Reflections on Richard Shusterman's Dewey

Abstract

Presumably, when Richard Shusterman talks of aesthetic experience, he has in mind the sort of experience that connotes immediate, qualitative whole John Dewey calls in Art as Experience. Problematically though, with Dewey, he has the urge to tell us what is primary in experience. Making liberal use of Dewey's own statements from Art as Experience Shusterman tells us it is just the memorable and ultimately episode of living, one that stands out from the humdrum flow of life as an experience by its internal integration and fulfillment reaching through a developing organization of meanings and energies which affords a satisfying emotional of some sort.1 Also, there seems, after all, to be something autonomous about art's value, something about its own good for which we pursue them [sic] as ends in themselves rather than means to other goods in other practices. That something is aesthetic experience. For the immediate, absorbing satisfaction of such experience makes it incontestably end in itself (PA, 46-47). Two conclusions present themselves. The first is that aesthetic experience is one immediately had. The second is that what counts as aesthetic experience, what is primary, is satisfaction; the quality that is immediately present is emotional one; felt not cognized. Immediacy is emphasized over reflection in aesthetic experience; the consummatory experience par excellence, according to both Shusterman and Dewey, and this seems to conflict with earlier claim that immediacy and reflection are accorded equal measure in the having of experience.2 We may conclude at this point that what is immediately felt carries the weight, so to speak, of aesthetic experience. It remains for reflection to organize, classify, and relate these experiences to each other in such a way that meaning develops. It functions in ex post facto manner to relate upcoming experiences to each other. As such, reflection is accorded importance,