On Aesthetics.

Context! Context context, context context context. Context context? Context context context context, context context context context context.

I was startled to read in a book about aesthetics that, of the Athenian Greeks, “the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ would not have been even understood” (Dewey, p. 6).

Who does aesthetic philosophy serve? According to John Dewey, everyone, “all being[s] fully alive” (p. 17). While I balked slightly at the initial separation of the artist from the intellectual, I am glad I pressed on. I was grateful that he promoted the idea that neither the artist nor the “intellectual” (the scientific, dialectic thinker) exists in a vacuum. I was relieved when I read that

“The difference between the esthetic and the intellectual is thus one of the place where emphasis falls in the constant rhythm that marks the interaction of the live creature with his surroundings. The ultimate matter of both emphases in experience is the same, as is also their general form. The odd notion that an artist does not think and a scientific inquirer does nothing else is the result of converting a difference of tempo and emphasis into a difference in kind.” (p. 14)

I am seldom quick to anger, almost to a pathological fault, but I get very, very defensive when someone pits intellectualism against art. I consider myself a very thoughtful and academic individual, but have chosen a life of musicianship and the teaching thereof. So thank you, Dewey. I find it a very odd notion, too.

What does aesthetic philosophy serve the live creature? A way of knowing, and a way of attaining “inner harmony” when “terms are made with the environment” (p. 16). After this sentiment of Dewey’s, it is almost as if James Baldwin took over writing, possibly possessing him through some spiritual phenomenon that I cannot understand and definitely had not achieved when I was ten, as Baldwin would have been. As if ripped from Baldwin’s mind, Dewey writes:

“Most mortals are conscious that a split often occurs between their present living and their past and future. Then the past hangs upon them as a burden; it invades the present with a sense of regret, of opportunities not used, and of consequences we wish undone. It rests upon the present as an oppression, instead of being a storehouse of resources by which to move confidently forward. But the live creature adopts its past; it can make friends with even its stupidities, using them as warnings that increase present wariness. Instead of trying to live upon whatever may have been achieved in the past, it uses past successes to inform the present… To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present as a halo. It consists of possibilities that are felt as a possession of what is now and here… Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reinforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is.” (p. 17)

A few paragraphs on, he writes: “The past absorbed into the present carries on; it presses forward” (p. 18). In this light, art and aesthetics is a way of understanding then, now, and the promise of what is to come. It also captures the “organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of things” (p 19) and can grant us the clarity to learn from the then and now to make the future better. When reckoning with our often burdensome past in an attempt to rectify the now and future, we can, as Dewey’s live creature, adopt it and use it as a warning. Understanding, context, and art are, to Dewey, inseparable. Understanding can inform art, and can inform our understanding.

I had to keep reminding myself throughout the first chapter of Art as Experience that it was written in 1934, before World War II and the start of the Cold War. Dewey points out that separating art from experience dulls it and decontextualizes it, causing it to lose its meaning, making it less attainable and less relevant. Later, in the wake of the Soviet Union launching the first orbiting satellite, a movement was born. Admiral Hyman Rickover, who “was familiar with the education needs of the technical age,” (Mark, p. 138) emphatically recommended that science and math offerings be strengthened and that “frills be eliminated from the curriculum” (p 138). If relegating art from everyday experience to the museum was the placing of aesthetics into its coffin, striking it from the everyday experience of schools was the nail.

Dewey, J. (1934). The Live Creature. In J. Dewey (Author), Art as experience (pp. 1-19). New York City,

NY: Perigree.

Mark, M. L. (2008). A concise history of American music education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield

Education.