The Act of Expression

“The epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and where its environment begins.  There are things inside the body that are foreign to it, and there are things that belong to it de jure, if not de facto” (p. 61).  I think we could think of the mind and the intellect in the same way, as acting on impulsions to fulfill needs.  And perhaps a major problem with public education comes from creating an environment congenial to the straightaway delivery of information, such that our students don’t have to “give an account of [themselves] in terms of the things [they] encounter, and hence they would not become significant objects” (p.62).  Of course this relation goes back to Dewey’s idea that there are impulsions which need to be fed.  And that seems to be the hook, to spark an impulsion which requires the student to interact with the environment in an educational pursuit.  But in our age of efficiency I think we are killing the impulsions, erring on the side of feeding information to pass the test.  Maybe not just with the recent NCLB, but by putting our content in books, sitting our students in rows and feeding them content in a disconnected way.  I think this relates to Dewey’s philosophy of education stemming from solving problems relevant to the life of the problem solver; the impulsions and the interacting with the environment to satisfy them.

Education would happen when one creates or perceives meanings, and Dewey writes that we learn “that particular acts effect different consequences… He thus begins to be aware of the meaning of what he does” (p.65).  This is the beginning of acting expressively, and it marks every work of art.  Later in the chapter Dewey writes more about meaning which I relate to the James and Wittgenstein discussion about meaning, with the qualitative and technical differentiations, “There are values and meanings that can be expressed only by immediately visible and audible qualities, and to ask what they mean in the sense of something that can be put into words is to deny their distinctive existence” (p.77).  I think Wittgenstein suggested that we could get closer to understanding this qualitative meaning by discussing the effects of changing parts of it, like changing one pitch in a melody.  I think this is a clue towards teaching qualitative perception.

The last concept I want to touch on deals with the union of the artist and the product.  Dewey writes of the transformation of the “inner” materials along with the transformation of the physical artwork.  He says that there are not two operations performed on each the inner artist and outer artwork but that “The work is artistic in the degree in which the two functions of transformation are effected by a single operation” (p.78).  In such a case the artwork would reflect back to the artist something of that “inner” quality.  It becomes something emotionally fulfilling rather than a routine chore.  Then when we engage as spectators with a work of art some of the fulfilled emotional experience is reflected onto us.  I think that merges with our own self, something from the artwork resonates with us in a meaningful way, as something about our experience is reflected back to us.  This seems at the heart of any meaningful communication.