Chapter 3: Having an Experience

"so that the whole body may respond"

Art as Experience
by: John Dewey



Chapter 3: Having an Experience



Two Forms of Experience



"Experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of live creature and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living. ... Oftentimes, however, the experience had is inchoate (being only partly in existence or operation). Things are experienced but not in such a way that they are composed into an experience." (Dewey, 36)

"In contrast with such experience, we have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences. ... Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self sufficiency. It is an experience." (Dewey, 37)

Empiricism:
In philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "the Theory of Knowledge". Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, while discounting the notion of innate ideas (except in so far as these might be inferred from empirical reasoning, as in the case of genetic predisposition).[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism)

Perception and Reality
Just as one object can give rise to multiple percepts, so an object may fail to give rise to any percept at all: if the percept has no grounding in a person's experience, the person may literally not perceive it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_perception)

Haptic perception is the process of recognizing objects through touch.
Haptic perception is active exploration
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_perception)

Haptic communication is the means by which people and other animals communicate via touching. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_communication)

"Because of continuous merging, there are no holes, mechanical junctions, and dead centers when we have an experience. There are pauses, places of rest, but they punctuate and define the quality of movement. ... Continued acceleration is breathless and prevents parts from gaining distinction." (Dewey, 38)

"We yield according to external pressure, or evade and compromise. There are beginnings and cessations, but no genuine initiations and concluding. One thing replaces another, but does not absorb it and carry it on. There is experience, but so slack and discursive that it is not an experience. Needless to say, such an experiences are anesthetics." (Dewey, 41)

"Thus the non-esthetic lie within two limits. At one pole is the loose succession that does not begin at any particular place and that ends-in the sense of ceasing- at no particular place. At the other pole is arrest, constriction, proceeding from parts having only a mechanical connection with one another. There exist so much of one and the other of these two kinds of experience that unconsciously they come to be taken as norms of all experience." (Dewey, 42)

"All emotions are qualifications of a drama and they change as the drama develops. Persons are sometimes said to fall in love at first sight. But what they fall into is not a thing of that instant. What would love be were it compressed into a moment in which there is no room for cherishing and for solicitude? The intimate nature of emotion is manifested in the experience of one watching a play on the stage or reading a novel. It attends the development of a plot; and a plot requires a stage, a space wherein to develop and time in which to unfold. Experience is emotional but there are no seperate things called emotions in it" (Dewey, 43).

"The experience ios of material fraught with suspense and moving toward its own concummation through a connected series of varied incidents" (Dewey, 44)

"There are, therefore, common patterns in various experiences, no matter how unlike they are to one another in the details of their subject matter. There are conditions to be met without which an experience cannot come to be. The outline of the common pattern is set by the fact that every expoerience is the result of interaction between a live creature and some aspect of the world in which he lives. ... But interaction of teh two constitues the total experience that is had, and the close which completes it is the institution of a felt harmony.
An experience has pattern and structure, because it is not just doing and undoing in alteration, but consists of them in relationship. ... The action and its consequence must be joined in perception" (Dewey, 46)