‘Aesthetic emotion’: an ambiguous concept in John Dewey's aesthetics

Abstract

This article analyses the concept of ‘aesthetic emotion’ in John Dewey's Art as experience. The analysis shows that Dewey's line of investigation offers valuable insights as to the role of emotion in experience: it shows emotion as an integral part and structuring force, as a cultural and historical category. However, the notion of aesthetic emotion is characterized by a fundamental ambiguity. There is a conflict between a mechanical and an organic understanding of emotion, a confusion of emotion as structure and of emotion as process, of emotion as content and as agency. The central problem may consist of the conception of aesthetic experience as the ideal. While evil and despair are thereby excluded from the art, everyday life is left wanting, as it cannot live up to the ideal.

Keywords:

• John Dewey
• emotion
• experience
• aesthetics

Notes

Notes

1. Even though ‘aesthetic emotion’ seems to the key to understanding the concept of experience, one should note that Dewey (1938), four years later in his Experience and education, does not mention the aesthetic at all. Here, the validity criterion of experience is that it be ‘educational’, that it allows for further experience.

2. It is strange how few have commented upon the similarity between Dewey's concept of emotion and Freud's (1946) concept of instinct, even though there are differences in nuance. The Deweyan person reacts to the break with a desire of restoration, while the Freudian person reacts with anxiety. Dewey is very optimistic with regard to the power of cognition, while Freud concerns himself with the destructive possibilities of emotion, i.e. the destruction of consciousness, though the basic concept of cultural development seems much the same. Freud calls it ‘sublimation’ (Levitt 1960).

3. Being informed by recent child research (Bråten 1998), there is a certain risk of over interpretation. It may not be clear whether Dewey makes a distinction between the instrumental and the communicative. In Art as experience, he implicitly does it by distinguishing between means and media. While ‘means’ refer to an instrumental action which has its purpose outside itself, ‘media’ refers to an action which is performed for its own sake, thus it is shared with others, especially in the last chapter of Art as experience, in which he emphasizes the communicative quality of experience.

4. This analysis owes a debt to Lorenzer's (1981) socialization theory, which is inspired by the pragmatic tradition and has made ‘interaction’ the pivot of its reflections.

5. We may note that ‘mood’ and ‘emotion’ are used synonymously, a problem which will be addressed later.

6. This qualification raises the question of whether animals and infants have emotions. The term ‘emotional discharge’ also becomes problematic since discharge and the automatic reflex, by definition, have no emotion. One thing is that it is counter intuitive to deny fright and shame emotional qualities, another is that the ‘jump of fright’, though unpremeditated, does involve cognition and is therefore based on a sudden event that spells danger. The blush of shame, although involuntary, is based on a complex evaluation of a given situation.

7. This of course is the path psychoanalysis has explored in depth. It is remarkable how close Dewey's concept of emotion comes to Freud's concept of instinct. Freud (1946) calls the attachment of emotion to an object ‘cathexis’ and the replacement of the object ‘transference’. Dewey and Freud differ though in fundamentally explaining the construction of emotion. Dewey ties it primarily to (physical) interaction, while Freud sees it as the result of a mental operation, i.e. of primary processes.

8. The notion begs the question of permanence, or duration of emotion. Conceding that emotion needs continuous kindling and reconstruction in order to be kept alive, is there duration only in change and transformation? Is there no rest in an emotion, no savouring and living through?