Learning and Teaching Art as Experience

In the preceding six chapters, we sought to trace in an illuminating way a series of common issues and interests that suffuse Dewey’s and Pirsig’s metaphysics, aesthetics, and individual outlooks with respect to personal and cultural renewal. We saw among these issues and interests many areas of substantive agreement, and several of disagreement as well. In the latter areas, where the value of the social and bodily dimensions of experience (or Quality) was foremost in question, I spoke at length about what I take to be the merits of Dewey’s respective positions. We likewise identified through Pirsig a number of Dewey’s apparent shortcomings as a thinker and as a writer. In addition, Dewey’s and Pirsig’s recurring motifs of a poetics of the everyday mediated this inquiry: meaning that the discussion centered on the various ways in which an appreciation for the generic traits qualitative immediacy, the stable and precarious (or the static and Dynamic), continuity (or association), novelty, pluralism, potentiality, contingency, and temporality is required of environments that support the cultivation of art as experience. This final chapter investigates some of the questions and issues involved in creating such an environment in a formal classroom setting. Before we begin, here is a last look at the focal questions that have guided us to this point: (1) What sort of world is it that makes art as experience possible? (2) What is the general nature of aesthetic experience and how might it serve to nurture the human erōs? (3) How might art as experience contribute to an everyday poetics of living? (4) What kinds of learning environments—formal and informal—help to foster art as experience?