This is what renders them artful to some extent. Yet one must not make the miss-step of thinking that the embodied activities paradigmatic of artful, embodied activity are those of institutionally identified artists. The live creature and the engaged tennis player can have unity in experience in the same way that a successful performance art piece might bequeath to its doer and audience.
One does not need to transcend or challenge the everyday or the ordinary to reap the rewards of the aesthetic on the account of Dewey that I have given. One merely needs the unity and build in object and in experience to get the heightened immediacy that the aesthetic represents. But here I have gone beyond a wide theory of art objects and into even more general ground. And a defense, or at least explication, of such a move must be made.
The Art of Experience: Activity as Aesthetic There is art in the creation of an object; there is also art in the creation of experiences with certain qualities. One may then ask, How can the experience of any activity become aesthetic on Deweyan grounds?
If the aesthetic captures a phase or quality of experience that is particularly delightful and meaningful, this question comes with great implications. For instance, long before he became comfortable or qualified enough to opine on art objects as traditionally conceived, he spoke on the artfulness behind activity and life. In his earlier Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics , he clearly made the point that the aesthetic or the artful can encompass most of life.
STROUD adjustment to a situation apart from reflective analysis; instinctive perception of the proper harmonies of act and act, of man and man. As was the case in the previously used example of tennis playing, the activity itself is the medium. In other words, the activities undergone by an agent comprise the larger endeavor e. The nuances and idiosyncrasies of the activities qua means become media when they infect and compose the details and particulars of the whole object in question.
In the case of activities such as sports, dining, or even artistic activities like dance, the period of effort and application of skill to activity is the art object. The means here become media given their internal relation to what they create and compose. Why must we struggle to attain this heightened notion of unity, quality, and build naturally resident in every experience in some amount? Talking about the expressivity of art objects, Dewey gives us our clue.
The definition of the aesthetic does not merely mean internal unity of parts of the material world of an environment. Familiarity induces indifference, prejudice blinds us; conceit looks through the wrong end of a telescope and minimizes the significance possessed by objects in favor of the alleged importance of the self.
Much, if not all, of our non-aesthetic experiences might be causally conditioned by the habits we take to them. The first example involves a simple everyday activity—a variety of passengers commuting into New York City by ferry boat.
One glances around randomly, seeing this building, pronouncing its name, and then glances at another one. Another passenger, anxious to get to work, sees the time on the ship as mere drudgery, as something to get through as quickly as possible. He is now seeing esthetically. No one single figure, aspect, or quality is picked out as a means to some further external result which is desired, nor as a sign of an inference that may be drawn. Yet some have taken this example to be misleading or confused, however.
I believe that the Deweyan point can be saved from such a demur, however, if one looks at it not with a focus on the aesthetic object, but instead with a focus on what habits create what quality of present experience. Our habits direct our attention, and our attention affects our present experience and the chances for success in future experience. Thus, attention is related to both experiential quality and efficacy, with the latter often ranging from present actions to future desired effects being realized.
In Human Nature and Conduct , Dewey argues: What sense is there in increased external control except to increase the intrinsic significance of living? The future that is foreseen is a future that is sometime to be a present. Is the value of that present also to be postponed to a future date, and so on indefinitely? Or, if the food we are struggling to attain in the future is one to be actually realized when that future becomes present, why should not the food of this present be equally precious?
STROUD What Dewey is reminding us of here is that so many of our normative endeavors—be they in art or in morality—focus on one site of reward and meaning: the present. Goals will always occupy some remote present, and all too often when we pursue a remote ideal our tendency is to ignore the present here and now. In aesthetic matters, this maligning of the present is the direct result of habits that focus our attention elsewhere.
Once they arrive at work, it is not a stretch to envision them rushing through work tasks while caring only about the paycheck lying at the end of the week. In a deep sense, their habits of attention have externalized the value and meaning of the present experience, and in so doing, they make their experience of that present activity or object a mere means—something that could be skipped or replaced if possible. What makes the experience of the third passenger aesthetic in quality is nothing about the object the skyline.
Instead, the difference- making factor lies in their habits of attention and goal valuation. To another, the means, the activity of learning, is completely one with what results from it.
The consequence, instruction, illumination, is one with the process. The object or activity is not the most important thing, since both test-takers like all the passengers on the ferry occupied identical material situations. Another way of putting it is that the aesthetic orientation does not 1 separate the present from remote states of affairs, nor does it 2 devalue that present in light of remote states of affairs.
Note that the operative orientation behind such experience involves a focusing of attention in a certain way. One could easily have an orientation that subverts attention to the present, perhaps in favor of ruminative worries over the future or about the past. The sort of orientation that is conducive to the aesthetic is there in the absorptive experience of art objects; it is just often obscured by the presence of objective media e.
The experience of the painting will clearly be one of attention to that paint, but it is an experience that takes place over time and that involves a viewer engaging the material of the art object. The subjective side to the aesthetic comes into play here, as harmful habits of attention orientation can distract us from the art object, or even from the work it does on us and to us in our experience.
I believe it very much is. The notion of the aesthetic foregrounds absorptive, immediate experience. Good artists are skilled at wrestling with objective materials in such a way as to stand a good chance of evoking such a reaction in an audience. They too can have the meaningful quality, build, and consummation that a well-wrought play could possess.
One simply needs to look at and value the present as a meeting place of past and future, as the location of funded meanings pointing toward something yet unrealized. Instead, To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present as a halo. It consists of possibilities that are felt as a possession of what is now and here.
In life that is truly life, everything overlaps and merges. But all too often we exist in apprehensions of what the future may bring, and are divided within ourselves. Even when not overanxious, we do not enjoy the present because we subordinate it to that which is absent.
In the case of art, an artist does an admirable job when it becomes easy for an audience to become enraptured in this scene, with its summations of what came before and with the anticipated pointings it does to the future within the film.
Yet we must never forget that life and the struggles of the living creature—including the living symbol-using creature that is the human—extends beyond the realm of art objects as defined by specific cultural traditions of production and reception. Our activities can hold the same level of integration as an art object; the difference is simply in the details. The form is still there—an attentively engaged present funded by the past and anticipating the future.
We can engage this present skillfully, or mechanically or randomly. The latter two qualities, of course, parallel the two extremes between which lies the aesthetic: the lockstep mechanism of pure execution and a randomness that allows of no build or meaningful culmination.
This reading of aesthetic experience as a certain manner of attention to present experience could also be read as a form of Deweyan mindfulness. Such a skilful and intelligent engagement with experience is as artful as any work on an artistic medium for Dewey. There is still media in the artful life, it is merely the material of activity and experience itself.
NOTES 1. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. For a similar way of accounting for the aesthetic, see Philip W. Ibid, p. Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. Armen T. Richard E. Hart and Douglas R. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, p. Related Papers. By Scott R. John Dewey and the Question of Artful Communication. Economic Experience as Art?
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Volume Editors: Patricia L. Maarhuis and A. This book is a pragmatic attempt to encourage application of aesthetic learning and living, ekphrasic interpretation, critical art, and agonist pluralism. There are two foci: a Deweyan philosophy and educational themes with b analysis and examples of how educators, artists, and researchers envision and enact artful meaning making. This structure meets the needs of university and high school audiences, who are accustomed to learning about challenging ideas through multimedia and aesthetic experience.
Contributors are: James M. Albrecht, Adam I. Attwood, John Baldacchino, Carolyn L. Berenato, M. Noonan, Louise G. Phillips, Scott L. Copyright Year: E-Book PDF. Login via Institution. Prices from excl. VAT :. View PDF Flyer. Contents About. Biographical Note Patricia L. She has co-authored Parallaxic Praxis: Multimodal Interdisciplinary Pedagogical Research Design Vernon Press, and book chapters on art-based inquiry about experiences of violence.
Rud was president of the John Dewey Society — and edited its peer-reviewed international journal, Education and Culture , — It provides a refreshing dialogue between threads of fields too often artificially separated, as it connects resources in American, continental, and postmodern traditions with foundational insights and concerns of Plato and Aristotle. Its energy of analysis is akin to midth c. Maarhuis and Rud have assembled a wide-ranging set of essays that illuminate our aesthetic experience of contemporary artistic and non-artistic works of very different kinds.
Their imaginative rediscovery of Dewey's insights and interests in the present will be revitalizing for scholars of aesthetic education.
Imagining Dewey by Maarhuis and Rud pulls together philosophy, pedagogy, and making to create a dialogic canvas of polyglossia on the aesthetics of unfolding life-learning. This collection bids for a reader response that experiences the art of living fully alive, in the halo of the present flash and flow, awake to the quickening of unity and dissonance of the real, the complexity of beauty, the freedom of harmony, the openness of rhythm.
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