 Okay, hello everyone. Welcome back to Great Texts. Today we're talking about John Dewey's art his experience, Chapter 4, The Act of Expression. Okay, this chapter as you can probably intuit from the title really focuses on the production of art. Okay, what the artist is doing when they are producing art. I want to start off with a quote Dewey gives us from Samuel Alexander, who's a late 19th and early 20th century British philosopher, a student of the British idealist Th Green. He was also a psychologist, as well as doing a lot of work in speculative metaphysics. Alexander wrote a book, Art and the Material, and Dewey quotes from this book early on in the chapter. So here's that quote, and let me zoom in on that. Alexander says, the artist's work proceeds not from a finished imaginative experience to which the work of art corresponds, but from passionate excitement about the subject matter. The poet's poem is rung from him by the subject which excites him. And this is quoted on page 70 of our experience. So here, you know, the contrast Alexander is setting up is one that's crucial to Dewey between the idea that art just sort of springs fully formed from the imagination versus the idea that it instead begins in passion or excitement. When Dewey talks about impulsion, that's what that idea is going to be seeing in Alexander. Now, Dewey says he's going to hang four comments on this passage. And here they are, right? First, Dewey says the real work of art is the building up of an integral experience out of the interaction of organic and environmental conditions and energies. Second, the thing expressed is rung from the producer by the pressure exercised by objective things upon the natural impulses and tendencies. Third, the active expression that constitutes a work of art is a construction in time, not an instantaneous emission. And fourth, when excitement about subject matter goes deep, it stirs up a store of attitudes and meanings derived from prior experience. Okay, so if we focus on this first comment, which Dewey tells us is a terse summary of the point of view laid out in the first three chapters, we see that it encapsulates two of the key ideas from the earlier chapters of the book. So the first is this idea of the organism environment interaction that produces an experience, what you might also describe as the transaction between the live creature and the world around them. And then also, you get this notion from chapter three, that a complete experience or an experience has a structure of a beginning, a middle, and an end, right? You think about this in terms of the new vocabulary from chapter four, you see that the beginning is what Dewey calls an impulsion, right? It begins in an impulsion and there's some kind of struggle or work or inquiry or process of creation, that's the middle, and then you have an integration and a kind of conclusion that culminates at the end. So not just any kind of conclusion, but a special kind of culminating, integrating conclusion. Now the second point Dewey raises is this idea that the thing expressed in the active expression is rung from the producer by the pressure exercised by objective things upon the natural impulses and tendencies. This really captures a lot of what is particular to this chapter. And so I'm going to go through the ideas in detail, right? So Dewey defines an impulsion at the very beginning of the chapter. He says all experience begins with an impulsion and he describes impulsion variously as a movement of the organism, a craving, a turning towards, he says it begins in need, he describes it as a discharge of energies in some cases. So it's clear that impulsions have some kind of end, something they're directed towards. It may be subconscious, it may be very inchoate, but there's a movement and it's a movement towards something. Now if the impulsion is acted on immediately and it finds its end, then that's it. It doesn't necessarily register in a conscious way or have any sort of further meaning. In the case of an impulsion that comes from hunger, if the food is so immediately available that you don't have to do anything to get it and consume it, then there's nothing to do. There's nothing to think about. There's nothing and there's certainly nothing to express. If your impulsion is a feeling of grief and what that leads you to do is to cry out, tear your hair, weep. There's no filter. There's no direction to it. It's just the immediate outpouring of feeling. Then that's all it is. It's just an impulsion that's immediately dissipated or let out. Even then, Dewey tells us that from the outside we might call it an expression in the sense that we may say that a baby that's crying is expressing its discomfort, but it's not expression in the sense of an intentional or conscious expression. Instead of what that means, when we use expression in that other way, it's just a sign or something. In many cases, impulsion meets resistance and so cannot get to an extent. It's blocked by some circumstances. If you're simply thwarted by the resistance, if that's the kind of resistance you meet, then you just end up frustrated, maybe even enraged, but there's nowhere to go. On the other hand, the resistance might call out for thought, might generate curiosity, might in the end be a good thing. If we don't just let the impulsion fade away in frustration, we must look for some medium to further it. Now, the resistance that we're talking about, of course, can be external, often is, but it can also be internal and intentional as well. You can sort of, especially when as a mature person, the positive side that sometimes comes from delaying impulsion for some further ends, then you're going to want to redirect that impulsion towards some alternative means to your ends. That's what Dewey calls a medium. The medium of expression is an alternative material for reaching one's ends, for acting on the impulsion when a direct expression of the impulsion is blocked. That's an alternative way to your ends, as I said. Now, the process of using an intervening medium, it actually clarifies and reorders or reorganizes the impulsion itself, transforms it from a kind of course and co-hate thing to a conscious emotion. There's a long discussion in the chapter of what an emotion is and how an emotion works that is built on that idea. That clarifying ordering process itself involves the values and meanings from past experience, derived from past experience, playing a role. Dewey actually seems to say that the process, this whole process actually doesn't even just reach the original kind of end of the original impulsion, but actually the end itself is transformed. And it's this whole picture that gives you what Dewey calls an act of expression. So, in an act of expression, impulsion becomes an emotion through the clarifying and ordering process that brings in values from past experience. It mediates the original impulsion towards, directs it towards a new end, which sort of expresses the now clarified emotion in some sense. Now, in part three, Dewey emphasizes the way in which an act of expression is a construction in time, not instantaneous. You can see how that follows pretty clearly from the picture we've just been discussing. Dewey expands on this in that same passage by saying it means that the expression of the self in and through a medium, constituting the work of art, is itself a prolonged interaction of something issuing from the self with objective conditions. A process in which both of them acquire a form in order they did not at first possess. So there's kind of a back and forth between the self and the world through this medium that constitutes the work of art. For example, you might think about painters, how painters may repeatedly sketch the subject of their work and the sort of the back and forth process between the hand, the eye, the page, the medium with which they're sketching and all of that sort of refines the work that's being expressed. Sometimes that happens not in a sketchbook, but in the imagination in part, but that back and forth is still present in that case as well. So Picasso was a master of this kind of back and forth refinement of expressive form. Later in the chapter, sort of on the same theme, Dewey tells us that the work is artistic in the degree in which the two functions of transformation are affected by a single operation. As the painter places pigment upon the canvas or imagines it placed there, his ideas and feelings are also ordered. As the writer composes in his medium of words what he wants to say, his idea takes on for himself perceptible form. Okay, so the thing expressed in the medium of expression, there's a kind of back and forth between these. Okay, now looking at the fourth point, this is about the the store of attitudes and meanings derived from prior experience. This is another thing that Dewey expands upon in greater detail a little bit later in the chapter. I'm just going to read this quote. Dewey says each of us assimilates into himself something of the values and meanings contained in past experiences. But we do so in differing degrees and at differing levels of selfhood. Some things sink deep, others stay on the surface and are easily displaced. The old poets traditionally invoked the muse of memory as something wholly outside themselves, outside their present conscious selves. The invocation is a tribute to the power of what is most deep lying and therefore the furthest below consciousness in determination of the present self and of what it has to say. Right, so this is just an example of that point that past experience and the meanings, values, ideas and knowledge encompassed in it plays a big role in what is done in the future. And this is true for the artist as well as for the perceiver. So okay, so after all of this we've been talking about the act of expression. So what for Dewey is expressed in the work of art? He makes it clear that he thinks it's not in the impulsion. The original impulsion is not what is expressed. It gets things going, but as the artwork is produced it gets refined into emotion. Right, so is emotion what is expressed? And in a sense that's got to be right. But also the emotion is itself created by the act of expression. It does not pre-exist the act, right? Nevertheless, there's a sense in which Dewey says that the art, the work of art does express emotion. But he kind of walks that back as well. On page 74 he says, and this is a quote, just because emotion is essential to the act of expression which produces the work of art, it is easy for inaccurate analysis to misconceive its mode of operation and conclude that the work of art has a motion for its significant content. Okay, and so just continuing on on the next page, page 75, Dewey says, in the development of an expressive act, the emotion operates like a magnet, drawing it to itself appropriate material. Yes, emotion must operate. And so this is my aside. There is some sense in which emotion is expressed. Dewey says it is selective, emotion is selective of material and directive of its order and arrangement. But, and this is the other sense, it is not what is expressed, it is not the content of the expression. Without emotion, there may be craftsmanship but not art. Okay, it may be present and be intense, emotion again, emotion may be present and be intense, but if it is directly manifested, the result is also not art. Okay, so the relationship between the emotion and the expression is in some ways indirect, mediated. So then what is the significant content of the act of expression? What does the artist express? That's a question I leave with you to think about this chapter. Does Dewey tell us what is expressed here in this chapter? Independent of what Dewey thinks, what do you think the answer is? What is expressed in a work of art in a schematic The Dewey refers to Van Gogh, Vincent Van Gogh in the chapter as an example of an emotionally intense artist. But with this intensity, Dewey says, there is an explosiveness due to an absence of assertion of control. And I think Dewey means that as a criticism of Van Gogh, that there is emotion but there is not enough ordering or control. So when you look at these works by Van Gogh, I wonder whether you agree with Dewey that there's a lot of emotion, but there's a kind of absence of control, which you might see as a defect in the work of art. Alternatively, do you think Dewey is being in some sense unfair towards Van Gogh? Would be the other question. So those are some of the key ideas I wanted you to get out of chapter four. Of course, there are a lot of ideas in the chapter that I didn't touch on or go into too much detail on. There's more ideas about emotion, about the creative process in the chapter, even about the relationship of aesthetic experience and religious experience. I didn't really get into that. Of course, also there may be some nuances of interpretation that I've missed or I've gotten wrong. So let me know what you think about that. I look forward to our further discussion in class on the discussion board or in the comment sections of the video. So that's it for chapter four and I'll see you soon.