Coleridge, John Dewey, and the Art of Contemplation

Abstract Chapter 4 reads Dewey’s Art as Experience as steeped in Coleridge, a constant reference throughout this foundational pragmatist aesthetics. Indeed Dewey said he found ‘spiritual emancipation’ in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, calling it ‘my first Bible’ (qtd in John Beer Aids to Reflection cxxv). Coleridge’s account of perception as active and creative, not passively receptive, gave Dewey profound insight into human experience, helping him articulate his philosophy of ‘art as experience’ whereby art originates in imaginative ordinary life. For Coleridge, ‘act’ and ‘activity’ ground both mind and matter in the same natural powers of production/creation: ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am’. Dewey’s analogy between the error of separating art from ordinary life, and divorcing imaginativeness from ordinary perception, shows how memories of prior acts of imaginative perception usurp the place of actual acts, as dead metaphors do in language.