Art as Experience

The Preface and introductory chapters of Art as Experience establish the conceptual and stylistic foundations of Dewey’s project. In the Preface, Dewey situates the book within a lineage of philosophical and artistic discourse, acknowledging figures from William James to A.C. Barnes. This gesture of respect signals that the book is a collaborative cultural project that is already participating in what will become one of Dewey’s major themes: Art as the Foundation of Cultural and Social Continuity. The following two chapters introduce Dewey’s core vocabulary—experience, organism, environment, sense, and art—and outline the central problems he aims to resolve: the isolation of art from ordinary life, and the entrenched dualisms that fracture human experience.

Dewey’s diction is artistic and literary. His language is metaphorical and often poetic, employing similes, imagery, and analogy, and this makes philosophy itself seem like a creative act. For example, he critiques conventional art objects by comparing their prestige to a weight that stifles perception, noting that “the very perfection of some of these products, the prestige they possess because of a long history of unquestioned admiration, creates conventions that get in the way of fresh insight” (3). His figurative language dramatizes his argument that reverence for canonical works can deaden experience. He enacts his claim that art is not confined to museums or canvases but permeates the ways people shape and communicate experience. Thus, his rhetorical style itself is a demonstration of Aesthetic Experience as a Unified Process of Life, showing that writing, like painting or music, can also be imaginative and vital.

Dewey directs sharp criticism toward institutions that claim to safeguard art while actually distorting it. He singles out museums, noting: “Most European museums are, among other things, memorials of the rise of nationalism and imperialism” (8). For Dewey, the problem is not preservation but the way institutional prestige freezes works into inert relics, obscuring their original role in communal life. He argues that when art is treated as a symbol of ownership or national pride, its original connection to shared experience fades. This critique links to the theme of Art as the Foundation of Cultural and Social Continuity, since Dewey insists that art sustains culture not by standing apart as an elite possession but by functioning as a living medium of shared meaning.

A recurring target in Chapters 1 and 2 is the proliferation of dualisms that sever human experience into artificial compartments: high versus low, intellect versus body, fine versus useful, and spirit versus flesh. Dewey sees these oppositions as the residue of historical institutions that treat human activity as inherently divided. He writes, “Prestige goes to those who use their minds without participation of the body and who act vicariously through control of the bodies and labor of others” (21). This observation critiques both social hierarches and philosophical traditions that devalue sensory and bodily experience. Dewey’s insistence that art emerges from the full participation of sense, impulse, and action anticipates the theme of The Interdependence of Artist, Audience, and Artwork. If art is to be meaningful, it must integrate every facet of human life rather than elevating detached intellect over lived experience.

These chapters also articulate some of Dewey’s most important definitions. In Chapter 1, he argues that “the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience” (3), shifting focus from the artifact itself to the dynamic process of making and perceiving. To him, art is not the painting, sculpture, or building as object but the interaction it generates when individuals make or perceive it with full engagement. In Chapter 2, Dewey extends this logic to perception, writing: “The senses are the organs through which the live creature participates directly with the ongoings of the world” (22). He says that perception is not passive—it is active participation. Experience, too, is not private but transactional: “Experience is the result, the sign, and the reward of that interaction of organism and environment” (23). These statements collectively define art as a mode of intensified, unified experience. By closing Chapter 2 with Keats’s dictum that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (34), Dewey shows that imagination is not a retreat from reality but a way of grasping truth through emotion. The Keats reference links aesthetic experience to a broader human condition in which sense and meaning are fused.

Together, these sections frame Art as Experience as both a philosophical argument and a literary performance. Dewey’s style mirrors the qualities of art, his critiques expose the dangers of institutional and cultural distortions, and his definitions provide the groundwork for rethinking art as an extension of lived experience.