Dewey, Art, and Experience

Dewey's conception of Experience as Art is interactive--a rhythm of one's action upon, and being acted upon by, one's environment. The conception is also an aestheticization of Pragmatism, for in the Means-End structure of Pragmatist behavior, a Means is an action on the environment, aiming at an End to be enjoyed. Dewey accomplishes this transfiguration of Pragmatism by showing how every Means is also an End, and every End also a Means, based on his deeper observation that every termination is also a new beginning. This project also has a political significance for Dewey, because in his analysis of class relations, the working class functions as a Means to the enjoyment of the leisure class. The scope of his achievement can be better appreciated by comparing it to two other independent contemporaneous aestheticizations of Experience. For Whitehead, personal Experience is a special case of organic harmonization. For Heidegger, the Pragmatic behavorial context, 'ready-to-handedness', is technological, and Technology is Ontological Poetry. Furthermore, if Whitehead's conception has political application, he never explains how, while Heidegger does suggest that his does, but he never elaborates on how National Socialism is Poetry. Regardless, on the basis of these conceptions, for Whitehead, Experience is fundamentally passive, while for Heidegger, fundamentally active, both one-sided from Dewey's perspective. Evolvemental Experience, the combination of Propriation and Exposition, entails both components.