catalog

Well-known member
Re plato, I do understand reservations, once he starts talking about how to actually run the Republic, you start to think, er...

But aristotle I thought was a good antidote to that, the way he conceptualise eudamonia as essentially a happy medium of things. I thought that was very common sense.

A contrast between their two ways of thinking was actually the central part of my proposed mphil, I was going to look at their relationship and compare/contrast with the relationship between modernity and post modernity.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
the left's worst case scenario obsession with rebirth and purity is Year Zero (or Year One, as the French originally put it), an absolute break with the past

one is about ideological (revolutionary) purity...
Or, equivalently, class purity: "dekulakization" etc.
 

beiser

Well-known member
Anyone have anything to say about John Dewey?
Dewey's "Art of Experience", quite frankly, solved art in 1934. Five years before the Wake and only slightly more comprehensible on first reading. It was the inspiration for performance art itself, it contains the best written account of how art functions, it is the bible. Shocked to learn nobody has yet invoked it here on Dissensus.
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah I've heard people call him the foremost American philosopher, and I knew nothing about him.

But thats high praise. I'll look for some lectures about him, to get his gist.
 

beiser

Well-known member
I know for a fact that @suspendedreason has.

Be warned that Dewey's writing on education—the only thing he's still known for—is basically crap. Not representative of the rest of his oeuvre.
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Dewey's "Art of Experience", quite frankly, solved art in 1934
not that I don't appreciate wild hyperbole as a rhetorical tool

but could you elaborate - sum up how he "solved art", for those of us (that, is everyone) who hasn't read this art bible

I only know his name and when he was alive. he's associated in my mind with William James, another guy I've never read.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
also I would be curious to hear how he inspired performance art

googling "John Dewey performance art" turns up the name Allan Kaprow, which I was not familiar with

but I do know a fair bit some other things I'd imagine to be related to the origins of performance art, especially Fluxus
 

sus

Well-known member
Be warned that Dewey's writing on education—the only thing he's still known for—is basically crap. Not representative of the rest of his oeuvre.

I always suspected this but it's good to hear it come from another mouth.
 

sus

Well-known member
@padraig (u.s.)

> Artistic production and theory in the 20th century shifts its emphasis from the material to the experiental. Art begins to be understood, or conceptualized, as an emergent product of the interaction between participant and stimulus. (Soon after, in a reflection of the zeitgeist, structuralist hermeneutics begins moving into theories of “reader response”: that the meaning of a text is an emergent property of its interaction with the interpretive schema of its reader, instead of an intrinsic property of the text itself.)

> Allan Kaprow, who started the participatory, multi-media Happenings movement in the 1960s treated Dewey’s Art As Experience like a Bible. Dewey was friends with Matisse and MoMA director Alfred Barr; his thinking touched John Cage and Fluxus, Rob Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Ray Johnson of Correspondence Art, and the Black Mountain College curriculum. Dewey’s ideas “reoriented” Bauhaus; Josef Albers befriends him and suddenly starts speaking like him: “We do not always create ‘works of art,’ but rather experiments; it is not an ambition to fill museums: we are gathering experience.” Or: “Through some kind of art experience… the student can come into realization of order in the world.” Dewey’s foil in the era is the better-read Clement Greenberg: a cult of flatness and an obsession with material. One philosophy wins.
 

sus

Well-known member
John Shook on John Dewey’s fin-de-siècle philosophical practice:
> There were Hegelian rationalisms flourishing, other kinds of idealisms, various kinds of radical naive empiricisms, all kinds of anti-Darwinian alternatives. And Dewey [...] incorporated what they were trying to say into a naturalistic framework so thoroughly that nowadays the field looks very cleaned up from our perspective.
 

sus

Well-known member
All the pragmatists are just monsters, Peirce is a bit kooky but they were just mountains in their day and no one reads them, no one in the art history department reads Dewey even though he solved art in 1934.

They get a bad rap in part from the positivistss'/Bertrand Russell's dismissal but pragmatism is a way more woke version of positivism, smarter on language, more oriented to effect, understands that the vast majority of our conceptual world is inherently nebulous
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Dewey's "Art of Experience", quite frankly, solved art in 1934. Five years before the Wake and only slightly more comprehensible on first reading. It was the inspiration for performance art itself, it contains the best written account of how art functions, it is the bible. Shocked to learn nobody has yet invoked it here on Dissensus.
Dewey was close to FM Alexander and wrote the forewords to a few of his books. There's a few photos of them together. I would think that the Alexander Technique influenced him in some way but I'm not sure how. The Technique is basically about thinking so I'd be surprised if it didn't overlap with his philosophy in some way.
 

beiser

Well-known member
here's my very partial gloss: https://gravitylobby.club/dewey.html

much of the rest of the book is about the mappings and associations created from human needs to abstract qualities, or how artists translate experiences into works.

If you read just one thing, make it chapters 1 and 3.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
@beiser very informative read, thank you.

What would you say, if you remember, were the primary iffy-zones of that translation of yours? The three points were all impactful for me.

That satisfying experiences comes from the process of taking actions that have the effect of improving fitness, may be unintuitive. Most hold the model that comfortable creatures are happy, and uncomfortable creatures are unhappy. Dewey’s model suggests that if you're the process of evolution, it’s better to reward the creature for doing its best to improve its station, not whether it's happens to be comfortable at a given time

This gets at one of the things I've been trying to articulate in a properly systematized manner: that the enjoyment of the fruit of the accomplished work doesn't compare with the satisfaction of enriching that fruit by deferring/nurturing it farther, higher.

That seems to be why the psychic phenomena we classify as capitalistic have become so dominant, because such ideology better orients the subject to value a higher future award over the smaller current award.

edit: perhaps the serotonin/dopamine dichotomy could map onto the satisfaction/enjoyment dichotomy, if you are still interested in connecting this theory to our base, pre-cognitive experience, if "experience" can even be said to apply in such a case.
 
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