Literature and Language in Dewey's Art As Experience

Literature and Language in Dewey’s Art As Experience

By Andrew Lawrence Crown

August, 2023

Art As Experience by the American pragmatist philosopher and educator, John Dewey, is a book published in 1934 and was based upon Dewey’s lectures on esthetics, delivered by Dewey in 1932 as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard. This contribution to the age-old theories of beauty and creation is just one of the many reasons why Dewey’s reputation remains indisputably strong today, and especially so at The University of Chicago, where Dewey was on the faculty for many years and where I earned my master’s degree in political science in 1993. Modern neuroscience and bio-psychology have vastly increased our understanding of the physiological and biological phenomenon of sense perception, including the perception of visual art through the sense of sight and the perception of music through the sense of sound. Advances in the field of linguistics have improved our understanding of the derivation of meaning from language, and the development of literary theory has enhanced our understanding of literature as art. Nonetheless, these modern developments impacting our understanding of both the creation and the perception of works of art in its various forms, have not obviated the need to continue to take seriously Dewey’s contributions to the field of esthetics today. His multitude of insights remain relevant and continue to stand as a crucial contribution to the understanding of art, which artists, critics, philosophers, and others interested in esthetic theory must take note of almost a century after Dewey delivered his lectures at Harvard.

In this present essay I aim not to merely summarize and present once again the essence of Dewey’s theories concerning all the arts he analyzes in his seminal work, mainly architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature. I could not hope to surpass Dewey’s own eloquence and depth of understanding already available to the interested artist, critic, scholar, or student in his masterly composed but concise and parsimonious volume. My purpose instead is to focus on Dewey’s analysis of the esthetic theory surrounding the art of literature, mainly poetry and fiction. I will do so for a number of reasons, chief among them being Dewey’s contention that literature is the art par excellence due to the unique potential of language, loaded as it is with an unsurpassably rich depth of meaning, to convey the essence of a culture, its people, and their civilization. Literature, derived from language and expressed as it is fundamentally through the medium of language, stands apart from the other arts in its ability to transmit from artist to perceiver, or from author to reader, the wealth of lived experiences that constitute a civilization’s past and heritage transformed into a current art form constituted of and derived from the sum total of past experiences that make the writer as artist a conveyor and representative of a specific culture and also a unique individual with something original and new to contribute to his chosen art.

The other reason why I am drawn to investigate and analyze Dewey’s esthetic theory is that I count myself as a writer of sorts, focused mainly, when not engaged in the composition of academic works like this one, on the writing of fiction and creative non-fiction. Though Art As Experience is just ten years shy of achieving the 100-year mark since its composition, I contend that this book continues to contain within it invaluable advice and instruction for writers like myself, who aim to create literature that is at once original and all one’s own, but also firmly embedded within the rich inheritance of those literary traditions and histories most relevant to our current literary endeavors. The advice and consul one may derive from Dewey’s esthetic theory concerning literature is not limited in its relevance to only authors or would-be authors. It also maintains to this day its relevance and salience for the literary critic. In fact, it is not entirely necessary or perhaps even possible to distinguish so clearly between Dewey’s advice for the writer and his advice for the critic. The best writers understand that at times it is fruitful to take a few steps back from their own literary creations in order to view them through the more objective eye of the critic. Similarly, the more incisive critics know that the perception and analysis of literature as art can never be an entirely objective affair to match or rival the objectivity of some formal scientific inquiry. The best critics realize that when they perceive literature as art with the intent to critique, they partake of an esthetic experiencing placing them on a similar plane as the author whose work they investigate. According to Dewey, there is something of the artist present in all of us in the perception of art, a sense of empathetic and vicarious identification with the artist as live creature interacting with his environment which cannot be entirely distinguished from and separated from the creation of art in the first place.

Dewey’s overarching theme regarding these various topics is what I intend to focus on in this essay. I will examine Dewey’s central contention throughout his text, mainly that all art originates, is shaped by and molded, as well a perceived, comprehended, and understood, based upon the experience of the artist as a live creature embedded within and interacting with his environment. The exploration of Dewey’s thesis leaves us with some very profound and also practically useful advice for writers, and especially for those writers intent upon creating literature as fine art aimed at an audience of taste and edification, rather than mass market pulp aimed at the general readership lacking the taste for sophisticated literary fiction.

The fundamental premise of the entire work is that the artist is a living creature and organism interacting with and shaped by his environment. This contention is based upon Dewey’s embrace of those theories, still very much in vogue in his time and era, positing that the human species evolved into its present form as a creature with very ancient animal ancestry transformed through a long process of natural evolution. Just as in nature, all live creatures are constantly engaged in an ongoing struggle for survival conditioned by the phenomena of natural selection or survival of the fittest, or in other words the survival of only those creatures best adapted to their environment, human beings too, as living creatures descended from animal ancestry, must adapt and cope with their environment or else perish. Obviously, as a pragmatist philosopher who always contended that philosophers must not veer too far away from a view of the world and human nature grounded in scientific principles, Dewey’s ideas regarding the origins of the human species are much in accordance with Darwinian evolutionary theory with its focus on natural selection and survival of the fittest. So the chief concept derived from Darwin in Dewey’s thought is that human beings, regardless of the fact that they now inhabit a technologically advanced, sophisticated, and complex modern society and civilization which they themselves have constructed, remain in some fundamental sense still bound and connected to their animal ancestry, and so must still be viewed as live creatures, civilized or not, who must adapt to and cope with their environment or else perish.

The ties between the live human creature and his environment shaped the lives and art of civilized twentieth century man no less than they did the lives and art of primitive peoples who had not passed through all the stages of technological, economic, and socio-cultural development which produced modern man and his civilization. The native inhabitant of the tropical rainforest must venture out into the wilderness to hunt for his food or else perish. Likewise, modern man must cope with his world of the densely populated metropolises of modern civilization and struggle for survival in the presence of modern architecture, streetcars, automobiles, and other people, all of which and whom constitute both the potential of threat to his continued survival and also vast opportunities for the enrichment and advance of his quality of life.

One may perish when crossing a downtown street filled with the threat of moving vehicles, just as primitive man faced the potential of falling prey to another dangerous animal denizen of the rainforest during the hunt. There are trains, cars, and dangerous criminal elements in the great cities of the modern world, just as there are poisonous vipers, wild beasts of prey, and poisonous plants in the jungle. As the human ventures out into the world at any stage of its development, she encounters an environment that is both hostile and a threat to her survival, but also the only source of her continued sustenance and ability to derive life itself and survival from the multitude of resources which the environment, whether natural or man-made, offers to her.

All of these considerations underly Dewey’s esthetic theory. Art produced at any stage of human development and civilization necessarily reflects and is the outgrowth of this inescapable interaction with and dependence upon the environment which all humans share. Countless threats and dangers hold the potential to end life, yet the environment also contains within it endless possibilities for the experience of the profound beauty and fullness of life, and it is these facts that condition the conception and creation of all art.

Animals, like humans, are engaged in the struggle for survival mediated through the interaction with their environment. Animal species therefore create a variety of structures in their ongoing quest for life and existence. There are the birds’ nests, the bees’ hives, the beavers’ dams, and the ants’ hills and colonies. The squirrel fills his winter’s den with a store of nuts for the long winter and the crab in the sea makes his home within the conch shell. Are these structures and creations of the animal world then to be viewed as art on par with the shaman’s mask and costume, the native rain dance and war dance, the theater of the holy sacraments in the Medieval church complete with the golden goblets and flowing robes of the priest, the colorful stained glass windows depicting scenes from the holy books adorning the grand cathedrals in which this theater takes place, and our contemporary museums full of fine art masterpieces in our modern cosmopolitan metropolises busting with human life and activity?

Dewey would answer this line of inquiry with a resounding “No.” The structures produced by animal life in nature are essentially different from the art created by and for humans. Only humans experience the depths and sophistication of conscious and also subconscious thought and intent when they produce art, which makes the creations of human beings fundamentally different from those of animals which are the product of blind instinct. Although the origin of the human species lies within the animal ancestry from which we evolved, over the millennia of evolution which made us what we are today, we have acquired the sophisticated and higher ordered intellectual capacity which leads to a higher sense of conscious intent which infuses all artistic creation, thereby sharply distinguishing the creations of the human from those of the animal.

Threat and opportunity exist, the potential to cause death and also to support and enhance and adorn life. These potentialities present within the environment confront humans at nearly every turn as the hard cold facts of survival and existence we share with our ancestors from the animal world. Yet humankind alone rises to great heights above the dictates of nature to produce art derived from the interaction between human and environment which is distinguished from the creations of animal life in its higher degree of complexity, sophistication, abstraction, and derivation from a process of conscious thought, contemplation, and intent.

The origin of human created art results from the interaction of the live human creature with the environment, whether that be the natural environment found in pastoral scenes of mountain, valley, brook, and wildflowers, or the modern manmade cities constructed of concrete, stone, steel, asphalt, and monumental architecture. From this dependence of art on environment there is another characteristic of the best art derived from the interaction of the human and his world, which is the presence and centrality of rhythm to all great art.

Both the natural and manmade environments are replete with regular patterns, rhythm, and cadence. There are always present the change of seasons, the rhythm of planting followed by harvest, day followed by night followed by day again, rain and angry storm followed by peaceful repose of blue sky, sunshine, and the chirping of birds, the transformation from inquisitive youth to knowledgeable and mature adulthood. There is also the pattern of war and death followed by peace and life, which inevitable succumbs to the crisis and destruction of war again. Love and affection too have their characteristic rhythms as the inevitable ups and downs of romantic relationships transport lovers through the cycles of separation and painful conflict, and then back to warm compassionate communion and warm embrace. In the workshop of the builder and artisan, the human as the animal who works, creates and fashions all manner of useful items against the background of the rhythmic cadence of tool hitting object, creating a kind of music and repeated pattern of sound as the skilled craftsman forms useful products of utility in the same manner that the skilled sculpturer forms works of profound beauty out of a block of marble to the sound of tool hitting stone.

These inescapable rhythms and patterns which both characterize and adorn human life, inevitably find their way into all manner of art. The cycles of intense action and stimulation, followed by rest and repose, are perhaps most evident in music and in writing. In music there is a steady building toward and accumulation to a cascade of emotive sounds often followed by a lull of rest and quieter peaceful repose pacing themselves between the moments of loud thunderous power. The periods of rest and quiet are no less central to these works of art, since they prepare the audience to receive with heightened perception the poignancy and power of the thunderous and emotive cascades of sound.

In writing there is a phenomenon similar to that characterizing the rhythm and repose found in music. This is because words themselves are a symbolic representation of sound carrying within them the potential to convey euphonious rhythm, which is the musical quality inherent in language. The reader, almost unconsciously perceives this musical flow of language, whether it is read aloud on the stage during a play or drama, or simply read silently by the reader of a poem or novel in a moment of solitary contemplation.

Poetry of course is in reality a song conveyed and expressed through the medium of words. Prior to the advent of modernist poetry, it was universally assumed that all great poems must be composed according to a rhyming scheme, the sound of which made all poetry closely akin to music. The music of poetry has its heights of emotive depth of sound along with its more subdued moments of quiet repose, all of which is intertwined with the meaning of the words and language used. Too much force and intensity crammed within too short a space, and the poem suffers esthetically by overwhelming the reader with a cascade of sound. Too much quiet space between the peaks of intensity, and the reader begins to lose interest. Great poetry and all great literary writing strike a careful balance and conform to just the right pattern of intensity and repose in both the sounds the words emit and the depth of profound meaning the words contain within them.

Of crucial importance is the fact that the periods of rest and repose are as much a part of the work of art as a whole as the periods of intense forceful expression. In the medium of writing, the one is inseparably tied to and dependent on the other in order to give the entire work meaning, expertly composed as one entity which is a masterfully organized construction of disparate parts united as a whole. The relation of the part to the whole, and their mutual dependence upon one another, is another central theme in Dewey’s writings on esthetics. The whole cannot exist without the part, and neither can the part exist without the whole. This returns us to the central importance of rhythm in art, derived as it is originally from the rhythm the living creature encounters in her environment. It is rhythm that weaves together rest and repose with powerful cascade of intensity, all through the medium of language that facilitates the interplay of mutual dependence of part and whole.

According to Aristotle’s analysis of Greek tragedy, the pattern of rhythmic expression is fundamental to that art form. In tragedy the rhythm consists of a welling up, increase, and accumulation of emotion. As the audience perceives the difficulties encountered by, and pain endured by the tragic characters in a drama, the audience vicariously experiences this same welling up of emotion inherent in the plight of the tragic figure. The building and accumulation of emotional tension and sympathetic, empathetic feeling leads the audience to identify with the plight and suffering of the tragic figures in the drama. One places oneself in the same shoes as the fictional characters on the stage, and then the welling up and building towards a peak of empathetic feeling and identification with the suffering of the characters reaches a pinnacle and height, which then rhythmically cascades downward from the heights making possible a cathartic release through empathy and compassion directed towards the suffering of the characters in the drama. The release of emotional tension accompanying cathartic experience is what Aristotle understood to be the pleasure of pathos. There is pleasure in the midst of suffering due to the masterful portrayal of the rhythmic pattern of suffering, pain, and release and even joy mediated though the medium of language.

Dewey reminds us that the pleasure of pathos is experienced by the audience only if it believes the characters on the stage and their suffering though the events transpired in the drama are not real but instead fictional. If a character on stage were to be in reality seriously injured or even killed and not just in a fictional sense, then the pleasure of pathos would evaporate and the joy of empathetic identification with the suffering of the other would be transformed into sheer horror and disgust. The esthetic experience in such a case would be sharply interrupted, along with the beauty experienced and lessons learned from appreciation of the art form of drama.

Drama of course utilizes the medium of spoken speech, language transmitted to the audience orally. Drama had its origins in the kind of tragedy initially conveyed through the tradition of oral poetry. Before the development of writing and printing technology, poetry was transmitted in a spoken and oral format. Both the Iliad and the Odessey of Homer were traditionally recited in spoken speech long before they were written down in book form. In both cases, that of the spoken, oral tradition, and that of the written and printed tradition, poetry achieved the status of the art par excellence due to the rich depths of meaning intrinsic to the medium of language.

Language, both spoken and written, is the storehouse of meaning and significances for an entire society, culture, and people with its history and civilization amassed within the symbolic system of language. Every word, whether spoken or written, is much more than a mere sound or the symbolic representation of sound. Words contain meanings from the past, often from the ancient past, within them, and when the poet or novelist forges his art through the malleable medium of language, a fathomless depth of historical meaning is accessed and available to both writer and reader, artist, and perceiver. When the writer creates a truly new and original work of literature, the ancient symbols of words take on a new, heretofore unexplored and unexploited meaning. The new and unprecedented singular contribution is fused to the heritage and history encoded within the symbolic system of language, as the present builds upon and develops ideas from the past of a civilization and its traditions. This is why the translation of great literature from one language to another is so often fraught with difficulty. In contrast to literature, scientific writing, with its abstract universal ideas expressed through the mathematical precision of scientific notation, numbers, and equations, is more readily translated with something resembling complete fidelity to the original.

Every word and the sound and meaning it represents, along with the culturally specific idiomatic meanings inherent in many expressions, provide a rich texture of deep significances that the author of poetry and literature can use to construct new meaning in a multitude of forms unmatched in the media of the other arts. To the rich pre-existing store of meaning, the truly original writer adds her own new ideas and concepts inspired by her unique experiences as a live creature interacting with the environment. Rather than simply rehashing and repeating the same old forms, however esteemed and honored they may be within a culture and civilization, the true beauty and achievement is gifted to us by the great writer when she forges ahead down new paths of form and insight, all the while knowing fully well that it is only possible to do so through the skillful and adept utilization of the medium of language which is inseparably tied to the historical heritage of the civilization in which she operates.

Letters and words written on a page are a symbolic system, each letter and word representing sounds which in turn convey meaning. The rhythm and cadence inherent in the sounds that language represents, returns us once again to the interaction with and immersion into the environment by the live creature which is fundamental to the creation of all art. The musical patterns of language expertly harnessed by the writer of talent and experience convey a rhythm and cadence that is esthetically pleasing as well a full of profound meaning and insight. Ideas from the past, stored in the language a writer utilizes as his medium, place the writer in dialog with history as he in the present engages and confronts the accumulated meanings of the past stored within language.

These properties of the artistic medium of language, a medium full of meaning inherited from the past even before the writer writes the first word of his text, is the primary reason why it is a truism that the best writers are necessarily the best readers. To become a great writer requires a long apprenticeship of preliminary reading and writing, enabling the writer as artist and craftsman to familiarize himself and internalize within himself the rich cultural heritage his language of choice contains within it. While there are a few literary prodigies who produce great works of literature at a very young age, most important writers achieve their notoriety and fame their masterpieces accord to them after years and years of reading and much trial and error in the way of writing. Through a long and difficult education, the author’s experience of his own environment is magnified and expanded through his vicarious emersion within the environments and experiences of other great writers when he reads with the intention of making their great works his own. Through intense deep reading one assimilates and incorporates into his own experience the profound thoughts, ideas, and skillful use of language employed by the past masters.

For all of the arts, and not just for literature, each time a perceiver perceives a work of art, this too is an experience like other lived experiences which change and transform the live creature. Not only does each individual perceiver experience a particular work of art in a unique way which differs from the experiences of other perceivers, the same person experiences the same work of art differently at different periods of his life. This phenomenon of changing esthetic experience is not confined to the perceiver of art. The artist himself, who also perceives his own art, will find that it means different things to him at different times and stages of his life. The living creature is transformed through his encounter with the environment in an ongoing process of growth via the accumulation of new and different experiences, both from different environments as well as different works of art, including his own. Language, because it is unmatched in its capacity to store an entire history of experiences accumulated over centuries or millennia, enables the writer as artist to experience and convey through his art a more profound and deeper esthetic experience conveyed by a sophisticated coinsurer of writing through repeated and prolonged exposure to and familiarity with the written word.

Each new esthetic experience transforms both writer and reader, increasing the capacity for more advanced and deeper esthetic creation and perception through an ongoing cumulative process. The live human creature is continuously transformed by his interaction with his environment and the created works of art emerging from the environments of others artists. Esthetic experience and appreciation are not confined to the viewing of fine art in a museum, listening to a symphony in a concert hall, or reading the most important books. There is also the experience of the very real physical, social, political, and cultural forces from which are derived the lived experiences one constantly encounters and the works of art derived from these experiences. In every society and in every civilization, the live human creature is surrounded by the real world and also the art works produced within and adorning that real world. He cannot help but be influenced and transformed by both the real and vicarious esthetic experiences surrounding him.

In contemporary society there is the distinction between fine art and popular art, the first being the art hanging on the wall in a museum, and the second being the art one constantly encounters in the course of daily life. Fine art is often viewed as art existing for its own sake, separate and distinct from popular art and also carrying with it more prestige and honor which is accorded to it by leading critics and expert connoisseurs of art. Such a distinction and clear line drawn between fine art and popular or practical art would not have been recognized or even understood by ancient civilizations. In the Athens of antiquity, the Parthenon, perhaps the most archetypical example of architecture as art ever constructed in human history, was never viewed by the ancient Athenians as distinct from daily life and practical concerns. Instead the Parthenon was deeply intertwined with the religious observances existent in ancient Greece, performing a crucial role as a unifier of the citizens of Athens through the worship of the commonly esteemed Gods of the city. Far from being art for its own or art’s sake, this masterpiece of architecture played a concrete role and function in Athens, unifying the population there religiously, socially, and politically. The same relationship between art and communal life held true for the classical statues of Greek antiquity. The statues were there in the temples, shrines, and other public places, playing their central role as an expression of Greek ideals concerning the potential for human excellence reflected in the anthropomorphic figures of Greek gods and heroes which were depicted in human forms all could recognize. No one at the time would have thought of isolating such art in a museum and thereby severing it from communal life.

During the Middle Ages too, when the church was the dominant institution central to all aspects of life within European civilization, art was not isolated from daily life, but instead was there for all to see and experience in the regular but ornate ceremonies and displays of religiosity in the church. The music, the flowing robes of the priests, the candles, icons, stain glassed windows, the monumental architecture of the great cathedrals, none of these artworks were isolated from daily life in Medieval European society. The priests in their vestments were not objects on display in a museum. Far from it. They were central figures of society familiar to all who partook in the rituals of religious observance in which all members of society were expected to participate.

The isolation of art from daily life and its removal from common experience into the museums where it is stored as fine art is a more recent development in human history. This modern practice severs the perception and enjoyment of art from the common people and the great bulk of the population. Far too often, people without the specialized training and education of the connoisseur view fine art as something divorced and alien from their own experience. It is almost as if art to the common person is viewed as some kind of inscrutable foreign artifact from a far-off distant land or past, holding no relevance or significance for the common person’s own life. This is a regrettable development in the history of art and its role in civilization. Often intellectually and spiritually brutalized by his status and place within a modern world dominated by the ubiquitous industrial machinery so central to the economy of the era in which Dewey wrote, the esthetic experience of life for the common person was sacrificed to the quest for efficiency, profitability, and productivity, cutting him off from the beauty of art which Dewey believed should be a spiritually and intellectually uplifting experience all members of society should be able to enjoy.

The factory workers of Dewey’s time, an age of ongoing and seemingly all-encompassing industrialization, were nonetheless, like the educated sophisticates of the upper classes at home in the museum and symphony hall, live creatures interacting with and embedded within a particular environment. The regimentation, rigidity, and dull uniformity devoid of esthetic beauty characterizing the industrial environment of the time, deprived the common laborer of those daily experiences of the beauty of nature and fine art available to those able to partake of the joys of life in the more sophisticated environment of the urban upper crust or the pastoral and pristine environs of the countryside. Factories and railyards, ugly functional buildings coated with the residue of smoke and coal, such was the more typically environment of the common persons, rather than magnificently adorned concert halls, mansions, and palaces of the rich, or the pristine stream and brook and fertile valley of the countryside all abloom with a colorful variety of wildflowers and other flora and fauna. The products of modern industry too were characterized by a functional uniformity and efficiency completely absent of the fine craftmanship and esthetic beauty of those found in the work of the preindustrial artisan.

Nonetheless, despite its dearth of esthetic beauty, such an industrial environment functioned as any other environment by shaping the perception of the world for its unfortunate inhabitants. Modern literature in fact discovered a great wealth of inspiration for art through the depiction of the struggles and suffering of the common people in what Dewey referred to as proletarian literature.

The isolation of the common people from great works readily available to the upper classes and the accompanying relegation of fine art to realm of the museum where its sits as an object foreign to the experience and understanding of the masses, is not an entirely new development in human history. Though in ancient Greece great art was neither divorced or severed from daily life, Aristotle categorized forms of drama according to their suitability on the one hand for the few elites and nobles, and on the other hand for the masses of common people. According to Aristotle, tragedy was a higher and more profound form of drama than was comedy. Therefore, Aristotle believed the proper subject for tragedy was the life and experience of characters derived from the noble class or class of gentlemen, while comedy remained relegated to the depiction of the lives and experiences of characters derived from the class of common people.

The prejudice against utilizing the commoner as the inspiration for and subject of fine art remained dominant in all media of European art well until the Enlightenment began to enter humanity into the modern era. During the Middle Ages only the wealthy could afford to commission and act as patrons of the arts, so the painting from that era reflected this reality and universally depicted only upper-class subjects. With the advent of the Renaissance, there was a widening of subject matter for great art as gifted painters and sculptors depicted themes from Greek and Roman antiquity, and thereby showed an appreciation of human excellence and beauty absent during the Middle Ages with its focus on religious themes positioning man as lower than and less deserving of beautiful depiction in art than God, saints, and other religious figures.

Even in Shakespeare’s dramas the focus was on the struggles and travails of the nobility, with commoners like servants and cooks relegated to the role of providing comic relief, functioning as rest, repose, and pacing within the rhythmic pattern of those timeless plays. The sometimes ribald humor, full of all manner of sexual innuendos and connotations, conveyed through the speech of the commoners in Shakespeare would have been deemed inappropriate by his audiences had it been pronounced from out of the mouths of the esteemed nobility.

According to Dewey, the writings of Rousseau brought forth a new kind of literature in which depictions of common life came to be viewed as appropriate in fine art. Rousseau’s preeminence and his entire reputation in literature and letters was based upon his impassioned promulgation of the ideas of social and political equality, leading himself and those who followed him to embrace the lower classes and their struggles as an appropriate theme and subject matter for fine art.

In the modern era in which Dewey wrote, the depiction of everyday and common life was no longer frowned upon, and instead constituted the subject matter of a new form Dewey referred to as proletarian art. Originating with Rousseau and continued through a long line of writers arriving eventually into the age of socialism and communism, conceptions of the appropriate subject matter for art were turned upon their heads. Ibsen in particular, the great Scandinavian playwright, was noted by Dewey as one of the pioneers in the normalization of the depiction of the struggles and dilemmas confronting regular ordinary people in fine art and great literature. No longer did literature focus exclusively on the lives of aristocrats and landed gentry. Now the life of the common people inspired much more than mere comic relief, it became the central focus and theme of great literature.

This sea change of proletarian art held the potential to make art more relevant for the masses and serve as a counterweight to that regrettable tradition of confining art to museums where it sat isolated from the common people who viewed it from a distance with distrust like it was some kind of foreign object divorced from their own concerns and experiences in life. Art about and for the common person was finally mainstream, and held the potential to reconnect art with the people once again, where it could take its place as the product of the real living creature interacting within his environment.

Primary in importance, and on the same level of consequence as the numerous scientific and technological developments leaving their mark on and forever transforming human civilizations, were the invention of writing during antiquity and much later the invention of printing which made the mass production of books possible. Both of these developments influenced the availability to and relevance of art to the common man and the great mass of humanity. Prior to the development of writing, the epic poetry, mythologies, and religious principles and practices of ancient civilizations were transmitted from one generation to the next through an oral tradition. Recited or sung by individuals who committed to memory those stories central to a people’s identity, the oral tradition conveyed the heritage of a civilization, often on special festive and religious occasions. The classic examples of the epic oral poetry of the past are of course Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. We know of these epics and entire corpus of Greek drama, poetry, mythology, and philosophy primary due to the invention of writing and books, enabling us to read these classics today.

The importance of the dramatic and fundamental transformation the invention of writing brought to humankind cannot be overstated. The medium of language was originally entirely a medium conveying sound. Words, sentences, verse, and song were recognized as meaningful based upon their nature as commonly and collectively recognized sounds for a given people. Written language was and is an entirely different medium, at once silent but also capable of representing the sounds that were tied to the original meaning of words as sounds existing prior to the invention of writing. Writing is essentially a set and series of symbolic meanings much later in human history written on papyrus or parchment paper. The symbolic representations which are language make no noise themselves, but the person able to read a given language can recognize the sounds imbedded in and carried by the symbolic system of letters, words, and sentences. Unlike the flute or drum, the symbols of language emit no sound directly. Nevertheless, writing conveys to the reader the oceans and worlds of meaning formerly existing as spoken and sung epics, and today available to the modern reader as poem, drama, or philosophical dialogue.

Because the original poetry, songs, and epics, as they were recited before the age of writing arrived, rhymed according to sonorous melodies, the tradition of rhyming verse was carried over from the oral tradition and became an essential characteristic of esthetically pleasing written language. As mentioned before, the rhythm of language, most clearly evident in poetry, drama, and opera, also is an essential characteristic of the best literature, be it poetry, the novel, or even well composed prose. What distinguishes ordinary writing from the classic works, beyond the depth of meaning conveyed through these works, is the skillful and expertly crafted language the best writers use to capture and express the ancestral rhythms and patterns of sound inherited from the spoken and oral traditions of the ancient past.

The development of printing was as revolutionary as the development of writing. Both inventions expanded the size of the potential audience for literature. Language as the storehouse of cultural, social, and historic meaning was more readily transmitted from writer to reader and from one generation to the next, and each reader amassed a wider set of experiences vicariously through the reading of books, journals, pamphlets, newspapers, and other writings. When immersed within the reading of a great novel, one encounters a plethora of settings, scenes, locations, characters, themes, ideas, and so much more. All of these elements of literature are consumed and digested by the reader, providing her with various and multifaceted experiences which magnify, deepen, and enrich the sum total of all direct experiences making and forming and shaping her into the person she is.

Printing, by making the production of novels and other works of literature more affordable, enabled literature to become available for multitudes of people in society. No longer was reading limited to the upper echelons of society as it previously was when books were painstakingly copied by hand in a time consuming and costly procedure. With the expansion of the potential audience for literature made possible by printing, new topics and themes arose and came to the fore, and writers began to focus on the struggles and suffering of the poor masses and their predicament and place within the new industrialized and mechanized civilization of modernity. These developments built upon Rousseau’s romanticism which had ushered in the age of concern for equality and the critique of the alienating potential and corruption of a society governed only by the principles of scientific efficiency, progress, profits, and productivity. From the age of the Enlightenment until the era in which Dewey wrote, science and its principles came to dominate economic life, making possible industrialization, a development in human civilization which impacted the lives of the poor like none other in human history.

The language of science, though like the language of literature a symbolic system, remained more distant and aloof from the understanding of the common man than other writing. The masses of the scientific and industrial age were not familiar with the mathematical symbols of physics or the scientific notation of the periodic table of elements representing the chemical and atomic structure of the matter that formed the universe. The ordinary person did not and could not read the pivotal works of science ushering humankind into the modern age, and so science was like a foreign language to most people. Science inspired awe and wonder, though almost no one other than the scientific specialist could decipher the meaning of the symbolic representation of the most pivotal scientific principles found within scientific journals and books. The advantage that scientific writing had over literature was the fact that it was more readily translatable from one language to the next, since the concepts of science in the symbolic representation, like the universal language of mathematics closely allied to it, was not burdened by the difficult to translate accumulated meaning and significances of entire cultures, societies, histories, and civilizations incorporated into and carried by the language of literature.

There was and there is always something profoundly important lost in translation of even the most universally recognized and esteemed literary classics. This is why, although there are many esteemed and noteworthy translations of the Greek classics of myth, poetry, drama, and philosophy, most specialists in the field of Classics believe a sound command of the ancient Greek language is required for a genuine and sound understanding and analysis of ancient Greek texts. Much of the best writing about the classics of antiquity proceeds with a focus on etymological issues as its core organizing principle, the best classical scholars paying close attention to the fine distinctions of meaning existing within the original vocabulary and linguistic structure of the ancient Greek texts they devote their lives to studying.

The writing of the scientific specialist, however, does share some crucial elements in common with the work of the authors of literature. Dewey contends that many, if not most new and pathbreaking scientific discoveries and advances come to the recognition and realization of the scientist in moments of intense imaginative creativity which is more commonly believed to characterize the experience undergone by the creator of fine art. Like many artists, leading scientists report that quite often their most profound ideas and discoveries come to them uninvited in moments of quiet, solitary contemplation when inspiration strikes, seemingly out of nowhere like some divinely inspired mystical force carrying with it an intense imaginative vision. The experience among both artists and scientists of these powerful and all-encompassing moments of inspiration and creativity is so powerful that they are often mistaken for and interpreted as some kind of mystical, religious experience.

In reality, what is in fact taking place in these moments of epiphany and creative inspiration, is the powerful impact felt by the artist and scientist of the compounded weight of their prior experiences as live creatures interacting with their environments, both the real lived environment and the one encountered vicariously through years of careful and dedicated reading and study. Again, such an experience requires a long apprenticeship in which all that one reads and writes over the years of scholarship and practice becomes incorporated into the sum total of experiences which makes a person who and what she is, making the seemingly religious and mystical feeling of divine inspiration possible. Throughout his analysis of this phenomenon, Dewey avoids and discourages the use of metaphysical, spiritual, religious, or otherworldly categories of analysis through which art is conceived as something emerging from a supernatural or magical inspiration which comes out of nowhere. While both artist and perceiver may feel a sense of spiritual elevation when creating or perceiving creative works, Dewey never strays from his contention that art comes from this world and not the next, through the interaction of the live human creature with his environment in the direct experience of life itself and through exposure to the lives and ideas of others in the perception of their art, rather than from divine, mystical, and supernatural forces.

Dewey’s evaluation of the various schools of art and literary criticism is consistent with his thesis throughout his work. Art has meaning when the perceiver observes it. This does not mean that the artist creates art solely for the benefit of the perceiver and only with an intended audience in mind. The artist himself, while fully engaged in the creative process is the perceiver of and audience for his own work. The purpose of art and literary criticism, when done correctly, is to enhance the perceiver’s ability to experience the creative product in such a manner that he gains enhanced understanding and appreciation of its meaning and esthetic value. Dewey expends some effort to explain why the prevailing schools of criticism of his time failed to perform these functions adequately.

Much criticism suffered from the excessive tendency on the part of the critic to judge and evaluate art with the solitary goal of identifying faults and limitations in the work. This overly judgmental approach, rather than enhancing the esthetic experience for the perceiver, instead became lost in the details in search of errors to criticize and dissect. Such an approach lost the forest for the trees, neglecting the requirement to view the work of art as larger integrated whole composed of disparate parts working together in unison to create a whole that is larger and more esthetically meaningful and pleasing than each of its parts taken in isolation. What may look like an error in a minute detail or element of the work when viewed in isolation, may actually be a necessary and crucial ingredient of the larger work taken in its entirety as a coherent and complete whole.

Psychological criticism too was misleading. The contention that some psychological dimension of the artist’s character, or perhaps some pivotal event from his childhood or other crucial period of life, is all that is required to completely understand a work of art is an approach to criticism Dewey rejects. Such an approach is overly deterministic, failing to recognize the importance of the continuous, lifelong process of growth and personal evolution of the artist’s identity and character achieved through the ongoing and never ending interaction of artist and environment.

The various philosophical schools of criticism make the error of trying to force a work of art into the rigid, preconceived categories derived from philosophy and theory. The best artists, though entirely capable of expressing complex and sophisticated philosophical and theoretic concepts in their creative works, do not preach through the unbending adherence to one or another philosophic system or the theoretical categories of intellectual analysis. Instead, the best artists portray life as it is really and truly lived. The deep philosophical meaning inherent in the great works of art and literature are conveyed through the complexity of the story about real life related through the artistic medium chosen, rather than via overtly stated philosophical statements disguised as art but actually amounting to the promulgation of a preconceived agenda.

Equally flawed is the reaction against to the judgmental and philosophical schools of criticism found in the impressionistic school. According to impressionistic criticism, there is no objectively identifiable meaning to any work of art. Instead, all art can only be viewed subjectively, holding a different meaning for each individual perceiver and at the different times when the work is perceived. All is constant flux and open-ended malleability, absent a clearly identifiable purpose and meaning. Such an overreaction against the rigid determinism of the other schools of criticism falls into error when it denies the possibility of identifying the true meaning and purpose of art. Though Dewey agrees that both artist and perceiver bring to their perception of art all of the accumulated experiences with the world which make them what and who they are, he refuses to go as far as the impressionistic critics and maintain like them that all meaning and esthetic experience through art is purely subjective.

Dewey’s criticism of criticism leads to a further question and line of inquiry concerning his book. What kind of advice then for the artist in general and for the writer in particular, does Art As Experience lead one to embrace? Although this book is not a practical guide for the aspiring writer, based upon Dewey’s teaching one can make several important and useful suggestions to help writers of literature compose works that are as profound in meaning as they are esthetically pleasing to read.

The most obvious piece of advice for the would be author is that it is imperative to go out into the world and seek experience, since according to Dewey all great art is the product of the live human creature’s interaction with his environment. Travel, including international travel, offers an unequaled opportunity for one to heighten and widen one’s experience of the world, and the exposure to foreign cultures, societies, and ways of life promises to reveal a wealth of material for profound and vital literature. Travel also enables a person to better understand her own culture and origins when these are viewed and experienced in contrast to the foreignness and novelty of the unfamiliar.

Great literature, however, need not require a focus on the foreign “other” and experiences outside of one’s native culture. Authors often claim that their work is firmly grounded in a place they call home and emerges from a deep familiarity with their origins. To represent and depict “home” in an esthetically pleasing manner revealing the true essence of a familiar place and its inhabitants requires an intense, prolonged, and reflective immersion within one’s own origins in the quest to discover the spirit and core of the familiar. Those venturing into the field of literature and letters for the first time are often advised by the time-tested experts with years of literary experience under their belts to “Write about what one knows.” This means a writer should focus on one’s direct experience with those aspects of the world and life with which he is most familiar. Ask oneself before embarking on a new writing project, “What is most important, essential, and thoroughly understood for me?” and “What are my true passions in life?” A focus on what one knows best, enables the writer to remain connected to that grounded place called home, and convey through the depiction of the unique and particular the essence of those universal truths and epiphanies that are the stuff of all great literature.

The best writers also know that expertise and skill in the art and craft of writing emerges only out of a long education experienced through much trial and error and inevitable failure in writing. Natural talent too obviously plays a role, but even the most naturally gifted writers must hone, polish, and fine tune their technical skills, enabling them to distinguish themselves in their chosen field as authors. Frequent and continuous writing is required of all writers, and like experience of both the foreign and familiar, is the lifeblood for any writer aspiring to be accounted among the rare and great talents with something new, original, and profound to say.

Finally, it almost goes without mentioning that the writer must also constantly expose himself to the writing of others through frequent and continuous deep reading. Reading the work of other writers magnifies and enriches one’s experience of the world through a vicarious experience of another author’s work, enabling one to make those vicarious experiences one’s own when it is assimilated into and combined with one’s intellect, heart, and literary soul. This is why it is so often the case that the best writers are the best readers, readers in fact with a voracious appetite for reading and books. So while it is of crucial importance for the writer to go out into the world and experience life with all of its ups and downs, magnificent victories and crushing defeats, in the effort to discover the subject matter for great literature a writer must not neglect the need for quiet and solitary engagement with the literature of others. Frequent, deep, and thoughtful reading is essential for any writer aspiring to greatness, and the best writers understand that books are as much the passport to another world of experience to rival in utility the real passport facilitating the kind of international travel from which so many writers of talent have discovered their inspiration and their best material for literature of esthetic beauty and meaning for the ages.

Sources

Dewey, John. Art As Experience. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1934.