Art as Experience

Art as Experience builds directly on John Dewey’s earlier work Experience and Nature (1925), where he developed his account of experience as the ongoing interaction between an organism and its environment. In Art as Experience, Dewey extends this framework into aesthetics, showing how art is not a luxury that is detached from life but an intensified mode of living. His connection to the pragmatist tradition—particularly to William James’s ideas, as expressed in his seminal work Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking—is especially clear. Like James, Dewey emphasizes lived activity, continuity, and the primacy of experience over abstract theory. 

Dewey also positions himself in dialogue with earlier philosophical traditions, most notably the ideas of Immanuel Kant. In the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant defined art in terms of disinterested pleasure and universal standards of taste. While Dewey accepts Kant’s insight that aesthetic form unifies perception, he rejects the idea that aesthetic experience must be detached from practical and bodily life. For Dewey, aesthetic experience always grows out of the dynamic processes of