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Expression, Imagination, and Organic Unity: John Dewey's Aesthetics and Romanticism

We are presently witnessing a renewed interest in the aesthetics of philosopher and educator John Dewey. And it would seem that this interest marks a significant intellectual reorientation and not simply a passing fad. The publications Educational Theory, Studies in Philosophy and Education, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, among others, have for some time now been seeing articles which look to accentuate Dewey's aesthetics while tempering his oft-cited and criticized scientism.1 Many of them take their lead from Thomas M. Alexander's acclaimed John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience and Nature or Richard Shusterman's Pragmatist Aesthetics.2 Two recent books by noted educators, Jim Garrison's Dewey and Eros and Philip W. Jackson's John Dewey and the Lessons of Art, offer ideas on how the fruits of Dewey's more poetic side might be used to enhance his relatively prosaic writings on education.3 I have come to find my own work of late pursuing a similar path. Yet I have also found that appeals to this more poetic Dewey are not without their potential hazards. Dewey's classic books, Human Nature and Conduct, Experience and Nature, Democracy and Education, and others are in their radical wholism always a challenge for readers schooled in the dichotomies of conventional Western metaphysics, dichotomies such as self and world, mind and body, or even art and nature. In Art as Experience, though, Dewey further complicates things by using English romantic writers William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (both favorites from his youth) to explicate some of his central ideas; particularly, I would submit, those dealing with expression, imagination, and organic unity. For in using the romantics in this way, he inadvertently encourages the idealist and subjectobject readings of his aesthetics that continue to undermine his thesis of art