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THE RELATION OF ART AND
MORALITY
IN JOHN DEWEY'S "ART &
CIVILIZATION"
By
David Buchanan
dmbuchanan@hotmail.com
May 2008
In his book Art as Experience (1934), John Dewey
makes a particularly striking claim about the relationship
between art and morality. In the final chapter, titled “Art
and Civilization”, he says, “Art is more moral than
moralities” (The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and
Modern, edited by Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley. Boston:
McGraw-Hill, 1995, page 524). The aim of this essay is
simply to unpack and otherwise make sense of that pithy
statement. Because Dewey’s claim might strike a person as
being too idiosyncratic or even uniquely weird, it will be
examined by way of a comparison with the views of Martin
Heidegger and Robert Pirsig. Since they essentially agree
with Dewey’s claim, we can illuminate it from three
different angles, so to speak. There are differences of
course, but we’ll focus on their similarities.
In “Art and Civilization” Dewey says, “The moral office and
human function of art can be intelligently discussed only in
the context of a culture” (PA, page 522). In fact, that’s
the very first thing he said. As the title suggests, Dewey’s
concern with art is intimately tied in with his concern for
the health of our civilization. He’s concerned with the
relatively marginalized position of art in our culture,
where it’s too often considered a frill or a luxury. He’s
concerned with the way museums tend to present art objects
in a de-contextualized manner, behind velvet ropes, under
glass and removed from their original settings. As long as
art remains isolated in the “beauty parlor” of civilization,
to use Dewey’s image, he thinks that art and civilization
are both in trouble. Like Heidegger and Pirsig, he thinks
art should play a larger and more central role in our lives
and culture. To extend the metaphor, we might say they all
believe that art belongs on every wall in every room, or
even that the house is made of art. As Dewey says, or rather
as he quotes a Mr. Garrod approvingly, “’Poetical values
are, after all, values in a human life. You cannot mark them
off from other values, as though the nature of man were
built in bulkheads’” (PA, page 524).
Similarly, this claim is that it is being made from within a
radically broadened conception of both art and morality. In
fact, we aren’t necessarily talking about the class
of objects we usually associate with the fine arts. For
Dewey, as well as Heidegger and Pirsig, the “poet” is one
who produces an imaginative vision in any medium so that
figures such as Copernicus and Einstein, Lincoln and Gandhi,
Buddha and Christ can be counted among the poets. As the
editors tell us in their introduction to this short except,
“Dewey concludes that only art is capable of allowing us to
conceive of a better future” (PA, page 522). The imaginative
conception of a better future doesn’t necessarily involve
actual poems, oil paints or bronze.
Likewise, the moralities that Dewey contrasts with art are
not limited to the taboos and behavioral codes we usually
associate with morals. Instead, this is morality broadly
construed. This is not limited to whatever might be
currently considered right and wrong in terms of church
morals or civilized behavior, but also extends to whatever
is taken to be correct, true, good or otherwise right in
general. In this sense, morality includes the way we see the
world, the entire inherited system of values with which we
interpretations of the world. As Dewey himself puts it,
morals should be “understood to be identical with every
aspect of value that is shared in experience” (PA, page
525). Dewey’s claim not only survives these expanded notions
of art and morality. It depends upon them. As we’ll see,
Dewey thinks that art’s role is to subvert and refresh these
moralities and he believe that role is a moral one.
In their introduction the editors explain that morals,
“according to Dewey, are by their essence conservative” (PA,
page 522). By contrast, Dewey thinks art is inherently
“subversive” and is, “in an important sense opposed to
morals” (PA, page 522). This opposition sets up a basic
dualism, we'll find in Heidegger and Pirsig as well. It is a
clear contest between the status quo and those who would
subvert it. This is not to say that Dewey is fan of evil or
that he advocates immorality. He’s not knocking the status
quo per se but the distinction is useful so we can
understand his claim to mean that art is more moral
than the status quo. Art offers a critique of what is deemed
normal. As Dewey puts it, “The first stirrings of
dissatisfaction and the first intimations of a better future
are always found in works of art” (PA, page 523). The
apparent contradiction between dissolves when it is
understood that, for Dewey, art is an imaginative vision
that subverts the status quo precisely by being a fresh
vision of something better. As Dewey
says, “It is by a sense of possibilities opening before us
that we become aware of constrictions that hem us in and of
burdens that oppress” (PA 523). We’ll soon return to the
basic dualism between the status quo and a better future,
between the actual and the possible, but first we need to
back up a bit. We need to take a look at Dewey’s rejection
of certain metaphysical assumptions. Why does that
matter when the topic here is the relation of art and
morality?
Dewey, Heidegger and Pirsig all reject subject-object
metaphysics and this led them all to reject traditional
aesthetic theories as well. As Daniel A. Palmer explains it,
“Heidegger explicitly rejects the aesthetic approach to art.
The aesthetic view of art is firmly entrenched within the
subject-object dichotomy that is characteristic of Western
metaphysics and prejudices the enquiry into art…”
(“Heidegger and the Ontological Significance of the Work of
Art”, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol 38, No 4,
October 1998, page 402). David A. Granger’s paper compares
Dewey to Pirsig and he says they, “both defy traditional
transcendent, foundationalist and subject-object
metaphysics” (“John Dewey and Robert Pirsig: An Invitation
to ‘Fresh Seeing’”, presented to the American Educational
Research Association, April 1995, page 1). Likewise, Nikolas
Kompridis compares Dewey to Heidegger and he says they both
take up new terms as an alternative to the subject-object
dualism. “Heidegger’s analysis of ‘being-in-the-world’,
Habermas’s of the ‘lifeworld’, and Dewey’s of the
‘situation’ are analogous attempts to show that we are
always already situated in a pre-reflective, holistically
structured, and grammatically regulated world” (“On World
Disclosure: Heidegger, Habermas and Dewey”, Thesis Eleven,
no 37, 1994, page 31). All three of these secondary sources
highlight the rejection of subject-object metaphysics as
essential for the re-conception of art and morality being
sketched out here. The shape of the alternative has already
come into view here. Dewey, Pirsig and Heidegger all share
the notion that we are “always already situated” in the
world. This is supposed to replace the rejected metaphysical
picture, which tells us that knowledge or truth occurs when
our subjective beliefs properly correspond to an
independent, objective reality. Why is that old metaphysical
picture a problem for the philosophy of art or its aesthetic
theories?
When this dichotomy is assumed, when aesthetics is
“entrenched” in subject-object metaphysics, the theories
become something like a complicated version of the problem
of knowledge. How can the subjective mind gain knowledge of
objective reality? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder or
are some things inherently beautiful? In Kant’s wake, for
example, aesthetic theories tended to emphasize the formal
properties of the art object, which were to be assessed in a
disinterested, almost scientific, way. Pure art or “art for
art’s sake” was perhaps born here. Or, conversely, the
aesthetic experience of the subject was emphasized. There is
something like a correspondence theory of truth at work when
we ask which interpretation is the correct
interpretation. Some kind of causal relationship between
subject and object has been assume and is at work when ask
what it takes to have an aesthetic experience or when we try
to define good art as the kind that causes such experience.
Objective properties and causal relations make a certain
amount of sense in the realm of physics. The success of the
sciences must be the number one reason why these rejected
metaphysical assumptions usually seem so true, but when this
method of inquiry is extended to the fine arts it seems that
good answers are pretty hard to come by. Thus, Heidegger’s
claim that the field is “entrenched” in subject-object
assumptions seems to have some validity and I’m sympathetic
with all three dissenters. This dualism was given its modern
shape by Descartes and it was hardened by Kant and the
success of modern science but the trouble goes back to the
beginning, all the way back to Plato.
It began, at least in terms of my own recent survey of the
various aesthetic theories, when Plato condemned Ion the
rhapsode for his inability to explain his craft. Plato’s
demand for intelligibility in art, a move Nietzsche would
later call “aesthetic Socratism”, even led him to condemn
the poet for knowing less than the characters he portrayed.
He also attacks art as an illusion two-steps removed from
what’s really real, as a copy of a copy of the real
form. Plato’s moral objections are the most relevant here.
As we see in The Republic, Plato would ban most art
from his city because of its morally corrosive effects. The
impulse to exclude unwholesome art can be extended beyond
Plato’s artless utopia, of course. We recognize all too well
in our own time. As Alexander Nehamas tells us, Plato’s
moral attack on art is still very much alive. Traditionally,
the problem is treated as if there were some kind of causal
relation between the work of art and a particular
individual. The artwork holds up an already existing moral
truth for the subject’s edification and instruction. Dewey
thinks otherwise. He says, “The relation of art and morals
is too often treated as if the problem existed only on the
side of art. It is virtually assumed that morals are
satisfactory in idea if not in fact, and that the only
question is whether and in what ways art should conform to a
moral system already developed” (PA, page 524).
This age-old demand that art should conform to already
existing morals is very much at odds with Dewey’s
re-conception of the relations between morality and art as
the tension between the status quo and subversion. For
Dewey, art’s task is to offer alternatives, not to uphold
the existing truths and standards. He agrees that art
presents us with moral ideals in some sense, but the
traditional conception of this fails. He says, “It fails to
see or at all events to state how poetry is a
criticism of life; namely, not directly, but by disclosure,
through imaginative vision addressed to imaginative
experience (not to set judgment) of possibilities that
contrast with actual conditions” (PA 523). For Dewey,
imagination is what gave rise to moral systems in the first
place. On a very basic level, civilized behavior depends on
the capacity to put our selves in the other guy’s shoes and
the existing moral codes should be understood as one in a
series, as one possibility among others. At the risk of
stretching the point, it seems the rejection of
subject-object relations in favor of a contextualized,
situated account is expressed when Dewey says, “The theories
that attribute direct moral effect and intent to art fail
because they do not take account of the collective
civilization that is the context in which works of art are
produced and enjoyed” and “their whole conception of morals
is so individualistic that they miss a sense of the way
in which art exercises its humane function” (PA, page 523).
The alternative idea, the idea that we are “always already
situated in a pre-reflective” world, can serve as well-timed
antidote to that “individualistic” conception.
Dewey, Heidegger and Pirsig all reject the subject-object
dualism and instead adopt terms that designate the whole
context, the person and the world, the live creature
and the environment, the individual and the
cultural situation. As was already mentioned, Kompridis
finds the notion that we are “situated” in Dewey and
Heidegger. Dewey’s analysis of the “situation” is analogous
to Heidegger “being-in-the-world”. (It seems that “Dasein”,
which, as literally translated is “there-being”, also refers
to the whole situation.) Granger finds the same notion in
Dewey and Pirsig. More specifically, Granger locates it in
their central terms. When he was a graduate student he read
John Dewey’s “Art as Experience” and Robert Pirsig’s
“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” at the
same time and he noticed, “that what Dewey referred to as
‘experience’ had close affinities with what Pirsig’s
narrator called ‘Quality’” (Granger, page 1). As Pirsig puts
it, “Quality doesn’t have to be defined. You understand it
without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct
experience independent of and prior to intellectual
abstractions” (LILA: An Inquiry into Morals. New
York: Bantam Books, 1991, page 64). This might look like
naïve realism but direct experience here simply refers to
everyday familiarity with the world, what a Heideggerian
would call “absorbed coping”. The phrase “prior to
intellectual abstractions” refers to that “pre-reflective”
aspect. It’s the reality we experience even before we have a
chance to think about it. It’s the front edge of experience,
to use Pirsig’s image. Granger lists five ways in which
Pirsig’s “Quality” and Dewey’s “experience” resemble with
each other:
“First, both are viewed as some type of immediate, primary
reality of the world encountered as something suffered and
enjoyed. Second, both can be conceptualized in terms of
‘events’ or ‘histories’. Third, both function to impel or
motivate change and adaptation by the living organism.
Fourth, both serve as the crucible of meaning and value but
are not ubiquitously a knowledge affair. And fifth, both
defy traditional, transcendent, foundationalist and
subject-object metaphysics, and are instead broken-down –
for avowed instrumental purposes alone - in terms of
stability and flux (Dewey’s favorite descriptors) or static
and dynamic (Pirsig’s eventual replacement for classic and
romantic; Pirsig, 1991)” (Granger, page 1-2).
In both cases experience is not conceived in terms of
the subject’s encounter with an objective world. Instead
experience is immediate, a “crucible of meaning and value”
in an ongoing process of “change and adaptation”. I think it
is also important to notice how Dewey and Pirsig both adopt
a similar dualism here. Unlike the subject-object dichotomy,
which puts reality on one side and mental representations on
the other, stability and flux characterize the whole
situation. This dualism lines up quite nicely with Dewey’s
re-conception of the relations between art and morals, where
morals represent stability or the status quo and art is the
dynamic process of subversion. As Kompridis explains it,
Heidegger’s version of this dualism is found his concept of
art as world disclosure. World disclosure is, roughly
speaking, a more grandiose version of the disclosure of
imaginative vision as described by Dewey. Here the two sides
of the process, where the subversive power of art is located
precisely in its capacity to offer the vision of a better
future, are described in terms of “decentering” and
“unifying-repair”. This latter side, he says, “refers as
much to the disclosure of new horizons of meaning as to the
disclosure of previously hidden or unthematized dimensions
of meaning” and he describes the decentration side as, “the
scrambling and defamiliarizing of existing patterns of
interpretation, action and belief” (Kompridis, page 29 and
30).
Interestingly, I think, Kompridis says, “the phenomenon of
world disclosure has been taken up and energetically pursued
in two directions. The direction taken depends on whether
the decentering or unifying-repairing power of world
disclosure is emphasized” (Kompridis, page 37). He names
Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida as examples of thinkers
who emphasize the subversive, decentering aspect and he says
Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus and Heidegger are among those
who emphasize the unifying aspect. Both sides risk
distortion, he says. The first group risks “an incoherent
pluralism” and the second group risks a world “too tightly
woven” (Kompridis, page 37). In other words, the first one
is too dynamic and the second is too static. This is one of
the areas where Heidegger parts ways with Dewey.
Because of his romantic, idealized and
“too tightly woven” conception of cultural change,
Heidegger paid little heed to the constant smaller changes
and instead treated the phenomenon of world disclosure as a
few, rare “world-historical events” or “the next verse in
Being’s poem” (Kompridis, page 44, endnote #13). Kompridis
thinks Dewey strikes a good balance between these two
tendencies because of the way he viewed any kind of
experience as a continuous process of adjustment, of change
and adaptation in an ongoing relationship. As Kompridis
(page 42) explains it:
“The crisis-inducing effects of
disclosure, that is, its decentering effects, can be handled
properly only through our constant activity of
reconstructing shattered interpretations of the world in
light of new ones. Dewey understood this reconstructive
process as the continuous readjustment of the relationship
between the ‘discrete’ and the ‘continuous’”
Here’s how Pirsig explains his own balancing act:
“Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive,
when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic
change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a
necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from
degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of
freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns
of quality, the quality of order, preserve our world.
Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the
other” (Lila, page 121).
The problem is that the “poet’s” fresh vision or new way of
seeing uniformly turns into hardened fact and becomes
the established truth. When the needed stability turns to
rigidity, when it becomes too oppressive, brittle, limiting
or otherwise worn out, along comes another poet to shatter
that truth. As Jefferson might put it, the tree of liberty
must be refreshed now and then with the blood of tyrannical
moral systems. As Pirsig puts it, “In the West progress
seems to proceed by a series of spasms of alternating
freedom and ritual. A revolution of freedom against old
rituals produces a new order, which soon becomes another old
ritual for the next generation to revolt against, on and on”
(Lila, page 384). Pirsig uses a wide range of
examples: the Bohemian revolt against Victorian morality,
the hippie revolution against square America and a
particular Zuni witchdoctor. He calls them all
“contrarians”. “That’s what drives the really creative
people – the artists, composers, revolutionaries and the
like – the feeling that if they don’t break out of this
jailhouse somebody has built around them, they’re going to
die” (Lila, page 359). These are Dewey’s “immoral and
sordid” shockers of conservative taste (PA, page 523).
They’re the dynamic one’s, the sources of cultural renewal,
if not world disclosure. In Dewey’s terms, these
creative people are fighting “the consecrations of the
status quo” (PA, page 524). Cultural change or world
disclosure is rarely the aim. The struggle is personal. But
changes move out in waves from each center and once in a
while big things happen as a result. Pirsig says history
is biography. I think Dewey (PA, page 525) agrees on
this final point too:
“What is true of the individual is true of the whole system
of morals in thought and action. While perception of the
union of the possible with the actual in a work of art is
itself a great good, the good does not terminate with the
immediate and particular occasion in which it is had. The
union that is presented in perception persists in the
remaking of impulsion and thought. The first intimations of
wide and large redirections of desire and purpose are of
necessity imaginative. Art is a mode of prediction not found
in charts and statistics, and it insinuates possibilities of
human relations not to be found in rule and precept,
admonition and administration.”
Please
note that the copyright of this paper remains with the
author who need to be contacted directly for permission to
use this material elsewhere.
dmbuchanan@hotmail.com
David’s
“Fun with Blasphemy”
paper
can also be found on this website
here
and his paper
“Clash of the Pragmatists”
here.
