So it has been ten years since Yuriko Saito's Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2007) came out, a seminal work in the burgeoning new field of everyday aesthetics. She will be having a new book on the topic coming out soon. But perhaps now is a time to revisit some of the issues raised especially in the first chapter of Everyday Aesthetics with the understanding that this is not necessarily her current position. The chapter is titled "Neglect of Everyday Aesthetics." It is available here. Most of what Saito says in this chapter I agree with and it should be understood that the purpose of this post is simply to use her piece as a jumping off point for reflection, as I have in the past. Saito makes a strong distinction between two kinds of experience in everyday aesthetics. One kind is the "stand out" experience, roughly similar to Dewey's idea of "an experience." The second is another set of reactions we might, and often do, have to sensuous and/or design qualities of objects. These would include the reaction of seeing an object as dirty and wishing to clean it up.
I accept Saito's expansion of the concept of the aesthetic to include these kinds of responses. There is a dialogue going on here since Saito may have been partly inspired in this by an early article of mine on neatness and messiness as aesthetic qualities: “Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities: 'Neat,' 'Messy,' 'Clean,' 'Dirty',” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
53:3 (1995) 259-268. This was reprinted in The Aesthetics of Human Environments ed Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2007). What I currently want to push is an in-between dimension of aesthetic experience, something between the two extremes Saito posits: a domain that I believe is fundamentally important not only for everyday aesthetics but for aesthetics in general. In the tradition of Karl Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and John Dewey in Art as Experience, but also of Thich Nhat Hanh on mindfulness, I want to call for expansion of this in-between domain, one that overcomes the alienation (usually based on exploitation as Marx would put it, or inadequate social arrangements as Dewey would put it) that characterizes experience at the low or "practical" end of the aesthetic spectrum. I also see the three levels of aesthetic experience, (1) the practical, (3) what I will call, after Buddhist thought, the mindful, and (4) the special/extraordinary, as dynamically inter-related. So, whereas Saito favors a dichotomy between spectator-like experiences and experiences that "prompt us toward actions, such as cleaning, discarding, purchasing..." I posit this, the middle "mindfulness," realm. Following Nhat Hanh in his discussion of washing dishes with mindfulness and Marx in his notion of non-alienated labor, I think that there is a problem at the lowest level of the aesthetic: a problem if the cleaning or discarding is not mindful, the purchasing is based on false consciousness in a society of consumerism (as critical theorist followers of Marx argued), and so on. Low level activities of the sort that happen when one cleans for entirely functional purposes or purchases clothes just for comfort, usefulness, or getting ahead, become enhanced when they are mindful of aesthetic qualities. This means that I favor a notion of low-level contemplation, for example contemplative as opposed to mindless shopping. Whereas Saito associates the idea of contemplation only with the high level of fine art experience or contemplation of natural beauty, I think that mindful washing of dishes, for example, is contemplative in its own way.
One difficulty here is that Saito associates contemplation and disinterestedness and with rejection of the proximal senses of taste, smell, and touch. This is not my approach: I see contemplation as applicable to multi-sensory experience. Contemplative aesthetic experience of sexual intimacy for example is the preferred mode. Thus, on my view, one can take an aesthetic attitude towards everyday phenomena, and this can be a more valuable, actually is generally a more valuable, way to approach such phenomena, as long as it does not interfere with getting the job done.
Actually, then, I disagree with the notion that actions such as cleaning, discarding, and purchasing without any contemplative dimension are "typically the way in which aesthetics functions in everyday life." They may in fact be typically the way in Western alienated capitalist society. But they may not be in other societies, for example in Denmark or Bhutan. Moreover, a better society would be one in which the contemplative or disinterested dimension of aesthetic experience of the everyday would be enhanced. So, to put the point in another way, when Saito says that she wants to include not only aesthetic experiences of art, however broadly defined, but also "those responses that propel us toward everyday decisions and actions without any accompanying contemplative appreciation" (11) I would count this domain as, yes, aesthetic, but only at the very lowest level, and not something to be encouraged. It is at the mid-level, where responses such as cleaning and choosing are not "almost automatic" as Saito puts it, but are mindful and at least minimally examples of contemplative appreciation because mindful of aesthetic qualities, that a happy life is constituted. (I also think that other things that Saito says in her first chapter are actually more in accord with this position.)
I understand the motive behind Saito's dichotomy: the need to move away from the hierarchy in which everything is seen in terms of Western fine art. Saito eloquently demolishes that position. What I am offering is hopefully the dialectical next stage. As with Saito, I also think my approach is more in accord with a multi-cultural, global viewpoint. But this is because I think that in most traditional or tribal cultures, and in many other non-Western cultures, the middle, mindful, aesthetic domain, plays a more important role in life. I agree with those people who believe that we should be more like the Navajo or the Bali people in their approaches to aesthetic experience, as much as we can given the Western-based world that surrounds us. It is the Western mindset that promotes the dichotomy of humdrum practical vs. high art aesthetic. I think that ultimately both Saito and I wish to undercut this dichotomy.
I also agree with Saito in attacking the tendency to see the aesthetic either as "highly specialized and isolated from our daily concerns, namely art, or else something trivial and frivolous, not essential to our lives, such as beautification and decoration" (12) and I agree that the low-level experiences that we are both interested in are important for practical purposes.
However, although we both want to "restore aesthetics to its proper place in our everyday" lives (12), and reclaim its status in shaping the world, I wish to do so by encouraging and enhancing mindful and contemplative approaches to the everyday, whereas Saito is concerned that these approaches are too associated with an art-centered approach to aesthetics. I agree that art-centered aesthetics can "compromise the rich diversity of out aesthetic life" but am not convinced that it always does. Nor am I convinced that what she calls "experience-oriented aesthetics" (12) is detrimental to a sound everyday aesthetics as long as "experience" is not just understood in such a way as to privilege the distal senses or extreme forms of disinterested approaches to aesthetic objects.
I also agree with Saito that "art is almost always regarded [in Western aesthetic theory] as the quintessential model for an aesthetic object" (13) and I believe that she is absolutely right to pursue this line. (This makes me consistent with her quote from my 1995 article in support of her position.) Saito presents an excellent discussion of the problems of art-centered aesthetics in the section with that name.
My only caveat would be a response to Korsmeyer's approach to the aesthetics of food. Saito quotes Korsmeyer with approval as saying "the addition of taste and food to the domain of established aesthetic theory presents problems: both inevitably come off as distinctly second rate, trailing the distance senses and fine art." I just cannot agree that it is never right to understand food in terms of fine art: my own view that something like the El Bulli dining experience is at the same level of high art as the best example of Japanese tea ceremony, and for the same reasons. We must not turn our Western prejudices against the proximal senses into a determination of what makes fine art: i.e. that fine art must use the distant senses.
Nor do we have to see all food preparation as fine art in order to concede that some is. Those who see the highest level Michelin star type dining experiences as somehow second-rate in relation to fine art painting are missing the point. Saito further quotes Korsmeyer that "the concept of art, dominated as it is today by the idea of fine art, is a poor category to capture the nature of foods and their consumption." (17) This just seems a category mistake since food as a category is broad like photography as a category. Most photography is not art, and even less is fine art, and yet this does not mean that photography cannot be fine art. Similarly if we want to broadly capture the nature of foods and their consumption it would be best to focus not on El Bulli but on the vast number of practices involving food. I would venture to say that virtually any social practice: dance, food, music, video games, advertising, religious ritual, etc., can have a fine art manifestation (can be a product of genius, in Kant's sense). But most dance, food, music, etc. is not fine art. In any case, I would not want to, as Korsmeyer puts it, "divert attention from the interesting ways in which the aesthetic importance of foods diverges from parallel values in art." (18) Of course one of the things that food as fine art does is focus our attention on such "interesting ways" just as dance as fine art focuses our attention on features of dance that differentiate it from other art forms.
Saito further quotes Wolfgang Welsh as holding that sport, for example, "cannot substitute for Schonberg, Pollock, or Goddard" which, in my view, is just plain silly, since (1) no one is calling for substitution, and (2) the correct comparison class is master artists. It is not sports against Pollock, but Pollock compared to the El Bulli master chef, Adria.
Saito is also excellent in his list of various things that are associated with the paradigms of classical Western art and which do not apply to everyday aesthetics. Putting the point negatively, she says that there are various features that make certain everyday aesthetic phenomena non-art, like "absence of definite and identifiable object-hood and authorship, our literal engagement, transience and impermanence of the object, and the primacy of practical values of the object" (17) although I am somewhat concerned about the notion of "primacy of practical values" which can be interpreted in different ways.
Saito's discussion of frames as unique to art as opposed to everyday aesthetics is of particular interest. Ronald Hepburn had once noted that non-art objects are frame-less and that we then become the creator of the aesthetic object: the frameless character can, as Saito puts it, "be compensated by exercising our imagination and creativity in constituting the aesthetic object as we see fit." (19) I agree with this, but then I also think that this means that we are then virtually framing the object and thereby treating it as if it were a work of art at least in respect to being something that is now unified and has an imaginative/creative dimension, although this time introduced to some extent by ourselves as viewers. This is why I say in my book that artists are the greatest experts in the aesthetics of everyday life. They are constantly seeing landscapes for example as if they were works of art by framing them and exercising their imaginations in the process. It is interesting in this regard that Saito's examples of such framing (a baseball game, the streets of New York, and drinking tea) read like a poet's appreciation of these things. She has a fine poetic sensibility. But poetry is an art form. Moreover, when she says "in appreciating the smell and taste of green tea, I may incorporate the visual and tactile sensation of the tea bowl, as well as the sound of slurping" I note that this is exactly how one ought to appreciate tea in the setting of the Japanese tea ceremony, which Saito elsewhere recognizes to be an art form. (15)
Saito admits that "In constructing the object of our aesthetic experience in these cases, we do select and specifically attend to certain ingredients in our perceptual field, just as we do when we appreciate art as art." (19) The difference in her mind is that, in art, we determine this based on social convention and "institutional agreement" not on the basis of "our personal preference, taste, and inclination." And she is right at least in that there is some greater degree of institutional agreement in the realm of art, but it strikes me that this is only a matter of degree and that there certainly a lot of relying on "our own imagination, judgment, and aesthetic taste as our guide" in art as much as in everyday life. Moreover, as Saito herself has described, there are some everyday practices that involve a lot of institutional agreement, for example sports and cat beauty contests.
So I agree with Saito when she says "We can appreciate the aesthetic value of a chair, an apple, a landscape, and rain as if the were a sculptural piece...[etc.] by becoming a pure spectator/listener. However, more often than not, we experience a chair not only by inspecting its shape and color, but also by touching its fabric, sitting in it, learning against it, and moving it, to get the feel for its texture, comfort, and stability." (20) I just think that this just is what aesthetically contemplating what a chair is, what it is to be a "pure spectator" and that seeing it as if it were art must also take into account that in looking at a painting, for example, we, as Dewey observed, are subliminally aware of all of the other senses, and that the intensity of the color is that all of that other information is in some way contained in the color, and then seeing it as it functions in life, is also part of the background information subtly contained in great art. It is just that, here, that stuff is no longer backgrounded. One of the most poetical and best said passages in Saito's book is her description of eating an apple, except that she starts wrongly by saying that it is "our typical experience of an apple." It is not your typical experience in alienated Western perception. Here is what happens to Saito: it is perceptual experience of eating an apple that is mindful: "starts by beholding its perfect round shape and delicate colors ranging from red to green and holding it in our hand to feel its substantial weight and smooth skin. Then we proceed to engage all of our senses and enjoy the crunching sound when we first bite into it, the contrast between the firmness of its contents and the sweet juice flowing from it, and, of course, its smell and taste." This is the approach to an apple that a great chef would take, as well as a great poet. It is an approach consonant with the tea ceremony approach to drinking tea. It is a deeply contemplative approach to eating an apple very unlike the ordinary way we just consume food.
There is also the issue of conventions. It is not as though there are no conventions in the experience of non-art. Saito experiences three ways of appreciating raindrops. One of them is "we may experience rain by sitting under the hanging roof of a Zen temple, looking out on its attached rock garden, attending to the way in which the surface of each rock glistens with wetness and nothing the elegant movement of raindrops..." She stresses that, of the three way of appreciating rain, one the "singing in the rain" approach, and the third being that of John Muir in Yosemite, all are legitimate. I agree, and yet each is a convention, and the one associated with the Zen temple is very immersed in the entire Zen aesthetic and even in a certain architectural aesthetic interestingly similar to what Heidegger speaks of when he describes a Greek temple experienced aesthetically. So, it is wrong to say that "in all these examples, there is no institutional or conventional agreement" and that the only guide is what is more rewarding: this sort of business is not as individualistic. Finally, it is also just plain false that "experiencing a chair or an apple as a piece of sculpture ...is likely to be less interesting and satisfying than more normal ways of experiencing them" since all of the power of an Edward Weston photograph is based on the way in which doing so can be very interesting and satisfying, and, again, largely because he manages to capture, using only visual means, what it is to touch and eat the vegetable he photographs. Again, although Saito is right that it does not matter when or under what light I observe a painting by Cezanne of Mt. Sainte-Victoire and it does matter when I view the actual Mt. Sainte-Victorie, I know this especially now because i have spent a lot of time looking at Cezanne. Cezannes's painting of the mountain would not make any sense if it were not the case that he could paint it over and over again because it has different aesthetic qualities at different times. (25) Again, it is the dynamic relationship between the aesthetics of the everyday and the aesthetics of art that is most evident here.
But where our area of disagreement comes up the most is exemplified when Saito says "We clean our kitchen and bathroom for hygiene, cook and eat food for sustenance, and pick our clothes for protection and comfort." (26) Maybe the word "for" is ambiguous here, but my immediate reaction is that this is just false. I spend a lot of time doing all of these thing and I can only think of hygiene, sustenance, protection and comfort and some of the functions served by these activities...often not the most important ones. I clean my kitchen mainly for the pleasure of getting it clean, and because I have been influenced by Nhat Hanh, secondarily for the pleasure in the rhythm of the process and the attendant aesthetic qualities, then thirdly because I want my wife to be happy with the results, and maybe fourthly for hygiene - sure, of course, you want to eliminate the germs that might give you food poisoning....this is in the category of unimportant precisely because so obvious.
So now to Kant. I don't want to get deep into Kant interpretation here, and there is a lot of room for disagreement, but it strikes me that Saito's disapproval of his notion of the disinterested attitude in application to everyday aesthetics seems based largely on her understanding of what Kant means by "pure." She thinks that Kant means that pure or "free beauty" is "more legitimate" than dependent beauty. And yet Kant does not say so. We Americans have associations with "pure" that Kant may not have had with the German word it translates. Saito admits that Kant also has a concept of dependent beauty but thinks that he requires us to "surgically remove" functional value in order to appreciate the everyday. But this is not how he treats architecture, or any of the arts, all of which he sees as examples of dependent beauty, with the possible exception of music without words. Although I wholly agree with Saito that "in our everyday, normal interaction with a utilitarian object, the aesthetic and the practical are experienced as fully integrated" I am not convinced that Kant would have held otherwise. (26) Going beyond Kant, I think it would be better to say that in approaching the everyday aesthetic object we need to bracket practical considerations to see it as purposeless, to capture the "pure" aspect of the experience in free play, but that we need also to toggle between that and the other, dependent, aspect of the aesthetic object when it is an artifact and not a free beauty of nature. (How we ought to appreciate nature is not under consideration here.)
Kant however was notoriously disregarding of the near senses, color (which he called mere "charm") and of the pleasures in practical activity. Dewey, however, with his anti-dualist stance, would not have disregarded these things. So this is why I join Saito against Kant when she says "the aesthetic value of a knife consists not only of its visual qualities, but also of its feeling in my hand, determined by its texture, weight and balance, but also of its feeling in my hand, determined by its surface texture, weight, and balance, but most importantly by how smoothly and effortlessly I can cut an object because of the material, shape, length, texture, and weight of the blade and handle." (27) Saito here stresses not the fact that the knife functions well but "the way in which all the sensuous aspects converge and work together to facilitate his use." (27) All of this, and the entire paragraph in which it appears, is, I think, a major contribution.
I am interested here in the relation between what I have called "aura" and what Dewey calls "quality." (These thoughts are inspired by Robert E. Innis's brilliant "The 'quality' of philosophy on the aesthetic matrix of Dewey's Pragmatism," in The Continuing Relevance of John Dewey: Reflections on Aesthetics, Morality, Science and Society ed. Larry A. Hickman et. al. Rudolpi 2011.) Dewey, following Peirce, speaks of Firstness as "sheer totality and pervading unity of of quality in everything experienced, whether it be odor, the drama of King Lear, or philosophic or scientific systems" experienced. I am not entirely comfortable with the notion of a unique pervading quality that unifies each thing experienced since this has the slight odor of naive realism. However, consider another take on this, somewhat at angles with Dewey's and Peirce's original idea, but largely in accord with it. That is, (and here I am speaking in my own voice) anything can be perceived as having a pervading quality. Let's say that this is the same as what I have described in my book as "aura." Let's say that when something is perceived as having a pervading quality this is a quality that is emotionally charged, filled with a sense of potentiality, and seems to make the object or situation involved go beyond itself, makes the thing seem to be alive, and gives it aesthetic charge (which we humans generally experience as a kind of pleasure). The point of divergence from Dewey and Peirce is that they would insist (I think) that King Lear has one proper pervading unity, whereas my idea is more relativist, i.e. that there are different possible readings of King Lear that can give rise to a pervasive quality, each such quality being different. So whereas their account is of "the given permeating total quality of anything experienced" I speak of the given permeating total quality that anything experienced can have if it is experienced "as," which is to say that the experience of that thing has been heightened or intensified in the way described. Articulation of such experience is usually in terms of some metaphor, i.e. some one word or phrase that takes on a special non-literal meaning insofar as it is what the object or situation experienced is experienced as. King Lear has its Firstness, but on my account, this would be different for different powerful or good readings/interpretations of that work. What Dewey refers to as a "total undivided quality" is, on my account, the quality of something experienced as with aura. I would agree with Innis as to the "primacy of the aesthetic in world-building" but probably in a different sense than his, i.e. that this primacy is a matter of the inception moment of the creative process in science, art, art appreciation/interpretation, religion, philosophy, business, invention, etc. in which the thing or situation seems filled with meaning and possibility, and in which this "feel" guides future developments in the creative process, i.e. in world-making. (I would allow the feel itself to evolve, perhaps unlike Dewey or Innis). I agree with Innis that this is not a matter of the quale of primitives such as "red" but rather a "projection of a world." Despite the above-mentioned divergences, my account is completely in accord with Dewey's statement that "considered in itself, quality is that which totally and intimately pervades a phenomenon or experience, rendering it just the one experience which it is" and that this quality is "ineffable." The only problem I have with Dewey here is that he makes a distinction between the quality as "first, present, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent" and the quality of descriptions of this very quality or the correlated situation that may follow. The subtle difference I hold to is that the pervasive quality is an aspect the creative process that is not just at the first point but can come and go, and when it is there it certainly has these characteristics, but that this can happen during the process of description too. Thus, on my view there is a continuity between originary and descriptive experience so that descriptive experience is not one removed from the originary but is just one more iteration or mode, i.e. of thinking. That is, the creative process is not just a matter of first the feeling and then the articulation of the feeling. Thus I would strongly disagree with Innis when he says (perhaps agreeing with Langer) that "art, as thematic, is derivative from this prior matrix of qualitative world-building." (45) This seems a major error. However, I certainly agree with Peirce's idea that, as Innis puts it, images, diagrams and metaphors "are all rooted in a shared quality, or firstness..." A manifestation in short of the object experienced as object with aura is that it is paired with metaphors, images, etc., since it is a way of "seeing as." This is a matter of seeing what I would call "essences" although such essences are historicised, unlike the Platonic or Aristotelian ones: thus when Dewey speaks of the sentence "The red Indian is stoical" as a sentence which does not simply attribute a property to the Indian or place him in a class but rather that the Indian is "permeated throughout by a certain quality...he lived, acted, endured, stoically" we are, in my language, speaking of the Indian as being seen as essentially stoical i.e. under the metaphor of the "stoic." Again, this should be historicized and not essentialized in the traditional Platonic/Aristotelian sense, which would leave us, for example, with a racist (in this case) static understanding of the Indian. Rather "the red Indian is stoical" would be better seen in this context as a powerful metaphor, if paired with a wide variety of other materials and experiences, that might work well in some context or situation not described here or by Dewey (e.g. as the pervading idea or theme of a novel by James Fenimore Cooper).
It should also be observed that there is an important relation between the pervasive quality and the notion of an organic whole: as something, for example a painting is seen, effectively, under a metaphor and "as" in this way, it is seen in such a way that each part seems internally related to every other part. Again, this can happen effectively under different interpretations. We can then see the pervasive quality as "articulated in the members of the configuration" as Innis puts it. Note also that this is, as Innis observes, the background to all propositional symbolization. Noteworthy in this regard is Innis's claim that "Peircean semiotics, for its part, is based on an explosion of the claim of uniqueness and exclusive of propositional - linguocentric symbolization" (48) If this is true of Peirce then I have misjudged and under-rated Peirce who I have generally seen as a minor character next to Dewey, someone roughly equivalent of the contemporary analytic philosopher of a realist science-centered stamp.
If, in the end, these findings go far beyond art to discussions for example of thinking in general and if it is right that, as Dewey puts it "existentially, thinking is association as far as the latter is controlled" association meaning"connection of objects or their elements in a total situation having a qualitative unity" and if qualitative unity is a matter of aesthetics, then it is aesthetics that forms the basis of philosophy, not epistemology or logic in the traditional formalist non-Deweyan sense.
What is the purpose of life (i.e. our lives, as humans)? My current answer is enhancement or enrichment of experience. I like to go back to ancient Greek approaches to philosophy that emphasize philosophy as a way of live. The business of philosophy, in this sense of the word (not in our current professionalized sense), is to enhance experience. Aesthetics takes on a central role here. By attending to aesthetics we learn how to enhance experience. Ethics clears the ground for this practice in that it helps us get along with other people, thus maximizing our ability to enhance experience. Ethics then should be subordinate to aesthetics (an unheard of view). Mathias Girel has recently taught me that Richard Shusterman's philosophy is pretty much in accord with this. See his "Perfectionism in Practice: Shusterman's place in Recent Pragmatism" Contemporary Pragmatism 12 (2015) 156-179. I have followed the development of Shusterman's pragmatist aesthetics over the years and, although I have sometimes been critical, our views are really quite close. This shouldn't be surprising: we both started in the ordinary language wing of analytic aesthetics influenced by Nelson Goodman and Wittgenstein, both were moved strongly by Rorty's recovery of pragmatism, Margolis's pragmatist aesthetics, and a rediscovery of Dewey's Art as Experience (and in this, of course, I was influenced by Shusterman's own book Pragmatist Aesthetics), and we both then became increasingly fascinated by outlier regions of aesthetics, Shusterman focusing on popular art forms such as Rap, I moving into the aesthetics of everyday life by way of gardens as a marginal art form that could move into the fine art realm once again (I have recently argued for a similar move for fine cuisine). I was one of the first to think seriously about Shusterman's somaesthetics. In general I see Shusterman as moving on a parallel path to mine, although of course he is more well-known.
Before going on to discuss Girel's take on Shusterman I should mention two terms he uses that I find irritating and wish would go away. The first is "meliorism." Although I see myself as a pragmatist I do not like this word. Dictionary.com defines it as "the doctrine that the world tends to become better or may be made better by human effort." The idea that the world tends to become better is just silly and is, at least, hard to reconcile with history. The idea that it can be made better by human effort is vague at best: for example, the world (i.e. the planet surface on which we live) could be made better by humans decreasing CO2 output, and human life would be better if we were able to cure major diseases or eliminate slavery...there is nothing controversial about either of these claims. But what more can we get from the label of "meliorism" than that one hopes things will get better and tries to make them so, for example, for one's community. Is this anything more than an optimistic attitude towards life? Or perhaps meliorism is just the theory that philosophy should be concerned with the art of life or how to improve our lives, which I have already affirmed. The other, related, word I don't like is "perfectionism." I suppose the spirit it represents is in the right place, but since human perfection is impossible, and since we can only ever speak of relative perfection, and since terms like "making better" and "improve" just work better, I think pragmatists should just drop this overly metaphysical and unrealistic-sounding term.
That said, Girel stresses "enhanced experience" in his analysis of Shusterman, and this is where Shusterman and I deeply agree. Girel also observes that Shusterman holds to the "somatic and non propositional dimension of experience," and I agree that this was neglected by overly-language-centered accounts of experience. I have stressed the non-linguistic aspect of experience in my notion of "aura" as developed in my book The Extraordinary in the Ordinary, and I have come to increasingly share with Shusterman an emphasis on the "notion of philosophy as a way of life." Thus, in the debate between Shusterman and Rorty on this point, I stand with Shusterman. Girel gives a quote from James that Shusterman has advocated and which I like as well: "the body is the storm centre, the origin of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-train. Everything circles round it and is felt from its point of view." Girel informs us that Robert Brandom's alternative version of pragmatism sees the idea of experience as useless or harmful since it is offered as something that gives "epistemic authority" without entering into the game of giving or asking for reasons. Neither Dewey, Shusterman nor I would advocate this for experience (although I do think that Brandom gives too much importance to the space of reasons). Brandom wants to replace the concept of experience with "perceptible facts and reports of them..." but then that erases the aspects of experience that has nothing to do with facts, particularly the aesthetic and ethical aspects. Moreover, the act of reporting on a fact is just an aspect of someone's experience anyway. To deny the existence of experience is like putting one's head in the sand. It reminds me of when Norman Malcolm denied that we have dreams at night: for him, we only have a disposition to tell stories in the morning. Experience is just the way we live in the world. Rejection of experience seems to come from a deification of language, i.e. removing it to a transcendent realm. I agree with Shusterman that there are non-linguistic understandings, understandings that come prior to language-based interpretations. A better way to put it is that every interpretation has a non-linguistic side, and the development of an interpretation is a dynamic interaction of linguistic and non-linguistic interpretations. As Shusterman says, non-linguistic understandings are "deeply shared by culture and history" and, therefore, rejecting foundationalism does not entail rejecting non-linguistic understanding. Girel observes another point of disagreement between Shusterman and Brandom: Brandom's commitment to linguistic pragmatism implies rejection of the continuities Dewey finds between man and nature in his Art as Experience. Brandom looks here to be just another representative of the Cartesian/Platonic tradition which sees a radical difference between man and nature, a tradition Dewey wisely opposed. This is the same kind of ideology that has left us in our current state of environmental disaster.
But the main reason why I have been inspired to write about Girel on Shusterman is the emphasis placed on enhancing experience. Everyday aesthetics, which I have been advocating since the 1990s, and Richard Shusterman's somaesthetics are, in my view, just two different ways to advocate essentially the same program. Girel quotes Shusterman: "Philosophy should be transformational. Rather than a metascience for grounding our current cognitive and cultural activities [the Cartesian project], it should be cultural criticism that aims to reconstruct our practices and institutions so as to improve the quality of our lives." The only point I would disagree with here is this: Shusterman thinks that we need to choose between improved experience and philosophical insight, or what he calls "originary experience." Unlike Shusterman, I hold that both are the "ultimate philosophical goal." However, my understanding of philosophical insight is not to be associated with the Cartesian tradition: I discuss it elsewhere in my writings on metaphor. My view of philosophical insight is historicized and pragmatic and thus not Platonic in any traditional sense. We enrich and harmonize our experience by way of having philosophical insight.
Two more comments before I sign off. First, Shusterman sees improvement of experience almost entirely in terms of what he calls somatic practices. I am not against these practices. What I want to stress however is that the practices involved in making works of art are themselves somatic in ways that Shusterman has never fully recognized, as are also practices involved in the everyday aesthetic attentiveness of any person who goes through life with the view of enhancing experience. Second, when Shusterman says that "philosophy's cultural politics could take the eminently pragmatic form of seeking to benefit life not merely by writing texts but by other forms of concrete praxis in the world...including somatic disciplines that can make a positive difference to the perception, performance, and attitudes of the practitioner" he should have also mentioned the practices of making works of art and the practices involved in appreciating those arts, whether fine or popular. That is, we need to recognize that with a revision of our conception of philosophy, what artists do actually comes quite close to what philosophers do, perhaps that what great artists do is even closer to what great philosophers do, although much more body-centered, and perhaps for that reason, more effective overall.
In a previous post I questioned whether there is a ritual theory of art. Today I want to revisit that question from another angle. The expression theory of art says that art is expression. It does not say that all expression is art. Nor does is really simply categorize art as a form of expression. It is a metaphor. "Art is expression" means that metaphorically art is expression. The same would go for a ritual theory of art. It would say, metaphorically, that art is ritual. What that means depends on the rest of the theory. But what interests me about Cynthia Freeland's account of the theory is that it comes under the heading of thinking about various art practices of the 1990s, some of which have continued into our own time, as indicating that art "is" ritual or, as she also puts it, art is "communal ritual." Freeland's conclusion is that although art can have "its own ritualistic aspects" these aspects are "completely unlike those achieved by the sober participants with shared transcendent values": such as in Mayan ritual. The reason that they are "completely unlike" is that "it seems unlikely [that contemporary artists who use blood and such in their art] are seeking to contact the gods and higher reality, or appease spirits of our ancestors." At the same time she admits that art like that of Damien Hirst, which is "ugly and disturbing" may not fit the kind of theory presented to us by Hume, Kant and such more recent figures as Bell, Bullough and Greenberg. So perhaps some theory other than disinterestedness theory of Kant is needed to explain the attractiveness of contemporary disturbing art. I think there is a problem with her use of the phrase "completely unlike." I suspect that although no one (or hardly anyone) ever outright advocated the view that art is ritual, many people working in the arts in the 1990s would have been attracted to the idea not as a literal claim (yes, people like Andre Serrano and Damien Hirst were probably not literally trying to contact gods) but as metaphorical (these people were trying to do something very much like what the creators of ritual in primitive times were doing, at least from one perspective.) Moreover, I also suspect that those who would have been attracted to the claim that art is ritual (or, if you want to put it this way, should ideally be more like communal rituals of the past) are not unreasonable. The path to this is by way of Dewey.
I now believe that "art is ritual" theory is best understood in the light of John Dewey's chapter "The Live Creature" in his Art as Experience. Dewey tells us a story of the history of humankind which is a story of fall. Once there was a time when people did not set art off on a pedestal, in which the various arts were "part of a significant life of an organized community." Further, as he puts it, "the collective life that was manifested in war, worship, the forum, knew no division between what was characteristic of these places and operations, and the arts that brought color, grace, and dignity, into them." In particular, "music and song were intimate parts of the rites and ceremonies in which the meaning of group life was consummated."
Although Dewey is not straightforward about this, I believe he was pointing in the direction of some sort of retrieval of this condition, i.e. of primitive life. I suspect that he would be comfortable with the definition of art as ritual, not as a description of the role of art in our own society, but of an ideal form of art, something that we could attempt to achieve again in some way. In this respect, think of Dewey as somewhat like Plato (of course, he is not like Plato in so many other ways, for instance in his rejection of dualism and his advocacy of democracy). Both imagine an ideal republic, one that also necessarily involves a transformation of aesthetics and our approach to the arts. In Dewey's case the ideal republic is one that does not have the "dislocations and divisions of modern life and thought" that currently hinders art from achieving its true value. Dewey's philosophy in short is a critique of modernity, and one way to express that is to, in a hopeful way, say "art is ritual." A new theory of this sort would disclose "the way in which [good works of art] idealize qualities found in common experience" and recognize "the normal development of common human activities into matters of artistic value." Rather than literally assimilating art under the category of ritual this new way of looking at aesthetics achieves many of the things ritual achieved without making any commitments to communicating with or influencing gods. (See my article on Dewey's aesthetics for my summary of the content of this chapter.)
Earlier I said that "art is ritual" is a metaphor. An interesting feature of metaphorical identification is that both sides of the metaphor are conceptually transformed. We do not simply see art as ritual in some deep or essential way but also that ritual is like art is some deep or essential way, although the second claim is more indirect since to claim that art is ritual is not necessarily to claim that ritual is art. By the way, Heide Gottner-Abendroth, the feminist aesthetician would probably be attracted to the idea that art is ritual since her matriarchal aesthetics is like Dewey's aesthetics of the live creature in calling for a return, in some way, to premodern times, which she saw to be matriarchal and fundamentally ritualistic. See my post on her.
To some extent Freeland was just trying to explain why people were shocked by, for example, the Sensation exhibit in Brooklyn. She says "Symbols of pain and suffering that are central to many religions can be shocking when dislocated from their community. If they mix with more secular symbols, their meaning is threatened. Artwork that uses blood or urine enters into the public sphere without the context of either well-understood ritual significance or artistic redemption through beauty." (7) Nice point. In some ways these works were directed against ritual as it is today, i.e. in established religions. Freeland observes that Andres Serrano saw himself not as criticizing Christianity but the institutions of Christianity. The claim that art is ritual is not only a shocking claim about art but a shocking claim about ritual, especially if ritual is mainly understood in terms of the standardized rituals we see in our religious institutions today. But I also think that these artistic efforts are not just for notoriety. They also propose a vision and, once again, an ideal.
It is noteworthy that Freeland writes "Most modern art, in the context of theater, gallery, or concert hall, lacks the background reinforcement of pervasive community belief that provides meaning in terms of catharsis, sacrifice, or initiation" (4) and that is why audience members sometimes feel shocked by such art. Yes, but isn't that the Deweyan point? If art is isolated in the theater, gallery and concert hall, and is decontextualized and isolated from any sense of community, then experiences of, for instance, catharsis may be less possible. The claim that "art is ritual" is (or was) a call to change society by way of changing our relation to art.
I have read that many artists are intrigued by Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology or object-oriented metaphysics. Having just read his The Quadruple Object (Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2011), I would say they could do better. Harman's theory is fascinating, but deeply flawed. Mainly he is inspired by Husserl, Heidegger and Whitehead. Although he rejects Husserl's idealism, his theory inherits some of the weaknesses of Husserl's phenomenology. Most importantly it suffers from a lack of the kind of insight a close reading of Dewey would provide. Harman makes some of the same criticisms of traditional empiricists that Dewey made, and yet finds himself committed to a Cartesian-like dualism. This is the fatal flaw of the theory. Some might find Harman attractive simply because his theory is not anthropocentric. But there are other ways to go against anthropocentrism. Sometimes Harman worries that he might be considered a crackpot. Although I take much of what he says quite seriously and admire him for the scope of his thought, there is a crackpot dimension to it. Anyone who claims that he has isolated exactly ten ontological categories and then goes on to explicate the system in terms of the relations of suits in a deck of cards, as Harmon does in his ninth chapter, is hard to take seriously. Or, to put it another way, Harman takes himself way too seriously.
I was introduced to Harman by an article in the current issue of Art Forum, "Those Objects of Desire" by Andrew Cole (Summer 2015). Cole is critical of Harman although from a different perspective than I am. He basically thinks that Harman has failed to see how Kantian his theory really is, and that personifying such objects as commodities runs up against criticisms already raised by Marx. Although Cole makes some good points, my response draws more from the American Pragmatist tradition.
One way to test Harman's theory, which is supposed to cover all sorts of objects, is to see how it works in relation to a work of art. Heidegger himself in "The Origin of the Work of Art" developed his notion of the thingliness of a thing in relation to works of art, famously a painting by Van Gogh of shoes and a Greek Temple. Harman argues that all objects have two sides, one side being the real object, something much like Kant's thing-in-itself, and the other being what he calls the sensual object, i.e. the object-as-experienced. (It is not clear whether the thinks that the sensual dog and the real dog are two sides of the same dog or two completely different things, although usually he talks as though they are completely different things.) He believes that real things are completely autonomous and do not depend in any way on relations to other things. This raises many concerns. Use our example of a work of art. It is impossible to understand a painting by Edward Hopper, for example, without understanding something about the context in which it was created.
I should put my Deweyan assumptions to the fore before going on. (David L. Hildebrand has written an excellent book that explains how Dewey avoids the very dilemmas that Harman finds himself in: Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003). Rather than saying that we should base our metaphysics on isolated or autonomous objects, Dewey would stress experience, although experience understood in his own way. Dewey is no subjectivist or idealist. On his account, experience arises out of the interaction between ourselves as live creatures and our environments. Because Dewey takes a naturalist perspective he does not rank humans as anything special. Animals and even plants can interact as live creatures with their environments, although the nature of their experience would be quite different from that of humans. Nonetheless, Dewey is not guilty of a mechanistic worldview typical of previous naturalist philosophers, or of the simplistic approach to empiricism found in Locke and Hume.
For Dewey, and me, the live creature, say a human, confronts an object, say a watch, directly. Rejecting dualism, Dewey would not accept that the watch that we confront sensuously is to be distinguished from the real watch. There are, of course, many manifestations of the watch, many ways in which it appears to us. These manifestations are all ways we confront the watch.
One of the ways in which Harman's philosophy is both anti-art and anti-aesthetic is the way in which he discusses sensuous qualities. Harman likes to talk about these qualities as "gems, glitter, and confetti of extraneous detail" (25). The aesthetic aspect of experience is to be degraded to the merely pretty. Following Husserl, he sees sensuous objects as "frosted over with accidental features" irrelevant to their identity. Again, as he understands Husserl, the objects of our world are "heavily adorned with frivolous decorations and surface-effects." Whereas Harman sees these sensuous qualities as superfluous, the everyday aesthetics position I advocate, approaches them as rich in meaning. Moreover, from a pragmatist perspective, these meanings are played out in the activity of the live creature. The sensuous qualities may be pursued to fulfillment, for example, in "an experience."
Not to be overly negative, I want to give credit to Harman for stressing one point which he derives from Husserl. He writes: "what we encounter in experience are unified objects, not isolated points of quality. Indeed...the individual qualities of things are already imbued with the style or feel of the thing as a whole. Even if the exact hue of red in my apple can also be found in a nearby shirt or can of spraypaint, the colors will have a different feel in each of these cases, since they are bonded to the thing to which they belong." (11) This seems right, although at the same time one should take into account Goodman's idea that objects can exemplify certain qualities, thereby indirectly referencing all other instances of that quality.
Harman is opposed to something called "correlationism" which holds that "we cannot think of world without humans or humans without world." He is right to reject this view. We can certainly think a world unperceived by humans. However, whatever we think and whatever we experience is, by necessity, thought or experienced by humans. We cannot expunge that aspect of experience. We start from out own positions in life and in philosophy. There is a real world, but the world we experience is one that has us at the center and is experienced in our terms. For example, any description we make of such a world is a description necessarily in a language of human making, with terms and meanings that carry out contribution. So, although correlationism is false, it does point to a certain truth that Harman ignores.
Harman is also interested in Husserl's notion of eidetic features of the sensual object, features that make up the eidos of the object. Harman follows Husserl in thinking that real eidetic qualities "can only be the target of intellectual and not sensuous intuition." The radical division of intellectual and sensuous intuition is the source of yet another problem: this is another dualism that needs to be undercut. All intellectual intuition is in part sensual and all sensual intuition is in part intellectual. I have written about essences elsewhere and will have more to say about them in the future. Suffice it here to say that essences on my view are emergent from the activity of searching for essences. Essences are not eternal and unchanging but emergent. Nor are they solely intellectual objects. Moreover, they may be deeply connected to the particular and the accidental. Some quality in all of its particularity can exemplify. We can say for example that this particular thing standing for universal, but I think that sometimes it is deeper than that. When a particular thing stands for a universal it does not do so in such a way as to lose its particular nature.
Harman's object centered metaphysics is based as much on his interpretation of Heidegger as on his interpretation of Husserl. In particular he focuses on Heidegger's understanding of a hammer. He also has his own understanding of what Heidegger means by the four-fold, which I will discuss in a future post. I think that Heidegger's understanding of a hammer in Being and Time is deeply flawed, and this is the basis for many problems I also find in Harman. Heidegger says that hammers are usually present to us only when they fail. This idea undercuts (and is in deep opposition to) the entire aesthetics of design. When I handle a hammer I am aware of its design. It is satisfying when it feels good in my hand, looks good, and does its job well. The awareness of the hammer I have when it is broken is different in kind from that: it is an awareness of a functional ugliness. But when a hammer works well, looks good, etc. it is a thing of beauty, more so of course for a carpenter than for me. Heidegger and Harman just exclude from consciousness the aesthetically positive value of the hammer.
Let Vico intrude here. Here is a quote from wikipedia on Vico: "Vico is best known for his verum factum principle, first formulated in 1710 as part of his De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710) ("On the most ancient wisdom of the Italians, unearthed from the origins of the Latin language"). The principle states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as per Descartes, through observation: “The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.”" Vico and Dewey are on the same page here: Descartes, Husserl, Heidegger and Harman are on the other page. We know the hammer through its creation and through using it in the act of creation. Knowledge is connected with the live creature doing things in the world. Knowledge is an aspect of experience. The hammer by no means functions behind or beneath experience. Heidegger should have known better since he is the one who stressed the way in which technology has made us close our ears to Being. It is technology when treated in a merely mechanical way that causes the hammer to recede. Things lose the shiny sparkly quality of aliveness in a world which is mechanized. Heidegger's and Harman's philosophy of the receding hammer is just a sign of the very concept of the thing as mere object of use that Heidegger critiques elsewhere.
Harman's Heideggerian talk of hammers withdrawing into "subterranean background, enacting their reality in the cosmos without appearing in the least" is offensive mystification. In talking about what lies behind all phenomena, Heidegger and Harman go in the opposite direction of Dewey, since Dewey rejects precisely this dualism, the phenomena/noumena dualism that goes back to Kant, but even further to Descartes and ultimately Plato.
The sentence "conscious awareness makes up only a tiny portion of our lives" (37) seems innocuous at first, perhaps trivially true, and yet what sense can really be made of it. Even when engaging in psychoanalysis everything that happens to me is in consciousness: I become conscious of unconscious desires. Moreover, the other manifestations of those unconscious desires also happen, for example in my Freudian slips, in daily life. Conscious awareness makes up most of our lives, not a tiny portion...we are the lives we live, the lives we experience, our conscious lives.
Harman and Heidegger say that I usually fail to notice my eyeglasses. In a way that is true. If my attention is directed elsewhere from my eyeglasses I do not notice them: they are on the very edge of my consciousness. However it is easy to redirect my attention to my eyeglasses, and this does not require that they be broken or even maladjusted. I can attend more or less to my eyeglasses and to their various features, for example how well they work and how good they look. Although the idea that tools "withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically" just seems implausible when I think about my glasses, Heidegger at least recognizes that tools exist in terms of relations to other pieces of equipment, often in a system of interrelated things, for example ink and inkstand.
The absurdity of Harman's position has be found in the sentence: "the world in itself is made of realities withdrawing from all conscious access." (38) The realities we encounter in life, for example my glasses, do not withdraw from conscious access. If I want to have conscious access to my glasses I simply attend to them. When I lose my glasses I can find them: that is because they are still available.
Following Heidegger, Harman says "an earthquake calls my attention to the solid ground on which I rely..." I have been through a major earthquake, the Loma Prieta earthquake in Northern California. I was in my backyard when it happened. It drew my attention to the way in which the ground, which I formerly saw as solid, could take another form entirely, something more like a wave at sea. Retroactively I could think of how my assumptions about the earth or the "solid" ground and what it could do were naive. The solid ground is not always solid. At the same time, it is easy for me to attend to the solidity of ground in non-earthquake times, for example when I am looking for a good foundation for a ladder. What does it mean to "silently depend" on the solidity of the ground?
Harman has a strange way of combining what seems to be common sense with nonsense. He says "There will always be aspects of these phenomena [for example the solid floor of my home] that elude me; further surprises might always be in store. No matter how hard I work to become conscious of things, environing conditions still remain of which I never become fully aware. When I stare at a river, wolf....I do not grasp the whole of their reality." Who could disagree! And then "This reality slips from view into a perpetually veiled underworld., leaving me with only the most frivolous simulacra of these entities." (39) What sense can possibly be made of this idea? It must mean something more than the mere truisms that preceded it.
For Harman there are only two kinds of objects: "the real object that withdraws from all experience, and the sensual object that exists only in experience." (49) The alternative position is that there is only one kind of object, the real object which is also the sensual object, i.e. the object that I sense. Although we can imagine stuff that never can be experienced we can only deal with the world as experienced, and even the most hypothetical and intellectualized or fantastic objects are experienced in some way, for example unicorns are experienced by way of unicorn pictures even though it would be wrong to say that there are animals rightly called unicorns.
There is a deep connection between meaning, communication and aesthetics. One can see Dewey's chapter on "Nature, Communication and Meaning" in his book Experience and Nature, as suggesting what this can be. (This discussion will be limited to the abridged version of this chapter to be found in Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy edited by John Stuhr.) The idea that meaning is a function of cooperative behavior as well as response to a thing as entering into behavior sets up the basis for all communication which is aesthetic in nature, including those forms of communication involved in the arts. Further, there is a dimension of the everyday in Dewey's comment that "a directly enjoyed thing adds to itself meaning, and enjoyment is thereby idealized." He goes on: "Even the dumb pang of an ache achieves a significant existence which can be designated and descanted upon; it ceases to be merely oppressive and becomes important....because it becomes representative..." This heightening of significance of the dumb pang takes it beyond the strictly ordinary into some other domain...not quite aesthetic, but getting there. To understand the aesthetic we need to understand the vast range of human experience that is not aesthetic but provides the grounds or basis for aesthetic experience.
Any aesthetic relation to the surrounding environment or to a particular object will have the multivalent quality Dewey has described in terms of relation between object, person communicating and person communicated to. Dewey describes it in this way: "The meaning of signs ...always includes something common between persons and an object. When we attribute meaning to the speaker as his intent, and also something, we take for granted another person who is to share in the execution of the intent, and also something, independent of the persons concerned, through which the intent is realized." Meaning is a "community of partaking" between these three things.
Dewey goes on to discuss tools and the ways in which they can help us to project potential efficiencies. Fire, for example, when it is used to cook is "an existence having meaning and potential essence." This is especially true when fire is the result of actions used to generate it. This is going to be the basis for any thought of the world as containing aesthetic objects and experiences.
Dewey then refers to language as the tool of tools and in doing so refers back to the ways in which tools take on meaning in ceremony and institutional setting. "The notoriously conventionalized and traditional character of primitive utensils and their attendant symbolizations demonstrates" that tools are used in this way. For a stick to retain its meaning as a lever, "the relationship between it and its consequence" must be distinguished and retained, and this is effected through language. Spears, urns, etc. may be "institutionalized as tools." Further "communication is a condition of consciousness," which means that aesthetic experience, which is a form of consciousness, would be impossible without communication.
The issue concerning aesthetics which Dewey raises for me in this writing is whether we can even speak of aesthetics separate from meaning. It seems that aesthetic experience is not only experience where the sensuous and formal are prominent but also the contextual and meaningful. It too has to be triadic. The aesthetic insofar as it is related to art is also related to tools. Artworks must be artifacts. Tools have meaning. They are items of everyday life with their own relatively primitive yet art-like in some ways aesthetic dimension. This is what I have tried to described as "heightened significance" of the aesthetic.
Dewey argues that it follows that "every meaning is generic or universal" in the sense that it is "common between speaker, hearer and the things to which speech refers" and is also "a method of action, a way of using things as means to a shared consummation..." In sum, "meanings are rules for using and interpreting things; interpretations being always an imputation of potentiality for some consequence" ... clearly a pragmatist notion of meaning. Here he opposes the traditional Aristotelian notion of meaning and of generalization as arising out of comparison of particulars. Rather, he sees generalization as spontaneously carried as far as it will go, as when a child uses a word as much as she can in new ways, and only then is it limited by conditions of use in a social context. Thus meaning and generalization is like metaphor in being promiscuous in interpretation, at least at first.
The picture I get out of Dewey is that of a first layer or level of meaning that provides a basis for our understanding of higher, more complex levels of meaning that can be called aesthetic. So, for example, he speaks of a traffic policeman using his whistle, and that this action is more than just a stimulus of the moment, but is situated within a set of consequences in terms of coordinating movement and even in terms of fines and imprisonment if one fails to respond. The essence of the whistle blow is "the rule, comprehensive and persisting, the standardized habit, of social interaction" for which the whistle is used. This is not aesthetic, nor is it art. But it does provide the basis for other actions and events which do have a distinctly aesthetic character.
It is not surprising then that when Dewey goes on to discuss fire he sees it phenomenologically as something "not merely physical" but entering "into human action and destiny." At this moment there is an aesthetic dimension, but at the level of everyday aesthetics, not at the level of art aesthetics. He writes that fire "enters experience; it is fascinating to watch swirling flames; it is important to avoid its dangers and to utilize its beneficial potencies." The fascination aspect of this experience of fire is aesthetic. He goes on: "the ultimate meaning, or essence, denominated fire, is the consequence of certain natural events within the scheme of human activities, in the experience of social intercourse, the hearth and domestic alter, shared comfort, working metals, rapid transit, and other such affairs." Fire is deep and rich with meaning, for example as something that can have such aesthetic or quasi-aesthetic qualities as giving shared comfort along with personal or family based associations of the hearth and alter and more practical and business-related associations involving metals and transit. This. of course, is distinguished from the scientific approach to fire which ignores such meanings in order to enhance control.
Dewey, however, is concerned about our current "sharp separation between meanings determined in terms of the causal relationship of things and meanings in terms of human association" where the latter are seen as unimportant or merely private. At the same time, he gives credit to the sciences, and to mathematics in particular, for disconnecting themselves from "human situations and consequences" and freeing themselves from the moral and the aesthetic in order to achieve what they achieve. Here, in the science/math perspective, the essence of something is entirely intellectual without any implications with regards to consummatory experience. The problem is that in doing this it becomes instrumental by way of detaching itself from the things towards which it is instrumental, i.e. valuable experience.
Of course science can be not only instrumental but also aesthetic itself, or as he puts it, an object of intrinsic delight. This is true also for philosophy (although it is hard to see philosophy as instrumental.) To be frank, this is a personal thing as much as a general point: Dewey obviously loves doing philosophy. And, in fact, this is true for me too. Doing philosophy, one might say, is part of my everyday aesthetic experience. As Dewey rightly says, "Few would philosophize if philosophical discourse did not have its own inhering fascination." But, as he also observes, this is not the goal of philosophy or of science or math, which relates rather to the function of their subject matters.
At this point in the chapter Dewey turns to art and religion. (One senses that he turns away from math with some relief.) This forms a culmination of his discussion of communication: "Letters, poetry, song, the drama, fiction, history, biography, engaging in rites and ceremonies hallowed by time and rich with the sense of the countless multitudes that share them, are also modes of discourse that, detached from immediate instrumental consequences...are ends for most persons." Discourse becomes both instrumental and final here. Further, as Matthew Arnold held, poetry (standing for art in general) is a criticism of life insofar as it "fixes those standards of enjoyment and appreciation with which other things are compared" and sets us on a path of action both for individual and community. The "staple objects of enjoyment," including not only the arts but also recreation, amusement and ceremony, do the most to "determine the current direction of ideas and endeavors in the community" by which life is judged.
So, in the end, communication in its highest form is both instrumental and final, giving us both a world of meaning and one in which there are objects valuable to the individual and the community. This second form, the final purpose of communication, is ultimately aesthetic: it is "a sharing whereby meanings are enhanced, deepened and solidified in the sense of communion" -- and the resultant objects are "worthy of awe, admiration, and loyal appreciation" as they are means to making life "rich and varied in meanings." As ends they free man from isolation into a realm of shared meaning.
Dewey concludes (after one of his typical blasts against the social conditions of our times): "When the instrumental and final functions of communication live together in experience, there exists an intelligence which is the method and reward of the common life, and a society worthy to command affection, admiration and loyalty." So, a chapter which addresses the nature of communication and meaning ends with a vision of an ideal society in which the arts, in the broadest possible sense of that term, are both means conducive to a great society and ends in themselves.
