Art as Experience by: John Dewey

"Inner harmony is attained only when, by some means, terms are made with the environment. When it occurs on any other than an objective basis, it is illusory-in extreme cases to the point of insanity." (Dewey, 16)

"Experience is the result, the sign, and the reward of that interaction of organism and environment which, when it is carried to the full, is a transformation of interaction into participation and communication." (Dewey, 22)

"When a flash of lightning illumines a dark landscape, there is a momentary recognition of objects. But the recognition is not itself a mere point in time. It is the focal culmination of long, slow process of maturation. It is the manifestation of the continuity of an ordered temporal experience in a sudden discrete instant of climax. It is as meaningless in isolation..." (Dewey, 24)

"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 ichoate. Things are experienced ut not in such a way that they are composed into an experience....
For life is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plot, its own inception and movement toward its close, each having its own particular rhythmic movement; each with its own unrepeated quality pervading it throughout...
Experience in this vital sense is defined by those situations and episodes that we spontaneously refer to as being "real experiences."
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." (Dewey, 36,37,38)

* "A generalized illustration may be held if we imagine a stone, which is rolling down a hill, to have an experience. The activity is surely sufficiently "practical." The stone starts from somewhere, and moves, as consistently as conditions permit, toward a place and state where it will be at rest- toward an end. Let us add, by imagination, to these external facts, the ideas that it looks forward with desire to the final outcome; that it is interested in the things it meets on its way, conditions that accelerate and retard its movement with respect to their bearing on the end; that it acts and feels tributes to them; and that the final coming to rest is related to all that went before as the culmination of a continuous movement. Then the stone would have an experience, and one with esthetic quality." (Dewey 41)