Kontrast bez diskontinuity: život jako umění ve filosofii Johna Deweyho

Abstract

After identifying the processes that have led to the separation of art and life, John Dewey, in Art as Experience, proposed a way to re-establish continuity between the two. His pragmatic process philosophy offers answers to three questions: Why is it necessary to conceive of the production and the perception of works of art in terms of a dynamic proces instead of the objectified result, such as a building, a book, or a painting? How do these processes relate to the broader context of social and natural events? And how does this model of ‘process aesthetics’ relate to traditional assumptions of modern aesthetics? In this article, the author presents Dewey’s answers to these questions. In the first part, he introduces, from a more contemporary point of view, a problem that Dewey was able to diagnose much earlier, and in the second part, he outlines Dewey’s main intention and its consequences. The third part of the article focuses on Richard Shusterman’s influential reading of Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics in order to localize one of the apparently central points of Dewey’s reconstruction of modern aesthetics, that is, the idea of disinterestedness. Finally, the author offers an alternative reading, based on the claim that Dewey does not neglect this idea, but deliberately uses it to retain two apparently contrasting features in his theory: the continuity between life and art and the distinctive quality of being completed, which makes a work of art stand apart from the events of everyday life.