Henry David Aiken, professor of philosophy at Harvard, here completes his series on American pragmatism. The previous articles, on Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, appeared in our August and September issues, respectively. All three will be brought together in a book to be published by Knopf, the publisher also of Mr. Aiken’s Reason and Conduct, out this month

In claiming that John Dewey’s Art as Experience marks a turning point in the development both of pragmatism and of aesthetics I am aware of enunciating a compound paradox. What on earth can a philosophy so preoccupied with problems, consequences, and methods tell us about that most gloriously inconsequential and unproblematic of objects, the work of art, or that most mysterious of human activities, artistic creation? And how can such a study as traditional aesthetics, concerned with the bare sensuous surface of experience, be illuminated by a philosophy of interpretation whose primary interest is in problems of meaning and belief which it, in turn, conceives entirely as problems of practice or conduct? A “pragmatic aesthetics,” in short, is, or sounds like, a contradiction in terms. Dewey’s purpose, so I believe, was to resolve this paradox by bringing to the surface certain erroneous preconceptions on the part of the older pragmatists concerning the nature of meaning as well as certain gratuitous restrictions in traditional aesthetics upon the scope of our intrinsic interest in works of art. Whether Dewey was wholly successful in this effort remains to be seen; what is clear is that he has forced a fundamental reconstruction of the conceptual scheme of the pragmatic theory of interpretation and criticism as well as that of aesthetics itself.

Having gone this far, I may as well add outrage to paradox by asserting, all seriously, that Art as Experience is John Dewey’s masterpiece, the central arch of his whole philosophy. Without it his moral philosophy—and Dewey is nothing if not a moral philosopher—loses both its heart and headpiece. And without it his philosophy of education—and in a sense his entire philosophy is a philosophy of education—becomes a horrible example of what may be called “the educator’s fallacy,” the error, that is, of assuming that life is for the sake of learning rather than learning for the sake of life. No one has emphasized more emphatically than Dewey the role of the problem-solving intelligence in the educational process; where there is no conception of a problem to be solved, education degenerates into a matter of routine conditioning and, in effect, manual training. But no philosopher has been less disposed to think of problem-solving as an end in itself, or of any solution as adequate apart from its fruits within experience. Human life, said Dewey, is not exclusively a “knowledge affair”; he might have added that it is also not exclusively an affair of choice, deliberation, and action. Indeed, this most indefatigable celebrant of the instrumental function of scientific cognition and moral deliberation is also precisely the one for whom all useful instruments, conceptual or otherwise, must be for the sake of something. It is, in fact, hardly too much to say that for Dewey the only relevant human test of civilization is aesthetic, and the only spiritual measure of any cultural activity lies in its artistry. The aim of Art as Experience is to show how this can be so.

Such claims, even if justified, are scarcely calculated to impress academic philosophers, pragmatic or otherwise. With the notable exception of Aristotle, whom Dewey resembles in this as in other ways, the greatest philosophers have usually given the arts short shrift. Before Kant, they usually treated the arts as vehicles of low-grade knowledge or else as unstable, enervating, incurably misleading ancillaries of morality and religion. Since Kant they have reserved for the arts a jolly corner in the newly-created province of “aesthetics,” itself a misbegotten offspring of the philosophy of sense-perception. The improvement, however, is not noticeable. For if, as the aestheticians have viewed him, the artist is no longer regarded as a liar and a seducer, he is now treated as a kind of parasite on the body of experience who unwittingly saps the strength that should go into the use of our senses in testing scientific theories.

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II

Lest it appear that I exaggerate, let us take a look at the aesthetics of the elder pragmatists, Charles Peirce and William James. Only in this way can we appreciate the distance traversed by Dewey in writing Art as Experience.

At the outset, it should be said that neither Peirce nor James provided, or sought to provide, a theory of interpretation in terms of which the full range of meaning and significance in the arts can be understood. Nor did either of them begin to appreciate the central place of the arts in any adequate philosophy of culture and civilization. Peirce, as we have already observed, found difficulty in construing the meaning of any form of expression—or thought—not verifiable by the operational procedures of science. In fact, by his own standards, even his celebrated pragmatic maxim, not to mention the metaphysical corollaries he appended to it, are devoid of sense. James, through his studies of the ethics of belief perceived, somewhat darkly, that truth—that which we ought to believe—cannot itself be defined in terms taken from the language of scientific description. Accordingly, he was forced to enlarge the pragmatic study of meaning—or use—of ideas so as to include concepts whose function is not to designate the observable characters of things, but to guide our actions and to articulate our ideals. Yet James no more than Peirce was equipped with a comprehensive philosophy of meaning which might do justice to those levels of significance in music, the plastic arts, or imaginative literature which can be neither understood nor appreciated primarily in scientific, moral, or religious terms. On the contrary, James as well as Peirce was victimized by a hand-me-down aesthetics, never deeply pondered or systematically overhauled, which reduces aesthetic experience, whether of nature or of art, to an affair of the supposedly “immediate” sensations and feelings that another, later pragmatist, C. I. Lewis, pungently misentitled “the primordial empirical given.”

The original thing about Charles Peirce’s aesthetics was his identification of the aesthetic with his own obscure category of “firstness” which, among other things, was supposed to represent the dimension of pure, unmediated, uninterpreted, and unobjectified feeling in experience. Whatever its other roles, such a category provides no basis for interpreting what we find in any work of art above the level, say, of a drone bass for the viola da gamba. On the contrary, if taken seriously, it serves to reinforce both the prejudice of our age against all art forms that take mind as well as time to comprehend and the prejudice of philosophers in all ages against any form of expression whose aim is neither to describe what is nor to prescribe what ought to be. Meaning, according to Peirce, is what we take to be signified by any sign; and all of his ingenious classifications of signs do not, and are not intended to, enlarge or alter this relation. Unfortunately, as Peirce himself well enough understood, what is signified by a work of art leads us as a rule directly away from the main sources of its artistic life. And to treat works of art as “signs” is, for the most part, merely to talk through them about something else which, whatever its interest to the historian or sociologist or psychiatrist, has only a loose correlation with what the artist himself is doing in his work. In effect, Peirce offers us only two alternatives: either to find and to translate in clearer scientific terms the verifiable propositions which we may suppose to be implicit in a work of art or else to take it “aesthetically” as an instance of unadultered firstness.

By natural endowment and cultivation, William James, of all the pragmatists, should have been most apt to provide the basis for an imaginative interpretation and critique of the arts. James knew how to draw and, up to a point, at least, how to look at a picture. And, in his own studiously unbuttoned manner, he could write, sometimes with extraordinary vividness and poignancy. Unlike Peirce, moreover, James was not hobbled by an obsessive regard for what he called “the sentiment of rationality.” He did not require that metaphysical, religious, or moral notions be run through an operational wringer of “signification” in order to be persuaded of their meaningfulness. Indeed, no philosopher in modern times has struggled more valiantly against the virus of scientism which afflicts most empiricists in the modern age.

James’s “complaint” was of a different sort. With his usual perceptiveness, his brother saw close to the heart of the matter. In the course of a reply to a letter of William’s about The Golden Bowl, Henry James makes the following comment:

I’m always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of mine, and always hope you won’t—you seem to me so constitutionally unable to “enjoy” it, and so condemned to look at it from a point of view remotely alien to mine in writing it, and to the conditions out of which, as mine, it has inevitably sprung—so that all the intentions that have been its main reason for being (with me) appear never to have reached you at all. . . .

The point is that in reading a novel or even in looking at a picture, William James was so constantly on the look-out for its “moral” that he could rarely enter freely and unguiltily into the imaginative world of any complex work of art. He had, in fact, to struggle so hard for what Paul Tillich calls “the courage to be” that he lost much of his native capacity to receive, or trust, the natural grace which art, as experience, may bestow.

But as a philosopher of art, James was hampered not only by his inability to “suspend the ethical,” but also by traditional preconceptions concerning the nature both of aesthetic experience and of art which precluded him from finding in either any challenge to his own pragmatic theory of interpretation. In his famous Psychology, in which he attempted to establish a physiological basis of opposition between thought and emotion, James says this about aesthetic experience:

. . . we must immediately insist that aesthetic emotion, pure and simple, the pleasure given us by certain lines and masses, and combinations of colors and sounds, is an absolutely sensational experience, an optical or auricular feeling that is primary, and not due to the repercussion backward of other sensations consecutively aroused. To this simple and primary pleasure . . . there may, it is true, be added secondary pleasures; and in the practical enjoyment of art [in which James includes intellectual enjoyment] by the masses of mankind secondary pleasures play a great part. The more classic one’s taste is, however, the less relatively important are the secondary pleasures felt to be in comparison with those of the primary sensation as it comes in. (Italics are James’s.)

Notice how automatic is James’s identification of the aesthetic as a form of feeling or emotion derived from sensory pleasure. Notice also the implicit assumption that good art, if not good art, sets up no commotion in the higher centers where mind begins to do its work. For James, in short, any art that requires cerebral or motor activity to appreciate fully thereby loses “classic” purity. Yet a classic taste, as he conceived it, is also a decadent taste which the moralistic James, who was always just a little afraid of decadence, was therefore bound to deplore.

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III

As it turns out, it was George Santayana, whose own aesthetic approach to the interpretation of religion James once described as “a perfection of rottenness,” who pointed the way out of this gratuitous and strangely unpragmatic impasse. It was also Santayana who made the first relevant protest against a foolishly “penitent” art, as he called it, which, in trying to rid itself of its “evil obsession with things,” seeks aesthetic salvation merely in the “emancipation of the medium.” Such salvation, Santayana perceived, saves neither art nor artist, but trivializes both. Great art, classic or otherwise, engages all our faculties. And as he writes:

Aesthetic satisfaction . . . comes to perfect all other values; they would remain imperfect if beauty did not supervene upon them, but beauty would be absolutely impossible if they did not underlie it. For perception, while in itself a process, is not perception if it means nothing or has no ulterior function; and so the pleasures of perception are not beauties, if they are attached to nothing substantial . . . , to nothing with a right of citizenship in the natural or in the moral world.

Unfortunately Santayana never bothered to work out the full implications of this remark. For all his Latin elegance and love of form, and despite his catholic tolerance for the sincere enjoyment of any artistic design, Santayana’s own formal aesthetics, as one finds it in his early work, The Sense of Beauty, is thin and perfunctory, and later he himself dismissed it as an academic performance whose subject-matter is unreal. In his later writings, however, one gets the impression that Santayana at last became impatient even with the arts themselves. Nor, I think, is it an accident that in his great work The Realms of Being no realm is reserved either for beauty or for art. The fact is that Santayana was a philosophical aesthete whose own imagination was cramped by the actual, and hence particular and limiting, forms materialized in individual works of art. As he says in a criticism of Browning which Dewey quotes with devastating effect: “The value of experience is not in experience but in the ideals it reveals.” The following comment of Santayana upon the art of Shakespeare is also typical: “. . . the cosmos eludes him; he does not seem to feel the need of framing that idea. He depicts human life in all its richness and variety, but leaves that life without a setting and consequently without a meaning.”

It is just at this point that John Dewey, applying in effect Santayana’s own deeper insight into the role of ideas in art, turns the tables on Santayana himself whom he charges with being guilty of a fundamental confusion of values. Dewey does not deny that Shakespeare had a philosophy or that it permeates his poetry. What he insists is that as we find it in the poetry, that philosophy cannot be understood or appraised save in terms of the total impact which Shakespeare’s art makes upon us. It is not Shakespeare’s business to frame an idea of the cosmos or, for that matter, to frame any other abstract idea. It is his concern to represent, or better, to present a compelling artistic world which engages our total resources as witnesses, thus enabling us to “have an experience” which, as we reflect upon it in tranquility, grows ever richer in significance. As Dewey remarks, with a clarity and economy for which he is not as noted as he should be:

The question for the critic is the adequacy of form to matter, and not that of the presence or absence of any particular form. The value of experience is not only in the ideals it reveals, but in its power to disclose many ideals, a power more germinal and more significant than any revealed idea, since it includes them in its stride, shatters and remakes them. One may even reverse the statement and say the value of the ideals lies in the experience to which they lead.

To my mind, this statement is a definitive reply to Santayana, and shows that Dewey, the avowed instrumentalist, understood more clearly than he the role of ideas in art and the significance of art for true philosophy.

Dewey is able to do so, however, because he rejects from the outset both the misplaced scientism and moralism of the earlier pragmatist tradition and the artificial sensationalism and emotivism of conventional aesthetics. As such, a work of art is neither a statement of fact nor a judgment of right and wrong (though it must be added that Dewey himself does not always sufficiently realize that in context it may contain—or use—such statements and judgments without destroying the integrity of the work of art). But from this delimitation it does not follow that a work of art must be regarded only as a congeries of agreeable feelings and sensations. In fact, pure sense-data, divorced from thought and action, are philosophical monsters that correspond to nothing actually “given” in experience. Like every other department of philosophy, traditional aesthetics has been bemused by age-old dualisms between thought and sensation, theory and practice, ideas and emotion for which experience itself provides no warrant. The question, so far as the appreciation of art is concerned, is not whether the intellect is operative, but how it operates and to what end. For Dewey, the great thing about the arts, not-so-fine as well as fine, is that they provide occasions for the integral exercise and the cumulative gratification of all our powers of mind, intellectual and imaginative as well as emotional and sensory. And it is for this reason, he contends, that we must go to our fullest, most imaginative responses to great art in order to understand what it is really to have an experience.

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Here we must proceed with care. In writing Art as Experience, Dewey did not intend to drag us out of the ditch of scientism and moralism in order to push us over into a slough of aestheticism, no matter how richly conceived. Dewey is no Pater or Berenson. The purely spectatorial mentality, whether in art or science or education or morality, is always parasitical and commentarial. Philosophically, however, the essential point is that when we contemplate a great work of art at the top of our own form, we are provided even as spectators with a foretaste of what a total engagement of our energies in any domain is really like. An adequate response to works of art is never a passive, “contemplative” acquiescence in something already given. On the contrary, appreciation of any original and creative work of art demands of the audience that experimental attitude toward experience which Dewey prizes, both morally and intellectually, above all others.

In saying this, it should be added at once that Dewey is no romantic subjectivist for whom the work of art provides only an occasion for the observer’s own private flights of fancy. It is the work of art itself, not our first-personal responses to it, which is moving or beautiful. What he contends, rather, is that only by involved “transactions” with the work can we hope to discover what it really is. Great art, even after many encounters with it, remains disturbing and exciting, not to our senses only, but to us. It engages the man, not a “faculty” of sensibility. Indeed, at its crest, as in King Lear or in the later paintings of Goya, it is well-nigh shattering. And this is not just a figurative way of describing a fact about ourselves; it describes an objective quality of the work as we encounter it. However, we won’t perceive this quality, or even see how it can be so, if we view the work of art only as a “phenomenon.” A work of art exists, as a work of art, not as a physical object only but also as something which is meant to be experienced, undergone, and enjoyed.

This means that Plato was at least half-right in perceiving that there is no poetry that is devoid of emotional excitement and interest. Nor was he mistaken in perceiving by implication that since emotion occurs only where there is conflict and stress, emotion, at least in ordinary contexts, is always a sign of some disturbance in the soul of him who experiences it. Dewey says much the same thing in other terms. On this score, he goes even further than Plato: Works of art, it is said (and Dewey agrees), are expressive rather than merely incitive; but “an impulsion cannot lead to expression save when it is thrown into commotion, turmoil. Unless there is com-pression nothing is ex-pressed.” This means that the very act of expression itself is automatically charged with feeling, and that in witnessing the compressions involved in the poetic use of language we ourselves cannot fail to be affected. In short, art by its very nature creates tension. And tension occurs on any level of experience only when perceptions are forced out of their accustomed ruts, ideas beyond the range of routine implications, beliefs outside the contexts of habitual affirmation, and affection beyond the limits of conventional antipathy and sympathy. This is quite as true, moreover, of “classic” as of “romantic” art, of the sculpture of a Donatello as of a Michelangelo, or of the music of a Haydn as of a Berlioz. But if this is so then the real death of art does not lie simply in a loss of sensuous concreteness, but in the unfelt, inexpressive, routine gesture. Similarly the death of aesthetic sensibility consists, not in wallowing in sensuous feeling, but in what I. A. Richards calls “the stock response.”

Overstating a point in order to make one, we may say that, in one sense, art is emotion. And, as we have seen, emotion does not exist without an abrasion. But whereas Plato feared the emotionality of art, Dewey did not. In explaining why this is so, we move toward the very center of Dewey’s philosophy of art. Great art cuts against the grain of customary accommodation and gratification, and in this fact lies a large part of its enormous powers of self-renewal. But this is not its whole essence. For if art is a wound, it is also a bow. In this lies the difference between works of art, and, as we so quaintly call them, “acts of God.” An act of God merely sears and rends, leaving us prostrate with astonishment or terror or grief. But the work of art is precisely not an instinctual cry of anguish but, so to say, an identifiable voice crying in the wilderness which by that very fact assures us that what so strangely disturbs us is not an act of God. Dewey, like Suzanne Langer, is mistaken, I believe, in suggesting that the arts are “languages.” But the underlying insight is a sound one. A work of art says something and means something; or, better, it does something and is something only in virtue of the saying and meaning. And in perceiving what is said and meant we find ourselves in the presence of something which, just because it is not an act of God, is profoundly satisfying. As Dewey is fond of putting it, the work of art is an act of expression in which emotion is “funded” back directly into our experience of the expressive object, with the result that, as in high tragedy, even fear or terror is something which we face rather than from which we try to run. High tragedy provides perhaps the most striking confirmation of Dewey’s analysis. Why, beyond all others, is the art of tragedy tonic and exhilarating rather than depressing? Not, we may be sure, because the tragedian manages to render a poetic justice which is always as unjust as it is unpoetic. Nor because he reveals to us, as sentimental moralistic critics believe, a supposed law above the laws of men or a truth that nullifies the truths of nature. The redemptive insight afforded by Oedipus or King Lear is the poet’s own act of continuous creation which thereby absorbs and gives meaning even to calamity.

It is not for nothing that the word “experimental” is often applied as a term of commendation in the arts as well as in science; nor is it an accident that critics habitually employ the terms “original” and “creative” in praising both artists and their works. We do well to ponder them. For originality is not the same thing as novelty, nor creativity the same as the ability to amaze. Despite Ezra Pound, “Make it new!” is a foolish dictum for artists. Novelties are literally a dime a dozen, and after one look, even the most astounding phenomenon becomes a bore. If oddity and unlikeness as such were “the distinguished thing” in art we could have it by any random hoot or belch. As the author of Genesis understood, creation is always of a cosmos, and only the origins of a world are perpetually original. He also understood that creation moves out of chaos. And what distinguishes an origin from any arbitrary point in the primordial flux is only the fact that it represents the rise of a significant movement or action.

It is exactly for this reason that in the higher religions God—the only being who deserves our worship—is conceived first as creator and only secondly as a law-giver, a super-scientist, a father, or a sage. And it is for a similar reason that the religious concern with origins is not a form of ancestor worship but a way of renewing our own source of strength and creativity. As Hume and Kant have both remarked, the “argument” for the existence of God which remains most appealing, even after we have seen through it, is the so-called argument from design. If that argument fails, as for most of us it inevitably must, the basic reason is simply that we cannot honestly view the natural world, by analogy, as a work of art and hence as an act of creation. But we need not pride ourselves upon the fact, for it shows us only how far in the ordinary course we are from God. And this point has quite as much pathos and significance for a naturalist and humanist like Dewey as for the traditional supernaturalist. Indeed, when we look behind their respective theologies to the experiences in which these are grounded, we may see that both are celebrating the same spiritual insight, the one mythically and perhaps credulously, the other more “realistically” as a human ideal. As philosophers we may debate the wisdom or truth of theories of the universe which take that insight as central; what we cannot dispute, if we know what art and creation are, is their centrality for any adequate conception both of the good and of the holy.

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IV

The aim of all aesthetic criticism is appreciation or, rather, the enhancement of appreciation. Criticism is, therefore, a practical art whose virtue consists in the experience to which it leads. The fundamental question is why criticism is necessary at all. In answering it, Dewey further elucidates his view of the objective status of the art object as a work of art and his insistence upon the relevance of prior experience, social and cultural as well as (in a narrower sense) artistic, to aesthetic appreciation.

Works of art, like wise men, do not wear their hearts on their sleeves. If experience and experience alone reveals to us what the work of art is, the experience necessary for such a revaluation requires instruction. It is indeed a measure of the power of a work of art that we must usually go through some travail before we are “up to it.” Unfortunately, adequate appreciation is rarely achieved by taking another look. One needs to know just what to look for, “the wee bit,” as Tolstoy calls it, which distinguishes genius from mediocrity and in which alone the artist’s act of expression lies concealed. Aesthetic criticism seeks to show us the wee bit. However, showing it is not usually accomplished simply by a movement of the critic’s pointer. For the wee bit reveals itself only within a context whose own significance can often be appreciated only in virtue of a fund of experience acquired elsewhere. No one insists more strongly than Dewey that good criticism should not go “outside” the work of art, but equally no aesthetician has argued more emphatically that it is not self-evident just where the inside ends and the outside begins. The spatial metaphor, moreover, is misleading. For what is “inside” a work of art is what gets put there by the artist, and if we lack the learning and sensibility necessary to grasp the full intention of an artist like Milton or Haydn, we may find something to enjoy but it will not be the work of art which has been created. Experience breeds appreciation, and there is no way of telling in advance what we need to know and to have appreciated in order to see the stroke of genius in Samson Agonistes or the “London Symphony.” In short, in art appreciation as in any other activity, success requires experimentation in order to perceive the relevant connections and relationships that define the quality of the particular composition.

Study of the cultural and artistic background of a work of art bears other fruit no less indispensable to the critic. For one thing in making him more perceptive of the varieties of individual talent, it also makes him more sensitive to the many different ways in which works of art may go wrong or right. For another, it helps him to avoid the crippling stock responses with which most persons approach any new work of art. We always tend to view any object, artistic or otherwise, with eyes and minds adjusted to its similarities to what has gone before. From one point of view, this is as desirable as it is inescapable. But similarity, if unmitigated, breeds contempt. The virtue of wide experience is that, by dissociation and contrast, it not only frees us from obsession with artistic styles and forms to which we have become addicted merely because we are familiar with them but also it enables us to return to the familiar with a sense of its own strangeness and individuality. It has been truly said that no one understands his own language unless he learns a foreign tongue, and of course the point works both ways. If nothing is old, nothing can possibly be new, and in relation to what is new the old is renewed and makes itself felt as if for the first time.

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What is true of criticism, whose end is appreciation, is true a fortiori of appreciation itself. One does not have to be a complete determinist in order to assent to the obvious truth that every perception and every experience is a function of all that has happened to us in our lives. For those to whom little has happened, it is unlikely that much will happen in the presence of Don Giovanni or the Sistine Chapel. Dullness breeds only dullness, and inexperience breeds nothing but a sense of inadequacy and futility. What constant intercourse with great works of art in many ages and traditions makes possible is that ranging sympathy which, morally and aesthetically, is the condition of civility.

These remarks are not meant as a justification of eclecticism or that passion for the exotic which is so characteristic of many aesthetes in our time. “Each culture,” says Dewey, “has its own individuality and has a pattern that binds its parts together.” Nor can any individual, even if he tries, wholly transcend the culture which has shaped his personality and sensibility. Nevertheless, as Dewey goes on to remark, “when the art of another culture enters into attitudes that determine our experience . . . [it] does not thereby lose its individuality but takes unto itself and weds elements that expand its significance. A community and continuity that do not exist physically are created.”

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V

Dewey’s own astonishing hospitality to diverse forms of culture and of art did not in the least blur his own integral standards of artistic excellence. In fact, if I have a quarrel with Dewey as a philosophical aesthetician, it is with his failure to perceive how far his own analysis of the aesthetic experience is itself conditioned by a critical and cultural ideal which places a premium upon normality, stability, and what he has called “equilibrium of form and matter.” Dewey’s taste, in short, remains (although in a very different sense from that intended by James) a “classical” taste which is offended by works in which, for whatever reason, that equilibrium is deeply broken. The trouble is that he does not see that after all even his taste and his ideal of artistic excellence is but one taste and one ideal and indeed that his whole analysis of the aesthetic is, at bottom, a normative or directional analysis whose function is to inculcate those attitudes toward life as well as art which he considers sane and normal. In a deeply revealing passage he says:

The danger is that the critic, guided by personal predilection or more often by partisan conventionalism, will take some one procedure as his criterion of judgment and condemn all deviations from it as deviations from art itself. He then misses the point of all art, the unity of form and matter, and misses it because he lacks adequate sympathy, in his natural and acquired one-sidedness, with the immense variety of interactions between the live creature and his world. (Italics mine.)

This is a fine as well as a typical statement, but it shows, I think, how little Dewey himself was aware of his own rationalistic bias. Suppose the critic—a kind of William James returned to judgment—should reply as follows: “The danger is that the rationalistic philosopher, guided finally by personal predilections for what he admires as wholeness, sanity, and unity of form and matter, will take them as necessary conditions of excellence and thus condemn all deviations from them as deviations from art itself. He then misses the point, not of all art perhaps, but of those forms of ‘romantic’ and ‘decadent’ art which by definition are not interested in the unities which Dewey takes to be the point and condition of all art. And he misses it because he lacks adequate sympathy, in his own natural and acquired one-sidedness, for authentic forms of artistic creation that are based upon a self-conscious and deliberate rejection of ideals, artistic and otherwise, that are not in accord with the sentiment of rationality.”

Whether I myself would advocate such a reply is beside the point; it is rather that, like Aristotle before him, Dewey is not—and perhaps cannot be—a merely natural historian of art forms, any more than he is a merely objective analyst of the standards of art criticism. Like every other philosopher, he tends in effect to write his own natural history into his morphology of art. Thus, despite his hostility to essentialism Dewey himself finally falls into it. He does so because, like the rest of us, he tends to confuse a particular vision of the wisdom of life and hence of the wisdom of art with the nature of wisdom as such. And at this point, I believe, he ceases to be experimental in his own widest sense of the term.

Once more a comparison between Dewey and Aristotle may prove instructive. It has often been remarked how necessary is an understanding of Aristotle’s Ethics for an understanding of his Poetics. From his Ethics we begin to see how deeply his theory of tragedy is rooted in his ideal of human wellbeing. That ideal, in which notions of proportion, balance, and normality figure so prominently, found its natural dramatic counterpart in the art of Sophocles. Accordingly, it did not occur to him that his definition of tragedy must inevitably lead him not only to prefer Sophocles to Euripides but, which is more important, that in disposing us to look at Hippolytus or Medea through eyes adjusted to Oedipus Rex, we might be led to a stylized perception of them which, although possibly interesting and rewarding, might also be false to Euripides’ central dramatic intention. Now Dewey’s philosophy of art, based as it is upon a wider experience of works and forms of art, is of course more catholic and open-ended than Aristotle’s. But because it is based upon a particular ideal of “consummatory” experience, it offers us at best only the description of an exemplary experience of art and by implication of an exemplary ideal of artistic form which inevitably slants his interpretations and appreciations of a great deal of mannerist, romantic, and despite many insights, modern art. It disposes him, in short, to regard as a breakdown of aesthetic art those artistic forms to which his notion of “having an experience” seems misapplied.

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No doubt the proof of all criticism, whether in art or in morals, should be experience. But as Dewey himself points out again and again, we don’t go to experience, whether of art or of anything else, completely empty-handed. His notion of what is involved in “having an experience” is not neutral; on the contrary it provides an implicit set of instructions to the jury whose experience is to provide the evidence for analysis and criticism. If those instructions are faithfully followed, then, as it appears to me, the jury will be bound at once to misconstrue and to denigrate many of the distinctive, wholly self-conscious qualities of 19th- and 20th-century art forms. Abrupt modulations and dissociations, unprepared shifts of context, tone, and style, violent distortions, ruminative developments, and proliferations of detail are all endemic to the most striking and original works of modern art in all mediums. It is as though the modern artist not only does not want us to have “an experience” in confronting his work, but even that he repudiates the whole ideal of having an experience. Such words as “unity,” “wholeness,” “integration,” and the rest are prejudicial or even self-defeating when applied to the art of a Dostoevsky, a Berlioz, or a Delacroix; applied to the most striking works of a Faulkner, a Sartre, or a Ionesco they seem irrelevant. And if these norms of aesthetic quality, naturally and happily applied to Racine and Mozart and Donatello, are stubbornly stretched until they do apply appropriately to any art that might sincerely be judged as aesthetic or fine, then to that extent they lose significance as critical ideals and become instead no more than redundant synonyms for artistic goodness or excellence itself.

At bottom, Dewey’s failure to perceive this fact marks the limitations for his own pragmatism and experimentalism. Dewey perceives a difference between the functioning of “signs” in poetry and in science; as he puts it, language is used “expressively” in poetry, whereas in science it is used for purposes of “statement.” What this comes to, so far as I can see, is simply that we don’t normally do with a poem what we do with a scientific statement. Even so, recognition of that difference is a great gain. The trouble lies in the supposition that when words aren’t being used expressively, they must be used, if they are meaningful, as statements of empirical fact. Such a simple-minded dichotomy of linguistic functions will not do. Commands, invitations, statements of principle, and expressions of religious faith are not in ordinary contexts forms of imaginative literature; nor are they statements of fact verifiable through the procedures of empirical science. The same is true of many other common forms of utterance, though this is sometimes concealed from us by the fact that their grammatical structure is no different from statements of fact. Some time ago, in an essay on Sidney Hook’s philosophy, I argued that Dewey’s ethical theory fails in the end because he does not clearly see the difference in logical function between commending something as desirable and describing or stating the fact that it is desired under certain “normal” conditions.¹ An analogous error afflicts his aesthetics. Why is there no recipe for making works of art? I answer: because there is no formula for specifying under what conditions any object is properly appreciated as a work of art. Aesthetic appreciation, literally, knows no bounds, since it is always possible that some original and creative work, for which we can find no adequate analogue in past experience, may command our admiration as a work of art. In the past this has happened many times; it is also happening now in music, in the plastic arts, in the movies, and in new forms of imaginative literature that fall, inconveniently, between the genres. Every such work, one way or another, pushes back the frontiers of artistic success and artistic appreciation beyond those previously acknowledged. This is not to deny that we ourselves may have artistic standards; it is to deny only that there can be general principles, such as the principle of “unity of form and matter,” that define absolutely the conditions of aesthetic experience.

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VI

The foregoing animadversions, it must be understood, are not meant as a wholesale attack upon the aesthetics of pragmatism. On the contrary, they are intended only to show that, in spite of himself, Dewey’s aesthetics is insufficiently pragmatic and experimental, especially as regards the problem of meaning. Like Peirce, Dewey is committed to the principle that we can determine the meaning of an utterance only through a study of what is being done in making it. But like Peirce also, he has difficulty, in the end, in comprehending that there is any reason to make a statement except in order to describe or predict some matter of empirical fact. This difficulty can be overcome by the contemporary pragmatist, not by more and more ingenious “translations” or “reconstructions” designed to show the empirical cash value of assertions, but rather by closer contextual analysis of the actual intent of what is asserted.

This is not to say that the study of linguistic performances is a philosophical be-all or cure-all. On this score, my sympathies remain with the pragmatists who, from Peirce to Dewey, have contended that philosophy should be a search for self-control and self-knowledge, ultimately, that is, for wisdom in the conduct of life. What distinguishes pragmatism as a historical school of philosophy is not so much its technical achievements in the analysis of symbolic forms as its approach to such analysis. Confusions of categories are sources of intellectual error, and for that reason alone they should be rooted out. But confusions of categories usually also represent underlying confusions of value, and confusions of value are a prime source of spiritual error. And it is for this reason that category mistakes are of concern to the philosopher, whose interest is not in knowledge only but in wisdom. In fact it is just this recoupling of the motives of the logician and the analyst with those of the sage that makes pragmatism a green place in the increasingly dessicated landscape of 20th-century philosophy.

The immense service to philosophy which John Dewey rendered in Art as Experience lies less perhaps in the clarity of his analysis of the aesthetic and artistic use of symbols than in his recognition that there is such a use, distinct from their roles in positive science, and in his tireless insistence that understanding of it is humanly of the very first importance. Positivistic philosophers, including many pragmatists, oppose confusions of categories in the name of science; despite his own egregious assumption that knowledge and positive science are one, Dewey opposes them in the name of art and in the name of man.

Followers of Dewey sometimes call their philosophy “scientific humanism”; so far as Dewey himself is concerned, such a description is inaccurate, for Dewey’s humanism, like his pragmatism, has a deeper commitment to the arts than to science—to aesthetic experience than to scientific inquiry. However, such a way of putting the matter is misleading, for it ignores the fact, which Dewey stressed in Experience and Nature, that science itself is also an art and that its enjoyment can also be a consummatory experience. Better to say, therefore, that what Dewey proposes is nothing less than a total reconstruction of philosophy which itself can only be accomplished through an experimental reconstruction of the governing ideals of our entire culture. This reconstruction, if it is to be effectual, requires simply that we turn philosophy inside out so that hitherto peripheral subjects such as the philosophy of art and of education may become central and the central “disciplines” of modern philosophy—logic and the theory of knowledge—may finally find their own proper places in a true republic of philosophical studies.

Such a task, we may be sure, is not easy. Indeed it is vastly harder now than in the late 20’s and early 30’s when Dewey was writing Art as Experience, for then the place of science in American education and in American civilization still remained uncertain. It is so no longer. In an era of technology and cold war, when science, joined in an unholy and perhaps suicidal marriage with politico-industrial power, provides our primary standard of human achievement, art, and science itself as art, can only seem a luxurious adornment of life. There lies a large part of our contemporary tragedy. For when reduced to a low-grade science, art, like religion, loses its mind; when, like science, art is converted, along with education, into a decoration or instrument of policy, it loses its soul.

Dewey never tires of telling us that the primary gift of art is a consummation and refreshment of experience, and that in this gift alone we may discover the proper meaning of Matthew Arnold’s definition of poetry as “a criticism of life.” The arts, as he says, provide us with “a vision of possibilities” which, when placed in contrast to actual conditions, affords “the most penetrating ‘criticism’ of the latter that can be made.” For it is only through that vision, when it becomes impassioned, “that we become aware of constrictions and burdens that oppress.” It is for this reason that a self-critical society, aware of the primordial sin of pride, needs its poets and artists, and needs them fierce, untamed, indomitable, and free. And it is for a similar reason that our age, afflicted with acquiescent, hand-to-mouth neo-pragmatists who whirl like dervishes around its unvital center, so desperately needs another Dewey who will show us where lie the deeper tap-roots of self-criticism, spiritual strength, and self-renewal.

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As a pragmatist, Dewey understood fully the aim of philosophy as individual and communal self-knowledge and self-control. It is therefore fitting that this essay should close with a remark about the metaphysical implications of Dewey’s aesthetics, for metaphysics—literally “after physics”—is nothing but first philosophy. In the first place, the fact that Dewey could even find such implications in aesthetics shows how well he himself understood that metaphysics as first philosophy cannot be a super-science even for those whose own first-philosophy amounts, at bottom, to a commitment to science as the preeminent human activity and whose notion of what is meaningful and real is exclusively a function of the procedures integral to that activity. No less significant, however, is the fact that for Dewey, to whom as to all pragmatists, “experience” is the philosophical golden word, it is the experience, the full and funded undergoing, of great art that reveals to us what our own metaphysical substance really is. In a fine chapter on “The Challenge to Philosophy,” Dewey says that:

esthetic experience is experience in its integrity. Had not the term “pure” been so often abused in philosophic literature, had it not been so often employed to suggest that there is something alloyed, impure, in the very nature of experience and to denote something beyond experience, we might say that esthetic experience is pure experience. For it is experience freed from the forces that impede and confuse its development as experience; freed, that is, from factors that subordinate an experience as it is directly had to something beyond itself. To esthetic experience, then, the philosopher must go to understand what experience is.

In short, aesthetics, at least as Dewey conceives it, is the metaphysics of experience.

Whether or not we can absolutely agree with this—and for reasons that must be explained elsewhere, I myself cannot—this statement Suffices to show how far is Dewey from those among his followers who would have us believe that the dictum “Science is knowledge” alone can show the way back into the heart either of metaphysics or of philosophy. Art as Experience affords no final wisdom; indeed the wisdom of the great opponent of “the quest for certainty” is that such a wisdom does not exist. But it will do until something else is provided, either in America or elsewhere. Meanwhile, so long as our “experiments in living,” as John Stuart Mill called them, do not involve the possibility of irreparable harm to others as well as to ourselves, we might try to experiment a little on our own. Should we do so, we may be surprised, both as philosophers and as men, at what we find. A good place to begin, I have discovered, is to reread the last sentence of Dewey’s book: “Art is a mode of prediction not found in charts and statistics, and it insinuates possibilities of human relations not to be found in rule and precept, admonition and administration.” In paradoxes begin responsibilities.

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¹ See COMMENTARY, February 1962. The conditions specified by Dewey are those of understanding of (relevant) causes and consequences of realizing the object of desire. As I contended, we can always significantly ask of anything desired under such conditions whether it really is desirable, i.e., whether it ought to be desired.