Art and Truth

Abstract

John Dewey said that art is actually not a thing; it is a quality that inheres in experience. The aesthetic experience can be emotional as much as it is rational. Experience is also always of the particular, while the general can only be comprehended. Habit, according to both Aristotle and Dewey, is central to human behavior. This is necessary to study morality as part of human nature, which it is, rather than as an ideal such as the divine or the purely rational such as Kant, or simplistic calculations such as utilitarianism. Our habits are guided by dramatic rehearsal, where we imagine the results if we change a habit to better meet social approval. This rehearsal offers discovery. In this way, imaginative moral experience has aesthetic quality. We also find that ethical discovery and thus experience can be metaphorically equivalent to aesthetic experience. In this way, art can show us truth.

[Dewey seemed] to have a feeling of intimacy with the inside of the cosmos that I found unequalled. So methought God would have spoken had He been . . . keenly desirous to tell you how it was.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr