SOURCE: "Some Questions on Dewey's Esthetics," in The Philosophy of John Dewey, Northwestern University, 1939, pp. 371-89.

[In the following excerpt, Pepper examines Dewey's writings on esthetics, which he finds are often contrary to Dewey's purported allegiance to Pragmatist tenets. ]

A personal item may more quickly reveal the grounds of certain issues I sense in Dewey's esthetic writings than anything else I could offer to the same end, and will also perhaps furnish him with a more direct focus for reply than the customary impersonal and more distant modes of statement. About 1932 I came to the point in a manuscript, which I was preparing on types of esthetic theory, where I wished to give an exposition of the pragmatic esthetics. I was not aware of any well considered work on the subject, and accordingly dug the matter out for myself, taking most of the details from scattered remarks on art and esthetic experience to be found in Dewey's writings up to that time, and for the rest following what I believed to be the implications of the general pragmatic attitude in the face of relevant facts. The section I tentatively prepared, therefore, amounted to a prediction of what I thought a pragmatist of importance would write if he undertook to make a carefully considered and extended statement. Accordingly, when Dewey'sArt as Experience came out in 1934, I turned to it with avidity to see how nearly correct my predictions had been.

I was excited to discover that all of the features I had thought important were emphasized by Dewey, together with others along the same line revealing further insights that I had not previously noticed. But I was also amazed to find Dewey saying many things which I had deliberately excluded from my tentative pragmatic account, believing them to be contrary to the spirit of pragmatism—things which an organic idealist would have said, and which I should have thought Dewey would rather have bitten his tongue than to have said, implying as they did a view he has often vigorously repudiated. In fact, Dewey said so much about the organic character of art that, when I had finished reading his book, this side of his work stood out for me more than the pragmatic. Was Dewey reverting to Hegelianism in his later years? Or had I so widely missed the character of pragmatism that I had seen only half of it, and that perhaps the lesser half?

The more I thought about the issue, the more convinced I became that I had been right in my predictions of the nature of pragmatic esthetics and that it was Dewey who had here gone astray. Accordingly, I set about myself to write what I thought a pragmatic esthetics should be. My Aesthetic Quality, of course, amply verifies my own predictions. But there is very little stated in Aesthetic Quality that is not also better stated in Art as Experience. The point is merely that many things are not stated in Aesthetic Quality which are said in Art as Experience, and which I believe should not be said by a pragmatist.

The criticisms to follow are now obvious. I shall try to show, first, that an organistic esthetics cannot be harmonized with a pragmatic esthetics. If one of these theories is unequivocally accepted, the other must be rejected. For even though the insights of the one can often be adjusted to the framework of the other, this can only be accomplished with considerable alterations or with loss of prestige to the insights in question.

I shall next try to show the presence of an almost fully developed organistic esthetics in Art as Experience. The presence of the pragmatic view I shall take for granted, assuming that it will be obvious enough to any reader.

I shall then point out certain unfortunate results that seem to me to arise from the mixture of the two views. Since my own solution of such a difficulty is to present the views separately (to use an old phrase, clearly and distinctly), I am virtually asking Dewey what objections he has to this solution, or why he prefers the mixture. This is a question of method which I believe reaches down into questions of fact, truth, and probability.

Finally, I shall hint that much of Dewey's polemic against Platonic and materialistic theories loses its force, unless he comes to terms with the criticisms that have preceded.

The characteristics of an organistic esthetics have, to my mind, been ably and summarily presented by Bosanquet in his Three Lectures on Aesthetics. The basic traits seem to be the following: First, the general organistic principle that experience is intrinsically coherent or internally related, from which it follows, that the process of elucidating or of comprehending or of adequately seeing into experience consists in making explicit out of the fragments of experience as we originally find them the implicit coherence that lies there.

Second, the value of any sort of finite or relatively fragmentary experience is proportional to the degree of coherence that has been achieved in it.

Third, the differences among values are based solely on the materials organized. So truth is an organization of judgments in experience, ethical goodness an organization of acts in experience, beauty an organization of feelings in experience. It follows that the differences among values become less and less apparent the more organized the experience. Clear-cut classifications are accordingly signs of inadequate organization, comprehension, evaluation. All of our human experience, however, is, we note empirically, fragmentary in various degrees and incomplete. No man is the absolute, though men in different degrees according to their achievements approach the absolute or the real structure and coherence of the world. And relatively few men achieve coherent organizations of considerable stability.

Fourth, applying these principles to the field of art and esthetic appreciation, we find that this field is defined by the feelings (primitively mere pleasures) in materials which have trends, nisuses, demands for other feelings to enlarge and complete them. The man of taste or the artist of genuine creative capacity follows these trends, and in so doing constructs organizations of feelings having cumulative satisfaction. The process of constructing such esthetic organization has, after Coleridge, come to be called creative imagination. The greatness of a work of art is judged by the degree of imaginative construction it contains. A good appreciative critic is accordingly of the same nature as a good artist. The only difference between the two is that the latter actually draws the materials together out of experience and exhibits their coherence, whereas the former follows the coherence achieved by the latter. Both activities are active, and in a sense creative, because the organization achieved even by the appreciative critic is not precisely that achieved by the artist since every man or center of experience is different from every other and in the intimate organization of his feelings the appreciator draws upon his experience which is not precisely that of the artist. However, the firmer the organization, the greater the degree of communion or esthetic communication between artist and appreciator, since the two have come nearer to certain intrinsic structures of the world.

Fifth, just as differences among values in general are determined by differences of experience in general, so the specific practical criteria of esthetic judgments are determined by the materials of the arts. Every art in its selection of certain materials to work with determines its own detailed critical criteria. These criteria are intrinsic to the art, namely the potentialities and directions of coherent esthetic construction in those materials. The critical criteria are themselves discovered in the process of the development of the art. Hence painting cannot be judged by the criteria of literature, nor the painting of the impressionists by the criteria of the painting of the postimpressionists, though it may be fitting to say that the esthetic materials of the impressionists have less constructive potentiality than those of the post-impressionists.

The traits of an organistic esthetics, then, are: (1) coherence, (2) value as degrees of coherence, (3) differences of value as differences of cohering materials, the esthetic field being that of feelings rendered coherent, (4) creative imagination or the process of rendering feelings coherent, (5) potentialities for coherence in specific esthetic materials as the intimate criteria of value in the arts.

Now, turn to the traits of a pragmatic estheties: First, experience is an enduring historical process with a past sloughing off, a central present, and a future coming in. For any man, his experience is embedded in an environment, which enters into his experience, and with which he is constantly interacting.

Second, there is a relational phase of experience with a web or texture-like nature, so that whatever experience one has is felt as interconnected with other experiences. The threads of these webs can be followed and their terminations to considerable degree predicted, or by means of instruments attained. But there are also frustrations, blockings, and downright novelties intrinsic to experience.

Third, there is a qualitative phase of experience, which may often be regarded as a 'fusing' or a 'funding' of certain of its relational phases resulting in an immediacy of perception of various degrees of vividness. The 'having' of a very vivid quality may be called a 'seizure.' In a broad sense (and perhaps in a final sense) the esthetic field can be identified with that of the qualitative phase of experience.

Fourth, it follows that the criteria of esthetic value are the extensity, depth, and degree of vividness of quality in experience.

Fifth, as secondary esthetic criteria, may be added those factors instrumental to the production of extensity, depth, and vividness of quality. Roughly speaking, organization is the chief instrument for increasing the extent and depth of an esthetic experience, and conflict the chief instrument for increasing vividness.

Sixth, a physical work of art is a continuant in the environment constructed so as to control esthetic values by acting as a stimulus to an organism whence an esthetic work of art is generated. This last is a qualitative experience partly contributed out of the organism and partly out of the environmental physical work of art (cf. 108-9).¹ It follows that the esthetic work of art is discontinuous, and that its quality will vary with the organism, with the amount of 'funded' experience available, and consequently with the culture or epoch. One cannot, therefore, legitimately speak of the value of a work of art in pragmatism as one can in organicism. A physical work of art has no absolute potentiality but only a potentiality relative to an epoch, for no man can develop beyond the limitations of his epoch. The esthetic value of a work of art, accordingly, changes with its epoch, and incidentally every epoch demands an art and a criticism of its own. The judgment of the value of a work of art should, accordingly, be distinguished from that of the esthetic value of an experience had. The latter is the genuine esthetic judgment; the former is an estimate of the potentiality of a certain continuant or set of continuants to produce the genuine esthetic judgment.

The traits of a pragmatic esthetic then are: (1) experience as historical duration, (2) relational texture of experience, (3) quality as the esthetic differentia of experience often unifying a texture of relations through 'fusing' and 'funding,' (4) extensity, depth, and vividness of quality as the basic criteria of esthetic judgment, (5) organization and conflict as secondary criteria, and (6) the work of art as an instrument for the control of esthetic values with its own (though related) criteria of evaluation.

That there are incompatibilities between these two theories must be evident from these summaries. For the moment, the question is not which is the more adequate theory (to me personally, they appear about equally adequate), but whether they are not definitely incompatible.

There is first a fundamental difference of emphasis on the defining feature of the esthetic field. For organicism the coherence of feelings is central, while for pragmatism it is secondary and instrumental. And for pragmatism quality is central, while for organicism, though quality is not actually neglected, it is only a sort of corollary, being the very concreteness of experience which is automatically attained with greater organization. But by this very fact, the quality envisaged by the organicist is not the same as that of the pragmatist, for the organicist disparages fusion as a limitation of finiteness and a species of confusion. The organicist recognizes 'funding' as part of the synthetic process of coherence, but in so far as 'funding' exhibits itself as a fused unity of quality it is incomplete and lacking in value. In other words, fusion, and therefore quality as the fused sense of the character of an experience, is appearance and not reality. Pragmatic quality is noticed by the organicist in finite experience and is preferable to singular and more abstract stages of experience; it is not, however, valuable in itself, but on the contrary a sign of disvalue. And for an organicist 'seizure' is little better than emotionalism. The organicist conceives the work of art as a complete clear whole in which every part or aspect implies every other and is implicit in it without blur or compromise or focus or fringe. That completely integrated whole is the individual thing, the character. Finite perceptions approximate it in various degrees, but in reality there is no fused quality of it. For the pragmatist, however, such a fused quality is as ultimate a reality as there is. The basis for this difference, of course, is that the organicist embeds his work of art in the absolute structure of the world, whereas the pragmatist finds the esthetic experience in historical processes as they come, and considers nothing more real or ultimate than an actually had experience.

A second major incompatibility is closely allied to the first. For the organicist there is really only one work of art, that integrated whole of feelings which has been achieved. Various finite centers enter into the work of art to the best of their abilities. If the work of art is really highly coherent, the variations of perceptions among the different perceivers only indicate men's own various limitations and failures to achieve the organization that is really there to be found. The value of the work is objectively there, the variations and incapacities to appreciate merely indicate a "weakness of the spectator" and his own lack of integration and reality.

For the pragmatist, there is no ground for belief in such a single real integrated whole, for he rejects the hypothesis of an absolute coherent structure of nature. He must therefore distinguish between immediate experiences had (the esthetic work of art), and the environmental instrument for the control of these experiences (the physical work of art). The pragmatist cannot adequately account for the facts of art without dividing the common sense 'work of art' into at least two factors. The result is a relativity of judgment about the value of a work of art. This relativity does not dissolve all objectivity of judgment, but it justifies differences of judgment in terms of inadequacy of experience and epochal changes in whole environments. For a pragmatist there is no absolute judgment of the value of a work of art, though the judgments about some works of art have a high degree of stability.

Thirdly, the organicist sees nothing in conflicts and frustrations but appearance and illusion and disvalue. For a pragmatist there is nothing more real or ultimate than a conflict had, and under certain conditions a conflict is valuable in its own right. The pragmatist notes that conflicts are actually sought after and valued in games, in comedy, in tragedy, and, if he looks carefully, even throughout all art subtly in the minutest details. He does not explain these away by suggesting that they are transcended and thereby converted into harmonious integrations in the organic wholes in which they appear. He stresses and savors them and suggests that the organization sought in works of art is mainly an organization of conflicts. For he finds conflict a principal source of the vividness of quality, and thereby esthetically valuable in its own right, and to be sought after up to that point where it cannot be endured and debouches into practical action.

These three incompatibilities are sufficient, I think, to demonstrate that one cannot consistently have organicism and pragmatism present at once in the same theory. If coherence is fundamental, then fused, had quality is not, and vice versa. If a work of art is a single absolute entity, then it is not a multiple relative entity, and vice versa. If conflict is always disvalue, then it is not sometimes a positive value, and vice versa. I have personally obtained esthetic insights from both of these theories, and believe for the present we ought to keep them both separately and consistently in mind; but I think a mixture of the two only blurs and damages both and adds nothing to general esthetic understanding. My criticism of Dewey's Art as Experience is that it contains a mixture of these two theories, and consequently results not only in many implicit contradictions and vacillations but also in mutual inhibitions such that some of the important insights of both theories are concealed.

I wish now to show by some references that a fairly complete organistic esthetics is present in Art as Experience. As for the pragmatic esthetics, that, as I said, can be assumed to be there, and is obvious in any ten pages of the book. The disturbing thing is that the organistic theory is equally obvious to one who is aware of what is going on, and that in large degree and at critical points, notably in Chapter XIII, the chapter specially devoted to esthetic criticism, it submerges the pragmatic view. Let us now consider Dewey's exposition of an organistic esthetics.

Let us follow seriatim the evidences for the five traits previously mentioned of an organistic esthetics.

(1) Coherence. That there is great emphasis on this principle will appear in the evidences for the other traits. It would be too much to expect of a deeply imbued pragmatist that he would ever slip into identifying reality with coherence. Had Dewey been aware that the evidences for the other traits went far towards committing him to this fundamental organistic principle, he would, I suspect, have drawn back and cleared his book of these implications.

(2) Value as degrees of coherence. This also is a general organistic principle which will exhibit itself so far as esthetics is concerned in the three remaining traits.

(3) The esthetic field is that of the coherent organization of feelings. Let us compare this with Dewey's definition of esthetic beauty.

In case the term [beauty] is used in theory to designate the total esthetic quality of an experience, it is surely better to deal with the experience itself and show whence and how the quality proceeds. In that case, beauty is the response to that which to reflection is the consummated movement of matter integrated through its inner relations into a single qualitative whole. (130)

Now, if Dewey had written, "Beauty is the consummated movement of feelings and their qualities integrated through their inner relations into a single individual whole," he would have given an orthodox organistic definition. What he did write is obviously far from a pragmatic definition as outlined recently. The emphasis is on integration, singleness, and wholeness, and quality comes out as the differentiating guide of the integrative process. There may be other kinds of integration, but the sort of integration that is esthetic is the sort that integrates quality. The question is how far Dewey conceived this quality in the organistic rather than the pragmatic sense. The two senses easily slip into one another but at extremes, as I have shown, they are very different. The quality of organicism (the individual, or the characteristic) is the coherent whole developed from the internal relations of the affective materials. The 'had' quality of pragmatism is the awareness of experience itself, and is not necessarily coherent, may even be indefeasibly incoherent. In Dewey's definition of beauty, which seems to me from its context to have been rather carefully considered, the meaning of 'quality' appears ambiguous. I am suggesting that it was so felt by Dewey—not, of course, with any intention to confuse, but possibly with an underlying (though I believe mistaken) intention to enrich. This same ambiguity runs through most of the book. I would even go so far as to say that the weight of significance for this and many other passages is predominantly organistic.

The definition quoted comes near the end of a chapter on "Substance and Form." Near the beginning of the chapter Dewey writes,

The material out of which a work of art is composed belongs to the common world rather than to the self, and yet there is self-expression in art because the self assimilates that material in a distinctive way to reissue it into the public world in a form that builds a new object. This new object may have as its consequence similar reconstructions, re-creations, of old and common material on the part of those who perceive it, and thus in time come to be established as part of the acknowledged world—as "universal." The material expressed cannot be private; that is the state of the mad-house. But the manner of saying it is individual, and, if the product is to be a work of art, induplicable. Identity of mode of production defines the work of a machine, the esthetic counterpart of which is the academic. The quality of a work of art is sui generis because the manner in which general material is rendered transforms it into a substance that is fresh and vital. (107-8)

And immediately thereafter comes an approving reference to A. C. Bradley, the most consistent and illuminating organistic critic since Coleridge. The foregoing passage might very well have been written by A. C. Bradley, or F. H. Bradley, or B. Bosanquet, or any other imbued organicist. Coherence is the evaluating principle which assimilates, objectifies, universalizes material. Incoherence and privacy are "the state of the madhouse." The result of coherence embodying material is a concrete universal, to use the technical term, to be strictly contrasted with the repetitive abstract universal which develops academism, and is but another mode of incoherence. "The quality [value?] of a work of art is sui generis," a concrete universal, which is individual and common to every aspect, since every aspect is internally related with every other though a unique center in its own right.

Hence A. C. Bradley can be aptly quoted as saying: "Poetry being poems, we are to think of a poem as it actually exists; and an actual poem is a succession of experiences—sounds, images, thought—through which we pass when we read a poem. . . . A poem exists in unnumerable degrees." (108) That is, different finite individuals approximate the potential integration of the poem according to their capacities of integration in reference to the material at hand. It is true that immediately after this passage is another into which Dewey slips by imperceptible transitions and which stresses the absoluteness of pragmatic relativity as emphatically as anywhere in the whole book. But that, of course, is just my point. A passage like the preceding can grow only out of organistic modes of thought leading to the conception of the work of art as a"public' object of the 'common world,' as 'universal,' 'individual' and 'induplicable' because it exhibits the necessary logic of the affective materials out of which it is made. And there is no justification in such a passage for an inalienable diversity of interpretations or for the idea that "it is absurd to ask what an artist 'really' meant by his product" (108), and that "if he could be articulate, he would say 'I meant just that and that means whatever you or any one can honestly, that is in virtue of your own vital experience, get out of it" (109)—unless by "honestly, that is in virtue of your own vital experience" is meant precisely the inevitable logic of the affective materials themselves, "the inevitable self-movement of a poem" (70) which eventuates in "material completely and coherently formed" (116), the work of art "sui generis. " Just what weight and direction is given to "honestly" here? Is it the pragmatic relativistic honesty of "whatever anyone can get out of it?" Or is it the absolutistic organistic honesty of "vital experience" following "the inevitable self-movement of a poem?" Throughout Art as Experience, phrases are indecisive on this matter, as here in the midst of a typically pragmatic statement. But evidences for the interpretation of "honestly" in the organistic terms of "the inevitable self-movement of a poem" multiply in the passages dealing with the creative imagination.

(4) Creative imagination. This term owes its currency to Coleridge, who got the idea it contains from the purest early organistic sources and projected it into the literary world where, though generally half understood, it has still proved very effective. As Dewey says, "it is a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole." (267) In the next paragraph,

Coleridge used the term 'esemplastic' to characterize the work of imagination in art.... But one may pass over his verbal mode, and find in what he says an intimation not that imagination is the power that does certain things, but that an imaginative experience is what happens when varied materials of sense quality, emotion, and meaning come together in a union that marks a new birth in the world. . . . Possibilities are embodied in works of art that are not elsewhere actualized; this embodiment is the best evidence that can be found of the true nature of imagination. (267-8)

The next paragraph is a quite orthodox organistic description of the processes of the creative artist:

There is a conflict artists themselves undergo that is instructive as to the nature of imaginative experience. . . . It concerns the opposition between inner and outer vision. There is a stage in which the inner vision seems much richer and finer than any outer manifestation. It has a vast, an enticing aura of implications that are lacking in the object of external vision. It seems to grasp much more than the latter conveys. Then there comes a reaction; the matter of the inner vision seems wraith-like compared with the solidity and energy of the presented scene. The object is felt to say something succinctly and forcibly that the inner vision reports vaguely, in diffuse feeling rather than organically. The artist is driven to submit himself in humility to the discipline of the objective vision. But the inner vision is not cast out. It remains as the organ by which outer vision is controlled, and it takes on structure as the latter is absorbed within it. The interaction of the two modes of vision is imagination; as imagination takes form the work of art is born. (268)

From the vague appearance to the clear reality; from the abstract and conflicting to the concrete and coherent; thesis, antithesis, synthesis; "enticing implications" becoming explicit in organic form and full "embodiment"; the internally constructive logic of the relations through which "the artist is given to submit himself in humility to the discipline of the objective vision." Is not this the very chorus voiced by Schelling, Hegel, Bradley, and Bosanquet? An "instructive" chorus, indeed, and to be well heeded, but where does it fit in or harmonize with the pragmatism of Experience and Nature, of The Quest for Certainty, and of the dominant message of Dewey?

Passages of this sort are not sporadic and unrepresentative. They constitute a theme that recurs with and without variations, and that is possibly (as I have suggested) the main theme of the book. It comes out most clearly and frequently in the form of the typical organistic principle that a work of art is the coherent embodiment of the esthetic implications of its materials.

(5) Coherence of a work of art as the implications of its media. This theme is the basis of Dewey's exposition of form, of the differences (or classification) of the arts, and of the critical esthetic judgment itself.

"Form, " he says, "may be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment. The connection of form with substance is thus inherent, not imposed from without. It marks the matter of an experience that is carried to consummation." (137) It follows that "each medium has its own efficacy and value" (227), and that "we may safely start any discussion of the varied matter of the arts with this fact of the decisive importance of the medium: with the fact that different media have different potencies and are adapted to different ends." (226) The examination of the different arts (229-244) is carried through on this principle and he concludes,

I have been concerned with the various arts in but one respect. I have wished to indicate that, as we build bridges of stone, steel, or cement, so every medium has its own power, active and passive, outgoing and receptive, and that the basis for distinguishing the different traits of the arts is their exploitation of the energy that is characteristic of the material used as a medium. (243-4)

Moreover, "when the effect appropriate to one medium becomes too marked in the use of another medium, there is esthetic defect." (229)

The transition from this insight to the typical organistic theory of criticism is natural. Practically the whole of Chapter XIII on "Criticism and Perception" is occupied with this theory either in positive exposition or in polemic against rival theories. And this chapter as next to the last in the book comes to the reader as a sort of summary of the esthetic doctrine of the book, the last chapter being reserved for reaffirmation of the social implications. It is largely because of the location of this chapter and its strongly organistic trend, that one comes out of readingArt as Experience wondering if Dewey has not turned Hegelian.

After some pages of probing into the superficialities of what he calls "judicial criticism," what the orthodox organicist calls "abstract" criticism, in which "criticism is thought of as if its business were not explication of the content of an object as to substance and form, but a process of acquittal or condemnation on the basis of merits and demerits" (299), Dewey presents his constructive view of the critical judgment.

If there are no standards for works of art and hence none for criticism (in the sense in which there are standards of measurement), there are nevertheless criteria in judgment, so that criticism does not fall in the field of mere impressionism. The discussion of form in relation to matter, of the meaning of medium in art, of the nature of the expressive object, has been an attempt on the part of the writer to discover some of these criteria. But such criteria are not rules or prescriptions. They are the result of an endeavor to find out what a work of art is as an experience. . . . Criticism is judgment. The material out of which judgment grows is the work, the object, but it is this object as it enters into the experience of the critic by interaction with his own sensitivity and his knowledge and funded store from past experiences. As to their content, therefore, judgments will vary with the concrete material that evokes them and that must sustain them if criticism is pertinent and valid. Nevertheless, judgments have a common form because they all have certain functions to perform. These functions are discrimination and unification. Judgment has to evoke a clearer consciousness of constituent parts and to discover how consistently these parts are related to form a whole. (309-10)

The last sentences of the chapter are,

We lay hold of the full import of a work of art only as we go through in our own vital processes the processes the artist went through in producing the work. It is the critic's privilege to share in the promotion of this active process. His condemnation is that he so often arrests it. (325)

All of this with certain alterations of style might have been written by Bosanquet.

Well, what of it? If it is good doctrine, why shouldn't a pragmatist write it? What's in a label? A good deal, I think, if it is a significant label. 'Pragmatism' and 'organicism' I think are significant labels. Dewey's eclecticism in Art as Experience has damaged his pragmatism without adding anything we could not gather elsewhere concerning organicism. This damage is of two sorts: the pressure of organicism inhibited the full growth of a pragmatic esthetics in Dewey's hands, and the simultaneous presence of both theories produced a confused book. I will say nothing about the confusions, but let me show some of the effects of the inhibitions.

First, we have been deprived of a pragmatic theory of criticism. The germs of it are repeatedly stated—quality, fusion, seizure, realization, vivid perception, novelty, uniqueness, conflict—but they are toned down or suppressed to make way for the organistic theory. We get occasionally a few sentences that summarize the view:

I have had occasion to speak more than once of a quality of an intense esthetic experience that is so immediate as to be ineffable and mystical. . . . All direct experience is qualitative, and qualities are what make life-experience itself directly precious. . . . A work of art may certainly convey the essence of a multitude of experiences, and sometimes in a remarkably condensed and striking way. (293)

But such "directly precious" realization or "seizure" is elsewhere derogated to the vague confusion that precedes organistic integration: "Artist and perceiver alike begin with what may be called a total seizure, an inclusive qualitative whole not yet articulated, not distinguished into members." (191) This precious vital kernel of a new esthetic and a new criticism struggles to grow in three eloquent pages (192-4), but is finally mulched under a rich layer of organicism:

The undefined pervasive quality of an experience is that which binds together all the defined elements, the objects of which we are focally aware, making them a whole. The best evidence that such is the case is our constant sense of things as belonging or not belonging, of relevancy, a sense which is immediate. (194)

Second, we are deprived of a theory, or let us say a solution, of tragedy in art. Organicism is a theory of harmony culminating in the great cosmic harmony of the absolute. Pragmatism is a theory of conflict, celebrating struggle and vigorous life in which every solution is the beginning of a new problem, in which every social ideal is an hypothesis of action, in which values thrive on conflicts. The inference almost comes of itself that vital quality will thrive on tragedy, so that artists will seek out great conflicts for the esthetic values that directly sprout from them. Conflict is not something to be overbalanced or transcended in art, but something to be brought prominently forward and emphasized. What organization is required in art (and much is, of course, required) is instrumental to realization of the very quality of experience, of its conflicts. Yet Dewey gives us the conciliatory organistic theory of tragedy: "This sense of the including whole implicit in ordinary experiences is rendered intense within the frame of a painting or poem. It, rather than any special purgation, is that which reconciles us to the events of tragedy." (194) And again,

The peculiar power of tragedy to leave us at the end with a sense of reconciliation rather than with one of horror forms the theme of one of the oldest discussions of literary art. . . . The positive fact is that a particular subject matter in being removed from its practical context has entered into a new whole as an integral part of it. In its new relationships, it acquires a new expression. (96)

There is just a hint now and then of the pragmatic view, as in the reference to

Shakespeare's employing the comic in the midst of tragedy. . . . It does more than relieve strain on the part of the spectator. It has a more intrinsic office in that it punctuates tragic quality. Any product whose quality is not of the very 'easy' sort exhibits dislocations and dissociations of what is usually connected. The distortion found in paintings serves the need of some particular rhythm. But it does more. It brings to definite perception values that are concealed in ordinary experience because of habituation. Ordinary prepossession must be broken through if the degree of energy required for an esthetic experience is to be evoked. (173)

But this point of view is never developed further.

Third, we are deprived of a pragmatic theory of ugliness (or rather of its absence) and meet instead with statements that might have come out of Schasler, Hartmann, or Rosencrantz—for instance: 'The explanation of the fact that things ugly in themselves may contribute to the esthetic effect of a whole is doubtless often due to the fact that they are so used as to contribute to individualization of parts within a whole." (204) The context indicates that Dewey is identifying dullness and conflict with ugliness. Why the problem obsesses orthodox organicists is easily understood. But though Dewey avoids the obsession, he does not escape the inhibition to look into the status of the concept in pragmatic terms. Unless I am mistaken, ugliness is a pseudo-concept in pragmatic terms, and some interesting consequences follow from this discovery.

Lastly, we are deprived of an intensive investigation into the nature of quality. Here is for pragmatists a fact correlative in importance with the fact of relations. The mutuality of the two was ably exhibited in Experience and Nature. In the Quest for Certainty the nature of relations in scientific procedures was intensively studied. In Art as Experience, we might have expected the corresponding intensive investigation into the nature of quality. We are not, to be sure, altogether disappointed. But there is so much to be said on this topic, and so much to be found out, that the spaces given up to the processes of integration in the book are a frustration to our hopes. Who more competent to tell us about the shades and discriminations and the scope and depth of quality, its fusions and its fundings, than Dewey? We are on the point of learning some new detail, our ears are pricked up, our heads turned to attend, and instead we are given another fragment of Hegelianism.

It is not that we should regret anything that Dewey writes, for his writing always has the glow of truth in it. These Hegelian insights are as valid, I think, as any. And Dewey presents them with his own personal flavor. But these insights are not new, and Dewey has insights that are. And those of us who feel what he might have given us, if he had not been drawn aside by the fascinations of the integrated whole, wish a little that he had not noticed these fascinations. Would he perhaps yet turn his eyes aside for a while, and give us what we are waiting for? There is no one else who can do it with his authority.

The comments I have made here on Dewey's esthetics come, it is clear, under two heads: comments on what I suggest to be shortcomings in the material and comments on shortcomings in the method. I believe the shortcomings in the material arise out of those in the method. Let me therefore summarize the preceding paragraphs in the following questions:

1. Is it not true that the method is eclectic—i.e., employs two incompatible theories in the presentation of the relevant facts?

2. If so, would it not have been better to have given separate expositions of the two theories?

3. And if so, does not much of the polemic against certain other theories in terms of the pragmatic and organistic theories lose its force? By what criteria does Dewey justifiably distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable theories? Why, for instance, is a coherent whole to be accepted but a recurrent form of the Platonic type to be rejected?

4. But if not so, and if it is held that esthetic facts are obvious, indubitable, certified as such, and need no theories to assist their discrimination, how account for the inconsistencies suggested?

Of the social message in Art as Experience, its plea to break down the separation between art and life, to realize that there is beauty in the commonest and meanest things, and on Tuesdays and Wednesdays as well as on Sundays, I have said nothing. Possibly this message is the chief intention of the book. Dewey is ever a reformer. And here as elsewhere he has shown the contemporary evil and the direction to take for eliminating it. I have commented on the book only as on something that intends to be sound and true, and have only asked how far that intention has been realized.

Nor have I tried to bring out the reasons for the greatness of the book. I am personally convinced that Art as Experience is one of the four or five great books on esthetics, and is a classic though but five years old. I am assuming that any one who reads the book with understanding will see that. But even the greatest books are not flawless. The most elementary student in philosophy now sees the inconsistencies of Spinoza, and, if a reply could be expected, would like to write him about them. This is such a letter to Dewey.

NOTES

¹ All references are to Art as Experience.