Dewey’s Deconstructive Hermeneutic: Contra the Phenomenology and Morphology of Aesthetic-Mystical Experience Statically Conceived

Summary

John Dewey's philosophy challenges the idea of static essentialism by emphasizing that aesthetic-mystical experiences are dynamic and evolve over time, rather than being instantaneous. He argues that these experiences must be understood in the context of past and future, highlighting the principle of continuity in human experience. For Dewey, beauty is not a momentary perception but a process shaped by our ongoing habits and temporal connections.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, I explore how John Dewey, through an application of his antiessentialist empirical naturalism, deconstructs the essentialist phenomenology of stasis as the dialectical development of preconceived notions constructed without any reference to aesthetic-mystical experience as it is lived. I endeavor to show that the only empirically justified phenomenological characterization of aesthetic-mystical experience for Dewey is that it is an intensified development of the traits and conditions belonging to every normally completed experience: what Dewey calls "an experience," whose dynamic growing form has run its course to fulfillment. I do so by drawing attention to the "principle of continuity" implicit in Dewey’s situational field theory of experience, which is a function of the unity of the habitual body that preobjectively confers sense, meaning, and temporal continuity to every passing moment. I contend that, on the basis of this principle, Dewey rejects the notion of aesthetic-mystical experience as something instantaneously had. Beauty for Dewey is not a "simultaneous perception" whose ex nihilo emergence is absolutely divorced from any association with past and future. I show that, due to the unity of habit and the principle of continuity, Dewey holds that there must be dynamic temporal direction and thickness to the experience.