Having an Experience

I finished reading Art as Experience last night so I’m thinking about how to approach writing/discussing it in the most useful way.  It certainly is full, I probably have at least one sentence underlined on each page, and it’s a work that I’m sure will continue to open up for me with time and persistence. For now I’ll discuss some of the themes and ideas which I hope to remember, and use for a specific purpose later. 

Having an Experience

I appreciate Dewey’s spectrum of the quality of experiences we have, from the inchoate, interrupted, and mechanical to the integral and aesthetic.   Certainly the aesthetic experiences are the ones we are wide awake to.  It occurred to me that completing this book was stepping towards havening an experience with it.  My first attempt was interrupted and while I wouldn’t say “humdrum” or “mechanical,” sustaining focus on what I was reading was difficult.  Regardless it was incomplete and not holistically aesthetic.

I feel conflicted with the idea that an interrupted experience is not aesthetic, because I feel like an interruption could come while being wide awake, such as falling from a rock climb or putting down a book after a few chapters.  But when Dewey writes, “To put one’s hand in the fire that consumes it is not necessarily to have an experience.  The action and its consequences must be joined in perception.  This relationship is what gives meaning; to grasp it is the objective of all intelligence” (p. 46) Then I think for Dewey “interruption” means something like 'that which ends the experience and any reflection on it.'  Falling from a rock climb is probably more like a resistance which invites reflection than an interruption.  Working with a few chapters could be an integral experience, so long as the reading is not merely mechanical and technical.  Working with the whole book, and perceiving meanings from it is a larger, fuller experience.  But merely reading a few passages and leaving them is something like wasted time.

The bedrock Dewey strikes is that “The esthetic is no intruder in experience from without…but that it is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normal complete experience”  (p. 48).  Every experience has an aesthetic element, such that we can’t separate what happens from how it happens (until reflection.)  So I think complete integral experiences are ones in which the how is perceived.  Certainly, comprehending the technical is only part of understanding experience.   Still, that’s the objective reality, that’s the starting and ending place of many minds. 

 I want to include this quote “To think effectively in terms of relations of qualities is as severe a demand upon thought as to think in terms of symbols verbal and mathematical” (p.47).  It makes me think that to think artistically one does not necessarily have to be an artist.  I think any perfomative task demands thinking in terms of relations of qualities, from how your words work together to where and how to strike at ice with an ice axe when climbing.   What fascinates me is the scope of relationships, from the very small minutia to the grand scale of an entire way of life.  In many ways verbal and mathematical symbols become automatic, such that people can talk a lot without saying anything, or as Dewey writes “ art probably demands more intelligence than does most of the so called thinking that goes on among those who pride themselves as being ‘intellectuals’” (p. 47).

My friend Jeff Previty climbing the route "Dracula" at Frankenstein Cliffs.