The painstaking elaboration of his Rube Goldberg-like argument is clearly motivated by where he wants to end up.

Rorty certainly insisted that his philosophical commitments and arguments had no political consequences. His liberalism was not a product of—or even connected in any way—to his pragmatism. He described himself as mostly in tune with Habermas’ and Rawls’ versions of liberalism (characterized by equality, open unimpeded discussion/deliberation, and hostility to concentrations of power) while disagreeing with their conviction that liberalism required theoretical or transcendental underpinnings. The first-order commitments to certain values—commitments generated by upbringing, by sensibility/temperament, social practices, and comparisons among varied ways of living on display in the word and in the historical record—were more than sufficient for taking a stand.

Philosophers are no different from any one else in trying to persuade others to adopt a particular stand—while stories, images, emotional appeals, and displayed loyalties are very likely much more effective tools of persuasion than philosophical argument. “[P]hilsophers’ criticism of culture are not more ‘scientific,’ more ‘fundamental,’ or more ‘deep’ than those of labor leaders, literary critics, retired statesmen or sculptors” (87). Philosophers just start out by working on a different set or materials—“the history of philosophy and the contemporary effects of those ideas called ‘philosophic’ upon the rest of the culture—the remains of past attempts to describe the ‘generic traits of existences’” (87). And philosophers use different rhetorical means to persuade—means that are presumably effective for some people, that minority (?) which likes (prefers?) their commitments to be underwritten by a certain kind of argumentation instead of only by stories, images etc. Rorty is guilty of unjustified metaphysical generalization when he claims (as he often does) that stories are always more effective than arguments.

I find this radical levelling—both of the hierarchy of thinkers and of planes of existence (no deep undergirding truth about our daily round)—attractive. I find it harder to credit that understanding being-in-the-world and action-in-the-world in this way has no consequences. Maybe adopting a particular attitude is not ratified by some set of metaphysical facts. But the description itself is fruitful. How we understand the facts influences our reaction/adaptation to them. [That’s simply straight-forward Peircean pragmatism.] Of course, it is not clear that Rorty would deny that. He thinks the vocabulary we choose to work in does have consequences. Those vocabularies (and the activities/practices that accompany them) just need to be recognized as ways of “adapting and coping rather than copying” (86). Still, the adapting must be to something—like the COVID 19 virus. Coping requires, it would seem at least in some cases, accurate modeling.

To conclude—and to set up the next posts on practice—it seems clear that the critique of experience is a resistance to the way the term takes as self-evident the naturalistic placement of an experiencing self in an environment. The preference for the term “practice” is meant to introduce the social influences (determinants would be, for me but not I suspect for Scott, too strong a term) that shape what any individual might experience or might articulate as her experience. Certainly, with his notion of “funded” experience, Dewey is not utterly naïve about the ways that experience has social and historical dimensions. But the term “practices” tries (as I will discuss in the next posts) to put much more flesh on this idea of the ways in which experience is embedded within social settings that have prevailing norms, preferred ways of “going on,” and pre-established goals/ends.

Dewey, Art As Experience (4)

I trust this is going to be my last post on Dewey, although Nick and I read the first and last chapters of Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art for our most recent conversation—and I will write a post on Goodman that, in part, considers his affinities and differences with Dewey.

Auden famously said “poetry makes nothing happen.” One way to read that statement is to return to the aesthetic’s “fictionality,” its taking up residence in a realm that is not real, but (rather) hypothetical or speculative. No one is killed in King Lear—which is why theories of the aesthetic inevitably end up pondering the mysteries of representation. Without a doubt, acts of inflicting death are represented in King Lear—and those acts of representation are patently different than real killings. A real killing does not represent killing; it is (simply) killing. Thus the killing done in King Lear, if it has consequences, does not have the consequence of some person dying. We must look elsewhere for its consequences.

Pragmatism, of course, is all about consequences. The famous “pragmatic maxim” tells us that the meaning of something rests in its anticipated consequences—and that human action (at least; no particular reason not to include animal action here) is guided by the forwardly projected imagination of those consequences in relation to the agent’s interaction with the environment.

Thus, the discontinuity between the aesthetic and ordinary experience appears heightened if we focus on consequences. Art, if it makes things happen, does not, quite obviously, produce material consequences that align with those that follow action in the “real world.”

Dewey, of course, wants to describe the aesthetic as part and parcel of ordinary experience. The aesthetic, for him, is any experience (whether writing/viewing King Lear or taking a stroll in the woods) that reaches “fulfillment.” What specifically art works and the practice of art (taking “art” here in its most common ordinary language usage) do for Dewey is make us self-conscious about the pathways to fulfillment. In art, we witness “a substance so formed that it can enter into the experience of others and enable them to have more intense and more fully rounded out experiences of their own. This is what it is to have form. It marks a way of envisaging, of feeling, and of presenting experienced matter so that it most readily and most effectively becomes the material for the construction of adequate experience on the part of those less gifted than the original creator. Hence there can be no distinction drawn, save in reflection, between form and substance. The work itself is matter formed into esthetic substance” (109).

The consequence of art, then, is the way it teaches us to live—more intensely, more meaningfully. Its impact, we might say, is on the audience, on the social, not on nature, the material. Art’s material consequences are small-scale. The sculptor does transform the stone; the poet and the composer do manipulate material sounds. But there are no large-scale material changes; temperatures do not rise, trees are neither grown nor felled in large quantities, colonies are not founded or overthrown. The artist himself may acquire fame or wealth as a result of his work, but those (it seems to me) are social, not natural, consequences.

Dewey’s position unfolds in three steps. 1. Art, by showing us those intense experiences, leads us to desire them. It fosters a sensibility attuned to the possibility and desirabililty of such experiences. 2. Once having awakened that desire in us, art shows us possible paths to its fulfillment. 3. Add one and two together and art’s major consequence is in enhancing the quality of our lives. (The fostering of that sensibility might be placed in relation to a modern world that leads us to expect too little, that lets the daily grind of “getting and spending” overwhelm our knowing about and desiring consummatory experiences.)

As I have already argued in previous posts, I think this position entails associating art with a certain kind of self-consciousness about what one is doing and a certain kind of “work” done upon “experienced matter” (109). That work requires, it seems to me, a stepping back from the flow of experience into an artificially framed space that also enjoys a limited immunity from temporality as it is ordinarily endured.

The way that art is well placed to demonstrate the pathway(s) to fulfillment is captured in Dewey’s most extended description of fulfillment in his book. This description is useful to me because he relies so heavily on the concept of “meaning” to make his case. Thus, it offers clues for my own ongoing project of trying to understand the special relationship to meaning of the arts and humanities.

Here’s Dewey’ description; it depends heavily on the Hegelian insight that the encounter with obstacles external to the self is what generates self-consciousness.

“Whenever the organic impulse exceeds the limit of the body, it finds itself in a strange world and commits in some measure the fortune of the self to external circumstances. It cannot pick just what it wants and automatically leave the indifferent and adverse out of account. . . . In the process of converting these obstacles and neutral conditions into favoring agencies, the live creature becomes aware of the intent implicit in its impulsions. The self, whether it succeed or not, does not merely restore itself to its former state. Blind surge has been changed into a purpose; instinctive tendencies are transformed into contrived undertakings. The attitudes of the self are informed with meaning. . . . The only way it can become aware of its nature and its goal is by obstacles surmounted and means employed. . . . Impulsion from need starts an experience that does not know where it is going; resistance and check bring about the conversion of direct forward action into re-flection; what is turned back upon is the relation of hindering conditions to what the self possesses as working capital in virtue of prior experience. As energies thus involved reinforce the original impulsion, this operates more circumspectly with insight into end and method. Such is the outline of every experience clothed with meaning. . . . [W]hat is evoked is not just quantitative, or just more energy, but is qualitative, a transformation of energy into thoughtful action, through assimilation of meanings from the background of past experiences. The junction of the new and old is not a mere past experience, but is a re-creation in which the present impulsion gets form and solidity while the old, the ‘stored’ material, is literally revived, given new life and soul through having to meet a new situation” 59-60).

The aesthetic is not referenced at all in this description of the movement toward “thoughtful action” that “assimilates meanings” and “gives new life” to those meanings as it forges a “qualitative” relation between the self and its impulses, and between the self and the situations it encounters. We get here Dewey’s commitment to the full continuity between what ordinary language calls the “aesthetic” and his insistence that any experience is potentially fulfilling. The aesthetic, for him, is a quality of experience, not a separate class of objects or activities. But, as the passage from page 109 that I quoted earlier shows, the aesthetic is a demonstration project that does show us the experiences can have that quality. My argument has been—because sheltered from certain material consequences and from certain temporal pressures while able to employ the heightened effects generated by framing—the aesthetic does that demonstrative work under conditions not as continuous with ordinary experience as Dewey assumes.

I want to end with a thought taken from Nick—one that resonates with the long description of “thoughtful action” just quoted. Dewey, like Goodman, is not at all interested in aesthetic judgment if that means making statements about whether an art work is good or bad—or beautiful or not. On pages 129-30, Dewey explains (pretty convincingly) why “beauty” is not a very helpful concept or term in trying to describe the aesthetic or art works. It is too non-specific, what Bernard Williams would call a “thin” as contrasted to a “thick” descriptor. A judgment that a work of art is “good” or “beautiful” doesn’t get us very far; it might serve as an opener for a conversation, but unless we get down to brass tacks in that ensuing conversation, we haven’t gotten said anything particularly enlightening. While Kant’s thoughts about the components of judgment are useful, his focus on judgments of beauty is not helpful. It deprives his account of a concrete engagement with the material to be judged.

When Dewey feels constrained to appeal to beauty, he redefines it (by way of rhetorical questions) to align with his criteria for successful art. “Is ‘beauty’ another name for form descending from without, as a transcendent essence, upon material, or is it a name for the esthetic quality that appears whenever material is formed in a way that renders it adequately expressive? Is form, in its esthetic sense, something that uniquely marks off as esthetic from the beginning a certain realm of objects, or is it the abstract name for what emerges whenever an experience attains complete development?” (107, Dewey’s emphasis).

The passive construction here—“an experience attains complete development”—is unfortunate. Form “emerges” in the interaction of agent and materials—as does “purpose” itself. “Thoughtful action” is a product of interaction that feels its way forward, discovering its purposes and its abilities as it goes along, guided (at least in the cases Dewey wants to celebrate) by a desire for “adequate expression” and “complete development.” Nick’s point is that judgment is located exactly in the process of feeling one’s way forward. At every juncture, decisions must be made about the next step—and those decisions (as in my discussion of Gerhard Richter’s description of his process some posts back) are more like feelings or intuitions (Dewey’s “affective” or “qualitative” thought) than formulaic or logical applications of a rule or a deduction.

There is no pre-existing plan, no recipe to follow, no method. (Shades of my criticism of Joseph North’s fetishization of method and rigor.) I must admit that I waver inconsistently between embracing what seems to me this romantic, faintly irrational understanding of judgment and being irritated by its mysterious ineffability. I want to nail it down better; to say, like Richter, that this just “feels right” seems to beg the question. How do you know it feels right? What is that feeling based on? Give me your reasons. I am fully willing to admit that good judgment is developed through practice and cannot be taught through a rulebook or method. One has to develop a “feel for” the practice. But I still long for more complete and specific articulation of the grounds for those feelings.

That said, I do think it absolutely right that the consequential stakes when it comes to judgment (the reason why trying to figure out judgment is important) are tied up with these decisions about how to “go on” (to use Wittgenstein’s phrase) and not with the relatively trivial issue of whether we judge this work good or nor, beautiful or not.

Dewey, Art As Experience (3)

I am now ready to offer an account of the aesthetic that is inspired by Dewey but departs fairly drastically from him as well. The key point of contention is the continuity between artistic endeavors and ordinary experiences. My account will make much of the peculiar powers and capacities art acquires precisely because it is discontinuous with everyday life.

Where Dewey helps me is his description of the work that the artist does upon the materials offered to her by the everyday. Here are some of Dewey’s helpful statements on that score. My “conception . . . of esthetic experience,” Dewey writes, “is, indeed, that the work of art has a unique quality, but that it is that of clarifying and concentrating meanings contained in scattered and weakened ways in the material of other experiences” (84). “[M]aterial is not subordinated to some particular and antecedent meaning . . ., but it is reconstructed and reorganized to express the artist’s imaginative vision. . . . Drawing is drawing out; it is extraction of what the subject matter has to say in particular to the painter in his integrated experience” (92, Dewey’s emphasis). “Art . . . carries further, through selection and concentration, the reference to an object, to organization and order, beyond mere sense” (126). “Through art, meanings of objects that are otherwise dumb, inchoate, restricted, and resisted, are clarified and concentrated, and not by thought working laboriously upon them, nor by escape into a world of mere sense, but by creation of a new experience” (132-33). “Emotional energy continues to work but now does real work; it accomplished something. It evokes, assembles, accepts and rejects memories, images, observations, and works them into a whole toned throughout by the same immediate emotional feeling. Thereby is presented an object that is unified and distinguished throughout” (156).

The artist achieves intensity (a focusing of attention and of energies) through a “work” of concentration, compression, unification, selection, and reduction. I can accept that we all might perform a similar work in our everyday lives—since we attend to only part of what lies in front of us and we strive to understand it and be responsive to its features by deploying strategies of concentration, unification etc.

Thus it is not the features of artistic work that I want to highlight. Rather it is the conditions under which that work is done. I have five I want to consider.

Framing. Drawing boundaries around any activity can increase its intensity. In part, this is an effect of concentration/selection, of only admitting within the frame things that are pertinent. The banishment of the non-relevant focuses matters.

But there is also the effect of deliberately and self-consciously stepping into the bounded arena. We are here in this space now to do this and only this. Framing creates a kind of unity of purpose that is hard to achieve in daily life. Games, classrooms, the operating room, and the bounded canvas of traditional paintings are only some examples of the power of spaces designated to one purpose—and one purpose alone. Everything else is to be checked at the door.

Such spaces are artificial; they must be constructed. The natural world does not come to us in bounded chunks or with sacrosanct spaces. Dewey’s aesthetics neglects both the rationales for and the processes through which framing occurs. Framing, I am suggesting, is a powerful and deliberate device erected against the “disordered heterogeneity” (157) that characterizes much of ordinary experience.

It is worth saying here that modern art has been very self-conscious about framing and its effects—and has often tried to deconstruct frames. From Duchamp’s Fountain (calling out attention to the institutions of art and the semi-sacred space of the museum) to Jo Baer’s paintings, artists have highlighted the artificiality of the frame, sometimes in the name of being more real, more attentive to a non-exclusionary heterogeneity, at other times in order to simply increase self-consciousness about framing effects.

Reflection/Self-Consciousness. Precisely because the artist works upon material provided by the world (whether that material be the emotions and thoughts arising out of experience or just the material stuff—paint, words, rock, sounds—the world affords), there is a stepping back from the flow of experience to this deliberate fashioning of something out of it.

Maybe what I am saying here is that there is a difference between “working” and “living”—and that Dewey (perhaps pragmatism as a philosophy) is blind to that difference. Does the interaction model imply that we are always working, that we are always fashioning what the situation provides in relation to needs and purposes? Isn’t walking through a landscape taking in its sights and sounds different from working up those sights and sounds into a painting or an essay? Is Thoreau’s living in his cabin distinct from Thoreau’s writing about that experience, striving to derive and communicate that experience’s meanings?

In other words, are we self-conscious in every moment? Or, alternatively, is it possible to do work without being self-conscious? Work is the quintessential case of Deweyean “intelligence”—the movement toward a desired end in relation to the means afforded by the materials at hand, the resources available to the worker.

My question here has two parts. A) Are we always working? One way of understanding the Darwinian interaction model would answer that question Yes. I am not so sure.

B) Doesn’t work require a kind of self-consciousness, a kind of deliberate action, that also requires certain enabling conditions—conditions that ordinary experience often does not provide? For starters, work might require a dedicated, framed space: a room of one’s own (or, at least, a workplace). The pandemic, of course, is challenging that spatial division, but doing one’s job on-line in the kitchen or the bedroom (the complete collapse of a distinction between domestic space and work space) is an experiment whose results are still undecided. More globally, I am suggesting that there is the sense of crossing a border from one way of being in the world to another way of being when one sits down to work. The artist as well as the engineer self-consciously takes up her tools. We don’t live every moment so self-consciously focused or so oriented to getting a specific thing done.

I suspect that Dewey thinks self-conscious focus and achievement are the most fulfilling form of human life. There is a deeply buried work ethic in Dewey, with his emphasis on “consummation,” on bringing things to “fulfillment.” Yes, he wants to celebrate process over product, but the process is always ends-driven, and engaged intelligence is his version of both Socrates’ “the examined life” and Mill’s pleasures of a higher animal.

A crucial—and to me truly decisive—discontinuity between art and ordinary experience is the relation to time. In our everyday experience, time cannot be stopped. There is not, pace Prufrock, time for visions and revisions.

The artist gets to step outside of time and work on the materials that ordinary life provides. Yes, there are deadlines—and there are the assorted pressures that a life in time presents—but the artist can work on his novel or his painting for eight years, striving to get things right. The framing inherent to the aesthetic is not just spatial, but also temporal. The luxury of reflection, of intense self-consciousness, requires not just a room of one’s own but expansive amounts of time. Both, needless to say, are luxuries not available to a majority of the world’s inhabitants. The relation to the materials provided by experience is radically different if one must react in real time or if one has the ability to step back, mull things over, revise one’s first (and second and third) responsive move, and manipulate various inputs to achieve an integrated whole. Art’s ability to achieve unity and coherence—not to mention the eloquence of its expressions of emotion and insight—is directly related to this slowing down of time.

Art is not entirely non-temporal. Art forms like the novel and music are explicitly temporal—but they demonstrate (and glory) in a kind of dominion over time that cannot be achieved in “real life.” To miss the discontinuity between the arts’ relation to time and the way we all must live temporally in our ordinary lives is to miss a distinctive reason art is so powerful.

Games and work benefit from the intensification effects of framing. But it is not obvious that they have the same relation to time as the arts. Yes, a musical or dramatic performance, like a baseball game, is a “one-off”—and thus subject to irreversible results (well-played or marred by errors). But the creative artist gets “do-overs” in the way that performers or the players of a game do not. Revisions and mulligans come with the territory of creating an art work.

Furthermore, not only does the artist step out of “real time,” but the artist also works in the realm of “fiction.” On the one hand, it is not surprising that Dewey, who really had barely an aesthetic bone in his body, missed the fictional nature of the arts. But on another hand, it is shocking that he did so—because of his life-long advocacy for “experimentation.” In a certain way, the space of the arts is not very different from the space of the laboratory. In both cases, the practitioner gets to assemble various materials, see how they interact with one another, and not have to worry about the results of that interaction having immediate real world consequences. (I will worry about the indirect, non-immediate, consequences in my next post.)

Thus, Shakespeare’s King Lear can consider the consequences of dividing up a kingdom without a real civil war occurring. We can call his play a cautionary tale, a plea to his fellow countrymen to maintain unity, through his vivid depiction of the awful alternative. But no one gets killed—even though he fictionally represents people getting killed. So we can add to the powers that art possesses by virtue of its special relations to space and time, its ability to step aside from “real life” into a controlled space we call “fiction” to conduct thought experiments about various alternative ways of living (or perceiving or thinking or reacting emotionally) in ordinary existence.

In short, most art works—even the ones that call themselves “realistic”—exist in a hypothetical universe, not in the universe you and I must live in. Again, modern art has sometimes chafed against this constraint, sometimes embraced it (“speculative fiction”), and sometimes played with it in various ingenious ways (Philip Roth’s The Counter-Life for just one of many examples). Still I am arguing that this discontinuity—a distinction between the hypothetical and the real—is endemic to the arts, for better and for worse.

I will consider the issue of how art impacts ordinary life in my next post. For today, I will conclude with a summary statement that will come as no surprise for readers of my earlier posts on Dewey. What I am repeating here is that the everyday does not come to us (in my opinion, but not in Dewey’s) endowed with form. The aesthetic’s work is to derive form, to create form, out of the material life provides. Dewey calls the art work “formed matter” (114), which seems right to me.

Here is his fullest discussion of form.

“In a word, form is not found exclusively in objects labeled works of art. Wherever perception has not been blunted and perverted, there is an inevitable tendency (my emphasis) to arrange events and objects with reference to the demands of complete and unified experience. Form is a character of every experience that is an (Dewey’s emphasis) experience. Art in its specific sense enacts more deliberately and fully the conditions that effect this unity. Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment. (Dewey’s italics; my underlining). The connection of form with substance is thus inherent, not imposed from without. It marks the matter of an experience that is carried to consummation. . . . The problem of discovering the nature of form is thus identical with that of discovering the means by which are effected the carrying forward of an experience to its fulfillment” (137).

Perhaps there is “an inevitable tendency” to attempt to organize the materials presented by the daily round. In that sense, the aesthetic impulse and our responses to everyday experience would be continuous. In both cases, we seek fulfillment or consummation through the achievement of form. I do think this is too mono-causal an account of the multiple ways that humans respond to experience—or, to be more fundamental still, simply experience. I don’t think our ways of being in the world are “perverted” if we fail to strive to “form” the heterogeneous stuff the world throws at us on any given day. Furthermore—and I have beaten this horse many times already—I don’t believe that situations and events and scenes have an “integral fulfillment” lurking within them.

What this post adds to these worries/objections is this: Even if there is a fundamental continuity between the aesthetic effort to achieve form and similar efforts we make in our everyday lives, it is a mistake to miss that the aesthetic possesses resources for that effort that the everyday lacks. Living forward in real time is a distinct disadvantage when it comes to doing the work of selection, concentration, clarification, intensification, and unification that the aesthetic performs in order to whip the matter of experience into shape. The aesthetic’s ability (its constitutive ability?) to step aside from the flow of experience grants it capacities that everyday life simply does not possess.

It is worth adding that the aesthetic’s various resources are not unique to art. In various ways, other forms of human activity (from games to specialized pursuits) avail themselves of the capacities activated by creating separate spaces, by selecting out only relevant features of a situation, by developing techniques of working upon and shaping available materials, and by focusing attention in various ways. Some of these other enterprises even possess strategies for stepping outside of time’s relentless forward flow.