The Varied Substance of the Arts

"The product of art- temple, painting, statue, poem - is not the work of art.  The work takes place when a human being cooperates with the product so that the outcome is an experience that is [enjoyed] because of its liberating and ordered properties" (p. 222).  This suggest to me that Dewey thinks of art not as what it is but when it is.  (I put enjoyed in [ ] just to comment that not all art products are enjoyable, but that enjoyed probably means worked with or appreciated, sometimes for its unpleasant relations.)

"If art is an intrisic quality of activity, we cannot divide and subdivide it.  We can only follow the differentiation of the activity into different modes as it impinges on different materials and employs different media" (p.223).  This, with the first citation, suggests to me that I can call teaching art, so long as it is done with attention and acute sensitivity to the qualities involved with the activity, for the integral completion of that experience.  Using each component within the educational environment as related to an overall whole, ("for the red is always the red of the material of that experience") and recognizing that it must be activily recieved to be complete.  What makes teaching completely unique, I think, is that some the components of the environment, we could analogize them to the individual brush strokes on a canvas, are the students themselves, and therefor not only must they actively engage with the experience as an audience does with a work of art, but they are the artwork itself.  When a composer uses tones to express an artistic idea, the composer understands the quality of relationships between the tones used.  In teaching, the tones have the unique quality of being alive, and as James teaches us, life can never truly be predicted.  There are always exceptions, the ongoing sense of an "ever not quite."  Furtharmore, the teacher (in public education today) does not choose the students as a composer chooses tones, the teacher works with the students given in the class.  The artful teacher predicts as best they can the quality of relations between planned experiences of a curriculum and the students involved in them, but at some point plans on improvisation being a part of the product.  I think here the discussion could turn to D&E or E&E with the ideas of using the situations of the group to drive experiences, and the roles of the teacher as facilitator.

I know its getting long but I want to remember that later in the chapter Dewey comments a bit about the elusive search for the essence, a connection I think to both James and Wittgenstein.  He also reminds me of Wittgenstein in On Certainty when he writes, "Language comes infinitely short of paralleling the varigated surface of nature" (p. 224).  This is like James' all-those-particular-qualities-which-make-this-thing-unique-to-each-and-every-person-every-time-it-is-encountered, and Wittgenstein's discussion of exactness, when he suggests that true exactness cannot exists, that we can only move closer towards some sense of exactness.