Making and attending to art take place, however, under what Dewey calls
the condition of“the incoherence of our [modern] civilization,”^6 with its
pervasive commodity production, intense and extensive division of labor,
and consequent social antagonisms. In this condition it becomes difficult,
often, to see the satisfying realization of freely chosen purposes in work and
in life. Art, according to Dewey, sometimes achieves widely endorsable free
purposiveness in representation and expression that are embodied in the
working of materials, thereby heightening our imaginative and emotional
attentiveness to both our prospects and our powers. It can both celebrate and
indict our circumstances of life. It can both represent subject matters in an
evident way and withdraw into more abstract exercises of form-making
powers. In any of a number of specific ways, it may help us to be not quite
altogether dominated by“a babel of tongues”^7 and by pervasive social antag-
onisms.“Art has been,”according to Dewey,“the means of keeping alive the
sense of purposes that outrun evidence and of meanings that transcend
indurated habit.”^8 In presenting a subject matter as a focus for thought
and emotional attitude, distinctively fused to the imaginative exploration
of material, art provides the evidence of things not seen.(^6) Dewey,Art as Experience, p. 337.
(^7) Ibid., p. 336. Compare also George Steiner’s thought that art is what helps us to live during
the“long Saturday”between the Friday of crucifixion (pervasive antagonism, envy, felt
meaninglessness) and the Sunday of the resurrection (achieved meaningfulness and
reciprocity within sensuous human life). See George Steiner,Real Presences(University of
Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 231–32.
(^8) Dewey,Art as Experience, p. 348.
288 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art