Contingency without Rorty. Dewey and Addams on Art as Resistant Reconstruction

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to address Rorty’s critique of Dewey’s notion of experience and to reaffirm a view in which the call to experience is indispensable for a genuinely contingent philosophy. In the first part, I analyze Rorty’s critique of Dewey and show its inconsistency. In the second part, I draw a comparison between their aesthetic views and argue that a true aesthetic experience must consist in the cultivation and creative transfiguration of situational resistances. In the third part, using Jane Addams as an example, I illustrate how at Hull House the resistances provided by the situation were transfigured into original and meaningful aesthetic experiences that touched people’s lives and allowed for a meaningful and intelligent reconstruction.