Abstract[1] John Dewey is frequently mentioned as an important forerunner of
everyday aesthetics. In this article, I
attempt to provide an updated view of Dewey’s place within everyday aesthetics
by drawing attention to aspects in Dewey’s own work and in contemporary
interpretations of his philosophy that have not been thoroughly discussed in
the context of everyday aesthetics. In
the first part, I offer a reading of Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience
that unties its content through noting the important position Dewey ascribes to
imagination in aesthetic experience in the later parts of Art as Experience. The second pillar of the pragmatist theory of
everyday aesthetics developed in this paper is formed by recent
Deweyan-inspired views in pragmatist ethics on the vital role of imagination in
moral life. I will place the view of
everyday aesthetics emerging from these pragmatist sources within current
developments of everyday aesthetics and defend it over other positions on offer.
Keywords
aesthetic experience, Dewey, everyday aesthetics, Haapala, imagination, Leddy, Saito
1. Introduction
As
a sub-discipline of philosophical aesthetics, everyday aesthetics is a
relatively new phenomenon. However, it
has often been noted in the growing literature on the aesthetics of everyday
life that this field is not without historical predecessors.[2] A figure that most frequently comes up in this
connection is the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey; he has even been called
“the grandfather” of the discipline.[3] That Dewey has been widely seen as an
important forerunner for everyday aesthetics, and that his work has served as a
source of inspiration for contemporary everyday aestheticians is understandable
since the connections between the central tenets of Dewey’s classic work in
aesthetics, Art as Experience (1934),
and everyday aesthetics are quite evident. For example, at the beginning of this work,
Dewey insisted that “in order to understand the aesthetic in its ultimate and
approved forms, one must begin with it in the raw,” that is, “in the events and
scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of a man, arousing his interest and
affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens.” Among these
sorts of objects and events Dewey counts such everyday phenomena as “the
fire-engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous holes in the earth;
the human-fly climbing the steeple-side.”[4]
Dewey
expanded his attempt to restore the starting point of analyses of aesthetic
experience to non-art, everyday phenomena by developing a critique of a view he
calls “the museum conception of art.” According
to this critique, the dichotomy between art and the everyday that Dewey found
the aesthetic theory of his time to be dominated by was based on an erroneous
conception of aesthetic experience, the historical roots of which Dewey tries
to untie in the beginning of Art as
Experience. The idea of art museums
and other art institutions as the only places where genuine aesthetic
experiences can occur was, in Dewey’s view, a result of certain historical
developments having to do with the rise of nationalism in the Western world. The conception of art, meshed with
nationalistic tendencies, implied a view of the art museum as “the beauty
parlor of civilization,” as Dewey’s trenchant phrase goes,[5] where each nation
exhibited its greatest artistic achievements or, in some cases, artistic
robberies.
In
Dewey’s eyes, there were no winners in this development. Art was concealed in a realm of its own that
was understood as an arena essentially different from people’s everyday goals
and interests. There was no room for
genuine manifestations of the aesthetic in the web formed by the needs, values,
and attitudes characterizing people’s everyday lives. In order to achieve a genuine aesthetic
experience one had to leave this everyday baggage behind and enter the
demarcated spaces of the museum and the concert hall.[6]
Even
though these critical edges of Dewey’s aesthetics connect it to the general ethos of everyday aesthetics, the
relationship of Dewey’s aesthetic thinking to this developing field of
contemporary aesthetics is not without problems. This is because his main work in aesthetics contains
passages in which he grieves over the fact that people’s “ordinary experience
is often infected with apathy, lassitude, and stereotype” characterized by our
inability to “get neither the quality through sense nor the meaning of things
through thought.” In these experiences,
“the ‘world’ is too much with us as burden or distraction” and “we are not
sufficiently alive to feel the tang of sense nor yet to be moved by thought.” “We are,” Dewey wrote, “oppressed by our
surroundings or are callous to them.” Dewey concludes his pessimistic analysis of
ordinary experiences: “Were it not for
the oppressions and monotonies of daily experience, the realm of dream and
reverie would not be attractive.”[7]
This
analysis of ordinary experience found in Art
as Experience shows that Dewey does not find everyday phenomena, in some
ways, unreservedly aesthetic. Rather,
people’s everyday must include experiences with specific qualities before it can
be considered aesthetic in a genuine Deweyan sense. In this paper, I shall first shed light on
these qualities by offering a reading of Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience
that highlights the role he attributes to imagination in this form of
experience in the later parts of Art as
Experience. Dewey’s complex (and
some might describe as rambling) account of aesthetic experience has not been
approached through his notion of imagination as systematically as I intend to
do in the first part of the paper. I
believe that this sort of approach to Dewey’s central concept helps to
illuminate some of its key features. However,
it also opens up an interesting connection to pragmatist-inspired ethics, where
imagination has been recently seen as a key element in the moral aspects of our
lives. In this context, aesthetic
experience has been considered to have a central role in developing the
capacities required in a flourishing moral life.[8] My belief is that this trend of pragmatism
offers some new perspectives on assessing Dewey’s significance for the more
recent developments of everyday aesthetics.
Richard
Shusterman has provided a distinction between two possible ways of
understanding a theory on the aesthetics of everyday life that I think
helpfully frames some of the key debates within contemporary everyday
aesthetics.[9] The first one concentrates on the everydayness
or ordinariness of the everyday and argues that the feelings of familiarity, in
particular that arise from everyday objects and events, involve their own,
though different, kind of aesthetic character from those raised by artworks, where
we usually value the new and the surprising.[10] The second understanding of everyday
aesthetics included in Shusterman’s distinction does not build the aesthetic
character of everyday objects and happenings on their familiarity and
routine-like character but takes a more reconstructive attitude toward the
everyday. It tries to find the means to integrate
those experiences that grab people’s attention from the flow of ordinary
experience and merit a heightened perception, like the best experiences of art
do, as more significant elements of peoples’ everyday lives.[11] Dewey clearly belongs to Shusterman’s second
understanding of everyday aesthetics. It
is my belief that the reading of Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience that
emphasizes the role of imagination in it provides some fresh insight into the
significance of Dewey’s aesthetics for this part of everyday aesthetics, and
brings forth some merits that the Deweyan approach to everyday aesthetics has over
the first variation in Shusterman’s distinction.
2. Dewey on aesthetic experience and imagination
Dewey’s
Art as Experience depicts the
experiential dimension of human life as a kind of continuous transformative
flow that never finds a final rest. Douglas
Browning provides an apt description of the character of this stream of
experience that Dewey finds essential to human life:
Day
after day we find ourselves within an integral part of those ever-changing and
always unique situations that constitute our lives and mark out their shifting
horizons. Each of us is bound within
this situational stream, a stream which is never at rest, always in transit. We cannot stop it or freeze it even for a
second…. [T]his stream of situations in our lives is precisely that to which
Dewey refers by the term ‘experience’.[12]
An
important reason why this stream of experience never finds a rest is that our
surroundings are in endless change and we constantly encounter new situations
and environments. “[L]ife goes on in an
environment; not merely in it but because of it, through interaction with it.”[13] This is the heart of Dewey’s interactional
view of our relationship to our environments.
Dewey believed that we are literally shaped by the environments we
encounter and the kinds of experiences we have in them. Environments, for example, provide
opportunities for certain kinds of experiences, but they can also impose limits
on our ways of thinking and acting.
Dewey
locates the roots of aesthetic experience in this general interactional
relationship that he sees prevailing between “the live creature” and his or her
environment. In this respect, aesthetic
experience is not some isolated particular in the sea of experience that makes
up our lives. But there is also
something exceptional in aesthetic experience for Dewey; it forms, within the
general experiential flow of human life, a particularly heightened and complex
experiential condensation. As is
well-known, Dewey never provided a definitive definition of aesthetic
experience. However, qualities that
often appear in his analyses include cumulativeness, intensity, and
fulfillment. Dewey contrasts aesthetic
experience to what he calls “inchoate experience,” which involves the opposite
qualities. Unlike aesthetic experience, here
the material of experience does not reach a fulfillment. Things follow each other, but the different
points of the experience in no way build on earlier phases of the experience or
develop them. However, “because of
continuous merging” there are “no holes, mechanical junctions, and dead
centers” in aesthetic experience.[14]
Aesthetic
experience is set off by some individual factors, such as opening a book; directing
a first glance at a painting; beginning to listen to a piece of music; entering
a natural environment or a building; or beginning a meal or a conversation. Aesthetic experience has a temporal aspect,
which means that the material of the experience does not remain unchanged but
the elements initiating the experience, like the first lines of a book, merge
into new ones as the experience proceeds and complex relationships are formed
between the past and newer elements of the experience. When these different parts of the experience
form a distinctive kind of orderly, developing unity that stands out from the
general experiential stream of our lives, the experience in question is an
aesthetic experience. This is why Dewey
thought aesthetic experience marks “experience in its integrity.”[15]
Especially
in the later parts of Art as Experience,
Dewey considers aesthetic experience more intently in light of the notion of
imagination. Right at the beginning of Chapter
Twelve, Dewey states that “esthetic experience is imaginative.”[16] Imagination is, of course, a highly contested
concept in philosophy and aesthetics; imagination is also a rather tricky
notion in Dewey’s philosophy. It appears
widely in his work and different aspects are highlighted in different contexts.
However at a basic level, Dewey uses the
term 'imagination,' to refer to a capacity to take on complex wholes and to
build relationships between the different elements making up these totalities. In other words, for Dewey it is “a way of seeing and feeling things as they
compose an integral whole.”[17]
The
connections Dewey builds between aesthetic experience and imagination are, in
my view, explained by the distinctive features he attributes to this form of
experience. Aesthetic experience is
composed of individual parts that fuse into new elements as the experience
proceeds, ultimately forming a distinct, complex experiential unit. Imagination, in the Deweyan understanding,
seems to be the faculty that keeps the experience intact and structures the
experience into an articulate, complex unity. Imagination, in other words, guarantees the
unity of the experience but at the same time gives the experience its structure
by connecting and merging earlier parts of the experience into new ones. As Dewey explained, “[i]maginative vision is
the power that unifies all the constituents of the matter of a work of art,
making a whole out of them in all their variety.”[18] This kind of merging of old and new elements
is one of the key aspects of the Deweyan sense of imagination, and this feature
is, according to Dewey, most powerfully present in aesthetic experience.
The
Deweyan sense of imagination also has to do with entertaining possibilities. Dewey argued that it is particularly artworks
that embody possibilities “that are not elsewhere actualized.” This aspect of artworks makes them into
important arenas for the use of imagination in Dewey’s eyes, for the kind of
embodiment of possibilities artworks exhibit “is the best evidence that can be
found of the true nature of imagination.”[19]
It
is also an important aspect of Dewey’s theory of imagination to reject views
that identify imagination with “a power that does certain things.” In connection with imagination, Dewey also wrote
of “an imaginative experience,” which is “what happens when varied materials of sense quality, emotion, and
meaning come together in a union that marks a new birth in the world.”[20] This characterization found in Dewey seems to
suggest that he did not consider imagination a mental faculty that a person can
actively operate but instances of imaginative experience happen without
conscious effort on the part of a person. In other words, imagination seems to be more
akin to a way of experiencing than a mental faculty like the power to entertain
certain thoughts.
It
can be argued that in describing imagination as having to do with building
relationships within a complex whole, my reading of Dewey fails to account for the kind of
happening-like aspect that Dewey attributes to the work of imagination. It is true that for Dewey imagination is not
a capacity that a person can switch on and off at will. Nevertheless, I think it can be described in
the kind of terminology I have used in my explication, for I believe the
consciousness a person has of the working of his or her imagination can take
different levels. Sometimes a person’s
experience can reach an imaginative level without much conscious effort, for
the capacity to feel things as complex wholes that Dewey found central to
imagination may be so ingrained in a person’s character, as Dewey might put it,
that no conscious effort is needed. In
some other cases, for example when encountering a highly complex work of art
like Wagner’s Parsifal, reaching the
imaginative level in one’s experience, that is, experiencing the work as an
integral whole, may require much more conscious effort on the part of the
agent. Also, if a person lacks a
capacity to feel things as integral wholes altogether, his or her experience
cannot reach the level of experience Dewey singled out as imaginative. I believe that, at least in this weaker sense
sketched here, the Deweyan understanding of imagination can be considered as a
capacity or a power of an agent. It is,
in other words, a kind of trait of a person’s character.
It
might also be useful to explicate Dewey’s notion of imagination from the
perspective of the artist and receiver. For
it might be argued that my explication of imagination as a form of building
relationships within a complex whole looks at imagination from the side of the
artist. That is, it is the task of the
artist to build complex
relationships, for example between characters in a novel he or she is writing. When the receiver, in turn, manages to feel the complex relationships the
artist has built, he or she is able to experience the final work imaginatively.
Dewey would, however, reject this
dichotomy, for he did not view the activities required from the artist and the
experiencer as completely distinct since they both involve similar phases of
doing and undergoing. That is, according
to Dewey, “taking in” an artwork “involves activities that are comparable to
those of the creator,” and “[R]eceptivity is not passivity. It, too, is a process consisting of a series
of responsive acts that accumulate toward objective fulfillment.”[21] In this respect, Dewey would arguably not
consider feeling things as integral wholes and building relationships between
parts of a whole as distinct activities but as two sides of the same coin.
A
distinction between two forms of imagination, the imaginative and the
imaginary, is still one important element of Dewey’s view of imagination and aesthetic
experience I want raise. The key
difference between these two forms of imagination is their relationship to the
material that serves as the basis for its functioning. In the case of the imaginary, it is distanced
and detached because the relationship between imagination and material cannot reach
the kind of cumulativeness that characterizes the imaginative form of
imagination. It is imaginary, that is,
illusory or fanciful, precisely in this respect. In cases of the imaginary, “mind and matter do
not squarely meet and interpenetrate” but rather “mind stays aloof for the most
part and toys with material rather than boldly grasping it.”[22] Contrary to the imaginary, the imaginative is
characterized precisely by the kind of merging of different elements that Dewey
saw as essential to aesthetic experience. Imaginative experience, in other words,
“exemplifies more fully than any other kind of experience what experience
itself is in its very movement and structure.”[23] 3. Imagination in pragmatist ethics
Imagination
has become a center of focus also in contemporary pragmatist ethics. Dewey had already found imagination to be “the
chief instrument of the good,”[24] and some
pragmatist-inspired moral philosophers have continued in Dewey’s footsteps by
attempting to build a more complete view of imagination’s relevance for the
moral aspects of our lives. Now, it is
my belief that some key points of this trend of pragmatism are highly relevant to
the topic of this paper, namely Dewey and everyday aesthetics, for they reveal
aspects of value in Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experience that have not
been previously considered within everyday aesthetics. The fuller understanding of the significance
of the Deweyan idea of aesthetic experience revealed by the framework of
pragmatist ethics also provides a background for defending the Deweyan take on
everyday aesthetics against some criticisms, which I shall consider in the next
part of the paper.
One
of the chief background assumptions of this tradition of ethics is a kind of
“situationalist”[25]
approach to moral problems, according to which moral situations often include
unique and situation-specific features and irresolvable-seeming conflicts, for
example, between individual hopes and communal demands, that cannot be
adequately embraced with the help of abstract principles and generalizations. Since moral situations do not “come in duplicates,”[26] the view of ethics
arising from Dewey’s writings postulates a more limited role for
pre-established rules and principles in the encounters our moral life consists
of, and in untangling the possible situational exigencies they may involve than
more normative oriented approaches to questions of moral philosophy.
This
is where imagination enters the picture. Steven Fesmire has argued that imagination is
precisely the sort of capacity that, with the help of moral deliberation, can
be attuned to the kind of key the Deweyan situationalist approach to moral
situations requires. It allows for a
creative “tapping of a situation’s possibilities,” which, as we saw in the
previous section, is one of the central senses of imagination found in Dewey’s
work.[27] Imagination, in other words, signifies “the
capacity to concretely perceive what is before us in light of what could be”
and can bring to light “undisclosed possibilities” inherent in the situation at
hand.[28] Thus, imagination becomes an indispensable
source of material for moral deliberation.
While
Fesmire has been the most important proponent of the imagination-centered
approach in contemporary pragmatist ethics, the importance of imagination in a
moral life has also been acknowledged by other philosophers working in this
tradition. Gregory Pappas, for example,
argues that from Dewey’s texts on ethics there emerges a view of an ideal moral
self.[29] The capacity for sympathy is one of the
important virtues of this kind of self.[30] According to Pappas, for the concept of
sympathy Dewey referred to “a special kind of sensitivity” that consists of the
ability to take on the viewpoints of other people. This virtue is a vital part of the ideal moral
self Dewey outlined, for with the help of sympathy, material for moral
deliberation can be acquired “that cannot be obtained through any other means.”[31] The feeling of sympathy widens the horizon of
our moral deliberation and, according to Pappas, Dewey found it to be a key
element in the capacity to approach other people as ends in themselves.[32]
The
characteristic traits of sympathy again show the importance of imagination for
the ethical vision contained in Dewey’s works.
According to Pappas, the ability to “reach beyond one’s narrow view of
things and understand others through sympathetic communication requires
imagination, rather than the mere manipulation of information.”[33] Even though Dewey emphasized the affective
aspects of sympathy, the emergence of the feeling of sympathy within a person
also requires a grasp of the other’s situation and how things look to a person
in such a situation. In other words,
sympathetic engagement with another does not primarily consist of entering
another person’s mind but requires a wider engagement with the situation of a
person. This is precisely what
imagination makes possible. Without such
understanding, a proper feeling of sympathy toward another person could not
arise.
Pappas
also attaches a strong communal dimension to the feeling of sympathy. The emergence and development of sympathy is
only possible in certain kinds of communities and through certain kinds of
communal experiences. Imagination is yet
again a key element in both, for “significant learning and shared experience”
can only occur “when individuals in communication are able to emotionally and
imaginatively take the role of the other.”[34] Pappas sees the feeling of sympathy as crucial
for the emergence of a morally good self and, in fact, argues that communities that
do not provide the possibility for the kinds of imaginative experiences at the
heart of it have very little hope.[35]
Fesmire
illuminates the important role he believes imagination has in moral life with the
distinction between the imaginative and
the imaginary form of imagination mentioned earlier. It is imagination precisely in the imaginative
sense outlined by Dewey, the vital position of which Fesmire seeks to defend for moral life. Following Dewey, Fesmire compares the
imaginary form of imagination to “moral fantasy,” and believes that it is this
type of imagination to which the negative connotations sometimes attached to
imagination of “caprice” and of mere “imagining things” apply. These criticisms, however, do not apply to the
imaginative, for it is, in Fesmire’s words, “imbued with sociocultural meanings
and rooted in problematic conditions.”[36] Unlike the “mind-wandering and wayward fancy”
of the imaginary,[37]
“the imaginative vision elicits possibilities that are interwoven within the
texture of the actual.”[38] So once the notion of imagination has been
properly understood along the lines of Dewey’s imaginative sense, its place as
a “central focus in ethical theorizing” should be acknowledged,[39] along with the key role
it plays in enriching people’s possibility of living more responsive and
morally rewarding lives.[40] 4. Dewey and contemporary everyday aesthetics
Even
though Dewey has been widely considered an important background figure for the
emerging field of everyday aesthetics, some central ideas of Dewey’s aesthetics
have also been seen as hard to reconcile with the goals some of its most
important theorists have found central to it. Attempts to build a more systematic theory of
everyday aesthetics on the principles of Dewey’s aesthetics seem to face a key
problem concerning the Deweyan notion of aesthetic experience itself. For it has been argued that peoples’ everyday
experiences only rarely seem to achieve the kind of rhythmic, cumulative, and developmental
character that Dewey found central to aesthetic experience. For example, according to Yuriko Saito,
Deweyan aesthetic experiences are among “the exceptions” in the flow of
peoples’ everyday life. She does
acknowledge their significance, but because of their rarity, the conception of
aesthetic experience understood according to Deweyan principles offers a rather
limited basis for building a comprehensive understanding of the aesthetics of
everyday life.
Instead
of focusing on what Saito calls “standout experiences,” which she considers the
Deweyan aesthetic experience to be a prime example, a theory of everyday
aesthetics should focus on the everydayness of everyday life and analyze the
experiential aspects of the everyday in terms of such concepts as recurrence,
routine, and closeness. We do not often
pay such close attention to the objects belonging to our everyday, but they nevertheless
manage to provide a kind of silent feeling of safety for our lives.[41] Or, as Arto Haapala, another proponent of this
trend of everyday aesthetics, formulates this kind of concealed aesthetic
character of the everyday, “Ordinary
everyday objects lack the surprise element or freshness of the strange;
nevertheless this gives us pleasure through a kind of comforting stability.”[42]
Thomas
Leddy, however, has offered a different view of the starting points of everyday
aesthetics that exhibits a much more favorable attitude toward Dewey’s
aesthetics. Though he finds Dewey’s
conception of aesthetic experience too narrow for covering the whole domain of
everyday life,[43]
he nevertheless argues that everyday aesthetics should pay more attention to experiences
that rise above the mundane and the ordinary than Saito considers necessary. Most of our everyday experiences, indeed, do not satisfy the criteria of a Deweyan
aesthetic experience. However, Leddy thinks
this does not remove the possibility of approaching it as “an ideal” that we
should aim for.[44]
It is not the ordinariness of the
ordinary that is important but rather “the way in which the ordinary can be
made extraordinary,”[45] and Dewey’s conception of
aesthetic experience provides for Leddy an important model for what it means to
render the ordinary extraordinary. However, it is my belief that the way in which
imagination has been approached in the framework of pragmatist ethics reveals lines
of defense for the Deweyan take on everyday aesthetics that Leddy does not
explore.
5. Aesthetic experience and the imaginative everyday
In
his interpretation of Dewey’s ethics, Fesmire places aesthetic experience at
the very heart of the vision of moral life emerging from Dewey’s work.[46] In his reading of Dewey, this aspect proves
highly relevant to weighing the significance of Dewey’s ideas for everyday
aesthetics. Given the capacities
considered vital for a flourishing moral life in the conception of morality
contemporary pragmatists have built on Dewey’s views, aesthetic experience
turns out to have an important role in developing those capacities. This is explained by the connection Dewey
builds between aesthetic experience and imagination, which I introduced
earlier. One of the benefits of
approaching Dewey’s concept of aesthetic experience in light of his views on
imagination is that it gives a more robust sense of its structure and conditions,
that is, that it consists of a coherent, developing unity. If aesthetic experience indeed has this kind
of structure, then it cannot be grounded on a simple sense perception but must
be underlain by more complex mental phenomena. I understood Dewey to refer to these with his
concept of imagination.
As
we saw, imagination, indeed, is not for Dewey a power a person possesses, like
the power to move one’s arm or to think certain thoughts. It may not be a power to do certain things,
but I argued that imagination can, nevertheless, be considered a capacity of a
person, at least in the sense that certain people have the ability to engage
with and experience situations imaginatively and that Dewey, moreover, thinks this
ability can be developed. If this were
not the case, much of Dewey’s writings on education would not really make much
sense.
Now,
if imagination and aesthetic experience are indeed connected in the way I
suggested in my reading of Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experience in the
first part of this paper, environments, artifacts, situations, artworks, and so
on, that give the possibility for aesthetic experiences are also among the
things that stir and activate our imaginative capacities and the imaginative
traits of our character. In other words,
our imaginative capacities to see and feel things as complex integral wholes are
actively engaged when our experience reaches an aesthetic level. Even though Fesmire does not provide as
thorough an examination of Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience and of its
connection to imagination as I have done in this article, his understanding of
the power of aesthetic experience to sustain and develop our imaginative
capacities seems to coincide with the view emerging from my reading of Dewey,
for he wrote that “we imagine most effectively when we live in an aesthetically
funded present.”[47]
Now,
in my view, the significant role that aesthetic experience turns out to have in
this pragmatist framework puts the critique leveled against the Deweyan notion
of aesthetic experience within contemporary everyday aesthetics in a new light.
If the aesthetic aspects of our lives
can indeed have the sorts of ramifications presented above, it would seem
strange or even harmful not to include Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience
among the central components of everyday aesthetics. In this respect, I support Leddy’s understanding
of Dewey’s place within everyday aesthetics. Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience should be
one of the cornerstones of the field, and more investigation should be devoted to
how the aesthetics of our everyday life can contribute to the development of
our imaginative capacities to experience things and situations as integral
wholes, which the pragmatists considered important pillars of a flourishing
moral life. It is also important to notice, particularly in the context of
everyday aesthetics, that the position of imagination is not limited to the
highpoints of one’s everyday experience, that is, cases of Deweyan “experiences,”
but by helping one to get more out of the situations one faces in one’s
everyday, it can enliven everyday life in a more general sense.[48]
The
Deweyan conception of everyday aesthetics developed in this article also
provides a new perspective on another point of controversy between Leddy and
Saito. Leddy criticizes Saito’s take on
everyday aesthetics for ruling out art from its domain in a too categorical
way.[49] The problem he sees in this kind of approach
to everyday aesthetics is that it is in danger of overlooking the ways in which
everyday life serves as a source of inspiration for many artists, and the
different ways in which art can have an effect on our experience and perception
of everyday life. Instead of exclusion,
Leddy suggests that everyday aesthetics should devote more attention to “the
dynamic relationship” that he thinks prevails between art and the everyday.[50]
Leddy’s
criticism of Saito is, again, in line with Dewey’s views, for one of the
central points of Dewey’s critique of the museum conception of art is to reveal
the artificiality of all sharp distinctions between art and the everyday. Leddy’s insistence on the need for a further
examination of the dynamic relationship he believes there is between art and
the everyday actually and interestingly draws attention to the other side of
Dewey’s famous critique. An attempt to undermine
the dichotomy between art and the everyday by focusing on the potential many
everyday items and events have for engendering experiences of the aesthetic
kind is surely an important part of that critique. However, it is an equally important goal of
Dewey’s criticism to highlight the fact that the effect of the experiences we
undergo in museums and concert halls do not cease at their front doors but can,
in a way, live on and heighten the quality of our everyday lives.
Further
insight into this aspect of Dewey’s critique of the museum conception of art is
provided by the distinction Dewey made between an art product and a work of
art. With this distinction, Dewey tries
to draw attention to two sides of an artwork. The concept ‘art product’ refers to artworks
as concrete physical objects. The other
pole of this conceptual distinction highlights the experiential aspects and
dynamic potentials artworks possess. That
is, for Dewey the work of art is “what the product does, its working,” and
ideally the product’s working marks “the beginning of a complex interaction.”[51]
When
combined with Dewey’s critique of the museum conception of art, this
distinction implies that museums and other art institutions should not be seen
as mere containers for art products but should also actively seek out the means
of enhancing the potential of the products they contain. Thus, museums would
serve as spurs for complex interactions, thereby extending the effect of imaginative
experiences people have in connection with artworks to their everyday lives. So from a Deweyan perspective, excluding art
from the domain of everyday aesthetics does not only appear arbitrary but it
may even be potentially harmful. What is
needed is more investigation on the dynamic relationship between art and the
everyday, which Leddy frames as a central question for everyday aesthetics.
The
points of emphasis apparent in the Deweyan approach to everyday aesthetics listed
here show why it can be considered a primary example of the second variant of
everyday aesthetics in Shusterman’s distinction introduced at the beginning of
this paper. This kind of take on
everyday aesthetics does not merely propose a certain analysis of aesthetic
experience but puts forth reasons why such experiences are significant and
tries to develop means for making them more omnipresent phenomena in people’s
everyday lives.
Now,
I have said very little about the pragmatic or reconstructive aspects of the Deweyan
approach to everyday aesthetics developed in this paper, that is, about the ways
in which the characteristic features Dewey lists for aesthetic experience can
be made into essential parts of the experiential dimensions of people’s
everyday life.[52]
But needless to say, this would mean a
close look at the environments people inhabit, the kinds of interactions they
afford, and how those environments need to be transformed so that they allow a ground
for aesthetic and imaginative engagements of the Deweyan kind. This examination needs to be left for another
occasion. However, what I hope to have
shown in this article is the significance of such undertakings, and that the
line of everyday aesthetics taking its inspiration from Dewey uncovers important
paths of research that should be further explored within everyday aesthetics.
The
pragmatist understanding of everyday aesthetics also reveals problematic
aspects in some other recent conceptions of everyday aesthetics. In Art
as Experience, Dewey outlined two possible worlds in which aesthetic
experience could not occur. In one of
Dewey’s scenarios, aesthetic experience is depicted as an impossible phenomenon
in a world that is “finished, ended.” Aesthetic
experience could not occur in this kind of world because it lacks the elements
of “suspense and crisis” and, therefore, there would be “no opportunity for
resolution.” “Where everything is
already complete,” experience could not develop cumulatively nor could it reach
a closing fulfillment in the way aesthetic experience, in Dewey’s
understanding, requires.[53]
The
world so portrayed by Dewey comes strikingly close to a world that is saturated
by familiarity and routines, that is, by qualities where the first variant of
everyday aesthetics in Shusterman’s taxonomy searches for the proper aesthetic
character of the everyday. From a
Deweyan perspective, this would be an aesthetic world only in a rather barren
sense of the term. Though critical of
Dewey, Saito incorporates within her conception of everyday aesthetics what she
calls “the hidden gems” of the everyday within which she includes such things
as “the cracks on the floor boards, the way in which mold and mildew grow, and
the oil stains on the driveway surface.”[54] In her view, these sorts of surprising
phenomena are important sources of enrichment of everyday life and they disrupt
in a positive sense the routine-like character of our everyday life. Thus, it is debatable how far Dewey’s picture
of an unaesthetic world corresponds with the conception of the everyday implied
by Saito’s theory of everyday aesthetics.
However,
the world portrayed by Dewey bears some significant similarities at least with
Haapala’s understanding of everyday aesthetics, and Dewey’s account also raises
some genuine worries about it. For, if
Dewey’s analysis of the relationship between aesthetic experience and
imagination is accurate, then the kind of world in which Dewey finds aesthetic
experience an impossible phenomenon would also provide very little stimulation
for our imagination. One of the primary
goals of the Deweyan take on everyday aesthetics sketched in this paper is
precisely to find ways of avoiding this kind of world and, in this respect, it
stands in stark contrast with theories that build an aesthetics of everyday life
on the everydayness of the everyday.[55]
Kalle Puolakka kalle.puolakka@helsinki.fi
Kalle Puolakka, Ph.D. currently works as a university researcher of
aesthetics at the International Institute of Applied Aesthetics, Palmenia
Centre, University of Helsinki. He is the author of Relativism and Intentionalism
in Interpretation. Davidson, Hermeneutics, and Pragmatism (Lexington Books,
2011), as well as some dozen articles in aesthetics and philosophy of art. His
most recent article in the field of pragmatist aesthetics is “Pragmatist
Cultural Naturalism: Dewey and Rorty,” The European Legacy. Toward New
Paradigms, 19, 2 (2014), 229-239.
Published May 5, 2014.
Endnotes
[1] This essay
was completed during my term as the Erik Allardt Fellow at The Swedish
Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS). The
stipend from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, which made my visit possible, is
gratefully acknowledged. An earlier
version of this paper was presented at the SCAS seminar series. I thank the participants of the seminar for an
extremely live conversation, as well as the people at SCAS, both the fellows
and other personnel, for making my visit the most rewarding time of my academic
life thus far.
[2] See especially the historical look provided by Thomas Leddy in his Extraordinary in the Ordinary. An Aesthetics of Everyday Life
(Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press,
2012), Chapter 1. See also Ossi Naukkarinen “What is
‘Everyday’ in Everyday Aesthetics?” Contemporary
Aesthetics, Vol. 11 (2013), endnote 1.
[3] Leddy, The Extraordinary in the
Ordinary, p. 44. Arnold Berleant and
Crispin Sartwell give similar assessments of Dewey’s place within everyday
aesthetics. See Arnold Berleant, Aesthetics beyond the Arts. New and Recent Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), p. 164; Crispin Sartwell
“Aesthetics of the Everyday,” in The
Oxford Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 761-770.
[4] John Dewey, Art as Experience
(New York: Perigee, 1934; reprinted
1980), pp. 4-5.
[8] See especially Steven Fesmire, John
Dewey and Moral Imagination. Pragmatism in Ethics (Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press,
2003).
[10] Shusterman does not explicitly mention which theorists he thinks belong
to this strand of everyday aesthetics, but at least Yuriko Saito’s and Arto
Haapala’s work contain points of emphasis that arguably make them members of
this trend of everyday aesthetics. See
Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp.
48-53 and Arto Haapala, “On the Aesthetics of the Everyday. Familiarity, Strangeness, and the Meaning of
Place,” in The Aesthetics of Everyday
Life, eds. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 39-55. It should be noted that there are also some
important differences between Saito’s and Haapala’s approaches. Saito, for example, emphasizes the importance
of detecting hidden “aesthetic gems” in our everyday life such as a peculiar
looking stain in a linen or “an interesting shadow cast by a broken window,”
Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, p. 244. These sorts of factors do not play a
significant role in Haapala’s theory of everyday aesthetics. Instead, he seeks to locate the aesthetics of
the everyday to a level of experience, which does not involve the kind of
conscious attention like the concealed “aesthetic treasures” Saito discusses
do.
[11] By defining everyday aesthetics as the transformation of the ordinary
into the extraordinary, Thomas Leddy seems to be the prime representative of
this line of pursuing the aesthetics of everyday life. See Leddy, The
Extraordinary in the Ordinary.
[12] Douglas Browning, “Understanding Dewey: Starting at the Starting Point,” paper
presented at the XIV Congresso Interamericano de Filosofia, Puebla Mexico,
August 19, 1999. Quoted in Gregory
Pappas, John Dewey’s Ethics. Democracy as Experience (Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press), p.
24.
[13] Dewey, Art as Experience, p.
13.
[17] Ibid., p. 267. Italics in the
original.
[20] Ibid., p. 267. Italics in the original.
[25] Pappas, John Dewey’s Ethics,
p. 47.
[26] Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral
Imagination, p. 58.
[29] Pappas, John Dewey’s Ethics,
p. 8.
[30] Leddy also shortly raises the importance of sympathy for proper moral
reflection and considers it “the only basis upon which any sort of moral
equilibrium and understanding can be achieved.” See his Extraordinary
in the Ordinary, p. 118.
[36] Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral
Imagination, pp. 66-67
[37] John Dewey, Democracy and
Education: An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Education, Vol. 9 of The
Middle Works of John Dewey 1889-1924: 1916 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1976-1988), p. 245.
[38] Dewey, Art as Experience, p.
345.
[39] Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral
Imagination, p. 60.
[41] Saito, Everyday Aesthetics,
pp. 44-48. Sherri Irvin raises similar
worries about Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience. See her “The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in
Ordinary Experience,” British Journal of
Aesthetics, 48, 1 (2008), 21-44.
[42] Haapala, “On the Aesthetics of the Everyday,” p. 50.
[43] Leddy, The Extraordinary in the
Ordinary, p. 90, p. 204.
[46] Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral
Imagination, p. 4. Pappas also frequently describes the
Deweyan ideal of moral life in aesthetic terms, as well as contrasting the
mechanical life-style caused by a too severe belief on the power of rules and
codes to engender genuine morality that Dewey argued against to “an aesthetic
moral life.” See Pappas, John Dewey’s Ethics, p. 46, p. 51, p.
152, p. 177.
[47] Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral
Imagination, p. 128.
[48] The position
of Dewey’s views within everyday aesthetics also depends heavily on how widely
the Deweyan notion of “an experience” can cover the domain of everyday life. I think a problem with Saito’s critique of
Dewey is that it involves a reading of Dewey’s notion, which overemphasizes the
standout character of aesthetic experiences of the Deweyan kind. See Saito, Everyday
Aesthetics, pp. 44-46. For more
mundane examples of “an experiences” see Scott Stroud’s Deweyan inspired
discussion of work and communication in his John
Dewey and the Artful Life. Pragmatism,
Aesthetics, and Morality (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011),
pp. 154-162 and pp. 179-188.
[49] Leddy, Extraordinary in the
Ordinary, p. 112.
[52] Scott Stroud has provided such examinations in his John Dewey and the Artful Life. See especially chapters 6-8.
[53] Dewey, Art as Experience, p.
17.
[54] Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, p. 202
[55] A great
thank you to the anonymous reviewer of Contemporary
Aesthetics for many helpful and challenging remarks.
|