Art as truth.

"Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis. Humanists find that science is the best methodology for determining this knowledge.... We also recognize the value of new departures in thought, the arts, and inner experience"

--Humanist Manifesto III

It is through acknowledging art as a source of some kind of knowledge that Humanists have come to recognize the arts as more than mere life-enhancing adornments. Humanists embrace a unique philosophical position when it comes to aesthetics and it makes a powerful statement for their life view.

Aesthetics addresses both the cognitive and the affective aspects of human nature. There is a natural relationship between aesthetics, science, and philosophy that recognizes the equal contributions of each in seeking truth without putting them in competition with each other to be the final authority. Science gives us verifiable knowledge. Philosophy presents us with systems of meaning for comprehending the universe. And aesthetics leads us to understanding human experience.

Our philosophical forbearers encountered problems in defining what art is and what art does. Most natural views say that art mirrors reality. This understanding is in direct competition with science and philosophy. Art is either similar to what these two tell us, and is thereby a testable proposition, or it is different from what science and philosophy say and speaks to other realities besides those of this world. For Plato it was an imitation of the "ideal." Thus Plato left us with our first dilemma: art is either a poor imitator of reality, because one can't test its truth, or it is a good imitator of another realm of reality. Its only truth is contingent on acceptance of the ideal reality as the repository of knowledge. It is assumed in this view that understanding is the highest achievement of which humans are capable. If art is important then it must offer some kind of understanding of some kind of reality.

Even with Immanuel Kant art was relegated as a referent to a mental or spiritual activity, which seems very much like some absolute specter from beyond this world. When philosophy in the United States became realistic, naturalistic, and positivistic, aesthetics was about something unrelated to a sense of reality. Reality was based on empiricism, observation, and scientifically verifiable facts. Art was therefore limited in what it could reveal and was only valuable for meeting utilitarian needs and instrumental purposes and expressing noncognitive sentiments.

The philosopher John Dewey brings resolution to these recurring dilemmas for art. Dewey helps resolve the unnecessary duality between the reality of some ideal world and the reality that science points to. He deals with the impasse between word and image and reason and emotion. For Dewey experience is the center of his philosophy and aesthetics is the heart of it. Experience is the personal interaction of self and environment and the subsequent changes in both. Art is the unification in experience of things that lead to a fulfillment and is characterized by a dynamic flow of intellectual and emotional responses between artist and audience. The aesthetic experience is appreciating, perceiving, and enjoying that which was lovingly rendered and speaks to the human spirit. It clarifies and concentrates meanings contained in scattered and weakened ways in the material of other experiences. Most of what one thinks or feels about death is captured by Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. Much of what one knows of loneliness and longing is encapsulated in the film Death in Venice with Gustav Mahler's haunting "Adagietto" from his Symphony No. 5.

In art we have a triadic relationship: the speaker, what is spoken, and the one who is addressed. The artwork is the connection. While the artist labors, she or he must step back and vicariously become the audience to see or hear if the connection is working. What the artist is conveying is the substance, and how it is said is the form. The artist draws on material that is the stuff of common experience. The artist assimilates this material in a distinct way, reissuing the material in a public form that then becomes a new object. In time, perceivers may recognize that new object as one relating to older objects that refer to common experience. The new object or artwork then becomes acknowledged as a universal expression. The material is public; the way of saying it is private. Picasso's Guernica stands in a building of its own in Madrid for good reason. The subject is the familiar one of the horror of war, but how Picasso expresses it is so very unique--it has never been portrayed in quite this way before and no words suffice to capture its essence.

The perceiver can look at art intellectually or emotionally to satisfy a particular need, but by looking at art aesthetically she or he will create an experience that is new. The raw material of the artwork is of the same old stuff of the world, but bringing one's individual experience to it creates an interaction with that old material and produces something in meaning that hasn't been experienced previously. Both artist and audience continue to find new and different meanings in the aesthetic interchange every single time they connect with the artwork. One hears something new every time one listens to Beethoven's late piano works and with each piano artist who interprets him.

The universality isn't to be found in a single correct interpretation of the work but in the recognition that one's own experience is called into relation to a common aspect of human experience by the artwork. The quality of the experience is what binds all the constituent elements and makes it a whole. It is an immediate awareness, not one of reflection. Aesthetic perception is an instant elicitation of a sense of wholeness and belonging to the universe in reaction to a work of art. It produces what Dewey calls "a feeling of exquisite intelligibility and clarity." One look at Michelangelo's statues of slaves or prisoners says more about oppression than a thirty-page essay--and they say it with a poignancy and immediacy that is overwhelming.

Dewey points to a kind of spirituality based on aesthetics. The term spirituality is repugnant to some Humanists who find it too closely tied with religion. For Dewey a religious feeling has nothing to do with established religions. For him spirituality describes "experiences having the force of bringing about better, deeper, and enduring adjustments in life." He says that the immediate sense of connection with the whole universe of human experience explains.., the religious feeling that accompanies intense aesthetic perception. We are, as it were, introduced into a world beyond this work, which is nevertheless the deeper reality of the world in which we live in our ordinary experiences. We are carried beyond ourselves to find ourselves.

We've all read fiction about characters from other times and places but whose experiences and inner lives mirror something of our own. They tell us new things about ourselves we didn't know before. Jane Austen and Milan Kundera, for example, open our inner eyes to various stages of our own development.

Thus we can see why Dewey calls art the highest human achievement. This experience is imaginative. It is imagination that makes the conscious adjustment between prior experience and the artist's vision as expressed in the artwork. During the interaction process of artwork speaking to receiver, thoughts and emotions are disconnected. Imagination connects these floating thoughts and feelings of the here and now to the vast past. Dewey says, "Imaginative vision is the power that unifies all the constituents of the matter of a work of art, making a whole out of them in all their variety. Yet all the elements of our being that are displayed in special emphases and partial realizations in other experiences are merged in aesthetic experience."

Imagination is what holds all the elements of aesthetic experience together in a conclusion. Aesthetic experience isn't just emotion, reason, sense, or activity. It is all of these and more. It is the beauty found in the ordering of particular elements and unifying them into a whole, which bears meaning and truth, which is grasped by all our faculties. Dewey believes that art is preoccupied with imaginative experience, which is our only vehicle for visioning a more ethical and moral world. He says,

   The first intimation of wide and large redirections
   of desire and purpose are of necessity
   imaginative. Art is a mode of prediction not
   found in charts and statistics, and it insinuates
   possibilities of human relations not to be
   found in rule and precept, admonition and
   administration.

Many of Charles Dickens' fictional works served to bring attention to and gain sympathy for the needed social reforms of his day that were eventually enacted.

So if Dewey finds that art speaks truth, then it must be in competition with science. He says, "Science states meanings; art expresses them." The scientific statement is useful as direction toward an experience. If it discloses something about the inner nature of things, then it would be competing with art. But it doesn't. Science operates in the dimension of correct descriptive statement. It points to experience. Art constitutes one.

Thus Dewey has elevated aesthetics to its former status as a major domain of knowledge and human achievement and a counterbalance to science and reason, ethics and other philosophies, not a challenge to their areas of authority. Aesthetics is lodged in the house of experience, not the house of verifiable knowledge or science. Aesthetics is a process that results in finding meaning but not a logical system of meaning like philosophy. Aesthetics makes connections to vast areas of human experience that result in deeper understanding, but it neither solves problems nor is used to make decisions, as with reason. Aesthetics is a catalyst for using the links from past and present actions to form new possibilities of human satisfaction, but it isn't a system of moral behavior, as is ethics. Aesthetics is a branch of knowledge, different but equal to all these others.

Dewey has eliminated dualism by rooting the aesthetic branch of philosophy in the world in which humans live and breathe--not in an ideal world or heaven beyond. His aesthetics has dignity and importance in the areas of knowledge and understanding. It deals with the expressive aspect of human nature and gives life its vitality, depth, significance, and hope.

Carol Wintermute is co-dean of the Humanist Institute and an artist specializing in oil and watercolor.