Since I graduated from college, I have developed a deep respect for the American educational reformer and philosopher John Dewey. My first encounter with Dewey was through his book Democracy and Education, which I read some years ago. Dewey’s insights into the mechanisms underlying the process of learning had a profound influence on my thinking. His analysis seemed to explain why my experience in the regimented American public education system had failed to deeply spark my interest in elementary or high school. His holistic view of education as a process that spans well beyond the confines of formal schooling has served as an inspiration for my own ongoing efforts to broaden my intellectual horizons and engage deeply with the world. His ideas have particularly influenced my approach to tutoring—I seek in the Deweyian spirit to help young people make meaningful connections between the subjects of their studies and their own experiences. Because Dewey so deeply influenced my ideas about learning, when I recently discovered that he had written a book on aesthetic theory called Art as Experience, I knew I had to get my hands on a copy.
In Art as Experience, Dewey seeks reestablish the connections between aesthetic experience — whether in making art or appreciating it —.and deeply lived everyday human experience. He argues that modern Western society has created an artificial separation between these two interrelated forms of experience, rendering aesthetic experience something inaccessible and alien to the common person. Although Dewey’s primary purpose is to analyze aesthetic experience in its close relation to other modes of deep human experience in the hopes of reversing Western society’s problematic tendency to alienate average people from the aesthetic, some of his passing observations in Art as Experience demonstrate a profound understanding of another troubling aspect of modern society’s attitude towards the arts — the tendency to treat them as somehow less valuable, rigorous, or worthwhile than activities perceived to be more economically productive. In discussing the process of artistic creation, Dewey writes:
Because perception of relationship between what is done and what is undergone [i.e. the perception of cause and effect in action and result] constitutes the work of intelligence, and because the artist is controlled in the process of his work by his grasp of the connection between what he has already done and what he is to do next, the idea that the artist does not think as intently and penetratingly as a scientific inquirer is absurd. A painter must consciously undergo the effect of his every brush stroke or he will not be aware of what he is doing and where his work is going. Moreover, he has to see each particular connection of doing and undergoing in relation to the whole that he desires to produce. To apprehend such relations is to think, and is one of the most exacting modes of thought. The difference between the pictures of different painters is due quite as much to differences of capacity to carry on this thought as it is to differences of sensitivity to bare color and to differences in dexterity of execution. As respects the basic quality of pictures, difference depends, indeed, more upon the quality of intelligence brought to bear upon perception of relations than upon anything else—though of course intelligence cannot be separated from direct sensitivity and is connected, though in a more external manner, with skill. [emphasis added]
One can detect in this passage that Dewey, who first delivered the ideas that came to comprise Art as Experience in a lecture at Harvard in 1932, was troubled by the tendency of industrial society to undervalue the arts, a tendency which has only been amplified in the post-industrial world. Western society has developed a pervasive habit of treating the arts as less rigorous, less valuable, even superfluous. The pervasiveness of disparagement of the arts in our discourse has even driven some parents to pressure their children into studying something more “practical” for fear that the study of the liberal arts will not prove sufficiently remunerative in the long term to outweigh the admittedly outrageously high cost of post-secondary education.
But why is post-industrial Western society so prejudiced against the arts? It is true that studying something like the classics or painting does not lead directly to a predefined place in the post-industrial workforce, but why does society seem so incapable of realizing the many other benefits that the liberal arts have to offer? Ironically, at its heart, this prejudice against the arts has its origins in a failure of precisely the sort of penetrating thinking that Dewey describes as the core of the artist’s work—the formation of connections between an immediate action and its result and the perception of how that result fits into the larger picture of what the artist is trying to achieve. The idea that the arts lack rigor and importance is the result of a superficial, narrow, and crassly materialistic perspective that fails to account for their true benefits.
We live in a world that has become obsessed with productivity and endless growth, and the fact that many branches of the arts do not have any obvious and explicit connections to “productive” professions is often taken as definitive proof that these disciplines can have no relevance to economic pursuits. The failure to perceive any relevance of the arts for economic production leads directly to the belief that they have little real value. This is particularly true of fine art, which is generally not suitable for economic ends in any direct sense. Dewey notes as much in Art as Experience, writing “Because of changes in the industrial conditions the artist has been pushed to one side from the main streams of active interests. Industry has been mechanized and an artist cannot work mechanically for mass production.” Even when fine art is commoditized, it can never be the product of an assembly line. It cannot be outsourced to developing labor markets for cheaper production to maximize profits.
Even if we adopt this flawed and myopic perspective, however, the idea that the arts have little to contribute to modern society does not withstand closer inspection. The productivity- and profitability-obsessed mindset that would discredit fine art, for instance, fails to realize its potential role as a catalyst to productivity. At its root, fine art is about connecting through human experience. Art can communicate on a far deeper level than verbal explanation, even when its medium is language (as in poetry, songwriting, or fiction). Through creating and interacting with art, we can gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a human being, to experience these desires and frustrations, to be aware of our own mortality. This almost mystical communicative power of art has the potential to refresh our morale, to restore our willingness to continue in the face of life’s many discomforts. What the narrow productivity-obsessed view that discounts fine art fails to recognize is that art has the power to renew people’s spirits and drive them to new feats of creativity in problem solving, to foster effective communications based on a deeper empathetic understanding of what it means to be a human being.
On another level, the prejudice against the arts is based on a false perception that STEM fields deal solely with concrete facts and problems with single solutions which can be arrived at through rigorous analysis. This idea is true to an extent, but if one scratches the surface of many subjects within STEM, one finds that it has its limitations. The study of physics, for instance, presents at its more basic levels a very rigid understanding of events. The description in Newtonian mechanics of the collision of two billiard balls seems to admit of no ambiguity or interpretation. Yet the very approachability of such problems in the academic context is to a certain extent the result of a gross simplification which eliminates factors like wind resistance or friction or assumes that acceleration is constant. The rules governing physics may be quite rigid, but any engineer with experience will tell you that their application in the real world is far from the exact science of a textbook problem. Even within the realm of more pure science, quantum physics has shown that there is room for interpretation. Is a particle moving forward in time or is an antiparticle moving backwards? The mathematics underpinning quantum theory cannot answer such questions. Thus Niels Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, said, "We must be clear that, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry." Even mathematics, which seems like a bulwark of rigid rationality and rigorous analysis, runs in its more advanced branches into realms that have thus far proven largely intractable from an analytical perspective. There are many sorts of differential equations, for instance, for which there is no known analytical approach to finding solutions.
I should note that my intent here is not to disparage rigid analytical approaches to problem solving. Such approaches, which form the foundation of STEM disciplines, are extremely incisive and useful tools for examining the world. My point here is that those methods cannot and should not be pursued in isolation and to the exclusion of the style of thinking promoted by education in the liberal arts. In the real world, problems without precise boundaries are the rule rather than the exception. Because STEM fields of necessity treat the real world and its myriad complexities, it is inevitable that they will run into situations so complex that they require a different kind of problem solving. Such ambiguous problems are precisely the sort which the arts can help to address. Whether one is faced with a moral quandary or a question of interpreting the complex probabilistic description of our world in terms of its smallest components, the perception of connection to which Dewey refers in the passage quoted above is humanity’s best asset, and the liberal arts can in a larger sense be considered the study of how to apply this mode of thought to untidy problems. The arts offer a potent and necessary compliment to the more rigid analytical approach at the core of the STEM disciplines.
I believe human society is at crossroads where the skills offered by the arts are more necessary than ever. We have advanced sufficiently far as a species to become cognizant of the potentially devastating consequences of the activities which fueled our very advancement — the unbridled exploitation of the environment and the practice of colonialism. We face numerous global ecological, social, and political crises, and our world is filled with signs of moral and emotional distress. Major depression is on the rise among all age groups in the United States, and the suicide rate is at a 30 year high. Our news cycles are plagued by mass shootings and hate crimes. We face an epidemic of loneliness despite our increasing interconnection through digital technologies. Across the globe populist politicians have taken to fanning the flames of xenophobia for their own aggrandizement. If we are to confront these serious problems, we cannot afford to continue to write the arts off as a frivolous and impractical pursuit. We need their powers to connect us to one another and to augment the more rigid styles of thinking which have driven our technological advance but have not proved sufficient in themselves to ward off potential disaster.