Orientational Meliorism, Pragmatist Aesthetics, and the Bhagavad Gita

by Scott R. Stroud

The Range of Aesthetic Experience


John Dewey's aesthetic theory takes a self-consciously normative approach to art and its relation to our experience. Instead of attempting to describe how art is used in some cultural practice, Dewey attempts to argue for a certain way that art can be experienced. Thus, in Art as Experience (1934, AE) he decries the "museum conception" of art that sequesters art objects away from the everyday world in museums. Some of the key points he makes involve the integration of art into the experience of everyday life (say, through public sculpture) or by making everyday objects in an artful manner (say, hand-crafted utensils). Dewey justifies this move by pointing out that what we note as so moving about good art objects—what one could call "aesthetic experience"—is not radically different in kind from "everyday" experience. Both experiences in front of art objects and in the activities of everyday life can reach that level of enjoyment, unity, and absorption that characterize what one can call an "aesthetic experience." If a certain unity, individualizing quality, and individuation from surrounding experiences can mark off an experience due to a finely crafted art object, Dewey asks, why can't we admit that such experiences occur with respect to meals we have had, skilled activities we have participated in, and so on? This gestures to what I think is the largest question that Dewey's AE poses: Can more of life's activities be aesthetic? This is a fundamentally important question for Dewey, as aesthetic experience epitomizes the quality of experience that we ought to aim for, if given the option. Let us push the point further: Can one render all of life's activities aesthetic?