Wellspring or Circuit? Commentary on Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness

Editor's note: This article contains material similar to a book review by the same author previously published in The Pluralist, vol. 18, no. 2, pp 114–21. The present article represents a further critical use of this material that we deem worthy of publication.in this vital and splendidly crafted work, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom far richer than the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. From its start, American philosophy looked beyond Europe's atomistic empiricism toward a continuity between our thought and nature's aesthetic splendor. Jonathan Edwards found beauty in the structure of being reflected in relations among ideas. For Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" in which nature's beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom "aesthetic experience is the highest mode of human experience" (Henning 55).Although aesthetic theory is usually associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, Dewey explores a broader non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In doing so, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism masking a history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Henning wonders whether America might accept "a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10) and finds a viable candidate in Dewey's underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy: an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and the world" (Henning 5). In affirming the unconscious depth of experience, this American reconfiguration welcomes "aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (Henning 5).When embodied meaning supplements cognitive reflection, we come to champion "the sensuous, lived body" as "the primary reality" of qualitative immediacy—a felt aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs (Henning 69). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). "To move adeptly into aesthetic experience means to be skilled at loosening focal consciousness" so as to cultivate "the essential porousness of the world" (130).With this, the body-mind relation becomes a problem of normative aesthetics, not epistemology. The Cartesian detachment of intellect from nature perpetuated our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (Henning 81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, we can begin to acknowledge and heal this trauma.In tapping the significance of qualitative immediacy, of "having" beyond "knowing," Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious strives to recover Dewey's remarkable insight into our essential situatedness in the world. This alone establishes its importance. But Henning's book is equally ambitious in suggesting how Dewey's aesthetic understanding canThese aims are of inestimable value. I pledge to do whatever I can to defend and advance them. At the outset, however, I feel we must shore up the relationship between two different approaches to thinking about our situatedness in the world: (1) of organic beings existing in a porous world they dynamically interact with, and (2) a phenomenology of experience wherein nonreflective having is an unanalyzed totality from which thought and thing, subject and object, organism and environment, functionally emerge in what Dewey calls the pattern of inquiry.The general consensus that Dewey failed to reconcile these two approaches—of existence with experience—was dubbed the "deep crack" in Dewey's thought, by Richard Bernstein in 1961. Bernstein laments Dewey's being caught between (1) a naturalistic realism that restricts experience to organisms interacting with a world that exists yet is unknowable in itself, and (2) a tendency to reject outright any reality beyond experience, leading critics to suspect an idealistic panpsychism (Bernstein 5–6).Although much subsequent scholarship (Sleeper; Boisvert; Rosenthal; Tiles) has tried to fix this deep crack with some manner of dynamic interaction between self and world, these have merely deepened the mystery of what is brought to or exists beyond such an interface. What most perplexed Hume and his successors is the notion that whatever comes to experience is not, or at least cannot be known to be, as it is independent of experience.This quandary is not resolved by talk of porousness, interfacing, or processes instead of objects. In my view, how we interact with the world must take a backseat to the second option noted above, an experiential approach in which our world-situatedness is essentially transactional. Throughout his career, Dewey stressed that his basic philosophical approach is to "use the traits of immediate experience as clews for interpreting our observations of non-human and non-animate nature" (LW 14:127). As early as 1905, this continuity grounds "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism," where to "describe anything truly" one must go to experience and "tell what it is experienced as" (MW 3:157)What everyday experience tells us is that it is predominantly nonreflective—an "unanalyzed totality" of subject and object.1 Only in response to an imposed problem or disruption do subject-object, body-mind, organism-environment emerge as agencies of response in reflective inquiry, and as a consequence of which objects are objectives of inquiry (LW 10:122). By this analysis, we establish a functional ground for objectivity without the baggage of traditional realisms and idealisms. It is intended neither as a metaphysical nor scientific determination of the contents of reality. But with this functional ground secure, we are free to explore the empirical contents and relationships of our world by whichever mode, interactional or transactional, best satisfies the circumstances at hand.Dewey often invokes organism-environment interaction in discussions where the phenomenological backstory is omitted.2 However, he attends to this in the important second introduction to Experience and Nature. Dewey opens with interactive examples, such as "experience reaches down into nature" (LW 1:13). But citing "dialectical difficulties" akin to the "deep crack" of fretting about what is outside of experience, he admits that "these remarks are not supposed to prove anything about experience and nature for philosophical doctrine" (LW 1:13). Instead, in the seminal philosophical or critical assessment attributed to William James, experience isTo me, this heralds a pragmatic phenomenology of experience in which this nonreflective phase is the alpha and omega of his circuit of inquiry. For Dewey, the aim of this circuit is to "convert" the ontological problem of minds accessing mind-independent reality into the logical problem of how qualitative immediacy is connected to objectivity in problem-solving activity (LW 16:287). Instead of wondering how we would detect "porousness" in the world "itself," we "go to experience" to remind ourselves that the default mode of experience is having—a unity of feeling (a gestalt) rather than a continuous parade of discrete feelings or objects.One might object that this "onto-logical" postulate is peripheral to a study of the aesthetic unconscious, but I think it is vital to it in several key ways. First and foremost, it helps us decide whether the aesthetic unconscious is best regarded as a foundational wellspring or as within and continuous with circuits of experience. Henning rightly notes that where Freud's unconscious is a subterranean lair of socially deviant drives and desires, Dewey's aesthetic background harbors habits of creative self-revelation accessible to conscious recognition and deployment. Properly utilized, we neither repress nor sublimate such feelings; we learn from them: the "subconscious of a civilized adult reflects all the habits he has acquired; that is to say, all the organic modifications he has undergone" (LW 1:228).But too much remains hidden if such "organic modifications" are thought to spring from "the threshold between the self and the world" (Henning 38). In a circuit of inquiry, to the contrary, mind as a habituated social background is both the origin of reflective thought and the repository of cognitively achieved objects—"objectives" settled into habits. To be sure, many feelings arise as simple organic affections, but these merge with and are modified by reflective assessments.3In Dewey's organic circuit, nonreflective having is interrupted by something doubtful or problematic. Where habit readily supplies a solution, the unity is restored. But when doubt persists—the stuck door refuses to yield to a firmer push—I step forth as an agency for dealing with the problem posed by what now stands forth as that door. Inquiry diagnoses the problem and propose a solution that, when successful, achieves an object-as-objective subsequently returned to the habituated matrix of mind that, individually and collectively, constitutes the open horizon of our world.An organic circuit also helps us more fully integrate the unconscious and conscious aspects of aesthetic experience. Noting, with Dewey, that unconscious habits are continually shaken by emotive "impulsions," Henning finds the artist perceiving "the world with an aesthetic unconscious." In this world, "to move adeptly into aesthetic experience means to be skilled at loosening focal consciousness" so as to cultivate "the essential porousness of the world" (Henning 130).Dewey agrees that the artist unconsciously resonates with impulsive rhythms within a unified whole. But this is essentially funded not by some porous world but with meanings assimilated from past experiences (LW 10:76). Moreover, impulsion is only the beginning of aesthetic experience: interesting impulsions are not these minor bumps that stir the imagination yet are quickly rectified by habit. Instead, they are emotional shocks that carry us from having to thinking—problems that stick and thus must be dealt with cognitively.4 For Dewey, "an" experience is never wholly or primarily confined within the realm of the unconscious, but occasions where we are thrust from noncognitive having into cognitive hypothesis and action, of envisioned means working to achieve an end-in-view. "An" experience signifies those special occasions where background, shock, execution, and attained objective remain continuous: a reciprocity of beginning anticipating closure and closure reflecting back upon its origin—that storm at sea, that infectious momentum in Matisse's Dance.As such, aesthetic experience incorporates the same dynamic of problem-solving activity—belief-doubt-inquiry—found in everyday affairs. What sets the aesthetic apart is not that it is "unconscious," but that the connection of background, emotional bridge, and cognitive end-in-view—an interplay of form and matter—is fully continuous and reciprocal. Emotion materializes memory and imagination into brush strokes, words, or notes; errors are felt and reimagined. As Dewey notes, "memories, not necessarily conscious but retentions that have been organically incorporated into the very structure of the self, feed present observation" (LW 10:35).Here, Dewey is crystal clear in asserting that the primary organ of aesthetic perception is not the "unconscious," but rather an interplay of habituation and observation. Aesthetic experience is fully adept at exploring its own empirical roots, of course, and here we are welcome to incorporate world-porousness and the body as the "point of contact" between flesh and world (Henning 71). But these relations, like everything else, are empirically attained objectives within the logical-phenomenological framework of a circuit of inquiry.Finally, I propose that Dewey has this circuit in mind in hailing the aesthetic as the pinnacle of experience and the truest test of any philosophy of experience. Experience often evades problems by sticking to the ruts of habit. It shuns the toil of deliberation by taking refuge in fantasy or fanaticism. It halts or breaks off due to resistance, exhaustion, or mere disinterest. It merely tolerates means as unpleasant utilities for desired ends. Only in aesthetic experience are each of its phases—habituated, problematic, hypothetical, experimental, consummatory, re-habituated—fully integrated and reciprocally responsive. Unlike most social and scientific ventures, art has the unique ability to integrate habit, expectation, and outcome in both its production and subsequent enjoyment.To summarize these points, I suggest the following: (1)It is better to think of the aesthetic unconscious as the unified phase of a circuit of inquiry rather than a wellspring arising from an interface or interaction of self and world.(2)Although nonreflective (unconscious) experience is aesthetic, aesthetic experience par excellence is the integration, via emotive impulsion, of the noncognitive and cognitive.(3)The signal philosophical importance of nonreflective experience is to highlight the unanalyzed totality of subject and object. This (a) facilitates the onto-logical rejection of "mind" versus "mind-independence" while (b) encouraging empirical inquiry into things (including organisms, environments, bodies, processes, etc.) of interest to science, culture, aesthetics, and philosophical anthropology.Henning might well resist my suggestion that her theory of the aesthetic is not yet sufficiently transactional. After all, in developing and defending the importance of qualitative immediacy, she taps the most philosophically significant aspect of experience, if not philosophy itself. As we have seen, Henning continuously seeks connections in shared human experience. And, beyond this, she affirms the specifically transactional insight that experience is a circuit in both (1) citing Peirce's doubt-belief and James's perchings and flights as precursors to Dewey, and (2) in the glorious declaration that "experience is a continuous circuit that emerges from and reaches back into our intimate, visceral engagement with the world" (Henning 13).It's only the prioritization of "engagement with the porous world" via "organic interaction" that raises an epistemological problem inviting a phenomenological-logical shaping of the relation between interacting and transacting. To begin with a circuit instead of a wellspring better connects our essential world-situatedness to the inestimable worth of more fully appreciating the aesthetic unconscious in our personal, social, and philosophical lives.Henning concludes with the profound observation that ideas "powerful enough to integrate the self with the ground from which it emerges are sacred" (158). I wholeheartedly agree, for this encapsulates Dewey's vision of the aesthetic and of philosophy itself. Our glassy essence—esthetic, moral, rational—lies within, emerges from, and returns to aesthetic qualitative immediacy. In its exploration of this dynamic, Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness is a timely and important work that sets a course for rehabilitating and advancing this sacred trust.