Abstract
This article makes a comparative analysis of Dewey's debt to and distance from Emerson in the vein of the aesthetic theory of form. In their aesthetic projects, Dewey and Emerson, departing from the criticism of the relevant traditional theories of form, base their formal thoughts on the everyday experience, construct them into formal theories with organic and dynamic features, and eventually treat the way of achieving aesthetic form as a valid approach to human significance. But in methodology, Dewey differs from Emerson. In the aesthetic subject's detached phenomenological observation of natural facts, Emerson, in the logic of sensory-perception, transforms analogically his experience of seeing into a form of an organic whole, while Dewey is more concerned with the opening of natural facts (or artwork's facts) to the aesthetic subject's multiple sensory, the subject's coordination with nature as well as his growth in wisdom in the collaborative process. Dewey's form, as a dynamic balance of conflicting forces in nature, is of historical and progressive rhythm and harmony formed through the subject's doing with nature and his undergoing in nature. If Emerson's theory of form is a method in which for Man to realize his self-renewal, then Dewey's theory of form is a paradigm by which for Man to live an artful life.
First Page
182
Last Page
190
Recommended Citation
Yin, Xiaofang. 2018. "Form in the Vein of Pragmatist Aesthetics: Dewey's Debt to and Distance from Emerson." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 38, (5): pp.182-190. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol38/iss5/8
