ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to highlight the difficulties Dewey experiences in trying to flesh out a coherent theory of experience. He recognizes that such a coherent theory requires a sense of the connection between reflective and non-reflective experience. However, because he considers all forms of analysis to be reflective only, his attempts to understand this connection are purely from the perspective of reflective experience. Dewey’s beliefs about analysis as reflective only are premised on his understanding of time as chiefly governed by temporal continuity, meaning that time exists as a timeline, with past-present-future as points along this line. This means that the immediate present moment is always fleeting, moving into the past before it can be reflected upon. From this perspective, non-reflective experience is background context to reflective experience, a background which is continuous with the two types of reflective experience. In other words the products of concrete and abstract reflective experience accumulate as the contextual background to further analysis; they operate in this way as mind. However, in Dewey’s framework the immediate non-reflective moment remains problematic. He understands it as subjective consciousness. Importantly, he connects this with emotion and from there with art, calling it aesthetic experience. This aesthetic experience is much closer in kind to existence understood as simple qualitative whole.
