Throughout this study we have again and again been led to consider the
relations of the aesthetic experiences to the practical life. It is as
the repository of deep desires and as the appreciation of values that
the aesthetic may be most readily seen to be practical, but it
performs other functions. As ecstatic experience it is the source of
_power_ in the conscious life, and it was indeed the belief in art as
a means of attaining power that has given art its place in the world.
The aesthetic experience is the form also in which desires are brought
into relation to one another, harmonized and transformed, or
transferred to new objects. So the aesthetic is the type of adaptation
in the inner life.
We have asserted that all life, and certainly the educational process,
must have its dramatic moments, since the dramatic experience, as
ecstasy of the social life, is the expression of social feeling in its
highest form. The aesthetic experience is the central point of
experience, so to speak, at which social ideals impinge upon and
influence and mold pure nature. Art is the form in which play,
representing biological forces, is carried to a higher stage, and made
a factor in conscious evolution. The aesthetic experience is a
practical attitude in another way. It is by our aesthetic
appreciation, more than we commonly understand, that we judge life as
a totality, that we estimate the fitness of its parts to belong to the
whole, and that indeed we guide life when we judge it not according to
principles which so often are seen to be inadequate, but when we try
to bring to bear our utmost of powers of appreciation and to find
ultimate values.
Such a recognition of the relation of art or the aesthetic to life we
see often expressed in the literature of the day. It is a sign of the
times--of an effort to attain higher powers, to take more
comprehensive views of life, and to gain deeper insight into it. It is
a phase of the seriousness of purpose which the war has aroused in us.
Dide speaks of a deep but obscure need that drives all human beings to
put themselves in harmony with the universal, and says that this is
the end and purpose of the aesthetic tendencies. This phase of the
place of the aesthetic is seen and expressed in various ways. Some
think of it as a significant change in the attitude of life which is
to bring about an era of peace. Clutton-Brook, an English writer, says
that unless we attain to some kind of beauty and art, we shall have no
lasting peace. We shall never have freedom from war until we have a
peace that is worth living. Some see in the humanistic spirit an
essentially aesthetic principle. The fairness and justice of the
French, the spirit of the English that expresses itself in their ideal
of sportsmanship, some attribute to the aesthetic spirit.
All this is in keeping with our new experiences of life in all its
dynamic expressions. It becomes easier for us to see the truth about
the nature of the aesthetic and of all other powers of consciousness,
since consciousness has revealed itself to us as itself so great a
power. The aesthetic experience may no longer appear to be only a joy,
something subjective, but, indeed, as a practical force in the world.
The aesthetic is a feeling of power, but it is also an experience in
which mental power is generated, and it must be employed to such an
end. The aesthetic mood is a mood of happiness, but it is also a mood
of persuasion, in which something is being done to the will, and in
which desires are being turned continually toward new objects, and
composite feelings are being formed which will direct the course of
future experience. So art and the aesthetic experience are not things
apart from life, but may even be thought of as the method and the
quality of life in some of its most dynamic forms. They are not added
to life as an ornament or a luxury, but are the spirit in which life
is lived when it is indeed most productive.
When we make specific analyses of aesthetic experience we find
represented in it all the deep motives and tendencies, of life. This
gives us our clew to the practical application of the aesthetic in the
business of life. All it contains, all the art and the play of the
world must be put to work, although this is a conclusion that might
readily be misunderstood. We do not expect to harness the powers of
childhood to the world's tasks, or expect industry to become fine art,
but we do expect art and play to be something more than passive and
unproductive states. We expect them to sustain and to create the
energies by which the world's work is to be carried on.
We would
utilize them to give more power to life at every point, and to make
all activities of the practical life more free and creative. And was
there ever a time when power was more greatly needed--in industry, in
political life and in every phase of life both of the individual and
of society?
But it is not only in creating and doing that the world needs art
to-day, in the sense in which we mean to define it. An aroused world
is called upon to feel to the depths of reality, and to draw from
these depths new and more profound valuations. We stand at a point
where many things in life must be tested and judged anew, where the
danger of perverting and misjudging many things is great. It is by the
powers of appreciation gained in dynamic states of consciousness, we
may believe, rather than by discoveries and an accumulation of data
that we shall be most certain of finding true values, and the way of
extrication from our present grave doubts.
Can one hesitate to conclude, then, that in all our educational
experiences, we must try not only to train these powers that we call
aesthetic, but to give opportunity at every point for the exercise of
them as selective functions, and as a means of creating and expressing
power in the mental life?