Speaking on the subject of “the moral function of art,” the great American philosopher / educator John Dewy mused that art and literature exist to give birth to — to be the midwife of– the experience of wonder in its audiences. But moreover “wonder” — in Greek the word is thaumazien — was for Dewy synonymous with what he called “aesthetic experience,” and synonmous more or less with what we in our own age simply call “mindfulness,” and the states of “contemplation” and / or “mediation.” In plain terms, aesthetic experience entails the act of being keenly, reverently, appreciatively (even ecstatically) attentive: i.e., not being asleep. Our hope this semester will be to understand and to elucidate for each other the ways in which our “great works” have served — whether in big ways or little ways — to midwife the birth of “aesthetic experience” in the humanity of contemporary digital users, specifically in the humanity of digital users whose online digital videos we will be glossing, commenting on. Dewy elaborated his theory of “aesthetic experience” this way:
The moral function of art itself is… [to manifest] “aesthetic experience,” …to sap the moralistic timidity that causes the mind to shy away from some materials and refuses to admit them into the clear and purifying light of perceptive consciousness…to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive.
[Our] office is to further this work [of “perfecting the purifying light of perceptive consciousness”] performed by the object of art…[And] we lay hold of the full import of a work of art only as we go through in our own vital processes the processes…and experiences…the artist went through in producing the work. It is [our] privilege to share in the promotion of this active…aesthetic… artistic… creative…process. [Our] condemnation is that [we] so often arrest it.
In the account of Dewy it is through the intentionality of close, attentive, literary perception (otherwise known as “attentive seeing” or “attentive observing,” what research scientists like Galileo do / did for a living) that we enrich our consciousnesses, that we give rise to an expansion of our own personal and collective awareness, that we “perfect,” in Dewy’s words, “the purifying light of perceptive consciousness,” and finally we come to perfect our moral sense, our thirst for authentic democratic freedom, for better, higher, deeper ways to be human.
Or, in other words, careful reading perfects clean, undistracted seeing, which, again, is in the neighborhood of what we in the digital age call “mindfulness” –and which is the precursor to our ability to access the invisible “wonders of life” behind the habitual familiars of visible-life:
Mindfulness is an art of living. When you are mindful you are fully alive, you are fully present. You can get in touch with the wonders of life, that can nourish you and heal you.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
In this intention of purifying our seeing — that is, in this (negative) intention of quieting down what scientists now characterize as the “the default mode network” of the mind, the “mental noise” of the squirreling work-a-day mind that robs us of all creative and interpersonal capability and even robs of the ability to authentically love — and in this opposite (positive) intention of working up our habit for slow, patient literary mindfulness (which, as we will discover, escalates our literacy for seeing invisible realities behind visible ones, so that “you can get in touch with the wonders of life”–thaumazien), we literally come to learn how to create and to hold a visible space for invisible and wondrous realities. And in this way, as our semester-long guide, Dewy, has often reminded us, we simultaneously perfect our ways and habits of authentic democratic freedom, our ways and habits of being in vital relationships, our ways and habits of being angled towards community, our ways and habits of, in the words again of Thich Nhat Hanh, of “being fully present [so that] you can get in touch with the wonders of life.”
The poet-philosopher David Whyte took Dewy’s vision a bit further. He argued that “the perfection of humanity” consists not only of our acts seeing and experiencing the midwifing activity that is intrinsic to all “great works” but it also consists in the activity of embodying that midwifing activity of a great work ourselves: which is for us to midwife (for our fellow classmates) a wonder that is eternally hidden and invisible and offering it “as a gift to others.”
To be human is to become visible / While carrying what is hidden [invisible] / As a gift to others.
The modern Irish poet John O’Donohue offers an almost identical characterization of “being human”:
The poignance of being a human being is that you are the place where the invisible becomes visible and expressive in some way.
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We will assume this semester, following Dewy, that to be fully human is not only to be able to “go through in our own vital processes the [very] processes…and experiences.. the artist went through in producing the work”; additionally we will assume that to be fully human is to “share in the promotion of [the artist’s] vital processes,” which, in other words, is the business of “carrying what is hidden…as a gift to others,” to our classmates, to our friends, to the total online world of readers of “great works” (and of less-great-works) like you and me.
Moreover we will assume this semester that the numberless online digital users who have offered a response to our semesters “great” texts have, to one or another latent or manifest degree, offered their digital responses as “aesthetic experiences,” as gifts, as “the place where the invisible becomes visible and expressive in some way,” as a kind of felt-echo of “the vital processes…and experiences.. the [“great”] artist went through in producing the [“great”] work.” In other words, each online video commentary constitutes a unique, eminently valid angle of approach towards a given “great work,” an angle of approach that in return releases into the world some sense of an expression of the core experience –the “aesthetic experience” – intrinsic to all great works and all great art.
So finally, we will be training ourselves in a proficiency for both spying out and precisely commenting on this “core” experience — which may also be understood as a unique zone of feeling and intimacy: specifically aesthetic feeling or aesthetic intimacy between contemporary digital users and our “great works,” precisely as we find this fact of an aesthetic feeling and intimacy operative in the numberless open-access video commentaries on our great works swarming all over the World Wide Web.
It is a great fortuity — a fortuity not appreciated enough — that there still exists in the world readers of our great works who have taken the extra step of becoming midwives themselves: digital humans “sharing in the promotion” of the extraordinary (or “great”) experiences of “great works” by, more or less, creatively channeling them into one or another form of online digital media (i.e., channeling them into our very own blogs)…as a kind of gift to the world.
Numberless digital users online from around the world — from “unknowns” to “well-knowns”– have literally fallen in love with (or at the very least have had very powerful experiences for or against) the so-called “great” texts we’ll be reading all semester. And, moreover, so deeply and mystically have numberless digital users penetrated our semester’s texts that they have endeavored to go further: they have endeavored to channel their powerful experiences with these texts — experiences which we will uniquely understand as associated with “aesthetic experiences” — into creative digital responses for the entire world to share, to co-experience, precisely as a form “sharing in the promotion of” a powerful rehumanizing and transformative experience. For indeed there exist numberless digital responses to our “great works” online that give expression to Dewy’s ideal that an auditor of a “great” artwork — a digital auditor exactly like you and me –has more or less gone “through in [his / her very] own vital processes, the [very self-same] processes…and experiences…that the artist went through in producing the work.”