§84. The Experience of Art
Dewey was alert to anything that seemed to confirm that “human hopes and purposes find a basis and support in nature.” Those hopes and purposes are not just his culture's ideology.
Art, for instance, can “[stir] into activity resonances of dispositions acquired in primitive relationships of the living being to its surroundings.” Art does deliberately what any organism does instinctively in response to need. The intervention of consciousness adds “regulation, power of selection, and redistribution,” but builds on powers long prepared in the evolution of life.12What other satisfaction could Dewey take in his refrain that our efforts are no less “the doing of the universe, and they in some way, however slight, carry the universe forward... our endeavors are significant not only for themselves but in the whole”? That seems meant to be reassuring. In our pursuit of the preferable we continue tendencies of nature. It is not just us, and it is not a sin; it is nature acting through us. To convert the unfulfilled to the fulfilled is “the manifest destiny of contingency... and generic uniformit[y] in nature.” Intellectual activity is not something “brought to bear upon nature from without; it is nature realizing its own potentialities in behalf of a fuller and richer issue of events.”13
He rejects aesthetic relativism and the notion that a work of art might be just anything, as if the qualities in which experience culminates were peculiar to a culture and cannot be generalized. They are not, because all cultures are subject to a common constraint of nature. “Underneath the rhythm of every art and of every work of art there lies, as a substratum in the depths of subconsciousness, the basic patterns of the relations of man and his environment.” Art is natural; the attraction of beauty and the repulsion of the ugly are evolved human nature.
“There must be, in spite of all indifference and hostility of nature to human interests, some congruity of nature with man, or life could not exist. In art the forces that are congenial, that sustain not this or that special aim but the processes of enjoyed experience itself, are set free.” Such aspirations belong to nature and are a phase of nature itself. “Nature signifies nothing less than the whole complex of the results of the interaction of man, with his memories and hopes, understanding and desire, with that world to which one-sided philosophy confines ‘nature.’” Nothing is more natural than culture, nothing less arbitrary than a work of art.14It apparently reassured Dewey to think that “the same natural processes which generate goods and evils generate also the strivings to secure the one and avoid the other, and generate judgments to regulate the strivings.” The thought seems to address the worry that the qualities he thinks make life worth living are arbitrary and not worth defending, against totalitarianism for instance. Ends, finalities, consummate satisfactions are neither arbitrary subjectivity nor eternal ideas. Empirically, they are “projections of possible consequences,” and when such ends are also means employed as plans, Dewey calls them ends-in-view. The objectives of conscious endeavor are not ideal endpoints, but working parts of plans that enter into the organization of action and become instruments in the materialization of the consummation they posit.15
Humanity learned this instrumental planning from the experience of the arts. “Apart from the processes of art, there is no basis for introducing the idea of fulfillment, realization, into the notion of end, nor for interpreting antecedent operations as potentialities.” Experience with the arts taught human ancestors the difference between how a thing is and how it can be transformed. Dewey's idea of art is closer to Greek techne or Latin ars than our “fine art.” “Art” means action with materials and energies, assembling and refining them to a new satisfaction.
He says the “history of human experience” is a “history of the development of arts,” and that “the idea of art,” meaning instrumental planning in the pursuit of consummating qualities, is “the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity.”16The arts taking over, introducing their inventions, enhancing our control of experience, converting the precarious to the stable, was not an unnatural event instigated against matter by a resentful exile. Art is a continuation of human nature and human nature is a continuation of nature, the arts and their changes being as natural as any occurrence in nature. “Art is a continuation, by means of intelligent selection and arrangement, of natural tendencies of natural events.” Dewey melodramatically scrambles an old trope, describing art as “the complete culmination of nature,” and science as no more than the handmaid who “conducts natural events to this happy issue.”17
Experimental science is an art, inquiry is an art, and every art is more or less scientific, which is just a name for the factor of intelligence, which is to say, technology. The outstanding fact of modernity for Dewey is the unevenness with which modern, experimental experience penetrates everyday life and society. Some domains of experience have been reorganized by science (e.g., industry and medicine), though others remain an unsatisfying morass and entrenched source of problems. Art again leads the way in compelling attention to these deficiencies and resisting collaboration with the ugly and stultifying. Dewey cites Matthew Arnold: “Poetry is the criticism of life.” Yes, he thinks, and not just poetry, for criticism of the conditions of life is the avocation of all the arts. Art expresses experience and life as they should to be, their immanent finality consummated. “Art fixes those standards of enjoyment and appreciation with which other things are compared; it selects the objects of future desires; it stimulates effort...
[and supplies] the meanings in terms of which life is judged, esteemed, and criticized.” This provokes an extraordinary statement. Observing that morality tends to “consecrations of the status quo, reflections of customs, [and] reinforcements of the established order,” he concludes that by its power of creation “art is more moral than moralities.”18Bergson and Dewey both oppose the argument that perception is some kind of knowing. Empiricism began in antiquity with the experiment of treating perception as an indication rather than a finality. We had to learn the difficult lesson of attending not to the what of experience—do we like it?—but instead the how of its changes, how to foresee and control them. We turn away from the admirable or terrible qualities of experience to attend to the relations on which those qualities depend and through which they can be controlled. That is what Dewey calls “reconstruction,” and those relations are the proper objects of science and technology. “Reduction of experienced objects to the form of relations, which are neutral as respects qualitative traits,” is a prerequisite of our ability “to regulate the course of change, so that it may terminate in the occurrence of an object having desired qualities.”19