 Okay, hello again, everyone. Welcome back to Great Texts, John Dewey's Art as Experience. And this week, we're going to be talking about Chapter 3, and that's Having an Experience. Okay. Now, the ideas Dewey's been developing so far in the book really come to fruition in this chapter. And we're going to get some of the central ideas for Dewey's theory of art and aesthetic experience on the table this time. The core distinction with which Dewey begins the chapter is that between experience at large and what he calls an experience, right? The idea is something like this. Experience in general is always going on as long as you're conscious, you're having experience, right? You're experiencing. And experience, as Dewey says, is an experience that forms a unified event that has a beginning, a middle, and an end where goals and expectations are fulfilled or there's a certain kind of unity. Everything comes together. Everything's integrated in an experience. We can see this sort of difference in everyday speech. So we'd talk about what an experience I had or that was a real experience. And there we're talking about something that is a kind of unified event, right? You know, Angela Chase might say we had a time, right? That's not that different from saying, you know, that was a real experience. Dewey provides some examples that are non-artistic in nature, like when you are working a problem and you solve it, when you complete a game of chess or something similar. When you have a conversation that has a real sort of back and forth flow. So writing something, these are all examples, some of them very long term of an experience, right? You know, if you're writing a book, that's a very long experience, but it is, if you finish it and you, you know, come to a happy, sort of you're happy with the way it ends up, you're having an experience. One of the features of experience that Dewey likes to emphasize is what we might call the unifying pervasive quality, or sometimes the immediate pervasive quality of an experience, right? To quote Dewey, he says, the existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variations of its constituent parts. As this unity is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual, for these terms are names, they name distinctions that reflection can make within this larger unifying quality, right? And this quality is immediately, immediately felt part of the overall experience. So I think back to this philosophical picture that Dewey's been providing us, you have the live creature embedded in the world or an environment, their environment. And you have this constant kind of back and forth interaction, equilibrium, sort of falling into disequilibrium and then returning to equilibrium, but not in a kind of purely cyclical way and then always kind of changing, evolving way. And the sort of activities where there's this interaction between the creature and the world, they have this pervasive quality. And we might say that the pervasive quality doesn't adhere in any particular part of this interaction, but in the whole thing. What Dewey sometimes calls a whole situation, right? So the whole situation is the thing that has this pervasive quality. And we can talk about situations in concert with experiences, with an experience, you have a situation. Dewey also here alludes to William James notion of the stream of thought. Sometimes it's called stream of consciousness. And James's idea developed in his psychology of 1890s principles of psychology is that consciousness, unlike what some of the early modern philosophers and and and other psychologists have told us is not just a succession of discrete little bits that we might call ideas or impressions, but a stream or a flow of thought he resists the notion of a of a bundle or train or chain of thoughts and instead sees these things as sort of a sort of flowing qualitatively one to the other. And Dewey very much, very much accepts this Jamesian idea and repeats aspects of it in this chapter. So, Dewey marks an important sort of transition moment in the chapter with this with this passage, he says, I've tried to show in these chapters, the first two plus the first part of the third chapter, that the aesthetic is no intruder in experience from without, whether by way of idol luxury, or transcendent ideality, but that it is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience. And emphasis is on complete here too in this in this quotation every time we have an experience. There is an element of the aesthetic to it, not necessarily something we would call a work of art or even an aesthetic experience per se, and we might focus on it as an intellectual or, or another kind of experience the experience of playing a game say. But, but whenever you have that kind of that kind of unity there's something of the aesthetic to it. Dewey sort of, he provides this distinction between the artistic and the aesthetic as a kind of central aspect of his of his thinking, where the artistic has to do with the production of art with activities of doing and making, right. And the aesthetic has to do with perception of an artwork and appreciation of the artwork or the enjoyment of the work. Dewey actually sort of bemoans the fact that there's no sort of ultimate category above these two right. So what come, what includes both the artistic and the aesthetic well that's the aesthetic right. So, so we he thinks we get confused actually by the, by the poverty of the English language to provide the sort of superordinate category of which artistic and aesthetic are the two elements the two key elements. What's key for Dewey is that the artistic and aesthetic that's a distinction that we need to draw but also these two things are can't be separated completely they're they're deeply connected to one another. The artist in making art, right, perceives it uses their aesthetic sensibility to evaluate it and refine it. Right. On the other hand, turning it around the perceiver in appreciating the art, supposes that there's an artist recruits their knowledge, if, if any of the production of this work or other works like it or of art in general, as part of the enjoyment of it, right. So, and the more the perceiver understands about the things that were done, or how they were made. The diff, they're going to have a different kind of aesthetic experience of it. So you can't, you can't sever the two. And both the art and the aesthetic experience of it suffer, right, to the extent that if we if we learn some that there is no artist that there is no production process behind the work of art. It might, it might really hamper our ability to enjoy it, you know, as, as, as such aesthetically. So this is a key this in the two sides of this distinction are going to be important as we move through later chapters and explore sort of different features of art. I do he refers to several artists in the chapter. I'm going to mention just to, for now, first Cezanne, right. Cezanne was a painter French, a post impressionist he sometimes called highly celebrated. He was, he worked from the middle of the 19th century died in 1906. He did a lot of landscape type work. So this is an example of a landscape painting. He was very influential on later 20th century art. So you can think of major early 20th century artists, there's a lot of influence Picasso, for example. Cezanne happens to be one of Dewey's favorite painters. Interestingly, also Cezanne was a favorite of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponti. And, you know, Dewey's emphasis on experience Merleau-Ponti's emphasis on phenomenology embodied phenomenology there's definitely some, some philosophical sympathico relationship there. But for Dewey, Dewey brings up Cezanne in this connection in this chapter because he's an example, Dewey thinks, of a great artist who is not also a great technician in Dewey's terms. In other words, if you think about the technical skills of painting, Cezanne doesn't have them or at least doesn't exhibit them in his paintings. Now Dewey contrasts Cezanne with John Singer Sargent, who was a well recognized as a master of technical painting skills. Painted landscapes, architectural kinds of paintings, but also was a sort of classic portrait artist. So you see examples of different kinds of art by Sargent here. So Dewey says he was a great master of the technical skills of painting but not a great artist. Definitely in his time and after some critics of Sargent called him out for a kind of superficiality. Now, I mean the justness or not of the specific praise for Cezanne, criticism for Sargent aside. I think we can see what Dewey's on about pretty easily, right, that the technical skill of the artist and the artistry and crafting and aesthetic experience are not the same thing. Right. And so that distinction is one that is particularly important to Dewey's theory. So that's all I really have for you today I look forward to reading a discussion posts and talking with you this evening about the chapter I think there's a lot of rich material in here that I didn't really touch on too much but I wanted to kind of orient you to some of the themes, let you know some of the things that I found interesting, and I look forward to finding out what you think. So I will see you. See you then and then, and then we'll be around next week for chapter four.