Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: The Vital Depths of Experience

(Hardback)

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John Dewey was the most celebrated and publicly engaged American philosopher in the twentieth century. His naturalistic theory of experience generated new approaches to education and democracy and re-grounded philosophys search for truth in the needs of life as it is shared and lived. However, interpretations of Dewey after the linguistic turn have either obscured or rejected the considerable role that he gives to the non-discursive dimension of experience. In Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: The Vital Depths of Experience, Bethany Henning argues that much classical American philosophy implicitly recognizes an unconscious dimension of mind that is distinct from Freuds theory. Although the unconscious that emerges within American thought has never been treated systematically, it found its fullest expression in Deweys work, particularly in his theory of aesthetic experience. This dimension of mind illuminates the continuity between nature and culture, and it provides us with an account of why artwork is often successful at communicating meanings from the ecological and intimate dimensions of life, where discourse often fails. If the relationship between the human and the organic world has emerged as the definitive question of twenty-first century life, then the aesthetic unconscious stands as a resource for our ecological and intimate well-being.

Reviews

"Bethany Henning explores a rarely treatedbut fundamentaldimension of Dewey's thought: the aesthetic unconscious. She does so with deep insight and nuanced care, producing a work that must be counted at the forefront of a new generation of scholarship on this complex and often misunderstood philosopher."

"Henning finds words for the wordless, touching the live depths of Deweyand of art, love, and nature."

Author Bio

Bethany Henning is the Besl Chair for Ethics/Religion and Society in the Philosophy Department at Xavier University.