Beyond situational meaning: From Dewey’s aesthetic experience to sensuous abstraction for deep learning

Abstract

This paper seeks to introduce a meaning-making process called ‘sensuous abstraction’ as one approach to aesthetic experience in line with Dewey’s philosophy. Dewey highlights aesthetic experience as the best form of experience that integrates emotional and intellectual qualities to foster deep learning and insights. Building on contemporary research on sensation, affect, and human brain, this paper identifies two distinct modes of human understanding: the linguistic/conceptual system and the sensuous-imaginative system. The former, often associated with abstraction and intellectual thinking, is heavily emphasized in traditional schooling, but the latter, integral to human cognition, is sadly neglected and overlooked. While situational meaning offers a way to bridge the two systems, it often falls short of leading to aesthetic experience. In response, sensuous abstraction can promote a process of meaning making that becomes more general than sensation but never as general as linguistic categories while maintaining its sensory wholeness as aesthetic experience demands. Using a classical artwork as an example, this paper concludes sensuous abstraction can be adopted as one approach for educators to create learning experiences by integrating sensory experience and generalizations and abstractions that lead to aesthetic experience.