 Hello again, everyone. Welcome back to John Dewey's Artist's Experience. This week we're talking about chapter 6, Substance and Form. In this chapter, Dewey continues to explore the properties of primarily objects of expression, that is, art objects, right, and the way they play out in works of art. And that exploration leads into some deep, traditional philosophical questions concerning substance and form. So let me just remind you of a few ideas that you may not have encountered in a while. The first is Plato's theory of forms, right? So Plato thinks that the sort of the form, the nature of a thing, like the form of a triangle or triangularity rather, the form of hoarseness are more real things than are physical things. Physical things are copies or projections of the fundamentally real forms into matter. True knowledge is knowledge of the very forms themselves, right? Aristotle, in his High Lomorphism, also talks about form and matter. He puts them more on a par than Plato does. So according to Aristotle, form and matter are mutually necessary components of a material substance. So all material substances have substance and form. He understands lots of things in this way. He understands change as change of form in one respect. He understands matter and form as separate causes of things. Aristotle allows for form without matter, but no formless matter. All matter has some kind of form. And these are both what Dewey is referring to, the kinds of things that Dewey is referring to when he talks about material theories of form in the book. When he's talking about, sorry, I mean metaphysical theories of form. So in any kind of metaphysical theory of form, the idea of form is something pre-existing, perhaps essential or intrinsic to a thing, but also separable in some sense from the matter is crucial. Now early in the chapter, at the beginning of the chapter, we start off with some pretty significant terminology and connections that he draws out very quickly from ideas that were already developed in the last chapter. We think about expression, what an expression is or what an object of expression is. He wants us to think of that in terms of a language. So to express something means you have a language. It means you are working in a medium. So in this case, the media of art might be painting, poetry might be music. These media are, in a way, languages. And as languages, they are for communication. So these are all tightly connected ideas here in this first part of chapter six. As language, as communication, it presupposes a notion of an audience. I'll talk about that in a moment, but every expression assumes, in some sense, an audience. Dewey also makes a fairly radical claim, which he's made before, but he stakes it out in more detail here, the idea that there's a certain kind of untranslatability between media, between different expressive media, between different languages of art. And that's worth looking at in a little bit more detail. So quoting now from the first page of the chapter, Dewey says, Each medium says something that cannot be uttered as well or as completely in any other tongue. In fact, each art speaks an idiom that conveys what cannot be said in another language and yet remain the same. So according to this quote, Dewey is telling us that any painting, piece of music, even poem, if you attempt to sort of explain what it's about in words, in ordinary language, you're always going to be missing something. You're never going to be able to completely capture what it's about. Which is a pretty challenging thing to say. And it's worth thinking about. Now coming back to the question of audience, and I'll quote here at some length, from the second paragraph of the chapter, Dewey says, Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner. The work of art is complete only as it works in the experience of others than the one who created it. So the work of art is complete only and it works in the experience of others than the artist. Thus language involves what logicians call a triadic relation. Here he's making a kind of, I think, reference to or drawing on the idea of Charles Perce of language as triadic, although it's distinct from the way that Perce talks about it a little bit. But that's an aside. So language involves a triadic relation, a three-way relation between the speaker, the thing said, and the one spoken to, the audience, the interpreter. The external object, the product of art, is the connecting link between artist and audience. And then continuing on, a sort of clarificatory point, even when the artist works in solitude, all three terms are present. The work is there in progress and the artist has to become vicariously the receiving audience. He can speak only as his work appeals to him as one spoken to through what he perceives. So this, again, is a pretty strong and interesting statement. Art and language presuppose an audience as well as an artist, a speaker as well as one who has spoken to and either is incomplete without the other. So it assumes not only that there's an artist with an expressive intent, but also an audience that the artist is expressing towards, expressing something too. Now take this painting of Napoleon Bonaparte by the artist Andrea Appiani. It's a portrait of Napoleon. We can ask of this painting, what is the form and what is the matter? When we're using those terms form and matter or substance, what are we talking about? For example, is the matter the canvas, the paints, the colors, the shapes that we see on the canvas and the form is those things arranged into a portrait of Napoleon looking thus and so fairly young and gazing over his shoulder? Or on the other hand is the matter of the painting Napoleon, that's the content of the painting and the form is the shape and the colors, the textures, the light combined together just so to communicate the matter that the painting is about. Or in some sense, perhaps is it both? I mean, when we talk about the raw material of a work of art such as this painting, we might very well mean paints, dyes, canvas. Or we might mean the shapes, the planes, the colors, the light, the texture. Or we might mean the kind of common meanings of the social world associated with styles of dress, the look of a particular well-known historical figure, the bearing communicated by a certain stance or gesture or way of holding a certain object, are these the matter? And we could ask similar questions about the form. So what exactly do we mean? This is sort of what the chapter is taking up, the relation between these ideas. Now along these lines, when talking about these related concepts of matter, substance, content, Dewey makes this three-way distinction between subject, substance, and subject matter. And this might have been a little tough to track in part because the words are so similar, but basically in this distinction, the subject, or what he also calls the matter for the artwork, is what it's about. So Napoleon depicted thus and so in the previous painting. It's the topic or the theme of the painting. The substance is, however, the painting itself. He calls this the matter in art. And in this sense, the substance is the untranslatable thing, the full message, which is not expressible in any other way. Now the subject matter is a somewhat more complicated idea for Dewey, related on the side of the artist to the original impulsions that create the art, but also in the viewer to what they bring with them in viewing the art. Kind of all the relevant experiences that the viewer or the artist brings to the painting. This might be in terms of emotional ideas like nobility or leadership, war, youth, could be other elements as well besides the emotional historical background knowledge. But all the things that might influence the experience of the work of art. Now, there are kind of two key theses laid out in the chapter about what form and substance are and how they relate to one another. The first is I'll call the unity of form and substance or we might call it might have called the integration of form and substance. And Dewey explains this in the following way. He says form marks a way of envisaging a feeling and a presenting experience matter so that it most readily and effectively becomes material for the construction of adequate experience on the part of those less gifted than the original creator. Hence there can be no distinction drawn save in reflection between form and substance. The work itself is matter formed into aesthetic substance in the act of expression. There is no distinction but perfect integration of manner and content form and substance. So there is no distinction between form and substance in the act. Dewey combines this idea of the unity of form and substance with another thesis which we might call the relativity of form and substance, which he explains in the following way. First he tells us that the critic, the theorist as a reflective student of the art product, however, not only may but must draw a distinction between substance and form. So although they are inherently integrated, still the theorist or the reflective and analyst must draw a distinction. The truth of the matter is that what is form in one connection is matter in another and vice versa. Color that is matter with respect to expressiveness, say, of some qualities and value is form when it is used to convey delicacy, brilliance, gaiety. And he tells us elsewhere in the chapter that what determines which is which is our own purposes. Why are we reflectively analyzing the work of art in the first place? What are we interested in? Are we interested in how the color expresses some quality or feeling? Or are we instead interested in how in painting subjects like delicacy or brilliance are expressed? And we might pick out one or the other thing as form based on those different interests. Not that some colors are matter and some colors are form in the same sense, but that we are interested in these things in different ways at different times. Towards the end of the chapter, Dewey gives us this sort of summary statement, which however kind of brings out a new idea, right? And so the statement is this. The sum of the whole discussion is that theories which separate matter and form, theories that strive to find a special locus in experience for each, are, in spite of their oppositions to one another, cases of the same fundamental fallacy. They rest upon separation of the live creature from the environment in which it lives. Now, these theories he's talking about, idealism on the one hand, empiricism, I think he calls it on the other hand, are themselves, he says, committing the same separation, committed to the same separation, which we know from the very beginning of the book, is a problem both for philosophy and for art itself, as it informs our lives. So those are some of the key ideas from chapter six. Of course, there are others along the way that I didn't mention, but we'll talk about in class. And also I want to point out, if you're looking ahead to chapter seven, the discussion of form continues there. The natural history of form is the title of that chapter. And so although we've kind of seen Dewey's initial thoughts on the nature of form and substance, we'll get a deeper sense of it in a historical framework next time. So thanks for watching, and we'll feel free to leave a message on the discussion board, speak up about things in class, or leave a comment here on the video, and I will see you later.