Knowledge, Art, and Power An Outline of a Theory of Experience (Value Inquiry Book Series / Social Philosophy, 346) 9004429174, 9789004429178

Table of contents :
Knowledge, Art, and Power: An Outline of a Theory of Experience
Copyright
Contents
Editorial Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Nature and Experience
2 Experience and Judgment
3 The Cognitive Dimension of Experience
4 The Aesthetic Dimension of Experience
5 The Political Dimension of Experience
Conclusion
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

Knowledge, Art, and Power

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Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Executive Editor Leonidas Donskis† Managing Editor J.D. Mininger

volume 346

Social Philosophy Editor Andrew Fitz-Gibbon (State University of New York, Cortland)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/socp

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Knowledge, Art, and Power An Outline of a Theory of Experience By

John Ryder

leiden | boston

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Cover illustration: L’uomo Vitruviano (Vitruvian Man) by Leonardo da Vinci. Image in the public domain. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0929-8436 ISBN 978-90-04-42917-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-42918-5 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents Editorial Foreword vii Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1 Nature and Experience 12 2 Experience and Judgment 47 3 The Cognitive Dimension of Experience 80 4 The Aesthetic Dimension of Experience 117 5 The Political Dimension of Experience 157 Conclusion 203 Bibliography 215 Name Index 222 Subject Index 225

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Editorial Foreword In 1998, the philosophy department at the State University of New York College at Cortland created an innovative program focused on social philosophy. The key components of the program are social and political philosophy, ethics, and applied philosophy. In 2007, following the successful implementation of the program, the department formed the Center for Ethics Peace and Social Justice to extend the outreach of the program through publications, conferences, and a summer ethics institute for faculty. As part of that outreach, we are delighted to co-sponsor the VIBS special series in Social Philosophy. John Ryder’s book is the sixth in the series and we are delighted to include it. The current book is a follow on from his 2013 The Things in Heaven and Earth (Fordham University Press), and continues his exploration of pragmatic naturalism. Ryder, a leading figure in that field, builds on his initial analysis of the tradition, and still avoiding naturalism’s reduction to materialism, moves to a consideration of experience in its political, aesthetic and cognitive dimensions, and in all of its many forms. Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Professor of Philosophy, Chair, Philosophy Department, Director, Center for Ethics, Peace and Social Justice State University of New York College at Cortland and VIBS Social Philosophy Special Series Editor

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Acknowledgements The theory of experience that is developed here spans a wide range of issues and human undertakings. As a result, it draws on the work of many people, some of it more “classic” and some contemporary, across many fields and subdisciplines. Where specific texts and individuals are drawn from, explicit mention of them is made in the text and the notes, and their works are listed in the bibliography. As always happens, though, there are many other people who through sustained discussion over time, in fact in various ways, have had an influence on one’s thinking. This is especially true in a case like this, where the philosophical analyses are results of thinking that has spanned a fairly long period of time. Many people who have been influential in this way are not necessarily mentioned in the text or the notes, and I would like to thank them now; even some of those who are explicitly mentioned warrant additional acknowledgement. I have been fortunate throughout my professional life to have a group of people with whom a close friendship was formed in graduate school and has continued and deepened in the years since. I will not list them here, but you know who you are. The Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University in the mid- and late-1970s was, I think, a unique environment in this respect. We reinforced one another’s thinking then, and we have done so in the decades since. There is no doubt that without that network of intellectual colleagues and personal friends, my thinking on matters covered in this book, and many other aspects of my life, would have been much impoverished. There are many other respects in which I have also been intellectually and personally fortunate. One of them has to do with philosophical relationships that have developed through participation in several organizations, most importantly the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, the Central European Pragmatist Forum, and the European Pragmatism Conference, and in the opportunity to try out some of the relevant ideas at meetings of these organizations. There have also been other conference and meetings, from Durham and Glasgow, to Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah, to Baku, Helsinki, Toledo and Malta, to New York and elsewhere in the US, where I have had the opportunity to discuss ideas that in one form or another appear here, and I am grateful to all those who took the time to listen, comment, criticize, and debate. This is an appropriate place to mention the debt I owe to the late John J. McDermott. I was never formally a student of his, but for many years I regarded

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him as a mentor. His written work and his philosophical presence and engagement had a deep influence on me, with respect both to his ideas and, as importantly, to his model of what it means to be an academic and a philosopher. I realized some time ago that at many points I am not sure where his thinking stops and mine begins. I live with the nagging suspicion that I am engaged in a grand exercise of plagiarism through adopting much of McDermott’s thinking as my own. If that is the case, then let these comments serve as my recognition of his extensive influence. I would like to acknowledge the support this project has received from the people at Brill, most importantly Andrew Fitz-Gibbon from the State University of New York at Cortland. He has been generous in his support of the manuscript and in his interest in including it within the Brill series of which he is the general editor. In the publication process the manuscript was read by two reviewers, and I am grateful for their valuable criticisms and suggestions, some of which I have incorporated. Finally, and most importantly, I want to recognize the ubiquitous presence throughout of Dr. Lyubov Bugaeva. Her support, insights, and criticisms are critical to the book, and the pleasure of sharing a life with her is one of the reasons that thinking about experience is a rewarding enterprise for me. The book attempts to develop new ways of thinking about some aspects of experience. To the extent that it succeeds, it does so in large measure as a result of what I have learned from others. Where it fails, I must, alas, take full responsibility myself.

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Introduction The initial working title of this volume was Making Our Way. The English phrase “making our way” means to conduct our lives, to move life along, to get through. It conveys a sense of navigating the forces that we encounter in our lives and managing in one way or another to get through or around them. To this extent the phrase has a somewhat passive connotation, as if to make our way is largely reactive or responsive to whatever we encounter. But a little reflection indicates that the phrase also has a more active meaning, along the lines suggested by Nelson Goodman in his Ways of Worldmaking. In this sense to “make our way” is constructive; it is to make something. Specifically, it is to make or craft our experience and our lives. We make our way in the world, in this sense, not merely by reacting but by acting, not merely by responding but by constructing. This ongoing process of making our way, of acting and reacting, absorbing and building, is the process of experience. What that process is like, which is to say what is happening when we make our way in the world, is the subject of the current study. It has become common among many philosophers, even among many of those who consider themselves to be pragmatists, as I do, to dismiss experience as a proper topic for philosophical exploration. In part, this is a result of Richard Rorty’s view that a careful exploration and understanding of experience is pointless, and it is also a result of certain assumptions and methods in what can be called analytic pragmatism, for example in the hands of Rorty’s student Robert Brandom. This tendency to avoid a careful study of experience is a mistake, indeed a quite damaging one, if we wish to understand both human being and the natural orders in which we find ourselves. Thus, this book is an unabashed study of experience and an attempt to delineate aspects of a theory of experience suitable to our lives as we live them and capable of useful implications and applications. To cut right to the chase, the idea I will develop here is that experience has three dimensions, for lack of a better term: cognitive, aesthetic, and political. What this means, what good reasons we have to think it, and what value it has, form the substance of the book. In the process of working out the theory I will have recourse to a number of concepts, theories, and ideas, most of which though by no means all are drawn from the pragmatic naturalist tradition. Though they will be developed in detail as we proceed, there is some value in indicating them explicitly at this point, even if only in very broad strokes. The first conceptual strand that forms the pattern of our theory of experience is what we may call a, or the, pragmatic naturalist ontology, which is

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b­ asically the idea that nature consists of whatever there is, and that whatever there is can best be understood as a complex of nature. Moreover, all complexes of nature, which is to say everything that there is of any and all kinds, are relationally constituted, so that ours is an ontology of constitutive relations. The point should also be made that the underlying ontology is not simply relational but also emergentist, a view that has roots in twentieth century American naturalism and is receiving careful consideration among some philosophers today.1 These ideas contribute to the naturalist side of the background metaphysics. The pragmatist side, though it has several components, is in the end primarily reflected in my approach to valuation. The adequacy of our ideas, from this point of view, is determined by their usefulness to us, either in advancing theoretical constructs or in more practical ways. In other words, ideas, concepts, indeed whole philosophical theories, recommend themselves to us not because they have been deductively proven to be true, but in so far as they have a use and value. Such an approach places a burden on us not to prove our ideas but to demonstrate their reasonableness and coherence, their plausibility, and their usefulness. More than that we cannot expect and do not need. The reader may realize that these points concerning the pragmatic naturalist ontology are reminiscent of an earlier book of mine titled The Things in Heaven and Earth (Ryder 2013a). Though I will develop these basic ideas in more detail in Chapter 1, one may in fact refer to that earlier book for a far more extensive development of and rationale for a relational ontology of this kind. Indeed, the current volume can be taken to be a companion to the earlier text. The theory of experience that will unfold in these pages is an extension of the conception of nature explored there. The second conceptual strand that I will appropriate is John Dewey’s understanding of experience. Michael Eldridge once made the point that “for Dewey there was a single phenomenon—experience—that could be understood metaphysically, aesthetically, politically, or epistemically” (Eldridge 1998, 38). I could not state better than this, especially in a single sentence, the view of experience that the current study embraces. There are occasions in which I part company with Dewey for this or that reason, but even so I am putting to use his idea that experience is the interaction of people with their environing conditions, insofar as we both absorb influences from our environment and act on it such that our environment, our “world” we might say, is affected by experience just as we are. Without developing his view in any detail at this point, 1 The most explicit development in recent years of the emergentist idea within this naturalist tradition is in Cahoone 2013.

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Dewey’s basic idea that experience is an interaction, or transaction, of an individual with her environment is a break from most of the ways experience had been understood before him, and it has extensive implications for how we understand both nature in general and what it is to be a human being, not to mention mind and consciousness. This idea of experience has immensely important ramifications, which suggests why it has been unfortunate, indeed myopic, for so many philosophers to think that experience is not philosophically significant. It also suggests why this particular approach to experience is important, indeed revelatory. Dewey of course was not creating his ideas out of nothing. Hegel is in the background, as are Charles Sanders Peirce and, most importantly, William James (Ryder 2019, Campbell 2019). And Dewey was not working alone, a point that is obvious enough on its own, but can be appreciated even more when we see how close George Herbert Mead’s approach to the self and to communication is to Dewey’s, and how his ideas intersect with those of Jane Addams, not surprising since he worked with both of them in Chicago early in his and their careers. As indebted as Dewey is to his predecessors and to his colleagues, he did not rest content with what they had done but sought to develop it further. In my theory of experience I will afford Dewey the same courtesy and look where appropriate to improve on his ideas. Eldridge has pointed out that in Dewey’s hands experience may be understood “aesthetically, politically, or epistemically,” which is precisely what I will do as well. For all Dewey’s attention to the political and to epistemology, though, as an aspect, or what I call here a dimension, of experience, Dewey paid more attention to the aesthetic than to the other two with respect to their centrality to experience. Indeed, the idea that triggers my whole approach to the dimensions of experience is his conception of aesthetic experience. I will have much more to say about this further on, but here there are two points we may make. The first is that I will embrace more or less whole Dewey’s idea, though he does not put it quite this way, that there is an aesthetic dimension of experience, and in what that dimension consists. The second is that I will take his insight and stretch it further to add the cognitive and the political as dimensions of experience generally, alongside the aesthetic. This will make possible a more elaborate and refined conception of experience, and it will provide the opportunity to explore how these dimensions are related to and inform one another. Some words of clarification are in order even at this early point. In fact, Dewey does not talk about the aesthetic dimension of experience. Rather he says, and I refer here to Art as Experience, that in order to understand art and the aesthetic we have to see how they permeate daily experience (Dewey 1987).

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It is this pervasiveness, this profusion, of the aesthetic in daily experience that I want to highlight. The fact that the aesthetic is as pervasive in experience as it is suggests that experience has an aesthetic dimension, or it is what we mean or refer to by speaking of the aesthetic dimension of experience. There are two important general consequences of this observation, both of which Dewey highlighted. The first is that we come to a much richer understanding of art by seeing more clearly how it permeates experience. The second is that we come to a much richer understanding of experience when we see the degree to which it is permeated by the aesthetic. Our conceptions of both art and experience are enriched by recognizing what I am here calling the aesthetic dimension of experience. If a case can be made that there are other features of experience that are similarly pervasive, then we can expect that, as in the case of experience and the aesthetic, our understanding of experience will expand as will our understanding of the other features in question. With this in mind I suggest that in addition to the aesthetic, we also find in experience a cognitive dimension and a political dimension. If this is plausible and sensible, which remains to be shown, then among the consequences of such a theoretical conception are that we understand knowledge and power better, just as we understand art better for recognizing the pervasiveness of the aesthetic in experience. And by recognizing the pervasiveness of the cognitive and the political in experience, we come to a much better understanding of experience, just as we do when we recognize its aesthetic character. A third strand of philosophical thought that I will take up is the emphasis on embodiment in our understanding of the human being in general and experience more specifically. Of course, this is not a new idea, having been explored in insightful ways by the classical Pragmatists and by Maurice Merleau-Ponty many years ago in his idea of the lived body. The notion of the embodiment of mind, and of the constitutive role played by the body in human being and experience, has received considerable attention in recent and current philosophical inquiry. One may mention the work of Mark Johnson on the central ways in which body drives metaphor and therefore thought in general (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Johnson 2017). One may also point to the extensive body of current literature on enactivism and the enactive conception of mind (Bugaeva 2013; Tikka 2008). The importance of the body has not been lost on other dimensions of experience, for example in aesthetics with Richard Shusterman’s idea of somaesthetics (Shusterman 2008). The theory of experience I develop here takes for granted the general adequacy of the emphasis on embodiment, and draws on specific features of this understanding of mind and human being when doing so helps to fill out the theory.

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Though it may appear that my theory of experience begins more or less with classical pragmatism and makes use of like-minded thinkers over the past century, there is also a more traditional, perhaps even conservative, strand of thinking here. It is surely the case that if an embodied conception of mind and an interactive conception of experience define our view, then the more traditional empiricist and Kantian approaches to experience are left behind. As a crass generalization that is right, but there are important aspects of experience as those traditions have understood it that remain. The most important feature of the more traditional approaches to experience is their emphasis on the role of experience in cognition and the importance of cognition and knowledge in the understanding of experience. I argue here that though empiricism and Kantianism got the details of the relationship wrong, and thus leave us with inadequate theories of experience, and of knowledge, they were right to see the importance of cognition in experience and of experience to cognition. I take up that central insight by positing the cognitive as one of the three general dimensions of experience, together with the aesthetic and the political. One could say that the approach I take here turns the traditional way of thinking about the relationship between cognition and experience on its head. Traditionally the question has been about the role experience plays in cognition, such that we assume that we can understand cognition and knowledge better if we are clear about how experience works within them. Here, however, I have rotated the question in that we are interested, more than the place of experience in cognition, in the role cognition plays in experience, the result of which will be a fuller understanding of experience. In fact, both questions are worth asking if only because the relation to one another of cognition and experience is constitutive of both, as is every other relation. When we have a reasonably clear idea of the way knowledge contributes to experience and the way experience contributes to knowledge, we have thereby a clearer understanding of both. One may make the same point about the other two dimensions of experience in their constitutive relation to experience and to one another. Indeed, the understanding of each dimension of experience, and consequently of experience itself, is greatly enriched by a more careful sense not so much of each dimension individually but of how the three interact and constitute one another. The empiricist and Kantian conceptions of experience essentially isolated these three central dimensions of experience from one another; I have brought them together and developed an understanding of how they are related. It is useful to note that Kant in particular may have had a sense of this. One might say that the three critiques map to a certain degree onto the three

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d­ imensions of experience, the first insofar as it concerns cognition, the second insofar as it concerns practice and power, and the third insofar as it concerns the aesthetic. To that extent there is a slight Kantian flavor to my approach, although the details are quite different in that in our hands the three dimensions of experience have quite different background conditions and relations with one another and with experience than they have in Kant’s treatment. Two critical assumptions of Kant’s approach, his Newtonianism and his idea of the transcendental constitution of experience, are explicitly abandoned here, in favor of an ontology of constitutive relations and the implications of that ontology across the spectrum of relevant philosophical concepts and issues. Nonetheless, a significant implication of closely relating the cognitive with the aesthetic dimensions of experience means that, like Kant, we are obliged to develop epistemology, which is to say conceptions of knowledge and truth, in ways that differ from the more standard epistemological assumptions and constructs in contemporary analytic philosophy. If there is a cognitive character to art and to action, for example, or if, as Foucault and many others have pointed out, knowledge is related to power, then it will never be sufficient to understand knowledge as a matter primarily of beliefs and propositions and related truth conditions. Indeed, an adequate understanding of truth will in similar ways need to be more expansive than is typically the case. One line of thinking that will help us to accomplish this more synthetic understanding is Justus Buchler’s theory of judgment. Buchler’s thinking underlies much of this study in that the idea of an ordinal, relational ontology was initially his, as was the understanding of the need for a broader conception of experience (Buchler 1955 and 1966). We will have the opportunity to examine in detail the theory of judgment in Chapter 2 and throughout the book, but for now I can say simply that it is a way of understanding how in our interaction with the complexes of nature, which by virtue of the interaction become the constituents of our experience, we invariably select for emphasis, consciously or reflexively, one or other possibility. It is this ongoing process of selection that Buchler means by “judgment,” and he argued that human beings judge in this sense in three distinct ways—assertively, exhibitively and actively. Precisely what this means, and why one would say it, will become clearer in later chapters. Suffice it to say at this juncture that the theory of judgment is put to work both to help us come to better terms with the character of our experience and to flesh out the three dimensions of experience. The idea is that the three modes of judgment correlate in ways to be explored with the three dimensions of experience. It is worth pointing out that there is another set of concepts that Buchler introduced through which he developed his understanding of experience,

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s­ pecifically the theory of proception (Buchler 1951). Like everything else Buchler wrote, the theory of proception is an insightful and painstaking effort to do conceptual justice to the lived realities of our experience, on his view in ways that the concept of “experience” itself is no longer able to accomplish. I do not make use of the theory of proception here not because it does not have a great deal to offer, but because I do not want to introduce too much unfamiliar terminology. This is always a problem for philosophical inquiry because when one wants to make distinctions and discriminations that have not been made before it may well be the case that available terminology is not up to the task. This is certainly what Buchler thought about the term “experience.” The danger of course is that by introducing neologisms we put the reader off and thus impede rather than enhance understanding. With that danger in mind, I will forego whatever conceptual advantages we would gain by making use of the theory of proception and do my best to develop the theory of experience in more familiar terms. Another conceptual strand in contemporary philosophy is the growing interest in relating the aesthetic to the political. Indeed, the interest in this relation is a driving force behind the development of the theory that experience consists of three dimensions. As is well known, and in any case we have just pointed it out, the relation of cognition and experience has long been taken as obvious, even if inadequately articulated. I have also suggested that the aesthetic dimension of experience was one of Dewey’s outstanding contributions to philosophic understanding of ourselves and of nature. The political, however, has not been much explored as a dimension of experience, and this theory gives us an opportunity to do so. To put it in a few sentences, the idea is that power, and by the political dimension of experience I mean the place of power broadly construed in our ongoing interaction with our environing conditions, is a general trait of experience, much in the way that art pervades experience through its aesthetic dimension, and knowledge through the cognitive. As I will show, power means a range of things and is a general term used here to pick out several specific aspects of experience, again functioning much like the terms knowledge and art do. By introducing a political dimension of experience, we can deepen our understanding of experience in general, and look more closely at, for example, how power and knowledge are related, itself an idea of long standing, and at how the aesthetic and the political, or art and power, intersect.2

2 There have been a number of studies along these lines in recent years. See, for example, Skowroński 2013a and 2013b, Koczanowicz and Liszka 2014, and Groys 2013.

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It should be pointed out, though I will forego an explicit analysis, that another relevant strand that one might weave into the theory of experience is the hermeneutic tradition, especially in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hands. As is well known, Gadamer was interested in the relation between the aesthetic and the cognitive, and by extension the interrelation of art, knowledge, and truth. In his exploration of hermeneutics to work out this relation he developed concepts and methods of inquiry that are most useful in coming to terms theoretically with the complexity and richness of experience.3 The structure of the book is to describe first the background ideas, specifically the ordinal ontology without which an interactionist conception of experience is untenable. Thus Chapter 1 focuses on the ordinal conception of nature and how experience is to be understood as a fully natural complex. This discussion to some extent reviews ideas that will be familiar to readers who know Buchler’s metaphysics, or who have read The Things in Heaven and Earth or other recent books that develop the idea. The general ordinal conception of nature is fleshed out further in this chapter through the introduction of the idea of emergence and its importance. Chapter 1 goes on to describe the Deweyan, transactional conception of experience, and how contemporary discussions of embodiment, enactivism, and the extended mind in both cognitive science and philosophical works, fill out the traditional Deweyan understanding. Chapter 1 ends with an account of the significance of the understanding of experience as culture, a perspective articulated by Dewey later in his life and one taken up by John McDermott throughout his writings. Chapter 2 begins to develop the broad outlines of the relevant conception of experience and the theory of judgment. A number of critical ideas that have traditionally been related to the idea of experience are discussed, most importantly the empiricist and Kantian approaches to experience, and the fairly common distinctions between primary and secondary experience, or immediate and mediate, or active and passive, or assimilative and manipulative. These distinctions are not equivalent, but they are all relevant to a reasonably full conception of experience. Chapter 2 continues with an initial articulation of the view that experience has three general dimensions: cognitive, aesthetic, and political. I also discuss at this point the relation of the attribution to experience of these three dimensions to additional categories in the analysis of ­experience. The first is what I will refer to as the constituents of experience, 3 An interesting study of this theme is in Miklós Nyírő 2015. Nyiro here focuses on recent work in pragmatic naturalism, though the relationship between Gadamer and the general pragmatist tradition has been noticed here and there over the years. See for example Richard Bernstein 1983 and 2010, Jeannot 2001, and Vessey 2010.

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by which I mean language, emotions, and imagination, and the second is what we may call the forms of experience, or simply experience of various kinds. With those several aspects of experience sorted out it is possible to introduce in detail the relevant theory of judgment, and how it is connected to the theory of experience. In addition to the contours of the theory of judgment itself, which is to say the idea that there are three modes of judgment—­assertive, exhibitive, and active—the theory requires that we examine more carefully what happens when experience is systematically and methodically exploratory, which it frequently is. In experience of that kind we are engaging in what Buchler called query, and Chapter 2 explores query, inquiry, and the implications of this broad conception of methodic exploration for the theory of experience. The remaining three chapters address the three dimensions of experience and their complex relations with one another. The focus in Chapter 3 is on the cognitive dimension of experience. Here I briefly look at the historical association of cognition and knowledge with experience and make the case that though this association has traditionally been overplayed, there is nonetheless an important insight in it. Any adequate understanding of experience, and of knowledge, must embrace the fact that our cognitive life is not simply a byproduct of experience, something that happens as a consequence of experience, but a central dimension of experience itself. This is what I take from the history of philosophy, even if historically it was rarely put this way. One may be tempted to say that cognition is dominant in experience, but this would be an exaggeration in the other direction. As important a dimension of experience as cognition is, it would not be correct to say something like “experience is cognitive all the way down,” or “through and through.” The reason this is not correct is that though cognition is a dimension of experience, it is neither the only nor the most important dimension. It is one dimension among three, and no more or less central to the nature of experience than the other two. It is also not a necessary feature of every experience, which is to say that though any experience may be cognitive, not every experience is, just as not every experience is aesthetic or political, though any experience may be. Moreover, if experience is transactional and constructive in ways my theory embraces, then we can expect the cognitive dimension of experience to be similarly transactional and constructive. If that is the case, the more traditional approaches in epistemology and cognitive science do not result in adequate conceptions of knowledge because they do not have an adequate understanding of the relation of the knower to the known or the knower to her environment. This point has further ramifications when we consider such central components of any epistemological theory as inquiry and truth. The bulk of

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Chapter 3 is an effort to work out an epistemology in a broad sense, and constitutive conceptions of knowledge, truth, inquiry, and query adequate to the general sense of experience as we are developing it. The chapter ends with the beginnings of the discussion of the relations, indeed the constitutive relations, of the cognitive dimension of experience to the aesthetic and the political. The account of these relations, at this point, is thin and tentative because I will not yet have developed in any detail the aesthetic and political dimensions of experience. In the subsequent chapters the ways the three dimensions of experience are related to one another unfold as I articulate the dimensions themselves in more detail. In Chapter 4 I turn my attention to the aesthetic dimension of experience. As I pointed out earlier, the aesthetic dimension of experience as it is here understood is largely Dewey’s, or in any case is derived from Dewey’s idea that art is grounded in experience because of certain features of experience itself. The chapter develops Dewey’s basic ideas concerning the traits of the aesthetic dimension of experience, augments and revises them as appropriate, and considers, with Dewey, how the aesthetic functions in both the experience of art and in quotidian experience. The chapter also considers examples of how specific works of art may exhibit aspects of experience, and an illustration of how concepts of experience may operate in works of art. Toward the end of the chapter I revisit the issues of the relations among the dimensions of experience, this time taking up the issue of the cognitive aspect of art and relations of art and power. Chapter 5 examines the political dimension of experience. This idea is likely to be the least familiar to the reader, so closer attention is paid to what we mean by the political dimension of experience, and why there is good reason to posit it. One of the reasons for ascribing to experience a generally political dimension is that the pragmatist understanding of experience is rooted in the idea of the relation of experience to problem solving, and thus has an element of power at its core. Another reason is that doing so gives us a way to understand and, in some sense, to explain the forms that institutional power tends to take, and in the chapter, we look at this issue in considerable detail. And finally, I turn again to the issue of the relation of the political to the aesthetic and cognitive dimensions of experience, which is to say the relations among power, knowledge, and art. The Conclusion is an overview of the theory and an explicit restatement of the advantages that accrue if one endorses this understanding of experience. The claim is made that a pragmatic naturalist theory of experience of the sort developed throughout the book is a valuable corrective to many of the misunderstandings, some of them pernicious, that may pervade our understanding

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of experience in general and of knowledge, art, and power more specifically. The theory is a corrective in the sense that it offers explicitly ways to avoid such pitfalls as intellectualism in our sense of experience, as aestheticism in our understanding of art and the aesthetic life, and it inserts power and interests at the heart of experience, where they belong. It turns out that there are many respects in which problems are avoided and insights gained in the development of a theory of experience that is adequate to experience itself. Pragmatism, or pragmatic naturalism, is the set of ideas and the conceptual context that enables just such a theory. For these and other reasons clarified in the Conclusion, indeed throughout the book, the theory of experience as it is developed here recommends itself to us, not so much simply for intellectual assent as for further development, ramification, and application.

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Chapter 1

Nature and Experience I made the claim in the introduction that the coherence of a conception of experience as a transaction of an individual with her environment is untenable without an underlying ontology of a certain kind.1 The purpose of this chapter is to cash out that claim by developing the ontology that makes the conception of experience tenable and further clarifying just what the transactional understanding of experience means, in general terms, given the background ontology. The details of the theory of experience are of course the subject of the remainder of the book. The basic assumption behind the claim that a theory of experience requires an explicit and appropriate ontology is that the articulation of the most general traits of the process that is experience must be consistent with the articulation of the general traits of what it is to be an experiencing individual. Similarly, the general traits of what it is to be an experiencing individual must be consistent with the general traits of the existential, the ontological, circumstances in which the individual finds herself. Put differently, an experiencing individual is fully a component of her world, and to understand her as an experiencing individual we must come to satisfactory terms with the general traits of her world. In our case, we are not dealing with specific details of an individual’s world: social, economic, cultural, religious, intellectual, emotional, familial, etc. If we were dealing with the individual at any of those levels of more detailed focus, then we would equally need to come to terms with the relevant environing conditions. If we were interested in the way religion figures in an individual’s experience, for example, we would need to have as clear an understanding as possible of the general traits of the religious environment in which the individual finds herself. The case would be similar if we were interested in any other of the more detailed aspects of an individual’s experience—social, economic, racial, national, emotional, etc. However, in this book, I am interested in the far more general topic of the character of experience, rather than of this or that sort of experience. In that case, we need to come to a satisfactory

1 The themes developed in this chapter have been discussed previously in many publications and presentations. Several pages were presented at a cognitive studies conference at the United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, uae, as “Persons and Brains,” in May 2014.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004429185_003 John

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­ nderstanding of the context in which experience happens, and that general u ­context requires that we raise questions about the character of what it is to be at all. Hence, I am concerned with the traits of a general ontology, and specifically a general ontology that is consistent with, indeed one that requires, a transactional theory of experience of the sort we are developing. I The first relevant term for a pragmatic naturalist ontology that requires clarification is “nature,” one reason for which is that this is a naturalist ontology. Another reason is that there is a fairly wide range of ontological conceptions that are considered naturalist, and we must be careful not to encourage confusion. The first point to make is that the term that contrasts with nature is “supernatural,” rather than, for example, “artificial,” or “human.” The second point is that it is characteristic of naturalism in this sense to hold that nature consists of whatever there is, or, to put it differently, there exists nothing that is outside of nature or other than natural. Whatever exists, in any sense at all, is a natural entity. In this sense, the term “nature” is less a category among others within an ontological system, and more a way of pointing to all of existence collectively and distributively. It is not simply a pointer, however, because by saying that it points to whatever exists, in any way or sense, the concept of nature takes on a normative character in the sense that it enables certain entities, many in fact, and rules out a few others. For example, if all things, for lack of a better term at the moment, are natural entities, then it is reasonable to expect some degree of continuity among them. What kind of continuity and to what degree remains to be described, but we can be confident that even as minimally defined as consisting of “all that exists,” we can expect that in nature we will not find a surd of any sort. Nothing, in other words, is entirely disconnected from everything else. Another example of the normative character of the concept of nature even understood simply as whatever exists is that it makes certain sorts of entities untenable, even if conceivable. We have, to paraphrase St. Anselm, the concept of a being that is the source or creator of nature. The creator of nature cannot be a natural entity, however, because then it would precede itself in time or at least in being, and that is incoherent. But if nature consists of all that is, and if the creator of nature cannot be a natural entity, then a creator of nature cannot be. So even as bare bones a conception of nature as “whatever there is” has powerful normative implications with respect to what we may find to exist.

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Nature, then, is whatever there is, but what, we may ask, is that? This is one of the key points that differentiate naturalism of this kind from much of what is called “naturalism” in contemporary, especially analytic, philosophy. “Natural” in my sense is, as I have said several times above, whatever exists of whatever kind and in any possible way. We do not, it is important to point out, follow other naturalisms in holding that nature consists of only material entities and their material constituents. On the contrary, nature as I understand it here is a much more tolerant conception in that it admits as natural entities all that we find in and through experience, including reason, without any insistence that any of it must somehow be reduced to or explained in terms of anything else. Nature includes, to offer a short list that intends not to be exhaustive, but simply to convey the spirit of the idea, material objects, ideas, dreams, histories, minds, persons, mathematical objects, emotions, fictional characters, ideas, possibilities, ethical principles, aesthetic values, lived bodies, universals, particulars, individuals, societies, and much else. If many or most other ontologies try to push entities out of existence and out of nature (one thinks of Quine’s “taste for desert landscapes”), this one is by contrast a very big tent. The spirit of an ordinal ontology follows on a comment that John Herman Randall, Jr. once made, that “The significant question is, not whether anything is real or not, but how and in what sense it is real, and how it is related to and functions among other reals.” (J.H. Randall, Jr. 1962) The reader may wonder how such a tolerant ontology can sustain itself. After all, one may say, if nature is defined in this broad way it must include many sorts of things the existence of which we often question, for example contradictions, falsehoods, fictions, gods and demons, and so forth. One may be inclined to find such an ontology crowded, though that would be a tenable concern only if our ontological “space” were limited, which it is not. Still, though, one may be inclined to think that if we allow for the reality of fictions and falsehoods, we would thereby deny ourselves a distinction necessary to make sense of our world and of existential emphases that we typically want to draw. I cannot respond to this concern in detail here, but I can say that one need not be concerned because the analyses have been developed and the arguments made to indicate how and why it is possible, indeed sensible, to maintain both a rich and diverse ontology and at the same time the distinctions we need to make for our experience to cohere.2

2 The reader who is interested in a more detailed development of an ordinal ontology and justification of its unusual features and implications, should consult Buchler 1966, Ryder 2013a, and Singer 1983.

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Not only does nature consist of all I have mentioned and more, it does so without any need for us to reduce anything to anything else. Whatever relations they may have, causal or otherwise, there is no inclination to posit an identity relation when none is called for. There is no need, for example, to explain human behavior solely or even primarily in terms of genetic structure, or people in terms of brains, or societies in terms of individuals, or ideas in terms of neurophysiology. All of the entities that prevail in nature, which is to say all things that exist of whatever kind, have whatever traits they have; they have the integrity that makes them what they are, generally without needing to be explained away. Nature is pluralistic, expansively so, and the naturalism espoused here recognizes that pluralism and therefore explicitly avoids reductionism. To put the point a slightly different way, there is nothing in our ontological or methodological concepts that prevents us from recognizing the multiplicity of natural entities and the integrity each has that makes it the entity it is. Unlike many other and for many philosophers more familiar forms of naturalism, this one studiously avoids reductionism. How, one might ask, is this possible; how is it possible for a general ontology not, as most do, to narrow the range of what may be said to exist? The answer is that this pragmatic naturalist ontology is thoroughly and radically relational. This is the heart of the matter, and therefore of critical importance to the ontology. It is also one of the two most radical and unusual traits of pragmatic naturalism, and it has proven to be one that is difficult for many philosophers to accept. We will therefore dwell for some time on the relationality, indeed the constitutive relationality, of the ontology. Even if the reader does not in the end accept it, one would want it to be at least comprehensible. The dominant understanding of entities in the history of Western philosophy is that in one way or another they are atomistic. There has been no or little reluctance to recognize the existence of relations, but the assumption, to many people a common sensical assumption, has been that while entities may of course enter into relations, that which enters into relations, which is to say the core or essence of the entity, is not itself relational. This view tends to assume that if entities are by their nature relational then they effectively dissolve ontologically, as if, as one might say in street parlance, “there is no there there.” The idea that entities cannot be relational, which we are identifying as the  view that entities are atomistic, has taken many forms. The most traditional and long standing has been the idea that entities are a substance. Not all philosophers have meant the same thing in their use of the concept of ­substance, but nearly all of them have made use of the Aristotelian idea that substance is that of which attributes may be predicated. There was disagreement over details, but certainly through medieval and modern Christianity

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(think “­transubstantiation”) to the Cartesians and beyond, some version of this idea of substance has prevailed. Spinoza used the term but stretched its meaning into something else, and in doing so made of his ideas a forerunner of contemporary pragmatic naturalism. Hume famously abandoned the concept of substance, but Kant brought it right back. By the twentieth century substance had been more or less cast aside as a useful ontological concept, but the atomism that it expressed remained strong. It is in Russell’s early metaphysical writings, in the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, centrally in the Vienna Circle, in Husserlian phenomenology’s bracketing of experience and search for essence, and the range of Austrian and English language philosophy to the present. There have been noteworthy exceptions in the history of philosophy, though they have been few. Without developing the details and/or undertaking the analysis necessary to support the claim, a relational ontology is central in Hegel and some Hegelians of the nineteenth century, and interestingly appears at least obliquely in the latter Wittgenstein. From the point of view of influence on contemporary pragmatic naturalist ontology, however, the most significant exceptions to the traditional insistence on atomism has been in the American pragmatist and naturalist traditions beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though his point was less an ontological observation and more a response to Hume, William James insisted on the reality of relations in experience, by which he meant to emphasize the point that relations are very much and importantly a part of the world as lived, and not an artificial overlay (See William James 1976). But it was John Dewey who first developed in a thorough way a conception of nature in which the traditional distinction between substance and attribute, or thing and relation, was broken down. It went the way of many of the traditional conceptual dichotomies that he thought significantly impeded philosophical understanding. We should also note that George Herbert Mead and A.N. Whitehead developed significant relational ontologies at basically the same time Dewey articulated his, i.e. in the 1920s and 30s. (John Dewey 1981, G.H. Mead 1932, A.N. Whitehead 1979) Dewey strongly influenced many younger thinkers of his day, two of whom further developed the relational view of nature: John Herman Randall, Jr. and Justus Buchler. Randall was a younger colleague of Dewey at Columbia University in New York City, and Buchler was a student and then colleague of Randall. It was Randall who had many of the insights into a relational conception of nature, though he paradoxically reintroduced the concept of Substance (this time with an upper case “S,” and in a more or less Spinozistic spirit), that Buchler would later develop into the most fully articulated relational ontology in any world philosophical tradition in any historical period. It is Buchler’s “­ordinal” ontology that I have appropriated and refer to here as the ontology of pragmatic naturalism. John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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The basic idea is that all entities, let us now call them complexes, following Buchler’s terminology, are constituted by the sets of relations in which they find themselves. This claim requires a bit of unpacking because there is a number of features of the idea that require to be expressed and developed. The first is the idea of an order, which as a category of our relational ontology means a set of relations. Every entity is a complex, and every complex, we may say, is an order of relations. Thus, every entity is a specific order of relations among its constituents. An order is not to be thought of as a container, which is to say as something that contains relations. It is better because less susceptible to misleading metaphors to say that an order is constituted by its constituents, its traits, each of which is itself an order, a complex, in its own right. It is also important to understand that an order is not a particular kind of complex. There is no meaning to a distinction between an ordered and an unordered complex, because there can be no such thing as an “unordered” complex in this sense of the word “order.” Every complex is an order of relations, and every order is a complex. The traits, often innumerable, that constitute an order are related to the order as a whole and to one another in various ways. An example would help, though it must be kept in mind that an order or complex may be any sort of entity: material, mental, ideal, fictional, normative, possible, actual, and so forth. Consider, to select just one sort of example, a family’s dog. A family’s pet is, like any and every other complex, an order constituted by the many relations among its constituent complexes. Rather obviously, a dog is a biological entity, and as such is constituted by a wide range of biological traits—its physiology, its organs, its several biological processes, etc. Some of these constituent traits may be thought of as parts of the animal, but not all constituent traits are parts in this sense. Among the traits that constitute the dog are its varied relations to its environment. For example, the chemical composition of the air the dog breathes contributes to its character, for better or worse depending on specific circumstances. The dog’s atmospheric environment is a constituent trait of the animal, but it is not in any normal sense a part of the animal. The dog’s behavioral characteristics are clearly among its traits, and these traits are typically related to the dog’s environing conditions. The dog may be hostile or friendly with strangers, vocal or quiet, passive or aggressive, patient or needy. These and all other behavioral traits are, like the animal’s physiology and environmental relations, constitutive of the complex that is the dog. They are all complexes that, we may say, are “located” or that “prevail” in the order that is the dog, which is to say the same as that they are constituents of the complex. There are other sorts of constituents as well. There are features of the dog’s own life trajectory, for example whether it has puppies and needs for  some time to care for them, and there are broader social traits as well. John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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In our example, the dog we are considering is a family pet, which points to another set of relations with its environing conditions. Perhaps it contributes to a child’s developing sense of responsibility, or to the emotional coherence of the members of the family; perhaps it spends time at a local nursing home where it brings some degree of comfort and pleasure to elderly residents; perhaps it is a terror and is a source of emotional turmoil for family members. All of these aspects of the dog’s life are among its constituent traits, and are, no less than the other traits mentioned, among the many relations that constitute the complex that is the dog. All complexes are equally relational, which is to say that with respect to ontological character it is senseless for anything to be more or less relational. However, not all constituent traits are equally relevant to the nature or integrity of the complex or order of which they are constitutive. A particular cell on the surface of the dog’s skin is a constituent trait of the dog, but likely to be minimally relevant to the dog’s overall integrity. On the other hand, it may be importantly relevant if, for example, it was to become cancerous. In other words, degrees of relevance can typically be ascribed to the constituent traits of a complex order, but not degrees of relation or relatedness. It is important to point out that in this understanding of what it is to be something, anything at all, there is no essential core, or nucleus, or substance, that is the entity and that then enters into relations of various kinds. On the contrary, a complex or order is the set of its constituent traits in specific relations with one another. Each constituent trait, it is important to remember, is also a complex that is constituted by its own traits in specific relations, and as a trait of a more comprehensive order, is located in or prevails in that order. So, for example our dog’s heart is a complex that has its own constitutive relational traits, and prevails in the order of traits that is the dog. This is in fact a ubiquitous feature of the complexes or orders of nature, that is, that they both locate the relational traits that constitute them and they themselves prevail as constituent traits of more comprehensive orders. A complex or order both locates traits and is a trait located. We will return to this important feature of the ontology, but at this point another example of what it is for a complex to be relationally constituted, of what it is to be an order, would be helpful, particularly an example of a different kind. The point cannot be made too often that the relational, ordinal features of nature apply to all complexes of any kind, not just to material objects, or biological entities, or any other kind of complex. With that point in mind we can consider the example of a fictional character and its relational nature, or its ordinality. This particular sort of example may be useful because the ontological status of fictional entities has caused a good deal of trouble for other

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ontological conceptions, but it presents no special problems for pragmatic naturalism. Like every other entity, a fictional character is a complex that is both an order of relations among its constituent traits and a constituent trait of, which is to say a complex that prevails in, other orders. For our example let us choose a fictional character that everyone knows: Romeo. Like any other complex Romeo has many, probably innumerable, constituent traits. Among them is that he is a young man, an Italian, a member of the Montague family, he is in love with Juliet, his love is complicated by the feud between his family and Juliet’s, and he dies. These are traits of the complex that is Romeo, and the fact that he is a creation of Shakespeare, actually a character that Shakespeare borrowed from a pre-existing tale, does not in any way alter Romeo’s ontological status. Within the orders of relations in which Romeo prevails, for example the order of fictional characters, the order of lovers, the order of Shakespeare’s characters, and many others, he has the integrity that he has. His traits are his, and within the orders in which he prevails they are not arbitrary traits. If we were to say that Romeo is a young woman we would be mistaken, as we would be if we denied or misdescribed any of his other traits. Romeo is the character that he is, he is the complex that he is, and like every other complex he locates traits and prevails as a constitutive trait of other orders. And as is to be expected of the orders of nature, Romeo may affect other complexes that prevail in other orders. He may, for example, make or break a non-fictional actor’s career, and he can have considerable emotional effects on a spectator in a theater in which Romeo and Juliet is being performed. That he is a fictional character presents no ontological problems or conundrums whatsoever. Romeo exists just as does any other complex, such as the family dog. The difference between them, and among any and all complexes, has to do with the specific set of constituent complexes that are the traits of each, and the orders in which each prevails. Those differences account for the distinct integrity of each complex, its identity, but they do not represent any ontological differences or problems. This is an illustration of Randall’s comment mentioned above, that the relevant question is not whether something exists, but how it is related to and functions among other existences. We must also attend to the important point that each and every complex both locates traits and itself prevails in orders of traits. Indeed, both aspects of a complex are necessary for a complex to be thoroughly relational and for an ordinal ontology to cohere as a whole. The reason, basically, is that the ordinal locations of a complex, we might call them ontological contexts to use a less precise but serviceable term, are among its traits and are to that extent among its constituent relations. No complex can be outside of any and all contexts, we can say, because if that were the case it would be entirely unrecognizable and

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un-discriminable. In order to be said to exist, to put the point differently, a complex must prevail in some order or orders. Indeed, we may say that in the context of an ordinal ontology, to exist is to prevail in an order, any order. A complex without ordinal location would have no integrity, and therefore no identity, and a complex without identity is an oxymoron. Thus, when we are interested in developing a further understanding of a complex we need to look both to its subaltern traits and to its ordinal locations, because together these are what provide the complex’s character. This will be as true for our attempt to come to terms with human experience as it is for the study of any other complex. In fact, the reason it is necessary to clarify the general ontology, as I am attempting to do here, in order to understand experience is that the context, the ordinal location, of experience in general is nature in general, and of experience for a given person its location is the orders that constitute its environment. Without understanding nature in general and more specific environing conditions of an individual’s experience, experience in general and in specific instances must remain opaque at best. The general ontological picture that is developing, then, is one in which all complexes are complexes of nature, all complexes are relational, and all complexes are contextual, or ordinal. There is a further critically important point that we have alluded to but not stated explicitly, indeed it is the second of what we called above the two most radical aspects of an ordinal ontology, and that is the principle that no complex of nature, of any kind, exists or prevails more or less than any other. Buchler called this the principle of ontological parity, and it is extremely important. Once we define existence as prevalence within an order without specifying any one or more orders, then we have implicitly pointed to ontological parity. There are for an ordinal ontology no degrees of reality, so there is no sense to be given to the idea that this or that exists or prevails more or less than something else. This is the reason that the status of fictional characters presents no problem for an ordinal ontology. The fictional order is no less real, and no more real, than any other. It may be more or less important, relevant, or influential for this or that complex or reason, but it is no more or less real. A further implication of the principle of ontological parity is that the traditional philosophical question whether this or that exists is rendered pointless. Philosophers have traditionally asked the question whether a specific sort of thing exists—God, minds, matter, values, mathematical entities, societies, individuals, nature, and so forth. One can find in the history of world philosophy positive and negative answers to the question with respect to each of these sorts of things. Indeed, it has been the stock-in-trade for many philosophers, and for many philosophers’ understanding of the enterprise of metaphysics, to

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ask just such questions. For pragmatic naturalism such questions are pointless. These and every other complex have the being, so to speak, that enables them to be discriminated in experience and discourse. They can, in other words, easily be said to prevail in some order or orders, in which case the question whether they exist is moot. What remains, however, is the question in which orders they prevail. It is easy enough to acknowledge, for example, that God prevails in a fairly wide range of orders of relations, for example the order of sacred beings, of the objects of human devotion, of elements significant in religious experience, and many others. We may still ask, however, whether God does indeed prevail in the order of beings that can create or sustain nature. A similar point may be made with respect to the other traditional subjects of philosophers’ existential questions. It is easy enough to grant that minds exist and to articulate orders in which mind and individual minds prevail. Whether minds can be said to prevail in the orders of relations that would enable them to have the traits and integrity traditionally ascribed to them in the history of philosophy is another question entirely. And so it is with matter, societies, individuals, nature, possibilities, actualities, or anything else the simple existence of which one may be inclined to question. The issue is no longer whether this or that exists, but in which order or orders it prevails, and that question can be answered only through inquiry into the specific subject in question. Again, I refer to Randall’s point that the question is not whether this or that exists, but how. There are several additional characteristics of an ordinal ontology that are needed to fill out the picture, but we do not need to address them in detail here. We can, though, at least point to them. One has to do with how an ordinal ontology deals with the facts of continuity and change in nature and in experience. When Buchler dealt with this issue initially he changed the terms of the question, as he did with many traditional issues, because he thought that the terms in which the issue was traditionally couched were insufficiently generic. Permanence and change, despite their intellectual pedigree from at least Parmenides and Heraclitus, do not quite capture the most generic relevant traits of complexes. The better way to put the question is not how to understand permanence and change, but how to understand the distinction between the maintenance and alteration of traits. The reason the latter distinction is metaphysically preferable is that sometimes change itself is the permanence, in which case it makes no sense to posit the two in a dichotomy. One clear example is the ocean tides. Here is a case where constant change in the position of water molecules is the prevailing condition. Change in this case would amount to the cessation of change in the position of water molecules. But this is clearly a metaphysically muddled way to pose the relevant question. The terms Buchler preferred to pick out this distinction are prevalence and

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a­ lescence, where “prevalence” means the maintenance of traits and “alescence” means the alteration of traits. In the case of the tides, the changing position of water molecules is the prevalent condition. If the tides were to stop and the position of the water molecules were no longer to change, there would be an alescence, in this case one with rather grim implications for us. In fact, any sort of regular flow allows us to make a comparable point. Consider the flow of water in a river, for example. The prevalent trait for a river is the movement of water, the change in the water. Because he was using inadequate ontological categories, this constant motion led Heraclitus to say, mistakenly, that we cannot step twice into the same river. He confused the changing position of the water with the prevailing traits of the river. In fact, as we all know, we can, all things being equal, step many times into the same river, and it is the same river because the prevalence of the complex encompasses the flowing water. As in the case of the tides, the alescence in this case would be for the water to stop flowing, a condition that generally does not bode well. We do not need to dwell on this point in detail, but it is certainly worthwhile to be familiar with the concepts of prevalence and alescence, and to understand how they function within an ordinal ontology. The nature of possibility is another question important for an ordinal ontology. Some philosophers following Kripke, and others, use the concept of possible worlds when considering the character of an entity. In the context of an ordinal ontology it is preferable to talk not about possible worlds but about possibilities. The difference is important because in the end it is much more meaningful to wonder not whether we can imagine this or that condition with respect to a given complex, that is, whether there is a possible world wherein this or that could or would be the case, but whether given its integrity, which is to say within the orders in which it prevails and in light of its constituent traits, what possibilities if any prevail with respect to the complex? On this approach, possibilities are constituent traits of a complex no more or less than any other, and among other things, a complex’s possibilities at any given time contribute to its current character and the trajectory of its future. For example, as I write there are several possibilities with respect to how I will spend the upcoming academic year. One or more of those possibilities will be actualized, and the others will cease to prevail. As possibilities, though, they prevail no more or less than any other traits, and, like other traits, they can be expected to be efficacious in that they will affect certain actions that I take and decisions that I make. The possibilities of a complex, unlike possible worlds, are not imaginary and they are certainly not “unreal” in any sense. Because they prevail in orders of relations they are as real as any other complex, though in kind they differ from actualities. The constituent traits of all complexes are either actualities or

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possibilities, and each is efficacious in its own way. Understanding any given complex means at least in part to understand its actualities and possibilities. Another question concerns how we are to understand nature as a whole, specifically whether there is sense to the idea of a complex that we may call nature, an issue which is related to the question how we are to understand what it is for relations to be constitutive of complexes. The reader may notice that we have so far avoided the traditional distinction between internal and external relations, and the reason is that the internal/external distinction has no place is an ordinal ontology. Ordinal relations are neither internal nor external, but constitutive. It is clear enough that by virtue of being constitutive, ordinal relations cannot be external to the character of the complex they constitute. The temptation may then be to say that they are therefore internal, but this too would be a mistake. For one thing, for an ordinal ontology all relations are constitutive, so there is no contrasting character for relations to have. Because there are no relations that are not constitutive, there cannot be relations that are external; if there are no relations that are external, there is little sense in thinking of constitutive relations as internal. More substantively, though, theories of internal relations have traditionally led to conceptions of entities as closed sets of relations. In such a case, a set of internal relations is cut off, we may say, from other sets of internal relations. Or, some philosophers have held that all entities taken together constitute a single system of internal relations, the result of which is that nature, or reality, is in the end a complete system. Neither of these conceptions has a place in an ordinal ontology. With respect to individual complexes or orders, their constituent complexes can be expected to have multiple ordinal locations, and thus by their very nature are among the constituent traits of multiple complexes. For that reason alone, it is not appropriate to consider constitutive relations to be internal. Moreover, because all complexes must not only be orders that locate other, constituent, complexes, but also must themselves be located, prevail in, other orders, there can be no sense given to the idea of nature or reality as a whole or a single system. The reason is simply that in such a case nature could not be ordinally located, and if it is not ordinally located it cannot have an integrity or identity. Nature is not a system or an order, which is to say not a complex, and therefore it cannot be a system of internal relations. It may seem contradictory on the face of it to say that nature is not a complex, when we have said that whatever exists is a complex, but the paradox can be removed. The implication has to be that what exists are innumerable orders, not something else called nature that can be differentiated from those innumerable orders. That in discussion we use a noun, “nature,” to talk about the innumerable complexes does not need to force us into any ontological commitment. When we talk about nature we

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are talking about the innumerable orders, the fact that there are innumerable orders, and the very general conditions in which those orders prevail. We do not refer to an overarching order of nature, and therefore we do not refer to any sort of system of internal relations. Ordinal relations are neither internal nor external, but constitutive; and nature is not an order of relations, but simply all complexes taken distributively. A final feature of the general ordinal ontology is the role of emergence within the orders of nature. There have been efforts some years ago and again more recently to defend the idea that though there is no sense to anything being more or less real, that is that the principle of ontological parity holds, there are nonetheless important senses in which some orders of nature are conditions of others. We find in nature the emergence of some orders from others such that without one the other would not be. The importance of this point is that it enables us to make use of developments in the natural sciences within the context of an ordinal ontology. This in turn is important because it is fair to say that if we find ourselves with a philosophical conception that is inconsistent with what we have reason to assert within the natural sciences, then there is probably something wrong with our philosophical conception. The same may be said about other aspects of our experience, a point that we will make use of as the study progresses. For now, the point has to do with how to accommodate the natural scientific understanding of the orders of nature within the context of an ordinal ontology. To put the point directly, pretty much all of our science points to the idea that the various dimensions of our physical environment have emerged over time from prior conditions. At a very gross level of generalization, it is fair to say that the chemical traits of physical entities rely on, indeed derive from, more basic physical traits. Similarly, the biosphere has over long periods of time emerged from physical nature as a result of the physical and chemical properties of material complexes and their interactions with their own environing conditions—heat, sunlight, water, etc. This emergence applies of course not only to the physical properties of biological complexes but to their behavior as well, so that societies and social relations are emergent properties no less than any other feature of biological beings. Human being has of course developed within the context of physical, chemical, and biological traits, and certain features of human being, most notably consciousness and mind, are properties that have emerged from prior physical conditions. Moreover, the full range of human actions and products, from its specific forms of social relations to the products of its intellectual and cultural activities, are rooted in this overall emergent process. There are two features of this general picture of emergence that are important for our philosophical purposes. The first is that it brings our ontology into John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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line with natural science, a point of some significance, and indeed our ontology is able to help the sciences, to the extent that they attend to it, to avoid some of the pitfalls of emergence in nature into which they sometimes fall. It is tempting for many natural scientists, and indeed some philosophers, to think that because b consists of a set of properties that have emerged from a, b must therefore be describable in terms of a. This of course is the reductionism that so bedevils much of contemporary science, philosophy, and cultural life in general. By understanding orders the way pragmatic naturalism does, however, it is possible simultaneously to endorse the idea of emergence while allowing for the properties of the emergent complex to be describable on their own terms, which is to say to avoid the reductionism. For example, as the biosphere gradually emerged from the chemical and physical traits of nature it came to have distinctive characteristics, for example the properties of organic molecules in relation to the inorganic. As those molecules in their interaction with environing conditions began to generate new kinds of complexes, genuinely new properties emerged. Biological beings, for example, reproduce while inorganic complexes do not, and biological complexes may grow, while inorganic complexes do not. When we wish to understand the traits that are distinctive of the biological order we cannot simply use concepts appropriate to the chemical or physical orders. Ontologically we understand how a biological being can have constituent traits that distinguish it from the chemical order, and the same point can be applied to the social and psychological dimensions of human life. There is no doubt, for example, that human consciousness and mental life, and all its products, require among other things a human brain and neurophysiologic system, but our relational ontology allows us to avoid the currently popular tendency to describe nearly all features of human life in terms of brain activity. If an ordinal ontology assists us in avoiding the excesses of emergence as it is understood by many natural scientists and philosophers, understanding the emergent character of our environing conditions, and the human place in it, will contribute importantly to our conception and understanding of experience. Human experience is, like everything else about human being, an emergent property, and that matters, as we will see, for how experience can be philosophically addressed and understood. I note, nevertheless, that there has over the years been criticism of the notion of emergence, the details of which I am not in a position to address here. The topic has been pursued elsewhere, however, in considerable detail and in the context of an ordinal ontology, and a more thorough account of emergence can be found there (Cahoone 2013). These are among the basic ideas that define the ordinal, relational ontology in terms of which I will explore the transactional understanding of experience. It will not come as a surprise to the reader when we say that human beings are John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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complexes like any other entity, which means that we are constituted by the set of relations among our traits, including the orders of relations in which we prevail. By our very natures we intersect with our environing conditions in ways that often crucially influence our lives. Our lives take place within the rich web of relations that is our environment, and our traits intersect and overlap with those of the complexes that constitute our environment. That intersection is both our ontological condition and the context for the ongoing transaction that is our experience, to a more explicit consideration of which we may now turn. II All complexes prevail in orders of relations and they locate subaltern, constituent complexes. As we have said, this is as true of human beings in general and any human being in particular as it is of any and all other complexes. In that case, any aspect of human life, including experience, possesses a comparable ontological character. Experience, like everything else, is complex and contextual. This is the reason that any proper understanding must avoid the traditional empiricist conception of experience as passive reception of sense data and embrace instead an understanding of experience as constituted by the interaction of an individual with one’s environment, very broadly conceived. Furthermore, any proper understanding of experience must also avoid the traditional conception of the experiencing subject as in any way cut off from the world experienced. Two points need to be made here. The first concerns how to understand the experiencing subject and the second how to understand the world as experienced. To point us in the appropriate directions, we may say from the start that for us the experiencing subject is not cut off from the world either as a mind, or a brain, inside a body, or even as a body disconnected from the rest of the world. The traditional conception approaches the subject as some sort of “in here,” in need of interacting with an “out there,” and in no way do we want to embrace any aspect of such a conception of experience or of an experiencing subject. With respect to the second point, we also do not want to absorb any version of a Kantian distinction between the world as it is in-itself and the world as experienced. There may be, and in many ways there are, differences between complexes independent of us and those same complexes in so far as they are related to us. Such differences, however, are not differences between two worlds—a world in-itself and a world as experienced—but are simply differences that arise by virtue of differing ordinal locations of the same complex. A given complex not related to any individual in that it is not a constituent of John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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any individual’s experience has whatever traits it has. The same complex in so far as it enters into the orders that constitute an individual’s experience may, probably will, take on other traits, but it remains the same complex as it is in other, non-experiential orders. There is a technical understanding of identity assumed at this point, which is that the identity of any complex is the ongoing relation between the complex in all its ordinal locations and any one of them. In other words, to alter ordinal locations in this way or that changes a complex in the sense that it introduces new traits, but it does not thereby destroy or even undermine the complex’s identity. The upshot is that in neither our ­understanding of the experiencing subject or of the world as experienced do we introduce any sharp ontological break or disconnect between the self and the world. To return to the understanding of an individual’s environment, the word “environment” when used in this sense points to the multiple orders of relations in which a human being is located, so it is important not to understand it only in the sense of physical environment. Of course, all individuals are importantly located in physical environments, a point that we will soon emphasize in the discussion of the bodily context of experience, but it would be a mistake to stop there. We are all also located in a wide range of environments beyond the physical, including but not limited to the cultural, historical, emotional, cognitive, interpersonal, political, social, and aesthetic. Because we are all located in such complex environments, our experience is, we may say, immersed in them as well. This is the basic feature of the pragmatist understanding of experience that has figured prominently in the ways James, Dewey, Mead, McDermott, Campbell, Hickman, and many others have discussed various aspects and dimensions of experience. It is also, we may add, an important aspect of the phenomenological tradition, especially in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer, a point to which we will return. Once we understand that such relational location is definitive of people’s ontological condition, it becomes all the more obvious that if we wish to understand the general traits of human being we need to come to satisfactory terms with experience. This, then, is the transactional, or interactional if one prefers, view of experience that was developed most extensively by Dewey throughout his many works. The prevalence of people in their environing ordinal locations is at the most general level enough to describe experience as transactional because the relations that constitute the ordinal locations are constitutive. The complex that is a human being is, more or less relevantly, constituted by its relations with all its traits, including its environing conditions, and the orders in which it prevails, its environment, are also constituted by the same relations. Orders are ecosystems in this sense: just as the plants in a pond affect the constitution of the water and the constitution of the water affects the character of the John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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plants, so too a person’s relations with the environing conditions in which she prevails are constitutive in both directions. In so far as the ontological condition consists of mutually constitutive relations, experience is rendered transactional in the added sense that in experience an individual is passive and active, assimilative and manipulative, undergoing and doing. This is yet another way in which experience in our sense differs from the traditional empiricist approach. Experience does not consist simply of taking in, or passive reception, if for no other reason than that its relations are constitutive of both itself and the orders in which it prevails, its environing conditions. Experience is certainly passive in some respects, and in experience individuals receive many things, from sense data to information to emotional input to linguistic and other kinds of meanings. But we also impact the world around us, and that impact is as much a trait of experience as are the processes whereby we receive. There is no need here to repeat this point, largely because the remainder of the book is in part an effort to spell out what this means for and what it indicates about experience. At this point it is sufficient if we all appreciate that at the most general level our understanding of experience is transactional, and to that extent we are working with a pragmatic naturalist rather than an empiricist conception of experience. An important aspect of our ordinal locations, though not exclusively important, is our physicality. Again, at the most general level this point is important because our ontological condition is one in which as a species we have emerged from the physical traits of nature. That emergence does not render human beings and our experience reducible to, which is to say describable solely in terms of, physical or material traits, a point we will make much of as we examine the many non-physical or non-material ordinal locations in which we also prevail and in which in our experience we are immersed. Nevertheless, the physical is crucial to an understanding of experience, a point that we understand better currently as a result of a good deal of strong philosophical study concerning the centrality of the body in cognition, aesthetics, and in experience generally. There are many ways to understand the physicality of experience, and we need to sort them out at this point. If I wish to say, as I clearly do, that experience and pretty much everything that goes with it, such as cognition, is a transactional immersion of an individual in and with her many environments, then the first obvious foil or contrasting position would be a wholly or even largely “mental” understanding of experience and such related human traits as emotion and intelligence. The mental is, as we well know, the traditional conception of mind, and by implication experience, in the history of philosophy. It is also a conception that remains strong and influential in many contemporary

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approaches to mind and knowledge. A review of many recent discussions in epistemology, for example, makes it clear that by and large discussions of what knowledge is and how it is acquired are carried on with practically no reference to environmental context or physicality. One increasingly popular alternative to this traditional “mentalism,” one that does make much of human physicality, is to understand experience in all its forms as a matter of brain function. This is a common view in contemporary cognitive science and to a considerable degree in philosophy of mind, and it finds extensive expression even in popular culture. The idea, to put it simply, is that once we know in some detail the brain events and functions that are associated with any specific activity, we thereby know everything there is to know, or everything definitive that there is to know, about that activity. A correlative tendency associated with this approach is to ascribe the many aspects of life and experience to the brain, such that people will say that the brain remembers, or thinks, or is bored, or moves a limb, or, as a computer scientist once said to me, opens his car door. Such locutions as these are not meant metaphorically, it seems, because when pressed people will often insist that they mean these expressions quite literally. We need to dwell on this point a bit to clarify the relation of the transactional understanding of experience to this “brain-bound” conception. In his last book on issues in aesthetics Arthur Danto made the point in passing that “As a philosopher, I would cherish an argument which demonstrates that the mind cannot be mapped onto the brain any better than the Sistine Chapel can be mapped onto the brushstrokes…” (Danto 2013, 75) If we may infer from the analogy Danto uses, just in the way the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is a result of a great many factors of various kinds, including importantly but not exclusively the brushstrokes, so too is mind, or we may prefer to extend the point to experience generally, the result of a great many factors of various kinds, including importantly but not exclusively one’s brain. If this point is reasonable, then we may further infer that though the emphasis on the brain has at least the value of building body, or anyway something physical, into mind and experience, it is far too limited in what it takes to be the physicality or embodiment of and in experience. But why, one wonders, would anyone think to begin with that mind and experience might be understood and explained solely in terms of brain activity? One reason may be that because brains are so important for human functioning, and because contemporary neurological sciences and cognitive studies are discovering so much about the brain, that it is tempting to think that it is in and with brains that the activities that define our lives take place (Churchland 2013). When, for example, in an experimental situation people do a c­ ertain

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thing and specific, identifiable brain activity regularly occurs when such activity is performed, one might be inclined to say that we have identified the area of the brain “in which” that activity takes place, or we have identified how and where the brain “undertakes” that activity. This is an easy and understandable linguistic slide, but it is not justified, and it is conceptually confused, indeed intellectually dangerous. It appears on the face of it that to attribute mental and experiential activities and traits to brains is simply to make a category mistake. It is not any bodily organ, brain or otherwise, that does the things that we understand as mental or experiential, rather it is people who do them. That is not to say that no processes can be ascribed to brains. It is obvious that many sorts of things go on in brains, but they are of the chemical, neurophysiological, and biological kind. They are not remembering or being bored or opening car doors. It may seem obvious to many of us, but perhaps it bears pointing out explicitly that it is people who remember things, not brains; people know things, not brains; ­people experience, reason, and experiment, not brains; in perception or cognition people compensate for this or that feature of a situation, not brains; and people get bored or excited, not brains. There are reasons we can more or less comfortably say these things. For example, we are not justified in saying, as many people seem inclined to do, that memories are located in brains, if only because memories can have properties that a physical object like a brain cannot have. Neurons and the chemical reactions between and among them cannot, for example, be pleasant or poignant, though memories can be and often are. For a similar reason, we may not say that ideas are located in the brain because to be located in a brain, or in any other physical object, something would have to be the sort of entity that occupies space and is therefore spatially located. Ideas are not such entities. We may also think of the experience of pain to illustrate the category mistake of ascribing experience to a brain. Pain language is tricky, and it is not clear that it is in any literal sense true that pains are located in a specific place. In our ordinary language, though, a pain is located in the part of the body that hurts. If I go to a doctor because my stomach hurts and the doctor asks me “where is the pain,” I will point to my stomach, not to my head, because that is where the pain is. It would be an extraordinary perversion of our language to say that though I feel the pain in my stomach it is really in my brain. The same would be true for pain in phantom limbs, by the way. The appeal to the way we talk does not by itself resolve a philosophical question, though it indicates a dimension, an important dimension, of what the word “pain” means, and how both pain and the word “pain” function in our experience. In the end, in whichever way we decide it is best to resolve philosophical questions that are related

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to the experience of pain or to pain language, our resolutions need to speak in some recognizable ways to our normal experience and talk about pain. If they do not, then we probably have not resolved anything, philosophical or otherwise, about pain and pain language. Thus, this is one of the reasons that talking about such phenomena as pains simply as brain events is not an acceptable way to understand most, perhaps all, experience. We may use the old example of brains in vats to make the point that attributing our experience to brains is a category mistake. If brain activity were attributable to persons in the ways that are often ascribed, then a room full of brains in vats, or jars with live brains, would be functionally equivalent to a room full of people at a dinner party. But as is rather obvious, these are two quite different scenarios: brains do not drive to the dinner or take a taxi to get there; brains do not mingle and make small talk with the other brains; brains do not smile when they see someone they know; brains do not find themselves attracted to someone one meets at the party; brains do not enjoy themselves at the party; brains do not eat and enjoy the dinner; brains do not drive or take a taxi home when the party is over; brains do not discuss the party with the other brains the next day. Brains do not go to dinner parties; people do. The reason the description of the dinner party is so different from a description of brains in vats is that people at a dinner party are engaged in complex and meaningful experience, and brains are not. When brains are parts of live and functioning bodies, they are significant elements of the process of experience, but it is no more appropriate to say that brains experience than it would be to say, for example, that legs walk. Legs do not walk, people walk; and brains do not experience, people experience. People need legs, or some facsimile of legs, to walk, and people need brains, among other organs, to experience, but in the end, it is people who walk and people who experience. We asked a page or two ago why people might think that brains do all these things, and one answer proposed is that neuro- and cognitive science have been extremely fruitful in recent years, thus mistakenly leading people to think that those sciences can explain more than they should be burdened with. Another possible answer is that many of us, including many philosophers, have simply been unaware that we have available to us a way of understanding experience that can avoid the traps of traditional mentalism, incorporate plausibly physicality in experience, and take account of the complexity of the interaction of an individual with her environment that is rather obviously, as the example of the dinner party makes clear, constitutive of experience. The transactional theory of experience that we are exploring throughout is just such a model. Through it we can take account of physicality and the mutually

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c­ onstitutive character of the relation of the individual and environment without committing the category mistake of too heavy an emphasis on brains. There remains the central point, however, that embodiment is critical to our conception of experience, and we need to explore further how that might work. In fact, in recent years, decades actually, the idea of embodiment has had a growing presence, to some extent in philosophy but in cognitive science as well. In this literature there are several ways that the approach to mind, and by extension to experience, offers alternatives to traditional dualist and brainbound conceptions. Embodiment in the sense that mental events involve not simply the brain but other aspects of the body is one such alternative. Another is the increasingly common idea that mind is embedded in our lived contexts, a point that resembles our concept of experience as interactional. Yet another important alternative is commonly referred to as the “enactive” dimension of mind, cognition, and experience, which conveys the idea that in our interaction with our environing conditions, the active side of experience is to one extent or another, depending on cases, constitutive of both the self and our environing conditions. This will be an important conception for us when we discuss the theory of judgment and the extent to which judgment is constitutive of experience. Finally, an idea that is being discussed more frequently in recent literature is that mind, and therefore cognition and experience, are extended beyond the body, such that a full picture of how experience, and such of its components as cognition, must take into account that it takes place as importantly in the complex that constitutes our environments as it does within our skin. We will benefit from a closer consideration of each of these concepts (see Rowlands 2010). At this point a reminder is in order. Much of the discussion of embodiment and the other approaches just mentioned has been carried on in the general field of cognitive studies or cognitive science. As a result, the primary emphasis in those studies is cognition and how best to understand it. Discussions of cognition of course are invariably tied up with accounts of mind, and in the hands of some writers with an understanding of experience as well. Nonetheless, the emphasis in most of the literature is on cognition. As we have indicated, the cognitive is for us one of the three dimensions of experience, and Chapter 3 below will address the cognitive dimension of experience in some detail. In most of the rest of this chapter my primary point is that the approaches to mind in the cognitive studies literature—mind as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended—are not only consonant with but are in fact enabled by the relationally constitutive ontology we have described and the transactional understanding of experience that we will develop throughout

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the book. One may even go further and say, though what evidence there is for this claim will have to unfold as we proceed, that some form or other of a conception of the experiencing self as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended is suggested, perhaps even implied, by our relational ontology and transactional understanding of experience. III I begin with the more straightforward idea of embodiment. An interest in the lived context of experience and mind emerged prominently in the pragmatist tradition in James and then Dewey, and a bit later though overlapping in Heidegger, and then even more prominently in several of the more outstanding philosophers who followed him, specifically Merleau-Ponty, and even Sartre. One might also consider Nietzsche in this lineage, though for our purposes the pragmatist and phenomenological traditions are more relevant, and in any case have been more directly influential for contemporary discussions. In the current literature both traditions have been fruitful in developing the idea of mind as embodied, for example in Varela, Rowland, Lakoff and Johnson (separately and together), and Shusterman. We may dwell a bit on these lines of thought to clarify the basic ideas and conceptual possibilities. That mind is embodied, which is to say that there is a necessary, conditioning bodily aspect of mental events and activity, is not a new idea. One wonders, in fact, how there can be as much enthusiasm as there has been over the past three decades or so when the idea itself has been important for a number of influential thinkers for well more than a century. We may refer, for example, to William James, who in his Principles of Psychology in the 1880s made abundantly clear that in many important respects mind and consciousness, and more specific mental functions as emotions, are bodily phenomena, and that no adequate understanding of psychology is possible without taking into account an individual’s body and its physical functions. James was of course no reductionist in this respect, in that he did not hold that psychological or mental activity is thoroughly physical and can be described and explained in purely physical or bodily terms. Rather he held, and developed the view, that the body is a necessary feature of psychological or mental activity. As Shusterman points out, though, in his discussion in his Body Consciousness of James’s treatment of the bodily aspects of mind, James was not entirely consistent on the point. In the end, James wanted to reserve a place for volition that was not in any way a consequence of bodily features, but rather as a purely ideal function could

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i­nfluence the physical. Despite such inconsistencies, however, James was one of the first philosophers outside of traditional materialists to attend seriously to the bodily aspect of mind, and he was not without influence. Among those whom he influenced was John Dewey, who credits James in general and the Principles of Psychology specifically with being instrumental in moving him from his early Hegelian idealism to a fuller sense of the self and of experience as necessarily embodied. In Experience and Nature, for example, Dewey in his use of the term “body-mind” was clear about the embodied aspect of mind, and in many places he wrote at length about the physicality of habit and the role of habit in experience generally and intelligence specifically. When Dewey spoke of the transaction of an individual with environing conditions, which is to say when he spoke of experience as transactional, he took as a given the physical, indeed bodily, dimension of the self and of the mental in experience. From some of its first expressions in the early years of the twentieth century, the transactional view of experience was a view of the embodied mind. Shusterman also writes of Dewey’s understanding of the embodied mind, and he makes much of the fact that Dewey was impressed by the Alexander technique because it demonstrates the integration of bodily conditions with mind and intelligence (Shusterman 2008). Contemporary pragmatically oriented philosophers have been contributing to the literature on the bodily character of mind, mental activity, and consciousness, one of whom is Shusterman. Another significant figure who has contributed to our understanding of “body in the mind,” as he once put it, is Mark Johnson, who has written on the topic alone and together with George Lakoff. Johnson also writes insightfully on Dewey’s and James’s understanding of embodiment and he draws on both quite a bit in developing his own views on embodied mind and cognition (Johnson 2007). We will turn to Johnson in a moment, but it is worthwhile to point out first that Johnson’s initial impetus in terms of intellectual background was not pragmatism but the insights into the embodied character of mind in Heidegger and especially Merleau-Ponty. Let us quickly look first at the ways body was understood to contribute to mind by those two figures. One could make a case, perhaps, that Husserl at some point in the development of his phenomenology took into account the embodied nature of mind, but whether one can or not, there is no question that for Heidegger embodiment was the normal, natural condition of human being. Dasein, as Heidegger makes very clear, is “being-in-the-world,” and there is no sensible way to understand human being if one approaches people as essentially cut off from their surroundings, or even primarily as observers of their world. Human beings by our very nature are in the world, and in this respect to be human is to be

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e­ mbodied. This feature of human being was developed still further, drawing on Heidegger, Husserl, and Dilthey, by Alfred Schütz and others in their appropriation of the concept of the lifeworld. In fact, as will be clear shortly, the idea of the lifeworld is relevant to the concept of the extended mind, which is to say the understanding of mind as constituted not only by or within one’s body but by and in those dimensions of our environment with which we interact in certain ways. Arguably the figure in the phenomenological tradition who did most to make the case for mind as embodied was Merleau-Ponty, primarily through his notion of the lived-body (Merleau-Ponty 2013). As in Heidegger and Husserl’s cases, the details of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the lived body are well known to those who are familiar with their intellectual traditions. The point, basically, is that the human body is not simply another physical object precisely because it is a human being, and experience, mind, and other features of human life are embodied in such a way that a human body differs crucially from other physical entities. Merleau-Ponty, in the context of his interest in perception, argued that it is the body that provides the condition of experience, and that mind and mental events are embodied simply by virtue of the fact that they are a function of perception and our engagement with the world generally. The lived body, or in Merleau-Ponty’s language le corps propre, is, we may say, a center of experience in ways that he expressed through his analysis of perception, and that, as we will see below, Johnson developed through the idea that metaphor has a bodily basis. To that extent, it is never appropriate to regard the body as simply an object like any other, nor is it possible to understand mind, and by extension experience, as separate from body. Importantly, though, in this unity of mind and body, if we must put it that way, neither is reducible to the other, so that one cannot regard body as somehow a mental construct nor mind as reducible to material properties. The point, rather, is that an adequate understanding of mind must include its embodiment and an adequate understanding of body must take account of its “lived” character. I may point out here, though, that both poles of this conception of body and mind are well embraced and accounted for by pragmatic naturalism’s constitutively relational ontology and the transactional nature of experience that follows from it. This is an important point because in some of the literature of embodied mind one can see the authors’ frequent reluctance even to use the terms “mind” and “body,” for fear that the reader may slip into a traditional, dualistic metaphysics and regard mind and body as two radically different kinds of things, or two different substances, to use the language of traditional metaphysics. One can of course understand the concern in that traditional dualism is still very much ensconced in our quotidian ways of thinking and talking about mind,

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and in the culture generally. It is easy, almost “natural” because so common, to think of mind as separate from body, as a non-physical entity of some kind, and perhaps as related in some way to the more theological idea of a soul. But of course, if mind is embodied in the sense usually meant by those of us who talk this way, then it is never conceptually appropriate to regard mind and body in dualistic terms. In our ontology, though, we have no trouble regarding mind and body as two different things without slipping into dualism or traditional “mentalistic” ways of understanding mind. Both mind and body are complexes, each with identifiable traits that constitute them as the complexes they are. The important point for our purposes is that each is a constitutive trait of the other. That is the ontological condition that Dewey’s term “body-mind” indicates. In other words, body includes mind and mind includes body, to put the point awkwardly, simply because each is one of the constitutive traits of the other, and both are constitutive traits of a person. It is the details of those constitutive relations that interest us when we inquire into the nature of mind, the lived body, the person, cognition, and experience. As long as we keep this point in mind, we may speak of minds and bodies without fear of falling into the ontological ­incoherence of traditional dualism. This, we should make plain, is one of the ­reasons that having a clear and explicitly articulated ontology is so important, a point that is unfortunately lost on far too many contemporary philosophers. To return to the explicit discussion of embodiment, it is not surprising that the phenomenological conception of body and mind as described here has been influential as a challenge to a good deal of standard cognitive science in recent decades. As that field developed, one of the first metaphors it used to understand mind was computational, such that mind is the mental operations done on sensory input. This metaphor was challenged early on by Hubert Dreyfus, Fred Evans, and others, relying more than anything else on the phenomenological tradition and to a lesser extent on Nietzsche (Evans 1993; Dreyfus 1992). One of the more influential texts to deal with the concept of the embodied along these lines has been The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Varela et al. 2017). It is also interesting to note that in this book the authors draw not only on the phenomenological tradition (with a brief nod to Rorty and pragmatism), but also to Buddhism, specifically Madhyamika Buddhism. This is interesting, without going into the details, because a case can be made, in fact a case has been made independently, that one finds in Madhyamika texts, especially in its primary representative Nagarjuna, a relational, indeed constitutively relational, ontology and by implication a relational approach to mind (Ryder 1982).

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The point is that there is a growing literature in cognitive science and psychology that draws on “embodied mind” traditions, grounding the analysis in both philosophical sources and empirical and experimental research. The interested reader is encouraged to turn to those works for detailed accounts of the idea and of the conceptual and empirical evidence for it. Another source to which the interested reader is urged to turn is to Lakoff and Johnson’s work on metaphor and generally on the bodily character of mind, thought, cognition, in fact of philosophy itself. These developments began with their well-known Metaphors We Live By in 1980, wherein they argued that mental life generally is characterized by conceptual metaphor, and that at least in many cases those metaphors are the result of features of our bodies. One example would be what they call orientational metaphors, such that to be happy is to be “up” and to be sad is to be “down,” that develop because we have the bodies we do and because we are physically oriented in space as we are (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 14). These ideas received ongoing development in subsequent works, for example Johnson’s The Body in the Mind and The Meaning of the Body, and they are applied to the ideas that constitute the history of philosophy itself in the jointly written Philosophy in the Flesh. Lakoff, writing on his own and with others, has also extended these analyses in other detailed directions, for example his 2001 work with Rafael Nuñez titled Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. One can almost trace in these books the development of the idea of the embodied mind through the years as an increasing amount of empirical evidence became available in cognitive science and psychology for the view that mind has bodily roots, and Lakoff and Johnson, together and separately, make extensive use of that empirical research in developing and supporting their ideas. One of the many interesting features of this development over the past few decades has been that the concept of embodiment has stretched into what we have called above the extended view of mind. For example, in Philosophy in the Flesh they could say that “The mind is not merely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual systems draw largely upon the commonalities of our bodies and of the environments we live in” (Lakoff and Johnson 2008, 6). This basic idea is explored in more detail in later works, as we will see below. But for now, I return to what is meant in this literature by the idea that the mind as embodied. In two important books twenty years apart, The Body in the Mind, first published in 1987, and The Meaning of the Body in 2007, Johnson is interested in the embodied nature of meaning, reason, cognition, and related mental phenomena such as imagination. It is valuable to notice at this point, because we will have recourse to the same idea as we develop the theory of experience more

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thoroughly, that Johnson argues repeatedly that meaning is not propositional, a point we will extend to knowledge and cognition generally. Actually, it would be more precise to say that meaning is not solely, and not even primarily, propositional. This is an important point because much of contemporary philosophy of mind and epistemology treat meaning and knowledge as propositional, which is to say having to do with the assertion and manipulation of propositions. If that were the case, then it would be exceedingly odd to talk about meaning, knowledge, and many other aspects of our mental life as bodily because there is nothing about our bodies, or their impact on mental events, that counts as propositional. The assumption that meaning and knowledge are primarily propositional is what gives much of current thinking about mind its traditional, “mentalistic” flavor. If meaning and knowledge are propositional, then other kinds of mental events such as emotions, and surely features of our physicality, cannot possibly be counted as “meaningful” or cognitive. Johnson is thus well aware that in order to make the case for the embodiment of mind he has to avoid a propositional conception of meaning and cognition. Much of his efforts in these two works is directed toward that end, and toward demonstrating the reasonableness of that end, as will be our approaches to judgment, cognition, and experience in general as we proceed. Johnson’s alternative to a propositional conception of meaning is the idea that what underlies propositions, and other features of mental phenomena, are image schema, and that image schema are themselves bodily grounded. Without going into details, image schema are understood as structured relations of the sort that condition metaphor and experience itself, and such schema, like the experience they condition, reflect features of our sensorimotor activity, neural activity, and in general our physicality. To give one simple example that Johnson gives early on, we encounter the fact of containment regularly through our bodies themselves and in our interaction with our environments. The repeated engagement with containment establishes schematic structures in terms of which we experience “in” and “out,” and furthermore are the grounds of the metaphorical use of “in” and “out” that informs some of our thinking. Schemata like this are many, they condition meaning and thought, and they are based in our physicality and aspects of the fact that we are embodied creatures (Johnson 2013, 21 ff). The Meaning of the Body is even more focused on the interaction or transaction of the individual with the environment, and effectively embraces the idea of the extended mind. In this work, Johnson draws more heavily than he had in the past on James and Dewey, and in so doing helps us to see how much of the pragmatist, and pragmatic naturalist, tradition has embraced the idea of mind as embodied. Referring to James, for example, Johnson makes the point that

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“The idea that thinking is embodied is not the relatively obvious claim that in order to think, one needs a body and a brain. Instead it entails that the nature of our embodiment shapes both what and how we think…” (Johnson 2007, 94). The general contour of Johnson’s argument in the book, and the extensive empirical evidence that he discusses, is in support of the physical basis of meaning and thought. He repeats the point he had made twenty years earlier that image schema arise from bodily structure and patterns in sensorimotor experience, and they represent not simply bodily traits or simple mental models, but rather contours of body-mind, or we may say of the experiencing individual (Johnson 2007, 139). And in pointing to the extended view of mind, Johnson says that “meaning does not reside in our brain, nor does it reside in a disembodied mind. Meaning requires a functioning brain, in a living body that engages its environments—environments that are social and cultural, as well as physical and biological” (Johnson 2007, 152). It is wise to remind ourselves again what the general point is. These pages are not an effort to argue for the embodied view of mind. That argument, rather, has been made in the several books to which we have referred, and it is grounded in both empirical research and conceptual analysis. The interested reader is encouraged to consult all the works mentioned to understand better the idea that mind is embodied. My point is simply that the transactional understanding of experience, and the ordinal, constitutive relational ontology that underlies it, is of a piece with the general contours of the view of mind as embodied. To make the point again, if all complexes are relational, and if whatever exists is a complex, then we can expect human being and experience to be complex in just this sense. The human complex is constituted by its many subaltern traits and the relations in which they stand toward one another. Among those traits are the many mental and bodily traits that we typically identify as constitutive of human being and experience. Given this general ontological conception, we would expect our mental and bodily traits to be constitutively related to one another, and in those relations to contribute to what it is to be a human being. The details are in the research to which we have referred, but the general idea that mind is embodied in constitutive ways is precisely what we would expect to find. This is the basic point. IV As we have indicated above, the idea that the mind is embodied has long since been expanded into the broader ideas that mind is embedded, enactive, and extended. These distinctions have been made by a number of people, but the

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individual who develops the distinctions in a way most germane to our project, for several reasons that will become clear, is Mark Rowlands in his 2010 book The New Science of the Mind. In speaking of the idea of embodied mind Rowlands makes the point that there are several ways in which one can understand the claim that mind, or better mental processes, is embodied. Only one of them fundamentally challenges the traditional Cartesian assumption of a mental entity, and that is the idea that to be embodied means that mental processes are in some ways and to some extent constituted by the body and its general physicality. This idea that body is constitutive of mind is, as we have said, precisely the view one would expect given our ordinal ontological background, and it is the view that Rowlands defends. Moreover, it is also a view that leads fairly directly to the idea of the extended mind. Before going into the meaning of and case for the extended mind thesis, however, we will look first at its less ambitious relatives, the ideas of the embedded and enactive mind. The proposal that we should understand mind as embedded in its environment, at least as Rowlands describes it, is related to a functional conception of mind. If we regard the primary cognitive nature of mind as solving problems, then the question concerns how the mind does that. We are assuming an embodied mind here, and one option is to say that the brain handles this function with input from the senses. Thus, for example, visual input is received, and given the nature of that input various processes in the brain perform the task of making visual sense of the input. In this version of an embodied mind, the brain does all the work and therefore a description of how the brain performs this function must be appropriately complex. But what, we may ask, if some of the task of solving such problems, which is to say some of the function of the mind, were located not in the brain but in the individual’s environment? Rowlands uses the example of a gps system to make the point. If I need to get from point A to point B, the solution to that problem if I must rely solely on my own capacities would be rather more difficult than if I received assistance from my environment, in this case a gps system or a map. In this respect, the environment is undertaking some of the function of mind, and to that extent mind is embedded in its environment (Rowlands 2010, 69). Rowlands goes on to point out that though the idea of mind being embedded in this way is a plausible and interesting one, it is still a rather weak version of the embodied mind, weak in the sense that it is not incompatible with Cartesianism, and therefore not really an alternative to traditional conceptions of mind and cognition. Even if it were true that mind functions in its environment in this way, the relation between the mind and its environment is, he says, one of dependence rather than constitution. This matters because a

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d­ ependency relation can leave the mind as a Cartesian substance unreformed, simply dependent on its surroundings in ways that the tradition had not anticipated or identified. Clearly Rowlands prefers, and our ontology expects, a constitutive relation rather than a dependency relation among mental functions, the body, and the self’s environment. For this reason, more radical possibilities seem more attractive, and the next candidate for that position is what is generally called the enactive view of mind. As in our discussion of the embodied and embedded mind views, we are able to take only a superficial and cursory look at the idea of the enactive mind. In fact, all of these ideas are receiving a great deal of attention currently in several disciplines, from philosophy and psychology to cognitive science generally to narratology to current work that is referred to as enactive cinema. The best we can do is give a flavor of the idea and point out its relevance to an ordinal ontology and transactional experience. The basic idea of the enactive mind is that in its embodiment and embeddedness in the environment the mind does not simply take in information that it can then use in whatever processes constitute cognition and other mental functions. The idea, rather, is that through its embodied embeddedness, mind acts in ways that constitute its environment much the same way the environment is a constitutive element of the mind. Actually, this description of the idea of the enactive mind is already more expansive than some of its adherents would prefer. Rowlands, for example, discusses the idea as developed by Alva Noë in his 2004 Action in Perception. There and elsewhere Noë argues that perception is an enacted process through our physicality and our sensorimotor activity. If perception is enacted in this way, then mind insofar as it operates with perception, is enacted. Rowlands in his discussion allows the details of enactive perception to count for the whole of the meaning of the idea of mind as enactive. As he argues, in Noë’s treatment the enactive mind rests more on expectations and abilities in and through perception than it does on action, and that, he argues, makes it a weak relative to the view that he really wants to defend, which is the concept of the extended mind (Rowlands 2010, 74). I do not want to get into the details of Rowlands’s analysis of Noë nor any effort to adjudicate between them, or for that matter any of the other arguments and interpretive disagreements among proponents of these various concepts of mind. At this point I would simply point out that others have pushed the enactive view of mind farther, and in ways that do highlight activity. For example, Massimiliano Cappuccio and Michael Wheeler allow for much greater affinity between the enacted and extended views of the mind, and moreover their understanding of enaction goes well beyond expectations and abilities. To give one example, in a

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recent article they argue that even the traditional phenomenological concept of the background, on which so much of the literature on embodied, embedded, enactive and extended views of the mind has drawn, turns out not to be simply a given in experience but is itself constituted to some degree, depending on cases, by an individual. To put the point far too superficially, the idea is that we do not simply draw information from the background context in experience, but our own experience feeds the background from which we draw the information (Cappuccio and Wheeler, 2011). In this view, we see the important idea that in its activity, or its enaction, the mind and its environment are mutually constitutive. And at the risk of belaboring the point, this is precisely what the ordinal ontology and transactional experience would expect to be the case. We find a similar phenomenon when the concept of the enacted mind is applied in specific cases, as it is for example in the study of enactive cinema. The Russian Lyubov Bugaeva and the Finn Pia Tikka have separately and together been exploring the character of the viewer’s interaction with film, and the implications that has both for understanding mind and for a richer sense of cinema and how it works. Like Cappuccio and Wheeler, Bugaeva and Tikka allow for a fairly close connection between the ideas of mind as enactive and as extended. To offer just one example, Bugaeva, drawing prominently on William James, Antonio Damasio, and Mark Johnson, makes a case through a study of viewers’ interaction with film for James’ often criticized idea from the Principles of Psychology that emotions are bodily reactions, in this case that arise through the interaction of viewer and film. As Bugaeva puts it, “Immersion of a viewer into cinematographic reality leads to the birth of emotions caused by the interaction of the subject with the environment in the virtual reality of the movie” (Bugaeva 2013, 95). And in a comment much like Cappuccio and Wheeler’s point about the active constitution of the background, Bugaeva says that “The term ‘enactive’ in this case means that there is no pregiven independent milieu; rather there is a perceiver-dependent milieu where action is perceptually guided” (Bugaeva 2013, 96; see also Pia Tikka 2008; Bugaeva 2016). With these ways of understanding the engagement of mind, body, and environment in mental activity, we are approaching now the fuller conception of the extended mind that is most consonant with our understanding of experience, and to which a number of cognitive scientists and others have been pointing. We may return to Rowlands in this context because he has an interesting approach. The ideal understanding of mind on his view is what he refers to as the amalgamated view, by which he means, and he is referring here explicitly to cognition though I think he would accept a broader application, that “Cognitive processes are an amalgam of neural structures and processes,

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b­ odily structures and processes, and environmental structures and processes” (Rowlands 2010, 83). Here we begin to have a fuller description of mind, one that fully accords with my ontological conception and general sense of experience. We may talk appropriately about mind in this extended, amalgamated, sense without Johnson’s worry about slipping into traditional mentalism, without reducing mind to brain, without artificially delimiting mind and self at one’s skin, and without dissolving mind into simply the myriad of factors and traits that constitute it. We may, in other words, have the extended mind in its full-blown embodied, embedded, and enactive sense because mind, like everything else, is a natural complex, and like all complexes it is constituted by its traits in whatever relations they stand to one another. All complexes, furthermore, are individuated through the specific set of traits in relation, and their relative continuity over time, that constitute that complex and no other. Most, perhaps all, complexes, have constitutive traits of various kinds, and in the case of mind they include the neurological, physical, ideal, environmental, historical, creative, cognitive, emotional, assimilative, manipulative, imaginative, representational, symbolic, mimetic, and many others. How these various constitutive traits of mind interact in specific cases is a matter for study and analysis of those specific cases. But whatever the case, because mind is a complex constituted by its traits and the relations among them, any specific mental activity must be approached on the assumption of an embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended mind. This is what enables us to engage our world, to make our way, both actively and passively, and it is what enables intersubjectivity and a social understanding of mind. Not only is solipsism an entirely artificial problem, but so is any perceived problem associated with intersubjectivity. Mind is social and intersubjective because each of us is among the constitutive traits of many others of us.3 Mind is constituted relationally, and in that sense alone it is extended in many of the ways the empirical, phenomenological, pragmatic, and applied research has suggested.4 I underscore the point by making it is a slightly different way. The extended mind thesis has been available for more than twenty years, and in that time it 3 We may point out, by way of remaining tethered to the pragmatist tradition, that Mead famously developed a relational, in his case social, conception of the self, and moreover he was equally committed to a broader, relational view of nature, as was Dewey and as are we. See, Ryder 2013b. It is also important to mention that a similar, relational view of the self has been most recently developed in Wallace 2019. 4 In current literature, this point is being applied in a number of ways. One interesting approach is to be found in a recent analysis of issues having to do with political philosophy, social psychology, and literary theory through Mikhail Bakhtin. See, Koczanowicz 2015.

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has received a good bit of exploration and development. It has also, as is fully appropriate for any significant philosophical conception, received a good bit of criticism. Neither its development nor its criticism, however, has had an ordinal ontology available to it as the background ontological condition in which the concept of the extended mind may reside. The availability of an ordinal ontology makes a great deal of difference. Most importantly, in light of the constitutive relations of the self and its environment, it is to be expected that the functioning of the self, in which we here include mind and mental processes, will best be understood in the broader ordinal contexts in which the self is located. This is simply a technical way of making the point that given an ordinal ontology, the self and the mind must be extended into the orders that define the self’s integrity and identity. A more traditional, “internal” view of the mind is simply impossible given the details of an ordinal ontology. The same point bears on much of the criticism of the extended mind thesis, which has trouble reconciling the concept with certain traditional assumptions about mind. For one thing, criticism of the concept at times assumes a proposition-based epistemology, which is then difficult to reconcile with identifying functions of the environment with the mind. As we will see in ­Chapter 3, however, such an epistemology has no place in a transactional conception of experience and in an ordinal ontology. For another, critics of the extended mind thesis can have a problem understanding how individual identity can be extended into the environment, and with traditional conceptions of the self, it would be reasonable to have this concern. In our case, however, the general ontology offers us a way to understand identity as the ongoing relation of a complex’s gross integrity, which is to say the complex’s multiple ordinal locations taken together, and any one of them. In other words, the ontology already places identity in the complex’s “environment.” When applied to the self and to mind, we can see that extending mind and mental functions into the environmental contexts that provide the self’s identity is precisely what we would be obliged by the ontology and the transactional conception of experience to do. Our transactional understanding of experience and our ordinal ontology both imply and support the idea that mind is extended beyond the body. In other words, as our theory of experience unfolds it will become clear that while the ordinal ontology implies an extended concept of mind, the theory of experience requires it. Experience as transactional is incoherent if mind is a discrete substance, or if mind is identical with the brain, or if mind simply happens to be embedded in body and physicality but is in the end something else, or if mental activity is describable solely or even largely in terms of the manipulation of representational, symbolic forms. To describe experience as transactional is to say that human beings, not simply minds or bodies, interact

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with our environments in constitutive ways, which is to say that the interactions that constitute experience are constitutive of both the self and the ­environment. A concept of mind as constitutively extended is also in part what underlies the details of the theory of judgment, as it will be developed in the next chapter, which is an integral aspect of the theory of experience. The theory of judgment, as I will show, is what describes the interaction of the individual with the environment in those ways that are manipulative of the environment and therefore productive in a literal sense. In our interaction with our environing conditions we produce, and those products of experience, what we will call judgments in a specific sense of the term, are the respects in which in experience we contribute to the constitution of both the self and the environment. These features of experience as we will develop it stand on the understanding of mind, indeed the self as a whole, as constitutively extended. V It remains by way of introduction only to speak briefly to the idea that experience is to be or at least can be understood as culture. John McDermott, for example, clearly takes this approach, as we can see in the subtitle of the selection of his essays from 2007, The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture (McDermott 2007). In selecting such a title McDermott is drawing on Dewey’s well-known remark concerning his Experience and Nature, several years after its publication, that if he were to write it at that later date, he would select the title Nature and Culture. One reason he said this was that in his earlier discussions of experience across many publications he was trying to revitalize the concept with a new and, he thought, preferable understanding. The problem with such efforts, as he knew all too well, is that frequently the received understanding is so well entrenched that there is no hope for new meanings. Dewey evidently despaired of his earlier effort and would have chosen to talk about culture rather than experience. The difficulty in talking about experience in other than the more traditional ways may be one of the reasons Rorty preferred to ignore the concept altogether. Its history simply makes it too difficult to resuscitate in a healthier form. In his commentary on Dewey’s approach to experience, however, James Campbell makes the important point that overall, by now “we have moved to an interpretation closer to his sense of experience as ‘the complex of all which is distinctively human.’ It would thus seem unnecessary and unadvisable to surrender the term at present, without at least an attempt to examine its contemporary value” (Campbell 1995, 68–69). I here take Campbell’s observation

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as something of a green light, licensing us to go ahead with our study of experience and development of a comprehensive theory in the Deweyan mold. Furthermore, there is good reason to follow Dewey, McDermott, and others and keep in mind that when we are speaking about experience we mean to encompass the vast range of individual and social interaction, or transaction with our environing conditions, with a focus on both process and product, that we may also sensibly call culture. We should notice, though, that the term “culture” is no less a problem than the term “experience,” as nearly any anthropologist will point out. In fact, anthropologists sometimes get a bit testy when the rest of us use the term in what can seem to them a far too loose and slipshod a way. With apologies to all those anthropologists who may be discomfited, we will nevertheless embrace the notion of experience as culture. It will help us to remember, first, that we are dealing with the whole of the human transaction with the rest of nature, or those parts of it with which we interact, and not merely sense perceptions. Second, it will help us to avoid attempts to split experience and nature. As the discussion to this point should have made clear, one of the reasons that a transactional theory of experience is justifiable and useful is that it accords fully with our ordinal understanding of nature generally. Far from bifurcating nature and experience, our theory of each relies to some extent on the other. In this respect, we take it as a fact of the matter that nature and experience, or nature and culture if one prefers, are of a piece. They do not pose a special “problem” for philosophers or anyone else to solve, except in the same sense that a careful philosophic understanding of any concept can be taken as a solution to a problem. There is no problem of the relation of ­experience and nature since they are transactionally related and mutually constitutive of one another. To treat experience as culture, then, is to underscore the point that experience describes the milieu in which we live, grow, prevail, suffer, endure, and prosper, with all its many traits and constituents. It is nature insofar as we assimilate and manipulate it, and it is we insofar as we are the ongoing subject and result of that process of assimilation and manipulation. We need now to go on in much more detail to see what this transaction is like. We have seen how the ontology enables it, and now we look at how the assimilation and manipulation, the stability and change, and the brute encounters and the refined products figure in our understanding. We need further to come to terms with the general aspects of experience that we know to be present but that often suggest difficulties for interpretation, specifically its cognitive, aesthetic, and political dimensions. To these matters we can now turn.

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Experience and Judgment Experience and philosophical exploration are no strangers to one another.1 Classical philosophers in all the great ancient civilizations grappled with it and its relation to knowledge, spiritual life, or social harmony. In Western philosophy Plato tended to disparage it as a source of insight, while Aristotle was rather more supportive. As Christianity developed, especially in its more Platonic forms, ordinary experience tended to be taken as an impediment to spiritual insight and an obstacle to the appreciation of revealed truths. As European culture became more secular, debate raged over the relation of experience to reason, and then to the relation of experience to the constituting subject, and to sense data, and to the given. In classical Indian traditions, particularly the more dominant of them, the world of experience and the world as experienced tended to be treated as an illusion, in roughly a Platonic sense, relative to a genuine reality available in special ways, though those special routes may themselves be understood as experience of some kind and in some sense. In this respect, we can speak in both Eastern and Western traditions of religious experience. In China, the dominant philosophical tradition took experience, especially social experience, as the ground of individual, social, political, and cultural understanding. To minimize misunderstandings, it would be wise to begin by clearing away some of this historical brush, maintaining what is necessary and discarding what is not. This is not an effort to offer a survey, historical or merely conceptual, of the idea of experience in the history of philosophy. It is, rather, an attempt to bring into focus those aspects of the history of the idea that I wish to overcome and those on which I intend to build. If something important is left out of this discussion, either through a failure to understand its importance or simple oversight, then the corrective must be left to others at a later time.

1 Brief sections of this chapter reproduce previous papers. They include “Judgment and Art” (Ryder 2015a), which was also presented at the Central European Pragmatist Forum in Wrocław, Poland, in 2014, and “Judgment and Film,” which was presented at the Film-­ Philosophy Conference: A World of Cinemas, in Glasgow, Scotland in 2014.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004429185_004 John

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I I begin with the unfortunate tendency in the history of philosophy to regard experience and the world independent of experience as cut off from one another, either ontologically or because that is how experience was thought to work. This tendency has several versions, and we can look at some of them. First is the general idea that experience consists of what comes to us in sense data, the so-called given, and that whatever such passive experience leads to, for example knowledge or simply meaning, is something we supply. On this view, experience is passively received sense data and knowledge is the result of an inference or set of inferences that the perceiver applies to experience. As I will show, Dewey explicitly rejected this approach, though he did so in language that is unfortunate and that requires a correction. A second way in which a sharp break or dichotomy between experience and the world independent of experience is expressed is in the Kantian approach in which the transcendental subject constitutes the world of experience, though not the other way around, and therefore the world as it is independent of experience is by implication unavailable to the self. When the world “in-­ itself” becomes available to the transcendental subject through the constitutive structures of the mind it is thereby the world of experience, and so the world of experience and the world in-itself are, presumably, not the same. A third approach that has contributed to the idea of a break between the self as a site of experience and the world experienced is the idea that the self is an internal reality and the world is “out there.” This unfortunate idea has wreaked havoc in our understanding of the self, the world, knowledge, and experience, and it continues to do so. It is an implication of the Cartesian distinction between material and mental substance, which is to say between body and mind; it is equally present in the entire tradition of regarding experience as reception of sense data; it appears in the seemingly endless discussions of the pseudo-problems of intersubjectivity and solipsism; and it is equally evident in much current cognitive science, in which it is taken for granted that mind is an internal phenomenon, tied entirely or to some extent to the brain and therefore inside the body, that must interact somehow with the external world. We may look at each of these approaches to begin to demonstrate how the pragmatic naturalist theory of experience differs and why it is preferable. It may be wise to begin with the last point because in some senses it underwrites the others, and it may be best to state unequivocally that for an adequate understanding of experience we must dispense entirely with the internal/­ external distinction. There is, in other words, no “out there” for any of us, simply because none of us is “in here.” For some reason, many have been attracted

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to the idea or assumption that we are in our heads and looking out at the world around us, as if through a window. But visually, to select one form of sensation, there is no window; there is simply the world around us and of which we are in every respect a constituent. We may seem to experience that world “from our heads.” but that is simply because that is where our eyes, ears, tongue, and nose are. If we consider a different sense, for example touch, then we have another sensory experience altogether. When I reach out with my hand I do not touch things from my head but from wherever in space my hand is. And the necessary activity of my nervous system and brain notwithstanding, my experience of touching is not in my head in any way. If we simply stay with tactile sensation for a moment, it is clear that the self is a center of experience, because a center of sensation, but the self is not in any sense “in here,” or inside anything. The self is wherever I find myself, but that is not inside a body. One of the reasons we can say this, consistent with the extended mind thesis that was discussed in the previous chapter, is that the mind, or now we are putting the point in terms of the self, is in the world, which is to say extended in space, though not as a single spatial object, and fully located in its environment. If the extended mind thesis is more or less right, then there is no “in here” and “out there” because the mind or self is as much “in” its environment as it is “in” its body. Here the spatial metaphor breaks down and we are better served by introducing the ordinal language that was presented in the previous chapter. When we understand the self, or mind if one prefers to think about these matters in those terms, as a complex and an order of relations, then the appropriate way to understand the self is as constituted by its relational traits and as having its integrity, its identity, by virtue of the orders of relations it constitutes. The self is a constituent trait of its environment, and its environment is a constituent trait of the self. If we abandon the spatial meaning of “in” and think of being “in” something as being a constituent trait of something, then it is just as true to say that one’s environing contexts are in the self as it is to say that the self is in them. When we understand those aspects of the self clearly, then there is no sense at all to be given to the idea of an “external world” in relation to the self, from which it follows that to understand the epistemological project as the pursuit of knowledge of the external world, or the possibility of such knowledge, is wrong-headed from the start. This all means that there is no phenomenological or ontological sense to the idea that the self is “in here” and that there is a world “out there.” Sensation does not work that way, and our ontological categories have no room for it. Experience is not, then, something one “has” of an external world. Rather, whichever details we are justified in ascribing to experience, by which I mean

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whatever our more developed theory of experience turns out to be, experience is a process sustained by an individual in relation to environing contexts of which we are fully a part, or more precisely, of which each of us is a constituent trait. As we mentioned, a common, traditionally empiricist, way of handling experience has been as a process whereby sensory data is taken in and the mind performs actions of various kinds on that data, the result of which is experience of the world. Once we abandon the “in here” and “out there” way of thinking about the self in the world, this traditional approach to perception becomes automatically inadequate, but it is also worth dwelling for a time on the way experience here is tied to perception and why that is not sufficient for an adequate understanding of experience. For one thing, and there is nothing new in this, the model of perception as the passive intake by a self or mind of sensory data is unacceptable. In the relation between the physics of light and the physiology of our optical systems, to take the sense of sight as an illustration, there is certainly a sense in which we receive input from our environment on which our physiological processes operate. The result of that operation is, we may reasonably say, seeing something. The mistake in a passive model of sense perception is not that we do not receive sensory data or information, but that we have allowed that aspect of the process to stand in for the whole. We are all well aware that many other aspects of our interaction with the environment, both contemporary and historical, affect what we see. We often see, or hear, what we expect to see or hear based on our experience, regardless of which data, visual or auditory, we receive at the moment. In this sense, our history can condition our perception as much as the moment’s input from the environment. It is also the case that the detailed structure of our sensory apparatus impacts the way our sensory processes work and what results from them. Eyes and ears, not to mention the neurological features of visual and auditory systems, would operate differently and produce different results if they were structured differently. The Kantian tradition built this idea into its understanding of the transcendental constitution of experience, but it has other shortcomings. We know too that our emotional states can impact what and how we perceive, as can the extent of our familiarity with the object of perception. A person who understands impressionist painting, for example, may see things in works of that period that a person without such understanding does not, even if both are standing in front of a painting at the same time under the same conditions in every other respect. So, notwithstanding the fact that there is perfectly good sense to be given to passive reception of sense data as an element of perception, the fact is that

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perception consists of a great deal more, and therefore cannot adequately be understood as a passive process through which we receive sensory information. If this is right, and we have reason to think that it is right, then the implied picture of the passive understanding of perception is also flawed. When we understand perception as resting on a passive reception of sense data, and if we think of experience primarily in these terms, then we can easily think that in experience the self encounters her world largely or maybe even exclusively through the reception of sense data. If one thinks that, then it is an easy step to the inference that our world is something we have access to only through a sensory process, and therefore the world of experience is something other, something from which we are cut-off except through the one avenue of the passive reception of sense data. But if such a passive understanding of how perception works is flawed, as we have been saying it is, then the idea that the self and her world are somehow cut-off from one another loses one of its more important props. Another historically important approach to experience that we have mentioned is the Kantian idea that the mind or the self constitutes the world as experienced. The details of the Kantian understanding have been well articulated, by Kant himself as well as by many followers and critics over the years, and we need not repeat or even review it in detail here. The idea is that there are certain features of the structure of the mind and of conscious awareness, especially of cognition but of other aspects or forms of experience as well, that serve as a kind of filter, or mold, to use a different metaphor, through which or into which sense data as it impinges on us moves. The details of this process, as we have said, are quite complex, and not especially relevant here. The critical point is that on this view the result of that “filtering” or “molding” process is experience. This means that the world of experience, if we wish to use that locution, is at least as much a result of features of our minds as it is of the details of sensory data. The world of experience is, in Kant’s terms, transcendentally constituted by the self. There can be no question that Kant was on to something important here. Even a little superficial reflection of our own experience can reveal that what we experience is a result to at least some extent of what the “experiencer” brings to the process, never mind the elaborate details of the Kantian articulation of the process. I am thinking here simply of such aspects of ourselves as experiencers that we bring to experience as our expectations of what we will hear in a conversation, or habits that we bring to an event in which we are engaged. I assume that many readers have had the kind of frustrating experience I have had, far too often, of describing a problem to a customer service representative only to have the individual respond to something I have not said.

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Sometimes this may simply be incompetence, but often it is the result of the representative hearing what he expected to hear rather than what I have actually said. I have no doubt in such a case that the representative really did hear something other than what I said, which is to say that his experience was conditioned or constituted more by what he brought to the interaction than by what was said. This, at a superficial level, is an example of a Kantian sort of moment, though it is not the sort of thing Kant had in mind. Similar examples can be offered of the details of experience filtered through habits of an experiencer. There is reason, then, both superficial and sophisticated, to endorse at least some aspects of Kant’s understanding of experience. The problem is that Kant did not go far enough. He understood that the self or mind constitutes the world as experienced, but he was not able to take the next step to say that the mind itself is constituted by the world it experiences. Perhaps the problem was that he accepted uncritically the modernist distinction between reason as a “purely” mental phenomenon and sensation as derived externally, or that he accepted uncritically the prevailing Newtonian understanding of nature. For Kant, mind is fixed in its nature, as is the world an sich. Neither mind nor the world on his view is constituted, but only the point at which they merge, which is the world as experienced. If this is so, then Kant’s Copernican Revolution is rather less revolutionary than it might appear. The more revolutionary step would be, as we are here proposing, to reject the absolute nature of mind and the world altogether, and hold instead that all of it is relationally constituted in the ways the ordinal ontology suggests. In that case, experience is not some sort of intermediate condition that happens when mind and world meet, but it is one of the constituting and constituted features of the ordinal character of both mind, or self, and its world. As we have said in various ways already, the self is constituted by its relations with its environment, broadly understood, and its environment is to some significant extent constituted by its relations with the self, as well as its relations with a myriad of complexes not the self. That relationally constitutive interaction, or transaction, is experience.2 This leaves the first historically influential conception of experience to address, and that is the idea that experience is to be understood as the passive 2 It is worth mentioning that there has been an ongoing attempt for a number of years to develop a far more sympathetic interpretation of the relation between Kant and pragmatism, indeed to develop a Kantian pragmatism. Success along these lines has been due above all to the work of Sami Pihlström. For one among a number of possible examples, see Pihlström 2009.

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reception of sense data, or a “given,” a point of view that was influential for the British Empiricists, and which still I suspect holds some attraction for philosophers and others today. On the face of it there is a good deal of plausibility to this view, which is not surprising in light of the fact that more than a few very bright people have endorsed it and built impressive conceptual structures on its basis. We can see the plausibility readily enough if we consider simply that all things being equal and working properly, when a bell rings nearby we hear it, or when we look at a tree in sufficient light we see it, or when we bring our hand close to a fire we feel the heat. Not only do we receive sense data, apparently passively in such cases, but we go on to apply operations of the mind, as it may have been put in the eighteenth century, to arrive at cognitively meaningful propositions such as that a bell is ringing, or there is a tree over there, or the fire is ready for cooking. The point is that we should not be too quick to abandon this traditional understanding of experience, at least not entirely, because there is something to it and to an understanding of the role of experience in cognition. Not only is there this specific advantage in maintaining some version of this understanding of experience, but there is also the advantage that it allows us to avoid an excessive idealism. One of the many pitfalls into which contemporary philosophy and the humanities in general can fall is what we might call an extreme postmodernism. This happens when one abandons altogether the idea that nature possesses objective traits, and therefore that all aspects of nature, and presumably experience, are a matter of interpretation, or subjective judgment, or opinion, or some such enterprise of an experiencer. The idea that we have every reason to maintain some understanding of objectivity in nature has been developed and defended elsewhere and I need not repeat it here. Suffice it to say that we have good reason—consider pretty much all the results of natural scientific inquiry—to hold that there are traits of phenomena that do not depend on us, which is precisely what we mean by objectivity in nature. Furthermore, we have good reason, the same good reason, to hold that natural phenomena as we experience them may and generally do have traits independent of us and of their interaction or transaction with us. This is not to say that the complexes of nature possess their traits absolutely, a position that would be inconsistent with the relationality of an ordinal ontology. It is to say, rather, that the complexes of nature possess many of their traits objectively. This point is rather obvious to most people, with the exception of the occasional philosopher and literary theorist who get confused by the imaginative power of their own subjectivity (see Ryder 2013a, 30 ff). It is worthwhile to point out how this works. Natural phenomena generally possess traits or characteristics independent of their interaction with us, and

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this applies even in those cases in which they are interacting with us. In other words, the process of experience, the transaction of the self and its constitutive environment, is always a matter of relational constitution, but not every trait of all constituents in the transaction is constituted by the same relations. We need to unpack this a bit. All complexes prevail in some number of orders of relations. Any one of these orders may include a person or persons, and it may not. It is fair to say that most phenomena with which we interact, or most complexes that are constitutive of experience, are diverse in their ordinal locations and therefore in their traits. Consider for example the computer on which I am writing these words. It prevails in a fairly broad range of sets of relations, or ordinal locations. Some of them have to do with me, for example I am its owner, its specific purposes are determined by me, the data files and documents in its memory have been placed there by me, and so forth. In these respects, the complex’s traits are not objective in the sense mentioned above, but they are rather constituted by the computer’s relations with me. But at the same time the identical computer has other traits that are not constituted by its relations with me. In some cases, they are the result of complex relations with the people at Apple, or the people on the assembly lines in China where the machine was, presumably, assembled. But there are also traits that are not constituted by those people, or by any people at all. The electronics that are among the constitutive traits of the computer are matters of relations among particles and basic physical forces, and those are not created by people. They are, we can reasonably and safely say, objective. The numerically identical, which is to say the very same, computer has objective (though still relational) traits and traits constituted by relations with us because the numerically identical computer prevails in a wide range of orders of various kinds, and our ­ordinal ontology enables us to recognize both the computer’s multiplicity of orders and its individual integrity and identity. To insist on objectivity is not to abandon the humanly creative aspects of nature, and to insist on the humanly creative aspects of nature is not to abandon objectivity. This feature of the ontological situation that describes all complexes applies equally to experience. The problem with Kant’s approach, as I have said, is that it renders the world as experienced a function of constitution by a transcendental subject, which rules out of court objectivity in the sense of independence of the self in the world as experienced. The more traditional, empiricist understanding of experience as the passive reception of sense data has the virtue of leaving objectivity in the world as experienced, with in some respects Hume as an exception, and as I have shown there is good reason to do so. The problem, as I have already indicated, is that understanding experience entirely in this way is far too selective an emphasis on the degree to which experience

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is passive and anything is simply “given.” To put the point another way, the empiricist understanding of experience cannot account for Kant’s insight, which is that much of our experience is indeed a function of the creative participation of people. At the risk of some exaggeration, Kant came down wholly on the side of human creativity, and the empiricists wholly on the side of objectivity, and through misplaced emphasis both have produced inadequate conceptions of experience. This analysis has led us to bring into focus the fact that in our various approaches to experience we must often deal with dichotomies that present themselves to us. So far, the relevant dichotomies have been the objectivity and creativity, as well as activity and passivity, of experience. How well we can handle such dichotomies goes a considerable way to determining the adequacy of our understanding of experience. I turn now to a consideration of other relevant dichotomies and how we may best address them. II There is a set of dichotomies with which conceptions of experience tend to find themselves saddled, and the tendency has been to select one alternative in the dichotomy at the expense of the other. Our approach is rather more of the Yogi Berra variety (with apologies to the excessive Americanness of the allusion): “When you get to a fork in the road, take it.” In other words, that a dichotomy has tended to present itself when thought has turned to the nature of experience suggests that both choices have something to recommend them. If they did not, then the dichotomy would not have developed in the first place or have been sustained. That is not to say that because there is a dichotomy there must in the end be equal plausibility to both choices, but it is to say that as a point of analytic departure it is wise to begin by giving both dichotomous choices their due. This is what we wish to do throughout this study, and by way of preview, the result is that in the long run it is the wiser choice to take a more or less Deweyan approach. This is to say that it is often most sensible while giving each alternative its due, to recast them in a way that they are not inconsistent with one another and thus we can consistently maintain both, thereby acknowledging the good reasons there were in the first place for the alternatives to arise. Sometimes this process can result in a more or less Hegelian sort of Aufhebung, in the sense that the alternatives that constitute the dichotomy are merged into a third possibility that synthesizes them, while in other cases it is simply a matter of a bit of redefinition that allows the choices to sit comfortably together.

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I have already mentioned two of the dichotomies that commonly arise in discussions of experience: (1) objectivity and creativity, and (2) activity and passivity. Among the other commonly encountered dichotomies related to experience are (3) primary and secondary, (4) immediate and mediate, and (5) assimilative and manipulative. We may also add (6) pure and refined experience. There is a degree to which these pairs map fairly neatly onto one another. If we imagine two columns, one titled “undergoing” and the other titled “doing,” we can say that one of the pair in each of the six sets can be placed in the “undergoing” column, and the other item in each set can be placed in the “doing” column. The “undergoing” list would include objectivity, passivity, primary, immediate, assimilative, and pure, while the “doing” list includes creativity, activity, secondary, mediate, manipulative, and refined. What might this mean for how experience has been considered in our intellectual history and where we can go from here? The answer begins with the observation that the general concepts of “undergoing” and “doing,” perhaps without our fully realizing it, have been the seemingly natural terms in which we have understood experience, and we have used the other, slightly more ramified, set of alternative concepts, or sets of dichotomies, to grapple with the complexities of the doing and undergoing that we know our experience includes. It is clear, in other words, that in obvious ways aspects of the world “happen to us,” we might say; we undergo things, and experience is to some significant extent a process of undergoing. This is the meaning of “making our way” as negotiating the world we find ourselves in, as we mentioned at the beginning of the Introduction to the book. We recognize this obvious factor in experience when we ask, for example, whether this or that has ever “happened to” someone. Things happen to us; when we open our eyes, there is a world there waiting for us. We assimilate it, we receive it, it is primary and immediate in the sense that we do nothing special to make it happen or give it the character that it has; it is simply there; it is given and, we may think, sometimes pure. That a good deal of the discussion and analysis of experience in the history of philosophy makes much of, and often emphasizes, this feature of experience is perfectly understandable. It is an obvious, and in many ways and at many times, an overriding character of experience. We must promptly notice, however, that with the same confidence we can say that our experience has the character of doing or making. It may be raining outside on a given day, but the impact of that rain on how the day proceeds, and the meaning of the rainy day in a range of ways, has at least as much to do with our decisions and actions as it has to do with the rain independently of us. We make countless decisions and determinations as we go along; we do not simply receive and assimilate, but we do things with what we assimilate; we

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manipulate as much as we assimilate; we are active as much as passive; we are creative as much as receptive; we refine and ramify at least as much as we simply “notice” or absorb. A moment’s reflection on how our own time is spent makes this clear. The world may be there when we open our eyes in the morning, but we decide whether to curse the alarm clock or get out of bed with some degree of anticipation of our intentions for the day. From that moment on, experience is the transaction, the giving as well as taking, that constitutes the way we move in the world. For reasons I do not claim to understand, philosophers have been inclined to select and emphasize one of these aspects of experience at the expense of the other when developing theories of experience. Thus, the eighteenth century empiricists were taken with the passive, receptive, “giveness” in experience, while on the other side many people whom we may refer to as “postmodernists” seem to have been convinced that there is nothing we can sensibly refer to in experience that is not a matter of interpretation. And as we have seen, when someone does have the insight that there is more to experience than just receiving or inventing, Kant for example, the result is that the world of experience, and the experiencing subject, find themselves cut off epistemologically and phenomenologically from the world independent of us. Clearly, or at least it is clear to me, no approach to experience is satisfactory that argues away undergoing in order to emphasize doing, or argues away doing in order to emphasize undergoing. Reflection on our own experience suggests to us that whatever our theory of experience will look like in the end, it has to make room for objectivity and creativity, passivity and activity, the primary and the secondary, the immediate and the mediate, the assimilative and the manipulative, purity and refinement. This is our Yogi Berra moment. As a very general observation this is right, but even this is not sufficient. The reason is that because of the inappropriate emphases on the doing or undergoing in experience, there are some factors that have been misconstrued and interpreted in ways that can no longer stand. The idea of immediate experience is an example. Presumably, to be immediate is to have the character of not being mediated by anything, which is to say to be simple, or unrelated, or unconstituted, or disconnected. The problem is that none of these traits is possible of anything. I have argued at some length, in this volume and more so elsewhere, that whatever there is has the nature of a complex and is constituted by its relations. If that is a plausible and reasonable way to approach the complexes of nature, then it is impossible for anything, including experience or any element of experience, to be immediate in the sense of being entirely unmediated, simple, or unrelated. In this sense, then, there is no such thing as “immediate experience,” nor, we should point

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out, “pure experience.” All experience, and all elements of experience, are mediated and refined at least in the sense that they are, like everything else, ­constituted by their relations with other complexes and the orders of relations in which they are located. But still, the aspect of experience that the term “immediate” is pointing to has some meaning for us, even if we cannot apply a literal meaning of the term to it. When we refer to experience or an experience as immediate or pure we mean, it seems, that there is a directness or urgency to it that does not require analysis or interpretation. Its reference, signification, and importance are obvious and direct; it is rich with possibility and potential, and it calls for whatever response we feel impelled to make, without further refinement or ramification. It may not be ontologically immediate, for the reasons we have indicated, but it can be, we may say, phenomenologically immediate. To that extent, philosophers and others have used the term meaningfully, and we can continue to do so. Dewey had something to say about all this that we would be remiss to pass by without comment. In Art as Experience Dewey talks about aesthetic experience as necessarily immediate, and that it is “only a twisted and aborted logic” that can say that because something is mediated it cannot therefore be immediately experienced (Dewey 1987, 123 and 125). At the risk of engaging in just such twisted and aborted logic, we want to say that there is literally no such thing as “immediate experience” not just because every experience is mediated but because every experience is a complex and therefore inherently relational. Dewey’s point, to phrase it slightly differently, is that because an experience is relational it does not follow that it is not direct. I can have a direct experience, what Dewey means by an “immediate” experience, of a snowstorm if I am in the middle of one. That the storm and my experience of it are complexes relationally constituted does not alter the directness of the experience. If this is indeed what Dewey means, then there is no problem. It would be better, though, not to speak of “immediacy” in this case. Whether it is appropriate to say, even given a willingness to speak of immediacy in the sense of directness, that an aesthetic experience must be immediate is of course a different question. I do not see why we would say this, if for no other reason than that every experience is directly of something, and presumably not every experience is an aesthetic experience. That said, Dewey’s tendency to use a term that we prefer to avoid is insignificant next to the important point that he wants to make, and in this we fully agree with Dewey and, we may add, with James. Experience is not of parts or elements, though they too can be objects of experience, but rather it is of the object experienced. We directly or immediately “see” not merely a color and “smell” not merely an odor and “feel” not merely a tactile sensation, and then

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indirectly or mediately a flower; on the contrary, we see, smell, and feel a flower. The flower is experienced, not its parts, other than through and as a result of the experience. This is really the force of Dewey’s interest in the “immediacy” of experience, and of this he is surely right. We have to forget our childhoods entirely in a fit of adult, analytic fixation to say that a child does not have as the object of experience the dirt in which he rolls, and the grass and the stones. Of course, we can also experience a color, shape, sound, smell, taste, and texture, but those are different experiences than the experience of an ­object that has a particular color, shape, sound, smell, taste, and texture The general point about mediacy and immediacy suggests to us that the pairs or characteristics of experience turn out not to be contraries or inconsistent with one another, but rather correlative. We have argued that ontologically nature, which is to say the complexes of nature, is both objective and created, and that they have both traits without contradiction. That fact allows us to understand that in experience objectivity and creativity are two sides of the same phenomenological coin. We do not experience at all without them both. The same is true of the other pairs. There is no experience at all without assimilation and manipulation, without the immediate and the mediate, without passivity and activity, without the primary and secondary, and without the pure and refined. Where the terms require revision in our understanding, as in the case of “immediate experience,” as with “primary” and “pure” experience as well, those revisions should and can be accomplished in such a way as to retain the initial sense and import of the terms while allowing them to sit comfortably with their correlative. There are kinds of experiences, we should point out, that seem to require an emphasis on one of a pair of correlatives over the other. Death comes to mind as an example. In most cases death happens to us, generally with our disapproval. It is something we undergo rather than do, even in the case of suicide. While we may notice, then, a stronger than usual call of passivity in the understanding of the experience of death, even here we need to be careful not to jump to conclusions. We may, for example, understand death not as a momentary event but as a process, in which case it becomes more obvious that even a dying person, or perhaps especially a dying person, may and often does play an active role in the process. This can occur not only in our struggle with the meaning of our own death, but in the ways we anticipate and plan for the process itself and its post-mortem implications. Even something that as obviously as death happens to us turns out to have as much of an active, creative, “doing” dimension as other experiential moments (see Pihlström 2016). The fact that experience is characterized by all of this is what it means to refer to experience as a transaction between the self and the world one is in, or

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of which one is a part. In this respect, we find ourselves filling in the Deweyan, pragmatic naturalist understanding of what it is to experience. I have so far remained at a highly general level, though now that I have distinguished experience at that general level from other and competing ways of understanding it, I can turn to greater specificity in the conception of experience I wish to develop. There are two further aspects of experience that I want to pursue at this point. The first is the proposal that in experience we find three distinct dimensions that give experience its character and without which we would not fully comprehend what it is to be an experiencing subject, which is to say what it is to be a person. The second is the theory of judgment which, as will become clear as I proceed, will provide a richness and depth to our understanding of experience that it would otherwise lack. I turn now to the first of these aspects of experience, which are its three dimensions. III To put the point directly, experience has three dimensions: cognitive, aesthetic, and political. Our first task is to differentiate what we mean by dimensions from other traits of experience, or kinds of experiences, with which they might be confused. There are three categories to keep in mind, and to make an effort not to conflate. If the distinction among them is not retained, then the overall theory of experience loses its cohesion. The three categories are the dimensions, constituents, and forms of experience. There are important features of experience that are easily identifiable and with which we are all familiar. Language is one such feature, as are emotions, and as is imagination. Features of experience like language, emotions, and imagination are important for understanding people and people’s experience, but they are not themselves dimensions of experience in the sense meant here. With respect to language, it is not necessary to point out that for many philosophers, and for many years, language has been the pivotal point around which they have constructed their understanding of human being, experience, indeed for some people all of philosophy. There cannot be any doubt of the centrality of language to human being, and of the fact that much of how we experience is structured to some degree by language, and presumably differently by different languages. Despite its importance, however, it is not the case that language points to or depicts a dimension of experience.

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We could say of the aesthetic, to offer one illustration, that any experience has the potential, in and for its development or fulfillment, to acquire or reach an aesthetic character. This is the reason Dewey can say, for example, that when we enjoy any sort of experience we are taking up or appreciating its aesthetic dimension. But we could not say such a thing about language. Many experiences are linguistic, but there is no compelling sense in saying that any experience in its fulfillment or developing richness becomes linguistic. Many experiences are not linguistic at all, whether in their initial phases or in their fulfillment—perfecting a putt or a pas de deux, or lying under a tree on a sunny fall day, or walking down the street. There is at both the relatively immediate and the refined stages an aesthetic character to even these quotidian events, but there is nothing in any plausible sense linguistic about them. As important as language is for experience and for our lives, it is not a dimension of experience in the sense that the aesthetic, or for that matter the cognitive and the political, are. We can say much the same about the emotional aspects of our lives and experience. Like the linguistic, the emotional is profoundly important, but it is not pervasive or ubiquitous as the three dimensions of experience are. The only way we could say that emotions are as central is if we were to regard all meaningful reaction, which amounts to all meaningful engagement, as emotion or emotional because it is meaningful. But this would be as odd as regarding all structured activity to be language or linguistic simply because it is structured. Not every reaction or judgment is an emotional one, nor is emotion necessary either as point of departure or as a fulfillment of an experience. And we have a similar issue with imagination. A great deal of what we do and how we react involves, or revolves around, or incorporates, or depends on, imagination in much the way it does on language and/or emotion. But imagination is no more a dimension of experience than are language or emotion. We might well say that imagination is an important aspect in the construction of meaning with respect to experience or to an experience, if only in so far as meaning is related to ends and purposes, and ends and purposes are the result of imaginative construction. But this is still a different function in experience than that which we designate a dimension of experience. If language, emotion, and imagination are not dimensions of experience, what then are they? We might say with some confidence that they are constituents of experience in that many experiences require one or more of them to be what they are. Experiences that are richly emotional would simply not be the same experiences in the absence of emotion—one’s life with a loved one, for example. Similarly, linguists and philosophers have developed in great detail

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the ways language can structure experience in those cases in which it is relevant, which would surely entitle us to regard language as a constituent of experience. We have also just pointed out that imagination is critical in the meaning of experiences, also surely therefore a constituent. Moreover, constituents of experience in this sense can be determinative of the character of a given experience. To say that language, emotion, and imagination are constituents of experience is not to diminish their impact and centrality in the characterization of experiences or in determining their importance in any particular respect. It is, simply, to acknowledge that they play a role in experience that is significantly different than what we call the dimensions of experience. We want, then, to distinguish between constituents of experience and dimensions of experience. We also need to distinguish forms of experience. One may, for example, talk of religious experience as a form or category of experience. Other examples may be multiplied without difficulty: social experience, romantic experience, historical experience, personal experience, military experience, international experience, sexual experience, athletic experience, ethical experience, professional experience, play, etc. We will have occasion to refer to many of these forms of experience throughout this study, as we refer to them regularly in our lives and normal conversation. For the purposes of analysis and this inquiry, however, we need to be careful to keep in mind the distinction among dimensions, constituents, and forms of experience. Each has its own set of traits, its own varieties, as James made clear with respect to religious experience, and each contributes to the character of experience generally in its own ways. It would be helpful to see that rather than confuse language, emotions, and imagination with the dimensions of experience, we realize that a more thorough understanding of the dimensions of experience leads to more varied and developed conceptions of language, emotions, and imagination. Once we take experience as suffused in comparable ways with the cognitive, aesthetic, and the political, we can ask the question how this fact impacts language and the way it functions. Several implications come readily to mind. First, if experience is fundamentally and equally cognitive, aesthetic, and political, we can expect that something as important in our experience as language will also have these same traits or functions, and in more or less equal measure. If that is the case, then a second implication comes to mind, which is that we must be careful not to emphasize one of those aspects of language at the expense of the others, at least not generally. It has been fairly common, among philosophers at any rate, to emphasize in ways that turn out to be exaggerations the cognitive role of language, usually in its propositional form. We tend to think of language as

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proposing or describing, and thus linguistic utterances come to be taken to be propositions with truth value. Philosophers have to their credit recognized that language also has a performative function, but the reason for and importance of that is generally unnoticed. The reason is that in its performative role language expresses the dimension of power that suffuses language in the first place, and experience generally through its political dimension. It should also make us realize that too much of an emphasis on the propositional and descriptive function of language exaggerates one aspect of language at the expense of other of its capacities. If we find that language embodies in its propositional character some sense of the cognitive, and in its performative function the political, we ought not to be surprised to see that language just as much, and just as importantly for an understanding of language, also expresses the aesthetic. We will have the occasion to look at this point again, but we can see already that once we realize that language expresses or embodies the aesthetic dimension of experience, largely though not exclusively in its literary use, our sense of literature in general, and fiction and poetry specifically, becomes more rich and comprehensible. Some philosophers who have wondered about the question of truth in literature, for example, have stumbled on the question because they have approached linguistic utterance as propositional and laden with propositional truth-value. They consequently have been led to say things like that the statements in a literary work are all false because they are fictional. But consider how thin must be one’s conception of language to arrive at such a point of view. When we realize that language works in several ways, such that it can express the aesthetic in experience no less than the cognitive and the political, it becomes much more likely that we can follow the richness of the many uses of language without the distortion that arises when we think that all the uses of lan­guage must be of one sort or another. We can go further. Not only are we able to see that language expresses or embodies the cognitive, aesthetic, and the political dimensions of experience, but it is also sufficiently flexible to engage them in their complex relations with one another. Again, we will have occasion in later chapters to consider this point in more detail, but because of the dimensions of experience, and because language is as important as it is, it is able to express the cognitive even in the aesthetic and the political, the political in the cognitive and the aesthetic, and the aesthetic in the cognitive and political. To make the point less obscurely, it turns out that language in its aesthetic function also has a cognitive character, and it participates in the power that one finds throughout experience itself. Literature, in other words, has cognitive and political sides, and language in its primarily cognitive role, for example in a work of philosophy, may have

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an aesthetic character, just as language in its performative, broadly political function can be cognitive and aesthetic. When we undertake a study of language we should do so, we may say, without removing language from its home in our experience. Once we realize that its experiential ground has cognitive, aesthetic, and political dimensions, we are freed, indeed required, to seek those traits in the complex and varied functions language performs in our lives. The net effect is that our understanding of language is vastly enriched and improved. The same is to be said of emotions. Emotions are at least as central and critical an aspect of our lives as is language, and so we can expect the character of emotions and of our emotional lives to be framed by the dimensions of experience just as we expect it of language. Whatever else our empirical and theoretical examination of emotions reveals, and there is plenty for it to reveal, it will be to our advantage to look out for the cognitive, aesthetic, and political aspects of emotions. It may sound a bit odd to talk about emotions in these terms, but that is no doubt due to the fact that we have not yet sufficiently appreciated the facts that experience is characterized by these three dimensions and that emotions can be expected to be similarly expressed. The emotional constituents of experience, just as their linguistic cousins, can and do have cognitive capacities. Certainly, it is true that emotion can obscure understanding, but it can also enable it. Attraction to a person, for example, can make it possible for us to perceive and comprehend traits of that person that we might not have grasped otherwise. Similarly, the relation between the aesthetic and our emotional responses is well known, but now we can see that among the reasons for it is that emotion embodies the aesthetic dimension of experience generally. The political, which is to say the power-inflected, aspect of emotions is also not something strange. It is common enough in our experience that in order to accomplish a given end it is not enough simply to want it or to know how to do it; frequently the power to achieve our goals requires a commitment and dedication that is itself an emotional response to the situation. It is this very relation between emotion on the one hand, and on the other hand power and knowledge as dimensions of experience, that James so insightfully saw in what he called the “will to believe.” The point is not so much that when we approach emotions in the context of the dimensions of experience we discover something about them that we did not already know. Rather the point is that when we examine emotions, and this should be the case whether we are undertaking an empirical, psychological or anthropological study or a theoretical, philosophical inquiry, what we know hangs together more satisfactorily than it otherwise might because we have a clearer grasp of the experiential ground of emotions and we therefore

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begin to look for those ways in which emotions reflect our experiential dimensions. Moreover, as in the case of language, we can expect to encounter in emotions, emotional states, and emotional responses the kind of mixed features that we found in linguistic utterance. So, for example, it will not be surprising to see in aesthetically tinged emotions a related capacity or ability that reflects the aspect of power, or along similar lines an emotional response that proves to be cognitively significant may at the same time possess an aesthetic charge. We will begin to see that these features of our emotional lives are what they are in some measure because emotional experience partakes of the cognitive, ­aesthetic, and political dimensions that we find to characterize experience generally.3 Imagination too proves to be an interesting case in point. As Dewey mentions (Dewey 1987, 37), there is an aesthetic need for satisfaction of the imagination. And this is only one side of the role of imagination in art, the other, obviously, being the fact that imagination is often if not always a critical moment in the production of a work of any artistic medium. In a similar way, imagination is often if not always a crucial stage in the process of query and inquiry. This is obvious enough on a moment’s reflection. The very process of generating theory is imaginative to its core, as is what we may properly refer to as imagining how a hypothesis might be tested. One way to understand what it means to make discoveries is to see or somehow encompass a subject matter in a way that has not been done before. The novelty that makes something a discovery and not merely a repetition arises through an imaginative act. Power and the political are no different. To solve a problem in anything other than a haphazard way or by chance is to imagine its solution, to see our way to a ­problem’s resolution clearly enough to guide us in our actions. Power can require imagination as can art and knowledge, and as in the cases of language and emotions, the reason is that the human capacity to imagine resides in an experiential ground that has these very political, aesthetic, and cognitive dimensions.4

3 An understanding of the many ways that emotions engage and express the dimensions of experience is enhanced by a number of recent studies of the history of emotions. One of them, which is of particular interest because it explores the topic through a specific historical event, in this case the French Revolution, is William M. Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (2001). A comparable point can be made about the work on emotions, the body, and enactive cinema by Lyubov Bugaeva (see, Bugaeva 2013). 4 For an intriguing study of imagination see Asma 2017. This work is especially interesting in relation to our analysis because the book explores the place of imagination in relation to many of the elements of our own approach to experience—language, knowledge, etc.

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We have now taken the initial steps in distinguishing constituents, forms, and dimensions of experience. The remainder of the book is an effort to fill out these ideas in terms of their meaning and their import. Dewey makes the point that traditionally what we now regard as works of art, and consequently what we take to be aesthetically significant, was once an integral aspect of people’s lives. Modern economic conditions and globalization have removed art from daily life and placed it in museums, and thereby has created the idea that art and the aesthetic is something removed from life. His point about the pervasiveness of the aesthetic in experience is that the aesthetic belongs to normal experience, and in fact it continues to pervade experience, as it once did in more obvious ways. This pervasiveness is part of what we mean by the aesthetic as a dimension of experience. We want to say something similar about the pervasiveness of the cognitive and the political in experience. If art has been removed from daily life and placed in museums, then knowledge, wisdom, and insight have similarly been removed from daily life and placed in schools, universities, and designated education, training, and information centers. Dewey understood this when he said that education is not preparation for life but is life itself. It is not something that can be removed from daily experience, without distorting it, any more than can art be removed from daily experience without impeding our sense of it. Knowledge, and by implication wisdom and insight, are as much aspects of ordinary life as is the aesthetic. That people may tend to think of learning as something that goes on in schools is an unfortunate byproduct of the artificial break between experience and cognition. A moment’s reflection, though, makes it clear that such a break is artificial and in fact contrary to everyone’s normal experience. We learn, we experiment, we gain understanding and insight, routinely and regularly, usually without effort. It requires effort to synthesize knowledge and to systematize its production, as it requires effort to refine our aesthetic sensibilities and skills in the creation of aesthetic objects and actions. But the fact that refinement requires effort is no reason to think that knowledge and art are not regular, routine, and definitive dimensions of experience. This is not to say that everything we do generates knowledge, any more than to say that the pervasive aesthetic character in experience means that everything we do generates art. Often enough we encounter or produce decidedly unartistic objects and events, and often enough we generate or encounter falsehoods. All this means simply that we do not derive satisfactory conceptions of knowledge by merely watching what people do, any more than we derive adequate conceptions of art from watching what attracts people or what they like or value. It does mean, though, that just as an adequate

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c­ onception of art must take full account of how art and the aesthetic permeate experience, which was Dewey’s point in Art as Experience, an adequate conception of knowledge, and by implication truth, must take account of the way the cognitive permeates experience. This also implies that a purely formalist enterprise in aesthetics is inevitably insufficient in that by definition it abstracts from the experiential environment in which the aesthetic resides. Similarly, a formalist epistemology, which is precisely how we might describe much of recent and current analytic studies of knowledge, is invariably insufficient in that it abstracts knowledge and truth from its experiential home. To understand experience adequately we have to come to terms with its cognitive dimension, and to understand knowledge and truth adequately we need to reconnect them to their place in daily experience. And so it is with power. In the way that art has been tucked away in museums, and knowledge shelved in schools and libraries, power has been relegated to institutions, typically state institutions. Of course, we can find instances of power and its exercise outside of state institutions, for example in any hierarchy, but we can also find art on the walls of people’s living rooms and in boardrooms, and we can find knowledge at work in the accomplishment of any complex activity. But to acknowledge those points without going on to spell out the experiential environment of art, knowledge, and now power, still leaves us with a disconnected sense of each. And like art and knowledge, power pervades experience, maybe even to a greater extent than the others. Though not all experience has to be about solving problems, the great insight of the early pragmatists, and one of the central ideas of pragmatism ever since, was that solving problems is, we may say, what moves us. Solving problems is more than anything else a continuous feature of human life and experience. To the extent that problem solving is at the heart of much of what we do, experience is from the outset a matter of power, specifically the power to solve problems, or to make things happen, to make our way. Without an appreciation of the centrality and role of power in experience we cannot appreciate and understand power even as it functions in its institutional settings, just as we do not come to satisfactory terms with art and the aesthetic by engaging them in museums. An appreciation of how power works in daily experience enables a more careful and thorough understanding of power and the political, as much as it helps us to achieve a richer and more satisfactory conception of experience. The theory of experience that identifies three dimensions, then, requires that we pursue three related questions with respect to each dimension. With respect to the cognitive dimension, for example, we need to clarify (1) how the cognitive functions as a dimension of experience, (2) how experience embodies and expresses its cognitive dimension, and (3) how the cognitive d­ imension

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of experience is related to the other two. The answers to these questions will enable a much more thorough and adequate understanding of knowledge and truth, as will the answers to the comparable questions about the aesthetic and political dimensions generate a greater understanding of art and power respectively. And taken together, collectively the answers to the questions will provide a theory of experience that is more satisfactory than we have had to date. How do we account for the complexity of functions we encounter in experience? For example, we have said that language can be encountered, or put to use, in its cognitive, aesthetic, or political functions. And we have noticed the same with respect to emotions and to imagination. In each—language, emotion, and imagination—we are engaged in an activity that presents a number of possibilities to us, possibilities that we have the ability to actualize or not. When we actualize them, we are expressing one of the two sides of experience that have been discussed, specifically the creative, manipulative, active side. We are, in these cases, doing something in experience that enables us to engage language cognitively, aesthetically or politically, and similarly with emotion and imagination. The doing, the manipulating, is the way we have of selecting certain possibilities over others for engagement. This process or activity of selection is what Justus Buchler called judgment. If we manipulate in experience, and if that manipulation is selective judgment, and if the possibilities that present themselves in experience are the cognitive, aesthetic, and political, as we have seen in the cases of language, emotions, and imagination, then we are in need of a theory of judgment that can account for how we are able to select in these and just these ways. Buchler’s theory of judgment provides just the material we need. In a sense, the theory of judgment describes something like the mechanism whereby the active, creative character of experience happens; it furthermore enables us to understand how it is that experience is characterized by the three dimensions of the cognitive, aesthetic, and political. It provides, in the end, an avenue through which we can achieve a more satisfactory understanding of experience in general and in some of its details. IV One of the difficulties the theory of judgment faces is the use of the term “judgment.” In its common usage, it expresses an explicit, conscious evaluation, one that rates an option preferable or superior in some relevant way to one or more alternatives; in its legal use, it denotes a final decision or verdict; it can mean

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an opinion or a conclusion; and as a character trait it suggests a degree of good sense or wisdom. In a well-known technical, Kantian sense, judgment is an ascription of a trait to a subject, as in a sensory judgment that something is tasty, or an ethical judgment that a particular action is good. With these and other senses of the word “judgment” available to us, and in common use, it can seem unnecessarily confusing to introduce yet another. The possible confusion is compounded by the claim we want to make here, specifically that what we pick out in the theory of judgment is critical to an understanding of how experience works, indeed of what experience is. While fully acknowledging these possible difficulties and potential for misunderstanding, I nevertheless adopt Buchler’s terminology and refer to judgment and the theory of judgment. There are two reasons for doing this. One of them is simply that this is the terminology that Buchler used, and it would be misleading to appropriate the ideas but call them something else. The second and perhaps more important reason for continuing to use the term “judgment” as we will here is that there is importantly a consistency between this use of the term and many of the more traditional and common uses. There are differences to be sure. One of them is that it is simply not common to refer to the constructive side of experience as judgment; another is that in common usage judgments tend to be conscious, while in our approach they need not be; traditionally judgments are one form of creative engagement with the environment, whereas we use the term to refer to all such creative engagement; in some traditional uses judgment is a proposition or commentary on something or anything, whereas for us a judgment is not a commentary, though it could be, but rather is the creative engagement itself; traditionally to judge is to render an explicit evaluation, often ethical or aesthetic, whereas in our case judgment is not necessarily explicit and it is not necessarily an ethical or aesthetic evaluation. With all these differences in meaning, one would be justified in asking what the consistency between traditional and our uses of the term “judgment” may be such that I am justified in continuing to use it. The answer is that judgment in our sense continues to pick out an evaluation in the sense of a selection. Moreover, this ongoing, never ending process of selection and evaluation is so central to the process we call experience that “judgment” in the sense of selection is precisely the term that we need. So, by judgment we mean to point to the fact that in the innumerable occasions in which we engage with our environment, in all of the ways in which we are making our way, we are taking part in complex processes of selecting among the often many available alternatives for propositional commentary, for demonstration, or simply for action, that are available to us. Sometimes these evaluations and selections are conscious,

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though sometimes not; sometimes they are explicit, though sometimes not; sometimes they are novel, though sometimes they are habitual; sometimes they involve normative matters, though sometimes not; sometimes they are susceptible to attributions of truth or falsity, though often not. It is the centrality of judgment in these senses to experience itself that justifies our using the term to refer to the selection and evaluation that lies at the heart of creativity in experience. It is incumbent upon us to be careful to avoid misunderstandings in its use and in its interpretation as we proceed. If we are sufficiently careful, we will, so the argument goes, be able to achieve a more satisfactory understanding of the creative side of experience, of the dimensions of experience, and therefore of experience generally. So “judgment” as I am here using the term differs from Kant’s and from other traditional uses of it, specifically in ways that make it appropriate within the relational, transactional conception of experience that we are exploring. Judgment in my usage is our interaction with our environment such that products of various kinds result; or to put it differently, judgment is our experience in so far as we produce. As I have said many times, experience in this sense is the mutually constitutive, relational interaction between a person and the environment, the surroundings, and that interaction in very general terms involves action and reaction, activity and passivity, manipulation and assimilation. In some respects, we absorb features of our environment, an aspect of experience that the traditional empiricists saw but overemphasized, and in other respects we craft our experience, an aspect that Kant saw but misconstrued as a largely mental process. Judgment, I suggest, is the mutually constitutive process that constitutes an individual’s experience in so far as it issues in products. Judgment is not a mental event or decision that precedes production; it is the production itself. To judge, then, is to produce, and we do so in three general ways: assertively, exhibitively, and actively (Buchler 1951, 1955, 1974). When Kant spoke about judgment, I suspect that he had in mind something like what I mean by assertive judgment. We judge assertively when we make a truth claim in a standard sense of the term, or when we attribute a trait to a subject. Assertive judgment tends to be propositional, and our assertive judgments tend to express propositions about a state of affairs, and about which we can typically say they are true or false in this or that respect. Though there is no necessary connection, assertive judgments tend to be linguistic. The point is made that there is no necessary connection because not all linguistic judgments are assertive and not all assertive judgments must be linguistic, but assertive judgments tend to be linguistic, and for the most part linguistic judgments tend to be assertive. Descriptions, for example, are

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t­ypically assertive judgments, as are philosophical analyses, as are treatises in history, sociology, or literary criticism. They consist of propositions that assert something about a subject matter, and to which we can generally assign truth-value. Philosophers have understood that such propositions need not be linguistic because we have for a long time recognized the propositional character of formal logical statements and mathematical utterances, to give two examples of non-linguistic propositions. Both typically assert, and to that extent they are assertive judgments. By identifying and characterizing the assertive form of judgment in this way we open up the possibility of approaching cognition differently than has typically been the case, indeed it enables us to develop our sense of the cognitive dimension of experience. The reason is not that cognition and assertion are identical, or even that each requires or implies the other, but that the two overlap extensively in our experience. In fact, they overlap so extensively that historically, and even in some contemporary philosophy, we have been tempted to conflate them, or at least to assume that cognition requires assertions and propositions and that it is only assertions and propositions that can be cognitive. These approaches to assertion and cognition are misleading not because there is not a close relation between the two but because it is not as close as traditionally thought. Much of our cognitive engagement with the world does take the form of assertive judgment, and by identifying assertive judgment as we have, we can understand more closely how and why that is, which is to say how the cognitive dimension of experience functions in experience generally. At the same time, by making it clear that the assertive is not the only form of judgment, we allow ourselves to see a broader role for judgment and a broader range of cognitive judgments. The result, not surprisingly, is that we are able to understand both assertive judgment and cognition more carefully than we have been able to without the theory of judgment. Philosophy has been mistaken, then, in allowing assertive, propositional judgment to stand in for the human function of judgment as a whole. It has been a mistake because there are other forms of judgment that are not assertive and are not propositional. Moreover, by recognizing only one form of judgment philosophy has forced itself into an inadequate understanding of cognition and truth, among other things, which in turn has distorted our understanding of aesthetics and art, and, as I will show, power, has truncated our understanding of experience generally. The second mode in which people judge is the exhibitive. If the assertive mode is that sort of judgment in which we organize natural material to assert propositional truths about things, then the exhibitive is that mode of judgment in which we organize natural material to show something about the

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world. I demonstrated that the human activity most typically associated with assertive judgment is the linguistic and suggest, similarly, the human activity most typically associated with exhibitive judgment is the visual and performing arts. We typically assert linguistically, and we typically exhibit in painting, drawing, sculpture, installations, film, and performances of various kinds. But as in the relation between assertive judgment and language, judgment in the visual or performing arts is neither necessary nor sufficient for exhibitive judgment. We may judge exhibitively through language, examples of which are poetry and literature generally, and we may through the visual or performing arts judge assertively, as in for example an overtly political poster that through a visual image asserts a clear political proposition. But still, the visual and performing arts are paradigmatic instances of exhibitive judgment in the way that linguistic utterances are the paradigmatic instances of assertive judgment. Because of this relation between exhibitive judgment and the arts, the ability to identify the exhibitive mode of judgment that this general theory of judgment makes possible will take us a long way toward a more satisfactory understanding of the aesthetic dimension of experience generally, and more specifically aesthetics, aesthetic theory, and art, as we will see in subsequent chapters. When we look more closely at the relation between the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions of experience, for example, we will be able to correct a long-standing philosophical mistake of associating knowledge with propositions and therefore not with art. A faulty understanding of judgment has played havoc with our epistemology, with our aesthetic theories, and with our understanding of how knowledge works, how art does what it does, and as I will show, with how power works in experience. Our conception of judgment will help us correct some of these traditional deficiencies. Before I go on to develop these points more fully, I need to introduce the third mode of judgment, which is the active. One of the ways we produce is in our actions themselves. To walk down the street, to turn in one direction or another, to cook dinner, to shoot a basket or kick a goal, to watch others do those things, to attend a concert or film—these are all ways in which we interact with our environment, and they are themselves judgments and products. They do not involve assertions, nor do they exhibit or show anything. Nevertheless, they are a way that we select from the possibilities and actualities presented to us, a way that we manipulate our environment and produce our experience. They are, in other words, active judgments. Active judgments are exercises in power, distinct from other forms of judgment because they are not assertive or exhibitive. In them, however, we engage the world, we select among options and alternatives, and we manipulate and create. The active mode of judgment is, we may say, the expression of power

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most obviously and overtly. Some philosophers have tempted to think that assertion is commentary that need have no effect on the world. Wittgenstein famously said that philosophy leaves everything as it is (Wittgenstein 1953, §124). He was wrong about that, if only because the judgment that constitutes philosophical analysis is productive and therefore is constitutive of, and changes, in some measure experience and the world, but he was able to think and say it because assertive judgment can easily give the impression of being outside the push and pull of things. Similarly, exhibitive judgment in the form of works of art and the process of artistic production is often described as expression, something that if relevant at all is relevant to the individual engaged in the expression. This, like the sense of assertion as floating above or alongside life, is understood, or too often understood, as something distinct from the ongoing engagement that constitutes our lives from moment to moment. But this too is mistaken, even if understandable. Exhibitive judgment engages the world no less than does the assertive. This is one of the reasons Dewey could rightly say that art and the aesthetic have their home in normal, daily experience. In active judgment, however, there is not even a temptation to think that it goes on outside of the bubbling comings and goings of life and experience. In action we judge no less than in assertion and exhibition because in all three cases we are similarly evaluating and selecting among options and alternatives, and in doing so crafting our experience. If in the assertive mode we judge in ways that point us to cognition and knowledge, and if in the exhibitive mode we judge in ways that point us to the aesthetic and art, in the active mode we judge in ways that highlight the political and power. In practice, the three modes of judgment are not cleanly separable, and it is important to understand that in experience the three dimensions of experience are not cleanly separable either. Just as our creative engagement with the world is characterized by ongoing processes of assertive, exhibitive, and active judgments that interweave and overlap, so experience is characterized by the three dimensions of the cognitive, the aesthetic, and the political, that overlap and interweave in similar ways. In this respect, the theory of judgment is central to an understanding of experience and its dimensions. One way to approach the overlap of the modes of judgment is to realize that often enough a judgment may function in more than one mode. A dance, for example, is an active judgment, but it is also a manipulation of elements of our environment that exhibits something. We frequently call such a product an expression of the dancer or choreographer’s intentions of one kind or another, but what is exhibited in such a case need not be an expression, or anyway not only an expression in that artists may do something more or other than express in their art. In any case, a dance is an active judgment that is also

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e­ xhibitive. To offer a different example, sometimes a linguistic utterance can be an assertive and an active judgment. Consider, for example, a man who wants to express the depth of his feelings to his lover. He may tell her that she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, and when he says this he is both stating how she appears to him and he is proclaiming his love for her; he is in such a case judging in two modes, the assertive and the active. A judgment may also judge assertively and exhibitively at the same time. We mentioned earlier the example of a political poster, or perhaps an even clearer example would be a painting with an explicit message. Guernica, for example, is quite evidently an exhibitive judgment in its unique and distinctive selection of elements of experience and their arrangement on a canvas, and at the same time it is equally clearly an assertion about the horrors of war. An additional element in the theory of judgment is a conception of inquiry and of query generally. Judgment takes place in one or more of three modes, as we have seen, and it occurs for a range of reasons and purposes. Sometimes the reason is interrogative in the sense that we have a question of some kind. If our interrogation of the subject matter at hand is in such cases undertaken methodically and systematically, we have an instance of what we may, following Buchler, generally call query. Query is the methodic manipulation of elements of a situation such that an exploration of some kind is undertaken. We may want to answer a specific question, or gain information about or greater familiarity with a specific topic or situation, or we may want to see what happens when we do this or that. There are many reasons we may wish to explore a subject or topic, and when we do so methodically and systematically, we are engaging in query. Inquiry, we may say, is a species of query in that it is a specific kind of exploration; it is exploration in an assertive mode. In an instance of inquiry we put a question, literally, and then explore the subject matter with an eye toward answering the question. There are differing forms of exploration that may be considered cases of inquiry. We may, for example, construct and undertake experiments, if the question or questions we wish to answer are of the appropriate kind. We might explore rationally rather than experimentally or empirically, as we typically do in cases of philosophical questions and as we are doing now. The questions may be mathematical, in which case the query takes the form of mathematical analysis or proofs, or they may be historical, in which case we gather relevant empirical material that we then organize in ways that ideally provide justifiable responses to our question. In all such cases, we put a question and methodically explore until we achieve a result, which will be an assertive judgment or a complex of assertive judgments.

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The critical point for my argument is to realize that not all query is a case of inquiry because not all exploration or interrogation takes place in an assertive mode. We may explore a topic, question, issue, or idea in such a way that the results of our exploration are not assertions or propositions, but active or exhibitive judgments. This is the sort of query undertaken in a modern dance, for example, wherein the choreographer is interested in exploring the possibilities of juxtaposing certain movements; or in a piece of sculpture where the sculptor has certain formal spatial problems in mind; or in a piece of music where the compositional challenge is to work with specific harmonic or rhythmic factors. In such cases the results of the methodic exploration are not propositions or other forms of assertive judgments, but rather they are showings of some kind. They are, typically, exhibitive judgments, though no less cases of query than exploration done in an assertive mode. It is equally true that query can be undertaken in an active mode. When a golfer works deliberatively on improving her skills with a driver or a chauffeur explores the best way to reach point B from point A, there is methodic query. As in cases of query in the arts, methodic, interrogative activity of this kind should not be confused with inquiry. It should also not be confused with artistic query because there is not necessarily anything aesthetic about the process of active query. There can be aesthetically relevant judgments related to the process, when for example the golfer becomes so proficient that her use of the driver takes on a certain beauty appropriate to that activity. In that case the swing can have an aesthetic character, but the process of query through which the skill was developed is different from the process of artistic query, and both differ from the inquiry related to assertive judgments. These distinctions are important for several reasons. They will allow us to get a much clearer understanding of the place of query and inquiry in experience. In this context, I will address a view that Dewey held that turns out not to be satisfactory, namely that all experience is imbued with inquiry. It will allow us to understand better the differences and similarities between science and art, a point on which more than a few people have stumbled over the years. It will also enable us to see more clearly the forms of query appropriate to different sorts of judgments. For example, it is sometimes said that a work of art may “argue” for a particular point, but this turns out not to be an adequate formulation. The idea is that art may wish to make a case for a certain idea or evaluation, which is true enough, but to understand how that works as a species of argument is to confuse assertive and exhibitive judgment, and query and inquiry, and therefore to muddle rather than clarify the situation. The idea of query, and an understanding of the differences in the forms query takes

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r­ elative to the three modes of judgment, helps us to clear up these and similar issues, and they generally help to fill out the theory of judgment, our approach to the creative aspect of experience, and our understanding of experience as a whole. There are, then, several conceptual advantages of this theory of judgment. One of them is that it helps us to understand better the ways in which experience is productive. Kant had shown one way, but his understanding limited the creative capacity of judgment to transcendental conditions of experience, and to mental processes. But the ways we assimilate, and more importantly manipulate, the complexes of our environment in experience are more numerous and varied than that. Our judgments are not necessarily mental processes, as we have seen; they are not necessarily conscious; they are not necessarily cognitive; and when they are exploratory, they are so in various differing ways. The novelty and creativity in nature, and the role of people in generating that novelty and creativity in experience, is far more diverse and varied than Kant and most others have realized, and the theory of judgment is an effort to illustrate and understand that fact about our experience. V We will close this chapter with a somewhat closer look at how and why the three modes of judgment are related to the three dimensions of experience, aside from there simply being three in each case. Each of the dimensions of experience describes or points to specific aspects of and possibilities within and for our ongoing experience generally, as well as for individual experiences. The cognitive dimension of experience is most closely identified with description, knowledge, truth, and possibilities. The many ways that we encounter and engender knowledge, for example observation, experimentation, argument, and inference, are also to be associated with the cognitive dimension of experience. The general idea is that one of the ways in which experience occurs, we might say, or similarly one of the forms in which experience expresses itself, to speak more metaphorically, is cognitive;  and this cognitive dimension of experience encompasses the many forms of knowledge and experiential conditions related to knowledge and its achievement. This point will be developed in much greater detail in the next chapter, but we can begin to sketch the general idea here. We do not mean to say that all experience, or that every experience when we choose to individuate them, is cognitive. We similarly do not mean to say that all experience and experiences are aesthetic or political. But more than the forms and constituents of John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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e­ xperience, the cognitive dimension of experience is pervasive in the sense that knowledge pervasively, if not uniformly, characterizes experience. This is not true of language, or emotion, or religious experience, or any of the constituents and forms of experience. Cognition, by contrast, characterizes the very fact of our lives, which is to say the fact that we experience at all. It is knowledge, and everything that accompanies it—reason, experiment, truth— that enables experience and our lives to have a contour, to move forward. It is this character of experience that makes it sensible for the pragmatists to have said from the beginning that knowledge is related to problem solving, and that experience itself is defined by ongoing problematic situations through which we work our way. This is the sense in which knowledge and its corollaries are a dimension of and pervade experience. All experience is not necessarily cognitive, but all experience is cognitively pregnant and enables cognition in the sense that Dewey meant when he argued that art and the aesthetic are rooted in all experience even if not all experiences are aesthetic and not every human product is art. It may be a contingent fact of the cognitive dimension of experience, though no less a fact for being contingent, that it inclines us to associate knowledge and its generation with assertion and inquiry. As an overall characterization of knowledge, it is true that assertion, proposition, and the processes that constitute inquiry embody the cognitive more than other activities or traits of experience. This, presumably, is the reason that historically knowledge has been associated more or less exclusively with the propositional. We can accept this general association of the cognitive dimension of experience with the propositional, which means that we associate the cognitive dimension of experience with assertive judgment, as long as we realize that this association has to be flexible. It turns out, in ways that I will explicate in later chapters, that exhibitive judgment is as capable of enabling knowledge as is assertive judgment, and the same applies to active judgment. This in turn means that though we are distinguishing three dimensions of experience and three modes of judgment, and correlating them in specific ways, the boundaries among the dimensions of experience and modes of judgment are flexible. The cognitive, aesthetic, and political dimensions of experience interact, enhance, and enrich one another, and the modes of judgment overlap as well, as we have seen. This point needs to be kept in mind as we discuss each of the dimensions of experience and their correlative modes of judgment, because if we do not keep it in mind the result will be an impoverished rather than an enriched understanding of experience. If the cognitive dimension of experience is correlated with the assertive mode of judgment, in a comparable way the aesthetic dimension of experience can be associated with the exhibitive mode of judgment, and the reasons John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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are similar. First, the aesthetic is a dimension of experience in the same sense that the cognitive is, which is to say that though not all experience is aesthetic and not every human product is art, our experience is conducive to and enables the aesthetic and art, much as it enables cognition and knowledge. The aesthetic is ubiquitous in experience, as is cognition; and aesthetic objects or works of art permeate and enable our experience and the trajectory of our lives as importantly as what we know and how we know it. Second, it is in the exhibitive mode of judgment that the aesthetic dimension of experience is most available and evident. We associated the cognitive dimension of experience with description, truth, and possibilities, and we similarly associate the aesthetic dimension of experience with unity, harmony, and dissonance. Just as the assertive mode of judgment engages description, truth, and possibilities, the exhibitive mode of judgment encompasses in definitive ways unity, harmony, and dissonance. And in case we need to remind ourselves, the borders between the assertive and exhibitive modes of judgment are flexible. A judgment may inhabit both modes simultaneously. Assertive judgment is able to embody unity and harmony, as a complex book of philosophy may harmonize well, in which case the book judges both assertively and exhibitively. And as I indicated above, it is possible for a predominantly exhibitive judgment, a painting for example, to have a cognitive character such that assertive judgments can and do integrate and enhance its meaning. It is important to keep in mind the flexibility of the borders, but that flexibility does not detract from the fact that the aesthetic dimension of experience is most readily expressed and embodied in, and therefore correlated with, exhibitive judgment, as the cognitive dimension of experience is correlated with the assertive mode of judgment. No one will be surprised that much the same can be said, indeed should be said, of the relation of the political dimension of experience to active judgment. This all needs to be developed and defended in detail, as it will be in Chapter 5, but for now we can say that the political dimension of experience is typically characterized by the traits of individual, community, and interests. Our experience is permeated by these traits, and in that fact lies the need to identify its political dimension and the related notion of power. Power in the general sense of the capacity to accomplish something is another of the three major traits of experience, together with knowledge and art. Like the other two, it is not so much that all experience is and experiences are expressions of power, just as not all experiences are cognitive and not all products are art. The point, rather, is that power is a ubiquitous trait of experience in the sense that it enables experience to move on; it enables us to make our way. We have said earlier that this is the feature of experience that the early pragmatists

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r­ecognized when they pointed out that more than anything experience is a matter of solving problems. Power, and therefore the political dimension, is that trait of experience in and through which we exercise the manipulative, creative side of experience. It is easily as definitive of experience generally as are knowledge and art. That its expression involves centrally the individual, the social, and interests is a matter to be explored in a later chapter. By the same token, the political dimension of experience is correlated with the active mode of judgment, as are the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions associated with the assertive and exhibitive modes of judgment respectively. And the same caveats apply. Active judgment is not uniquely expressive of power at the exclusion of the other dimension and modes. An active judgment may also have an exhibitive character, as does a dance for example, and it may have a cognitive character, as when as an athlete refines a particular skill. Similarly, power, knowledge, and art overlap in many respects. It is commonplace and clichéd to say that knowledge is power, though the common is often on the mark, as in this case. Art can and frequently does engage power at many levels, including the power of political institutions. Nonetheless the fact that experience is characterized by power, and that there is in that sense a political dimension of experience, finds its expression and embodiment most readily in the active mode of judgment. These remarks about the dimensions of experience and their relation to the modes of judgment are introductory, and require to be articulated and supported in much greater detail. The subsequent chapters do precisely that, and we turn first to the cognitive dimension of experience and the many ways it frames our lives.

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Chapter 3

The Cognitive Dimension of Experience Experience has a cognitive dimension.1 In this chapter I will clarify what it means to say this, the reasons for making and accepting such a proposition, and the differences it makes for both cognition and experience when we endorse it. To this extent I will make an argument for understanding experience to have a cognitive dimension. The reader would do well to keep in mind, though, that an argument in this sense does not mean to demonstrate deductively, or inductively for that matter, the truth or necessity of a particular proposition. Argument understood as drawing valid deductive inferences is a formalized and idealized version of one aspect of the cognitive situation, one that has been misplaced as a primary substitute for the whole. Unpacking this claim can wait a few pages. For now, one simply needs to keep in mind that to make an argument for a particular proposition is to demonstrate that it can be plausibly asserted, that it is reasonable to hold it, and that maintaining the proposition does some specifiable good. These, and not proof of any kind, constitute the argument and justification for a philosophical proposition. With respect to the claim that experience has a cognitive dimension, to clarify its meaning is to indicate its plausibility; to articulate the good reasons for holding the view is to demonstrate its reasonableness; and to specify its advantages is to outline its usefulness. There is no reason or need to expect anything other than this from philosophical discussion and justification. I To put the point directly and succinctly, the reason for holding that experience has a cognitive dimension is that in experience success in the resolution of problems occurs. If it did not, then there would be no experience, merely chaos, and in that success, there lie the many traits that constitute knowledge. This 1 Several pages in this chapter include material from “Understanding Experience: Language, Inference, and Judgment,” a paper presented at the conference Emancipation: Challenges at the Intersection of American and European Philosophy, at Fordham University in New York City, 26–28 February 2015, which was published as “Understanding Experience: Language, Inference, and Judgment” (Ryder 2015d). It also reproduces some material from “Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Again)” (Ryder 2015b).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004429185_005 John

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was the fundamental insight of the classical pragmatists, and we here build on their conception to flesh out the cognitive dimension of experience. Experience and cognition have always been closely associated. Historically that association has been encapsulated in the question of the role experience plays, for better or worse, in the acquisition of knowledge. Various differing assumptions have been brought to bear in addressing this issue, and not surprisingly the answers differ depending on, among other things, the assumptions. In the more Platonic and later other rationalist traditions, the key assumption was that knowledge must be of something permanent, because only then can knowledge provide certainty, or at least assurance of any kind. Experience understood as sensation was always a less than adequate candidate for reaching anything permanent because our senses never fail to reveal a world of constant change. If the experienced world is changing, and if knowledge should be of the permanent, then experience as sense perception cannot be relied upon to achieve knowledge. The assumption that knowledge should be of something permanent, then, suggests that knowledge is to be achieved in some way or ways other than through or in experience. Those other ways are, as we well know, reason in general, and mathematical reason in particular. Another assumption that has traditionally been brought to the question of the relation of experience and knowledge is that the process of achieving knowledge is an engagement of the knower with something other, in particular something external, that is, the known. In this case, the epistemological questions concern how it is possible for the knower cognitively to “reach” beyond herself and achieve knowledge of the external world. This assumption has framed most of Western epistemology in the modern and contemporary periods, including the entire Kantian enterprise. Kant’s “revolution” was his realization that the world of experience is better understood as something transcendentally constituted rather than something external. That in turn created a number of its own problems, as we have seen. As powerful a tool as reason is, there has been a suspicion among many philosophers that it is not a reliable tool by itself, at least outside formal mathematics and such mathematically oriented exercises as formal logic. Accompanying that suspicion is the assumption that knowledge must draw on experience of the world around us through our senses. Even this assumption, though, has had various versions. One of them is the idea that we perceive the world around us in the form of sense data; another is that in some way or other our minds work over the sense data to produce knowledge, the details of which process vary depending on the psychological theory put to use; another version is what has since Quine been referred to as “naturalized epistemology,” which is the idea that the source of understanding of what knowledge is and

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how it happens must be the natural sciences. On this view, which I will consider in greater detail below, the relevance of experience to knowledge is through the natural sciences and those aspects of inquiry, for example observation and experimentation, that constitute the sciences. In the modern period, by which we mean that of the seventeenth and eighteenth century rationalists and empiricists, experience was assumed to be a matter of an individual’s interaction with her environment. Experience is invariably described or defined in terms of an individual’s perception. In more recent years this assumption has been challenged through approaching knowledge in more social terms, from Marx’s sense of the importance of class in our experience of the world through contemporary feminist and other approaches to epistemology that either assume or explicitly maintain that social experience is at least as determinative of knowledge as an individual’s; or put slightly differently, that one’s social contexts are at least as determinative of knowledge as are the formal ingredients of cognition such as reason and perception. Some species of what we may call post-modernism, sensing that something is wrong in all this, despaired of the entire enterprise, and came to assume that knowledge as traditionally understood is either not possible or is unavailable, in which case it is better to try other ways of getting along intellectually, for example through an understanding of interpretation. Some, and here Richard Rorty is probably the best illustration, have combined the idea that experience in cognition is more social than individual with the idea that the whole enterprise of developing a theory of knowledge is doomed and therefore should be abandoned. In Rorty’s hands, the idea is that there is no non-circular way to reach epistemological justification, so the most we can do in any given case is to be content with ideas and propositions that comport with our social experience; in this event, the basic question is whether this or that proposition is what “we” think, as opposed to how others may think, and a component of how “we” see the world. If it is, then on this approach that is all the justification we can expect or should require. As I indicated previously, and though it is probably needless to say, the philosophical tradition has been correct to think that there are significant ways in which knowledge and experience are related. Philosophers have been right to believe that in order to understand either one we need to have some sense of the other. This is true even for Rorty, for whom neither experience nor knowledge required a methodic exploration and a theory, in that he too understood their importance for one another. He just did not think that either lends itself to traditional philosophic inquiry. Our idea with regard to the tradition’s approach to knowledge and experience is that the fact that it persistently sought to understand the relation between the two is good reason for us to think or at

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least suspect that there is indeed a relation to understand. People have continued to look for the connection between experience and knowledge because there is in fact such a connection. This point is not a logical inference; if it were it would be invalid. Rather, we take as a guide the tradition’s persistence. It may in the end turn out that there is no relation at all between experience and knowledge, but that outcome seems highly unlikely. We do better in this case to approach the problem much more conservatively, and to think, with the tradition, that there is indeed a relation between experience and knowledge to articulate. With their assumptions related to the general question of the nature of knowledge and cognition, philosophers have tended to endorse one or another understanding of experience and then ask how experience in their sense, whichever it may be, bears on the process of knowledge and its results. It has been as if knowledge or cognition were the broader category into which a sense of experience needs to fit. My approach, as I have said, is to get at this relation the other way around, and to ask not how experience fits into cognition but how cognition fits into experience. In this way of posing the issue, it is experience that is the broader category into which an understanding of cognition must be able to fit and contribute. This is a meaningful shift for a number of reasons. One of the most important is that the tradition’s assumption that cognition is the broader category embodied, consciously or not, the idea that human beings are basically and most generally knowers. This, however, is a distortion of the human condition. We are very basically and generally knowers, but most basically we are creatures who experience, and not all experience is necessarily cognitive. Our interest, then, is to combine the idea that experience is the more general definitive trait of human life with the traditional idea that cognition is a general and fundamental human activity. The way to do that is to say simultaneously that human beings are creatures for whom experience is a defining trait, and for whom experience has, so we are suggesting, three general dimensions. One of them is the cognitive, and it is in this way that we acknowledge the basic and generic importance of cognition and knowledge in human life, while at the same time acknowledging the fact that human experience is broader and more varied than merely a process that is folded into cognition. The issue of the place of cognition in experience has come up before in the pragmatic naturalist tradition when Dewey discussed the degree to which experience is inferential. His concern was to offer an alternative to one of the traditional empiricist approaches to the relation of experience and cognition that held that knowledge or cognition is something that arises from the mind’s actions with respect to sense data. On this view, cognition and knowledge are

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not inherent in experience, but something added to experience by the mind. Dewey, and in this he was quite right, regarded this approach to the relation of experience to knowledge to be artificial and stilted. A different approach was needed. Dewey introduced the distinction between primary and secondary experience, along the lines of the dichotomies discussed in the previous chapter, wherein primary experience is a more assimilative, direct, non-reflective undergoing while secondary experience is a more manipulated, refined, articulated experience that contributes to an understanding of primary experience. The refinement and articulation that characterizes secondary experience is achieved, Dewey thought, through inquiry, and inquiry is the primary form of the active, manipulative dimension of experience. Inquiry is the more or less systematic application of intelligent, rational reflection on primary experience such that primary experience is rendered coherent and meaningful. On the face of it this looks rather like the empiricist view that Dewey rejects, but in his hands inquiry in this sense is as ubiquitous in experience as is meaning and knowledge. Nature, as the arena in and through which experience takes place, is for Dewey imbued with meaning because inquiry is the way human beings engage their world and resolve the problems we face. For this reason, Dewey said that when we understand experience properly, we see that it “is full of inference,” and that “there is, apparently, no conscious experience without inference; reflection is native and constant” (Dewey 1980b, 6). Inquiry is not a process of the mind that filters experience to produce knowledge, as the earlier empiricists had it, but a feature of experience itself, Dewey holds. My approach, as articulated through Buchler’s theory of judgment, is significantly different. Like Dewey, I want to recognize that in experience we both assimilate and manipulate. For reasons described in the previous chapter I am not inclined to make Dewey’s distinction between primary and secondary experience, but I am interested, like Dewey, in considering carefully the manipulative dimension of experience, as long as it is not radically separated from the assimilative, because it is in manipulation of the elements of our environment that the creative character of our experience occurs. Here, though, is the critical difference between Dewey and my understanding of the cognitive dimension of experience: if for Dewey the manipulative dimension of experience is characterized above all by inquiry and inference, for me the relevant concept is judgment. This is not just a difference in words because if I am right that there are three dimensions of experience, one of which is the cognitive, then we have to part company with Dewey’s idea that experience is full of inference. In other

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words, if we assume that when Dewey talks about inquiry he means in fact the process of inquiry that he painstakingly describes and explores in many of his works over many years; and if we assume that when he speaks of inference he means that function within inquiry whereby we move reasonably from one proposition to another, whether that specific form of reason is deductive, inductive, or abductive, then it is fair to say that Dewey wishes reason, inquiry, and inference to characterize the manipulative dimension of experience to a degree that for my approach is far too extensive. The manipulative aspect or dimension of experience can take several forms, only one subset of which can appropriately be described as inquiry and therefore as inferential. This is the upshot of what it means in the theory of judgment to say that we judge in three modes, to only one of which we can properly ascribe inference. If that is right, then Dewey misses too much of the manipulative character of experience by focusing as he does on inquiry and inference (Buchler 1955, 103–105). Dewey seemed to think that all forms of exploration are forms of inquiry, which presumably is the reason he said, “there is no conscious experience without inference.” Buchler, by contrast, said that inquiry and its inferential processes are only one form of query, and the reason he thought so is that some forms of exploration are not rational or inferential at all, but rather exhibitive or active. An example of the sort of thing he had in mind, and that we inherit through the theory of judgment, is when a painter sets a problem to be resolved on the canvas, or when a student of music composition is assigned a problem in Baroque counterpoint. The products that result from these sorts of explorations are not assertions, nor is the process of exploration itself a matter of drawing inferences, yet the processes are indeed exploratory in that they are methodically resolving problems. This suggests that either the term “inquiry” is stretched well beyond its normal meanings, which would do little more than obscure important distinctions within our understanding of experience, or there is query, in the sense of methodic exploration, that is not inquiry. Ironically, Dewey was too much predisposed to privilege reason in experience over other modes of methodic utterance and judgment. To see what he means we can look more closely at the passage in “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” in which he says that, to paraphrase, conscious experience is infused with inference. The general context in the first few pages of the essay is to distinguish the conception of experience Dewey prefers from the traditional view, as we have mentioned, which is to say his idea that experience is the ongoing interaction of a person with her environment over against the empiricist and rationalist views. Specifically, he suggests that the traditional view divorced thought from experience, in the sense that experience was something

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one “had,” on which thought then operates. It is in this connection that Dewey wants to say that this dichotomy is mistaken because “experience … is full of inference.” Interestingly, a few lines earlier Dewey also objected to the traditional conception of experience on the grounds that “In the orthodox view, experience is regarded primarily as a knowledge affair,” a view of which he does not approve because experience should be taken more broadly, that is, as “an affair of the intercourse of a living being with its physical and social environment” (Dewey 1980b, 6). This is precisely the point on which I agree with Dewey and on which I base my entire theory. This, however, is where the irony arises, because as Buchler says, despite Dewey’s objection to the overly epistemological flavor of traditional conceptions of experience, this traditional approach “held [Dewey] in its grip more than he suspected” (Buchler 1955, 141). What Buchler meant is that by describing conscious experience as “full of inference,” and by casting secondary experience as a matter of thought and inquiry, Dewey ironically remained consistent with the tradition by defining experience in terms of knowledge. This is a good illustration of the dangers inherent is making too much of any of the dichotomous traits of experience as I described them earlier. It certainly appears as if Dewey does in fact understand experience in this way, at least in the passages cited. As I suggested earlier, if we assume that by “inference” Dewey means what the word typically means, which is to say drawing a proposition according to logical principles from other propositions, and if conscious experience is full of inference, then conscious experience is primarily a matter of thought. But if it is primarily a matter of thought, then it is primarily a matter of knowledge, or the pervasive attempt to acquire knowledge. That Dewey held this highly “epistemologized” conception of experience is also suggested by the fact that as an element of thought, inference occurs in the context of inquiry, and inquiry is, Dewey held, the process whereby we transform an indeterminate situation into a determinate one. Because we are continually engaged in the process of resolving indeterminate situations, we are continually engaged in thought and inquiry, and this, presumably, is why conscious experience is “full of inference.” Dewey saw that the traditional conceptions of experience were inadequate in part because they read experience as largely epistemological, but now it appears that Dewey holds his own version of an epistemologized conception of experience. The irony of course is that among the greatest and most influential philosophers Dewey stands out as being aware of and sensitive to the breadth of experience, and does not “epistemologize” it. One need only look at Art as Experience, from which I draw much of my philosophic inspiration, to see the point. Yet in the passages cited above, he is interpreting experience, or at least

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manipulative experience, as a matter of inquiry and inference. It is worth noticing at this point that one of the reasons Buchler developed the theory of judgment that I have appropriated was to try to capture what Dewey wanted, which is to say a “de-epistemologized” conception of experience, without the lapse into the epistemologized tradition. If experience is characterized by three dimensions, only one of which is cognitive, and if we judge in three modes, only one of which can suitably be described as inferential, then it cannot be appropriate to claim that experience, even only “conscious” experience, is full of inference. As Buchler put it, “‘Thinking,’ as activity, is only one instance of manipulation…” because in fact in experience we regularly engage the world manipulatively in ways other than those described by the processes of thinking, inquiry, and inference (Buchler 1955,  141). A closer look at art and ordinary experience may help us see the point that there is something odd and strained in reading manipulative, and even ­reflective, experience as shot through with inference and as instances of inquiry. On the face of it there does not seem to be any reason to describe what a painter does as a process of inquiry and drawing of inferences. Even when artistic production is consciously a matter of solving problems, formal or otherwise, as it has been and remains for many artists in many contexts, there appears to be something other than inquiry and inference at work. There is creative activity to be sure, and the process no doubt has some moments in common with inquiry as Dewey understands it. The artist needs to clarify the problem, for example to determine whether it is a matter of formal elements, and if so which, or whether there may be matters of content and meaning involved in the problem. The artist needs to know the capabilities of the materials with which she is working and the tools available for solving the problem. These moments are, presumably, shared with instances of inquiry. What the artist typically does not do, however, is engage in the drawing of inferences as a primary way of resolving whatever aesthetic problem has been set. The artist may even experiment, but she does so exhibitively rather than inferentially. And even in those cases, especially instances of narrative art, where a case is being made for an idea or set of ideas, the case is typically made through showing rather than inferring, and the case is exhibitively offered rather than propositionally. In other words, there are occasions of manipulative experience in which reflective and methodic interaction is undertaken but for which the concepts of inquiry and inference are not suitable descriptors. The same point might be made in those cases of artistic production that are not instrumental, something that is certainly a possibility. These are among the reasons that a theory of judgment has to be broad enough to encompass more than assertive

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judgment and inference, and that a theory of experience has to have room for more than cognition among the dimensions of experience. The point also applies to cases of more ordinary, quotidian experience. We do things in the course of walking down the street, or cleaning the house, or eating dinner, that involve manipulation of our environment, and that may even be exploratory, but that do not necessarily involve inference. When, for example, we direct our attention to the taste of a particular dish at a meal such that we note, savor, and enjoy it, there are manipulations of our environment at work, there is even a sense of exploration in the savoring, but there is nothing inferential going on, at least not necessarily. Dewey well captures this sort of thing when he describes the aesthetic character of experience, but his overly epistemologized sense of experience does not do justice to it. We may say something similar about the process whereby an athlete hones a particular skill, say a three-point shot or effecting a header off of a corner kick. The process is manipulative and even methodic, but it is not inferential. And on both Dewey and Buchler’s terms, if a process is not inferential then it is not an instance of inquiry. If it is adequate and reasonable to describe some instances of refined, manipulative, and even methodic experience—the examples we have given are in the creation of artworks, the enjoyment of eating, and athletic practice—which are not cases of inference and inquiry, then Dewey’s idea that e­ xperience is full of inference in the sense that inference pervades conscious experi­ence does not work, and his related understanding of secondary, refined experience as a function of inquiry is too narrow. What is needed is a conception that can account for this breadth in the manipulative dimension of experience, including its inferential moments. The theory of judgment appears to do just that. And if Dewey meant something different by “inference,” for example something broader that might resemble my and Buchler’s descriptions of judgment, then his theory is still not sufficiently finely grained because we remain in need of something that would distinguish among the various sorts of “inference.” Again, the conception of judgment does that well. By identifying the three modes of judgment, and by accommodating the fact that methodic exploration occurs in all of them, the theory enables us to account for the breadth of experience as we find it, including the fact that not all cognitive experience is inferential. Similarly, the idea that there are three dimensions of experience, one of which is cognitive, allows us to recognize simultaneously the centrality of cognition to experience and the fact that not all experience is cognitive. When the philosopher attempts to work out the meaning and ramifications of an idea, as I am doing here, there is clearly inference and inquiry in a process of methodic exploration. When the artist works out

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the relation of colors or rhythms there is also methodic exploration, but in that case there is likely not to be inference and inquiry at work, but query of an exhibitive kind. And as the basketball player perfects her three-point shot, there is methodic, even exploratory active query taking place, but it is not inferential and it is not inquiry in any standard sense of the term, or at least it is not enough to call it inquiry if we wish to understand how it works in experience. Moreover, this broader understanding of judgment and query allows us to develop a more adequate epistemology than is available otherwise. One of the problems with traditional, especially analytic, epistemology is that it has assumed that all knowledge is propositional, and that knowledge is available to us only through those forms of exploration that engage in inquiry through some combination of empirical grounding and rational articulation. The natural and social sciences, mathematics, and even philosophy for the more broadminded of such epistemologists, can be said to issue in knowledge. This is good as far as it goes, but it leaves out far too much. We have every reason to say, for example, that the arts have a cognitive dimension such that knowledge is available without inquiry as traditionally understood. Given that knowledge is available in exhibitive judgment, and we may add in active judgment as well, and that methodic query in those modes of judgment differs importantly from inquiry, an adequate conception of knowledge must be able to accommodate knowledge arising in these plural ways. By implication, we will also need a broader conception of truth than that which is applicable only or primarily to propositional knowledge. In later chapters we will have the opportunity to look more closely at the way cognition intersects with the aesthetic and the political, which is to say how the three dimensions of experience interact. For the remainder of the current chapter, however, we need to explore much more thoroughly the cognitive dimension, and the correlative conceptions of knowledge and truth. II Like experience generally, knowledge is a transaction. Specifically, it is a transaction in and through which we solve problems. Solving problems is a pervasive feature of experience, sufficiently pervasive to be the feature that enables us to recognize both the political and the cognitive dimensions of experience. The political dimension is indicated by the fact that solving problems requires power; the cognitive dimension is indicated by the fact that solving problems moves experience along and enables our lives to happen. We would do well to remember that cognition and knowledge, like all experience, is a transaction

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of a self fully embedded and extended in her environment. It may be difficult for some philosophers to give up the picture of knowledge as some sort of familiarity with something “out there.” We know from Wittgenstein and others about the hold a picture or metaphor can have on us, and how pernicious that hold can be. For those of us most at home in the Western philosophic traditions it seems almost natural and automatic to think of ourselves as “in here” and the rest of the world “out there,” in which case knowledge, other than selfknowledge, must be knowledge of the “external world,” as it is still described in many textbooks and readers in epistemology. We may assume that the reason it seems so obvious to us is that the idea seems to be obviously true. The strength of a picture, though, may have nothing to do with the truth of a proposition that the picture depicts. That knowledge is “of an external world” is a proposition that we need at least to examine, and alternatives for which we should consider. To do that, however, it is critical to let go of the picture. It is so thoroughly antithetical to the conception of experience and cognition that I wish to develop and defend that progress in understanding can be had only when the picture is jettisoned. The reader, therefore, is invited again to do just that. The reason we ought to do without the idea that knowledge is “of the external world” is that with respect to the self and mind, the entire internal/external distinction is largely meaningless. To remind ourselves of the conception of the self that I want to employ, the self, like everything else, is a relationally constituted complex, rather than something—mind/brain/soul/—inhabiting a body, and even rather than the much richer notion of a “lived body.” The relevant distinction now is not internal/external but constitutive/unrelated. All complexes to which a person is related are constitutive of that person, of the self. Such constitutive complexes are more or less relevant to the self. A specific blade of grass growing in one’s yard or garden is relevant, but minimally or weakly so, at least usually. A person’s child is likely to be strongly relevant in that one’s child is far more determinative of a person’s integrity, a person’s nature, than a single blade of grass. In both cases, what in the old picture would be something external, in my conception is constitutive. These are merely two examples of complexes that are constitutively related to a self; there are innumerable others that constitute each of us. We are in fact constituted by all the complexes in our environment that are related to us. Most of them are so weakly relevant to us that we rarely if ever attend to them; others have more or less strong relevance depending on the circumstances, and their relevance can change from time to time and situation to situation. We can and do have knowledge of many of the complexes that constitute us, and in many cases such knowledge is critical for our well-being or even for our

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survival. In no meaningful sense, however, would we want to say that knowledge of a strongly relevant constitutive complex is knowledge of the external world. A child is not the external world, a fact that we recognize emotionally when we say that a child is “part” of us. That way of speaking is meant metaphorically, usually, though it has a nearly literal meaning and truth. A child is not “part” of a parent in any literal meaning of “part.” but a child is constitutive of a parent in that it constitutes an important part of the parent’s life. That claim is both metaphorically and literally true. In that case, one’s knowledge of one’s child is in no meaningful sense knowledge of the “external world.” The only way that locution can have meaning is if in its use we refer to all of nature beyond our skin. But to limit what constitutes us at our skin is to destroy any meaningful sense of what it means to be a human being. We are whatever constitutes us, wherever in space, time, and the imagination that may lie, and there is no necessary significance to the border of our bodies or the surface of our skin. This is why it is important to realize that we are more than embodied beings, we are embedded and extended beings. The process of cognition is not a process of familiarizing ourselves with anything “external.” but with creating or encountering relations of a certain kind with the environments in which we are embedded. There is a curious sense in which one may plausibly say that in fact we can have knowledge only of that which is a constitutive relation of or for us. The reason is that to develop a cognitive relation with something is to have a relation, and if all our relations are constitutive, then all cognitive relations are constitutive, and ergo we can only know that which constitutes us. That is a strange sounding proposition, but in practice it is not as bizarre as it sounds because it implies no pernicious break between the world as related to us and the world unrelated to us. Here the distinction we have made earlier between the objective and the absolute is relevant. All complexes are relational, and for any complex its relations may or may not be relations with us. Some complexes are not related to us in any meaningful way and never will be. Some complexes are our creations, in which case they are to that extent necessarily related to one or more of us. For other complexes, they are related to us in some respects and unrelated in others. Moreover, a particular complex, for example a particular ocean anemone, may be unrelated to someone until that person comes across it and begins to study it. Now it has become a constitutive relation, presumably one about which a person may acquire some knowledge. That the knowledge of the anemone constitutes a cognitive and therefore constitutive relation with a person does not in any way detract from the cognitive character of the relation or the knowledge the person may gain of the anemone. It is still knowledge, and it is still knowledge of the anemone. In other words, that one can have knowledge

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only of that which is related to and therefore constitutive of one creates no difficulties at all for our understanding of the knowing self or of cognition. A complex is objectively whatever its relations constitute, whether or not any of those relations are with a person or a knower. A complex may come into a relation with us and go out of such relations. Such a process alters the complex’s integrity, minimally or importantly depending on the strength of the relation’s relevance. Knowledge and cognition have their home in the relations that constitute us because a cognitive relation is a relation, and all relations are constitutive, a state of affairs that does not in any way intrude on our ability to know the world. Embedded in the pragmatic naturalist frame of reference, we will avoid a good deal of potential confusion if a word is said at this point about the difference between the cognitive dimension of experience and its related conceptions of knowledge and truth, on the one hand, and so-called “naturalized epistemology” on the other. In the English-speaking world, and beyond it as well, there are many philosophers who associate the term “naturalism” with what has been and continues to be called “naturalism” in the analytic tradition. There are also those who are aware that there is another, older naturalist tradition in American philosophy, but who may fail to see or appreciate the differences between the two. It is essential that we be clear about this because this distinction has important implications for epistemology generally and for our conceptions of knowledge and cognition. Of necessity I will glide over a number of significant details, but most generally, what we may call “analytic naturalism” is the view that whatever exists is a material object or process, or reducible to, in the sense of being explainable in terms of, material objects or process. On this view, knowledge of any aspect of existence is available only through those forms of inquiry that study material objects and process, which is to say the natural sciences and by extension mathematics. With this conception of naturalism in the background, a number of critics have held that if they can demonstrate an inadequacy in either of these components of the position then they have therefore demonstrated the inadequacy of naturalism. The first point to clarify is that the naturalistic soil from which our pragmatic naturalism springs holds neither of these positions. It shares with analytic naturalism, and this is the respect in which both may reasonably be called “naturalism,” that whatever exists is a natural entity and that in principle we have cognitive access to nature. Here the similarity ends. Pragmatic naturalism, as I have shown in previous chapters and is in other publications by any number of philosophers, does not embrace the idea that whatever there is must be material or explainable in material terms. There is, in other words, no

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reason that we would need to concern ourselves with accounting for such phenomena as mind and consciousness, and the many products of mind and consciousness, as material entities or process. This does not mean that pragmatic naturalism is committed to a dualism, Cartesian or any other, that posits sharply distinct kinds of entities in nature. Pragmatic naturalism, on the contrary, avoids the traditional distinction between matter and mind, or the material and the ideal, as substances of some kind that radically differ from one another and the relations between which pose some sort of difficult problem. This is not to deny the reality of material objects and process, or of mental and ideal entities for that matter; it is rather to understand them differently than most traditions have tended to do. Rather than a dualism of this kind, our naturalism is a pluralism in the sense that it acknowledges the plurality of what exists without the need to define any one sort of complex in terms appropriate to another. In this respect pragmatic naturalism has a strong affinity with Spinoza. The general trait we may ascribe to all entities, the trait that enables us to sustain this sort of pluralism, is that all entities are complexes and relationally constituted. In this respect we differ from Spinoza. There is disagreement among pragmatic naturalists as to what else we may say of natural complexes at the most general level. I side with those who support an emergent naturalism because this sort of position allows us to r­ ecognize the central place of physical objects and processes in nature while recognizing nature’s genuine multiplicity and without having to reduce any one sort of complex to any other.2 The idea, to speak very generally and to review a point made earlier, is that as the physical universe has developed over time, long periods of time that is, its own processes have led to the rise of new sorts of complexes: the chemical from the physical, the biological from the chemical, the mental from the biological, and the ideal from the mental. This capacity of the physical processes to generate novelty, we should point out, is evidence that the mechanical conception of the physical world is inadequate. Moreover, at each of these stages emerged not only new sorts of complexes but new principles of description and explanation that do not require exclusive appeal to the principles of prior stages of emergent development. For example, with the emergence of the chemical “world,” or perhaps we should say the chemical “order,” principles of description and explanation appropriate to the chemical arose with it. To understand the chemical world requires not only principles 2 The idea of the primacy of material objects and processes in an ordinal conception of nature was, as far as I am aware, first suggested in “Ordinality and Materialism” (Ryder 1991). More recently the concept is developed in detail, in slightly different terms and with a stronger emphasis on emergence in nature, in The Orders of Nature (Cahoone 2013).

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appropriate to the physical world, but additional principles appropriate uniquely to the chemical world. We can recognize that the physical is the source of the chemical without having to reduce the latter to the former. The same ontological and explanatory relationships apply to the other sorts of complexes and the prior sorts from which they arose. The upshot is that pragmatic naturalism endorses an ontological pluralism, by contrast with analytic naturalism’s rather crude materialism, and the ontological picture has epistemological implications. Though pragmatic naturalism values the natural sciences and mathematics highly, it does not embrace the view that the sciences are the only possible source of knowledge, and the reason should be fairly clear. If nature consists of a plurality of kinds of complexes, then there is no good reason to think that only one sort of query can be appropriate to acquire knowledge of them. In fact, the plurality of complexes suggests the contrary, which is that given the many kinds of complexes in nature we can expect a range of forms of query necessary for cognitive access. Such a range of forms of query is precisely what we encounter in experience and in judgment. Two points are salient here. First, there are many different ways that we human beings approach the world conceptually. In our universities we have broken them up among natural sciences, humanities, social sciences, arts, sport, and maybe others as well. We approach the world, to be as neutral in formulation as possible, in these several ways because the world is pluralistic and it requires various kinds of approaches to engage it. The second salient point, and this bears directly on our discussion of the cognitive dimension of experience, is that these various ways of approaching the world are not just a matter of engagement generally, but are or at least can be cognitive as well. This is a critical point for our revamped epistemology, and so warrants additional discussion. If nature is pluralist in the way we have described, then it is to be expected that our cognitive interaction with our environment is likely to be pluralistic as well. There would be no reason to think that only the sciences can be cognitively powerful if much of nature is not available to scientific inquiry because science deals with the physical and much of nature is not physical. To put the point differently, if much of nature is other than physical, then to know anything about it would, presumably, require that we engage it cognitively through means other than natural science. And in fact, that is precisely what we do. Thus, we ought not to be surprised to learn that art can be and frequently is cognitive, and that knowledge arises, or at least can arise, in and through methodic action. This general point is captured in the theory of judgment in that the three modes of judgment clarify how it is that knowledge can arise in ways other than assertion and proposition.

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To encapsulate all this, nature consists of much more than the physical, which means that to have knowledge of non-physical nature we must have means available to us to probe the non-physical complexes of nature; as the theory of judgment indicates, we have those means available to us not only in assertive but in exhibitive and active judgment as well. Therefore, we should expect that all judgment, and not only the assertive, can and often does have a cognitive character. Given all that, it becomes possible to see how my approach to cognition and knowledge differs vastly from analytic, naturalized epistemology. It should go without saying that my disagreement with naturalized epistemology is not over the value of the natural sciences. There is no question that the results of the empirical investigations of the sciences, for example psychology or cognitive science, should be brought to bear on our understanding of knowledge in those circumstances in which they are relevant, of which there are many. The disagreement concerns the extent of the role of the sciences. In my version of a naturalist epistemology it can never be said that the natural sciences are the only form of query that can be relevant for cognition and knowledge. Cognition happens in and knowledge results from all modes of judgment under the right circumstances, and an adequate theory of knowledge and cognition must be able to account for that fact. Any theory that rests knowledge and cognition solely on the natural sciences has impoverished the cognitive dimension of experience beyond recognition, and is automatically unacceptable. Whatever else we say about cognition, and however else we describe and account for knowledge, truth, query, and other aspects of the cognitive dimension of experience, they will necessarily involve more than assertive judgment, propositions, and the natural sciences. This is precisely why we will be able to speak of the interaction among the cognitive, aesthetic, and political dimensions of experience. Dewey argued that the roots of art are to be found in normal, ordinary experience, and we wish to say much the same about cognition. We need to consider carefully what this means for our understanding of cognition and knowledge, because it can be easy to get this wrong. Fortunately, Dewey provides a good model for us in the way he handles art and the aesthetic in experience. Works of art, of the sort that we may want to say deserve to be on display, are refined, ramified instances of the aesthetic in experience. We want to say something comparable about knowledge and cognition. That is not to say that all experience is art, or that all experience is beautiful. Some experience is decidedly not beautiful, much experience is not art in any sense of the term, and often enough even conscious attempts to create a work of art fail. The same observations apply to knowledge and cognition. Not every moment in experience, and not every judgment, is an instance of knowledge.

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For some experiences cognition is simply not relevant, and some experience and judgments aspire to but fail to achieve knowledge, which is to say that often we are mistaken in what we think we know. With those caveats in mind, the cognitive dimension of experience does nevertheless mean that knowledge and cognition are aspects or elements of ordinary experience, and that whatever else we may say about knowledge, and however we may describe and understand its details, we need to be sure to maintain its connection with ordinary experience. The problem with too many conceptions of art, Dewey reminded us, is that we have divorced our understanding of art from daily experience and made of it something that belongs not in experience generally but in museums or on display. Dewey’s insight into art and experience applies equally to knowledge and experience. Along these lines, we can achieve a clearer conception of knowledge, and even truth, if we resist the temptation to think about them in terms of beliefs and propositions, and justification, justificatory practices, or truth conditions. There are two reasons for considering this possibility. The first is that we seem to fall too easily into the trap of understanding knowledge and truth exclusively in the ways philosophers use the terms. We talk about things like “discursive practices” and “epistemic conditions” and “justificatory criteria” and “rationality” as if the ideas of knowledge and truth were pertinent only for people who move about in the world in those ways, which is to say primarily for philosophers and similar intellectuals. To put the point explicitly, knowledge and truth are important for all, or most, people, and most people by far do not interact meaningfully with one another or animate their experience in ways that we can describe as providing “epistemic justification” for things, or even as involving rationality in the more or less strict sense of the term that epistemologists give it. Consequently, to employ or accept an understanding of knowledge or truth in terms that apply primarily to philosophers and to no one else is doomed to be far too narrow. We will never understand how knowledge works, and what it might mean for something to be true, if we understand knowledge and truth by generalizing from how philosophers behave in conversation or argument. An illustration may help. Let us consider a fairly ordinary activity of normal people, or of philosophers when we are acting like normal people instead of philosophers. We discover, for example, that we have run out of milk, and that we need milk for the children or to cook dinner. So, someone has opened the refrigerator, noticed that there is no milk, and a discussion is now underway about who will go to the store for milk. There might also be a consideration of whether other things should be bought while at the store, so we might look around the kitchen and consider the question. Then someone either walks

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down the block or drives to a nearby store, both of which actions require numerous decisions and encounters with a fairly wide range of real conditions: walking out the door, turning in one direction or the other, driving down the street and negotiating other traffic. In the store, selections are made, items reached for and grasped, relatively simple financial transactions are undertaken; when a decision is made that desired ends have been reached it is time to return home, and then one negotiates the street, the traffic, the turns in the right directions, and all of the actions required to get home and place the milk in the refrigerator. We do this sort of thing all the time, and in the doing we are taking up reality, facts, knowledge, truth, automatic inferences, and everything else required to solve daily problems and to live. Philosophers’ accounts of knowledge and truth, however, often do not account for a situation like this at all. No one in this scenario is concerning him or herself with justificatory criteria and discursive reasons, or worrying about whether the car coming at me in the other lane is an objective fact. The reason we typically do not find situations like this in philosophers’ talk about knowledge and truth is that the philosophers are approaching the question backwards. We could of course redescribe a situation like this in the epistemologist’s language, but it is inappropriate for us to do so if our goal is to understand knowledge and truth, and reality as well. The categories of epistemology of this kind are an abstraction from experience, one that distorts how we cognitively get along in the world. People, all of us all of the time, are immersed in our experience. The working conceptions of knowledge and truth that we might offer if we are asked to articulate them, emerge from that experience. And experience in this sense, which is to say cognitive experience, is in fact an immersion in, and transaction with, our world. It is not an intellectual exercise in giving reasons and making inferences. It may be easy to misunderstand the point, so we should dwell here a bit longer.3 The point is not that whatever in our ordinary experience we think is knowledge is therefore knowledge, any more than we want to say that whatever in experience we regard to be art is therefore art simply because we think it is. The point rather is that like in the case of even fine art, for which an adequate conception requires that we understand its ground and origins in ordinary experience, knowledge, including knowledge of a sophisticated sort, has 3 One example of a misunderstanding of the point is in Richard Bernstein’s commentary on a paper in which I made this argument about the cognitive character of daily life and the implications it has for how we understand knowledge. Bernstein, it appears, took the point to be that in daily experience, whatever we think we know is thereby knowledge, as if no one can ever be wrong. This, as we have tried to show, is a misunderstanding. See Bernstein 2015.

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its home and origins in ordinary, quotidian experience. It is not correct to say that every judgment is cognitive, just as it is not correct to say that every judgment is aesthetic. It is correct to say, however, that a conception of art that ­divorces it from experience generally is an inadequate conception of art, and a conception of knowledge that divorces both cognitive processes and knowledge from experience generally is inadequate. To understand knowledge and truth we need to consider them not in analytic abstraction, as so many philosophers do, but in and through experience. If that is the case, however, then we are obliged to ask how we then can understand when knowledge occurs and how we may evaluate candidates for knowledge. These are traditional epistemological questions, but they are now pursued in the context of an assumption that cognition and knowledge occur in normal experience and can be understood in the context of normal experience. The first relevant point is that we do not want to consider knowledge in terms of beliefs, or propositions, or epistemic warrant, or truth conditions, or giving reasons, or epistemic justification, or many of the standard epistemological tools. We begin, rather, with the idea that knowledge arises in and is a type of experience in which we engage a problem. This means that the resolution of problems is not only the occasion of thought, as Peirce and Dewey argued, but it is the feature of experience in which we find its cognitive dimension and consequently the ground of knowledge. Knowledge is acquired, reached, or achieved in the process of resolving the problem or problems that present themselves. This is true for experience as simple and ordinary as going to the store for a bottle of milk and as complex as the development of a philosophical theory or solution to a problem in quantum physics. The problem of the nature of knowledge in this general sense presents no special challenge, in fact, once we know where to look for the answer. Any number of related issues arise immediately, most significantly the questions concerning truth and justification. It is worth noticing at this point, in relation to the question of justification, that what counts as knowledge is determined by the nature of the problem and what in any given case counts as a solution. The traditional question of whether knowledge is to be understood as accurate description of some relevant fact, or in some other way, which is to say whether we prefer a correspondence or a coherence theory of knowledge, has not needed to be a thorny as it has appeared to be. For one thing, not all knowledge is a function of beliefs or propositions with truth value, and so the question posed as a choice between coherence and correspondence is badly put in the first place. But even if we look only at propositions and beliefs, which clearly are capable of conveying ­knowledge, whether or not a particular proposition or belief does so, depends

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on whether a problem is resolved, and what counts as knowledge in a given case is determined by what counts as a solution. For example, if I am cooking and need a kilo of potatoes, I will measure them on what I have reason to believe is a reliable scale. When I reach a kilo, I will be finished. What counts as knowledge in that case is that my belief that I have a kilo of potatoes reflects the fact of the matter that the potatoes I have weigh a kilo. This is a fairly plain and simple case of a belief reflecting a state of affairs. The state of affairs in this case is of course itself a complex matter, in that what counts as a kilo is a result of social agreement, certain standard ­linguistic usages, and other factors. Nonetheless, once we agree on what “kilo” means, and in practice we do that without any of the epistemological tools and concepts philosophers typically employ, then my belief that I have one reflects the fact that there is a kilo. Knowledge in this case resides in the success of the action taken on the basis of having the amount of potatoes I think I need. A different kind of problem would be resolved in a different way, and what counts as knowledge in such a case would have to be differently described. When one moves to a new home and has to learn the way to work, what is involved in acquiring that knowledge is not a matter of beliefs and propositions, but learning directions, and to recognize certain landmarks, and to anticipate this or that challenge that regularly arises. The problem is solved through practice and the development of habit, and it does not require establishing beliefs that correspond to anything, but rather it requires the activities that get one from home to work. When those activities are reliably established, then one knows how to get to work. As in weighing the potatoes, knowledge is achieved in the solution of problems, though both the problems and their solutions differ in kind. When we see that knowledge makes more sense this way than others, we can also see why our way of thinking about knowledge has to be related to ordinary experience, and why much of the ways epistemologists tend to talk about knowledge points us in the wrong directions. Epistemologists often speak insightfully about how to make sense of refined knowledge relevant to the sort that philosophers may achieve, but they make a serious mistake in thinking that such knowledge can be representative or paradigmatic of knowledge in general. Knowledge in general is about solving problems in experience, not about giving reasons and achieving true belief. And justification comes in solving problems, not through the establishment of propositional warrant, except in those cases in which the problem to be solved lends itself to such justification. In other cases, the justification must be understood to be appropriate to the problem to be solved, to what counts as the solution to that problem, and to the kind of knowledge acquired in the process.

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A more detailed understanding of this can be accomplished through a closer look at the relation of cognition and knowledge to judgment. There are three modes of judgment, and for each mode judgments may be more or less complex, in the ordinary sense of the term “complex.” Our understanding of knowledge and cognition requires that we attend to both of these features of judgment. If we consider for the moment assertive judgments, it is clear that some are simpler than others. The proposition that there are boats in the marina outside my window is a much simpler proposition than, for example, the proposition that there are three dimensions of experience. Both are assertions clearly enough, but the form of inquiry appropriate to each differs, as does the nature of justification. The first is a fairly straight-forward empirical proposition, and it counts as knowledge of the marina if it reports something accurate about the marina and the boats. The second is not an empirical question at all but a conceptual matter, and whether it counts as knowledge of experience depends on a complicated range of factors. There are empirical matters that can be seen in some of the examples one might bring to bear to elucidate the claim, and there are ideational matters, for example that have to do with the claim’s relation to other ideas about knowledge. These and other factors achieve their justification in a variety of ways. In the end, however, the justification of the proposition that there are three dimensions of experience, and whether embracing it counts as having knowledge, will depend on the degree to which it solves philosophical and perhaps other problems for us, and whether it moves our understanding of experience forward. In any case, the point is that with respect to assertive judgment, there are various forms of justification and valuation that are relevant depending on the assertion in question, and assertive judgment is cognitive in a corresponding range of ways. Exhibitive judgments have their own complexities with respect to knowledge and cognition. They too can be more or less complicated in structure and context, and in any case are capable of possessing cognitive traits. A child’s simple drawing, for example, can convey a great deal about the child’s state of mind and psychological health, or about the dynamics of a child’s family. At a much greater level of complexity, something comparable applies to a piece of music. To offer a fairly random example, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s orchestral piece The Lark Ascending is an evocation of the bucolic peacefulness of the English countryside, the meaning and power of which is enriched when we understand that it was originally composed in 1914 in what we may presume to be nervous anticipation as the First World War was beginning. The degree to which either of these cases of exhibitive judgment are cognitively significant depends to a considerable extent on how they function in our experience, which is to say that their justification and valuation depend on their

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ability to resolve problems for us, though the problems are of different kinds. If a psychologist is able to work more effectively with the child as a result of the child’s drawing, then the drawing conveys knowledge and the psychologist and others can be said to have learned from it. Similarly, if in taking the measure of Vaughan Williams’ piece we can better appreciate the meaning for and impact on individuals and society at large of the prospect of all-out war, then The Lark Ascending has a cognitive character and can fully be said to convey knowledge. It should surprise no one at this point that something comparable may be said about active judgments and their cognitive character and valuation. The scenario discussed earlier about going to the store for milk is an example of a relatively simple set of active judgments. As we said, a great many judgments are involved in the trip to the store, many of them habitual if the person involved is familiar with her surroundings. A more refined active judgment or set of active judgments is available to us when we consider climbing a mountain, a case where a great deal of preparation and training is required. In both cases there is knowledge in the active judgments themselves, and the valuation of that knowledge comes in the actions and their consequences. There is little point in talking about anything reflecting or corresponding to an independent reality in these cases, if for no other reason than that the situations themselves prevail only because actors are central to them. On the contrary, if the actions move experience forward in some relevant way—the milk is purchased and brought home, and the mountain climber achieves her goals, whatever they may have been—then the cognitive character of the judgments and their valuation is clear. III It is impossible to come to terms with the nature of knowledge, cognition, and the cognitive dimension of experience without a consideration of the related issue of the nature of truth. Perhaps the first point to make is the same as I made with respect to knowledge, which is that we have to give up our tendency to think about truth in relation to beliefs and propositions. Of course, beliefs may be true or false, but truth may be ascribed to many other things: descriptions, insights, a work of art, meaning, and more. An artist for example may with complete justification talk about an important truth expressed or conveyed in a work, or a mystic may talk about having experienced a profound truth, and in neither case is it possible to translate completely the truth in question into propositional language, assertions, or even beliefs. We ought not

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to rule such uses of the term out of court because to do so would be to reflect a woefully narrow conception of query and knowledge, and it would defy unreasonably the breadth of our experience. It is therefore a mistake to attempt to understand truth only in terms of beliefs or propositions, and to associate it with assertive judgment alone. If, as I have been arguing, knowledge works in more than one way, then it must be that truth works in more than one way as well. This of course does not answer the important questions for us; it merely sets the problem to be addressed. The problem is this: given the broad cognitive dimension of experience, and the breadth that we have assigned to knowledge, what conception of truth is most appropriate and defensible? The obvious place to begin is with James’ idea, one that was later taken up, even if not with explicit recognition or acknowledgement, by Heidegger, Gadamer, and most recently by Vattimo, that truth “happens” to an idea. This is only a beginning because even this at one-time radical proposal is still a conception of truth only in relation to ideas, which we here take to include beliefs, propositions, and assertive judgments generally. Whatever we say about truth in relation to ideas in this broad sense will have to be expanded to be able to apply to truth in relation to other modes of judgment. In fact, there are two initial ways of thinking about truth that suggest themselves immediately. One is the notion that truth “happens” to an idea, and the other is the more traditional conception of truth as correspondence. We should not be inclined to abandon the idea of correspondence with respect to truth any more than we have been to abandon it with respect to knowledge. We very often mean precisely correspondence when we refer to a particular assertion as true. When we say that the claim “it is raining outside” is true, in standard cases anyway, we mean that the proposition reflects a state of affairs. “It is raining outside” is true if it is raining outside. Whatever else we are inclined to say about truth, we want to maintain this conception for its obvious adequacy in very many cases. Notice, in fact, that we avoid here the use of the bi-­conditional, which is common among some philosophers when engaged with definitional problems like this one. Corresponding to or reflecting a state of affairs is a sufficient condition for an idea or proposition to be true, in the ordinary run of things, but it is not a necessary condition of truth. Thus, as we have said, truth does not mean only one thing, even only in relation to ideas, and its more expanded meaning is captured by James in his view that truth is a condition of an idea that occurs when the idea serves its function, or when it “works,” as he famously said. James understood well enough that this version of truth is, we may say, fuzzy at the edges. An idea works to some extent and in some respects, and often the extent and the respects are

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not clear as we move along. This is the reason James also said that an idea becomes true as far as it goes. Its value is likely to be limited by breadth or time, or in some other way. Circumstances may change, in which case an idea that was useful, and therefore true as far as it went, becomes less than useful and therefore it makes little sense to continue to regard the idea as true. An idea may become true in this sense at one point and cease to be true in this sense at another. One of the objections to James’s formulation from the beginning is that some ideas we know to be false are nevertheless useful in some respect. It may, for example, be useful for someone to accept that the earth is flat, but that does not make the idea true. Along similar lines, Vladimir Lenin objected to James’s thesis that an idea is true if it works on the grounds that it opens the notion of truth to opportunistic abuse. Of specific concern to Lenin was its abuse in support of bourgeois interests. In other words, James’s idea seemed to Lenin to allow the ruling class to claim to be true anything that it perceived to be in its interest if it were true. Lenin preferred, and pretty much all of Soviet epistemology for the rest of the twentieth century followed suit, the traditional correspondence view that true ideas reflect an objective reality. It may be, he and many others argued, that true ideas are useful by virtue of being true, but it is not their usefulness toward any end for any individual or class that makes them true (Lenin 1972, Chapter 6). Though these observations are in some respects right, they point not to the unacceptability of James’ idea but to the fact that truth means more than one thing, and that sometimes its various meanings come into contact, either as convergence or conflict. The first point to notice in this regard is that the idea of truth is susceptible to abuse regardless of which meaning we ascribe to it. Those in power frequently assert to be true whatever they think would be in their interests if it were true, and most of them are not advocates of a Jamesian conception of truth. The fact is that Lenin’s followers were able to abuse a correspondence theory of truth no less than one could abuse James’. It is not a unique criticism of the Jamesian, pragmatist idea of truth, then, that it is susceptible to abuse. “Truth” in any guise can be and often is twisted for purposes that have little connection with any conception of truth. The second point to notice is that if it is reasonable to hold a variety of conceptions of truth, and if those conceptions can conflict, then we need to be careful about how we apply or appeal to them. In most cases in which we are not doing philosophy, we in fact apply differing conceptions of truth appropriately. If I am driving down the street and believe I see a small obstacle in the road, I will if possible drive around it. I assume in such a case that my belief that there is an obstacle is true if it corresponds to the presence of an obstacle,

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and I am right to do so. If I am not able to drive around it and I collide with the obstacle, it is because it was true that there was an obstacle in the road. Along different lines, however, I may immediately after dealing with the obstacle have to face the question of what may be the best route from where I am to my destination. I will think, bring to bear my knowledge and experience, and make a decision. If I reach the destination within an anticipated timeframe, and if nothing unanticipated happens, then those events constitute the truth of the idea. That I arrived as I had hoped, and maybe even with greater success than I had expected, means that my idea that this was the best route worked. To that extent my idea was true. We apply differing conceptions of truth in differing contexts, usually without any difficulties. There are other versions of truth that we may also apply in appropriate circumstances. Vattimo, to give one example, says that “truth changes us,” and he means this, I think, as a defining trait of truth. This is the sense of truth that the mystic appropriates when he says that he has experienced a profound truth. In such a case it would be misleading to think that there is some state of affairs to which a specific belief or proposition refers, and it would be equally misleading to think that this truth, whatever it is, has some specific use or value to the mystic by virtue of which it has become true. The truth, in this case, lies in the profundity of the meaning of an experience for the individual who has it. The experience has changed the person who has it, importantly, and therein, as Vattimo has it, lies its truth (Vattimo 2008). There are, then, at least three distinct conceptions of truth that have plausibility in experience, and we have no good reason to insist that only one of them is right and thereby jettison the others. Each seems reasonable in its own sphere. The variety of conceptions of truth does place a burden on us, though, to be careful in our appeal to them. As we began to suggest, we normally do not have a problem concerning which version of truth to apply, but there can be cases in which it is tempting to make use of a conception that is not appropriate in the circumstance in question. For example, we may be committed to a specific political position, or to a candidate in an election, and our commitment is so strong, and our desire to prevail so intense, that we are willing to overlook any number of items in our experience and believe that we are right in any case because it works for us, at least temporarily. This is a sort of case in which we need to be more willing to recognize facts than to insist on our goals, and not to let our commitment to the truth of our ideals, because we presumably believe them to work best, override truth in a traditional, correspondence sense of the term. Similarly, if we are planning a space shot, our hopes and desires are not sufficient conditions of truth on which to base our judgments about the thrust

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needed to propel a rocket beyond earth’s atmosphere. For that we need detailed information about physical laws and mechanical reactions. Our hopes and desires, however, are important criteria of truth when we consider whether to embark on the project in the first place. The idea that the rocket launch is a worthy enterprise is true to the extent that it directs us toward that end, and in so far as it helps to bring about ends that we desire, which is to say to the extent that it works. To insist on some correlation with facts to determine whether or not the enterprise is worthy is to misunderstand which conception of truth is appropriate at that point. Even here, though, long- and short-term goals are relevant. It may be that our goal with the rocket is to launch a nuclear warhead at a civilian population, in which case simply “working” in the sense of getting out of the atmosphere and landing on the desired site is not by itself evidence that the idea has worked because there are other, in this case ethical, issues in play. This fact, however, speaks to the complexity of analysis required to make the judgment whether to launch the rocket, but it does not impact the sense of “truth” at issue. Even if we decide that we need to take a longer ethical view concerning the desirability of launching the rocket, it remains the case that the truth of that judgment is still a matter of the extent to which it “works” in our ongoing experience. Complexities such as these indicate that when we are dealing with problems beyond those that tend to be habitual, and therefore relatively easy to resolve, we need not to insist that truth can mean only one thing, but rather to be careful which notion of truth we bring to bear. That there are in fact several candidates for what counts as truth suggests the question whether they may have anything in common. In fact, all three conceptions of truth—­ correspondence with independent facts, working, and deep meaning—share the trait of opening experience to possibilities. Truth and knowledge appear in those judgments that engender possibilities for not only more but richer experience. Dewey made this sort of point over and over again, especially in the context of education, and not surprisingly given that the enrichment of experience through the expansion of possibilities is so much a trait of knowledge and truth. We may want to go as far as to say that education is that activity that, whether pursued institutionally in schools or through one’s own structured engagement, provides the context for the refinement and ramification of the cognitive dimension of experience into the achievement of knowledge and truth. This is one of the senses in which, as Dewey also said, education is “life itself.” If there are multiple meanings of knowledge and truth, if cognition is ­possible in and through any of the modes of judgment, and if valuation and justification come in a range of forms, then we should expect that the role of argument itself has to be reconsidered. The reader will notice that nowhere in

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this text is there an attempt to “prove” a proposition, beyond the fairly trivial or minor point here and there, one that may lend itself to a simple inference. The reason is that complex philosophical claims, as radical as this may sound to most philosophers, do not lend themselves to deductive proof. They have in fact far more in common with exhibitive judgments than I imagine most philosophers would want to grant, in which respect they are as much literature as they are bodies of assertions. This is not to minimize the cognitive power of strong philosophical positions and assertions because, as I have been pointing out, knowledge does not reside solely in assertive judgments. It is to say, though, that to the extent that we philosophers have thought ourselves to be proving things, we have gone rather far astray. This point ought not to be surprising. The fact is that no significant, meaningful philosophical proposition has been proven to be true. Had they been, we would not be able or even inclined to continue to argue about them. If Plato or Aquinas or Kant had actually proven something, in the strict sense in which a mathematical proposition can be proved, we would have recognized and accepted the proof and moved on. But on the contrary, it is precisely a mark of an important, provocative philosopher that we continue to study, examine, consider, and argue about what he or she has had to say. We do not treat mathematical accomplishments that way because though there is always something to learn from an important mathematical proof, there is nothing still to argue about. If there were, we would not consider it a proof. If philosophers have proven nothing of importance, then why, one wonders, do we continue to think that philosophers should set about proving things? The answer to that question probably has something to do with the fact that though philosophy is not mathematics, it is not literature either. There is no point in arguing about Pythagoras’s theorem, and there is also no point to argue about Homer. In the case of Pythagoras, the issue is settled and argument is pointless; in the case of Homer argument is also pointless, not because any issue is settled, but simply because argument is not appropriate to literary judgment. Plato, however, is different. Plato renders assertive judgments, which give him more in common with Pythagoras than with Homer. As a result, we seem to think that the means of valuation of what Plato has produced should be more similar to the way we evaluate Pythagoras than to the way we evaluate Homer. This inference is right, but not quite as much as we have assumed. Philosophy is not literature, but it is not mathematics either. That fact should suggest to us that the means of valuation of a philosophical proposition or complex position cannot have as much in common with the valuation of a mathematical proposition as we have tended to think. In other words, the ­valuation of ideas in a philosophical work is not a matter of deductive proof.

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But if philosophical valuation ought not to aspire to proof, to what should it aspire? I suggested at the beginning of the chapter that philosophical argument ­aspires not to deductive proof but to the demonstration of plausibility, ­reasonableness, and usefulness. In a fully Jamesian spirit, a philosophical proposition or set of propositions that is plausible, reasonable, and useful is to that extent acceptable, or even true. For important philosophical judgments, such valuation is never finished because people can be expected to return to it any number of times over any number of years, and in that process the valuation may change. New information may come to light and the proposition or propositions appear to be less plausible or reasonable than they once did, or circumstances change, and a set of ideas that was once useful becomes less so. And it should not surprise us that this is exactly what we find throughout the history of philosophy. It is worth pointing out that in the process of considering the plausibility, reasonableness, and usefulness of a philosophical idea we have recourse regularly to the principles of deductive, inductive, and abductive logic, and it is right that we should. We may even prove a point here and there. For these reasons alone it is worthwhile for philosophical education to continue to place the study of logic at its center. But because judgment, knowledge, and truth are as diverse as they are, it is necessary for us to acknowledge that traditional deductive argument is one among a range of forms of valuation. It is important that we not forget that the achievement of knowledge and truth, other than in those cases in which it happens by chance, is a result of query, and the variety of forms of philosophical valuation is really a point about query. To that extent we need to sustain our understanding of query and the forms it can take. In the interest of avoiding unnecessary repetition, the point here is to remind ourselves of the salient traits of query rather than to rehearse the analysis. First, we may all recognize that in judgment we sometimes engage in methodic exploration. The fact that not all judgment is exploratory, and not even all exploratory judgment is methodic, requires that we be able to distinguish one sort of judgment from another. We do that by describing methodic, exploratory judgment as an exercise in query. Because the theory of judgment enables us to recognize the different modes of judgment, and because we further acknowledge that methodic and exploratory judgment may and does occur in any mode, it is incumbent on us to establish various forms of query. This is a helpful conceptual move in that it allows us to make certain comparative analyses more clearly than we otherwise might have. For example, there have been many efforts to compare art and science with respect to their ability to create knowledge, driven to some extent by the not uncommon insight that art and science are both ways that we

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e­ xplore our world. In the course of such analyses one may hear people say that because art and science can both be revelatory, they must in some ways be doing “the same sort of thing,” or some such locution. Without a clear way to account for the similarities and differences, however, people frequently struggle with how to characterize this “same sort of thing.” Sometimes one hears that art is a kind of science, or science is a kind of art, both of which claims are fairly crude efforts to account for the similarity in exploratory capacity. In a more sophisticated vein, we saw Dewey’s claim that all conscious experience involves inquiry in that it is “full of inference,” which unfortunately collapses all forms of query into one. The initial insight in that art and science are both revelatory is a good one, as we have been trying to demonstrate, but a further understanding of that similarity gets bogged down if we are not able to indicate clearly how the revelatory process differs in each case. By recognizing that query takes a range of forms, we are able to acknowledge both the similarity and the differences. All modes of judgment can be methodically exploratory, and when that occurs in the course of assertive judgment we have a case of inquiry. The methodic exploration that constitutes inquiry describes the form of exploration that involves the drawing of rational inferences, experimentation, the creation of theories and hypotheses, and the gathering of empirical data in relation to a specific topic or question; in short, all the methodic gathering of assertive judgments that constitutes the natural and social sciences, mathematics, philosophy, journalism, and much of our daily productive experience. As we have seen, though, not all methodic exploration fits this description. Some of it occurs in and through exhibitive and active judgments. Such exploration is query, and can issue in knowledge and truth, but it is carried on differently from inquiry. It is not inferential and, as I will show in the next chapter, it does not argue, though it often makes a case, and does so in a sustained and methodic way. Exhibitive query is a matter of assembling material to make a point in some methodic way, as active query is the sustained and deliberative effort to produce an end in action, whether it is faster wood-chopping, or new forms of  movement in dance, or athletic improvement, or even more successful exercise. The reason it is important to keep the forms of query in mind is that they are necessary to account for the variety in the ways knowledge is achieved, which is to say the range of expressions of the cognitive dimension of experience. Knowledge, truth, judgment, and query are complex and varied in specific ways such that they reinforce one another. Together they contribute to the elucidation of the cognitive dimension of experience.

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IV To this point I have filled out the picture of experience in its cognitive dimension, and it is clear that its components—knowledge, truth, judgment, and query—are all necessary to give the picture texture and depth. The other ­aspect of the cognitive dimension of experience that enriches the picture further is the ways it intersects with the aesthetic and the political dimensions of experience. At this point it is a bit early to develop these features because we have not yet had the opportunity to articulate the other dimension in any detail. We can, though, begin a sketch that will gradually be filled in by each of the subsequent two chapters. One of the points I am able to make, even at this early stage, has to do with a feature of the aesthetic dimension of experience to which I have alluded several times already, and that is the cognitive character of art. In fact, as I have just pointed out, one of the reasons we need to make finer distinctions than usual in the forms of query is precisely to be able to accommodate without distortion the fact that art is capable of achieving knowledge, and more typically than not it does so through methodic exploration rather than haphazardly. Art is the expression of the aesthetic dimension of experience in the same sense as knowledge is the expression of the cognitive, and the relation between knowledge and art is the more obvious way that the two dimensions interact. One form that relation takes is the potentially cognitive character of art, while another form is the potentially aesthetic character of knowledge, or more accurately the aesthetic character of query in general and inquiry in particular. Both are possible, and both speak to the engagement with one another of the cognitive and the aesthetic dimensions of experience. That art has a cognitive character is something after a bit of reflection we all realize, even if many of us have traditionally lacked sufficiently well-­articulated philosophical categories through which to account for it.4 Actually, there is no good reason to have had so much trouble with this point, considering the fact that there have been sustained and quite rich explorations of the issue. Gadamer comes readily to mind, and there have been others (Gadamer 1989). In 4 Dewey worries about attributing knowledge to art in Chapter 12 of Art as Experience (John Dewey 1987). His concern there is with the fairly common romantic claim that art provides a special access to something like “higher” knowledge of the world, nature, the self, God, or some similarly important subject. Dewey was at pains to point out that we ought not talk about a cognitive capacity of art in any such sense, primarily because there is no “higher” knowledge of this kind, and therefore no special capacity of art to open it to us. We think that our way of handling the relation between art and knowledge is one of which he might approve.

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the next chapter I will explore this point in much greater detail, but I can indicate here that, once we realize that knowledge and truth do not have to take the form of propositions, it becomes much easier to acknowledge that we can and do, when we give ourselves the opportunity, learn a great deal from art in any and all of its forms. One of the hallmarks of great works of literature, to use one example, is that it can reveal an abundance of insight into its subject matter, from the psychology of the relation of moral and religious struggle in Dostoyevsky, or the experience of the Dublin street in Joyce, or the nature of memory in Proust, or the tension of tradition and modernity in Soseki or Pahmuk. Film, theater, painting, sculpture, music, performance art, installations, any and all of it, is often rich in cognitively significant impact on us. We too often talk about art as purely a matter of expression, or concert music is sometimes praised for its ability to relax us. It is not that art does not have these traits, because it often does. But we frequently fail to appreciate the extent to which we learn in aesthetic experience. A visit to a museum can be a cognitively important experience in many ways. We can of course learn about art and artists, which is often sufficiently satisfying to justify the visit. But it is even more satisfying when we come away from an exhibition with an understanding of the world, of ourselves or others, of war, peace, justice, and other monumental themes, that we did not have going in. In such cases it is entirely reasonable to say that we have learned something, just as we can say so after reading a book or article. In neither case is the knowledge necessarily certain or irrefutable, and in both kinds of cases it may be that the knowledge is significant in that it opens possibilities and points us in directions we would not have thought to go otherwise. We have just such experiences in museums and concert halls, in libraries and schools, and in our more normal and daily experience. Sometimes it is propositional and sometimes not, but if it engenders an understanding we did not have previously, and if it opens to new experience and possibilities, then it is cognitively rich. In this respect, the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions of experience intersect, and they do so regularly. These are not rare events, but part of the sustained fabric of experience. In fact, one of the advantages of the theory of experience that we are developing here is that it enables, indeed requires, us to recognize this feature of experience. The better we understand the degree to which the aesthetic in experience enables and enriches our cognitive lives, the more we will see and understand it around us. It is interesting that philosophers have a particularly difficult time recognizing this. The reason, presumably, is that we have too readily allowed ourselves to think that knowledge has to come in the form of beliefs and propositions that are justified or warranted. Of course, we need to retain the commitment to justification and warrant,

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a­ ppropriately defined and conceived, or knowledge collapses into arbitrary opinions, assertions, and commitments of various kinds, not to mention deadends disguised as possibilities. But once we free ourselves from the unwise insistence that knowledge can have to do only with beliefs and propositions, and with the restrained conceptions of truth that are associated with such an ­insistence, we are able to allow ourselves to appreciate the knowledge we gain in and through works of art and the aesthetic generally. If it is interesting that philosophers have had trouble with this, it is similarly interesting that artists and art critics have not had trouble acknowledging the cognitive character of art and the aesthetic. It is not unusual for an artist or critic to refer to a work of art as, for example, “insightful,” or “revelatory,” or “enlightening.” These are all cognitively loaded terms, and one of the assumptions of our position that art has a cognitive character is that when artists and critics use terms like these they mean them not metaphorically, notwithstanding the fact that they tend to be metaphorical to begin with, but literally in the sense that they imply cognitive value in these cases no less than they do when they refer to propositions. That a coherent understanding of knowledge and cognition should be able to accommodate this sort of usage of the terms “knowledge” and “cognition” is one of the advantages of our theory of experience. Once we realize that experience is constituted in some measure by a cognitive dimension, and that knowledge and cognition is not restricted to beliefs and propositions, it becomes possible to hear artists and commentators on art as they intend to be heard. The more obvious way that the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions of experience are integrated with one another is in the cognitive character of art, and we are now able to recognize that fact in both epistemology and art theory. The less obvious way the two dimensions of experience are integrated is in the aesthetic character of knowledge, or the aesthetic character of query and inquiry. As in the case of the cognitive character of art, this relation is not a new one. It has long been normal, for example, to refer to the beauty of a mathematical proof, or to the elegance of a theory, or the literary quality of a piece of philosophical or historical writing. Among English language philosophers, for example, it is unsurprising to see a reference to the aesthetic quality of Hume, or Emerson, or Santayana. We may also find conceptual structures aesthetically elegant, for example Spinoza’s metaphysics or Hegel’s conceptual architectonic, quite independently of whether or not we agree at the propositional level. In a similar vein, we can read Plato’s dialogues as literature as easily as read them as philosophy, while with due respect to Aristotle’s philosophical bona ­fides, we tend not to ascribe literary value to his works, though there may well be reason to praise the beauty of his intellectual constructs. That the

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r­ easonableness of these claims is readily recognizable points to the fact that we are already well aware that knowledge and query can be aesthetically rich, a judgment that we may make without regard to the conceptual content of the material. Moreover, that we can fairly easily acknowledge the point indicates that we need in our understanding of cognition and knowledge generally a way to accommodate it. Traditional epistemologies that focus primarily or exclusively on assertive judgments and on inquiry so divorce the cognitive from the aesthetic that the two tend to be treated as entirely distinct and separate realms. By treating the cognitive as a dimension of experience, by doing the same with the aesthetic, and by attending to the ways the two integrate with one another, we are able to make better sense of our own experience, both cognitive and aesthetic. In this respect my theory of experience has the dual advantage of bringing into focus elements of experience not commonly noticed, for example the nature of judgment and the appropriate distinctions among forms of query, as it simultaneously clarifies how it is that we can have the experience, for example of the ways art and knowledge intersect, that we regularly have.

…

The general point is further clarified by a look at the ways the cognitive and the political dimensions of experience intersect and overlap. Knowledge and power, which are the expressions of the cognitive and political dimensions of experience, are related most fundamentally in the fact that much of experience is a matter of problem-solving. The problem-solving feature of experience, on which the classical pragmatists based so much of their approach to both experience and knowledge, propels our epistemology in that it points to the conception of knowledge and query as manipulating our environments such as to move us along, and our understanding of the truth of ideas as “working,” in the sense of indicating the success of the “moving along.” At the same time, the fact that experience is characterized by problem-solving is precisely where we identify the centrality in experience of power generally understood, and consequently to the political dimension of experience. I have yet to develop the idea of the political dimension of experience in any detail, and I will have to wait until Chapter 5 to do so, but we can anticipate the point to some extent here. The basic idea is that the third strand in the texture of experience, in addition to the cognitive and aesthetic, is the political. Just as experience is characterized most pervasively through and in knowledge and art, its third pervasive

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trait is power. Because experience is a problem-solving process, for the most part, power in the general sense of the capacity to alter our environment, is determinative of experience and, we may also say, human life. How this power expresses itself, the many forms it may take, and the varied contexts in our lives in which it is relevant and in many ways determinative, are the themes to be pursued as we develop the general idea. At this point, though, we may ­notice a few of the features of the political dimension of experience in which it intersects with the cognitive. Its relations to the aesthetic must wait until the next two chapters. It is a commonplace to say that knowledge is power, and the cliché is accurate enough in various respects. For our purposes it is useful to notice that the reason knowledge is power is that the two are sides of the same problem-­ solving coin in experience. It is impossible to introduce this relationship without bringing Foucault to mind, so a word is in order about what our understanding of the relation of knowledge and power does and does not share with his. One obvious point that we share with Foucault is the pervasiveness of power. As he put it, “power is everywhere,” and in our parlance, power is a dimension of experience (Foucault 1998, 63). His formulation is pithier, to be sure, but it is a comparable point. Power is not merely something that this or that person exercises, but it is part of the fabric of experience itself. Foucault also explicitly avoids talking about power in a negative sense, and on that point he is quite right. As a pervasive feature of experience, power is value neutral, moral valuation being a function of specific situations in which power is relevant, not a feature of power generally. Foucault made the point, for example, which we might also say ourselves, that “power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (Foucault 1991, 194). Among Foucault’s more interesting, and controversial, claims is that knowledge and truth are integrally related to power, and in fact are features of experience, we may say, embedded in power. Foucault was most interested in political and social discourse, and in specific forms of the social and political exercise of power. Our interest is more general than that, though we will go to some lengths to think through the social and political implications of the view that power expresses a pervasive dimension of experience. The details can wait, but we may say now in relation to Foucault that the general idea we wish to articulate and defend provides an underpinning for his more specific analyses. In his hands, the discourses of knowledge that we typically use, the natural and social sciences more relevantly, are themselves steeped in power relations and implications.

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On this point Foucault was quite right, and my theory of experience describes why. The very act of manipulating our environments, of ­problem-­solving, of judgment itself, is everywhere and always an exercise of power. That is what it means to say that there is a political dimension of experience. Such power may be minimally relevant in a given case, or it may be profoundly relevant. In a child’s game of “hide and seek” there is power at work, though u­ nless there is some sort of broader competition going on, for example for bragging rights in the neighborhood, the implications of the exercise of that power remain within the confines of the game. In a social theory, or an experiment in physics, or a literary study, or a political movement, there is also power in the broadest sense of judgment at work, and in those cases the implications can be enormous and far-reaching. In all these cases, power and knowledge cannot be separated, though they can be distinguished for the purposes of study. Their understanding, however, requires that we continually keep in mind that there is no knowledge without power, indeed there is no manipulative experience that is not suffused with power. Foucault went a considerable distance to help us appreciate these points, and our theory of experience is, we may say, a friendly extension of his insights. The general point, then, is that knowledge is an exercise in power, in the process of making things happen. Not everything we make happen counts as knowledge, simply because not everything we make happen engages us cognitively. But whatever does engage us cognitively embeds us in the exercise of power. Knowledge is our ongoing effort to achieve ends of certain kinds, and the capacity to achieve those ends is power, which is to say it is the pervasive political dimension of experience. There is a reciprocal relationship here, as there is in the case of the relation of knowledge and art. We have been able to describe how art is cognitive and how knowledge is aesthetic. In a similar vein, we want to be able to say that knowledge is political, and power is cognitive. Foucault was especially good in describing how knowledge is political. He was less concerned with how power is cognitive, but this is a feature of the situation that I want to stress. I made the point above that not every work of art is cognitively significant or interesting, but every work of art has the capacity to be cognitively valuable. There is a comparable point to be made about power. Not every exercise of power is cognitively valuable, if only because if it were then every judgment and every moment of experience would be an instance of knowledge, in which case knowledge would be equivalent to experience and we would lose all capacity to identify and understand knowledge as a dimension of experience. But any exercise of power, like any work of art, can be cognitively significant, and this is a feature of our experience that we

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do well to keep in mind. Another way to say this is that active judgment, which is in some ways a more direct form of power than the assertive and exhibitive, is capable of cognitive significance, just as is exhibitive judgment. This introduces yet ­another reason for expanding our epistemology to account for the broader range of experience beyond simply beliefs, propositions, and assertive ­judgment. The more standard forms of epistemology simply do not allow us to recognize that active judgment may be cognitive, and therefore the more standard forms of epistemology are unable to elucidate knowledge in its varied forms. Actually, to point to the cognitive capacity of action, of power, is not altogether novel. There is a long-standing tradition of talking about “knowledge through” and “knowledge how,” and distinguishing those ways of knowing from “knowledge that.” There may be an inclination to understand what is meant by “knowledge through” and “knowledge how” as variations of “knowledge that,” in the sense that they might be taken to be ways of reaching beliefs or propositional knowledge. One might, along such lines, be inclined to think that to achieve the knowledge of how to do something, for example swim smoothly or effectively chop wood or drive a car, is translatable into propositions, and that it is in the translations, in the propositions, that the knowledge resides. But this would be a misunderstanding of what it means to achieve knowledge of how to accomplish something. It is true that it is possible, to use the example of swimming smoothly, to describe in propositional terms what one ought to do in order to swim smoothly. Those propositions may indeed be true or false, and there is surely knowledge of a propositional sort involved at that point. But that is not equivalent to the knowledge embedded in the action itself. It is the action of swimming smoothly, the exercise of the relevant power in our broad sense of the word, that constitutes the knowledge. Knowing how to swim smoothly is equivalent to having the capacity to swim smoothly, not the capacity to describe how to swim smoothly. It is the successful action that constitutes the knowledge and the epistemological validation of the knowledge. This is the reason that knowing how to do something, or even knowing through some action or other, is not simply a form of, or explainable as, or reducible to, propositional knowledge. The cognitive character of power, to return to our more technical language, is analogous to the cognitive character of art, and in neither case are they reducible to the form of knowledge expressed in assertive judgment. The cognitive dimension of experience is interwoven with the aesthetic and the political dimensions, and knowledge has to be understood sufficiently broadly to recognize that fact. In light of the central place of knowledge in experience and the broad nature of knowledge that is now clearer to us, an adequate view of

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e­ xperience has to be able to recognize and accommodate both. Our theory of experience is an effort to do just that. With this discussion of knowledge and the cognitive dimension of experience behind us, we can turn now to a consideration of the aesthetic dimension of experience.

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Chapter 4

The Aesthetic Dimension of Experience At the risk of conveying the impression that I am more interested in dissection than in synthetic analysis, I must begin with a distinction.1 This chapter is an account not of aesthetic experience but of the aesthetic dimension of experience. The two are of course related, but in the broader understanding of ­experience they reside, so to speak, at different levels of generality. Aesthetic experience is an example of what in Chapter 2 I referred to as forms of ­experience, such as personal, or historical, or religious, or political, or ethical experience, among others. The aesthetic dimension of experience, however, is a ­feature of experience in which all forms of experience may share. Because all experience may have an aesthetic character, the aesthetic is a definitive feature of the very fabric of experience. It is, together with the cognitive and the political, in this regard a dimension of experience. We may say, at this early stage, that experience has an aesthetic dimension because in its particulars and its generality, which is to say in individual experiences and in the general trajectory of one’s experience, there is dissonance, unity, and harmony that together make experience possible and that constitute in the most general terms the aesthetic dimension. Another distinction that has to be made at this point, in addition to that between aesthetic experience and the aesthetic dimension of experience, is that though in the explication of the aesthetic dimension we will have recourse to extensive discussions of art, this chapter is not an attempt to develop a theory of art. With an exception here and a quibble there, the idea of an aesthetic dimension of experience takes as a given the theory of art that Dewey articulated in Art as Experience. That work embodies the most insightful and valuable theory of art offered to date. And even if one is not predisposed to agree with such an evaluative opinion, it is surely the case that the theory of art 1 This chapter draws on four earlier essays: “Judgment and Art” (Ryder 2015a), and presented at the Central European Pragmatist Forum, Wrocław, Poland, 8–14 June, 2014; “Central Park in the Dark” (Ryder 2013c), and presented at the First All European Pragmatism Conference, Rome, Italy, 19–21 September, 2012; “Literary Modernism and Philosophical Pragmatism” (Ryder 2015c), and presented at the conference Maverick Voices and Modernity, 1890–1939, University of Durham, UK, July 5–6, 2013; and “Judgment and Film,” Film-Philosophy Conference: A World of Cinemas, University of Glasgow, UK, 2–4 July, 2014. The point should also be made that some of the ground covered in this chapter, especially on the cognitive capacity of art, was also developed to some extent in Ryder 2013a, Chapter Seven.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004429185_006 John

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­ ewey has developed is the most consistent with the several philosophical D commitments that constitute the pragmatic naturalism that is my own philosophic environment. The many specific issues explored there, for example the transactional understanding of experience that enables the aesthetic, the embedded condition of the subject, and the conceptions of substance and form in a work of art, are consistent with and inform my approach to the aesthetic dimension of experience. The reader is encouraged to turn to Art as Experience for a theory of art to which the current chapter, indeed this volume as a whole, is intended as a friendly amendment and extension. Because in the process of developing his theory of art Dewey had a great deal to say about the aesthetic character of experience, or what is referred to here as the aesthetic dimension of experience, indeed because the pervasive presence of the aesthetic in experience is a foundation of his theory of art and the clue to our general idea of the dimensions of experience, we would do well to begin with a quick look at his basic point. In the earliest pages of Art as Experience, Dewey makes his point about the root of aesthetic experience in what we may call routine or quotidian experience: In order to understand the esthetic in its ultimate and approved forms, one must begin with it in the raw; in the events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man, arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens: the sights that hold the crowd—the fireengine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous holes in the earth; the human-fly climbing the steeple-side; the men perched high in air on girders, throwing and catching red-hot bolts. The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of the housewife in tending her plants, and the intent interest of her goodman in tending the patch of green in front of the house; the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and crumbling coals. dewey 1987, 10–11

Here Dewey points to the fact that some features of experience attract our attention, but the more critical point for our purpose is, as Dewey would agree, that the attractive features in experience in these and countless other cases embody or express the aesthetic character, or what we wish to call the aesthetic dimension, of experience. Dewey in Art as Experience is interested, as I have said, in developing a theory of art, and his point of departure is that what we now call a work of art “idealize(s) qualities found in common experience”

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(Dewey 1987, 17). It is those qualities that I wish to identify as constituting the aesthetic dimension of experience. Dewey is right when he says that “esthetic quality is implicit in every normal experience…,” if by “implicit” he means to say, “potentially present” (Dewey 1987, 18). Among the features of “ordinary experience” to which Dewey refers are, first, the fact that experience occurs as an interaction with an environment, and second, that this interaction consists of taking and giving, or assimilating and manipulating. He locates here the first indication of the aesthetic in experience, which is the harmony, balance, and dissonance that emerges when we engage our environment actively. Actually, at one point Dewey emphasizes the assimilative aspect of experience in his theory of art, referring to the aesthetic as the “undergoing aspect of experience” and as “receptive,” though a page later he emphasizes the manipulative aspect when he says that “Without an act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art. The artist selected, simplified, clarified, abridged and condensed according to his interest. The beholder must go through these operations according to his point of view and interest” (Dewey 1987, 59–60). Dewey seems to mean in this instance that the aesthetic prevails in the assimilative aspects of experience automatically, while the production of art requires a manipulative intervention. I shall put this slightly differently, because I wish to say that the aesthetic dimension of experience is as much a matter of the manipulative as the assimilative aspect of experience, though by definition Dewey is right that a work of art is a product, therefore a judgment. The manipulative aspect of experience occurs in response to a felt need of some kind, whether it is biological, social, psychological, ethical, or intellectual. This, Dewey might have said, is the “problematic situation” of which he speaks elsewhere as the occasion for thought. We treat such needs or problems as met or settled when through our response to them our situation achieves a degree of unity and harmony that we find sufficient. Because experience consists of an endless process of such assimilation and manipulation, of feeling and responding to imbalance and dissonance in our environment, the creation of harmony and unity is an inherent feature of experience and the root of the aesthetic. Moreover, the generation through active manipulation of the environment of unity and harmony produces order and form, both of which are critical features of art and of aesthetic experience. Indeed, “only when an organism shares in the ordered relations of its environment does it secure the stability essential to living. And when the participation comes after a phase of disruption and conflict, it bears within itself the germs of a consummation akin to the esthetic” (Dewey 1987, 20). Dewey goes on to point out that there are two kinds of conditions, two “logically possible worlds,” in which the aesthetic would not reside. One would be a

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world in which there is nothing but flux, with no attainment of harmony and balance, however temporary and limited in scope. Such a world would have no rhythm, if only because ironically continuous change is not change at all, in that there is never any sort of culmination into wholes of integrated, harmonious, constituents. In a world of constant and nothing but change, we may say, there are no complexes, no integrated wholes, and therefore no harmony, however fleeting it may be. This sort of world, Dewey says, is a world without an aesthetic dimension. Similarly, a world without change and tension is also a world without harmony, balance, and dissonance because it is a world in which nothing happens at all. In this respect, we can see that James’s horror at what he called a “block universe” was an aesthetic reaction, or better a horrified reaction to the fact that such a world is a world without an aesthetic dimension. If Dewey is right, then we are able to locate or ground the aesthetic ­dimension of experience in the very fact of complexity. There is an aesthetic dimension of experience, we may now say, in the fact that nature consists of the harmonious relation of elements that constitute its complexes, as well as the fact that experience itself, given the ubiquity of the dissonance in problematic situations we encounter, is the ongoing necessity of achieving unity, harmony, balance, and rhythm in the interactions that constitute it. Given our ontological and lived circumstances, it turns out, experience cannot help but have an aesthetic dimension. Dewey makes a comparable point when he says “Apart from relations of cause and effect in nature, conception and invention could not be. Apart from the relation of processes of rhythmic conflict and fulfillment in animal life, experience would be without design and pattern” (Dewey 1987, 31). Creativity and the harmonious relation of elements is in nature and experience themselves, and in them lies the aesthetic dimension of experience. A clearer understanding of the aesthetic dimension of experience is available through a consideration of the relation of art to experience. Dewey is at pains to demonstrate that art derives from experience generally, and we can readily agree. We need to push aside, as Dewey advises, the red herring distinction between the fine and applied arts and realize that all art is useful in its way, or at least has its origins in what at some time and place was useful, even if now its place is in a museum. When we realize that all art is “useful” is some meaningful way, then it becomes easier to see how its origins lie in the push and pull of experience and the consummations we find or produce there. The more profound achievements in art are products refined from the rawer materials of ordinary experience. In this respect, the arts are similar to cognitive achievements, which are also products refined from rawer epistemological aspects of the same push and pull of experience.

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The aesthetic dimension of experience is similar to the cognitive dimension in another way as well. In our intellectual activities, for example in philosophy or psychology or sociology or political science, to name just a few, we not only draw our ideas from and through experience, but we also turn our skills and methods back on experience as a subject matter for study. In our aesthetic activities, we may do the same. Art has its roots in experience vis-à-vis its aesthetic dimension, but art also treats experience as a subject for aesthetic examination. The query that constitutes exhibitive judgment often has experience as its focus, and as we will see further on, the results of that query may be as enlightening as the results of the inquiry into experience that constitutes much of our intellectual efforts. The aesthetic dimension of experience, then, is revealed in both the sources of art and the products of its query. Illustrations of the ways art and works of art illuminate our understanding of experience will be considered a few pages on. Here, though, we need to dwell a bit longer on some of the traits of the general relation of art to experience. Specifically, we would do well to remind ourselves of some of the details of the exhibitive mode of judgment because it is the way we judge that characterizes art and that most clearly embodies the aesthetic dimension of experience. I have associated the aesthetic dimension of experience with the traits of unity, harmony, and dissonance, and in an earlier chapter made the point that the exhibitive is the mode of judgment that is most correlated with those traits. It is important to note that the point is not that the aesthetic appears only in or through exhibitive judgment, because to say that would be to make two mistakes. First, to say that the aesthetic appears only in or through exhibitive judgment would be to ignore the fact that we may locate the aesthetic in assertive and active judgments as well as in exhibitive. Second, to say so would be to associate the aesthetic with only the manipulative aspect of experience. The assimilative aspect of experience is capable no less than the manipulative of expressing an aesthetic character and embodying the aesthetic dimension of experience. When Dewey makes his point that the roots of the aesthetic are in ordinary experience he uses examples drawn from our largely passive exposure to events in our environment, for example watching a fire truck race by or seeing workers on a girder toss hot bolts back and forth. He is quite right to indicate in this way that what we absorb in our interactions with our environment can and does have an aesthetic character. Nevertheless, I have embraced the point that experience has both assimilative and manipulative aspects, and the fact is that the aesthetic is no less relevant to the manipulative than it is to the assimilative, which, as I have just shown, Dewey also pointed out. And in the manipulative aspect of experience,

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the aesthetic dimension finds its most direct and explicit expression in exhibitive judgment. To appreciate this point, it is important to keep in mind that the exhibitive is that mode of judgment in which we manipulate the complexes of our environment not through asserting anything but through showing. The showing can be visual, or aural, or tactile, or kinetic, or linguistic, or in principle any sort of sensory relation to the individual rendering the judgment and to those of us who engage with it. To this extent we can speak of the arts of any and all kinds as products of human manipulation that embody exhibitive judgment, a painting or sculpture no more or less than a poem or novel or dance or food or music. One of the reasons it is appropriate, even necessary, to distinguish the aesthetic from the cognitive dimension of experience is that the exhibitive and assertive modes of judgment must also be distinguished. I made the case in the previous chapter that cognition and knowledge pervade experience of all kinds, but that there is nevertheless a cognitive dimension of experience that we can and should identify. In fact, it is precisely because cognition may pervade experience that the cognitive emerges as a general trait, or dimension, of experience. Because experience has both assimilative and manipulative aspects, it is incumbent on us to consider both when we sort through the general traits of experience. With respect to the manipulative, we have recognized that not all manipulation in experience, which is to say not all judgment and the products of judgment, are of the same sort. Specifically, I have, following Buchler, identified three modes of judgment: assertive, exhibitive, and active. Traditionally, though not for pragmatic naturalism, the assertive has been most closely associated with linguistic production, which in turn has been most commonly associated with propositions, which themselves have been most commonly associated with knowledge. Assertion, as I have shown, has traditionally been associated with cognition. As I have also demonstrated, this traditional correlation is understandable because there is good reason to regard a great deal of knowledge to be propositional, which itself is the reason that we posit description as one of the indicators of the cognitive dimension of experience. The mistake has been to use assertion and propositions as paradigmatic or necessarily definitive of knowledge and cognition, because in doing so we have made it virtually impossible to recognize the other ways that knowledge is achieved. So, we may say that though the assertive mode of judgment can be associated with cognition and knowledge, that association is neither complete nor necessary. Assertion does not constitute the whole of judgment, and cognition is not limited to the assertive. Because assertion does not constitute the whole of judgment, we have been motivated to look elsewhere in the manipulative aspect of experience to

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identify other modes of judgment, one of which is the exhibitive. Moreover, as assertion can be justifiably associated with cognition, recognizing that such an association is neither complete nor necessary, exhibitive judgment can be associated with art and the aesthetic dimension of experience, though the correlation also is neither necessary nor complete. In a work of art, we typically do not assert anything, rather we show, demonstrate, or exhibit something. That “something” can be a perspective or angle on any subject or theme whatsoever, from a purely formal matter of the relation of elements to a highly programmatic work. We have associated the cognitive dimension of experience, and its related assertive mode of judgment, with description, truth, and possibilities, and in a similar way we may associate the aesthetic dimension of experience and its related exhibitive mode of judgment with unity, harmony, and dissonance. In the gathering of complexes to render an exhibitive judgment, at the most general level our exhibitive judgments can be expected to engage unity in form and/or program, harmony of the elements involved, and dissonance of contrast among the elements. Indeed, whatever other criteria of evaluation we may use in any specific case, the adequacy of an exhibitive judgment will depend to a considerable degree on its aesthetic value, and its aesthetic value in turn will in some ways or other necessarily involve traits that embody unity, harmony, and dissonance. I want to hold, then, that more than any other mode, the exhibitive mode of judgment engages the aesthetic dimension of experience because an exhibitive judgment takes up, or engages, as I have said, precisely those general properties that contribute to the definition of the aesthetic dimension of ­experience—unity, harmony, and dissonance. In this regard, exhibitive judgment differs importantly from assertive judgment, just as the aesthetic and the cognitive dimensions of experience differ. I will have occasion below, as I have already done in the previous chapter, to emphasize the ways the dimensions of experience and the related modes of judgment intersect and overlap, but here the emphasis is on what differentiates them. As is the case throughout this study, attention alternates between analysis and synthesis, between distinctions and integration. In the end, experience is characterized by both dimensions (and of course by the political as well), and it is important not to emphasize one at the expense of the other. The significance of the distinctions made in the theory of judgment in so far as they enable a richer understanding of the aesthetic dimension of experience is reinforced by a return to considerations that were raised in the previous chapter, having specifically to do with the confusions that we can avoid by distinguishing assertive from exhibitive judgment. A good deal of confusion about art and what we are calling exhibitive judgment, and about knowledge

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and assertive judgment, has resulted from an inadequate grasp of the relation between the aesthetic and the cognitive. At the risk of over emphasizing this relation, we would do well to look a bit more closely at it again. As I have shown, the tendency in Anglo-American epistemology has been to treat knowledge as a matter of beliefs that meet certain conditions, for example that they be true and justified, in one version. But if knowledge is a matter of true and justified beliefs, then it is also a matter of propositions. Knowledge, in other words, tends to be understood as a matter of propositions, specifically propositions that assert beliefs that, in this version, are true and justified. There are other versions, for example Dewey’s warranted assertability as a definition of knowledge, but the limitations are the same. If knowledge is to be a function of beliefs or assertability, then only those judgments that assert propositions can have a cognitive capacity. One extreme version of this approach is in some branches of so-called “naturalist” epistemology, for which only the propositions of the natural sciences can be a genuine source of knowledge. The problem for art of this sort of epistemology is obvious. If knowledge is a matter of propositions, and if art is for the most part not a matter of propositions, then art could not reasonably be thought to have a cognitive dimension. Clearly, though, for artists themselves there is no question that art has to do, often in unspecified ways, with knowledge and with truth. So, there is a serious problem here. Artists, art historians and critics frequently refer to the element of truth in works of art, and they equally commonly speak as if works of art are capable of revealing something about a subject matter, which is to say that they are capable of generating knowledge. Either artists, art critics, and art historians are deluded about the nature of the work they produce and upon which they comment, or there is some non-trivial meaning of knowledge and truth that can be applied to the arts. In the spirit of generosity, and unless we encounter good reason to think otherwise, let us assume that artists and those who comment on art are not delusional when they speak of knowledge and truth in relation to art, which is to say that knowledge and truth can sensibly be ascribed to art. Let us also grant that on the whole works of art do not consist of assertive propositions. The colors and forms in a typical Kandinsky painting do not assert anything, though they are rich in meaning; the meaning, simply, does not derive from propositional assertions. Similarly, an effort by Henry James, or James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf, to capture the flow of inner experience is not an exercise in propositions or assertions, however full of meaning it may be. We shall say the same of a Schubert Impromptu, or a Kurosawa film, or a Beckett play. Art, let us grant, is not propositional and assertive, yet any of its forms can be cognitive and veridical.

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If these assumptions are reasonable then an epistemology that requires knowledge and truth to derive from propositional assertions is deeply flawed. We should note that this point is not new, and in fact traditions in Continental philosophy have been well aware of this for some time. Most importantly, as I have suggested in the previous chapter, is the hermeneutical tradition in general, and Gadamer specifically. Gadamer went a great distance in helping us to understand both knowledge and art so that their relation became clear and comprehensible. In this respect the pragmatic naturalist account of judgment, knowledge, and art is fully in a Gadamerian spirit, and intended to complement his contributions. This is also not a new point, in that the American philosopher Richard Bernstein made this observation long ago (Gadamer 1989; Bernstein, 1983). The upshot at this point, and to some extent this repeats what was said in the previous chapter, is that an epistemology that allows us to speak meaningfully about knowledge and truth in relation to art is called for if we are to have an adequate conception of the aesthetic, and our theories of experience and judgment enables us to provide it. First, knowledge is not only “knowledge that” something is the case. There is also “knowledge how” in the sense of a skill, and as Shusterman and others have pointed out, there is also “interpretive knowledge,” and “knowledge through.” The latter three are particularly important for us because they indicate that knowledge is not so much a matter of belief or believing, at least in many cases, but of enabling and making (Shusterman 2000a, 2000b). William James, as I have shown, had talked about truth as happening to an idea, and truth happens to an idea when it becomes able to do something, or when it enables us to do something. James scandalized much of the intellectual world at the turn of the twentieth century when he first used this locution, but in many respects, he observed something profoundly important about truth, and by implication knowledge. Leaving aside the question of how to justify his conception in relation to propositional knowledge and truth, the idea that truth happens is very nicely applicable to knowledge and truth that are not propositional, which is to say to art. Shusterman has said that interpretive knowledge is a matter of evoking in us a “meaningful response,” and this is a  very nice way of describing how knowledge and truth happen in and through art. The query that exhibitive judgment undertakes is a manipulation of e­ lements of a medium such that their arrangement brings into focus something new, something we had not seen or heard, and therefore not realized, before. The reason Malevich’s Black Square shook the Russian avant garde to the degree that it did is that those who saw it, in the context in which it was

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­ roduced and experienced, learned something from it. They learned, among p other things, about the purposes and possibilities of art, about the weight of history on their own artistic processes and judgments, and it pointed them in new directions. This is as good an example as we could want of the generation of a meaningful response, and it is in this response that the cognitive power of the Black Square and its truth lie. This is knowledge in and through art, and we are able to understand how it can be an instance of knowledge because we can see how the form of query undertaken through the manipulation of formal visual elements constitutes exhibitive judgment; moreover, we can see how exhibitive judgment generates products that are capable of provoking a meaningful response because we can now understand how those judgments function in and constitute a dimension of experience. Illustrations of this point can be multiplied many times through all the arts. Music, dance, and film are as capable of evoking knowledge and of being truthful, as are painting and the visual arts generally. The same is true of poetry, fiction, and drama. Because philosophers have too often been trapped by a propositional epistemology that assumes that only assertions can convey knowledge and truth, they have had a good deal of trouble with all the arts. Some have been willing to ascribe the possibility of knowledge to literature because it alone among the arts is linguistic, though this still leaves such philosophers unable to account for knowledge and truth in non-linguistic art works. Others have assumed that despite the fact that literature consists of linguistic utterances, because the context is fictional the linguistic propositions must in a literal sense be false. The extent of the confusion in such cases as these is mind-boggling. The initial confusion comes from thinking that only linguistic utterances can be cognitive and can convey truth, while the second confusion comes from thinking that all linguistic utterances are propositional assertions and therefore are subject to the same truth conditions. With respect to the first, once we have a broader theory of judgment that allows us to understand that in experience we produce meaningfully not only in and through assertions but also through exhibitive and active judgments, we are no longer tempted to think that only linguistic utterances can be cognitive, and by implication we are no longer inclined to limit knowledge and truth in art to literature. If exhibitive and active judgments are as capable of generating knowledge as are assertive judgments, then we are free to understand how all the arts may engage with knowledge and truth. With respect to the second confusion, we would say that all utterances in a work of literary fiction are literally false only if we feel compelled to say that

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all linguistic utterances are assertions that refer to some state of affairs, and that  literal truth may therefore reside in linguistic utterances made only in non-fictional contexts. And presumably we would say that literal truth may reside in linguistic utterances made only in non-fictional contexts only if we thought that knowledge and truth may be conveyed only by assertions that refer to non-fictional states of affairs. But pretty much all of this is wrong, or so stultifying that to accept it forces us to ignore much of the experience we often have in our engagement with works of art and artistic processes, which is operationally equivalent to being wrong. First, as the theory of judgment helps us to understand, not all linguistic utterances are assertions—some of them are exhibitive judgments and some are active judgments—and therefore not all linguistic utterances refer. Second, knowledge and truth, as we have been attempting to demonstrate, are not exclusively, or perhaps even primarily, about reference, belief, or propositional assertions. There is simply no reason to accept the idea that knowledge and truth may be conveyed only by assertions that refer to non-fictional states of affairs because knowledge and truth do not require assertions, reference, or states of affairs. In that case, there is no good reason to say that the linguistic utterances that constitute a work of fiction are literally false. Any good poet, novelist, or playwright may engage the truth in her work and, therefore, be the source of knowledge, and I can be confident in saying this because my conceptions of knowledge and truth are couched in a theory of experience and its related conception of judgment that do not require us to limit knowledge to assertion nor truth to non-fictional contexts. Furthermore, we may extend our understanding of knowledge and truth in the arts well beyond literary art to accommodate all the arts because we have grounded our understanding of knowledge and truth in a theory of judgment that does justice to the richness of our experience. Experience, then, has an aesthetic dimension, one that has its basis and finds expression through ordinary experience, and is thereby pervasive in experience, and one that is specifically correlated with the exhibitive mode of judgment in the manipulative aspect of our experience. Experience, we may say, presents itself aesthetically no less than it presents itself cognitively. In this respect, we have been speaking about how the aesthetic appears in and fills out experience. The relation works both ways, however, and we can learn a good deal about experience in general and its aesthetic dimension by looking at some of the ways experience appears in the aesthetic. In other words, one of the many subjects or themes that exhibitive judgment, which is to say art, takes up from time to time is experience itself. A look at examples of the

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e­ xamination of experience in art will help to illuminate both experience generally and its aesthetic dimension. I One of the aesthetic forms that has paid explicit attention to experience is literature, and one may look to modernist literature for a particularly insightful approach to experience. Interestingly enough given our philosophic context, the approaches to literature among the modernist writers has a fair bit in common with pragmatist philosophy. A comparative look at the approaches to experience in modernist literature and our own pragmatic naturalist understanding of experience is revealing with respect to both. William James famously said in “What Pragmatism Means” that “There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere.” Also addressing the issues of differences, Gertrude Stein remarked in “Composition as Explanation” that “There is singularly nothing that makes a difference[,] a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending[,] except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking” (W. James 1981; Stein 2013, 104). These passages, each in its own way, suggest a vibrant sense of the world, a sense of it as complex and as imbued with meaning. James’ pragmatism, and in this respect his understanding applies to pragmatic naturalism generally, and literary modernism share the idea that the world, or reality, matters, and that what makes it matter is in its relation to us. For our purposes this is significant because it is a powerful understanding of things in general, of experience, of knowledge, and of art. It may appear to be tautological in that obviously, if something matters then it must matter to us, and that is already a relation with us. But the point is something else. One may look at the world as a rather mute place consisting of whatever is reducible to material entities and processes. We know some forms of philosophical modernism and scientism do look at it this way, but we also know that pragmatic naturalism does not. The relational, creative construction of meaning through the individual’s relation to the world, or as I have been arguing throughout the book, through experience, is something else, and it is this latter, more interactive understanding that we may ascribe to both literary modernism and pragmatic naturalism. In recent years there have been several books published that deal with the relation between literary modernism and philosophical pragmatism, and with varying emphases. Lisi Schoenbach’s Pragmatic Modernism (2011), discusses these questions at considerable length, and posits the connection between literary modernism and philosophical pragmatism in the approach each takes to

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habit. Habit was an explicit concern for Dewey because the character of experience turns out to be particularly important for many other issues, and Dewey placed a great deal of emphasis on what he liked to call “intelligent” experience, or the “method of intelligence” in experience. Some experience is more enriching than other experience, and the difference turns on the degree to which reflection and intelligent direction figure in experience, and thus the emphasis on habit. In another recent book by Richard Daniel Lehan titled Literary Modernism and Beyond: The Extended Vision and the Realms of the Text, the point is made that modernism understands reality through the way it is symbolized, and pragmatism understands ideas, and hence reality, through action and the resolution of problems. In both cases, in other words, the understanding of reality is not a reflection, but is mediated by our interaction with it (Lehan 2009). More recently, Megan Quigley in Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language, discusses the engagement of modernist literature with turn-of-the-century pragmatism, Russell, and Wittgenstein, in the context of precision and vagueness in language (Quigley 2015). Richard Rorty, with whom pragmatic naturalism shares several approaches, if not the current articulation of a theory of experience, dealt explicitly with literary modernism and argued that there were several points at which the two converge. Along these lines, Rorty advanced the claim that “Pragmatism is the philosophical counterpart of literary modernism, the kind of literature which prides itself on its autonomy and novelty rather than its truthfulness to experience or its discovery of pre-existing significance” (Rorty 2010a). Rorty had a particular interest in Proust and Henry James, and he wrote about both on various occasions (Rorty 2010b). Rorty rejected much of classical pragmatism, including its “naturalist” side and its theory of experience, and he seems to have thought that the appropriation of literature in general, and literary modernism in particular, is of a piece with his rejection of much of classical pragmatism. As should be clear, in the study of experience I am not following Rorty in those respects, and consequently this brief look at modernist literature and its treatment of experience differs from his. Nevertheless, it is useful to note that even given my disagreements with Rorty, he too saw in literary modernism features that are well worth noting from a pragmatist point of view. For those readers who are well versed in pragmatism and the history of philosophy, the next few pages may be unnecessary. It may be helpful for some readers, though, to take a moment and look briefly at some of the history of pragmatism. In 1908 Arthur O. Lovejoy, a prominent American philosopher of the time, published what became a famous article titled “The Thirteen Pragmatisms.” The point, obviously enough, was that the term “pragmatism” was doing a lot of work, and not all of it was consistent. In pointing this out Lovejoy

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was not saying anything that was not generally known already (Lovejoy 1908). Some years earlier, in 1905, C.S. Peirce was so distressed by the direction in which William James and F.C.S. Schiller were taking his ideas, especially with respect to the understanding of truth, and its use in “literary journals, where it gets abused,” that he publicly declared that he was henceforth going to call his ideas “pragmaticism,” which he took to be sufficiently barbarous to be immune to borrowing (Peirce 1905). When we turn to the early years of literary modernism we find a similar variety of ideas and approaches. The anthologies of modernism tend to include a broad range of what was being written from 1870 to 1940, more or less (Carter and Warren 2013). If that span is accurate, then we can be confident that there are more than thirteen modernisms as well as pragmatisms to talk about. With all this variety in both pragmatism and modernism it is virtually certain that there is no single trait in terms of which we can identify either one, never mind both. It is more likely that each will be describable in terms of family resemblances, so that there will be a set of traits that we can expect to find distributed among the various pragmatisms, and a set of traits similarly distributed among the many modernisms. As we begin to consider these traits we will find that some are distributed among a representative sample of both pragmatism and modernism, forming the points of contact between them. It may be helpful to look at the background of both pragmatism and literary modernism to assist in a consideration of their perspectives on experience, particularly in that there can be some confusion over the use of the term “modernism.” Philosophical modernism begins roughly with Descartes, who was convinced that tradition is not a reliable basis on which to ground our beliefs about the world, so he famously set about to develop a method with which we could reliably achieve knowledge about the world, rather than simply received opinion, traditional wisdom, or what would be worse, downright falsehoods. For Descartes and many others in those years, the reliability they sought could be found in reason generally, and mathematics specifically. Over the years, others were far less sanguine about the ability of reason to produce knowledge, and so various attempts were made to demonstrate how knowledge reliably derives from experience, which at that point meant “the testimony of the senses,” as Hume put it. Whether it was reason or sense perception, the assumption of philosophical modernism was that there is a world more or less ready-made out there for us to find and describe. The modernist methods of inquiry were intended to enable nature to reveal its secrets; knowledge is a reflection of reality. Assumptions like these are rather out of fashion these days, at least in the humanities, and sometimes we dismiss the modernist thinkers as if they were

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simply naïve. It is worth keeping in mind, though, that a case can be made that the modernists, especially early on, had fairly good reason to want to “get it right,” so to speak. Descartes was writing in the midst of the Thirty Years War, and he was quite familiar with the horrors that we can visit on one another armed with nothing but tradition, religious certainty, and a blunderbuss. He thought we needed to do better.2 He and the other practicing scientists of the day also understood that for other practical reasons, for example that increasing trade and colonial expansion required more and more ships sailing farther and farther afield, there was a genuine need for accurate information about nature. They did not, as we tend to do today, divorce science and philosophy from one another, so that demands arising in astronomy and optics placed conceptual burdens on philosophy and logic. If you are sailing into the middle of the ocean, a good deal turns on “getting it right,” and there is not much reason to trust our “constructions” of reality. Despite these understandable motives, though, philosophical modernism could not be sustained, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the assumptions of modernism were under siege from a variety of sources: among others Emerson, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the pragmatists. In 1868, C.S. Peirce published the essay that is the initial approach to pragmatism, in which he dismantled the Cartesian assumptions that underlay rationalism and philosophical modernism generally (Peirce 1868). Peirce was at Harvard at the time, and with him in Cambridge were William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and several other significant American intellectual figures. Together they formed the nucleus of the group that developed the ideas that characterize philosophical pragmatism. The relevant point at this juncture is that they did so in the context of distancing themselves from the assumptions of philosophical modernism.3 Later figures, Dewey and Mead in the first half of the twentieth Century, and John McDermott, Richard Bernstein, Rorty and others in recent and current times, have followed suit. 2 Stephen Toulmin made this point convincingly in Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, 1992. 3 One of the popular discussions of this group in recent years is Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, 2001. Interestingly, Menand offers the same sort of explanation for the Harvard scholars’ rejection of modernism’s quest for certainty that Toulmin gave for Descartes’ desire for it. In Descartes’ case it was the death and destruction of the Thirty Years War that inclined him to wish to replace tradition with reliable knowledge and certainty, and for the pragmatists it was the death and destruction of the American Civil War that inclined them to want to avoid the sense of certainty, having recently witnessed what a belief in the absolute truth of your own ideas can bring about. It appears that death and destruction are our forte either way.

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As literary modernism was taking shape, philosophical postmodernism in the form of pragmatism was doing so as well, never mind the fact that contrasting terms are used to denote them. Pragmatism’s initial driving force is rather different from that or those of literary modernism. Peirce argued in the 1868 essay mentioned above, and James and others developed the argument, that the rationalists and empiricists were wrong to think that they could provide an unshakeable foundation for thought, experience, and therefore knowledge. Descartes had famously tried to start from no assumptions at all, and he failed in that effort, or so the pragmatists argued. It is a mistake to think of the pursuit of knowledge as if it were a matter of peeling back the layers of an already formed onion, or to use a more common metaphor, of treating mind as a mirror and knowledge as a reflection of reality. But if knowledge is not a matter of accurately reflecting reality, then what is it? The pragmatist response, as I have already shown in considerable detail in the previous chapter, is that knowledge is a matter of solving problems, a point that is critical for our understanding of knowledge and, as we will see in the next chapter, for our claim that there is a political dimension of experience. We think when something goes wrong, a dissonance of the sort that thinking can remedy. It can be something practical and mundane, or something theoretical and abstract; it can be something unanticipated and in the normal course of things, or it can be something arranged, as in a game; it can be a problem we encounter, or one we set for ourselves. There are many ways that problems can emerge, and many sorts of problems, but regardless of the details, thinking arises when there are problems to be solved, and the purpose of thought therefore is to solve the problem. If that is the case, then ideas become not descriptions of some aspect of an antecedent reality, but rather tools we use to solve problems. And we revise or give up our ideas not because they are discovered not to reflect reality accurately, but because for one reason or another they stop working, and when a tool does not work one reaches for a different tool. Our philosophies, our ways of understanding things, are on this view intellectual mechanisms for getting along, and we continue to endorse them to the degree that they enable us to get along. If we encounter some aspects of life or the world that clash with an idea that we hold, then we have a problem. We may decide in such a case that the idea is not true and revise it in a way that will be consistent with the new element of our experience. William James made much of this point, as I have already demonstrated, going so far as to define “truth” as that which works for us, which gets us along. His point in part is that we would not accept an idea as true if it did not line up with the rest of our ideas. In such a case, we would reject the idea, or revise it until it fit, or revise other of our ideas until the new one fit. In whichever way we do it, we rest

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content that we possess a new truth only when our ideas reside comfortably with one another, and they reside comfortably with one another not because there is any reflection of reality going on, or at any rate only reflection, but because our interaction with our environment, which is to say our experience, is such that these ideas, these tools, work for us. This is the view of things that James was expressing in the passage with which we began this section of the chapter. Differences, for example between two concepts, suggest not differing descriptions but differing consequences. This is also the view, it is worth noting, that Rorty endorsed, and that he thought links pragmatism with literary modernism. The assumptions of philosophical modernism, which is to say that there is a world with its traits determined independently of us, that our methods of inquiry are suitable to learning about that finished world, and that the ideas that result from our inquiry are true only in so far as they accurately reflect the finished world, are, Rorty thought, consistent with literary realism, indeed with realism and traditional naturalism in the arts generally. The literary realist would like to capture or describe the world accurately, and presumably the more accurately the world is described the more insightful is the description. Something comparable might be said of realism or naturalism in the visual arts. Up to a point, it is fair to say that realism in painting looks to depict its subject in accurate detail, and the technical clarity and accuracy with which the painter depicts that detail contributes to the aesthetic valuation of the work. For philosophical modernism, and for realism and traditional naturalism in the arts, the point, Rorty was saying, is to describe or depict accurately a pre-determined world. By contrast, Rorty’s own pragmatism rejected the whole idea that knowledge is a reflection of reality, and even that it is worth our efforts to develop philosophical theories about any aspects of reality, for example a theory of truth or a theory of experience. It is precisely here that he saw the affinity with literary modernism. We may put the point this way: philosophical modernism holds that ideas are reflections of reality, while philosophical pragmatism holds that ideas are ways in which we creatively negotiate our experience; along similar lines, literary realism regards its art as reflecting reality, while literary modernism regards its art as a creative engagement within and for experience. This similarity between philosophical modernism and literary realism on the one hand, and pragmatism and literary modernism on the other, is what Rorty picks out in the essay mentioned above when he says that modernism is “the kind of literature which prides itself on its autonomy and novelty rather than its truthfulness to experience or its discovery of pre-existing significance,” and on the basis of which he describes pragmatism as “the philosophical counterpart of literary modernism.”

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To see whether this sort of point holds up we need to look more closely at literary modernism. For pragmatists inquiry solves problems; for the literary modernists, however, the purpose of writing is different. In an 1884 essay on “The Art of Fiction,” for example, Henry James makes several observations about how best to approach a novel, particularly if one intends to write one, and he uses language that is strikingly unlike his brother’s—though to be fair, in 1884 William was not yet speaking the way he would some years later either (James 2013). James suggests that the novelist be just as concerned with an accurate depiction of reality as is the historian, and both are in the business of looking for the truth. Of course, the novelist’s depiction is not simple description, though neither is the historian’s. Each selects material, both for emphasis and for the contour and integrity of portrayal. James acknowledges that the novelist has a much wider range of material from which to choose than does the historian, and in this respect, he or she “has more in common with the philosopher and the painter…” The other admonition James provides the ­aspiring writer is to be interesting, however that is effected. This account of the underlying purposes of the novelist seems to have more in common with the philosophical modernist than with the pragmatist, or even with the literary realist. Presumably, what distinguishes James at this point from the realist are  the literary devices he uses in speaking the truth and in remaining interesting. Twenty-five years later Virginia Woolf had a go at a general account of the writer’s purposes in a short piece titled “Modern Fiction.” Woolf criticizes H.G. Wells and others for being first-rate craftsmen, but for writing lifeless fiction. She does not want to be too precise in the word that she uses to describe what she is after—“life or spirit, truth or reality”—but the point is that fiction to be worth the effort of writing and reading must possess it. Such vagueness as this would make most philosophers more than a little unhappy, but Woolf is not here doing philosophy. She is rather trying to help us understand what seems to her to be wrong with realist and other such art. She says later that a writer should focus on what interests him, and make that the stuff of his art, though she seems not to wonder about those writers who might be most interested in realistic portrayal. So, Woolf has something to say that is close to Henry James. Their concerns are not philosophical, and their modernism in the literary meaning lies in method and technique more than ontological or epistemological standpoints. We should say, though, that in her sense of what counts as reality Woolf does come rather close to William as well as to Henry James. Her objection to the realists is not that they try to convey reality, but that they miss reality in the process. Theirs, she might have said, is a processed reality, one already thought

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through, one already filtered through the categories that the writer brings to the process of writing. Woolf rather is after what William James may have been pointing to with the term “pure experience,” by which he seems to have meant the aspects of the world simply as available, prior, so to speak, to being processed or mediated. She offers what sounds like a complementary account of the detail and exactness one might find in a realist’s description of a person or event, but then asks, “Must novels be like this?” “Look within,” she continues, “and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’”: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad of impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there … Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-­ transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit…? woolf 2013, 474–475

The reality that Woolf calls on the writer to convey is the world of pure experience, perhaps something like what James famously referred to as the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of experience, before we, through the course of normal living, put structure and sense to it. In this same essay Woolf praises Ulysses, which at the time had not yet been published in full but was appearing in the Little Review, and what she likes in Ulysses is just this reach for pure experience, this effort to capture it all on the sprawling canvas of that day in Dublin. Indeed, there is no better source of insight into the quality of moment to moment experience than preparing breakfast with Leopold Bloom (and his cat), or, in Woolf’s own hands, walking through town with Mrs. Dalloway thinking about the evening she must prepare and the people who will attend. This idea of directly capturing experience leads us to yet another aspect of some literary modernism for which there is a pragmatist analogue, and that is  the use of multiple narratives that one finds in, among others, William Faulkner. Modernist art famously set about to fracture the presentation of reality and experience, presumably on the assumption that reality and experience are too rich and complex to capture in a single narrative or from a single perspective, in which process we see the general breakdown of linear perspective. In The Sound and The Fury, and elsewhere, Faulkner portrayed his subject

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­ atter through several narratives, sometimes unreliable and sometimes even m inconsistent. In the plastic arts, the Cubists, and Picasso in a good deal of other works, had done much the same. And in music, to give one example, the American composer Charles Ives experimented with multiple keys sounding simultaneously in such works as “A Symphony: New England Holidays,” completed in 1913. Much of this was driven by the wish not to be constrained by traditional forms, a process that had been well underway for decades in the visual arts, for example in the Impressionists, and in music in the chromatic compositions of Wagner and others. But the impact of such developments is not merely formal, because there is a profound sense in which such multiplicity and complexity get at something important about nature, knowledge, and experience themselves, which brings us back to the philosophical counterpart. In comments made above about Rorty too quickly abandoning traditional philosophical issues, the point was made that we have good reason to ask ourselves how best to understand experience, knowledge, truth, indeed nature itself. The good reason in this case is that we continue to talk and write, and in various ways depict nature and experience directly. Indeed, that is precisely the point of much of literary modernism, which is to say to go around traditional constraints and get more directly at whichever aspects of our lives we wish to examine. At the risk of repetition, the traditional, philosophical modernist assumption about nature and knowledge is that a single fairly straightforward, precise, unambiguous account of nature and a reliable epistemological access to it are possible. As we have seen, the traditional pragmatists and current pragmatic naturalists, like postmodernists generally, reject that assumption. We may ask the question, though, if we abandon the traditional hope for linear descriptions of nature and unambiguously grounded knowledge, yet we still wish to develop conceptions of nature, knowledge, and experience, what are we left with? The answer is that we are left with the same sort of fractured, perspectival, multiple conceptions of nature, knowledge, and experience that modernist writers, artists, and composers exhibit. Recall that for the pragmatist ideas are not reflections of reality, but tools with which to address the problems and challenges we face in daily life and in scholarly inquiry. Our problems and challenges, however, are often complex, ill delineated or “fuzzy at the edges,” and multiple. This implies that no set of ideas can cleanly, without ambiguity, work for us. Multiple problems imply multiple tools, and just as our problems and challenges may present inconsistencies, so too may our ideas. Moreover, the relational conception of nature and experience that one finds in the classical pragmatists and in contemporary pragmatic naturalism makes multiplicity, and even inconsistency, a necessity. If entities are relational then their traits are defined in terms of the sets of

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r­ elations in which they find themselves. In differing sets of relations, the same object may have different and even contradictory traits. For example, in the order of relations in which material objects find themselves, the size of an object, say a house, does not vary depending on its proximity to a viewer. But in the order of relations that is an observer’s vision, the size of the house most definitely changes as the observer moves farther from or closer to it. Or to give a different example, in the order of the relations of objects in the solar system, planets can best be described as moving around the sun. In the order of our experience, however, every one of us knows from our experience every day that if we stand in one place we can watch the sun rotate around us. If objects like houses and the sun are relational entities, which pragmatic naturalist ontology takes them to be, and if no set of relations is any more real than any other, which is an operative principle of pragmatism and pragmatic naturalism at least since William James insisted on it in Essays in Radical Empiricism and was reaffirmed by Buchler in his principle of ontological parity, then objects have differing, sometimes inconsistent, traits from one set of relations to another. This is the reason that a Faulkner may offer ambiguous and inconsistent narratives yet still make sense, and why the depiction of a person from multiple perspectives, as we find so evocatively done in Picasso, can cohere. Indeed, we may want to say that because of the relationality and complexity of nature, experience, knowledge, and truth, literary and other artistic approaches almost have to take multiple perspectives if they are to avoid providing only partial understanding of their subject matter. But even if one does not wish to go quite that far, it is clear that the relationality of pragmatism is of a piece with the multiple perspectives of modernist art and of the multiple narratives of modernist literature. Furthermore, in modernist literature we find exhibitive explorations that illuminate our understanding of nature. In this respect, exhibitive judgment as the expression of the aesthetic dimension of experience reflects on experience to generate distinctively derived insights into the character of experience. Proust too comes close to the pragmatists, especially in his sense of the constructive significance of experience. À la recherche, it is safe to say, is not an exercise in nostalgia. Proust rather is trying to come to terms with memory and time, and he is well aware of the studies in psychology and philosophy that were prominent at the time. One of the philosophers with whom he engaged was Henri Bergson, who was also of particular interest for William James. It is intriguing to notice here, though, that in his approach to time and experience in À la recherche, Proust is working with a conception of experience that differs markedly from James’s “pure experience.” In the latter, there is a

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focus on ­immediacy, in the sense of direct engagement, and Woolf, Joyce, and others of the modernists seemed to want to capture it in its immediacy and multiplicity. A more common understanding of experience among pragmatists, however, assumes the complexity and relationality of experience. As important as relations were for James, Dewey more thoroughly and systematically worked out the relationality of experience. In his treatment, as I have articulated it throughout the book, experience is to be understood as the ongoing, complex transaction of an individual with her environment. Moreover, this process is constructive in the sense that the relations between the individual and the environment are constitutive of both. Both—the individual and the ­environment—are in some measure the entities or complexes they are by virtue of the relations, or more accurately the many sets of relevant relations. Experience for Dewey, and for pragmatic naturalism generally, is complex, relationally constituted, and constitutive of its environment and the self. In experience so understood, memory is not just a record, more or less accurate, of past events, but a constituent element in the construction of ongoing experience. Similarly, time does not simply pass, but is or can be very much a constituent of present experience and future possibilities. Thus time, memory, and all the other potential constituents in experience, contribute to the complex interaction that is experience. If Woolf and Joyce are after an immediate “pure experience,” Proust is working with experience in which its complexity is what enlivens it: So art’s completely wrong when it thinks it’s dealing with the immediacy of lived experience, and calls that the real… That kind of life, which imagination aims to transcend, is always a source of disappointment and boredom. In the return of the lived experience, on the other hand, literature finds something worthwhile inasmuch as this return signals the happening not of the same lived experience but of this transformed lived experience, metamorphosed by forgetting, lived again and always unlived. The lived experience returns differently and this difference is literature’s only real concern. beistegui 2007, 65

Gertrude Stein may have had something like this in mind when she spoke of each generation as looking at something different, and that this is what it means for there to be differences. Each generation does not look at an entirely new world, but it does look at a world differently constituted if only because time, history, and memory change the present and future (and in some ways

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the past). And this is true not simply for each generation, but it is true for all individuals, and for each individual at different points in time. It can be trivially true in the sense that the differences that the altered situation constitute may not matter much, but then again, they may, in which case the differences can be extensive and profound. This discussion of literary modernism has been an effort to direct our attention to one way that exhibitive judgment, in the form of the sustained query that constitutes serious art, can lead us to a clearer sense or understanding of experience. In the case of literary modernism, it turns out that there is an affinity between the sense of experience at work in modernist literature and my own theory of experience. That there is more than one approach to experience in modernist literature furthermore helps us to see that experience itself is not captured in any simple formula. Joyce can emphasize the rather “unfiltered” feel of our ongoing experience, Faulkner can develop is multiply perspectival nature, and Proust can help us appreciate the significance of the complexity of experience. Through its exhibitive query, art brings these features of experience into focus, and what enables art to do this is precisely the aesthetic dimension of experience. II To this point, I hope that I have been able to develop some clarity with respect to the nature of the aesthetic dimension of experience, some of the reasons for advancing the idea, and the ways aesthetic expression itself, in the form of literature in this case, can enrich the concept of experience. We may turn now to a more explicit account of the relations of the aesthetic dimension of experience to the cognitive and the political. We shall begin with the cognitive, and consider the relation of the aesthetic to the cognitive dimensions of experience through a further consideration of the relation of art and knowledge. The first and most obvious point to make, and I risk tedious repetition in saying it again, is that art can generate knowledge, which is perhaps the clearest way that the aesthetic and cognitive dimensions of experience intersect. I made the argument earlier in this chapter, earlier in the volume, and in other places, but I briefly review it here.4 As I have shown, knowledge traditionally has been construed in such a way that it makes little sense to say that art can result in knowledge. If knowledge is only achieved through either empirical or rational propositions, then it would follow that any human product that is not 4 See, for example, Ryder 2013a, Chapter Seven.

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in the form of a proposition does not generate knowledge. Art in any of its forms is not propositional in any traditional sense, therefore art is not a source of knowledge. This general line of thought is one of the reasons it has been common to regard art as a matter of expression, presumably an expression of some characteristic or feeling of the artist. Of course, we know that art can also be didactic, for example throughout the long period in European history in which art was meant to reinforce the teachings of the Church. In this case, though, one would have to have said that the teachings are themselves propositional, and the paintings, sculptures, plays, and poetry that reinforced it could do so only because the knowledge was grounded propositionally. This grounding could take the form either of previous propositional articulation or of translatability into propositional articulation. In either case, it is not the art that expresses or conveys knowledge, it is the propositional expression. The art, even in such didactic circumstances, simply supports. Another way people have spoken about art is that it is intended to evoke emotional responses. This is the respect in which music, dance, theater, or literature can be entertaining or disturbing, or pictures can be pleasing or distressing to look at. Along these lines we may like or dislike a work, or find a work to be attractive or repulsive, relaxing or disturbing, beautiful or ugly. Many artists produce with precisely these possible reactions in mind, and for many people who engage with art it is largely in these ways. Such an understanding of art is as common as it is because art does indeed function in this way, and often it functions in only this way. Yet another way that art has been understood is in terms of the manipulation of formal elements into a coherent whole, on which view the aesthetic evaluation of a work of art is based on the satisfaction with which for whatever reason the formal features of the work are received. One of the reasons a formalism of this kind is possible is that it appeals to precisely the formal traits of the aesthetic in terms of which we have described the aesthetic dimension of experience: unity, harmony, and dissonance. Many artists have appealed and continue to appeal to just these formal characteristics in creating their art and in their expectations of its evaluation. Formalism, in other words, is readily available to artists and the art world in general as an understanding of what art is and what it should do. One may also approach art in social and political ways. It is well known, for example, that in earlier times it was common for powerful individuals to commission portraits or other works that through form and content described their social power and influence. And of course, this practice continues today. It has also been the case that art has been an influential mode through which to offer social and political commentary. One might argue, in fact, that the

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­ roduction and engagement with art is always socially situated, and so social p and by implication political context can never be divorced from what art is, why and how it is produced, and what its purposes and goals are. I will have more to say about the relation of art to power when I turn to the relation between the aesthetic and political dimensions of experience below. At this point, suffice it to say that one can without difficulty develop and sustain such a social and political conception of art. The point is that there are many ways for us to understand art, its rationale, and its valuation. There is no need to adjudicate among them, other than to say that it would be inappropriate to insist that art “really” is this or that, and not the others. If we address art, and by implication the aesthetic, honestly, then we will avoid any temptation to insist that art must do this or that alone. We may add to the list of traits that can describe or define art the observation that art may be cognitive in the sense that it can be a source of knowledge. Artists and those who comment on art, from critics to art historians to museum directors to gallery owners, tend to take this point for granted. It will not come as a surprise to any such people that an artist may have insight, or that we may learn from an exhibition, or that a particular work of art may enhance our understanding of some theme or subject. It tends to be philosophers who have trouble with this, and the root of the trouble is an inadequate epistemology. I have tried to correct that inadequacy by arguing that through the methodic examination that is exhibitive query, an artist and a work of art may bring into focus a perspective or insight that is genuinely cognitive in the sense that it advances our knowledge of a subject. This is possible because judgment is not necessarily assertive and propositional, and because cognition is not necessarily tied to assertive judgment. Moreover, the knowledge gained is not limited to either the formal traits of the work nor to the subject of its content. It is certainly true that we can learn about formal traits of a work through the art itself. Consider how much more clearly one may understand harmonic relations through a sophisticated exemplar such as one of J.S. Bach’s contrapuntal pieces. At the same time, one may also come away from the B Minor Mass, to give an arbitrary example, with a sense of spiritual significance that one had not had previously, or even with a better understanding of the form of spiritual engagement that characterized the Lutheran communities in eighteenth century German lands. One may say something comparable about the relations of color in one of Vassily Kandinsky’s abstract paintings and about religious practices of communal, peasant Russia from one of his works on that theme. In any such case, and we could offer examples indefinitely and from any art form, there is knowledge no less than one finds in the propositions and assertions of books or in mathematical

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formulae. How such knowledge is possible is clarified by the theory of judgment, and that such knowledge is actual indicates the intersection of the aesthetic and cognitive dimensions of experience. This point must be made here that our way of understanding the relation between the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions of experience does not commit the sort of mistake that Dewey worried about in his misgivings with respect to treating art as a source of knowledge. As I pointed out in one of the notes in the previous chapter, Dewey discussed this issue in Art as Experience, and he has in mind primarily the romantic inclination to understand art as a special sort of access to a “higher” or “superior” knowledge than, for example, science or other forms of inquiry. Romantic poets and painters in some cases believed that their art made available to them a more spiritual understanding, an appreciation of the majestic or sublime in reality and experience, than was otherwise unavailable. Dewey is clear that he has no truck with this hierarchy of knowledge and of means of its access. There is no “higher knowledge,” he thought, and no privileged access in experience. Suffice it to say that our approach to experience, knowledge, and art, is in this respect fully consistent with Dewey’s. No reality is greater or more real than any other, and no form of knowledge is inherently and generally superior. As should be clear from the details of the analysis to this point, to say that art has a cognitive capacity is not to say that it is in some way special or gives us more profound knowledge. It is to say more modestly that in experience one of the ways we cognitively engage the world is aesthetic, and that art is the medium or mechanism through which aesthetic engagement typically or at least often occurs. With this way of approaching the point Dewey should have had no trouble. That art has a cognitive aspect may be driven home further by considering in some detail how art may examine a specific theme. We may take, as an illustration somewhat arbitrarily selected, the issue of the relation of city to countryside. There are many directions from which one might approach such a broad theme. One might consider it historically, or economically, or politically, or geographically, or sociologically, or religiously. In each of these cases there is a great deal to learn about the relation between the two, and each sort of approach adds to the body of knowledge something different, something that the other approaches could not grasp or develop. The same can be said of an aesthetic approach to the topic, in which context we can come to know something about the theme, and the knowledge gleaned enhances what we know about the topic from other sources and other forms of query. Painting and music, to use two examples, can teach us something about the relation between the city and countryside we would not know otherwise.

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There is an obvious justification for looking into the relation between city and countryside, which is that whether we inhabit a rural or urban locale, our societies and our lives are complex enough that none of us are simply “urban” or “rural.” In the contemporary world, and probably long before the contemporary world, it is impossible to make sense of our experience without taking account of the constitutive relation between city and countryside; neither prevails without the other. This speaks, first, to our idea, following Dewey and many others, that the aesthetic is to be found in ordinary experience, and it suggests that if relations are constitutive, as we have been arguing, then the city and the countryside constitute one another. Their relation contributes to their identity. Given that fact, it is not surprising that artists in their own exploration of experience would find the relation significant, and relevant to their own understanding of nature, of themselves, and of the aesthetic in experience. We will look at several works of art that themselves inhabit, express, or develop the relation between the city and countryside. What, we may ask, have insightful artists had to “say,” so to speak, about the interaction between the two? We may find that the aesthetic consideration of the relation between city and countryside can push our understanding of the aesthetic dimension of experience beyond merely the rural or urban and into the creative relation between them, while at the same time revealing meaningful dimensions of both. There is a great number of works of literature, poetry, visual art, music, and dance to which we could turn to examine this question. For now, I will turn our attention to three works of art that take as a theme the city and countryside in their relation to one another: Claude Monet’s paintings of the Thames, Charles Ives’ Central Park in the Dark, and Bedrich Smetana’s Vltava. We will also say a few words about Aaron Copeland, easily the most important American composer of the twentieth century, whose whole body of work encompassed the complex, constitutive relation between city and countryside. Probably the most well-known of Monet’s paintings are those of water lilies and other aspects of his extraordinary garden in Giverny. However, like other French Impressionist painters, Monet was no less interested in urban scenes and settings, often in, though not restricted to, Paris; Camille Pissarro was seemingly as much at home depicting street scenes in Paris and London as he was among the fields and farms of northern France; Renoir is as famous for depictions of dance scenes and other crowds as for anything else; Degas is most well-known for his dancers and scenes in the theater; and Toulouse-­ Lautrec, if we may regard him in the same company, belonged more than

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a­ nywhere else in the night life of Montmartre. The pictures that interest us here, though, are those Monet made of the Thames during his visits over several decades to London. The earliest such pictures date from 1870–71, when Monet had traveled to England to escape the impact of the Franco-Prussian War. He returned, and completed the bulk of his paintings of the Thames, around the turn of the century. The interesting feature of these paintings, for our purposes, is that they address explicitly the relation between the urban traits of central London and the river itself. He did not travel outside the city to depict the river in its rural character, but studied it as it appeared in the heart of the city. Industrial London at this time was rather a mess, and the environmental impact of its factories and industry was fouling both water and air. The pollution in London had an effect on sunlight as it was perceived in the center of the city, and Monet’s Thames paintings portray, among other things, the river as it might be seen in the light refracted through London’s smog, or what Londoners euphemistically referred to as the “London fog.” Monet’s interest in light, its perception, and its depiction, is well known, and it is one of the defining traits of the impressionist style in Monet and the others. That interest was as crucial for the Thames paintings as it was for everything else Monet painted. He was interested in how the river would appear at different times of day, when the sun was in various points in the sky, and from different points in the city. This is the reason there are so many Thames paintings. Some were done in the morning, others in midday, and others still in late afternoon and twilight; different paintings depict different bridges and were done from different sides of the river, and the most well-known of them have a view of Parliament. From whatever angle and at whatever time of day, the paintings explore not just the Thames, but the Thames as it passes through central London. We might be tempted to say that the river is a feature of the countryside that as it happens passes through the city, though the relation is not as haphazard as that, if only because the city is where it is because of the river. In any case, the river has some traits in the countryside and quite others in the city, as the light plays differently on its surface and movement in the complex relations among the river, the city, its atmosphere, and the light. We may describe the aesthetic impact of the paintings in many ways. We may emphasize the fact that through his distinctive vision and methods Monet is able to pick out for us dimensions of the river, the city, and their interaction, that we may not have noticed otherwise. Or we may point out that the paintings help us to realize dimensions of our own experience with a city and its river that we may have passed over. In  this respect, the paintings can enrich our experience, provide it with an

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a­ esthetic character we may otherwise have overlooked, and distinctly enhance our knowledge of London, the Thames, and their relation to one another. The same may be said of the potential impact of other artistic forms. Like Monet’s Thames paintings, Smetana’s portrayal of the Vltava and its journey through Prague explores the relation between river and city. In Smetana’s case, because he is working with an artistic medium that is by its nature temporal, unlike painting, he can bring to our attention the changes in the river as it passes through the city. In this respect, he is able to describe both the city’s effect on the river and to use the river as a vehicle through which to announce the profundity of the Vysehrad Castle in Prague, a symbol of Bohemian national identity. The relation between city and countryside in this case takes on a political dimension. The Vltava (Ger: Moldau) is the second movement of the symphonic poem Ma Vlast (My Country), which Smetana composed in the 1870s. It depicts the river as it emerges from two springs south of Prague, travels through the countryside, enters and passes through Prague, and eventually flows into the Labe (Ger: Elbe) in the north of Bohemia, on its way to the border with Germany. The piece begins with sprightly and light passages in the winds that depict the springs from which the river arises. Soon the strings enter and we hear the full theme that depicts the river, a beautiful melody that because it is composed partially in dotted rhythms is able to convey marvelously the sense of flowing movement. The river passes through a village and a village wedding (we can hear dance music along the way), and before long reaches its dynamic climax as it enters Prague and passes below the castle and under the Charles Bridge. The music at this point is dramatic, and we know that it represents the castle because it uses themes from the first movement of the poem, which is devoted to the Vysehrad Castle. As the river leaves the city and as day passes into night, the music becomes quieter, we can “hear” the moonlight rippling on the flowing water, and the river fades into the Labe, though it does so with a final, emphatic, punch. This is a thoroughly nationalistic piece, as is the entire symphonic poem, and it uses the relation of the countryside and the city to express a general sense of Bohemian pride. Prague and the castle clearly convey the Czech sense of the importance of historical place, and as the river arises and flows through the fields and villages it serves to unite countryside and city and to portray the critical importance of both to Bohemian and Czech identity. Art is clearly ­political in this case, and in Smetana’s hands political identity is thoroughly aesthetic, an understanding that he accomplishes through the interrelation of city and countryside. Here, then, we have a clear relation of the aesthetic not

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only to the cognitive but to the political as well. Art has the capacity, due no doubt to features of exhibitive judgment, to engage simultaneously the several dimensions of experience. Charles Ives’ Central Park in the Dark is something different. In this case the countryside is the park, which is itself an engineered effort to imbue the urban with an experience of the rural. The park is an urban phenomenon because of its location and purpose, and the city is enhanced by the presence in its heart of the fields, woodlands and water that constitute the park. In this short piece for chamber orchestra Ives uses the park not as a representation of the countryside, but as a vehicle through which to convey a dimension of the experience that is New York City, more specifically mid-town Manhattan, at night. If one asks oneself what comes to mind as the prevailing sounds of midtown Manhattan, the answer is likely to be traffic sounds—automobile horns, the thousands of passing cars and busses, and the sirens of police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks. A century ago, in 1906 when Ives composed Central Park in the Dark, and before the combustion engine dominated the aural character of the city, the experience would have been different. The piece uses the park as its setting because the relative peacefulness and quiet encountered there allows one to bring into focus the many sounds that emerge from the surrounding city. Ives was a musical visionary and an early master of atonal and polytonal techniques in composition, all of which are used to great effect in the piece. Even before car horns and sirens, the sounds of the city were chaotic, the representation of which begs for atonality and polytonality to capture its character. And Ives does not disappoint. One hears different sorts of sounds emerging from all directions, from bands playing to jazz themes, from popular songs of the day to the cries of newsboys. We are able to hear this chaos, and to make experiential sense of it, by hearing it in the context of a more or less rural setting. The park gives the surrounding urban environment a chance to emerge, just as the urban setting gives the park its character and purpose. And the whole embodies the aesthetic dimension in our experience that Ives captures profoundly. We may turn now to Aaron Copeland in the context of the aesthetic in the relation of the countryside and city. There is no one piece to discuss, but we may direct our attention to the whole body of Copeland’s work because as a whole it is an extraordinary illustration of the way the rural and urban, the countryside and the city, engage one another in the development of our understanding of the aesthetic in experience. Copeland was easily the greatest of twentieth century American composers, and his music has become iconic of American experience. This is especially true for rural America, which Copeland’s music embodies so well in his ballets and his only opera. Appalachian

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Spring and Rodeo, two of Copeland’s ballets, contain themes, some of which he composed and some of which he borrowed, that are used repeatedly in many contexts from films to advertising to convey an American atmosphere. The music of The Tender Land, his only opera, has the same effect, underscored by its setting on a Midwestern American farm. All of this, combined with such pieces as Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man, present Copeland as a musical embodiment of Middle America in the central decades of the century. Yet this is only a partial picture of Copeland, and one that if not filled out misrepresents his art. Copeland was a product of the city, New York as it happens, and his musical development was ­immersed in the artistic tendencies of his time. He grew up around the jazz and developing modernist trends of the early years of the century; soon after the Great War he traveled to Europe where, as so many other great composers of the century did, he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He returned to the United States and spent most of his life living in Manhattan and immersing himself in the musical, and to some extent political, life of the city. Many of his compositions reflect his mastery of the compositional developments of his time. In fact, the pieces that have come to represent America, even “Americana,” are themselves steeped in the modernist compositional techniques and styles that Copeland mastered in Paris and New York. This American composer and American music are in the end products of the urban aesthetic experience and rural motifs of America at the time. If there is a person in the American context whose aesthetic achievements reflect the interrelation of city and countryside it is surely Aaron Copeland. We have considered several examples of the intersection of town and country, and the selection of examples has been idiosyncratic. Others might have chosen differently. One would be well served, for example, to discuss along the same lines the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. In their early years, their work was tied closely to aesthetic and other developments in New York City, while later in her life O’Keeffe’s work became nearly synonymous with the bleached yet simultaneously colorful landscapes of New Mexico. There is, not surprisingly, a great deal to learn there about photography, painting, New York, New Mexico, gender and gender relations, color and form, to name only a few features of experience that art can illuminate. The cognitive capacity of art is, as I have said, embedded in the distinctive way that exhibitive judgment functions. I have noted previously, moreover, that the exhibitive, like other modes of judgment, can be undertaken methodically and systematically, in which case it constitutes a form of query. It is in its character as query that exhibitive judgment in the form of works of art can generate knowledge. As we also indicated, this point has been commonly

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a­ vailable to many people in the art world, and they have been right to speak about art in cognitive terms, at least in those cases in which art is cognitive. There is one respect, however, in which people may be inclined to misunderstand how art and exhibitive judgment function when they are engaged in query. It is sometimes said that in its examination of a topic, art may argue for a particular position or point of view. We would do well to consider this point because it reflects a misunderstanding of query, and consequently of exhibitive judgment and the cognitive possibilities of art. The point is, basically, that though art may explore a subject, and may achieve knowledge, because it is typically a form of exhibitive rather than assertive judgment, art does not in any helpful sense “argue” for anything. That is not to say that it is impossible that a particular work of art may contain an argument within it, for that is clearly possible. One could imagine a painting, sculpture, or installation that explores the relation between artistic query and inquiry and uses a literal argument in some way. But this would not be typical of the way art explores; it is not typical of exhibitive query. We might say in a metaphorical sense that art “argues,” but to avoid a distorted conception we would have to be very careful about what the metaphor means. If we are not careful we will run the same risk as have many attempts to compare art and science, which is to say that we will be trying to understand a dimension of artistic query by confusing it with inquiry. This is especially an issue in art forms that occur in time and that, unlike music, have a significant linguistic dimension. Film, as a temporal combination of image, word, and sound, is most susceptible to the ascription of argument, which makes it an ideal medium in relation to which to consider the ­issue of art and argument. Toward that end, I shall now turn to the question whether it is appropriate to ascribe argument to film. First, I should state clearly that despite some attempts to suggest otherwise, it seems incontrovertible that film is an art. As the methodic manipulation of elements of experience, of complexes, with the purpose of exhibiting in some way specific features of experience, or points of view, film is as much art as is anything else we might identify. As an art form, we can expect film to possess those characteristics typical of aesthetic media, and to display characteristics that distinguish it, just as all forms of art do. Like painting, photography, sculpture, theater, and dance, it is a visual medium; like theater, music and dance, it is a temporal medium; like music and dance, it typically involves sound in some way; like theater and literature, it is typically a verbal medium; and like dance and theater, it is an active art. All of these features are also true of opera, by the way, which we may then distinguish from film in that film typically is not sung, and perhaps most importantly, it is not a live medium and as such critically incorporates editing. We may say that film combines all these f­ eatures John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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in a unique way, and that is largely what enables us to regard it as a distinct form of art. Because it is temporal, linguistic, and visual, film more than most other forms of art, with the possible exception of literature, can be said to “make a case” for an idea, or a point of view, or a proposition or set of propositions. Presumably this is what someone would mean by saying that a film can “argue.” Let us take it to be non-controversial to say that a film can make a case for something, in the general sense that a film maker may intend that a viewer come away from a film more convinced of a specific idea or proposition or perspective as a result of having seen the film. This is not to say that anytime a film explores an idea it is making a case for that idea. In fact, one suspects that such a claim would not be true. For example, Gone with the Wind has been popular in Russia because it displays a society in collapse and its efforts to rebuild, a situation Russia found itself in as the Soviet Union collapsed, but the film does not make a case for anything specific; it portrays a society under existential threat and efforts to resurrect it. Or in a different time and place, Easy Rider touched a generation of young Americans, myself included, because it explored features, many of them unpleasant, of the counter culture then prevalent, but it would be a stretch to say that it made a case for anything. So, films may exhibit without making a case. The question we want to consider here is whether, because a film can make a case in the sense of rendering an idea or proposition more plausible or even compelling, it is reasonable for us to say that a film argues for that case? One might consider as an example to elucidate the point the film Westside Story. This discussion concerns the film, but it would equally well apply to the musical when staged, and we will speak little about technical aspects of film making unique to it, for example the editing process, though such technical features of the film maker’s art may be absorbed into the analysis. And the fact that most of what we will say applies equally well to the stage version of the musical should not be a surprise because the same question of argument can come up in relation to the stage. Westside Story can be understood to make a case. Specifically, the case it makes is for a rejection of racist stereotypes of ethnic groups and sociological stereotypes of youth gangs; it also makes a case for greater attention to be paid to the social and economic problems of cities. The setting in this case is a certain neighborhood of Manhattan in the 1950s, but the case is probably generalizable to other places and times. We should like to say that though it makes its case cleverly and compellingly, it does not argue for its case. Surely it does not argue in a literal sense of advancing propositions in logical relations to one another, but the point is that we risk too much even if we talk about it as arguing in a metaphorical sense. The only thing “argument” in this case can mean John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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as metaphor is “making a case,” and the latter locution risks much less confusion than the former. Inquiry is a subset, not the whole, of query. How does the film make its case? First, the aesthetic elements are of the highest caliber, and thus compel our attention. The music, choreography, and book are all brilliant, with some debt to Shakespeare of course, all of which lends credence to the exhibitive product that is the film’s “case.” The various dimensions of the film’s case are offered in a range of ways. The roughness of the streets on the Westside are clear in their visual representation, an effect made possible by editing decisions and camera angles; the music and choreography embody in turn both the jagged edges of street life and the elegance embedded in ethnicity, in family life and in the community that comes from the gangs; a certain silliness of standard sociological and psychological ­accounts of such gang life is overtly articulated in the music, lyrics, and choreography of the song Gee, Officer Krupke, which manages to ridicule the police, the courts, psychoanalysis, social work, and the prison system all at once; the police are summarily dismissed in the person of the unsavory and racist detective Schrank; in America the Puerto Rican characters contrapuntally convey an economic and a social perspective, as the young women sing of the economic opportunities they have in America while the young men sing of the racism they all face; and in Cool we can sense the anger the Jets and their girlfriends feel not only at having lost their leader but at the desperate nature of their lives, an anger conveyed vividly through the acting, the music, the lyrics, the choreography, and the camera angles. And in the midst of all there is the tragedy of the doomed love affair of Tony and Maria, made impossible by forces well beyond the control of any of the film’s characters. The force of the case that Westside Story makes is due in part to the masterly way it is exhibited. It does not argue; it offers, it shows, it demonstrates, it portrays, it exhibits, and it does so clearly and relentlessly. The film makes no attempt to convey the logical relations among the elements of its case, specifically racism, urbanization, economic opportunity and inequality, not to mention love. For that we need the analyses and arguments of sociology and economics and philosophy, though through what it conveys the film makes us wonder whether any of those activities are capable of coming to terms with the problems. The power of the film, and the strength of its case, derive not from argument in any sense, literal or metaphorical, but precisely from the film’s distinctive aesthetic traits, which is to say the exhibitive force of its constitutive judgments. Again, we may call the aesthetic power of this and any other compelling film, or any other work of art, “argument” if we wish to use the term metaphorically, but when it is possible for us to articulate and appreciate more directly how and why a work of art can make a compelling case, which our conception John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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of exhibitive judgment and query make possible, there is little point in using terms and concepts from entirely other forms of query. In the end, it is more conducive to clarity of understanding if we let argument remain in its proper home of assertive judgment and inquiry, and let the power of art emerge through its capacity for aesthetic, exhibitive judgment and aesthetic query. In light of this general analysis, two salient points are underscored. The first is that cognition is a complex phenomenon, as I have been arguing throughout. There is no question that we can learn something from a film like Westside Story, and from many works of art, which means that they have a cognitive character among their many other traits. In that case, however, it is not reasonable in our understanding of knowledge and cognition to reduce them to propositional affairs. Knowledge, as becomes increasingly clear the more angles from which we consider it, is a multi-faceted feature of experience, and any adequate epistemology has to take account of that fact. In our case, we approach the complexity of knowledge through the theory of judgment and the relations of each mode of judgment to knowledge and cognition. We also ­approach it through our understanding of the corresponding dimensions of experience and their relations with one another. The second salient point concerns the primary focus of this section of the chapter, which is the relation of art and knowledge, or more broadly the intersection of the aesthetic and the cognitive dimensions of experience. It is now clear that the two interact in several ways, without collapsing one into the other. One form of interaction is that in and through the aesthetic dimension we can come to a clearer understanding of, that is we can achieve knowledge of, experience itself. We can also acquire knowledge of any subject matter with which art deals, including even the formal elements of artistic production. We have seen this in the insights into the relation of city and countryside that have been discussed, as well as the clarity that a strong work of art can bring to the sociological and other characteristics of a form of city life in a certain time and place. And finally, we can now see that the way art functions cognitively differs sufficiently from the ways the various forms of assertive inquiry work, a point illustrated in the discussion of argument, and it requires that we maintain the distinctions between exhibitive query and assertive inquiry, and by implication between the aesthetic and cognitive dimensions, that our theory of experience posits.

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This chapter on the aesthetic dimension of experience can be brought to a close after a consideration of the relation between the aesthetic and political dimensions. We now have a much fuller sense of the meaning and function of John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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the aesthetic dimension of experience, but we are still without a comparable understanding of the political. A more satisfying account must wait until the next chapter. We can, though, even at this point, address to some meaningful extent how the two dimensions of experience relate to one another. It will be useful to keep two general points in mind even at this early stage of the discussion of the political dimension of experience. The first is that as knowledge is the correlative term of the cognitive dimension, and art of the aesthetic, the correlative term of the political dimension is power. The idea is that because judgment, by virtue of its centrality in experience, is the many ways that we manipulate our environments, and because experience is to a great extent a matter of the ongoing resolution of problems, experience at its heart is a matter of power, which is the power to affect our environment. Such power is a constitutive trait of experience, and it is just that pervasiveness of power that constitutes the political dimension of experience. The second point to keep in mind is that power in this sense is highly general. I will argue in the end that all specific expressions of power—political, personal, social, economic, national, etc.—are specific instantiations of power in the general sense, but that point awaits further discussion and elaboration. At this juncture, we need to be careful that when speaking of power to keep in mind the fact that not every claim relative to power in general applies to every distinct manifestation. In other words, to say that power resides at the heart of experience is not necessarily to make a sociological point; it is not necessarily to make a political point in the sense of politics as the exercise of public authority; and it surely does not mean that experience is necessarily manipulative in a morally evaluative sense. To speak of power at the heart of experience is to emphasize the fact that experience has to do with crafting our environments, with “making our way,” which is to say that it does not have to do with any sort of moral judgment about experience. The fact that power is at the heart of experience accounts for why it is that power is so much a part of our lives. In this respect, it is parallel to the pervasive place of cognition in experience and to the fact that the aesthetic is rooted in countless features of ordinary and daily life. To exercise power is to live, and to exercise power in certain specific relations to knowledge and art is to live in distinctly human ways. For the moment, the task is to speak as much as we can to some of the ways power is related to art, which is to say how the political and aesthetic dimensions of experience interact. We may make two general points here, one of which has to do with the appearance of the aesthetic in the political, of art in power, and the second of which concerns the place of power in art. With respect to the first, it will come as a surprise to no one that art is quite often related to power. There is a long

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tradition in Europe and European cultures of portraiture contributing to the prestige and influence of the subjects, to offer one example. Another would be the way art works of various kinds have contributed to the entrenchment or extension of political power, for instance in the “Proletkult” movement in revolutionary Russia, or even less propagandistically in the forms that avant garde painting, design, architecture, poetry, and theater took in Russia and the Soviet Union during the first decade or two of the revolution. And to remain on a Russian note, one of the most profound contributions to the morale of Soviet people during the darkest days of the Second World War and the siege of Leningrad were the initial performances, first in Kuibyshev, now Samara, but several months later in Leningrad itself, of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, still known today as the Leningrad Symphony. Art can enhance power, it can propagandize, and it can inspire. It can also be a form of resistance to power. With respect to the power of the state, there are countless instances of writers, artists, and musicians, often living in exile, whose work is intended to speak against the power of the state they had fled or from which they had been exiled. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz wrote profound criticism of the socialist state in Poland, just as the composer Kurt Weill produced cutting political critique of the fascist regime in Germany some decades earlier. If we think of power more broadly, for example in terms of the power of a socio-economic system, there is also no shortage of art intended as a critique of prevailing and entrenched systems of economic power. The Grapes of Wrath comes to mind, as do the innumerable posters and other artistic expressions that appear at public demonstrations. In this regard, we might also consider such writers as James Baldwin, who wrote of racism and sexual oppression in American society from self-imposed exile in Paris and Provence. We also need to think of power, though, and I will develop this theme in the next chapter, not simply in its large-scale forms of public authority and established socio-economic systems, but in the many, many ways in which in ordinary experience itself we are ceaselessly exercising and confronting power. Our relationships generally have some sort of power dimension, as do the social structures in which we live our lives daily. Not surprisingly, we can and do find art and the aesthetic as a pervasive trait of the political dimension of our daily lives. The way we organize and design our private and public spaces, for example, both takes into account and addresses the aspect of power built into the relationships that occupy those spaces. We design the exterior and interior of our homes, to the extent that we are able, to contribute to the establishment and maintenance of peace within the family, and unless we are looking for trouble, we tend to do the same with our yards and other more public spaces in which we live. The contrary is also frequently the case in the sense that works

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of art are often compelling responses to the felt aspects of our personal circumstances and relations. Literature and films can be especially valuable vehicles for responding to the felt pressures, and oppressions, of family and community life. These too are instances of the place of art in power and power relations, and to that extent of the intersection of the aesthetic and political dimensions of experience. As I have suggested above, though, we find this intersection not only in the place of art in power but also in the place of power in art. At the most general and somewhat tautological level, because power is a pervasive dimension of experience, we can expect that it pervades art and aesthetic experience no less than any other. If we consider art from the perspective of the artist, it is reasonable to say that the production or generation of art, its creation, is itself an exercise of power, and the capacity to so create is an empowering existential condition. There are also contexts in which the capacity to create works of art may, especially if we are successful, endow us with power, for example in the art community, that we would not otherwise have. We can undertake activities and accomplish goals in those communities that would be unavailable to us otherwise. This sort of power can make a considerable difference in a person’s life, and it is an instance of power in art and aesthetic experience. Even in what we may regard as more superficial ways, the creation of art and the capacity to create art can engender possibilities. A person who is able to sit down at a piano and play with some facility, especially among a group of friends or colleagues at a social occasion, can find herself with degrees of influence, which is to say power, in that circle of people which she would not have had otherwise. On the face of it this appears to be a “finishing school” sense of art, or the kind of reason a parent may give to a child to encourage her to practice the piano every day. To that extent there is something rather trivial about it. This may indeed be superficial, but it also may not be, depending on the nature and impact of the possibilities thereby engendered. A parent may have less than profound intentions when encouraging a child to practice, but if the ability to make music opens up social worlds and potential for the child in later years, there is nothing trivial or superficial about that. In the art world, to be a bit more focused, power is on display everywhere. In some respects, it is what enables the creation, distribution, and engagement with art to occur, and in other ways it intrudes, a fact about which artists, writers, musicians, and actors regularly complain. In either case, we can see the place of power in art nearly everywhere we look in the art world. Traditionally, nearly all artists of any sort were dependent on the patronage of the great and the good, from Hans Holbein at the court of Henry viii to Leonardo da Vinci with François Premier to Joseph Haydn at the Esterházy estate. To some extent

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a similar arrangement exists today, as we can see in the commissions on which many artists continue to rely. Similarly, the power of museums, curators, art critics, and gallery owners can be determinative of the directions in which art develops. Art that is not judged to be appropriate or of sufficient quality to distribute or exhibit may reach at most a very limited audience and as a result lose whatever capacity it may have had to engage and influence us. Through the exercise of their power and control of resources, state and other public authorities can have a tremendous effect on the development and distribution of art, and indeed on the way art is understood and engaged in a society. The purpose of art as understood by the Church effected the course of the development of art for well more than a millennium. That is not to say that the art produced was thereby of a lesser quality than it may have been otherwise, because that would clearly not be true. Much of the painting, sculpture, architecture, and music written to underwrite either the church as an institution or a theological point is as profound as anything produced outside the Church’s orbit, and maybe more so. Power and its exercise are not necessarily to be deplored, but they are to be understood. Through its power and influence the Church helped to define art and its development. Along similar lines, the extraordinary forms of design and architecture in the Islamic world are due in part to the influence of Islam’s hostility to representational art, its general iconoclasm. Such institutional power can limit and thereby operationally define directions of development, and in doing so it can enable the generation of profound design and equally profound criticism. Consider in this regard both the Alhambra in Andalusia and Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red. State bodies can do much the same. Art developed as it did in Stalin’s Soviet Union through the ideological insistence on Socialist Realism as the only appropriate style for revolutionary art. To some extent like the case with the Church, in constraining and thereby defining the development of art as it did, the exercise of State power in this case both squeezed out art that may have developed under other conditions even while it also enabled valuable artistic production. It is fair to say that Soviet architecture did not engender anything comparable to the Vatican or the great Gothic cathedrals, but at the same time painting and other art forms in the 1930s in the Soviet Union, even within the more or less realist constraints, succeeded well beyond the Socialist Realist caricature with which many people are familiar. We are well aware of the aesthetic value of the best of Soviet music and films of the period, and in painting one may look to the group of artists called the Krug Khudozhnikov, literally the Circle of Artists, to get a more nuanced understanding of Socialist Realist painting than we are used to. Again, power is not necessarily, or in any case only, detrimental.

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Closer to our own time the State continues to exercise power in art, sometimes through ideology and sometimes through resources. In the United States, for example, it is not uncommon for those in positions of political influence to object to art that they find disturbing or offensive. This tends not to happen for overtly political reasons, presumably due to the entrenched commitments to freedom of speech and expression in the country. It happens, rather, by appeal to religious or ethical values, and, we should note, the source of such pressure need not be the state. It is not so long ago that books and films were being censored, and today an exhibition may well find itself closed down or at least criticized, because it cuts against the grain of prevalent ethical and religious ideas. Artists have, maybe always but certainly in recent centuries, been inclined to push the boundaries of what is considered acceptable. For the general public, this is frequently a non-issue because we typically simply ignore what does not interest us. For the authorities, though, and occasionally for selfappointed “authorities,” there is sometimes a tendency to attack what offends one’s religious or moral sensibilities. This is also beginning to occur in such social institutions as universities, in which it is increasingly common to hear that what offends members of the university community, perhaps on racial or ethnic grounds, should be eliminated or banned. The opposition to the exhibition of works of art that offend some people for this or that reason can result in the direct exercise of power through refusing to allow exhibitions or closing them down. It can also result in less direct forms of the exercise of power through controlling the resources available to support artists. On a large scale this can be done through reducing, or perhaps even eliminating, grant and other forms of support on which many artists and art institutions depend. Even without limiting or reducing funding, requirements and criteria for the receipt of funding can be so defined that they effectively constrain the sort of art that can be supported, thereby to some degree defining the art that is produced and by implication the directions of the development of art in the society. Power pervades the art world, the lives of artists, and the creation of, and engagement with, art in countless ways, big and small. That power and art impact one another in the many ways they do is an indication of both the pervasiveness of the aesthetic and political dimension of experience, and of the fact that these dimensions, together with the cognitive, are constitutively and thereby intimately related with one another. This general feature of the character of experience, more than any other, accounts for the reason our experience, at general and particular levels, has the traits it has. To fill out this conception, however, we still need to develop the analysis of the political dimension of experience, a task to which I can now turn.

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The Political Dimension of Experience The third dimension of experience to explore is the political.1 Unlike the cognitive and aesthetic, for both of which there is a fairly extensive literature wherein their relation to experience is discussed, even if it is not the same relation we propose here, to talk of the political as a dimension of experience at the same level of generality as the cognitive and aesthetic is unusual. My first task, therefore, is to clarify what it means to say that there is a political dimension that together with the aesthetic and cognitive constitute the fabric of experience. Clarification of meaning is not sufficient, though, and I will go on to offer an account of the coherence, plausibility, and usefulness of the idea. The analysis will conclude, as have the past two chapters, with an account of the relation of the political to the cognitive and the aesthetic. To help avoid confusion, though it somewhat puts the cart before the horse, it may help to begin with a claim that sounds more like a conclusion. The reason we may, and should, recognize a political dimension in experience is that we have the power to resolve the many problems that constitute experiences and experience generally. This point may be aligned with the comparable ­assertions about the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions this way: the cognitive dimension lies in the fact that we can and do succeed in resolving p ­ roblems, the aesthetic dimension resides in the integrity of experiences and a general trajectory of experience, and the political dimension lies in the power to engage the problems in experience. I have demonstrated the details of the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions and can turn now to the political. By way of introduction, however, I can point out that the relation of the political to the other two is not a novel idea. If the political dimension has as its most general expression the place of power in experience, I remind the reader that I have discussed the relation of power and knowledge in the hands of Foucault, and the relation of power and art, particularly in a pragmatist ­context, has recently received attention from Richard Shusterman, Krzysztof  Skowroński, and others (Shusterman 2008; Skowroński 2013a and 2013b; ­Koczanowicz and Liszka 2014). They have not approached the topic in quite 1 Three earlier papers are reproduced in part in the current chapter. The first is “Experience and Judgment: Political and Aesthetic” (Ryder 2014). The second is “Democratic Theory: Interests and Antagonisms,” which was presented at the Central European Pragmatist Forum, Turda, Romania, 4–8 June 2012. The third, closely related to the second, is “Democratic Theory: Pragmatist and Agonistic,” presented at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, Fordham University, nyc, 15–17 March 2012. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004429185_007 John

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the same way I do, but the general ideas overlap in certain specifiable respects, as I have shown. Also, in an effort to clear the conceptual ground, I need to develop the distinction between the political dimension of experience and political experience, as was necessary in the case of the aesthetic dimension in the previous chapter. I have had occasion to speak elsewhere about political experience and its relation to aesthetic experience, but if I were writing that piece today, I should choose my terms more carefully (Ryder 2014). Specifically, I tended there to conflate the two terms that here I wish to distinguish, with respect to both the political and the aesthetic. The two terms in question are “experience” and “dimension.” It is not wise to speak, as I did there, of “political experience” and the “political dimension of experience” interchangeably because they are not the same. Political experience, in our current parlance, is a form of experience, whereas the political dimension of experience is a component, along with the cognitive and the aesthetic, of the fabric of experience generally. There has been a fair bit of discussion of the former, and we will add to it below. There has, however, been very little about the latter, hence the need for the current analysis. We will benefit from a brief look at some of the ways pragmatist philosophers in recent years have considered the place of the political as a way to ­begin to explore the meaning of the political dimension of experience. I have mentioned in the Introduction that Michael Eldridge pointed out that “for Dewey there was a single phenomenon—experience—that could be understood metaphysically, aesthetically, politically, or epistemically.” Eldridge takes this observation not so much in the direction of a political experience or political dimension of experience, but he developed what he calls a Deweyan “­political technology,” by which he meant an instrumentalist approach to social action and to the resolution of social problems. (Eldridge 1998, 83). Larry Hickman has spoken about “technological activity,” by which he means the kind of activity that cognitively makes use of tools, a concept that overlaps to a considerable extent with the theory of judgment, and may have implications for what we mean by both the political dimension of experience and political experience (Hickman 2001, Chap. 1). And James Campbell has made the point that Dewey’s entire understanding of experience is political (Campbell 1992, 1995, 68–75 and 144–157). In a sense, it may seem to become unnecessary to make a point of the political in experience as a somewhat novel analytical idea if experience is such a central category for Dewey, and if, as Campbell suggests, social reconstruction is equally central. It is more than worthwhile to notice that Campbell’s idea of community reconstruction, Hickman’s technology, and Eldridge’s political

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technology are valuable ideas, and strong interpretations of Dewey, though they are not what we mean by the political dimension of experience. When we talk about the political dimension of experience we do not mean the cognitively inferential in experience, as Hickman does by “technology,” nor do we mean with Eldridge social action, nor do we mean Campbell’s community reconstruction, as important as all of them were to Dewey and as important as they are as aspects of political experience, entirely independent of Dewey. That these are not the traits of the “political” to which I refer indicates the need to distinguish between political experience and the political dimension of experience. Let us leave aside the meaning of the political dimension of experience, to which in any case the bulk of this chapter is devoted, and focus for a moment on political experience. The kinds of experience, and the sense of “political,” that Eldridge, Hickman, and Campbell employ, are indeed aspects of political experience, but a more general characterization is required. When we talk about political experience, we do not have in mind the political in these senses. Nor do we refer to partisan politics, or the “political” in the sense of the electoral competition among political parties. That process, and partisan politics in general, is certainly one possible aspect of political life and activity, but it is a fairly narrow slice of it. That in some contexts the “political” is equated with partisan competition is an example of how distorted the understanding of the political aspects of our lives can and has become. When we talk about political experience, as distinct from the political dimension of experience, we mean rather the entire range of our individual and social lives that has to do with the systematic exercise of public authority. In this sense, political experience is to be distinguished from experience that bears only on personal matters, or issues that concern only a slightly larger circle of people, such as families or neighbors, but that are nonetheless private. It is also to be distinguished from activity and experience that concern a wider range of people, or we may say social groups and organizations, but that do not have to do with authority and its exercise. Civil society generally falls into this category, as do ngos, religious organizations in so far as they deal exclusively with spiritual concerns, arts organizations, groups of people with single common interests, for example families whose children all attend a specific school, and other groups of people with a social function but without access to public authority. Economic activity is yet another category, as are the structures and organizations, either private or public, through and in which economic activity is carried out. Such organizations can have extensive social reach, and they can concentrate a good deal of power over individuals and social organizations, but it is not necessarily public authority and therefore the organizations are not inherently political.

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All of these kinds of organizations may become political, or at least intersect with the political, when in their activity they engage public authority. Groups of parents and teachers may constitute a school board, in which case their activity deals with public policy and authority; ngos may find themselves needing to negotiate with public authority in order to function; arts organizations may need public support, and whatever quid pro quo arrangements such support requires, in order to prosper or even to survive; people living in the same neighborhood may think it prudent to constitute themselves a neighborhood watch committee, and thereby collaborate with local police and other organs of public authority; and corporations or groups of small businesses generally find it necessary to engage public authority in the interest of policy making that they find acceptable. No individual or social group that partakes of the structures of contemporary organized life can avoid the political, at least not for long, but they are not therefore identical with the political. This is a significant point because we need to be able to distinguish political from other forms of social experience if we are to say anything significant about it. Also, by way of definition, it is important to notice that we are speaking here of public authority rather than state power to identify political experience. There are several reasons for this. The first is that the “political” ought not to be  limited to that which concerns the state, if only for the obvious reason that  political activity also occurs on much smaller or local levels than state concerns. When the American Congressman Tip O’Neil famously said that “all  ­politics is local,” he was exaggerating for effect, but he had a point. ­Political  activity is at least local as well as national, and to some extent international. A second reason to distinguish public authority from state power is that authority and public power are not the same thing. All public power is a form of authority when exercised legally, particularly within an area in which it has the legal right to function, but not all authority is public power, or at least not power in the same sense. The state’s control over legally exercised violence is certainly a form of power, as is its ability to persuade through other more peaceful means. The distinction between hard and soft power is now a familiar, and in some respects, a useful one, but for my purposes I note that power in either sense is not authority. No state has legitimate authority over another, though it may have the means to exercise hard and soft power in relation to it. Moreover, public bodies, local or national, may exercise authority without exercising power. For example, the state body that has the responsibility for taxation may exercise in a variety of ways its authority over the taxes one pays and the ­processes through which one pays them without calling into play the coercive power it may also have to enforce that authority. The point is simply that power and authority are not the same thing, and that we wish to identify political John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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experience as that activity that concerns itself not necessarily with public power, but necessarily with public authority. When we speak of public power in this way it is useful to indicate that when public power is used to enforce its authority it is in that instance a form of coercive power. Power in its most general sense need not be coercive, a point that is assumed when we say, as we have about the political dimension of experience, that power in the sense of solving problems is central to the nature of experience. There is nothing coercive about power in this sense. Its meaning is more that of a capacity to effect a result, the capability to produce, than it is to coerce. In the case of the employment of its enforcement role, a public authority is exercising coercive power rather than power generally. It is coercing a result rather than simply producing one. The political dimension of experience, then, is not defined by power in a coercive sense, and public power is not necessarily coercive in that a public authority may in its actions simply be effecting the results its authority permits. To distinguish between public authority and public power in the way that we have is in fact to distinguish between public authority and the coercive use of public power that, when performed in legally sanctioned circumstances, is the proper purview of the state. The close relationship of political experience with power is precisely what requires us to approach these distinctions carefully. Political experience, we have said, is that experience in which we engage with public authority, which may or may not in any given case involve engagement with whatever coercive power the relevant public authority may possess. As I will show below, however, and as I have already mentioned at many other points, the political dimension of experience is defined in terms of power, though power understood more broadly than the power of public authority. Nonetheless, political experience as the engagement with public authority, with or without the aspect of that authority’s power, is an expression of the political dimension of experience, much in the way that aesthetic experience is an expression of the aesthetic dimension of experience and epistemic engagement is an expression of the cognitive dimension of experience. To sort all this out I now turn to the political dimension of experience directly, after which we will be better placed to explore ways in which it is expressed in daily and political experience. I The political dimension of experience is embodied in the fact that power and its exercise is central to what it is to be a live person. In this respect, to embrace a political dimension of experience is to acknowledge most baldly the pragmatist take on philosophical anthropology and experience in general. It John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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has been commonplace in pragmatist circles, in fact definitive of pragmatism as a distinct philosophical position, to regard ideas as tools in the solution of problems. This has led to two common positions among pragmatists, namely that inquiry is an effort to solve problems rather than to describe states of affairs, though description is of course both possible and frequent, and that by implication the truth of an idea is to a significant degree a function of how well that idea solves the problem or problems to which it is applied, or as James put it, the extent to which the idea “works,” though truth in the sense of accurate description also is both possible and frequent. In this regard, inquiry, cognition, and knowledge are intimately tied to problem solving, a connection of which we will make more below. At this point I wish to say explicitly that in defining and explicating the political dimension of experience I wish to generalize the pragmatist insight concerning problem-solving beyond inquiry and to experience as a whole. To experience, which is equivalent to being a live, functioning human being, is to engage in the process of solving problems, even if not every individual experience necessarily involves a problem. The capacity to do so, which is to say the simple fact of experience, is defined by the power continually to engage in the solution of problems. This sounds more ominous and exhausting than it needs to, so we should spin the idea out somewhat. The fact is that to say this adds nothing to what we already do, other than to help us better understand it and build it into our existing stock of ideas, so that to understand experience as ongoing problemsolving should not be off-putting. Rather, it describes what we already do in a way that brings into focus aspects of our experience, from the mundane and quotidian to the momentous and profound, that should help us understand ourselves and the general context of our lives more richly than otherwise. In pursuit of this point we must back up one step and distinguish experience, in the sense of being a live human being, from being alive in a strictly biological sense. Not every aspect of life is power in the sense of a dimension of experience, largely because not every aspect of human life is experience in any meaningful sense. For example, there are countless bacteria and micro-­ organisms in our body at any given time, which collectively are part of the organic process that sustains us. But this does not mean that every one of them is strongly relevant to any of the contexts of our engagement with our environments; not every one of them is an ingredient in the power that enables our experience. Experience is not, we may now say, equivalent to life; it is, however, equivalent to a life lived in terms of human potential. The theoretical ability to distinguish between aspects of our worlds that are literally related to us but not relevant to experience, because they are at most weakly relevant to us, allows us to develop the idea of experience as constituted by power without trivializing power such that it becomes meaningless. Our biology may require a notion John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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of potential that accounts for how each of the countless microbes in our body functions, but this purely biological conception of potential does not necessarily connect with the sense of power as enabling experience. Another way to put this is that the power that constitutes experience is a capacity that is strongly related to our identity; it contributes to who we are and what we do in ways that define us in general as human beings and individually as the person each of us is. Some of our microbes may be strongly relevant in this sense, but most never are. The power that defines experience interests us precisely because it defines how we become and sustain the individuals we are.2 In our account of experience as defined in part by power, we are interested then not simply in biological potential, but in power exercised in the problem solving that constitutes our engagement with our environments as distinctively human individuals. It is in this connection that understanding experience as problem solving, and hence as possessing a political dimension, can add to the depth of our understanding of experience. First, it clarifies the nature of experience as engagement. In fact, we have already done this by defining experience as the transaction of an individual with her environment, broadly conceived, but we are able to add a bit more thickness to that idea in that we can now see what form such engagement takes. We have said that the transaction that is experience is mutually constitutive in that both the environment and the individual take on the traits that they do through the transaction. We can now say that this happens in the context of the problem solving that describes the engagement, and the power to carry on the engagement, without which experience ends. We may also point out here that power in this sense characterizes both the passivity and activity of the engagement with our environments. That the point refers to activity is fairly easy to see, in that when we are actively pursuing a problem to its resolution, whether purposeful or not, and whether consciously or not, it is clear that power in the sense of capacity to act is at work. However, even passivity consists of power in the sense of the power to undergo, which is to say that power as a feature of undergoing is evident in the fact that our capacity to undergo is not infinite. Some engagement damages or kills us, and that is because our power is limited. The capacity to undergo without damage, which is to say to sustain our experience in passive reception, is to that extent a form of power, 2 This distinction between complexes that are technically related to us and are thereby among the complexes that constitute us as individuals with identifiable integrity, and those that are relevant to us as constitutive of experience, is what Buchler was articulating in his conceptions of procept and proception. A procept is a constitutive complex that enters an individual’s proceptive domain, and one’s proceptive domain is that set of complexes that constitutes one’s experience. See, Buchler 1951. John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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namely the power to sustain ourselves, and often to prosper, in the midst of our interactive engagement with our environments. Second, which is actually a way of emphasizing the activity in experience, to point to problem solving, and thus to power, as characterizing experience is to indicate the sense in which, as we have indicated at the beginning of the book’s introduction, experience is the process of “making our way.” In the engagement with our environment which is our experience, we construct our lives. There are any number of ways we could imagine how that construction might work. We could, for example, think that our lives are constructed through the adherence to some set of beliefs or principles, which in the following of them our lives are built. I might suggest, to offer a different possibility, that constructing our lives is accomplished by identifying which leaders to follow and then following them. We might, in other words, understand the building of our lives in various ways. The suggestion made here is that in fact we make our way, we construct our lives, through the exercise of power in the process of solving the countless problems, big and small, that we routinely encounter. Some we deal with by instinct, some by habit, some by conscious deliberation, and some by allowing chance to take its course. In whichever ways we solve the problems with which we are engaged, the process of doing so is how we make our way and make our lives. As these points suggest, if power were not a continual thread in the fabric of experience, which is to say if it were not a dimension of experience, we would be stopped cold. We would have no way of addressing the problems that emerge in experience and thus no way to proceed from moment to moment, never mind from day to day. This is the prima facie case for regarding power as central to experience and consequently for identifying the political as one of the three dimensions of experience. Of course, as I have shown in previous chapters and will show again later in this one, the political dimension of experience is interwoven with the cognitive and the aesthetic dimensions, which is to say that power is intimately connected with knowledge and art. Moreover, the parallel level of generality in terms of which we may understand all three is suggested as well by the fact that each is reflected in a distinct mode of judgment that taken together describe in greater detail how we “make our way.” The cognitive dimension of experience is most closely associated with the assertive mode of judgment, and the aesthetic dimension with the exhibitive. Comparably, the political dimension of experience is expressed most directly in the active mode of judgment. Before I turn to the concept of judgment and its relation to the political dimension of experience, a moment should be spent on what to some readers may be an obvious question, which is whether there is a relation between our

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concepts of power and the political dimension of experience and Nietzsche’s concept and role of the Will to Power, and if there is, what that relation may be. This issue is worth discussing not only to clear some conceptual ground, but because there is indeed a relation between the two sets of ideas, and my own concept can be refined more sharply by developing the comparison. The first common feature of the two is that for pragmatic naturalism and for Nietzsche, power is a central feature, in some respects a defining feature, of human life. One difficulty in discussing Nietzsche’s idea is that it is open to a range of interpretations, some of which are consistent with my use of the notion of power in experience and some of which are not. For example, if Nietzsche meant to use the concept of the will to power as a feature of our psychology, then I would part company with him. There is no point here to engage in a debate about the correct interpretation of Nietzsche, so I leave the point in the conditional mode, which is to say simply that if he was making a psychological point, then I do not follow him there because the ubiquity and exercise of power in the pragmatist sense in which I want to put it to work is not a matter of psychology, it is a matter of experience more generally. If, however, Nietzsche meant that power and its exercise is a feature of life generally, and there is some evidence in some of his writings to suggest this, then we are on more congenial ground. Though it may appear that “power” in Nietzsche’s use refers to domination and manipulation of others, there is some reason to think that he did not mean this, and that in fact he meant something more general, something one can find even in the clear absence of manipulation and domination. At one point in his notes he comments, for example, that the “powerful nature” may be found even in those who “bury themselves in a garden house” (Nietzsche 1880, 6 206). Even here, though, Nietzsche refers to the “powerful nature,” not to power itself, so the generality he wishes to ascribe to power is unclear. There are other occasions in which he is clearer about the generality of power, though even in these cases the character of that generality is open to interpretation. There are points in On the Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil where Nietzsche suggests that the will to power is some sort of general “principle” or cosmic force that lies behind or underneath human behavior. Such an idea is suggested by the quote above from the Nachlass, and by passages in other writings where he indicates that acts of love as well as acts of domination are expressions of the will to power, and that even the philosopher’s pursuit of truth is a manifestation of a will to power. Power, if it can be applied this generally, is far more than a matter of individual psychology; it is a character at least of experience if not of nature generally. Still, though, we need to be careful about the character of this generality. There need not be anything

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mysterious about the generality of power in experience, and unfortunately such terms as “principle” and “force” are at times conducive of mystery and obfuscation. Whatever specifically Nietzsche meant, if his idea is that power is at the heart of what it is to live a human life, then we are in agreement. In our case, to be “at the heart” means to be a feature of experience generally, and specifically that feature of experience appears, as we have said, in the fact that experience is an ongoing transaction between self and environment that is characterized by the encounter with and resolution of problems. We do not wish to posit something so to speak “underneath” experience, but rather to point directly to a generic feature of experience that is the exercise of power. If Nietzsche ascribed power to human life in this general sense, then we are in rough accord. There are other possible aspects of Nietzsche’s idea that we would not want to endorse. There is some possibility, for example, that he thought the will to power to be an alternative to a Darwinian account of evolution, wherein the driving force of evolution is not the struggle to survive but the struggle for power. Nietzsche’s idea has been interpreted this way, and regardless whether he so intended it, the point seems to be ill-conceived. If, as I am suggesting, power lies at the heart of experience in the capacity to solve problems, then a “will to power” cannot in any meaningful way be distinguished from a struggle to survive. The latter is no less an exercise of power in the sense of resolving problems faced than is the former. There is an interesting question here about whether power as a feature of experience can be ascribed to life generally. The answer is “no,” if what we mean by experience is broader than power alone, and of course it is broader, at least in so far as the dimensions of experience consist of more than the political alone. But power as the engagement, though a non-conscious engagement, with nature that could characterize any being in an effort to survive, could plausibly be ascribed. In this respect, though, I am not saying anything remarkable about biological nature, beyond the obvious point that even in experience, human beings are fully natural entities. What could plausibly be said to characterize something distinctly human is what I have been calling judgment, and a brief review of the conception of judgment that is at work in our understanding of experience may be useful at this point. One of the features of experience that has received inadequate appreciation is the fact that in experience we produce. Indeed, it is the fact that in experience we produce that defines the way experience constitutes an active process of “making our way.” We do not produce all the time, and not ­everything related to us is a product merely by being related to us. But we produce a great deal, and all of those products in experience are judgments. They are the ways we interact individually and collectively with nature that taken together give to our engagement with nature, which is to say our experience, John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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the character that it has. By attending to judgment within our experience we can bring into focus aspects of a good deal of what we do and what we create in ways that are more clear and effective than by talking simply about experience. At the most general level, as I have said repeatedly, there are three modes of judgment: assertive, exhibitive, and active. Every dimension of our experience may be characterized by products, by judgments, in one or more of these three modes. This in the end is the reason that such seemingly disparate aspects of our experience as the cognitive, political, and aesthetic dimensions have much more in common than we might at first think, and in fact together constitute the fabric of experience. If, as I have done, we associate the assertive, exhibitive, and active modes of judgment respectively with the cognitive, aesthetic, and political dimensions of experience, then we can expect the judgments in the three modes to intersect comparably to the interweaving of the three dimensions of experience. For example, both political and aesthetic experience will include, even in large measure consist of, judgments that assert something, for example specific goods or goals; that exhibit something, perhaps that arrange formal components of a picture or a piece of music, or of a national tradition; and that perform something, perhaps a political process or a dramatic encounter. Experience in its political, aesthetic, and cognitive dimensions have shared forms of judgment; they participate in or consist of activities and processes that overlap in character, meaning, and force. This is so because experience involves judgment in one or more of the three modes. Some judgments are assertive in that they make a claim about something. They say something, generally something that has a truth-value in a traditional sense. Much, though not all, of our ordinary speech is assertive in this sense, as is for the most part both journalism and academic writing in all or nearly all disciplines. Assertive judgments are most obviously associated with linguistic utterance, but there is no necessary connection between them. An assertive judgment may be mathematical or formally logical rather than linguistic; and language, as is well known, may be used for performative utterance, and it may also be used in exhibitive judgment, as is the case of poetry and literature as a whole. That literature and poetry are not assertive judgments for the most part is the reason that philosophical discussions of them that describe propositions in a fictional work as “false” are misguided, as we have seen. Assertive judgment is not the whole of judgment, though it i­ nteracts with others. It is, as I argued in Chapter 3, the mode of judgment that is most closely associated with the cognitive dimension of experience. As I have also shown, exhibitive judgments differ from assertive judgments in significant ways. Exhibitive judgments do not assert anything; they do not consist of propositions. Rather, exhibitive judgments show something; they John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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arrange materials, which is to say materials of any kind, in such ways that something is revealed to us. In powerful works of art (and the aesthetic is the dimension of experience that is the paradigmatic exemplar of exhibitive judgment), the materials appropriate to a given medium are skillfully arranged such that something new is shown, demonstrated, exhibited. Sometimes we are struck by it immediately; at other times, repeated viewings or hearings are necessary before we grasp the fuller import of what has been exhibited. Exhibitive judgments are not necessarily matters of art, however, because meaning and even truth may be displayed throughout the range of our experience. Because our current concern here is with the political dimension of experience, as well as ways that it intersects with the other dimensions, it is worthwhile to point out that political meaning can be, and often is, expressed in and through exhibitive judgment. A propaganda poster, or a political billboard, or sometimes simply a photo can have a powerful political resonance. Some readers, especially Americans old enough to remember the Vietnam War, are familiar with the famous photo of a young Vietnamese girl running naked down a road in the aftermath of a napalm attack, an image and exhibitive judgment that conveyed a powerful message and that served to support political opposition to the war. The photo did not describe terror and pain or assert propositions about it; rather, it exhibited terror and pain, and it did so in this case with considerable political impact. The third mode of judgment is the active, which is a distinctive mode of judgment because in some cases it is in our actions themselves that we judge, that we produce. When we move something from here to there, or chop wood, or clean the house, or in countless other kinds of actions, we are judging for the  simple reason that we are generating products, and in the process ­selecting from among options. And in some cases, the kinds of actions that typically function in one mode of judgment are central to another. I mentioned above that sometimes speech acts are performative, in which case a linguistic utterance does not assert but performs an action, and the meaning of the utterance is in the action itself; sometimes actions can be exhibitive, as in performance art. Furthermore, any given judgment may, depending on the circumstances and context, function in more than one mode simultaneously. A dance is a good example, in which movement is as much exhibitive as active judgment. Because of its centrality to the political dimension of experience we should explore in more detail the active mode of judgment. If the political dimension of experience can be identified with power as its expression, then the active is that mode of judgment that, by virtue of being the clearest and most direct exercise of power, is the most directly expressive of the political. This point can

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be illustrated if we think of the three modes of judgment—assertive, exhibitive, and active—as comparable, not strictly but loosely, to saying, making, and doing. It is in doing, by contrast with the other two, that we most directly exercise power. That is not to say that saying and making do not produce products and are not thereby having consequences. It is to say, rather, that in so far as saying and making change the world in one way or another and to a greater or lesser extent, they are partaking of the power that lies at the heart of experience, which is to say of the individual’s creative engagement with nature. That our judgments are capable of generating products at all is an indication of the fact that the exercise of power is at the heart of experience, and in doing as active judgment, we are most directly exercising that power. There are common locutions that express this point. When we say, for example, that it is one thing to talk about x and quite another to act on our talk, or that it is easy to say one is committed to something but more serious if one acts on that commitment, we implicitly recognize this distinction. Such ideas and turns of phrase as these convey the suspicion we have that “actions speak louder than words,” that it is in action that we make a bigger impact. We suspect, in other words, that our power lies more in action than in anything else. The truth inherent in these suspicions is the very point I am making, which is that it is in our actions, in our active judgments, that we most directly express the power that characterizes experience generally. This in turn is the point of recognizing the political as one of the dimensions of experience. Such suspicions, however, also tend to mislead us in that they seem to suggest that saying and making, or assertive and exhibitive judgments, are generally less forceful and less valuable than action. This, however, is clearly not right, and in our general cultural experience we already know it. We may have available to us the phrase “actions speak louder than words,” but we also have available to us the phrases “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Though in themselves such platitudes do not establish a philosophical point, they suggest to us the possibility that the reason they have arisen and survived is that they point to something about our experience that, even if inarticulately grasped, is nonetheless evident to us. Folk wisdom, as we see, already contains an important point with respect to judgment and experience, which is that no mode of judgment—the pen, the picture, or the sword—is necessarily and generally superior to or more important than the others. All have an impact because all are ways that human beings produce in experience. One of the reasons that the theory of judgment is useful in the larger theory of experience is that it helps us to recognize the several ways in which we produce. Another is that once we have a way of recognizing the several ways we

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produce, we are far less inclined to reduce one to another. Once we understand that in art, typically, we judge exhibitively while in science, typically, we judge assertively, and that both can express the cognitive dimension of experience, we can acknowledge the cognitive and truth-bearing traits of art without feeling the need to claim that art must therefore be a science. Similarly, we can recognize that knowledge is power without losing the cognitive significance of the sciences and humanities by reducing their activity to the pursuit of power. This conception of judgment helps to fill out an understanding of experience by elucidating the ways our productive experience generates meaning and is related to knowledge, truth, beauty, and a host of other dimensions of our lives. Experience can be described not simply as the interaction with our environment in which we manipulate and assimilate, but also as the interaction with our environment in which we undertake the significantly human functions of asserting, exhibiting, and acting. The theory of judgment, by clarifying the forms in which we produce in our ongoing engagement with nature, helps us to refine the theory of experience by bringing into focus its three generally prevalent dimensions. II I want now to look more closely at the traits that identify the political as a dimension of experience and its expression in political experience. One strong candidate for a trait of our activity that is a constituent of the political is interests. We all act to some extent to achieve interests. We may do so instinctively or reflectively; we may so act haphazardly or systematically; we may pursue interests intelligently or not; we may advance our interests through our actions or we may damage our interests because we have misidentified them. Whatever the detailed description of how and why we pursue interests in any specific case, we act in general to achieve or advance our perceived interests, and not knowingly and willingly against them. Of course, our interests are involved in one way or another in many forms of our activity and experience. We pursue our economic interests in our commercial and market relations; we pursue interests of other kinds in supporting a favorite team or in playing for our own; we engage our aesthetic interests when we play an instrument or visit a museum and our spiritual interests when we attend religious services. So, the pursuit of interests is not exclusive to political experience; it is, however, definitive of it because when we are engaged in activity that concerns public authority, we are invariably looking to secure our interests. That we also do so in other forms of activity and experience indicates, as we have repeatedly said, that John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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there are indeed aspects of the political that intersect with the other dimensions of experience generally, much as there are aspects of the aesthetic and the cognitive that pervade experience generally. We may identify unity and knowledge in the political, for example, just as we may identify the pursuit of interests in the aesthetic and the cognitive. In fact, we need to back up a bit and place interests in a proper perspective, because as an element in the political they are related to other such elements. We have associated the cognitive dimension of experience with description, truth, and possibilities; and the aesthetic dimension of experience with unity, harmony, and dissonance. Comparably, there are three traits of the political dimension of experience: individual, community, and interests. More needs to be said about each to clarify the idea. “Individual” conveys the integrity of experience and experiences, that is, the fact that we may speak of experiences as a plurality and not simply a mass term. Nature in general, including experience, is constituted by complexes rather than simples. Ours is a relational rather than an atomistic nature. Nonetheless, it is a nature in which there are individuals in relation, even as we insist that those individuals are themselves relationally constituted. And this general description applies to experience and experiences no less than to nature as a whole. “Community” conveys the complexity and relationality in experience, the fact that in experience we continually deal with many factors, most generally described as the ongoing transaction of organism and environment, and the many distinct elements of those two moments in experience. If “individual” captures the plurality and multiplicity within experience, then “community” captures the relations among the multiple constituents. In this sense, “community” is an expression of the equally general trait of relationality. The term “community” applies here because, for the most part and despite the occasional bumpy ride, our experience hangs together; the experiencing individual is not simply a collection of events and processes, or a “bundle of perceptions” as Hume had thought, but a collection with an integrity or integrities of its own, and in some senses even a trajectory of its own. To offer slightly more detail, we  mentioned above that the constitutive traits that define our experience rather than merely our biological existence, are those that are related to us as ­instances of the power expressed in our lives. It is precisely these same traits that define the integrity and trajectory of our individual lives, our experience as it characterizes each of us uniquely.3

3 In this regard we should note that Buchler captures this point in his theory of proception through the concept of proceptive direction. Experience is not simply a mass of events, but John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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“Interests” are, we may say, the force of experience; they play the role that Hegel or Marx would have assigned to contradictions. It is in the pursuit of our interests of any kind—individual, social, economic, aesthetic, bodily, and all these and others in various combinations—that experience “grows,” as James and Dewey both said. (On this point, I differ considerably from Nietzsche, if one may ascribe to Nietzsche the view that the will to power drives much of our activity.) At this general level, we do not yet need to distinguish various forms of politically oriented interests or the kinds of relations that may prevail among differing sets of such interests. Those considerations come, as I will show, when I unfold the general traits of political experience into some of its varieties and versions. At this point, I simply need to indicate that the three general traits of individual, community, and interests are definitive traits of the political dimension of experience, and because experience is a woven texture of its three dimensions, they are also characteristic traits of experience generally. The Hegelian sound of this may seem somewhat strained: there are two general traits, individual and community, more or less opposite or contrasting traits, that frame the context in which our pursuit in experience of the third element, interests, provides the motor that energizes our experiential process. Though this may have a somewhat forced or artificial ring to it, it nevertheless seems to make sense. So rather than applaud or condemn ourselves for this Hegelian moment, let us play it out and see where it goes. These are characteristics of experience in general, and they describe the ­political dimension of experience because they are especially relevant to the political aspect of our lives, roughly in the way harmony, unity, and dissonance are relevant to the aesthetic in life and experience, and description, truth, and possibilities to the cognitive. The less general features of our political lives, and now we refer to the “political” both in its general sense and in the sense of the pursuit and exercise of public and state power and authority, flow from the interaction of the individual, community, and the pursuit of interests in experience: conflict, domination, liberation, conquest, compulsion, liberty, exploitation, rights, rebellion, revolution, genocide, and the many other ­concepts and categories that arise in political theory and practice. Our political theories depend to some extent on how we understand these three concepts and how we wish to describe their relations with one another and their relative importance. And specific forms of political life and state organization also flow from

events with integrities, and those integrities together represent a general direction in our lives. See Buchler 1951.

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the ways these three general traits of our experience are exercised: single-party rule, democracy, dictatorship, anarchy, theocracy, etc. For example, in the pursuit of our interests we may generate, or at least find ourselves in, situations of conflict or harmony. Some political theorists make much of conflict, for example Chantal Mouffe today and Carl Schmitt in the previous century. Schmitt regarded irreconcilable differences as inherent in political life, which made political liberalism untenable in his view. Mouffe agrees that conflict is inevitable, though it moves her to articulate a conception of democratic political forms that do not attempt to smooth over conflict with consensus, but manage in other ways to incorporate them (Mouffe 2009; Schmitt 2007). But as important as is the recognition that conflict and antagonism happen, and regularly, in our political lives, it is a mistake to take it to be a necessary trait of political experience because conflict and contestation simply do not function at that level of generality. The general category, and feature of the political dimension of experience, is not conflict but interests and our pursuit of them. The process of pursuing our interests may lead to antagonism, but it need not. One component of the argument, or form of evidence, I offer to support the plausibility of identifying individual, community, and interests as traits of both the political dimension of experience and of the political as a form of experience, and of the idea that more specific forms of political experience derive from them, is the conceptual value Dewey demonstrated them to have by identifying common interests among members of communities as a definitive trait of democratic experience. As is well known, though still underutilized in analysis, Dewey developed his conception of democracy by noticing two features of our experience, as I have mentioned: that in all social groups their members have interests in common and that social groups necessarily engage in interaction with those beyond their own boundaries, specifically, we may add, most valuably in the form of the pursuit of common interests. (Dewey 1980a, C ­ hapter 7). If that observation is accurate, then conflict is no more a necessary feature of political experience than is commonality. Dewey built his understanding of democracy on these two features of community. In other words, he drew his conception of democracy from the very features of experience that we are here using to characterize the political dimension of experience. Just as democracy may be defined in terms of a certain form of the interaction among individual, community, and interests, so too may other p ­ olitical categories and forms of political experience. We may pursue interests in common, as in a democratic model, or we may pursue them at each other’s expense, as other forms of political organization may enable or encourage; we may recognize the importance of a rough equality of opportunity among

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individual members of communities in the pursuit of interests, or we may let the differences in power and access of various individuals fall where they may; we may rely on rights or on social utility in the ways that we structure our ­organizations and the pursuit of our interests; we may fail to pursue common i­ nterests across borders and engage instead in imperialist adventures; we may pursue our interests intelligently or carelessly; we may emphasize collaboration and persuasion or we may rely on coercive power in our political structures. Each of these alternatives will generate a different political picture, and a different type of political organization. In short, our political experience will differ depending on which of these forms of action and structure we promote. But all of them are types of political experience, and all of them involve individual, community, and the pursuit of interests, and a specific relation among the three, as their defining traits. The reason for that is that these are the traits of both the political dimension of experience and the political as a form of experience. III It is appropriate at this point to examine in some detail how the relations and relative balance among individual, community, and interests can help us to account for various forms of state political organization. Since we have been discussing democracy already, and because democracy is central to the pragmatist tradition of political theory, let us begin with a detailed look at how individual, community, and interests can be understood to interact in ways that define our understanding of democracy. To put the point in a nutshell, democracy in the pragmatic naturalist’s, especially Dewey’s, hands is an effort to describe a form of social and political organization that can integrate individual and community good through the pursuit of interests understood a certain way. If such a concept can be sustained, through plausibility in theory and value in practice, then an argument to be reckoned with will have been made in its defense. As we will see when we move past democracy to other possible political arrangements, this specific conception of the relations among individual, community, and interests is distinctive of democracy and, it may be said in passing, gives it its theoretical and practical strength. As I have indicated, one of the core concepts of Dewey’s understanding of democracy is “common interests.” The definition of democracy in Democracy and Education rests on two observations: that all communities require some interests held in common by their members, and that healthy communities are

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characterized by their members’ pursuit of communication and further interests held in common with those beyond the borders of their own communities. These, Dewey says, are the traits of all communities from which he draws his definition of democracy. (Dewey 1980a, Chapter 7). A useful contrast can be established with Chantal Mouffe, one of whose core concepts in her agonistic understanding of democracy is the ineradicable presence in a democratic society of a plurality of viewpoints, opinions, and interests, stemming from the fact that communities are collections of individuals, some of which are inevitably antagonistic. For Mouffe this fact points to the inadequacy of consensual and deliberative theories of democracy. A consideration of these two apparently quite different conceptions of democracy will help us to clarify the relations among individual, community, and interests that constitute democratic theory and practice. (Mouffe 2009) The question of the relation of pluralism to Dewey’s conception of democracy is familiar through the literature in recent years. Robert Talisse has argued that a Deweyan democracy cannot handle the fact of pluralism and so has to be given up. The issue has also been put in terms of the problems a pragmatist democracy might have with respect to dissent. Both concerns, especially Talisse’s, have generated some response and ongoing discussion.4 But to date that discussion has not dealt with the issue in terms of the challenge that Mouffe’s agonistic theory poses. Unlike the other literature to which I have just referred, Mouffe does not address Dewey in any serious way. In fact, she does not address pragmatism at all, other than through some comments on Rorty (Mouffe 2009, passim). She is more concerned with the general deliberative and consensual theories of democracy that have become prominent, specifically the liberalism of Habermas and Rawls and the communitarianism of Walzer, Taylor, and others. But even in these terms, her analysis is relevant for our pragmatic naturalist conception of democracy, and for our theory of experience, so much so that it is incumbent on us to take up the relation between the two.5 4 See, especially Talisse 2005, and 2007. Talisse’s criticism of Deweyan democracy prompted a healthy debate in the journals. Among the more interesting responses are Ralston 2008; Deen 2009; Koopman 2009; Clanton and Forcehimes 2009. Talisse responded to many of these analyses. See for example Talisse 2009. The issue of dissent has been discussed in Ryder 2007; see also Eldridge 2007. 5 Larry Hickman has discussed the relation between Dewey and Mouffe in Hickman 2008. In this paper Hickman holds, as I do, that there is more compatibility between Dewey and Mouffe than one might suspect, and probably than Mouffe suspects, though he also rightly emphasizes a critical difference, which is that Dewey’s experimental approach is missing from Mouffe. In any case, his focus is on methodological similarities rather than the issue of common interests.

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A comparison of pragmatist and agonistic theories of democracy prompts several questions. The first is whether the empirical underpinnings of both conceptions are accurate, and it seems clear that they are accurate. That is, Dewey is right in his observation of the importance of common interests, and Mouffe is right that there can be and often are antagonistic interests in any democratic society. One reason for this is that though Dewey is right that in communities people hold interests in common, it is more precise to say that they hold some interests in common. The other interests the members of a community have as individuals may, and often are, antagonistic to one another. The second question is: what does the fact that they are both right indicate or imply? If it is true that the pursuit of common interests is a fact, one that should be encouraged; and if the existence of antagonistic opinions and interests is a fact, one that should also be encouraged; then either democracy is impossible or it is a social and political condition that is capable of accommodating both common interests and antagonistic differences among members of a given community. Perhaps not surprisingly, the argument to be made here is that democracy, particularly its Deweyan, pragmatic naturalist version, is in fact capable of doing both. The upshot of this conclusion, for our purposes in any case, is not so much that democracy is preferable to other types of political and state organization, though it may well be, but that this specific construal of individual, community, and interests is uniquely descriptive of democracy. We should consider the first two questions in greater detail before moving on to the issue of how they may be accommodated. With respect to the first, Dewey attempted to develop a conception of democracy not from abstract or general principles but from the actual character of social life. The details of social life that he chose had to do with the interests that people share. He does not claim that people share all interests, as we have said, or that no other characteristics of communities are relevant for our understanding of them. He makes a modest but profoundly significant claim, which is that people within a specific community, whatever else we may want to say about them, can be expected to share some interests. He also does not claim, nor does he need to claim, that there must be a single interest that all members of a community share. He could, in other words, handle the Wittgensteinian point that we should not expect there to be a single, essential interest that defines a community. There may be a “family of interests,” to use Wittgenstein’s metaphor, and Dewey would have had no problem with this; in this respect, as in many others, our conception follows his. The second aspect of Dewey’s definition may be a bit more puzzling, but it is equally justifiable and equally profound in its ramifications. Dewey’s claim is that a healthy community, which is to say one that can sustain itself, adapt to

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changing conditions, and perhaps grow to some extent, is one that maintains, indeed pursues, common interests with other communities. A healthy community looks beyond its own limits, boundaries and borders to communicate with others, to identify common interests, and to pursue them together. It is possible for a community to exist for some time and under some conditions without engaging in such communication and pursuit of shared interests. Dewey gives the example of a gang of thieves. But such a community is not healthy and, he claims, will not prosper. Dewey’s view in the end is that a democratic society will be roughly equivalent to a healthy community, so it will be one characterized by communication and common interests within and beyond its boundaries. If we are asking an empirical question here, that is if we ask simply whether it is true that communities consist of common interests and that healthy communities pursue such interests beyond their boundaries, it is easier to accept the first point than the second. It seems fairly non-controversial that members of a community have interests in common. But do we want to follow Dewey in making the further claim that members of a healthy community, a democracy, must also be expected to pursue communication and common interests beyond the borders of their community? This seems more of a normative than a descriptive question because it requires of us that we endorse its implications for our understanding of democracy. For example, it turns out that very little of United States or any other countries’ foreign policy is democratic if by “democratic” we mean policy that consciously and persistently pursues common interests with those beyond one’s borders. In their foreign policy nations typically identify “national interests” first and then foray into the international arena to protect or advance them. But on Dewey’s definition that is not a democratic way to undertake foreign policy. To endorse Dewey’s extended and “other-regarding” conception of democracy requires that we accept it as a normative proposition. We shall do just that at this point because though we will not develop it here, it is possible to make a case for a broader view of democracy as requiring the pursuit of common interests across borders.6 For the sake of argument, then, at least we can agree that Dewey’s observations about common interests and their relation to democracy are acceptable for us. What then about Mouffe and the question of antagonistic pluralism? Her basic point derives, it seems, from the nagging suspicion she apparently feels that the standard deliberative and consensual models of democracy are simply unrealistic because they presume the possibility, even if only as a regulative 6 For a more elaborate consideration of the question of a properly pragmatist foreign policy see Ryder 2009; see also, Ryder 2010. See also Ralston 2013.

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ideal, that something like consensus can be reached in public, political discourse. This is, she says, a feature of the dominant liberal and communitarian conceptions, and, she claims, both go wrong on this point. Furthermore, she argues that if she is right that we can expect and even want a plurality of ideas, opinions, and interests, some of which will be antagonistic, then we endanger the future of democratic development by insisting on the ideal of consensus, if for no other reason than that we thereby ignore the dimension of power, by which she means coercive power, in the political sphere. Is Mouffe right about this? At the descriptive level, she seems obviously right. The only political environment in the contemporary world in which we can expect much other than partisan bickering is one in which alternative conceptions are not permitted, which seems to support Mouffe’s insistence that pluralism and antagonism are important for democracy. But there are other dimensions of this question because it is not simply an empirical matter of what people do, but a speculative question that concerns what we can expect people to do and a normative question of what we would want people to do. By their nature speculative questions are tricky because there is not much to go on other than suspicions, and there is no reason to assume that we will share those suspicions. For our part, we will hold that Mouffe is right that we can expect people to disagree, and if our academic experience is any guide, the more education we have the more we disagree. At the speculative level, there is no reason to think that there is a political condition, either a possible future or a regulative ideal, in which sharp disagreements and a plurality of points of view will disappear, regardless of how we structure the conditions of deliberation and discourse, even if we are able to eliminate what James Madison in the Federalist Papers No. 10 called “the most common and durable source of faction,” which is “the various and unequal distribution of property.” And on the normative side, we may also be reminded of Mill’s arguments in On Liberty for the value of vigorous debate, without necessarily arriving at agreement or consensus, a point that would suggest that we ought to accept Mouffe’s normative claim that we do not want to dissolve disagreement into consensus. I have suggested that there is some reasonable plausibility for both Dewey’s insistence on the importance of common interests to communities and democracy, and Mouffe’s view that disagreement, even of the antagonistic sort, is inevitable and in fact desirable in a strong democratic political environment. The second issue that I have raised is this: what is implied if both Dewey and Mouffe are right, or if their respective views are at least plausible? On the face of it the implication seems to be that either democracy must be able to handle both the centrality of common interests and of antagonistic disagreement, or it is impossible. Let’s dwell on this point for a bit.

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As I indicated earlier, it is true both that democracy is possible and that a healthy democratic society can accommodate both common interests and antagonistic disagreement. The reason is that there is nothing about common interests or antagonistic disagreements that preclude one another, either formally or in practice. People may have interests in common in one respect and disagree in another, or they may have interests in common but disagree fundamentally about how to achieve them. In fact, the co-existence of common interests and antagonistic disagreement is not only possible, it is probably the normal state of affairs. Another way to put this is in the terms of our understanding of the political dimension of experience. That conception commits us to the idea that our experience is characterized by the interplay of the individual, the community, and our interests, both individual and collective. These three may be construed in various ways. We may highlight the individual over the community, which for example Margaret Thatcher famously did when she asserted that there is no such thing as society; or we may highlight community over the individual, as collectivist societies have done and continue to do; we may regard interests as relevant to individuals but not to communities; we may regard interests as determined within but not among or between communities. The way we shape these concepts and their relations with one another will produce differing political theories. In the case of the question of the relation between common and antagonistic interests, my argument is that we may recognize and encompass both by endorsing the Deweyan understanding of the centrality of interests held in common. By doing so we acknowledge that while individuals are not reducible to their communities because they may hold interests different from and even antagonistic to one another, they are members of a community by virtue of their common interests. One may push this analysis further. Dewey’s view implies not just that there are interests that people hold in common, but that it is a democratic responsibility that we pursue common interests, even or especially in those cases where there are no obvious or immediate common interests. In other words, there may be communities, or nations, that are so antagonistic in their relations with one another that it takes a special effort of will and commitment to identify interests in common. Consider, for example, the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Relations between the two nations were so antagonistic that it was nearly all they could do to prevent open warfare. But it was not in fact all they could do, because eventually Richard Nixon went to Moscow to speak with Leonid Brezhnev and find common ground. He did the same with the leadership of the People’s Republic of China. And some years later Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, as unlikely a team as one can imagine,

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nearly agreed to eliminate their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Whatever else one might think about Nixon, Reagan, Mao, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev, these were profoundly democratic actions, and at times when the world was in desperate need of them. They represent occasions when in the midst of stridently antagonistic disagreements and relations, the pursuit of common interests was nonetheless possible, and indeed valuable. It seems clear, then, that it is possible for both Dewey and Mouffe to be right, which is to say that both common interests and antagonistic disagreements may characterize communities and their interactions simultaneously. This then leads us to a third question, one at which I have already hinted: how is such an accommodation possible? If an accommodation between the two approaches is possible, which it appears to be, it is so only if the Deweyan, pragmatic naturalist conception of democracy as the pursuit of common interests is not a deliberative theory. Mouffe is probably right in arguing that a conception of democracy that requires the approximation of consensus and a model of public discourse that encourages it, even if only as a regulative ideal, is a dead-end approach to a workable theory of democracy. If that is so, and if at the same time one wants to endorse a Deweyan conception, then we are required to distinguish a Deweyan conception from deliberative theories. At this point we part company with one of the dominant strains within commentary on Deweyan democracy that treats it as a theory of deliberative democracy.7 That Dewey has been read as a forerunner of contemporary deliberative democratic theory is not very surprising because his ideas do lend themselves to such an interpretation.8 Throughout his work, from epistemology to education to social and political theory, Dewey emphasized the importance of intelligence. His reason was basically that the exercise of intelligence in the ways we address our problems is likely to produce more satisfactory results, more workable solutions. In the personal sphere an intelligent approach to problems may be contrasted with traditionalism or with any form of what Peirce called “tenacity.” In the political sphere intelligence may be contrasted with an ideologically driven approach to problems and to an assumption of the necessary exercise of coercive power, especially violence, in the solution of problems. This was basically Dewey’s theoretical objection to Marxism. If we build 7 Though he does not discuss Mouffe, Shane Ralston has also argued that there is good reason not to read Dewey as a deliberative democrat. See, Ralston 2010. 8 There are many studies of Dewey that place him in the context of the theories of deliberative democracy. See for example, Shook 2004; Kadlec 2007, and the review essay that discusses Kadlec’s book, Caspary 2008; David Woods 2010a and 2010b. James Campbell develops a related strain of interpretation of Dewey and social pragmatism generally with an emphasis on community in Campbell 2004a and 2004b. John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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class struggle into the heart of our understanding of social and political realities, and if we assume that in most cases violent struggle will be required to overcome class oppression, then we have abandoned intelligence in the solution of fundamental social problems from the start. Dewey’s idea was that we ought to be able to approach our social, economic, and political problems more or less the way scholars approach disagreement in the sciences and other disciplines. As much as scholars in opposing camps may wish to whack each other over the head at times, we usually do not resolve our disagreements that way. We talk, we argue, and we undertake our research, all on the assumption that in the end the better evidence, the more refined theory, the stronger argument, and the idea that has preferable outcomes, will carry the day, however unrealistic in practice this assumption may be. This looks rather like the picture deliberative democrats paint of how a functional sphere of public discourse might function; and we may read Rawls or Habermas as attempting to describe some of the details of such a discursive space. And if we were to approach our problems and disagreements in such a spirit we may well end up with a picture of collective problem solving and general agreement about the good that communitarians endorse. When I say that we may not want to read Dewey as a deliberative democrat I do not mean to say that he is wrong in his emphasis on the exercise of intelligence in the resolution of our problems and the ongoing construction of our experience. Surely it is better when possible to work our way through problems thoughtfully, carefully, self-critically, and peacefully rather than through arrogant bullying, an automatic recourse to the exercise of coercive power, or through violence. We mean only to say that the exercise of intelligence, even just as Dewey meant it, does not require the degree of agreement, never mind consensus, that deliberative and consensus democratic theory posits. It does of course require some agreement, for example to the democratic institutions that have been developed and in which political problems are addressed. In this respect Dewey and Mouffe are in agreement. Nor does the exercise of intelligence require a general commitment to the superiority of any particular version of democratic theory, for example liberal democracy. One of Mouffe’s concerns with both liberal and communitarian versions of deliberative theory is that they tend, sometimes surreptitiously, to assume that one or another form of contemporary liberalism is a necessary condition of a workable democracy. Mouffe’s own socialist background inclines her to be suspicious of such “universalizing” assumptions, as the rhetorical language of the day refers to this sort of thing (Laclau and Mouffe 2001). Dewey’s idea requires no assumption that contemporary Western liberal democracy is, when all the bugs are worked out, the best of all possible political worlds. It may or may not be the best game in town for the moment, but even John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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if it is, the exercise of intelligence does not preclude the development of new and better social and political arrangements as new problems arise that require creativity and novelty in their solution. Indeed, the near certainty of new problems over time and the need for creative solutions and social reconstruction is precisely why intelligence is so important if we are to maintain the development of democratic social relations. This, we may point out, is one of the more significant ways in which the political and the cognitive dimensions of experience interact. Furthermore, Dewey’s idea of democracy is not a deliberative theory because it rests not on common viewpoints or even commitments, but on common interests. That is to say that the Deweyan view of democracy assumes the possibility and desirability not of agreement, beyond the minimum necessary for civil interaction, but of people’s action toward common ends. That we can expect people, whatever else we may disagree about, to have common ends is clear simply from the fact that we live together and that in some respects and to some degree the prosperity of each of us requires the prosperity of others. Of course, we can choose not to focus on that fact and act in ways that exploit others for our personal gain, but on Dewey’s view this is not democratic behavior and, we should point out, it is not likely to be sustainable. The point is that we share some interests simply by virtue of the fact that we live together, that there are communities at all. If we recognize that we may pursue the interests that we share to greater effect by collaborating, then we are likely to do so. Moreover, if we generalize that inclination to look for, and even construct, common interests beyond our own narrow communities, and if we do so intelligently in Dewey’s sense, then we will be acting in a genuinely democratic fashion. No consensus and no agreement on the nature of the overall good are required. We will presumably continue to have whatever disagreements, and even antagonisms, that we can expect thoughtful, freethinking people to have. If that is right, then a democracy based on the pursuit of common interests allows for the continuing existence of diverse and even contrary interests and viewpoints, primarily because the pursuit of common interests does not ­assume that the interests of all individuals or communities will eventually converge into one large consensus. It assumes only that individuals and communities may undertake the pursuit of their own interests, to the extent possible, by attempting to identify common interests with others, even if and when some interests are incompatible and therefore antagonistic. Such a conception of democracy has the advantage of encouraging the community identification that is in any case at the heart of all social groups, as well as the advantage of recognizing that there is no reason to expect a consensus on any major issue in a society of free, intelligent individuals. John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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The upshot is that once we separate Dewey from the deliberative democrats, we are able to see how his democratic theory of common interests is compatible with Mouffe’s agonistic democracy. The two have this much in common, and they differ in the same respects from recent theories of deliberative democracy. Nonetheless they also share with deliberative democratic theories the idea that some social and political structures are necessary for democratic social development and action. At the political level, there must be institutions capable of providing the opportunity for the engagement of differing views and interests within a polity, and for the constructive exercise of both debate and power. At the social level, there must be social institutions and the habits of mind within the populace necessary to enable constructive engagement with one another in the ongoing effort to address our problems. The difference, again, is that these political and social institutions should not be expected to funnel interests and disagreements into a consensus, with respect either to a general conception of the good or to broader scale individual and social interests, but to enable the constructive, intelligent pursuit of both our differences and our common interests. The implication of this account of democracy for our conception of the political dimension of experience is that democracy as a form of political experience can be understood as consisting of certain notions of individual, community, and interests. Specifically, it is critical in a democracy that neither the individual nor the community be reduced to one another; each must be understood robustly and vibrantly. Furthermore, interests must be understood, at least for the clarification of political concepts, as interests held in common. Individuals may have interests unique to them, as may communities. But in their political character they are obliged, in a democratic society, to act to achieve, and even to develop, interests with other members of the community and, as Dewey argued, with those outside of their community. Taken together, these conceptions define democratic society, and taken this way they indicate why the frequent disruptions to democratic political life are not to be accepted. Groups that would have us believe that communities are a fiction, as ­libertarianism sometimes does, misunderstand the nature of democratic polity, as do individuals or groups who would subsume the individual into any larger identity formation, whether it is class or race or blood and soil. The same point should be made about the pursuit of national interests. If they are undertaken without taking into account the possibility and actuality of common interests with other nations, and if they are undertaken through the imposition of one nation’s will upon another through coercive power of any sort, then such a pursuit of national interests is to that extent undemocratic. The larger theoretical point is that the various ways we construe the individual, community, and interests result in differing political conceptions. We John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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have seen how this happens with respect to democratic theory, and we may now look at others. There have of course been many theoretical criticisms of democracy, from Plato through Hobbes to Carl Schmitt. In our time, there are those in prominent countries in the world who reject Western, liberal democracy in favor of non-democratic, or quasi-democratic, political systems on the grounds that liberal democracy is not appropriate for their societies. There is a tendency on the part of many supporters of liberal democracy to insist, either through assumption or argument, that liberal democracy is the superior political formation, and that those who oppose it are not just wrong, but either confused or evil. If a critic of liberal democracy is in a position of power, then she is assumed either to be corrupt or to be more concerned with her own power than anything else; if the critic is a normal citizen, it is assumed that she is confused or in some way duped by authorities. This is a situation in which, for the most part, very little careful analysis is undertaken. Imagine, for example, that one is a committed socialist, of some kind, and also a Chinese patriot. It is quite possible to hold that it is in the best interests of China and her people, by and large, to marshal the power of the state through the Chinese Communist Party to advance the material interests of Chinese citizens and the interests of the nation. One does not have to agree with that point of view to recognize its possibility. Similarly, it is possible to believe that for the citizens of a Gulf kingdom, a Muslim theocratic monarchy is the best way to protect the interests of the citizens. Both of these positions, in their respective contexts, can be plausibly held by reasonable people, even if those people are in positions of authority and stand to gain in wealth or power from the prevailing system. We do not dismiss supporters of liberal democracy if, as it happens, they are material and political beneficiaries of the system, and we should not automatically dismiss others who reject liberal democracy due simply to their position in society. Of course, there are also countries in the world that are little more than kleptocracies, and one would hope that they would be recognized. They often are not acknowledged as such, generally for geopolitical or commercial reasons, which is unfortunate from the point of view of political development around the world. The point is, though, that the arguments and evidence both for and against liberal democracy are extensive, and the issue is complex, if for no other reason than that there may in principle be reasonable and defensible polities that are not liberal democracies. For my purposes, I will take two points of departure as givens: (1) there are at least prima facie reasons for regarding political possibilities other than liberal democracy as viable political options, and (2) our interest is not in defending one over against the others, but in understanding such political formations in relation to the theory of experience

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and our conception of the political dimension of experience. My interest, then, is to explore the degree to which the concepts of individual, community, and interests, as definitive of the political dimension of experience, are helpful in understanding such large-scale features of political experience as general political formations. We have indicated how this works with respect to liberal democracy, or in any case a plausible pragmatic naturalist version of liberal democracy, and I turn now to other political formations. I am not in a position to examine many alternative political types because that process alone, to be thorough, would require one or more volumes. The general point can be made, however, through a brief look at two currently influential political types that do not claim to be liberal democracies. The first is the theocracies of the Persian/Arabian Gulf, and the second is single-party rule of the sort one finds in, for example, the People’s Republic of China. I turn first to the Gulf. There is something inappropriate about speaking of the Gulf Arab theocracies as if they were all the same, because they are decidedly not, and in several different ways. For example, despite recent policy changes toward greater opportunities for women, the situation of women in Saudi Arabia is far more restrictive than it is in the United Arab Emirates (uae) and other Gulf countries. To give another example, in foreign policy there is a different relation with Iran on the part of Oman than for the other Gulf countries, and there is currently a serious dispute between Qatar on one side and several other Gulf countries on the other. It is not quite right, then, to assume that these are uniform societies with respect to several important areas. It is also useful to bear in mind that there can be a theocratic, monarchical state that has some but not all defining features in common with the Gulf theocracies. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is an example. Despite the various differences, though, there are important commonalities among Gulf states with respect to basic political structure. The two most salient features of the political systems in each are the foundational role of Islam, Sunni Islam to be precise, and the hereditary right to leadership for the ruling families. Even here there are some differences. In the uae, for example, the country’s seven member Emirates are each ruled by a family that has been in such a position for many generations. The leader of the country, by agreement among the member emirates, is the Ruler of Abu Dhabi, with the other six Rulers constituting a ruling council in his support. The leader of the country, in other words, has that position by political agreement forged in 1971 when the union was declared. In other Gulf countries, the national leader is the head of the family that has ruled for some time, though the specific histories differ.

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Again, even accommodating the differences, there remain the two features of the role of Islam and the hereditary and relatively absolute rule on the part of the (typically) tribal leader. In these respects, the Gulf countries differ fundamentally from the liberal democracies elsewhere in the world. With respect to the concepts of the individual, community, and interests, the differences between the Gulf theocracies and liberal democracy are striking, perhaps most significantly in the relation of the individual to the community. Because of the role of Islam in Gulf countries, it is impossible to make the distinction common in liberal democracies between a social or political community and a religious congregation. Islam is so central to each of the countries that the community and the congregation are, effectively, the same entity. In liberal societies, one could say, though only in a limited sense, that the individual precedes the community in that the community is in some respects a consequence of ongoing decisions by relevant individuals to continue to participate. This idea is already built into the seventeenth century concept of the social contract, in which the legitimacy of the state and ruler rests on the at least tacit agreement of the individuals who constitute the political community. The same principle is built into American political foundations through the notion of “consent of the governed.” Because of the centrality of Islam, however, in the Gulf states the individual does not lend her assent to the ­community or the state in the way one does in a liberal democracy. Rather the community, especially in the form of the community of Islam, situates the individual in a far more influential way than does the community in a liberal democracy. Moreover, there are strong forces, some of them cultural and some legal, that influence individuals to remain committed to the community. It is virtually impossible psychologically to convert from Islam, in part because membership in the religious community is not a result of personal choice or decision, it is a consequence of one’s identity by virtue of having been born into the community. It is fair to say that for most citizens, especially of a fairly culturally and religiously homogenous society like that in the uae, there is little push against this dominating place of the community. There are of course ongoing issues that cause changes here and there, especially with respect to the impact of Western cultures and modernity, but in general the communities hang together. In countries that have a sizable Shi’a minority, such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, the situation is far more complex and unsettled, one should note. It is important not to overstate the dominant influence of the community in relation to the individual. Though it is the case that the community defines an individual differently than it does in a liberal democracy, the political power of the ruler still requires the legitimacy that comes from popular support. The

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hereditary sheiks of the Gulf states are tribal leaders, and they have a responsibility to the members of the tribe, and to members of allied tribes and families, that cannot be overlooked if the ruler wishes to retain his legitimacy. Because the size of the citizenry, which is typically much smaller than the population as a whole because especially in current times the population includes a large number of expatriates from around the world, the ruler can maintain fairly close contact with his subjects. In some places, for example, citizens think nothing of contacting the ruler, or the ruler’s office, if there is something that concerns them, or they have a specific complaint. In such emirates, the ruler may occasionally hold a kind of “open house” at the palace, where citizens may come to pay their respects, leave a petition, and generally engage in a direct way with the leader. Citizens expect this kind of access to their ruler, and the rulers understand the situation and typically comply. In light of this, it would be a mistake to think that the individual in a Gulf theocracy is subsumed under or simply absorbed in the community. The point, rather, is that the nature of the community, the nature of the individual, and the relation between them in a Gulf theocracy differs in important respects from the way these elements function and may be understood in a liberal democracy. Such differences, furthermore, go a considerable distance in characterizing the distinction between these two types of political organization. The role of the individual, it should be pointed out, is also differently construed in the two polities. It is assumed in a liberal democracy that the individual has a notable degree of responsibility for the functioning and health of the society at all levels, though the specific ways this assumption operates differ among democracies. The place of ngos in social life is a good example, as is the role of civic organizations. Another illustration is the fact that in a democracy, individuals have a key role in determining political leaders through the ballot box. The specific ways these roles of individuals are fulfilled differ, as I have said, from one democracy to another. In the social democracies of Europe, for example, the state is likely to assume responsibility for a number of social functions that in the United States would be left to individuals or organized groups of individuals independent of the state. In the United Kingdom, which struggles to define itself as a social democracy, as in most of Europe, or an individualized democracy as in the United States, there is less confidence among the population about the relative responsibilities of the individual and the state, and of the role of the community in defining the social and political parameters of the individual’s place in the polity. Israel represents another interesting illustration of this phenomenon. It is in most relevant respects a modern liberal democracy, and the individual’s place is determined as it is in other democracies. The interesting feature of Israel is a consequence of its self-­identification as a

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Jewish state. If all that is meant by this is that Judaism is a state religion, in the sense that Catholicism is the state religion in Austria and Anglicanism is the established religion in the United Kingdom, then there is no special problem. If, however, the political character of the State of Israel is defined by Judaism in the sense of the community of Jews, then there is a tension between the community and the individual that does not comport comfortably with the way democracies maintain the community-individual relation. Aside from such anomalous occasions, though, and in either social or individualized democracies, it is clear that the constitutive relation between the community and the individual is such that the individual has a great deal of responsibility for social and political health. The Gulf theocracies differ in this respect. A fully independent ngo, for example, would be rare in the best of circumstances. The cynical, though probably to some extent accurate, reason for this would be that the state authorities want to ensure that no individual or set of individuals is operating to undermine the ruler’s authority. The more generous interpretation, also to some extent accurate, would be that in such a polity, the leader of the community, which is the head of the hereditary ruling family, is responsible for the general well-being of the citizens, so it is best left to him and his advisor to address social questions. Thus, for example, in the uae the state provides all newly married citizens with land and a very inexpensive loan to build their own house. And because the ruler and his council are tending to the needs of the society and the polity, there is no need for elections that are likely to contribute little and possibly disturb a great deal. Again, it is not that the individual is unimportant. Rather, the point is that the nature of the individual as a social and political being is differently constructed and functions differently in a Gulf theocracy than in a liberal democracy. The same point may be made about the respective nature and role of interests in a theocratic, hereditary monarchy and in a democracy. We have made the case that for democracy, at least for democracy of the sort we wish to identify with pragmatic naturalism, the role of common interests is definitive of the polity. In a Gulf theocracy, this is not the case. If the focus is on individual and community interests, then we may say that the broad interests of the individual are identical to that of the community, where the latter is understood as the religious community. A strong and healthy Islamic community defines the individual’s life in so many ways that it is impossible, again at the broader levels, to distinguish among the interests of each, or to say that the community implies some set of common interests. The community in this case does not imply or require a subset of common interests because the community and the individual by definition share the broadest of interests. Put a different way, in

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a Gulf theocracy, the common interests among the community and the individual members are not a subset of the interests of either, but the set of interests that defines the community generally, and by virtue of their memberships, the individuals as well. If the focus is on national interests, the situation is roughly comparable. In this case it should be said that there are similarities in how national interests are determined and the role they play between the Gulf theocracies and liberal democracies. National interests in a Gulf country are a shifting combination of the interests of the State, of the ruling family, of Islam, and of the citizenry, where the latter, again, is understood to include not the population generally but only those members of the community who are born into designated tribes. In this respect, national interests in liberal democracies are also determined by an amalgam of factors, which also shift in relative importance from time to time and case to case. The major difference is that in the case of a democracy, the national interests and the interests of the government are not to be conflated. The reason is obvious: in a democracy the government changes, sometimes extensively, from election to election, as a result of which even the principles that drive the determination and articulation of national interests may be significantly revised. This happened in the early months of the Trump presidency in the United States, much to the pleasure of some and the dismay of others. In a Gulf theocracy, however, the government may easily identify its interests with those of the nation, for the straightforward reason that the government and the nation are more integrally related due to the prominent role of a nearly absolute monarch in the character of the polity. In a democracy, those who lead the nation may, and often do, attempt to conflate their interests, or their party’s interests, with those of the nation. They often do not succeed, and even when they do, the relative brevity of their tenure in power tends to limit the effects of such a conflation. One might argue, as Marxists do, that in liberal democracies class interests are typically conflated with those of the nation, a situation that is quite a bit more stable because even changes in g­ overnment and shifting power among political parties generally leaves the ruling class in a dominant political position, and thus able to maintain the identification of its interests with those of the nation. It should be pointed out, though, that my own analysis of the role of interests in a democratic society and polity implies that the identification of ruling class interests with those of the nation is inconsistent with the traits of a proper democracy. If that is right, it should also be pointed out, no modern liberal democracy has yet come to terms with this anomaly in its political life, a situation that, presumably, cannot last indefinitely.

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If we consider the question of international relations and the conduct of foreign policy, the picture is different again from the way international relations ought to be carried out in a democracy. We have argued that democracies, because of the defining role and pursuit of common interests, have an obligation, on pain of inconsistency and undemocratic behavior, to conduct foreign policy with an emphasis on the pursuit and maintenance of common interests across national borders. Gulf theocracies have no such obligation. The ruler or ruling council in a Gulf theocracy may, and presumably does, look for a clear sense of the interests of the Islamic community, and of his family in its capacity as embodiment of the nation, and then seeks to advance those interests in its relations with other states. Policies so determined may or may not succeed, and are, presumably, maintained, abandoned, or revised according to their degree of success, as would be true for all states. But unlike for democracies, the determination of foreign policy for Gulf theocracies does not require the pursuit of common interests, other perhaps than what is held in common with other like-minded members of the international Islamic community. Nothing follows from this about the relative merits of any given policy. It is simply a matter of articulating the difference in how we can understand international relations and foreign policy between liberal democracies and Islamic theocracies. The larger point, then, is that the three general traits of the political dimension of experience—individual, community, and interests—turn out to be determinative of the character of political structures. The point may be further illustrated by a brief consideration of a third type of political structure, a ­single-party state, which is represented here by the People’s Republic of China (prc). Some conceptual clarification is in order before a meaningful analysis is possible. The prc is frequently referred to as a “communist state.” That term, as well as similar expressions, will not be used here because it is too loose a way of speaking. First, on traditional Marxist principles, the term “communist state” is an oxymoron. Marx argued that by the time a society reaches the point of material development that will allow a condition that can meaningfully be called “communist.” the state will have “withered away.” Whether he was right about this is another question, but the idea is that the state is by definition an expression of ruling class power and ruling class interests. In a genuine communist society, there is no ruing class, so by definition there is no state. One may or may not agree with this, but Marxists generally do, and that is the reason no self-defined Marxist society ever referred to itself as a “Communist nation.” Nations in which a Communist Party or a Marxist-oriented Workers Party is the dominant political power may refer to themselves as socialist, or as “building communism,” but not as a communist state or nation. John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Second, this point applies to the Chinese Communist Party (ccp). Under the leadership of the ccp, the prc is not a communist state or nation and it is not referred to as one by the ccp, which implies that the analysis we want to provide is not an analysis of “communism” or a “communist polity.” The ccp does use the term “socialism,” or more precisely in recent years, “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Whether my analysis in this case applies to a “socialist state” depends not on definitions, then, but on whether it is sensible to refer to the prc as a “socialist state,” and there is reason to be skeptical about that. One might say that since the death of Mao Tse-tung in the mid-1970s, and notwithstanding the ccp’s rhetorical appeal to socialism, the contemporary prc is much more accurately described as a form of state capitalism. On the other hand, it is also possible to provide a rendering of “socialism” in which one could say that material development, left extensively in private hands as it currently is, is an important step in raising material conditions to the point where something more clearly socialist can emerge. Presumably, the ccp leadership has something like this in mind when it uses the expression “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Fortunately, I do not need to resolve these questions because for the purposes of my analysis it makes little difference whether the contemporary prc is a form of state capitalism, or a step on the road to a uniquely Chinese socialism. Rather, the important point for our purpose is the fact that the prc is ruled by a single, modern political party, the Chinese Communist Party. That is the feature of the contemporary prc that defines its political character, and it is the feature of the Chinese polity which we will now consider in the light of the concepts of individual, community, and interests. My concern, then, is with a political system that has single-party rule, which, it should be pointed out, applies not only to the prc. Vietnam is an example, as perhaps is contemporary Russia, and certainly Cuba would also be an example. There are many countries that are ruled by dictators, but we should be clear that those do not fall within the purview of this analysis. Whichever other criticisms one may have, a country ruled by a single party is not a personal dictatorship, and nothing conceptually coherent is gained by conflating them. My interest, then, is not in dictatorships of a single individual, but in singleparty rule.9 9 One interesting case that might serve as a counterexample to this point is the dprk, or North Korea. It is a single-party state which, unlike any other, is characterized by dynastic rule. This is not quite a conflation of party and individual rule, but it is close. We may also notice that with respect to the next point concerning the tendency toward secularism among one-party states, the dprk may also be regarded as an exception in an interesting way. Though the Marxist culture of the society has no use for religion, it is clear that the reverence and awe with which the population regards the ruler is more than a garden-variety personality cult. People appear to regard the ruler with an omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, and John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Single-party states tend not to be religious or to build religion into their identities. Russia could possibly be an exception to this, given the state’s embrace of the Russian Orthodox Church, but that is more likely a result of political expediency than genuine identification. And in Russia’s case there is considerable debate across the society concerning the role that the Church should or should not play in political and social life. Even given the Russian case, it seems clear that single-party states tend toward secularism, in which case they have something in common more with liberal democracies than with theocracies. There are also similarities with theocracies, for example in the approach each has to the relation of the individual to the community. In a single-party state, it is typically the case that the institutions of the society are to some significant degree controlled by, or at least monitored by, state authorities so that social institutions consistently embody and represent the principles to which the state leadership is committed. In this way, the general principles that inform the state leadership, and thereby the social institutions, have an extensive role in the construction of individual identity, as we have seen in the case of theocracies. This is one of the clearest ways in which the relation of the individual to the community distinguishes liberal democracy on the one hand from theocracies and single-party rule on the other. Again, it is important not to exaggerate this point. It is not that individuals are somehow subsumed under the community, or that in a figurative sense, individual value disappears into community or state value. In all of the countries mentioned as examples of single-party rule, there is a great deal of social “space” in which individuals may and do pursue their own ends, and thereby construct their lives and experience in significant ways according to their own lights. The unfortunate tendency on the part of many in the liberal democratic world to paint a cartoonish picture of societies characterized by other types of political structures as monochromatic and one-dimensional can frequently lead to misunderstandings of this kind. In these and other single-party states, individuals lead their personal lives in meaningful ways, and this fact should not be overlooked. The ways they lead them, in relation to social institutions and the state leadership, differ more or less broadly depending on the specific case. It is in this respect that the difference between political forms, with respect to the relation of the individual and community, appears. The relative value of one or the other in relation to individual and social good is another, and contestable, issue. omnibenevolence that is usually reserved for a god. There are occasions in which they seem to believe that all good, and only good, emanates from the wise decisions and actions of the leader. This may be as close as we can come to an instance of a secular religion.

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The ways the community itself may be understood in single-party states represents a respect in which such states differ from both theocracies and liberal democracies. We have allowed that in a theocracy, the primary defining trait of the community is religion, and in the Gulf theocracies that is Sunni Islam. For a liberal democracy, the community is defined more as the result of the individual and collective actions of its individual members. In fact, it is safe to say that many of the specific disagreements one may find in the political lives of liberal democracies, and we may generally use the terms “conservative” and “liberal” to identify the more salient division, derive from this question of the relative import of the individual and the community in their relation to one another. While granting that this point risks a mischaracterization due to gross over generalization, modern “conservatives” are likely to hold that the individual understood independently of the community is of greater import than the community, and consequently care has to be taken to avoid an overreaching community. That this may be an over-generalization can be seen in the fact that in the United States, for example, while conservatives are generally suspicious of state overreach, they tend to be far more tolerant of a strong impact on individuals of a religious community. This possible anomaly is for the conservatives to work out on their own. On the “liberal” side, if we may use the term this way, there tends to be much greater acceptance of the constitutive role played by the community, including the state, in the character and lives of individuals. In both cases, though, the community tends to be understood as more a consequence of actions and commitments of individuals than the other way around. A single-party state represents a distinctive situation. If in liberal democracies the community is defined by individuals primarily, and if in theocracies the community is defined by religious commitments primarily, single-party states are prone to locating the identity and character of the community through one or more other social or ideological factors. One obvious, and ­traditionally prominent, candidate is ethnicity or nationality. The clearest ­examples of the appeal to the nation, ethnically construed, as determinative of the community is the fascist states that prevailed in Europe and Japan during the first half of the last century. Here the community is the nation, in the most extreme cases it is the nation represented by “blood and soil,” and the most important feature of the individual is her belonging by birth to the nation. One of the reasons the resurgence of nationalism in Europe in the early twenty-first century is worrisome to many people is that it is moving in the direction of defining the community in just these national grounds. If such an understanding of the community differs importantly from the way the community is understood in liberal democracy, then the form of nationalism becoming more

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prominent in Europe today is a challenge to the democratic character of those societies. The fact that they retain, for the moment, democratic elections and other features of democratic society indicates that the non-democratic character represented by the appeal to ethnicity has not yet prevailed, but the ethnic and national appeal does represent a challenge. Russia, if it may be included in the set of countries with single-party rule, represents an interesting case. There is to some extent an appeal to ethnicity as a defining trait of the community, but the appeal is half-hearted, for several reasons. One of them is that the victory over blood-and-soil fascism in 1945 is deeply carved into the Russian sense of identity, which makes it relatively less likely that the Russian population in large numbers can embrace that sort of nationalism enthusiastically. Russians can be and are patriotic, but that is a different matter. Citizens of liberal democracies may be patriotic as well, without any hint of radical nationalism. A second reason that an identity of the community with an ethnic nation is difficult in the Russian case, unlike for most other European countries, is that Russia is far too extensively and importantly multi-national. Too strong an emphasis on Russian nationality leaves out far too large a proportion of the country’s population, a circumstance that the state leadership knows would be dangerous. Contemporary Russia appeals not to the prominence of the individual, to religion, or to nationality, though all are relevant, but primarily to state interests. The trait that defines the power of the community in Russia is what the population and the state leadership believe to be the country’s historic and proper role as a major power in world affairs. The self-conception of Russia as a worldhistoric nation has a long history. In earlier times Russians thought of Moscow as the “Third Rome”; in more recent times, the Soviet Union was the vanguard nation in the development of world socialism and in the defense of the thirdworld against first-world imperialism. For a short time after the collapse of the Soviet Union the Russian role in the world was diminished. Since the early years of the current century, the two most prominent features of the nation’s political development have been the simultaneous emergence of the United Russia party as the dominant force in domestic politics, and the emergence of Russia as a significant geopolitical actor. The two developments are related in that they reinforce one another. Russia’s role in the world has become the value and character on which the national community rests, and the singleparty domination is legitimated by that appeal. To complicate the case slightly, it is worth noticing that in the March 2018 presidential election, the dominant party was and remained United Russia. Interestingly, though, in his re-election campaign, President Putin was not a candidate of the party. He represented

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not the ruling party, but Russia generally. For several reasons, then, the relation of the individual, community, and interests in Russia’s case is unique. The other possible claimant among single-party states to geopolitical influence is the prc. In this respect, it is similar to the Russian case, and it is also similar in being vastly more multi-national than would allow a simple appeal to ethnic nationalism as a defining trait of the community, even given the prevalence of ethnic Han Chinese. Unlike Russia, however, the prc also has an ideological factor to which it appeals, and that ideology is the importance of building socialism. The place of socialist ideology as the, or a, defining trait of the community to which the single-party leadership can link and thereby understand itself, is not to be underestimated. Notwithstanding the extent of private business and evident capitalism flourishing in the prc, as well as the extensive corruption among political and business leaders, the ability to identify with an ideological goal, in this case the construction of socialism, can go a very long way to uniting individuals into a coherent and strong community. The community in the prc, as in other single-party states, dominates the relationship with the individual. In the case of the prc, as would also be true of Cuba, Vietnam, and similar states, the community is identified primarily through the commitment of the state and its leading party to socialism. How deep this commitment is for any particular individual in the ccp is a question of cases, but it is reasonable to recognize that with respect to understanding the general political character of the prc we can and should take seriously the central place of socialism in its understanding of the national community. The fact that there is extensive private property in contemporary China is not necessarily an evident contradiction. Marxist theory recognizes that the development of socialism requires advanced material development, a point on which even Lenin acted with the creation of the nep in the earliest years of the Soviet Union. The nep was short-lived compared to the extended life of private ­investment and private property in contemporary China, and in Vietnam, and  increasingly in Cuba, but one could plausibly argue that it is the same principle. We may ask, then, how socialism as the defining trait of the community influences the character of the political structure. The obvious point is that the party running the state and leading the nation is a socialist party. In this case it is socialist values to which the leadership can be expected to appeal to help unite the population and maintain its support. In the Chinese case, there is the additional factor that, like Russia, China sees itself as having an historical role in at least regional affairs, though in recent years its economic reach and its exercise of soft-power is extending well beyond its region. This can be expected

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to be a point of pride for Chinese people, as it is for Russians. For the prc, though, the point is not simply taking its rightful place as an internationally important country, but to do so, eventually, through the creation of a society that rests not on exploitation but on collective values that benefit the population as a whole. To the extent that the state can reach such a goal and achieve material and social well-being for its people, and at this point it still has a long way to go, or even to the extent that it can make perceptible and meaningful progress toward this goal, it may earn its ongoing legitimacy and viability as a functional, modern political structure. And again, the same may be said for other states in which ideology plays a crucial role in defining the community in relation to individuals. As for the individual, one influence of a socialist ideology is that individuals will regularly be asked to suppress at least temporarily their personal needs and interests to allow collective interests to prevail. This not surprisingly affects how individuals construct and order their attitudes, desires, and expectations. In this kind of case it is not a matter of embracing and acting on common interests among individuals in a community, but of embracing the community’s interests, often as defined by the ruling party, and treating them as one’s own for some, often unspecified, period of time. In this respect, the relation of individual, community, and interests in an ideologically inflected single-party state is quite different than in a liberal democracy. This will come as no surprise to anyone, but it is interesting to see from precisely what we may understand the difference to derive. It may also be pointed out in this regard that the way the state will handle its interests in its international relations can be expected to be distinct. There is no reason to expect the prc to make a sustained effort to seek common ground with other nations, except as a political expedient when deemed necessary. On the contrary, interests function to drive international relations and foreign policy as internally derived goals and principles. That one believes oneself to be pursuing a world-historic goal, in this case the construction of a successful socialist society, may well make the political leadership disinclined to compromise. Of course, a serious commitment to any principles will render one reluctant to compromise when those principles are at stake. In the case of each political structural type, however, the point at which a leadership digs in its heels will differ. The point has been to illustrate how the three traits of the political dimension of experience play out even at the level of state politics, and in so doing allow us to understand important features of each. One could go on to discuss other possibilities—anarchism comes to mind as potentially interesting in this respect—and even variations of those that have been discussed, for example the character liberal democracy takes when merged with a constitutional monarchy. The point can be expected to remain the same, however, and that is John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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that the three factors of individual, community, and interests are so central to the political in experience that they suffuse importantly our political experience all the way down. I may point, also, in the direction of another general issue relevant to the expression of the political dimension in our lives, that regardless of specific political forms, all of us are familiar with an imbalance in social power among individuals and communities that constitute our societies and nations. It is not possible here to develop the analysis of this, if for no other reason than that there are so many different circumstances and respects in which we encounter disparity in social power that another volume may well be required to sort it out. I may say, however, by way of anticipation of such an analysis, that we can expect to be able to account for various forms of disparity in social power in terms of how interests are pursued among individuals and communities. This is the case in several senses. For one thing, if we take a snapshot of any specific society at a given time, we can expect that some set of interests will be more firmly established than others, usually to the detriment of some. This fact alone already points to likely disparities in social power. For another, the pursuit of interests among social groups will take different forms, and encounter greater or lesser obstacles, depending in large measure on how those interests are already situated in the fabric of the society. We can expect, then, that the same terms of analysis—individual, community, and interests—will enable an analysis of social power and its exercise, just as it enables an analysis of political forms. IV I bring this analysis of the political dimension of experience to a close, as I have done with the cognitive and the aesthetic, with yet a further look at the way the political intersects with the other two. I begin with the cognitive. The point has been made earlier that the pragmatist conception of experience as constructive engagement of an individual with her environment implicitly recognizes the centrality of power in experience in that the constructive engagement is an ongoing exercise in the solution of problems, and thereby an exercise of power. Moreover, as I have also pointed out, a pragmatist epistemology implicitly places power and its exercise at the heart of the cognitive process by understanding ideas, inquiry, and knowledge as elements not so much in describing the world as in solving the problems that our engagement with it engenders. By seeing that power is central to experience itself, in that it is the expression of the political dimension of experience, the pragmatist insights take on a context we may not have seen clearly otherwise. John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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More specifically, we have seen a number of relevant points of intersection between the political and the cognitive in the place of power in knowledge and the role of knowledge in power. Knowledge is suffused with power. We already knew this thanks to Foucault, but we now have a better understanding of why and how knowledge is suffused with power. I have also shown that active judgment, relevant because it is the most direct expression of the political dimension of experience, is capable of generating knowledge in the broader sense of knowledge that our revised epistemology enables. I spoke, for example, about what it means to know how to swim. Such knowledge is, first, not a matter of propositions or beliefs, it is not expressed in propositions, and it is not acquired through propositions or beliefs. Knowing how to swim is the potential to act in a specific way, and that potential is acquired through action, which is to say through active judgment. This observation is important because it points clearly and directly to the cognitive capacity of the political, so we should dwell a bit more on it in case there may be readers who are not yet convinced. There are many examples one can provide of knowledge generated by and in action, a skill like swimming being one sort. Another, and one that has the advantage of bringing the aesthetic into the discussion, would be knowing how to play an instrument. As anyone knows who currently plays a musical instrument, or who once learned to play an instrument, to know how to play a piece is not a matter of acquiring trustworthy propositions or beliefs about the piece. To know how to play a piece of music is, rather, the capacity to do so, and the degree of knowledge one has, which is expressed in locutions such as “I know the piece well” or “I know the piece only roughly,” indicates a degree of competence in the performance of a piece. Moreover, to learn to play a piece requires not study but practice. The ­practice may be accompanied by structured and directed study, and one’s ­knowledge of the piece is enhanced by such study. It is useful, for example, to be aware of the key changes in a piece, or the piece’s harmonic structure, or the dynamics expected in performance. Such knowledge is of the assertive kind, which is to say that we can indicate, for example, that a piece modulates its key from D Major to A Major at this or that point, and such propositional knowledge is relevant to knowing how to play the piece and to the degree of one’s competence in playing the piece. It does not constitute in any sufficient way, however, knowledge of the piece in the sense of knowing how to play it, for which one must advance beyond assertions and propositions to activity. Knowledge in the performance of a piece of music is an exercise and expression of power, specifically the power to act in a certain, often highly complex, way. This is the reason that to learn a piece is not a matter of mastering propositions

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but of acquiring the muscle memory that comes from directed repetition. It is also, we may point out, an exercise of power with an aesthetic character in that the capacity to play a piece, the knowledge of a piece, is to some extent a function of one’s engagement with its aesthetic traits, not to mention the fact that the performance of a piece of music is an exhibitive judgment. At its quotidian level, experience is constituted by countless expressions of power, many of which are related constitutively to knowledge in one or more of its forms. At the social level, and at the level of the political form of experience, knowledge in its traditional, propositional form, as well as the skills to act in cognitively competent ways, can be critical because at these levels of experience there is often a great deal at stake. If one blunders into a situation in which public policy is under development, the only way to avoid bad policy, or even good policy merely by accident and sheer luck, is to have a clear understanding of the issues to which the policy is directed, the history of the situation, the potential political implications of this or that policy, etc. The competent exercise of power in such cases requires knowledge, and interestingly, it requires knowledge of various kinds. Certainly, propositional knowledge is relevant, but so too can be the sort of knowledge expressed in negotiating skills, for example, as well as the sort of knowledge that is required to reason through complex problems to workable solutions. To go into a negotiating session with a political opponent, for example, it is not enough simply to have a command of the relevant issues. This is the reason not every policy expert can function successfully in a political or diplomatic environment. A different sort of knowledge is required. One must, for example, know how to “read” one’s interlocutor, or to judge when to push for further concessions and when to concede oneself. At international and intercultural levels, one needs a command of cultural factors adequate to engage meaningfully and fruitfully with one’s counterparts. Such a cultural “sensibility” is a form of knowledge that is rooted in the countless judgments made when engaging another cultural environment, and the skills acquired as a result. In this regard, the intersection of knowledge and power is relevant at the ground-level problem-­ solving stages as well as at the more refined and specialized engagement of a negotiation. In such cases, power without knowledge in various of its forms is reckless and can be exceedingly dangerous, and knowledge without power in its various forms is not even possible.

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The aesthetic and the political dimensions of experience are no less integrated than the cognitive and the political, and in roughly similar ways. That is to say,

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the political, in the form of power, is constitutive of the aesthetic, which is to say art, and art and aesthetic traits generally are constitutive of the political. We have reviewed some of this in previous chapters, and we may look at it briefly again to emphasize the point. Art is infused with power, and in that respect constituted in part by power, in various respects. If we consider simply the creative process of the production of art of any kind, there is a myriad of problems to solve or resolve. The skill alone in creating a work of art, and we may use examples of plastic, literary, or performance art, is first, a result of countless hours of preparation and practice, not unlike learning to swim. The development of technique in painting or performance is the development of a skill, and the skill is achieved through the resolution of challenges, which is to say problems, that arise continuously in the process. Second, in the creation or performance of any work, there are problems encountered throughout, and their resolution, as in experience of any sort, is the exercise of power. A significant work of art gains its significance in part through the mastery of skill and problem-solving in the process of creation. This, in the end, is the reason that though it may look to some people that some recent and contemporary art could be done by “my five-year-old,” that impression is usually mistaken. A five-year-old, unless she is a genius of the Mozart sort, does not have the ability to exercise the power required to address the problems the resolution of which constitute the creative process. The engagement of a work of art and its context, which is to say the meaning of a work, is similarly constituted in some respects by and through power. A work of art may be influential on the subsequent development of art, as was the case with early Impressionist work, to offer one of many possible examples; or on conceptual development with respect to art, as was, for example, Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square; or on people’s understanding of themselves, for example through the works of art installed in churches, or the design itself of religious buildings, for example the Blue Mosque in Istanbul; or on how we feel in a given space, a theme that engages a good deal of public art and creative design; or on the strength and resolve we maintain in dealing with even lifethreatening situations, as in the case of the meaning of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony for the population of Leningrad during the fascist siege. Given the ubiquitous presence of art and the aesthetic, the instances of its influence are indefinite, and all of them are cases in which power constitutes art. Some art is designed to have a political impact in the standard sense of “political,” and thereby exercise power. It is common for governments to employ art in various forms to encourage patriotism, especially in times of war or economic difficulty. Consider as an example the many films of the “Hollywood

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goes to war” variety, or for purely ideological purposes nothing matches Triumph of the Will. Art may of course also be used as a form of dissent, either against political authorities of the moment or against contemporary events one opposes. Picasso’s Guernica is perhaps the most well-known example of anti-war art, but it is only one of many instances of politically oppositional art. The famous Proletkult movement in the early years of the Russian Revolution is an illustration of art organized consciously to effect a political end, in this case in the service of prevailing political power. Either purposefully or haphazardly, art in various forms has come to represent national cultures—­ Impressionist painting in France, the ballet music of Aaron Copeland in the United States, modernist ballet in Russia, manga in Japan, and these are only a few possible examples. The latter instances of art having a political impact illustrate the facts that art is constituted by power and that power is constituted by art. And the aesthetic is constitutive of the political in many ways beyond its potential role in serving ideological or narrowly political ends. Our built environments are a case in point. Our towns and cities, as well as transportation and other infrastructure, are the ways at macro and micro levels we engage our environments in the contemporary complex material and economic conditions. To a large extent, those built environments succeed or fail depending on whether those of us who use them do so enthusiastically, or at least happily, or whether we do so grudgingly. Among the factors that incline us to thrive in the environments we build are, beyond the purely functional, the livability and congeniality of our spaces and places, and those are aesthetic considerations. This feature of our environments appears in a range of ways, from the use of public art to the degree to which buildings and infrastructure meet our aesthetic expectations. The first tall buildings in Manhattan, for example, were rectangular in shape, which had the effect of blocking sunlight from the surrounding buildings. The planning authorities quickly learned to require the now-familiar “wedding cake” shape of most tall buildings as a way to address this concern. Along similar lines, municipalities are taken to task for building in ways that blight the scenery rather than enhance it. Cities increasingly will build in ways that make the best use of the environments, and “best use” is increasingly understood to include aesthetic considerations. The Manhattan High Line is a good example. The success of political authorities, and the exercise of political power in these respects, is evaluated in part on aesthetic criteria. Perhaps the clearest illustration of the centrality of aesthetic considerations in the exercise of power that constitutes experience is the role of design in much of what we do. For example, whatever the means at our disposal, and we do not have to be wealthy for this point to apply, we do what we can to make

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our homes both materially and aesthetically comfortable. Most of us would not be satisfied with ugly surroundings if we could avoid them. We generally disagree about aesthetic preferences, and they can vary considerably not only from person to person but also by locale and culture, but we will all seek some version of aesthetic congeniality in our lived environments. This is true of our homes, and it is true of what is likely to be the most common aspect of our experience to which we ascribe aesthetic value, and that is the way we present ourselves in public. Of all the aspects of our day-to-day experience, fashion in the broadest sense may be the most pervasive form of the integration of the aesthetic and the political in experience. With relatively few exceptions, and assuming some measure of material capacity to have options, everyone spends some time every day before emerging into the public ensuring that one’s appearance is satisfactory by one’s own standards. The aesthetic aspect of how we present ourselves publicly is so important, in other words, that we do not and will not even begin to engage the world, outside of our most private spaces, without due attention to appearance. Making our way, as our own behavior indicates, is an aesthetically charged process. This is the reason that in developed economies fashion is as prominent an industry as it is. Whether in private or in public, the power to make over ourselves and our worlds has aesthetic requirements. Experience in general, we may then say, has a political dimension, much as it has cognitive and aesthetic dimensions. The political, by virtue of being the exercise of the power that constitutes our engagement with the world, is thereby pervasive throughout experience. In this respect, it is among the threads that is the fabric of experience in general, and we will see it expressed in any and all less general forms of experience. The place of the political dimension of experience is therefore central and definitive in much the way the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions are. Moreover, we have now seen from a variety of different angles and through a fairly broad range of illustrations, the many ways that the three dimensions of experience are interwoven such that they are all definitive of our lives. Experience is, in the end, the ongoing engagement with the environment that is characterized at the most general level by the cognitive, aesthetic, and political.

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Conclusion I can now repeat succinctly why experience has the three dimensions of the cognitive, aesthetic, and political. If we make the two pragmatist, indeed Deweyan, assumptions about experience, that it (1) is the ongoing transaction of an individual with her environment, and that it (2) is characterized by the ubiquitous presence of problematic situations, then the three dimensions are seemingly inevitable. In experience, we frequently succeed in resolving or taking up the problems, challenges, and opportunities that we regularly face, indeed we do so incessantly, and in this fact lies the cognitive dimension of experience. The cognitive dimension of experience is expressed in the fact that in the process of making our way we frequently achieve the ends that we wish, which is knowledge in its rawest form. Without this pervasive cognitive dimension in experience, experience itself would be impossible because we would never reach solutions of the countless problems and unsettled occasions we must address. The aesthetic dimension of experience points to the fact that our circumstances are regularly disrupted, which is the inevitable dissonance in experience, and that we are able to engender from those dissonances the harmony and balance that constitutes a resolved situation, however fleeting it may be. The aesthetic, to put the point slightly differently, is the fact that the innumerable complexes that constitute our interaction with our environment possess the integrity that enables them to prevail, without which there would be no experience. That there is a political dimension of experience is expressed by the fact that in the transaction that is experience generally, we have the power to engage our environments and make our way in and through them. This, taken as a whole, is the sense in which I have been suggesting that the dimensions of experience represent the fabric of experience itself. Given the general traits of experience as transaction, it could not, it seems, have been any other way. The best way to draw this discussion of experience to a close is by reviewing the implications of the theory as it has been developed. The analysis to this point has been an effort to explicate the theory and to make a case for its coherence and plausibility. These are two pillars of pragmatic valuation of any philosophical theory. The third has to do with the degree to which the theory works, which is to say the value it has for us if we assent to and make use of it. Some attention to this question of implications has already been given, but it will be useful to summarize it here. If in the end a case has been made for the theory’s coherence, plausibility, and usefulness, then on pragmatic grounds the theory is as fully justified as one could expect.

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To avoid losing the several points in a more flowing narrative, I provide the important implications of the theory in outline form. This enables them to stand out more clearly. 1) I begin with an outline of the advantages of the pragmatic naturalist transactional concept of experience: – The first point to note is that to regard experience as the ongoing transaction of an individual with the full range of her environing conditions enables an understanding of experience and human being that is more consistent than prevailing alternatives with how we actually interact with our world. • We do not in fact gaze out at the world from inside a body, but rather find ourselves in media res as a matter of course. The eyes may be a “window to the soul,” as the clichéd metaphor has it, but they are not our windows on the world. We do not need windows because we are fully in the world. There is thus no need for the traditional epistemological question of how we can have knowledge of the external world, and we are therefore liberated to develop a more suitable epistemology. • We are not “minds” that in some mysterious way interact with a physical world; we are rather fully a part of that world, and therefore do not have to struggle with traditional mind/body “problems.” They are, in a technical sense, not philosophical problems at all. • Though the self is fully embodied and embedded, we are nevertheless not bodies in the sense that all features of human being, life, and experience could, even if only in principle, be described in material terms. We cannot be “reduced” to material entities because there is a great deal within human experience that cannot be predicated of material objects, no matter how complex and sophisticated they may be. – This is turn allows us to avoid the all-too-common conception that we are our brains. We are no more our brains than we are our hearts, livers, nervous systems, or skeletons. Without any of them we could not live as human beings, or not live at all, and it is certainly true that as our knowledge of them increases, so too does our knowledge of ourselves. But we are not wholly or even primarily describable in terms, categories, or traits appropriate to any one of our physical constituents. With respect to brains and the neurosciences that study them, our knowledge of human being is greatly enhanced by advances in those sciences that lead to increased understanding of brains. As important as brains are,

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a complete understanding of them is not and cannot be a complete understanding of human being, or of experience, because human experience resides in the full and complex transaction of individuals with our environments, and not with any single constituent of that transaction. – We are therefore able to appreciate and value the neurosciences and other forms of inquiry concerning human being, material and otherwise, without expecting too much of them and without burdening them with implications they cannot possess. – Second, the conception of experience as transaction has a set of similar implications for a fuller approach to experience overall in that it allows us to avoid traditional materialist and idealist conceptions of experience by situating the experiencing person fully within nature. • Our experience is such that it is sometimes amenable to descriptions that employ mental or spiritual terms and concepts, and in other respects it is amenable to descriptions that employ material terms and concepts. In our lives and experience, this never presents a problem, and this is not because in ordinary affairs we are simply not clever enough to ask the questions. – The problem has been that in our traditional philosophic activity we have been too clever by half, thereby creating problems where there are none. The reason we do not need to pose the questions about experience in ways they have traditionally been posed is that an understanding of persons and experience comes not from understanding mind and matter, but from understanding the transactional, constitutive relations of persons and environments. In understanding those relations, we have recourse to a range of differing terms and concepts—ideal, material, social, historical, geographical, political, aesthetic, ethical, religious, psychological, medical, economic, among others. All of them are applicable to experience in some ways and not others, and that fact creates no problems with respect to any of them. The range of applicable descriptors of experience creates problems only when their application is stretched beyond their proper range of applicability. All of these aspects of the transaction between an individual and her environment that constitutes experience are related to one another, but they are not thereby all relevant to every aspect of the person, nor are they relevant to the same degree even in those cases where they are relevant. People have wondered with respect to the relation of emotions to our physicality, whether we feel sadness, for example, as a consequence of a physical reaction, i.e. is the emotion

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an effect of a physical state, or is a specific physical state like crying a consequence of sadness? This is a question that can be and has been debated, so the relevance of one state to another is undetermined, though the fact that they are constitutively related is not. – The transactional conception of experience, then, helps us to avoid the category mistakes that occur when we appeal to one constituent of the transaction to account for or frame others when in fact that is not the proper relation between them. Our brain states can only go so far in accounting for our economic circumstances, just as our aesthetic sensibility may but does not necessarily account for our geographical situation. That we are social beings, to give another example, is built into the idea of experience as transaction, in fact into ordinality itself, but our sociality does not and cannot describe everything about us, even everything about our experience. – Third, by embracing the transactional conception of experience, we are able to acknowledge the broad scope of experience without over-loading any single aspect of it • The dimensions of experience—cognitive, aesthetic, and political—­ define the overall tapestry. We are not obliged to make the intellectualist mistake of treating the whole of experience as if it were primarily or exclusively a component of cognition. To do so would be to mistake one dimension of experience for the whole. Or to give an example of the contrary sort, wherein we simply overlook a dimension of experience, we are not obliged to regard one dimension, for example the aesthetic, as trivial with respect to the others, as happens when the aesthetic is pushed out of any consideration of the cognitive on the alleged grounds that it is merely a matter of personal expression of more or less arbitrary personal taste. – By identifying the three dimensions of experience and the forms of their interaction, the theory enables a thicker and richer appreciation of the depth and breadth of experience – Fourth, the constituents of experience indicate the importance of language, emotion, and imagination, without which experience would be mute and hollow • Again, this identification enables us to develop and maintain appreciation and understanding without overextending the role and function of any one of the constituents of experience. As important as language is for defining human experience and its traits, not all experience is or can be linguistic. Not all experience is or can be emotional or imaginative either. The critical point, and what accounts for the difference in generality

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b­ etween the constituents of experience and the dimensions of experience, is that while all experience can, depending on the case, have cognitive, aesthetic, or political traits, not all experience can be linguistic, emotional, or imaginative. With respect to language, the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy has created conceptual paths of limited value because it has ascribed to language a level of generality in experience that it simply does not have. The only way to ascribe linguistic traits to many aspects of experience is to stretch the meaning of “language” to such an extent that it fails to mean anything, other, perhaps, than any symbolic system. One could of course be inclined to make a similar claim about the way we have treated “knowledge,” though much of the volume has been an attempt to demonstrate the reasonableness of treating knowledge, and art and power as well, as we have. – Fifth, the question remains to be explored how the constituents of experience interact with one another, and with the dimensions of experience. Language, emotion, and imagination are surely and importantly related, and it would be a valuable contribution to a fuller theory of experience to have as clear an understanding as possible what those relations may be and how they impact experience generally, specific forms of experience, and the general environment that is the context of experience. In this respect the theory points to the need for further ramification. – Sixth, the forms of experience render the theory able to acknowledge any of the innumerable contexts in which our experience unfolds. Without the many and open-ended forms of experience we would not be human beings, and without an appreciation of that fact our understanding of experience would be inappropriately truncated and inadequate to experience itself. • All the forms of experience deserve to be studied in their own right, as many have been. James’s Varieties of Religious Experience is a classic example, as there have been and will continue to be studies of political, sexual, social, ethnic, and many other forms of experience. • With the analytical categories supplied by the dimensions and constituents of experience it becomes possible to approach an understanding of any of the forms of experience more fully. By understanding, for example, the senses in which and the extent to which the aesthetic is a general dimension of experience, one may be more disposed than one might have been to understand, let us say, the ethical form of experience as having aesthetic traits. As a result, an analysis of any form of experience may be more revealing and evocative than it otherwise might have been. 2) Because I have posited the cognitive as among the three dimensions of experience, I have been obliged to revise a number of epistemological

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concepts. By doing so, my epistemology provides a more adequate conception of knowledge than the alternatives: – The first relevant point is that given the transactional understanding of experience, the knower is not looking out on an external world, so knowledge and inquiry cannot be construed that way – Second, knowledge is not simply a matter of description of independent facts about any aspect of the world. Such description surely exists, is functionally important, and plays a role in knowledge, but knowledge cannot be understood solely or even primarily as a matter of providing accurate description. Still, however, description is one of the key components of the cognitive dimension of experience because it is one sort of assertive judgment and therefore critical to one of the significant aspects of knowledge generally. – Third, knowledge, ideas, query and inquiry—what we may refer to as the elements of cognition—have their character, meaning, function, and value within the context of the ongoing transaction of persons with our environments. This is the larger point about experience that underscores the traditional pragmatist notion that ideas and knowledge are tools we use to get on in experience. – Fourth, knowledge arises in experience, all of it. Knowledge is relevant to and resides not in perception, reason, inquiry, and science alone, but rather in the full engagement with our world. This is the reason the three modes of judgment are relevant for cognition, and that art and power are integrally related to knowledge. – Fifth, all of this is enabled by realizing that the traditional question of the place of experience in the acquisition of knowledge has led us astray because it is formulated backwards, and that the proper question, which our theory poses, concerns by contrast the role of knowledge in experience. • With this point, we are able to avoid the excessive intellectualism that has traditionally plagued epistemology in that traditionally, a general sense of knowledge has been construed with a philosopher or intellectual’s habits as the model. When intellectuals inquire, we analyze, provide justifications, look for ramifications, criticize and revise, and so forth. In the philosopher’s more honest moments we want to say that knowledge is not achieved until we have worked through these and other related aspects of the processes of inquiry. • The problem with this is that it does not describe how knowledge works for the rest of the world, nor does it account for how knowledge frequently functions in most people’s experience. Much of

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normal experience has a cognitive character because in getting things done people engage knowingly with their environments. For the most part, though, this occurs without reflective articulation, marshaling of evidence, provision of reasons and justifications, or the explicit exploration of implications and ramifications. The cognitive character of most experience lies in the doing and the experiencing, not in systematic and methodic reflection, but it is nonetheless cognitive. This should not be misunderstood to suggest that whatever anyone normally says or thinks is true therefore is true, or that whatever anyone thinks she knows is thereby automatically knowledge. It does mean, however, that our understanding of knowledge and cognition has to account for the fact that much of what constitutes knowledge in experience does not fit the intellectualist model. • It also should not be mistaken to mean that there are no relevant differences between knowledge as embedded in the mundane matters of living, which is to say unreflective knowledge, and the more refined, articulated knowledge generated by systematic and methodic inquiry and query. The latter does indeed embody the careful description and articulation, presentation of evidence and argument, critical reflection, and ongoing revision that intellectuals expect of ourselves and one another when we are undertaking serious scholarship. The point is not that such processes and those that characterize daily experience are or should be the same. It is, rather, that both sorts of processes are legitimately to be understood as cognitive, and so our epistemology has to be general enough to account for both. Traditionally, theories of knowledge have not been general in this way, while our theory of experience pushes us necessarily in this preferable direction. • By understanding cognition as a dimension of experience, related integrally with the other dimensions of experience, we are as it were compelled to offer a broader, less intellectualized conception of knowledge than the epistemological traditions have tended to do. Moreover, we are able to do so without falling into traps that weaker forms of post-modernisms have set, wherein one infers from the fact that traditional conceptions of cognition are not sustainable, that what we have thought to be knowledge dissolves into so many perspectives and biases. – The conception of the cognitive dimension of experience, and the broader theory of which it is an aspect, in fact provide an

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a­ venue to avoid the extremes of both artificially intellectualized conceptions of knowledge and the abandonment of knowledge altogether. Both extremes overlook the realities of experience, a mistake our theory protects us from making. – Just as the conception of knowledge is more properly broad, so too is the conception of truth that my theory of experience enables. In some circumstances, a traditional correspondence conception of truth is clearly appropriate, as when we judge an empirically relevant descriptive proposition to be true when it accurately depicts the state of affairs it describes. This is a conception of truth that is obviously serviceable and well deserves to be retained. It is not, however, the only serviceable conception of truth, and the theory of experience, with its attendant revised epistemology, points to others, some of which were suggested more than a century ago by William James. It was he who claimed, scandalously at the time, that truth “happens” to an idea, and that an idea is true if it “works.” My conception of the ascription of truth is also expanded beyond propositions and ideas to exhibitive and active judgments. In fact, we have suggested three legitimate senses of truth—correspondence with a relevant state of affairs, cohering with other aspects of experience in the Jamesian sense of an idea as “working,” and Vattimo’s sense of truth as deep meaning in experience. These are aspects of truth that have long been clear to artists and others but have eluded epistemologists because they have been unreasonably and exclusively focused on propositions. Now we no longer need to focus in such a way when engaged in epistemological inquiry, and that liberation is a consequence of the revised understanding of knowledge encouraged by the theory of experience. Finally, with respect to the cognitive dimension of experience, the ways that we are able to reconceive knowledge and truth point to the function of both in the expansion of possibilities in experience. Knowledge and truth understood in this way, as the ongoing expansion of possibilities, are essential traits of the broadening enrichment of experience, in which respect we return to an aspect of experience that Dewey emphasized. Moreover, in Dewey’s treatment of experience, this enrichment is one of the more important functions of education. By returning to Dewey in this regard, we also underscore his point that education, as he put it, is “life itself.” • In so doing, I also return to a point of which Dewey had made much, which is that to understand experience is to understand culture in the John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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sense that both are ways of indicating the broad context, or what we have been calling the environment, in which human life occurs. This is in fact the reason, or one of the reasons, that an adequate theory of experience is so important. If we wish to understand human life then we are obliged to come to close terms with experience. This is also the reason that for Dewey, and we should follow his lead on this point, education is so important. Education is the systematic effort to develop the possibilities inherent in experience, which is another way of saying that it is the effort to make what we can of the potential in  our  lives and the lives of all those for whom we have some responsibility. A theory of experience that posits the aesthetic as a dimension of experience necessarily enables a richer understanding of the aesthetic in our lives, and of art generally: – First, throughout our experience, especially if we focus on the fact that experience is an ongoing exercise in manipulation and reception of features of our environments, we are continually engaged in the pursuit and creation of harmony, balance, and rhythm, even as we encounter disharmony and dissonance. The latter are the problematic situations of which Dewey speaks, and they and their resolutions express and embody the aesthetic dimension of experience. • To put the point in ordinal terms, it turns out that in the very fact of complexity, which is to say the integrity that defines the way multiple constituents cohere as any given complex, lies the aesthetic dimension of experience because the complexes that constitute us in our experience are expressions of harmony, balance, and for that matter, the related disharmony that sometimes characterizes complexes and is typically a goad to the emergence of balance and order. The emergence of novelty in this complexity, to sound a bit like Whitehead, is the creativity in nature and experience, which is the reason experience has an aesthetic dimension. – Second, by relying as we have on Dewey’s conception of the place of the aesthetic in experience I have opened my theory to a rich load of possibilities. • One of the most significant implications of this, and of which we have made much throughout the book, is the clearer understanding of the cognitive potential of art – This is something people involved in the arts, and a relatively small subset of philosophers, have all along understood. – We can now see that art not only has a cognitive character, but we can see how that can be, specifically through the interaction of the John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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cognitive and aesthetic dimensions of experience and through the related assertive and exhibitive modes of judgment. – Third, the theory of judgment allows us to distinguish more carefully between art and other creative activities. • The relation of art and science, understood broadly, occasionally inclines people either to collapse one into the other, or to posit a wide gulf between them. – One may notice that art has a cognitive capacity without having a clear conception of how that happens, for example, and in that case it can be tempting to conflate art and science inappropriately. One might be tempted to say that in the end art is a form of science, or of inquiry in our terminology, or that science is in the end a form of art. – Or one may be tempted to say that science and art have such different functions that the two operate toward different ends entirely. Along these lines one may want to say that science is cognitive and art is expressive, for example; or that science and scholarship provide knowledge while art provides decoration; or that science and scholarship appeal to the intellect while art appeals to the passions; or that science and scholarship are to be evaluated intellectually, while art is to be judged as a matter of taste or emotion. – Both of these alternatives, which is to say collapsing art and science into one another or radically separating them, distort art, they distort science and inquiry, and the thereby distort experience. An advantage of a theory of experience that approaches the cognitive and the aesthetic as ours does provides a clear way to avoid such distortions. • My theory of experience and the theory of judgment allow us to recognize and articulate the similarities and differences between art and science without distorting either, and by allowing an understanding of the fuller range of their role in experience to emerge. • I have also been able to show how, though art is importantly cognitive, the form of query and judgment that characterizes it, engages subjects of query differently than others forms. Thus, for example, we have seen how art may make a case for an idea or perspective, but does so not by argument, as assertive judgment would, but by exhibition and revelation. In this way, we can maintain the complexity of art’s potential while at the same time retaining the distinctive features of aesthetic activity and exhibitive judgment.

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– Finally, that experience has an aesthetic dimension as part of its very fabric accounts for the fact that art can be as revelatory as it sometimes is of the character of experience. I showed clear illustrations of this in literary modernism, where Joyce highlights the traits of direct or immediate experience, Faulkner the sheer multiplicity of perspectives in experience, and Proust the constitutive nature of the relations within experience. Art, we may say, can clarify aspects of experience for us because it is a dimension of experience itself. The fact that power and its exercise is central to experience, knowledge, and art, is clarified: – First, the pragmatic naturalist idea, derived primarily from Dewey and Peirce before him, that in experience we engage problems and opportunities and achieve their solution or resolution can now be seen to indicate the centrality of power in experience. The point about p ­ roblem-solving and its role in our lives turns out to be even more profound than we may have realized. We do not, as it turns out, gaze on the world and describe it, rather we engage and in doing so continuously revise it. The engagement and revision that constitute experience take the form of addressing the problems we encounter. Problem-solving is not a trait primarily of knowledge, but of experience itself. That realization in turn clarifies the importance of power and the political within experience. – Second, it turns out that understanding the political dimension of experience in terms of the concepts of individual, community, and interests has considerable explanatory power with respect to forms of political structure. • Democracy, as I have shown, can fruitfully be understood as the form of political and social life in which the good of both the individual and the community can be realized through the pursuit of common interests, as in fact Dewey had described it a century ago. • Other forms of political structure—we looked at theocracy and single-party rule—can also be described, and distinguished from one another and from democracy, in terms of their own distinct relation of individual, community, and interests with one another. • These points suggest that the many ways that the exercise of power emerges in our lives—for the individual, in families and communities, in social relations and structures, nationally, internationally, in public authority, in organizational structures, in institutions, and no doubt many other forms—can be approached to some advantage with the conceptual apparatus that the theory of experience

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provides by placing power centrally in experience. Precisely how fruitful such analyses could be can be seen only when they are developed, but the theory points in that analytic direction. – And third, as I have shown, it has been common knowledge to anyone who looks that power has been a feature of both knowledge and art. We now have a theoretical account of why and how this is. • Bacon, Nietzsche, Foucault, and others discussed the fact that knowledge and power are closely related. It is now possible to see that their interaction, far from a surprise, is to be expected in light of the role each plays as a dimension of experience. – This conception also suggests to us that in our efforts to understand and make use of the mechanisms and institutions of power we be sensitive to the fact that there is likely to be a cognitive aspect to them. – Similarly, in our cognitively oriented activities, in study and in teaching, we are wise to keep in mind that there are likely to be aspects of power associated, and that those aspects can be varied, from relations of power in our intellectual work to the implications and consequences of the work when put to use. This is the reason no university has ever been an “ivory tower.” • Social institutions and governments have long put art to work on their behalf because they understood the power that art and the aesthetic have. In any approach to art on our part, especially if there is a public aspect to it, we would do well to bear this point in mind. As one can see in these several pages of explicit implications of the theory, we are still at the level of an outline, as the book’s subtitle makes clear. The reason is not so much because the theory is open to revision, though of course it, like any theory, is always open to revision. The reason this remains an outline is that it serves as a suggestion, or a series of suggestions. It points in directions that other work may go. If the theory is a strong one, then further studies that put it to work will prove fruitful. If that happens, then the theory will be as successful as it can be, since on pragmatic grounds, meaning and import is to a considerable degree to be found in the future and in the possibilities and actualizations that the theory has engendered.

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Schoenbach, Lisi 2011. Pragmatic Modernism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Shook, John. 2004. “Deliberative Democracy and Moral Pluralism: Dewey vs. Rawls and Habermas.” In John Ryder and Krystyna Wilkoszewska, eds. Deconstruction and Reconstruction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 31–41. Shusterman, Richard. 2000a. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Shusterman, Richard. 2000b. Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the End of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Shusterman, Richard. 2008. Body Consciousness. A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Singer, Beth. 1983. Ordinal Naturalism: An Introduction to the Philosopher of Justus Buchler. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Stagoll, Clifford and Michael Levine, eds. 2019. Pragmatism Applied: William James and the Challenges of Contemporary Life. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Skowroński, Krzysztof Piotr. 2013a. Beyond Aesthetics and Politics, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Skowroński, Krzysztof Piotr. 2013b. “The Constitutive Role of Social Values and Political Power in G. H. Mead’s Reflections on Aesthetic Experience.” In Tom Burke and Piotr Skowroński 2013. Stein, Gertrude. 2013. “Composition as Explanation. London.” In Carter `and Warren eds., op. cit. Talisse, Robert. 2005. Democracy After Liberalism. New York, NY: Routledge. Talisse, Robert. 2007. A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy, New York, NY: Routledge. Talisse, Robert. 2009. “Response to My Critics.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. Vol. 45, No. 1, 90–108. Tikka, Pia. 2008. Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense. Helsinki, Finland: University of Art and Design Publication Series. Toulmin, Stephen. 1992. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Varela, Francisco J, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 2017. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Vattimo, Gianni. 2008. Art’s Claim to Truth. Santiago Zabala, ed. Luca D’Isanto, trans. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Vessey, David. 2010. “Dewey, Gadamer, and the Status of Poetry Among the Arts.” In Paul Fairfield, editor, John Dewey and Continental Philosophy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 161–173. Wallace, Kathleen. 2019. The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity. London, UK: Routledge. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1979. Process and Reality. New York: Macmillan Publishers. John Ryder - 978-90-04-42918-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/16/2024 04:08:44PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Name Index Addams, Jane 3 Alhambra 155 Anselm, St. 13 Aquinas, St. Thomas 106 Aristotle 47 Bach, J.S. 141 B Minor Mass 141 Bacon, Francis 214 Bakhtin, Mikhail 43n4 Baldwin, James 153 Beckett, Samuel 124 Bergson, Henri 137 Bernstein, Richard 8n, 97n, 124, 131 Berra, Yogi 55, 57 Blue Mosque 200 Boulanger, Nadia 147 Brandom, Robert 1 Brezhnev, Leonid 179–180 Buchler, Justus 16 and ontological parity 20, 137 approach to experience 7, 87 on alesence and prevalence 21–22 on query 9 on the inadequacy of Dewey on experience and inference 85–87 ordinal ontology of 6, 14n, 16, 21 theory of judgment of 6, 68–70, 74, 122 theory of proception of 6–7, 163n, 171n–172n Bugaeva, Lyubov ix, 4, 42, 65n3 Campbell, James 3, 27, 45, 158–159, 180n8 Cappuccio, Massimiliano 41–42 Churchland, Patricia S. 29 Copeland, Aaron 143, 146–147, 201 Appalachian Spring 146–147 Fanfare for the Common Man 147 Lincoln Portrait 147 Rodeo 147 The Tender Land 147 da Vinci, Leonardo 154 Damasio, Antonio 42 Danto, Arthur 29

Degas, Edgar 143 Descartes, Rene 130–132 Dewey, John 2–4, 7–8, 38, 84, 131, 142, 158–159, 172, 211 and deliberative theory of democracy 180–183 and the method of intelligence 129 and resolution of problems 98, 105 and warranted assertability 124 conception of experience of 27, 33–34, 45–46, 48, 58–59, 67, 96, 158–159, 210–211, 213 objection to Marxism 180–181 on aesthetic experience 4, 10, 58, 61, 77, 88, 118–120, 143 on body-mind 33–36 on common interests 173–180, 183, 213 on community 173–180, 183 on democracy 173–180, 183 on education 66, 105, 210–211 on habit 129 on imagination 65 on immediacy 58 on inference and inquiry in experience 75, 83–88, 108 on relations 16, 43n3, 58, 138 theory of art of 10, 66, 73, 77, 95–96, 109n, 117–118 Dilthey, Wilhelm 35 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 110 Dreyfus, Hubert 36 Easy Rider 149 Eldridge, Michael 2, 3, 158–159, 175n4 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 111, 131 Evans, Fred 36 Faulkner, William 139, 213 and multiple narratives 135–136, 137 The Sound and The Fury 135 Foucault, Michel on knowledge and power 6, 113–114, 158, 198, 214 on power 113–114 François Premier 154

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NAME Index Gadamer, Hans-Georg 8, 27, 102, 109, 125 Gone with the Wind 149 Goodman, Nelson 1 Gorbachev, Mikhail S. 179–180 Habermas, Jürgen 175, 181 Haydn, Joseph 154 Hegel, G.W.F. 3, 16, 34, 55, 111, 172 Heidegger, Martin 27, 33–35, 102 Henry viii 154 Heraclitus 21, 22 Hickman, Larry 27, 158–159, 175n5 High Line (Manhattan) 201 Hobbes, Thomas 184 Holbein, Hans 154 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 131 Homer 106 Hume, David 16, 54, 111, 130, 171 Husserl, Edmund 16, 34–35 Ives, Charles 136, 143, 146 A Symphony: New England Holidays 136 Central Park in the Dark 143, 146 James, Henry 124, 129, 134 James, William 3, 33–34, 38, 42, 120, 128, 130–133, 207 on experience 27, 58, 62, 64, 135, 172 on relations 16, 137–138 on truth 102–103, 107, 125, 162, 210 Johnson, Mark 4, 33–35, 37–39, 42, 43 Joyce, James 110, 124, 138, 139, 213 Bloom, Leopold 135 Ulysses 135 Kandinsky, Vassily 124, 141 Kant, Immanuel 16, 26, 69, 70, 76, 106 conception of experience of 5, 8, 48, 50, 51–52, 54–55, 57, 81 Newtonianism of three Critiques 6 Kierkegaard, Soren 131 Kripke, Saul 22 Kurosawa, Akira 124 Lakoff, George 4, 33, 34, 37 Lehan, Richard Daniel 129 Lenin, Vladimir I. 103, 153, 195 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 129–130

Madison, James 178 Malevich, Kazimir 125, 200 Black Square 125–126, 200 Mao Tse-tung 180, 191 Marx, Karl 82, 172 on communism and the state 190 McDermott, John J. viii–ix, 8, 45–46, 131 Mead, George Herbert 3, 27, 131 on relations 16, 43n3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 4, 27, 33–35 Miłosz, Czesław 153 Mill, John Stuart 178 Monet, Claude 143–145 Mouffe, Chantal 173 on agonistic democracy 175–183 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 200 Nagarjuna 36 Nietzsche, Friedrich 33, 36, 131, 214 and evolution 166 and the will to power 165–166, 172 Nixon, Richard 179–180 Noë, Alva 41 Nuñez, Rafael 37 O’Keeffe, Georgia 147 O’Neil, Tip 160 Pahmuk, Orhan 110, 155 My Name is Red 155 Parmenides 21 Peirce, Charles Sanders 3, 98, 130–132, 180, 213 Picasso, Pablo 136, 137 Guernica 74, 201 Pihlström, Sami 54n, 59 Pissarro, Camille 143 Plato 48, 81, 106, 111, 184 Proust, Marcel 110, 129, 137–139, 213 À la recherche du temps perdu 137–138 Putin, Vladimir V. 194 Pythagoras 106 Quigley, Megan 129 Quine, W.V.O. 14, 81 Randall, John Herman, Jr. 14, 16, 19, 21 Rawls, John 175, 181

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224 Reagan, Ronald 179–180 Renoir, August 143 Rorty, Richard 36, 131, 175 on experience 1, 45, 82, 136 on literary modernism 129, 133 Rowlands, Mark 32, 40–43 Russell, Bertrand 16, 129 Santayana, George 111 Sartre, Jean Paul 33 Schmitt, Carl 173, 184 Schoenbach, Lisi 128 Schubert, Franz 124 Schütz, Alfred 35 Shakespeare 150 Romeo, as example of a natural complex 19 Shostakovich, Dmitri 153, 200 Symphony No. 7 (Leningrad) 153, 200 Shusterman, Richard 4, 33–34, 125, 157 Sistine Chapel 29 Skowroński, Krzysztof 7n, 157 Smetana, Bedrich 143, 145 Ma Vlast 145 Vltava 143 Soseki, Natsume 110 Spinoza, Baruch 16, 93, 111 Stein, Gertrude 128, 138 Stieglitz, Alfred 147

Name Index Talisse, Robert 175 Taylor, Charles 175 Thatcher, Margaret 179 The Grapes of Wrath 153 Tikka, Pia 4, 42 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 143 Triumph of the Will 201 Trump, Donald J. 189 Varela, Francisco J. 23, 36 Vattimo, Gianni 102, 104, 210 Vaughan Williams, Ralph The Lark Ascending 100–101 Wagner, Richard 136 Walzer, Michael 175 Weill, Kurt 153 Wells, H.G. 134 Westside Story 149–151 America 150 Cool 150 Gee, Officer Krupke 150 Wheeler, Michael 41–42 Whitehead, A.N. 16, 211 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 73, 90, 129, 176 atomism in early view 16 relationality in later views 16 Woolf, Virginia 124, 134–136 Dalloway, Mrs. 135

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Subject Index active (judgment) 9, 70, 72–75, 127, 167–169 and art Chapter 4 passim and knowledge 75, 77–78 Chapter 3 passim 126, 198, 210 and power 78–79 Chapter 5 passim activity and experience Chapter 1 passim 56ff, 163–164 and passivity 56–57, 59, 70, 163 aesthetic aesthetic experience 3ff, 58, 88, 161 and exhibitive judgment 68–79, 164 as dimension of experience 1, 3, 10, 46, 60ff, 95 Chapter 4 passim 157, 161, 164, 167 Conclusion passim in relation to the cognitive dimension 6, 8ff, 63, 109ff, 151ff in relation to the political dimension 7, 8ff, 63, 151ff, 199ff value 123, 140 alescence by contrast with prevalence 21–22 analytic philosophy 6, 89, 124 approach to nature 14 experience in 67 naturalism 92, 94–95 pragmatism 1 Anglicanism as state religion 188 architecture 155, 201 Soviet 153, 155 argument 105, 209 and art 148ff, 212 and deductive proof 2, 80, 106ff as demonstrating the plausible 2, 80, 107 and judgment 75 reasonable, and useful 2 107 art Chapter 4 passim, Conclusion passim and argument 148ff, 212 and daily life 66–67, 77–78, 87, 95ff, 110, 118, 120 and emotional response 19, 42, 64, 65n3, 140

and exhibitive judgment 71ff, 119, 122ff, 139, 147, 167–168, 170 and imagination 65 and inference 85ff and Islam 155, 200 and knowledge 94, 109ff, 124ff, 139ff and power 7, 10–11, 68, 79, 152ff, 157, 199ff and the Church 140, 155 and truth 101–102, 124ff, 170 distinction between fine and applied  97, 120 formalist approach to 67, 140 in the Soviet Union 153, 155, 201 political role of 145–146, 154–155, 199ff relation with science 75, 107–108, 148, 212 romantic sense of 142 social and political approaches to 140–141 theory of 117–119 assertive (judgment) 6, 9, 70ff, 112, 122–124, 151, 167, 169–170, 208, 212 knowledge and truth in 77–79, 95, 100, 102, 106, 141, 198 atomism 16 Austria 188 avant garde Russian 125–126, 153 Bahrain 186 belief 130, 164 and knowledge 6, 96ff, 110–111, 115, 124, 127, 198 and truth 96, 101ff, 127 135 brain 25–26, 29, 40, 48–49, 90 unacceptable reduction to 15, 25, 29–32, 39, 43–44, 204, 206 Buddhism 36 built environments aesthetic features of 201 Cartesianism 16, 40–41, 48, 93, 130–132 Catholicism as state religion 188 China 47, 54

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226 People’s Republic of (prc) 179, 184–185, 190–191, 195–196 Christianity 47 concept of substance in 15–16 cinema see film city and countryside 142–147, 151 civil society 159 class interests 82, 103, 181, 189–190 cognition Conclusion passim and assertive judgment 77–79, 95, 100, 102, 106, 141, 198 and valuation 100–101, 105 as dimension of experience 1ff, 60ff, 76ff Chapter 3 passim inadequacy of propositional conception of 6, 96ff, 110–111, 115, 124, 127, 198 in relation to the aesthetic dimension 6, 8ff, 63, 109ff, 151ff in relation to the political dimension 10, 66–68, 78–79, 112ff, 198ff cognitive science 8–9, 29, 31–32, 36–37, 41–42, 48, 205 Cold War 179 community 150, 154, 158–159, 173, 186–197 and common interests 173–180, 183, 213 and the political dimension of experience 78, 171–174, 185–186, 213 complexes 2, 6, 18ff, 32, 36, 43–45, 52, 54, 59, 76, 93–5, 120, 122–123, 148, 1 63n, 171, 203, 211 as central concept of ordinal ontology  8, 17–18 relation constitution of 17–18, 23, 26, 39, 43, 49, 53, 57–58, 90–95, 138 conflict 103, 119–120, 172–173 consciousness 24–25, 33–34, 135 implications of theory of experience for 3, 93 consensus 173, 178, 180–183 constituents of experience 8–9, 60–66, 76–7, 206–207 contradictions 14 as analogous to interests 172 creativity 55, 70 and objectivity 55ff and the aesthetic dimension of experience 120

SUBJECT Index in nature 76, 120, 211 Cuba, Republic of 191, 195 Cubism 136 culture 29, 36, 47, 149, 153, 186, 191n, 201–202 as experience 8, 45–46, 210 dance 73, 75, 79, 108, 122, 126, 140, 143, 145, 148, 168, 201 deduction limited value of 2, 80, 106ff democracy as form of social/political organization 173, 174ff, 213 and the problem of dissent 175ff contrast with Islamic theocracy 185–190 contrast with single-party states 190–196 deliberative theories of 180–183 Dewey on 173–180 description as a feature of the cognitive dimension of experience 76, 78, 122–123, 171–172 design 120, 153 and power 153ff, 200–202 dissent 175 and pragmatist conception of democracy 175ff dissonance 132 as a feature of the aesthetic dimension 78, 117, 119ff, 140, 171–172, 203, 211 dog as example of a natural complex 17–19 education 66, 180 and enrichment of experience 105, 210–211 embodiment as characteristic of mind 4, 8, 29, 32ff, 79 emergence 2, 24–25, 93 emotions 12, 14, 18, 19, 50, 77, 91, 140, 212 as constituent of experience 9, 60ff, 206–207 as embodying the dimensions of experience 27, 62, 64–65, 68 relation to language and imagination 207

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227

SUBJECT Index relation to physicality 28, 33, 38, 42, 43, 205–206 empiricism 5, 8, 26, 28, 50, 53–55, 57, 70, 82, 83–85, 132 enactivism 4, 8, 32–33, 39–43, 66n3 emergence 8, 24–25, 28, 93–94 and natural science 24 environment 24, 144, 146, 199, 201–202 individual transaction with 2–3, 9, 12, 20 Chapter 1 passim 49ff, 67ff, 82, 84ff, 112–114, 119–122, 133, 138, 152, 162–166, 170–171, 178, 197, 202 Conclusion passim epistemology 6, 9, 29, 38, 44, 67, 72, 81, 89ff, 103, 124ff, 141, 180, 204 feminist 82 in relation to the theory of experience 3, 10, 111ff, 151, 197–198, 208ff naturalized 81–82, 92, 95, 124 ethics 14, 69, 105, 119, 156, 205 and power 152 as form of experience 62, 117, 207 exhibitive (judgment) 6, 9, 70ff, 85, 87, 89, 108, 121, 146, 169, 199 and art 71ff, 119, 122ff, 139, 147–148, 167–168, 170 and knowledge 77, 89, 95, 100, 106, 115, 137, 139, 141, 148ff, 164, 168, 210, 212 experience active and passive 1, 8, 28, 43, 56–57, 59, 68, 119, 166 and inference 83–88 and inquiry 9–10, 75, 77, 84ff, 108, 121, 130, 208ff and knowledge in history 9, 47ff, 82–83 as an individual’s interaction with the environment see environment as cognitive Chapter 3 passim assertion in see assertive (judgment) assimilation and manipulation 46, 59, 70, 84, 119 as subject of query 121, 134ff, 139, 213 constituents of 8–9, 60–66, 76–7, 206–207 forms of 9, 51, 60, 62, 66, 76–77, 117, 170, 202, 207

immediate and mediate 8, 56–61, 138, 213 in modernist literature 130, 134ff, 213 primary and secondary 8, 56–57, 59, 84 pure and refined 56, 58–59, 135, 137–138 quotidian (common, normal, daily) 3–4, 10, 30–31, 88, 96, 98, 110, 118–121, 127, 143, 152–153, 162, 199, 208–209 evolution and Nietzsche’s will to power 166 fascism 153, 194, 200 role of the nation in 193 fashion and power 202 fictional characters 14 ontological status of 17–20 film 42 and argument in art 148–151 as exhibitive judgment 72 and power 154–156, 200–201 cognitive significance of 110, 124, 126 see enactivism foreign policy 177 in relation to political forms 185, 190, 196 forms of experience 9, 51, 60, 62, 66, 76–77, 117, 170, 202, 207 God 14, 109n, 192n prevalence of 20–21 Gulf, Arabian/Persian 184 political structures in 185ff, 212 habit 34, 51–52, 70, 164, 183 and knowledge 99, 101, 129, 208 in literary modernism 129 harmony 47, 173 as a feature of the aesthetic dimension 78, 117ff, 140, 171–172, 203, 211 hermeneutic tradition 8, 125 idealism 34, 53 ideas 1, 8, 14, 30, 82, 87, 133, 208, 210 and truth 102–103, 112, 133 pragmatist understanding of 2, 129, 132, 136, 162, 197

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228 valuation of 106–107, 203 identity 15, 19–20, 23, 27, 44, 49, 54, 143, 163 and political forms 183, 186, 192–194 ideology 156, 195–196 contrast with intelligence 180 imagination 37, 91, 138 as constituent of experience 9, 60–62 as embodying the dimensions of experience 65, 68 relation to emotions and language 206–207 Impressionism in the visual arts 50, 143–144, 200, 201 individual 12, 26, 28, 39, 138 and the political dimension of experience 78–79 Chapter 5 passim 213 inference 48, 51, 80, 83, 97, 106–108 in experience 75, 83–89 inquiry 9–10, 65, 74, 77, 82, 92, 94, 100, 134, 142, 151, 162, 197, 208–210 aesthetic character of 109, 111–112 as a form of query 74ff, 89, 108, 148, 150 Dewey on 84ff, 108 in experience 75, 85–88 installations 72, 148 cognitive significance of 110 intellectualism 11, 208–210 intelligence 28, 34, 129 and Deweyan democracy 180–182 contrast with ideology 180 interests 11, 103 Chapter 5 passim 213 and democracy 173ff and the political dimension of experience 78–79, 171ff as analogous to contradictions 172 common 159, 173ff interpretation 46, 53, 82 in experience 45, 57–58 intersubjectivity 43, 48 international relations 177, 199, 213 in relation to political forms 190, 196 Iran, Islamic Republic of 185 Islam and art 155 in Gulf nations 185ff Shi’a 186 Sunni 193

SUBJECT Index Israel 187–188 Japan 193, 201 Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of 185 Judaism as state religion 188 judgment Chapter 2 passim active 72ff, 89, 95, 101, 108, 115, 121, 126–127, 168–169, 198, 210 assertive 70ff, 95, 100, 102, 108, 115, 123–124, 141, 148, 151, 167, 208, 212 exhibitive 72ff, 89, 100, 115, 121ff, 137, 139, 146ff, 167–168, 199, 212 correlation with dimensions of experience 6, 68ff, 76ff, 123, 142, 151–152, 164, 167, 169, 212 theory of 6, 8–9, 32, 45 Chapter 2 passim 84ff, 94–95, 107, 123, 126–127, 142, 151, 158, 169–170, 212 See also inquiry; query knowledge Chapter 3 passim aesthetic character of 111–112 and art 7–8, 79, 94, 100–101, 109n, 124ff, 139ff, 147–148, 151, 208, 211–214 and assertive judgment 73, 77, 100, 106, 115, 122–124 and experience in history 5, 47ff, 81ff and justification 98–101, 105, 107, 115, 203 and ordinary experience 66–67, 95ff, 110, 208–209 and power 7, 64, 79, 112ff, 152–153, 162, 164, 170, 197–199, 208, 213–214 and reflection of reality 102, 130, 132–133 and the cognitive dimension of experience 9 Chapter 3 passim as external reality 48–49, 81, 90–91, 204, 208 as resolution of problems 77, 98, 132, 162, 203, 208, 213 inadequacy of propositional conception of 38, 72, 77, 89, 94–95, 98–99, 110–111, 115, 122, 124ff, 139–141, 151, 199, 210 interpretive 125 knowledge ‘how’ 115, 125 knowledge ‘that’ 115, 125 knowledge ‘through’ 115, 125

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229

SUBJECT Index knowledg Chapter 3 passim (cont.) negotiation as 199 Krug Khudozhnikov (Circle of Artists) 155 language as constituent of experience 9, 60ff, 206–207 as embodying the dimensions of experience 62ff linguistic utterance 63, 65, 70–72, 74, 122, 126–127, 167–168 ordinary 30 pain 30–31 vagueness of 129, 134 life and education 66, 105, 210 and experience 9, 11, 35, 67, 73, 83, 113, 120, 162, 172, 204, 211 lifeworld 35 literature and knowledge 63, 110, 126 and language in 63 and pragmatism 128–129, 133, 137 and realism 133 as exhibitive judgment 72, 167 modernist 128ff on experience 138–139, 213 philosophy as 63–64, 106, 111 Rorty on 129, 129, 133 truth in 63, 126, 165 linguistic turn limitations of 207 manga 201 mathematics 81, 89, 92, 94, 108, 130 and philosophy 106 meaning 38, 48, 84, 101, 124, 128, 168, 214 as embodied 37–39 creative construction of 56, 61, 170 memory in experience 137–138 for Proust 110, 137–138 mind 3, 14, 20–21, 24, 28–29, 50, 93 and brain 29, 44, 48, 204–206 as mirror 132 computational view of 36 embedded 32, 39ff, 204 embodied 4, 8, 33–36, 32ff, 204 enactive 4, 8, 32, 39ff

extended 8, 32, 35, 38ff, 49 implications of theory of experience for 4–5, 48, 83–84, 204–205 Kant on 51–52 mind/body dualism 26, 36, 48, 90, 204 modernism philosophical 128ff literary 117n, 128ff, 213 music 140, 148, 201 and power 153–156 and query 75, 85 as exhibitive judgment 122, 167, 199 cognitive significance of 100, 110, 126, 136, 142ff, 150, 198–199 naturalism 2 analytic vs. American 14–15, 92–94 pragmatic 8n, 10–11, 13, 15–16, 19, 21, 25, 35, 48, 60, 83, 92–94, 118, 122, 128–129, 136–138, 165, 174–176, 180, 185, 188, 204, 213 nature 7, 43n3, 52, 84, 92ff, 109n, 130–131, 143, 165 and experience 2–3, 20, 46, 136, 166, 169–170, 205 and matter 93n and ordinality 8, 14–16, 18–21, 137, 171 as normative conception 13 by contrast with ‘supernatural’ 13 complexes of 2, 6, 18, 20, 57, 59, 94, 120 creativity in 76, 120, 211 emergence in 24–25, 28, 93–94 impossibility of a creator of 13 not an order 23–24 not exclusively material 13–14, 94–95 objectivity in 53–54 pluralistic character of 2, 13–15, 20–21, 94 New Economic Policy (nep) 195 ngo 188 novelty 65, 76, 129, 133, 182 emergence of 93, 211 objectivity 53 and creativity 54, 56–57, 59 in modernist philosophy 54–55 Oman 185 ontological parity 20, 24, 137 ontology emergentist 2

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230 of constitutive relations 2, 6, 8, 14ff, 32ff, 52–54 pragmatic naturalist 1–2, 13, 15ff, 137 relation to theory of experience 1, 8, 12–13 opera 146–148 order as complex 17ff, 49, 93, 137 as ecosystem 27–28 ordinality 18, 93n, 206 pain 30–31 painting 29, 50, 72, 122, 124, 133, 145, 148 and power 153, 155, 200–201 cognitive significance of 74, 78, 110, 126, 142–145, 147 passivity and activity 55–57, 59, 70, 163 performance art 72, 168, 200 cognitive significance of 110 phenomenology 16, 34, 36 philosophy Introduction passim 15–16, 20–21, 25, 28, 37–38, 41, 43n4, 53, 60, 71, 73, 89, 103, 108, 121, 134, 137, 150, 205, 207 American 92, 128ff Continental 125 Modern 131, 16 and deductive proof 106–107 as exhibitive judgment 63–64, 78, 111 history of 9, 16, 21, 28, 37, 47–48, 56, 81–83, 107, 129–132 physicality 28ff political 2–3, 27, 47, 72, 104, 117, 205, 207 and active judgment 73–74, 168–169 and political theories 43n4, 172–173, 176, 178ff and public authority 152–153, 159–161, 170, 213 as dimension of experience 1, 3ff, 46, 60ff, 76ff, 89, 95, 109, 117, 123, 132 Chapter 5 passim 203, 206ff in relation to the aesthetic dimension 7, 8ff, 63–64, 139ff, 151ff, 168, 199ff in relation to the cognitive dimension 10, 63, 66–68, 78–79, 89, 112ff, 198ff partisan 159

SUBJECT Index political experience 158–161, 167, 170ff, 199 possibility 14, 21, 126, 138, 148, 154, 211, 214 and judgment 6, 72 and immediacy 58 as a feature of the cognitive dimension of experience 76, 78, 105, 110–111, 123, 148, 171–172, 210 by contrast with actuality 22–23, 68 by contrast with possible worlds 22 in relation to truth 76, 78, 105, 123, 171, 210 postmodernism 53, 57, 82, 132, 209 power 6 and active judgment 71–73, 78–79, 168–170 and art 7, 10–11, 68, 78–79, 141, 152ff, 157, 164, 168, 199ff, 214 and emotions 64–65 and design 201–202 and film 150–151, 154–156, 200–201 and imagination 65 and knowledge 4, 6–7, 64, 78–79, 112ff, 152–153, 157, 162, 164, 170, 197–199, 208, 213–214 and language 63 and literature 63 and moral valuation 152 and negotiation 199 and the political dimension of experience 7, 10–11, 67, 89, 152 Chapter 5 passim 203, 207–208, 213 as problem solving 67, 157 pragmatic 43 naturalism 8n, 10–11, 13, 15–16, 19, 21, 25, 35, 48, 60, 83, 92–94, 118, 122, 128–129, 136–138, 165, 174–176, 180, 185, 188, 204, 213 naturalist ontology 1–2, 13, 15–16 usefulness as criterion 2 80, 107, 157, 203, 214 pragmaticism 130 pragmatism 5, 11, 34, 36, 52n, 67, 162, 175, 180n8 analytic 1 and modernist literature 128ff

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231

SUBJECT Index and valuation 2, 107, 203, 214 prevalence 17ff, 27 by contrast with alescence 21–22 proception theory of 6–7, 163n, 171n–172n Proletkult 153, 201 proof not the goal of philosophical inquiry 2, 80, 106–107 public authority and interests 160, 170 and political experience 152–153, 159–161, 170, 213 Qatar 185 query 9–10, 65, 85 as aspect of judgment 74ff, 125–126, 141, 147–148, 151 in achievement of knowledge 94–95, 102, 107–108, 109, 111–112, 208–209 relation to inquiry 74ff, 89, 108, 148, 150 various forms of 75, 89, 107–108, 109, 111–112, 121, 139, 142, 151, 212 reductionism 15, 25, 204 relationality 137–138, 171 of an ordinal ontology 15, 53 relations and human being 39, 43–44, 49, 52, 54, 58, 91, 138, 172, 207, 213 internal and external 23–24 ontology of 2, 6, 10, 15ff, 26–28, 54, 57, 91–92, 136–137, 171, 205 religion 188, 191n, 192–194 in experience 12 Russian Federation 149, 153, 201 and nationalism 194–195 and single-party rule 191–192 Russian Revolution 201 Saudi Arabia 185–186 sciences 29, 31, 108, 113, 170, 181, 205 natural 24–25 as source of knowledge 82, 89, 92, 94–95, 124, 204–205 relation with art 75, 107–108, 212 social 89, 94, 108, 113

sculpture 72, 75, 122 and power 155 cognitive significance of 110, 140, 148 secularism 191n, 192 sense data 26, 28, 47ff, 81, 83 single-party state 191n as form of social/political organization 190, 192ff situations as dissonance 173 indeterminate 86 problematic 77, 120, 203, 211 social contract 186 socialism 194–195 and political forms 191, 195 Socialist Realism 155 solipsism 43, 48 somaesthetics 4 Soviet Union 149, 153, 155, 179, 194–195 substance 15–16, 18, 41, 44, 48, 118 Thames Monet’s paintings of 143–145 theater 140, 148–149, 153 cognitive significance of 110 theocracy as form of social/political organization 173, 189–190, 213 contrast with liberal democracy 187–189, 193 Thirty Years War 131 transubstantiation 16 truth 6, 9, 68, 80 and judgment 70–71, 78, 102, 127, 167–168, 170 and ordinary experience 67, 96–98 and possibilities 105, 210 and power 113, 165 and propositions 6, 63, 89, 96, 98, 101–102, 110–111, 125, 127 as a feature of the cognitive dimension of experience 8, 10, 67, 76ff, 92, 95, 98, 101ff, 105, 107ff, 123, 171–172 as correspondence 102, 210 ‘happens’ 102, 125, 210 in art 101, 124ff, 170 in literature 63, 126–127, 130ff

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232 truth (cont.) three senses of 103ff, 210 when an idea ‘works’ 102, 107, 112, 132–133, 162, 210 United Arab Emirates (uae) 186ff United Kingdom (UK) 187–188 United States of America (US) 156, 177, 179, 187, 189, 193 unity as a feature of the aesthetic dimension 78, 117ff, 171–172

SUBJECT Index universities 66, 94 and censorship 156 not an ‘ivory tower’ 214 valuation 2, 105, 113, 123, 133, 140–141 of philosophical propositions 106–107 usefulness as criterion of 100–101, 203 Vienna Circle 16 Vietnam, Socialist Republic of 191, 195 Vietnam War 168

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