We Teach Art, But Can Art Teaches Us? John Dewey on the Significance of Art forHuman Life
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24821/j2n2sj78Keywords:
art, knowledge, philosophical bifurcation, experience, John DeweyAbstract
Those who pursue an academic career in art and design universities most likely are aware of one of its most puzzling dilemmas. On the one hand, as a subject situated in a post-industrial university setting where the progressive accumulation of scientific knowledge – mostly in propositional form and explaining how things work in our physical or social reality – constitutes its primary academic purpose, art and design are unavoidably driven to adopt the same outlook. On the other hand, most artistic/designerly activities are not aimed to produce or derived from experimentally replicable objective research statements but conducted to generate new and unique artifacts, performances, narratives or experiences in order to enhance artistic/designerly universe. However, considering their being as non-propositional, unique creations of art and design are unfortunately regarded as mere products of subjective emotional preferences, where its appropriate functions are nothing more than museum spectacles, entertainments or ornaments, which at the same time testify its marginal relationship with the knowledge or greater purpose of life. However, this predicament is not as self-evident as it looks since it eventually results from a particular philosophical outlook, namely, an outlook that bifurcates mind and body, rational (scientific) and emotional, subject and object, and so forth that comes down to us from Platonic and Cartesian tradition. It is precisely the holistic yet radical thought of John Dewey, the forerunner of everyday aesthetics, that profitably conceives art prior to Platonic/Cartesian bifurcation that would be studied and presented in this paper. Art, for Dewey, is not a product of subjectivistic emotions, but instead emerges through/as “experience,” understood as primary/pre-linguistic/embodied human-environment “transaction.” Located in such a primary experiential domain, art obtains its utmost significance and even becomes, in Dewey’s terminology, a “handmaiden of science.”
References
Cazeaux, Clive, Art, Research, Philosophy, Routledge, London, 2017.
Dewey, John, “Experience and Nature” in The Later Works of John Dewey, Vol. 1, Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1981.
_______________, “Art as Experience” in The Later Works of John Dewey, Vol. 10, Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1988.
Fesmire, Steven, Dewey, Routledge, London, 2015.
Jackson, Philip W., John Dewey and the Lessons of Art, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998.
Johnson, Mark, The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2018.
_____________, “Embodied Knowing Through Art” in The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, Biggs & Karlsson (eds.), Routledge, London, 2011.
