Dewey's Experience and Nature as a Treatise on the Sublime

Dewey's Experience and Nature as a Treatise on the SublimeAuthor(s): RICHARD GILMORESource: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 4 (2002), pp. 273-285Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25670426 .

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PJMU

Dewey's Experience and Nature as a Treatise on the Sublime RICHARD GILMORE Concordia College

1. Introduction

In the first section of this paper I lay out a reading of Experience and Nature as a treatise on the sublime and what that means in terms of our

experience. In the following two sections I work out some of the impli cations and finer points of this reading of Experience and Nature, espe

cially in relation to other critical works on Experience and Nature and

Dewey's metaphysics. In the final section I go beyond the text of

Experience and Nature to say something about how the concept of the sublime applies to Dewey in more general terms and something about how this Deweyan reading of the sublime might be relevant to us today politically, socially, and individually.

2. The Sublime and an Emotional Turn

The dynamic of the sublime strikes me as an especially useful one to

analyze, especially now in this postmodern, anxious age, because it involves the transformation of an experience that is horrible, unsettling, or anxiety-provoking into an experience that is pleasurable, aesthetic, and life-affirming. I take the great American treatise on the metaphysics of the sublime to be John Dewey's Experience and Nature. Although Dewey does not explicitly call his subject the sublime, I read the title of this work as denoting the fundamental constituents of the sublime:

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2002.

Copyright ? 2002 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

273



274 RICHARD GILMORE

us, our experience, which we have in response to the huge indeterminacy in which we find ourselves immersed, that is, nature. Nature, however, does not

begin for us as something sublime. Our early experiences with nature will often

suggest that our existence is, as Dewey says, "precarious and perilous" and that what comes to us comes by sheer luck or chance. Dewey says of this aspect of our condition: "Man finds himself living in an aleatory world; his existence

involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk, it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their times and seasons" (LW L43).1 Dewey concludes, "man fears because he exists in a fearful, an awful world. The world is precarious and

perilous" (LW 1:43-44). This is an acute description of the initial moment of the sublime. We, as human beings, have lived individually and communally, tem

porarily and interminably, in this moment. This condition is, of course, not the

experience of the sublime. It is the experience of the world as more terrifying than pleasurable or aesthetic.

That we need not exist interminably in this moment, in this condition, takes a discovery. To make this discovery can be a somewhat arduous and painstak ing undertaking, and it will take time. What the discovery is a discovery of is that there is another aspect to nature, to things in nature, that is initially invisi ble. It will take a certain amount of undergoing, training, practice, and discipline in order to be able to perceive this aspect of things in nature, but once one has, nature itself is transformed, and access to the sublime is opened.

Dewey refers to a remark by Herbert Spencer to elucidate this idea: "When he [Spencer] says that every fact has two opposite sides, 'the one its near or vis ible side and the other its remote or invisible side,' he expresses a persistent trait of every object in experience. The visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen . . ." (LW 1:44). I read

Experience and Nature to be a kind of manual about how to see the invisible in

the visible. Somewhat paradoxically, the discovery that will render the unseen

visible will ultimately be about seeing the continuity between the visible and the invisible. It will have to do with understanding the continuity between our expe rience and nature. To make this discovery we will need a method. Dewey explic

itly describes his overall project in the first chapter of Experience and Nature as

replacing the "traditional separation of nature and experience" with a clearer sense of the "continuity" between experience and nature (LW 1:9). He then out

lines his method for achieving this goal. Dewey correlates these two different ways of regarding nature with different

moods, and correlates the different moods with different periods in human his

tory. "A gloomy temper of life" dominates those periods of human history in

which human beings have felt severed from and mystified by nature. The meth

ods for trying to secure some control over nature in these periods tend to be on

the order of divination and propitiation. Dewey mentions pre fifth-century B.C.E.

Greece and the medieval period as being characterized by superstition and gloom.



Dewey's Experience and Nature as a Treatise on the Sublime 275

The flowering of fifth-century Greece, especially in Athens, where nature was

viewed as to some degree malleable and subject to our control (especially our own natures as being subject to some sort of moral or ethical control) gave the Athenians a sense of power over their lives that created a pervasive mood of cheerfulness and joy.2 What the cheerful Greeks had that the gloomy ones did not have was a method, or, rather, the idea that there were various methods, meth ods for doing things that were more effective than other ways of doing things. Dewey refers to these as "instrumental arts": "Through instrumental arts, arts of control based on study of nature, objects which are fulfilling and good, may be

multiplied and rendered secure" (LW1:103). The difference between the gloomy and the cheerful mood is a different way of regarding our relation to nature. This difference is especially characterized by having a particular kind of method, or,

say, the right attitude for discovering all sorts of different methods. The method or the methodological stance that will achieve the kind of under

standing of nature that will be empowering and liberating Dewey refers to as the

empirical method (or the experimental method or the scientific method or the method of intelligence). It is a method based on the methods employed in the sciences. It is a method that begins with material from primary experience and refers back to primary experience for testing.3 It is a fallibilistic method, that is,

self-correcting, and it is sensitive to the "tendencies" of things as opposed to

responding only to the immediate experience of things. Dewey says, "The idea of tendency unites in itself exclusion of prior design and inclusion of movement in a particular direction, a direction that may be either furthered or counteracted and frustrated, but which is intrinsic" (LW 1:279). That is to say, to identify a

tendency is not to identify a pre-ordained telos, but to recognize a thing in process, and to see what direction the thing is progressing towards. Dewey goes on to say, "To assert a tendency and to be fore-conscious of a possible terminus of movement are two names for the same fact" (LW 1:279). What is liberating and empowering about this method is "fore-consciousness," an understanding of what is happening and where things are going and how one can influence what will happen or where things will go.

A defining characteristic of the empirical method is discovery. As Dewey says, "the life blood of modern science is discovery" (LW 1:21). That is, the empiri cal method is not about simply our response to things, but about how things, understood contextually and temporally, really are. And the things that it is con cerned with are not objects so much as "potentialities" or "tendencies": relations, correlations, characteristics of a situation that will yield probabilities for future conditions. As Dewey says, "For any object of primary experience there are

always potentialities which are not explicit; any object that is overt is charged with possible consequences that are hidden..." (LW 1:28). The overriding objec tive of this method is to identify the implicit potentialities of things, with "things" understood to include all aspects of nature, events, other people, and ourselves.

Dewey says, "The history of the physical sciences is the story of the enlarging



276 RICHARD GILMORE

possession of mankind of more efficacious instrumentalities for dealing with the conditions of life and action" (LW 1:20). That is to say, what the empirical method will reveal is properties of things and of situations, properties that we

will be able to make use of when we need to. For Dewey, this empirical method is not just for scientific experimentation,

but for philosophy, and not just for philosophy as a specialized academic dis

cipline, but as the name for "reflective analysis" (LW 1:26) in general, so that

anyone and everyone might use the empirical method, and the more the better. Of course, we all do use the empirical method in many aspects of our lives. Any

operation in which we respond to a problem we encounter with experimenta tion, with exploration, with trying different options, and which ends in some

kind of discovery?this works, that does not?is an example of the empirical method in action.

A primary physical manifestation of the process of thinking, of employing the

empirical method, is tools. "The first step away from oppression by immediate

things and events was taken when men employed tools and appliances" (LW 1:105). Dewey defines a tool as "a thing in which a connection, a sequential bond

of nature is embodied" (LW 1:101). This is an appropriately pregnant definition of a tool. It suggests that our human connection to nature is manifested in our con

nection to our tools, which are themselves embodiments of connections to nature.

This embodiment itself is not so much immediate as futural. A tool represents "a

sequential bond of nature," which I read to mean that a tool represents a means

by which a sequence of events can be initiated, directed, and chosen. To use a tool is to respond "to things not in their immediate qualities but for

the sake of ulterior results, immediate qualities are dimmed, while those features

which are signs, indices of something else, are distinguished" (LW 1:105). Insofar as anyone has ever used a tool successfully they have worked with the invisible

in the visible, the unseen in the seen; they have demonstrated the knowledge of

nature as a mixture of the precarious and the predictable. To use a tool is to have

and to generate meanings. The failure of human beings in gloomy times?and I take it to be a truism

that gloomy times occur for individuals in certain times of their lives as well as

to civilizations in certain periods of their histories?is the failure to trust that the

invisible in the microcosm of their lives (where they will successfully use cer

tain tools) operates in the whole realm of nature as a macrocosm. They fail to

see that there are still greater tools to use to secure greater powers for initiating and directing sequences of events in the world. For Dewey, to be so empowered is to have the numinous haze of gloom dissipate. To feel like one has some con

trol in one's life is the solution to the problem of gloom. It is an understanding of the subtle powers of nature itself, and in that understanding comes a power to

work with nature to bring to fruition what is in you and in nature to bear fruit.

The "tool of tools" (LW 1:134) for Dewey is language, and it is the poets who

are the masters of this tool. As Dewey says, "Poets who have sung of despair in




the midst of prosperity, and of hope amid darkest gloom, have always been the true metaphysicians of nature. The glory of the moment and its tragedy will

surely pass" (LW 1:96). I read Dewey as saying here that the criteria for being either a poet or a metaphysician are, first of all, to be able to see the transient in

every situation, the seeds in every situation of its opposite. Second of all, how

ever, is required the ability to sing of these things, which I read to signify that the true metaphysician, as well as the poet, is not daunted by this transience, but rather remains in the attitude of celebration and cheerfulness. Even the gloom entailed by the most hopeful moment entails a still more future hope. To see this, and to see that this too is something that can be worked with, used, or brought to a particular fruition is to be a real metaphysician and a real poet of nature.

This invocation of poets and metaphysicians gets to the very heart of Dewey's project in Experience and Nature. Near the beginning of the second chapter, a

chapter entitled "Existence as Precarious and Stable," Dewey says, "the concern is not with morals but with metaphysics, with, that is to say, the nature of the existential world in which we live" (LW 1:45). Dewey's is an existential meta

physics, with all the reverberations of the word "existential." That is, Dewey is

taking on the problem of where the meanings are in a world that is precarious and uncertain. What Dewey has discovered is that there are ways of interacting with the world, ways of experiencing the world, that naturally yield meanings.

An important emphasis here is on the idea that meanings are yielded. That is,

meaning is not something we simply come upon in the world. Meaning is some

thing that, if we persist in a certain way, that is, with a certain method and a cer tain kind of open, experimental attitude, over a period of time, will emerge. If you do not understand this it is likely that you will not believe it. You will choose not to believe it because to sustain the appropriate attitude and methods takes a cer tain amount of discipline, which is difficult at first. What is perhaps most difficult about it is the necessity of muting one's own desire for resolution; what is most difficult is sustaining the doubt, the ambiguity, the skepticism that must be com bined with persistent pursuit, persistent inquiries, and persistent attention to the tendencies of things over a sufficient length of time for the meanings to emerge.

There will be, especially initially, an element of faith in this kind of experi ence, in this way of experiencing the world. That is, if the world really is ulti

mately arbitrary and chaotic, and meanings will not, will never, emerge, then this attitude and method are really pointless and counter-indicated. If, on the other hand, meanings do emerge, and, furthermore, their emergence depends on our

activity, our participation, our selecting and directing energies, so that in facili

tating their emergence we are empowered as well as edified, then to miss this whole way of being in the world will be itself a kind of tragedy, a waste. This attitude and method may be difficult to adopt initially, but, according to Dewey, their effectiveness, and the empowerment they yield, will transform the onerous into the frankly pleasurable, so that each moment of experience becomes its own

pleasure as well as the preparation for a future satisfaction.



278 RICHARD GILMORE

The metaphysics of Experience and Nature is an inductive metaphysics, not a deductive metaphysics. That is, Dewey's metaphysical conclusion that mean

ings emerge is not derived by some abstract logic from axioms, but rather is derived from the logic of experience itself. We have all had successful experi ences of emergent meanings, the question is, how far we trust this pattern to hold in nature at large and for experience in general. Dewey's claim is that the fur ther you can go in experimentally testing this pattern in the world, the further

you will see that the world will respond in ways that are surprising, amazing, and, ultimately, meaningful, which is to say, revealing of patterns and tenden cies that are gratifying to discover and useful for future projects.

In his Preface to Experience and Nature Dewey speaks explicitly of the ele ment of faith in this method of relating experience to nature, "It points to a faith in experience when intelligently used as a means of disclosing the realities of nature ..." (LW 1:4-5). That is, this faith is not blind but the result of experi ence intelligently used. To speak of experience "intelligently used" is to suggest that there is an alternative to that, experience without intelligence. Experience without intelligence is just experience without the attention to the tendencies of

things, without the selective and directive response to tendencies that make expe rience something we do as opposed to something we simply undergo. It is the

experience of a sequence of immediate opacities as opposed to of imminent and

emergent revelations.

Dewey goes on to say, "There is in the character of human experience no

index-hand pointing to agnostic conclusions, but rather a growing, progressive self-disclosure of nature itself (LW 1:5). Nature itself is unfurling, like the bloom

of a rose or the curl of a wave. In so far as we are reactive, without intelligence, we are "pulled and pushed about, overwhelmed, broken to pieces, lifted on the crest of the wave of things, like anything else" (LW 1:277). Insofar as we expe rience nature "intelligently," our delight will follow naturally upon the revela

tions of the unfurled rose, which we have anticipated and hoped for, or upon

catching a wave. To catch a wave takes study, knowledge, practical skill as well

as a kind of intuitive responsiveness to the dynamic of a particular wave. To live

one's life catching the wave of nature is to have one's experience be art.

What needs to be seen, according to Dewey, is that

science is an art, that art is a practice, and that the only distinction worth draw

ing is not between practice and theory, but between those modes of practice

that are not intelligent, not inherently and immediately enjoyable, and those

which are full of enjoyed meanings. When this perceptions dawns, it will be a

commonplace that art?the mode of activity that is charged with meanings

capable of immediate possession?is the complete culmination of nature. .. .

(LW 1:268-69)

Art is the culmination of nature. Nature itself aspires to art, which is only to say that the processes of nature are those of bringing to fruition the tendencies of




things. When we live in the fullest, most intelligent experiential way we are, like

nature, identifying the tendencies of things and working with those tendencies to bring them to a fruition that is most satisfying to us. To catch the wave is to do what nature does. It is to be aligned with nature in oneself. It is to be natura

naturans, nature naturing, to use Spinoza's phrase. To be able to do this is part of what I call the American sublime. I call it the

American sublime because of how closely this conception of the sublime is tied to the lineaments of American pragmatism, being empirical, fallibilistic, melior

istic, futural, and empowering. It is the transformation of the potentially awful and terrifying into the satisfying and useful for some future purpose. It is the transformation of the horrible into the aesthetic. It is a description of this trans formation that pervades the classics of American philosophy, in the works of Thoreau and Emerson, James and Dewey. It is profoundly futural, and so revo

lutionary, coming out of America's severance with its own past by means of its own revolution.

This American sublime is a departure from the Kantian sublime of the third

Critique. There the resolution of the terrifying into the satisfyingly aesthetic was attributed to a ratification of our separateness from nature. That is, for Kant, the sublime moment comes when we recognize something about ourselves that is untouchable by, and distinct from, all of the principles of nature. We recognize our own internal unity, our Ding an sich-ness, our potential autonomy from nature and our potential capacity for morality. The Deweyan American sublime finds the sublime moment in a very different recognition. It comes from the

recognition of our deep continuity with nature. We are nature, we are in nature and nature is in us. Whereas this possibility was itself horrifying to Kant, ren

dering us mere objects in the clockwork mechanism of nature, for Dewey this

recognition is the very source of our autonomy, of our freedom and power. Nature, for Dewey, is not a pre-established clockwork mechanism. It is in

process, as are we. Insofar as we understand the processes of nature, we can work

with them, and working with them we can make choices. As Dewey says, "choice is not arbitrary, not in a universe like this one, a world which is not finished and

which has not consistently made up its mind where it is going and what it is

going to do" (LW1:67). Kant's separation of our human nature, of the ultimate grounds of our con

sciousness, from nature as a whole makes the concept of freedom only clear as a negative concept and so, ultimately, mysterious. Dewey directly connects our consciousness with nature. It is an expression of nature in us. Dewey goes on to

say, "When consciousness is connected with nature, the mystery becomes a lumi nous revelation of the operative interpenetration of the efficient and the fulfill

ing" (LW 1:265). For Dewey freedom is an explicitly positive concept of our

intelligent engagement with nature. To realize this is to have the terrifying as well as the mundane transformed into the sublime. The luminosity of this reve lation is what makes the experience of the sublime aesthetic.



280 RICHARD GILMORE

3. Metaphysics is Aesthetics

Experience and Nature is Dewey's great work on metaphysics. What the clos

ing chapters of Experience and Nature reveal is that for Dewey metaphysics is

ultimately aesthetics. Dewey makes a distinction between the aesthetic and art

that, ultimately, points to the continuity between them. His initial description of the aesthetic is that it is relatively static, "In the esthetic object tendencies are

sensed as brought to fruition," while art is more active, "Artistic sense on the other hand grasps tendencies as possibilities_" His consummatory definition of art, however, combines the two notions. "Art in being the active productive process, may thus be defined as an esthetic perception together with an opera tive perception of the efficiencies of the esthetic object" (LW 1:281). Aesthetics is metaphysics because what aesthetics is sensitive to is just the tendencies that obtain in an object, a situation, a relationship, or a medium. This is metaphysics because these tendencies are physically invisible. They transcend the physical. Neither microscope nor telescope can help detect them. For all that they are real,

they have real powers to affect and be affected by things. It is a sensitivity to just such powers that characterizes aesthetics, as well as Dewey's metaphysics. These are "real" things, not quite real in the same way as Aristotle's entelechies, but

real all the same. I have in mind here the idea of the real that Raymond Boisvert

picks up from Plato's "Sophist" to apply to Dewey's metaphysics. Boisvert says, "The sign of whether something is real or has 'being,' is not whether it is acces

sible to the senses, but whether it has 'power' to affect 'anything else or to be

affected'" (1998, 153). Of course the tendencies and relations between things that Dewey so frequently refers to do have such powers. These powers are as

real as the potential of a pile of lumber for becoming a house or the paint in the can for becoming Pollock's "Lavender Mist." Dewey says, "Art brings tenden

cies to fruition" (LW 1:280) which is an appropriately organic metaphor for how

the meaningful emerges from the meaningless through an aesthetic sensibility, and for how what emerges is life-giving, pleasure-giving, and health-giving. Art

is sublime because it transforms the accidental and "fated" into the meaningful, the pleasurable, and the useful.

To return to Dewey's description of what I take to be his own metaphysics, what he is doing in Experience and Nature, as a metaphysics that concerns itself

with "the nature of the existential world in which we live" (LW 1:45). A large

part of Dewey's metaphysical discovery has to do with the importance to our

experience of the reality of the tendencies and relations of things, which I under

stand Dewey to be saying really exist, at least in the sense that Boisvert suggests, that is, as having the power to affect and be affected by other things. This is, it

seems to me, an existential or ontological, as well as a metaphysical, claim,

although it is in no way a mystical or an a priori logical claim. There is nothing in Dewey's metaphysics that is non-empirical. The tendencies to which we can

be sensitive will or will not be verified in experience. The emphasis in Dewey's

metaphysics is on what we do with what we can make of the world, not on posit




ing particular entities that are supersensible. Either there is enough lumber to

build this particular house or there is not. One can "see" in this pile of lumber the potential to build the particular house outlined in this blue-print and you can be simply wrong about that. Dewey also emphasizes the importance of criticism and reflection. One should trust only those of one's judgments that one is prop

erly equipped in experiences to make. This points to the other major element of Dewey's metaphysical discovery.

If the first element of his metaphysical discovery is the importance in our lives of the physically invisible, i.e., the tendencies and relations in and between

things, the second major discovery is how one's experience can be transformed if one is self-reflectively aware of the first discovery. To be self-consciously aware of how important tendencies and relations are in any situation, in any object, entails not only a more sophisticated sense of how to direct one's atten

tion, but more importantly, makes possible the conscious engagement of the "method of intelligence," the method of science, which involves testing in expe rience what at first only appear to be tendencies and relations.

This is the discovery of the pervasive potential for the sublime in experience, where the dark, the confounding, and the dispiriting is transformed into a sense of one's having powers to see and understand that are liberating, and which yield a sense of joy at that discovery. A Deweyan word for this process is that it is about "reconstruction." To more strongly emphasize the aesthetic dimension would be to call it a process of re-narrativization. By either description the trajectory is the same, it is that of the sublime?the transformation of the indeterminate or under determined into the determinate and meaningful. In this sense, all art is achieved via the trajectory of the sublime. The beautiful in art, as in experience, is the con

summatory period that follows the transformative work of the sublime. John McDermott's poignant answer to the deep existential question "Why bother?"

(1993,280) is to point to Dewey's description of "the time of consummation" (LW 10:23). I read Dewey's metaphysics as being about how to get there, how to achieve the experience of "the time of consummation," and that his discovery is that the way to get there is via the sublime, and the sublime is an art.

If metaphysics is about art, and nature is about art, and science is about art, and wisdom is about art, and experience in the sense of having an experience is about art, it would seem that the question of how to distinguish good art from bad art would be preeminent. The final chapter of Experience and Nature turns to the now pressing question of criticism.

4. All Criticism is Self-Criticism

Once we have been socialized, given language, developed in a community, the

greatest impediment to our use of the method of intelligence seems to be our sense of ourselves as, in Dewey's phrase, "a little god" (LW 1:325). That is, we



282 RICHARD GILMORE

think of ourselves as detached from nature and in possession of some privileged a priori understanding of nature. This impediment can be removed through crit

icism, or, more specifically, through philosophy as criticism. Dewey gives this

description of criticism: "Thought goes beyond immediate existence to its rela

tionships, the conditions which mediate it and the things to which it is in turn

mediatory. And such a procedure is criticism" (LW 1:297). Criticism, then, is aesthetics. The "criticism of criticisms," the aesthetics of aesthetics, is philoso phy (LW 1:298). I read this to mean only that philosophy is concerned with rela tions that are more removed from the immediate in our experiences, with tendencies that are more subtle, less obvious, relations that emerge from among other relations, and yet which are, for all that, as real and as experientially sig nificant as any relation. This is what I take Dewey to mean by his description of

metaphysics as concerned with "general traits" (LW 1:308). We will need a sensitivity to such general traits if we are going to be able to

determine genuine good from mere conventional or illusory good. As Dewey says, "Either, then, the difference between genuine, valid, good and a counter

feit, specious good is unreal, or it is a difference consequent upon reflection, or

criticism, and the significant point is that this difference is equivalent to that made by discovery of relationships, of conditions and consequences" (LW 1:301,

emphasis added). The difference that makes a difference is the consequence of

criticism, and criticism itself is based upon discovery. Earlier in Experience and Nature Dewey analyzes the dynamics of discov

ery. He says, "unless the newly found and seen object was used to modify old

beliefs, to change the sense of the old map of the earth, there was no discovery in any pregnant intellectual sense, any more than stumbling over a chair in the

dark is a discovery till used as basis of inference which connects the stumbling with a body of meanings" (LW 1:125). Real discovery, that is, in the "pregnant intellectual sense," involves the transformation of our world and of us. Dewey goes on to talk about the discovery of America and how this discovery changed not just the map but the way the whole world was looked at, with new possibil ities, new opportunities, new sources of wealth and adventure, and the potential for new discoveries. Dewey concludes, "every genuine discovery creates some

such transformation of both the meanings and the existences of nature" (LW

1:125). Criticism is about discovery and discovery is about the transformation

of our beliefs about how the world is and about how we are in it. All criticism,

then, is also self-criticism. The possibility of a discovery will begin with something like "stumbling over

a chair," but the actual discovery phase will have two aspects, the aspect of pro

cessing the fact of the chair into its ramifications and meanings; and the aspect of how this changes one's own perceptions about, say, the dynamics of the room.

The first aspect, however, is in a sense dependent on the second. That is, since

many of the most important discoveries are of the more metaphysical kind, of

tendencies and relations, and so more easily missed than a chair in the dark, an




attitude of being receptive to discovery, to the possibility of one's worldview

being radically changed, is prerequisite for the possibility that such a discovery can be made. As Dewey says, "a mind that has opened itself to experience and that has ripened through its discipline knows its own littleness and impotencies; it knows that its wishes and acknowledgments are not final measures of the uni verse whether in knowledge or in conduct, and hence are, in the end, transient. But it also knows that its juvenile assumption of power and achievement is not a dream to be wholly forgotten" (LW 1:313).

There is a rhythm here that Dewey describes. "When criticism and the criti cal attitude are legitimately distinguished from appreciation and taste, we are in the presence of one case of the constant rhythm of 'perchings and flights' (to borrow James's terms), characteristics of alternate emphasis upon the immedi ate and the mediate, the consummatory and instrumental phases of all conscious

experience" (LW 1:299). I include the following diagram to illustrate this rhythm of "perchings and flights" "of all conscious experience" that Dewey describes:

Intelligence Intelligence Intelligence Intelligence Applied: Applied: Applied: Applied:

Self-Criticism/ Art/Construction Art/Construction Faith Attitudinal Shift of Meaning of Meaning

Ambiguity/- - -

Ambiguity/ Fate/Chaos/ i-1 ^-^ I-1 .-j-1 Fate/Chaos/ f-1 Gloom/ | Discovery[^eSublim>| Discovery^ ] Discovery| Gloom/ | Discovery Despair

| Discovery of

^ 7^ Beautiful: \ Despair | V Tendencies, of J \ Appreciation J

\Meaning S \ofMeaning j/

5. Faith

Dewey begins the final paragraph of Experience and Nature by saying:

Because intelligence is critical method applied to goods of belief, appreciation and conduct, so as to construct freer and more secure goods, turning assent and

assertion into free communication of sharable meanings, turning feeling into

ordered and liberal sense, turning reaction into response, it is the reasonable

object of our deepest faith and loyalty, the stay and support of all reasonable

hopes. (LW 1:325)

Dewey's invocation of faith here I read to be an expression of faith, of faith in the possibility of intelligence, in intelligence as responsive to the possibility of

discovery, in discovery as the possibility of criticism and renewal, in criticism as the possibility of philosophy, and in philosophy as the possibility of joy. For



284 RICHARD GILMORE

Dewey, philosophy is not academic work, but the practical work of being self reflective in our criticism as well as being critical of objects other than one's self. It is in this self-reflective criticism that lies the possibility of, in Michael

Eldridge's phrase, "transforming experience" (1998). It is in the trajectory of the transformation of experience that I see the parallels between Dewey's meta

physics in Experience and Nature and the experience of the sublime.

Faith, here, does have an element of "conviction in spite of evidence to the

contrary," but it is not faith in some entity, it is faith in the process that new mean

ings will be revealed even though the source of meanings may, at the moment, seem exhausted. It is faith in the rhythm of experience, that experience inevitably has its moments of doubt as well as its moments of appreciation and fullness. This faith is itself empirically verified if one is only sensitive and alive to the

ongoing processes of these rhythms in one's own life.

Morally, the imperative is for one's own growth and trust in the possibility of

growth in others. Politically, this metaphysics points to a humanistic liberalism that appreciates a complex web of tendencies and relations over conservative entrenchment and the reification of values. Individually, in this postmodern time

of unstable identities, Dewey outlines a possibility for a kind of stability of iden

tity from a concept of identity as fundamentally, ideally, unstable. It is a con

ception of identity that trusts that the strongest identity is the identity that is

responsive to contexts and so is constantly changing. In all of this the initial movement derives from the possibility of a transfor

mative discovery. The sublime is about the transformation of experience through

discovery. This is a constant Deweyan theme. It is also an aesthetic phenome non, which Dewey begins to acknowledge as central to his metaphysics in

Experience and Nature, and this acknowledgment blossoms into a full and rich

theory in Art as Experience nine years later. I read the core of all of Dewey's

philosophical writing to be about empowerment, about what empowers us indi

vidually and communally, and the sublime too is about empowerment, about dis

covering one's powers precisely in the moment when one has the gravest doubts

about one's abilities. Finally, as many commentators have mentioned, there is in

the works of Dewey a kind of red thread of the spiritual, an acknowledgment of

the sense of joy that is yielded in simply experiencing the world fully, which is

well captured in the idea of the sublime.

Notes 1. Following convention, all Dewey citations refer to volume and paragraph of The Later Works

of John Dewey, 1925-53, hereafter LW.

2. See LW 1:103-4.

3. See LW 1:15.

Works Cited Boisvert, Raymond, D. 1998. "Dewey's Metaphysics: Ground-Map of the Prototypically Real." In

Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation, ed. Larry A. Hickman.

Indianapolis: Indiana UR




Dewey, John. 1988. Experience and Nature. In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-53, Volume

1: 1925, ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. -. 1989. Art as Experience. In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-53, Volume 10: 1934,

ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.

Eldridge, Michael. 1998. Transforming Experience: John Dewey's Cultural Instrumentalism.

Nashville: Vanderbilt UP.

Kant, Immanuel. 1951. Critique of Judgment. Trans. J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner P.

McDermott, John J. 1993. "Why Bother: Is Life Worth Living? Experience as Pedagogical." In

Philosophy and the Reconstruction of Culture: Pragmatic Essays after Dewey, ed. John J.

Stuhr. Albany: State U of New York P.

Spinoza, Baruch. 1982. The Ethics and Selected Letters. Trans. Samuel Shirley and ed. Seymour Feldman. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.



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