Abstract
This paper aims to develop Dewey’s aesthetics in relation to the epistemology of complexity. The focus is particularly on the convergence between a work of art and a living system. Indeed, a work of art, much like a living system, is a unity in variety, being integrated and differentiated. This characteristic is not the result of linear causality, for which each part affects only the contiguous aspects, but the consequence of dynamics of the whole (or, of the field) coordinating the activities of the elements through to their most remote junctions. Every part “feels” the whole, which in turn is realized via articulation in all its parts. Congruently, a work of art contains a perfect integration between “spiritual” and “sensorial” levels, between “bodily” and “ideal.” Thus, it is evident that amongst the various levels comprising a work of art, there is continuity. Ultimately, a work of art is the result of a historical process during which it advances, interacting with the medium, like a living organism that develops, acquiring articulation and volume, learning from experience, embodying and internalizing the learned meanings. In developing this perspective, the concepts of emergence and organicism will be assumed as the focal points for both Dewey’s (aesthetic) thinking and the epistemology of complexity.
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Notes
- 1.
More recently, attempts to re-read Dewey’s thoughts in the direction of the epistemology of complexity are being made (for example: Godfrey-Smith, 1996; Semetsky, 2008). El-Hania and Pihlströmb (2002) further the concept of emergence also with reference to pragmatism and, specifically, to Dewey’s thought without drawing the final consequences from Deweyan emergent naturalism. In their view, “perhaps a notion of emergence based on non-reductive physicalism [...] does some interesting, pragmatically valuable work in certain specific fields, e.g., in the philosophy of biology—possibly in accounting for the relation between biological and physico-chemical properties. But when we move on to other, ontological regions, particularly the mental and cultural realms, we do not seem to have a sufficiently clear idea of how the program of non-reductive physicalism could be the carried through (with or without emergence)” (24–25).
- 2.
Even if “a clear understanding of the concept of experience is undoubtedly a more difficult theoretical task for those who turn to the study of Deweyan philosophy” (Calcaterra, 2011, 118, transl. my own), adopting the organismic approach, we can say that the experience, as a whole, is its meaning, in an almost phenomenological sense, without further additions. In this regard, please refer to the Sect. 8 in this paper.
- 3.
In From Absolutism to Experimentalism, Dewey (1930) recognizes that “Hegel has left a permanent deposit in my thinking” (21). We have to recall that, even before knowing the Hegelian philosophy, Dewey had come into contact with the idea of organicism during the physiology course held by T. Huxley. Dewey recalls that meeting as follows: “I have an impression that there was derived from that study a sense of interdependence and interrelated unity that gave form to intellectual stirrings that had been previously inchoate and created a kind of type or model of a view of things to which material in any field ought to conform. Subconsciously, at least, I was led to desire a world and a life that would have the same properties as had the human organism in the picture of it derived from study of Huxley’s treatment” (13).
- 4.
For Calcaterra (2011), “if you are willing to accept a certain degree of exaggeration and provocation in the historical work, you could describe the whole evolution of Deweyan thought as an attempt to make the theoretical content of this fundamental youth intuition more and more pervasive and logically compelling” (14, transl. my own). In Knowing and the Known, this attempt succeeded. In this book, Dewey comes to develop the concept of transaction, with which he ultimately takes the distances from any “ontological reference”—such as “‘elements’ or other presumptively detachable or independent ‘entities’, ‘essences’, or ‘realities’” (1949/1991, 101–102), to adopt an organismic logic that examines the dynamics of the whole situation. What’s more, in that book Dewey’s thought is projected in the direction of those thinkers—from J.C. Maxwell to K. Goldstein, from J.V. Uexkull to the Gestalt psychologists—who were working to develop an organismic (or field) perspective within their respective areas of competence. For example, complaining that, “The new foundation that has been given physics on a transactional basis [...] has not yet been made complete” (107), Dewey comments—citing Maxwell—that “the properties of the field alone appear to be essential for the description of phenomena” and that “[t]he electromagnetic field is, in Maxwell’s theory, something real” (108). Likewise, in physiological and biological sciences “against the vitalisms [...] Views of the type called ‘organismic’, ‘organismal’ etc., except where they contain reminiscences of the old self-actional forms, stand for the transactional approach intra-dermally” (116–117). This organismic-transactional approach has the “desire to allot the leading adjective rather to the full living procedure of the organism than to minor specialized processes within it” (117).
- 5.
Dewey knows full well the risk of reductionism inherent in concepts such as emergence or statements such as “the spirit and life emerge” (Dewey & Bentley, 1949/1981, 155). It is not simply, as El-Hania and Pihlströmche evidences, that “Dewey did not reject the idea [of emergence] altogether but only what he saw as its magical overtones. He simply required scientific research on the emergence of life and mind”, rather he is entirely aware of the risk that a concept such as emergence “still retains an independence and an unnatural isolation of the old type” (Dewey & Bentley, 1949/1981, 155). In this way, emerge results that are extrinsic and not inherent to the dynamics of the phenomena, incorporating dualisms or containing the remnants of old vitalistic or mechanistic concepts. The new approach is to dispense of any “must be” of the phenomenon, looking at it as a pure relational-transactional becoming. It is no coincidence that, in this regard, Dewey mentions the concept of “field”. The direction that Dewey suggests is to make a more careful analysis of the phenomena: “the conception transactional emergency [...] will in the descriptions enriched primary processes of life in their environments and more complex behavioral processes in them”. Reductionism implies to stop simplified explanations. To invoke the respect of the phenomenon as a whole, in fact, does not hint at a rejection of the analytic approach, as is sometimes argued, as the true “complex” attitude is to compare oneself with the infinite complexity of reality, renouncing the temptation to introduce extraneous explanations. As Stengers (1985, 50) observes, whilst reductionism says “nothing but …”, the analytical method “could lead to ‘this’…, but in other circumstances, ‘that’, and then to ‘that yet’” (transl. my own). Therefore, at every step, upon each discovery, others lie in wait.
- 6.
To this regard, cf. notes no. 4 and 5.
- 7.
Cf. note no. 5.
- 8.
“Through art, meanings of objects that are otherwise dumb, inchoate, restricted and resisted are clarified and concentrated, and not by thought working laboriously upon them, nor by escape into a world of mere sense, but by creation of a new experience” (Dewey, 1934/1980, 132–133).
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Polenta, S. (2021). The Work of Art as a Living System: A Deweyan Approach. In: Hornbuckle, C.A., Smith, J.S., Smith, W.S. (eds) Phenomenology of the Object and Human Positioning. Analecta Husserliana, vol 122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66437-4_13
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