I am using these reviews to recapitulate the way reading has enriched my life; from childhood on it has provided a source of self-fulfilling experience. If I were to collect these reviews and give them a title, it might well be “My Life in Books”; a list of these books might well be headed “books that have lived in me.” In one way, the bible among these books—the one that explains how and why the others work—would be John Dewey’s Art as Experience (c1934). My copy is a well-worn, well-marked little paperback published by Capricorn Books in 1958.

John Dewey is best known as a philosopher, and this book might be read as a philosophy (Dewey would say theory) of art. He was first known, however, as an educator and an educational reformer, the apostle of “progressive education.” To me, reading this book was an education; to Dewey, writing it must have been an attempt to reform the way art, or aesthetic experience, was defined and, ultimately, taught. Rereading the book, I am struck by the first marginal statement I made about its message: It’s in chapter 3, “Having an Experience.” I think in my first reading it was at this point that the book began to speak to and for me. “An experience finds joy,” I said, in triumph, “in the pursuit as well as the final goal, in the conflict as well as the outcome.”

But looking back on the text now, I know that it spoke to my subconscious understanding (if that’s not an oxymoron) from the very beginning. The son of a carpenter and woodworker and an admirer of my brother-in-law, a radio (and eventually television) repairman, I felt my heart jump up at this first characterization of art: “The intelligent mechanic engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his materials and tools with genuine affection, is artistically engaged.” Here, here! I must have thought. This sentence is preceded by a quotation from Coleridge about the reader of poetry; I knew he was speaking of the reader in me: “The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, nor by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution, but by the pleasurable activity of the journey itself.”

Having now reached an age when memory fails me more and more often, especially memory of recent events (and of what I’ve just read), I have had to adjust to reading that is no longer so much the intellectual pursuit that it once was. Having retired from my life as a teacher, one who always harvested passages from texts I was reading to be used with students, I have had to adjust to reading that is no longer similarly practical or utilitarian. I read more slowly now and digress more often, but the stack of books I want to read, or re-read, keeps growing and growing. Why? Because reading is still an esthetic pleasure—just as much so as when I first discovered Tom Sawyer all those years ago or first identified with both Goldilocks and the littlest bear, or returned to Joseph and his coat of many colors so many times that I almost committed that story to memory.

I am what I read; what I read, at least for the time being, lives in me.

All experience, Dewey maintains, transforms the interaction of one’s inner self with something external into genuine participation and communication. The esthetic experience, Dewey says, “is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience.” Active participation and communication. Clarity and intensity. To read esthetically, no matter what the text, is to be more alive, to become more one’s self. The antonym of “esthetic” is “anesthetic.” The rivals of the esthetic are not intellect or practicality, but rather “the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission to convention in practice and intellectual procedure,” Dewey contends. “Rigid abstinence, coerced submission, tightness on one side and dissipation, incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other, are deviations in opposite directions from the unity of an experience.” Coerced submission to Paradise Lost or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in an English classroom not only does not guarantee an esthetic experience; it is likely to interfere.

The esthetic, however, is not passive or merely acquiescent; it is not a cozy, relaxed receptiveness. If I see a movie or watch television only to escape from the tensions and conflicts of everyday life, it will not likely result in an esthetic experience. To achieve what James Joyce called an “epiphany” or what Coleridge referred to as the “balance and reconciliation of opposites” is to engage the intellect, the emotions, and the imagination in a full, unified experience. All of Art as Experience might be read as Dewey’s comment on these lines from Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”

“It was in moments of most intense esthetic perception that Keats found his utmost solace and his deepest convictions,” Dewey says. To experience beauty that is truth, or wisdom, he continues, one must enter into a state in which one “accepts life and experience and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities—to imagination and art. This is the philosophy of Shakespeare and Keats.”

In his book, Dewey proceeds to discuss in detail the creation of and response to expressive objects, the form and substance of the arts, the philosophic challenge of aesthetics, criticism and perception, and art and civilization. He concludes with a brief consideration of art and morality, relying on apt quotations from Shelley. For example, “A man to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively.” But to achieve that level of the experience of art, one must understand that art goes well beyond “the pleasuring of an idle moment or as a means of ostentatious display.” The work of great prophets begins, he would insist, in poetry, in free verse and parable. That is the highest morality. Only when it is reduced to a set of rules, to simplistic moralism, does it lose its esthetic dimension—and its ultimate moral power.