Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art

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Perhaps no twentieth-century philosopher was as favorably inclined towards the role of aesthetic experience in building a democratic culture as was John Dewey, the preeminent public intellectual in America during the first half of the twentieth century. His vision of democracy necessitated a robust commitment not only to an open-ended process of unimpeded free inquiry, which emulated that of the scientific community, but also to the self-realization that came through active participation in the public sphere. The model of that self-realization he saw best expressed in the sensually mediated, organically consummated, formally molded activity that was aesthetic experience. “That which distinguishes an experience as esthetic (sic),” he wrote, “is conversion of resistance and tensions, of excitations that in themselves are temptations to diversions, into movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close.” 1 As such, it was the quintessential exemplar of what is meant when we say we “have an experience,” rather than merely register an ephemeral sensation. In the words of Thomas Alexander, the foremost commentator on Dewey’s aesthetics, in the idea of art we find the moment in which human alienation is overcome and the need for the experience of meaning and value is satisfied. Through art, in the aesthetic experience, the rift in the world that frustrates our primordial desire for encountering a sense of meaning and value is healed. 2