 Okay, hello everyone. I'm Professor Brown. Welcome back. I'm here to talk to you again about John Dewey's art as experience. Today we're talking about chapter two entitled The Live Creature and Ethereal Things. Dewey starts the chapter with a discussion of the compartmentalization and the separations that tend to be a part of the way we think about things, including the way we tend to separate art from everyday life and experience, as well as from our creatureliness, our animal nature. As we said before, Dewey disdains dichotomies and separations, always looking for the underlying unity, and this chapter is no different. However, he does admit the reality of these separations, the fact of this compartmentalization of experience, but he identifies them not as sort of ultimate dichotomies, but as a feature of our culture, as the way we organize our lives in modern civilization, a product of our institutions, our practices, our economic and political and social relationships. Now, Dewey focuses in on the word sense as a way of thinking about a potential bridge for these separations, and to get at a kind of underlying unity. So, he asks us to think about all the forms and cognates of sense, including the sensory and sense organs, the sensational, the sensitive, the sensible, the sentimental, the sensuous, and making sense, like making sense of an idea. These notions all related to sense run the gamut from physical sensations, the sensuous, our sense organs, to the emotional, the sensitive, the sensational, the sentimental, to the dimension of meaning and thinking, even the rational, the sensible. Sensible is a word for reasonable, right? So, already he points out that our everyday language has these kind of deep roots that belie the compartmentalization. And then he reminds us about his notion of experience with this restatement. He says, experience is the result, the sign, and the reward of that interaction of organism and environment, which, when it is carried to the full, is a transformation of interaction into participation and communication. So, here again, Dewey is reminding us of that organism-environment interaction that produces and constitutes experience, and which, again, belies that sort of separation, the separateness of the experience from the world. Then he returns to a theme that's important from the end of the last chapter, when he tells us that art is prefigured in the very processes of living. He's drawing this continuity between art and aesthetic experience, experience in our everyday life, and the very notion of life, the very processes of living, even for non-human animals. So, he points to examples like the bird's nest, as an example of art, or the beaver dam, as an example of art, or at least the way art is prefigured in life experience. Now, of course, we can ask, right, is it really art, is a beaver dam really art? And Dewey admits that perhaps it lacks the directive intent, is his phrase, of what we call art. So, we might not say the beaver dam is art, or the bird's nest is art, but he says that these are the conditions of life that such an intent, a directive intent, that is necessary for art grows out of, and it has to work with these kinds of these conditions, these processes. So, maybe the beaver dam is not art per se, but it is an activity on the same order of art. And when it becomes conscious and deliberate for humans, it becomes art properly so-called. So, Dewey has this quote, this key quote on page 31, where he tells us that art is the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning, the union of sense, need, impulse, and action, characteristic of the live creature. The intervention of consciousness adds regulation, power of selection, and redisposition. Thus, it varies the arts in ways without end. So, notice you've got two different things going on here. On the one hand, you've got continuity. Art is proof that humans can get back to the union of sense, need, impulse, and action that's characteristic of the live creature, but they do so consciously on the plane of meaning, and thus with regulation and selection and redisposition. And finally, Dewey tells us the intervention of consciousness also leads in time to the idea of art as a conscious idea, the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity, because if you've got the idea of art, then you can not only use consciousness to regulate and select art, but you can actually think about the nature and meaning of the whole process of art itself. So, continuing on the theme of that compartmentalization that plagues our modern condition, Dewey talks about the distinction we want to draw between the fine art and the useful arts, right? So, another way in which we might want to sort of separate art out from everyday life as something special is to distinguish it from the activities of making that we call the useful arts. And Dewey here again rejects the dualism, whether some, you know, he puts the burden on the person who wants to say there really is a dichotomy here, and he argues instead that whether something is put to use, right, in some way has nothing to do with whether it's aesthetically fine or not. And we talked about some examples of this in our discussion last week. Now, Dewey says, you know, under different social conditions, being aesthetically fine might itself be considered a source of the usefulness of something, right, that a broader sense of what is useful might be in order. He does point out that under our social conditions, often everyday articles of use are not aesthetic. They're either, you know, bare and utilitarian or even ugly. And he sees this not as a matter of the sort of difference of fine art and useful art on some kind of scale, but rather as a feature of the conditions of mass production and of the cheap kind of disposable culture, the culture of the disposable. So, he really wants to push us to think of art, artifice, artifact, artisan, as having a kind of underlying unity, right, all of the arts, practical and fine. Now, something I want to point out in terms of examples of art and artists that Dewey talks about in the chapter, there's a kind of funny thing going on here. He refers almost exclusively to writers and poets rather than artists in a more concrete medium like sculptors or painters. I wonder, you know, why that is and what you think about that. You know, he's making references to things like the bird's nest, the beaver dam, technology, also to tribal art, African and Native American art are referenced or exhibited in the course of the chapter, but no recent visual artists. So, it seems like there's a missed opportunity for comparison there. I wonder why that is and what you think about that. Now, near the end of the chapter, and maybe this is one of the reasons that Keats comes up, is Dewey talks about Keats' notion of negative capability, right. So, and Keats regarded Shakespeare as the sort of exemplar of this virtue of negative capability, which consists, in Keats' words, of being capable of being in uncertainties, in mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. So, I'm going to say that again because I think the wording is important. Negative capability is the virtue of being capable of being in uncertainty, being in mysteries, being in doubts, without reaching after fact and reason. You know, I wonder how you think this fits into Dewey's discussion in this chapter, why it's supposed to be a virtue. I'd be interested to hear what you think about that. Now, this chapter also treats us to a discussion of perhaps Keats' most famous lines. Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all you know on earth and all you need know. And this is from Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn, and much discussed philosophically and artistically. Dewey's contribution to the discussion is to remind us that when Keats talks about truth, he's not so much as talking about logical truth or the truth of a proposition or of a scientific fact or theory. Rather, he's talking about truth in the sense of maybe you would say living your truth, although that's not quite capturing exactly what Keats means either. What Keats means by truth has to do with moral conviction, moral behavior, with how to live your life well and rightly. And Dewey here sees a close connection between the role of art in life and the role of this notion of the moral truth of it. So I think it's an important notion for Dewey why art is such an important thing for the philosopher to think about is because it does kind of get us away from this overly intellectualistic set of notions. It takes us back in the direction of experience and life. Okay, so those are some of the things I found particularly interesting in the chapter that I wanted to think about and talk to you about. I'd be interested to hear what you were interested in, what you were thinking about. Obviously, it's a pretty rich chapter. There's a lot going on, several things I didn't bring up, but I look forward to the further discussion, so I'll see you soon.