with deliberately selected and arranged inventions and artifices, is in effect a recognition that the teleology of nature is achieved and exhibited bv nature in thinking, not apart from it. If modem theories have often failed to note this implication and have instead contented them¬ selves with a denial of all teleology, the reason is adven¬ titious; it is found in the gratuitous breach of continuity between nature, life, and man.
“This,” whatever this may be, always implies a system of meanings focussed at a point of stress, uncertainty, and need of regulation. It sums up history, and at the same time opens a new page; it is record and promise in one; a fulfillment and an opportunity. It is a fruition of what has happened and a transitive agency of what is to happen. It is a comment written by natural events on their own direction and tendency, and a surmise of whither they are leading. Every perception, or awareness, marks a “this,” and every “this” being a consummation in¬ volves retention, and hence contains the capacity of remembering. Every “'this” is transitive, momentarily becoming a “that.” In its movement it is, therefore, conditioning of what is to come; it presents the potential¬ ity of foresight and prediction. The union of past and future with the present manifest in every awareness of meanings is a mystery only when consciousness is gratu¬ itously divided from nature, and when nature is denied EXISTENCE AND IDEAS temporal and historic quality. When consciousness is connected with nature, the mystery becomes a luminous revelation of the operative interpenetration in nature of the efficient and the fulfilling.
CHAPTER NINE Experience, Nature and Art Experience, with the Greeks, signified a store of practi¬ cal wisdom, a fund of insights useful in conducting the affairs of fife. Sensation and perception were its occa¬ sion and supplied it with pertinent materials, but did not of themselves constitute it. They generated experience when retention was added and when a common factor in the multitude of felt and perceived cases detached itself so as to become available in judgment and exertion. Thus understood, experience is exemplified in the discrimina¬ tion and skill of the good carpenter, pilot, physician, captain-at-arms; experience is equivalent to art. Modern theory has quite properly extended the application of the term to cover many things that the Greeks would hardly have called “experience,” the bare having of aches and pains, or a play of colors before the eyes. But even those who hold tins larger signification would admit, I suppose, that such “experiences” count only when they result in insight, or in an enjoyed perception, and that only thus do they define experience in its honorific sense.
Greek thinkers nevertheless disparaged experience in comparison with something called reason and science. The ground for depreciation was not that usually assigned in modern philosophy; it was not that experience is “subjective.” On the contrary, experience was con¬ sidered to be a genuine expression of cosmic forces, not an exclusive attribute or possession of animal or of human nature. It was taken to be a realization of inferior por- EXPERIENCE, NATURE AND ART 355 tions of nature, those infected with chance and change, the less Being part of the cosmos. Thus while experience meant art, art reflected the contingencies and partialities of nature, while science — theory — exhibited its necessities and universalities. Art was born of need, lack, depriva¬ tion, incompleteness, while science — theory — manifested fullness and totality of Being. Thus the depreciatory view of experience was identical with a conception that placed practical activity below theoretical activity, find¬ ing the former dependent, impelled from outside, marked by deficiency of real being, while the latter was independ¬ ent and free because complete and self-sufficing: that is perfect.
In contrast with this self-consistent position we find a curious mixture in modern thinking. The latter feels under no obligation to present a theory of natural exist¬ ence that links art with nature; on the contrary, it usually holds that science or knowledge is the only authentic expression of nature, in which case art must be an arbi¬ trary addition to nature. But modern thought also com¬ bines exaltation of science with eulogistic appreciation of art, especially of fine or creative art. At the same time it retains the substance of the classic disparagement of the practical in contrast with the theoretical, although formulating it in somewhat different language: to the effect that knowledge deals with objective reality as it is in itself, while in what is “practical,” ' objective reality is altered and cognitively distorted by subjective factors of want, emotion and striving. And yet in its encomium of art, it fails to note the commonplace of Greek observa¬ tion — that the fine arts as well as the industrial technolo¬ gies are affairs of practice.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE This confused plight is partly cause and partly effect of an almost universal confusion of the artistic and the esthetic. On one hand, there is action that deals with materials and energies outside the body, assembling, refining, combining, manipulating them until their new state yields a satisfaction not afforded by their crude condition — a formula that applies to fine and useful art alike. On the other hand, there is the delight that attends vision and hearing, an enhancement of the receptive ap¬ preciation and assimilation of objects irrespective of participation in the operations of production. Provided the difference of the two things is recognized, it is no matter whether the words “esthetic” and “artistic” or other terms be used to designate the distinction, for the difference is not one of words but of objects. But in some form the difference must be acknowledged.
The community in which Greek art was produced was small; numerous and complicated intermediaries be¬ tween production and consumption were iacking; pro¬ ducers had a virtually servile status. Because of the close connection between production and enjoyable fruition, the Greeks in their perceptive uses and enjoyments were never wholly unconscious of the artisan and his work, not even when they personally were exclusively concerned with delightful contemplation. But since the artist was an artisan (the term artist having none of the eulogistic connotations of present usage), and since the artisan occupied an inferior position, the enjoyment of works of any art did not stand upon the same level as enjoyment of those objects for the realization of which manual activ¬ ity was not needed. Objects of rational thought, of contemplative insight were the only things that met the EXPERIENCE, NATURE AND ART 357 specification of freedom from need, labor, and matter. They alone were self-sufficient, self-existent, and self- explanatory, and hence enjoyment of them was on a higher plane than enjoyment of works of art.
These conceptions were consistent with one another and with the conditions of social life at the time. Nowa¬ days we have a messy conjunction of notions that are consistent neither with one another nor with the tenor of our actual life. Knowledge is still regarded by most thinkers as direct grasp of ultimate reality, although the practice of knowing has been assimilated to the procedure of the useful arts; — involving, that is to say, doing that manipulates and arranges natural energies. Again while science is said to lay hold of reality, yet “art” instead of being assigned a lower rank is equally esteemed and honored. And when within art a distinction is drawn between production and appreciation, the chief honor usually goes to the former on the ground that it is “crea¬ tive,” while taste is relatively possessive and passive, dependent for its material upon the activities of the creative artist.
If Greek philosophy was correct in thinking of knowl¬ edge as contemplation rather than as a productive art, and if modern philosophy accepts this conclusion, then the only logical course is relative disparagement of all forms of production, since they are modes of practice which is by conception inferior to contemplation. The artistic is then secondary to the esthetic: “creation,” to “taste,” and the scientific worker — as we significantly say — is subordinate in rank and worth to the dilettante who enjoys the results of his labors. But if modern tendencies are justified in putting art and creation first, EXPERIENCE AND NATURE then the implications of this position should be avowed and carried through. It would then be seen that science is an art, that art is practice, and that the only distinc¬ tion worth drawing is not between practice and theory, but between those modes of practice that are not intelli¬ gent, not inherently and immediately enjoyable, and those which are full of enjoyed meanings. When this percep¬ tion dawns, it will be a commonplace that art — the mode of activity that is charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed possession — is the complete cul¬ mination of nature, and that “science” is properly a handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue. Thus would disappear the separations that trouble present thinking: division of everything into nature and experience, of experience into practice and theory, art and science, of art into useful and fine, menial and free.
Thus the issue involved in experience as art in its preg¬ nant sense and in art as processes and materials of nature continued by direction into achieved and enjoyed mean¬ ings, sums up in itself all the issues which have been previ¬ ously considered. Thought, intelligence, science is the in¬ tentional direction of natural events to meanings capable of immediate possession and enjoyment; this direction — which is operative art— -is itself a natural event in which nature otherwise partial and incomplete comes fully to itself; so that objects of conscious experience when reflec¬ tively chosen, form the “end” of nature. The doings and sufferings that form experience are, in the degree in which experience is intelligent or charged with meanings, a union of the precarious, novel, irregular with the settled, assured and uniform — a union which also defines the artistic and the esthetic. For wherever there is art the EXPERIENCE, NATURE AND ART 359 contingent and ongoing no longer work at cross purposes with the formal and recurrent but commingle in harmony. And the distinguishing feature of conscious experience, of what for short is often called “consciousness,” is that in it the instrumental and the final, meanings that are signs and clews and meanings that are immediately possessed, suffered and enjoyed, come together in one. And all of these things are preeminently true of art.
First, then, art is solvent union of the generic, recurrent, ordered, established phase of nature with its phase that is incomplete, going on, and hence still uncertain, contin¬ gent, novel, particular; or as certain systems of esthetic theory have truly declared, though without empirical basis and import in their words, a union of necessity and freedom, a harmony of the many and one, a reconciliation of sensuous and ideal. Of any artistic act and product it may be said both that it is inevitable in its rightness, that nothing in it can be altered without altering all, and that its occurrence is spontaneous, unexpected, fresh, unpredictable. The presence in art, whether as an act or a product, of proportion, economy, order, symmetry, composition, is such a commonplace that it does not need to be dwelt upon. But equally necessary is unex¬ pected combination, and the consequent revelation of possibilities hitherto unrealized. “Repose in stimulation” characterizes art. Order and proportion when they are the whole story are soon exhausted; economy in itself is a tiresome and restrictive taskmaster. It is artistic when it releases.
The more extensive and repeated are the basic uniformi¬ ties of nature that give form to art, the “greater” is the art, provided — and it is this proviso that distinguishes EXPERIENCE AND NATURE art — they are indistinguishably fused with the wonder of the new and the grace of the gratuitous. “Creation” may be asserted vaguely and mystically; but it denotes something genuine and indispensable in art. The merely finished is not fine but ended, done with, and the merely “fresh” is that bumptious impertinence indicated by the slang use of the word. The “magic” of poetry — and pregnant experience has poetical quality — is precisely the revelation of meaning in the old effected by its pre¬ sentation through the new. It radiates the light that never was on land and sea but that is henceforth an abiding illumination of objects. Music in its immediate occurrence is the most varied and etherial of the arts, but is in its conditions and structure the most mechanical. These things are commonplaces; but until they are com¬ monly employed in their evidential significance for a theory of nature’s nature, there is no cause to apologize for their citation.
The limiting terms that define art are routine at one extreme and capricious impulse at the other. It is hardly worth while to oppose science and art sharply to one another, when the deficiencies and troubles of life are so evidently due to separation between art and blind routine and blind impulse. Routine exemplies the uni¬ formities and recurrences of nature, caprice expresses its inchoate initiations and deviations. Each in isolation is unnatural as well as inartistic, for nature is an inter¬ section of spontaneity and necessity, the regular and the novel, the finished and the beginning. It is right to object to much of current practice on the ground that it is routine, just as it is right to object to much of our current enjoyments on the ground that they are spasms of excited EXPERIENCE, NATURE AND ART 361 escape from the thraldom of enforced work. But to transform a just objection against the quality of much of our practical life into a description and definition of practice is on the same plane as to convert legitimate objection to trivial distraction, senseless amusement, and sensual absorption, into a Puritanical aversion to happiness. The idea that work, productive activity, signifies action carried on for merely extraneous ends, and the idea that happiness signifies surrender of mind to the thrills and excitations of the body are one and the same idea. The first notion marks the separation of activity from meaning, and the second marks the separation of receptivity from meaning. Both separations are inevi¬ table as far as experience fails to be art: — when the regu¬ lar, repetitious, and the novel, contingent in nature fail to sustain and inform each other in a productive activity possessed of immanent and directly enjoyed meaning.
Thus the theme has insensibly passed over into that of the relation of means and consequence, process and product, the instrumental and consummatory. Any activity that is simultaneously both, rather than in alternation and displacement, is art. Disunion of pro¬ duction and consumption is a common enough occurrence. But emphasis upon this separation in order to exalt the consummatory does not define or interpret either art or experience. It obscures their meaning, resulting in a division of art into useful and fine, adjectives which, when they are prefixed to “art,” corrupt and destroy its intrin¬ sic significance. For arts that are merely useful are not arts but routines; and arts that are merely final are not arts but passive amusements and distractions, different from other indulgent dissipations only in dependence upon a certain acquired refinement or “cultivation.”
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE The existence of activities that have no immediate enjoyed intrinsic meaning is undeniable. They in¬ clude much of our labors in home, factory, laboratory and study. By no stretch of language can they be termed either artistic or esthetic. Yet they exist, and are so coercive that they require some attentive recognition. So we optimistically call them “useful” and let it go at that, thinking that by calling them useful we have some¬ how justified and explained their occurrence. If we were to ask useful for what? we should be obliged to examine their actual consequences, and when we once honestly and fully faced these consequences we should probably find ground for calling such activities detrimental rather than useful.
We call them useful because we arbitrarily cut short our consideration of consequences. We bring into view simply their efficacy in bringing into existence certain commodities; we do not ask for their effect upon the quality of human life and experience. They are useful to make shoes, houses, motor cars, money, and other things which may then be put to use; here inquiry and imagination stop. What they also make by way of narrowed, embittered, and crippled life, of congested, hurried, confused and extrava¬ gant life, is left in oblivion. But to bejiselulis to fulfill need. The characteristic human need is for possession and appreciation of the meaning of things, and this need is ignored and unsatisfied in the traditional notion of the useful. We identify utility with the external rela¬ tionship that some events and acts bear to other things that are their products, and thus leave out the only thing that is essential to the idea of utility, inherent place and bearing in experience. Our classificatory use of the EXPERIENCE, NATURE AND ART 363 conception of some arts as merely instrumental so as to dispose of a large part of human activity is no solving de¬ finition; it rather conveys an immense and urgent problem.
The same statement applies to the conception of merely fine or final arts and works of art. In point of fact, the things designated by the phrase to fall under three cap¬ tions. There are activities and receptivities to which the name of “self-expression” is often applied as a eulogistic qualification, in which one indulges himself by giving free outward exhibition to his own states without reference to the conditions upon which intelligible communication depends — an act also sometimes known as “expression of emotion,” which is then set up for definition of all fine art. It is easy to dispose of this art by calling it a prod¬ uct of egotism due to balked activity in other occupa¬ tions. But this treatment misses a more significant point. For all art is a process of making the world a different place in which to live, and involves a phase of protest and of compensatory response. Such art as there is in these manifestations lies in this factor. It is owing to frustra¬ tion in communication of meanings that the protest be¬ comes arbitrary and the compensatory response wilfully eccentric.
In addition to this type — and frequently mingled with it — -there is experimentation in new modes or craftsman¬ ship, cases where the seemingly bizarre and over-indi¬ vidualistic character of the products is due to discontent with existing technique, and is associated with an attempt to find new modes of language. It is aside from the point either to greet these manifestations as if they constituted art for the first time in human history, or to condemn them as not art because of their violent departures from received EXPERIENCE AND NATURE canons and methods. Some movement in this direction has always been a condition of growth of new forms, a condition of salvation from that mortal arrest and decay called academic art.
Then there is that which in quantity bulks most largely as fine art: the production of buildings in the name of the art of architecture; of pictures in the name of the art of painting; of novels, dramas, etc., in the name of literary art; a production which in reality is largely a form of commercialized industry in production of a class of com¬ modities that find their sale among well-to-do persons desirous of maintaining a conventionally approved status. As the first two modes carry to disproportionate excess that factor of particularity, contingency and difference which is indispensable in all art, deliberately flaunting avoid¬ ance of the repetitions and order of nature; so this mode celebrates the regular and finished. It is reminiscent rather than commemorative of the meanings of experi¬ enced things. Its products remind their owner of things pleasant in memory though hard in direct-undergoing, and remind others that their owner has achieved an economic standard which makes possible cultivation and decoration of leisure.
Obviously no one of these classes of activity and prod¬ uct or all of them put together, mark off anything that can be called distinctively fine art. They share their qualities and defects with many other acts and objects. But, fortunately, there may be mixed with any one of them, and, still more fortunately, there may occur with¬ out mixture, process and product that are characteristi¬ cally excellent. This occurs when activity is productive of an object that affords continuously renewed delight.
EXPERIENCE, NATURE AND ART 365 This condition requires that the object be, with its suc¬ cessive consequences, indefinitely instrumental to new satisfying events. For otherwise the object is quickly exhausted and satiety sets in. Anyone who reflects upon the commonplace that a measure of artistic products is their capacity to attract and retain observation with satisfaction under whatever conditions they are ap¬ proached, while things of less quality soon lose capacity to hold attention becoming indifferent or repellent upon subsequent approach, has a sure demonstration that a genuinely esthetic object is not exclusively consummatory but is casually productive as well. A consummatory object that is not also instrumental turns in time to the dust and ashes of boredom. The “eternal” quality of great art is its renewed instrumentality for further con¬ summatory experiences.
When this fact is noted, it is also seen that limitation of fineness of art to paintings, statues, poems, songs and symphonies is conventional, or even verbal. Any activity that is productive of objects whose perception is an im¬ mediate good, and whose operation is a continual source of enjoyable perception of other events exhibits fineness of art. There are acts of all kinds that directly refresh and enlarge the spirit and that are instrumental to the production of new objects and dispositions which are in turn productive of further refinements and replenish¬ ments. Frequently moralists make the acts they find excellent or virtuous wholly final, and treat art and affection as mere means. Estheticians reverse the per¬ formance, and see in good acts means to an ulterior exter¬ nal happiness, while esthetic appreciation is called a good in itself, or that strange thing an end in itself. But on EXPERIENCE AND NATURE both sides it is true that in being preeminently fructify¬ ing the things designated means are immediate satis¬ factions. They are their own excuses for being just because they are charged with an office in quickening apprehension, enlarging the horizon of vision, refining discrimination, creating standards of appreciation which are confirmed and deepened by further experiences. It would almost seem when their non-instrumental character is insisted upon as if what was meant were an indefinitely expansive and radiating instrumental efficacy.
The source of the error lies in the habit of calling by the name of means things that are not means at all; things that are only external and accidental antecedents of the happening of something else. Similarly things are called ends that are not ends save accidentally, since they are not fulfilments, consummatory, of means, but merely last terms closing a process. Thus it is often said that a laborer’s toil is the means of his livelihood, although except in the most tenuous and arbitrary way it bears no relation¬ ship to his real living. Even his wage is hardly an end or consequence of his labor. He might — and frequently does — equally well or ill — perform any one of a hundred other tasks as a condition of receiving payment. The prevailing conception of instrumentality is profoundly vitiated by the habit of applying it to cases like the above, where, instead of an operation of means, there is an en¬ forced necessity of doing one thing as a coerced anteced¬ ent of the occurrence of another thing which is wanted.
Means are always at least causal conditions; but causal conditions are means only when they possess an added qualification; that, namely, of being freely used, because of perceived connection with chosen consequences. To EXPERIENCE, NATURE AND ART 367 entertain, choose and accomplish anything as an end or consequence is to be committed to a like love and care for whatever events and acts are its means. Similarly, consequences, ends, are at least effects; but effects are not ends unless thought has perceived and freely chosen the conditions and processes that are their conditions. The notion that means are menial, instrumentalities servile, is more than a degradation of means to the rank of coer¬ cive and external necessities. It renders all things upon which the name of end is bestowed accompaniments of privilege, while the name of utility becomes an apologetic justification for things that are not portions of a good and reasonable life. Livelihood is at present not so much the consequence of a wage-earner’s labor as it is the effect of other causes forming the economic regime, labor being merely an accidental appendage of these other causes.
Paints and skill in manipulative arrangement are means of a picture as end, because the picture is their assemblage and organization. Tones and susceptibility of the ear when properly interacting are the means of music, because they constitute, make, are, music. A disposition of vir¬ tue is a means to a certain quality of happiness because it is a constituent of that good, while such happiness is means in turn to virtue, as the sustaining of good in being. Flour, water, yeast are means of bread because they are ingredients of bread; while bread is a factor in life, not just to it. A good political constitution, honest police- system, and competent judiciary, are means of the pros¬ perous life of the community because they are integrated portions of that life. Science is an instrumentality of and for art because it is the intelligent factor in art. The trite saying that a hand is not a hand except as an organ EXPERIENCE AND NATURE of the living body — except as a working coordinated part of a balanced system of activities — applies untritely to all things that are means. The connection of means- consequences is never one of bare succession in time, such that the element that is means is past and gone when the end is instituted. An active process is strung out tem¬ porarily, but there is a deposit at each stage and point entering cumulatively and constitutively into the outcome. A genuine instrumentality for is always an organ of an end. It confers continued efficacy upon the object in which it is embodied.