Apathy

I’m sure it’s a product of the time in which he was living, but Dewey has a very thorough way of writing. There’s no way to be unclear about the message of the entirety of Art as Experience; aesthetics, art, and meaning come only from collaboration and interaction of the person in his environment. Just in case the reader hasn’t gotten that from the fourteen chapters - and I can personally testify that the order in which you read them doesn’t change the inevitability of the message - he repeats it explicitly once more at the beginning of the eleventh chapter, “The Human Contribution”:

Experience is a matter of the interaction of organism with its environment, an environment that is human as well as physical, that includes the tradition and institutions s well as local surroundings. The organism brings with it through its own structure, native and acquired, forces that play a part in the interaction The self acts as well as undergoes… There is no experience in which the human contribution is not a factor in determining what actually happens. The organism is a force, not a transparency. (p. 256)

But while the rest of the book acknowledges human interaction and the multifaceted nature of the complexities thereof, then turning to focus mainly on the art, this chapter spends the majority of its time looking at the person (who, of course, we recognize cannot be considered separate from his environment; we recognize that over and over).

Because human nature is complex and flawed, there are flaws all over how we talk about this, Dewey writes. We’ve naturally ruined and overused the majority of the terms in question: projection, contemplation, perception, intuition, imagination, and probably most egregiously (in Dewey’s seeming opinion) mind. But the complexities of these nuanced and charged words are possibly not important at all, as they cannot be considered in isolation and only matter when considered as part of the totality of experience.

Something that I wrestled with for the majority of the chapter (only to eventually find resolve) was his argument against mere contemplation. On pages 262 and 263, he writes “At first sight, ‘contemplation’ appears to be about as inept a term as could be selected to denote the excited and passionate absorption that often accompanies experience of a drama, a poem, or a painting. Attentive observation is certainly one essential factor in all genuine perception including the esthetic. But how does it happen that this factor is reduced to the bare act of contemplation?” It caused me to wonder - what about those of us who rarely, if ever, experience “excited and passionate absorption”? What about those of us who medically experience a greatly diminished range of emotions? On page 264: “Carried to its logical conclusion, it would exclude from esthetic perception most of the subject-matter that is enjoyed in the case of architectural structures, the drama, and the novel, with all their attendant reverberations.”

He uses Kant to explain that “every experience, including the most generous and idealistic, contains an element of seeking, of pressing forward. Only when we are dulled by routine and sunk in apathy does this eagerness forsake us” (p. 265). But what if we do live in that apathy, not by choice, but by chemistry? Are we locked out of the realm of aesthetic appreciation? “Since life is activity,” he writes on page 266, “there is always desire whenever activity is obstructed.” I am reminded of the plot of Office Space, that, if given the choice, the protagonist and I would both do nothing.

The only solace I could find was in the idea of the “active and eager background” that “lies in wait and engages whatever comes its way so as to absorb it into its being” (p. 275) and that

"intuition" is that meeting of the old and new in which the readjustment involved in every form of consciousness is affected suddenly by means of a quick and unexpected harmony which in its bright abruptness is like a flash of revelation… Oftentimes the union of old and new, of foreground and background, is accomplished only by effort, prolonged perhaps to the point of pain. In any case, the background of organized meanings can alone convert the new situation from the obscure into the clear and luminous. When old and new jump together, like sparks when the poles are adjusted, there is intuition. Because interest is the dynamic force in selection and assemblage of materials, products of mind are marked by individuality. (p. 277)

It seems that, regardless of the breadth of the range of emotion, the spark can be felt in the context of our ever-changing environment as we ever-change with it.

Dewey, J. (1934). 12: The Human Contribution. In J. Dewey (Author), Art as experience (pp. 255-282).

New York, NY: Perigee Books.