Experience, Nature and Art - revisited

“For all art is a process of making the world a different place in which to live, and involves a phase of protest and compensatory response” (p. 272).

“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 differentiation of arts, not a record of separation from art” (p. 290).

Buds on a recently pruned apple tree, slightly out of focus.  April 25^th, 2011.

“When this perception dawns (previous paragraph), it will be a commonplace that art –the mode of activity that is charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed possession –is the complete culmination of nature, and that ‘science’ is properly a handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue” (p. 269) (emphasis mine.)

“Thus, the issue involved in experience as art in its pregnant sense and in art as process and materials of nature continued by direction into achieved and enjoyed meanings, sums up in itself all the issues which have been previously considered.  Thought, intelligence, science is the intentional direction of natural events and meanings capable of immediate possession and enjoyment; this direction –which is operative art –is itself a natural event…” (p. 269) (emphasis mine).

“And the distinguishing feature of conscious experience, of what for short is often called ‘consciousness,’ is that in it the instrumental and the final, meanings that are signs and clews and meanings that are immediately possessed, come together in one.  And all of these things are preeminently true of art” (p. 269).

Upon revisiting this chapter I had a feeling of happiness and ease.  Many of the “issues which have been previously considered” do feel summed up in this chapter; and they fit together nicely in a rather optimistic and uplifting philosophy.  When considering art as a mode of activity charged with meanings, and conscious experience as the union of signs, clues, and meanings, we do have experience as art.  This idea, that art is something of a holistic lifestyle, seems something like our final ED 5010 prompt, and the saying attributed to Dewey, “education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” 

 

Recently grafted apple trees, in a row, out in a field.  April 25^th, 2011.

 “Thus the theme has insensibly passed over into that of the relation of means and consequence, process and product, the instrumental and the consummatory.   Any activity that is simultaneously both, rather than in alteration and displacement, is art” (p. 271).

It would not be appropriate to discuss this chapter without Dewey’s consideration of social situations of economy.  His argument, if I understand him correctly, is that “the existence of activities that have no immediate enjoyed intrinsic meaning is undeniable” (p. 271) and that the leisure class (held over from Greek thought) continues to avoid these activities by employing a working class; it could probably be argued that this is done in a way to ensure the continuation of class separation.  The working class is held in economy as needing to work in order to survive, that working is a means to survival.  “…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).   This separation is unaesthetic and unnatural.   

Split and stacked wood (which will be used to warm my house next winter.)  April 25^th, 2011.

 “…a measure of artistic products is their capacity to attract and retain observation with satisfaction under whatever conditions they are approached… a genuinely esthetic object is not exclusively consummatory but is causally productive as well” (p. 274).

“When this fact is noted, it is also seen that the limitation of fineness of art to paintings, statues, poems, songs and symphonies is conventional, or even verbal.  Any activity that is productive of objects whose perception is an immediate good, and whose operation is a continual source of enjoyable perception of other events exhibits fineness of art” (p. 274) (emphasis mine).

My goal then, as indicated in earlier posts, is to realize an enactment of education as art. 

Replaced and refinished clapboards and trim, on house built ca. 1835.

“Science is an instrumentality of and for art because it is the intelligent factor in art” (p. 276).

“When appetite is perceived in its meanings, in the consequences it induces, and these consequences are experimented with in reflective imagination… we live on the human plane, responding to things in their meanings.   A relationship of cause-effect has been transformed into one of means-consequence.  Then consequences belong integrally to the conditions which may produce them, and the latter posses character and distinction” (p. 278). 

“Thus, to be conscious of meanings or to have an idea, marks a fruition, an enjoyed or suffered arrest of the flux of events… we may be aware of meanings, may achieve ideas, that unite wide and enduring scope with richness and distinctions… it [these large scope ideas] marks the conclusion of long continued endeavor; of patient and indefatigable search and test.  The idea is, in short, art and a work of art.  As a work of art, it directly liberates subsequent action and makes it more fruitful in a creation of more meanings and more perceptions” (p. 278) (emphasis mine).

Not only is art a lifestyle in actions, but a lifestyle in thinking.  And this makes me think of formal education; I wonder how often we foster the transformation of cause-effect into means-consequence, how often these consequences belong integrally to the conditions from which they arose, and how often students participate in the long continued endeavor of forming ideas. 

Dave, an Ed 5010 student, behind the ice cave at Beede Falls. February 19^th, 2011.

“In esthetic perceptions an object interpenetrated with meanings is given; it may be taken for granted; it invites and awaits the act of appropriate enjoyment… [aesthetic objects] are pleasing endings that occur in ways not informed with  meaning of materials and acts integrated into them” (pp. 280-281).

“Artistic sense on the other hand grasps tendencies as possibilities; the invitation of these possibilities to perception is more urgent and compelling than that of the given already achieved” (p. 281).

“Art in being, the active productive process, may thus be defined as an esthetic perception together with an operative perception of the efficiencies of the esthetic object” (p. 281).

“…the difference between the diffuse and postponed change of action due in an ordinary person to release of energies by an esthetic object, and the special and axial direction of subsequent action in a gifted person is, after all, a matter of degree”(p. 281).

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 “…fine art consciously undertaken as such is peculiarly instrumental in quality.  It is a device of experimentation carried on for the sake of education.  It exists for the sake of specialized use, use being a new training of modes of perception” (p. 293).