ABSTRACT
This chapter build on concepts and arguments examined in prior chapters to introduce Deweys aesthetic theory and philosophy of art, especially as set forth in Experience and Nature, Qualitative Thought, and Art as Experience. It explains the concept of consummately experience as the unifying pulse of Deweys philosophy, and author will generally avoid the temptation to explicitly engage him in twenty-first-century debates among aestheticians. Civilizations high water mark, aesthetic experience, is not a merely subjective episode encased in a free-willing mind cut off from nature. Aesthetic experience, Dewey asserted, is the culminating event of nature as well as the climax of experience. He investigated the uprootedness, dislocation, and unrealized potential wrapped up in a museum concept of art that displays the aesthetic refinements of cultural existence chopped off from our natural history as imaginative living creatures. For Dewey inquiry at its best is an art that has the enrichment of immediate experience as its principal charge.
