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Between Ordinary and Extraordinary: A Deweyan Approach to Ordinary, Aesthetic, and Cultic Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 June 2020
Abstract
The relation between the everyday and the religious cult has traditionally been regarded as one of opposition, like the profane and the sacred. Since such a conception comes with a high price—rendering the cult esoteric and the everyday bereft of religious significance—this article proposes a more complex dynamic between the two. Drawing on Dewey’s idea of aesthetic experience as an intensification of ordinary experience, the article argues that a similar structure should be applied to the cult, or, more specifically, cultic play. In cultic play, there is admittedly discontinuity from ordinary life, owing to play’s distinct settings and rules. Nevertheless, such discontinuity reveals a deeper continuity, in which ordinary experience becomes present in new, sacred ways. In a dialectical manner, cultic play draws on ordinary experience, discloses and intensifies it through the context of play, and thus points forward to possibilities for inhabiting the everyday in richer ways.
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- © President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2020
References
1 What I have called “the logic of separation” is discussed at length in my Phenomenology and the Holy: Religious Experience after Husserl (London: SCM, 2010) chs. 1, 7.
2 Richard Shusterman accounts for these two contemporary trends in “Back to the Future: Aesthetics Today,” Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2012) 110–11. For an example of the former, see Thomas Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Ordinary Life (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press: 2012); for an example of the latter, see Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
3 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Worlds: Reclaiming an Unredeemed Utopian Motif,” New Literary History 37 (2006) 300.
4 Ibid., 316.
5 John Dewey, Art as Experience (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008) 12 (hereafter cited as AE).
6 Despite being criticized for excluding ordinary occurrences from the field of aesthetics, Dewey remains perhaps the most important ancestor of everyday aesthetics (Sherri Irvin, “The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience,” British Journal of Aesthetics 48 [2008] 32).
7 John Dewey, A Common Faith (2nd ed.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) 10.
8 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications, 1958) 6–7.
9 Here, as in many other places, Dewey’s pragmatism moves in a close circle with phenomenology. For the aesthetic ramifications of Husserl’s notion of horizons, see my “Toward a Phenomenology of Painting: Husserl’s Horizon and Rothko’s Abstraction,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 41 (2010) 229–45.
10 William M. Shea, “Qualitative Wholes: Aesthetic and Religious Experience in the Work of John Dewey,” JR 60 (1980) 43–46.
11 Dewey, A Common Faith, 35.
12 Ibid., 17.
13 John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: Prometheus Books, 2002) 37. Cf. chs. 1–2.
14 The appeal to totality, unity, and consummation in aesthetic experience has been under attack from advocates of everyday aesthetics for other reasons; see for example, Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary, 58.
15 Dewey, Experience and Nature, 21.
16 I am drawing on Martin Heidegger’s analysis of wonder (Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic” [trans. R. Rojcewics and A. Schuwer; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994] 131–33).
17 Emmanuel Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl (trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998) 111.
18 Bernhard Waldenfels, In den Netzen der Lebenswelt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994) 45–54.
19 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. Joan Stambaugh; Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010) 161–73.
20 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (Sioux Falls, SD: NuVision, 2007) 165–67.
21 Romano Guardini, Vom Geist der Liturgie (Mainz: Grünewald, 1997) 57–59. Hans Georg Gadamer has a similar view; see his Die Aktualität des Schönen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977) 29–30. See also my “Cultic and Aesthetic Experience: Revelation, Play, Mimesis,” Transfiguration: Nordic Journal of Religion and the Arts (2010/2011) 77–82.
22 Eugen Fink, Play as Symbol of the World (trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016) 130.
23 Ibid., 24.
24 Roger Caillois, “The Definition of Play and the Classification of Games,” in The Game Design Reader: A Rule of Play Anthology (ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) 125. Cf. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: The Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1950) 19.
25 Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary, 77.
26 Gadamer, Die Aktualität des Schönen, 46.
27 Dewey, A Common Faith, 17; Fink, Play as Symbol of the World, 25.
28 Fink, Play as Symbol of the World, 133.
29 Dewey, Experience and Nature, 38.
30 Ibid., 7.
31 Dewey also emphasizes the forward orientation in religion; see Dewey, A Common Faith, 40.