ABSTRACT
Western modernity typically defines the aesthetic in opposition to the practical, describing it in terms of disinterestedness and lack of purpose. Though pragmatist philosophy contrastingly highlights practice and functionality, it nonetheless insists that the aesthetic dimension is crucially central not only for art and culture but also for philosophy, cognition and for life in general. Pragmatist aesthetics does not present a single, uniform system of doctrines to which all pragmatists subscribe without qualification. Like pragmatism as a whole, its tradition involves a multiplicity of voices that often converge on certain key themes. Perhaps the most crucial points of convergence are the centrality of embodied aesthetic experience and the way that such perceptual experience extends well beyond the circumscribed field of fine art to pervade manifold dimensions of life, action, thought and culture. Hence for pragmatism, aesthetics cannot be narrowly equated with the philosophy of art, especially when art is understood in the modern institutional sense of the established fine arts of high culture. Pragmatist aesthetics received its first systematic formulation in John Dewey’s classic
Art as Experience (1934, see 1969-91a), but earlier American thinkers associated with pragmatism anticipated many of his central aesthetic ideas. Most notable here are the poet-essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher-psychologist William James and the African American philosopher and cultural critic Alain Locke. Before considering these four thinkers in detail, we should briefly note that C. S. Peirce (originator of not only pragmatism but also semiotics) formulated theories of interpretation, logic and ontology (e.g. the type/token distinction) that have influenced aesthetics in both the analytic and pragmatist traditions. Peirce also emphasized the immediately felt quality of experience (so important for aesthetics) as his first category of consciousness or “Firstness.” Moreover, he made “Ethics dependent upon Esthetics,” treating “the morally good… as a particular species of the esthetically good” (Peirce 1998: 142, 201). If “Ethics is the science of the method of bringing Self-Control to bear” in order to gain what we desire, “what one ought to desire… will be to make [one’s] life beautiful, admirable. Now the science of the Admirable is true Esthetics” (Brent 1993: 49).
