Experience and Nature

I thought I'd start with Dewey's 9th chapter, Experience, Nature, and Art, as it's so closely related to Art as Experience.  I get the sense that Dewey thinks of art as a way of life, as a verb, much more than he thinks of art as a category of objects.   Though of course he discusses art as objects also.

He discusses useful arts compared to fine arts, and culminates the discussion at the end of the chapter with, "Fine art consciously undertaken as such is peculiarly instrumental in quality.  It is a device in experimentation carried on for the sake of education" (p. 293).  This comes after some discussion about the idea of "usefulness" pertaining to serving a definitive purpose, as shoes, mugs, or buildings might be put to a particular use.  "Here inquiry and imagination stop.  What they also make by way of narrow, embittered, and crippled life, of congested, hurried, confused and extravgent life, is left in oblivion" (p. 2 72).  Dewey gets into means and ends, I think making the point as he does in AAE that when they are separate they fall towards the anaesthetic, and that for many workers the labor which seems to lead to wages are rather disconnected, "instead of an operation of means, there is an enforced necessity of doing one thing as a coerced antecedent of the occurrence of another thing which is wanted" (p. 275). 

Later Dewey discusses meaning and ideas, some meanings are formed hastily from perceived actions and results, while others are incorporated with ideas, bearing consequence on long term, consistent experiences.  "The idea is, in short, art and a work of art" (p. 278).  He discusses process in relation to means and ends, and that in aesthetic process the ends are present in the means, such that the house is present in the wood we use to make it.  "The end-in-view is a plan which is contemporaneously operative in the selecting and arranging materials" (p. 280).  Dewey discusses essences and seems to reject the classic philosophical notion of them as making things "what they are, even though not causing them to occur" (p. 289).  The classic view of the essence seems to me out of place with the aesthetic process.

In considering the place of science in relation to art and nature Dewey writes, "In short, the history of human experience is a history of the development of the arts.  The history of science in its distinct emergence from religious, ceremonial and poetic arts is the record of a differentiation of the arts, not a record of separation from art."  Dewey feels that science is an art, it is the art of observing, recording, and explaining the details of the natural world.

When we come  back to the end of the chapter and consider fine art to be an experimentation for the sake of education, I'm thinking about that notion of art synthesized through art as verbage, or as an active way of life.  I think of taking a stand to make a point, such as Thoreau's act of civil disobedience, as an expression of the artistic life.  Or, I think taking a stand in another way, such as living deliberately, is to live the artistic.  Its extremely fulfilling.